From the IDF twitter feed:
RAW FOOTAGE: This is the moment the Iron Dome intercepted a barrage of rockets over Tel Aviv and central Israel. pic.twitter.com/8jl8OTgWCl
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 11, 2021
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Seriously cool technology. It’s like shooting a bullet with a bullet.
Thank you JB!Report
Freddie wrote about Israel/Palestine.
I don’t agree with him. I certainly don’t agree with his conclusion. But, you know what? He hit a number of points in the essay that were important to hit and he included them with other important points and I don’t know that I’ve seen all of the important points next to each other.
It’s usually the This Side people who pick up This Set of Points and the That Side people who pick up That Set of Points and if you want to read all of the points together, you’re boned.
But he put the points in the same place. Good for him.
Pity about his conclusion.Report
The part he largely skips, or says “it doesn’t matter”, is the segments of the Palestinians who don’t want peace.
Israel could wave a magic wand and make everyone happy and peaceful.
That is a weird conclusion when he spends so much time talking about anti-Semitism in the Pro-Palestinian movement. Hamas doesn’t have issues with anti-Semitism? Really? Israel is just going to make everyone accept peace?Report
His assumption is that the hate is a rational and reasonable response to repression. Oh, the government is killing your children? Well, we’ll just make the government stop killing your children. Now you will stop hating us. Or, at least, hate us less. The next generation will hate us even less! And then the generation after that will just have Tumblr-level complaints but engage in commerce!
Yay! Neoliberalism!Report
Funny how they don’t apply that kind of magical thinking to racism here at home.Report
THEY’RE ENGAGING IN COMMERCE, AREN’T THEY?!?!?!?Report
The hatred predates the occupation. The hatred may have even decreased in recent decades.
I had a culture teacher walk us through where their heads were at and it’s hard to understate just how offensive a Jewish state right there is.
Look at how all the states (excluding Israel) and people around there deal with Atheists. The same cultural issues are there (i.e. Atheists aren’t supposed to exist) but without any of the history of war and so on. Are things all happy or can the Atheists expect to be murdered because they’re not supposed to exist?Report
Freddie is right in one sense that Israel could take unilateral action to de-escalate this current version of the conflict. But there is a synecdoche problem. Who or what is “Israel” in this case? Israel contains ultra-religious zionists, secular conservatives, peaceniks, an Arab minority that constitutes 20% of the population. It is not clear to me that “Israel” is going to get to a point where it can take any kind of unilateral, decisive action. This is in part why Netanyahu’s strategy has been to let the Palestinians linger in a perpetual state of under-development and then escalate militarily when the discontent eventually bubbles up into some sort of active resistance.
To me, Netanyahu’s strategy is a crime against humanity. But it works because his popularity tracks the level of Palestinian resistance. And Israel has had four elections in the last two years and has yet to fully elect a new government.
When you say that “Israel can do X,” you are describing a world that does not exist.Report
“Holding a wolf by the ears” is the analogy that I have heard before. Yes. It is a bad situation. Yes, changing the situation might have some long-term benefits but it has some very painful moments in the short term.
And so we hold this situation for a moment longer.Report
There is an additional level of complexity in that the hands holding the wolf belong to multiple people, who cannot decide amongst themselves how they feel about wolves.Report
He’s more right than not. The Israelis could unilaterally release their grip on Gaza and the West Bank, haul their shrieking settlers back to defensible lines and dig in. The power to do so lies entirely in Israeli hands whatever the Palestinians do.
That would, it bears noting, be a very difficult thing for Democratic Israel to do. The settlers are a powerful political constituency; dragging them out of the territories would be a horrible national experience (and every day they put it off makes it even more horrible) and the highly likely outcome is that the Palestinians would potentially cause no end of trouble from within the territories in terms of hurtled missiles and the like. The Israelis would, no doubt, have to foray back in militarily at least initially. So, a politically difficult, damaging and costly exercise that’d end up leaving Israel, in the near term, suffering from more harassment in their neighborhood. Not hard to see why even a pragmatic politician would shy away from such a course of action (and poitics in Israel favor the right which is not entirely or even mostly pragmatic). At least, then, Israelis would be on more solid ground morally and demographically. They would defuse the bombs that could actually destroy their state in the long term: demographics and apartheid. Scant comfort to the politicians who enacted such a policy and would likely lose their jobs afterwards over it.Report
Israel’s birth rate is more than 3 children per woman. I think the demographic bomb is largely gone.
As for apartheid, presumably they wait for a war and then force enough of the Palestinians out that everyone has pretty contiguous states again. Or alternatively, they do something similar to that gradually.Report
The Palestinian birthrate isn’t exactly low either and if you lump all the Palestinians in the territories in the demographics ain’t good now. The best you can say is the Israeli demographic situation isn’t -currently- getting much worse.
Having to resort to ethnic cleansing, which- let’s not mince words- is exactly what you’re talking about, is literally the problem with apartheid. The danger such a path would present to the Israeli state, at least the current modern globally integrated version of it, would be astronomically greater than any risk presented by simply giving up the land the territories make up and pulling back. Sharon (no liberal there) knew this and acted accordingly. If that blood clot hadn’t felled him he’d have probably done the same in the West Bank.Report
We saw something very similar to this in Israel in 48 & 67. We also saw something similar in all the Arab countries after 48 when they kicked the Jews out.
I don’t see why it would be “more dangerous” than it was then, and the creation of these ethno-states has the advantage of being what both sides want.Report
Israel didn’t start out as an occupying power in 48 or 67 and the balance of power is ludicrously more tilted towards Israel now than then so any war that was started would have to be started by Israel since there’s not a state in the neighborhood that’d be idiotic enough(or has even the remote capacity to try) to start a war with Israel.
The Arab states that ethnically cleansed their Jewish residents in 48 were A) not modern democratic states integrated into a modern globalized economy and B) didn’t have the internet, modern media or modern sensibilities floating around either.
Israel would have to gut their own sense of self as a liberal democratic state to indulge in an ethnic cleansing war and they’d probably end up with a devastated economy from getting boycotted by most of the Non-US west (and the US itself would be an open question). Especially since, in the scenario you’re talking about, they also ethically cleanse their own Israeli Arab citizens. Would it destroy the country? No, likely not, but I’d say it’d be an open question as to if they’d be recognizable to what we know Israel to be today.
Comparing that to the risk of dragging their settlers off a few hundred square miles of desert and urban wasteland and pulling back behind a modified border? It’s pretty much a no brainer and they’d end up with a mostly Jewish state as well.Report
Hamas, the elected gov of Gaza, has fired something like 700 rockets at Israel and has a policy that all Jews are fair game. All they have to do is get better at killing or develop WMDs.
They’re not angry enough at the moment. Picture Hamas putting nerve gas on rockets and launching them into cities, or just blowing up some skyscraper 911 style.
I’m assuming a messy war on the apartheid areas with the civilians fleeing.
At the moment it’s a lot easier to picture a messy war than Israel standing up to its own settlers. Now we’ve seen leaders every now and then who thought something like your idea was the-answer, so there’s that.Report
Hamas, the whatever you might call it of Gaza can barely get crude rockets into the air and keep the lights on. If the managed to smuggle nerve gas in to mount on a rocket it’d end up blown up on the iron dome. Hamas isn’t capable of any kind of sustained combat that’d give Israel cover to start attacking Arab civilians within their borders or the West Bank. If it’s a trumped-up terrorist cell there’s no war and without a war there’s no excuse. You’d need a nation state neighboring Israel with the capacity to go toe to toe with them for a little while. There simply isn’t one.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I agree Israel isn’t where it needs to be politically at the moment but Sharons administration wasn’t that long ago and Israeli politics are a kaleidoscope. Anything could happen. Whereas the last time Israel did anything even remotely ethnic cleansing like was during the dawn of their state. Frankly I feel like you have a lower opinion of the Israelis than I do.Report
They dragged them out of Gaza, the Palestinians swooped in and immediately burned a former synagogue to the ground (instead of, you know, turning it into a Museum of Atrocity Against Palestinians), and this stuff got posted all over the news.
I had someone explain to me that this was a dirty trick on Israel’s part because Israel knew that something like this would happen and so therefore was ready to capitalize on it.Report
I acknowledged in advance that the Israelis’ couldn’t expect any good behavior from the Palestinians in the short term after vacating. The reality of being rid of the territories and responsibility for the non-Jewish peoples that live there is the reward.Report
No, I know you did.
I was just actively being irritated at the idea that leaving would fix a goddamn thing.Report
Leaving would fix a number of things for the Israelis and while it wouldn’t, particularly, fix a lot of things for the Palestinians it would eliminate a huge block that bars the Palestinians from fixing things for themselves.Report
If leaving won’t fix things for the Palestinians then why do it? It ain’t the Israelis’ problems that are leading to rocket bombardments of civilian populations.Report
Removing gangrenous decay from your arm wound won’t fix that you have an arm wound but it is a necessary step to addressing ones arm wound. The Palestinians are ultimately responsible for their own welfare but they aren’t/can’t going to be able to work on that until they don’t have Israel both stepping on their necks and providing an excuse not to get started at it.Report
“Removing gangrenous decay from your arm wound won’t fix that you have an arm wound but it is a necessary step to addressing ones arm wound.”
congratulations, you have compared the Palestinians to a gangrenous arm wound
maybe wanna workshop that metaphor someReport
Heheh, if you wanna try and go that torturous interpretation route you’d probably be asserting I’m comparing the Israeli occupation to a gangrenous arm wound. So I’d be an anti-Semite rather than an islamophobe.Report
I was thinking about this in the car and I think that part of this is due to how effed up everything is.
It’s true that Israel pulling out of the settlements is not a silver bullet.
This does not mean that Israel shouldn’t pull out of the settlements.
It strikes me that there are 4 or 5 things that need to be done and some things need to be done On Both Sides and neither side really has reason to trust the other and do what they need to do until they see that the other has done their part.
And why in the hell should you bend over backwards for the other guy when he hasn’t even made an overture for doing his part?Report
This is where Freddie’s point has some merit though. Israel has the power to make an overture. It would be very hard but I don’t think impossible, as North’s point on the Gaza pullout illustrates. I do not think the Palestinians realistically have the capacity to do anything unilaterally which is why the demand that they do is pointless.
Of course I believe we’ve passed the point of no return where this will be Bosnia x 1000000. Not a matter of if, just when.Report
Agreed. I mean the Palestinians could make some of the painful rhetorical concession the Israeli right demands but then the Israeli right would just shift their goalposts to even more intolerable demands.
As with neocons and the hawks in Iran we should remember that the extremists by and large like the status quos and cooperate with each other to sustain it. So it is with Hamas and the settlers.Report
Yeah, the problem is that “The Palestinians” consists of multiple distinct groups and the easiest distinction is between the West Bank Palestinians (diaspora! educated! urbane!) and the Gaza Strip Palestinians (poor, rural… remember when NPR did a story about the 2018 protests and they stumbled across a group of Palestinians flying kites with swastikas on them? That was Gaza).
Global Neoliberalism can play ball with the West Bank. Hey, we all went to the same schools and watched the same episodes of Gilmore Girls, right?
It’s the Gazans that are the Trumpy ones that you just can’t reach. I mean, NPR went there and practically *BEGGED* them to stop being unsympathetic! Nope. This ain’t about you, Inskeep! This is about Them!
And that’s why I think we need a 3 state solution but to even say that out loud outs me as nuts.Report
It would be very helpful if the refugee camps were closed. We have grand children of people displaced in the war of ’48 waiting for Israel to be destroyed.
The Right to Return, especially applied to descendants, has been a disaster in terms of peace. There are strong arguments that it’s the rock that killed the 2000 Camp David Summit.Report
Dark, I believe that the focus on the unachievable demands of the Palestinian side is a massive red herring. Most of the people harmed are either dead or old and dying. If Israel withdrew from the West Bank and removed its settlers to the pre 1967 borders or something very close to it* no one else in the world would care much about who owned what or lived where in 1946 or 1966. The moral revulsion is about the treatment of people happening today. End that and Israel suddenly has a very strong claim to the moral high ground.
And if the Palestinians wanted to continue to focus on those issues and fail to govern themselves when given the opportunity sympathy for them will plummet. But Israel has made a different choice, which to be clear, I wouldn’t give two s—s about but for the US government’s sponsorship.
*Obviously there would remain an issue with Jerusalem but hopefully negotiations on that subject would become much more workable without an ethnic cleansing campaign in the background.Report
This is trying to pretend the other side doesn’t mean what they say and they’ll be reasonable no matter how often they’ve insisted and demonstrated that they really do believe what they say.
Arafat walked away because of the RoR. For that to make sense, he must have thought giving it up would be very divisive and he’d even be killed. There are large numbers of refugees in camps waiting for Israel to be destroyed. This is a recruiting ground for the most radical.
We view the RoR as an insane fantasy, but for some people, it’s their world.
There is no chance for peace as long as RoR is viewed as reasonable + important. It will be “reasonable + important” until a few generations after the refugee camps are closed.
I remember when building a wall was Israel forever giving up the moral high ground. Ditto whenever they stop terror attacks by shooting people.
Seizing the moral high ground is less important than keeping boots on neck. Granted, doing that instantly creates the problem that the settlers take advantage of the situation and do their thing.
You mean sympathy will drop for them in the West. Everyone who is using them as cannon fodder will presumably continue to do that.
It’s not clear to me whether we’d get a copy of Jordan or Gaza-on-steroids.Report
You’re proving my point. Neither the Palestinians nor any ally of theirs has the ability to force a RoR on Israel. They literally cannot do it due to Israel’s complete military supremacy. Seriously, who do you think is going to make them? Arafat’s ghost? The dudes firing home-made rockets Israel is swiping away in this video? The regional players who failed spectacularly in the 60s and are in a far worse position to try it today than they were then?
Conversely, Israel can remove the settlers. They did it in Gaza, they can do it in the West Bank, or as I said, something close enough to it. It’s their choice, 100%.
The wall is irrelevant, other defensive measures at that line are irrelevant. Regarding those you believe use them as cannon fodder, see above on Israel’s complete military supremacy.Report
The issue came up in the context of “what could the Palestinians (Arabs) do unilaterally?”
My answer is close the camps so people can get on with their lives and eventually the “need” for RoR will die. The only reason to keep the camps open is to maintain a militant population who CAN’T make peace with Israel.
If the conversation needs to be “what can the Palestinians force/do/inflict on the Israelis in their never ending quest for RoR” then the conclusion is Israel needs complete military supremacy just to function and acts which empower the Palestinians will result in dead Jews.
Those home made rockets are the best they can do and a result of Israel handing control of Gaza to the Palestinians. To deal with that, Israel goes to war every few years.
So serious question, do these frequent wars put Israel on the “moral high ground”? If the Palestinians were 10x more powerful and the wars thus 10x more bloody, would Israel still have the moral high ground?
I think Israel loses the high ground because it’s strong and it’s opponents are weak, and wars aren’t supposed to kill civilians. Certainly Freddi was pretty clear about his reasoning.Report
I’m lost on the point you’re making. Sure the Palestinians can close the camps but the camps have nothing to do with the annexation and settlement of territory. Whether they remain open or closed has no bearing on that. They certainly are not the reason Israel has achieved and maintains both conventional military supremacy and nuclear weapons. I take it as a given they will continue to do that in perpetuity, settlements or not, camps or not.
The home made rockets are ineffectual and an incredibly poor excuse to continue settlement. If attacks continue to be mounted against Israel proper from an abandoned West Bank Israel can defend itself without annexing and colonizing. Again you’re picking at a side comment I made without addressing the core issue of control over settlement.Report
With the camps open, there can be no peace. Arafat showcased that.
Without peace, handing more power to the Palestinians just creates more terrorism.
Since the Palestinians won’t be happy with anything Israel can do, they might as well be unhappy with less.
That is the massive opening that the settlers are exploiting. If peace isn’t an option, then the settlements are irrelevant to the peace process (yes, really), but do make the settlers happy.
The rest of Israel could stand up to the settlers for peace, but they can’t if all it’s going to do is make more dead Jews.Report
This is the classic inversion. If Palestinians or anyone else want to destroy Israel, as you assert, they do and as no small number of them wish to, then they would want the settlements to continue, they would wish for the occupation to continue. That is the only realistic long-term threat to Israel that’s on the table. So, saying that Israeli withdrawal should be predicated on actions the Palestinians/Arabs take then that’s giving Palestinians/Arabs the power to dictate whether Israel must roll the dice on its long-term survival. That’s insane. Of course, Arab powers would never take that deal. They’re perfectly content to sacrifice any number of Palestinians to roll the dice of undermining Israel.
The politics of Israel withdrawing from the territories are brutal. Of course, the Israelis would like to get something from the Arabs/Palestinians in exchange for withdrawing. But the benefits of withdrawing are obvious on their own merits even if the Israeli’s get nothing. The Israeli’s are essentially saying “pay me to remove this timebomb I have strapped across my chest.” Of course, the Arabs and Palestinians aren’t going to do that! It’d be great if someone dropped by and handed me a C-note every morning for brushing my teeth. No one does that. That doesn’t mean I stop brushing my teeth- bruthing my teeth is in my interest even without additional incentive.
The rockets are, and always will be, an empty excuse. The Israelis would be fully capable of going in and mowing down people launching rockets at them. If they withdrew from the West Bank and the Palestinians there ended up exclusively responsible for their own wellbeing without the Israeli occupation to blame the odds are pretty good, they’d have at least some development and actually have something to lose when the Israelis came in and flattened the area around rocket attacks. That’d actually give them a personal reason to oppose rocket attacks in Israel. Currently? No reason at all.Report
I’m old enough to remember this same logic being used on why Israel should withdraw from Gaza.
The next questions should be “what went wrong”, and “is it unreasonable to expect that to happen again?”Report
Ummm… nothing “went wrong” Israel withdrew from Gaza and now the Gazan Palestinian population is at absolutely zero odds of being integrated into Israel proper and no one of consequence has much sympathy for Gazans (there is some chat about the blockade but *shrugs* the Gazans keep hurtling rockets despite it so not much will come of that).Report
So Gaza is an example of things going right and we should repeat the experiment? 🙂
I’d say that the idea that the “locals will insist on development and hold the powers that be responsible” hasn’t worked out for them.
I failed to figure out if the body count went up or down after Israel pulled out. I also failed to figure out the GDP, but the piecemeal information that is available is suggestive of bad things. Without the large amount of aid and resources being sent in, we’d probably have starvation and other problems. The openly genocidal religious fanatics proved popular enough to win elections, and then the wheels came off.
If we’re going to limit “good outcomes” to just Israel, I think (but can’t prove) that the number of dead/terrorized people went up. I’m not sure if Israel’s withdrawal got them any “moral high ground” credits because they still need to go in and kill human shields every now and then.
If the expected outcome to a West Bank withdraw is a second gaza but with more people+resources then it’s not clear to me that this is a good thing, much less worth the massive political pain standing up to the settlers would entail.
In Gaza, yeah, long term Hamas won’t be joining the State of Israel (so that problem is fixed), but it’s not clear to me that was an immediate problem.Report
Gaza’s a pretty unique case- it’s functionally an open-air prison since it’s cut off by Israel’s blockade from the rest of the world and since it’s cut off from the West Bank as well when Hamas took over that was that and wasn’t going to change.
As I previously noted- Israel would be unilaterally withdrawing for Israel’s sake. They don’t have any obligation to keep the Palestinians from having Hamas running things (nor could they prevent it if they tried). So, Hamas doing a shit job governing is entirely incidental to the case for unilateral withdrawal.
As for Israeli deaths since the Gazan withdrawal- Hamas has scored a very small number of kills via rockets or tunnel-based raids. If you want to claim that’s more Israeli’s killed than would have been killed if the Gazan settlers and occupation forces had stayed in Gaza I think you’re nuts but let’s be generous and call it a wash.
The Gazan withdrawal eliminated any chance what so ever of over 2 million Palestinians who lived there being integrated into the Israeli polity in the future and the Israeli state holds pretty limited control over them. That is an enormous benefit for the long-term survival of the Israeli Jewish state AND it was achieved with none of the ethic cleansing or purging you casually suggested elsewhere. That’s an astronomical win from an Israeli point of view. Yes, they have Gaza occasionally shooting rockets at them. That’s an annoyance a threat to their survival. So, the Israelis traded a long-term existential threat and turned it into a near term nuisance. That is unambiguously a success for the Israeli state even though the outcome was pretty much as bad as the Palestinians could make it.
Now I’m pretty strongly dubious that a West Bank withdrawal could be expected to produce outcomes as poor as Gaza. The new Palestinian government would not be particularly eager to have the Israeli’s come in and mow them down if they became a launch pad for rockets. But withdrawal would ethically eliminate the possibility of another 2.7 million Palestinians from prospective integration into a future Israeli state. It’d also mean all those refugee camps you were talking about could close- they could just go back to Palestine. Even in the unlikely event that the West Bank became some kind of failed state that shot rockets at Israel now and then the Israelis would be astronomically better off in the long term than they’d be clutching the West Bank to their proverbial chest. The only two realistic threats to their survival as a Democratic Jewish State (apartheid and Demographics) would be off the table pretty much entirely.
Obviously politically it’d be an extremely difficult thing for the Israelis to do, but in terms of the welfare of their state and its future it’s a no brainer. Not even close.Report
More grimly than casually. BTW, you make a strong argument and present it well. Two amusing side notes here.
First, forcibly removing hundreds(?) of thousands of settlers from their homes sounds a lot like ethnic cleansing.
2nd, why are we assuming they need to be removed? Israel sets its borders. Keeps the land it wants (which would presumably include the larger settlements but whatever).
Then it asks the settlers to come back. They will refuse. Israel then leaves them to be minorities in the new Arabic country.
IMHO there’s an unspoken belief that they’d be killed. That’s charmingly ironic considering supposedly Israel doesn’t have the moral high ground right now.Report
Thanks, this is an old debate in some of my social circles. I have some Jewish RL friends and the Israeli question is a favored, argument over drinks, subject.
Ethnic Cleansing is defined as “the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society.” So the removal of Jewish settlers is not only not ethnic cleansing but is probably as close as you can come to the diametric opposite of ethnic cleansing. Instead of expelling them you’re pulling them back into your state; instead of their being an undesirable ethnic or religious group they’re a highly desirable (to Israel) ethnic and religious group and instead of them being expelled from your society they’re being brought closer into same society. I don’t know if there’s even a word for it. Decolonization? Ethnic repatriation?
Israel could, absolutely, demand the settlers return and threaten to leave them there if they refuse. This is, however, an empty threat and all sides know it. The settlers would not return, they wouldn’t accept the authority of the Palestinians over them, they’d arm up into fortified camps and then, when it inevitably came to blows, there’s virtually no way the Israelis would stand idly by while they were killed. Israel is no more capable of withdrawing from a territory and leaving Jewish residents to die than it is ethnically cleansing its Arabic citizens. They just wouldn’t do it and the settlers know it.
Now, if the Palestinians had even a quarter of a way functional governmental system in the West Bank maybe some arrangement could be made that the settlers would hate and the Israelis could live with. That isn’t the case. I’m dubious the Palestinians are capable of developing a healthy state apparatus under their current conditions- they’ve certainly not been able to so far. I don’t know that I can, exactly, blame them for that. It’s a tall order. But those realities are what exists on the ground.Report
Israel could theoretically defend itself from rocket fire from the West Bank if they continue after a withdrawal but I think there would be a lot of diplomatic pressure for Israel to take a stiff upper lip at the rocket attacks. The activist set will also complain, protest, and petition heavily for Israel to be punished for responding just like they did with the Gaza rocket attacks.Report
And I’m really unmoved by the idea that the rocket barrage doesn’t matter because they are mainly ineffectual. Enough of them still make going about normally impossible. They still do property damage in massive amounts and can wound and even kill on occasion.
It’s like all the activists who say that Jews shouldn’t get so concerned about rallies where “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews” are common chants. We should take them seriously rather than literally or assume that these are just ritualistic expressions like the Pledge of Allegiance that nobody really believes in. Despite Jews being subjected to a genocide and all that.Report
It’s important to note here that they’re shooting rockets up, rather than down.Report
It’s like the “Kill All Men” thing from 2015.
You need to understand that, sometimes, historically oppressed people will engage in hyperbole.Report
What would they need to do to convince us it’s not hyperbole?
Have official leaders explain it’s not hyperbole? Target civilians and children for death? Engage in terrorism? Have a charter that reads like Mein Kampf and genocide-is-the-plan? Have wars for the express purpose of killing everyone and destroying the country? Kill/mistreat minorities where they do have the power (say in their own countries)?
They lack the power to engage in genocide, however that’s all they lack.Report
Quit being so thin-skinned.Report
Funny how this alleged right to hyperbole never extends to the Jews.Report
Never ever?Report
The Palestinians can’t force a RoR but they can refuse to sign any agreement that doesn’t include it.Report
I said that the rockets aren’t an excuse for annexation of territory. And they aren’t. I never said they aren’t a justification for retaliation.
Regarding an agreement this entire discussion is about what Israel has the power to do without one. Admittedly it isn’t a perfect parallel but the way you and Dark are treating the RoR is like saying ‘al-Quaeda would never sign a peace treaty with the United States and therefore we have no choice but to occupy Afghanistan forever.’ It simply doesn’t follow.Report
What are the alternatives? Walk away and live with the occasional 911-but-not-with-planes? If that’s the alternative, then yes, we stay there forever. In the real world we have an ocean between us so maybe we can make walking away work.
But every rocket attack on Israel terrorizes tens of thousands of civilians. Giving up the West Bank, at worst, means all of Israel is subject to that sort of thing.
So… are we comfortable with Israel dropping a billion dollars of economic damage on the West Bank every time they’re terrorized?Report
Your first queation is a false choice. There are other methods of combating terrorism, and plenty of evidence that our military occupations and adventurism are actually exacerbating it.
To your second question I don’t personally care what they do as long as our government gets its nose out. But that aside, if we’re talking about pure costs I can’t think of anything more expensive long term than indefinite occupation. It’s certainly way pricier than periodic retaliatory attacks and air strikes. What they’re doing now is at absolute best penny wise, pound foolish.Report
“So… are we comfortable with Israel dropping a billion dollars of economic damage on the West Bank every time they’re terrorized?”
Let’s be real here. The answer to that question in a world where Israel has withdrawn from the West Bank is an unambiguous yes. Yes the normal suspects on the far left would shriek but Israel could and does ignore those voice. With withdrawal there’d be no oomph behind allegations of apartheid and absolutely no demograpic threat. If West Bank Palestinians tolerated rockets being launched into Israel from there then the Israelis could promptly level a couple blocks around where the rockets were launched from and, outside the fringe left, the rest of the world would shrug and say “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
Also a unilateral Israeli withdrawal would also eliminate the right of return question. Palestinians in the camps could move to the West Bank. If they carped and demanded something in Israel then the Israelis would say “Nope, go to Palestine (the West Bank.” And, again, the world would shrug.Report
“They would defuse the bombs that could actually destroy their state in the long term: demographics and apartheid.”
Freddie is attempting to navigate a domestic ‘Thucydides Trap.’ Basically he’s arguing that Israeli Hegemony today is the reason why they should ‘devolve’ power *now* in a sharing agreement that brings along the upcoming power and aligns them with a peaceful transition to a Palestinian ‘Secular’ State with a Jewish Minority that’s integral and integrated.
If they don’t do it (now), then either that demographic has to be more forcibly removed/expelled or the upcoming power will eventually go to war themselves against the decaying hegemon — and defeat the old regime with usually catastrophic results.
It’s possible to navigate this, but, usually ends in war… I’m less sanguine than Freddie about the powers of Secular Liberalism to act as a magic balm. I see his logical steps of why it might, but they are laden with assumptions and, honestly, counterfactuals to lived experience in the region.
Which is to say, I thought his diagnosis of the interior dynamics of his faction forthright and honest… the obvious parallels and cross-parallels to US political dynamics is probably the better use of this article… But like most of us, the diagnosis is easier than the cure.Report
I concur and, despite being a secular liberal myself, I think his idea of a a secular non-sectarian state is pie in the sky idealistic and unrealistic.
Yes, his musings on the lefts interplay was quite interesting as well. He doesn’t let his own side off the hook. I’m gratified you gave him a read.Report
The intra-left-activist interplay is interesting but I think also discrediting in terms of inability to identify actual parallels, current and historic. Iraq was stupid and immoral but the similarities to what’s going on in the occupied territories are superficial. The only time anything remotely like it happened here smallpox did all of the heavy lifting. Though I guess their inability to understand that is pretty telling about where that type of activism is and why it has so much trouble getting a seat at the table.Report
I think this is mainly because if the Pro-Palestinian faction in the West admits at least a decent percentage or even a plurality of Palestinians want at least a sort of serious Islamic theocracy, the entire situation becomes hopeless for them. Why would any Jew in Israel/Palestine want to end up like the other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East. It would be totally irrational even if they were sympathetic to the Palestinians.
This is why the Pro-Palestinian faction in the West need to ignore the existence of Hamas and Islamic theocratic politics? Who could object to a multicultural secular Palestine in good faith? To their mind, nobody. On the other hand, the Arab Islamic Republic of Palestine is very objectionable and even the most sympathetic of Jews to the Palestinians are going to want no part of it unless they happen to be ultra-Orthodox Jews who think this could increase their power over the Jewish community.
Another factor that the Pro-Palestinian faction in the West misses is that the demographic parity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is a lot greater than the 9 to 1 demographic of Blacks to Whites in South Africa.
The much greater number of Black South Africans to White South Africans allowed for a relatively easy crafting of a new national narrative after Apartheid ended. The more equal demographic parity between Jews and Arabs, along with the fact that you are dealing with Jews who can clame both a historical-religious connection to Israel/Palestine and a long history of persecution rather than a standard white person, is going to make forming a new national narrativ tough as nails.Report
rather than a standard white person
I’d avoid using this phrase.
There are more and more non-standard white people every day.Report
Only an infinitesimal number.Report
This column is yet another example of “Freddie realizes he’s saying something that’s sorta like what Republicans say, and he zooms off on a weird tangent in an attempt to avoid saying something that’s exactly like what Republicans say, because he’s a Conflict thinker and to him if you say what X says then you’re an X”Report
From Gal Gadot:
Be sure to check out the quote tweets!Report
Since I now have friends from real life who have very strong Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine opinions, I get to observe two alternative realities develop in real time. My Pro-Israeli friends see this as brave Israel fighting dastardly Hamas. My Pro-Palestinian friends portray this as the Palestinians raising up against evil colonial Israel. The fact that this conflict has been totally mythologized doesn’t make resolution easier.Report
I studiously avoid commenting on posts regarding Israel/ Palestine because it reminds me very much of the Irish Troubles in the 80s.
The commentary, that is. I recall reading articles and essays written by both Loyalist and Nationalist partisans, and coming away with a heavy sense of pessimism. Their grievances were real, their claims to victimhood real, and each seemed to conform in some ways, to the other’s depictions of them- intransigent, triumphalist, near-genocidal.
But the voices I was hearing were the voices of those with a vested interest in triumphalism, that victory was just one car bomb away, one more sweep of IRA car bombers, and all would end well.
I don’t really know what broke that dynamic, or it it was even broken or just subdued temporarily.
But when I look at the situation in Israel, I can’t wrap my head around anyone who sees triumph as being achievable. It seems like a stalemate without any winning moves, yet without any sense of fatigue on either side.Report
Israel is pretty much like the situation in Northern Ireland but you even have more people who really shouldn’t have much emotionally invested in the conflcit approach it with way too much concern. Nearly every Jew is basically pro-Israel, although there is decent sized anti-Zionist Jewish community, the other Arabs and Muslims generally are in it for the Palestinians, and way too many activist sorts get really emotionally invested despite not being a Jew, an Arab, or a Muslim. To the activst set Israel is “capitalist white settler-colonial state oppressing the non-white wretched of the earth Palestinians.”
Speaking of bombings, I’m still kind of surprised that there seems to be a large number of activists who believe that repeated spectacular terrorist attacks will cause the side that they don’t like to “reconsider their evil ways and ponder the enormity of what they have done.” You saw this with the Pro-Catholic side in the Troubles, anti-American activists after 9/11, and the Pro-Palestinian side in the Israel-Palestinian conflict and many other places probably. Why does anybody think this, I don’t know.
They also seem really confused that most politicians seem to believe that it in their best electoral interests to react strongly against terrorist attacks, especially big spectacular ones. Like if any politician told the American people that the best response to 9/11 was to clean up the damage, go about with our lives, and otherwise do nothing because the cost of revergence was too high that politican would be really out of office fast. Same with other terrorist attacks.Report
Rage Against The Machine has chimed in. Hey! Guys! Maybe stick to music!
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When did they rescheduled their Reunion Tour show at the Capitol One Arena again, cause that was an all-timer of a promoted ad…Report
SPICY!
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One thing that all the mythologization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict obscures is that the entire Israeli-Arab conflict, and I mean the entire thing from start to now with every participant country involved, is one of the least bloody ethnic conflicts of the 20th and 21st century but a lot of people care so much about it you would think the number of deaths is in the millions. Somewhere between 100,000 to 276,000 people died in the Sri Lankan Civil War. The Yugoslav Wars killed 140,000 people between 1991 and 2001. The First and Second Congo Wars killed in the millions. By contrast, the entire Israeli-Arab conflict had only slightly above 100,000 fatalities from the Israeli War of Independence to the present.
By late 20th century standards, the Israeli-Arab conflict is on the low end but you would think the numbers would be a lot higher. The only reason why the Israel-Palestinian conflict is given so much attention because of how much it was turned into a myth. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians represent a lot of archetypes to their friends and enemies. The Holy Land is involved. Millions of people who shouldn’t be invested are invested in the conflict.Report
I’m just really getting frustrated with Leftist anti-Zionists. They really do treat Jews very differently than they do nearly every other oppressed group. They want to use our history of persecution as an appeal so we support their causes but when Jews try to fight for the rights of the Jewish people they just call us selfish and self-interested. They do not do this with any other oppressed group, who seems to have the right to fight for their own group. They just do it with the Jews. When Jews need help, we just get to be a bunch of selfish white people.
I was trying to argue with somebody on another blog about what does she thing will happen to the Jewish people after WWII without Israel. My point was that MENA Jews would end up in the same perilous position that Christians and other minorities in the Middle East are in, entirely dependent for protection on deal with the devil from a venal or batshit dictator. Either that or we support democracy and just endure what the Islamic theocrats would put us through. Most of the European Jews that survived the Holocaust would find themselves stuck in the Eastern Bloc and under Communist dictatorship hellbent on oppressing them but the global Human Rights Community would care no more than they did for the Soviet Jews because there were more important things to fight for. The Ethiopian Jews would be totally screwed.
The person was predictably unmoved and basically said that liberal Jews shouldn’t support “genocide and oppression” because it was good for the Jews. They just really should come clear. If they really believe that Jews are a lesser oppressed group than the Palestinians, African-Americans, Native-Americans, or any other group that they can thing of and we really don’t have the same rights that the other wretched of the earth have than they should come out and say so. They should say that we need to get a kick in the ass and take a big gamble even if it results in even more pain and destruction for us and they really don’t care if we find being Jews in state heavily dominated by Muslim imagery oppressive or not.Report
All countries have separation of church and state.
All state use of force (especially the army) is wrong and unjust.
Everyone (except the GOP) is reasonable.
All cultures are equal and just for show.
If those are your core beliefs, maybe even so core you don’t understand you have them, then what Israel does is going to look heinous.Report