Open Mic for the week of 10/30/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Shani Louk’s body has been found. She has been confirmed dead.
And before we get all “What about the dead Palestinians? What about Ukraine? WHAT ABOUT DARFUR? WHAT ABOUT TRUMP?!?!?”, she was the poster child for a handful of days following October 7th and there were reports that, nope, she’s still alive.
Maybe we’ll find out if those reports were accurate or just, you know, an attempt to buy some time.Report
A couple of stories have been circulating of this new housing development in Texas:
LIBERTY COUNTY, Tex. — Principal Sheri Hawthorn drives about an hour north of her Houston suburb every morning to the booming community of Colony Ridge, a development that seems a showcase of Texas conservative values given its limited government, unfettered growth and enthusiastic support for charter schools like Hawthorn’s.
In recent weeks, though, Colony Ridge has found itself under fire from conservative lawmakers. They’ve blasted it as a haven for illegal immigrants and cartels, threatened a state takeover and listed it as a priority during this month’s special legislative session along with border security and school vouchers.
One Republican critic even condemned the development as “an existential danger to life and liberty for many Texans.”
The problem? I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count:
The political uproar was fueled by a story last month in The Daily Wire, which noted that the area at one point had the fastest-growing Hispanic population in the United States and was struggling to provide adequate schools and policing. It warned, without evidence, that the area could become “a strategic asset for cartels.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/us/texas-migrants-housing-colony-ridge.htmlReport
Around the same time that Chesa Boudin was elected DA of San Francisco, two neighboring suburban counties, Alameda and Contra Costa, also elected progressive DAs. Yesterday, there was a recall both for the Alameda DA at the supermarket I go to. The woman collecting the signatures for the recall petition was an African-American. Police reform seems to be losing its luster.Report
Something similar is underway in Portland, where there is a significant challenge to the progressive DA from within his own office; the challenger is running on a platform of explicitly “rebuilding” the prosecutor’s office’s relationship with police. An odd sort of thing for a person seeking the votes of homogenously-liberal Portlanders to campaign on, but people are frustrated with the prevalence of property crimes and visible homelessness.
IMO the police union threw a hissy fit when the progressive DA won four years ago and seemed to start slow-walking everything but response to violence. Which has left a lot of property crimes all but un-responded to, particularly vandalism and theft of cars. The homelessness results from the cartels flooding our streets with fentanyl. How much of that is the DA’s fault? What is the DA supposed to do about either of those things? And there are groups of people, who appear to have downtown land developer money and organization, spearheading what purports to be a grassroots campaign against the DA. Maybe it’s grassroots, maybe it’s astroturf. It’s hard to say in an effectively non-transparent political system.
But the general public doesn’t get to express their dissatisfaction with the general state of affairs by voting on criminal organizations’ strategic marketing decisions any more than they get to vote for police union leadership. So our DA seems to be in a bit of trouble: there’s no other real way for Portlanders to express their frustrations but voting.
So it’s no surprise to see evidence of similar sorts of frustration in the Bay Area, and many other cities too. I’d look for a lot of municipal turnover this election season, whether it’s fair to the incumbents or not.Report
But crime is going down!Report
It is! It just doesn’t feel that way!Report
Has there ever been a time when people “felt” that crime was going down?Report
Kind of like how the economy is getting way better but no one feels that way?Report
It doesn’t feel this way because of increased homelessness in major cities. There is a feeling of visible disorder. The media creating bad vibes for whatever reason doesn’t help.Report
The existence of the unhoused is visible, but I am still not sold that it’s “disorder.” We can’t call it that since we don’t “mandate” people be housed. We make that an economic outcome. So unless we cross that line we need a different term.Report
The Anglophone Left tends to be a lot more romantically inclined towards visible disorder so that might just be aesthetic preferences. Generally, people prefer a tidier environment and feel unsafe in an untidy environment. There is a sort of white male privilege in finding that increased visible homelessness does not come across as visible disorder.Report
What I’m trying to get at is why unhoused people make things untidy. Sure, walking certain streets in DC where the unhoused camped created a visible disjunction between, say, railroad overpasses nearly a hundred years old and the tens they sleep in, but it’s not “untidy.”Report
Isn’t it a general tendency of people for their tolerance of disorder to vary depending on who is doing the disorder?
Like how if a hillbilly parks his car on the lawn he is just a simple unpretentious salt of the earth Everyman but when a black guy does it, it becomes a “Dangerous Neighborhood”?
Or like how cocaine was an addiction whose users need help and treatment while crack was a scourge whose users needed tough prison sentences?Report
I think there are plenty of people who would dislike both your examples equally and a posture like this is mainly an attempt to dodge a hard question that might be inconvenient or undesirable to address.Report
Let’s try this by example.
We both agree that it is good for people to take public transportation as much as possible, correct? For fighting climate change and other reasons.
In 2018, long before COVID and long before SF was called a failed city, I had to take BART to Oakland for Court. While on BART, a homeless person decided to urinate in the train car right onto the floor. I am also pretty sure I have seen human feces on BART in the pre-COVID era.
Generally, seeing this stuff makes people disinclined to take public transport.
For more mild examples, there are or were the people who listened to music or TV loudly on public transport without headphones. More often than not in my observation, people who did this part were not white.
I don’t think it should be a controversial statement that public spaces require a certain kind of universal decorum to make them run smoothly. However, there is a kind of white liberal that is so loathed to even have it be possible to accuse them of being a BBQ Becky or Karen that they do not want to critique the music on public transit without headphones as a lack of decorum. So they reverse it and state people complaining about this should stick to the burbs. Or that no one really minds it except the BBQ Becky’s of the world.
For the homeless person (who was white) urinating in public, there seems to be a certain kind of liberal who thinks something like this:
1. Increase in homeless people urinating in public and it “afflicts the powerful….”
2. ????
3. Social welfare state utopia with unlimited resources for affordable housing, mental health services, social work, etc.
This obviously hasn’t happened yet and I am not sure why the thought process continues.
It shouldn’t be a controversial or racist stance to state use headphones when listening to music on public transportation.Report
In most countries with heavy public transit use, there is a general agreement that keep to yourself and behave is just good transit etiquette. You don’t have anything like that in the United States but more than a little misbehavior and people being told to just take it.
Also for 3, everything will be entirely voluntary and there will be no compulsion to take the services.Report
It shouldn’t be a controversial stance to ask people to wear a mask when riding on public transportation, but you would be surprised what sort of people pushed back against this, sometimes violently.
Hint: It wasn’t a “certain type of liberal”Report
What about asking them to wear a mask at the Met Gala?
Or in a nightclub?
You wouldn’t believe who pushed back against that sort of thing.Report
Good point- We should shame anyone who refused to wear a mask during the pandemic.Report
What about those who defended the right to refuse to wear a mask? Should they be held accountable for the people they participated in attempting to kill?Report
I think that’s debatable, depending on the facts.
If you were to make such an argument, I’ll comment on it.Report
Sure. Here it is.
“The people who defended the folks who refused to wear masks were being just as feckless as the refusers themselves. Maybe they weren’t being actively malicious, assuming they were masking, but they were definitely giving aid and comfort to people who were being actively malicious.”Report
That’s a fair comment.Report
Should they have been called out at the time?
What amends should they make today, if they have not yet made amends?Report
Let’s clarify;
We’re talking about people who refused to wear masks;
Who encouraged other to refuse to wear masks;
Or supported those who did;
And you’re saying these people are either actively malicious, or at least giving aid and comfort to those who were.
Well, as to what sort of amends they should make, I guess we would need to determine if it was in fact malice, or just innocent error, whether it was a one time lapse of judgement, or an ongoing persistent pattern.
Does that seem fair?Report
Allow me to post the first sentence of what I posted again to clear up any misunderstanding of the argument that I thought you thought was fair:
“The people who defended the folks who refused to wear masks were being just as feckless as the refusers themselves.”
Do you see that as a reasonable assertion?Report
Absolutely.Report
Very good.
Personally, I think that the whole issue of “why do you care when other people aren’t masking?” is a transparently bad argument and I think it fits well with the original topic of bad actors on public transit.
“Why do you care if someone poops on the subway? You know how to use a regular bathroom, right?”
“Why do you care if someone gets in a fistfight on the subway?”
“How does someone barfing on the subway affect you *PERSONALLY*?”Report
OK so lets get back to your question.
These people we’re talking about:
Who refused to wear masks;
Who encouraged other to refuse to wear masks;
Or supported those who did;
According to your posts here, this is a serious violation of public order, and it doesn’t wash to just shrug and say why should we care.
What amends should they make today, if they have not yet made amends?Report
I got an answer to my question.
Those people are feckless.
I don’t think that they appreciate how much they undercut the whole “public order” thing.
In any case, we find outselves in another situation where public order is being undercut by bad actors.
This time relating to public transit.
I think that, at the very least, we should note who is saying stuff like “this is a quality of life issue and we should address it!” and who is saying “but when someone else in another jurisdiction entirely does something different, you don’t think that we should do anything about that!”
Perhaps we could notice if they’re the same folks who ran interference for the people who refused to follow their own mask mandates. If they are, maybe we could say “Yep. Still feckless.”Report
Yeah they are feckless, but there is more don’t you think?
I mean, people who not only weren’t masking, but actively discouraging others from masking, and in some cases using the power of law to prevent other people from masking, that’s malicious right?
Not just an innocent slip or momentary bad judgement, but actual malice aforethought.
I think we should name and shame those people and that those sort of people have a lot of amends to make, wouldn’t you agree?Report
Compared to the people who ran interference for the people who laid out mask mandates and then refused to wear the masks that were required by those same mask mandates?
I don’t know.
A disobedient person is a disobedient person.
Put someone who covers up for a so-called “leader” who refuses to follow the rules that they themselves put down?
That’s a special kind of wrecker.
Similar to the people who call for more people to ride public transit but make excuses for the people who defecate on the train, asking “whatabout people in other parts of the country?”Report
Why compare the two, as opposed to unequivocally condemning both those who are hypocrites, and those who knowingly led people to their death by telling them not to wear masks?Report
Because, much like the person here and the person who is in another jurisdiction entirely who does something different, I don’t think that we’re comparing apples to apples.
As for “those who knowingly led people to their death by telling them not to wear masks”, I’d say that there were a handful of reports that said that masks, for the most part, don’t work.
Perhaps those people read those reports.
The people who put out mandates that masks must be worn?
They don’t have even the potential of that excuse.Report
Oh, so the only problem here is hypocrisy.
All those other people refusing to mask may have a legitimate difference of opinion on the efficacy of masking.
Why do you care if they aren’t masking? Its none of your business.Report
No. But I appreciate that that’s the interpretation that makes sense to you.Report
Oh my mistake!
We should definitely shame and shun those people who violated public order by refusing to mask as if they were crapping on a subway.
I stand corrected.Report
“Why do you care if they violate public order? You know that you should wear a mask, right?”Report
Yes yes, we’re both saying the same thing.
Subway crappers and mask refusers should both be dealt with harshly.Report
It’s weird when you encounter someone who defends those people, isn’t it? Like, let’s say that we’re discussing public disorder on the subway.
Now imagine someone who busts in and says “but what about hillbillies who put cars on their lawn?”
What do you think that this person would be thinking?Report
OK, I admit I was wrong to defend hillbillies.
Lets add lawn car-parkers to the list of subway crappers and mask refusers as those who we should shame for violating norms of behavior.
I’m being serious by the way. A strict social etiquette enforced by shaming is perfectly fine by me.Report
That’s what you were doing?
When Saul brought up visible disorder on the BART, you thought “I need to defend hillbillies”?
Because, quite honestly, that’s not how it came across.
A strict social etiquette enforced by shaming is perfectly fine by me.
Fair enough. I, personally, think that people who try to distract from, say, complaints of visible disorder by bringing up people in other jurisdictions entirely should be called out for it and dragged back to the issue.
I think that Saul made a very good point when he said:
I don’t think it should be a controversial statement that public spaces require a certain kind of universal decorum to make them run smoothly. However, there is a kind of white liberal that is so loathed to even have it be possible to accuse them of being a BBQ Becky or Karen that they do not want to critique the music on public transit without headphones as a lack of decorum. So they reverse it and state people complaining about this should stick to the burbs. Or that no one really minds it except the BBQ Becky’s of the world.
For the homeless person (who was white) urinating in public, there seems to be a certain kind of liberal who thinks something like this:
1. Increase in homeless people urinating in public and it “afflicts the powerful….”
2. ????
3. Social welfare state utopia with unlimited resources for affordable housing, mental health services, social work, etc.
This obviously hasn’t happened yet and I am not sure why the thought process continues.
It shouldn’t be a controversial or racist stance to state use headphones when listening to music on public transportation.Report
I’m agreeing with you and Saul.
I’m just broadening it out to include other forms of norm-breaking which are defended by all sorts of people not just liberals.
This is important because as you have so brilliantly demonstrated, when we apply the social etiquette of norm compliance society-wide we ensnare a lot of people who are surprised to find themselves on the wrong side of it.
Like, you and I started by talking about subway crappers, but within a few comments, ended up talking about the guy in rural Georgia parking his car on the lawn.
Bet he never thought he would be placed in the same basket of deplorables as the subway crapper!
But that’s what happens with social norm enforcement.
Which I still support, by the way.Report
Really?
Because I am guessing that the next time someone points out that there is visible disorder, you’ll return to the tried-and-true “butwhatabout”.
And it’s in that context that I read what you’re saying here.
Time will tell.Report
Ony if someone tries to say that the only defenders of disorder are a certain type of liberal because as we’ve seen right here, there really isn’t any partisan divide to defenders of disorder.
I might even say that it is a general tendency of people to see our violations as ok, but other peoples as not ok.Report
Took less time than I expected.Report
There are two groups of “unhoused”.
There are the ones where it’s an economic outcome. There are the ones who suffer mental illness and substance abuse to a degree that they’re not functional.
Members of the second group occasionally make the news by randomly attacking people.
As the first group becomes more visible we mistake them for the second.Report
Yes we do, and as many poor people are considered lazy – and thus not needing structural reform assistance – we consider the economically unhoused to be unworthy of help because “surly in America” you don’t loose your house unless you screw up.Report
Mental illness and substance abuse are indeed correlated with economic distress… but they often effects of that distress, rather than its cause.
Lacking a home is not exactly conducive to recovery of any sort.Report
I’m old enough to remember how in the 80s and 90s as crime was steadily dropping, and before homelessness was as prevalent as today, the perennial winning message in any local election was to “Git Tough On Crime!!1!”
Remember “Crack babies”? There was a flurry of horror stories in the 90s about babies being born on crack and how they were going to grow up to be “Superpredators” who would come to your house and slaughter your family and only by increasing the police budget could you protect your family from them.
The “OuttaControlCrime!” narrative never needs any sort of actual facts. It doesn’t matter if shoplifting and turnstyle jumping is up or down, it doesn’t matter if drug use is increasing or decreasing, the idea that Those People are out of control and need to be brought to heel is everpresent because it makes people feel good.
Its right up there with “These Kidz Today” sort of panics where Teh Kids are doing drugs or having sex or wilding in Central Park or being abducted to Satanic orgies.
Its urban legends, about things that people WISH were true.Report
Pointing out the lack of a factual basis for the vibes won’t get rid of the vibes. Liberals need to find an alternative narrative because humans are social apes that operate on a narrative.Report
You can’t narrative a person out of a narrative that they didn’t narrative themselves into.
People who innocently believe a news story that a IDF missile struck a hospital can be persuaded by facts and reason.
People who are angry and fearful and looking for someone to blame will always believe that Zionists bombed a hospital full of women and children no matter what.
We can’t fix the latter but we can work on the former.
Engaging in too-clever counternarratives to try and out-bullcrap the bullcrappers is how we get the insane campus leftists that we all make fun of here.Report
we have alternate narratives. They just aren’t catchy. An alternative narrative on unhoused people is we don’t take care of our own. Why don’t we take care of our own? Well its complicated but seems to boil down to we prefer as nation where there are haves and have nots.Report
I think the real contradiction is that it is difficult to liberate people from coercive social forces without also liberating them from a strong sense of social obligation. That’s basically the debate Chip and Saul are having above. In what some refer to as our peer nations they have maintained stronger senses of social obligation. People in those places will also feel free to aggressively chew out strangers to maintain social norms and put severe social pressure on them to conform in ways that a lot of influential Americans would call racism or classism or patriarchy or any number of similar terms.Report
Or,,,put severe social pressure on them to conform in ways that a lot of influential Americans would call DEI or political correctness or wokeness or any number of similar terms.Report
No, that really doesn’t grok. A significant part of the liberal project of the 20th century in America was liberating us from a certain strain of Protestant norms and morality that had mostly been the default of the country. One of the ways that case was made was citing the arbitrariness of it on the margins, and how it could be unfair in certain circumstances. Wokeness and DEI is an attempt to reimpose something similar, except that it’s far more capricious, incoherent, and divorced from common sense and human experience than the old Protestant stuff was, even on its worst days. All the same arguments against the old norms are even stronger against these new ideas, which is why they tend to fail, one way or the other, anywhere they are subjected to even the most basic scrutiny. Anyone who sees them as the future needs to think a little harder.
To put a finer point on it, no mental gymnastics are ever going to succeed in valorizing the drug addicted bum pissing on the train and marginalize the successful person that goes to work every day to support a family. I would think the reasons for that are incredibly obvious, but at times it seems we need a reminder.Report
Where did I suggest that wokeness will valorize the bum and marginalize the businessman?
Isn’t the whole complaint about corporate DEI that it uses the rhetoric of liberation to entrench a new hierarchy of wealth and status, just with nonwhite and queer people?
In the same way that there is an overlap between radical feminists and Puritans demanding conformance to strict norms, there is an overlap between secular conservatives and libertines demanding personal license to use slurs or refuse to use proper pronouns.
In this, the conservatives are valorizing the transgressor of norms.Report
There are a number of complaints on the merits of those types of programs, which, thankfully, are already dying.
However the point I was making is that once the idea of moral authority itself is been sufficiently eroded it becomes impossible to reimpose a new one, particularly if the new moral authority has done 0 to address what caused the downfall of the old one. Similarly, once we have said that a person is free from the obligation to conform to social norms we don’t like it becomes a lot harder to convince them that they may have other obligations to society we do like. For example, I am not sure you can kill the obligation to hold oneself to some minimal standards of decency and decorum in public without doing very serious damage to the idea that we owe a duty to care for the wellbeing of others, no matter their circumstances.Report
I think actual history shows otherwise.
For example, the Sexual Revolution of the 60s eroded the old moral boundaries. Everything was open to question, all sorts of new practices were open to being legitimized.
Premarital sex, age of consent, swinging, group sex, public nudity- all of these things were at one time proposed as freedoms to be explored.
But lo and behold, only some were made legitimate, while others were rejected and remain taboo, even by self-described liberals.
Look at how you yourself, your family and friends all behave and the norms you abide by.
You and they all came of age after the old norms were destroyed, but you willingly and freely abide by new norms.
Look at how queer people reject some of the old norms, but embrace others and enforce them with the same tools of shaming and shunning as any Victorian.
I think this shows that as a general rule, people like having norms and rules and boundaries on behavior but that these are constantly being adjusted and negotiated.Report
I do not think that really captures where we are in the US. Yes, people make choices that work best for themselves, and a number of ideas can be said to implicitly have been rejected based on the fact that the vast majority of people do not live their lives in the manner those ideas suggest they might. However that really isn’t the same as living in a place where total strangers will aggressively police small transgressions of rules and decorum. It’s probably just because I was just out of the country for the first time in many years, but depending on where you go it can be really stark, with random people feeling comfortable critiquing dress, behavior, and activities in a manner that you just don’t see in most of the US, and that the wider culture definitely frowns upon.Report
Maybe, except it’s hard to ignore the fact that the most ardent defenders of decorum and decency from at least the 1950s were the exact same people who argued most vehemently against owing a duty to care for the wellbeing of others.Report
Lee not Saul.Report
At least in the United States, I think a large part of liberal distaste in enforcing social norms is a belief that they will be used most aggressively against African-Americans and Hispanic-American young men and LGBT people rather than everybody.Report
A belief with most of US history as a data set.Report
I would never argue that there is no basis for where we have gone. I would say though that it means people really need to adapt their expectations to the trade offs inherent to the path we are on.Report
Why should *I* have to make tradeoffs? I have fulfilled my part of the social contract! It’s the people who failed to do their own part who should have to make tradeoffs!Report
Ouch.Report
Heh, I mean, it’s an interesting situation because we are on a vector set in a lot of ways by post 1960s liberalism. Which isn’t to denigrate post 1960s liberalism! A lot of IMO indisputably good things we take for granted today came out of that. But we also have to acknowledge that, especially when paired with a certain kind of conservative flavored neoliberal economics, we have not built a society conducive to the social contract mainstream progressive (or populist conservative for that matter!) movements seem to want.
Like, you can’t go around liquidating as many social norms and obligation as possible, and making everything for sale to the highest bidder, but then asking for a really robust sense of solidarity, sacrifice, and contribution. At a very basic level humans are traders and know a bad deal when they see it.Report
All of this is correct. It can also be fueled by videos which turn up on search algorithms (i.e. cherry picking).
This sort of thing is also where we get the idea that the police are randomly killing minorities in large numbers.Report
Did we miss the part where the cops are on strike?Report
Surely the ones who tally the crime aren’t also on strike.Report
Surely not, just the ones who might deter or arrest criminals.Report
Do you see why DAs might be in the sights of people who care about crime as well?Report
There is a cartoon I see on the internet from time to time where a normal person sees a sign that “Defund the Police” and the normal person basically states that is nuts. The second panel is a reveal which shows that Defund the Police is actually shorthand for a wide variety of Progressive wants from drug treatment, affordable housing, mental health services/social work, education budget increases, decriminalizing/regulation sex work.
A lot of these proposals are broadly popular but only in a keep it hazy on the details kind of way. Some of them are outright intra-left wedge issues. There might be a growing consensus among the chronically online for lack of a better term* on decriminalzing/regulating sex work but I can tell you that there are a lot of solidly-liberal straight down Democratic voters (mainly but not exclusively of the wineparent variety) that are still opposed to the concept and probably see it as enabling creeps.
*For the most part, the people I know who have decriminalizing sex work as a big issue are generally not what I would describe as part of mainstream culture for lack of a better term.Report
Legalizing marijuana was once a fringe platform too. It takes a generation or more of pushing at the margins of culture, changing a few minds out at the margins. And then, like all cultural change, years and years of gradual work suddenly result in attitudes shifting all at once. For sex work, maybe that’ll happen when we’re all in our golden years.
Or maybe not; Puritanism runs deep in this country.Report
I concur but the thing about Marijuana it was a thing that a lot of people were open about their habits for years before legalization. Also it is still illegal at the Federal level and the GOP is a massive no on changing this. People are generally not open about seeing certain kinds of sex workers because there is still a notion that only creepy losers doReport
The push for marijuana reform occurred when members of the dominant group (white middle class people) decided they liked it and discovered it was harmless.
The only parallel with criminal justice reform is where Jan 6 activists suddenly experience the iron fist of law enforcement and decide that hey, criminals have rights!Report
“A liberal is a conservative that has been arrested” is one of the oldest cliches in the books.
That being said, I think that the fight over sex work (really prostitution/escorting) is a bit different and the split appears to be among women and I would rather not get involved in it but I know plenty of women who I would describe as bona fide progressives who think opposite thoughts on whether this should be decriminalizedReport
I am vaguely impressed and rather disgusted at the same time of the ability of Pro-Palestinian activists in the West to protest against Israel in the current conflict with Hamas without any context of the Simchat Torah massacre on October 7th. One would think based on their contextless protests that Israel is just invading Gaza for the fun of it all and not an atrocious act of war that killed at least 1,400 Israelis and hundreds of Israelis, including literal babies, kidnapped as captives. They day after the Simchat Torah massacre, the Pro-Palestinian activists in the West were celebrating before Israel did anything. As more facts became clear and Hamas made a ceasefire proposal that was “heads we win, tails you lose” to Israel, rather than acknowledge that Hamas did a wrong, the Pro-Palestinian Westerners just remain completely silent about it. In fact many Diaspora Jews and Jewish owned businesses and institutions have been either vandalized or threatened by Pro-Palestinian activists in the West despite their arguments that they are merely anti-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic. There is a reason why most Jews do not believe Pro-Palestinian activists when they say this.
This is why I consider most of the so called allies of the Palestinians not to be allies at all. They continually egg on the Palestinians in their worst and most intractable beliefs and behaviors rather than giving them some constructive criticism. You can find lots of constructive criticism of Israel from sources that at least some Israelis would listen too. You can’t find this for the Palestinians.Report
October 7th was an example of the IDF killing its own people.
That’s the defense of October 7th that I’ve seen. Maybe some Palestinians got a little over exuberant… but 1000 people? How in the hell could you expect the Palestinians to kill 800 people? Even using paragliders, it’s not possible for them to have killed 500 people. Only the Israelis are capable of that.
Like destroying a hospital.Report
I mean, the IDF _did_ kill some significant amount of Israelis during that. Not all, or even most, but, some percentage. And not normal wartime accident, but through total apathy towards the hostages.
The IDF has talked about shelling their own people’s houses, where Hamas was, with hostages. A lot of the footage of the dead has dead and burned Hamas in the same destroyed house as dead and burned Israelis that they had taken prisoners, which implies either Hamas surreally blew up houses they were in…or the IDF collapsed those houses via rockets.
And also…as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, it is rather inexplicable to think that launching rockets at places that Hamas is can somehow recover the hostages that Hamas has and are, presumably, holding at the places they are. Assuming they are not lying to us and are indeed shooting at Hamas locations instead of wildly, odds are that at least _one_ of those locations had hostages who are now dead.
But you have to realize…the IDF showed that same level of concern towards hostages and civilians (none at all) during the initial pushback of Hamas too.
Now, to be clear, Hamas was taking hostages, and Hamas is at fault in all that, I guess metaphoric felony murder rules apply, and Hamas was perfectly willing to kill any hostages that tried to flee, and just killed a bunch of people for no reason. But also, the IDF just…leapt in firing wildly in the direction of Hamas and everyone they were holding hostage and anyone just standing near them. And still is.
I’m sorta waiting to see what happens when the IDF kills a Palestinian Jew in the West Bank through sheer carelessness. They’ve already started roughing up the pro-Palestinian ones.Report
Israel thinks it has to choose between destroying Hamas and saving the hostages (i.e. rewarding it for taking hostages).
Very unclear how many could be saved even if Israel were willing to negotiate.
Some of them were dead bodies just dragged off, there hasn’t been a lot of proof of life which in theory would be pretty easy. Hamas claims about 50 have died in the airstrikes.
At most it’s a very few hundred people. This conflict has killed thousands and will kill tens of thousands only if we’re lucky.
If we’re unlucky then we’ll see it drag on for years. If Hamas can’t be destroyed then the active war will go on until Israel calms down.Report
There is plenty of criticism that _some_ Palestinians listen too…but of course, they are not actually in charge of Hamas, so that seems pointless.
Anyway, there’s an actual crisis being caused by civilians in Palestine, in the West Bank, as it is breaking out in violence by Israeli settlers that Israeli security forces refuse to do anything about. At least 115 Palestinians have been killed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/world/middleeast/west-bank-settlers-palestinians-violence.html
And before anyone tries to make it about any sort of both sides…at least 1000 Palestinians have been forced from their homes as part of this, and I’m pretty sure people can’t ‘self defense’ other people out of their homes. If a conflict happens and it ends up with people being forced out their house at gunpoint, pretty sure the problem was the guy doing that. This is again, the West Bank, which is theoretically not at war, and certainly not controlled by Hamas.
Since we’re talking about what _civilians_ in that area are being encouraged to do, maybe some of the pro-Israeli protestors need to talk to Israeli citizens, too. Because that’s not just vandalism and threats, it’s actual murder.
*holds finger to earpiece*
Oh, sorry, I’m being informed it isn’t actually pro-Israeli protestors in other countries egging settlers on, but the Israeli government. Nevermind, ignore this comment.Report
While I appreciate that the Palestinians in Palestine have little-to-no influence over Hamas, do the pro-Israeli protestors in other countries have more influence over the Israeli government than the Palestinians in Palestine have over Hamas or an equal amount?Report
I said that it isn’t actually pro-Israeli protestors causing this…it’s the government itself. I was just pointing out how silly this logic is. Both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestine protests have an equal amount of influence on the Israeli government and Hamas, of which can be measured as ‘very close to none at all’.
The Israeli government, and Hamas, are both entirely disconnected from outside pressure, the Israeli government because it gets supported and insulated by the US no matter what, and Hamas because almost no one supports it. (And, no, random dumbass statements of support by naive idiots cheering civilian slaughter is not any sort of base of support.)
They are both also mostly disconnected from _internal_ criticism. Hamas hasn’t held an election in almost two decades, and the Israeli government is backed by a bunch of religious fanatics and run by a far-right government that breaks it own laws and is only in power because they have managed to keep the country on a war footing for decades.
This is why, as I have pointed out repeatedly in our discussion of this, about the only way to have an impact on any of this is the ‘the Israeli government supported and insulated by the US no matter what’ part of what I just said.
And, hell, maybe we can even pull Qatar (Who is supposed to be an ally) aside, and tell it to put some restrictions on Hamas as they support it (And host their leaders!)…although, I’m not sure they knew what was going to happen, and might have already reconsidered that.Report
Is money support?Report
I have no idea why you ask such questions, I literally referred to it as support in my post.
Neither of those entities are meaningfully supported monetarily by ‘protestors’, or even individuals in general, unless I’m missing something. Hamas is supported by Qatar and a few other countries, mostly via money with a few weapons in there, the Israeli government is supported by not only transfer of money but also weaponry from the US.Report
I guess I was still unclear after reading:
Hamas has a handful of strange bedfellows. It goes a bit beyond “almost no one”. I think we’re in full on “it’s complicated” territory.Report
I was talking comparatively speaking, but whatever.
Hamas doesn’t actually need a huge amount of money for the combat it is doing, which basically just requires bullets. I’m not sure cutting off any of the cash would even have an effect in short or mid term, so I’m not sure that anyone supplying that cash could effectively threaten the supply. And on top of that, it consists of small amount of support from a lot of people.
This is opposed to Israel, which is supplied, massively, by the US (Not just in money but in military hardware.), and the US could make quite plausibly threats of ‘Change what you are doing or we will no longer fund you.’
The Iron Dome is incredibly expensive to operate. Air support is expensive. Israel is operating a real professional military, Hamas is operating a ‘We issue paychecks to soldiers and give them a gun, and we have a guy in the basement cobbling together rockets from water pipes he pulled up, he might have one ready if you want it’ militia.
—
As the political situation in the US for the Democratic party’s support of Israel becomes even more untenable, I fully expect Biden to start publicly saying that Israel needs to back off some of the very obvious war criming (Although he obviously won’t come out and say it’s just because of political pressure.)
Although the US almost certainly won’t bother to actually make any _rules_ they have to follow yet…that will happen in about a month as the sheer scope of the deaths becomes more visible.
And at that point, everyone will start pretending they were all horrified from the start and always wanted Israel to back off. And we’ll have these nice little comment sections proving exactly what people said back now.Report
Let me repeat my prediction from a few weeks ago: Gaza will be very fortunate if it gets through this with less than 6 digits of dead.
The bulk of these will be civilians.Report
“we have a guy in the basement cobbling together rockets from water pipes he pulled up, he might have one ready if you want it”
“A senior Hamas official based in Lebanon gave details of the Hamas’ weapons manufacturing in an edited interview with Russia Today’s Arabic-news channel RTArabic published on their website on Sunday.
“‘We have local factories for everything, for rockets with ranges of 250 km, for 160 km, 80km, and 10 km. We have factories for mortars and their shells. … We have factories for Kalashnikovs (rifles) and their bullets. We’re manufacturing the bullets with permission from the Russians. We’re building it in Gaza,’ Ali Baraka, head of Hamas National Relations Abroad, is quoted as saying.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/11/middleeast/hamas-weaponry-gaza-israel-palestine-unrest-intl-hnk-ml/index.htmlReport
…um…thanks for the article confirming the point I making, I assume that was your intent?
Palestine’s military is operating off scrap metal and bullets, none of which is expensive. And hence they are not reliant on outside support.
Even a lot of their current outside support is merely knowledge and training, which rather obviously cannot be threatened to be withdrawn by Hamas’s outside suppliers unless they have some sort of long range memory erasure device that we don’t know of.
Also…I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t be trusting Hamas when they are bragging about how good their military manufacturing capacities are. Yes, I’m sure they call the guy in the basement making rockets ‘a factory’, but…but for some mysteriously reason re-labeling the basement doesn’t change the fact they’re still incredibly bad and barely function. Oooooo, a factory, scary.
They can make AKs, though, those rather infamously can be made in any machine shop. I assumed we all knew they were making their own guns. (And bragging about making bullets is just…sad.)Report
Question – do you really believe non-state actors like Hamas terrorists are in fact committing acts of war? Words matter, definitions matter. And calling out and out terrorism an act of war elevates Hamas to the level of nation state. Which would be a telling change, ad not necessarily helpful to the israeli narrative.Report
From what I understand, Hamas was elected.
There is a relationship to legitimacy there.Report
They may have been “elected” many years ago, but Israel has never treated them as a government entity. Nor does Israel respect their “borders” when its inconvenient for Israel.
Still not my point.Report
From what I understand, Biden was elected in roughly the same way Hamas was elected.Report
Yes by a majority of voters.
Unlike Hamas leadership, he’s up for reelection next year. Hamas hasn’t stood in multiple decades apparently.
Apples and Ice Cubes.Report
Hamas is a quasi-state actor rather than a non-state actor. They are the power in charge of Gaza and run it like a military state. They have goals that can be attributed to a state like the total defeat of a government/country they see as the enemy. There are actual countries that are much smaller than Gaza in terms of area and population so you can’t argue that Gaza is not big enough to be a country. Therefore, they are capable of waging war and doing other state actions.Report
Gaza is only its own nation when it’s convenient to the narrative, it’s never its own country when talking about stuff Israel does to it, which is all somehow ‘justified’.
If Gaza is an independent state, than Israeli’s blockade of their sea and air is an act of war. It doesn’t matter why they’re doing that, that is casus belli for a war.
In fact, if Gaza is a country, then it is pretty clear that it and Israel have been at undeclared war the entire time it has been independent. Which…I guess would have started with the violation of Gazan airspace that happened almost immediately after Israel set it free, or I guess Hamas firing rockets at Israel _for_ that violation.
Which means the attack by Hamas was not, under any circumstances, ‘unprovoked’. To be clear, it was still a war crime, because it targeted civilians, but there is no possibly universe where something that happens fifteen years into a war can be called ‘unprovoked’.Report
If we’re going to count “acts of war” and “undeclared war” then Israel has been at war with Hamas since they started putting bombs on buses in the 90’s (80’s?).
Hamas views attacking civilians as “resistance” with the end goal being no jews in the Middle East, i.e. the state of Israel should be destroyed.
Hamas won an election in Gaza and the West gave it a choice. The West isn’t going to pay for Hamas to make dead Jews, so Hamas had to choose between Western support and continuing to target civilians.
“Why” the blockade started matters a lot.
It was less and act of war and more recognition that the war was going to continue.Report
(Okay, when when we getting blockquote working again?)
Imagine thinking that this hypothetical war did not start with the First Intifada. Because, of course, Palestinians started blowing things up in 90s for no reason, and that didn’t start after five years of Intifada, aka, protests, boycotts, general strike, refusal to pay taxes, and all the stuff that populations generally do when they are unsatisfied with their government, as the Palestinians became more and more unsatisfied at the _two decades of occupation_ and Israel not even pretending it was moving forward to making a Palestine within the 1967 borders, as it had promised.
It really is weird how history for a lot of people stops in 1967, leaving us with a cliffhanger of Israel having expanded to ‘1967 borders’, and also controlling the West Bank and the Gaza Strip which it promised it would create Palestinian government in…and then history restarts in 1992, with somehow that having not happened and the Palestinians start blowing things for NO REASON AT ALL.
Look, Israel had been _busy_ for a quarter century! It just hasn’t gotten around to the legal obligations it has under international law for occupied territories. It certainly was not due to the fact it didn’t want to give up that land, please ignore all the Israel politicians saying exactly that during that time.
However, Israel and Palestine couldn’t have been at war in the 90s because _Palestine was an Israeli occupied territory_ in the 90s.
You cannot be at war _with yourself_.Report
In 1967 the Palestinians were still not a separate people and were still represented by the Arabic states.
Right after 1967 war (which was a war where Israel fought for it’s survival against all it’s neighbors) we had the “three Nos”.
No peace with Israel,
No negotiation with Israel,
No recognition of Israel.
So in the face of that open declaration that Israel shouldn’t exist and must be destroyed, Israel was supposed to return land to the states vowing to destroy it? And this was going to result in peace… how?
BTW this is one of the missed opportunities, with a phone call in 1967 the Arabic states could have had peace and a Palestinian state if they’d wanted.
Egypt was the first country to break ranks and make peace with Israel in 1979, their leader was murdered because of that. Egypt took back their land but not Gaza because they didn’t want it.
Jordan made peace with Israel in 1994.Report
No, Israel was supposed to _form a state_ from the occupied territory, not ‘return land’. Something it didn’t do for two decades. (Or, ever.)
There was violence, a good chunk of it started by _Israel_. Israel actually has a really long history of agreeing to ceasefires and other things, and then _literally assassinating opposing leaders_, and then complaining that the ceasefire is broken when attacks are launched against it in response.
The rest of the violence…wasn’t happening in Israel. Or Palestine. It was happening in Egypt and Lebanon. To be clear: Israel was helping Lebanon fight an internal religious civil war, a war which had Palestinian militant groups in it (But not in Palestine) and used that violence to somehow justify…not doing its obligations under international law for Palestinians
But that supposed violence was not the reason Israel didn’t move forward.
They didn’t move forward because _Israel didn’t want to give the land up_. They had been putting illegal settlements on it the entire time, had openly talked about how it was Israel’s land.
If, twenty years after WWII and Japan’s surrender, we still controlled Japan and had politicians talking about how it was rightfully ours, and had started kicking Japanese people out of their houses and moving Americans in, what do you think politics in Japan would have started looking like? Might start looking a little ‘terroristic’, or ‘freedom fighterish’, depending on which side you’re on.
For reference, we officially handed control over to the new Japanese government less than seven years after they surrendered. (And, obviously, never gave any indications we were going to keep it.) In case you think that’s uniquely short, Iraq took eight years, and Germany took _four_.
That’s how long it should take to set up a country. Not twenty years. But…that’s assuming you want a country there instead of seizing the land for yourself, which Israel had repeatably indicated it was going to do.
And we eventually got the First Intifada, where Palestinians in general started turning against Israel. That’s where Israel lost support of the Palestinian people, and they turned on it, and it happened in the fricking _late 80s_.
At any point before that, Israel could have created a Palestine and _walked away from it_. Instead, they spent decades constantly finding excuses to murder Palestinians…oh, some random militants killed some soldiers.
Israeli politics are the reason that played out that way. There are dozens of quotes, by very prominent elected officials, including the actual leaders, talking about how they considered ‘Israel’ to be that entire area, and were not going to give it to the Palestinians.Report
Does Hamas have any diplomatic relations with any other nations?
Does anyone in Gaza have any diplomatic relations with any other nations?
Does Hamas engage in trade with any other nations?
Does anyone in Gaza engage in trade with any other nations?
Does Hamas have any connection to any international organizations (e.g., UN, NATO, EU, OPEC)?
Does anyone in Gaza have any connection to any international organizations (e.g., UN, NATO, EU, OPEC)?
From Wiki, on its entry regarding the removal of settlements:
“After Israel’s withdrawal, the Palestinians were given control over the Gaza Strip, except for the borders, the airspace and the territorial waters.”
Now, it’s Wiki, so I’m happy to be told that isn’t accurate. But if it is… is there any other country in the world that we can say does not have control over its own borders, airspace, and territorial waters?Report
I’m pretty sure that Hamas has relationships with Qatar. The Hamas leadership lives there, anyway.Report
Okay! So the answer to one of those questions is, “Probably one country.” Does that make Gaza a country like other countries are countries?Report
It certainly moves us from “is there even a single country that recognizes them?” to “okay, there’s one! Are there *TWO*?”
There’s a wikipedia page dedicated to “Foreign relations of Hamas“.
Cuba is filed under “Diplomatic Support”. Huh.
Anyway.
No, Gaza is not a country like other countries are countries.
But it’s also not a territory like Puerto Rico is a territory.Report
“ “is there even a single country that recognizes them?””
I asked several questions. This was not one of them.Report
Fair enough. I’d be willing to say that Gaza is more like a territory than it is a country, their government is more like a religious dictatorship than a democracy, and their border is more like the one between East Berlin and West Berlin than the one between the US and Mexico.
I kinda like the whole “quasi-state” thing.
It says “it’s complicated”.Report
The US lacks control over it’s borders.
Gaza’s borders have the problem that Israel and Egypt both don’t like Islamic fundamentalist’s terrorism and have set up walls.
Gaza could instantly become a normal country if it’d choose to become a normal country. As long as it’s determined to be a terror group at war with it’s neighbors and their allies then it’s going to be treated that way.
Hamas doesn’t want peace. That’s the core problem and it’s been the core problem since before it’s creation.
Gaza is something like 70% refugees (and descendants of refugees) from the war of 1949. That’s the war they want to refight.Report
This is a pernicious lie that needs to die.Report
Exactly. All those illegal migrants coming in? They are being let in intentionally.Report
Well sort of – the US has business segments that demand cheap labor that Americans (Mostly Black Americans) no longer provide. Those business segments create demand, and others in other countries respond to that demand.
But let’s be clear – those migrants are not being stopped and then let in to fill some super secret quota. They are simply successful at evading passport and border control. the 9/1 attackers overstayed their visas after all.
But we do have “control” of as much of our border as any other nation that doesn’t use its military for that purpose.Report
We have a border that is thousands of miles long in a hostile desert (or wilderness) and other the other side is a non-hostile country.
We don’t need or want full control, it’s not cost effective. This “lack” doesn’t mean we’re not a country.
Hamas doesn’t want to be a state.
Last poll had them 5x as popular as the PA. They tear up water pipes and turn them into rocket launchers.
The people of Gaza want to refight the war of 1949 and drive the Jews out.
They don’t want to be abused or mistreated. They don’t want to live in an open air prison camp.
But they do want Hamas to kill Jews.Report
“They are simply successful at evading passport and border control”
Ok, now I’m confused. The US either lacks control over it’s borders, or it doesn’t. If the US HAS control over it’s borders, then no one would be able to overstay their visa (assuming they got one) because the system would catch them. If they are here without a visa, they would be caught and deported. If they are “successful” in staying in any way, then the US does not have control over it’s borders because….they are still here.
So which is it? Somehow I doubt that it would take the all the marine regiments to “secure” our borders.Report
Lee is correct that Gaza is a semi-state… an issue is that their elected governing body (replacing the PA) is a body that is incorporated for the liberation of Palestine, so it ‘governing’ of Gaza is incidental to it’s mission. This is an important point, distinct even from the Palestinian Authority.
To your point, though, yes, Hamas is recognized as the defacto control of Gaza and has direct relations with Iran, Qatar and Turkey; indirect with Lebanon; and ‘complex’ relations with Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
For security reasons, imports into Gaza pass through Israeli customs; there isn’t a general embargo on goods or exports (in ordinary circumstances), just certain imports (like arms).
We can look-up the current trade relations as summarized by the US Govt:
“Last published date: 2022-08-09
In October 1996, President Clinton signed a proclamation granting duty-free import status to items produced in or imported from the West Bank and Gaza. The EU has a preferential trade agreement with the West Bank and Gaza similar to that of the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences program. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has more restrictive trade agreements with Jordan and Egypt. ”
To be blunt, Hamas can’t be a reliable partner to negotiations to transform Gaza from a territory/proto-state into a state because it doesn’t want that to happen — so much so that partners like Egypt and Jordan *also* won’t work with Hamas as such an actor precisely because they are destabilizing actors in Egypt and Jordan (and Syria). Separating Hamas from the Palestinian People (in Gaza) is perhaps possible as an intellectual exercise, but remains to be seen as a practical exercise; Hamas and the PA aren’t even the same thing for negotiating / Governing perspectives… so a general ‘settlement’ of the status of Gaza isn’t possible with Hamas.
Hence the situation, and, honestly the continuously bad interpretations of Hamas as an actor for the Palestinian people. But for the fact that it’s not clear that the people of Gaza would ask for any other representation.
Gaza and Hamas can’t build a state until Hamas wants to build a state in Gaza which it doesn’t want to do and will actively subvert — which is why the slow normalization with Israel by other Arab states like Saudi Arabia is inimical to it’s objectives, and the likely spark for this particular attack.
I appreciate the folks who hope for a solution based upon a broad liberal democracy for the region; but I’m skeptical that there is a democratic framework that’s sufficiently liberal or democratic to contain it.Report
So, would it be reasonable and fair to conclude — based on this and other responses to my questions — that Gaza is autonomous from Israeli rule? If so, should this be seen as an international conflict? It’s long been my understanding (which may very well be wrong!) that the Israeli government has considered all the goings on in Gaza and between Gaza/Israel as internal matters of a sort.
It seems interesting to note that the reporting I’ve seen has consistently framed it as Israel’s war with Hamas and not Israel’s war with Gaza. Now, that is American reporting in English so I don’t know how the Israeli government is actually framing the hostilities, internally or publicly. But if this is a war between nations or a nation/quasi-nation, that does seem to change a number of things, in a variety of directions.Report
Given how Hamas is Iran’s pawn and how this happened to train wreck Israel getting in bed with Saudi Arabia, I’d call it an international thing.
Certainly the rest of the international community wants to weigh in.
The Israeli gov views Gaza as an internal matter because none of the surrounding states care enough to do anything and Gaza depends on Israel for basic things.Report
Israel’s highest court has ruled that Israel is an “occupying power” under international law and is responsible to the Palestinians in Gaza for basic services. The Knesset has chosen to ignore the court’s ruling.Report
So… to the question of “Is Gaza its own state?” the best answer would be “It depends”…?Report
“It’s Complicated”Report
Gaza is a hostile power on Israel’s border; it refuses to accept it’s own statehood. I am not aware of any Israeli claims to the land in the territory once they abandoned the settlements and pulled out 15-yrs ago.
The ‘problem’ still is that Gaza refuses to be Gaza. And that’s why things they might have they don’t and things they don’t have they can’t until they agree not to be an actively hostile power in a cease-fire (suspended) with Israel.
The number of things that change or don’t have been changing or not for 75 odd years; there’s nothing particularly new here.Report
Israel had a helicopter in ‘the nation of Gaza’ airspace less than two days after they withdrew, which is an act of war. (It is possible this helicopter blew up a Hamas vehicle during a victory parade, killing 19, but this claim is disputed. However, the _mere act_ of being there, in another nation’s airspace, would be an act of war.) Israel still claims control of the airspace and will shoot down any airplanes there it doesn’t approve of, which is also an act of war.
Israel shoots at people who get too close to the Israeli border, which is also an act of war. Israel also claims control over Gazan territorial waters, which is, you guessed it, an act of war.
If Gazan is considered an independent nation under international law (It’s not, but let’s pretend), Israel has literally committed acts of war against it since the very very first day it existed, and every day since.
Gee, I wonder why Gaza was ‘hostile’.
It’s worth reminding people that behavior on the part of Israel was _before_ Hamas was elected.
I repeat: Gaza is only its own nation when it’s convenient to the narrative, it’s never its own country when talking about stuff Israel does to itReport
You’re reversing cause and effect.
Gaza was effectively created in 1949. They were genocidally opposed to Israel then. That’s when Egypt ran the place and long before the occupation.
Hamas was created because the surrounding Arabic states were becoming less genocidally opposed to Israel.
They’re so extreme in their views and beliefs that Egypt doesn’t want them back.
They’re deeply offended by the existence of Israel. I suppose that yes, they also dislike having their airspace violated and so on.
However if left to their own devices they will prioritize attacking Israel and murdering Jews over the basic “setting up a state” sort of things like putting in water pipes and creating an economy.
Israel has a boot on their neck because they’re genocidal. The boot might make them worse, but they’d be genocidal even without it.Report
…could the reason that the Palestinians were so opposed to Israel in 1949 be that Israeli murdered thousands of them and displaced hundreds of thousands of them literally one year earlier and claimed the place they had been living as another country and would not allow them back?
“Man, the French inexplicably hated the Germans in 1943. Must be a bunch of genocidal weirdos. Can’t think of any other reason they’d have a problem with them.”
Weird, man. So irrational. The rest of the world would just let other people take over their land and kick them out.Report
Sure. All that is true.
In the war of 1949 the Jews resisted their own extermination and created a state. Like normal, crimes were part of that.
The unusual part is we’re still hung up on it. We’re supposed to treat Israel’s state creation as an unforgivable crime when by the standards of that region it’s one of the nicer states.
Subtract them being Jewish and I don’t see anything unusual for that area.Report
Iran is probably the biggest Hamas supporter.
Iran is different racially (Persian is not Arab) and religiously (Sunni vs Shia).
Since Iran takes it’s religion seriously, it probably views Hamas as apostate cannon fodder.Report
Threats to Jewish students at Cornell lead to police investigation. And the Anti-Zionists wonder why Jews don’t believe them when they say they are merely anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic. Yet every time there is a flare up in I/P conflict, they can’t seem to help themselves. God damn them one and all.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/threats-to-jewish-cornell-university-students-in-online-discussion-board-provoke-police-investigationReport
People who know how to read polls have apparently started to read polls.
Report
“What? No, the stuff I said last week was anti-Zionism. You must have misheard me. That happens a lot when you’re racist, that thing where you mis-hear someone saying something different from what they really said.”Report
Here are screen shots of the threats posted at Cornell:
https://cornellsun.com/2023/10/29/posts-online-threaten-jewish-students-and-center-for-jewish-living/Report
But you understand that when screen name kill jews said “from the river to the sea”, he meant…Report
I admit: I had a handful of theories about the online posts. I should have gone with the whole “No, it’s going to be weird and dumb” theory instead of going with my prejudices.
Report
New York Magazine’s “The Cut” has an article titled “When Posting About the Israel-Hamas War Costs You Your Job”.
Apparently, people are getting disproportionately fired for being pro-Palestinian. Sure, *SOME* pro-Israelis are getting fired for what they’re saying online… but not enough to properly make a “both sides are getting fired” defense.
My favorite take on this issue is that “People who are used to being fashionable have no natural immunity.”Report
Consequences baby. I remember, a long time ago…maybe around the time the internet came out or maybe the WWW, someone said “what you post stays forever”.Report
They fired Twilight Sparkle!!Report
Politico has a good article on how the Anti-Israel Left are putting American Jews in an impossible place and comparing the current moment to 1967 and the Six Day War:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/23/anti-israel-left-jewish-politics-00122848Report
Its a great opinion piece with a healthy dose of reminder history.
What it doesn’t do is give he left any kind of hint or path or framework to hold any of the players to account. Hamas as a terrorist organization is easy to condemn, but there’s seemingly no way to express support to actual non-Hamas Palestinians that isn’t taken as being somehow anti-Semitic. Likewise Israel as a secular state has actions prior to and since October 7th to answer for but there no language that seems to allow for that duality.
So the left either clings to its priors or shuts up because we don’t have an alternative. Which I’d love to have.Report
An honestly liberal liberalism wouldn’t have a problem fitting this into its priors. Terrorists raped murdered innocent citizens of a democracy allied with the US. It’s that simple. This modern leftism, with its warmed over revolution and race obsession, who cares if it’s stumbling. I keep getting told there’s a difference between liberalism and leftism – well, stop telling me and show me.Report
Terrorists committed rape and murder. A “democratic” nation state is also openly committing was crimes against civilians, after decades of forcefully taking land from those same civilians. Where’s the “Rule of law” the right used to be so haughty about?Report
You were starting to have a candid conversation about the problem in the American left – quick, change the subject back to the right!Report
No, I was pointing out (In response to the article Lee linked to) that the “American Left” can’t criticize the “democratic” nation state of Israel without being called anti-Semitic AND we can’t support individual Palestinians in their right to live in peace without being called “anti-Semitic” because letting Palestinians live in peace may mean criticizing the nation-state of Israel. And form that I was asking quite genuinely for language that allows me to do both things.
You then jumped in and said this should be easy for a liberal since all you have to do is denounce terrorists. I then reminded you that Israel has openly declared its intentions to commit war crimes (never mind having actually committed them). And asked somewhat rhetorically where the GOP is on this since it long ago branded itself as the party of law and order and war crimes are, by definition, illegal.
Still plenty on target, just not a target you want to acknowledge apparently.Report
I don’t have any problems fitting it in. No one should defend what Hamas did. But it’s also just being a grown up to understand that the policy choices of the Israeli government make this kind of thing inevitable. It’s also plenty reasonable to wonder whether the current dynamics of our alliance with Israel are good for us, or, frankly, for them. I don’t know how anyone can continue to say it is. All we’re doing is helping them to slowly strangle their own status as a liberal, democratic country.
Anyway it’s not like you see this kind of widespread, high profile condemnation of, I dunno, France or the UK when they are the victims of Islamist terrorism. The most basic reason for that is they left their colonies decades ago and even where they still exert influence, diplomatically or militarily, in their former possessions it isn’t remotely the same as indefinitely maintaining a huge number of totally stateless disenfranchised people in territory de facto under their control.Report
At some point we’re going to see another serious peace proposal sent to Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians.
The expectation should be that they reject it, just like they’ve rejected the others.
The policy choices of the Israeli government make things worse, but that’s starting from an already amazingly grim baseline.Report
I’m not sure we will see another. The Palestinians have been degraded to the point that there’s no authority capable of negotiating a proposal to reject and the Israeli government is so dependent on the settler movement I don’t think it’s capable of talking or making an offer.
The only answer IMO is unilateral withdrawal from the territories by Israel and fortification of the new border to some approximation of the green line.
One of the things to keep in mind about the Israeli response is just how much misdirection and ass covering is going on. Netanyahu left the border with Gaza so poorly defended it was breached by a bunch of irregulars with small arms and commercial vehicles, who were then able to run rampant for hours and hours, some for a few days. That’s a failure so massive that you have to assume that they are as much clinging to any semblance of credibility as looking towards legitimate military objectives.Report
“Terrorists raped murdered innocent citizens of a democracy allied with the US. It’s that simple.”
Is it better, worse, or the same if someone rapes and murders innocent citizens of a non-democracy, non-US ally?Report
In context I think the act itself is almost a secondary question. This debate is really about the things people are saying and the things people are saying are inseparable from the fact that Israel is a (nominal) US ally and (nominal) democracy.Report
I’m a little lost then, I guess.Report
I’d say that any of those points would have inspired a JFK-era liberal to want to intervene.Report
Google “rape of US nuns in El Salvador”
Spoiler- the men who ordered the rape and murder of the nuns were granted citizenship in America and now live happily and freely in Florida.
Sometimes the bad guys win.Report
Therefore…?
Ceasefire?Report
Therefore the rape and murder of innocent citizens of a democracy allied with the US is…not that simple apparently.
Sometimes women and children are just collateral damage in a larger struggle.
I’m not being sarcastic, by the way.Report
I’m willing to run with “Hey. Sometimes these things happen.”
I’d be curious as to when we need to pivot away from “Hey. Sometimes these things happen” to “OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU BEING SO CYNICAL WHEN THERE ARE *LIVES* AT *STAKE*?!?”
If there’s, like, a meta-set of rules beyond “Who. Whom.”Report
Good question.
What do you think?Report
That there is not, in fact, a meta-set of rules beyond “Who. Whom.”Report
The guy who gave the order was eventually deported.
Most of the other people involved did various amounts of time (at least 14 years).
On the other side, various Popes have cracked down on liberation theology (LT) to avoid this sort of thing. LT in practice means preaching there needs to be a violent communist revolution.Report
Yeah, those nuns had it coming. What did you think kinetic anti-Communism looked like, vibes?Report
If you’re preaching that the local billionaire should be killed, and people are taking this seriously enough that his and his family’s lives are in danger from armed groups, then it’s somewhat expected that he form his own armed group.
Whether those nuns were active participants in this mess is unclear. They’ve been accused of it but I’ve never seen convincing evidence.
However this is the backdrop for what is going on.
The Popes stepped on this movement hard because it effectively turned the Church from a religion of peace into active participants and instigators of civil wars.Report
So, in response to Pinky’s assertion, the rape and murder of Americans would NOT have inspired a JFK-era liberal to step in?
And would you be receptive to arguments that the settlers who were killed by Hamas were involved in preaching violence to Palestinians, and therefore what happened to them should be expected?
Here’s an alternate suggestion- that we unequivocally condemn the slaughter of innocents, whenever it fails to meet the test of a just war theory?Report
RE: The US stepping in.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to invade a country every time a crime committed. There are things we can do less than that. We put pressure on the legal systems and supplied support to oppose the communist rebels.
The real question which hasn’t been answered is why were the nuns killed?
If it was because they were nuns then that’s a war crime. This is assumed to be the reality and might be true. But our local reality is that Nuns are by definition innocent but it was less true there.
If you’re calling for a local family to be dragged out of their home and killed, much less providing support for people who are actively doing that sort of thing, then “innocent” doesn’t seem the correct word to describe you.
For Hamas, they kill people because they are Jewish. If they were targeting settlers for specific things, like attacking Muslims, then the nature of the conflict would be very different.Report
Were the nuns actually “calling for a local family to be dragged out of their home and killed”?
And is “calling for a local family to be dragged out of their home and killed” justification for extrajudicial rape and murder?
Because hoo boy, a lotta Proud Boys and commenters at Gateway Pundit should be very, very worried.
See, this is what we’re seeing a lot of here in the national conversation about the Hamas/ Israel war.
People think that if they admit wrongdoing by the side they favor, they will automatically make legitimate whatever the other side does.
So like, if they admit that Israel has behaved like a colonizing apartheid regime, this will justify or minimize the atrocities of 10/7. Or conversely, admitting the atrocities will excuse or minimize the injustices suffered by the Palestinians.
And so it was with the nuns- any admission that this was an atrocity would somehow make the Communist insurgency seem legitimate.
What if we reject that sort of thinking?Report
As I said, I’ve seen no convincing evidence that they were in that Theological Camp… although it’s weird that they, personally, would be targeted for death by a group that targets people like that for death.
No doubt a believer of Liberation Theology would argue “dragged out and killed” isn’t what they want, but it’s magic thinking on how it doesn’t happen. It’s like calling for a robust right of return but also claiming you’re cool with Israel existing.
Was it an atrocity? Legal system thought so so the answer is “yes”.
RE: What if we reject that sort of thinking?
A lot of Palestinian suffering is because they support terror groups, want to refight wars, and are used as pawns by various states.
Gaza wasn’t always an open air prison, but Israel gets fewer dead Jews if it is. So calling for the embargo on Gaza to end is also calling for Iran’s proxy Hamas to be empowered.
There are also nasty things Israel does that it shouldn’t, most of them connected to the settlers.
However most people in the West don’t really understand where the line is drawn between Israel being a bully and Israel making legit security decisions because the Palestinians want to refight a war.
For example, Israel is currently doing an all out war with Hamas, and civilians in Gaza are dying. Is that a war crime, a war crime because it’s impossible to be anything else, a just cause, or all of those?Report
What happens if we apply this same standard to America?
As I said, there are plenty of Jan.6 rioters and MAGAs who explicitly have called for violence against their enemies, and many more who endorse a political vision which, as you say, implicitly leads to such a conclusion.
If their wife and children were raped and murdered by some paramilitary outfit would we say that they brought it upon themselves?Report
It seems to me that we would have people saying just that. Which isn’t to say there wouldn’t also be outrage. But I recall the whole ‘little Eichmanns’ thing after 9/11.Report
In America, we have a functional legal system and functional law enforcement so a Rich man can call the cops and say he has an armed intruder or that his daughter has been kidnaped and the State will take care of it.
Wearing a tee-shirt that says “eat the rich” is a humorous political statement but that’s all. The Jan 6th rioters will face the legal system. Some will spend decades in prison.
If the State doesn’t have a monopoly on the use of force then we quickly go dark places.
For example the 4th time in a year a Billionaire needed to deal with himself or family members being kidnaped he funded a death squad.
Deliberately interjecting yourself into that situation and openly aiding one of the armed groups by claiming one of the other armed groups is evil and deserves to die runs the risk of being taken seriously.
If it were against an ethnic group and not an economic group we’d call it hate speech.Report
I’m not seeing how your logic doesn’t also apply to the victims of the 10/7 massacre.
Or for that matter, the billionaire and his family.
What can you say about the nuns that doesn’t also apply to them?
And aren’t you really just saying that if the overall cause is just, then anything done in service to it is justified?Report
I am pointing out that within the margin of error, those nuns may have been the equiv of Hamas supporters in Gaza.
Yes, people like that are civilians. However at the same time it can’t be that much of a shock if you end up with violence on your door step.
Does that mean you should be targeted and killed? No. However “innocent civilian” doesn’t mix well with “calling for lots of blood to be spilled”.
I’m not sure how this argument is supposed to compare to “all Jews and music lovers” (victims of 10/7). I’m also not sure how this is supposed to compare to that Billionaire whose crime was being rich.
A more valid comparison would be a civilian in Germany in the 40’s who supports the Na.zi party though they know exactly what’s going on (or even, they support because they know).Report
There is a lot of Jewish opinion on Israel and this ranges from Jews deserve all of Eretz Israel because God promised it to us and we should also take down the Al-Aqsa complex and rebuild the Temple to Israel is a colonizing apartheid regime and all the Jews need to leave now and give it back to the Palestinians and everything in between. Most Diaspora Jews are mildly to very pro-Israel and see it as a national liberation but wish relationships with the Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims would be better and more people saw Zionism as the Jewish national liberation movement.
From what I can tell this sort of nuance does Jews a lot of good. The Jews embraced by the Palestinians, the rest of the Muslims, and their Western allies are the most anti-Zionist of Jews while everybody else is assumed to be a rabid genocidal Zionist because they don’t call for the complete destruction of Israel.Report
The people Hamas killed were not ‘settlers’, they were just random Israelis. Settlers are Israelis living in Palestine.
Settlers actually _are_ breaking the law. All of them. Just being a ‘settler’, is illegal. At least, under Palestinian (and international) law.Report
Once again, so what if they are?
You seem to think that just establishing Israeli crimes and injustices is enough.
But that’s like saying that France in 1940 was a racist settler colonial power (which it very much was!)
OK, so what if it is? Where does that leave us?Report
Should we intervene as such when American men rape American women?
ETA: Is the issue rape? Or who’s raping whom?Report
With the military? Absolutely not.
With the police? Well. It’s so complicated, isn’t it?
With the full force of the university’s administration? HELL YES GAME ONReport
The way you do it is by expressing support for the two state solution.
I would like to resolve this conflict and end the suffering of both sides (but especially the Palestinians) by having a Palestinian state which exists along side, and peacefully, with Israel.
If you’re cheering for ending Palestinians suffering by driving Jews out of the Middle East then you’re calling for a genocidal war. This is true even if you’re engaged in fuzzy thinking and don’t really understand that this is what you’re doing.Report
I keep being told the two state solution is dead because the Palestinains don’t want it. Why then cheer for the impossible?
That aside, the Netanyahu regime made a ton of unforced error in the run up and response to this attack. And yet there are MANY online people who will not countenance critique of those because they are somehow anti-Semitic.Report
RE: Why then cheer for the impossible?
Because it’s the only solution that doesn’t involve ethnic cleansing and/or mass murder.
RE: And yet there are MANY online people who will not countenance critique of those because they are somehow anti-Semitic.
If you’re cheering on children being burned alive because they’re Jewish, then yes you’re an anti-Semite.
If you think that this sort of thing was a predictable outcome of Netanyahu’s policies, then you are in the complex position of opposing those without being on the same side of a murderous anti-Semitic openly genocidal terror group.
This is easier to do poorly than well. For example trying to argue that the openly genocidal terror group would have been less genocidal if they’d been richer or had access to more guns.
Worse, a lot of the people you’d be agreeing with online view Hamas as the good guys. The basic Palestinian narrative is either anti-Semitic (Jews shouldn’t be in the Middle East) or trivially becomes that.Report
Here is an interesting essay on why the younger generation of DSA leftists is attracted heavily to the cause of Palestine. TL/DR, Biden is trying very hard to be an economic left President with varying degrees of success because of torpedoing from Sinemanchin and lukewarm public support but on foreign policy, there is a lot more elite consensus than on domestic issues so it is an attractive wedge: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-american-socialist-worldview-4aaReport
I think its also a problem of only two political parties really gaining – and keeping – traction in the US. If the DSA had elected representatives in state legislatures and county councils and thus actual experience in governing, they might look very different a as political entity.Report
Duverger’s law is a harsh mistress but it is the truth of how the United States organizes its political elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_lawReport
The inability of Western Pro-Palestinian activists to come out and condemn the Simchat Torah massacre is contributing to the bad feelings that Jews have towards them and not trust them when it comes to them saying they are not anti-Semitic:
A former OTer but this on my Facebook timeline.
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/we-are-ruled-by-sociopaths-and-morons-a9c448d85387
“As far as I’m concerned everything that happened on October 7 was the result of generations of Israeli abuse, the British decisions that made it all possible, and the American backing which has kept it all possible.”
Translation into regular English: “The Israelis had it coming and they don’t deserve any sympathy even if they are literal babies. This is from a white Australian woman.Report
California regulators suspend recently approved San Francisco robotaxi service for safety reasons
https://www.kcra.com/article/california-regulators-suspend-recently-approved-san-francisco-robotaxi-service-for-safety-reasons/45630146
“The DMV didn’t elaborate on the specific reasons for the suspension, but the move comes after a series of incidents that heightened concerns about the hazards and inconveniences caused by Cruise’s robotaxis. The worries reached a new level earlier this month after a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle driven by a human, and then pinned the pedestrian under one of its tires after coming to a stop.”
Yeah, that might do it….Report
On the other blog we keep getting into heated debates on whether Israel’s response to the Simchat Torah massacre is proportionate. Gaza is a dense area and Hamas deeply buried itself in the civilian areas and infrastructure of Hamas. This means that there is no practical way for the IDF to go after Hamas easily. This is especially true with aerial bombardment but even a pure ground invasion would be long and protracted and bloody. The fact that hundreds of Israeli Jews including literal babies are being held captive in Gaza makes it worse.
A lot of people are trying to basically argue that the best response for Israel to the Simchat Torah massacre would be to do nothing and accept Hamas extremely arrogant “heads we win, tails we lose” ceasefire proposal. Beyond the Pro-Palestinian protestors out on the street on October 8th, 2023; most of the rest of them are too intelligent to just come out and say this. When one tries to press them for alternative responses that a realistic Israeli PM could take, they usually demure and say it is not my job. But this basically amounts to Israel should do nothing.
Hamas is an impossible problem to solve. They are arrogant true believers in their deluded cosmology and want Jews out of the region. They are also basically one of the governing factions of the Palestinians. Negotiating with them is like negotiating with you know who.Report
I agree with your points but this is eerily similar to the discussions I recall having in 2006 about Islamic terrorism, where you can easily argue yourself into a very dark place.
Its not a good idea to eliminate the possibility of a political solution which sees Hamas defeated and the Palestinians accepting Israel’s right to exist.
It doesn’t have to be a probability now, but needs to be held out as a possibility.Report
The Simchat Torah massacre has made me angrier than any other Hamas action in my life time. Not only because of the sheer scale of it but because of the Pro-Palestinian Westerners that are outright celebrating the murder of Jews. I loathe them.Report
So, how many dead Palestinians are worth it to get your revenge?
Hamas is evil, but what evil are you willing to support to get what you think your people deserve?Report
Jewish life seems to be very cheap.Report
I can’t imagine any other group on the planet told to take atrocities against them on the chin as much as Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular are supposed to take them. The Palestinians and Muslim world want a cease fire then they release all the hostages and they do it now and without conditions.Report
I think it would’ve been dumb to hang over foreign policy decisions on 9/12 to only people directly affected by 9/11, which is basically what’s happennig in Israel right now. I think it was dumb to rush to war in Afghanistan right away as well, and that the shock and awe campaign in Iraq was a terrible thing.
I think there’s a lot of room between saying Israel should just take it on the chin, and the current actions of the Israeli government. I’ve seen zero evidence that their current plan is making it more likely the Palestanian population turn on Hamas, that it results in Hamas handing over hostages, or any other positive result, other than lots of dead Palestinians and ruined buildings.
I think deep down, many Israelis and their allies know that the actual people who masterminded what led to the attack, are out of harm’s way in some palatial estate in the Middle East, and will never face justice
Currently, no, Israel is not committing a genocide. What they are committing, is a reactionary, dumb military action led by a kind of incompetent government, that is not going to lead to anything good for them in the long view.
Hamas is evil, the current reactionary Israeli government and their supporters in settlements currently attacking Palestanians and Israeli Arab’s are terrible and evil, and the IDF may not have committed war crimes to the letter of the law, but it’s also 2023, not 1943.
The US couldn’t do Dresden or the Tokyo fire bombing without much international backlash today, even if they were fully justified.
Also, if Jewish life is cheap, then it seems Israel thinks Palestinian life is even cheaper.Report
Under what fantasy system would the response to the Simchat Torah massacre not be handled by Israel or really any foreign policy decision not handled by officials in the country directly affected by it? Attempts to create international systems of arbitration to deal with these things have generally failed more than they succeeded since the League of Nations because turning over that much sovereignty is not popular with most countries. Plus you need to find a decision makers acceptable to both the Israelis and the Palestinians and possibly every Muslim majority country. That isn’t going to happen.
I find the continual liberal belief in something like world government puzzling. The number of illiberal people outnumbers global liberals by orders of magnitudes. A global democracy is going to be very conservative one socially and not safe for groups that global liberals sympathize with like LGBT people.Report
I don’t support a world government. I’m just stating a fact – if NYC was a sovereign nation with nukes and a strong military, they might’ve reacted as incredibly badly, military and strategically, in a way Israel has.Report
What is the mechanism to prevent Israel’s response to the Simchat Torah massacre to be handled by anybody other than Israel without basically taking it over immediately?Report
“I think it would’ve been dumb to hang over foreign policy decisions on 9/12 to only people directly affected by 9/11, which is basically what’s happennig in Israel right now.”
So, only people with the correct views deserve self-determination and to elect their own leaders?Report
The logical and rational view is as follows:
When Lebanon kidnaped two Israelis, Israel went to war and dropped a couple of Billion dollars of damage on their economy. The kidnapers later said they wouldn’t have done it if they’d known this would happen.
Israel is trying to impress on the Palestinians that doing this sort of thing is a bad idea. That the result won’t be good things, it will be very very bad things.
This is a nasty brutal part of the world and this is normal for it. Maybe with enough dead bodies, there will be more support for peace.
The flaws in this are…
1) Israel is trying to be a lot nicer than this.
2) Their supporters would like them to be a lot nicer than this.
3) I very much doubt logic and rationality are at work here.
You phrased it very well with your 9/11 comparison.Report
Hamas actually claims that something like 70% of their recruits are orphans that Israel made…which to be clear, is a blatant lie, it’s nowhere near that amount, but it is certainly a signification fraction, and gets even higher when you aren’t just talking about parents but include other family members.
It really is amazing how many people think ‘Beat a conquered people into submission’ will work. It has literally never worked in human history. You can kill them all, you can integrate them into your populationsa nd normalize things, but you can’t just…keep controlling them.
The reason reactions ‘worked’ for Lebanon is that other people can leave Israel alone. Hezbollah (Not Lebanon.) had to be prodded into that thing by Iran, and rather obviously regretted it.
Hezbollah can just ignore them and walk away, and generally has since then. (Well, until right now, when they realized Israel is weakened.)
Palestine cannot do that.Report
An op-ed on why it is factually wrong and counterproductive to accuse Israel of genocide but why it happens anyway:
https://forward.com/opinion/567718/does-israeli-military-action-in-gaza-constitute-genocide/?amp=1Report
I’m told that Canadian Aboriginal Women having a murder rate comparable to the USAian average is a genocide, but the Holodomor is not.
I think this word game might be rigged.Report
Meanwhile, back here in the good old US of A:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/31/opinions/mike-johnson-gop-extreme-right-agenda-avlon/index.htmlReport
sounds great but do keep in mind that if you replace the primary system with direct elections, you get President John McCain from 2008 to 2016, and President Bernie Sanders from 2016 to the present day. (Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2008 primary, and Sanders did in 2016.)
Whether that would’ve worse than what we got is, of course, a separate discussion.Report
Its talking about the House, which Republicans have gerrymandered a number of safe districts into . . . which allow whackos like Johnson to obtain and hold power.
And Bernie would have been way better then the guys in the WH over the same time period. McCain I could have lived with the same way I live with GWB. At least none of them fomented an attack on the US capitol.Report
From the New York Times:
After Years of Vowing to Destroy Israel, Iran Faces a Dilemma
Here’s your subhed:
With Israel bent on crushing Iran’s ally Hamas, Tehran must decide whether it and the proxy militias it arms and trains will live up to its fiery rhetoric.
Truly, Iran is a land of contradictions.Report
One error people make is to assume that the status quo is some sort of naturally occurring order which can never change.
But with any system, when the forces which created an equilibrium change, the system changes to a new status.
There were a lot of forces which preferred the old status quo in Gaza;
Likud, which had a convenient but ineffectual enemy to terrify the population into supporting Likud;
Hamas, which had a convenient enemy to immiserate the Palestinians into supporting Hamas;
The other Muslim nations, which had the plight of the Palestinians as a convenient distraction from their domestic corruption and oppression;
But this all relied upon the Palestinians forever being an irritant but nothing more and Israel being a colonial occupier but only just, and the Palestinians being satisfied with the lip service from the other Muslim nations, but nothing more.
Now the table has been flipped over and chaos unleashed.
So the issue confronting all the players is, now what?
Are the Palestinians going to tolerate the passive indifference of the Muslim nations, literally standing at the gate to Egypt and seeing it slammed shut in their faces?
Are they going to continue to support Hamas, or listen to an alternate voice which promises a better future than endless misery and war? Its one thing to vow war against Israel when it meant nothing more than an hour walking thru the streets but now it means burying your dead children.
Are the Israelis going to rethink the “Fortress Israel” concept when it has failed so spectacularly?
At what point do all or any of the players begin to consider other alternatives?Report
This is true but it doesn’t consider the effect of an entirely different cosmology. From even beofre Israel was founded in 1948, a large chunk of Muslim majority nations saw Zionism as an offense against all Islam because Palestine was part of the Dar al-Islam. Once under Muslim control, always under Muslim control. Hamas and other similar organizations like Hezbollah along with the Iranian clerical regime really believe this. Maybe this ideology can change but it doesn’t seem too over the decades.Report
This is what i am referring to, the “Put up or shut up” moment for all the players:
The Islamic Republic views the militias as its extended arms of influence, able to strike while affording Tehran a measure of deniability. They give Iran leverage in international negotiations and a means of tilting the balance of power in the Middle East away from archenemies like Israel and the United States, and rivals like Saudi Arabia.
But if Iran does nothing, its fiery leaders risk losing credibility among constituents and allies. Some Iranian hard-line conservatives have questioned why Iran’s actions are not matching its rhetoric to “free Al Quds,” or Jerusalem, from Israel’s rule. Many supporters of Iran’s government have even symbolically signed up as volunteers to be deployed to Gaza and fight Israel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/world/middleeast/iran-israel-hamas.html
Islamic nations like Iran and to a lesser extent the Saudi kingdom were content to use the Palestinian misery to their own benefit and saw them as tools to be controlled, not causes to be advanced.
But now things are threatening to spiral out of their control. Its hard to whip up war fever with absurd and unrealistic promises, and then attempt restraint and nuance.Report
Not just “use”. I’d argue “create”.
The Arabic states who invaded Israel in 1949 and 1967 weren’t doing so to help the Palestinians.
Gaza is filled with refugees from 1949. Egypt could have trivially created a Palestinian state between 49 and 67 because it controlled that land.
Gaza Palestinians (and others) were put into camps by Egypt and forced to put their lives on hold in order to poison the idea of peace with Israel.
For that matter the UN’s whole “Right to Return” and “child of a Palestinian refugee is a refugee” concepts only make sense if Israel is going to be destroyed.Report
The Palestinians could have also been given citizenship but were generally not with a few exceptions like Jordan or Lebanon quietly naturalizing Palestinian Christian refugees to increase the Christian population. If the Palestinians were absorbed into other Arab countries like the Mizrahi Jews were into Israel, not a perfect process, than the situation would be really different today.Report
Wow, your brain is..a weird place to be.
In 1917, Britain signed a statement, the Balfour Declaration, indicating they were going to give part of Palestine to Jews despite Jews only being 10% of the population at the time. In 1920, they actually got the UN Mandate [Edit: Sorry, the League of Nations Mandate.] to run the place and build governments there, and this became a real possibly.
And at that point, violence started. In all three directions, really.
I like how you think it requires some sort of magical religious thought of ‘Dar al-Islam’ to have a problem with a third party decided that part of your country should be handed over _small minority_.
Honest to God, do people here even hear themselves? ‘Why were the other Palestinians not happy to hear that 10% of the population were going to be put in charge?! Herp-derp, must be religious fanaticism!’
It couldn’t be that they thought they should rule themselves via democracy, or possibly noticed that it would either require some form of apartheid minority rule _or_ ethnic cleansing to actually work.Report
I mean, we can literally go and check why they rejected the UN Partition plan, and weirdly they didn’t say anything about Dar al-Islam.
“The plan was not accepted by the Palestinian Arabs and
Arab States on the ground that it violated the provisions of the United Nations
Charter, which granted people the right to decide their own destiny. They said that
the Assembly had endorsed the plan under circumstances unworthy of the United
Nations and that the Arabs of Palestine would oppose any scheme that provided
for the dissection, segregation or partition of their country, or which gave special
and preferential rights and status to a minority.”
https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/DPIQoPPub_280220.pdfReport
David, as someone who thinks the Israelis are more wrong than right, and more responsible for ending this than the Palestinians, let me explain to you why this train of argument is pointless, and no one with a brain will ever accept it. The map of the entire globe was re-drawn, a few times in in some places, in the years between 1931 and 1962. There are a lot of new countries, and a lot of new borders, most of which were created with violence and displacement. And yet most of those people, including the ones who got the short end of the stick, have found ways to muddle along without drawing a line in the sand on redoing history in a way that is not and never will be possible. Now the common denominator is that they all got the protection of citizenship of some kind of country, somewhere. The Palestinians deserve and need to get that too. But the biggest hurdle is the refusal of the belligerents to live in the here and now, with a priority for the people who are alive today. Not the ones 100 or 70 or however many years ago. You prioritize the interests of the living not the dead.Report
While true, there are frequent instances of folks who long for the days before radical changes happened to their ancestors. You still find folks talking about the “southern states” in the US. Besides, being against the “jews” probably gives them street cred and funding from muslim countries. It server their interests and those that give the $.Report
Translation: The boarders of the new countries need to be drawn so they are Islamic Republics.
What you have here is the Palestinian narrative. Like all narratives, it’s a description of where their heads are at. That makes it true even in the places where it’s false.
The problem is there’s also a Jewish narrative, which is equally valid for the same reasons.
IMHO if our end goal is Peace then we need to admit both narratives exist and should be accommodated. Thus the two state solution.
If part of your narrative is that only your own narrative is valid, then that’s going to fuel problems. And yes, the Israeli Right fits that description and has that problem.
However, the Palestinian narrative that there can be only one has been a bigger problem for resolving this historically. Thus them still fighting over whether or not there will be a Jewish state.
If their narrative was “we need a state”, then we could resolve this. If their narrative is “they can’t have a state”, then there’s nowhere to go.Report
RE: 1917
Faict, The Palestinian people became a defined demographic in the 70s or so.
RE: “a small part of your country”
And what country would that be? The Ottoman Empire? The British Empire?
Why should the Arabs in places far away from Palestine in different countries care? Judging from their behavior they certainly don’t care about the Palestinian people.
When all this got started before WW1, the Jews were moving to the Ottoman Empire and buying land. Then that Empire fell apart and Britton took over. Britton between 1917 and 1948 had the issue of how to handle Jewish immigration.
It didn’t create the Jewish connection to that land and didn’t want them, however the Jews wanted to be there a lot more than Britton wanted to keep them out.
After WW2, Britton decided they didn’t want the area and would hand it over to the natives. By that time there were so many Jews there that there was a strong argument for giving them a state.
Thus the UN proposal of 1948.
And then we had the war of 1949, which was both a land grab (NOT to give it to the Palestinians) and an act of Anti-Semitism by the Arabs.
Anti-Semitism is the rocket fuel that has propelled the creation of Israel. Without the Arabs kicking out their own Jews, Israel wouldn’t have the population to be a local super-power.
What happened would be the rough equiv of the USA getting unhappy with some African strongman and taking it out on all of our local Blacks. Probably the worst thing the Arabs did was rounding up the refugees from the wars and putting them into camps to keep the conflict alive.Report
Hamas official states that Hamas is going to repeat October 7th attacks until Israel is totally destroyed. Not just leaves Gaza and the West Bank but totally gone even within the Green Line.Report
I forgot the link. Here it is:
https://twitter.com/MEMRIReports/status/1719662664090075199?s=20Report
To which a reasonable person might ask, “How’s that working out for ya? ”
And by “reasonable person” I mean any of the Gazans who are burying their children.
In any war in any period of history there comes a time when people get tired of funneling their young men into a meatgrinder for the promise of a victory that never comes.Report
Hamas and other Islamist actors are not acting as reasonable persons but people filled with faith in their correctness. The creation of Israel has seemed to have wrought psychological havoc on Islam in general. Not only was a non-Muslim country created out of what should be the Dar al-Islam but they were beaten by Jews. It is like being a heavy weight champion of the world in the flush of youth and getting beaten by the pudgy, balding neighborhood accountant who has a receding hairline, wears glasses, and has a bad mustache.Report
MattY has a decent essay that mentions polling.
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The link I just posted leads me to something I don’t understand. Why are so many Pro-Palestinian activists in the West in deep denial of the goals of at least a good chunk of the Palestinian leadership and wider Muslim leadership when it comes to Israel. Hamas has repeatedly stated that the only acceptable goal is the complete destruction of Israel and it’s replacement with a Muslim state in all of Palestine. Other Muslim groups have made similar statements. Despite this, Western Pro-Palestinian activists just go about pretending that they are a Middle Eastern ANC and they want a modern 21st century rainbow Palestine despite no Palestinian leader or really any Arab or Muslim leader saying anything close. We can provide all the evidence we like and there is no bend or change but flat denial.
You have LGBT people making bold stands against the one country in the Middle East where they have rights and can live openly rather than get killed outright. Many of the people pulling down the pictures of the captive Israelis would be killed dead one second in Gaza. The only plausible explanation is that David Baddiel’s argument that Jews Don’t Count is completely correct and the activists have generally decided that Jews don’t belong in the “Sacred Circle of Oppression” no matter what.Report
Oppression doesn’t really exist in the US. “Oppressed people” are a group of people who point to historical injustices to explain their current failures. Historically it’s understood by everyone that they didn’t deserve it.
So “failure” and “oppression” can almost be used interchangeably by the Left.
Israel is successful. Jews as a whole are successful, especially in Israel. Ergo by definition they’re not oppressed.
The Palestinians are actually oppressed, ergo by definition they don’t deserve it. Gaza is an open air prison camp, most of the people there are civilians. Ergo by definition they shouldn’t be.
Hamas is basically a group of Na.zis and they’re popular. Gaza is an open air prison camp because from Israel’s point of view, the people deserve it.
The obvious conclusion is that the people in Gaza are Na.zis as a reply to Israel’s repression. Logically that holds up pretty well, certainly it matches the Palestinian narrative.
It even gives us things like “this is all a cycle of violence”.
If the reality is the repression is mostly because Gaza is filled with Na.zis and their supporters, then there is no hope for peace. And the oppressed people can deserve it. That’s massively different from what they want to believe.Report
It’s not based in more than aesthetics.
It doesn’t need to be coherent.
It just needs to be fashionable.Report
We could just as easily ask why so many people are in denial about any of the rising authoritarian movements.Report
That is fairish. Denial is not just a river of Egypt but it is playing out in ugly ways. I am not too concerned that it is going to down Biden in 2024. I am not breaking out into hives over polling 53 weeks away from an election.* But I am not quite ready to forgive or be kind to the people who wave around terms like Settler-Colonialism or Genocide easily because:
1. They aren’t all dumb college students;
2. They really don’t understand Jewish history and don’t seem to care to;
3. It isn’t true;
4. I don’t believe in a no enemies to the left stance like Reagan’s No Enemies to the Right stance.
*For anyone who wants to tut tut, I am not stating Biden is a shoe in but please remember InMD’s observation on the 2022 midterms was everyone owes me a beer.Report
If one of the effects of all this is to marginalize the Jill Stein contingent from mainstream liberals, that would be a silver lining.
We don’t need them to win and they just suck up too much oxygen from the discourse.Report
The past few weeks have been basically proving David Baddiiel’s Jews Don’t Count thesis and Dara Horn’s Everybody Loves Dead Jews thesis correct when it comes to the Further Left at least. Jews are not in the Sacred Circle of Oppression (TM) and Jews who attempt to live rather then die like the Zionists have engaged have done something awful apparently.Report
I read this old book where Israel just kept pretending there wasn’t a Covenant and they were an ordinary people. The same stupid things just kept happening over and over. Good book, but a little repetitious. The follow up was shorter and a faster read.Report
So, only people with the correct views deserve self-determination and to elect their own leaders? I bet the Muslims in Uyghurs don’t have views that align with mine, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think they don’t have basic rights they should have.
If a Palestinian state passes anti-LGBT laws, they can be treated like we treat any other reactionary country that doesn’t have oil or other resources we need, but until that happens and the actual laws are passed, all we have is the possibility.
But yes, kids at college will believe dumb things.Report
“So, only people with the correct views deserve self-determination and to elect their own leaders?”
You wouldn’t believe who would argue such a thing for the Confederacy.
Part of the problem is the whole “Fort Sumter” thing. How many Fort Sumters do you think the North should have endured?Report
If Hamas or any other Palestinian leadership faction is going to try and try again to destroy Israel and get rid of the Jews rather than doing anything constructive, it really isn’t a peace process is it?Report
No one is arguing that Gaza doesn’t deserve to elect their own leaders. The argument is those leaders are openly genocidal and this is one of their sources of popularity.
Everything else follows predictable paths.Report
Is there no end to the open letters?
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Nice to see Cancel Culture is an equal opportunity affliction.Report
It wasn’t supposed to metastasize!
However did we reach this point?
It’s making *ME* feel unsafe!Report
I’m looking forward to Phase Two, where the students who signed the letters and lost their job offers are denounced for being so insufficiently committed to the cause as to want their jobs back.Report
What’s interesting is that I’m not seeing a whole lot of sympathy among mainstream liberals for the pro-Palestinian left.
Once again, Uncle Joe Brandon has found the political center of gravity and is occupying it.Report
For most mainstream liberals, the Simchat Torah massacre comes across as the slaughter of innocent civilians. You really need to buy fully into a sort of Far Leftist or Islamic world view to see the 1,400+ victims as deserving it because they are “white settler-colonialists.” Most people see it as an anti-Semitic pogrom against Jews like what Na.Zis did during the Holocaust, especially with Hamas being loud and clear about what they believe.Report
It’s kind of rich that you have a bunch of young people that want to play revolutionary but also want to have high paying lucrative careers. These are also businesses with many Jews employers and employees. I’m pretty sure that the Jewish co-workers are going to love working with people who believe that Jewish babies killed by Hamas had it coming for being settler-colonialists.Report
Oh, on the whole “crime is going down” thing. There are a handful of pockets where it is going undown.
Double-plus undown.
Note. There are reasons to yell “WHATABOUT”.
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San Francisco had one of the smallest increases, while the rural counties like Fresno and Kern saw the highest.
Maybe they should study San Francisco to see what works.Report
Would “recalling DAs” be on that list?Report
In which another senior Democrat shoots his own toes off by not paying attention to appearances, much less things that matter:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/02/politics/adam-schiff-primary-residence-maryland-california/index.htmlReport
I don’t really think this is going to damn him at all.Report
With California democrats? Maybe not. But in an all out political war for America’s very soul I’m beyond tired of Democrats giving Republicans ammunition to deflect from the GOP’s massive failures.Report
Oh, like you wouldn’t rather keep your hard-earned money instead of giving it to some welfare queen.Report
The Oakland Teachers Union is the latest group to issue and then quickly delete a provocative statement on Israel-Palestine because it did not quite realize “Hey, Oakland Public Schools still have a lot of Jewish employees and Jewish students.”Report
Forgot the link: https://jweekly.com/2023/11/01/parents-teachers-condemn-oakland-teachers-union-statement-on-palestine/Report
I really wonder what is driving all sorts of groups to issue public statements about the I/P conflict at this time. In the past very few groups would issue any sort of Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestinian statement unless it was directly relevant to the organization or the organization was explicitly political. During the early aughts flare up of I/P, it wouldn’t occur to a teacher’s union or a law firm to issue a statement. There seems to be a radicalization among the younger members.Report
Burger Buffet, where America eats Buffet Burgers, wants *YOU* to know:
Black Lives Matter.Report
You should look at it as aesthetics and fashion.
Flying massive American flags and printing Bible verses on cups or fish symbols on business cards is fashionable and has great aesthetics.Report
That made me curious.
Has Dylan Mulvaney released a statement about the conflict in the Middle East?
10 seconds of googling tells me that the answer is no.
Probably the right move, honestly.Report
Now I can cover the Bud Light spot on my Jaybird bingo card.Report
Didn’t mention them.
Only the corporate entity that has demonstrated mastery of protecting one’s brand in the middle of multiple ones that seem to have zero idea of how to do that.Report
My bingo card, my rules. I gave you a pass on Jewish Space DAs earlier because it was somewhat relevant. Otherwise, I’d have covered two spots.Report
Oh, I certainly won’t tell you how to play.
I’d just point out that aesthetics and fashion are as relevant to this as Jewish Space DAs were to the discussion of the state of crime in San Francisco.Report
“We strongly and proudly declare that We Are Not Witches, and in fact we subscribe as strongly and proudly as possible to Antiwitchism.”Report
The tech companies I’ve worked for have developed an astonishing array of feelings for things over the past decade.
Citizens United: a modern day fairy tale where the corporations actually did turn in to real persons.Report
I’m not saying this is true. I do visit some semi weird areas of the intertoobs….
And yeah, I wouldn’t put it past any gov’t to do what’s asserted here because of…..history…
“IDF helicopter pilots received a stand-down order on October 7th that prevented them from responding to the Hamas attacks for six hours that day”
https://chananyaweissman.com/article.php?id=557Report
That is some grade A conspiracy theorizing.Report
All Hail DevCat!Report
Is there a “Buy a cold one for DevCat” fund?Report
Thank you DevCat!Report
Speaking of the Matt Y piece that Jaybrid posted, I occasionally see cartoons on Facebook that basically present two groups of civilians that are supposed to represent ordinary Israelis and Palestinians frightened or scarred as the rockets explode around them. The point being something like most people are really decent and want peace and the war is just something forced upon them by a handful of violent malcontents.
A noble sentiment but it has a problem of not being especially true for the current Israel-Hamas War or really many conflicts in general. As the Matt Y piece shows, something like 55% of Gazan Palestinians support armed resistance and I’m pretty sure that an even greater majority of Israeli Jews believe that Hamas needs to be dealt with once and for all least they break another ceasefire with an even greater atrocity as their leaders promise to do. This is true of every conflict on the planet.
Humans have a great capacity The inability of the Secret Disney Liberals to recognize this is just infuriating. It doesn’t really do much to solve anything.Report
I’m still trying to work out what the critics of Israel’s military operation in Gaza think Biden should have done after the Simchat Torah massacre? Obviously the most militant believe that Biden should have immediately come down on hard on Israel and take the point of Hamas. As Chip points out, that might not really be popular with the not very online because plenty of normie Democratic voters are supportive of Israeli action. The people who are too intelligent to come out and direct say that Israel deserve and deny that they believe the proper response was to do nothing or respond with sackcloth and ashes and full repentance but know how that sounds bad if vocalized so merely imply it believe that there is something that Biden could do in response that would satisfy everybody or at least expect the Jews to grumble and vote for Team D while fearing the mighty youth vote staying out.Report
What could Biden do differently? Make unapologetic statements that a two state solution remains the only viable option for peace. Condemn both parties openly, honestly, and forthrightly for their actions now, and their actions that led p to this. Continue demanding that Israeli defense aid be yoked to Gaza humanitarian aid, and Ukraine military aid – using his veto pen to make the point if necessary. And step up shuttle diplomacy in the region to include all sides.Report
Picture 911 except we lose 100k people. How would we have reacted to hearing it was our own fault and this was an opportunity to make peace with Al-Qaida?
I think Biden has done well by pushing Israel to let in water, food, and reminding them of the mistakes we made.Report
Russia, China, and Iran support Hamas. Are you surprised? I’m not.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-information-war.htmlReport
That’s not new news per se.Report
It might be news to people who believe that “almost no one supports” Hamas.Report
Or to Pro-Palestinian Westerners and what side Hamas is on.Report
I was wrong about somebody real calling for a ceasefire by November 1st. I had honestly thought that Biden would have talked about the importance of peace or something or other.
Dick Durbin may or may not qualify as someone “real”. But he is in the Senate rather than merely the House. He called for a ceasefire on the 2nd.
If he’s not real, then we still have a ways to wait.
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This ceasefire is going to be enforced how? There should be unconditional release of the hostages held by Hamas before a ceasefire. Since Hamas viewed to do this again and again until Israel is gone, I’m not sure what a ceasefire would do in the long term.Report
The same way that the May one was enforced, probably.Report
A mess of DNC staffers have signed a letter asking for a ceasefire. While I certainly wouldn’t count them as “real”, it’s true that some of the people they work for are.
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Oh, one big thing that happened today was Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-general of Hezbollah, gave a speech about what to expect from Hezbollah.
He wished the Palestinians a great deal of luck and then offered them thoughts and prayers.
Now, there are two basic (incompatible) ways to read this:
1. LOL! Everybody thought that he’d make a generalized “Call To Arms” and bring it to Israel! And he didn’t! He just got up there and shrugged!
2. Well, of *COURSE* he couldn’t make a generalized “Call To Arms” and anybody who thought that he would just doesn’t understand the political realities of the region. Hezbollah is a *RESISTANCE* tool and not a government in and of itself. It can’t just say “yeah, bomb me!”. It has to say “We’re not doing anything” out of one side of its mouth while it whispers “full speed ahead” to the various Jihadis out of the other side of its mouth. Don’t worry. The announcement said “We’re in it to win it!” to anybody who has ears to hear.
I have no special insight but it does seem that there was more reason for Team Evil to feel good after the speech than Team Good and if Hezbollah doesn’t do anything particularly interesting over the next 7-10 days, the people who are telling themselves #2 are likely to realize that the people who believed #1 were a lot closer to right.Report
Rashida Tlaib explains what “From the River to the Sea” means to her:
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How many times do people have to come out and say “No Israel, No Jews” in so many different ways before people realize that they might entirely be serious about “No Israel, No Jews.” I know that people find this to be a bummer conclusion because it means that the West is basically left with convincing Israel to take a great leap and get repeated kicks in the rear for centuries but maybe if we start from the premise that “No Israel, No Jews” is what the Palestinians and their Muslim allies see as justice than we can get somewhere rather than pretend that deep down everybody is a Secret Disney Liberal.Report
Macklemore spoke at today’s Free Palestine rally.
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For some reason, the polls look like this despite how amazing everything is.
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