Joe Biden Agrees that Some People *DO* Deserve the Death Penalty
On his way out of the door, Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row inmates from The Death Penalty to Life in Prison.
It means just three federal inmates are still facing execution. They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.
By refusing to commute the sentences of Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers, he seems to be agreeing that there are people who do deserve the death penalty, it’s just that these three meet the standard and the other 37 prisoners do not.
Gallop’s poll on the Death Penalty in 2023 communicated that Americans’ support for the death penalty was the lowest in five decades.
So this decision of Biden’s seems to be mostly in line with public opinion.
Let’s meet a few of the lucky ones and their commutable crimes.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/23/us-news/biden-commutes-death-sentences-of-child-killers-and-mass-murderers-2-days-before-christmas/
“Thomas Sanders, who in 2010 kidnapped and then shot 12-year-old Lexis Roberts four times and cut her throat in Louisiana — days after the girl watched as Sanders murdered her mother on a road trip near the Grand Canyon.”
“Anthony Battle, who murdered an Atlanta prison guard with a hammer in 1994 while serving a life sentence for raping and murdering his wife, a US Marine, in 1987 at Camp Lejeune, NC.”
“Jorge Avila-Torrez sexually assaulted and stabbed to death two girls — Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9 — who had been riding their bicycles in their neighborhood in a suburb north of Chicago in 2005. Four years later, he strangled naval officer Amanda Snell, 20, inside her barrack in Arlington, Va.”
“Iouri Mikhel, another clemency recipient, was convicted of murdering five Russian and Georgian immigrants after kidnapping them for ransom, which in some cases was paid before he killed them anyway.”
“Kaboni Savage, meanwhile, was convicted of committing or ordering the deaths of 12 people including four children as a Philadelphia drug dealer”
“James Roane, Jr. participated in the murder of 11 people as a drug dealer in Richmond, Va.”Report
He’s leaving them in prison. We’re just done with the idea that we’re going to be executing those guys so we’re done with the expensive fighting about it.
One of the big arguments against the death penalty is we don’t seem able to do it right. We convict someone and then spend the next 30 years navel gazing over whether or not we’re going to kill them.Report
It’s also very interesting the crazy spectrum that exists there. Anthony Battle raped one person and murdered two.
Now, this is, uh, very very bad, but I promise you, people do not _normally_ get the death penalty for that. A lot of people do not even get ‘prison without the chance of parole’ for that!
He notable was sentenced to death just for the prison guard murder, in 1997, after already being in prison. This is…kind of crazy, honestly. There are people who have killed prison guards out on the street 27 years later, and he was on death row.
And, look, maybe people feel those crimes deserve it, but if they do, the system is just completely broken in the other direction, because the vast vast vast majority of people convicted for that level of stuff are not sentenced to death.
The death penalty makes absolutely no sense when it is so erratically applied. We just pick one random guy…often, it must be pointed out, a very poor one who cannot afford a lawyer, often is a minority, and just…sentence that guy as hard as humanly possible, and then spend decades trying to figure out how to actually do the sentence.
Hey, do people know that between the start of the modern Federal death penalty in 1998 and it being paused in 2021, almost half of all Federal death sentences came from Missouri, Texas, and Virginia? And 10 of the actual 16 executed. Those states, put together, have only 15% of the US population. And…both Texas and Missouri are moderately high in violent crimes, 12th and 8th respectively per 100,000, but that’s not that high, and Virginia is way down at 42th. That feels…weird, doesn’t it? This is the Federal death penalty, I won’t say it should be identical across the states, but should it be that different? (Is the reason that Virginia is on that list is that Washington is right there?)
Meanwhile other people are getting 5-10 years for a murder, and even the absolute worst murdery ones are getting life without parole.Report
He didn’t PARDON these people. He commuted their death sentences to life sentences. Have you enjoyed the accommodations in Federal prison lately? These folks will now get that, until the unconstitutionally shitty medical care there kills them.Report
Sometime in January 2025… ‘Yes Your Holiness, I was deeply moved by your teachings and my conscience moved me to act as far as my Interns would permit.’
Carefully calculated to apply no general principal nor satisfy any particular good nor mollify any constituency at all. The Biden Presidency in a nutshell.Report
Of course some people deserve the death penalty…it’s just that we really don’t come anywhere close to administering it in any equitable, meaningful, timely fashion. It doesn’t work. Get rid of it.Report
I believe that the counter argument is “mend it, don’t end it”.
Figure out how to do it in an equitable, meaningful, timely fashion. We need more equity!Report
I never know what to do with that one. Is the ask to kill more people? It sounds like the concept for a Slayer album.Report
In practical terms, which are the only ones that matter here, yes.Report
“In practical terms” you have lost the pro-death penalty argument long ago. On the relatively rare occasion that it is actually applied, it may be somewhat emotionally satisfying, but in any practical terms, what a waste of time, money and effort.Report
That’s missing the point of the comment. I’m personally against the death penalty because, among other reasons, it’s clear there’s no way to have it without occasionally killing an innocent (or at least not guilty of the capital offense) person. It’s not a price worth paying.
The point is that arguing about ‘equity’ or whatever, in this context, is plainly ridiculous. The government could solve that one by deciding to execute more people, rather than fewer or none at all.Report
Of course the government can’t simply “decide” to execute more people. Courts, appeals, more courts, more appeals. That’s where any deciding is being done. I understand you are against the penalty, but do you envision even the possibility of some law being passed that says “o.k., stop arguing, just do it already”? (Well, hell, upon re-reading, yes, I can imagine the possibility — dictators do it all the time. Yet another reason to cancel the whole mind-set.)
I am firmly against the death penalty as well, but largely because it is beyond our human capabilities to do it properly. Innocents, political misfits, sexual sinners, etc., etc., have all been snuffed at various rather irregular times throughout history. There just isn’t any reason to believe that it can be applied in a way that makes any sense. It should be recognized as the failure it has always been and stopped. (“should” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.)Report
I think you think we disagree. I don’t think we do. I was responding to InMD’s question about what the “ask” was, not asking it myself.Report
Years upon years on death row post sentencing, unknown piles of money and effort spent on appeal after appeal. How is all of that not an attempt to “mend it, don’t end it”? When do you finally admit defeat and just let ’em rot in their cells? How is that not satisfactory given that we are simply unable to make the death penalty work in any meaningful way?Report
Because it’s not a utilitarian argument, and it hasn’t been for a while.
(Additionally, the “unknown piles of money and effort spent on appeal after appeal” are seen as some of the problems that have been added to the issue that could be fixed fairly easily by getting rid of them.)Report
Cue the famous H.L. Mencken quotation.Report
Insisting that it be “equitable” is also insisting it be eliminated. Criminals don’t commit crimes by percentage of population nor do we even have a definition on what “equitable” would even mean.Report
In the abortion debate, the hardcore pro-lifers tend to make an argument that takes the form “abortion should be banned”.
What’s the response? Come on, let’s sing Deep Blue Something’s 1993 hit “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”!
BUT I SAID
WHATABOUT
We don’t even need to fill out the next few words, do we?
And if we can get the hardcore guy to agree well, of course, if the mother’s life is in danger… then we can raise an eyebrow and say “well, I guess you’re pro-choice too!”
The people who believe that women should be able to control their own sexual destinies without the interference of dudebros who want to force them into some weird and twisted Handmaid’s Tale fantasy tend to see this argument as a knockdown/drag out rhetorical victory.
Biden just pulled a similar move.
BUT WHAT ABOUT
“Oh, yeah. Okay. He deserves the death penalty.”
Back in 2023, Larry Nassar got shivved in prison. What was the most common response?
It wasn’t “but we don’t know if Nassar was really guilty!”
It wasn’t “Doesn’t Nassar deserve another trial? Maybe the prosecution screwed up somewhere and he was denied a vigorous defense!”
It wasn’t even “this just goes to prove that prisons should have fewer bad people in them with less access to stabbity things and less unsupervised free time!”
It was, and this is a paraphrase, “good”.
And until the pro-life imprisonment (because maybe the criminal will repent and find God) people can overcome the impulse to say “good”, they’re going to be stuck having to use top-down political power to overturn the impulses of the people until they lose access to this top-down political power at which point they’re going to be stuck at square one again, making appeals to a morality that isn’t shared by the people they’re used to talking down to.Report
No he didn’t, for a very simple reason: Democrats, unlike Republicans, do not have to reflectively defend everything their leadership says.
What we have an example here is of what one guy believes. That guy was elected president, so it’s entirely reasonable to say ‘The blame for this (Whatever that would be) is on Democrats’, but it’s not some sort of reasoned implementation of Democratic policy…there are plenty of Democrats and people on the actual left asserting everyone’s sentence should be commuted, some people with ‘most of them should be commuted, but it’s fine to leave some there’ (Aka, what Biden did), and others who basically don’t have an opinion and…honestly, I’m not really seeing any ‘No one’s sentence should be commuted’, there’s not a huge pro-death penalty side over here, but they could exist.
But this isn’t policy. This is something Biden chose to do, by himself. No one else has to defend it, because it’s not a policy position. People with a policy position of ‘The death penalty should be abolished’ have no problem continuing to hold that position, they have not been revealed to be hypocrites or anything.
And even _that_ wouldn’t be hypocrisy unless this commutation was, like, their policy being implemented. Like if Biden stepped up and said ‘I have commuted the sentence of these people and left the others on death row following the guidelines of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who said not to commute the sentence of those last three guys because they’re Really Bad and deserve killing.’. That would be stupid hypocrisy and undermine any argument they had.(1)
You know, in exactly the same way that a party that wants to outlaw something, something they call murder, but clearly do not think of as murder, because they’re willing to let some people do it. That is them having to build a policy, and they put loopholes in it allow some murder. It is perfectly fine to call that out as what it is: They do not actually believe the things they are saying.
1) That organization make a practical argument against the death penalty, not moral, but it would still undermine them if their position is ‘the death penalty is done right ~5% of the time’. That weakens the abolition side quite a lot and just argues for reform.
You keep doing these things that is just vaguely ‘People had this response to one thing, and people had an entirely different response to something else’.
Firstly, perhaps most obviously, people feel different about the power of the state doing something in their own name vs. something just happening. Which is something a lot of people pretend desperately to never understand, notice how opposition to arming Israel is met with ‘You don’t oppose Hamas and they’re as bad’, and everyone just calmly says ‘We probably shouldn’t arm Hamas either!’ There is a difference between something I, or someone claiming to represent me and the system I supposedly have a voice in and a level of control doing something, and just…some dude doing something.
Or to put it in a way conservatives should understand: There is a different between the government doing something and private citizens doing something.
But secondly, there’s absolutely no evidence those are the same people. Some people voiced opinions that Nassar getting killed was a good thing. Those people made noise, and you heard them. And some people voice opinions (In a more formal and louder way, cause this is a real political position) that the death penalty is bad, and you hear them, in fact, they are part of a political debate.
Those are probably not the same people. Some of them might even be part of the same ‘group’ of people, like the Democrats, but that doesn’t make them the actual same people.Report
Oh, and I guess I should point the difference between ‘getting the thing you can practically get’ vs ‘getting what you want’.
There are plenty of times pro-life organizations will support a bill with rape or incest exemptions despite them not approving them. Likewise, it would be fine for anti-death-penalty organizations to support a bill that massively reduces and reforms the death penalty, but does not end it.
If you completely oppose X, and a bill is sitting there that _mostly_ stops X but sometimes allows it, it is entirely reasonable to say ‘I do not like these exceptions, but it is better than nothing.’
The problem arises when they, or politicians who claim to follow their philosophy, are not willing to state the actual conclusion and instead fall short and cave and make exceptions because they think the conclusion would be unpopular.
If you are claiming that something is murdering kids, but women who have very bad crimes happen to them to put them in that position should be _allowed_ to murder kids, you, uh, are really obviously a hypocrite and a lair…or a complete sociopath. But probably just a liar who does not actually believe it is murder, even if you have manage to convince yourself that you do believe it.
Likewise, if you are claiming the death penalty is immoral, that the power of the state should not be allowed to end anyone’s life, that it is immoral to purposefully kill someone…except, like, that one dude over there who did the most bad things, he’s fine to kill…you’re a liar or an idiot.
This is admittedly somewhat trickery WRT a lot of death penalty opposition, which, as you can tell by this very page, is often grounded in more practical complaints, not morality. It would be, I guess, possible to say ‘The death penalty is apply inconsistently and erratically and in a racist and classist manner and costs a lot and doesn’t really do much, but this _particular_ guy really did deserve it’ or even a most consistent ‘the death penalty should only be for terrorism’…but no one’s actually arguing that. Biden might have randomly thought that, and acted on it, but, like, we’re not Biden.Report
Hey, remember the CEO who got shot the other day?
Are you aware of the sentiment behind the folks who don’t say stuff like “murder is bad, actually” but “well, look, life is *REALLY* complicated…” in response to it?Report
Nassar didn’t get killed. He survived and is still down in the Florida federal penitentiary (I think it’s the Florida one).
Maybe he’ll get shivved again. There were a lot more people who got utils from his stabbing than negative ones created by it, so win-win.
What we have an example here is of what one guy believes.
I’m not sure Biden had anything to do with this, quite honestly. I don’t know who was the person who decided to do this, but it wasn’t Biden. There’s a team of people who were behind this and the team is representative of a particular belief system.
To the extent that this belief system is represented by this act, it’s fair enough to call the belief system onto the carpet and judge it.
People who want to defend it can do so. Or claim that “the death penalty is always wrong” is a straw man or what have you.
For what it’s worth, I do think that Biden’s act is representative of a large swath of the anti-death penalty folks out there.
And even the most principled ones would be willing to concede that, hey, on a political level, it makes sense to keep those three on death row (when the other option is taking them off of it).
Firstly, perhaps most obviously, people feel different about the power of the state doing something in their own name vs. something just happening.
Hey! Something like the pardons and commutations?
Anyway, my example of Nassar was not an example intended to point out the hypocrisy of the Democrats but was talking about what the anti-death penalty folks were up against.
Because, seriously, the second that those folks are out of power, they’ll be back having to make arguments in the face of a society that believes that there is a separate “justice” thing that the government’s acts are orthogonal to.Report
It’s not, you can actually tell by the name ‘anti-death penalty’ as to what their political position is. They are against _having_ the death penalty as punishment. At all. Against it existing as a punishment for crime.
What Biden does or does not do is a good reason to criticize Biden, I guess. Or his advisors, sure. Not ‘anti-death penalty folks’, which Biden doesn’t really claim to be…or maybe he does, and if he does, well, he’s a hypocrite, but that’s just him.
Where I think you have been confused is that the anti-death penalty people have minorly criticized him for falling slightly short, while praising him for practically doing like 95% of the best he could do.(1) You might not know this because the anti-death penalty organizations get absolutely no airtime.
They aren’t going to run some sort of massive campaign to attack him for not going all the way.
You know that’s normally how politics works, right? If a politician hand someone a political win of 95%, they don’t attack him. They might not award him any awards, or maybe they will, but they’re not going to attack him. (In addition to the question of ‘What the hell is the point of attacking Biden anyway?’)
1) A reminder, although I just said it: The goal of the anti-death penalty people is not ‘a politician sometimes commutes the sentence of everyone on death row’. The goal is ‘Capital punishment literally no longer exists as a punishment on the books’ and maybe even ‘is barred for states by a law at the Federal level’. That’s not something the president can do, though, that requires either a supreme court decision (unlikely) or legislature.Report
So what the anti-death penalty want is not something that Biden is capable of doing.
Biden, or Biden’s team, is only capable of doing “Something Else”.
So Biden, or Biden’s team, did “Something Else”.
To the extent that there is a belief system that is represented by this act, it’s fair enough to call the belief system onto the carpet and judge it.Report
Their ultimate goal, yes.
If, in some unlikely universe, literally every US president from now on held the same position as they do and commuted the sentence of everyone that was ever put on death row, hypothetically they’d ‘get what they wanted’ (Well, except for state executions.), but that’s just silly. You generally want political changes done via laws and not subject to the whim of the president.
Yeah, but as far as anyone can tell, that’s just _Biden’s_ belief system. That was the point I was making, that this isn’t some ‘statement of the anti-death penalty people, who have decided to carve exceptions’.
Incidentally, the belief system was actually stated by Biden, where he said the commutations were ‘consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder’.
‘Hate-motivated mass murder’ is rather vague, but…honestly, a lot of people on death row are ‘normal’ murderers who just got really unlucky in the court system, with people who committed identical crimes often getting 15 years. It’s almost totally random. I’m honestly not sure if there’s anyone on the list of 37 that would be borderline.Report
I’m honestly not sure if there’s anyone on the list of 37 that would be borderline.
Depends on how badly you want to protect your borders, of course, but it’s real easy to pick this commutation or that one and point out the grotesque circumstances.
Read up, for example, on Len Davis. (Len was a cop. He ordered the execution of a witness to his violating another citizen’s rights who filed a complaint against him.)
Ronald Mikos killed someone who was going to testify against him in a trial.
Brandon Leon Basham and Chadrick Evan Fulks didn’t do anything particularly spectacular, just murder… but they murdered a woman *AFTER* they escaped from prison. If you wanted to come up with someone who deserves the death penalty in a thought experiment, you’d have to work pretty hard to come up with a better example than “guy escapes from prison and kills somebody”.
There are a couple more examples that are so very egregious that they are probably risible. You know. Children being involved and all.
And we get to discuss the moral distinction between killing a guy by shooting him, killing a guy by lethal injection, and killing a guy by locking him in a room and giving him a sandwich every day until he dies of old age.
And sputtering in indignation when someone wants to pick a different one than “waiting”.Report
DavidTC: notice how opposition to arming Israel is met with ‘You don’t oppose Hamas and they’re as bad’,
Israel is our ally and at war with civilian targeting genocidal terrorists.
The only reason to stop them would be if they’re engaged in genocide (thus the accusations of genocide). Since Gaza’s birth rate is higher than their death rate, when the war ends their population will have increased. Thus these accusations require redefining “genocide” to mean “fighting a war”.
Opposition to the war seems to be based on the idea that Israel shouldn’t exist, or that war shouldn’t exist. Both of those seem unreasonable.Report
We have literally dozens of reasons to not supply arms to a country besides ‘genocide’.
For example, if they’re doing ethnic cleanings.
Or have developed nuclear weapons without signing on to the non-profliferation treaty.Report
Or have developed nuclear weapons without signing on to the non-profliferation treaty.
That’s a conspiracy theory.Report
DavidTC: For example, if they’re doing ethnic cleanings.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. (wiki’s definition).
The Palestinians aren’t being forced to leave Gaza. If you can’t make your case without redefining basic terms, then you have no case.
By normal language, Israel is engaged in a war. The terrorists they’re fighting started the war, use their own population as human shields, and are responsible for the civilian death toll in Gaza if we use normal ethics.
By normal military standards for urban warfare the way Israel has fought the war has been fine. That doesn’t mean no war crimes, but subtract the hysteria and they’re doing better than most.
If we’re going to stop supporting them it needs to be for some reason other than “genocide”, “ethnic cleanings”, and the like. Typically the reasoning seems to amount to “Israel shouldn’t exist”, or “war shouldn’t exist”.
DavidTC: Or have developed nuclear weapons without signing on to the non-proliferation treaty.
Not signing the treaty means they weren’t bound by it. To the best of my knowledge we’ve passed no laws saying we’d punish countries who didn’t sign.
The 4 UN nations who didn’t sign are India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan. North Korea joined in 1985 but pulled out in 2003.Report
*cough* The West Bank?Report
North: *cough* The West Bank?
Far as I can tell, we don’t have vast numbers of Palestinians being kicked out of the West Bank. If we want to call it “ethnic cleansing” then that needs to happen.
What Israel is doing with the settlements is uncool and unwise, but that’s just my opinion. The counter argument is they don’t have settled boarders, and it’s weird to insist land Israel controls should be Jew free because it is going to upset the genocidal jihadists.
IMHO relations are so poisonous between them that serious ethnic cleansing might be an path to improvement.Report
I think that Israel should just leave the West Bank but I emotionally don’t like the idea of the Palestinians getting rewarded for decades of obstinance, stupidity, and terrorism. Despite not winning any battle, their leadership has always demanded maximum victory with an arrogance that is beyond belief that is reinforced by their vile allies across Islam and in other radical communities.
The entire moment is pissing me off. Jews are supposed to say how wonderful these self-congratulatory DEI conferences are and how bad we are for oppressing the Palestinians. In return, we get an antipathetic dismissive tolerance at best or treated as wypipo cosplaying as a group with a culture of our own at worse. They are all utterly horrible.Report
The reason why I tend to be pissed off a lot more about anti-Semitism from the DEI people and Intersectionalists or really the left in general is that it comes across more as rank betrayal. The White Right and Islamists can’t help themselves but for the DEI sect, Jews were some of the most passionate advocates for pluralism and multi-culturalism in the word but the current advocates for DEI think that Jews are nothing more than white people with pretensions and that “Jews Don’t Count.”Report
It’s not just betrayal but towering hypocrisy on the part of the leftier DEI and intersectionalists. It’s also naked paternalism towards the Palestinians.Report
And Jews are supposed to love them along and their self-congratulatory conferences. I’d break every bone in the people who attend these conferences or nod in support of them if I could. It is absolute demand in one hand and complete denial in another. And yes, the DEI sect and the Western Left in general treats the Palestinians with a paternalism that defies belief.Report
Jews don’t have to do anything with regards to the fringe left. As a friend of Jews and their state I’d advise them that, maybe, they should consider doing things that will prevent the anti-Israeli left from steadily growing and winning converts world wide. But the Israeli’s, apparently, have decided they’re going to double down on what they’ve been doing for years to empower the anti-Israeli left. I wish I had enough Jewish background to know what clever Yiddish phrase would apply to that foolish decision- I have no doubt there is one.Report
Write down אמת on some clay.
Then remove the aleph.Report
I don’t think this group is as fringe as you make it out to be. There seem to be a lot of them persistent in driving their message and not letting up. They need to be made to stop.Report
Lee: I emotionally don’t like the idea of the Palestinians getting rewarded
Whatever happens won’t be a “reward”.
Israel should admit it doesn’t have a partner for peace and won’t for the foreseeable future. Then it should do what is in it’s best interests. That might include pulling out of the WB, it will certainly include ignoring whatever the Palestinians want.
2nd issue is all those decades of obstruction and war with Israel have cost them dearly. They have lost land that they could have gotten from peace deals. Further that has happened repeatedly and repeatedly cost them more.
There has also been vast amounts of economic and other damage. All the jobs that people in Gaza had which involved working over the boarder for Jews went away permanently.
And they’re not done digging. Hamas isn’t going to surrender and won’t be destroyed. Ergo after the Gaza war ends Israel will prevent Gaza from having military development, which will include preventing most economic development.
We’re going to see the “open air prison” aspect of Gaza back but this time a lot more seriously.Report
Okay so ethnic cleansing is okay so long as it’s done by the Israeli’s and it’s done slowly. Gotcha.Report
I am pointing out that we need different words to describe what is going on. If we use normal rules, then it’s reasonable for the gov to build neighborhoods in areas it controls and to have laws which control who owns what.
The complications are “who owns what” can be land which has changed hands several times because of wars and the “neighborhoods” can require security to prevent genocide and/or terrorism.
Normally we’d have some sort of peace agreement after the war ends which includes national borders.Report
Sure to all that, but what I am referring to in the West Bank is not questions of ownership.
What I’m referring to in the West Bank is settlers and other right wing Jewish activists attacking Palestinians and driving them off their land with the either indifference or acquiescence of the Israeli military authorities and the forcible immobilization of any Palestinian authorities coupled with a steady development and expansion of Jewish only settlements in that same region with security barriers and Jewish only transport hubs to connect said settlements. When we also consider that it’s no longer 2000 and the West Banks Palestinian administration has generally been cooperative with the Israelis and has suppressed anti-Jewish attacks (both within the West Bank and originating from the West Bank) the difference becomes even more nakedly stark. That said authority is corrupt and non-democratic is true but irrelevant. All this action by the Israeli right with the allowance of their government is undeniably ethnic cleansing. It’s slow and gradual but that doesn’t change what it is.
While I don’t subscribe to the lefts wacky fringers or their deranged ideas about Israel proper we’re very much long past the point where the actions Israel and her people are taking in the West Bank can be defended by pointing at past West Bank Palestinian choices (they’ve been largely peaceable for over a decade now) nor by pointing at the actions of other Palestinians or neighboring Arab states (that’s empty whataboutism).
I, myself, and an Philo-Semite regarding Israel but when I watch the reputation of the Jewish state relentlessly but slowly eroding to my left I cannot, in any honesty, say that development is purely baseless anti-Semitism.
And while I agree that what Israel is up to in Gaza doesn’t meet the bar of genocide or ethnic cleansing… yet. I find the very purposeful ignoring of what Israel is getting up to in the territories intellectually dishonest and borderline hypocritical.Report
That said authority is corrupt and non-democratic is true but irrelevant.
IMHO the only reason it can cooperate with Israel on security (when it’s not paying for terrorism) is because it’s corrupt and not-democratic.
The generic Palestinians want their land back and that requires a war where they drive the Jews into the sea. Hamas represents the Palestinians on this issue.
The one hope from the current war is the Palestinians are getting a really good look at what war with Israel really looks like. Maybe their general ideology will be dropped if it’s clearly shown to be failed.
But that’s not going to happen if the world rides to the rescue to prevent the Palestinians from suffering the consequences of the war.
what Israel is up to in Gaza doesn’t meet the bar of genocide or ethnic cleansing… yet. I find the very purposeful ignoring of what Israel is getting up to in the territories intellectually dishonest
IMHO we can mostly ignore this only because the Palestinians are dialed up to eleven just because Israel exists. That has been repeatedly been made clear.
Various charters. Everything that happened before the settlements existed (the 3 no’s). Various rejections of peace agreements because they don’t include an Israel destroying Right of Return.
I’m sure they don’t like the settlements, but there is nowhere to go after dialing it up to eleven. They’ve rejected peace offers that would fix the settlements (or even predate the settlements) in favor of trying for “No Israel, No Jews”.
With or without the settlements this is not a fixable problem.Report
We’ve been around and around on this and you eventually end up admitting the settlements and land theft are a massive problem and that Israel is nakedly wrong to be there and would probably be in better shape both reputationally and literally if they withdrew unilaterally. I don’t want to rehash that.
I do want to observe that all the “justifications” you keep proffering occurred decades and decades ago, in many cases over fifty years ago whereas the West Bank Palestinians peaceable behavior is the literal current tense state of affairs for the past decade or two. That is either incoherent or contradictory.
Likewise with the respective governments and populations. Your assertions for Gaza are:
1: Hamas is the government of Gaza
2: Hamas attacked Israel
3: The Palestinians of Gaza didn’t resist Hamas or throw Hamas out thus they can be ascribed to approve of this attack and be of the same mindset as Hamas.
I think that’s reductive but, fair enough, we’ll go with it. But when we apply this -exact- chain of logic to the West Bank it utterly implodes.
1: The PA is the government of the West Bank.
2: The PA has maintained peacable de jeur relationships with Israel for many years now.
3: The Palestinians of the West Bank haven’t resisted the PA nor have they thrown the PA out thus they can be ascribed to… have the same attitude that the Palestinians in Gaza have because Dark Matter has some dubious polls and points at some things other Arab states did fifty years ago?!?!?!
It just doesn’t work. And on top of that we agree that the PA is undemocratic and corrupt which, somehow, also means that it is incredibly and secretly effective at suppressing all violent action from this population which is supposedly seething with violent attack now impulses for Israelis and has Israeli targets readily at hand.
And, then, this whole mess of contradictory reasoning somehow means that the Israeli rights’ land seizures, vandalism, violent attacks and exclusionary development doesn’t constitute slow motion ethnic cleansing?
Look, I repeat myself, I’m pro-Israeli and I still think the far lefts anti-Israeli postures are deranged but it is no mystery at all to me why Israel’s moral position is crumbling in the eyes of every non-Jewish group or every young person that looks at the matter or why the far lefts anti-Israeli posture keeps slowly growing in strength year after year. Because I do think you’re doing the best you can, Dark, regarding the West Bank and despite that this is pathetically weak tea.Report
I’m honestly starting to wonder if the debate isn’t for all intents and purposes over. Israel is now at war in 3 or 4 other nations, depending on what you count Gaza to be, with no significant consequences from its Western benefactors. One assumes that the Trump administration isn’t going to do anything. Now that all of the important Iranian proxies have been defeated I’m waiting for Israel to announce full annexation. This may be the strongest their hand will ever be. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.Report
North: The PA has maintained peacable de jeur relationships with Israel for many years now.
Other than having budget items for rewarding terrorists and dismissing the Trump peace plan as “hot garbage” because it didn’t have a right to return; Sure, the PA can be bribed and threatened into working with Israel’s security.
So… if Israel pulls out and leaves them in charge (maybe with international pressure for the PA to be less corrupt and more democratic), what should we expect to see happen?
Didn’t Israel try that plan in Gaza and in Lebanon?
Israeli rights’ land seizures, vandalism, violent attacks and exclusionary development doesn’t constitute slow motion ethnic cleansing?
My claims are:
1) The dictionary definition of ethnic cleansing doesn’t match what Israel is doing. That doesn’t make it ethical. Unless they start forcing people to leave the West Bank (which they might) what they’re doing seems to be closer to “Jim Crow”.
2) The settlements don’t matter because we’re still stuck on “the right of return”, i.e. “no Israel, no Jews”.
If we want to have a detailed discussion on where Israel’s borders should be, and which settlements should be removed, then there needs to be a partner for peace. The PA is still telling it’s people there can’t be peace without a right to return.
It’s probably worth having another Camp David style sit down where we get everyone together and talk about having a peace agreement. However given that the PA can’t even float “no RoR” as a trial balloon the only real purpose would be to make it clear to the West that they’re not serious.Report
For what it’s worth, here are some random Palestinian civilians talking about what they want. This channel does “Ask an Israeli/Ask a Palestinian Project”.
They don’t want peace. Nor do they want their own state if that means accepting Israel. They want the Jews to leave. “This is only our land”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH1iV1fb2pgReport
Let’s not dance around that issue which is that we both know that Israel got caught with their pants down on 10/7 and the 10/7 attacks were, accordingly, so destructive because the Israeli right had re-oriented the IDF away from Gaza to cover their activities in the West Bank. To put it even more starkly their idiotic and atrocious activities in the West Bank enabled Hamas’s body and kidnapping count. Hamas remains, ultimately, responsible of course but the Israeli right, both in being a midwife of and enabler of Hamas and in redirecting the IDF and ignoring intelligence warnings unambiguously puts the Israeli rights as the chief contributing element to the 10/7 attacks.
The subsequent outcome, moreover, validates the unilateral separation policy since Israel was able to devastate both foes since they had little entanglement and no settlements or other insanely unethical attachments clouding the issue in the Gaza or Lebanon theaters. By virtue of the IDF’s guile and determination as well as American ammunition Hamas and Hezbollah were decimated. The IDF is unlikely to run out of the two former elements but, again, the occupation of the West Bank is steadily eroding the Israeli’s future assurance of access to the latter.
The dictionary definition (Though the definition itself is in some dispute) of ethnic cleansing is:
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
If you want to try to claim that now two decades of violent steady but gradual land expropriate and dispossession doesn’t count as ethnic cleansing because, what, it’s too gradual? I suppose you can but it doesn’t strike me as a strong claim.
As for the right of return? It’s a canard and we both know it. Israel will -never- permit the mass immigration of Palestinians into Israel proper and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. That the PA or other Palestinian representatives won’t say the magic words that acknowledge that reality changes nothing except that the Israeli right uses it as a fig leaf excuse to enable them to continue their “it’s only a little bit of” ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.Report
Ideally there should be a way for Israel to leave the West Bank that doesn’t feel like a win for the Palestinians. They aren’t going to negotiate a treaty because they can never give up the desire to flood Israel demographically and leaving mainly but chomping off a bit of territory will be seen as not a real withdrawal by the diplomatic community.
I also expect that the dead enders, which will be most of them, can continue to press on the right to flood Israel or focus on the illegal settlements of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva and tens or hundreds of millions would join that fray. Even if they got everything they are supposed to and demand more, nobody will ever tell the Palestinians to stop and that they are being ridiculous.Report
they can never give up the desire to flood Israel demographically
Why is this a bad thing?Report
I mean if they want a one state solution than they should ideally have the courage to say it rather than go about it in a backdoor manner that fools nobody. Saying that there needs to be an ethnic Palestinian Arab state in the WB/Gaza but Israel can’t be a Jewish state seems more than a tad hypocritical.Report
Everybody should be more open to living in peace with each other.
Here’s some celebrities singing “Imagine”.
Report
Why is this a bad thing?
It’s not bad if it’s the American version of “flood [country] demographically”. Everyone gets new foodstuffs to consume. We see people wearing funny hats but don’t care enough to ask what they’re called.
The Middle East “No Israel, No Jews” version is serious about the “No Jews” part. We have seen that repeatedly (and currently) showcased. For that matter we have also seen that spelled out black letter in various charters and verbalized.
My paraphrase is brutal and direct but imho it’s useful to reduce the desire to it’s core. Using flowery words “this is only our land” doesn’t change the intent.Report
To be fair, many countries in the Middle East do seem to be getting used to the idea of Israel. There are some that are not though.Report
Umm if Israel unilaterally withdraws from the West Bank then they’ll first annex all the land along the boundary that they’ve already settled to the nines before dragging their wingnuts kicking and screaming from the more disconnected or far flung settlements. They obviously will take all of Jerusalem and its surrounding environs (as they generally already have) and every other choice bit they can manage to keep without annexing in very many Palestinians. Unilateral withdrawal means that the Israeli’s will be drawing the lines mostly by themselves and exactly zero Israeli land will be given to the Palestinians in return. You can bet your bottom dollar the Palestinians, were Israel to do this, would be very unhappy about the ultimate map and outcome.
As for if the Palestinians keep advocating for the right of return? I have no doubt they will. So will the various far left identarians wing do the same. But neither of them will have any means of making what they want to happen- happen. The world will mostly tune out until/unless the West Bank Palestinians are actually dumb enough to attack Israel at which point Israel will move the attackers and likely every other Palestinian down in a couple block or maybe even mile radius, the left will scream genocide but the other 95% of the world will say “dumb fishers what did you think would happen” and tune out again.
And at some point, likely pretty quickly going by Lebanon, when a Palestinian gets word that someone in a one block or one mile radius of them is gearing up to attack Israel their response will not be “Allahu Akbar” but “Stop you dumb fisher, I live here, I’m calling the cops!”
And even if they don’t? Israel can -easily- sustain an occasional attack from the Palestinians and deliver back a disproportionate retaliation. Because everyone everywhere who matters will be saying “Ya dumb fishers, what did you expect?”Report
the Palestinians, were Israel to do this, would be very unhappy about the ultimate map and outcome.
And does the world allow this? The UN will proclaim it “illegal” and insist (like they already are) that the “right to return” is a thing.
Worse, what Israel learned from Gaza and Lebanon is they can’t let these terror camps arm up. That they should have gone to war with them much earlier.
I don’t see a lot of world wide support for what Israel is doing in Gaza right now outside of the USA. Would even the USA have backed the Gaza war before October 7th?Report
Maybe the UN would, maybe it wouldn’t that and two bucks would buy ya a cup of coffee. If Israel was no longer controlling the territories and had granted citizenship to all the people who lived in the land it formally annexed then most of the world would stop paying attention.
As for Gaza and Lebanon the lesson is probably more along the lines of, you shouldn’t redivert your defense forces to keep their boots on West Bank Palestinians while you get up to shenanigans in the West Bank when there’re avowed genocidaires behind you. Bibi probably hopes the Israeli public will forget who midwifed those groups and who funneled money to them- it might even work.Report
you shouldn’t redivert your defense forces
This is an argument that Israel’s Gaza policy was a failure on 10-7.
However was it a failure before that? Is the world really ok with Israel having a serious war with Gaza just because it’s arming up and sending the occasional rocket?
If the answer is “no”, and imho it is, then Israel is expected to live not only with terrorism, but with a genocidal army getting ready just outside it’s borders.Report
I don’t think it was a particular failure prior to 10-7. Had the IDF been in position when the “armed up” enemy attacked on 10-7 there’d have been a small mountain of dead Hamas militants and a spare handful of Israeli casualties (and few to no hostages).
We can look at Lebanon for another example. Hezbollah armed up and, indeed, got up to other shenanigans in Syria while Israel looked on quietly. But the Israeli’s didn’t waste this time either and were able to extensively identify and compromise their opponents assets, communications and leadership. When they elected to strike, all of Hezbollahs time arming up availed Hezbollah only a slow sprinkling of blown up people and missile stocks and even greater exasperation and dislike from the people of Lebanon.
As for if Israel is expected to live with hostility and potential genocidal armies sitting outside its border? I suppose so, but now probably also less so than any time her short history except perhaps the brief period before Bibi took charge in the early teens.Report
I don’t think it was a particular failure prior to 10-7.
I disagree.
To counter 911, the USA got better doors for every cockpit and told pilots to not open them. The resource cost was almost zero per plane.
You are drawing a line between the WB and 10-7, but it wasn’t a matter of resources. Israel thought Hamas wasn’t willing to drop all of Gaza into a woodchipper.
Given an unlimited amount of time and the resources of a country, a ruthless Hamas will be able to do this again. That’s over and above the “tens of thousands of rockets terrorizing random civilians” issue which was also a failure.
The solution is to not let them have an unlimited amount of time and resources.
That implies if it pulls out, Israel will still need to be willing to put Gaza and/or the West Bank through a woodchipper even before 10-7.
I find it hard to picture the world being comfortable with that.Report
I am just incredibly angry at the people you call identitarians. With the White Right or the Muslims, there anti-Semitism is at least to be expected. It doesn’t seem as much as a rejection because Jews by nature can’t be part of either the White Right Club or the Muslim Club.
With the identarians, it seems like an extraordinary betrayal. Jews were some of the most passionate advocates of pluralism and multiculturalism and this is a club that we can be part of. And what do we get? We get the current champions of multiculturalism treating Jews as a white people with pretensions at best. We are supposed to love them but they get to hate us in return.
These people have committed crimes and need punishment. They may not be as powerful as the Right portrays them but they have access to many elite corridors.*
*Although on the other blog one person argued that maybe corporations embraced DEI so hard because they knew it might drive enough people to the Right.Report
corporations embraced DEI so hard because they knew it might drive enough people to the Right
I am a fan of conspiracy theories, don’t get me wrong, but the explanation that they’re dumb and short-sighted can get you to the exact same place while also explaining how silly some of the people you work with are.Report
That’s understandable- they’re the people you have to rub elbows with as they’re extremely loud and prominent on the internet. They’re the libertarians of the left. Noisy, influential but in command of very little love or votes in meatspace.Report
North: Israel was able to devastate both foes since they had little entanglement
This is true. However if we’re comparing the WB to Gaza one can reasonably think the former outcome is more desirable.
North: Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal… from a given area
If someone is being forced to move from Gaza to Gaza, is that “ethnic cleansing”? I see that claim a lot from the same people who claim the same for the WB.
North: two decades of violent steady but gradual land expropriate and dispossession doesn’t count as ethnic cleansing because, what, it’s too gradual?
Do a deep dive on a specific case about a specific house and we’re going to find the Arabs being removed didn’t own it. Far as I can tell the settlements are new construction. The toxic part is the security needed to protect it.
North: As for the right of return? It’s a canard and we both know it. …That the PA or other Palestinian representatives won’t say the magic words
You and I agree it’s insane and Israel will never allow it. Where we disagree is you are claiming the Palestinians aren’t serious but I see nothing to support that.
RoR is what they say officially, in peace negotiations, and in man-on-the-street interviews (see my previous link).
None of those random dozen Palestinians talked about “the settlements” except in the context of “all of Israel is a settlement”.
We are still fighting over whether the Jews get a state. The core problem isn’t the settlements, it’s that the Palestinians view all of Israel as a “settlement” and want there to be no Israel and no Jews.Report
The Jordanians, the Syrians and the Egyptian men on the street populations all have the same attitude and their governments say the same thing and, yet, the Israelis seem to manage to get by without having any form of West Bank entanglement with them. Which brings us back to the base fact that the right of return question is simply an excuse Israel (primarily the Israeli right) uses to not make the hard decisions on the West Bank that they need to make. They could set their borders unilaterally at any time, they just claim to want to be given some promises in return for doing so.
As for Israel’s activity in the West Bank… the uh… facts don’t quite comport with your notions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624qr3mqrzoReport
West Bank
Fair enough. I stand corrected. Slow motion ethnic cleansing it is.
They could set their borders unilaterally at any time
Sure. The problem is if they do that strongly implies they’ll be pulling out of the other places.
Which could instantly result in them being turned into terror bases.
and their governments say the same thing
The other governments are far away and can say this sort of stuff cost and impact free. The Palestinians have walked away from peace agreements and engaged in serious terrorism over it.
It’s a massive leap of faith to think they’re engaging in terrorism and are upset over settlements when they claim otherwise, even at a negotiating table that could end the settlements and result in them getting a country.Report
Fair enough, good conversation.
And we don’t disagree as much as one might think. It can’t be denied that a negotiated withdrawal, an agreement or even merely a representative government worth its name that could actually speak to and for the Palestinians would be enormously superior to a unilateral withdrawal. You’re unambiguously correct on that point. I simply do not have the idealism (or duplicity) to think that such an outcome is in offering in the foreseeable future. I think, if my cynicism is correct, that unilateral withdrawal is better, for all concerned (except the Israeli right-settler movement and their Palestinian terrorist Israeli-eliminationist counterparts but fish them), than a continuation of the status quos.Report
While the countries might not have ‘formal’ borders, they do in fact have clearly defined areas areas that they are supposed to control, with Israel slowly withdrawing from, in five years, aka, by May 1999, under the Oslo Accords and related accords, treaties that Israel signed.
They have not done that, and in fact exist in areas they are not supposed to exist.
And no, this is not the fault of Palestinians. We can argue why negotiations stalled near the end of that five year period, whose fault that was, but that gave Israel no right to stall with their withdrawal, the withdrawal was not dependent on those negotiations.
Yet they did stop them withdrawal, and in fact later reversed some of them, due to political opposition within _Israel_ for the treaties _they had signed_. (Including a far-right Israeli assassinating their own prime minister for working on the Accords.)Report
this is not the fault of Palestinians.
The big things that derailed Oslo were the assassination of Rabin (by a Jewish extremist), the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre (ditto), and Hamas’ wave(s) of suicide bombings.
All of these were expressly done to disrupt the peace process and Oslo.
Yes, the settlements are also a big problem… although my impression was the Palestinians didn’t get serious about peace until the settlements forced their hand.
Claiming that the Palestinians weren’t involved in derailing Oslo ignores that Israel walking away from security tends to result in more terrorism.
Big picture there is absolutely a problem with lone wolf Jews engaging in terrorism and violence. However their counter parts among the Palestinians are way more organized and can even win elections from this sort of thing.Report
…what are you talking about? The first settlement was basically _immediately_ after Israel controlled the territory. It was like six months or something, I can’t be bothered to look it up.
It…hasn’t, actually. Israel withdrawing from Gaza resulted in a massive dip in violence, or at least death, as Hamas was no longer able to pull off suicide bombings because _they couldn’t reach Israelis_, and had to resort to extremely inefficient rocket attacks, and had to team up with Iran (Who they hadn’t worked with before) to even manage those!
And this was with Israel literally handing an entire territory over to Hamas, a thing that would not happened had they withdrawn starting _a decade earlier_.
It really is amazing to watch the mental filter you have on, where violence _by the IDF_ against Palestinians in Palestine, doesn’t count as organized violence, presumably because it’s by the government, whereas violence by Hamas against Israelis in Israeli is organized violence…despite them ‘winning elections’ on that.
Fun fact: Neither of them are the government of the territory or people they are harming. Both of them, however, are ‘governments’. So it’s somewhat hard to see the difference.
And to be clear, Israel is neither legally the government of the Gaza String _or_ the West Bank. The West Bank has a government called the Palestinian Authority, created by a joint agreement between the PLO and Israel. (We can argue whether they or Hamas are the government of Gaza, if Hamas ‘officially’ won a civil war and took part of the country…but it’s not Israel either way.) Israel, as an occupying power, only allows the PA partial civil control over part of its own territory, and illegally took back a lot of control in 2005. (Instead of, as I said, doing a withdrawal process that was supposed to end in 1999.)
To be even more clear, the PA has mostly not objected to the actions of Israel because they are incredibly corrupt and essentially bribed by the US and other countries not to object, and they have failed to hold elections for almost two decades at this point so the Palestinians can replace them.
But the PA’s inaction can’t actually make the actions of Israel legal.Report
DavidTC: Israel withdrawing from Gaza resulted in a massive dip in violence, or at least death, as Hamas… had to resort to extremely inefficient rocket attacks,
Pointing to rocket attacks as an example of “violence decreasing” is self conflicting. For that matter pointing to Israel turning Gaza into a prison to prevent suicide attacks is close to the same.
DavidTC: …violence _by the IDF_
This takes us to whether or not the state has a monopoly on the use of violence. We normally give the state a pass on that, especially in the context of fighting terrorism.
The Palestinians literally can’t make peace. If Israel makes a peace agreement the IDF will enforce it. Israel would still have these lone wolf actors but in theory each is a one off.
The Palestinian equiv of those lone wolves is Hamas and various other groups.
Both of them, however, are ‘governments’. So it’s somewhat hard to see the difference.
A big difference is the number of Jews who can live in areas Hamas controls is zero where about 20% of Israel is Arab.Report
Really? Only Jews/Israel have agency? The Palestinians are just perfect innocent victims incapable of any bad act? Palestinian terrorist attacks and suicide bombings didn’t sour Israelis towards peace? They should have just grinned and bared it and gave everything the Palestinians allegedly wanted on a silver platter in exchange for nothing?Report
…over the thing that their country agreed to do without any conditions, and then did not do?
Yes. Only they have agency over that.
…only Hamas has agency, apparently.
You know, there was a perfectly functional way to stop suicide bombing that worked incredibly well from 2005 onward. It was called a) building an actual border wall, and b) not having Israelis on the wrong side of the wall.
This, of course, is incredibly hard to do with settlements, although Israel eventually did it, mostly by barring Palestinians from large sections of the West Bank.
It would have been easier to just _withdrawal_ like they were supposed to, on the timetable they had agreed to.
Oh, let me guess ‘Hamas would have just started doing rockets earlier’. Well, no, they wouldn’t have, because they were not, in fact, part of the government then. In fact, that wouldn’t have been impossible had Israel not deliberately _handed Gaza over to Hamas_.Report
There have been more people killed in the Syrian Civil War and Yemen Civil War since 2011 than the entire I/P conflict but all the Pro-Palestinian people go around like the I/P conflict is the worst thing that ever happened in human history. I wonder why.Report
Hey, in the altercation between Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, which did you automatically shift your sympathies to?
I mean, imagine if you heard that Jordan Neely got stabbed by another homeless guy, would you have cared?
If not, then you’ve got some insight into why people care about Israel and the Palestinians but not some Syrians killing Syrians or Yemenis killing Yemenis.
Who gives a crap when bums kill each other?Report
We’ve passed laws saying we won’t sell weapons to countries that did not sign and yet developed nuclear weapons.Report
DavidTC: We’ve passed laws saying we won’t sell weapons to countries that did not sign and yet developed nuclear weapons.
My two minute search found we can’t export nuclear tech or nuclear weapons to countries that haven’t signed. That’s not the same as “can’t sell any weapons”.
We do have laws that prevent us from sending weapons to countries which are committing genocide and the like. However invoking those depends on redefining ‘genocide’ to mean something like ‘fighting a war’.Report
The NPT forbids selling any nuclear tech to any country that has not signed. Taha is not what is relevant.
The US law called the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act bars selling weapons to nuclear powers that have not signed the NPT.
– https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-nuclear-weapons/
There is no possible waiver and the sanctions are _ridiculously high_ under US law, if you detonate a nuclear device (after 1977) without having signed the NPT.
Israel detonated a nuclear device September 22, 1979. Everyone knows it. The US basically admits it. But…refuses to actually admit it. The Department of Energy (You know, the nuclear people) apparently have rules where employees and contractors cannot mention this fact, they treat it as somehow classified.Report
DavidTC: The Glenn Amendment is an amendment to the Arms Export Control Act that allows the President to impose sanctions on non-nuclear weapon states that detonate nuclear weapons…
Two problems:
1) “Allows” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The President doesn’t have to do this and has waved this law for India.
2) “that detonate nuclear weapons” is also an issue. According to Google’s AI, Israel hasn’t officially tested nukes. It is suspected of having a test in 1979 around South Africa but that’s never been confirmed.
DavidTC: There is no possible waiver
Let me just quote your quote: if the U.S. government were to conclude Israel detonated a nuclear explosion after 1977, the law, unless waived, Report
There are some part of the laws (There’s actually multiple laws), like foreign aid, that can be waived, and in fact have been waived for other countries. They have not been waived for Israel, so it’s actually still illegal.
There are parts that cannot be waived, and those have to do with supplying weapons.
And Israel has not ‘officially’ tested nukes in the sense that they have not admitted it and the US State Department has very pointedly refused to say anything about it. There is no actual doubt they were behind the nuclear explosions off the coast of South Africa, and there were actually three explosions.
BTW, working with and having a military alliance with South Africa in 1979 is, um, rather deplorable behavior, South Africa was already a become a pariah nation by that point for Apartheid, including a complete arms embargo by the UN in 1977, including nuclear material, but is something Israel indeed did.
The funniest document to come out of all that is this:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2010/05/23/Peres-letter.pdf
(In case anyone is wondering about South Africa, when it became clear they were going to overthrow Apartheid, they dismantled their nuclear weapons, and signed the NPT. They’re fine now under the law.)Report
DavidTC: There are parts that cannot be waived, and those have to do with supplying weapons.
India is openly a nuclear power and we sell weapons to them, because we’ve waved the parts you claim can’t be waved.Report
Why do people who keep accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” at any time in it’s history don’t seem to have any issue with the rest of the Middle East giving their Jews the boot? It tends to be overlooked in the name of “anti-colonialism” and Jews are just supposed to take it on the chin as communities hundreds or thousands of years old get destroyed over night. And don’t say that the Mizrahi Jewish communities would have been fined but for the creation of Israel. The rest of the non-Muslims and even the wrong types of Muslims aren’t doing fine in the Middle East either.Report
I think it has to do with the assumption that the borders will be changing soon.Report
I think there is a very good chance they already have and we just haven’t caught up to the new reality yet.Report
That might be the case but this type of moaning existed since Israel was founded. Going on an on about the Palestinians while ignoring what happened to Jews in continental Europe and the Middle East/North Africa has been the norm for decades.Report
Can they call it “Ethnic Cleansing” after it’s the case?
Or is it one of those things where, nope, they said it too many times and now it’s like crying wolf so even if there is a whole lot of new waterfront property available, it doesn’t count?Report
Plenty of people still call the aftermath of Israel War’s for Independence ethnic cleansing while ignoring the Arab states kicking out all their Jews. I’ve heard cries that the Palestinian refugees, or really their descendants must return, while all the Jews need to leave the Middle East even if Mizrahi.Report
The aftermath of ‘Israel’s war’ _was_ ethnic cleansing. There is literally no way other to describe ‘Removing 750,000 from an area based on their ethnicity so there are less people of that ethnicity living there relative to other people’. It is basically the _definition_ of ethnic cleaning.
Arab states kicking out their Jews was always ethnic cleansing.
And not to defend those Arab countries too much, but they tended to do it somewhat slower and saner and via some sort of legal process and didn’t kill 15,000 people while doing it, unlike Israel. The casualties, as far as I can tell, are in the hundreds, despite Arab countries expelling ~900,000 Jews vs. Israel and Jewish paramilitaries expelling ~750,000 Arabs. I want to be clear, it’s still ethnic cleansing, but it is at least a good deal less bloody.
Granted, the number widely varies depending on what you count. How far in the past are we counting? Are we counting things that are very obviously due to European colonialism, including actual Na.zis controlling the country, and not any sort of ‘Arab’ decision?
For an actual example of deaths that would clearly count as part of this, there was about 80 Jews killed in a riot in Yemen in 1947, a riot explicitly about Israel. 14 killed in an anti-Jewish riot in Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1945. There are a half dozen other events like that in a few different places, 75 dead in Syria, but it’s like…countable. A few individual events, riots, where some of number of Jews died. I don’t know the full amount, there probably were a bunch of small groups we don’t know about, but if we assume the _biggest_ are the ones people talk about, and we’re throwing around numbers like 80 and 75 and 14 as the largest for some countries, it’s hard to see how it could be more than a thousand, and I think about half that is a more reasonable guess.
That ethnic cleansing did not end up with 15,000 people dead, in a single year, which is what Israeli’s ethnic cleansing did.
Again, not defending Arab’s countries, just pointing out how _insanely violent_ the Nakba was, and how you keep downplaying it and doing whataboutism of Arab countries did it too!’. Just wanted to point out Israel ‘escorted people at gunpoint and killed a lot of them in a very short period of time’, whereas a lot of the Arab ethnic cleansing was ‘a few violent riots and some economic oppression and Jews, over a period of decades, ended up on flights leaving the country, either because they were required by law or they could just read the writing on the wall’. Not all ethnic cleansing is identical.
Or to put it another way: Israel and a bunch of Arab countries all committed ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. Israel, and the armed militias that existed before Israel and were turned into its military, also committed a f*ckton of war crimes while doing that ethnic cleansing.Report
Responding to succinct points with long verbiage is not impressive looking.Report
Let me tl;dr it for you:
Israel and the pre-Israel militias that became Israel’s military killed 15,000 Arabs and displaced 750,000 Arabs in a single year, forcing them to abandon their homes with no recompense.
Surrounding Arab nations, in response to this, had some violent riots that killed ~500 Jews over a decade or so, and had legal changes and threats of violence that resulted in 900,000 Jews eventually leaving them over four or five decades, usually forcing them to abandon their homes with no recompense
You may notice the first was _entirely_ violence, very rapid violence, resulting in a lot of deaths, whereas the second was some small amount of violence, a implied terroristic threat of more violence in the future, and mostly just a bunch of laws and restrictions that made it very clear Jews were unwelcome, or were legally required to leave.
Again, the second is _still_ ethnic cleansing. It’s reprehensible. No one should have their government say ‘People like you are not allowed to live in this country, you have to move, and we’re keeping your house’, or have the worry of ‘People occasionally get very angry at people like us and kill a dozen’, especially when its clear the government doesn’t _particularity_ mind that, even if it’s not official government action.
But pretending they are morally equivalent is nonsense.Report
The pro-Palestinian movement does a lot of motte-and-bailey.
No one is in favor of “ethnic cleansing” so let’s claim Israel is doing that and point to a legal case where land that changed hands in wars has a court rule on it.
That’s the motte. The bailey is they want an Israel destroying right of return to undo what they claim is “ethnic cleansing”.
The simple way to sum up their self expressed views is “No Israel, no Jews”. They don’t say that because it doesn’t play well in the West, precisely because it is accurate.Report
“land that changed hands in wars”
How many times did you have to rewrite that particular phrase?Report
Asking the legal system to deal with issues that were resolved (sometimes multiple times) by wars is a bit of a problem.Report
Yeah, looks like it resolved the heck out of them.Report
The Pro-Palestinian movement keeps running into anti-Semitism and the Holocaust without a particular solution. Saying that they believe that “colonial-settlerism is so bad that they believe it would be a more just world if more Jews died in the Holocaust and the Mizrahi Jews got the boot to the West in the name of anti-colonialism sounds bad, so they just pretend that Zionism isn’t addressing a particular problem that Jews had and that the non-Zionist solutions lost because they failed big time,.
Ideally, I think they basically think that Jews take up too much room and make too much noise for our population size. They would prefer us to be more like the Zoroastrians and keep to ourselves in small isolated communities. Sort of like living museum pieces where the reaction is “oh, those people are still around” rather than people being able to rattle off large numbers of famous Jews without effort.Report
Lee: Jews take up too much room and make too much noise for our population size.
Far as I can tell, if the world would just treat Jews as normal uninteresting people that’s what they would be.
Normal countries are allowed to go to war over terrorism and kill civilians in the process. Witness our reply to 911 (and a long list of other wars). It’s normal for “war”.
For that matter normal countries are allowed to be ethnostates and even allowed to repress their minorities within limits.Report
Look where that got us.Report
Jaybird: Back in 2023, Larry Nassar got shivved in prison. What was the most common response?
https://apnews.com/article/larry-nassar-gymnastics-stabbed-prison-98c5ca2052f0ebce4a785f5fa2b2ede2
Larry is a convicted serial child rapist. That’s bottom of the food chain by prison standards. He’s going to be despised even by them. Just keeping him alive might require solitary confinement.
The death penalty might be less punishment. I’m not sure if any of his (many) crimes would have gotten him the death penalty since he didn’t kill anyone.Report
Given that Biden campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty, stating that he believed that if the federal version was abolished, states would follow, I think it’s possible to see this as a betrayal of his stated principles. The question is why: has he found wiggle room in those principles for “terrorists” (a term that we should absolutely banish from our political and criminal lexicons, but I digress)? Or is the betrayal of principles based on political calculations? I am inclined to believe it’s the latter, even though he is a lame duck president who’ll never run for office again, because ultimately he’s a team player.
Still would have been better if he’d commuted them all.
I agree with you on people’s reactions to Nassar’s stabbing and similar cases. I think people are very inconsistent in their application of their principles in such cases, because they let their understandable disgust for the individual guide their moral judgment, which is always a mistake.Report
Let me say explicitly: I don’t think that Biden had anything to do with these commutations.
So the accusation of hypocrisy, as interesting that *THAT* accusation always is, isn’t against Biden. It’s against the people who are acting on his behalf.Report
Fair enough. I say this as someone who has harbored a deep, abiding dislike of Biden since I first became aware of him in the 90s: I would not be surprised to learn than the people making decisions on his behalf have more malleable principles than he, to the extent that they have any.Report
And we’re back to he’s too senile to know what he’s signing. Got it.Report
This is one of those overton window things, I think.
It’s not in your overton window, so it’s unthinkable to you. Heck, it’s unthinkable that someone else would think it.
But it’s in my overton window. So you saying that tells me “oh, it’s not in his overton window…” rather than “holy cow, what have I become that I think that Biden is senile?”Report
Some random thoughts about the DEI movement/Intersectionalists and it’s tense relationship with Jews and Asian-Americans that I am putting here because of some sub-threads. I’m wondering if some of the tense relationship comes from while Jews and Asian-Americans are definitely a numerical minority in the United States, and Jews everywhere but Israel, we do not come across as a minority in what I guess could be called a behavior or cultural sense. In his book, “Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel argues that a lot of the rejection of Jews in the DEI movement comes from the fact that Jews aren’t seen as suffering from material deprivation. He thinks this is a wrong reason to reject Jews as a minority/oppressed people but it is the reason why they are doing it.
I’m wondering if this also extends to the cultural realm. I’ve mentioned this incident before but a few weeks ago there was a group of six to seven African-American teens on the BART ride home that were making annoyance of themselves by sharing a blunt between them and behaving in a rowdy manner. Everybody was annoyed but, thanks to obviously cultural stereotypes, they seemed authentic and that this is who they really are. If you replace this group of teens with Asian-Americans or Jewish teens in your mind, the immediate reaction mentally besides annoyance would be “who are you fooling?” and that the teens would come across as tools to everybody. Even White Christian teens from relatively privileged backgrounds would come across as more authentic than Asians or Jews doing this.Report
“Are Jews white?” is one of those questions that used to get “Hell NO!” answers from pretty much everybody.
Now only honkeys and Jewish people think that Jews aren’t white.
Which, lemme tell ya, does not stack the DEI deck in the favor of Jewish people.Report
Vox put this as no white supremacist thinks that Jews are white but a lot of non-whites think Jews as white. At least in the United States, Jews always came off as closer to white than non-whites to many African-Americans even during the pre-WWII era.Report
“no white supremacist thinks that Jews are white”
Wait, so what would an open-minded white person think? A good progressive one?
Hey, Lee. Do you consider yourself white?Report
Good progressives think that the way to assess a person is based on blood quantum. Same with white supremacists.Report
I don’t consider myself white but don’t get into long arguments about it.Report
Is it white supremacy to agree with you?Report
The tension comes from the fact that ‘Intersectionality’ is a power theory and not a justice theory.
You keep thinking it’s the other, and it’s not.Report
I think it is a load of crock but a lot of it is a way to assert power.Report
I think the only way you’re going to get to the answer you’re looking for with this is to start thinking bigger picture. Let me help.
I come from planet Catholic. By virtue of that my heritage is a mish mash of non-Anglo Saxon Europeans that did not share the religion of the traditional American ruling class, and whose treatment varied and was not always great upon arrival. However we are now assimilated. My extended Catholic family and larger social circle is now starting to grow twigs and branches incorporating people whose heritage is Salvadoran or from other ‘hispanic’ countries south of the Rio Grande. The children largely speak English and are growing up in normal American suburbs. There is no reason to believe they will not also be assimilated, if they aren’t already. I think more already are than our cultural institutions are yet ready to admit, but that’s another story.
My guess is that you too and the Jews you have grown up with are also assimilated. Most of the Jews I have interacted with (and there are many in greater DC) are. The only group that did not go through normal assimilation processes in this country are the descendants of African slaves. And even they have done a lot of assimilating since the big legal barriers to them doing so were removed 60 years ago.
What I am trying to get at with this, is that, maybe with the exception of descendants of slaves, the whole intersectional DEI classification chart is BS. It’s based on the idea that racial social constructs are much stronger and more enduring than there is any reason to believe to be the case in 21st century America. Most of the people grasping at these identities (and this is the key part) aren’t living in some sort of extra level of authenticity nor do they carry any particular moral authority. More likely than not, the educated people who are obsessed with this sort of thing are under the surface suffering from intense anxiety and neurosis over the social atomization that is sadly a feature of modern American life. That is sad for them but you are not compelled to take any of it at face value, and the sooner you stop the sooner you’ll feel better.Report
I prefer the term acculturated rather than assimilated but the more I compare my childhood to the childhood of other people who grew up in the 1980s, even among the same upper middle class lines, the more different it appears. Like DARE was not apart of my elementary school education but it seemed very common in basically every other public school elementary school during the 1980s. It was near totally absent from my school. Also my town had very strong music and theater program, complete with my high school putting on opera yes an opera every year since the 1970s, and more freedom for teacher in social studies and literature to assign things that would be hard banned in other schools.
I don’t know how much of this weirdness comes from class or how much because of Jewish attitudes towards both culture and education plus the general liberalism of American Jews. We probably had the closet to a European style sex education that you can get in the United States.
Your last paragraph is probably spot and explains why the DEI paradigm tends to be African-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and even Muslim Americans as the latest victims of American imperialism as seen by the Left.Report
I’m not sure how common it is for high schools to have opera but this sounds like more of a class and regional thing than a ‘race’ thing. It may be worth rethinking how important those sorts of affinities really are when it comes to objective questions. Among the many major errors made by adherents to the ideas in question is the one that grossly inflates the importance of various little customs and cultural superficialties into totalizing theories of how the world works. Which doesn’t mean these things never matter but it’s how we get into everything from idiotic fights over who can cook a burrito to insisting various forms of incompetence or laziness are actually an essential cultural value for certain people.Report
I suppose the big difference between the Zionists and the Anti-Zionists is that the Anti-Zionists believed that despite everything that happened between 1881 and 1948, the Diaspora System worked and didn’t need to be disturbed while the Zionists argue that the period between 1881 and 1948 showed that the Diaspora System did not work and Jews needed to take steps to save themselves and a place and country of their own to pursue their culture.
By the Diaspora System, I mean how Jews lived between the Destruction of the Second Temple and the creation of Israel. We would be scattered into communities of different sizes and allowed to organize ourselves however the ruling powers determined. Some Jewish communities will be very acculturated and integrated into the majority society like they United States and others would live with degrees of alienation and neglect and just kind of be there like pieces of furniture if the majority deemed that correct. Some communities would be free of state persecution and others would be heavily persecuted. Nothing that happened between the start of Zionism and the creation of Israel meant that the Diaspora system didn’t work including the Holocaust. That was just a super persecution but not unusual and if most of the survivors found themselves stuck under hostile Communist regimes and the Mizrahi Jews got the boot, so what? There were thriving Jewish communities elsewhere.
The Zionist argument is that the period between 1881 to 1948 definitely shows that the Diaspora System did not work and Jews needed to take steps to save ourselves.Report
You’re over thinking this.
The United States exists and would respond harshly to violent efforts to destroy it. It’s supported by it’s citizens. That reality soundly trumps any argument over who “should” control the land and/or various religious narratives.Report