What Are the Pro-Palestine Demonstrators Thinking?
Felton Davis, CC BY 2.0
I was watching some of the coverage of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations recently and started thinking. I wondered why people would come to the US (and other Western countries and start doing things like tearing down American flags and attacking Jewish citizens. From there, I wondered what the protesters hoped to achieve with their behavior.
I think I made a bad assumption in the first paragraph and I’m going to address it first. Why do we assume that those protesters aren’t American? It may be that some of them are Palestinian or Muslim immigrants, but behind the keffiyehs and masks, I wouldn’t be surprised to find quite a few good old American palefaces.
Think about it. We’ve had quite a few violent episodes in our recent history. Aside from January 6, there was the BLM rioting, the Portland anarchy, the Occupy movement, and going a little further back, there were large-scale protests and rioting in Seattle in 1999 over the World Trade Organization. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people behind the masks of the pro-Hamas violence are the same people and groups who have engaged in rioting for other left-wing causes.
Whoever makes up the protesters, I think that they are miscalculating. I think it’s a mistake to engage in violent protests because it normally hurts the image of the cause that brought out the protesters. In general, most average people don’t like disruptions in their lives. They don’t like seeing their towns vandalized and innocent bystanders (or even counterprotesters) hassled. And most of us really don’t like to see the American flag torn down, trampled, and disrespected.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I support freedom of speech and the First Amendment, even for those who disagree with me. In fact, if you don’t support free speech for those who disagree with you then you don’t really support free speech at all. I think that even immigrants and noncitizens have the right to speak their minds without fear of reprisal. That’s true even if they support Hamas and hate Israel and the United States.
There is a line, however. That line is crossed when the protesters start vandalizing property that does not belong to them and assaulting other people. The line could also be crossed inciting riots or conspiring to commit crimes or acts of violence.
The real question is what the protesters hope to accomplish. If they want to change American policy towards Israel, acting like a—h—-s is not the way to accomplish that. Americans (and many other peoples around the world, notably the Ukrainians and the Israelis) don’t react well to intimidation. If the pandemic didn’t teach us anything else it should have taught us that if you tell people to do something, they will often do the opposite out of spite. That’s true even if what you tell them to do could save their lives. Anyone who thinks that local acts of violence are going to make the US distance itself from Israel hasn’t been paying attention.
It’s also possible that there is no real goal for the protests. Sometimes, riots and demonstrations are just days of rage in which tempers boil over and people flood into the streets because they have taken everything that they are going to take. I think that was the case in much of the BLM riots.
There were a lot of polls back in 2020 that showed that violence hurt the Black Lives Matter movement. Even though most Americans were supportive of the goal of fighting police brutality, they didn’t support the violence and the rioting hurt the movement’s image.
That’s true even though most BLM protests were peaceful. The small number of violent protests crowded out the majority peaceful demonstrations on the news and allowed critics to mock the claim that the protests were “mostly peaceful.” Violence harmed the cause.
But that didn’t stop the violence. By then, the rioting had taken on a life of its own. Some people were legitimately angry and boiling over, some were spoiling for a fight, and some wanted to take the opportunity to shoplift a new television.
I think the truth of the matter is that people engage in protests because it’s fun. Protesting doesn’t accomplish much. How many protest movements actually achieved their goal? Not many.
The protests against the Vietnam War are a classic example. The first big protests against the war date back to 1964, but the war continued for more than another decade. Michael Medved, my favorite conservative radio talker, used to point out that the end of the Vietnam protests coincided more closely with the end of the draft in 1973 than the end of the war.
I have to confess that I’ve engaged in a few protests myself. Well, two anyway. I remember taking part in a silent pro-life vigil that my church sponsored back in the late 1990s. I was also part of the earliest round of Tea Party protests in 2009. I took my son to the rally at the Georgia State Capitol and we had a blast.
I also went to other Tea Party events later including one where a “former Marine” went viral for singing the last verse of the National Anthem (I’m on the right side of the video frame with a brown hat over my heart at 1:39. Those later events were more commercial and less grass-roots than the original rallies.
Protesting makes us feel like we are doing something, but in the end, it’s a feel-good activity. Protesting doesn’t usually accomplish much unless the protesters are willing to take things to the next level. By that, I don’t mean violence. I mean persuading their fellow citizens.
The Civil Rights protests were probably the most successful series of protests in our history. One thing that made them different from the pro-Palestine (or even the BLM and Stop the Steal) protests was their nonviolence. Martin Luther King’s strategy of peaceful civil disobedience ultimately won the day.
Do you know who got violent back then? It was the establishment. It was the Klansmen, the Bull Connors, the police who cracked innocent heads with their nightsticks, and the firefighters who turned hoses on marchers. These acts of violence ultimately cost the segregationists any hope of retaining the moral high ground and won sympathy for civil rights demonstrators.
I think there’s a lesson there. This isn’t a dictatorship where change is going to be brought about by a violent uprising. This is a democracy where you change society by winning hearts and minds.
As I have written many times about government shutdowns (another of which is looming), votes are what matter. If you don’t do something to increase the number of votes on your side, then your side is going to lose. That’s true whether the cause is civil rights, police brutality, banning the bomb, saving the whales, pro-life, pro-choice, electing Trump, or the war in Gaza.
That’s also true even if there are legitimate grievances involved. You hurt your cause when you act crazy and get violent.
For the record, I do think that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances. More than two million Gazans have been shoehorned into a strip the size of Las Vegas for decades. The economy is almost nonexistent and life is cheap. People there didn’t have much of a future, even before the war.
This isn’t all the fault of Israel, however. Hamas has maintained its rule with an iron fist and Egypt tightly controls its border with Gaza. The Arab nations don’t want Palestinian refugees in their countries because of the possibility of importing radicals and militants.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians caught in the middle between Hamas and Israel. Take polling from authoritarian countries with a grain of salt, but last July, 62 percent of Gazans supported maintaining the ceasefire with Israel in a Washington Institute poll. Fifty-seven percent approved of Hamas but that’s a shockingly low approval number for what is essentially a military dictatorship.
Gaza health authorities report that 11,000 Gazans have been killed so far in the war. Whether that number is accurate or not, I have no doubt that a lot of the casualties were innocent civilians used as human shields or camouflage by Hamas or were killed inadvertently. Whatever your politics, the war is tragic and the human cost is horrible.
None of this going to be solved by tearing down American flags and assaulting American bystanders.
I don’t think that there is much chance of breaking up the US relationship with Israel. On the right, evangelicals are tightly aligned with the Jewish state while American Jews make up a significant portion of the Democratic Party. However, I will say that there is a better chance of getting some political concessions if pro-Palestine demonstrations are peaceful and respectful.
When pro-Palestine activists get violent, it is simply viewed as confirmation of a stereotype: The activists who support baby-murdering Hamas are roughing up Jews on the street. Where, in that viewpoint, is there any incentive for either party to aid Palestine?
If the demonstrators really want to help Gaza, they can collect money for aid organizations or work to promote understanding for those who think that every Gazan (or every Muslim) is a terrorist.
The problem is that it’s much more fun to rage from behind a mask.
What I have come to realize is how many of the players involved, from Israel to Iran to the other funders of Hamas, were tacitly but consciously pursuing the “mow the grass” long term strategy.
That term was used to describe Netanyahu’s policy of preferring Hamas to the Palestinian Authority because he thought Hamas, while being more radical, was less credible and easier to control. They were seen as a threat which could be managed and contained indefinitely while providing a useful enemy to prop up for domestic political reasons.
In reading comments from leaders of Iran and other nations supportive of Hamas, I am struck by how cautious they sound and how much they stress the importance of not letting the war widen.
Which, given their long time vocal support of Hamas and the “From the river to the sea” rhetoric makes no sense. At last, here is the war they have been funding, the open breakout putting Israel on the back foot. Why suddenly grow shy and talk peace instead of war?
Especially since it seems clear that it was Iran that gave the green light for the attack in the first place?
It seems reasonable to conclude that they don’t really believe any of the rhetoric and see the Palestinians much the way Netanyahu does, as useful pawns for domestic benefit, but ultimately not anything worth fighting and risking for.
And ultimately, the entire vision that was sold to the Palestinians, the idea of a vanquished Israel and Jew-free Palestine is just a sham, a cynical pretext. Even if one were to accept the horrific premise, it was never more than vaporware.
Anyone who actually cares about dead Palestinian babies would be counseling peaceful coexistence and the recognition of sharing the land with the Israelis.
FWIW, I would say the exact words about the Israeli settlers who use the same sort of eliminationist rhetoric. They too, are being used as pawns in a miserable game.Report
Pro-Palestinian activists in the West have been encouraging the Palestinians to believe that they can destroy Israel and have all the Jews go home for decades. If anything, they have gotten more stringent in this recently.Report
They’re thinking “yay, we finally get to be angry about Jews and you’re not allowed to say that we’re bad for doing it!”Report
I think this is a big part of it. During the Second Intifada, the Rabbi of the synagogue I attended growing up said that many people are looking for an excuse to say “See the Jews are as bad as we say.” There is a lot of anti-Semitism in the Pro-Palestinian movement in the West but very few people want to bring this up.Report
Israel is as bad as we say. Jews may or may not be. Its a critical thinking challenge.Report
“yay we finally get to be angry about Jews!”Report
I’m not angry about Jews. I’m angry about terrorists, some of whom have the color of a nation state.
This isn’t hard.Report
Plenty people on the Further Left had no problem being angry about Jews even before Israel existed or for things not relating to Israel at all. According to the organizers of the Women’s March, Jews were responsible for the transatlantic slave trade.Report
The Pro-Palestinian activists go way beyond Israel is bad. They present Israel as something uniquely evil in world history and argue that it must be completely destroyed while ignoring what the Palestinians aren’t using universal human rights language but arguing for Arab Muslim Palestine.Report
“In the warmest of all hearts, there is too often a cold spot for the Jews.” Ben Hecht or Irving Howe.
A lot of the Further Left always had a troublesome relationship with Jews since the 19th century because they like the Right anti-Semites associated Jews with capitalism, money, and power rather than seeing Jews as an oppressed and persecuted people. This has gotten worse with the development of the idea of systematic racism. The argument is that racism leads to some sort of outcome disadvantage that will still exist even if personal bigotry goes away. The Jews have been rather successful despite facing persecution and oppression. This either means that the theory of systematic racism needs some work or that anti-Semitism isn’t a real form of racism.
Many on the Left prefer to go with the later rather than former. What this means for Israel is that Zionism isn’t seen as a movement for Jewish self-determination but a form of European colonialism where privileged and wealthy white people invaded the lands of indigenous people of color, the Palestinians, and took them away. Never mind that Israel/Palestine had a Jewish population of 25,000 in 1881 and the Jews fleeing to Israel/Palestine between 1881 and afterwards were often poor and fleeing for their lives. Jews aren’t really the Wretched of the Earth (TM), so it is settler-colonialism rather than refugees seeking freedom.
Basically, as British Jew David Baddiel would put it, “Jews Don’t Count” and aren’t in the “Sacred Circle of Oppression” in the way that Non-Whites (besides maybe East Asians and Hindu Indians) , LGBT People, or Muslims are. Therefore, Israel is the evil white capitalist settler-colonial country and any killing is justified in their view.Report
Could it, hypothetically, have transitioned from settler-colonism instead of refugees seeking freedom because around 1917 or so instead of Jews moving there to live in peace with their neighbors, they started demanding from the British, despite being a fairly small minority, their own government which by necessity would require either removing Palestinians or ruling over them as a minority government?
(And then, you know, actually did that first thing?)
Like, what exactly is your definition of settler-colonialism if not ‘moving somewhere with the intent of installing a government to serve your specific desire instead of respecting the desires and self-determination of the people who already live there’?Report
“Why do we assume that those protesters aren’t American? It may be that some of them are Palestinian or Muslim immigrants, but behind the keffiyehs and masks, I wouldn’t be surprised to find quite a few good old American palefaces.”
It feels… odd?… something… that you see a binary dividing the protestors into just two groups: Palestinian and Muslim immigrants or “American palefaces”. Couldn’t there be American Muslims? Americans with Palestinian ancestry? Black Americans?Report
One of the interesting things about Israel/Palestine is that it is an ethnic conflict that commands and outsized attention in the West. How many people can remember the conflicts in the Congo in the 1990s with killed and displaced millions?
Regardless, a lot of them simply think they are correct and many are young enough that they mainly know the Israel that has grown increasingly religious and right-leaning. A good bunch may be overtly anti-Semitic. Others not as much but get carried away in the moment and enjoy being provocative.
Also, I think a lot of Americans (both left and right) end up reducing conflicts to white and not-white. This goes for Israel’s supporters and detractors. They both see Israel as the white nation and might think of Jews as being like their Orthodontist whose ancestors came from Poland in the late 1800s or early 1900s. They don’t realize that a lot of Israel’s population is Middle-Eastern in origin and not a pale person from Eastern Europe.Report
Only modern racially obsessed progressives look at things this way (which in fairness probably does include a lot of the more provocative American activists). That said I am pretty sure a good chunk of American supporters of Israel hold their positions because of bizarre religious beliefs about the end times.Report
It’s more explicit on the Left, but definitely informs the Right, going from “quiet part” to “loud part” as you get further right.
What is much more explicit on the Right is viewing all conflict in terms of an existential struggle against Islam—it’s probably the thing that most closely links the rabid Right of 2023 with the rabid Right of 2003.
I think this is an under-appreciated reason for pro-Israel sentiment on the Right.Report
I look at them as slightly different things. I agree there’s still a ‘clash of civilizations’ strain on the right, and a rump of the GOP that hasn’t gotten the memo that the neocon stuff is supposed to be memory holed. What I’m seeing in Saul’s comment is the projection of American conceptions of race (and very particular ones at that) onto events across the globe. That strikes me as much more of a modern progressive kind of (IMO faulty) analysis than one you’d get from a conservative.*
*There are exceptions of course, but I think the faulty grand theories conservstives have in this areas will tend to be more about religion than race. I very clearly remember when suddenly ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ became a right wing talking point.Report
Yeah, agreed the idea that you can just transpose US racial categories to arbitrary foreign conflicts and controversies is a (very dumb) knee jerk that’s much more prevalent on the American Left.Report
The I/P conflict involves Jews and the Holy Land, two big obsessive points for the West even if the West has largely secularized. The Congo Crisis or the civil war between the Sinhalese and the Tamil in Sri Lanka involved neither, so they get less attention despite being more deadly than the entirety of the I/P conflict.
Besides reducing things to White vs. Non-White, as a poster on the other blog noted, there is a tendency to reduce the I/P conflict to having one villain and one victim on both sides. You occasionally see this for other conflicts that activists care about but it is in really hyper drive for the I/P conflict.Report
Paywalled but thought this was interesting:
Sweden is suffering a grim wave of gang violence
On october 15th thousands of followers of 5iftyy, a Swedish rapper, tuned into his Instagram channel for what he said would be an important livestream. They found themselves watching a bearded man brandish a gold-plated ak-47 while hurling insults at rival gang members, backed by three rifle-toting thugs in balaclavas. The man with the golden gun was Mustafa “Benzema” Aljiburi, a leading member of a Swedish narcotics network known as Foxtrot. Mr Aljiburi is believed to be living in Iraq. He staged the appearance to dispel rumours of his death and to threaten various enemies, including a Swedish prosecutor.
The livestream looked ridiculous, but the threats were serious. For years Sweden has suffered from high rates of gang-related violence, but for the past two years it has been relentless. In the first ten months of the year there were 324 shootings in Sweden, 48 of them fatal. The rate of gun crime is several times higher than that in neighbouring countries. Gangs have taken to attacking the homes of rivals with hand grenades and dynamite; there have been 139 explosions this year. The government is frantically toughening laws and raising its law-enforcement budget, but it is behind the curve. “We should have seen this coming and taken these measures at least ten years ago,” says Daniel Bergstrom, an adviser to Sweden’s justice minister.
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Overall, Sweden remains a relatively safe country, and the areas where the conflicts play out hardly look like crime-ridden slums. Skarpnack, a suburb south of Stockholm that has seen several shootings and bombings, is a tidy neighbourhood of low-rise flats and gardens. At a recent town council meeting in the cosy kulturhus (community centre), community activists pressed council members about mixed-income housing and pleaded for the preservation of a bat colony in a local park. But talk soon turned to security concerns. “We had several shootings at the beginning of 2022 that really woke us up,” says Monica Lovstrom, a city-council member. This year there have been three explosions in the district; one on August 19th blew up the stairwell of an apartment building.
Gangs often use bombings as a warning, and none of those in Skarpnack killed anyone. (The only bombing fatality in Sweden this year was a 25-year-old bystander.) But in early September a 13-year-old boy from one of the district’s richer and safer areas was found in a forest south of the city, shot in the head. Prosecutors have not released details, but say the murder was gang-related. Because the minimum age of criminal responsibility is 16, gangs are recruiting ever-younger teenagers as drug couriers and, occasionally, assassins.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/11/13/sweden-is-suffering-a-grim-wave-of-gang-violenceReport
I saw a video on this a few months ago on YouTube. Part of the problem is that Sweden is a bit too generous with it’s refugee benefits and doesn’t do much to integrate the refugee immigrants into Swedish society or the workforce. This leads to a sort of “idle hands are the devil’s play thing situation.Report
W’Kabi talked about this in Black Panther.
“You let the refugees in, they bring their problems with them, and then Wakanda is like everywhere else.”Report
Considering that the Pro-Palestinian activists in the West see Zionism as a form of “settler-colonialism” rather than “self-determination”, I’m wondering if many of them see Israel as a sort of reversible error. Like they can’t roll back the clock and give North and South America back to the Native Americans, Australia to the aboriginals, or New Zealand to the Maori and Hawaii to the Native Hawaiians. For some reason, they do believe they can roll back the clock and have all the Israeli Jews “go home” or at least elsewhere and give Palestine back to it’s “true” inhabitants.
*Never mind that I/P was never Jew free and had a Jewish population of 25,000 at the start of the First Aliyah, around six percent of the population, and 85,000 by 1914, around 15% of the population. Also never mind that most Israeli Jews, regardless of whether they are Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, or Sephardic were not viewed as countrymen of the places they lived before their ancestors moved to Israel even if they came from a community that was hundreds or even thousands of years old. Oh well.Report
It’d help a LOT if the Israeli’s didn’t tolerate their fellow Israeli’s behaving like active settler-colonialists in the territories as they have been doing for decades (and it’s been getting steadily worse).Report
There’s endless confusion (and worse) caused by blurring the lines between Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.Report
I don’t think this is the case. The anti-Zionists in the West have bee against Israel form 1948 and always argued the settler-colonial argument. They want Tel Aviv and the WB settlements gone. Plus the average Israeli probably sees the settlements as defense lines since the withdrawal from Gaza has been giving them nothing but grief.Report
The composition, size, and general ideological bent of Western anti-Zionists have not remained a constant for the 70 years of Israel’s existence. The idea that people’s opinions on the Israel/Palestine are purely endogenous is pretty weird, but it’s hard to see what other foundation you could build your argument onReport
… Hey is there anything that _isn’t_ ‘settlements’ that could have happened in 1948 that would cause people to think it was settler-colonism?
Like, the UN literally carving up their country against the wishes of the people who lived there but because of internal political lobbying, Britain actually refusing to do this colonization for once in their life, and then massive violence to displace people so a ‘democratic’ government could be set up with the correct people in it because they removed all the wrong people?
I swear to god, it is amazing how many people here use dates and act like Palestinians mysteriously got
upset for literally no reason at those times.Report
Trying to blur opposition to the colonization of the territories; which is current, unambiguous, indefensible and ongoing; with the opposition to the existence of Israel itself; which is more morally ambiguous and is also a fait accompli; is both incorrect and also is a really really really bad idea if you have the long term interest of Israel at heart.Report
Lee has been doing this for weeks on the other site, so it’s not surprising.Report
Can you explain how this works? Hamas has repeatedly stated that they make no distinction between Israel within the 1948 borders and Israeli settlements in WB and vowed for repeated attacks. Fatah is utterly useless in coming to an agreement because they can’t give up the right of return and more of them are in agreement with Hamas than the say not. Their allies in the West hem and haw when you press them on what it means to Free Palestine but basically also agree with Hamas when you press them enough. The international organizations still consider Gaza under occupation. I think “No Israel. No Jews” is seen as the only just solution by many more people than the entirety of the world’s Jewish population.
What people seem to want to do is have Israel just agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for literally nothing. If the Palestinians decide to misuse their new found independence, than Israel should take it on the chin no matter what They just lack the courage to say this.Report
Hamas has repeatedly stated that they make no distinction between Israel within the 1948 borders and Israeli settlements in WB and vowed for repeated attacks.
So Hamas is trying to blur the very line that North said you shouldn’t blur if you have the best interests of Israel at heart?
Huh. Wild.Report
It sure is weird how Hamas is making no distinction between that time Israel stole huge amount of Palestinian land and displaced almost all the Palestinians on them, a thing that happened way way in the past that surely no one cares about…
…and the constantly continual much smaller theft of Palestinian land and displacement of Palestinians that is literally happening at this exact moment.
They are TWO DISTINCT THINGS, I insist loudly. How can anyone confuse them or think they in any manner related to each other!
“Look, I know I invaded your house and stole a bunch of your valuable stuff a decade ago and seriously injured your family, but I only did that once, and frankly the fact you keep trying to assault me when I break in every few days _only to steal groceries_ is absurd. I very clearly have explained I’m not stealing _much_, and it’s not the same as the first time! Let bygones be bygones!”Report
Let’s try a metaphor, Lee. You are Israel within its’ generally non-controversial borders (to the wider world) and the territories with their Palestinian residents are a ticking radioactive bomb which you have, yourself, attached to your chest. You initially did this for relatively reasons- at the time you acquired this bomb you were smaller and weaker and you didn’t want your enemies to have this bomb -so you kept it. It is, however, a bomb and it is ticking and radiating.
Your right arm, Lee, is the Israeli right (especially the settler right) and for the past few decades your right arm has been busily duct taping this bomb to you. It wraps more and more tape around that bomb and around you and you’re taped pretty solidly to this bomb. I remind you, again, that it is a bomb and it is ticking and you notice your skin is getting a really funky rash from all that radiation.
I, in this metaphor, represent Israel’s well-meaning friends abroad and I say to you: “Lee, buddy, you have a bomb taped to your chest and it is ticking. You have grown since you acquired this bomb and your foes have become feeble and weak. If your foes had this bomb, it’d be their problem and, while they could potentially in a worst-case scenario use it to cause you woe, they couldn’t kill you with it. If you keep it strapped to your chest, though, it will eventually explode and when it explodes it will either kill you or maim you into something unrecognizable. Also, I’m pretty sure the radiation from that bomb is not good for your health- you’re pale and you’ve been showing some increasing symptoms of illiberal derangement. For your own good, Lee, you need to strip that duct tape off and remove the bomb from your chest.”
To this, Lee, you respond “But this bomb is duct taped to me and removing all this duct tape would be a LOT of work and it’d be painful. Have you ever peeled duct tape off your skin? It hurts, it tears hairs out and then I’d have this big bundle of tape I’d have to find a place for on my person. I’m willing to remove the bomb, sure, but only if my enemies give me something in exchange for the trouble of removing it. A peace deal, recognition, security guarantees, just a bunch of words really. They’re weak so giving me these things would not be hard for them to do and until they do it, I’m not removing the bomb.” Meanwhile your right arm just keeps on wrapping that duct tape around you and the bomb, year after year, and, I would like to emphasize, the bomb is still ticking.
Now I understand your reasoning. Undoing all this taping and entangling would be one heck of a big pain but my sympathy is necessarily limited because this taping and entangling is something you, Lee, have done to yourself. It is something you are continuing to do, even as I talk to you. Your right arm is taping and taping away and the bomb, it’s ticking and glowing in a very unhealthy manner.
I reply: “Lee, my friend, I know you’d prefer to get something to make it easier to justify going to the trouble of unsticking this bomb from yourself but I don’t think you’re thinking this through. Your enemies are weak and they hate you. Your enemies don’t want to give you these little things you want and your enemies wish you ill. They can see that removing the bomb from your body would be good for you and they would very much like to see you explode. So no, Lee, it is irrational to expect that your enemies will pay you to remove the bomb from your chest. You should remove the bomb now. It is ticking and radiating and it’s bad for you. Removing the bomb would give you the boon of not having a bomb strapped to your chest and that is its own reward. For goodness’ sakes at least stop adding more tape!”
To this you retort: “But look at Dave! Dave says I should remove this bomb and also cut my whole body up into small bits and then mail them to all my friends to live there. That’d kill me. Why are you agreeing with Dave?!?” I look over at Dave who, in our metaphor, represents the anti-Israeli activist left.
So, I answer “Dave is a friend and I certainly consider his opinions but I disagree with him about dismembering yourself. You exist and dismembering you and mailing your parts to everyone else’s houses is an irrational thing to demand. Removing the bomb from your chest, on the other hand- while a lot of trouble, would be good for you. And if you remove this bomb from your chest then you’ll no longer be a person walking around with a bomb strapped to your chest. People will be a lot less inclined to listen to Dave’s more wild demands if you remove that bomb from your chest.
But you, Lee, keep alternating between demanding that your enemies pay you to save yourself and pointing at Dave and obsessing about his larger demands. Every time I, or anyone, brings up the subject of the bomb or the tape you just keep going back to those two points. Meanwhile there’re really nasty colored veins growing over your torso from where that bomb is strapped to your chest. Your right arm is getting really beefy from all that taping it’s been doing. What is worst, all the young new people who meet you go “Look at that guy, he’s taping a bomb to his chest, he must be a crazy psycho.” I try and tell them that you’re a good person at heart but a glowing radioactive bomb makes a pretty strong first impression so you’re getting sicker and more right arm heavy with every passing day and most everyone new who meets you is viewing you in a negative light because you’re a radiation poisoned dude with a huge right arm and a bomb on your chest.
And that bomb hasn’t even blown up yet. It’s there under layers and layers of duct tape. I’m beginning to worry about where the duct tape ends and you begin but even still I can hear it beneath the layers. Tick… tick… tick…Report
Even granting the charge of “settler- colonialism”, the conclusion makes no sense.
South Africa didn’t deport all its white people and Northern Ireland didn’t deport al the Protestants. They both found a way to coexist.
If someone predicates peace on a mass deportation of millions of people, it seems fair to call it ethnic cleansing.Report
We talk a lot about the territory but I think the real questions are all about what happens with the people.Report
Like Saul mentioned, the claims made aren’t unique to that place- There are similar claims made by Russia about the eastern territory of Ukraine and multiple versions of claims of ethnic sovereignty in the Balkans- that’s where the term “ethnic cleansing” was popularized in the 90s.
I do think that when someone’s political philosophy turns from “We need to create a just world where the malefactors no longer can do wrong” to “We must punish the ethnic group called malefactors for their crimes” it turns from liberal to illiberal.
I remember reading an essay during the 90s which listed all the terrible things done during WWII by the Croats against the Serbs, in an effort to absolve or justify the crimes of Miloscovic. It read exactly like what we are hearing now from the Hamas apologists. Because they weren’t lying, its a historical fact that during WWII plenty of groups of people allied with the Axis powers for all sorts of nefarious reasons and atrocities ensued.
But instead of trying to create a world free of atrocities, the apologists just wanted to exact vengeance.Report
I think you may be misunderstanding my comment, but what I am trying to get at is actually consistent with your reply.
Back in law school I took international law as an elective to fill out my credits, and one of the cases they had us read was Canada’s high court’s decision on independence for Quebec. A significant part of the analysis was whether the Quebecois were afforded the right of self determination within the structure of the Canadian state. The court held that they in fact were, for a bunch of reasons, but primarily because Quebecois are fully enfranchised citizens of Canada who can vote and have civil rights and all the other protections of Canadian citizenship. Importantly, the question was about what the people were afforded, not the territory of Quebec and the history of who had been on it at any given time.
Similarly the Germans don’t get East Prussia back because the German people get to be citizens of Germany. Russia’s claim on Ukraine is unfounded because Russian speakers get to be citizens of Ukraine. No sensible person takes claims to Native American land seriously because Native Americans get to be citizens of the US, with some additional cultural and sovereignty concessions on certain territories. One could go on like this.
The critical question here then is about the status of stateless Palestinians under the de facto control of the Israeli government. The weird racial projections and preoccupations of American leftists are irrelevant to that question, and yet it is what Israel’s defenders are most eager to talk about.Report
What people point out is that the Palestinians themselves don’t want to be citizens of Israel. An ANC type campaign for Israeli citizenship would be a lot more effective and harder for Israel to resist than what the Palestinians are doing.
The Palestinians want to be citizens of a country called Palestine and they don’t seem to want to share it with Israeli Jews in a meaningful way. The hard part is that either the Palestinians are unaware of what land borders they can live with or the leadership wants everything including Green Line Israel or at least knows giving the Palestinians less than that or at least not getting a right of millions of Palestinians to move into Israel proper is a death sentence for them. Israeli leadership is not going to agree to deal that is basically the death of their country. So the Palestinian leadership just stays very vague about what they want and never uses concrete language.Report
It seems to me clear that as elegant as the ‘one state’ solution would be it is not viable for a host of reasons, and would more than likely result in a civil war ending in something similar to the status quo or worse. On that we agree.
This is why I am increasingly convinced Ariel Sharon had the right idea of unilateral withdrawal and fortification. That can be done without any Palestinian agreement, and allows Israel to defend itself while providing Palestinians with the same opportunity that has worked out for others that have lost territory in the recent past. Israel’s current path is making it harder to defend itself, not easier, and Palestinian hopes and dreams about returning to Israel proper are no match for Israeli firepower, properly configured.Report
Unilateral withdrawal can work but as you see it isn’t seem as a real solution. Gaza is still considered occupied and is a constant irritant or worse for Israel. Having the WB become Gaza 2 would be even more disastrous.Report
That’s one interpretation. But I think a better one is that Gaza is what happens when you combine a half measure with leaving all of your best men patrolling disparate corners of the West Bank, preoccupied with protecting the most difficult, least productive members of society.
If the concern is defanging criticism from abroad the easiest way to do that is to hand the Palestinians a viable chunk of land and say ‘here, it is yours forever.’ Does that end all violence immediately? No, but its a new status quo that history shows is the best way to secure a peaceful future. Maybe over time you can have a heavily defended artery between the West Bank and Gaza. But it all starts with renouncing the claim to both, not just one.Report
Much easier than that, and something that would help considerably with criticism, is to unilaterally stop building settlements in the West Bank.
I’m not going to pretend they’re the biggest obstacle to peace, especially as long as Hamas exists, but it’s something that Israel can absolutely do unilaterally without needing any sort of security guarantees from anyone else.Report
I think it would certainly help.
Though this is where I sympathize with Israel. If stopping settlements is done in hopes of securing a deal it may well be a waste given the totally degraded state of the PA and Palestinian leadership. The days where there was someone who could plausibly cut a deal on the Palestinian side may well be in the rear view mirror. It’s why I think the answer is for Israel to impose one based on what past Palestinian leadership and the West has said are at least reasonable enough for table stakes on the Palestinian side.Report
I don’t want to get all “Make Colonialism Great Again” but I do think that Gaza would benefit from having its governance outsourced until there’s a tipping point of its citizenry who could be called fully “post-colonial”.Report
Outsourced to whom?Report
Probably not Israel.
Probably not America.
Maybe the Swiss?Report
Jordan is the natural answer, with the Nordics footing the bill.Report
I don’t think it will get them to a deal by any means.
But it would at least stop hurting, without opening the door to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or some successor group turning the West Bank into another base from which to launch attacks.
The logic of continuing to occupy the West Bank is difficult to argue with, as much as I wish it were otherwise. But that logic does little or nothing to justify profiting (in terms of seized land or domestic political gains) on that occupation.Report
You and I may have a point of disagreement on the logic of continued occupation of the West Bank. I think in a scenario where Israel leaves (and realistically probably also keeps all of Jerusalem and the settlements along the green line) all the pressure in the world comes to bear on the Palestinians to do something other than become a terrorist bantustan. Even if that’s in fact what they do Israel at that point gets to fortify itself and wash its hands of whatever is going on beyond the walls.Report
Yeah I think my disagreement comes from the fact that the hand-washing and fortification failed so disastrously for the Israelis in Gaza.Report
Well it bears noting that what made Gaza so disastrous for the Israeli’s was not necessarily what Hamas did; attacking; but what Israel did under Bibi ; divert attention, institutional capacity and troops from the Gazan border to defending West Bank territory grabs.
Had the Israeli’s not had their pants down then Hamas would have caused enormously fewer casualties and most of them would have been military.Report
I do think there is a big underlying question of military competency. Maybe that’s unfair in a way, but in the ME it’s just a fact of life.
There have been stories about Israeli citizens successfully repelling Hamas militants with small arms and without the help of the authorities where they had some warning and the wherewithal to do it. It’s hard not to conclude that the attack would have been much less significant if all of the best forces weren’t dispersed in the West Bank. Now that the regulars are all focused on Gaza there’s a real question of what happens in the West Bank when the full time soldiers have been replaced with conscripts and reservists.Report
I mean, possibly, sure the IDF might have gotten complacent but considering that Israel has been suffering under a progressive series of administrations that have grown worse and worse as time has pressed on to their current level of absolutely deranged fanaticism and incompetence I suspect the more likely culprit is misadministration.
As for the West Bank? Who the fish knows. I have no bloody idea. I suppose it depends on what the scholeric Palestinian Authority views as in their interests.Report
Well yea, and I probably wasn’t being clear, but that’s what I was getting at. I think Israel is more than capable of defending a frontier from any Palestinian force and has the highest tech capability in the world for air defense. I don’t find the assertion that an unoccupied West Bank would become a base of serious (much less existential) threat convincing. October 7 didn’t change that analysis, rather it went way further than it had any business going because of bad deployment decisions by the Israeli government.Report
Indeed, the idea that Israel needs to occupy the West Bank for security reasons has always been pretty laughable but has gotten even more feeble as the years have ground on.Report
The issue isn’t whether something like a Hamas controlled WB is an existential threat to Israel. The basic issue is what Israel will be allowed to defend itself. From what I can tell, lots of people from the activists, and even some prominent people on the sidelines of politics, think that Israel needs to take a lot of things on the chin that other nations would not be expected to take like a chin. Even in the day immediately after the Simchat Torah massacre, people were basically trying to argue the proper Israel response would be nothing without directly saying it.
Whoever is control of the WB, especially if it is Hamas, will eventually do something even more spectacularly vicious that would require a response. This would be unpalpable for many other people on the planet even if they aren’t exactly Palestinian activists.
Plus lots of people would argue that as long as their no formal deal, between Israel and the Palestinians. So Palestinian terrorism will be seen as unjustified.
There is a lot of only Israel has agency in these discussions.Report
Countries can only act in response to existential crises? Great! If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be burning down the local public school. And I’ll be driving there at a speed that *I* find appropriate, thank you very much.
I’m sure this just extends to international conflict, though (even though that’s never been the standard). I’d argue that Israel has been fighting a proxy war for decades against Iran among others, or at least a proxy war for the opponents taking place in and immediately around Israel. That’s pretty close to an existential threat by any fair standards.Report
At some point the sheer level of willful blindness towards Israel needs to be addressed, because everyone seems to keep acting like the fact Israel does things that break the peace is some weird accidental thing Israel is doing, instead of deliberate behavior because a very large chunk of Israeli politics centers around the idea that they will eventually own all of that land and drive the Palestinians out.
You can go back to the UN partition plan and read about it, you know the one that Israel accepted and Palestinians rejected because Palestinians are assholes and Israel are the good guys, and you will literally read it, it’s right there on wikipedia, about how Israel only accepted it cause they thought they could get more later.
Zionists and Palestinian people have always wanted the same thing, literally the exact same thing, it’s just Zionists are integrated well enough into Western society that they can do it via politics, they can come into the UN to hand territory over to them, they can somehow handwave the blatantly illegal settlements that they keep doing and have done literally since they gained any territory whatsoever that wasn’t theirs, whereas Palestinians have to pull out guns because they have no political power.
This fact is not actually a secret in Israel, it’s something the ruling party will outright state over and over again, but it seems almost impossible to permeate the heads of older people in the US.Report
[…]Palestinians have to pull out guns because they have no political power.
I’m sure that is going to work out for them any day now.Report
From the Israeli standpoint, the settlements in the WB are the reason the WB isn’t being used as an assault staging area like Gaza is.Report
But, of course, that’s a delusional cope and doesn’t reflect reality, quite the reverse actually- the settlements in the West Bank are why the IDF wasn’t watching Gaza more closely.Report
I’ll grant that the Israeli view of settlements in the West Bank is, at the very best, dumb as hell.Report
From what I recall Israeli Arabs enjoy all of the same civil rights as other Israelis except they are exempt from the draft. Freedom House rates Israel as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. The occupied territories aren’t rated.
I think this is a rather important part of the Quebec opinion: “The international law principle of self-determination has evolved within a framework of respect for the territorial integrity of existing states. The various international documents that support the existence of a people’s right to self-determination also contain parallel statements supportive of the conclusion that the exercise of such a right must be sufficiently limited to prevent threats to an existing state’s territorial integrity or the stability of relations between sovereign states.” I see very little interest in critics of Israel to any concern for threats to Israel, particularly the other post up here yesterday that justifies symbolic or at least minimization of the hostages. This is what Israel’s defenders are most eager to talk about.Report
Israel’s extension of citizenship to Arab Palestinians in Israel proper I think rightly eliminates the question with respect to them, or at least clearly settles it in Israel’s favor. Not so for those under the rule of Israel but without the rights of citizenship. I also don’t think withdrawal from Gaza alone is determinative for people in the Gaza strip. It’s too closely connected at this point to try to settle the issue with them separately from the West Bank.Report
So if I would inform you that approximately 15% of Arab Palestinians living under Israeli rule don’t have voting rights, that would change your mind on this topic, right?
Edit: I just noticed you said Arab Palestinians, and I copied you, but both of us actually mean Arab Israelis.Report
I’ll take your word on the facts. That 15% should either have voting rights or the availability of citizenship in a country where they do. But either of those in my opinion would suffice.Report
“Arab residents of East Jerusalem have the option of obtaining Israeli citizenship, though most decline for political reasons. According to official government figures, those who have attempted to obtain citizenship face significant delays and are rejected in 66 percent of cases. While these noncitizens are entitled to vote in municipal as well as Palestinian Authority (PA) elections, most have traditionally boycotted Israeli municipal balloting, and Israel has restricted PA election activity in the city.”
That’s from Freedom House. Many Palestinians (which is what I believe this group in East Jerusalem identifies as) have Jordanian citizenship, and for reasons that aren’t surprising many don’t want to legitimize the Israeli annexation of E. Jerusalem.Report
Yeah, that’s who I was talking about.
A good primer is this, for people who don’t know: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-know-about-arab-citizens-israel
But…people trying to give Israel credit for letting Arabs vote need to realize that basically everything Israel does is to _not_ let them have enough voting power actually actually _change_ anything.
It’s why they won’t let Palestinians return to their homes, it’s why they won’t (in reality) let the ones in annexed East Jerusalem vote, it’s why when they do settlements they first forcibly remove Palestinians. It’s why the founding of Israel involved removing _the rest_ of the Arabs.
Israel then proudly stand there and point at the 21% Arabs that they do have, the amount they are carefully keeping under a number that would actually be able to wield political influence besides the occasional ‘We will support you if you give us a little more money for better schools’.
And that primer sorta skims part the nation-state bill, which says “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people”, which, um…Report
I don’t see how this is constructive. By your logic no ethnic minorities within a democracy could ever be enfranchised, or rather that the analysis of whether they are or not is a sort of post hoc outcome based determination that depends on the vagaries of what they are able to achieve through politics. In the case of Israel that’s setting the goal posts to ensure a resolution is never possible on anything less than the most maximalist Palestinian terms, which is exactly what the smarter Israelis say when they defend the status quo, the settlements, etc.Report
Except that Arabs are only an ethnic minority because Israelis drove them out of the area of the land that became Israel. They don’t get to then proudly point to a rump minority they allowed to stay behind with no power that they have technically granted voting rights to.
Especially since, under international law, there is actually no legal justification to not let those displaced people return. Indeed, the justification that Israel _is using_ is basically ‘they would vote ways we don’t want’.Report
Yea but this is again a line of discussion that I don’t think is productive. Right or wrong they lost a war. A point comes where you have to work on attaining a peace not demand to relitigate that which can’t be.Report
Tell that to conservative whites in the South.Report
Heh, for good or ill (mostly ill) it seems to me that conservative southerners have been quite successful at exercising power and their rights to self determination within the US federal system they were forced to stay within.Report
Yes, well. I think if you told “conservatives in the South” that they could have their own Special Zone to run however they liked so long as they stayed there, they’d take that deal in a hot minute.Report
…and that point might actually happen if Israel didn’t keep blatantly and openly stealing _more_ land from Palestine.
I find it completely baffling when people talk about ‘relitigating’ an issue that is literally still happening and has not ceased happening at any point since 1967, and the only reason it didn’t happen between 1948-1967 was that other Arab countries stepped up and started a bunch for wars to contain Israel. But they eventually lost.
You want to know how to get everyone who suffered forget that really bad thing you did to them in 1948? Well, I don’t know exactly how to do it, but it sure as hell isn’t ‘Keep doing it on a much smaller scale over and over to the same people’.Report
I think a lot of people believe that sending all the Jews out of the Middle East and handing Jerusalem over entirely to the Muslims is both the just solution and a great way to get the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia to calm down. For many Muslims, Palestine is part of the Dar al-Islam and should be an Islamic state. Trying to create a secular democratic Palestine is not going to be easy, so why not just send the Jews elsewhere? It’s the simplest solution.Report
From what I know (and what I know is not that much honestly) stating they “found a way to coexist” has coexisting doing a lot of heavy lifting especially on the South Africa part. They still live lives apart with a lot of communities which still end up being whites only be default like American suburbs are technically not allowed to be sundown towns anymore and redlining is illegal but things happen and get baked in.
I think Lee’s broader point is similar to mine. A lot of Palestine’s supporters in the West think of Jews as white and therefore they don’t belong in the Middle East. They belong in West, North America, and Australia/New Zealand. They don’t know much about Jewish history or why Zionism arose as a political point and I honestly get the subtext from a lot of them of “Eh, wouldn’t it just be better if they all moved to NYC-Metro or SoCal like all the other Orthodontists.”Report
A lot of younger American millennials and zoomers really don’t have a good conceptual place for the Jews in their cosmology. Even older millennials and Gen Xers or Boomers can have these issues. They vaguely understand that Jews were subject to persecution and this thing called the Holocaust happened but the reasons for this seem mysterious because they don’t know much about Jewish history. However, the Jews they know, if they know Jews at all because Jews tend to be heavily concentrated and they aren’t that many of us, seem white, prosperous, and not systematically affected by anti-Semitism. Therefore, how can they be one of the oppressed peoples in need of self-determination. Often times they can jump straight into pure anti-Semitism from these observations and argue that Jews had no reason to leave Europe after WWII despite the Holocaust just happening and the pogroms breaking out in Poland, Hungary, and other places when they tried to go back “home.”
Sometime in my thirties, I was talking to a younger millennial woman. She had to be in the her early to mid-twenties at her time. She was white and basically her point was that Jews were white, I am white and she wasn’t going to have it any other way. The important blocs in her mental space where white people vs. non-whites and anything that made this more complicated was simply to be waived away with a hand motion.Report
Non-American younger millennials or zoomers are much less likely to know any Jews in real life.Report
It is probably a major factor that for most boomers and some Xers Israel was a small embattled nation refuge for Jewish refugees of the holocaust that was under genuine threat of genocidal destruction by its neighbors. For most of the later generations lives Israel has been a fearsome Middle Eastern regional power under zero threat of genocide from anyone that routinely and continuously grinds its bootheel on the Palestinians it controls the territory of while performing a slow motion ethnic cleansing action in the West Bank.
They’re two very different things to have as a basis for forming your opinion of Israel when you’re young.Report
Yeah. “Do you remember Leon Klinghoffer?”
If the answer is “yes”, you have one opinion of the PLO.
If the answer is “no”, you’re more likely to have another.Report
I remember him. I remember a lot. I suspect my opinion of the PLO is cross generational.Report
If the answer is no? You may well have no memory of the PLO at all.Report
PLF. The Provos of Palestine.Report
Oh, jeez. You’re right. The PLF (un-huh, uh-huh… PLF is gonna rock you).
Huh. Mohammed (Abu) Abbas apologized for killing Klinghoffer in 1996.
I did not know that.
No harm, no foul, I guess.Report
THE JUDEAN PEOPLE’S FRONT!Report
Jews tend to take genocidal threats against them a lot more seriously than non-Jews do. You might think that the chest thumping about wanting to kill all Jews from different parts of the Muslim world are generally impotent but Jews aren’t going to want to take that risk. This comes close to saying that Israel should just take Hamas attacks on the chin because they can’t do any real long term damage.
Activists also don’t do this with other groups they care about. They go on and on about atrocities that were a lot more distance in past than the Holocaust and how they are still important and something must be done. The Holocaust? Nah, that’s yesterday’s news. Totally irrelevant.Report
But that is all irrelevant Lee. We’re talking about young people forming their opinions on Israel right now, young people who are overwhelmingly not Jewish and not living in Israel. They don’t have the Israeli’s… rarified… sensibilities about threats. Also, thanks to Bibi and the right Israeli’s can no longer claim settlements in the West Bank are some fringe lunatic activity; they’re not- they’re the official policy of the Israeli government for several cycles now. Israel isn’t the scrappy underdog in the Middle East anymore and it hasn’t been for quite some time. Many of the old arguments for Israel are losing salience or have become completely inverted and, I say this as a long standing supporter of Israel, it’s hard to see anyone to blame but the Israelis themselves.Report
These young people are able to take hundreds of years of racism against African-Americans seriously and wail bitterly about what happened to the Native Americans and European imperialism. They certainly should be able to conceptualize why Jews might not feel comfortable as they think they should be unless they have cold spot for the Jews alone.Report
Err… Lee.. in case you missed it, Jews in Israel aren’t playing the roll of African American slaves in America or First nations people; they’re in the role of the other side. They have the power, they have the agency, they have control. What is more, for coming up on a decade now the Israeli’s have been going hard core Likud and right wing. No one under 50 has any personal knowledge of the Jewish state being in any form of material peril.
Like it or not the Israelis are in the domineering role, very similar to how the Europeans/Americans were in North America in the 1800’s. But 1800 era behavior isn’t going to fly in the 2000’s, it’s just not. And none of that, none what so ever, has anything to do with the fact that the Israeli’s are Jewish.Report
I think we are talking past each other. What I meant is that for other groups, the Activist Left can generally see deep into the past and how past atrocities effect the present. They do not do this for the Jews at all, in Israel or the Diaspora.Report
Perhaps we are, lord (lady?) knows I don’t cary much of a torch for the activist left but when it comes to the modern Israel, at least vis a vis the territories, the Activist left has at least half a concrete point.Report
The Activist Left is at best apathetic towards Jews and thinks that Tel Aviv is a settlement. They have no issues demanding Jewish support because our history but at the same time don’t want to do anything when Jews need help and deny that we are a distinct people with a communal identity. It is absolute demand in one hand and complete denial in the other.Report
Do *YOU* feel any obligation of support for Evangelicals in response to their support of Israel?
If not, I would wager that you understand that it’s possible to accept support from someone but not feel that it’s appropriate to give it back.
I mean, it ain’t transactional. It’s in service to some higher principle.
Right?Report
Like I said, half a point. But constantly changing the subject to the Activist lefts nonsensical ideas about Israel proper does Israel no favors because the actual atrocious things Israel is doing in the West Bank are real, are getting worse and are poisoning the whole project. Oslo imploded decades ago now, the Israelis in general have to come up with a new plan or else the Israeli rights “Turn Israel into Tehran on the Levant” plan will win by default.Report
The Holocaust is as relevant as slavery is – which is to say it formed a major pillar of the world when Israel was created. It caused decisions to be made by the Zionists, the Europeans, even the Arabs. Those decisions in turn created systems – economic, social, governmental – which modern Israeli’s and Palestinians grapple with.
And just like slavery in the US, the modern question is what to do about modern society, built and informed by that prior event? As many people point out, Israel as a Nation is making decisions and spouting policies that are antithetical to its stated goals, just as many American states and the federal government still do. Those youthful activists are simply calling on Israel to deal with the here and now it has co-created with the Palestinians, just as they call for America’s federal government to deal with the here and now it has created. They are demanding that Israel as a nation recognize that it can not do things which appear to be like the things that were done to Jews prior and still claim a moral upper hand.Report
“The Holocaust is as relevant as slavery is – which is to say it formed a major pillar of the world when Israel was created…[a]nd just like slavery in the US, the modern question is what to do about modern society, built and informed by that prior event?”
ah-heh. “okay fine, sure, the Holocaust happened, but not recently…”Report
Depends on recently. In my parents life time? yes – though my dad is just now 80 so he was very young. In my life time? Nope. In yours? I don’t know because I don’t know how old you are.
But that’s a snarky quibble meant to misdirect form my main point isn’t it?Report
Once the Jews are totally kicked out of Jerusalem, “Next year in Jerusalem” will really mean something.Report
The OP’s first sentence: “I was watching some of the coverage of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations recently and started thinking.”
Does the rest of the post tell us about the world? Or does it tell us about the inside of the OP’s head?Report
Mostly the latter.
I mostly come to OT to read about other people’s opinions, not original reporting, so that struck me as appropriateReport
That was a clear, concise counterpoint to what I wrote–thank you.
I’ll switch to using your terms, because they’re better than mine.
Reporting and opinion always mix, because we’re human, but with practice and self-reflection, we can minimize that mixing, also because we’re human. Reporting at its best tells of the world. Opinion at its best expresses our true human feelings about the world.
Underlying and shaping both reporting and opinion is worldview. The depth and accuracy of one’s worldview–of what’s inside one’s head–is what can enable a person to sift the worst of the reporting out from the rest and to then express their opinions about real events and real people rather than about self-serving exaggerations and caricatures.
No one’s worldview is a perfect reflection of the real world. We mortals are flawed. Doomed to err. To err often. And to continue erring no matter how hard we work at stopping.
No, no one is perfect, but some people are more likely to be right in their reporting than other people because they’ve put in the work to become that way, and the key to refining your worldview is to find those people and take what they report seriously (not *uncritically*, but seriously).
You probably won’t find those people on television. Even if one does happen to appear there, television is unlikely to be the format that either brings out their best work or enables you to understand that work.
So when someone states that he has based his opinion on what he has seen on television, what I wonder is whether I’m hearing about the world, or hearing about a low-fidelity version of it.Report
Yes, the Walter Cronkites of the world are no longer to be found on the nightly news nor is the fairness doctrine, much to our determent. There is still good solid journalism done on some parts of legacy media though, and done by younger journalists who can place it in context.
I’d say that very much depends on what TV networks said person consumes, whether they read in addition to that, and whether they travel outside their location of origin. as the OP is a professional pilot I suspect he has both traveled, and gains information outside TV news. His version of the world has always seemed high fidelity, even when he writes in support of political and policy responses I disagree with.Report
Even the most solid television journalism rarely goes below the surface, though, and that has always been true. Television cannot provide the depth one gets from personal contact with a variety of people and from the flexibility and density of the written word.
I acknowledge your defense of the OP, and grant that you know him better than I do. But what would you have me think of a lengthy essay purporting to be concerned about what pro-Palestinian demonstrators are thinking that does not quote the thoughts of a single pro-Palestinian demonstrator? The essay is not about them at all. It’s about what the OP has seen of them on television, and the ensuing stream of consciousness. It’s about what’s in his head, not about what’s in the world.Report
That’s the essence of political commentary. If you are looking for accurate reporting this is not the place for you.Report
Political commentary has to be based on the accurate reporting (whether your own or someone else’s) of actual facts because politics is a real thing with real consequences that happens in the real world.
Commentary based on what you imagine is happening is not political commentary. It’s fiction, on the same continuum (though at a different point) as Bryan O’Nolan’s wonderful tales of Mike Pence. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all, as long as the writer understands that that’s what he’s doing, and frames what he writes accordingly.
My favorite coinage of the Trump Years is “Fox Cinematic Universe”. And one of my dearest hopes is that the $787 million settlement that Fox had to pay in the real world of real things with real consequences marked the end of that era.Report
I think that the overwhelming majority of the pro-Palestine demonstrators are thinking something to the effect of “we are so self-evidently correct!”
Look at the aesthetics. You’ve got “the little guy” going up against “the bad guy”. You’ve got the various skin colors of the people involved. You’ve got the history of the whole region going back more than a dozen years. And, let’s face it, let’s look at the aesthetics of the people who support Israel. Look at who are the biggest cheerleaders. Old people. Old *WHITE* people. John Hagee.
Just look around. How could *ANYONE* question which side is right or wrong? Look at us! Now look at *THEM*.
That’s my guess for the thought process.Report
The skin color thing gets to me because half of Israelis are descendants of Mizrahi Jews, there are 130KJews from Ethiopia, and most Palestinians just look generically Mediterranean. Yet, the Israelis are white and the Palestinians are not.Report
Not the half that are on TV, they aren’t. Not the half that are crying on camera saying that they now feel “unsafe” on campus, they aren’t. Not the half that are filming people tearing down posters and posting them to the web, they aren’t.
Just look around.Report
There are certain aesthetic advantages that the Palestinians have.Report
Only a problem if one’s morality is co-extensive with one’s aesthetic preferences.Report
“I read up all about bishops in our anarchist pamphlets, in Superstition the Vampire and Priests of Prey. I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed. When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, ‘Down! down! presumptuous human reason!’ they found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all.” — G.K. ChestertonReport
I’m not saying that there aren’t a number of earnest ones sincerely chanting “From the River to the Sea!” as they cut Social Studies. They’ve done the research and have concluded that the Palestinians were at the Wailing Wall first and these Jews are displacing them by inches in a slow-motion trail of tears.
But the majority of the ones doing stuff like shutting down the bridge? Hey. It’s what’s happening this week. You won’t believe this TikTok that I just saw! Why didn’t they teach this stuff in school?Report
These protestors you often speak of…is it your opinion that they can feed and clothe themselves, or no? Do they soil themselves, or are they capable of using toilets?
I’m trying to establish a baseline here.Report
Feed themselves? Sure. If someone else buys the food. Some may be capable of assembling ingredients, even. Certainly masters of pressing the “1 Minute” button on the microwave. Clothe themselves? Sure. If someone else buys the clothing.
But I don’t hold the inability to earn a living against sophomores. That’s why they’re there in school in the first place.Report
This essay is titled “What Are the Pro-Palestine Demonstrators Thinking?” It is 1,560 words long.
Not a single word of it quotes the thoughts of a pro-Palestinian demonstrator.Report
I see it more as like when a guy is playing with nunchucks and gets himself in the nards. It’s appropriate for his bros to ask “What were you thinking?”
And, no, I do not need to quote the nunchuck guy.Report
Someone I know used to practice with nunchucks when we were teenagers. It was in vogue at the time (they might have been illegal then, too, which would have added to the mystique). If he ever tried to pass them between his legs, he might have done some nard damage (he has a daughter now, so it couldn’t have been too bad).
It would be weird to ask him all these years later what he was thinking, but I remember what I thought when I had a chance to hold the nunchucks: No one would want to get hit by one of these. People would back off. For a teenager, that might worth the risk of nard pain.Report
Oh, I wouldn’t ask “what were you thinking?” now. I know what they were thinking at the time. The Way of the Dragon was pretty f’awesome.
I’m talking about the moment after.
Wah! WAAAAAH! WAAAAAAunhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.(deep breath) unhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
“What were you thinking?”Report
Guys, I’ve been doing research and I think that we could solve the problem with a properly worded Stolen Land Acknowledgment. If they could open meetings in the Knesset with something like this. I mean, you’d have to swap out “Palestinians” for “Dakota” and they probably have different names for nearby geographic features but if they did something like this (and *INCLUDED* stuff like “Donating time and money to Indigenous-led organizations”), maybe we could turn things around.
I’m putting together a music concert at the border where the two lands touch and I hope that everyone can come together there and discuss this like adults.Report