If Israel dragged their settlers out and withdrew from the West Bank maybe we'd see the blooming of a flourishing civilized state, maybe we'd see a repeat of what happened in Gaza, maybe they'd start eating the pavement and shooting babies from catapults at the Israeli border. From the standpoint of the Israeli's survival It. Wouldn't. Matter.
A positive outcome would be nice. But even if the Palestinians attacked or shot missiles the Israelis could do just about anything short of re-occupying the West Bank to respond and the world would be fine with whatever it was. The Israeli state would be secured in both the short and long term. Eventually the Palestinians would either come to terms with that or not but the Jewish state would survive (and likely thrive) regardless of whether the Palestinians did or not.
Yup, I agree. Looking back in time from the present my mind reels at how shocked my younger self was at Sharon's actions. His unilateral withdrawal without negotiation or agreement to impose final boundaries on the Gazans seemed astonishingly right wing at the time. Now? My goodness how the changing of times changes perspectives!
Fatah and Hamas are very different birds. But the West Bank is the only region that presents an actual mortal threat to the Israeli state. What we saw come out of Gaza was abhorrent, granted, but was it an actual threat to the survival of Israel? No. Heck, it was only even as terrible as it managed to be because Bibi basically left the Israelis pants down due to internal politics.
Heh, I appreciate you making me feel so young DavidTC, this is a grand throwback to the arguments over the moral merits of the foundation of the Israeli state from when I was in my twenties. But these arguements can go in circles forever and elides my core point. The Israelis will never agree to a right of return into Israel proper no matter what anyone does. It will never happen. It was vanishingly unlikely to happen twenty some years ago and conditions for it to happen now have gotten far worse. They will never, ever, do it and it's a waste of breath to inveigle that they should do it. The Palestinian diasporas best bet is to hope to return to an eventual Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza or else integrate into where they were born or migrate somewhere else.
I mean, let's be real, we're talking about a huge disparate set of people scattered across the globe. There're almost as many reasons for Palestinian sympathy/support as there are supporters. I agree with your point but there's no way to coordinate and orginze that disparate support. They don't all agree on their reasons. Some are coming from moral or humanitarian sympathy, some simply want to use the Palestinians as a weapon against the Jews, some see them as totems of decolonization or the end of capitalism, some see the Palestinians as an instrument of Gods' hand for Christian end times and many many more. You can't organize them- they don't agree with each other.
No, Jay, the West Bank is the problem and Sharon's death and failure to deal with the West Bank is why the Gazan withdrawal didn't "fix" the issue (it merely helped). But if you followed the matter closely, you'd have noted that the Israeli's reaped enormous goodwill when they dragged their settlers out of Gaza. The Palestinians, likewise, harvested enormous bad will when the Israeli's withdraw and the Palestinians burned down the buildings they vacated and showered the Israeli's with missiles.
What it boils down to is this. There're three ways Israel perishes:
A-Demographic destruction (which is why Palestinians are so stuck on the right of return) wherein the Jewish population can't sustain the political, economic and military force necessary to maintain the state.
B-Global Pariah status since Israel is a trade dependent country or
C-Selling out their own national soul and becoming an illiberal theocratic state (which then makes A and B follow on in short order).
If anything, the outcomes from the Gazan withdrawal, from a cold-eyed perspective, strongly endorsed the viability of the conservative withdrawal option. Israel withdrew from Gaza and they earned enormous global goodwill (threat B) and removed 2 million Palestinians from becoming potential citizens of a future Israel state (threat A). Global goodwill was so strong, in fact, that the Israelis got near carte blanche to do whatever they needed/wanted to contain further threats originating from Gaza. A complete chokehold on trade and movement? Sure! Vicious reprisals for attacks? Absolutely! Assassinations? You betcha!
You keep fixating on the Palestinians, themselves and I agree that withdrawal from Gaza didn’t help the Israeli’s with Palestinian attitude. But Palestinians have no ability to destroy or even seriously threaten the survival of the overall Jewish state. It is only the world at large or the people within Israel itself who can do that. Had the Israeli’s dragged their settlers out of the West Bank the global goodwill would have been larger, the demographic benefit would have been geometrically larger and, while Israels geographic exposure to attacks might be larger the world would be even more firmly lined up in support of the Israeli States’ survival and the Palestinians, worst case scenario, would be beating their heads bloody against a brick wall. Would they be able to kill some Jews? Yes, from time to time. But to threaten the overall state? No, never.
Why not? I mean I don't think MLK's organizations ever said anything in their charters like:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him"
Not exactly a stirring paen to convince the Israelis’ to let you ship millions of Palestinians into Israel proper and saying “you might be a strong plurality or slight majority in the country, but we’ll write a couple rules saying the new masses have to be nice to Jewish people so you’ll be fine” is probably also not going to be persuasive. It’s not like Arabic peoples don’t attack Jewish people the world over even when they’re a very small minority.
Now I could go into a long discussion with you about the Palestinian/Arab history, their endless missed opportunities, their enormous runs of ill luck and, of course, the myriad ways the Israelis have been harsh and unjust with them but why? I am sure we could go around about how, after several wars launched, by the Arab world, to try and eliminate Israel, the lands the Palestinians lost could be argued to be morally lost or contrast how the Arabs treated the Palestinians who fled the war vs how the Israeli’s treated the Jews who fled the same violence but, let’s be real, it’s pointless.
Israel exists, it’s a Jewish ethno-state and, unfortunately, it’s been getting even more ethno-statey in the last couple decades. While the Israelis bear the primary responsibility for that it’s unserious to pretend that the Palestinians haven’t played a major part in the death of the peace process and the evisceration of the Pro-peace Israeli left. The idea that the millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees would ever be allowed back into Israel proper was nonsensical twenty years ago and it’s so utterly insane now, as a practical or political matter, that I don’t see the point in litigating it. You might as well demand we ship the population of North America back to Europe and leave the whole continent to the descendants of the First Nations.
As to the settlements? Yeah I'd agree the current Israeli government is entirely on board with them. It is horrible.
Good article. I also read this on Kevin Drums' site a little while back. I really don't think looking at polls this far out is likely to be predictive.
https://jabberwocking.com/joe-biden-is-as-popular-as-any-former-president/
I have no sympathy for the Israelis regarding the incident you're talking about but "give us back our land and let millions of Palestinians from all over the middle east move into Israel where their grandparents/great grandparents lived" doesn't really... umm... translate into MLK style messaging. It’s a message for the dissolution of the Israeli state and it is, fundamentally, eliminationist. Moreover, it’s just talk and talk is cheap.
I agree the Israelis behaved abhorrently towards the protesters because, whenever the Israelis have an opportunity to reduce the risk to their lives at the expense of greater violence and peril against the Palestinians they generally choose to do so. The only mealy-mouthed defense I’d offer of the Israelis in the example you cite is that Hamas has a justified reputation for using civilians as shields and protests as covers for attacks. But that doesn’t excuse how badly the Israelis treated the protestors
I don’t think the Israeli’s want the entire Palestinian population on their hands. They certainly don’t want anarchy and Palestinians running willy nilly everywhere in the West Bank. The PA serves a very important function for keeping things quiet and peaceable there for them and threatening to cease to perform that function would present a very serious problem. It wouldn’t be violence at the normal “low” level, it’d be anarchy and violence at a much higher level from the revanchist actors compounded with mass protests from the more peaceable majority would present a critical challenge to them.
Likewise, I think you misinterpret the settlements. The settlements aren’t being made to provoke the Palestinians- it’s nothing so elegant or Machiavellian. The Israeli settlers quite literally want the actual land. Like I said in my original comment it’s basically slow-motion ethnic cleansing.
Heck I'd have that reaction too! But I don't, honestly, know beyond general understandings of the politics of the region whether there're actual cultural differences between Palestinian Gazans and Palestinian West Bankers. I don't have the personal or social circle knowledge of what their culture is like.
I think he's making a MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying- aka Gov Assisted Euthanasia) joke.
One would THINK this would be a deathblow to Bibi. Golda Mier didn't survive something half as horrific. It will depend A) on if the Security Services have the receipts and B) just how far down the lunacy path the Israeli right and right-of-center has gone.
Gaza is a bleak subject, sure DavidTC, but in this scenario we're talking about the West Bank PA especially. More specifically we're talking about them threatening to dissolve their entire state apparatus. That includes police, security services etc. The PA does a LOT to tamp down on Palestinian violence against the Israelis and you can be sure that the PA threatening to dissolve their national state and dump it in the Israeli's laps would be a monumentally different affair then what happened in Gaza where the Gazans marched up to the border and pitched their bog standard Israeli eliminationist rhetoric. The Israelis would have to pay attention and, no, they couldn't just shoot them. You can't shoot people into operating a separate state for you.
I... honestly... don't know enough about the Palestinians in these two locations to honestly be able to judge. On paper, for instance, what you are saying seems backwards because the West Bank is far more territory whereas Gaza is literally a single city and a postage stamp of land. So you would thing the Gazans would be more urbane.
But it does make sense to view them as distinct because, by now, their histories have significantly diverged and their geographic circumstances are really different.
I don't disagree at all. Beyond the weaknesses you laid out the Palestinians ability to force project is piteous, barely over the level of the IRA. That being said, the Palestinians have cards they can play and concessions they can make. What is more most of those cards and concessions are ideological in nature which has the virtue of having very little meatspace cost to trade away.
The Israelis will mostly have to make material concessions in terms of removing their boot from the collective Palestinian neck; dragging their settler loons out of the eventual territory of the Palestinian state; relaxing their iron grip on the borders of the eventual Palestinian polity etc...
The Palestinians will mostly have to make ideological concessions in terms of acknowledging that Israel exists and will continue to exist, defining its borders, accepting that Palestinian resettlement into that territory will not occur and agreeing that attacks on the Israeli polity should be not just be eschewed by themselves but also prevented by them against outliers within their polity.
Thanks!
I view the settler movement as example one million of how a passionate and driven minority can steer policy in their direction in the face of an indifferent or even mildly hostile electorate at large. When I first became aware of the Israeli political scene in the early aughts the vibe I got (and actual Jewish folk or people deeply engaged in the Israeli political scene can correct me) the settlers were viewed as kooks and nuts- at best ideological and harmless, at worst murderous religious fanatics (let us not forget that a pro-settlement Israeli murdered Yitzhak Rabin in '95!). The have followed a trajectory somewhat like the kooks on the right in the US. First mocked and ignored, then cynically used by one party for political gain and then exercising increasing clout until they're an 800 lb gorilla in the room.
In the case of the settler movement this phenomena is magnified by the fact that every additional household they plant creates more inertia against moving them and more political clout in their corner. They're a self reinforcing movement in the way other elitist well funded minorities (like the wealthy low tax low regulation contingent in the US) can only look at in envy.
As to when the masses say 'enough'? I'd guess it'll be when the settlement movement impacts them: either by provoking so many endless conflicts that the masses get fed up or, more ominously, by allying with Jewish fundamentalists to the point that they begin imposing social regulation on the masses.
Israel holds an overwhelming and historic degree of dominance, as a practical and military matter, which means that the larger onus of acting and deciding naturally falls on their side. That being said anyone who pretends the Palestinians or larger Arab world are innocent or don't have responsibilities or must not make concessions in any final settlement is not morally or intellectually serious.
Indeed and I noted that very bleak fact obliquely in its cons. I suppose I could have dwelled on how a brutally high % of Palestinians polled express eliminationist rhetoric but my comment was verging on article length already. I do, however, think that no small amount of that sentiment is rooted in the frustration and powerlessness of the situation that Palestinians find themselves (and have put themselves) in. If you can do nothing to exercise a preference and have no consequence for expressing it then that trends towards extremism.
They only implemented the moral conservative answer on Gaza. For it to have been "the answer" they'd have had to implement it where it was hard- the West Bank. Has a blood clot ever been more consequential in modern history than the one that felled Sharon? I honestly can't think of one.
I'm confident that the moral liberal answer would work but you are absolutely right that there would be violence and death in the near term. As long as the state held fast- that the murderers were swiftly and justly punished, that the rioters were dispersed and violence discouraged and punished then in time- quite possibly with surprising swiftness- the violence would peter out. But, again, it'd be incredibly hard.
But, alas, I agree with you. Water follows the easiest course and, absent the rise of an Israeli or Palestinian politician of remarkable vision and capability, I also predict that neo-likudnikism is the likely future for Israel.
On “Auribus Teneo Lupum: Holding a Wolf by its Ears”
Hmmm on further thought maybe Sharon, being so close in with the Israeli right, could see where his own side was headed and tried to head that off.
"
Sure, but nothing the Gazans do can threaten the actual survival of the state of Israel. Nothing.
It is quite the reverse in the West Bank.
"
Indeed Sharon clearly had a particularly prescient vision. I never liked him but in hindsight I cannot help but respect the man.
Agreed entirely. Israel has functional dominance and thus the preponderance of the moral and practical need to act falls on their shoulders.
"
If Israel dragged their settlers out and withdrew from the West Bank maybe we'd see the blooming of a flourishing civilized state, maybe we'd see a repeat of what happened in Gaza, maybe they'd start eating the pavement and shooting babies from catapults at the Israeli border. From the standpoint of the Israeli's survival It. Wouldn't. Matter.
A positive outcome would be nice. But even if the Palestinians attacked or shot missiles the Israelis could do just about anything short of re-occupying the West Bank to respond and the world would be fine with whatever it was. The Israeli state would be secured in both the short and long term. Eventually the Palestinians would either come to terms with that or not but the Jewish state would survive (and likely thrive) regardless of whether the Palestinians did or not.
"
Yup, I agree. Looking back in time from the present my mind reels at how shocked my younger self was at Sharon's actions. His unilateral withdrawal without negotiation or agreement to impose final boundaries on the Gazans seemed astonishingly right wing at the time. Now? My goodness how the changing of times changes perspectives!
"
Fatah and Hamas are very different birds. But the West Bank is the only region that presents an actual mortal threat to the Israeli state. What we saw come out of Gaza was abhorrent, granted, but was it an actual threat to the survival of Israel? No. Heck, it was only even as terrible as it managed to be because Bibi basically left the Israelis pants down due to internal politics.
"
Heh, I appreciate you making me feel so young DavidTC, this is a grand throwback to the arguments over the moral merits of the foundation of the Israeli state from when I was in my twenties. But these arguements can go in circles forever and elides my core point. The Israelis will never agree to a right of return into Israel proper no matter what anyone does. It will never happen. It was vanishingly unlikely to happen twenty some years ago and conditions for it to happen now have gotten far worse. They will never, ever, do it and it's a waste of breath to inveigle that they should do it. The Palestinian diasporas best bet is to hope to return to an eventual Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza or else integrate into where they were born or migrate somewhere else.
"
I mean, let's be real, we're talking about a huge disparate set of people scattered across the globe. There're almost as many reasons for Palestinian sympathy/support as there are supporters. I agree with your point but there's no way to coordinate and orginze that disparate support. They don't all agree on their reasons. Some are coming from moral or humanitarian sympathy, some simply want to use the Palestinians as a weapon against the Jews, some see them as totems of decolonization or the end of capitalism, some see the Palestinians as an instrument of Gods' hand for Christian end times and many many more. You can't organize them- they don't agree with each other.
"
No, Jay, the West Bank is the problem and Sharon's death and failure to deal with the West Bank is why the Gazan withdrawal didn't "fix" the issue (it merely helped). But if you followed the matter closely, you'd have noted that the Israeli's reaped enormous goodwill when they dragged their settlers out of Gaza. The Palestinians, likewise, harvested enormous bad will when the Israeli's withdraw and the Palestinians burned down the buildings they vacated and showered the Israeli's with missiles.
What it boils down to is this. There're three ways Israel perishes:
A-Demographic destruction (which is why Palestinians are so stuck on the right of return) wherein the Jewish population can't sustain the political, economic and military force necessary to maintain the state.
B-Global Pariah status since Israel is a trade dependent country or
C-Selling out their own national soul and becoming an illiberal theocratic state (which then makes A and B follow on in short order).
If anything, the outcomes from the Gazan withdrawal, from a cold-eyed perspective, strongly endorsed the viability of the conservative withdrawal option. Israel withdrew from Gaza and they earned enormous global goodwill (threat B) and removed 2 million Palestinians from becoming potential citizens of a future Israel state (threat A). Global goodwill was so strong, in fact, that the Israelis got near carte blanche to do whatever they needed/wanted to contain further threats originating from Gaza. A complete chokehold on trade and movement? Sure! Vicious reprisals for attacks? Absolutely! Assassinations? You betcha!
You keep fixating on the Palestinians, themselves and I agree that withdrawal from Gaza didn’t help the Israeli’s with Palestinian attitude. But Palestinians have no ability to destroy or even seriously threaten the survival of the overall Jewish state. It is only the world at large or the people within Israel itself who can do that. Had the Israeli’s dragged their settlers out of the West Bank the global goodwill would have been larger, the demographic benefit would have been geometrically larger and, while Israels geographic exposure to attacks might be larger the world would be even more firmly lined up in support of the Israeli States’ survival and the Palestinians, worst case scenario, would be beating their heads bloody against a brick wall. Would they be able to kill some Jews? Yes, from time to time. But to threaten the overall state? No, never.
"
Why not? I mean I don't think MLK's organizations ever said anything in their charters like:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him"
Not exactly a stirring paen to convince the Israelis’ to let you ship millions of Palestinians into Israel proper and saying “you might be a strong plurality or slight majority in the country, but we’ll write a couple rules saying the new masses have to be nice to Jewish people so you’ll be fine” is probably also not going to be persuasive. It’s not like Arabic peoples don’t attack Jewish people the world over even when they’re a very small minority.
Now I could go into a long discussion with you about the Palestinian/Arab history, their endless missed opportunities, their enormous runs of ill luck and, of course, the myriad ways the Israelis have been harsh and unjust with them but why? I am sure we could go around about how, after several wars launched, by the Arab world, to try and eliminate Israel, the lands the Palestinians lost could be argued to be morally lost or contrast how the Arabs treated the Palestinians who fled the war vs how the Israeli’s treated the Jews who fled the same violence but, let’s be real, it’s pointless.
Israel exists, it’s a Jewish ethno-state and, unfortunately, it’s been getting even more ethno-statey in the last couple decades. While the Israelis bear the primary responsibility for that it’s unserious to pretend that the Palestinians haven’t played a major part in the death of the peace process and the evisceration of the Pro-peace Israeli left. The idea that the millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees would ever be allowed back into Israel proper was nonsensical twenty years ago and it’s so utterly insane now, as a practical or political matter, that I don’t see the point in litigating it. You might as well demand we ship the population of North America back to Europe and leave the whole continent to the descendants of the First Nations.
As to the settlements? Yeah I'd agree the current Israeli government is entirely on board with them. It is horrible.
On “An Anxious Man’s Advice to Dems: Don’t Psych Yourself Out”
Good article. I also read this on Kevin Drums' site a little while back. I really don't think looking at polls this far out is likely to be predictive.
https://jabberwocking.com/joe-biden-is-as-popular-as-any-former-president/
On “Auribus Teneo Lupum: Holding a Wolf by its Ears”
I have no sympathy for the Israelis regarding the incident you're talking about but "give us back our land and let millions of Palestinians from all over the middle east move into Israel where their grandparents/great grandparents lived" doesn't really... umm... translate into MLK style messaging. It’s a message for the dissolution of the Israeli state and it is, fundamentally, eliminationist. Moreover, it’s just talk and talk is cheap.
I agree the Israelis behaved abhorrently towards the protesters because, whenever the Israelis have an opportunity to reduce the risk to their lives at the expense of greater violence and peril against the Palestinians they generally choose to do so. The only mealy-mouthed defense I’d offer of the Israelis in the example you cite is that Hamas has a justified reputation for using civilians as shields and protests as covers for attacks. But that doesn’t excuse how badly the Israelis treated the protestors
I don’t think the Israeli’s want the entire Palestinian population on their hands. They certainly don’t want anarchy and Palestinians running willy nilly everywhere in the West Bank. The PA serves a very important function for keeping things quiet and peaceable there for them and threatening to cease to perform that function would present a very serious problem. It wouldn’t be violence at the normal “low” level, it’d be anarchy and violence at a much higher level from the revanchist actors compounded with mass protests from the more peaceable majority would present a critical challenge to them.
Likewise, I think you misinterpret the settlements. The settlements aren’t being made to provoke the Palestinians- it’s nothing so elegant or Machiavellian. The Israeli settlers quite literally want the actual land. Like I said in my original comment it’s basically slow-motion ethnic cleansing.
On “Brief Aside On Cancel Culture”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/
On “Auribus Teneo Lupum: Holding a Wolf by its Ears”
Heck I'd have that reaction too! But I don't, honestly, know beyond general understandings of the politics of the region whether there're actual cultural differences between Palestinian Gazans and Palestinian West Bankers. I don't have the personal or social circle knowledge of what their culture is like.
"
I think he's making a MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying- aka Gov Assisted Euthanasia) joke.
One would THINK this would be a deathblow to Bibi. Golda Mier didn't survive something half as horrific. It will depend A) on if the Security Services have the receipts and B) just how far down the lunacy path the Israeli right and right-of-center has gone.
"
Gaza is a bleak subject, sure DavidTC, but in this scenario we're talking about the West Bank PA especially. More specifically we're talking about them threatening to dissolve their entire state apparatus. That includes police, security services etc. The PA does a LOT to tamp down on Palestinian violence against the Israelis and you can be sure that the PA threatening to dissolve their national state and dump it in the Israeli's laps would be a monumentally different affair then what happened in Gaza where the Gazans marched up to the border and pitched their bog standard Israeli eliminationist rhetoric. The Israelis would have to pay attention and, no, they couldn't just shoot them. You can't shoot people into operating a separate state for you.
"
I... honestly... don't know enough about the Palestinians in these two locations to honestly be able to judge. On paper, for instance, what you are saying seems backwards because the West Bank is far more territory whereas Gaza is literally a single city and a postage stamp of land. So you would thing the Gazans would be more urbane.
But it does make sense to view them as distinct because, by now, their histories have significantly diverged and their geographic circumstances are really different.
"
You get an approving Paula Abdul clap from me for it! That's not nothing.
"
That's just an expanded version of the last sentence of my comment so I entirely agree.
"
I don't disagree at all. Beyond the weaknesses you laid out the Palestinians ability to force project is piteous, barely over the level of the IRA. That being said, the Palestinians have cards they can play and concessions they can make. What is more most of those cards and concessions are ideological in nature which has the virtue of having very little meatspace cost to trade away.
The Israelis will mostly have to make material concessions in terms of removing their boot from the collective Palestinian neck; dragging their settler loons out of the eventual territory of the Palestinian state; relaxing their iron grip on the borders of the eventual Palestinian polity etc...
The Palestinians will mostly have to make ideological concessions in terms of acknowledging that Israel exists and will continue to exist, defining its borders, accepting that Palestinian resettlement into that territory will not occur and agreeing that attacks on the Israeli polity should be not just be eschewed by themselves but also prevented by them against outliers within their polity.
"
Thanks!
I view the settler movement as example one million of how a passionate and driven minority can steer policy in their direction in the face of an indifferent or even mildly hostile electorate at large. When I first became aware of the Israeli political scene in the early aughts the vibe I got (and actual Jewish folk or people deeply engaged in the Israeli political scene can correct me) the settlers were viewed as kooks and nuts- at best ideological and harmless, at worst murderous religious fanatics (let us not forget that a pro-settlement Israeli murdered Yitzhak Rabin in '95!). The have followed a trajectory somewhat like the kooks on the right in the US. First mocked and ignored, then cynically used by one party for political gain and then exercising increasing clout until they're an 800 lb gorilla in the room.
In the case of the settler movement this phenomena is magnified by the fact that every additional household they plant creates more inertia against moving them and more political clout in their corner. They're a self reinforcing movement in the way other elitist well funded minorities (like the wealthy low tax low regulation contingent in the US) can only look at in envy.
As to when the masses say 'enough'? I'd guess it'll be when the settlement movement impacts them: either by provoking so many endless conflicts that the masses get fed up or, more ominously, by allying with Jewish fundamentalists to the point that they begin imposing social regulation on the masses.
"
Israel holds an overwhelming and historic degree of dominance, as a practical and military matter, which means that the larger onus of acting and deciding naturally falls on their side. That being said anyone who pretends the Palestinians or larger Arab world are innocent or don't have responsibilities or must not make concessions in any final settlement is not morally or intellectually serious.
"
Indeed and I noted that very bleak fact obliquely in its cons. I suppose I could have dwelled on how a brutally high % of Palestinians polled express eliminationist rhetoric but my comment was verging on article length already. I do, however, think that no small amount of that sentiment is rooted in the frustration and powerlessness of the situation that Palestinians find themselves (and have put themselves) in. If you can do nothing to exercise a preference and have no consequence for expressing it then that trends towards extremism.
"
They only implemented the moral conservative answer on Gaza. For it to have been "the answer" they'd have had to implement it where it was hard- the West Bank. Has a blood clot ever been more consequential in modern history than the one that felled Sharon? I honestly can't think of one.
I'm confident that the moral liberal answer would work but you are absolutely right that there would be violence and death in the near term. As long as the state held fast- that the murderers were swiftly and justly punished, that the rioters were dispersed and violence discouraged and punished then in time- quite possibly with surprising swiftness- the violence would peter out. But, again, it'd be incredibly hard.
But, alas, I agree with you. Water follows the easiest course and, absent the rise of an Israeli or Palestinian politician of remarkable vision and capability, I also predict that neo-likudnikism is the likely future for Israel.
On “Brief Aside On Cancel Culture”
Amazing.