What is Israel’s Endgame in Gaza?
As the death toll in Gaza rises and even the IDF acknowledges more than 15,000 Palestinians killed since the war started on October 7, international pressure is mounting on Israel to wrap up its attacks on Hamas or at least reduce the level of violence to protect innocent civilians. That pressure includes the Biden Administration, which is urging Israel to be more careful to avoid collateral damage.
“I want them to be focused on how to save civilian lives. Not stop going after Hamas, but be more careful,” President Biden told reporters last week.
Criticism of Israel will only increase after the revelation over the weekend that three hostages were killed by Israeli soldiers as they approached under a white flag. The Wall Street Journal reports that the shooting violated the rules of engagement but that a soldier opened fire because he “felt threatened,” a familiar rationale to those who follow American police shootings. Two hostages were killed immediately while the third was killed by a soldier who kept shooting after a ceasefire was ordered. The incident seems to confirm Steve Berman’s notion that Israel is not doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties and raises the question of how many Gazans have been gunned down in similar circumstances.
[As an aside, the story reminds me of a disturbing scene from Saving Private Ryan in which two surrendering German soldiers are shot by Americans. I didn’t learn until recently that the men were speaking Czech and represented Czechoslovakian men conscripted into service by the Wehrmacht. I’m no veteran, combat or otherwise, but I’ve read plenty of accounts that acknowledge that sometimes enemy soldiers would not be “allowed to surrender,” particularly after vicious combat.]
The war in Gaza is what can be termed an asymmetric conflict. Israel has a modern military including an air force that can drop bombs with impunity and armored vehicles that can roll over Hamas’s irregular militia infantry. Although armored vehicles can be vulnerable to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other anti-tank weapons, I haven’t seen any evidence of effective anti-aircraft fire in Gaza.
Some recent statistics show that Israel has dropped about 29,000 air-to-ground munitions (bombs and air-launched missiles and rockets) since the Gaza war started. CNN reports that bout 45 percent of those have been unguided “dumb” bombs while the remainder have been precision-guided weapons. Reuters estimates that about 40,000 buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. That’s about 18 percent of the prewar total. The Palestinians claim that their death toll exceeds 18,000, which as Steven Bergman pointed out recently, closely matches IDF estimates. No matter how you slice it, the Gaza war is a humanitarian disaster.
An Israeli officer explained to the Times of Israel what the IDF has encountered in Gaza, saying, “They [Hamas} don’t really try to face us, but to sting here and there. Their method of operating is fleeing in civilian clothes, leaving behind their uniform, their guns, anti-tank missiles, explosives, and they just run. After we leave the area, they return and attack the next forces.”
“There isn’t a single house here without weapons, there isn’t a house without [tunnel] infrastructure,” he continued. “It’s unbelievable. In dozens of yards of homes we found dozens of rocket launchers. We found Kalashnikovs under mattresses, inside clothes closets. It wasn’t thrown there suddenly, they were hidden in the homes.”
The Hamas strategy of hiding fighters and weapons in and near civilian targets was designed to, as the officer put it, “take advantage of the sensitivity we once had.” This is also what has caused much of the civilian loss of life.
“Schools, a cemetery near us, in a clinic… these are the places where they concentrated most of their tunnel shafts. They thought we wouldn’t strike there, and that’s where we found the enemy’s significant infrastructure,” he said.
As a result, “The enemy has nothing to return to. It has no infrastructure here to return to, it has no weapons in the homes to return to and use against us.”
What has Israel got for the destruction it has wrought in retaliation for the Hamas attacks and massacres on October 7? Israel estimates that at least 7,000 of the Palestinian dead were Hamas fighters. That is a lot but not nearly all of the estimated 40,000 Hamas fighters.
Hamas is also still firing rockets at Israel, although the numbers have declined sharply. The Times of Israel reports that about 3,000 rockets were fired in the opening hours of the war and about 7,000 since then. In the first week of the war, there were 3,523 alerts issued and most were due to rockets. That number had trended down to 455 by mid-November.
Israel’s stated goal for the war was to destroy Hamas. More than two months into the fighting, Hamas has been severely damaged but is still a long way from being eliminated. With world opinion turning hostile, where does the Israeli government go from here?
It’s important to realize that the total destruction of Hamas was probably never in the cards. If you’re familiar with the history of the Arab-Israeli wars, you probably remember that a great many of the previous Arab-Israeli conflicts have ended when the international community and the United Nations pressured the warring parties to agree to ceasefires. In the 1967 war, this famously took only six days. The odds are good that the current fighting will end in a similar fashion.
The only way to wipe out Hamas is to wipe out Gaza. There are many reasons that such a strategy is unworkable starting with the immorality of a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners policy and continuing to international opinion and the effect that carrying out such a policy would have on Israeli soldiers. There is also the practical consideration that young Palestinian children who watch their friends and parents die are more likely to grow up to become Hamas fighters themselves. If they grow up.
Or maybe that’s not a good assumption. Sometimes a defeat that is painful to the civilian population to prevent future wars. The Union stranglehold on the Confederacy and Sherman’s march to the sea helped to dissuade Confederates from making a second attempt. Germany’s surrender in 1918 left the homeland untouched but paved the way for a second world war 20 years later. After the destruction that Germany experienced in the 1940s, the country has not been aggressive for the past 75 years. Maybe the horror being inflicted on Gaza will help to break the cycle of young Palestinians being recruited into jihad. We won’t know for 100 years or so.
You might think that Israel holds the cards on the ceasefire negotiations since they have the dominant military in the region, but that isn’t a good assumption either. A truce in November provided a “humanitarian pause” in the bombing as Hamas returned more than 100 hostages kidnapped on October 7, but it was Hamas that broke that truce. In fact, the IDF reported that Hamas fighters had attacked only 15 minutes after the truce began.
Israel might well be open to a ceasefire as it gains control of more territory in Gaza, but it takes two to make a ceasefire and Hamas has shown no willingness to stop fighting in order to spare the lives of innocent Arab civilians. The situation is similar to that of Ukraine where Republicans are pushing for a ceasefire despite the fact that Vladimir Putin, the continuing aggressor, shows no interest in halting the fighting.
There is an old saw that says if the Arabs stop fighting and put down their weapons, there would be peace, but if the Israelis stop fighting and put down their weapons, there would be a massacre. That dynamic applies in Ukraine as well where the Russians continue to push and kidnap and kill Ukrainian civilians.
There will be no peace in the Middle East, but what Israel can hope for is an uneasy truce based by keeping Hamas unable to mount attacks. This may require a reoccupation of Gaza. From the Six-Day War of 1967 until Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the IDF occupied the disputed strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. The occupation was costly and unpopular but was arguably less costly both in terms of money and lives (including Palestinian lives) than allowing Hamas free rein.
An alternative Israeli strategy would be to return to prewar borders and focus on using intelligence and airpower to keep Hamas impotent. The problem with this strategy is that Hamas has become very adept at camouflage and trickery. When intelligence fails, October 7 is the result.
Nevertheless, the world is sympathetic to victims, but has limited patience for retribution and preventive war. Pressure is going to mount for a ceasefire, which the United Nations has already called for, or more restrictive rules of engagement as requested by President Biden.
Biden’s motives are purely altruistic. The Democratic Party has a schism on Middle East policy just as the Republican Party does on Ukraine. Biden is attempting to bridge the gap between the Democratic friends of Israel and the Democratic Arab sympathizers, a faction that includes many young voters. Biden needs to keep the Democratic coalition together to defeat Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, next year.
There will almost certainly be a ceasefire in Gaza. Both international politics and American domestic politics will add pressure on the Israeli government to slow or stop its offensive operations. As the Israeli death toll mounts in Gaza due to vicious, close-quarter, urban combat, public opinion in Israel may also favor ending the war.
The question is how far the Israelis will go before Hamas agrees to stop fighting. Temporarily. The one sure thing is that no matter how much Hamas complains about Arab casualties at the hands of the IDF, it won’t stop them from launching another war that will also inflict a horrible price on their own people. That may well mean that Israel maintains a long term occupation of at least part of Gaza after the war ends.
Hamas could always surrender and admit it lost but Hamas is not the type of organization that will surrender for a variety of reasons. One is that they are bunch of utter fanatics that really believe in their mission to drive or kill all Jews in the Middle East. Surrendering would be an admission of total defeat on this issue. The other reason is that if Hamas surrenders, they know they are all going to prison for the rest of their lives or a very long time. This means that the other end goal since Hamas can not and will not surrender is that either Israel wages war until Hamas is destroyed or eventually the world manages to impose another ceasefire that will last until Hamas does something stupid again. A final peace deal is not going to happen because Hamas is never going to agree to anything that leaves Israel existing and Israel won’t trust Hamas for good reason.Report
Hamas could always surrender and admit it lost but Hamas is not the type of organization that will surrender for a variety of reasons.
One reason that they haven’t surrendered is it’s not clear they’re losing the war.Report
From an international politics perspective maybe but from a purely military standard, they are getting their rears handed to them. The problem with quasi-state organizations like Hamas or ISIS is the only way to defeat them is to get rid of them down to the roots. Few governments really have the stomach for this/ Plus Hamas is just as entrenched in Gaza as the Iranian clerical regime is in Iran. Even if the Palestinians get sick and tired of Hamas, they aren’t going anywhere until forcibly removed.Report
To clarify my point, Hamas isn’t going to get their dream scenario where they kill all the Jews in the Middle East or the world comes swooping down and takes all the Jews in Israel away and leaves them that area to create their Islamic theocracy. That is their avowed goal and they basically stated endless Simchat Torah massacres till they said it. Hamas isn’t going to win in being able to achieve its goal.Report
To clarify my point, Hamas isn’t going to get their dream scenario where they kill all the Jews in the Middle East or the world comes swooping down and takes all the Jews in Israel away and leaves them that area to create their Islamic theocracy.
Yeah, they aren’t.
But while I’m skeptical that Hamas’ leaders have the “geniuses” part of “evil geniuses” nailed down, I’m pretty sure they know that they are not going to push all the Jews into the sea.
That doesn’t mean they can’t accomplish a lot:
* preventing Israel from continuing rapprochement with Arab states (especially Saudi Arabia);
* eroding support for Israel among its key allies;
* demonstrating the ineffectiveness of Israel’s security apparatus;
* and forcing better terms for the inevitable end of hostilities.
All of these seem to be happening. Their ability to fight is being degraded, but, again, I don’t think they’re such idiots that they thought they’d beat the IDF in a stand-up fight.
“Wait for the Israeli response to cause a sufficiently dire humanitarian crisis, and the IDF to slaughter enough Palestinians, and get caught committing enough war crimes[1] that they’re required to stop slaughtering Palestinians,” is monstrous, and it surely leaves the Palestinian people[2] as a whole much, much worse off. But it leaves Hamas much better off.
The Iron Law of Institutions doesn’t just apply to well-intentioned bureaucracies. It also applies to terrorist gangs.
[1] Beyond being awful in its own right, the fact that Israeli forces murdered three hostages who were waving a white flag in defiance of their own rules of engagement, is damning evidence that they haven’t been coming remotely close to living up to their obligations under the rules of war, and have murdered many, many more Palestinians. This is just the one the IDF itself has had to show happened unambiguously.
[2] The ones that survive, anyway.Report
I think that Hamas are big enough idiots to believe that they can destroy Israel because they keep going on media and saying that is their intent in ways that don’t sound like acting. You are applying your own secular logic and reason to a bunch of political fanatics. Hamas aren’t the North Vietnamese.Report
I believe that Hamas are fanatics, but I don’t believe for a second that they are too fanatical to want to expand their own power, or, you know, figure out ways to inflict damage on Israel that falls short of its destruction.Report
They are undoubtedly fanatics, as you’d expect from a group membership in which is pretty close to a death sentence (either by assassination, terroristic suicide missions, extremely asymmetrical armed conflict). That’s not the sort of organizations that attracts doubters. That said, despite the fanaticism and manifest bloodlust, they’ve proven themselves to be pretty politically savvy, as even the October 7 attack shows: it achieved at least one of their apparent goals (at first likely temporarily, but due to Israel’s atrocities, now perhaps significantly longer term) in disrupting negotiations between the Saudis and the Israelis.
It’s also worth noting that Hamas is not the only armed group in Gaza, nor perhaps the most fanatical, and the main other group may not be quite so politically savvy or easy to negotiate with (for Israel or Hamas).Report
A lot of people seem to make the mistake that Hamas is _religiously_ fanatical, which it isn’t.
It’s fanatical about its goals, but its goals are not religious, they are very definitely political. They are ‘Get Jews out of the entire territory of Palestine (By which they also mean Israel)’, or, when it’s feeling more moderate, ‘get Jews out of the control of any of Palestine but maybe possibly they can keep living here? Maybe?’.
Or, they would put it as ‘fanatical about Palestinian liberation’.
It’s not ‘institute Shari’a law at gun point’…they do actually think Palestine will be that, but they tend to assume Palestine will _vote_ for that, which honestly is probably true.(1) And it’s certainly not ‘force people to convert to Islam’, or whatever anyone is hallucinating.
Nor do they actually have any political goals outside of that territory.
1) At some point people are going to have to start understanding that “Shari’a law” has very different implementations from place to place, because right now I’m not sure anyone does. You can have basically an entire modern legal system and government with almost identical laws as anywhere else, with a few specific things like ‘Can banks charge interest?’ and ‘How do property disputes work?’…or you can have public stoning for women without covered hair.
When people say “Shari’a law”, they really just means ‘a nation that is officially Muslim and does not have a purely secular government’ and references Islam in the laws’. If you swap out ‘Christian’ for ‘Muslim’, something like 1/2 the Western world still fits under it.Report
Yes, Hamas is a nationalist project (explicitly so, after 2017), and has moved away from its religious project less because they don’t still have a religious project than because they want to keep more political options open than their previous stated goals would allow.
Does this mean there aren’t a lot of people in Hamas with blind blood lust? No. It does mean, however, that Hamas is, over all, a different actor than it was in the past, with different internal factions producing different conflicts internally and externally.
While it’s clear people on this website don’t understand much of this, or much of anything about the conflict, Israel is fully aware of all of this, and it affected how they treated Hamas before 10/7. Obviously, 10/7 changed everything, but we’re dealing with a reality that was created by the actual, post-2007 and post-2017 relationship between Israel and Hamas (and Hamas and other regional actors), not the reality that, say, Lee here has imagined.Report
Does it? At some point, the question seriously has to be asked if it is better than the current situation for them. Which was already constant war crimes, just…war crimes no one cared about.
Even worse: The only reason anyone bothered to look into this was that one of the killed hostages was a redhead, which cause enough IDF people to go ‘Wait, what?’ and try to figure out who they were.
So the question is: How many times has this happened without anyone knowing, cause none of the Israeli’s looked weird enough to not be Palestinians? How many hostages are laying dead in the streets with IDF bullets in them?
Actually, I think a better question is: Why doesn’t Hamas randomly release their male Israeli hostages in Gaza and just…let the IDF kill them? ‘You are free, we will not touch you, welcome to the war zone, surely as unarmed civilians you can track down the IDF and be fine. Don’t forget there are no-go areas you will be shot if you enter, hopefully those are clearly marked. Good luck, be free!’
What’s that moral position called ‘You should decide disputes as if you do not know which side of the dispute you will be on?’ You should probably decide military rule of engagement as if you don’t know which side you’ll be on, too.Report
RE: Does it? At some point, the question seriously has to be asked if it is better than the current situation for them.
Picture Israel being forced by international pressure to have a cease fire, i.e. leave Hamas in charge.
Israel will still be the dominate power. Do we really think Israel will stop everything and go back to how it was?
Or do they end work permits forever, put in a hard blockade of everything, and not allow water or power except a few days a month? Basically downgrade Gaza’s treatment from a prison to a reserve of dangerous animals.
Gaza’s best hope for the future is Hamas losing and Israel or their proxy taking over. Something like what happened in Japan after we took over.Report
The thing most people aren’t following about Hamas is, they don’t care if _they_ win.
They care if Palestine does.
You mean the…situation that Hamas had before all this?
Pretty sure they don’t want that.
I don’t understand your hypothetical. If Israel is forced to stop the war, what is Israel going to do?
I don’t mean ‘Ah, they’ll have nothing they can do!’, I mean I literally do not understand what this hypothetical situation is supposed to be. What can Israel do or not do?
Um, yeah, that’s…probably what Hamas is trying to make happen. Like, literally.
Because once Israel ends up back occupying Gaza, it makes it _extremely_ hard for Israel not to do the peace process. Remember, the entire point of letting it split off and Hamas end up in charge was to make that stop.
And the world’s understanding of the issue has changed over the last few decades, as people actually started paying attention to Israeli politics and how they have refused to allow a Palestinian state. Israel cannot keep up the absurd stalling, especially as they have now repeatedly publicly admitted they will never allow such a state to exist to appease their far-right. (Yes, I know _you_ don’t understand it is Israel’s fault, everyone Knows(TM) it’s the Palestinians who refused, but that is, flatly, not true. And the world has noticed.)
Especially if international support for Israel has fallen apart, which it _is_. Right now. As everyone watches.
Meanwhile, and this is key, Hamas, or someone else, can continue to exist past ‘Hamas losing’. Even if Hamas is destroyed, any can take up the slack, all anyone has to do is put up a sign saying ‘New Startup: Any orphans who want to kill the people who killed your parents, sign up here.’.Report
Hamas doesn’t view “peace” as victory, it views it as defeat. Their definition of “victory” is “no Jews”.
Agreed that the Israeli Right, who have been running things for a decade or so, have no desire in a Palestinian state.
However if the Left takes over and offers a state to the Palestinians in exchange for peace, again, then there’s a very good chance we’ll see Hamas and groups like it reject it because it allows Israel to exist.
RE: New Startup
Agreed with that too. Hamas is a reflection of the Palestinian’s political asperations. Which at the moment includes undoing the war of 1948 and forcing all the Jews to leave.
So Hamas can’t really be destroyed and the Palestinians don’t want peace.Report
Of course there’s no chance Hamas would be able to wipe out Israel. No one, not even Hamas itself, believes it (*). It’s not going to happen, so talking about it is not very productive.
At the same time, do you have a view on how Israel is going to “destroy” Hamas? Hamas, at its core, is an idea. You can kill a lot of Hamas fighters (if you can distinguish them from the rest of the Palestinian population) but too much killing will just reinforce the idea of Hamas, even if the next group is called something else.
Of course, at some point, you can kill enough people to kill an idea. Ask any cathars around, if you can find any. But you have to kill a lot of Palestinians to get there.
You can also not kill an idea, but banish it far away. Emperor Hadrian did it. So did Isabella and Ferdinand. So did Catherine the Great. So did others. But to empty Gaza of the Hamas idea you have to empty it of Palestinians, and, unlike 135, 1492, or 1791, international political conditions are not favorable to a forced deportation of millions to…. where exactly? Where will these people go, and why would the people there receive them?
The third option is to quarantine the idea. Keep all that could be Hamas fenced. It’s a short term palliative, but you can extrapolate the result from high school biology. Keep the population controlled and isolated, and sooner or later (actually sooner) the whole population will carry the idea. And then you are worse off than you are right now.
I suspect Israel will go for the quarantine option, reoccupy and block Gaza, looking for Hamas, and its eventual successors, members, with the intent of eradicating them. The comparisons to events you are familiar with write themselves.
So what is Israel’s vision? We talk a lot about “from the River to the Sea” coming from Hamas, but it seems from the outside that that’s exactly the vision of the Israeli right, and of the current Israeli government. You are probably closer to it so please correct me. Please tell me that Israel is truly working for two states (two real states, not a state and two bastuntans), or for a single multiethnic Great Israel.
Because from the River to the Sea will never come to happen. Neither for Hamas, nor for Netanyahu (**)
(*) there’s probably someone on the internet that would disagree with this statement, but let’s, not quibble about him and stipulate it for the time being
(**) Let me throw another alternative here. The end vision of the Israeli government is to milk the conflict for continued power in Israel in the next couple of decades, and then après moi le dèluge.Report
Israel’s style of proportional representation prevents its government from having a single unified vision even more than most democracies.
But the varied visions promulgated by the constituent members of its governing coalition lean heavily to the self-serving, the stupid, the fanatical, and the bloodthirsty.
It been working out about as well as you expect, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to wind up losing their justified war against Hamas by fighting it in an unjustifiably brutal way.Report
Another issue is that since Arab parties and MKs refuse to participate in coalition formation, Israeli liberal and centrist parties are a lot weaker than they should be. The last non-Netanyahu coalition was formed because an Islamist party of all things finally decided to form part of the governing coalition.Report
What does “MK” mean?Report
Member of the KnessetReport
RE: No one, not even Hamas itself, believes it (*).
They claim they’re serious. They behave like they’re serious.
They understand that it’s not going to happen this week but they seem to actually believe that the Jews can be terrorized into fleeing the region, just like Jews have been terrorized into fleeing other regions over the centuries.
Part of the human condition is believing in all sorts of things that aren’t especially realistic.
RE: Ideas
Yes, that. The Palestinian (especially Gaza Palestinian) political desire is to undo the war of 1948. Hamas gained power by promising that.
If their lives didn’t suck fewer of them would be wiling to blow themselves up to terrorize Jews. However making their lives not suck would probably include giving them more opportunity to blow up Jews so even though there would be fewer terrorists as a percentage of the population, there would also be more dead Jews.
Terrorism causes poverty.Report
You should read the 2017 charter. (If you don’t automatically know what that is, you should probably just avoid commenting on the situation entirely.)Report
RE: 2017 charter
…maintains the longstanding goal of an Islamist Palestinian state covering all of the area of today’s Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip, and that the State of Israel is illegal and illegitimate.
It now states that Hamas is anti-Zionist rather than anti-Jewish, but describes Zionism as part of a conspiratorial global plot, as the enemy of all Muslims, and a danger to international security, and blames the Zionists for the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#2017_Document_of_General_Principles_and_PoliciesReport
A lot of people think that the Hamas charter updates are much nicer than they actually are. The duplicity and hypocrisy of Arab and Muslim intellectuals towards Jewish identity and Jewish self-determination is staggering. They demand collective rights for themselves while basically saying they will barely tolerate some kind of Jewish community as long as the Jew still quiet and know that we are the guest people and they are the true people of the state connecting to other Muslim states.
Western anti-Zionists fail to see why Jews don’t find this impressive.Report
Why don’t Palestinians want peace? With Benny Morris | SpectatorTV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkwr7YVwYlk
Big name historian talking about various issues, does a lot about their mindset.Report
To sum the mindset up:
The job of the government and of all right thinking people is to serve Islam and to further its goals.
So the idea the Jews could have a state on land that Islam has claimed is silly on the face of it. Ergo their first priority to make sure there is no Jewish state.
That’s been the observed reality since before the creation of Israel, and that mindset has caused all sorts of other problems in various other regions.Report
To sum the mindset up:
The job of the government and of all right thinking people is to serve God and to further His goals.
Lotta that goin’ on.Report
Fully agreed.
It feels like it’s less of an issue with us… but I’m not sure if that means percentage of the population or if we just have so many religions that are opposed to each other that we have a Mexican stand off.
Also when I look at various movements, I can see echoes of this sort of thing with them. “Stop Oil Now” comes to mind.
In any case, with the Palestinians this is a huge thing. So yes, Hamas is serious. Ergo them setting up a peaceful state next to Israel would be a massive defeat.Report
This has not only been the observed reality before the creation of Israel but plenty of Pro-Palestinian activists in the West still believe in this because “anti-colonialism” even though at least one faction of Palestinians isn’t cuddly Western multiculturalists.Report
Israel might well be open to a ceasefire as it gains control of more territory in Gaza, but it takes two to make a ceasefire and Hamas has shown no willingness to stop fighting in order to spare the lives of innocent Arab civilians.
This is absolutely true, and unless Israeli military and political leaders figure out why this is true in, like, the next couple days, they’re going to be facing a much worse set of choices when it comes to the endgame.Report
My very first comment here on this war was exactly this, that neither side has a rational end game.
They have fought each other to a stalemate for several generations and are no closer to a permanent peace than they were when they started.Report
They have fought each other to a stalemate for several generations and are no closer to a permanent peace than they were when they started.
This isn’t quite right–Israel is at pease with most of its Arab neighbors and was about to expand on that significantly/
This has a lot to do with why Hamas started this war in the first place.Report
That’s true, I stand corrected.Report
Why do you think that most groups involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict want peace? What I think the Palestinians want is something more lie victory, where they get independence from Israel without having to give any concessions or recognition to Israel at all. Whether they achieve this through their own might or through outside force imposing this on Israel, but why would anybody do this escapes imagination, is irrelevant but they want victory.
Many or even most Israelis also want something resembling a victory at this point. Obviously the hardcore types want a victory that causes the Palestinians to somehow magically go away and merge with other Arab states so Israel gets the West Bank and Gaza to themselves. Even the less radical victories probably want the Palestinians to basically surrender and admit that they lost and have acted badly, in the Israeli minds, for the past several decades and accept whatever deal that Israel gives them.Report
Everyone involved wants some sort of “peace” but how that is defined and achieved varies from something resembling a negotiated accord and coexistence to utter genocidal triumph.
I don’t have any magic solution in mind. but I don’t see anything resembling a realistic end game emerging yet.
Hamas didn’t always exist, and after they are gone, someone else will replace them.Report
I think very few people in the region want peace as how Secret Disney Liberals in the West define it. Doesn’t stop the Secret Disney Liberals from really believing that the ordinary people of both sides or the side that they prefer want peace as they see it. This is why I use the term victory rather than peace to define what many or most Israelis and Palestinians want.
To be fair, I have an unrealistic desire for victory where I imagine Muslims admitting that they were wrong for opposing Jewish self-determination and all the Imams that said bad things about Jews, Judaism, and Israel to their congregations from 1948 to the present perform acts of true redemption. This isn’t going to happen though and at best Jews will be tolerated but looked down upon religion like an old fashioned grandparent that doesn’t realize the knew hip thing that is Islam.Report
I have a question: What _should_ have happened? Write the alternate history of what you think should have happened, changing only the behavior of the Arabs so they refuse to challenge ‘Jewish self-determination’, starting in, I dunno, 1900.
I mean, when I look at it, the actual Zionist movement had much wider aims than what is currently Israel, or even Palestine, their aims were ‘Eretz Israel’, which was generally understood to be Palestine, Transjordan (Aka, the current Kingdom of Jordan), the Golan height and the southern part of Lebanon.
As Ben–Gurion told the twentieth Zionist Congress about the Peel Porposal: ‘The Jewish state now being offered to us is not the Zionist objective. … But it can serve as a decisive stage along the path to greater Zionist implementation. It will consolidate in Palestine, within the shortest possible time, the real Jewish force, which will lead us to our historic goal.’
Israel has always aimed bigger than they currently are. (This is literally the entire point of the settlements). So if you rewind and they never get pushback at all, Israel probably has all of Jordan too, at minimum, that was actually a serious plan at one point.
And is, very obviously, some sort of religious theocracy where Arabs have very few rights, because there are nowhere near enough Jews to actually have legitimate control via voting. (Or all the Arabs were removed or killed?)
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What does your AU look like?Report
Anti-Semitism is the rocket fuel behind Israel’s creation. If we just change the behavior of the Arabs then they don’t kick their Jews out and Israel has a tiny population of Zionists living in a tiny micro country defined by the UN.
We don’t end up with the wars and we don’t end up with hundreds of thousands of refugees being rounded up by Arabs and forced into camps.Report
That seems a reasonable premise in my alternate universe, a much much smaller Jewish population in Israel…although I sorta suspect it wouldn’t remain small during the Holocaust.(1)
The question is if Zionists would have settled for that, because, again, the quote above. Zionists really did want the entire area. The ‘historic goal’ mentioned above was Eretz Israel…and that guy, in case you don’t recognize the name, would become the first prime minister.
1) This, incidentally, is why I am always sorta horrified at how badly Zionism screwed up, because if, instead of a Jewish state, they had instead asked Britian for ‘Strong constitutional protections for Jewish people put in the Palestinian constitution as Britain helped build a Palestine state, perhaps even some explicit refugee provision for Jewish people’…just imagine that version of Palestine getting set up in the late 1920s or 1930 or whenever, and Jewish people be able to move there…during the Holocaust.
But instead the tensions from attempting to carve out a nation, but not yet succeeding, had already escalated so badly that hardly any Jews were able to escape to there during the Holocaust.Report
…asked Britian for ‘Strong constitutional protections for Jewish people put in the Palestinian constitution as Britain helped build a Palestine state, perhaps even some explicit refugee provision for Jewish people’
At the time, there were no Palestinians, there were Jews and Arabs. If we picture Jews as a minority in a Arab state in a region that already doesn’t want Jews, then I strongly expect it doesn’t end with millions of Jewish refugees fleeing there no matter what the British write into someone else’s Constitution.
The Arabs aren’t stupid, they would understand that letting in millions of Jews results in a Jewish state. The Middle East had already had a recent genocide on some group that wasn’t Islamic enough.
During this period of time, both the United States and Britton understood that the Holocaust was going on and we still sent fleeing Jews back to Europe.
Unless the Jews are running the state then that’s the expected outcome.Report
The hypothetical we are discussing is that Arabs start out with the premise they are ‘ wrong for opposing Jewish self-determination’ (By which LeeEsq means ‘attempting to declare themselves a country and that they are in charge’ despite being a small minority)
There is a difference between ‘a state where the majority are Jews’ and ‘a Jewish state’.
But also, that’s likely not true anyway.
Trying to figure out the numbers back then is very difficult, no one actually did a census or anything. So let’s look at what the numbers are now.
There are something like 11 million Palestinians (refugees and otherwise) that are in Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia…and Chili for some reason.
There were only 16 million Jews in the world before the Holocaust. (And slightly more than 10 million after.) Coincidentally, the world-wide Jewish population currently is almost back up to 16 million now.
But we’re looking at an alternate universe. The best estimates of the number of Jews in the world that would exist without the Holocaust that I can find is about 26 million…but we’re not supposing it didn’t happen at all, just that a lot of Jews escaped, so let’s split the difference between 16 and 26 million and go with 21 million.
Vs. 11 million Palestinians…except not really. That’s a bunch of Palestinians who fled, who live in refugee camps. It’s a population that, to a huge amount, is children, with adults who _should_ still be alive but are not. So that number is probably too low.
Meanwhile, only like a 1/3rd of all Jews live in Israel, so the 21 million is too high. And that’s with a rather large amount expelled from surrounding countries, which we already agreed wouldn’t have happened in this alternate universe.
Like, we can’t actually know this, but it certainly seems like the Jewish population in that area would be _roughly_ the same size…Jews didn’t come in from surrounding Arab countries, but did come in from Europe in the same amount? Or, I dunno, maybe twice as much? Three times? But…we really need a _lot_ more to get a Jewish majority.
As a mere practical matter, if we magically joined the two countries together and put back all the Palestinians, it would be extremely difficult for Jews to outnumber Arabs _even now_, much less back then. And everyone back then should have been able to do that math.Report
RE: So that number is probably too low.
A world without those wars is also a world where the Palestinians get a lot less aid. If we’re not paying them to reproduce then they might not have the numbers they do.
RE: And everyone back then should have been able to do that math.
It’s not about the math.
In the real world, the United States and Great Briton were so racist that we sent Jews back to face the holocaust and the ME was worse.
Great Briton was getting out of the empire business and wanted to set up some states in the ME. There were no historical states to use as a map for boarders so Briton would have to draw new ones.
Since the Jews and the Arabs had opposite opinions on what to do with the land, the obvious solution was to give both of them states.Report
What happened to the Jews of Algeria? They were basically not really interested in Zionism but were kicked out with the French despite their community being centuries old because the Algerian Muslims saw them as colonial traitors.
There were more than a few Mizrahi Jews who participated with the Arab nationalist project and by and large, the other Arab nationalists rejected them just as the European nationalists rejected their Jews. Without Israel, the Mizrahi Jews would end up in France, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The people wailing about the Palestinians would be fine with this.Report
I mean…weren’t they?
Their community might have been centuries old, but…it changed. Their relationship with Muslims changed, they joined with the French! I feel I should just straight up quote wikipedia here:
At the time, the French government distinguished French citizens (who had national voting rights and were subject to French laws and conscription) from Jewish and Muslim “indigenous” peoples, who each were allowed to keep their own laws and courts. By 1841, the Jewish batei din “religious courts” were placed under French jurisdiction, linked to the Israelite Central Consistory of France. Regional Algerian courts or consistoires were put in place, operating under French oversight.
In 1845, the French colonial government reorganized communal structure, appointing French Jews, who were Ashkenazi Jews, as chief rabbis for each region, with the duty “to inculcate unconditional obedience to the laws, loyalty to France, and the obligation to defend it”. Such oversight was an example of the French Jews’ attempt to “civilize” Jewish Algerians, as they believed their European traditions were superior to Sephardic practices.
This marked a change in the Jewish relationship with the state. They were separated from the Muslim court system, where they had previously been classified as dhimmis, or a protected minority people. As a result, Algerian Jews resisted those French Jews attempting to settle in Algeria; in some cases, there was rioting, in others the local Jews refused to allow French Jewish burials in Algerian Jews’ cemeteries. In 1865, the Senatus-Consulte liberalized rules of citizenship, to allow Jewish and Muslim “indigenous” peoples in Algeria to become French citizens if they requested it. Few did so, however, because French citizenship required renouncing certain traditional mores. The Algerians considered that a kind of apostasy.
The French government granted the Jews, who by then numbered some 33,000 French citizenship in 1870 under the Crémieux Decree, while maintaining an inferior status for Muslims who, though technically French nationals, were required to apply for French citizenship and undergo a naturalization process. For this reason, they are sometimes incorrectly categorized as pieds-noirs. The decision to extend citizenship to Algerian Jews was a result of pressures from prominent members of the liberal, intellectual French Jewish community, which considered the North African Jews to be “backward” and wanted to bring them into modernity.
Within a generation, despite initial resistance, most Algerian Jews came to speak French rather than Arabic or Judaeo-Spanish, and they embraced many aspects of French culture. In embracing “Frenchness,” the Algerian Jews joined the colonizers, although they were still considered “other” to the French. Although some took on more typically European occupations, “the majority of Jews were poor artisans and shopkeepers catering to a Muslim clientele.” Moreover, conflicts between Sephardic Jewish religious law and French law produced contention within the community. They resisted changes related to domestic issues, such as marriage.
That is a lot of quoting of Wikipedia, but, I don’t know what to tell you. This isn’t my opinion, this is basic history. The French tried to pull people into their colonial government system, promised them French citizenship, and Jews fell for that. France even used French Jews to do it, to help ‘civilize’ local Jews. And as a result all the Jews became ‘French’, and thus got kicked out with the French.
…well, first, this backfired horrifically because France turned into Vichy France and put serious restrictions on Jews in Algeria. But then, after all that ended and Algeria fought for independence and won, and the French left, it turned out the Jews had no friends at all there, because, again *points to Wikipedia quote*.
I do love how things that are pretty much entirely due to _European_ conquest somehow are due to Arabs. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky you aren’t blaming Arabs for Vichy Alergia sending Jews to concentration camps.
‘more than a few’ were rejected ‘by and large’, huh. Wow, that is so astonishingly vague I can’t even comment.
Almost all Algeria Jews, by 1962, considered themselves ‘francais israelites’, aka, ‘Jewish French’. I am sure there are a few, in fact, there’s a term, ‘pieds rouges‘, referring to the Jews who went the other way.
And it sucks they got kicked out. Especially the indigenous Jews (who you have decided to call Mizrahi for some reason, but are properly either the North African Sephardim Jews and the Maghrebi Jews.), who were innocent victims of all this, and actually treated pretty poorly by everyone. France used them as a pawn, other Jews wanted to ‘civilize’ them, and Arabs rejected them at the end despite living in peace with them for hundreds of years. And thus they ended up in France and their way of life was over anyway.
But pretending this is some sort of example of Arabs disliking Jews for no reason is utterly absurd…this is an example of anti-colonialism that Jews ended up entangled in. (Even if they themselves were indigenous.)
No, that one was just because they were antisemitic.
..they, uh…did go to France? What are you talking about? Almost all Algerian Jews fled to France, like 130,000 of them, along with something like 800,000 Chrisitians, it was a pretty serious problem in France!Report
There is a really dumb political cartoon I’ve seen since the start of the Israeli-Palestinian war where you have two famiies in tatters looking scarred among a bunch of ruins. One family is obviously Palestinian and the other being Israeli. The implication is that most ordinary Palestinians and Israelis don’t want this fight and it is being led by fanatical madmen on both sides.
I think this is obviously wrong for both sides. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians trust each other that much and what Hamas did is popular among the Palestinians and how IDF is responding is popular among the Israelis for the most part. You can’t make even a cold peace by operating on false pretenses.Report
I am seeing memes that are trying to argue that Jesus was a “ Palestinian” rather than a Jew. It’s like for many Palestinians and their Allie’s, Jews aren’t a real people with a real history but some sort of European colonial plot cooked up during the 19th century to exploit and rob from non-Whites.
This is why many Jews think that any-Zionism is anyi-Semitism. There are lots of people engaged I. What is called erasure against us that they would be up and arms about if done to groups they care about. It’s not enough to deny Jews self-determination, they have to ensure total Jewish severance from our history.Report
That’s rough. It really sucks to be accused of European colonial plots.Report
Israel’s endgame is exactly Hamas’s endgame, because, to be blunt, Israel is governed by a bunch of fanatical lunatics who are responding exactly like Hamas wants them to.
Everyone needs to read this:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-gaza-war/
The war that Hamas is fighting is not the war you think it is, and Israel is losing it, badly.Report
That is a powerful take down of all sides – and a reminder that this attack and Israel’s subsequent response is not something that appears De Novo. Its also a reminder that the US – which is still refusing to acknowledge much less grapple with its role – has along history of using proxy states to fight wars (especially in the global South) and then shun the people actually doing the fighting when they turn up on our doorstep.Report
Hey, question, who has the guns in the West Bank?Report
The IDF has started pumping as much seawater as they can into the Hamas tunnels. If they pump long enough, they render Gaza uninhabitable: wells contaminated, shallow aquifers contaminated, most of the limited arable land contaminated, salt marshes created miles inland. J_A’s question comes to the fore. Where do two-million-plus Palestinians go? Part of me wants to say North Dakota. The US could probably buy up more land than Gaza and put up basic housing/infrastructure for less than the annual military aid to Israel.Report
Israel doesn’t care where they go, so long as they don’t stay.Report
Hamas can always surrender.Report
Would you if you were them?Report
If I was and Palestinian leader and allegedly cared about the Palestinians , I would. The Israeli government is apparently expected to care about its citizens and also the Palestinians while Hamas gets to ibe psychotic towards both Israelis and the Palestinians while getting treated as a serious international political force. We have to respect their right to self-determination but they don’t have to respect our right at all and can continue to treat Israel as a blight on all of Islam.
We see the same sort of double standards, duplicity, and hypocrisy when it comes to Jewish-Muslim relationships in general. The Jews are expected to do all the grunt work in maintaining good relationships and give them true respect while what we get back is the lesser patronizing respect given to an out of it grandparent at best. That isn’t good enoguh. They maintain the right to have a Muslim world from the tip of Morocco to the tip of Indonesia that the Muslims inhabitants being seen as more true to the place than anybodoy else who lives there and have this enforced by government policy while declaring at the same time the concept of the Jewish State is “racist” and “apartheid.” Respect is a one way street in this relationship and it apparently only flows from Jews to Muslims.Report
The Israeli government is apparently expected to care about its citizens and also the Palestinians while Hamas gets to ibe psychotic towards both Israelis and the Palestinians while getting treated as a serious international political force.
On the other hand, Israel gets, like, an air force and tanks and stuff.
War is a lot of things, but “fair” isn’t one of them.Report
Hamas’ refusal to surrender does not justify every possible tactic that Israel can dream up.Report
Then Hamas would just regroup and be around for another atrocity and the entire thing will start again. Perhaps if Hamas is actually defeated and made to acknowledge that they lost, things can move forward.Report
Israel has a large, mobilized military, tons of materiel, and no small amount of willingness to keep fighting.
The idea that they need to try every crazy thing no matter what the consequences in order to defeat Hamas makes no sense. You yourself have been arguing vigorously (and entirely correctly) that Hamas doesn’t pose an existential threat to Israel.Report
Decades, centuries, millennia of Jewish work has been destroyed in the mid-20th century by you know, the Communists, the Arab nationalists, and the Political Islamists. The world yawned at this despite also saying “Oh Jews, oh Jews, you need to support our righteous and worthy cause” At the same time they say “Oh Jews, oh Jews, you aren’t a real true member of the wretched of the earth and that we don’t deserve special justice” and need to take all the persecution we endure on the chin, especially when it comes from the real true wretched of the earth.
It is all utter trash. I am tired of the duplicity and hypocrisy and trash that the world continually inflicts upon the Jewish people. We perform the mullticultural ecumenical rituals and people go to the bathrooom on us behind our back at best. The iidea that their can be a Muslim world and it is all good and just but not a Jewish state because that is “apartheid” is just really vile. They claim all the rights of secular nation and religious community for themselves while denying Jews the rights of either.Report
Is there any obligation for Jews to support Evangelicals?
Because, if you see this as a stupid question, you may have already internalized the whole “support isn’t transactional” thing.Report
…this is utter lunacy to say in the context of _Palestine_.Report
The existence of Israel is not what leads to the accusations of apartheid. Its the government’s refusal to honor agreed to borders by encouraging and protecting illegal settlers that leads to that accusation. Its the continued practice of mass arrests – including women and children – without charge, trial, or sentence that leads to that accusation. It’s the differing treatment of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank with regard to work and movement that leads to that accusation. Israel, as a nation state, keeps shooting it’s own toes off and asking why it is bleeding.Report
I’d say based on a lot of criticism I see of Israel I’ve seen, many people object to the existence of an explicitly Jewish state itself while being fine with other much more explicit identity states. They don’t want Jews to have any access to state revenue to further and promote our culture at all but Muslims countries with actual blasphemy laws are at least tolerated in a we can’t do anything about it sense.Report
Are explicit identity states okay or not?
If they are, then they are.
If they aren’t, then they aren’t.
“My circumstances are exceptional!” is true for every single person on the planet.
Which makes it a less than perfect reason to do anything non-universally.Report
Most of the EU are identity states.
The USA is the extreme exception to this sort of thing but we tend to forget that.Report
Japan and South Korea come across as identity states. Plenty of Muslim majority states declare themselves to be Muslim states and come complete with blasphemy laws. Other countries might be less explicitly identity states but people have a very particular image in mind when they think of Mexicans that doesn’t include the 40,000 Jews with Mexican citizenship at all. Same with Brazil and it’s 120,000 Jews. The response would be more like “oh, there are Jews in Brazil?”
It is the Jewish identity state that gets the most ire in the world. Funny that.Report
You shouldn’t be afraid of Palestinians, Lee.
They’re going to be teaching your children, they’re going to be doctors for your children, and they’re going to be policemen for your children.
Do you not like hummus? Try it with chicken. You might like it.Report
Do you not like hummus?
I don’t know whether this joke is intentional, but either way it’s hilarious.
Take it away Wikipedia:
Hummus is often seen as an unofficial “national dish” of Israel, reflecting its huge popularity and significance among the entire Israeli population,[35] which Israel’s critics describe as an appropriation of Lebanese,[59] Palestinian or Arab culture.[60] According to Ofra Tene and Dafna Hirsch, the dispute over ownership of hummus, exposes nationalism through food and the important role played by the industrialization of hummus made by Israeli private companies in 1958.[61][62] Report
About six years ago, I was watching my salt *HARD* and I started making my own salsa. I did a minimalist version with just onion, jalapeno, and tomatoes with some balsamic vinegar to tie everything together.
I had a Guatemalan team lead and she said “YOU MADE CEVICHE!” and I said “What?” She said “CEVICHE!!! It’s a Guatemalan dish!” and we googled it and the opening paragraph includes this line “recognized by UNESCO as an expression of Peruvian traditional cuisine” and then she started yelling at me like it was my fault.Report
I believe there was a joke about this in the Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno.Report
We’ve tried to “do things” about those Muslim countries. To the tune of Trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Didn’t work out really well, in no small measure because the Muslim world exists in countries created by Europeans to partition resources for extraction.
That aside you neatly deflect every single time from Israel’s active governmental policies that exacerbate the situation, and have for decades. If that makes you feel better great I guess. but it doesn’t change the fact that Israel is not an innocent victim here.Report
Israel is very much not an innocent victim here. You are correct in your criticism about it’s policies.
However Arab flat refusal to let Israel exist predates those policies and that flat refusal opened the door to much of the current situation.
We’re told that if Israel pulled back to it’s 1967 boarders we’d have peace, but we didn’t have peace in 1967 and the PLO was founded three years before that to “end the occupation”.
Israel should behave better, just for the sake of it’s international relations, but I have serious doubts that the Palestinians are willing to accept peace.Report
you know how you get peace in the Middle East? You start with the EU countries apologizing for carving up the region to control oil, and for promoting the worst, smallest minority sects of Islam to run a good many of those countries. Then you let them redraw their own lines. Including Israel. This is a generations old insult to the locals, and its not going to go away anytime soon, even IF Israel manages to rout Hamas completely.Report
The Middle East being a place of wars predates the Roman Empire, much less the EU states.Report
However Arab flat refusal to let Israel exist predates those policies and that flat refusal opened the door to much of the current situation.
True, but Arab flat refusal to let Israel exist had been on the wane since the end of the Yom Kippur War. A lot of that is due to US efforts.
I feel like we’re seeing this stepwise series of projections where we start with an extremely reasonable assumption about Hamas’ motives–that they won’t rest until Israel’s destroyed–and then project it onto all Palestians, and from the Palestians we project it onto the Arab states.
But Arab states actually don’t care that much about Palestinians either. They can live with Israel and even work with Israel as a (at least de facto) ally against a common enemy (namely Iran).
We’re told that if Israel pulled back to it’s 1967 boarders we’d have peace, but we didn’t have peace in 1967 and the PLO was founded three years before that to “end the occupation”.
Yup. A lot happened in the intervening 60 years, including Israel winning two major wars against its neighbors and then normalizing relations with most of them.
Anyway, unilaterally pulling back to the ’67 borders is probably not going to create peace. But ceding most of the West Bank is going to be part of any imaginable negotiated settlement for peace.Report
It is a mistake to project the Palestinians onto all of the surrounding Arabs.
It is also a mistake to project the surrounding Arabs onto the Palestinians.
It’s fun to think that Israel’s Right is responsible for that… but if we ask the Palestinians they’ll talk about the Right to Return.Report
I don’t think Israel’s Right is even mostly responsible for it… but they sure as hell haven’t been helping.Report
Israel is basically insane at the moment. They’re the US the week after 911. We blew up wedding parties in Afghanistan for years.
Whatever the official policy, it’s going to be carried out by people who see Hamas terrorists everywhere in Gaza.
To his credit, Biden is determined to both support Israel (who are fighting modern day Na.zis) and play Jimmy Cricket to their Pinocchio. Maybe in a year or two Israel will listen.
In the mean time Gaza is going to be a brutal warzone. Sort of like Germany at the end of WW2.
Now maybe after after all this the sides might feel the need for peace. However before that happens either Hamas needs to surrender or Israel needs to get it out of their system.Report
Israel is basically insane at the moment. They’re the US the week after 911. We blew up wedding parties in Afghanistan for years.
Yeah, agreed.Report
Continuing the Allies/Axis analogy, in 1945 even as we were incinerating hundreds of thousands of women and children across Europe and Asia, we were drawing up postwar plans for a Germany and Japan which were to be stable independent and free nations.
The current situation shows both similarities and differences. One of course is that there isn’t a recent history of peaceful coexistence of the Palestinians that we can draw upon as a base to build from.
But the US managed to sideline the imperial Japanese and de-Naz.ify the occupied Germany and give power and control to those Germans and Japanese who were willing to build a peaceful new nation.
I’m not seeing any such thinking or planning by Likud.
They speak only about maintaining the Palestinians forever as a subjugated occupied people, in perpetual stateless limbe, citizens of no nation and without hope of ever being one.
Setting aside the morality of this, what strikes me is its utter madness and futility.Report
Part of this is that the sort of “conquer the enemy and remake their soceity” type of warfare is no longer seen as a good thing internationally. I don’t think anybody believes that a Muslim majority society would react well to Jews remaking them also. Nobody selected by Israel would have any long term legitimacy. This means handing the situation over to a bunch of international actors and they have a long tendency to encourage the worst aspects in the Palestinians and don’t tell them to give up their anti-Semitism, etc.Report
This reminds me of conversations abut Iraq circa 2005, where every possible alternative to the then-current strategy was preemptively closed off.
A working relationship with the Palestinian Authority is unrealistic, but forever occupation and subjugation is?Report
I’m an American Jew but honestly have some really big trust issues at this point. There is just so much double standards and hypocrisy I see relating to Jews among the people we need to deal with and their supporters in the West, I can’t expect them to respect our rights as a people at all.
I’ve written this before but I think that the world basically decided on Napoleon’s solution to the Jewish problem. “To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing.” The Palestinians and other peoples are the ones who will get a corporate communal existence. Jews will be a bunch of atomitized indviduals that happen to share a culture but it would be an extremely individual thing with the only organization beting that allowed by whatever nation we happen to be in and we have to pay for it ourself.
There is a private right to be a Jew but a communal and private right to be a Muslim, Palestinian, LGBT, etc. It is almost like acknowledging Jewish communal identity would cheapen and destroy their communal identity.Report
There is a private right to be a Jew but a communal and private right to be a Muslim, Palestinian, LGBT, etc. It is almost like acknowledging Jewish communal identity would cheapen and destroy their communal identity.
I’m also an American Jew and I have to say this is absolutely bizarre.
We have just as much communal right to be Jews as any other minority, subculture, or identity. We have our individual First Amendment rights to religion, speech, and association, which actually, just observationally, provide a hell of a lot.
We’ve also largely if not entirely free of state suspicion and harassment since the ’50s. I want to be cautious and avoid misery poker, but Muslim communities in the US are subjected to far worse from law enforcement and immigration authorities.
I’m not trying to say it’s all perfect. American Jews are perennial targets of hate crimes and anti-semitism spans across the Far Right and Far Left the way other bigotries don’t. You’re right that a lot of SJ activists (including ones who aren’t wild Hamas apologists or whatever) doesn’t really notice Jews as having marked identities worthy of particular attention, and that kind of sucks too.
But all in all, we get what everyone else gets.Report
The difference is that Muslim communal rights exist because of their own power, rather than dependence on a gift from others, and is seen as more natural. Activists and academics who aren’t Muslims speak of a Muslim world as a naturally organic thing that exists. The idea that Muslims should be able to describe Muslim majority states as Muslim and place crescent moon flags and other Muslim symbols everywhere exists without questions.
Jewish communal existence depends on the good will of others without a government. Jews can decide to have a big international meeting somewhere and half the participants could be denied visas because reasons. Jews aren’t treated as one international community but a bunch of divided communities and God help us if we demonstrate “double loyalties” but If a Muslim in Morocco wants to tell a Jewish neighbor that they feel more kinship with a Muslim in Indonesia because they are Muslim and the Jews are not than so be it.
Unless we have a right to enforce a communal existence by our own power rather than the good graces of others, it is meaningless.Report
The difference is that Muslim communal rights exist because of their own power, rather than dependence on a gift from others, and is seen as more natural.
You realize you’ve moved the goal posts here, right?
You went from “Muslim, Palestinian, LGBT, etc.” to just “Muslim”.
LGBT people obviously don’t have anything like the kind of communal identity you’re describing, and it’s unclear how they even could. Going through obvious elements of “etc.” and you see many more counter-examples.
Also, your suggestion that there is a “Muslim world” that functions as you describe is clearly false. The actual Muslim world contains states that are currently at war with each other, deep (and often bloody) sectarian divisions, and equally deep (and often bloody) ethnic divisions.
Hell, if the Muslim world worked the way you describe, most Palestinian refugees would have been absorbed into neighboring countries in much the way that Mizrahi Jews, Russian Jews, etc. were welcomed to Israel.
Jews aren’t treated as one international community but a bunch of divided communities and God help us if we demonstrate “double loyalties” but If a Muslim in Morocco wants to tell a Jewish neighbor that they feel more kinship with a Muslim in Indonesia because they are Muslim and the Jews are not than so be it.
Dude, have you noticed anything that the Right has said about Muslims in the US or Europe in the last couple decades?
Like, at all?Report
Far as I can tell, no one questions whether or not any specific Muslim state should exist. Even states like Iran and Saudi Arabia.
It’s not even an issue, just like it’s not an issue on whether or not Poland or the US or even Russia should be allowed to exist.
The only state where this even comes up as an issue is Israel.
So when we conversations that talk about “the Jews need a state”, or “Israel should be a secular state and not Jewish”, it’s already over the edge of the normally acceptable universe.Report
There was a Tom Clancy novel that ended with the city of Jerusalem being declared an international city and run by the UN. This always struck me as a wise solution.Report
The number of people that will trust this solution among the people who live in Jerusalem are next to nothing. I think Jews would be especially prone to believe, not incorrectly, that the bias would be against them in disputes no matter what the facts are.Report
Most likely true. I didn’t say it was viable, just wise.Report
I’m not sure what “international city run by the UN” means in a mechanical sense.Report
It’s been awhile, but IIRC some horrific event caused both Jewish and Muslim leaders to come to the conclusion, aided no doubt by the U.S., that continued competing claims of sovereignty were not amenable for peaceful coexistence.Report
I want to build a new house of worship in that city. Or heck, I want to move there but that will alter the balance between Jew/Arab.
Who approves it? The UN? We’re clearly not using local rules from either Israel or Palestine. Will the UN have it’s own police force?
The most important issue is what will the UN do about terrorism? UN peace keepers have gotten in trouble when Israel’s opponents have set up rocket launchers next to them and then attacked.
If Israel counter attacks then they’re shooting the UN, if they don’t then that’s a problem.
When Hamas or someone like them starts terrorizing Jews, will the UN be arresting/shooting them or will it be looking the other way?
The UN is good when both sides want peace and can be separated, but that’s not the case here.Report
I should go back and reread the book. I’m sure it wasn’t all carrot for the parties in Jerusalem.Report
My strong expectation is it assumes good intentions and good behavior from people who have shown that they don’t have either.Report
By the time of our invasion of Germany, we’d been at war for years.
Israel has been at war for months. The appropriate comparison would be us having weeks of celebration after our first bombing of Tokyo.
We most certainly didn’t have long term plans that involved standing them up as countries at that time.
And I have seen Israeli plans on “what comes next” for Gaza which involve breaking it into pieces and subjugating it… which again is pretty close to what we did with Japan and Germany.
IF Israel is successful at taking over and does the occupation route then hopefully Israel will have elections and kick the Right out.
Then they can spend about three decades standing up a Palestinian state.Report
Israel and the Palestinians were at war before you were born.
You would think somewhere along the line each side would have developed some long term thinking beyond “Hey, maybe one more bus bombing will do the trick!”
Which is the other side of the coin.
I am open to the idea that some majority of Palestinians are wedded to the idea of the extermination of Israel, to the point of rejecting even a free and independent Palestine which leaves Israel intact.
The fact that this seems pointless and mad to us doesn’t change the fact that it may be the actual case.Report
Israel has many supporters that tell Israel it needs to be humane and sensible with the Palestinians. As far as I can tell, Pro-Palestinian activists among Muslims and Westerners do not tell the Palestinians they need to be sensible. The complete destruction of Israel and even the expulsion of the ajees are created as legitimate goals.Report
Israel has many supporters that tell Israel it needs to be humane and sensible with the Palestinians.
It must be reassuring that Israel ignores our advice so consistently!Report
We’re one voice of many and do some good.
To have some influence is not to have total control.Report
Yeah.
I’m probably almost as badly on tilt here as Lee is, I’m just tilting in a different directionReport
The problem is if some majority of Palestinians or really the broader Muslim public see the only true justice as “No Israel” than the options for everybody become really bad.
You either have israeli withdrawal with no Palestinian rejection and the occasional slap down when the Palestinians decide to make another stab at destroying Israel. This going to bring about a lot of protests and there are plenty of people who are going to argue Israel should take it on the chin, which naturally the Israelis and broader Jewish community do not like.
You can continue the status quo but that has some obvious problems and Pro-Palestinian activists see it as unjust. Israel isn’t likely to let the Palestinians go without at least an agreement for a cold peace though.
The traditional solution where you let both sides at it until one side vanquishes another is not permitted in today’s world. I imagine that many more people would be screaming out violently if Israel won such a battle than if Israel was the side that got vanquished.
So if a small or big majority of Palestinians believe that the only just solution is “No Israel” and they have support from other Muslims and Western activists, what do you do? This is why I think people want Israel and the Jews to commit an act of national self-sacrifice even if they can’t come out and say it and prefer to adopt “Israel is the most evil country that ever existed rhetoric.” Dealing with sixteen million pissed off Jews is easier than hundreds of millions of angry Muslims.Report
The traditional solution where you let both sides at it until one side vanquishes another is not permitted in today’s world.
Sez who?
To be cold blooded about it, what are the pro-Palestinians going to do about it?
They aren’t going to get foreign aid cut off. They aren’t going to get any foreign nation to commit to anything other than lip service to Gaza and the West Bank. Israel has and will continue to hold the upper hand militarily.
And as we saw with sanctions on Iran and Russia, those don’t work all that well.
The conditions which led the Saudis to be receptive to rapprochement with Israel haven’t gone away. They weren’t doing it out of a groundswell of good feelings towards Israel, and the anger over this will pass because they never cared all that much about the Palestinians to begin with.
I’m not endorsing it, just noting that outside of Iran, which is hated and feared by the Sunni nations, the Palestinians don’t really have much actual support.Report
This was six days ago:
Report
Yes.
its as true today as it was then.Report
Thanks for doing your part to keep it so.Report
I was speaking in broad philosophical terms rather than actual politics I guess. Still, there hasn’t been much in official international endorsements for the traditional solutions since World War II for many conflicts including but not limited to the I/P conflict. It’s why Somalia just hangs on rather than getting swallowed up by the stronger states surrounding it among other issues. There are exceptions like Tibet but the I/P conflict would have ended, not necessarily in a humane way, if the traditional solutions were more readily available.Report
Israel President tells foreign envoys that Israel is ready for another humanitarian pause according to Haeretz. Let’s see if Hamas takes a hint.Report
Hamas’ idea of a “humanitarian pause” includes Israel pulling out of Gaza and no return of any hostages.Report
Yes, I realize that.Report
The way the Israel-Hamas War is playing out in American politics is interesting. As best as anybody can tell, the American public is pretty much split down behalf between “Permanent Ceasefire Now” and “Israel needs to vanquish Hamas no matter what.” Both sides are angry at Biden’s policy because they don’t see it as being anti-Israel enough or pro-Israel enough.
Right now the Online Left is worried that Arabs and Muslims and the youth vote are going to set 2024 out because they see Biden as too pro-Israel. But as my brother points out, there are 2.2 million Jews in New York, and probably a million more in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A more anti-Israel policy would lead to debates on whether Jews would sit out or even go Republican and put NY,, NJ, and PA into play. What side you care about reveals a lot.Report
New York went Biden by approximately one bajillion million (specifically, 60.9% to 37.7). NY ain’t swinging. Jersey was 57.1% to 41.3%. NJ ain’t swinging. PA was 50.0% to 48.8%. Maybe PA will swing… maybe. But the price of gas will move more votes than Israel/Palestine.Report
Even if I didn’t think Biden was handling it correctly, I wouldn’t vote on it. Trump has sucked all the oxygen out of the contest.Report
I really don’t undestand how a good chunk of the 21st century left sees Jewish identity. There seems to be a big chunk that basically finds Jewish identity really difficult to deal with in their cosmology so they have us as “white people who aren’t Christian” rather than Jews. They like invoking our past enough to gain support for their causes but when Jews need help they get all closed mouth and quiet, especially if the anti-Semitism is coming from a group they care more about. “Can’t do anything about it, don’t want to talk about it.” It seems that having us as part of their club is utterly painful for them.
Things that would be obviously seen as racist if a White person did it to a Black person get treated as nothing if done to Jews. It is utterly disgusting. If America would officially proclaim itself a White nation and if White Americans tell non-White Americans that they feel more affinity to Whites from Europe or Australia than they do for non-White Americans than the Left would instantly recognize this as racist. However, if a Muslim majority country declares itself to be Muslim and the Muslim majority tells Jews that they are strangers and other Muslims are country man than Jews are required to accept second class status and be happy living under a Muslim state.Report
Things that would be obviously seen as racist if a White person did it to a Black person get treated as nothing if done to Jews.
Racism == Prejudice + Power.
If you don’t have any power, then you can’t be racist. Wait. That’s not how addition works…
Anyway, it’s all about David vs. Goliath. Israel stopped being David when “The Six Day War” got its name.
You ain’t David anymore at that point. You’re Goliath.Report
Defining racism as power plus prejudice seems like a really convenient way to argue that anti-Semitism isn’t really racism and the persecution of the Jews isn’t real persecution since Jews are generally comfortable at least. Plus as Chip pointed out on the other blog, even if the world could strong arm Israel into creating a Palestinian state, that won’t cause the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to accept Israel and leave peacefully with it and at least a decent portion seem to prefer misery over accepting Israel.
There are hundreds of millions of people across the world who believe the demon Jew is out to get them and their group. Enough people know this enough and use it as a way to get Jewish support but they aren’t willing to do anything to combat it. There aren’t really any Jews in that area, so it would be a wasted effort they say.Report
Now meditate upon “BIPOC + AAPI”.
Anyway, Netflix came out with this show called “Dear White People“. Watch it. Listen. Maybe you’ll learn something.Report
Do you think it’s designed to single out Jews? Or do you think the philosophy in question isn’t so much a good faith attempt to make sense of the world as it is a tactic to set the terms of any debate as heads I win tails you lose?
As I keep telling you the only way to win that is not to play. But maybe this time you’ll convince its disciples that your religion really does mean you deserve special rules too.Report
RE: a tactic to set the terms of any debate as heads I win tails you lose?
That. That exactly. It’s a power game designed to shield minorities in the US from being held accountable for dysfunctional behavior.
It’s effect on Jews is an unintended side effect. However it’s basically a religion now days. Telling people that their religion is nonsense or racist doesn’t go anywhere useful.
Edit: Similarly the Right’s idea that Israel needs to be supported so Jesus can come back is equally nonsensical, but it has the unintended side effect of supporting Jews.Report
Pretty much. And you’re right, it’s not like the support for Israel from the right comes from some place of deep empathy for the historical plight of the Jewish people. It’s undergirded by a bunch of Christian religious fanatics that would seem downright nuts if they were ever made visible to mainstream society.Report
It is a combination of both. There is certainly a big amount of heads I win, tails you lose to the philosophy in question to various levels of intention. DEI is a form of grift for liberals but it does seem to have many sincere believers too.
As to intentionally single out Jews, people in the Western Hemisphere always tended to divide into big blocks like White, Black, and Native American as opposed to the small block division you see in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Anti-Semitism is easier to understand in a small block division system rather than a big block division system, so Jews get pushed into the white group.
Americans also have a very bad tendency to take what makes sense in America and apply it globally even if it doesn’t make sense in that context. So Jews are white and Arabs/Muslims are non-White even if you are dealing with a Muslim majority country. End of story.
It is impossible not to play this game because it is really prominent among the top political circles.Report
Yes, the boundaries of whiteness and nonwhiteness are arbitrary and most frequently drawn with malice.
I mentioned once that the dividing line between liberalism and illiberalism is the revolutionary mindset.
A liberal person sees all people as flawed but entitled to equality and freedom.
The revolutionary divides people into those who are legitimate and those who aren’t, with the second group deserving punishment.
A lot of the dialogue about the I/P war is revealing of these two mindsets.Report
Malice is a good way to describe this. Putting Jews strictly in the white category is done out of a raw exercise of power and because they know it will annoy and frustrate or even hurt Jews.
With the I/P conflict, there is also the issue that the West is basically powerless over changing opinions in the Arab and Muslim nations as you noted. Several people in the West are deeply uncomfortable with telling said countries they need to modernize their religious beliefs and do it yesterday. So they decide to go against Israel or Jews because they believe they
have more power of us and because they see angry Jews as less troublesome.Report
Why? Is being in the “White” category necessarily bad?Report
Nothing is more meaningful in life than the personal validation one gets from checking a box on a federal census form. How else can you know who you really are, and where you fit in?Report
There’s some truth to this Chip but lately these definitions have been more about interest group politics than anything else. Officially speaking people from the Levant, ME, and North Africa have been considered white in the US for some time. That includes both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. The relevant distinctions are religion and ethnicity, not race.
The movement for changing that isn’t coming from some renewed popular interest in rank racialism. It’s coming from a DEI apparatus run amok and a bunch of activist groups and bureaucracies looking for sh*t to do no matter how meaningless.Report
Has it ever been different, though?
The motivations for exclusion and outgroup status vary but only because it depends on who is playing the game in which favor.
When a group of white people say they want to “take back their country” it sounds very similar to those who want to “take back Palestine”.
Or the “populists” who tell us that there is some class of malefactors who have perverted the purity of culture and must be punished and driven out of the temple.
Or we could compare them to the ethnic Russians who insist that Ukraine doesn’t really exist, or any group anywhere that finds an outgroup and conjures up reasons to persecute them.
These are all various flavors of outgroup exclusion and illiberalism, where they deny the legitimacy and humanity of some group or another.
In all these cases the boundary of what is an acceptable national identity, an acceptable race, an acceptable culture, are arbitrarily drawn so as to exclude whoever the target happens to be.Report
The answer as to whether it has ever been different is both yes and no depending on time, place, and people involved.
The relevant question is whether it is better or worse to try to permanently institutionalize these concepts in the context of the 21st century United States.Report
What would be some examples of these concepts being “permanently institutionalized”?
Would those who are doing it agree that they are doing it, or furiously deny it and insist they are actually doing something else, something fine and noble?
Its not a trick question, its to illustrate the history of humanity shows that the hardest task isn’t to reject evil, but to recognize it in the first place.
We are sitting here in the 21st century and the leading candidate for the Presidency is talking about hordes of vermin who are poisoning the blood of the country while something like 70 million Americans cheer lustily.
And we know that when confronted they angrily insist they are doing something noble and fine.Report
Pick a group, use the powers of the gov to make them do better than they should.
When DEI does it, we’re supposed to call it good.
When Trump does it, we’re supposed to call it evil.Report
‘ ‘
There is a big difference between “we should use the powers of government to kill the outgroups like transpeople” compared to “we should use the power of government to get people to accept a more diverse and inclusive society.” I’m skeptical about the ability of DEI to do the later because humans are unruly that way but it is really visibly different from what Trump does.Report
If the number of trans people killed by the gov last year was zero, then this is a strawman argument.
RE: we should use the power of government to get people to accept a more diverse and inclusive society
This is the most positive spin possible on the motivations of what they’re trying to do. But great, what does this mean mechanically in terms of what we do and how do we measure it?
Harvard has a leader who has been accused of plagiarism about 40 times and who can’t bring herself to call students who openly support Hamas or even the Holocaust as violating the student code on racism. She still has the support of Harvard because she’s a black female and thus a massive force of good and virtue signaling for people who care about DEI.
Why is lowering the bar for her a good thing for society?
Do you see how people who are indifferent to DEI (poor whites say) can look at this and say they deserve the same set of rules and uplifting as her?Report
Soon we will find our way back to our age old OT argument about whether it is better to get children literate and numerate or browbeat white collar schlubs into random acts of self reflection.Report
I would posit the beneficiaries of DEI policies have in the past been on the business end of the powers of governmental policies, whether stated or not, and thus should be granted a leg up. The trick is finding the end point.Report
These are evil tools. They were evil when they were used against them, and they’re no less evil and dangerous for their users’ supposed good intentions now.
The solution is to say the “end point” has already passed and the tools themselves should be outlawed.
That way we’re not doing things like preventing high achieving Asians from going to college in the name of fighting racism.Report
I’m pretty certain that no Asians, high achieving or not, are being prevented from attending college through DEI initiatives. Perhaps the colleges that only accept 1 in 50 applicants, but not all colleges.
You pronouncing DEI initiatives as evil does not make them so.Report
If we’re going to call racism evil, and imho we should, then we instantly have the problem that DEI in practice looks pretty racist.
DEI is all about letting group rights and desired group outcomes overcome individual rights and individual outcomes/evaluations.
We’re keeping high functioning Asians from going to high level colleges because of their skin color and how successful they are.
Racism: Discrimination by an individual, community, or institution against a person on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group (google).
Ergo DEI is a form of racism, which means DEI is evil. The logic is very straightforward.Report
I think you’re moving a little too fast here. The place to start is with agreeing on the definition; then to agree on whether/when it qualifies as “evil”. It’s hard enough to achieve the first part, much less both of these things, but that agreement is essential for having a productive debate.
Tangentially, notice that the definition you posted says “discrimination *against* a person” — this is not necessarily the same thing as discrimination *for* a person that just happens to negatively affect others not in that racial/ethnic group. Or at least that would be a point of negotiation.Report
this is not necessarily the same thing as discrimination *for* a person that just happens to negatively affect others not in that racial/ethnic group.
In practice? No, it’s not.
In appearance to the people you’re hurting? Also no.
There are a ton of other problems this opens us up to as well. Everything from special interest capture of the programs to encouraging bad behavior to other people asking why they can’t have the same benefits.Report
I’m not affirmatively arguing for it, just saying it takes more work to get to your point than simply posting a definition.Report
I was a little high. Harvard’s acceptance rate is about 1 in 30. Still no guarantee of admission. There are tons of highly qualified applicants who get rejected every year, and the trend seems to indicate the ratio is getting worse.
https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/harvard-acceptance-rate/#class-2028-acceptanceReport
Not sure what your point is with this – there are so few spots that it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t get in, regardless of race? Or it matters just enough that we need AA for Black applicants but not quite so much that we should care about Asians being turned down because of their race?Report
RE: There are tons of highly qualified applicants who get rejected every year,
So it doesn’t matter if we reject qualified applicants on the basis of their skin color?
Is that still non-evil if we start doing it to blacks?Report
Liberalism or really every center-left ideology always never really had a good answer to the question about what to do when a majority or strong plurality of people in a democracy want something that is bad.
The Secret Disney Liberals assume that deep down everybody is good or wants to be good but doesn’t recognize it. With just a little encouragement, they can be made good. Other forms of liberalism recognize evil but have no idea what to do about it beyond making angry “sinners in the hands of an angry God” sermons and hope that people hear it and repent, repent, repent.
There is also the problem that we have no agreed upon definition of what it means to be good. Does liking violent or overly sexual entertainment make you a bad person or not? Different forms of liberalism have spilled a lot of ink on this subject to little conclusion. The debate goes back all the way to Ancient Greece with Aristotle and Plato duking it out on whether theater was legitimate or not.Report
Right.
The difference between these two statements:
“Bankers have too much power and influence over our politics” and;
“(((Banksters))) are secretly controlling the world”
Seems obvious that one is liberal and the other illiberal.
But there is a vast territory in between where it isn’t clear whether it has crossed a line between liberal and illiberal.
And like the devil, very few people show up dressed in the robes of illiberalism so as to be easy to reject.
For example, per Dark Matter’s comment about “using the power of govt to make one group better than others”, well, that is the main component of CRT.
Like how the govt used the power of eminent domain and infrastructure to favor white suburbanites over urban minorities, or how schools draft hair style policies that exclude ethnic hairstyles.
Outgroup exclusion gets woven into the very fabric of laws and conventions.Report
Liberals often don’t want to talk about tradeoffs when it comes to things making it more difficult. During the pandemic, lots of people in the West marveled how nearly all Japanese complied with the COVID requirements without complaint. What they don’t wonder about is whether the things we like about Japan are tightly would up with things that would drive us batty.
The current Intersectional/DEI school of liberalism, although they are very bad at articulating this, is trying to create a society that has all the elements of Japanese and South Korean society that Western liberals find attractive without the outgroup exclusion or the “nail that stands out will be hammered down” thing. It might not be possible. I have some serious doubts if you can have “free to be you and me” with the sort of self and group discipline that makes certain parts of Japanese social organization attractive to Westerners.Report
I think a good way to illustrate it is to look about 100 years ago at the people HP Lovecraft hated, and othered in exactly the kind of way your previous comment talks about. His views are notoriously really ugly, and while not exactly popular, were widespread enough in the elite of the day as to have real influence on thought and policy.
How would you say it has gone for those groups and their descendants under nothing but the natural logic of assimilation and the American constitutional system, post 14th Amendment? Well or poorly? And how did HP Lovecraft’s views hold up against that?
Conversely, instead of the path followed, do you think it would Instead have been better to ask them and their descendants to in perpetuity officially identify themselves as, say, ‘Slovak’, set aside special privileges for them in contracting and hiring, educate the WASPs on the special sensitivities needed to understand and sympathize with the Slovak culture, and make the case in any political dispute that the Slovak experience gave them a special understanding that overrides the views of others, no matter the particulars or the logic?
That’s what Lee is really saying he wants here, a special metaphorical (or maybe actual?) Jewish card that he can play when he feels threatened.Report
The food really improved since we stopped forcing a meat and potatoes Anglo-Saxon diet on everybody as a mark of Americanism.Report
Holy crap, this is why the left believes that only Asians should make dumplings.
Because if white people can make dumplings, the “food” argument evaporates.
Report
“There are somethings so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” George Orwell.
A lot of the arguments being made have at least some good points but everybody seems to take them beyond the edge of reason into sheer eye-rolling dumbness.Report
Whatever policy the big brain guy comes up with will be implemented by the pointy hair boss.Report
At least with the Internet age, the Internet encourages loud rhetoric to get points and gives people a big broadcast tool. Things like the above tweet or the equivalent stupidity from the Right would have been just mumbled in faculty room lounges and radical spaces for the most part rather than released onto the world.Report
You seem to be suggesting that assimilation and “race blindness” is a balm that heals all wounds, when the actual history you cite shows otherwise.
The American experience based its social hierarchy on physical appearance, accent, and mannerisms. So those groups which could adopt the physical appearance, accent and mannerisms, were able to assimilate and be accepted.
Those that couldn’t disappear and “pass” were, and still are, excluded.
We see how “race blindness” instantly disappears when say, the White house stages a a tap version of the Nutcracker Suite, or when Disney makes a black mermaid.
Suddenly people who swear up and down about how they don’t see race suddenly and mysteriously find these things objectionable.
Or in the reverse, where the very people who scorn official recognition of minority groups’ unique perspective on things suddenly grow angry when the official “Christmas” holiday is renamed a “Winter” holiday and deliver sensitivity training lectures on the unique perspectives of Jesus-worshippers.Report
Heals all wounds is not a possible standard. Manageable way forward is.
For the rest I don’t know that it’s possible to have a discussion if I have to answer for perspectives that aren’t my own or that I haven’t expressed.Report
Well, you cite the history of the assimilation of the Slavs as an exemplar which we should be pursuing.
I’m pointing out that that very example negates the idea that assimilation can be a manageable way forward because only a few groups can possibly assimilate.Report
The alternative to “race blindness” is not “we only discriminate against people who deserve it”.
If these tools are out there and available to use then they will be used. Both by people who think like you and by people like Trump.Report
France and many other European countries are still pursuing mid-20th century race blindness to the extent that they don’t even collect census information on ethnicity or race. It isn’t exactly working as it is supposed to.Report
I am saying that I am tired of having people play it both ways with the Jewish people. On one hand they love to invoke our history in order to support their cause. On the other hand, when we need help or anti-Semitism is considered to come from groups more of color than we, they want Jews to be mere “wypipo” who don’t count and aren’t true members of the diversity coalition.
I am sick and tired of all the double standards and hypocrisy that the Jewish People have to experience. The Western Left might not like countries declaring themselves Muslim and basing their laws on sharia with actually enforced blasphemy rules but are at least willing to adopt a “we can’t do anything about it” position or might even admire it to an extent.
But the one Jewish majority state. The one place in the world where the tax supported schools teach Jewish history and literature from elementary school to university, where the calendar follows our holiday, and the food, festivals, and customs are our food, festivals, and customs. That is something they hate and view as illegitimate. They will deny Jews their space while granting hundreds of thousands or millions of square miles to the groups they care about.
The people who rally to defense of obscure languages don’t take any joy in all that the Jews revived our ancient language. They revile in it and find it disgusting. They say “No, no, no. It should have been Yiddish.” “Oh like the Ultra-Orthodox Jews?” “No, no, no. Not like that.”
I am tired of them and want them gone. They are horrible.Report
On the other hand, when we need help or anti-Semitism is considered to come from groups more of color than we, they want Jews to be mere “wypipo” who don’t count and aren’t true members of the diversity coalition.
Again: if you understand why it’s not appropriate for evangelicals to expect support from Jewish folks, then you have the whole “support is supposed to be for moral issues and it’s not transactional” thing down.
“But Evangelicals are horrible on the stuff they want support for! It’s stuff that Jewish people oppose!”
I’m not arguing that Jewish people should support stuff that they find morally repellent.
You should stop expecting people to do stuff that they themselves find morally repellent.Report
These tools are so dangerous, disrupting, and corrupting that they shouldn’t be used.
DEI tries to use these tools for “good” purposes, it hasn’t worked out well.Report
People can sincerely believe things that also happen to be dumb and/or self serving to their particular interests or (also dumb or naive) worldview. That’s all that’s going on here, same as the projection of the racial and political conflicts of the United States abroad.
Even your statement about how people have self divided in the western hemisphere isn’t particularly historical, including for the United States. It reads like operating from a bunch of 19th century racialist premises that ultimately lost out themselves over the long haul.
Anyway it seems to me that the protection for a minority group like Jews is a strongly small-l liberal society where they’re guaranteed the same protection under law as everyone else. That’s probably why there has always been such a prominent Jewish presence in movements for that kind of society. The alternative of course is the nationalist project in Israel which anyone is free to strap up and join at any time. But if you’re just going to do this groups thing, then yes, you will ultimately be trampled by one that is bigger and louder, as will all of the others foolish enough to throw their lots in with it.Report
Now we just need to figure out how to impose small l-liberalism. It tends to go against the human tendency to self-organize into groups. Intersectionality/DEI liberalism has the virtue of being at least consistent with this tendency even if some groups get hit in the rear because of it.Report
My dude. Are you familiar with anything that has happened in the last 400 years of history?Report
The closet we got to your ideal of small-l liberalism is the French/Continental school of liberalism that has the state impose a relatively uniform version of citizenship and national culture on the entire population. It always ran into issues even before mass immigration from outside of Europe happened.
Anglophone liberalism was more comfortable with subcultures doing their own thing, but not entirely comfortable, as long as they obeyed laws of general applicability and kept it quiet.
The basic problem with nearly every form of liberalism is that they are imperial ideologies that don’t want to recognize themselves as much and have no idea how to get places that don’t believe as they do to get along with the plan. We talk about universal human rights but large swathes of the world see this as a Western imperialism on their traditional culture. Attempts to get different places in line with liberal practices have met with varying success.Report
I’m not talking about convincing people in Riyadh to embrace American style liberalism. I’m talking about acknowledging the reality that you live in a huge multicultural, multiracial, multi religious, country of 320+ million people where we only came to major blows on this kind of issue once (believe it or not, the good guys won, and so far are undefeated on all of the skirmishes since), and we have otherwise muddled along towards an increasingly tolerant society.
Yet you want to come on here every day complaining about being excluded by a bunch of numbskulls that you clearly feel very personally threatened by, yet whose ideology is the exactly antithesis of one that would ever let Jews (or whoever) be left alone and in peace.Report
You might not be concerned about the Jews who end up stuck in a Muslim majority state but I am.Report
According to Al Jazeera, Israel actively bombed Bethlehem on Christmas Day. If this is true – and I have yet to corroborate the report elsewhere – it represents a new, unnecessary and probably counterproductive front in Israel’s war. Clearly Hamas isn’t enough for Bibi.Report
Al Jazeera is the only news outlet reporting this. Others are just saying the mood is somber:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-hamas-war-bethlehem-jesus-birthplace-christmas-day-rcna131106
Al Jazeera is not exactly known for being unbiased in this.Report
I find myself in-between Chip Daniels and InMD issue on the virtues of Intersectionality/DEI Liberalism vs. Race Blind Liberalism. Like Chip, I recognize that race-blind liberalism doesn’t really have a great track record in practice and is kind of impossible to pull off. France has pursued this sort of liberalism for a long time and it hasn’t really worked out for them that much. The French government keeps bunting into a lot tensions for its refusal to even take accurate censuses that reflect the demographics realities of modern France.
There is a big problem with Intersectional/DEI liberalism in that it keeps running into the issue of the Oppression Olympics and which groups are and are not true minorities or in the sacred circle of oppression. The frequent ways where Jews just fall through the holes of intersectional thought and they seemingly don’t have any idea on what to do with Jewish issues because a good chunk of their coalition sees Jews as just a strange type of white person at best is an example of this.Report
race-blind liberalism doesn’t really have a great track record in practice
What are we comparing it to?
Please don’t answer “something theoretical”. In practice, what works better?Report
The type of liberalism that acknowledges that humans can be bigoted and sometimes you need the force of law to make sure that don’t indulge in that in a way that puts minorities varyingly defined into a bad socio-economic position. Basically Great Society liberalism with things like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. Not exactly Intersectional/DEI diversity but it does acknowledge that humans can be awful to out groups and some corrective steps need to be taken to stop this.Report
Civil Rights Act was 1964. Voting Rights Act was 1965.
Give it a few decades to cook and you’ve got the 1990’s.Report
I’m confused by this. The Civil Rights Act is something I am in favor of and exactly the kind of thing I am defending. Also it is race blind. It prohibits discrimination by race and by religion, it doesn’t say you can’t discriminate against x race or y religion but the others are fair game. The latter is intersectional/dei (il)liberalism.Report
Didn’t someone here note that many school districts are actually more segregated now than in 1965?
This is a data point on the “not a great track record” list.Report
Do these school districts include the Intersectional/DEI parts of the country?
If so, we may have something going on that we haven’t accounted for quite yet.Report
So what is your explanation for this phenomenon?Report
Are we looking to explain it now? I thought we were still on the whole “what would work better than race blind?” topic.
Do these school districts include the Intersectional/DEI parts of the country?
If so, I think we can establish that Intersectional/DEI does not, in fact, guarantee better outcomes than “Race Blind”.Report
Lets agree then.
So what is your explanation for the phenomenon?Report
What are we agreeing on?Report
That these schools include the DEI/ intersectional parts of the country, and your observation that they are still highly segregated.
So what is your explanation for this?Report
Screaming ‘DEI/Intersectionality!’ loudly provides one hell of a smoke screen for tribalism. People care about their own ingroups more than they care for outgroups and a good way to hide the ball when you’re screwing over the outgroup is to talk very, very loudly about how these guys are actually ingroup.
So, like, bringing up stuff like “WE HAVE TO ADDRESS RACISM!!!” instead of stuff like “what have our policies actually created” is a great way to maintain the status quo and keep screwing over the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Ingroup.
But that’s just off the top of my head.
Do you have a better explanation?Report
Just to clarify, you’re suggesting the people screaming about DEI are in fact racist?Report
Just the white ones.
The BIPOC and AAPI can’t be racist.
Do you have a better explanation?Report
Oh, wait! I have one!
“People in San Francisco are painfully aware of the damage done by toxic whiteness. That’s why it’s so important to create schools where black faces can see other black faces without being poisoned by whiteness and its toxicity. Also, algebra.”Report
No I agree with you.
So it would seem to be a data point supporting the assertion that “race-blind liberalism” such as the Civil Rights Act and assimilation don’t have a great track record of ending racism.Report
Chip: So it would seem to be a data point supporting the assertion that “race-blind liberalism” such as the Civil Rights Act and assimilation don’t have a great track record of ending racism
Only if we’re going to define “self sorting” and “concern over schools” as “racism”.
Example: 2+ years ago I sent my kid into a majority minority school. They had the highest test scores.
If you’re claiming this was an act of “racism”, then you have some heavy lifting to do.Report
How does “self sorting” work?
Are black parents refusing to send their kids to majority white schools?Report
RE: How does “self sorting” work?
For me 2+ years ago, I look at the test scores of the local schools, then I take the top ones and see how close they are to my place of work.
Two of the top three were very close so I narrowed my search to those and looked at housing. Because of COVID and because I’m a single parent I wanted to live within walking distance.
Ideally I’d send her into the best around and that worked. Later I found out the school was majority minority but whatever.
Did this process mean she didn’t go to other majority minority schools at the bottom? Yes it did but that’s not my problem.Report
I meant, how does self sorting work to produce the outcome that Jaybird notes, where many schools across the nation, including ones in DEI neighborhoods, are as segregated as they were in 1965.Report
It’s not that *I* noted it, Chip. You and I agreed that it happens.Report
RE: how does self sorting work to produce the outcome that Jaybird notes,
I just zoomed the microscope down to one person. When I talk to the other parents going to that school, they all say pretty much the same thing.
Everyone going to that school as a parent who is a member of my class. We’re all making the same choice based on the same information.
Part of that package is we all have to live in the same set of zip codes.
So functional zip codes get super functional and the terrible zip codes get super terrible. Functional people who prioritize their children’s education (which is almost the definition of functional) move away from bad schools.
Functionality maps really well to “has a good job” and dysfunctional maps really well to “does not”.
There are going to be exceptions both ways but whatever, these are trends.
We can slap culture on top of that to do some more heavy lifting.
The end result is what we see, but the driving force is vast numbers of people all making the same choices in lockstep.
The local school is majority minority, but that’s only if we look at skin color. The forces driving our current situation aren’t about skin color.Report
What are we comparing it to?
Please don’t answer “something theoretical”. In practice, what works better?Report
I’m not aware of what works better.
I’m just agreeing that racism still exists, and still warps our society in ways which have remained unchanged since 1965.
Because a lot of people get very offended by your observation and deny it furiously.
So before we prescribe a solution, we need to start with a diagnosis.Report
Well, what’s the diagnosis? “Race-blind liberalism isn’t perfect”?
Sure. How’s this? We set up a city and make it one of the most progressive in the world. With me so far? Then, after a couple decades of progressivism, we can see if “racism” is solvable by being open-minded and liberal and just downright good enough.
Oh, let’s also make the city *RICH*. Like one of the richest in the world.
So, like, we can’t pull the whole “but we didn’t have enough funding!” defense.Report
Sure, lets agree that race-blind liberalism works, but not perfectly.
And that there will still be further measures needed- legal measures, cultural measures, institutional measures- in order to reach the goal of a truly race-blind society.
Because as you say, screaming ‘DEI/Intersectionality!’ loudly provides one hell of a smoke screen for tribalism. People care about their own ingroups more than they care for outgroups and a good way to hide the ball when you’re screwing over the outgroup is to talk very, very loudly about how these guys are actually ingroup.
So we obviously need to not be content to just let people scream about DEI/ Intersectionality.Report
Where the rubber seems to meet the road is how “race blind liberalism” fails the most when it isn’t race blind.
DEI/Intersectionality… is there a way to say that it’s failed?
By not including Jews in the “oppressors” category, I guess. I see a lot of people who think that DEI/Intersectionality would be peachy if only it included “us” in the “oppressed” category.
“It’s giving moral authority to the wrong people! It’s denying it to the right people!” might be a way to say that DEI/Intersectionality has failed.
But, if you ask me, that kind of gives away the game.Report
Where this thinking fails is when it assumes culture (and personal efforts) has no role in success/failure rates. That your people’s (or even your own) failure rate is a measure of your level of repression.
This is why it’s hostile to Jews, they’re successful, ergo they can’t be victims, they have to be oppressors.Report
The very definition of “Intersectionality” is exactly what Dark Matter references in the “class not race” comment:
Intersectionality is “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”
It also applies to what Lee is talking about where dark skinned Muslims are regarded differently than light skinned Jews.
The Jews appear “white” so they are judged according as regular (and privileged) Americans while dark skinned Muslims are seen as exotic (and oppressed) foreigners.
You criticisms are valid- compressing all the various aspects of a person down into a binary “Oppressor/ Oppressed” diagram hides a lot of complexity and allows for hidden agendas of prejudice to appear.
But then this leaves us in a place where we need to think about how to rectify the situation.Report
RE: But then this leaves us in a place where we need to think about how to rectify the situation.
Depends on the situation.
For Israel, it should be judged by normal country standards. So not setting boarders is a bad thing but the current war is acceptable.
For internal USA, trying to use racist policies as a tool for good hasn’t worked well and has enough other problems that it should be scrapped.
Past that I’m not sure what goal we’re talking about.Report
Well, if a private school ends up with a student body that is wildly lopsided in terms of its race/ gender/ ethnicity, and if we have scrapped existing DEI policies, is this a problem that requires a remedy, and if so, what?Report
“Maybe we could fix public schools first? Or is the point to do to private schools what you people have already done to public ones?”Report
I’m totally cool with fixing public schools first.Report
If that translates into: “We can’t stop discriminating based on race until we get public schools to fix the poverty cultures and get the outcomes we want”, then I’m not.
We have defined racism as evil and illegal. Ergo we should stop it, and we should stop it now.Report
Depends on how it got there and how we define “wildly lopsided”. “Percentage of population” is going to be a wildly inappropriate metric since it won’t reflect the applicate pool.
If the school is basing it’s choices on protected classes (race), then that’s a problem.
If their mission is to reflect the population as a whole, then they can admit people at random and call it a day.
If they are trying to be selective then they can openly select on non-protected classes. The big ones they normally go for is GPA.
For Harvard, the reason they have 30x as many people apply as are accepted is they lower their standards for everyone down to the point where enough Blacks will “pass”, and then they raise their standards for who will be admitted for everyone but them.
Or alternatively they have totally subjective “tests” (their personality test) and magically fail all Asians.
A fair process is something we should legally force, a proportional-to-population outcome is not.Report
Or alternatively they have totally subjective “tests” (their personality test) and magically fail all Asians.
Like the schools Jaybird is talking about that magically happen to not have any black kids.
“A fair process is something we should legally force.”
I agree. So when a school just magically happens to have a weird mix how would we force them to remedy the situation to achieve a proportion we think is fair.
Or just force them to adopt a standard, like a SAT test, which we think is fair.
Or some other mechanism which we think is fair.
Do you think there even exists some wholly objective standard of what a “fair” outcome of racial balance would be?
Or is it always a degree of subjectivity based on our ideas of how the intersection of talent, environment, and social structures work?Report
Chip: Do you think there even exists some wholly objective standard of what a “fair” outcome of racial balance would be?
We have made race a protected class. Ergo, it should be (or is) illegal to decide what your racial balance will be.
The moment we decide what we want the result to be, we have to bounce people because of their skin color.
Harvard needs to make it’s admission decisions based on something else. If it’s grossly unethical and even illegal to make decisions based on race then Harvard can’t make decisions based on race.
Harvard is telling kids they’re not going to be admitted because of their skin color. That’s heinous.
The “fair” thing is to stop doing that. I don’t care what the outcome will be. I care about individual rights and individual outcomes, not group rights and group outcomes. If the inputs/process are fair then the outputs/results are fair.Report
You can see why this statement:
“Or alternatively they have totally subjective “tests” (their personality test) and magically fail all Asians.”
And this statement:
“I don’t care what the outcome will be.”
Seem to be at odds with each other?Report
Are you suggesting Asians don’t have personalities? That it’s reasonable to find that there’s some special quality that Asians lack?
OK, let’s assume that’s true for a moment.
Then Harvard won’t have any issues with describing this personality flaw and outsourcing the personality test to someone else to do it blindly.
My strong expectation is the difference in Asian personalities disappears if we don’t know the skin color of the person taking the test.Report
I’m pointing out that you can see how vague and subjective tests can be discriminatory, even when they are facially objective.
Like, no one is openly saying “Lets devise a test to weed out Asians” but somehow, mysteriously, that is precisely the outcome.
And you can see this, and object to the outcome as contrary to the goal of fairness.Report
I’m pointing out that you can see how vague and subjective tests can be discriminatory, even when they are facially objective.
After you have used the words “vague and subjective” then you really shouldn’t also be calling it “objective”.
If Harvard can actually describe what trait they’re trying to reduce (other than skin color), and if they get someone else to run it(*), then I will change my opinion on whether it’s fair.
My strong expectation as it stands is the test amounts to “check the person’s skin color and grade them appropriately” so it will be quietly dropped.
(*) My company does both of these things. They have a personality test, they give it to a company that professionally does personality tests and they report the results.Report
And you can see this, and object to the outcome as contrary to the goal of fairness.
Sure. This leads to us to argument that “math is racist” because it has unequal outcomes.
That’s why I’d rather police inputs rather than outputs. If someone can point to some math question that is racist, we can change it.
I am pointing to the personality test and suggesting that it’s likely a skin color test. If that’s not true, then Harvard can prove me wrong by making the test not-vague and not-subjective.
The likely problem is that it really is a skin color test and not a personality test. Harvard doing it doesn’t make it more ethical than when the South was doing it.Report
The easiest and fairest way to handle this is for Harvard to set some standards for general admission and then randomly pick from that pool who they admit.
However whatever method they pick, I think we should be forcing them to be open about it. Harvard has shown that they REALLY want to discriminate based on race.Report
When I was a kid, “Intersectionality” was a way to criticize superficial attempts to be “diverse”.
It meant “hire a Black guy” or “hire a white woman” but nobody ever thought “let’s hire a Black woman… IN A WHEELCHAIR”. We unpacked our invisible knapsack and boggled at how many boxes we, ourselves, checked and how very few people we knew who only had one or two checked (and we didn’t know *ANY* without a single check… which made sense because one of the categories was “speaks English”).
And we went from there to “feeling good about ourselves because we checked our privilege and now that means that we can tell other people to.”
Those were the days.Report
The diagnosis is that it’s not racism, it’s classism.
The solution is for them to join my class and adopt my cultural values, not for me to lower my standards.Report
The soft bigotry of low expectations.Report
RE: what is your explanation for the phenomenon?
Individual choices.
Which means this “segregation” is likely not a bad thing.
Choice and consent is the line that separates sex crime from acceptable behavior. We may not approve of the behavior but that’s a different issue.Report
So if a corporation or Harvard says “We insist on rigid racial quotas for recruitment” this is merely a personal choice, and likely not a bad thing?Report
That example is not even slightly close to “individual choice”.
Big picture there is a ton of self sorting. We see this in a lot of human behavior.
There is a segment of society that is hugely focused on getting good schools for their kids. They vote with their feet.
Having people focused on schools is a good thing. Having people have the ability to vote with their feet is also a good thing.Report
In what way is it not an example of individual choice?Report
Chip: In what way is it not an example of individual choice?
You’re talking about institutions, even arms of the government, making choices inflicted on individuals because of their race.
I don’t see why you’re even attempting to describe that as “an individual choice”.Report
I think it’s more of a data point that it hasn’t been perfect, which I will concede is the case. It has to be weighed against things like the creation of a quite successful black professional class, or the fact that black women are now among the most educated demographics in the country.
You also have to factor in the..
not so great results of things like public housing projects that seem to have trapped people in poverty and dysfunction instead of helping them get out. It probably isn’t fair to call that a DEI/intersectionality policy given the chronology but it may be a warning about what we could expect with the kinds of policies that approach would favor.Report
Thinking more I think it’s worth noting just how off course this has gotten from the original issue. I can grant that there is a very unique historical situation with respect to descendants of African slaves. My opinion is still that ‘race blind’ is better but there’s a lot of complication to it with respect to that particular group.
However the entire conversation becomes laughable when we go back to what we were originally talking about, which is applying the same kind of rubric to Jewish and also by necessity of the conversation I suppose to Arab Americans. These are both statistically wealthy, very well integrated populations (in the Arab case we’ve integrated them to a downright amazing degree when you compare the situation to other western countries).
There’s just no case for special treatment with respect to the actual living, breathing people themselves, which is why you end up stuck in these endless meditations about peoples and ‘races’ in the abstract. It becomes self evidently stupid the moment a molecule of reality enters the room.Report
How do we “know” that Muslim and Jewish people have become wealthy and integrated or that black women have a certain graduation rate?
Someone somewhere had to stop being blind for a moment and observe the ethnic identity of the actual living breathing people and make a written record of it, the way an HR director records the identities of all the employees.
And it means that we can then look at the data collected to determine if we have reached the goal or not.
Because as Jaybird has repeatedly observed, even people who vehemently deny being racist, can often be racist even when it is hidden under a smokescreen of platitudes.
It doesn’t make sense to pretend to be blind to something which has an observable deciding factor in where people choose to live or work or send their children to school.Report
That kind of information is available from private and non profit entities.
But this generally seems like some major goal post shifting. By the terms of DEI/intersectionality CRA and similar legislation is ‘race blind.’ I know we didn’t officially define terms but if you want to take the position that it isn’t then we aren’t even having the same conversation and indeed none of the threads from yesterday and today would make any sense.Report
To me race blind liberalism suggests that the government shouldn’t take any steps to remedy natural prejudice because it would mean acknowledging race exists.Report
See response to Chip.Report
I am trying to be charitable but I find the impugning of the track record to be so… agnostic to recorded history and facts on the ground that it’s hard for me to know where to begin. It isn’t perfect but the progress and successes are downright extraordinary.Report
The trick seems to be “in practice”.
In Practice, it wasn’t perfect.
Well, what *WOULD* be perfect?
“This theoretical thing.”
And so we get to compare reality to fantasy and say that reality, in practice, just doesn’t measure up.Report
Intersectionality/DEI Liberalism becoming anti-Semitism seems built into it’s structure, or a very natural outcome of how it views the world. You should set your expectations accordingly.Report
I realize that.Report
I am increasingly wondering how many people have a sort of “the Jews should be seen but not heard” solution to the Jewish question. When I was a teenager, I did a summer program that the highly educated types like for their kids. One of the fellow participants in the program was a Jewish kid from Brazil. Since I grew up in one of the parts of the planet with a high Jewish population, I was interested in what it was like to be a Jew in Brazil. He said there wasn’t really any anti-Semitism but at the same time you felt kind of isolated because Jews just weren’t on the cultural radar for Brazil either in how Brazilians saw the country or how outsiders saw Brazil.
I’m getting a feeling that many people see this as the ideal solution to the Jewish problem. Just have Jews as a bunch of small spread out insular communities that are at most 2% of the population and not really on the radar. If Jews feel isolated and alienated from the culture, so what? They aren’t that many of them.Report
I spent my teenage and college years in a Latin American country and it was exactly like that. Jewish people were not unknown. My parents had Jewish friends, there were a couple of Jewish kids in high school, and I went to college with others, which still remain friends after four decades (one moved to Israel, and reports every once in a while on what she sees there). I even met a couple of Holocaust survivors.
But in general, they all were all “normal” people. @Jaybird would call them EPCOT Jews. They had different holidays were they ate different foods, were happy to explain them to you when you asked about them (and I got invited to a couple of Friday Seders or Purim parties, as well as some synagogue weddings and brits, were kippas were provided at the door for gentile guests), and went to synagogue on Saturdays instead of Mass on Sundays. But otherwise, they were indistinguishable to the rest of us. They studied with us, partied with us, and if my mum served pork chops for lunch to one of them, my Jewish friends would eat them in good spirits.
The only thing in which they stood apart from the rest was dating. They very rarely dated outside their religion. One of my gentile friends married a Jewish guy and it was a big big deal for both families (she converted and her Italian family father cut her off for many years).
I do not think they felt isolated from the rest of society. Nobody discriminated against them. They favored certain neighborhoods, but could be found be living anywhere in town.
At the same time, they all blended in. Sometimes, you saw a very modestly dressed woman and could accurately guess she was Jewish, but Haredi-like men were as rare as hen”s teeth (most of the ones I met were rabbis). But the vast majority lived exactly like their neighbors, went to the same schools and clubs, worked in the same jobs, and were welcome without much thought.
So, for what is worth, I find most people are welcoming of those who want to belong. Probably the EPCOT version of diversity is all we can safely have, but at the same time the EPCOT diversity is there for the taking. I myself am a foreigner living in a different land, and I’ve been welcome even with my own cultural quirks. Nobody takes offense that I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in my house, but I’ll accept an invite if offered.Report
That is the benign version of the phenomenon. The malign version is basically that there are only 16 million Jews in the world and they have too much prominence for their numbers, so steps must be taken to remedy this and if the Jews complain, so what? This also assumes that Jews find this not on the radar system acceptable. Many might but most probably would feel invisible. If done to another small minority group like Native Americans or Roma, it would be seen as totally unacceptable as a solution.Report
Small weird groups that are repressed aren’t supposed to be successful.
That Jews are both repressed and successful disproves too much of the Left’s holy beliefs for them to be comfortable.
The level of repression in the US is so low that small weird groups that are supposedly repressed can be successful. Ergo the other groups that are not successful are failing because of their own behavior.
If they’re going to keep the demon of racism alive so it can be opposed, there has to be some other explanation for Jewish success. This quickly becomes Jewish conspiracy theories.Report
I do not entirely agree with this. There were lots of de jure and de facto policies against African-Americans and other big non-white outgroups at the federal, state, local, and private levels for a long time from the end of reconstruction to at least the mid-20th century. This really did make wealth accumulation incredibly difficult among other things. There are also differences between middle man minorities like Jews in Europe and North America or the Chinese in South East Asia and minorities used as source of physical labor like African-Americans or Native Americans in South America.Report
RE: This really did make wealth accumulation incredibly difficult
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.
Wealth affects yourself and your children. You need to create a stupidly large amount of wealth for it to affect 3+ generations.
It’s so rare it has no effect on the bigger picture.Report
The other issue is that when even pursuing this path, it doesn’t necessarily work if the non-Jews decide that the Jews are still strangers who need to be targeted. This is what happened in Europe starting in the 1880s.Report
The “just blend in and be invisible” is by definition malign.
Imagine if the secular liberal culture demanded the same of Christians.Report
I think that a lot of people, not just white, see this as a great solution to the Jewish problem. Even many Jews traditionally saw this as a great solution to the Jewish problem. Jews would acculturate into the greater society but just be a different religion. I suspect a lot of this remains because Jewish emancipation occurred before modern ideas about multiculturalism emerged. There is a big element of path dependence.Report
At this point you are half-arguing a hypothetical. What if people that currently invite Jews into their houses suddenly decide to target them?
If we are going to explore that (and I acknowledge it has happened before, 80 or so years ago), you have to fill in the details. What were the causes then? What is different now, if anything? Is the same everywhere? Is there anything the Jewish community can do to stop, or to accelerate, this change in attitude?
Because otherwise to just point out that perhaps one day non-Jews will decide ( everywhere? In the USA? In Latin América?) to target (what does target actually mean in this argument?) the Jews, is like saying that perhaps one day an asteroid will hit the earth. It is possible but there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it.
So, in this particular case, is there anything you think people could be doing to foreclose the chance of the 1930s happening again?Report