Muslims and Jews already live together in Israel in peace.
What we're dealing with now is how to convince the non-Israeli Muslims that they should set up their own state and stop trying to re-fight a war they lost 70+ years ago.
Chip: But my point is that the concept of an “ethnostate” or “monoculture” doesn’t seem to solve any of the problems that societies have and really just makes them worse.
Israel's existence was a response to brutal anti-Jewish discrimination including the holocaust.
One of the big arguments for Israel as an ethnostate is it's an improvement/solution over that sort of thing.
Chip: How do they determine who is a True Pole, versus a mongrel outsider?
Mostly by language.
Speaking as a mongrel outsider, it was impossible for me to get married in Poland without living there for 6 months. It's impossible for me to get a Polish citizenship without speaking Polish and living there for whatever.
My children were all made Polish citizens as babies. It would be impossible for them to become citizens now because there's no way they could pass the various tests now even with a full Polish parent.
Poland has been very open about not letting in immigrants from Europe's Southern boarder crisis. They have let in huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees but that has been amazingly out of character.
Normal countries are allowed to determine who they will accept and who they won't based on their own standards.
Israel's behavior for immigration control is normal by ethnostate standards. If we want to judge them by how they treat their minorities by Middle East standards then it's just silly.
The Palestinians behavior isn't. No country wants millions of religious fundamentalist terror supporters who will form armed bands to abuse their fellows and eventually attempt to overthrow the government.
Various countries have accepted the Palestinians and then kicked them out for that reason. This is why Egypt doesn't want them in now.
That's the wrong conflict. After WW2 Russia insisted that Poland and Germany change their borders. Millions of people got up and followed them to stay in their countries. The world has largely forgotten.
Every conflict should never be allowed to end much less be forgotten.
The Jew/Arab conflict is the model we want to adopt and not the post WW2 Polish/German/Russian model where people got on with their lives and forgot it.
If it means "right to return to a Palestinian state somewhere in that area" then you have the two state solution. That has been offered and refused as not a real RoR.
If it means "right to return to the house your great grandparents left 70 years ago" then that also means "kicking out the Jews who have been living there for the last 70 years".
The Palestinians are not fighting to become minorities in a Jewish state. They've made it clear that for them, RoR needs to include "the Jews will leave".
When I read the wiki on the alleged sex crimes during the attack we seem to have a large volume of claims of various levels of creditability.
At the bottom of that is several people who are clearly lying.
I think it's way too early to be claiming everything fits in that category. Do hostages claim they were assaulted or don't they? Did Hamas have pictures of females without their pants? I'm not willing to do a deep dive on the raw stuff even if it's available somewhere.
This is one of those things we'll figure out the truth and falsehood of in a few years. Given hundreds of civilian dead bodies the answer will probably be grim.
One of the issues with "subtract the situation" is "everything we know could be wrong".
So for example we had a talk about that hospital being blown up and how it was a clear and deliberate war crime. Everything we knew about it was wrong. The hospital wasn't blown up. The size of the explosion was much smaller than stated. The number of people dead was wrong. And Israel didn't fire the missile.
Hamas has occasionally made the error of giving details on the number of dead. We've had statisticians point out that those numbers were clearly made up. The implication was dead adult males were being reported as dead women and children.
For your "mass grave", we need to also assume that we know is a lie. We need to question whether a mass grave even exists. We need to question whether it has civilians. We need to question who created it.
And yeah, I get that it really sucks that we can be told by "official" sources that there's a mass grave and we can't reasonably conclude anything about it.
DavidTC: Do you know that it’s literally against US law for the US to fund countries that are committing war crimes?
Hamas has made it impossible to have a war without committing war crimes.
Their strategy is to get as many of their own people killed as possible, lie about what is going on and who is at fault, and get international pressure to win the political front.
That means Israel gets graded on a curve.
Subtract the situation and within the (large) margin of error, Israel might be using Queensbury rules.
My expectation is that they're not and this is ugly. That being filled with rage is affecting them.
None of which changes that within the margin of error on the curve they're fine.
If we want to help the Palestinians then we should be calling for Hamas to surrender and not for Israel to tolerate what no democracy would tolerate.
I just watched a video on the denaz.ification of Germany.
The good news is Germany turned away from that. The bad news is our efforts at denaz.ification seem to have failed. Germany reformed because they wanted to and because Russia was such a big problem.
It would be real easy for Israel to win this war and decide that they hadn't been oppressive enough and for the Palestinians to decide they hadn't been savage enough.
Israel lay siege to a hospital for weeks. That was reported with no mention of who they were fighting. It's like the unarmed doctors and nurses were somehow preventing them from taking over.
If we're going to use this as "actual evidence of Israeli intent" then the fact it went on for weeks strongly suggests that yes, the hospital was also a military base.
Similarly we also saw that hospital parking lot where 50 people died reported as 500 dead and dead deliberately when it turned out it was a Palestinian misfire.
That level of spin and outright lies should inform us of just how slanted the info coming out of Gaza really is. We should expect that in all of the reporting.
If Israel is actually genocidal then we should have hundreds of thousands of dead. What we have is something that, within the margin of error, could be Hamas claiming that every dead solider is a civilian plus an expected loss of human shields.
My expectation is Israel is committing more war crimes than it absolutely has to. But we're in "brutal war" territory here and not "total war" thus far.
If we listen to Hamas, every Israeli bomb magically (and deliberately) kills only women or children.
If we listen to Israel then they're killing between one and two civilians for every solider which is pretty good everything considered.
Hamas is boldface lying about everything with the media and the UN repeating that; presumably Israel is also being less than truthful. So we really don't know what is happening.
30-35k dead puts us into "war" territory, but if Israel were deliberately killing everyone then they're not doing a good job of it.
You are over estimating how much thought most have put into this.
1) Killing is bad.
2) Israel is killing.
Ergo Israel is bad.
So if Israel would just stop killing it would be all happiness and rainbows.
That's the start and the conclusion.
Various other facts, when they come up, need to be tacked onto that "thinking". 10/7 was also bad... but if we need to add that into the existing reasoning we need either "the Palestinians must have been provoked" or "two wrongs don't make a right".
Freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to force me to listen.
Freedom of association doesn't mean you can force me to associate with you.
"Getting in my face" means "threatening me personally".
The "we" who has to agree to this is the Israelis.
What I am pointing out is after we strip away the wishful thinking, that's what we need to talk them into accepting.
This is where Biden has done a good job. He understands that's a non-starter.
Ergo "the US should pressure the Israelis into accepting a cease fire" needs to include "a cease fire which doesn't include Hamas doing the occasional 10/7".
The US' idea is a 6 week cease fire where the hostages are released and we flood Gaza with aid. Israel hates the idea but we could probably force them to accept it.
Hamas also hates the idea because it would have to admit what it has been doing to the hostages which would enflame the situation. They think that after the body count gets high enough Israel will be forced to back off no matter what they do.
Realities of war are hard to stomach and lend themselves to wishful thinking.
We insisted that Israel guard those aid convoys. This instantly became the Israeli guards shooting Palestinian civilians. With the benefit of hindsight that looks predictable.
Similarly we have a lot of people insisting that the two sides make a deal. Israel wants it's hostages back (which Hamas literally can't do). Hamas wants Israel to end the war and tolerate the occasional 10/7 (ditto).
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Free Speech, But No Freedom to Harass”
Muslims and Jews already live together in Israel in peace.
What we're dealing with now is how to convince the non-Israeli Muslims that they should set up their own state and stop trying to re-fight a war they lost 70+ years ago.
"
Chip: But my point is that the concept of an “ethnostate” or “monoculture” doesn’t seem to solve any of the problems that societies have and really just makes them worse.
Israel's existence was a response to brutal anti-Jewish discrimination including the holocaust.
One of the big arguments for Israel as an ethnostate is it's an improvement/solution over that sort of thing.
"
Poland's immigration standards are more strict than Israel's. They both get about 75k people a year but Poland is massively bigger.
"
Chip: How do they determine who is a True Pole, versus a mongrel outsider?
Mostly by language.
Speaking as a mongrel outsider, it was impossible for me to get married in Poland without living there for 6 months. It's impossible for me to get a Polish citizenship without speaking Polish and living there for whatever.
My children were all made Polish citizens as babies. It would be impossible for them to become citizens now because there's no way they could pass the various tests now even with a full Polish parent.
Poland has been very open about not letting in immigrants from Europe's Southern boarder crisis. They have let in huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees but that has been amazingly out of character.
Normal countries are allowed to determine who they will accept and who they won't based on their own standards.
Israel's behavior for immigration control is normal by ethnostate standards. If we want to judge them by how they treat their minorities by Middle East standards then it's just silly.
The Palestinians behavior isn't. No country wants millions of religious fundamentalist terror supporters who will form armed bands to abuse their fellows and eventually attempt to overthrow the government.
Various countries have accepted the Palestinians and then kicked them out for that reason. This is why Egypt doesn't want them in now.
"
So in other words, Poland can never be at peace because it's openly an ethnostate?
The United States is the extreme exception to the world in that it's NOT an ethnostate and is pretty much open to everyone.
And we would never let in millions of religious fundamentalists with a strong tradition of backing terrorism.
The two sides are not equally guilty.
"
That's the wrong conflict. After WW2 Russia insisted that Poland and Germany change their borders. Millions of people got up and followed them to stay in their countries. The world has largely forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_Poland_immediately_after_World_War_II
"
Every conflict should never be allowed to end much less be forgotten.
The Jew/Arab conflict is the model we want to adopt and not the post WW2 Polish/German/Russian model where people got on with their lives and forgot it.
"
Define "right to return".
If it means "right to return to a Palestinian state somewhere in that area" then you have the two state solution. That has been offered and refused as not a real RoR.
If it means "right to return to the house your great grandparents left 70 years ago" then that also means "kicking out the Jews who have been living there for the last 70 years".
The Palestinians are not fighting to become minorities in a Jewish state. They've made it clear that for them, RoR needs to include "the Jews will leave".
"
Think of all the bricks that get thrown at BLM.
The theory of building a minority organization is different than the reality.
"
When I read the wiki on the alleged sex crimes during the attack we seem to have a large volume of claims of various levels of creditability.
At the bottom of that is several people who are clearly lying.
I think it's way too early to be claiming everything fits in that category. Do hostages claim they were assaulted or don't they? Did Hamas have pictures of females without their pants? I'm not willing to do a deep dive on the raw stuff even if it's available somewhere.
This is one of those things we'll figure out the truth and falsehood of in a few years. Given hundreds of civilian dead bodies the answer will probably be grim.
"
One of the issues with "subtract the situation" is "everything we know could be wrong".
So for example we had a talk about that hospital being blown up and how it was a clear and deliberate war crime. Everything we knew about it was wrong. The hospital wasn't blown up. The size of the explosion was much smaller than stated. The number of people dead was wrong. And Israel didn't fire the missile.
Hamas has occasionally made the error of giving details on the number of dead. We've had statisticians point out that those numbers were clearly made up. The implication was dead adult males were being reported as dead women and children.
For your "mass grave", we need to also assume that we know is a lie. We need to question whether a mass grave even exists. We need to question whether it has civilians. We need to question who created it.
And yeah, I get that it really sucks that we can be told by "official" sources that there's a mass grave and we can't reasonably conclude anything about it.
"
https://www.timesofisrael.com/14-kids-under-10-25-people-over-80-up-to-date-breakdown-of-oct-7-victims-we-know-about/
"
DavidTC: Do you know that it’s literally against US law for the US to fund countries that are committing war crimes?
Hamas has made it impossible to have a war without committing war crimes.
Their strategy is to get as many of their own people killed as possible, lie about what is going on and who is at fault, and get international pressure to win the political front.
That means Israel gets graded on a curve.
Subtract the situation and within the (large) margin of error, Israel might be using Queensbury rules.
My expectation is that they're not and this is ugly. That being filled with rage is affecting them.
None of which changes that within the margin of error on the curve they're fine.
If we want to help the Palestinians then we should be calling for Hamas to surrender and not for Israel to tolerate what no democracy would tolerate.
"
Likud opposes two states.
Likud is also 23% (as of 2022)
Something like a third of Israelis support two states (28.6% of Jews and 72% of Israeli Arabs).
For perspective about 24% of Palestinians support two states.
"
The "follows" is going to be interesting.
I just watched a video on the denaz.ification of Germany.
The good news is Germany turned away from that. The bad news is our efforts at denaz.ification seem to have failed. Germany reformed because they wanted to and because Russia was such a big problem.
It would be real easy for Israel to win this war and decide that they hadn't been oppressive enough and for the Palestinians to decide they hadn't been savage enough.
"
Israel lay siege to a hospital for weeks. That was reported with no mention of who they were fighting. It's like the unarmed doctors and nurses were somehow preventing them from taking over.
If we're going to use this as "actual evidence of Israeli intent" then the fact it went on for weeks strongly suggests that yes, the hospital was also a military base.
Similarly we also saw that hospital parking lot where 50 people died reported as 500 dead and dead deliberately when it turned out it was a Palestinian misfire.
That level of spin and outright lies should inform us of just how slanted the info coming out of Gaza really is. We should expect that in all of the reporting.
If Israel is actually genocidal then we should have hundreds of thousands of dead. What we have is something that, within the margin of error, could be Hamas claiming that every dead solider is a civilian plus an expected loss of human shields.
My expectation is Israel is committing more war crimes than it absolutely has to. But we're in "brutal war" territory here and not "total war" thus far.
"
RE: On going genocide.
If we listen to Hamas, every Israeli bomb magically (and deliberately) kills only women or children.
If we listen to Israel then they're killing between one and two civilians for every solider which is pretty good everything considered.
Hamas is boldface lying about everything with the media and the UN repeating that; presumably Israel is also being less than truthful. So we really don't know what is happening.
30-35k dead puts us into "war" territory, but if Israel were deliberately killing everyone then they're not doing a good job of it.
"
You are over estimating how much thought most have put into this.
1) Killing is bad.
2) Israel is killing.
Ergo Israel is bad.
So if Israel would just stop killing it would be all happiness and rainbows.
That's the start and the conclusion.
Various other facts, when they come up, need to be tacked onto that "thinking". 10/7 was also bad... but if we need to add that into the existing reasoning we need either "the Palestinians must have been provoked" or "two wrongs don't make a right".
On “More Campus Palestine Protests, More Arrests, More Viral Video”
The "malicious actors" view themselves as mainstream pro-Palestinian. They may have the numbers for that.
"
Freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to force me to listen.
Freedom of association doesn't mean you can force me to associate with you.
"Getting in my face" means "threatening me personally".
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/22/2024”
JayBird: if we’d established that warring is orthogonal to stopping Hamas
Turning the other cheek isn't going to do anything useful.
Israel could fail to totally eliminate Hamas and still do useful things. Reducing the resources they can access is useful.
Unfortunately this takes us to "terrorism causes poverty".
That UN agency which has been teaching the Palestinians that they have a RoR might get reformed out of this.
This generation of Palestinians might learn a 1 to 100 death rate is a Pyrrhic "victory" that shouldn't be repeated.
"
We can't remove them entirely but it's not a reach to think things might get better if they're not in charge.
"
I think Israel would go for it if it didn't include them with drawing from Gaza and they got their people back.
Their army could take a break and get ready for the next phase.
I'm not convinced Hamas views aid as something good. Their entire path to victory is getting as many of their own civilians killed as possible.
"
The "we" who has to agree to this is the Israelis.
What I am pointing out is after we strip away the wishful thinking, that's what we need to talk them into accepting.
This is where Biden has done a good job. He understands that's a non-starter.
Ergo "the US should pressure the Israelis into accepting a cease fire" needs to include "a cease fire which doesn't include Hamas doing the occasional 10/7".
The US' idea is a 6 week cease fire where the hostages are released and we flood Gaza with aid. Israel hates the idea but we could probably force them to accept it.
Hamas also hates the idea because it would have to admit what it has been doing to the hostages which would enflame the situation. They think that after the body count gets high enough Israel will be forced to back off no matter what they do.
"
Realities of war are hard to stomach and lend themselves to wishful thinking.
We insisted that Israel guard those aid convoys. This instantly became the Israeli guards shooting Palestinian civilians. With the benefit of hindsight that looks predictable.
Similarly we have a lot of people insisting that the two sides make a deal. Israel wants it's hostages back (which Hamas literally can't do). Hamas wants Israel to end the war and tolerate the occasional 10/7 (ditto).
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.