Free Speech, But No Freedom to Harass
Photo by SWinxy, CC BY-SA 4.0
The campus protests in support of Hamas have flared up again. This time, the protests are centered on Columbia University where students have set up an encampment, but demonstrations are also taking place at Princeton, Yale, and other colleges around the country.
Personally, I think the students and faculty who are demonstrating in support of Gaza and Hamas have a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. Looking back on the history of the region, a great many of their notions are dispelled. Israel took control of Gaza in 1967 in the Six-Day War, a war in which it was attacked by a coalition of neighboring Arab countries. Despite starting the war on the defense, Israel quickly turned the tables and emerged from the conflict with several territorial gains including Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.
Israel occupied Gaza until 2005, hoping to trade land for peace. When no peace deal was forthcoming after four decades, Israel unilaterally dismantled Jewish neighborhoods (settlements) there and withdrew. Shortly after, Hamas became the government and established dominance over the rival group, Fatah, to control the area.
Since then, it has been Hamas that has been the obstacle to peace. The group has launched thousands of rockets and missiles against Israel as well as sending raiders and suicide bombers. It was Hamas that started the current war with large-scale attacks and thousands of murders and kidnappings on October 7. Even now, as the pro-Palestinian college students camp out to support a terrorist group, it is Hamas, not Israel, that refuses to agree to a ceasefire.
The pro-Hamas demonstrators are wrong, and they are on the wrong side of history. But in America, they have a right to be wrong.
They also have a right to be racist and anti-Semitic. This doesn’t mean that they have a right to escape the consequences of their odious leanings, however. As Steve Berman wrote yesterday, pro-Israel and pro-Jewish Americans and groups have every right to withdraw support for colleges that don’t reflect their personal beliefs. Employers have every right not to hire students who espouse radical viewpoints. Students have the right to attend classes without being intimidated or harassed and can vote with their feet by transferring to a different school.
What the students don’t have the right to do is cross the line to criminal and unlawful behavior in their zeal to spread their hateful message of cleansing Palestine of Jews. (It is ironic that the Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday on an Oregon case in which a city banned public camping to discourage the homeless from sleeping in parks.)
Colleges seem to be coming to this realization. More than 100 protesters have been arrested at Columbia, presumably on charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct. The AP reports that police were called to disperse protesters on the campus of New York University after the crowd became disorderly and engaged in intimidating and anti-Semitic behavior.
Colleges also need to maintain safe and functional campuses. Federal law requires that colleges protect students from bullying and intimidation while most campuses also have rules against such behavior. In the past, a major problem has been that these rules are not applied evenly against leftist protesters. Too often, students demonstrating for leftist causes are humored and coddled while conservative student groups face restrictions and harsh rules. Campus rules, like the law, should be applied in a manner that is neutral regarding viewpoints.
Free speech has limits. The limit is often when one person’s freedom runs up against someone else’s rights. For example, a few weeks ago, a Berkeley student grabbed the microphone at a Berkeley law professor’s home and began an anti-Israel rant. Forcing her to leave did not violate her constitutional rights. She has a right to free speech, but she does not have the right to speak in her professor’s private home.
This incident is directly analogous to several examples on the other side. The January 6 protesters had the right to speak out against the 2020 election results, however ill-informed they were about election fraud. They did not have the right to storm the Capitol in an attempt to change those results. Likewise, social media laws in Florida and Texas that attempt to regulate how platforms can moderate content are right-wing versions of leftists who say that protesters have the right to the mic in a private individual’s home or business.
I’ll add violence and lawbreaking is typically a turnoff to the American public. Americans might well view Israel’s actions in Gaza as excessive. There would be good reasons to take that view. But when protesters start occupying college campuses a la Occupy Wall Street, blocking streets, and generally acting in an unruly manner, the focus quickly shifts to the bad behavior of the protesters and the Palestinian cause loses sympathy. I can say the same for MAGA, which has now lost a string of elections due to its bad behavior.
The right position on all of these incidents is to support free speech as long as it remains lawful and nonviolent. That includes not trespassing on private, college, or government property. Where laws are broken, enforce them regardless of the political persuasion of the lawbreakers.
Certainly college authorities shouldn’t let their decisions on enforcing rules be influenced by the politics of the rule-breakers — though that may be exactly what they’re doing — but they should be influenced by common sense and good judgment. Bust people who engage in violence and actual harassment. Leave the merely offensive alone. Bust people who actually prevent others from going about their business. Wait out the campers, even if they are trespassers because busting them will, predictably, make things worse. Some of us learned this 50 years ago.Report
Colleges and universities have spent the time roughly between around 2010 to 2024 emphasizing that they were a safe place for students. Now we have a situation where a large number of students feel unsafe but rather than being of color or LGBT or women, they are Jews. The universities and people who are prone to defend academic freedom or side with the Palestinians and their allies don’t know what to do. They can either enforce what they said about safe spaces, make a really big exception for Jews alone, or just come out and say we lied about the entire safe space thing.
The big tendency on the Left is to a combination of defense, dodge, and denial about how at least some of the protestors are using this to allow their anti-Semitic freak flags fly. They just really don’t want to say anything about the protestors, radical academics, or look like they are agreeing with Republicans at all, so no matter how much evidence is presented they deny. The statements of Jewish students are entirely discounted and any counter-voice from a Jew is seen as telling the truth in a way that they wouldn’t do it for any other minority.Report
If *I* were a student organization, I’d go for the immediate reframing.
“No safe spaces for genocide” or something like that.
Do *YOU* support safe spaces for genocide?
Or do you stand with the oppressed?Report
I think this is what they have been doing and then accusing any Jew who doesn’t see things their way as being for genocide.Report
Once you establish that, all you have to do is ask something like “would you support a white supremacist student group on campus?” and game on. Just call whatever group you disagree with a modern “Students for South Africa”.
“Did any colleges have a Students for South Africa back in the 80’s?”
“I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Probably. They probably supported Pat Buchanan. But we defeated them back then and we’ll defeat the new one!”Report
There are probably some Pro-Palestinian protestors in the West who sincerely believe the entire thing is going to end up like South Africa if they try enough with one secular multicultural rainbow Palestine. That no Palestinian leader on the ground is saying anything like this, and we don’t even have a Palestinian Gerry Addams let alone Nelson Mandela, never seems to suggest to them that the Palestinians don’t want this for themselves. The popularity of theocratic politics in Muslim majority countries from Morocco to Indonesia doesn’t seem to be relevant to them either.
It is like dealing with people who live in an alternative universe where Israel is the sole theocratic bad guy and all the rest of the surrounding states, besides Saudi Arabia, are multicultural secular liberal paradises or that Palestinian/Arab/Muslim politics but for Zionism would be totally free of the elements that made them so ultra-nationalist in bad ways. They probably view my version of history as equally strange and not based in fact.Report
Eh, I’m honestly suspecting that this has little (if anything) to do with Israel or Palestine at all.
It’s fun to go into the quad. It’s fun to sleep in a tent for a day or two. It’s fun to chant things. It’s fun to watch the squares in ties with corporate jobs turn red and have the little vein in their forehead pop out. It’s fun to look at the Iraq War protests from the oughts. It’s fun to think about the Vietnam War protests. Protesting is fun. This is fun!
Oh, yeah, it’s “righteous” too.
(Not to say that there aren’t a whole bunch of people who actually think/believe stuff among the kids camping on the quad. I’m sure there are. But I wrote about the Harvard backlash against students who were members of groups that signed the open letter and two students emailed me, Jaybird, personally asking me to take their names out of the post when all I did was link to a since-deleted tweet in the essay. This is all fun and games until someone graduates and enters the real world.)Report
There are probably a fair number of people who are doing the Pro-Palestinian protests more for the self-righteous energy rather than any real opinion about Israel or Palestine. If they are willing to be among anti-Semitic malcontents and waive blood libel placards, I’m not inclined to deal with them that gently.Report
If you haven’t seen this, you should. It’s only a few seconds and it’s really a treat.
(Note: You shouldn’t judge a protest movement based on a handful of the people at the periphery.)
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You are over estimating how much thought most have put into this.
1) Killing is bad.
2) Israel is killing.
Ergo Israel is bad.
So if Israel would just stop killing it would be all happiness and rainbows.
That’s the start and the conclusion.
Various other facts, when they come up, need to be tacked onto that “thinking”. 10/7 was also bad… but if we need to add that into the existing reasoning we need either “the Palestinians must have been provoked” or “two wrongs don’t make a right”.Report
Everybody knows that only Israel/Jews has agency. The Palestinians/Muslims have no agency and are only reacting to what Israel/Jews do.
Also, “two wrongs don’t make a right” is a frequent anti-Zionist retort when somebody points out the rather difficult straights Jews were in during the mid to late 20th century. The persecution by you know who, the Communists, and under Araba nationalism or Islam doesn’t make Zionism or as they see it Jewish settler-colonialism right. The normally consequentionalist progressives and leftists can get very deontological at this.Report
I think that’s an overly generous framing of the whole ‘safe space’ thing. It’s never been defensive, it’s been a cudgel against anyone unwilling to join in with a narrow and particularly histrionic type of politics. Now the universities are finding out how hard it is to put the students back on any kind of leash after a decade and a half of saying anything goes, no matter how crazed or irrational, as long as it is in service to a particular worldview. Nothing is more difficult to take back than a get out of jail free card post issuance.Report
This was also accurate. I was talking about safe spaces as an advertising perspective from universities though. From the corporate admin types who have a light liberal world, safe spaces were great as concept. It was something that seemed to prevent confrontation on anything, admin types hate intense confronation over stuff, and sounded liberal in bland manner at the same time. They could advertise how progressive they were while getting a lot of money.
Now the universities are in a tough spot because the Pro-Palestinian crowd sees their cause as so inherently righteous that no antic is out of line and that if there anti-Semites among them that they need to be tolerated in the name of movement solidarity. That Pro-Palestinian activists code as left and a big chunk of the left has always been allergic to any respectability politics, means that they have to deal with a bunch of out of control people. At least some center left types decided that denial is the best option because they don’t want to look like they are supporting a Republican talkng points. On the other blog, at least one poster is saying that the Jews complaining about anti-Semitism are either Republican plants or Jews for Jesus.Report
I always appreciate when an author uses the first sentence to tell me there’s no reason to read further. Thank you for that.Report
Yeah, he should call them “Al-Qassam”.Report
Is there any situation where you would say a Pro-Palestinian protest has crossed the line into anti-Semitism or is the cause so inherently righteous that you are willing to tolerate anything?Report
I think you can find fringe cases, sure. I think antisemitism should be condemned in every instance.
The difference between you and me is that you don’t care about an ongoing genocide, because the side you are rooting for is committing it, and I do care about instances of antisemitism, regardless of who commits them. I’ve called them out openly in person and on Twitter. I’ll happily do it here. I think it’s not only bad in itself, but it harms the cause of Palestinian liberation.
Honestly, watching your comments on this subject has been as revealing, and more disturbing, than anything I’ve ever seen on this blog, and that includes the two people who, er, self-banned for overt anti-black racism (TvD and BlaiseP). It’s absolutely disgusting, and I hope, when this is all over, you find the time and strength to closely examine how and why your own moral judgments were able to be so completely compromised.
You may think I’m being harsh – after all, you’re not the only one: look at this OP, Koz, or Jaybird — but those are people whose moral compasses were inoperably broken long ago, if they ever had one, and if nothing else the fact that they’re the ones supporting your position should give you serious pause.Report
those are people whose moral compasses were inoperably broken long ago, if they ever had one
I wonder if this works on people who have less experience with Evangelicals. It might. It’s a powerful shaming technique.
But it loses something when not given by someone who speaks to the Lord regularly, don’t you think?Report
RE: On going genocide.
If we listen to Hamas, every Israeli bomb magically (and deliberately) kills only women or children.
If we listen to Israel then they’re killing between one and two civilians for every solider which is pretty good everything considered.
Hamas is boldface lying about everything with the media and the UN repeating that; presumably Israel is also being less than truthful. So we really don’t know what is happening.
30-35k dead puts us into “war” territory, but if Israel were deliberately killing everyone then they’re not doing a good job of it.Report
Now do Israel and the Palestinian Authority/Fatah.Report
The number is _way_ higher than 30k, that’s the number from months ago, before Israel started attacking hospitals so no one could record any deaths anymore.
No, it’s actually pretty easy to figure out what’s happening. There’s all sorts of actual videos of IDF soldiers just murdering people and, the, you know, unmarked mass graves discovered at hospitals and plenty of actual evidence of Israeli intent, including what is going on the West Bank.
You just don’t know any of this, because the media is extremely bad at their job.
The protestors do know it, BTW.Report
Israel lay siege to a hospital for weeks. That was reported with no mention of who they were fighting. It’s like the unarmed doctors and nurses were somehow preventing them from taking over.
If we’re going to use this as “actual evidence of Israeli intent” then the fact it went on for weeks strongly suggests that yes, the hospital was also a military base.
Similarly we also saw that hospital parking lot where 50 people died reported as 500 dead and dead deliberately when it turned out it was a Palestinian misfire.
That level of spin and outright lies should inform us of just how slanted the info coming out of Gaza really is. We should expect that in all of the reporting.
If Israel is actually genocidal then we should have hundreds of thousands of dead. What we have is something that, within the margin of error, could be Hamas claiming that every dead solider is a civilian plus an expected loss of human shields.
My expectation is Israel is committing more war crimes than it absolutely has to. But we’re in “brutal war” territory here and not “total war” thus far.Report
See, you say that, but that is because you are piecing together weird propaganda you have been told and not paying attention to any actual facts.
Israel has ‘laid sieges’ to quite a lot of places, including hospitals, where _literally no one opposed them_. This is because ‘laying siege’ is just them randomly sniping people walking to and from places.
Here is an actual fact: Armies should not leave behind mass graves at hospitals they have been in control of for months until they withdrew, and they certainly should not have bodies that were executed at point-blank range in them.
Armies actually shouldn’t be capturing people and executing them at all.
This logic is insane. Genocides are not normally done with nukes.
It sure is fun for you to crack the dial all the way up to ‘The quickest genocide that could exist’, and argue that is not what is happening.
I haven’t even mentioned the word genocide, and that’s because I think a much more accurate description is ethnic cleansing. The people are Palestine are being ethnically cleansed, as they been have _repeatedly_ by Israel (Including the literal founding of Israel), so that Israel can take land it believes it is entitled to away from people it has completely dehumanized.
I don’t think Israel wants to destroy the Palestine people, I think it literally just wants every inch of land under them, and them not there. You know, the explicit thing that Israeli politicians in the government straight-up keep saying.
Do you know that it’s literally against US law for the US to fund countries that are committing war crimes?
No, actually, they aren’t really in a war at all. The IDF is just straight up murdering people. Please go check what’s happening in the West Bank if you don’t believe that.Report
“I don’t think Israel wants to destroy the Palestine people, I think it literally just wants every inch of land under them, and them not there.”
If you replace Israel with Hamas in the above statement, I think Hamas wants exactly the same thing.Report
I _also_ think we should stop funding Hamas. We should stop sending them money and missiles, and we should stop blindly supporting them no matter what they do.
You do understand that’s going to be the response everything someone says ‘But Hamas is also doing the bad thing that Israel is’, right?
Of course, there’s another problem here: Contrary to what people seem to be told, Palestinians are a lot more willing to moderate than Israelis.
There’s a reason that Israel is completely unable to even vaguely motion towards stopping settlements (You’d think they’d stop from committing additional extremely overt war crimes during all this. Nope.), and that is because they are held captive, politically, by far-right religious zealots who understand Israel to include all of Palestine. Israeli politicians who veered from this have literally been _assassinated_.(1)
And no, that’s not also true in Palestine. Firstly, Hamas…isn’t particularly fundamental religious, despite what people think. Second, Hamas is a _reaction_ to Israel, whereas Israel was _founded_ on the premise that it eventually will be the entire area. I don’t think _Hamas_ will bend from that, but _Hamas_ is not irreplaceable, whereas Likud appears to be.
Hell, Hamas _pretended to moderate_ for the past decade. Now, they have admitted that they were biding their time, but Palestinians seemed fine with it…hell, they seem mostly okay with the PA, which is almost entirely a defanged Israeli puppet government!
Or to put it another way, Israel believes in manifest destiny as a fundamental concept to their nation, and Palestinians mostly are reacting to that. Which, I’m not actually going to argue that because, actual literal decades of Israeli propaganda make that where no one here is going to believe it, but it is true. Give Palestinians a generation of peace, they’ll be fine.
1) Interesting fact: It’s possible to argue that Zionists invented terrorism, under British rule of Palestine. Not completely invented, it sorta sporadically existed before that, but they were one of the first organized groups that used random violence against groups as an attempt to alter political opinion, eventually driving the British entirely out of Palestine. And it has functionally never stopped, the exact same methods are being used by Israeli settlers right now.Report
DavidTC: Do you know that it’s literally against US law for the US to fund countries that are committing war crimes?
Hamas has made it impossible to have a war without committing war crimes.
Their strategy is to get as many of their own people killed as possible, lie about what is going on and who is at fault, and get international pressure to win the political front.
That means Israel gets graded on a curve.
Subtract the situation and within the (large) margin of error, Israel might be using Queensbury rules.
My expectation is that they’re not and this is ugly. That being filled with rage is affecting them.
None of which changes that within the margin of error on the curve they’re fine.
If we want to help the Palestinians then we should be calling for Hamas to surrender and not for Israel to tolerate what no democracy would tolerate.Report
One of the issues with “subtract the situation” is “everything we know could be wrong”.
So for example we had a talk about that hospital being blown up and how it was a clear and deliberate war crime. Everything we knew about it was wrong. The hospital wasn’t blown up. The size of the explosion was much smaller than stated. The number of people dead was wrong. And Israel didn’t fire the missile.
Hamas has occasionally made the error of giving details on the number of dead. We’ve had statisticians point out that those numbers were clearly made up. The implication was dead adult males were being reported as dead women and children.
For your “mass grave”, we need to also assume that we know is a lie. We need to question whether a mass grave even exists. We need to question whether it has civilians. We need to question who created it.
And yeah, I get that it really sucks that we can be told by “official” sources that there’s a mass grave and we can’t reasonably conclude anything about it.Report
Actually, ‘Hamas numbers’, which are just the Ministry of Health in Gaza, are accepted by Israel, and they have not made any actual errors in them, and you’re basically just repeating vague propaganda that has been floating around.
Stated by _whom_? On the ground reports about a huge explosion at a hospital?
There is a difference between scattered reports and actual statements by Hamas or the Israel.
Fun fact: That wasn’t Hamas lying. That was a mistranslated tweet by Al-Jazeera English Twitter. Hamas said the total injured were about 500 (Later revised down to 470), which is almost exactly the amount that everyone else has arrived at. Some dumbass at Al-Jazeera decided that was the same thing as ‘dead people’, and all the other news media reported that number as being from Hamas without attribution.
So, right there, we have an example of a Hamas lie that isn’t a Hamas lie.
There’s a pretty clear sequence of events here that happened: Israel sees a hospital hit by someone that isn’t them. Hamas also sees a hospital hit by someone that isn’t them. Both of them blame the other.
It turns out it was a misfired rocket from a third party, Islamic Jihad, which is what Israel eventually concluded, and Hamas has probably concluded, as they collected the pieces. They did this in an apparent plan to expose Israel did it, making public statements they were going to do that, but got tripped up when it turns out it was not an Israeli rocket, and they suddenly shut the hell up about it.
None of that appears to be deliberate lying at the time, it’s two side being identically mistaken, although I guess Hamas sorta lying by omission at _this_ point, but not when they said it. Regardless, we have another thing called a Hamas lie that isn’t a Hamas lie.
However, you know what actually _did_ happen WRT that rocket attack, that we know happened? Israel produced a manipulated audio file trying to show that Islamic Jihad fired it. Now, this is possibly ‘trying to frame the guilty party’, but it is indeed a lie. A very deliberate one.
There’s only one side here who actually fabricates evidence and says things it knows is false at the time, and it’s not Hamas. Hamas is just…sometimes factually wrong, just like everyone in a war. But Israel is utterly untrustable.
We have the same nonsense with the ‘headquarters under the hospitals’ thing, where Israel made grandiose claims, eventually produces extremely odd videos that prove none of them, and everyone just moves on from the fact that these unproven ‘headquarters’ were their justification for occupying and destroying hospitals.
Here’s the actual problem: The internet exists.
And both Israelis and Palestinians are posting to it. And people can see those posts. Young people especially.
And they can see Palestinian children with burned off limb, and they can see the IDF shooting people crawling along the ground waving a white flag to try to get to airdropped supplies.
And they can see IDF soldiers destroying people’s houses and going through Palestinian’s women underwear and mocking them, and they can see the statements by the Israeli government openly calling for removing all Palestinians and seizing their land that western media is, inexplicably, not running.Report
‘Hamas numbers’, which are just the Ministry of Health in Gaza, are accepted by Israel, and they have not made any actual errors in them,
Statistics Prof talking about Hamas’ numbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyfDp8BE9Yg
“The Ministry of Health in Gaza” is another way to say “Hamas” since they run Gaza.Report
That so many people who should know better are trusting anything out of the mouth of Hamas doesn’t speak well of them. They deliberately committed an act of war, are openly genocidal in their goals, and now they look and lie about what is happening does not speak well of them. They believe Hamas because they want to believe Hamas.Report
I need second pretty much everything says in this. It’s been astonishing to watch more time and discussion spent on ‘some possible bad actors at protests’ and not the actual thing that is actually happening in Palestine, which everyone here is _astonishingly_ poorly informed about.
No one here has even bothered to mention the media very, very slowly walking back the claims of mass rape, to the point where it seems clear not only was there no systemic rape, there appears to have been no rape at all, all allegations of rape were b weird religious fanatics who never should have been platformed at all. And yet…here everyone is, pretending to be informed about the topic.
And no one seems to be noticing the violence that Israel is committing in the West Bank. Just…completely off the radar, like that isn’t relevant, like that doesn’t actually speak to Israel’s behavior in all this, their dehumanization of Palestinians. Oh, and they’re still building settlements, still stealing land.
Hey, people found mass graves at a hospital a few days ago, where Israel forces apparently handcuffed doctors and shot them in the head, would this at all be relevant to our discussion of how Israel couldn’t possibly have attacked a hospital? Maybe a follow-up is due.
Or did we just sorta trail off talking about the horrors going on over there as it because clear that Israel was sorta lying about basically every fact we had about everything?
But, hey, maybe this blog is very focused on local things, but if so, it’s astonishing to watch how actual large amounts of people actually _have_ gotten ‘canceled’, as in, lost their jobs and careers, for being pro-Palestine, and no one has said anything. Really thought that cancel culture was a big issue we discussed all the time here.Report
Dude, write a post and send it to me and I will see if I can’t get it put up.
I will do my darnest to make sure that the editorial touches are light and only do stuff like remove unnecessary swear words and ableist slurs.
Write the essay you wish we would write. I will make sure it gets put up.Report
i-dont-want-a-solution-i-want-to-be-mad-dot-jpegReport
I think the fact that I’m the only person who seems to be paying any attention to the _actual conflict_, and instead we have a bunch of articles about the mean protestors, is itself somewhat damning.
We still have people here yammering about dead babies…exactly one baby died on October 7th, shot in the arms of its still-living mother by a stray bullet. We know this, we counted. No babies were beheaded, none were microwaved, none appear to have even been targeted to be killed.
The sheer amount of propaganda this place has internalized about what is going on over there is almost overwhelming, and it’s even more astonishing _here_, because as I’ve watch this place pick over exact details of a police shooting for _months_.
I don’t even know what the point of trying to debunk any of this is. I don’t know what the point of any of this site is if we’re not actually to actually operate based in some sort of facts.
Just, hell, here’s a link about how the claims of sexual violence on October 7th, and how almost all of them are just…obvious nonsense at this point: https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/03/05/israel-hamas-oct7-report-gaza
Can this site actually understand and internalize that? That one thing? I dunno.Report
The set of people here who refuse to write essays about the actual conflict will continue to contain you, then?Report
https://www.timesofisrael.com/14-kids-under-10-25-people-over-80-up-to-date-breakdown-of-oct-7-victims-we-know-about/Report
I don’t really know what you’re trying to address here, but I was talking about the ’40 beheaded babies’ claim, which yes, is wildly impossible if only 14 people under 10 died _in total_.
But as that article points out, literally only one of them was a baby, that was the same baby I was talking about. If you follow the link it talks about how the mother was holding her and the mother lived. And although it doesn’t mention that, as far as people can make out, the shooter wasn’t actually try to kill the baby, but I argue that ‘deliberately shooting unarmed people near babies and accidentally hitting the baby’ is probably as bad as deliberately shooting a baby, I’m not trying to downplay the crime, I’m trying to point out we have _one_ instances of it, and thus there cannot possible be forty babies dead, much less decapitated.
…or, I guess, maybe two dead babies, if you count the pregnant woman killed during childbirth.
But still, the total number not only makes it clear that ’40 decapitated babies’ was an extremely absurd dehumanizing slur (The fact that a Jewish-lead government was making unfounded accusation of _baby murder and mutilation of their corpses_, actual literal blood libel used against Jews for centuries, is almost surreal.), but only 14 total under 10 makes it clear Hamas wasn’t actually targeting young children at all, because that’s way less than any statistic would suggest.Report
When I read the wiki on the alleged sex crimes during the attack we seem to have a large volume of claims of various levels of creditability.
At the bottom of that is several people who are clearly lying.
I think it’s way too early to be claiming everything fits in that category. Do hostages claim they were assaulted or don’t they? Did Hamas have pictures of females without their pants? I’m not willing to do a deep dive on the raw stuff even if it’s available somewhere.
This is one of those things we’ll figure out the truth and falsehood of in a few years. Given hundreds of civilian dead bodies the answer will probably be grim.Report
Really? What’s a credibly one? Would it be the allegations that Israeli girls were raped so badly their legs and pelvic bones were broken, a thing that is not actually possible, and no one has managed to locate?
Or something else? The allegation that a bunch of women went to rape centers, a thing that…doesn’t appear to be true.
The Wikipedia article is fully of obvious nonsense reporting, because that’s how Wikipedia works: It simply repeated reporting.
Hey, why do you think that article’s locked?
Here’s an idea: If massive amounts of lies are being thrown around, maybe raise the threshold of belief slightly above ‘someone said something’?
Maybe in a situation where ‘[t]he police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault or witnesses to acts from the Hamas attack, and are unable to connect the existing evidence with the victims described in it.’, we sorta just start thinking maybe those ‘described victims’ never existed.
They do not generally. There is one who just come forward last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20240425053616/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/middleeast/hamas-hostage-sexual-assault.html
So we have one hostage, at least. But…the reason that made the paper is she is literally the first and only hostage who has said this. In fact, she’s the only named rape victim we have _at all_, dead or alive.(1)
And…look, rape is rape for the victim, but there’s a rather large difference at the political level between ‘This particular captor was a rapist and worked themselves up to rape.’ and ‘There was systemic rape and violent orgies at massive levels during the attack,’ which was the original claims, and helped justify Israel’s overreaction.
If anything, the behavior of the rapist towards Soussana indicate he was not ordered to rape her, that rape was not in fact being used a weapon of war…he was just a normal everyday rapist who ended up in control of a woman prisoner.
1) Now that they had to give on Gal Abdush, a dead woman they were pinning all their hopes on because she supposedly was stripped, when it’s basically impossible for there to have been time for any rape.
I have no idea what this is in reference too, but Hamas actually livestreamed a good amount of footage during the attacks via GoPros. (Which is another thing that made the claims of wild rape implausible.) There’s not any record of them taking ‘pictures’, and that seems oddly redundant.Report
DavidTC: In fact, she’s the only named rape victim we have _at all_, dead or alive.(1)
This would be a lot more comforting if we didn’t have a huge number of dead bodies, most of them civilians.
DavidTC: ‘There was systemic rape and violent orgies at massive levels during the attack,’ which was the original claims, and helped justify Israel’s overreaction.
Overreaction? Killing all civilians they could get their hands on takes us to “not an overreaction”.
Not having enough time to commit rape because they’re committing mass murder might be accurate but won’t result in the situation being defused.Report
The actual problem there, one that has been pointed out a lot, is that a) we have a lot of survivors from that also (Plus released hostages), almost none of who report seeing rapes and those who did are the two or three lunatics who have had their stories completely dismantled over time, and b) the time constraints that Hamas was operating under, which made the entire thing improbable to start with, and c) the aforementioned GoPros didn’t catch anything either, and if you were using the threat of rape as a weapon of war, and _filming_ the war, you’d, uh, probably film some rape.
It is, at this point, wildly improbably there were any rapes _during_ the invasion by Hamas, and certainly the accusations of Hamas using rape as a weapon of war are just, flatly, 100%, untrue. (A claim that, again, was helped used to justify the response.)
Now, as for raped hostages, there probably are some, although if you put the behavior reported above and look at _other_ behavior by other hostages, who have talked about how their captors were extremely careful and curious to them, it seems clear that Hamas was _trying_ to not do anything to harm them, even if some member of Hamas turn out to be rapists.
But, I mean, if we were condemning organizations that, ‘when members of area are placed in control of women, a few turn out to be rapists’, we’d have to condemn most of the police forces in US, along with the IDF. The fact we only have one report shows Hamas was pretty good at policing itself.
The thing that actually sounds like it might have been ‘official’ is the weird threatening and torture. I, much like her, don’t understand what that was about, but…it’s interesting that the ‘official’ torture was not sexual in nature.
Yes, killing tens of thousands of people is an overreaction.
The thing we are talking about is lies by Israel, and everyone _already knew_ Hamas had committed mass murder. Israel had a bunch of people suddenly rush forward to _make up lies_ to go on top of that which were clearly nonsense and created an entire false narrative.
This is…important, because it informs how much we should trust what Israel says…actually, it doesn’t, because those of us who were already paying attention already knew Israel had a history of massive lies, but, it’s just sorta the easiest and most recent thing to point out, because people _remember_ being duped by it.Report
Yes, killing tens of thousands of people is an overreaction.
Depends on the civilian to military ratio, and we have no clue what that is. Israel claims something like 1.5 to 1. Hamas claims every death has been a civilian.
What is clear is Israel had good reason to go to war. Since the public wants it done now that means ground invasion. Which means Hamas’ tactics should be getting lots of civilians killed.
The current death count in Gaza is 34,305. That’s Hamas’ number. For perspective Israel still isn’t sure how many people died on 10/7.
If Hamas is still doing the whole “10x” thing they did at the hospital bombing then we could have less than 10k dead. Let’s assume the number is right but they’re only shifting “who died” into other columns.
With the scale of the war, Israel’s control over the air and overall power, Hamas’ tactics, & the number of displaced people, 34k suggests Israel is mostly trying to not kill civilians.
The war has been going on for 200 days and Israel had dropped 29k bombs in December, so they’re probably above 40k now. I’m sure they could average more than one death per bomb if they tried.Report
This is just the same argument both sides have repeated endlessly.
“Look at our oppression! Behold our suffering! Note the atrocities!”
These are all true.
But so what? Oppression and suffering atrocities isn’t a magic spell that confers legitimacy over any actions you take.
Likud and Hamas have ben very careful to avoid telling us what their vision of “victory and what follows” is.
And if they aren’t willing to do that, then I can grieve over the suffering, but not sign on to what they plan to do.Report
The “follows” is going to be interesting.
I just watched a video on the denaz.ification of Germany.
The good news is Germany turned away from that. The bad news is our efforts at denaz.ification seem to have failed. Germany reformed because they wanted to and because Russia was such a big problem.
It would be real easy for Israel to win this war and decide that they hadn’t been oppressive enough and for the Palestinians to decide they hadn’t been savage enough.Report
Likud has actually been _incredibly_ clear about what their version of victory is.
The fact that it hasn’t been published in American media is a rather damning indictment of American media.Report
Also true.
Still where does this leave us as American citizens?
We are being beseeched to support one side or the other and I’m not seeing a whole lotta reasons to do so.Report
I mean, we can always take the centrist, middle-of-the-ground position and not support either side.Report
I think both sides are pretty clear at what their version of victory looks like. Hamas openly states that they want everything to become the Islamic Republic of Palestine with no Jews. Likud wants Israel to control everything with the Palestinian as just sort of being there at best. It tends to be Westerners that ignore what is being said.Report
Likud opposes two states.
Likud is also 23% (as of 2022)
Something like a third of Israelis support two states (28.6% of Jews and 72% of Israeli Arabs).
For perspective about 24% of Palestinians support two states.Report
I keep comparing this to the Irish Troubles, or the South African accords after the fall of apartheid, or even the various ethnic troubles in America- black people, Native Americans, Chicanos.
In all cases we had indigenous people who rose up against their settler colonials, but in all those cases, consciously chose to pursue sharing the land and reconciling rather than ethnic cleansing a la the Balkans.
These are just choices people make. There isn’t anything predestined or impossible.Report
On the other blog, a commentator pointed out that while South Africa got the ANC while equally racist Peru ended up with the murderous Shining Path. The only Israel/Jews have agency aspect is what really pisses me off about how this contact plays out. The entire burden is placed on Israel/Jews to come up with a solution while the Palestinians are immune from all bad decisions they made.Report
And this is where the protests really do remind me of the Vietnam war, where naive people just assumed that if America was bad, the Viet Cong must be good, right?
I can’t say enough bad things about Bibi, but that doesn’t affect how I feel about Hamas.
Sometimes there just isn’t a good team to pick.Report
And what really pisses me off isn’t necessarily the anti-Zionism per se but just treating Jews as differently as they would treat other minorities whose cultures were being destroyed. Jews building Jewish organizations and having a culture isn’t seen as a great act of human liberation like it would be for say the LGBT community or Native Americans but at best “meh, who cares” and at worse a giant conspiracy against humankind. Jews are expectedly to stoically deal with this.Report
Think of all the bricks that get thrown at BLM.
The theory of building a minority organization is different than the reality.Report
“What about Palestinian on Palestinian crime?”
Seriously, you’ve seen this argument play out a thousand times.
You know the moves and the counter-moves and the counter-counter-moves and the counter-counter-counter moves.
Are you just not used to being something other than the underdog?Report
A mass slaughter of Jews but an organization that explicitly calls for expelling Jews from the Middle East so they can have an Islamic Republic of Palestine seems a bit different. Either you have to pretend that Hamas and the Palestinians aren’t being serious and literal in their rhetoric, because reasons, or you have to decide that this is a righteous goal.Report
I also expect that the period where Jews were seen as an underdog was short and not entirely universal. Anti-Semitism is based on Jews having money and power. Israel might have been – plucky underdog in the Mao stream West for a time but the Further Right, Further Left, and much of the developing world saw it as an imperial power before it even existed because Jews.Report
The underdog status ended after the Six Day War over there.
It’s wobbly over here but there are still a handful of people who believe it.
Anti-Semitism is based on Jews having money and power.
Something like “ressentiment“? That doesn’t have the longest pedigree… but it does go back to at least Kierkegaard.
Pity that nobody reads René Girard anymore.Report
The time frame is more complicated. Even after the Six Day War, it was seen as a larger Israel-Arab or Israel/Muslim conflict rather than a smaller Israel-Palestine conflict. The long shift of focus to the Palestinians for various reasons made Israel less than underdog as time passed. There were also people who never saw Israel as an underdog even between 1948 to 1967 but they were on the margins in the West.Report
You don’t think this has anything to do with the fact that US government is funding of those sides and not the other, so any pressure that Americans can assert would _be_ on that side?Report
Again, lets look at the fact that multiple things can be true and that motivated reasoning tends to cause people to ignore various facts on this front:
1. Congressional Republicans are acting in completely bad-faith or largely bad faith with varying instances or hearings on anti-Semitism;
2. University Presidents and admin say what happened to the Presidents of Harvard and Penn and freaked out and are now overcorrecting in their responses. There is something very “Jump? How high?” about the current changes at Columbia, Yale, and NYU.
3. There are people inside and outside of universities who are taking advantage of the current conflict/war between Israel and Hamas and the concern for Gazans to let their anti-Semitic freak flags fly and menace Jews more broadly.
3a. There are protestors on and off campuses across the United States who are either letting their anger get the best of them or doing it intentionally but tend to confuse Jew and Israeli. Recent examples of this are the Loyola Law School anti-racism fellow who stated “Get your ugly Jewish asses out of here” and the confrontation at what were supposed to be celebratory get togethers for 3L students at Berkeley Law at the dean’s house. It is quite risible that a 62 year old woman “assaulted” a 20-something year old man and it should be noted that the Dean was acting in his capacity of Dean of the School and is not an emissary for Zionism or “Zionism” just because he is Jewish.
But admitting all these things can be true requires people to get out their partisan spaces and accept complexity and nuance, so they don’t. Instead, there is just the selective dodge, downplay, and maybe an admission of some “fringe cases.”Report
“There are protestors on and off campuses across the United States who are either letting their anger get the best of them or doing it intentionally but tend to confuse Jew and Israeli.”
This absolutely is a thing. But this conflation is not limited to the current situation nor to those critical of Israel.
How often have we seen folks say that any criticism of Israel, Israeli politics, or Israeli foreign policy is inherently anti-Semitic?
And folks (like your brother) who call Jews who themselves are protesting Israel, calling for a cease fire, or showing support/empathy towards Palestinians traitors and what not fall into the same ugly ways of thinking.
Not all Jews are Israeli. And not all Israelis are Jewish.Report
“How often have we seen folks say that any criticism of Israel, Israeli politics, or Israeli foreign policy is inherently anti-Semitic?”
It gets said often because it’s “often” true that Israel’s critics just can’t not use anti-Jew slurs in their criticism.Report
If criticism of Israel includes anti-Jew slurs, it ought to be criticized as anti-Semitic.
But I’m calling out those who say any and all criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic, regardless of such specifics.Report
Because they keep doing things like this. Complete with blood libel.
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/berkeley-erwin-chemerinsky/Report
“They” being… critics of Israel? They are a single monolithic group with identical views?Report
So if we can find one good man in Sodom and Gomorrah, we won’t destroy the cities?Report
It’s the “THIS PERSON IS REPRESENTATIVE!” vs. the “THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY AN OUTLIER!” game.
Oh, you’re attacking my position by pointing to a rally? I’ll have you know that that person is an outlier. Unlike this person at one of your rallies.
The problem is that, after the last decade, the whole “college students aren’t representative of progressivism!” thing holds less water due to, among other things, slippery slopes.
Just wait to see if a position like “I can’t believe how short-sighted Israel is being! They’re going out of their way to ensure that future elites are anti-Zionist!” shows up.
Then you can pull the whole “They are a single monolithic group with identical views?” thing and see if eyes are rolled.Report
I remember a story from a couple years ago where some Campus Republicans were distributing goodie-bags that had some kind of white supremacist literature in them, and it turned out that said literature had been insert by a non-student.
I do recall Kazzy declaring that even so, it was the Campus Republicans’ fault and a clear sign of their Racism, because they let that person be anywhere near them and they should have known better.Report
Eh, I find that it’s always best to include a link to that sort of thing. If they say “that’s a misrepresentation!”, you’re stuck without a link.
I will say that there seems to be a lot of the Schmittian reduction of the political to the existential distinction between friend and enemy going on.
And a whole lot of people who have no freaking idea how to tell who their friends are and are waaay too good at making enemies.Report
John Ganz has a good look at the complicated history of the Mizrahi in Israel: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/go-back-tomorroccoReport
Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin was Mizrahi, particularly from Yemeni background. The Jews of Yemen started moving to Israel during the first and second aliyahs even if the vast majority of them did not end up there until the creation of Israel. There were already 25,000 Jews of Yemenite origin in Israel/Palestine in 1948. This is all very inconvenient for the anti-Zionists and it tends to be overlooked for a variety of false narratives.Report
One of the things that I don’t understand from Pro-Palestinian Westerners is how they keep on insisting that Ehud Barak’s offer and Ehud Olmert’s offer wasn’t a real offer of peace because it didn’t include the Right of Return. It seem to me that it would be an obvious no-brainer that even the most sympathetic Israeli government to the Palestinians would give a hard no on allowing millions of Palestinians into green line Israel because it is an obvious back door one state solution. Or as I read somewhere, an agreement for two Palestinian states. It is even a bigger hard no than handing the Western Wall and other Jewish places in East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. But the Pro-Palestinian position seems to be that the Palestinians are so wronged that they don’t have to compromise on any issue and the Israelis should just give them what they want hand over fist.Report
To be clear… your objection to the “right of return” is that it would lead to too many Palestinians in Israel?Report
Define “right to return”.
If it means “right to return to a Palestinian state somewhere in that area” then you have the two state solution. That has been offered and refused as not a real RoR.
If it means “right to return to the house your great grandparents left 70 years ago” then that also means “kicking out the Jews who have been living there for the last 70 years”.
The Palestinians are not fighting to become minorities in a Jewish state. They’ve made it clear that for them, RoR needs to include “the Jews will leave”.Report
“It seem to me that it would be an obvious no-brainer that even the most sympathetic Israeli government to the Palestinians would give a hard no on allowing millions of Palestinians into green line Israel because it is an obvious back door one state solution.”
I’d say whatever definition for RoR that is informing this thinking.Report
Is there a statute of limitations on the right of return?Report
IMHO it’s nuts to insist a RoR spans generations.Report
Tell that to the Israelis.Report
What do you call it when racial discrimination is the official state policy, determining who can live in and immigrate to the country, who can work what jobs and where, etc.?Report
This is the root of the conflict isn’t it?
That a nation can be restricted to a single ethnic or religious group with all others being unwelcome or relegated to second class.
And so long as this is the driving purpose behind both warring parties, there can never be peace there no matter who wins.
Because what we know from human history is that no group can ever be homogenous enough, pure enough. There is always an Other who must be fought.Report
So in other words, Poland can never be at peace because it’s openly an ethnostate?
The United States is the extreme exception to the world in that it’s NOT an ethnostate and is pretty much open to everyone.
And we would never let in millions of religious fundamentalists with a strong tradition of backing terrorism.
The two sides are not equally guilty.Report
I am not that familiar with modern Poland.
Is it place restricted to a single ethnic or religious group with all others being unwelcome or relegated to second class?
How do they determine who is a True Pole, versus a mongrel outsider?Report
Chip: How do they determine who is a True Pole, versus a mongrel outsider?
Mostly by language.
Speaking as a mongrel outsider, it was impossible for me to get married in Poland without living there for 6 months. It’s impossible for me to get a Polish citizenship without speaking Polish and living there for whatever.
My children were all made Polish citizens as babies. It would be impossible for them to become citizens now because there’s no way they could pass the various tests now even with a full Polish parent.
Poland has been very open about not letting in immigrants from Europe’s Southern boarder crisis. They have let in huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees but that has been amazingly out of character.
Normal countries are allowed to determine who they will accept and who they won’t based on their own standards.
Israel’s behavior for immigration control is normal by ethnostate standards. If we want to judge them by how they treat their minorities by Middle East standards then it’s just silly.
The Palestinians behavior isn’t. No country wants millions of religious fundamentalist terror supporters who will form armed bands to abuse their fellows and eventually attempt to overthrow the government.
Various countries have accepted the Palestinians and then kicked them out for that reason. This is why Egypt doesn’t want them in now.Report
Well, just asking people to speak the language doesn’t seem to make Poland fit my definition of ethnostate.Report
It’s pretty common on the American right to want English to be the official language of the U.S. I think this is very silly, so I would feel the same about Poland, but at the very least, it makes Poland more like the American right than Israel.Report
Language Laws kinda exist in a lot of places, including places that have universal literacy and universal health care coverage.
So comparisons to the American right kinda ignore the sheer number of European left countries that also do this sort of thing.Report
Language laws are bad, and a reflection of some of the worst aspects of the history of nation formation.
The American right is the obvious connection in an American context. That the American right does not line up perfectly with right-left divides in Europe should surprise no one.Report
It’s not limited to real countries, though! China has them, India has them, Russia has them, Algeria has them, Brazil has them, Cuba has them, Paraguay has them…
I am honestly curious as to whether there are more countries (even poor countries!) that have them than don’t.Report
Strict language rules are bad but there does need to be some way for diverse group of citizens to talk to each other unless you want each group to basically maintain it’s own separate area.Report
Poland’s immigration standards are more strict than Israel’s. They both get about 75k people a year but Poland is massively bigger.Report
It’s beyond language in most of continental Europe. They fall under what I believe is referred to as jus sanguinis, or law of the blood, meaning citizenship of the parents (among other things potentially) is the primary consideration, even if born in the country’s territory. The US also has a jus sanguinis rule for people born to American citizens overseas, though of course we also have a uniquely generous jus solis rule, for anyone born on American soil.Report
Let’s not forget the religious dimension. From what I can tell, it is really important for basically the majority of Muslims on the planet that Muslim majority countries be officially Islamic, and not in trivial ways like say the UK is Christian, and have a deeper bond with Muslims from other countries compared to non-Muslim countrymen.
Even if Jews didn’t want a state of our own, I’m not really sure why we should be happy to be citizens of a state where the stamp of Islam is placed on everything and other Muslims are seen more a neighbors and fellows than we are. When Jews do this we get accused of insular tribalism. I reject any official policy or even cultural feeling that would place Jews in subsidiary citizenship status.Report
The fact that you are unwilling to read these things to yourself with a southern accent before you post them is baffling to me.Report
I fail to see how what I wrote isn’t true. Theocratic politics are genuinely popular in much of the Muslim majority countries. They are very open about living under a system that is officially Islamic is important to them. That a lot of people like to look the other way about this doesn’t matter.Report
Quid est Veritas?
We live in a world of narrative and the fact that you are unwilling to read these things to yourself with a southern accent before you post them is baffling to me.Report
Which is a problem that Israelis themselves grapple with, completely separate and apart from the relationship with its Arabic neighbors.
Who is a Jew?
Who is Jewish enough?
Where do secular Jews fit in, or do they?
There are regular clashes between the secular Jews and Ultra-Orthodox over just these sorts of things, roughly comparable to our own struggles with religious extremists.
And I don’t really have a dog in the fight, its up to the Israelis themselves to work out.
But my point is that the concept of an “ethnostate” or “monoculture” doesn’t seem to solve any of the problems that societies have and really just makes them worse.Report
Chip: But my point is that the concept of an “ethnostate” or “monoculture” doesn’t seem to solve any of the problems that societies have and really just makes them worse.
Israel’s existence was a response to brutal anti-Jewish discrimination including the holocaust.
One of the big arguments for Israel as an ethnostate is it’s an improvement/solution over that sort of thing.Report
I used to say, in jest, that we should have given the Jews Texas, and maybe Oklahoma too, as a homeland.
Couldn’t be worse.Report
What bothers me about these conversations is that you have a lot of Western wonks and activists who can explain with great specificity on how alienating it is to be a Muslim under a Jewish state and or Hinduvata India or Buddhist Myanmar or Thailand is can get very silent when dealing with Muslim theocratic politics. It seems like it was basically decided that Muslims get this big exception to the no-theocracy rule and there is no point speaking about it. To do so is “Islamophobic.” The entire thing seems like a call for unilateral disarmament.Report
I agree that Arab or Palestinian more generally nationalism is as wrong as Jewish nationalism. I think one is a bit more of a problem right now, since only one group of nationalists in the country has tanks, jet fighters, and nukes.
You might say that Arab nationalism among Palestinians hinders the peace process, but it a.) doesn’t harm the two-state solution, and b.) the one-state solution has never been on the table for Israel anyway, so I don’t think it’s harming the peace process.Report
As I’ve said a number of times, I’m not willing to support either side until they tells us explicitly what constitutes victory and what comes after.
If what comes after isn’t explicitly stated as “a liberal democracy where Muslims and Jews can live together in peace” then I can’t get on board.Report
Muslims and Jews already live together in Israel in peace.
What we’re dealing with now is how to convince the non-Israeli Muslims that they should set up their own state and stop trying to re-fight a war they lost 70+ years ago.Report
And also convince the Israeli Jews that they have to accept that a significant chunk of land they currently control will need to be released to the custody of said state or genuinely held in trust for such a future state. Which means settling it and all the other quasi to outright ethnic cleansing activities they keep playing footsie with has to stop and, to some degree, reversed.Report
That problem would be a lot easier to solve if it were possible to transfer a tiny compound of Jews to the Palestinians without the expectation they’d be instantly killed.
If memory serves a lot of the settlers are there because of tax reasons or other gov economic support. Reverse those policies and we might see them move back over the green line over a few years.
It’s not clear to me how many are motivated by religion and would refuse to move even if it meant dying there. I guess we could review what happened during the Gaza pull out but that’s more effort than I’m willing to do.Report
I think your understanding of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, especially the ones out there causing all the trouble right now, is extraordinarily dated.
But even if it weren’t, the existence of an entire tax and subsidy system by the Israeli’s to encourage settlement in the territories is, itself, an extraordinary problem almost as bad as the Palestinians irredentism.Report
I don’t understand the mindset that says “I refuse to support these people who are very objectively being oppressed, physically, economically, spiritually, intellectually, etc., because they haven’t yet told us what they want to do when they stop being killed, maimed, having their homes stolen or bulldozed, etc.”
This is the mindset that supporters of Israel use to argue that killing, maiming, bulldozing, occupying, blockading, etc., are justified. Even if you don’t feel it’s justified, by not siding with the oppressed, you’ve effectively sided with the oppressor.Report
Why can’t they tell us?
The guys lounging in penthouse apartments in Qatar sipping tea and issuing press releases can’t fashion a coherent story of what their future Palestine looks like?
The American protesters after countless hours of dorm room philosophizing can’t summon up the words “What do we want? Liberal democracy! When do we want it? NOW!”
And why can’t Likud do the same?
I’ve said before, oppression isn’t a magic spell that gives you carte blanche to do whatever the hell you want.Report
“Why can’t they tell us?”
Who’s they? Everyday Palestinians? The leadership of Fatah? The leadership of Hamas? I mean, the political groups have been pretty clear, and of course disagree with each other greatly (they fought a war against each other in this century!). As for everyday Palestinians, how are they going to tell you? By voting? They don’t have a lot of options (by analogy, most Americans want universal healthcare, but neither of our political parties does), in terms of representation, and besides, when you are being killed, maimed, losing your homes, there are literally roads and businesses you can’t use because of your ethnicity, your economy is stunted by occupation and blockade, your movements in and out of the country are heavily restricted, even for medical care or education, etc., etc., etc., why would we expect them to care a whole lot about what comes after except that it means all of those horrible things are no longer part of their daily lives?
If you think that people have to earn liberation, that they have to earn the right not to be brutalized on the basis of race and ethnicity, then you are no better than the brutalizer.Report
“They” is whoever is calling the shots in Gaza and the West Bank.
And I’m willing to believe that they don’t represent most Palestinians, but so long as “They” are able to direct troops and weapons, it doesn’t matter.
If “They” want me to sign on to a Palestinians state, “They” need to explain to me what I’m signing on to.
Ditto ditto for the Israelis.Report
At least with the protestors in the United States, I think a lot of the silence is because they don’t want to split the coalition between the “every Jew is an illegitimate settler-colonialist who must leave Palestine” and the more practical types, so they maintain a code of silence. Plus nobody has any real power over the Palestinians on the ground.
The Palestinians themselves probably keep mum on their vision because they don’t want to split their own liberation movement into a civil war between the Maximalists and the Practicalist faction. The Maximalist faction probably senses if they come out and say what they mean, they will lose credibility among Western governments. Protestors can agree with “all Jews out” but Western officials and politicians can not.
Likud and other Israeli politicians face the same problems but from a different angle. They know a kick out the Palestinian argument will make them lose all credibility internationally.
Everybody is engaging in a lot of strategic ambiguity.Report
Where are the goal posts for “ending the oppression”?
If it’s two states, then we have somewhere to go but that doesn’t explain the history.
If it’s “everywhere from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] sea will be free [of Jews]”; then that explains the history but we don’t have anywhere to go.Report
Chris, there have been Arab/Palestinian Israeli MKs, judges, civil servants, cabinet members (appointed under Likud), business people, scientists etc. An Arab/Palestinian Israeli woman was made rector of the University of Haifa. Anti-Zionists have been making all sorts of false arguments about what Israel law allegedly doesn’t allow Israel to do and just doubling down when shown otherwise. Meanwhile, they ignore that every Muslim majority state or at least nearly everyone officially proclaims itself to be Muslim complete with blasphemy laws and laws against apostasy for Muslims.
There is a big inconsistent with the ethnostate accusation against Israel in that the people who make this basically ignore every other de facto or de jure ethnostate or religious state on the planet and focus in on Israel as being uniquely bad and needing to be destroyed compared to the others.Report
Maybe you guys could offer to open meetings with a Stolen Land Acknowledgement?
Here’s a handy guide.
Helpful tips:
Start with self-reflection.
Do your homework.
Use past, present, and future tenses.
And, most importantly: Use appropriate language. Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonizers.Report
Heh, what is this? Passages from A Very Berkeley Thanksgiving?Report
Here’s the “about us” page. (Check out the picture!)
As someone with Native American ancestry, I find it important to make you people acknowledge what you did to mine, even if it’s never going to change. At the very least, maybe I can make you people jump through some small hoops for my enjoyment.Report
That’s really, really excellent. You know my MIL got 23andme for everyone for Christmas several years ago and it turns out I have a tiny pinch of sub saharan African in there somewhere. If all those ‘Cherokees’ can make use of it why not me?Report
Fair enough.Report
Every conflict should never be allowed to end much less be forgotten.
The Jew/Arab conflict is the model we want to adopt and not the post WW2 Polish/German/Russian model where people got on with their lives and forgot it.Report
What we need is a West Jerusalem and an East Jerusalem.Report
That’s the wrong conflict. After WW2 Russia insisted that Poland and Germany change their borders. Millions of people got up and followed them to stay in their countries. The world has largely forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_Poland_immediately_after_World_War_IIReport
My understanding is that many Native Americans do not like Stolen Land Acknowledgements.Report
Y’all didn’t believe in land ownership. I’ll apologize for the rape and murder, but the land was fair game.Report
Native Americans did indeed believe in land ownership, the idea they did not is just claptrap used to justify stealing from them.
https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-columbus/
The fact that land was often held in common by the entire tribe means it wasn’t ‘owned’ is akin to asserting that American doesn’t believe in land ownership because look at all the roads and parks held in common, with ‘no owner’. But Americans do own that land, we just _jointly_ own it.
Likewise, tribes _did_ own their land, they just often did it jointly.Report
It was not my intention to express anything but mocking contempt.Report
You’re into group rights here. Or maybe countries claiming dominion.
Part that defeated them was the serious lack of population. Between 1609 and 1890 we lost 10,476 soldiers in all tribal wars combined. That includes the war of 1812 when Europe was helping.Report
Stolen Land, or an Exodus?
One of them is a ridiculous nonsense, the other is a solemn ritual which should be respected.Report
Wait, which one is ridiculous nonsense?Report
Most white people are comfortable with the Jewish and Christian tales of oppression and martyrdom since the baddies are people long gone.
But mention the Native American genocide and things like the Trail of Tears with Andrew Jackson taking the place of the pharaoh and people lose their sh!t.Report
(What the hell?)Report
I’m genuinely curious; who loses their shit over the subject of Native American genocide and what do they say?Report
Let’s find out!
Does everyone reading this agree that it is important to:
“Use appropriate language. Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonizers.”?Report
In a Stolen Land Acknowledgment?
I think that it’s essential to a proper Stolen Land Acknowledgement.
Would you like me to find you some sources that back me up on this?Report
There are sources that back up that Jaybird thinks something? Who out there follows such things?Report
When it comes to Stolen Land Acknowledgments, here’s a handy guide.
Let me know if you have any questions.Report
This is an interesting source on stolen land acknowledgments. It is not a source on what you, Jaybird, think about them. That you can tell us directly, or not, if you prefer.Report
That this is a good guide for Stolen Land Acknowledgements and a proper Stolen Land Acknowledgement will use appropriate language, not sugarcoat the past, and use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonizers.
There is a right way to do a Stolen Land Acknowledgement and this guide will help you (or anyone) write a good one.Report
@North.
Here’s your example.
The subject makes people uncomfortable, so they resort to sarcasm or jokes about their Native heritage or whatever.Report
I don’t think the joke is the historical treatment of Native Americans. The joke is the dumb white people invoking them.Report
That’s some really weak tea if that’s all you’re referring to. Land acknowledgements, after all, are an eminently mockable form of empty signaling.Report
Isn’t the Jewish tradition of reciting their slavery and exodus a “land acknowledgement”?
Isn’t the children’s Bible story of Christians being fed to lions just an empty virtue signaling of Victimhood Olympics?
Every schoolchild ‘s first history lesson is a ritual retelling about how Team Bad oppressed the Puritans and they came to America seeking freedom.
What is wrong with reciting the truth that Native people have been variously enslaved and slaughtered and driven off their land?
Is anyone going to contest that, or just admonish us for saying it?Report
Exodus is not a “land acknowledgement”.
Like, to the point where I’m seriously questioning whether you know anything about Exodus or whether you read the link that talked about Stolen Land Acknowledgements.
As for Christians being fed to lions, that’s not in the Bible. There’s a story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, but that’s very much a story about a Jewish guy who very much did *NOT* get eaten.
And I don’t recall what my first history lesson was but there’s enough stuff that might make for a good history lesson that The Mayflower is probably pretty far down the list.
What is wrong with reciting the truth that Native people have been variously enslaved and slaughtered and driven off their land?
Depends. There are ways to do this right and ways to do it wrong and, seriously, the link gets into this.
And I say that as someone who views Stolen Land Acknowledgements as performative activism.Report
How can there be a “right way” or “wrong way” to simply state historical facts?
If I recite those fact using terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonizers, is that a “right way” or a “wrong way”?Report
Well, one way to state historical facts the “wrong way” is to introduce error.
Like if I said “Chip Daniels lives in Idawist Springs, Tennessee” and you pointed out “that’s not the name of a real city in Tennessee and you’re not even in the right time zone!” and I said “how can there be a right way or a wrong way to simply state where someone lives?”
Because that’s the level of “wrong way” we’re exploring here.Report
Well, absolutely we should state facts and not errors.
Like, the history of Europeans in American is a history of genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal.Report
I’d say the Jewish tradition of reciting their slavery and exodus is as close to the opposite of a “land acknowledgement” as one can get.Report
EDITED:
Do you think people should offer Stolen Land Acknowledgements?Report
You’re trying to get a straight answer? Good luck.Report
I don’t think we should have them to open a baseball game or when a new Starbucks opens but they strike me as exceptionally appropriate when, for example, land is given by the government back to Native Peoples.
“Why not at baseball games?”
Because they strike me as performative activism in, like, 99% of cases. It’s a way to gain clout rather than actually engage with anything.
But, like, if we’re doing something like giving land back or opening a press conference where we announce a Supreme Court case like HAALAND, SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR, ET AL. v. BRACKEEN ET AL., it makes sense to have one there.
99%? Maybe I should have said 99.9%.Report
Well, you’ll be relieved that to know that nary a baseball (or football or basketball or hockey or soccer) game that I’ve ever heard of starts with one.Report
What do you think about them, Kazzy?
Have your students ever heard one given?Report
My students? Not by me. I think maybe someone opened up a staff meeting in 2020 or 2021 with one, but don’t recall specifically and it certainly hasn’t occurred since.
A podcast I listen to offered a form of land acknowledgement for the host and guests at the start and noted that it “felt worth doing on every episode” but then they stopped.
I think there are places and times they’re probably worthwhile but that doing them alone won’t yield much change.Report
I’m sure I’ve posted it here before, but I cannot recommend this book enough, even if it’s not perfect:
I’d also recommend this, in which you get to see, among other things, the genocidal origins of Texas as we know it.Report
I think, for your open question to have value, it would need to be more specific. The term “colonizer” for instance has been brutalized almost as much as the socialist, communist, fascist and racist terms have been.
For instance, the treatment of the First Nations peoples in the Americas was absolutely horrific, it surely qualifies as genocide and ethnic cleansing. It is distinguished from all the historically previous acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing that have happened, the world over, only in that we, as a people, became liberal enough to stop doing it before it was completed and thus left survivors through to the present day to remind us of it.Report
The way these seems to work is that by establishing X practice is bad per se, then everybody accused of X practice is bad per se.Report
Genocide means, literally, the killing of a people.
Not killing people, but A people, that is, the destruction of their language, their culture, their identity as a group.
What Russia is attempting in Ukraine is an example of genocide. They are trying to eradicate the very existence of something called Ukraine, and any idea of such a thing as Ukrainian society apart from Russia.
What happened to the Native people in the Americas was most definitely a genocide.Report
“What Russia is attempting in Ukraine is an example of genocide”
This isn’t correct at all. Russia is engaging in a normal war of conquest. If the Ukrainians had not fought back, Putin would have been happy to rule them, not kill them all.
For the term “genocide” to mean anything distinctive, it has to be about actually killing off the people in a category, not just taking over a nation.Report
Genocide is NOT killing a lot of people.
It is about exterminating the existence of a people, even if they live but are forced to abandon their sense of identity.
Start here:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtmlReport
Then go here:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/23/russia-ukraine-cultural-genocide-looting-indoctrination-deporatation/Report
That’s just rhetorical semantic creep, like with “racism”, “torture”, many other examples. Terms that are used for things that everyone agrees are horrible get applied to progressively less horrible (or maybe differently horrible) things, as a rhetorical strategy.
If Russia’s attack on Ukraine is genocide then many historical wars of conquest would have to be reclassified as genocides, which means that the label itself is weakened.Report
If the five named conditions are met, it is genocide no matter how many conflicts fall under the definition.Report
Similar to “torture”, the listed conditions are guides but hardly constitute an unambiguous checklist. There’s a general understanding of the term that they’re trying to capture, and then people will try to fit things into them. Russia accused Ukraine of genocide too — that was part of its justification for the war. But neither side AFAIK is doing what most people think of when they hear that term.Report
Russia is not attempting to take over Ukraine like it did with Poland.
Russia is claiming that there is no such thing as a Ukraine people, they’ve always been Russian. It’s been claiming that internally for years. It’s attempting to absorb, not take over, all of Ukraine.
It’s taking large numbers of children to send them to be raised as Russians. If it wins the Ukrainian people will be scattered within the Russian empire and “real Russians” will be encouraged to move to Ukraine.
It doesn’t want the Ukrainian people dead, it wants them to be Russian. It most certainly does want the Ukraine as a separate identity, much less country, dead.Report
The unfortunate reality of our species is that these questions tend to be litigated by combat.Report
Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was part of Russia for a few centuries — were they genocided then? Do you think Putin has some other aim here than just restoring the Greater Russia of the Soviet era?Report
Technically the modern territory has been split up among several different kingdoms and empires over the centuries, the Russian Empire of course being one but significant chunks have also been part of no longer existing Polish kingdoms and the Habsburg empire/Austria-Hungary. I think you’re right about how Putin sees it but I’m not sure he sees it in a way that is entirely historically accurate.
Ukrainian nationalism has been a pretty muddled project, but then so are they all. Personally I think the clearest proof that Putin is wrong is that the Ukranians are still in the fight, even if it’s with our old kit. We saw what happens to fake states with no legitimacy when we pulled out of Afghanistan.Report
True, the details are complicated — and I certainly am not suggesting that Putin’s actions are anything other than horrible and sad, or that he’s not directly or indirectly responsible for war crimes. I just don’t think “genocide” is an accurate or helpful description of what’s happening.Report
Yeah one thing we can all say with certainty- you can debate whether Ukrainian national identity was a thing pre-Russian invasion but there’s zero doubt it’s a thing now post invasion. See also the war of 1812.Report
There is a tendency with us Americans to shrug off things happening to foreigners which we would never tolerate if applied to us.
Like, for instance, if the Red Dawn scenario came to pass, where China allied itself with Mexico and they jointly decided that the 1850 war was wrongly concluded and launched a military invasion to recapture the southwest portion of the country.
And in this recaptured territory under the Sino/Mexican rule, Spanish was the official language and children were forbidden to speak English at school.
Christianity was outlawed in favor of Buddhism, and children were taken from their parents and enrolled in government boarding schools to cleanse them of their old culture and instill in them the new culture of President Xi .
Property held by Americans would be confiscated and distributed to the new Chinese and Mexican inhabitants, with all place names changed to Chinese or Mexican names.
And history would be re-written to reflect that the Americans welcomed the Chinese as liberators from their old corrupt government.
And so on and so forth, basically doing to Americans what was done to the Native people here, and what Russians are attempting in Ukraine.
It sounds like freaky science fiction to us, because none of us have ever experienced it, but Native Americans and people all across the former Soviet Bloc and across China have vivid memories of that very thing happening.
And I don’t doubt for even a second that people like us would immediately call it “genocide”.Report
There is a current argument among some Arab intellectuals and Western Leftists that the Mizrahi Jews were entirely Arabized and saw themselves as Arabs who practiced Judaism rather than Jews. This argument goes on and states that the Mizrahi Jews only started to see themselves as Jews once the evil Zionists came along an reawakened their Jewish consciousness.
Besides being completely wrong, this line of argument both amuses me and enrages me because it fits the UN genocide definition of genocide but it was the “evil” Zionists who are the bad guys because they resurrected the Jewish identity of Mizrahi Jews. People who wail at the top of their lungs at other cultural genocides are utterly fine with the cultural genocide of a branch of Jews if it can be used against “evil” Zionism.Report
ridiculous nonsense
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then you win.Report
Naomi Klein has apparently given a little speech on the false idol of Zionism. Naturally, the Pro-Palestinian protestors love that some Jews are there and going against Zionism. I really don’t understand what it exactly means to be an anti-Zionist in 2024. Israel has existed since 1948. Half the worlds Jews live in Israel. This isn’t the early 20th century before World War I where Zionism was very much a theoretical idea. It also ignores Arab nationalism and Political Islam as it played out. it just seems really impractical way to approach the I/P conflict.Report
If appealing to deontology didn’t work, why do you think that appealing to utilitarianism will work?Report
I don’t think either will work. I’m just pointing out that there is a certain lack of reality in a lot of the intellectual discourse here. Nobody’s mind is going to change and the song goes on.Report
Lee: I really don’t understand what it exactly means to be an anti-Zionist in 2024.
Probably it means fuzzy thinkings and not well thought out positions.
Logically, if they’re Jewish it probably doesn’t mean “Israel must be destroyed” but rather “Israel must not be an ethno-state”. Like the US is and some of the Western Europe states pretend to be.
How that would happen in practice I have no clue. Both sides agree to live in peace in one state and both agree to not use the state to push Islam/Jewishness.Report
When the best case scenario for an idea is ‘be like Lebanon’ I think it is fair to say that more thought is in order.Report
I think that many of them are thinking like the new state would be more like a Western democracy where people just do holidays and identities are generally worn lightly.Report
Best case scenario is “be like the United States”. They live in the West and consider us to be the norm.
They could copy our Constitution. Separation of Church is state would fix all of these issues… except that no one there wants anything other than an ethno-state.
The United States is the extreme exception, people forget that.Report
Federalism isn’t a great choice for geographically small states and parliamentary systems are generally better than Presidential ones, so I’d say directly copying the United States wouldn’t work out well in some regards. You can’t copy and past constitutions. Local conditions matter. Separation of religion and state is also a bit more complicated in the United States because in many places, the public schools were de facto Protestant schools until the Supreme Court said no to that.
We didn’t have this universally because of federalism and just enough politicians realizing that de facto Protestant schools would be a bad idea everywhere. That didn’t prevent many rank and file American citizens from attempting to create an officially Protestant America and not liking it when they realized they had to allow for religions they don’t like.Report
LeeEsq: and not liking it when they realized they had to allow for religions they don’t like.
DeSantis is in trouble because his “improved book banning” legal machinery has been used to ban the Bible and/or ALL books in the library.
The temptation to use the machinery of the gov to help my group and repress all other groups is very strong.
The United States lucked into this situation because we had a Mexican stand off. No single group was dominate enough to use the state to oppress everyone else and everyone didn’t want to have the state used to oppress them.Report
Speaking of stolen land acknowledgments…
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That’s brilliant!Report