The YouTube channel Kings & Generals decided to put on a video about how Judaism and Christianity separated. This is all well and good I suppose but a brief sentence a bit after the 10 minute mark in the video about how God is cruel in the Hebrew Bible but of seemingly different character in the NT shows how hard it is to get over stereotypes. Cruel vengeful Jewish God vs.Loving Hippie Jesus is such a cliche that even atheists voice it. Jews obviously do not see God as being cruel as depicted in the Hebrew Bible but no matter how much we explain things in plain language there is always a sort of "yeah, we aren't buying it and the Hebrew Bible God is an asshole" vibe going on.
If you could create a true culture neutral binational state in Israel/Palestine, that might not be a bad solution to the conflict. I don't think it will be culture neutral state though. It will be an Arab and Muslim state with maybe a large Jewish population.
There are several I/P conflicts that are going on at the same time. You have the actual conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the ground and the competing factions within Israel and Palestine.
You also have the I/P conflict that is playing out in different head spaces. You have Muslims who see the I/P conflict in theocratic terms and see Israel as a plot upon Islam. You have Western Leftists who see it as White Settler-Colonialists vs. Brown Wretched of the Earth. You have well-meaning Western liberals with different degrees of sympathy for Israel but who want co-existence and multiculturalism to reign supreme despite nobody using those terms.
This is even more true for ultra-prestigious boarding schools as well as the lowest inner city public schools. These are the kids of busy and important people who need to totally outsource all parenting.
Ghada Karmi was born in 1939 according to Wikipedia. She might be a moderate but she is also too old to update her political beliefs that Israel must be destroyed. She is the type that accepted Oslo in so far that they viewed it as a necessary first step to destroy Israel and send the Jews packing. They say one thing to the West, another thing to themselves, and avoid taking any responsibility for their own failures.
Most states in the world are de facto or de jure ethno-states. Israel is just the one that gets called out for it. I have not heard Japan or South Korea being lambasted as ethnostates despite the fact that both are way more ethnostates than Israel is. Like I wrote InMD, I think that many people just find the idea of Jews having a place of our own repellant and don't like the idea of school system teaching Jewish history and literature the way you would teach other history and literature. That the public holidays are Jewish holidays is another thing they can't stand.
The militant insistence on the Right of Return makes sense when you realize that the goal is to destroy Israel and hurt Jews more than help the Palestinians. Even the Palestinians seem to care more about destroying Israel and hurting Jews than helping themselves.
The idea of Jews being a majority somewhere, having tax funded schools like other people, and a place where the culture and time revolves around Jewishness is too much for hundreds of millions of people world wide. They need us degraded.
I really wish the Jews are colonists brigade would address what would happen to the Jews if they stayed in Europe. If they really believe that the Jews who migrated to Israel/Palestine between 1918 to 1948 are colonists and that's bad than they should come out and see "we think it is more moral if they stayed in Europe and died." They are way too cowardly to do this though.
I fail to see why Israel as an ethnostate gets treated as the most evil thing in the world while dozens of countries officially proclaiming themselves to be Islamic, complete with international organization is not.
The Palestinian rhetoric is not of multi-cultural Palestine. It is explicitly that they the Arab Muslim Palestinians are the real true Palestinians and everybody else just lives there. It shouldn't take that many brain cells to figure out why Jews inside and outside of Israel find this a bad deal and don't want to be second class citizens of an officially Muslim state.
Ireland doesn't quite produce the same level of fanaticism as the Holy Land and Jerusalem does. Also while you had a bit of the same issues regarding settler-colonialism or not, it wasn't nearly as intense as the I/P conflict.
The Arab states are generally moving slowly towards accepting Israel as a presence. I think that going for diplomatic relationships between Israel and the other Arab states even while the I/P remained unresolved was a good idea even though lots of Western liberals and leftists thought it was terrible. Western liberals also prefer a lot softer take against Iran than everybody else in the MENA region.
The other issue with finding a realistic solution to the I/P conflict or really many other conflicts in the post-WWII world is that a lot of traditional solutions to things like power vacuums, failed states, and other such problems are seen as no longer permissible but nobody came up with a working alternative to the traditional solutions.
Like with the I/P conflict. The Arab states lost big to Israel in 1949 and 1967. Traditionally, this would mean that Israel got to dictate peace terms towards the defeated Arab states but what happened was that you got an armistice in 1949 and the Three No declarations in 1967. As mentioned above, the Palestinian side tends to negotiate like the lost no battle even after losing every battle and have people willing to prop them up on this or prohibit Israel from imposing the terms because things aren't done that way anymore. But the ways that things are supposed to be done don't exactly work if you have people looking for victory. The I/P conflict has people on both sides looking for victory.
A big problem with solving the I/P conflict that very few people in the West want to address is what if both sides have significant numbers of people that really do see the I/P conflict in religious terms. Like there are large numbers of Israeli Jews who see Israel as the place promised to them by God and there are large numbers of Palestinians and other Muslims that really do see Israel as a theocratic plot on all of Islam.
Partisans of one side or the other, including myself, are willing to see the side they don't like as possessing weird true believers but both sides. An ethnic or colonial conflict is solvable but a theocratic conflict is not.
Hamas has a day after version. It is the state of Israel is vanquished, all the Jews leave the Middle East, and the glorious Islamic Republic of Palestine is established.
Israel has a bunch of competing visions of the Day After. The number of Israelis that believe in the Two-State solution aren't that great anymore. The most liberal probably see some type of independent Palestine with hard borders maintained by Israel rather than co-prosperity. Others want Israel to annex the West Bank without the Palestinians somehow. There might be a few genocidal Israelis but I think most of them just want the issue to go away or for the Palestinians to admit defeat and live quietly as they are now. Obviously neither of these things are going to happen.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel and makes no secret that they believe justice is "No Israel, No Jews." I have no reason to believe the IDF is lying about it. That doesn't mean Hezbollah was just about to carry out this plan but it would be something they would want to do.
Part of the problem is that different Palestinian groups keep trying to negotiate like they win every battle despite losing every battle. Different groups sympathetic to the Palestinians in the Muslim world or the West encourage them in this. The idea that losing a battle or several might come with consequences doesn't seem to occur to people because everything is operating on a justice scale.
The Further Left deals with the Israelis and Palestinians that exist in their headspace rather than actual Israelis and Palestinians. As noted on the other blog, it is all 1960s and France in Algeria to them. They ignore that the Palestinians have grown more Islamist in their rhetoric or that Israel is much more populous and wealthy. Their solution is for all the Jews to go "home" even though most Israeli Jews were born in Israel and those that weren't don't have fond memories of home.
Radical Jews like Judith Butler are more into putting their fellow Jews in danger of death and persecution to keep their radical credentials buttressed more than anything else. There also does seem to be this weird sub-group of the LGBT radical community that seeks an alliance with Islam despite the homophobia in Muslim majority countries or even in Muslim communities in the West.
According to an Israeli commentator on the other blog, the IDF has found plans for a 10/7 type attack in northern Israel from Hezbollah. I can't find any confirmation of this by a google search yet though. This person is rather critical of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians so I have no reason to doubt it though.
Like many people who hate Israel, Chris really really hates Israel. The Further Left goes a lot stronger against Israel than other countries because it is the conflict where the tools they use to analyze who is the good guy and who is the bad guy align in their minds.
1. Imperialist vs. Anti-Imperialist-Israel is associated with the United States and the West while the Palestinians were seen as allied with the Communists and the Developing World.
2. White vs. Brown-Most people on the Further Left have a really poor grasp of Israel's demographics and think it is a bunch of Ashkenazi Jews on timeshares that could easily "go back to Poland" vs. the brown indigenous Palestinians. They don't know that there are 7.2 million Jews in Israel and half to sixty percent of them aren't from Europe. Nor do they know that 61% of Israel's current cabinet is Mizrahi.
3. Goliath vs. David-Being a well-organized and wealthy nation state, Israel is clearly Goliath.
For the other big international conflicts of the moment, Russia v. Ukraine and PRC v. Taiwan, the race axis is neutral and the other axis and 3 is unclear so this causes some pause on who to support or not.
Judith Butler apparently has an interview in an intellectual journal or something somewhere where she describes 10/7 as an act of resistance. This is the same woman who said that Hamas and Hezbollah are more progressive than liberal Zionists several years ago. I just don't get the Further Left on the I/P conflict. I get sympathy towards the Palestinians but the Further Left insists on playing these rhetorical games and fitting the I/P conflict in an intellectual framework that doesn't really do justice to either the Palestinians or the Israels, plus ignores the actual facts on the ground*, that it is worse than useless.
Another thing that I do not like are the Radical Ashkenazi Jews who are so into maintaining their radical credentials that they would be willing to throw millions of their fellow Jews to death so that they may burnish their radical credentials. This is despite the fact that previous times radical Jews did this, the Soviet Union, they quickly got tossed aside when no longer needed by the people in control because they were Jews. All those Bolshevik Jews found out that their devotion to the revolution amounted to nothing under Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders while Jews who merely wanted to be Jews got to suffer. These Radical Ashkenazi Jews would have their Mizrahi brothers and sisters as second class citizens to maintain their anti-colonial credentials.
*I am utterly convinced that the Further Left's knowledge of 21st century Israel is basically zilch. They do not seem to realize that the majority of Israel's 7.2 million Jews come from the MENA region ancestry wise, that MENA Jews are the base of Likud and other Rightist parties, or that the majority of Netanyahu's cabinet are Mizrahi Jews. You can point this all out to them and they don't believe it. It is just all white settler-colonialists from Europe, never mind what happened to the Jews of Europe, against the brave and indigenous people of color Palestinians. I can't stand the stupidity of it.
This is almost a rightist statement from you. The entire honor culture thing is considered a big shibboleth on the liberal-left side of the aisle to even consider it. Many people on the Broad Left side are positively allergic to any sort of cultural analysis.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/30/2024”
I don't find the Hebrew Bible terrifying at all. It is awe-inspiring.
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The YouTube channel Kings & Generals decided to put on a video about how Judaism and Christianity separated. This is all well and good I suppose but a brief sentence a bit after the 10 minute mark in the video about how God is cruel in the Hebrew Bible but of seemingly different character in the NT shows how hard it is to get over stereotypes. Cruel vengeful Jewish God vs.Loving Hippie Jesus is such a cliche that even atheists voice it. Jews obviously do not see God as being cruel as depicted in the Hebrew Bible but no matter how much we explain things in plain language there is always a sort of "yeah, we aren't buying it and the Hebrew Bible God is an asshole" vibe going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCyQmLd7xAQ
"
Those are ancillary conflicts that might effect your position on the I/P conflict but aren't part of it.
"
If you could create a true culture neutral binational state in Israel/Palestine, that might not be a bad solution to the conflict. I don't think it will be culture neutral state though. It will be an Arab and Muslim state with maybe a large Jewish population.
"
There are several I/P conflicts that are going on at the same time. You have the actual conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the ground and the competing factions within Israel and Palestine.
You also have the I/P conflict that is playing out in different head spaces. You have Muslims who see the I/P conflict in theocratic terms and see Israel as a plot upon Islam. You have Western Leftists who see it as White Settler-Colonialists vs. Brown Wretched of the Earth. You have well-meaning Western liberals with different degrees of sympathy for Israel but who want co-existence and multiculturalism to reign supreme despite nobody using those terms.
"
This is even more true for ultra-prestigious boarding schools as well as the lowest inner city public schools. These are the kids of busy and important people who need to totally outsource all parenting.
"
Ghada Karmi was born in 1939 according to Wikipedia. She might be a moderate but she is also too old to update her political beliefs that Israel must be destroyed. She is the type that accepted Oslo in so far that they viewed it as a necessary first step to destroy Israel and send the Jews packing. They say one thing to the West, another thing to themselves, and avoid taking any responsibility for their own failures.
"
Most states in the world are de facto or de jure ethno-states. Israel is just the one that gets called out for it. I have not heard Japan or South Korea being lambasted as ethnostates despite the fact that both are way more ethnostates than Israel is. Like I wrote InMD, I think that many people just find the idea of Jews having a place of our own repellant and don't like the idea of school system teaching Jewish history and literature the way you would teach other history and literature. That the public holidays are Jewish holidays is another thing they can't stand.
"
The militant insistence on the Right of Return makes sense when you realize that the goal is to destroy Israel and hurt Jews more than help the Palestinians. Even the Palestinians seem to care more about destroying Israel and hurting Jews than helping themselves.
The idea of Jews being a majority somewhere, having tax funded schools like other people, and a place where the culture and time revolves around Jewishness is too much for hundreds of millions of people world wide. They need us degraded.
"
I really wish the Jews are colonists brigade would address what would happen to the Jews if they stayed in Europe. If they really believe that the Jews who migrated to Israel/Palestine between 1918 to 1948 are colonists and that's bad than they should come out and see "we think it is more moral if they stayed in Europe and died." They are way too cowardly to do this though.
"
I fail to see why Israel as an ethnostate gets treated as the most evil thing in the world while dozens of countries officially proclaiming themselves to be Islamic, complete with international organization is not.
The Palestinian rhetoric is not of multi-cultural Palestine. It is explicitly that they the Arab Muslim Palestinians are the real true Palestinians and everybody else just lives there. It shouldn't take that many brain cells to figure out why Jews inside and outside of Israel find this a bad deal and don't want to be second class citizens of an officially Muslim state.
"
Ireland doesn't quite produce the same level of fanaticism as the Holy Land and Jerusalem does. Also while you had a bit of the same issues regarding settler-colonialism or not, it wasn't nearly as intense as the I/P conflict.
"
The Arab states are generally moving slowly towards accepting Israel as a presence. I think that going for diplomatic relationships between Israel and the other Arab states even while the I/P remained unresolved was a good idea even though lots of Western liberals and leftists thought it was terrible. Western liberals also prefer a lot softer take against Iran than everybody else in the MENA region.
\
"
The other issue with finding a realistic solution to the I/P conflict or really many other conflicts in the post-WWII world is that a lot of traditional solutions to things like power vacuums, failed states, and other such problems are seen as no longer permissible but nobody came up with a working alternative to the traditional solutions.
Like with the I/P conflict. The Arab states lost big to Israel in 1949 and 1967. Traditionally, this would mean that Israel got to dictate peace terms towards the defeated Arab states but what happened was that you got an armistice in 1949 and the Three No declarations in 1967. As mentioned above, the Palestinian side tends to negotiate like the lost no battle even after losing every battle and have people willing to prop them up on this or prohibit Israel from imposing the terms because things aren't done that way anymore. But the ways that things are supposed to be done don't exactly work if you have people looking for victory. The I/P conflict has people on both sides looking for victory.
"
A big problem with solving the I/P conflict that very few people in the West want to address is what if both sides have significant numbers of people that really do see the I/P conflict in religious terms. Like there are large numbers of Israeli Jews who see Israel as the place promised to them by God and there are large numbers of Palestinians and other Muslims that really do see Israel as a theocratic plot on all of Islam.
Partisans of one side or the other, including myself, are willing to see the side they don't like as possessing weird true believers but both sides. An ethnic or colonial conflict is solvable but a theocratic conflict is not.
"
Hamas has a day after version. It is the state of Israel is vanquished, all the Jews leave the Middle East, and the glorious Islamic Republic of Palestine is established.
Israel has a bunch of competing visions of the Day After. The number of Israelis that believe in the Two-State solution aren't that great anymore. The most liberal probably see some type of independent Palestine with hard borders maintained by Israel rather than co-prosperity. Others want Israel to annex the West Bank without the Palestinians somehow. There might be a few genocidal Israelis but I think most of them just want the issue to go away or for the Palestinians to admit defeat and live quietly as they are now. Obviously neither of these things are going to happen.
"
Trump's plan to help with housing includes "making deportation easier to ease demand."
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c96dc8d11b88e779ee44be7a2f3eb1b44cb1a2cb903d4a8e918f75588d8eff86.jpg
"
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel and makes no secret that they believe justice is "No Israel, No Jews." I have no reason to believe the IDF is lying about it. That doesn't mean Hezbollah was just about to carry out this plan but it would be something they would want to do.
"
Part of the problem is that different Palestinian groups keep trying to negotiate like they win every battle despite losing every battle. Different groups sympathetic to the Palestinians in the Muslim world or the West encourage them in this. The idea that losing a battle or several might come with consequences doesn't seem to occur to people because everything is operating on a justice scale.
"
The Further Left deals with the Israelis and Palestinians that exist in their headspace rather than actual Israelis and Palestinians. As noted on the other blog, it is all 1960s and France in Algeria to them. They ignore that the Palestinians have grown more Islamist in their rhetoric or that Israel is much more populous and wealthy. Their solution is for all the Jews to go "home" even though most Israeli Jews were born in Israel and those that weren't don't have fond memories of home.
"
Radical Jews like Judith Butler are more into putting their fellow Jews in danger of death and persecution to keep their radical credentials buttressed more than anything else. There also does seem to be this weird sub-group of the LGBT radical community that seeks an alliance with Islam despite the homophobia in Muslim majority countries or even in Muslim communities in the West.
"
According to an Israeli commentator on the other blog, the IDF has found plans for a 10/7 type attack in northern Israel from Hezbollah. I can't find any confirmation of this by a google search yet though. This person is rather critical of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians so I have no reason to doubt it though.
"
Like many people who hate Israel, Chris really really hates Israel. The Further Left goes a lot stronger against Israel than other countries because it is the conflict where the tools they use to analyze who is the good guy and who is the bad guy align in their minds.
1. Imperialist vs. Anti-Imperialist-Israel is associated with the United States and the West while the Palestinians were seen as allied with the Communists and the Developing World.
2. White vs. Brown-Most people on the Further Left have a really poor grasp of Israel's demographics and think it is a bunch of Ashkenazi Jews on timeshares that could easily "go back to Poland" vs. the brown indigenous Palestinians. They don't know that there are 7.2 million Jews in Israel and half to sixty percent of them aren't from Europe. Nor do they know that 61% of Israel's current cabinet is Mizrahi.
3. Goliath vs. David-Being a well-organized and wealthy nation state, Israel is clearly Goliath.
For the other big international conflicts of the moment, Russia v. Ukraine and PRC v. Taiwan, the race axis is neutral and the other axis and 3 is unclear so this causes some pause on who to support or not.
"
Judith Butler apparently has an interview in an intellectual journal or something somewhere where she describes 10/7 as an act of resistance. This is the same woman who said that Hamas and Hezbollah are more progressive than liberal Zionists several years ago. I just don't get the Further Left on the I/P conflict. I get sympathy towards the Palestinians but the Further Left insists on playing these rhetorical games and fitting the I/P conflict in an intellectual framework that doesn't really do justice to either the Palestinians or the Israels, plus ignores the actual facts on the ground*, that it is worse than useless.
Another thing that I do not like are the Radical Ashkenazi Jews who are so into maintaining their radical credentials that they would be willing to throw millions of their fellow Jews to death so that they may burnish their radical credentials. This is despite the fact that previous times radical Jews did this, the Soviet Union, they quickly got tossed aside when no longer needed by the people in control because they were Jews. All those Bolshevik Jews found out that their devotion to the revolution amounted to nothing under Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders while Jews who merely wanted to be Jews got to suffer. These Radical Ashkenazi Jews would have their Mizrahi brothers and sisters as second class citizens to maintain their anti-colonial credentials.
*I am utterly convinced that the Further Left's knowledge of 21st century Israel is basically zilch. They do not seem to realize that the majority of Israel's 7.2 million Jews come from the MENA region ancestry wise, that MENA Jews are the base of Likud and other Rightist parties, or that the majority of Netanyahu's cabinet are Mizrahi Jews. You can point this all out to them and they don't believe it. It is just all white settler-colonialists from Europe, never mind what happened to the Jews of Europe, against the brave and indigenous people of color Palestinians. I can't stand the stupidity of it.
"
This is almost a rightist statement from you. The entire honor culture thing is considered a big shibboleth on the liberal-left side of the aisle to even consider it. Many people on the Broad Left side are positively allergic to any sort of cultural analysis.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.