No, I still don't think this is right for two reasons:
The first is that Palestinian hatred for Israeli Jews isn't completely spontaneous. I don't kid myself about the tolerance of Muslims and especially not middle eastern Sunni Muslims. They're an anti Jewish people steeped in an anti Jewish cultiure and a backwards regressive religion. But the attacks are driven as much by the day to day reality of Israeli settlers, soldiers, and the state actively engaging in its own violence and terrorism against Palestinian civilians. This is the one area where that Ta Nahesi Coates piece Chris shared made a point. What would you think of Israelis if it was your brother killed by an IDF patrol or your parents driven off their land by psychotic settlers? What if it was your kid who couldn't get medicine because of the blockade? Would you care that Hamas was as much to blame or would you be tempted to take up arms? I know I would.
The second and related point is that the biggest threat to Israeli democracy isn't violence. It's insisting on creating a state with boundaries full of hostile non-citizens.
The Palestinians own what they do and so do the Israelis. But it's the Israelis by their own policies insisting on living in the same country with Palestinians, then pointing to Palestinian violence as the reason for their own crazy choice. It's completely circular.
Lee, this is where I think being so much more obsessed with what people say instead of what facts are creates problems and confusion for the Israel camp.
Of course apartheid SA and Israel aren't exact parallels. The ANC never needed to take an official, whites out position because all they had to ask for was actual democracy where black people had equal rights and the vote. It also goes without saying that in principle their stance was the right, morally defensible one, which goes a long way towards explaining why they won the battle for world opinion.
Nevermind the fact that the ANC has always also been an expressly Leninist party with plans for radical affirmative action sure to create the exact conditions that exist today. All the Mandela speeches in the world weren't going to change the mission of rewarding the Xhosa ethnic group that dominated the coalition, primarily at the expense of the white holders of wealth and power (though some black ethnic groups as well). The whites then predictably began a steady exodus that continues today. All of SAs racists from the old regime and apologists said that was what would happen. It wasn't some secret.
So the question for Israel is whether it's more important to secure itself as a democratic, Jewish homeland that will last for the foreseeable future, or to have a little more territory but where the democratic nature of the government and demographic ascendency of Jews is under perpetual threat. That's the actual, real, state of affairs, and the choice to be made, regardless of whether the Palestinians say nice things or say horrible nasty things.
That's closer to what I think is likely to happen on current trajectory. There will still be a place on the map, most likely called Israel, but where all of the Jews with the wherewithal are leaving for America or Europe. The political situation resembles Lebanon where the state exists mainly on paper.
There are a small number of relatively secure zones in what was Israel proper while non state actors vie for control over an area increasingly unable to produce anything or function due to the danger and instability.
I'll also just throw in I am capable of changing my opinion based on actions and facts on the ground. I used to have a hell of a lot more sympathy for the Palestinians than I do today.
Just to put a finer point on this, I think South Africa is really instructive, and not the fairy tale version of it we got before the press went dark on the subject. Specifically the ANC was an anti-white vengeance party out of power and has remained one in power. Not to the degree people feared, and not nearly to the degree other anti-apartheid groups might have been. But they've nevertheless destroyed the country through a combination of short sighted black economic empowerment policies, weird ideas they got from the Soviets who were their main sponsors, outrageous acts of ethnic violence, often against other black groups, and just flat out petty corruption and incompetence.
Now the fact that the white South Africans maxed out at something like 16% of the population, and were spread across both the urban centers and had taken over all of the arable land, meant there was no neat solution with a geographic split. Israel has an advantage in that something like that is still possible.
But the longer Israel stays in the territories, the more the actual Israel becomes less a democracy occupying foreign territory, and more a single, unitary state, where roughly half of the population is not a citizen, cannot vote, and has no say or stake of any kind in its governance. Something like that can't go on forever, not in the modern world.
If it refuses to leave, Israel will either have to ethnically cleans the territory and accept the consequences of that, which could be permanent and grave, which it is slowly doing now, or eventually give in to demands to enfranchise all of the people under its authority, in which case it goes the way of SA, or just collapses into civil war.
Which is why the security case you're making is so absurd. What you're really arguing for is one of those latter two outcomes.
No what caused them to make that deal was their situation becoming untenable due to international isolation. They could have held out a pretty long time in the face of that too but ultimately decided it was better not to follow that path. Unfortunately I think SA is too broken to ever work out well.
As for what keeps breaking the peace agreements it's the fact that Israel insists on keeping millions of people inside its de facto borders who they will never grant citizenship to or any other rights. Unlike SA, Israel has the ability to solve that problem, and be a real democracy merely by unilaterally redrawing it's own borders to some approximation of the maps thrown around at various points. However if it insists on keeping millions of non citizens in it's country for security reasons while demanding 'peace first' it will never get it, and it isn't hard to understand why.
Read about how advanced and rich apartheid South Africa was. How long did it last once popular opinion in the West decided that the situation was intolerable?
There's no paralysis. The issue is that Israel is not a liberal democracy but wants to be treated like one by other liberal democracies. The rules have been bent for decades under the theory that Israel was going to remedy that situation but it's becoming increasingly obvious that it never will, which is fueling a slow change in attitudes. I don't understand why that is so hard for you to grapple with, especially given your ability to identify double standards generally.
Not opinions Dark. Military aid. Diplomatic cover. Privileged access to the wealthiest and most sophisticated markets in the world for Israeli technology services, the backbone of their economy.
The second biggest supplier of military equipment to Israel is Germany. Do you think this is fun for members of the coalition government there? What about other European governments, where the conservative parties arent beholden to the weird Evangelical Protestant affinity for Israel we have in the US?
Or, do you think it would be good if over the next 10-20 years American aid becomes on again off again instead of bipartisan? What if European governments just got tired of explaining why they're being treated terribly by the people Israel elects and stopped picking up the phone?
You're completely discounting the extent to which Israel is a tiny island whose status is dependent on being viewed as a democracy in good standing by other wealthy democracies.
I think you're missing North's point. No matter how bad or incorrigible the Palestinians are Israel's standing with its western benefactors is going to become increasingly tenuous. Not in the way dumb college students think it should. But in the same way that happens with anything else that becomes more trouble than it's worth.
Now personally I don't really care. My opinion has long been that America in particular has no interest in who controls that territory, and if the Israelis and Palestinians need to fight to the death over it there's nothing we can do to stop them. But Israel is kidding itself if it thinks western democracies can just go along with this forever, or that there's no point passed which Israel won't greatly diminish itself. It may well already be in the process of doing that and saying terrorism 1000 times a minute isn't the magic Trump card it was 20 or 30 years ago.
I don't think a threat to go nuclear is the worst thing in the world as a negotiation tactic, assuming there really is some kind of negotiation happening.
Back here on Earth though I'm not sure the Democrats are playing the game. We can't even get Sonia Sotomayor to retire when there is a decent chance of her one upping Ginsburg in disastrous levels of pride. Makes it pretty hard to take seriously.
So what should Israel do then with all of the disenfranchised people in territory it controls? Expel them? Kill them? Leave them in a perpetual limbo then point to their periodic violent lashing out as the post hoc justification for it?
And look, I'm not saying you guys are necessarily wrong. No one should have rose colored lenses about what freedom for the occupied territories is likely to look like. But I will say all of these rationalizations fail to address the actual issue, that being several million stateless people inside of the de facto state of Israel. None of it is convincing because none of it deals with the problem.
Gamblor has never been my vice demon of choice. The $50 I pay into my annual fantasy football league, and maybe an occasional lotto ticket when the jackpot gets really high, is as far as I go. But I do have friends who have found themselves in some low, but thankfully not catastrophic, points with it.
Either way it seems like it's already gotten well into some seriously predatory territory.
I've always been a 'legalize and regulate' person for gambling but something about putting this stuff on peoples' phones then bombarding them with ridiculous 'can't lose deals' is a disaster waiting to happen. Or maybe a disaster that's already happening. Either way I'm very open to reigning it in. Big question is whether states are willing to walk away from any of the revenue, especially when there's already a race to the bottom.
See, I think the South African parallel is accurate in some ways but doesn't really bode well for any 'side.' The book on SA is that the critics of the white apartheid government were right. And no matter how much they built, how much they tried to create something like a normal, 1st world, "democratic" country, they couldn't do it. Apartheid made it inherently illegitimate, authoritarian, and abusive.
But this is where it's worth continuing the story. As best as I can tell, the critics of the ANC were also mostly right. Behind Mandela they turned out to be incompetent, corrupt, and enamored with all kinds of discredited Eastern Bloc and other group rights nonsense. The result is that they've been unable to pick up and run the civil infrastructure inherited from the old racist regime, and it's all starting to collapse, just as the political system is itself regressing. So of course no one in the West talks about South Africa anymore, as if it just disappeared in the late 90s.
Now I happen to think there is a decent chance something like that happens with Israel/Palestine too. But it would be very strange to me to call that outcome vindication for anyone, not in a positive way.
I think lots of young people have always said really radical things, some of which catch on, most of which don't, and it's a fool's errand to assume the staying power of any particular flavor. Our recent history is littered with various ideas and movements that had their moments only to be totally forgotten.*
But I would also say that the biggest part of my criticism of whatever exactly this phenomena we're discussing is that it's either incredibly backwards looking, to times and situations that are already almost out of living memory and/or fail to account for things as they are now, or that they're incredibly inward looking, while completely ignoring the big questions about where we are going to be tomorrow. Maybe I will be proven wrong, but to me that does not portend well.
*One of the odder things about the US, maybe because we're still a relatively young country, maybe because of our history of immigration, is that we haven't experienced a big right ward cultural push from young people, but it isn't written in the stars that it couldn't happen. Other western countries have experienced that and some might be on the verge of it right now. Not that I'm predicting that for us, I only mention it to reiterate my belief that humility is in order with respect to predictions about the future.
I think the bottom line is that no matter how much you tinker with the process for capital punishment there is no way to pursue it without occasionally executing an innocent person. I'm not ok with that, nor do I see it as a price worth paying.
Certainly true. It just seems to me like we've been waiting for that big defection for a while now, and if it's happening it isn't showing up in the polls or other indicators.
But hey maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised in November. Nothing would be sweeter (or better for the country, conservatism, everyone) than, I dunno, Harris getting North Carolina's electoral votes because the combination of Trump and Robinson is just too nuts for the state's Republican voters.
Do you think that anything is different now than it was in King's day?
I'm also wondering if HR consultants should be thought of as similarly situated to civil rights activists of the 50s and 60s but I'm afraid of the answer.
This is where I hate to yell you but... Trumpism is conservatism now. I understand there are a lot of people in the right of center camp that aren't particularly enamored with it for whatever reason. But until someone else takes over the ship that is the Republican party, or gets something else instead as the animating force of movement conservatism, then the two will remain one and the same.
Fair enough, and maybe I am misreading him. But to your original comment, I am all in favor of de-escalation. Everyone here knows my priors on these types of topics, but I can easily concede that those, mostly, but not all, conservative types, that have embarked on their own personal crusades are making things worse, not better. We could use a lot more chilling the F out.
I never get my panties in a twist with those who do not get theirs in a twist. And yet, my comment was enough to get Chip accusing me of thinking gay guys shouldn't be able to write musical numbers (as if anyone has the power to stop that) or thinking black people shouldn't be able to work at NASA... or something.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
No, I still don't think this is right for two reasons:
The first is that Palestinian hatred for Israeli Jews isn't completely spontaneous. I don't kid myself about the tolerance of Muslims and especially not middle eastern Sunni Muslims. They're an anti Jewish people steeped in an anti Jewish cultiure and a backwards regressive religion. But the attacks are driven as much by the day to day reality of Israeli settlers, soldiers, and the state actively engaging in its own violence and terrorism against Palestinian civilians. This is the one area where that Ta Nahesi Coates piece Chris shared made a point. What would you think of Israelis if it was your brother killed by an IDF patrol or your parents driven off their land by psychotic settlers? What if it was your kid who couldn't get medicine because of the blockade? Would you care that Hamas was as much to blame or would you be tempted to take up arms? I know I would.
The second and related point is that the biggest threat to Israeli democracy isn't violence. It's insisting on creating a state with boundaries full of hostile non-citizens.
The Palestinians own what they do and so do the Israelis. But it's the Israelis by their own policies insisting on living in the same country with Palestinians, then pointing to Palestinian violence as the reason for their own crazy choice. It's completely circular.
"
Lee, this is where I think being so much more obsessed with what people say instead of what facts are creates problems and confusion for the Israel camp.
Of course apartheid SA and Israel aren't exact parallels. The ANC never needed to take an official, whites out position because all they had to ask for was actual democracy where black people had equal rights and the vote. It also goes without saying that in principle their stance was the right, morally defensible one, which goes a long way towards explaining why they won the battle for world opinion.
Nevermind the fact that the ANC has always also been an expressly Leninist party with plans for radical affirmative action sure to create the exact conditions that exist today. All the Mandela speeches in the world weren't going to change the mission of rewarding the Xhosa ethnic group that dominated the coalition, primarily at the expense of the white holders of wealth and power (though some black ethnic groups as well). The whites then predictably began a steady exodus that continues today. All of SAs racists from the old regime and apologists said that was what would happen. It wasn't some secret.
So the question for Israel is whether it's more important to secure itself as a democratic, Jewish homeland that will last for the foreseeable future, or to have a little more territory but where the democratic nature of the government and demographic ascendency of Jews is under perpetual threat. That's the actual, real, state of affairs, and the choice to be made, regardless of whether the Palestinians say nice things or say horrible nasty things.
"
That's closer to what I think is likely to happen on current trajectory. There will still be a place on the map, most likely called Israel, but where all of the Jews with the wherewithal are leaving for America or Europe. The political situation resembles Lebanon where the state exists mainly on paper.
There are a small number of relatively secure zones in what was Israel proper while non state actors vie for control over an area increasingly unable to produce anything or function due to the danger and instability.
I'll also just throw in I am capable of changing my opinion based on actions and facts on the ground. I used to have a hell of a lot more sympathy for the Palestinians than I do today.
"
Just to put a finer point on this, I think South Africa is really instructive, and not the fairy tale version of it we got before the press went dark on the subject. Specifically the ANC was an anti-white vengeance party out of power and has remained one in power. Not to the degree people feared, and not nearly to the degree other anti-apartheid groups might have been. But they've nevertheless destroyed the country through a combination of short sighted black economic empowerment policies, weird ideas they got from the Soviets who were their main sponsors, outrageous acts of ethnic violence, often against other black groups, and just flat out petty corruption and incompetence.
Now the fact that the white South Africans maxed out at something like 16% of the population, and were spread across both the urban centers and had taken over all of the arable land, meant there was no neat solution with a geographic split. Israel has an advantage in that something like that is still possible.
But the longer Israel stays in the territories, the more the actual Israel becomes less a democracy occupying foreign territory, and more a single, unitary state, where roughly half of the population is not a citizen, cannot vote, and has no say or stake of any kind in its governance. Something like that can't go on forever, not in the modern world.
If it refuses to leave, Israel will either have to ethnically cleans the territory and accept the consequences of that, which could be permanent and grave, which it is slowly doing now, or eventually give in to demands to enfranchise all of the people under its authority, in which case it goes the way of SA, or just collapses into civil war.
Which is why the security case you're making is so absurd. What you're really arguing for is one of those latter two outcomes.
"
No what caused them to make that deal was their situation becoming untenable due to international isolation. They could have held out a pretty long time in the face of that too but ultimately decided it was better not to follow that path. Unfortunately I think SA is too broken to ever work out well.
As for what keeps breaking the peace agreements it's the fact that Israel insists on keeping millions of people inside its de facto borders who they will never grant citizenship to or any other rights. Unlike SA, Israel has the ability to solve that problem, and be a real democracy merely by unilaterally redrawing it's own borders to some approximation of the maps thrown around at various points. However if it insists on keeping millions of non citizens in it's country for security reasons while demanding 'peace first' it will never get it, and it isn't hard to understand why.
"
Read about how advanced and rich apartheid South Africa was. How long did it last once popular opinion in the West decided that the situation was intolerable?
"
There's no paralysis. The issue is that Israel is not a liberal democracy but wants to be treated like one by other liberal democracies. The rules have been bent for decades under the theory that Israel was going to remedy that situation but it's becoming increasingly obvious that it never will, which is fueling a slow change in attitudes. I don't understand why that is so hard for you to grapple with, especially given your ability to identify double standards generally.
"
Not opinions Dark. Military aid. Diplomatic cover. Privileged access to the wealthiest and most sophisticated markets in the world for Israeli technology services, the backbone of their economy.
The second biggest supplier of military equipment to Israel is Germany. Do you think this is fun for members of the coalition government there? What about other European governments, where the conservative parties arent beholden to the weird Evangelical Protestant affinity for Israel we have in the US?
Or, do you think it would be good if over the next 10-20 years American aid becomes on again off again instead of bipartisan? What if European governments just got tired of explaining why they're being treated terribly by the people Israel elects and stopped picking up the phone?
You're completely discounting the extent to which Israel is a tiny island whose status is dependent on being viewed as a democracy in good standing by other wealthy democracies.
"
I think you're missing North's point. No matter how bad or incorrigible the Palestinians are Israel's standing with its western benefactors is going to become increasingly tenuous. Not in the way dumb college students think it should. But in the same way that happens with anything else that becomes more trouble than it's worth.
Now personally I don't really care. My opinion has long been that America in particular has no interest in who controls that territory, and if the Israelis and Palestinians need to fight to the death over it there's nothing we can do to stop them. But Israel is kidding itself if it thinks western democracies can just go along with this forever, or that there's no point passed which Israel won't greatly diminish itself. It may well already be in the process of doing that and saying terrorism 1000 times a minute isn't the magic Trump card it was 20 or 30 years ago.
"
Are there any Maronites left in Lebanon? All I know of are efforts to get them out.
"
Good Lord.
"
I don't think a threat to go nuclear is the worst thing in the world as a negotiation tactic, assuming there really is some kind of negotiation happening.
Back here on Earth though I'm not sure the Democrats are playing the game. We can't even get Sonia Sotomayor to retire when there is a decent chance of her one upping Ginsburg in disastrous levels of pride. Makes it pretty hard to take seriously.
"
So what should Israel do then with all of the disenfranchised people in territory it controls? Expel them? Kill them? Leave them in a perpetual limbo then point to their periodic violent lashing out as the post hoc justification for it?
And look, I'm not saying you guys are necessarily wrong. No one should have rose colored lenses about what freedom for the occupied territories is likely to look like. But I will say all of these rationalizations fail to address the actual issue, that being several million stateless people inside of the de facto state of Israel. None of it is convincing because none of it deals with the problem.
"
Gamblor has never been my vice demon of choice. The $50 I pay into my annual fantasy football league, and maybe an occasional lotto ticket when the jackpot gets really high, is as far as I go. But I do have friends who have found themselves in some low, but thankfully not catastrophic, points with it.
Either way it seems like it's already gotten well into some seriously predatory territory.
"
I've always been a 'legalize and regulate' person for gambling but something about putting this stuff on peoples' phones then bombarding them with ridiculous 'can't lose deals' is a disaster waiting to happen. Or maybe a disaster that's already happening. Either way I'm very open to reigning it in. Big question is whether states are willing to walk away from any of the revenue, especially when there's already a race to the bottom.
On “New York City Mayor Eric Adams Indictment: Read It For Yourself”
When I saw the news I figured they'd finally found evidence that he has been living in New Jersey all along. Totally different from what I expected.
On “Missouri Conducts Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams”
I think if we tried to do it any cheaper we wouldn't be killing the occasional innocent person, but rather quite a few.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
See, I think the South African parallel is accurate in some ways but doesn't really bode well for any 'side.' The book on SA is that the critics of the white apartheid government were right. And no matter how much they built, how much they tried to create something like a normal, 1st world, "democratic" country, they couldn't do it. Apartheid made it inherently illegitimate, authoritarian, and abusive.
But this is where it's worth continuing the story. As best as I can tell, the critics of the ANC were also mostly right. Behind Mandela they turned out to be incompetent, corrupt, and enamored with all kinds of discredited Eastern Bloc and other group rights nonsense. The result is that they've been unable to pick up and run the civil infrastructure inherited from the old racist regime, and it's all starting to collapse, just as the political system is itself regressing. So of course no one in the West talks about South Africa anymore, as if it just disappeared in the late 90s.
Now I happen to think there is a decent chance something like that happens with Israel/Palestine too. But it would be very strange to me to call that outcome vindication for anyone, not in a positive way.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
I think lots of young people have always said really radical things, some of which catch on, most of which don't, and it's a fool's errand to assume the staying power of any particular flavor. Our recent history is littered with various ideas and movements that had their moments only to be totally forgotten.*
But I would also say that the biggest part of my criticism of whatever exactly this phenomena we're discussing is that it's either incredibly backwards looking, to times and situations that are already almost out of living memory and/or fail to account for things as they are now, or that they're incredibly inward looking, while completely ignoring the big questions about where we are going to be tomorrow. Maybe I will be proven wrong, but to me that does not portend well.
*One of the odder things about the US, maybe because we're still a relatively young country, maybe because of our history of immigration, is that we haven't experienced a big right ward cultural push from young people, but it isn't written in the stars that it couldn't happen. Other western countries have experienced that and some might be on the verge of it right now. Not that I'm predicting that for us, I only mention it to reiterate my belief that humility is in order with respect to predictions about the future.
On “Missouri Conducts Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams”
I think the bottom line is that no matter how much you tinker with the process for capital punishment there is no way to pursue it without occasionally executing an innocent person. I'm not ok with that, nor do I see it as a price worth paying.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
Certainly true. It just seems to me like we've been waiting for that big defection for a while now, and if it's happening it isn't showing up in the polls or other indicators.
But hey maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised in November. Nothing would be sweeter (or better for the country, conservatism, everyone) than, I dunno, Harris getting North Carolina's electoral votes because the combination of Trump and Robinson is just too nuts for the state's Republican voters.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
Do you think that anything is different now than it was in King's day?
I'm also wondering if HR consultants should be thought of as similarly situated to civil rights activists of the 50s and 60s but I'm afraid of the answer.
On “Why a Trump Loss is Best for Conservatives”
This is where I hate to yell you but... Trumpism is conservatism now. I understand there are a lot of people in the right of center camp that aren't particularly enamored with it for whatever reason. But until someone else takes over the ship that is the Republican party, or gets something else instead as the animating force of movement conservatism, then the two will remain one and the same.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/23/2024”
Fair enough, and maybe I am misreading him. But to your original comment, I am all in favor of de-escalation. Everyone here knows my priors on these types of topics, but I can easily concede that those, mostly, but not all, conservative types, that have embarked on their own personal crusades are making things worse, not better. We could use a lot more chilling the F out.
"
I never get my panties in a twist with those who do not get theirs in a twist. And yet, my comment was enough to get Chip accusing me of thinking gay guys shouldn't be able to write musical numbers (as if anyone has the power to stop that) or thinking black people shouldn't be able to work at NASA... or something.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.