So Scott, if you or anyone else like you ever bothered to notice the pattern, by which Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described - you’d figure out where Hen Mazzig’s accusation of antisemitism comes from. By the same token, if any of you noticed that the alleged victims of Jews’ ontological evil are always worthy of the emotional reactions you described, you’d get why Hen identifies the cause as antisemitism.
Yes, I know you’re Jewish. And yes I know that the story of this Gazan boy reached you whereas the 6 year old boy abused in Hamas’ dungeons after they killed his father in front of him, apparently, did not. And yet somehow you and people like you have endless capacity to ignore suffering and abstract away specifics in this region - right until the suffering serves the purpose of undermining the security of 10 million Israelis, at which point suddenly you’re attentive.
> Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told
Everything else aside, surely this isn't true? I can think of like three oscar winning Holocaust movies in the span of typing this sentence (Zone of Interest, Schindler's List, The Pianist). Also I think the Old Testament ended up being fairly important in the grand scheme of things. I'm not sure I could, off the top of my head, name *any* oscar winning movies or important cultural touchstone books about, like, Punjabi Sikhs. (That's not to say that one is more important than the other or comment at all on the moral validity of anything above. It's just that this comment immediately struck me as hyperbolic and probably hurts your larger point like...a lot.)
But the idea that Jews are treated uniquely unsympathetically is ridiculous. The reasons Israel gets more attention than other countries are clear (U.S. support, the many ties between American and Israeli Jews, and the fact that it's in many ways a Western country--it's even in Eurovision). And while anti-semites certainly join in the criticism of Israel, I recognize that the vast majority of Israel's critics are motivated by genuine and real compassion for suffering Palestinians, even when I think their criticisms are misplaced or one sided.
Jews are treated about as the South African whites/Indians are treated. Prove me wrong. (Nobody's talking about the people eating beating children's hearts either).
In both Israel and South Africa's case, there are ideological reasons for "information promotion and suppression."
Here's my attempt to rewrite this with the exaggeration removed: The current Israeli government [not Jews in general] are treated almost as badly by US progressives [not by everyone, certainly not conservatives] as the people making claims of genocide against South African whites.
What in what I wrote was exaggeration? You're attempting to switch both parts of the analogy. My discussion is with people, not with governments. Therefore, my examples and my core understanding is with people.
Edited: upon reread (did you edit? not sure): You can switch Jews to Israelis, that's fine, include the Druze if you want.
I don't know what this comment even means. And I don't see anyone talking about people eating beating children's hearts (I'm sure someone has made that claim about someone, but it's not something even the far left believes, much less being a mainstream idea).
You can also read about the coverup of the "only place not looted was the bookstore" -- because it's off narrative, so needed to be "corrected". Ahem, did I not say "fact-checked"?
No mention of children, hearts, or eating in the text behind that link. Source it cites in turn wants me to sign in, so that's inaccessible. I'm not calling you a liar, there's just this frustrating thing where you're... "gesturing at an emotive context," I suppose, rather than making explicit, factual claims with enough detail to be independently checked.
> Did I not just mention information suppression?
If I made a credible effort to 'keep up with the news,' that could be relevant. I don't, and that policy has been notably beneficial for my mental health. Accordingly, I have very limited patience for claims about what some third party strives to prevent me from finding out. Please, stop dancing like the kind of person who has secrets they might soon share, and start actually communicating. https://dresdencodak.com/2012/09/26/dark-science-21/
"The reasons Israel gets more attention than other countries are clear (U.S. support, the many ties between American and Israeli Jews, and the fact that it's in many ways a Western country--it's even in Eurovision)."
Surely this should all lead to *less* criticism of Israel and *more* leeway for them to do as they please, rather than the opposite which is what we actually see. Positive attention instead of absurd isolated demands for moral rigor.
No. It leads to much more rigor, especially from the left, because it puts Israel in the "oppressor" category of its oppressor/victim paradigm. If people began to die in police custody in France, you would see far, far more attention than if it were to happen in Niger or Surinam or Indonesia.
"No. It leads to much more rigor, especially from the left, because it puts Israel in the "oppressor" category of its oppressor/victim paradigm."
Right, that's what *does* happen, but it's not what rationally *ought* to happen.
"If people began to die in police custody in France, you would see far, far more attention than if it were to happen in Niger or Surinam or Indonesia."
Only because we don't expect civilized nations to act like brutes; it's a man-bites-dog situation, newsworthy because surprising. That's not analogous to Israel/Palestine, where people are *actively rooting for the barbarians to win* and trying their best to trip up the Israelis. The analogous situation for your France example would be if people insistently claimed that it's better to live in Indonesia because there 33% of people in police custody die mysteriously, instead of just 0.001% like in France. Actively taking the absurdly wrong side on purpose.
I think there are elements of angry agreement here. The original poster observed that Israel is held to a higher standard than the Palestinians, and concluded this must be because of antisemitism.
Gordon has argued that Israel is being held to a higher standard than the Palestinians, especially by the left, but not because of antisemitism but because of the left's oppressor/victim paradigm.
I think you're arguing that the oppressor/victim paradigm isn't very rational, which is often true. But it might be helpful to pause and notice that we all agree the left are holding Israel to a higher standard, and that it's probably got more to do with the left's paradigms than specific antisemitism*.
(*Life is complicated and exceptions exist. Parts of the left have spent so long hating on Israel for oppressor/victim paradigm reasons, and have found Muslims such useful electoral recruits, that their views seem to have set into something pretty indistinguishable from antisemitism, but mostly its helpful to remember that the Israel haters are less racist, and more stuck in an oppressor/victim mindset that gives unequal weights to different parts of the dataset.)
Yeah this struck me too. To claim that Jewish stories are always considered unworthy of being told just seems objectively false. To me, the overwhelming pattern is that Jews/Israel recieve a massively disproportionate share of both positive and negative media and political attention (at least in the West) compared to the actual number of Jewish people. It's true we hear a disproportionate amount about Gaza too - but this is because Israel is one of the participants in this conflict.
Given that, one can argue there is coverage bias and whether it is motivated by antisemitism; there is a whole genre of meta-argument about the level of this bias. But consider it would be very hard to have an argument about the media bias regarding, say, the TPLF vs Ethiopia, Indonesia vs the Free Papua Movement, or the Rakhine people/Arakan Army vs the Myanmar government/Tatmadaw - the media about those conflicts barely exists to begin with.
Information suppression seems to be the tactic being used in the Ukraine, in order to let us write the narrative how we like, sure. Genocide? Must have been Russians!
"Every single time" isn't literally true, but it's trying to say something. Prominent examples of Jewish suffering are made known either by Jews, by reds (who are sympathetic to Jews), or by people using them to promote a political agenda (such as people who like to see their enemies as Nazis).
What I wrote in my other comment also applies: there's a difference between not protesting when you don't care and not protesting when you hate someone. Just replace "not protesting" with "not making a movie about". We don't see many movies about Sikhs, but if someone did make one, it would be accepted by the people who normally play, watch, and review independent movies, A pro-Jewish film about Gaza would be rejected.
Dogmatic films tend to get rejected on sight, sure. A nondogmatic film (like, um, Dogtooth) would probably pass muster. Incendies passed muster, for god's sake, and that has *spoiler* *spoiler* in it.
I looked those up. Neither has Jews. "A film that shows horrible things is acceptable" doesn't mean "a film that shows horrible things happening to Jews would be acceptable", unless it's divorced from any modern political conflict.
Beaufort. Operation Thunderbolt. Waltz with Bashir. Ajami (this is less military, but still showing horrible things happening to Jews). Foxtrot.
If you look closely, you'll see that Israel hasn't nominated a lot of war films recently. (or, alternatively, Israel is locked in a constant war, and therefore nominates "small pictures" of the constant struggle).
Are we done now? This is just quickly pulled from "what's been nominated for an Oscar". War movies tend to get put up for Oscars for quite a lot of reasons (expense being one of them -- incentivizes advertising).
Yes, for exactly the same reason that a pro-Nazi film about the holocaust, or a pro-Russian film about the Bucha massacre would also be been by many people as leaving a very bad taste in the mouth.
It's not obvious to me what point you're trying to make. I suggest in future you write in as clear and simple way as possible, to maximise information transfer.
I am suggesting that "foundational myths" used to destroy entire civilizations are not easily shaken off, in no small part because there are agents who would actively intervene to make sure a film vivisecting them Does Not Get Made.
(You can compare Nazis to the Lost Cause, which was funded for ... about a hundred years. And the subsequent dropoff in belief after the propaganda stopped flowing.)
I think that the quote isn't right, but I heard a far. better one recently: "Jews are only likeable when they're the victims". That's basically antisemitism with an exception. Such person will disapprove of Holocaust or the Hamas attack but other than that Jews are an epitome of evil - for leftists because they are CEOs of owners of big corporations, for conservatives because George Soros funds liberal causes, for everyone oppression of poor Gazans...
As per Gaza I too am torn - on the one hand what Israel does there is terrible, on the other hand even after the attack Hamas still had 70% approval in Gaza and from my point of view they can stop it anytime be releasing all the hostages. Until then I'm not gonna support either party...
I think the current conflict represents a significant vibe shift, in that immediately after 10/7, before Israel went into Gaza or anything, there were factions that expressed condemnation toward Israel (e.g. the famous Harvard letter). Which was a change from the old status quo you reference of “Jews are likeable when they’re victims.” (For more on the latter see Dara Horn’s book, _People Love Dead Jews_.)
Okay, but *most people* are only 'likeable' in that sense when they're the victims. We have a whole saying about how everyone likes the underdog. That's not unique.
This isn’t unique or complicated. Everyone’s likeable when they’re a victim.* Cf. Rohingya, Ukrainians, Palestinians, Yazidis etc etc. People naturally sympathise with people who are suffering.
If you want people to like you when you’re not a victim, that’s something you have to earn by being, well, likeable. Israelis are generally not very good at this, and come across as a weird mixture of self-pitying, self-serving and mildly sadistic. This tends to make people want to side with their victims even more.
*This may just be a European gentile thing as a result of Christianity, but those are the people we’re talking about.
If people naturally sympathized with people who are suffering, we'd disband the Ukraine entirely. And Orban would stop posting anti-Semitic memes.
You don't need to be likeable -- you need to avoid being both a Gigantic Asshole to everyone around you, and being a Psycho "Attack First" hyperactive nutcase. Afghanistan is not "likeable" (they pay soldiers in "marriages to virgins" so yeah, lotta rape). But they also aren't going around attacking their neighbors and causing suffering outside their borders.
When did Orban post an anti-semitic meme last time?
(And we haven't even touched the question that is portraying George Soros as one of the Ultimate Evils anti-semitic just because he is Jewish? Others portrayed as the Ultimate Evils are not Jewish, not that I know of, that is.)
Ukraine has decided to perform "cultural genocide" on the transcarpathian population (who wave Hungarian flags, and would quite frankly rather be Hungarian). Orban posted a meme conflating rats and Zelensky (might have been wiped, but I saw it before they walked it off the internet, if so).
If you can say that "every person of this category" gets portrayed as one of the Ultimate Evils (like Koch for example), then no, it's not anti-semitic. Other influential jews (like the one backing the Azov militia threatening to murder Zelensky if he stopped bombing Ukrainians...) aren't mentioned in the same way either.
I've known several Israelis, and they were likeable. Their government isn't. None of the groups in power in that area deserve any sympathy. Many of the people do.
OTOH, the existence of Israel was a mistake. I understand some of the reasons why it was created, but it was still a mistake. (OTOH, I don't know what *should* have been done.) It was a culture war from the very beginning. That tends to lead to government led strife, and it did in this case.
I can't agree with that, historically Jews seem to be disliked far more than they ought to. Pogroms on Jews used to be favorite pastime in middle-age Europe (and if we believe the book of Esther even long before that).
And if we look at Israel we find the only well functioning country in the region, great technology, agriculture (while not being oil producers), only country that's actually LGBTQ friendly around there... And they get tons of hate even from woke groups (and it's not like it started only with invasion).
It’s an awkward one, but Jews have a tendency to be a bit grating, especially en masse. Specifically loud, materialistic and self-absorbed (eg Jeff/Suzy from Curb Your Enthusiasm). Plenty of the better ones aren’t, but they come across as less noticeably Jewish. Your arguments are also kind of a case in point; if someone says you’re not likeable, stating that everyone irrationally hates you and then rattling off a list of reasons why you’re actually better than everyone else is… an argument against that’s evidence for.
It's certainly true that Israel is the most similar to a western nation in terms of tech, agriculture, and lgbtq friendliness. It's much easier to maintain a general economic and social trend of improvement situation when the development and security of your nation is heavily subsidized by a foreign government.
it's pretty dishonest to include military aid in that number - how does that help in development, except by ensuring that Israel isn't wiped off the map?
Anyway, why don't you compare it to foreign aid that Palestine got ( that was only economical obviously)?
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aid to Palestinians totaled over $40 billion between 1994 and 2020. That's only 26 years for half the population and unlike 80 billions over 80 years for Israel not even inflation adjusted.
Palestinians got at least 5 times more economic subsidies per capita from foreign countries and what do they have to show for it?
> they can stop it anytime be releasing all the hostages
I'm not sure this is true. Israel's actions are not even close to the path you would pursue if rescuing hostages was your main objective. They're using this as an opportunity to pursue their other national security objectives and that won't stop when the hostages are returned.
Well, Netanyahu is obviously asshole and doesn't do what is the best for the Israel/hostages, but that doesn't mean that what I wrote isn't true.
Can you imagine international response if all the hostages were released and Israelis continued with the offensive even if it goes against all of their previous proclamations?
I think if you don’t register that the Holocaust is the exception that proves the rule, you should consider the extremely extensive history of violent Jewish persecution - both immediately before and after the Holocaust, both in Europe and in the Middle East - and consider, again, why the error only goes in one direction.
now you're shifting goal posts AND cherry picking responses (you dropped the mention of the old testament for eg), both of which again do not make you look truthful and hurt your position
I'd agree that, if there was a prize for "widely hated and repetitively hunted", Jews score nightmarishly high. That gets harder to judge as we look further back (due to a lack of record-keeping). Also I think such group-level score-keeping is overrated. But if you and me were both ordered to score that prize, I suspect we'd vote the same way.
But you did make a much, much stronger claim: ""*always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described.""
You don't need to do that. Just, stretch it to something easily-refuted, by the universal acclaim that Schindler's List gets. Everyone including non-Jews (like me) praises that film, deservedly. And FWIW there are loads of other atrocities we all collectively forget to feel bad about. I think there's a big hole left in film history, that no equivalent of Schindler's List was ever made for what Imperial Japan did to Chinese people.
Thanks. To be fair there have been films made about e.g. the Nanjing Massacre. But none were anywhere near the cultural impact or acclaim as Schindler's List. Almost nobody (myself included) even knows who the leader of Japan was at that time, but we all know Hitler.
In the phrase "The exception proves the rule" the meaning of "prove" is "test". And it doesn't test the rule. Consider the fate of the Gypsies at that same time an place. Also blacks, but there weren't many present. It was a generalized persecution of many "non-Aryan" minorities. Jews were the most commonly visible of such.
There *is* a long thread of persecution of Jews, but in Europe that was because they refused to accept the "state church", and they were the largest group to do so. OTOH, this did become sort of a tradition, and now many folk seem to have a tradition of persecuting Jews.
Consider "The Merchant of Venice". Why was Shylock a money-lender? Because Jews were forbidden to own real estate. If you were moderately wealthy and you wanted to invest your money, and you couldn't buy land, what should you do? But money lenders are always hated. So wealthy (i.e. visible) Jews were essentially forced into a profession where they would be hated for other reasons that not holding the proper religion. (There's a lot more to the story, but that gives the general direction as I see it. And there's a lot of "family tradition" that's a part of it.)
Indeed. And it turns out that in developing economies, money lending is a pretty amazing way to build wealth. Are jewish families overrepresented in global wealth management? Sure. Did they choose that or were they sort of forced into it? I don't know enough to answer.
You misunderstand the meaning of "the exception that proves the rule." Exceptions don't prove rules, right? They disprove them. Duh. What the phrase actually means is *the exception that tests the rule.*. So here's this exception, and it seems to disprove the rule. Does it? Or is there some explanation for the exception, some way in which it actually a disguised instance of phenomena following the rule? Get the idea?
Given the actual meaning of the phrase, your little paragraph makes no sense. If you gonna hate on Jews you have to be brighter than them. Otherwise you just come off as a dummy with a gripe.
3!?! Look at your foreign film oscars/top5 nominees (something like a third of the time there's at least one holocaust movie in the top 5). Hollywood LOVES the holocaust. There's NoMan'sLand about Bosnia, so people tend to put whatever looks dramatic into the Oscar Contention. (And Incendies is even about the Middle East, so it's not like these don't get play -- that's a nomination not an Oscar, but when you have 200+ contenders, top 5 is a useful stat).
Without saying anything about who's right on the object level, I want to note that this is *exactly identical* to how people on the other side of the conflict experience the discourse. This has implications, if not for figuring out who's right, then at least for thinking about what kinds of arguments are likely to convince anyone.
The Holocaust is the most well-known genocide in history. It's definitely the one I learned the most about from school, the media, and popular discourse. And I'm not saying it shouldn't be! I'm saying that your claim that "Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told" is completely wrong.
Exactly! I grew up knowing as rock-solid certainty that neither of the two God-chosen nations, Israel and America, could ever do anything wrong ever(slavery and Jim Crow notwithstanding; cognitive dissonance). Later on I learned otherwise. That doesn't mean I switched to thinking that the Holocaust was okay or that it never happened. Or that the Russian pogroms were okay. Or that the actions of certain members of the Rothschild family (not everyone of that surname) were somehow more wrong than those of other robber-baron type people because of their ethnicity. Or that when a synagogue gets vandalized or bombed it's somehow less bad than when it happens to a different building. My parents were devout followers of Jesus and brought me up during the Cold War to believe in the separation of the inherently evil Soviet government from the human-natured-good-mixed-with-bad Russian people, a concept which in my opinion stood me in good stead when learning about world history and politics. I don't have a solution to people killing each other in the Middle East over land/religion/identity any more than I have the power to prevent my fellow citizens doing it here in the US. What kind of world is it where someone praying, "I wish nobody anywhere was hurting or killing any children anywhere" is translated as "I wish every Jewish person all over the whole world was struck dead"?
I don't know. I feel that Israel and by extension the Jews there got a lot of empathy after the October attacks. I heard many horrifying stories about that day and the aftermath. Israel received extensive emotional, political and kinetic support from the international community.
Having sympathy for the fact that Israel was attacked first doesn't preclude sympathy for the people and children of Gaza. How much more death is needed to balance the scales? What is even Israel's strategic endgame that is served by this level of death, starvation and terror?
I don't know about how other people feel, but I was willing to give Israel a lot of latitude in their response. For quite some time now, I have lost the ability to defend the morality of their actions.
I mean Hamas could just surrender. The Palestinian people could work to get Hamas to surrender instead of this apparent strategy to have the world come galloping to their rescue because of the deaths of their own civilians and somehow Palestine will be free someday.
What a nonsensical, disgusting comment. If you're caught between a person near you with a gun threatening to kill you if you do try to X and a person far from you with a gun threatening to kill you if you don't do X, you are probably fucked either way. But maybe a little less fucked if you don't try X, because that threat is near and immediate.
As far as I can tell, this is little more than another attempt to shift the blame of the genocide being inflicted on them *onto the Gazans.* Hamas bears some significant fraction of the responsibility. So does the IDF. So does Netanhayu, who helped Hamas old onto power because it was politically convenient for him. But the kid with the backpack? Exactly none of the responsibility for this is on him.
Unlike me and probably you, Gazans are Muslims and most are probably serious about it, they believe in martyrdom and afterlife in heaven. Unlike many people here, they don't examine GDP vs life expectancy correlations charts and P(B|A).
Israeli politicians have helped (for some degree) to prop up Hamas to power, but they couldn't invent it out of nothing.
Of course, the kid has none responsibility but he is forcibly educated to believe in what Islam teaches and maybe the kid's uncle is currently genociding minorities in Syria.
even after the Hamas terrorist attack (and before the Israel launching invasion of Gaza) they had 70% approval rating according to AP. It seems more true that most Palestinians are Hamas(adjacent) than that they are hostages.
"You could just surrender, therefore any amount of atrocities I inflict on you is just YOUR fault, really" is not how just war theory or the Geneva convention work. Especially when the party in power in question isn't even really a democratic expression of the current living population - they won one election, ONCE, and then simply never left.
if you look at polls it's not like they didn't have public support. In December 2023 57% Gazans still supported the attack ( www.pcpsr.org/en/node/963 ) . I'm pretty sure that before the retaliations it was far more.
Hamas cannot possibly surrender unless Israel promises that all Hamas militants who surrender will not be punished.
Otherwise known Hamas militants who hand over themselves can expect to be put in those Israeli dungeons where people get raped (there are videos) and can expect to be prosecuted as terrorists (the prosecutor for the trial of those captured for the Oct 7 raid has asked the death penalty for everyone just for having taken part in the raid, regardless of any crime committed individually).
Unless Israel makes that promise, thousands of Hamas militants will continue to resist, if anything to save themselves.
Even if the Israelis made that promise, I can't imagine them abiding by it, and I'm sure Hamas militants can't imagine it either. The right wing voters of the Israeli government want the heads of the "terrorists", not mercy.
On top of that, if Hamas surrendered, nothing would stop the Israelis from claiming that there are still "terrorists" in Gaza (with good reason as there are warmongering militant groups other than Hamas, and they would continue to resist, but even if there was not any such group, Israel can just claim that there are still terrorists because Israel says so), and use that excuse to continue destroying and starving Gaza just like they're doing now, with the endgame of forcing everyone into a concentration camp and opening up Gaza for settlers. Meaning that the surrender of Hamas would not change anything.
The Israeli goal is ethnic cleansing. Their endgame may look like this: every Gazan still living has been forced into a concentration camp ("humanitarian city") from which the only way out is to other countries ("voluntary emigration").
If Hamas surrendered, there would be other groups in Gaza that continue to fight back against Israel, and Israel would use those as an excuse to keep starving and destroying Gaza (since that's how you achieve the endgame described).
I don't know if it's even possible for Hamas to surrender, even if their leaders declare a surrender. Of the tens of thousands of Hamas militants, surely many would continue to resist, all the more so since they know that if they hand over themselves, Israel will put them in dungeons where people get tortured and raped, and will prosecute them as "terrorists".
As long as there is a single Gazan with a kalashnikov hidden in some hole, Israel will use that guy as an excuse to claim there are still "terrorists" and continue the ethnic cleansing. And even in the case that the guy with a Kalashnikov does not exist, nothing prevents the IDF from claiming that he exists and continue the ethnic cleansing.
It's not about balancing the scales; it's about ending Hamas rule in Gaza. And the analogy I always raise is the Allies' decision in early 1945 to demand nothing short of unconditional surrender rather than to accept any ceasefire that would leave the Nazis and Japanese High Command in charge. What I ask critics of Israel in Gaza (and that includes myself at times) is why if it was legitimate for the Allies to demand that surrender (and to kill many hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese women and children in the last months of the war in order to achieve that goal) and not for Israel to insist on it?
That being said, I can also understand why others may think very differently.
{Edit: I had just made this comment elsewhere so I didn't make it here originally, but I should add that I think that Lorem is right that Israel DID receive tons of support in the wake of October 7th. I totally agree about that. My comment is just a response to his second paragraph.}
Over 100,000 civilians were killed every month in the lead-up to the end of the WWII in China alone. I think "some civilian deaths is necessary to prevent a greater number of ongoing civilian deaths elsewhere" is prima facie a good reason for the US to have dropped the atomic bombs if they believed that the atomic bombs could have sped up the Japanese surrender by a few months. In contrast, nobody has presented a similar case for urgency for why Gazan civilians ought to be bombed or starved.
That argument by itself doesn't explain why nothing short of unconditional surrender was acceptable; the usual narrative is that that was driven by longer-term considerations.
Yes it was very possible that the US did not do the best job negotiating there, especially since they (empirically) covered up a bunch of Japanese war crimes and evacuated Japanese and German scientists after the "unconditional surrender" anyway.
Japanese and German scientists were "booty" -- I'd maintain they were part of looting the power structure to cripple the other side, AND making out like a bandit.
Linch: I don't know anything about the Japanese killing a 100,000+ Chinese civilians a month in 1945. Would appreciate a link or a cite of where I can learn more.
Meanwhile, even if true, I have never heard that was a significant factor in the decision to drop the atomic bomb. From what I understand that decision was all about preventing the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in an invasion of Japan (the same reason that the Israelis drop bombs instead of relying only on tactics that would reduce civilian casualties).
And regardless, it doesn't explain why the Allies decided to insist on an unconditional surrender. They could have ended the war at any time in 1945 (and immediately stopped any deaths in China) by simply offering a ceasefire that would have left the Japanese High Command in control.
"I don't know anything about the Japanese killing a 100,000+ Chinese civilians a month in 1945" Yeah this isn't a knock on you, it's really common for people in the West to just vaguely know WWII Japan is vaguely bad and fashy, as a junior partner to Germany, like if they were Italy or something.
I have a comment on LW briefly describing how evil they were, relative to the Nazis (TW: lots of bad stuff):
"tl;dr: Imperial Japan did worse things than Nazis. There was probably greater scale of harm, more unambiguous and greater cruelty, and more commonplace breaking of near-universal human taboos."
This all makes some guy's earlier point about how people uniquely ignore Jewish victims rather odd to me.
Worth mentioning (not as a disagreement, though) that some Nazi units were particularly bad, such as the Dirlewanger Brigade, lead by Oskar Dirlewander, himself a serious POS.
That said, as an fyi for others, I don't think it really speaks to the issue of this thread: whether there are differences which explain why it was legitimate for the Allies to demand the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers but not for Israel to demand the unconditional surrender of those behind October 7th.
"From what I understand that decision was all about preventing the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in an invasion of Japan"
As I recall, keeping Stalin out of the conflict--so that he would have less leverage in the negotiations that followed the surrender--was a significant part of it. One could consider it one of the opening moves of the Cold War.
Ironically enough, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria contributed a lot in the Japanese surrender (of course, Western common knowledge knows only about the two atomic bombs).
A, this is a very modern, fairly revisionist take.
B...if this is true, then Japan, and Hokkaido especially, owes the US a yearly thank you letter for not letting North Japan go through the same ordeal as North Korea and East Germany.
> And the analogy I always raise is the Allies' decision in early 1945 to demand nothing short of unconditional surrender rather than to accept any ceasefire that would leave the Nazis and Japanese High Command in charge.
Applying that ratio to Gaza – population circa 2 million – implies that Israel would need to commit to a long-term occupation of 50,000 personnel. The goals of an occupation would need to be nearly generational, providing low-corruption political stability and well-run infrastructure to ultimately improve material conditions and eliminate the socioeconomic pull to resistance.
That kind of effort is hideously expensive, and it is evidently not Israel's strategic goal. Operationally, it does not seem to be setting the stage for a Marshall Plan.
I submit that without a goal of productive occupation for the benefit of civilians, a demand for unconditional surrender is morally suspect. The significant rebuilding of both Germany and Japan (even if also driven for geopolitical reasons) retroactively justified the strict demands; note that we think more kindly of the western Allies' occupations than the Soviet ones.
Modern war is expensive, and Israel faces the same sort of constraints as the United States. Grand objectives cannot be achieved with an occupation-lite force that heavily relies on airpower, but such an operation can do a fine job of eroding foreign goodwill. As part of its own domestic political compromises, it seems to have chosen to speed-run the Iraq war with all its quagmires and PR problems.
Unconditional surrender is unconditional, it does not come with conditions of "productive occupation". The US occupied West Germany & Japan in the context of the Cold War. The "Morgenthau Plan" was to remove German industry that could be used to re-arm, which would have made more sense viewing defeated Germany as the big remaining threat (as it was after WW1) rather than the USSR.
Japan is also the analogy I used, seeing as how the US was so ticked at them for attacking Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war, and how we bombed the hell out of them rather than rolling the tanks in like with Germany.
My understanding is that Germany was more defended against bombing, which the Brits responded to operating at night, and the Americans by bombing at higher altitudes (expecting the Norden Bomb Sight to still provide accuracy). Japan was relatively defenseless, and its buildings more vulnerable to fire-bombing, to the extent that many cities were taken off the list of atom bomb targets because they'd been so thoroughly bombed already that there wasn't much left to destroy.
Germany was better defended, so we spent a great deal more effort and materiel on bombing it. Since it was closer, we were also able to spend more time doing so.
I don’t think this is evidence of an increased resentment for Pearl Harbor.
>why if it was legitimate for the Allies to demand that surrender
The thing is, I am not sure it was legitimate. It was sort of legitimized. This it now how war happened throughout history, a king losing a war did not mean the eradication of his entire regime. Of course, these regimes were more terrible than those. Still, the democratic regimes replacing them can be I think honestly interpreted as puppet governments. At least initially... and they were allied with a regime just as terrible, Stalins. I don't think the actions of the Allies were entirely legitimate...
They were legitimized because winners write history, as simple as that. So there is no such thing as objective history about relatively recent events.
Imagine if the Soviets win the Cold War and the whole world becomes communist. What is in the history books. "After 1945 the imperialist powers installed capitalist puppet governments in Germany and Japan" etc.
Ethnic cleansing -- the removal of people... do we have to add in what the Israelis did to the Africans now as well? I was just going on "number of lives lost" in the Great Leap Forward and various Stalinist purges.
Good points. Just a side note to puppet governments. Japan is currently governed by the LDP party, established in 1955 (and financed by millions of dollars in the following decades by the CIA). Out of the past 70 years, it ruled Japan in 67. Does not look like a real democracy to me.
Note that "unconditional surrender" is not the norm; WWII was a major exception. Even WWI was a negotiated armistice.
(At least for Japan, I think it was clearly illegitimate. They wanted to conditionally surrender; the US wanted it unconditional, so it nuked two cities and might have kept nuking more until it got what it wanted. I think that was obviously just the US waging a massive deliberate terror campaign against civilians including the threat of genocide, and in a just world Truman would have also hanged at Nuremberg.)
If you believe that Truman should have been hanged at Nuremberg, then I think it makes sense total sense to believe that Netanyahu should be hanged at the Hague. I respect that consistency.
But I also think it's an absurd opinion. Not only would it have been considered laughable at the time, but the history of post World War Ii Japan and Germany (especially compared to post WW-I Germany) have largely validated the wisdom of the demands for unconditional surrender.
>Not only would it have been considered laughable at the time
Why would it have been considered laughable, if not for the reason that Truman was a leader on the winning side and the winning side conducted the Nuremberg Trials?
Because if you told the vast majority of people that Truman should be hung for that decision they would literally have laughed at you.
The decision was understood for what it was: a tactic made during a full fledged war in an effort to force an enemy to surrender and minimize the loss of American lives. The idea that it was out of bounds to attack cities had long gone by the wayside. And the folks hung at Nuremberg were not German military leaders who had bombed English cities as part of the war effort. They were folks who directed the systematic slaughter of millions of civilians or thousands of prisoners of war, which even Germans were ashamed over.
The idea that the Nuremberg Trials were simply "victor's justice" is one of those edgy opinions that sounds sophisticated but collapses when one looks closely.
The situations feel different enough that it feels like a bad analogy. Not least of which because the ability of Japan to rapidly industrialize and militarize looks like a completely different scale than what Palestinians are capable of, even if you adjust for comparing a regional conflict to a global one. If Palestine had the level of industrial and military capacity that Japan had relative to its size, it would be more like Iran, and could probably insist on being treated like a nation instead of its current status.
I was guessing that part of the Allies consideration was whether Japan could rebuild itself in a generation, and the fact that they had gone from a feudal society to fighting on equal footing with Russia and then the US and British within less than half a century probably factored into that math. Although I admit I'm making a lot of assumptions. Anyway, the idea that if Israel left Gaza, Hamas might rebuild itself and attempt another Oct 7th is a rational fear, but the idea that they would pose the same level of threat to Israel's security as Japan posed to the Pacific at the height of its power seems to require a lot more steps (like an investment from Iran, Egypt, or Lebanon that has so far not manifested).
Ah, I see. I guess my response is that there are 2 million plus Palestinians, all living within a few miles of Israel. And as was demonstrated on October 7th, not much industrial capacity is needed to make them a threat.
I don't think it's unreasonable for the Israelis to think of Hamas in the same way that the Allies thought of the Nazis and the Japanese High Command: as threats that have to be completely rooted out.
Japan did not unconditionally surrender. How many lives would it have been worth to demand the execution of the Emperor?
Crimes went unpunished, unpunished crimes cause incentives. It wasn't a costless decision. But there isn't some universal rule of demanding unconditional surrender from evil.
it's worth noting that Palestinian Authority news write about *Hamas* murdering Palestinians trying to get aid. Egypt and even Qatar of all places are openly advocating for Hamas to step down. Western news? Barely gives it a mention. But oh, Israel did this and that and the other thing, how dare it!
The UN Security Council routinely passes more resolutions against Israel than against the rest of the world *combined*. Because obviously Israel is worse than Russia and Syria and Sudan and Iran and North Korea and all of those places put together.
How much death is needed? I don't know, but it's clearly apparent even to other Arabs that Hamas is at least a large percentage of the problem, if not the entirety of it.
Probably because the West views the Palestinians as the perpetually wronged party (despite their consistently belligerent history.) and doesn’t view them as having any agency over Hamas. Hamas is some force that arose and then, according to the West, is propped up by external actors like cunning Israel and Iran, but certainly not by Europeans and the UN. The poor Palestinians are suffering under the yoke of these terrorists who they certainly don’t support, but if they do it’s understandable because Israel.
It’s like these news stories I am seeing about the UK ready to recognize a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Authority holds elections? After the last Gaza elections and freaking Brexit, Keir Starner really believes we’re all going to like what comes out of a Palestinian election?
I'd guess it goes the other way. Everyone already knows Hamas is a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists, so we expect nothing better of them than what they do. But Israel is a first world democracy, so we expect more from them.
Explicitly yes. This has been my view of the conflict for quite some time. Both sides are behaving quite badly, but one side has a huge, *huge* advantage in prosperity, security and above all ability to influence their government. I naturally expect more from those who have more. And thus I am much more angry when I see them not only doing worse, but doing entire orders of magnitude worse[1]. Add to that the fact that Palestinians as a people have effectively never been allowed full autonomy[2], and the conflict does indeed look *extremely* one-sided to me, no matter how little I care for the ideologies of many of the Palestinians.
[1] The number of Gazens killed in the current conflict is 30-40x the number of Israelis, so at least one order of magnitude. I don't even want to try to count in terms of something like QUALYs, but it must surely be a much greater disparity still given how immense the privation and misery being heaped upon those in Gaza currently is.
[2] Before Israel it was the British pushing them around, and before the British it was the Ottomans. And I'll add that yes, I'm aware that the Jewish people have also had huge and tragic historical issues with autonomy and being victimized by more powerful groups controlling the lands where they lived. But the decision to establish the State of Israel *was* an exercise of their autonomy as a people, as has been everything that State has done afterwards, and it's fair to judge those exercises.
>Both sides are behaving quite badly, but one side has a huge, *huge* advantage in prosperity, security and above all ability to influence their government.
You say that as if Israel's advantages in these things were assigned entirely randomly and arbitrarily. In reality, most good societies are good because they're made up of pro-social people, and most bad societies are bad because they're made up of anti-social people, so when you say "People from good societies should be held to a higher standard than people from bad societies," what you actually end up doing is supporting the anti-social over the pro-social.
"I naturally expect more from those who have more."
Maybe not even that. I think it is more like "the party which tends to view itself as the 'only democracy of the Middle East', and which is treated as the only Western country in the region, is expected to act like one".
I mean, if you hear Azerbaijan to ethnic cleanse Mountain Karabah, well, yeah, things like this happen all the time in the world. However, would you hear the Netherlands taking over Belgium and ethnic cleansing the Wallons (the French-speaking half of Belgium), you might bet would induce different reactions.
(Or the USA conquering and annecting Greenland by force -- while similar stuff happens in Africa, I bet, all the time.)
> Probably because the West views the Palestinians as the perpetually wronged party
Well not the West as such, but certainly the western Left, which I've always thought of as an ideology that could be replaced by a rock that says "whichever side appears more pathetic is right".
I don't know if non-western countries really have a left, at least not in the same sense.
"Egypt and even Qatar of all places are openly advocating for Hamas to step down. Western news? Barely gives it a mention. "
I don't think the are many people anywhere that don't consider Hamas to be some percentage of the problem. The difference you seem to be missing between Egyptian and Qatari media and Western media is *who they can hope to influence.*
There is approximately a 0.00% chance that saying any further bad things about Hamas[1] in Western media will have any influence whatsoever on Hamas' decisions of when, where and how to exercise their power. There is a slightly more than 0% chance that Egyptian and Qatari media might. By contrast, Western countries--the U.S. in particular--have quite a bit of influence with the State of Israel[2]. So if Western journalists are at all interested in seeing Israel tone down the murder at least a little bit--and I guarantee you a lot of them are--it makes perfect sense to focus their attentions on the side of the conflict where they might *possibly* have an effect.
[1] Who already have a very poor reputation in the West.
[2] Whose reputation is much higher--and thus more susceptible *at least in theory* to downward pressure--with at least a subset of Westerners.
> There is approximately a 0.00% chance that saying any further bad things about Hamas[1] in Western media will have any influence whatsoever on Hamas' decisions of when, where and how to exercise their power.
Strong disagree. I think Hamas's whole war strategy is entirely about the Western media -- their primary KPIs are not the number of Israeli soldiers they kill but the number of dead kid stories that find their way into western media. Recently it's been working great, they've managed to kill enough of their own kids to get the likes of Macron and Starmer onside.
Also it's terrible geopolitical game theory to say "we put pressure and criticize the side that's more likely to listen to us". The just incentivizes both sides to publically show that they're less likely to listen. It's saying to Israel: "Be more like the terrorists and prove nothing will make you change your ways".
I think this is a reasonable concern in the abstract, but it's really not like the west puts no pressure on Hamas: it is a designated terrorist group basically everywhere; all the BDS demands about Israel are basically already satisfied w.r.t. the relationship between western countries and Hamas; no western country supplies Hamas with weapons; many western countries have been happy to supply Israel with weapons for the explicit purpose of dismantling Hamas.
By any reasonable measure, western countries put *immensely* more pressure on Hamas than they do on Israel; and there are presumably diminishing returns to applying more. I'm not opposed to the west trying to do so: if someone suggested leaning on Turkey/Qatar in some way to make them less supportive of Hamas I think that's reasonable; but all the big ticket items are already in play.
It's true that western countries are *increasing* pressure on Israel more than on Hamas, but I think this has to reckon with the fact that pressure on Hamas is more or less maxed out.
"I think Hamas's whole war strategy is entirely about the Western media...." I think you are conflating Hamas and TicTok. Pretty clearly, their "whole war strategy" is not about "likes."
Now apply this logic to the Ukraine. Perhaps you might want to increase your uncertainty of "Very Very Bad Military Actions" being blamed on Russia?
... Russia did in fact bomb a village because they rebuilt too many houses. The village's name was something like "ten houses" and whenever they'd build more than ten, it would get bombed. Russian humor.
"Hamas killing their own kids" is such BS. Nobody forced Israel to resort to mass starvation and other inhumane tactics.
Winning a war is a zero sum game. If one side gets closer to victory the other gets closer to defeat. Dead kids brings closer to victory which side? If Hamas were the side that benefits from dead kids, Israel wouldn't be trying so hard to starve kids dead.
And yes, Israel is still starving Gaza. The amount of food that the "Gaza humanitarian foundation" is giving out is insufficient to feed Gaza, by a long shot. It's a ridiculous amount. The purpose of the GHF is to pretend they're not starving Gaza while they starve Gaza.
Regarding inhumane tactics other than mass starvation, such as shooting civilians unnecessarily, the reason it's harder to convince people that Israel is committing those crimes is that the Israelis don't allow Western press into Gaza, which proves they're in bad faith. But the argument remains: if an army is so evil they will resort to MASS STARVATION, how can you believe that the same army is trying to minimize civilian casualties when it comes to bullets and bombs? Obviously this is an immoral army.
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Of course when I say "winning a war is a zero sum game" there's the counterargument that Israel isn't actually playing that game, they don't want to defeat Hamas, their goal is to get rid of the civilian population of Gaza (call it genocide, ethnic cleansing, "voluntary emigration", making Gaza unlivable, whatever) and they're letting Hamas survive so they have an excuse to complete the genocide. All the more so, the international community should make Israel stop.
A brief look at the UN Security Council's resolutions doesn't leave me very convinced of your claim. Perhaps it depends on exactly what makes a resolution count as "against" a particular party. But the great majority of UNSC resolutions have nothing to do with Israel, and most of them are like "Recalling this, remembering that, noting the other, and mindful of yet another thing, we urge all parties concerned to abide by their agreements of such-and-such dates and to act in accordance with our resolution of such-and-such other date".
Also, they're mostly concerned with _war_. The fact that they don't say much about North Korea, for instance, says nothing about how _bad_ NK is, it says that NK's badness is a matter of oppressing its own population rather than attacking anyone else.
I do agree that Hamas is a lot of the problem. I don't see how it follows from that that unlimited amounts of death are going to be helpful. There's a definite sense of "beatings will continue until morale improves" here for me; when you have a population that feels mistreated and oppressed and is sympathetic to terrorists who promise to do something about the mistreatment and oppression, attacking that population is not generally an effective way to solve the problem. Not that I can think of anything that _would_ be an effective way to solve the problem. But, again, "there is no good way forward; therefore we're going to massacre thousands upon thousands of people in pursuit of an obviously-unattainable goal" doesn't seem like great reasoning either.
This just adds credence to the argument that the average Gazan should be thought of more as a hostage than a genuine Hamas sympathizer. But many people in this comment section seem convinced that the average Palestinian is 100% pro-Hamas.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the average Gazan", but at least last summer Hamas had a ~75% popularity rating. in March of 2024, 71% of polled Gazans said that the decision of Hamas to attack Israel on Oct 7 was the correct decision.
The escalating war dramatically reduced both of those numbers.
I don't know the methodology being used here, but it seems to me like popularity polls are dubious when you are being asked to choose between a side that is raining missiles on you and a side that will shoot you or put you exactly where the missiles are falling, or at least starve you if it gets back to them that you voiced criticism.
I mean, this side of the blogosphere was filled a couple years ago with people proclaiming up and down that they were terrified to voice anti-woke sentiments at bar with friends on the off chance it got back to the wrong people and they lost their job, but suddenly its hard to understand why you might not be very vocally supportive of the local warlords in a time of war?
That being said, even if that number is 100% solid, the fact that its going down as the situation gets worse proves that Gazans are not mindless death-cultists who embrace martyrdom at any cost, as several commentors here are insisting. They respond rationally to obvious changes in the situation.
I feel like Jews very often get their stories told! For example, I think I've heard about equal discussion of the 10/7 attacks and the Gaza bombing, despite the latter affecting 10-20x more people, though maybe this is only after some kind of hard-to-notice mental adjustment for one of them being a single attack and the other a protracted campaign.
I would now, because it’s basically right both as a comparison (ill-thought-out revenge invasion that achieved nothing) and a contrast (established an occupation then tried to set up a new government and win popular support vs mindlessly storming around killing people and blowing up buildings, then trying to starve the population)
And yet, somehow, the story I mentioned - which happened - either didn’t reach you, or didn’t elicit an emotional reaction. Which was it? And how do you, of all people, not register the bias only going in one direction?
No amount of prior tragedy gives a nation the right to starve millions of people they dislike to death in open air prisons. It was wrong when the nazis did it to the jews of Europe and its still wrong now that its Israel doing it to the Palestinians. Religious fundamentalists are truly the worst people on Earth.
Are you saying there are no religious fundamentalists in Israel who wish for such things? Are you saying that Israeli policy is in no way motivated by the decisions of such figures in the executive and legislature?
Hamas (not known for lying to make Israel look good) says that only around 100 people have starved to death throughout the entire war. Presumably that includes the ones who starved due to congenital metabolic conditions rather than lack of food, as these are the ones whose pictures are published on the front page of every newspaper. So "starving millions of people to death" would be quite the exaggeration, even if Israel weren't fighting international opposition to be able to *feed* Gazans through the GHF.
There are plenty of Jews out there whose “story” does not consist of support for an apartheid government’s campaign of genocide. I’m proud to call some of them friends
I've heard the "apartheid" charge a few times but I'm confused what it actually entails.
I mean, I'm prepared to believe that the Israeli government does discriminate in favour of Jews and against Muslims and other groups in some ways, I'm just not sure exactly what it entails in practice and how it compares to Apartheid South Africa.
When I use the word "apartheid", I mean, roughly, "one government, ruling over two peoples, chosen by (and, therefore, only concerned with the interests of) only one of them".
I think that Israel's treatment of the minority of Palestinians it permits citizenship is merely "extreme racism that should exclude it from the community of civilized nations", not "apartheid", but its treatment of the remainder is actual, literal apartheid, and if anything compares unfavorably to white South Africans treatment of non-whites.
That is ridiculous. Nowhere in Israel or Palestine does the Israeli government discriminate based on ethnicity. Israeli citizens of any race have the same rights everywhere, whether they are Jewish or Arab. This is true in both Israel and the West Bank.
Also you might have forgotten how Israel just intervened to prevent the genocide of Druze in Syria, even though Druze are not Jewish. Hard to argue that is due to exclusive concern for Jews.
Now if you want actual apartheid there is plenty of it in the region. Starting with the Palestinian Authority where selling land to a Jew (yes, Jew not Israeli) is a crime punished by death. But of course all the people talking about apartheid don't actually care about apartheid, they just want an excuse to ostracize Jews.
Israel only requires military service out of certain people, and not others. Some of this is religious in nature, some of it is race, but Jews also want to be both a religion and a race.
I do not forget the Druze, as in my first sentence. They do serve in the Israeli military after all.
This is an important elision that causes much confusion, whether purposefully or not. By conflating Israeli Arab citizens, who do have most rights afforded to them, and subjects of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza, who do not have equal rights, one is able to pretend that the treatment of the latter group is not the responsibility of Israel. All of the Palestinians in Gaza are not freely allowed to leave that area. Movement of non-Jews in the West Bank is also highly constricted. The Israeli government and its military are the controlling power in these regions. To claim that this is not unequal treatment is facile
The Israeli government effectively rules the West Bank, and the situation there is clearly apartheid. Israeli citizens can vote, are subject to civilian law and courts, and have their own road network. They can also easily get building permits, including on Palestinian land, which the Israeli government regularly expropriates (without compensation) to give to them.
Palestinians can’t vote. They are subject to military law and courts, where they have ~0 rights; a 17-year-old recently starved to death in an Israeli prison after being held for months without trial. They have to use a different and worse road network full of roadblocks and checkpoints, and the authorities can close off passage entirely, at any time, for any reason or none. They can effectively never get a permit to build anything. If an Israeli attacks a Palestinian, the law will take the side of the Israeli ~100% of the time. There are even bantustan equivalents (Areas A and B).
The credible charge is about the occupied territories: Palestinians in the West Bank are ruled by Israel, on land that Israel kinda-sorta regards as part of Israel, they live alongside Jews who are citizens of Israel--but they themselves aren't citizens, can't vote, and on the basis of not being Jews have no prospect of them or their children ever becoming citizens or gaining the rights that their Jewish neighbours have.
In some places in the territories, especially I believe in the area of Hebron, there's a bunch of infrastructure that is available for use by Jewish residents but not Palestinians: roads and highways and such. In theory, the distinction is between Israeli citizens and non-citizens, but since Palestinians have no hope of becoming citizens, and since Israel quasi-officially refuses to recognize them as citizens of any other state, this is basically an ethnicity-based group whom Israel insists it has the legal right to rule over, without giving them political rights.
I don't buy that caring about the death of a 6 year old ought to be operationalized as not caring about the deaths of other children, or even seeing such acts as revenge, or leverage, or torture.
"So Scott, if you or anyone else like you ever bothered to notice the pattern, by which Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described"
How could one possibly notice such a pattern in this conflict? To date, a grand total of 2,000 Israelis have been killed in this conflict, and the vast majority of those were nearly two years ago. By contrast, something like 60-80,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of those very recent, with the real possibility of that number rising very sharply and very soon. I certainly heard heartbreaking stories of Israeli tragedy told at the time they were current. But even setting aside the current factor, if you *actually* heard 1 such story of an Israeli death for every 30 or 40 such of Palestinians, would you notice? Truth be told, I suspect you have heard them rather more frequently than that, and *still* round it off to "*always and every single time* unworthy of having their stories told."
"if any of you noticed that the alleged victims of Jews’ ontological evil are always worthy of the emotional reactions"
While I don't doubt there are some terrible humans out there convinced of "Jews' ontological evil," those that I talk to seem far, FAR much more concerned with the very REAL, very *non-hypothetical evil* which the State of Israel is carrying out right this moment as it murders and maims and mutilates and starves thousands upon thousands of people, with no end in sight. When THAT evil is ended, perhaps it will seem less galling to hear this sort of complaint.
When I see this sort of utterly hyperbolic and tone-deaf complaint, the only reasonable belief I can form is "here is a person who values Palestinian lives and zero, if not less." The degree to which these human fucking beings--living, breathing men women and children--are being treated as irrelevant and disposable is nothing short of disgusting. I don't want to live in world where that happens. I *also* don't want to live in a world where harms and tragedies that happen to Jewish people are ignored or discounted or overlooked. But complaints like this certainly bring us closer to such a world, not further.
> Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described
This is a wild thing to say when Holocaust related literature and filmography are essentially their own genre.
The problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Jews happen to belong to the side that has the most guns and the biggest army and the most wealth and industrial might, and is using those to punch down repeatedly a handful of people living in abject poverty in something that can't even be called a country. And therefore the focus moves to the underdog because it seeks to balance things out. Jews were the underdog in 1936 Germany. Jews aren't the underdog in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(it's not even that right to just say "Jews", mind you; a 1:1 identification of Israel with Jews is a powerful rhetorical tool but in practice while virtually anyone who counts for something in Israel is a Jew, not every Jew is Israeli since Jew remains a religion/ethnicity with many members around the world, and anyway even Israel has its own internal politics and isn't a monolith)
Now you can say that Israel here *actually* is the underdog because it's at risk of being wiped out by its neighbours and must always act first and hard to have a chance to come up on top. But that is a bit of a rhetorical mugging - it presumes we have to accept that everything will play out exactly like the most hawkish of hawks say unless we do as they say we should do. At the very least, at that point we are in the merit of the war, what counts as necessary war, how far you can go to prevent future harms to your country even if it means you are now the aggressor, and so on so forth. Which is a lot more complex than just "the only reason why people think that Israel's attacks on Palestine are worse than what Hamas inflicted on them is that they hate Jews". When the October 7 attacks happened, plenty of solidarity was expressed with Israel, and the brutality of the crimes committed against its civilians. But that solidarity doesn't usually last past inflicting even worse brutalities and killing even more civilians in retaliation. At some point it begins feeling like even being the victim of that attack doesn't justify it all any more. Just like being the victims of 9/11 hardly justified the US to wage two wars in response (not even against the direct culprits), and those were actually waged with far stricter rules of engagement than Israel seems to follow.
Oh, I'm sorry, do we need more people telling the story of "completely safe crybully gasbag complaining that he doesn't get enough sympathy and special treatment"? I thought you guys hated idpol
Nobody's telling the story about the IDF soldier being tortured by Hamas for fundraising purposes because it's brain-scarring even in text format. If you want to tell it, you can be my guest.
Semites play cards with suffering. Who's got the worst suffering today? Who hit whom? Who hit whom FIRST?
You'd probably be on stronger grounds arguing that "American Genocides are generally not reported" and pulling a level of anti-Semitism out of that. Aka "the powers that be" are anti-semetic. Which, um, totally. Who else but the jews think that pissing off the diving board is a good place to be? They do it again and again. So the powers that be put the Jews in as frontmen. It's to their purposes to make the Jews hated and look bad. Next pogrom is coming...
As others have mentioned this is just not true of course, as we saw and continue to see memorial events and outpouring of support for victims of October 7. It is also the very first thing most Western news anchors bring up before they talk about Gaza, ironically.
But you should ask yourself why you have this perception. Is it because you yourself are a slave to your news feed? Do you situate yourself mentally based on what you just saw online? Or is it maybe that you personally, in your life, feel as though you aren't getting enough attention and no one is listening to your story?
Or the secret third possibility: You are a bad actor who is repeating a talking point you heard online because it's politically convenient for your side.
I'm fed up of everyone reaching for anti-Semitism! the Holocaust! Jews are being persecuted! when there's any criticism of what the Israeli government and the Israeli Defence Forces are doing.
Yes, they're Jewish. But they claim to be a secular state, not a theocratic one. So they get judged by the same civil standards as every other state.
They do it... enough, domestically. Like, I'm sure India claims to be a democracy, even if there's a lot of discrimination (or downright population displacement) against muslims. Not everyone's getting the "we are the only liberal democracy in the Middle East" but Israelis are hearing that as part of public school.
Secular gets sold to the gays, to the Druze, to the Palestinians... because the impossibly religious aspects really only apply to Jews (can't be converted by the majority of Jewish synagogues in the United states, say...)
The claim to be secular is more like in Turkey, where it's a part of the founding ideology. It's also still very much a live ideology in Israel, both culturally and politically; nearly half of Israelis identified as _hilonim_--secular-- in 2018.
As in Turkey, religious parties have been growing more powerful, eroding the secular nature of the state, but the claim that it's just for American consumption I think is over the top: it's still the desired mode of government for a large minority of the country, and probably is still overrepresented in many governing institutions (though I don't know enough to feel confident about this; I'm thinking of the Israeli Supreme Court here, which I'd guess is more committed to a secular view of Israel than the average Knesset member), and has the weight of history behind it yet even as those advantages wane.
Chief Rabbinate of Israel. There's apparently two schmucks who tell Jews in Israel that they can't be married by Reform or Conservative Rabbis, and tell Jewish converts in America (who are converted by reform or conservative traditions) that they aren't Jewish. I can continue on, but if you haven't seen gett the trial of viviane amsalem you probably should.
Are you kidding? The Ayatollah wields supreme political power and formally sits above the elected government. The Rabbinate is a bureaucratic organ within a democratic parliamentary state. It isn't even close to a reasonable comparison.
When the Rabbinate governs who can get married, who can get divorced (and when women cannot get divorced without their husband's consent), who can be a Jew (and this is important for immigration purposes. for Aliyah!) The rabbinate governs who can marry people -- conservative rabbis, reform rabbis cannot marry people in Israel.
The Ayatollah "wield supreme political power" in name only. He is like King Charles. The queen of England is NOT the proper comparison. The favorite beer in Iran is labeled BEER -- this is not a state where the Ayatollah is the sole power. Iran is a very complex state, please don't try to tell me that you think it's communist china.
I won't repeat other criticisms of this argument. But I will say that, to the extent that it's true, you don't have to invoke antisemitism to explain it. I think it's a manifestation of Western progressives giving a lot of moral weight to what they view as oppression, and in this case they view the average Palestinian as the oppressed and the Israeli government as the oppressor. That's not to say there aren't antisemites criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza -- of course there are. But I don't think it's driving the narrative.
As many have pointed out this comment severely undermined itself via overstatement, yet the point that Western liberals might hear about this Palestinian boy but are very unlikely to hear about the Israeli boy seems clearly correct.
You need to look further. When the white Jewish soldier boots the brown Jew in the staging area in the teeth, who reports it? (Not a real incident, but indicative of the pervasive racism in Israeli Jewish Culture). Ain't nobody whose narrative that supports, so ain't nobody talking about it. Except, of course, the folks witnessin' it.
I think another important point, 𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦 the value of consistency, is that having inconsistent values often means that one will, in trading them off against each other, end up in a worse situation than if one had had decided upon a consistent set (Dutch books / "money pumps").
Good point—I guess I might say that here we at least have a /lower bound/ for "the value of consistency" (i.e., maybe there's no reason to be consistent as long as you're not vulnerable to a "morality pump", so to speak, but /at least/ that level of consistency ought to be maintained).
I'm also sort of imagining that Scott's opponents here are saying stuff like "why bother trying to reason out any moral principles at all?!"... which might not actually be the case (but I've seen people say it! questions of this sort often seem to arise in debates wherein far-fetched hypotheticals are involved, I think).
Yes. But from a third-party perspective, the person who is consistent and has values very different from mine makes things worse for what I think matters with nearly every action, while the inconsistent person, who makes things always worse according to their *own* values, is sometimes making things better and sometimes making things worse.
True—also a very good point, now that I think of it. Hmm...
...perhaps this suggests that we ought to—in secret—encourage our friends to be consistent, but (publicly / in front of our enemies) decry consistency as pointless...?
I don't think we should worry about consistency per se, one way or another! We should worry about people aligning to the correct values (or to our values, or to the values we like, or whatever it is). Just because they're friends doesn't mean that their attempts at consistency will bring them closer to the correct values - it might bring them away!
Excellent point, again. I think I'd definitely agree that the more important question is 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 values someone holds, in general; whether they consistently {order / apply / trade off} those values is far & away a lesser concern.
After all, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘧 we assume (undoubtedly wrongly) that ideological allies won't move away from the Correct™ moral values upon reflection, there are still—as you pointed out initially—many, many folks for whom consistency would be, from my perspective (i.e. the 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 one), an unalloyed minus.
...but, 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘰, in the spirit of Scott's post (or something):—
Well... one might assume that (ideological) friends would 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘺 end up aligning their values in a(n ideologically) friendly way, such that it is at least as likely that their inconsistency costs you(r "side") some number of morilons¹ as that it will turn out to have benefitted you, relative to the "now they're aligned—but maybe not exactly as you'd wish?" counterfactual...
...but there's no guarantee, true enough. Perhaps the likelihood of benefit drops off as one's values depart farther from the mainstream, since this might imply that one got there by some combination of unusual intuitions or unusual(ly 𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥!) reasoning—like, maybe the modal individual who agrees with my own values only got there by chance, and I don't want them reflecting upon 'em, very much...
...sort of depends on the faith one has in their (& one's own) reasoning abilities, I suppose.²
(Probably there are also a good number of cautionary historical examples wherein "group decides to take its principles more seriously & reason out a nice logical formulation of the same" turns out to be worse than "let's all just do our collective best off of our vague moral intuitions", heh.)
--------------------------
¹: "𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘴", 𝘴𝘦𝘦?–
²: I, personally, don't have very much faith in the average—nor even in the modal!—person, I'm afraid. I might go so far as to say that I'm not sure very many people actually 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 any sort of coherent moral framework at all (nor, really, much in the way of any other coherences); pushing such individuals to "reflect & perfect" probably just pushes 'em closer to the values of those around them / the dominant culture in their area. I dunno, I'm just spit-ballin' here, aight–
I guess for some degree, people value consistency more than alignment. This is solely based on that traitors are usually avoided by everyone, even when they rebel from enemy side to your side. Inconsistent people can't be trusted to hold what they say, by definition. At least you can predict what an opposite-aligned people would do.
An adversary known to have internally-consistent, maximalist goals can simply be ruthlessly crushed, which is ugly but hasn't really been a hard problem (in the grand scheme of things) since at least WWI. http://tangent128.name/depot/toys/freefall/freefall-flytable.html#2447 Someone with inconsistent, imperfectly-understood goals has to be dealt with more diplomatically, which requires a lot more deep thinking - not least because any visibly consistent diplomatic policy, being an axiomatic system, has flaws. Decision thresholds have to be drawn somewhere, and once they are, deliberately constructed edge cases can provide opportunities for bad-faith actors - potentially including those with covert maximalist goals - to slip through the cracks, inflicting attrition while avoiding scrutiny. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout , and the fans of popular media which they've antagonized, laying siege to payment-processors' customer service departments with deliberately time-wasting calls, as another example from current events.
FWIW, my go-to thing to point out about most Gaza discourse isn't "why aren't you mentioning other larger-scale tragedies", it's "why aren't you mentioning the context that the ruling government of Gaza is ideologically committed to there being no sovereign Jewish state in the region, not in the dog whistle or squint sense, but in the explicit say-it-out-loud, that's-really-their-main-thing sense and the majority of their constituents are on board".
"the majority of their constituents are on board".
I'm skeptical of this. I mean, to start with, how would you know? I doubt Gallup has a poll in the field. And even if its true, in some abstract sense, that the majority of Gazans would nod and say yes to the proposition "there should not be a Jewish state here" that is probably in conflict with their lived experience in a way that is certainly going to impact their pragmatic goals.
I'm sure if you polled most Irish people in the majority of the 20th century, they would say there is no part of Ireland that should be part of the British Empire, but that doesn't mean every single one of them supported the tactics of the IRA or thought it was worth the Troubles to have that victory. I'm sure its beneficial for Hamas to claim they have a mandate from the Palestinian people, but that doesn't make it true.
Your comment is a great representation of what we're dealing with. Westerners just don't believe the Palestinians' own clear statements that they definitely WILL NOT STAND for a sovereign Jewish state in the region. When they say things like "we value death more than they value life", it's because they just really want sovereign Jewish Israel to not exist, at any price - it's their top ideological religion-linked priority. It's more important *to them* than economic flourishing. *They* only want economic flourishing in a non-sovereign-Jewish-state world.
You'll forgive me, I spent my formative years hearing very similar arguments about Muslims in general, that we had to treat every single one of them like a suspected suicide bomber because it was just fundamentally a religion of violence. And its not like there were no imams, and no terror attacks to support the argument! But ultimately the horde of radicalized sleeper agents never materialized. I recognize that the situation is different, but this idea that religion or ethnic tribalism overrides all other concerns is just not convincing to me.
There was one free election in Palestine ever. It was won by Hamas, a group which since its founding has been openly committed to the extermination of Jews. Since then, Hamas has consistently been far more popular in opinion polls than its opponent, the Palestinian Authority.
I do not think this is intrinsic to Islam or anything like that. I just think this is the outlook of most Palestinians in recent decades (as they repeatedly say and demonstrate), and is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as well.
Hamas won that election,not on "exterminate the jews" but on an anti-corruption bent. Same as Zelensky. Hamas didn't realize they were going to win that election, so I doubt the Protest Vote that got them elected realized it either.
There is a pretty clear pattern of antagonism and violence between Jews and Arabs that stretches back...I dunno, a century or so, in its modern incarnation. Not sure what else would convince you at this point.
We can similarly inquire about how many German women and children didn't actively support the Nazi party in WWII. I would just make sure to notice the crucially important observaton that Nazi Germany was really big on the Final Solution and the Allies weren't big on anything analogous/symmetrical.
There are of course plenty of people who argue that both the firebombing of Dresden as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immoral and injustied acts even if by some utilitarian calculus they could be argued to have saved more lives in the long run. To me this is simply a larger disagreement about whether or not it's okay to kill civilians, especially women and children under the thumb of a particularly murderous and barbaric regime of men, for the actions of those murderous men in charge. I think you will find that there are many more men than women on the "yes it's morally acceptable" side of that equation, but then, that is not surprising since it is men who prosecute wars.
I have this disagreement with my husband. We are both in agreement that when it comes to Hamas, or even just the general political and social order of Palestine, vs Israel, Israel is the clear winner and side we are on - there is zero dispute there. The difference is, that he believes it's therefore okay to starve/bomb/kill their women and children, to eradicate Hamas, and I do not. He views it as Hamas' fault for hiding behind them as shields. I think that's irrelevant, as we've already established that Hamas are barbarians, and that doesn't change the moral calculation of making children suffer the punishment for the sins of their fathers.
I don't think this should be such a controversial position. It reflects the position we've undergirded in our own rule of law, which is that it is worse, morally, to convict and punish an innocent man than it is to let a criminal go free, if you have to weigh those things as opposing moral considerations that require bias one way or the other.
Hmm how about a simple hypothetical where it's a high-ranking Hamas leader sheltering in a tunnel located under 1 sleeping civilian woman, and let's say the only way to target him is to target the whole building+tunnel complex. Obviously there's no good option here, but are you saying you consider the better option to be that targeting him isn't allowed in that situation? Because the problem is that then he can walk around with babies strapped to him and he's invincible right?
Ask anybody who's currently being shot at what their top priority is, it'd be kinda shocking if the answer WASN'T "stopping those guys who are shooting at us." When they stop being in continuous mortal danger, and economic flourishing looks like a real option rather than a distracting theory, answer tends to change.
I think if you look at the actions of the Irish or South Africans over the last 75 years of their respective conflicts and compare it to Palestinian conduct over the same period, it will reveal the preferences of their respective populations.
Because the South Africans and Irish did not ever commit acts of terror? Or because the Palestinians never engaged in a protracted period of nonviolent direct resistance?
There are several organizations that routinely poll Gazans. In the immediate aftermath of Oct 7, 52% of Gazans and 85% of the population of the West Bank explicitly stated that Oct 7 was the correct thing to do.
That averages out to about 72% of all Palestinians.
There is a tiny bit of difference between "Ireland shouldn't be part of the British Empire" and "Britain shouldn't exist", especially when you have a long history of murdering British civilians.
The time between October 7th probably feels like twenty years if you are actually living in Gaza, its certainly thousands of deaths ago. See also Taymon Beal's post above. Doesn't seem like anyone is ready to unilaterally disarm but they seem pretty dispirited.
Also, the Irish DID murder British civilians, its a debated number, and I don't pretend to be an expert on the history, but a quick google shows the lowball projection over nearly 100 years of violence to be at least 30% civilian. I don't actually think "Ireland shouldn't be a part of the British empire" is that different from "Israel should not exist" when you consider that in the end the Irish still agreed to give up 1/6th of the country.
"There is a tiny bit of difference between "Ireland shouldn't be part of the British Empire" and "Britain shouldn't exist", "
Is there? Or rather, does the difference map in any sensible way to this case?
Irish people wanted to be in full and complete control *of Ireland* as they recognized it. I doubt they very much cared what British people did over in Britain, as long as they did it *in Britain* and not in Ireland.
If in a counterfactual universe a giant chasm had opened up and swallowed the island of Great Britain, with the survivors fleeing to Ireland and declaring parts of the island to be "New Britain" to which they had eternal and sovereign claim, I doubt too many of the Irish people of this counterfactual universe would budge very much on their view that Irish people should have full and sovereign control of Ireland--the whole of Ireland--regardless of what the newcomers called parts of it.
I have enough basic empathy that I can understand how and why Palestinians feel the same way. To be crystal clear: I don't think they should get what they want. Israelis also deserve homes and also deserve peace and security and prosperity, and as fraught as the area where they live is, there's not really an alternative. But when a foreign group shows up on land that your group has lived on for centuries and starts pushing you around and telling you that parts of it are no longer your and never will be, wanting them gone is a pretty damn natural reaction.
Notice, though, that even in this universe--even without the inconvenience of an giant chasm and a disappearing Britain forcing the issue--the Irish didn't actually get everything they wanted. A large chunk of their island is *still* under British control. And that is and has been a very, very contentious issue that has produced a lot of really shocking violence in the past. But several decades of mutual peace and prosperity have done quite a lot to cool off that lingering resentment. It's not gone. But it's probably closer to gone than anyone 50 years ago would have imagined. Funny how that works.
> the Irish didn't actually get everything they wanted
I mean you can't really generalise about what "The Irish" wanted, that's the point. The Southern Irish wanted to be a separate country, and they got that. The Northern Irish wanted to be part of the UK, and they got that too. This is about as happy a compromise as you could hope for, except that a bunch of Southerners decided that they wanted the North to be part of their country too and were willing to kill random civilians to try to get it.
You can try to map this onto Israel-Palestine if you like but the analogy isn't all that useful. The Southern Irish may have wanted to conquer the North but I doubt they would have exterminated all the Northern Irish if they'd done it, whereas the Palestinians would absolutely kill every Jew if they had the chance.
This is, to put it lightly, not a very accurate description of Irish history. The entire problem is that a large minority of northern Irish wanted (and still want) to be part of a united Ireland, independent of the UK. A narrow majority, who are descendents of British planters, wanted (and still want) to remain part of the UK, and view themselves entirely as British.
At the foundation of the Irish state a compromise was struck to partition the island, which ended the war of independence. This compromise then started a civil war in Ireland, because it was viewed by some as a betrayal of the Northern Irish Catholics who were left living as second class citizens in the newly created Northern Ireland. This simmering problem re-ignited in the late 1960s first as a peaceful civil rights movement and then subsequently as a horrific multi-decade series of terrorist attacks and reprisals, between the mostly Northern Irish Provisional IRA, Northern Irish Unionist terrorist groups and the British Army.
Eventually all sides saw fit to end the madness by accepting messy diplomatic compromises that made their most fervent members very angry. The most consequential of these compromises was an agreement to hold a refedendum on uniting Ireland, if it appears likely to pass. Given demographic trends it has looked like this is an eventual inevitability, but that may be changing. Hopefully we do not look back on the last 20 years of peace in Northern Ireland as an abberation.
First, it was relatively small, with under 400 respondents in the West Bank and under 300 in Gaza. I can only assume that the response rate would have been very low, too.
Second, there are the usual limitations of polling during a war, and of polling in an authoritarian, violent state; in this case, the two are combined, and the results should surely be taken with a pinch of salt.
Third, and more importantly, the respondents didn't "explicitly state that Oct 7 was the correct thing to do". The question asked was: "How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?" I think we can agree that this question might, shall we say, cautiously imply a possible answer.
More generally, I strongly suspect (and here I'm definitely just speculating) that, like the absolute majority of Russians on Ukraine or even most Germans under the Nazis, most Palestinians don't actually support mass violence, terror and the killing of civilians. I was struck by someone pointing out the Arab Wikipedia article on Dalal Mughrabi (https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%BA%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A; I don't speak Arabic, but your browser's translate funcion will do fine). If you don't know who she is (I didn't): you ca start with the English version (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalal_Mughrabi), but, in short, she led the Coastal Road massacre, killing numerous civilians. The Arab version doesn't mention any of this; it just stated she was a freedom fighter, and that around 30 Israelis (implied later in the article to have been soldiers) were killed in a shootout. People generally (generally!) don't root for murderers.
I presumably got it wrong; the numbers you quote are a closer fit with a different poll, the one here: https://pcpsr.org/en/node/963
Here's the first paragraph of its "Main findings":
Most of the questions asked in this last quarter of 2023 revolved around the October 7 offensive and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. It also covered the debate about the future of the Gaza Strip after the war and the Palestinian perception of the positions of the various relevant countries and actors. Findings indicate that a majority of the respondents believe that Hamas' decision to carry out the offensive is correct, and believe that the attack came in response to “settler attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque and West Bank residents, and for the release of Palestinian prisoners.” It is worth noting that there are significant differences between the attitudes of the residents of the West Bank compared to those of the Gaza Strip, in terms of the “correctness” of the Hamas' decision (and other matters), as the attitudes of Gazans tend to show a greater degree of skepticism about that decision. It is clear from the findings that believing in the “correctness” of Hamas' decision does not mean support for all acts that might have been committed by Hamas fighters on October 7. The overwhelming majority of respondents say that they have not seen videos from international or social media showing atrocities committed by Hamas members against Israeli civilians that day, such as the killing of women and children in their homes. Indeed, more than 90% believe that Hamas fighters did not commit the atrocities contained in these videos. When asked what is or is not allowed in war, under international humanitarian law, the findings indicate that the vast majority believes that attacking or killing civilians in their homes is not permissible. The majority (except in the Gaza Strip) also believe that taking civilians as hostages or prisoners of war is also not permissible.
So let's grant your premise that most Palestinians are ideologically committed to there being no Jewish sovereign state in the region, including little children somehow. How does that justify starving those people to death? The majority of Israelis support, at a minimum, 'expelling' Gazans (https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jewish-israelis-support-expelling-gazans). Does that justify October 7? Would it justify a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv?
First let's agree there's an asymmetry here. Most Israelis are absolutely NOT ideologically opposed to having a sovereign Muslim Gaza, they just don't want to be existentially threatened, which unfortunately they are. If Gazans would just *say* "hey we're cool with sovereign Jewish Israel", my own view is representative of the median Israeli's - we'd be like "oh really? Let's move toward a 2-state-solution peace process then". But they won't say it! Again, it's not dog whistle level. It's explicit, ideological, and religious. If you think this is hyperbole or symmetrical to a description of median Israelis, then you & I are at an impasse.
I'm curious about this, I feel like your perspective laid out here is rarely covered. For example, I hear plenty of content about settlers who seem pretty set on a Jewish dominated Palestine/Judea and Samaria, and statements by the current Minister of National Security, but I accept their views may be a small minority within Israel.
What are the different political parties' positions on this - do any list out conditions under which they would recognise a sovereign Gaza/West Bank? Is there popular support for any unilateral actions which may engender some future goodwill and compromise?
You can search for videos where people walk around Israel and Palestine and engage people on the street with these simple questions like "do you want to coexist with your neighbor in peace, yes or no" - this is absolutely the key difference. The fact that my comment is news or treated as hard to believe by so many people is pretty incredible because neither side is even trying to be coy.
To your question, Israel has religious extremists just like Palestine does. The difference is we're talking a low % fringe (not sure how much, maybe 10%), while in Palestine it really is *their thing*, similar to the rest of the neighboring Arab world which is 100% Jew-free by law.
Couldn't some of that be related to the actual status quo situation (Israelis have a state, Palestinians do not)? I mean, it's much easier to say you want peaceful coexistence when it's your army which is in control!
I don't mean to discount your point entirely - clearly there is a lot of religious-hatred/racism among Palestinians and the wider Arab world. It just seems a bit glib to imply, 'yeah we'd totally give them what they want (a state), if only they were nice and peaceful like us'. It doesn't look that way from my (admittedly, outside and uninformed) perspective; for example it seems like Israel's West Bank policy is to put ever more settlers in, making it ever harder to create/compromise on a feasible, independent Palestinian state, and further aggravating tensions in the region.
Am I wrong? If 90% of Israelis really want peaceful coexistence and only really care about security, shouldn't there be strong domestic criticism and opposition to that policy? Is there? Hence my question to you about Israeli politics - I don't hear much from the 'peace and compromise' side.
Israeli politics is much more lively than American politics about israel, because they don't have AIPAC breathing down their necks. Lots of views, many Jews, all opinions, including Green Leaf (the marijuana party).
>"Most Israelis are absolutely NOT ideologically opposed to having a sovereign Muslim Gaza"
What about a sovereign Muslim Jerusalem? Have there been any Israeli two-state solution proposals that involve completely ceding Jerusalem? I can totally get why Israel would think they shouldn't have to give up Jerusalem, but from the rhetoric that gets tossed around in the Western world you would think this is a secondary issue. I think it is actually a crux.
This isn't my area of expertise but I believe the Camp David deal on the table would have involved splitting Jerusalem so both sides got control over their holy half or something.
I think the time when the Palestinians were getting any part of "real" Jerusalem (as opposed to some outlying area they can call Jerusalem) is long past. The deal is going to do nothing but get worse the longer it gets drawn out.
Just because you're wearing body armor doesn't mean you should tolerate someone stabbing you repeatedly.
And if that person loudly declares that their goal is to kill you and destroy everything you care about, and you know that they are absolutely sincere, letting them go free is stupid. You know they'll try again and again until they succeed. Tying them up in your basement isn't the best idea, but there isn't a police in this analogy, and you're fresh out of better options.
Thank you for being honest. But I will point out that states are not humans. Even among humans I think your conclusion would be pretty suspect. But among states--where long-simmering conflicts are pretty much the norm--admitting that you cannot possibly tolerate the existence of another state that holds itself hostile to you is pretty much announcing your intention to tyranny.
The vast, vast majority of states current and historical simply do not have that luxury. I'm sure Ukraine would be more comfortable is Russia didn't exist, China would be more comfortable if the U.S. didn't exist, Taiwan would be more comfortable if China didn't exist, India would be more comfortable if Pakistan didn't exist and so on and so forth down the list of (often legitimate) fears and grievances. But states are much, much harder to get rid of than people. The *only* circumstance in which a state can realistically decline to tolerate the existence of a hostile and untrustworthy neighbor is the circumstance in which that neighbor is *not* an existential threat: the circumstance in which the power differential is so vast that ending that state becomes a reliable and realistic option. So when you hear somebody say that Israel *must* subdue Gaza or *must* bar Palestinian statehood because not doing so is allowing an existential threat, you can be sure that this person is either being dishonest with you or dishonest with themselves.
The reality, of course, is that Israel's own conduct in this conflict has been much, much more of an existential threat to its existence than Gaza ever could have been. Internal strife and international isolation are both more dangerous forces by far to *any* nation state than terrorism.
I find this to be one of the key arguments, and one that I (if I understand it correctly) strongly disagree with.
It takes
- Hamas is a terrorist organization bent on destroying Israel and killing Jews (relatively undisputed)
- Many or most Palestinians support Hamas (somewhat disputed)
- Many or most Palestinians supported October 7, and support killing Jews generally (disputed)
and synthesize it it "their goal is to kill you and destroy everything you care about".
(I've also noticed that these arguments almost always use "they," so much so I've actually started to notice it creep up in many different charged discussions. Is "they" more or less a prerequisite for motte-and-bailey arguments?)
In this case, you're talking about a comparison, but, here, too, it's unclear who the "person" stands for. Hamas? Many Palestinians? Most Palestinians? All Palestinians? How many righteous wilt though destroy with the wicked?
I agree that there is a strong case for justified self-defense after October 7 (Putting aside the question of to what extent are past Netanyahu governments responsible for keeping Gaza in the state it is in, and keeping Hamas in power), and indeed most of the West has stood beside Israel as long as it was a strategic, measured response.
It is a thorny question how much responsibility you have in this case for minimising civilian casualties while trying to achieve your strategic objective (which surely is neutralising Hamas, right?)
But currently we are clearly beyond this point, right? It no longer looks like the goal is "neutralise Hamas while minimising civilian casualties".
>How is Israel existentially threatened by Gaza, or how would it be by a sovereign Gaza?
Hamas' founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jews and rejects any peaceful resolution of the Israel/Palestine problem.
Now, it's true Hamas-controlled Gaza isn't in a position to seriously threaten Israel's existence. But that's an argument for keeping Gaza down for as long as it's ruled by Hamas so that Hamas can't threaten Israel, not for letting Gaza get stronger so they can pose a threat. Geopolitics isn't a sports tournament where you want to make sure every team has a decent chance of winning.
"Most Israelis are absolutely NOT ideologically opposed to having a sovereign Muslim Gaza, they just don't want to be existentially threatened, which unfortunately they are. "
So "they're absolutely NOT opposed to X, they're just absolutely and utterly unwilling to consider any realistic possibility that includes X in any way."
If you think that's an unfair characterization, I'll invite you to take a look at the phrase "existentially threatened." Are they? Are they really? By GAZA? The utmost effort of the most powerful, hateful and militant group in Gaza, with many years of planning and literal suitcases of foreign cash managed to kill roughly as many Israelis as a really bad train wreck. Yes, I'm aware that Hamas *wants* Israel gone. But I tolerate the--genuinely far more threatening--existence of North Korea every single day, despite what the leadership of North Korea wants, because I know they won't get it.
So when I hear "Hamas in Gaza is an existential threat to Israel," I can interpret this in one of two ways. Either the speaker is so wildly anxious and poor at risk evaluation as to be unable to tolerate *any* neighbor with any sort of bad blood or history of conflict. Or the speaker is using the term in bad faith, as an excuse to justify things that could otherwise not be justified. Either way, it's hard to read something like this and come away with the conclusion that Gazans or even Hamas are the actual problem here.
> If you think that's an unfair characterization, I'll invite you to take a look at the phrase "existentially threatened." Are they? Are they really? By GAZA?
Israelis are individually existentially threatened by Hamas, even if the existence of their entire country is not. You can hardly expect me to be happy about being murdered just because hey, my country will survive.
Obviously you shouldn't be happy about it, but there are lots of things that have a probability of killing the citizens of a state without threatening the state itself. Usually, we judge what responses to such a threat based on how factors like the distribution of risk across the population, and what the cost is to mitigate that risk. I don't see why Hamas violence should be any different.
COVID killed ~5 times as many Israelis as October 7; it would be weird to describe COVID as an existential threat to Israelis on the basis that any individual has some (small) percent of being killed by it.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Centuries ago the Jews who controlled Palestine were conquered by Muslim peoples, these then were conquered by the Turks, who in turn were conquered by the British. In the meantime, Europe spent approx. 1500 years doing their level best to exterminate the Jews (Hitler wasn't the first, he just had better technology) and, by the end of WWII, there was basically nowhere on earth where Jews were allowed to live in peace. The British, who had decided to leave the region, refused to allow the Jews a state in Palestine because they needed to be all pally with the Jordanians and Arabians for their oil. The Jews finally had no other choice but to declare their own state (in their original homeland!), at which point all of the Muslims living in the area left, expecting that the five Muslim countries that immediately declared war on Israel the day of its birth, would wipe it off the map after which they could happily return home in the following days. Instead they ended up in Gaza. My feeling is that post British empire, there was more than enough space and more than enough reason for there to be a Jewish state (and a right to exist, means a right to defend itself). It also accepted a two state solution which Palestinians refused and tried to give Gaza to Egypt but they refused. My question, what should the Jews/Israel have done differently to avoid this situation? 'Cause I can't think of anything.
> My question, what should the Jews/Israel have done differently to avoid this situation? 'Cause I can't think of anything.
Not done the Nakba. The Israeli Arabs (i.e. Arab Muslims who live in internationally recognized Israel and have since before 1948, not Mizrahi Jews &c) are perfectly fine members of Israeli society who, so far as I am aware, have done less terrorism than the actual Jewish citizens of Israel; 18% of Israelis are Muslims.
Yahya Sinwar was the child of people who were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba. In the universe where his parents were not ethnically cleansed, he probably would act like all the other people who were demographically similar but whose parents were not ethnically cleansed by Israel, and not organized a horrible terrorist attack.
(Whether or not you got cleansed in the Nakba was basically random because there was no central command on the subject; it's not the case that the most volatile Palestinian populations specifically were chosen for cleansing.)
Maybe just call it "killed" because "ethnically cleansed" just seems a ridiculous usage of the English language. If they were killed specifically because of their race, you could use the word "genocide" but "cleansed" has no meaning when referring to a specific person who was killed.
>If you think that's an unfair characterization, I'll invite you to take a look at the phrase "existentially threatened." Are they? Are they really? By GAZA?
The reason they're not currently existentially threatened is precisely that the IDF tends to stamp down on anything that looks like a military build-up, precisely the thing you say they shouldn't do. You might as well say "You claim that this man needs to stay in prison because he's a dangerous criminal, but how can he be a danger to anyone when he's locked up?"
>But I tolerate the--genuinely far more threatening--existence of North Korea every single day, despite what the leadership of North Korea wants, because I know they won't get it.
Also because North Korea doesn't sent commando raids to the mainland US to kidnap, rape, and murder American citizens. If they ever did such a thing, the US response would make the IDF look like a bunch of Zen Buddhists by comparison.
Strictly speaking it wasn't responding to a raid *on the mainland US,* but Operation Paul Bunyan seems comparable to the scenario you describe in most other ways, and yet involved zero civilian casualties - no North Korean fatalities at all, to my understanding. It was also a complete success, tactically and strategically.
The Oct 7th attack killed about 1200 and took hostage 250 in a country of 10 million. 9/11 killed about 3000 people in a country of 300 million, and I sure remember the furor over that.
Comparisons to "a really bad train wreck" are at best misleading, even if terrorism is not a large cause of overall mortality.
Egypt ruled over Gaza after the 48 war, as Jordan did over the West Bank. Unlike Jordan, which I believe gave citizenship to those living in the West Bank, Egypt basically ruled Gaza as a military occupation, though until 1959 they had a puppet client state there.
Sure, I will grant that there is an asymmetry, though I think it has more to do with history and material realities than some inherent quality of your average olive farmer in Gaza. My point is, it's irrelevant to the horrifying situation in Gaza right now.
It's effectively saying, "but the people we're slaughtering really really hate us!"
I'm interested in dropping the second half of your argument.
Let's assume that many or most Palestinians oppose the existence of Israel. Few of them will be actually terrorists, but let's assume many or most support Hamas, one way or another. Let's assume it means Israel has to continue having the security measures and efforts it had for the past decades (which I think would be absolutely extraordinary for any other "developed" state), and still have the occasional terror attack, and - say, once in ten years - even a October, 7 (again, absolutely extraordinary by Western standards).
This is an extremely important point. For some reason, "Palestine" as a nation is constantly discussed as if its political leaders (i.e. Hamas) are a wholly separate and irrelevant entity. There are tons of people who are pro-Palestine but neutral/allegedly opposed to Hamas, which is like being pro-Russia but anti-Putin. Or pro-Germany but anti-Nazi during WW2. Generally, when one sides with a country in a war, that would be understood as some sort of endorsement of that country's political leadership.
How many Israelis are so careful to make a similar distinction about Palestinians? Or any distinction, really? I really don’t understand where the asymmetry is supposed to be. If anything, the only asymmetry is that for Palestinians, we’re just speculating about what they would do if they had the means, while with Israelis, we don’t have to speculate, we can just look at recent and past history.
I’m not really talking about either the Israelis or the Palestinians, directly. I’m referring to the debate in the US and Europe, where on the one hand it’s very common to rhetorically separate Hamas from the Gazans, but not to separate Israelis from their government. It’s a part of the general trend of downplaying the degree to which Gaza has had any agency in its own downfall.
I mean, how much you can actually impact what your government does should matter when deciding if that government should be considered separately from the citizens of the country in question.
For example, most people don't consider an authoritarian dictator to accurately represent the people of their country. It's clear that you can separate the two, because the people (by definition) don't have any say over the choices of the dictator.
On the other side, a direct democracy (you vote on everything) would mean the citizens are functionally inseparable from the government. If the people of a country voted to go to war, it's fair to say that they support that war.
Anything in between is going to be shades of gray, but it falls on one end or the other of this spectrum.
IMO, I think that's why Hamas gets separated from the Palestinian people, whereas the Netanyahu government isn't. The Palestinian people don't really have a say in how Hamas handles things, whereas Israel is a parliamentary democracy. You can probably argue about whether or not Israel's government is doing what the citizens want (I'm not an expert on their political dynamics), but I think that difference is enough to make the views logically consistent.
You can construct that argument, and perhaps you yourself hold it sincerely, but I don’t think it’s one that is held in good faith by a lot of people. It’s certainly not a distinction we make regularly, at least not to that degree, in other conflicts even when the belligerents are non democratic (there appears to be little sympathy for the people of Russia right now, for example).
Fundamentally I think people believe there is a massive Palestinian “peace party” among “average innocent Gazans” not because of the structure of Palestinian politics, or because of any evidence on the ground they have carefully researched, but because it is comforting to believe that, and it makes it easier to cast Israel as a clear villain. Hell I suspect even most supporters of Israel want “innocent average Gazans” to be true since it seems to be the only hope for long term peace.
Whereas to admit that Gazans were broadly supportive of Hamas, their warmongering, and even Al Aqsa Flood itself, muddies the waters.
If Gazans are not enslaved victims of Hamas, but rather their coconspirators and fellow travelers, then it’s harder to maintain a black and white view where they are the blameless targets of a one sided genocide, rather than a belligerent in a very badly lopsided war they chose to start (and continue to fight) anyway.
I’m married to an Israeli and am very critical about Netanyahu so I make this distinction all the time. However, I have noticed my Arab friends tend to accept the distinction less because they have been critical of multiple Israeli governments.
In my experience, a lot of people who consider themselves "pro-Palestinian" more mean they support Palestine's right to exist and have some degree of sovereign freedom and viability, not that they support the policy platforms of the Palestinian governments. The reason this is different from your rule-of-thumb that supporting a country implies endorsement of its leadership, is that normally the country in question isn't being denied sovereignty or at risk of ethnic cleansing.
So yeah, if somebody says they're pro-Russia, it's a reasonable guess that they at least somewhat endorse Putin's leadership. If somebody says they're pro-Catalonia, it's a less reliable guess that they endorse Salvador Illa's leadership. They might just believe in the Catalonian people's right to self-determination.
This is why I'm careful to always refer to "Palestine" if I'm referring to the set of people who live in Gaza + West Bank or "Gaza" if I'm referring to the set of people who live in Gaza or "the democratically elected representative government of Gaza" if I'm referring to HAMAS
>"Generally, when one sides with a country in a war, that would be understood as some sort of endorsement of that country's political leadership."
It depends what you mean by "sides with in a war". I don't want Hamas to "win" the current war in Gaza; insofar as I want a ceasefire it's because I think Israel has already "won" the war, not because it is secretly a way for Hamas to stay in power.
I agree there are some (many?) people who genuinely do want Gaza to "win" but a) I think a good number of these people are pretty explicit about their support of Hamas, and b) are completely delusional about the prospects of this happening.
For the rest of us, we only "side with" Gaza over Israel in the sense that we think that either much of what Israel is doing isn't a valid war aim; or insofar as it is advancing war aims it's doing so at too a high cost relative to the value of those aims.
>I think Israel has already "won" the war, not because it is secretly a way for Hamas to stay in power.
But if Israel disengages, Hamas will stay in power, openly even. The only victory that Israel will accept at this point seems to be re-imposing total occupation, and that hasn't been achieved yet.
Sure, I don't think Israel should just disengage in the sense of, leave and walk away. I have no problem with Israel holding out for reasonable terms of victory, and to the extent those are on offer and Hamas is refusing, that's on them.
But I also suspect that some of what Israel is doing is not for the purpose of securing reasonable terms, but rather to accommodate the desires of the resettle Gaza faction.
And to the extent that Israel is being reasonable about terms, it still can't pursue just totally arbitrary measures to achieve that.
So, I want Israel to win, but only if "win" is construed reasonably, and if reasonable measures are used to secure victory. Any sense in which I "support Gaza in war" is just: I am doubtful if those conditions and think it's reasonable to apply pressure on Israel to meet them. It's a far cry from that to, "must support the Gazan government"
The ruling government of Israel is ideologically committed to there being no sovereign Palestinian state in the region (they even gave Hamas billions of dollars to stop it from happening), and the majority of their constituents agree. What is your point, exactly?
No, there's a big and critical asymmetry with what you're saying. Right now the position of the Israeli government, and most Israelis, and me personally, is that it's crazy to talk about a neighboring state that is explicitly and ideologically opposed to the non-existence of sovereign Jewish Israel *as their #1 priority* for god's sake. But if we could go back to Camp David and have Palestinians actually accept it and drop the whole "let's make it our #1 priority to take down sovereign Jewish Israel" thing - which unfortunately doesn't seem like something they'd be willing to trade *anything* for - then most of us Israelis would! We don't have a fundamental/ideological problem with these guys having a Palestinian state dude.
Putting aside the issue of which faction currently has more intrinsic genocidal animus, the practical realities of what it would take to create a genuinely independent and self-governing Palestinian state would raise a whole host of fundamental/ideological problems for Israel.
"Putting aside which faction has more genocidal animus"? I'm telling you this is the key asymmetry. I personally have zero genocidal animus for Palestinians, yet I'm strongly pro-Israel, and that goes for all my friends & family. We are the same normal people with normal views you meet in Silicon Valley, New York, etc.
how is this an asymmetry? do you think the kids in gaza being slaughtered hold bloodthirsty views towards jews in silicon valley? look at the the guys like shaun maguire in silicon valley lol.. "normal people"
Yes. The settlers are not going to go quietly. The messianic/radical faction is willing and eager to kill and conduct terror attacks if that is what it takes. That’s what they did to Rabin. And their leader controls the Israeli police
Right now, Palestine’s neighboring state Israel is explicitly and ideologically opposed to the existence of sovereign Palestinian Palestine *as their #1 priority*:
• They gifted Hamas terrorists billions of dollars in the service of this cause. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas” —Prime Minister Netanyahu, March 2019
• They have a government minister dedicated entirely to this: Orit Strook, the Minister of Settlements.
• They are sacrificing the lives of their own hostages in order to prolong the war and prevent a sovereign Palestine.
• “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River. This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?” —Prime Minister Netanyahu, January 2024
So again, you & I have an impasse if you think the situation of who is ideologically committed from preventing the other's sovereign governance is anything like symmetrical. I will die on the hill that it's not (i.e that my personal experience with Israeli family/friends/acquaintances NOT being ideologically committed to Muslim non-sovereignty generalizes to the majority of Israelis) and I think if we can't even agree on that, nothing else will make sense.
But again, like I've tried to explain, the quote from Netanyahu is still consistent with what me & everyone I know supports *as long as the Palestinians are explicitly all about being determined to eliminate sovereign Jewish Israel*.
If there is any “big and critical asymmetry here”, it’s the asymmetry between worries about what a hypothetical Palestinian state could theoretically possibly maybe end up doing in the unknown future, versus what the actually existing State of Israel is doing in the present reality right this second.
So just to repeat, because I am hereby laying down and dying on this hill: The Palestinians are *fundamentally, ideologically committed* to no Jewish sovereign Israel.
The majority of Israelis are making a *practical determination* that empowering Palestinians near our border right now with state-level capabilities means empowering a "let's do everything we can to take back sovereign control over Israel including mass-scale terror" society.
Do you have any evidence for these statements, beyond “I know some Israelis, and that’s what they tell me they think, and I don’t know any Palestinians, so I just assumed”?
Of course, the reality is that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are a monolith. And just as many Israelis would be more willing to accept a Palestinian state were it not for Palestinian terrorists regularly attacking innocent civilians, more Palestinians would be willing to accept Israel if Israel’s government wasn’t killing and oppressing them every day.
If the Palestinians were doing the same kind of practical determination, based on Israel’s behavior in the past, would you expect them to behave any differently? If not, what else is making you so sure of this minor difference of intent? Do you have any evidence for this?
>worries about what a hypothetical Palestinian state could theoretically possibly maybe end up doing in the unknown future
Hamas explicitly rules out any sort of peaceful co-existence in its founding charter, and kills Jews any chance it gets. It is literally as obvious as anything in international relations that, if a Hamas-led Palestinian tate got control over Israel, it would try to commit genocide.
A hypothetical Palestinian state *might* end up being led by Hamas. (I think it’s not the most likely outcome, and there are many ways to ensure it doesn’t happen, but it’s not impossible). And Hamas *might* end up trying to start something—and fail miserably, due to the vast gulf in technological capabilities. They were able to do October 7 only because the incompetent political leadership of Israel disregarded all the repeated warnings from their intelligence agencies.
In contrast, the State of Israel is not just trying to commit genocide; it’s actually succeeding, right now.
anyone with a brain in 2025 understands the two-state solution zionists push for is a farce and will always be akin to apartheid and oppression+occupation lol no one is buying this shit anymore - you are a genocide apoligist
The reason they don't want there to be a Palestinian state is that October 7th but with a state army would be undesirable, for everyone involved
Meanwhile either Gazans support Hamas and want Israel to not exist on principle, or they are Hamas' true hostages. Neither of these options are improved by preventing the destruction of Hamas, it just sets up the next round and makes the world happier on net, with a high discount rate, by reducing their own distress as soon and as much as possible
This is a tangential comment, and I do not mean it as an ad hominem sort of thing, but I feel this might be a good public forum to discuss, and it is extremely important.
I think you, Liron, should think through more deeply if you should be taking on the role of communicating about existential risks from AI.
In this comment thread, I think you exhibit:
- a strong personal bias on a topic, with a very high, not-very-much-updating prior (Call it overconfidence? Arrogance?)
- Being partial to your "ingroup", without making any acknowledgement of the death and suffering of thousands of people
- As far as I can tell, in some cases engaged in ~demagogic arguments.
I admit I haven't watched all your content on YouTube, but I do seem to remember at least cases when you come across arrogant and overconfident as well as make arguments that sound convincing but have certain holes.
I don't know if the empathy point will be relevant soon in AI advocacy, but it very well could be.
I think public advocacy is important, and the AI Safety community has been neglecting it for too long -- I have respect for you for trying to actually do something.
But I'm extremely worried that you will burn "our" credibility very quickly.
(I hope this sort of comment is okay to leave, and I am open to being corrected.)
Hey Gugu, I'm making a specific, narrow, factual point about the majority of Palestinians want in their own words. Why make this about me? If I didn't represent their position, we can argue about that. But I would just go look up the facts about what actual Palestinians are saying about whether it's at all acceptable for sovereign Jewish Israel to exist in any capacity.
But thanks for your thoughtful feedback that my convincing-sounding arguments have "certain holes".
The position of Hamas since 2017 is that they would accept the existence of Israel with a Palestinian state within 1967 borders and the right of return.
That's not acceptable to the Israelis, but it's frankly much closer to a fair resolution than what Netanyahu wants, which is for Gaza to be ethnically cleansed and the entirety of the West Bank settled except for a few Palestinian cantons.
Yes, precisely - the idea that Hamas (let alone the Palestinian population as a whole!) is explicitly ideologically committed to Israel's destruction and therefore peace is impossible is just ludicrously false. Hamas's own charter says they'd settle for a two-state solution!
That's false. Their 2017 document literally says "Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea."
And then in literally the next sentence it says "However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus."
Put the two together and you get "If the national consensus wants to sign an agreement removing Israel from half of Palestine, we will not oppose the agreement, but afterwards we will fight to destroy what's left of Israel".
That's one way to resolve the incoherence of that self-contradictory paragraph of the charter, I suppose. But I think the much more logical interpretation is that you put the two together and get "Look, we can't officially say, as the government of Gaza, that we accept 1967 borders, since then we'd be relinquishing a negotiating chip without securing anything in return, but look, obviously, we'd accept the 1967 borders in exchange for statehood".
Accepting a two-state solution and then continuing to fight in an attempt to destroy Israel sounds... obviously impossible? Why would Palestinians fight for such Hamas in a world where they have a state? How would Hamas retain power? I would think that Hamas immediately ceases to exist as a significant player if a two-state solution happens, and I would think they know it.
(Their offers during the current fighting to disband in exchange for a two-state solution reinforce this interpretation of the charter.)
>Why would Palestinians fight for such Hamas in a world where they have a state?
To get more land, because they don't recognise Israel as a legitimate country and don't want to give up half their rightful land to it, revenge, because they don't like the idea of Muslim territory being occupied by non-Muslims...
>How would Hamas retain power? I would think that Hamas immediately ceases to exist as a significant player if a two-state solution happens, and I would think they know it.
I think you're typical-minding pretty hard here TBH.
Read the actual revised 2017 Hamas charter. Hamas did not offer to recognize Israel and sign a peace treaty normalizing relations—the kind of normal relations that exist between e.g. the US and Mexico. It offered a temporary truce as a matter of expediency while maintaining its position that Israel is illegitimate and should be destroyed.
Obviously, given Hamas’ pedigree and history as the faction totally *opposed* to the peace process, Israelis are inclined to think Hamas was exaggerating, rather than underselling, its commitment to peace here. (As minimal as that stated commitment was.)
Hamas stated that Palestinian national consensus is for there to be a Palestinian state within '67 borders. Truces are often precursors to permanent peaces; sometimes they just continue indefinitely. North Korea and South Korea are still at armistice. Japan and Russia are still at armistice.
Hamas has, within the last decade, participated in steps towards the peace process and enforced ceasefires that Israel broke. They are frankly more committed to a two-state solution that Likud is, which will not even theoretically accept one under any circumstances.
Yes...as a prelude to eventually establishing a Palestinian state within all the pre-1949 borders, sans Israel and its Jewish inhabitants?
>Truces are often precursors to permanent peaces
And they're also often precursors to future wars. For example, the 1994 ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan left the status of Nagorno-Karabakh unsolved, hence the 2020 and 2023 wars. The 1973 Paris Peace Accords were shortly followed by North Vietnam's invasion and destruction of South Vietnam. (North Vietnam, of course, did not recognize South Vietnam as a legitimate state under the provisions of the Accords.)
Notably, the specific Islamic concept of hudna used by Hamas originates from a truce between Mohammed and Mecca, which was followed by Mohammed's conquest of Mecca. I'm not sure if the peace agreements in the Crusades were considered hudanāt, but they're instructively similar: temporary pauses in fighting, without recognition of legitimacy, that were followed by Islamic conquest.
>Hamas has, within the last decade, participated in steps towards the peace process and enforced ceasefires that Israel broke.
And we saw with 10/7 that Hamas has no problem using a period of calm to premeditate and prepare an attack on Israel in conjunction with its regional allies. (To clarify, as reported by NYT, Hamas asked both Hezbollah and Iran pre-10/7 to join it, but neither were enthusiastic.)
Again, Hamas' rise in the 1990s was in *opposition* to the actual Oslo peace process. It was the faction you joined if you thought the PLO was selling out Palestine with the Oslo negotiations. They were orchestrating suicide bombings *before* the Second Intifada. Call me crazy, but when these dictatorial religious fanatics turn around and say "time for a ceasefire!," I don't actually believe it's because they've secretly done a complete ideological 180.
> They are frankly more committed to a two-state solution that Likud is
I absolutely agree that Likud, considering its ideological pedigree and actions, is not committed to a two-state solution. But if we used the same credulous and generous standards that people like Robert Wright apply to Hamas' statements, we could conclude that Likud supports a 2SS.
For example, Netanyahu famously said in his 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech:
"In my vision of peace, there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbor's security and existence."
If you're familiar with Netanyahu's biography and Likud's politics, you have every reason to be skeptical that this is the most accurate reflection of his private understanding of the conflict. (As discussed in Anshel Pfeffer's biography.) It's a political ploy. But if you used the same kid gloves often applied to Hamas' statements, you'd conclude that, wow, Netanyahu was really interested in making a deal to create a Palestinian state.
War is not an accident activated by bad political mechanisms; it is a perennial state brought about by human enmity, which abounds and is going nowhere. Like Winter, it inevitably arrives.
My opinion on the war in Gaza is that it's not my war, and it is not my place to be involved. Why would it be my place to be involved. The participants must sort it out for themselves.
Hamas are evil. More evil than the Israeli government as a whole. Even more evil than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
But (a) that doesn't mean anyone is allowed to commit war crimes against Gazans. (This would be true even if all those Gazans supported Hamas.)
And (b), more to the point, my government isn't supporting Hamas. If arms manufacturers in my country were selling missiles and bombs to Hamas, I'd be out in the streets demanding that they stop. But they're not, they're selling them to Israel instead. And yes, I'm out on the streets from time to time demanding that they stop, not quite as fervently as I would if they were selling to Hamas, but still with passion.
So to give a little symmetry to your post, my go-to when people say "why aren't you mentioning other large-scale tragedies" is that my government doesn't view the perpetrators of those other tragedies as allies. Israel isn't the worst perpetrator of crimes against humanity in the world, but I think it probably is the worst one that has widespread popular support in my and other western countries. The only one that it's reputationally risky to challenge.
This is mostly irrelevant. Hamas is a shell of its former self. It barely even exists anymore. The function of this line of argumentation serves primarily to excuse and justify, not to explain.
I think the reason that gets left out of those conversations is because that does not justify war crimes and letting children starve to death on purpose, even if they’re the kids of people that hate you.
It’s simply irrelevant to the question if the current behavior by Israel is acceptable (it’s not).
I'm afraid this simple two-node causal model you're referring to, "Israel's actions --> children starving to death", isn't a sufficiently accurate capturing of the situation. Try adding other relevant causal nodes.
I’m not really interested in arguing about wether Israel is committing war crimes or causing a famine. That wasn’t the point of my comment at all, and I don’t think the position that they’re not deserves to be taken seriously in 2025 anymore.
I was simply answering why people leave out how bad Hamas is in discussions like this; because it is irrelevant to the question if the behavior of the Israeli government is justified (its not).
I still understand you to be reasoning from a two-node causal model, and actions that seem bad in such an “all things equal model”, like “causing kids to die”, often turn out to actually be the best of bad alternatives when you make the causal model larger.
No, it's a fact of causal analysis and average human morality that a two node model "military makes explosion --> baby dies" can in some unusual circumstances be a net good action. For instance, Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar was targeted hiding under a hospital, and killing him is good even if there are nonzero civilians above him. Fortunately this one is a purely hypothetical example as Israel heroically managed to target him without killing civilians.
Funny you mention that. Actually, this was the main argument of ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan regarding the charges against Netanyahu -- that Israel, as an occupying power, has the duty of preventing famines in Gaza.
(As someone watching from another country, I have the impression that, for the most of these 2.5 years, Israel, without a doubt, could not care less.)
There is a nice interview with him on CNN, available online.
See, when you say "explicit say-it-out-loud" I counter with "Iran says that too. And they damn well don't really mean it." Perhaps Hamas really does mean it, but if they lack any tools to make it happen, we'll never be able to judge by their behavior, unlike Iran, which does/did have the tools to destroy Israel.
I think it is highly probable that the little boy carrying around pieces of his brother in a backpack will be committed to the end of Israel for the rest of his life. He may never get to act on it, but surely he will hate every Israeli forever.
I really don't know how you deal with that. Ten years from now, if you interviewed that now-grown kid and he told you the backpack story and told you that of course he wants every Israeli dead, what would you say to him?
In a few years Gaza will more likely than not be wiped off the map, and the number of Israelis harmed in the conflict will be a very tiny drop in a very large lake full of mostly Palestinian bodies. And it will seem afterwards very strange indeed to place at the root of the horrors that have followed: Gaza's historically helpless and ineffectual opinion on whether Israel should exist.
But if we must . . . I think it's generally pretty easy to speak of perceived ideological commitments beyond official policies and principles of a party.
*Officially*, the government of Gaza is committed only to a return to the original 1948 borders of the Balfur declaration.
So if we want to move beyond official commitments (on the grounds that purported goals need not align with *actual* goals):
I quite clearly perceive that the government of Israel is ideologically committed to there being no sovereign Palestinian state in the region. (By the history of their military actions, by their activity in the West Bank, and sometimes even by the things they're just willing to say out loud)
In effect, this particular question cancels out on each side's moral ledger. And we can just assume both sides have equally strong sentiments supporting each other's right to exist somewhere else.
We're left then to ask only "which side is being more consistently and mercilessly horrific toward the other?"
And the answer is, by basically any random sample of horrificness metrics you care to draw from a hat, very obvious.
(Go get some horrificness metrics from people who don't know why you're asking, and then try drawing then from a hat at home!)
Again, I'm happy to die on the hill that only one side makes it their whole thing to be ideologically, religiously committed to not allowing the other side to have a state. I see that as the root of Westerners' misunderstandings. It's not like "oh two sides both don't want the other to have a state". No my friend. "Palestine" isn't the state they want. Just go ask random Palestinians - they're not going to lie. (I've already asked random Israelis for you, and can tell you we are 100% OK ideologically / in principle with Palestine being a state.)
> espousing a principle is like wearing a shirt. Someone demanding that you lay out a defensible, coherent description of what shirts you will and won’t wear, with the palpable intent to hold you to it for all time and catch you out in a lie if you ever wear a shirt that doesn’t match, is like an SS officer at the door asking if you’re harboring Jews in the basement. They’re already an enemy (or at least not clearly someone to trust), so there’s no moral obligation to tell them the truth. You just describe the shirt you’re currently wearing and hope they go away.
That quote, out of context, did a pretty poor job of communicating to me what the linked post was about.
I would summarize the linked post something like: There's a lot of people (Duncan suggests at least two-thirds and perhaps 95%) who care about personal loyalty and group conformity, who have never cared about principles, but who pretend to care about principles BECAUSE that is the group-conforming thing to do (because our society praises principles). They assume that everyone else is doing the same thing and so they don't realize they're even fooling anyone with the pretense, but they can't STOP pretending because that wouldn't be group-conforming. And perhaps you should try arguing with those people by talking about that difference, instead of by accusing them of being unprincipled (since they were never trying to be principled, and don't understand that you ever expected them to be).
I don't actually understand how Duncan imagines that hypothetical argument going. Aren't the people-people just going to continue insisting that they're actually principles-people and interpret any counterclaim as a dishonest social attack? How would that argument be different from the "I am being principled and you are not" line that the principles-people usually say? It seems like the fundamental problem is that people-people are refusing to discuss their true reasons for things, and there isn't an obvious way to solve this from the principles-people side.
I suppose maybe you could talk about instrumental reasons for principles (rather than ethical reasons), and hope that if they understand how principles can be useful they'll start entertaining the idea that some people might actually have some?
I also think that Duncan is trying to make his readers feel sympathy for people-people but that this mostly failed for me. I suppose a person who doesn't understand how to be good, who was never taught what goodness was or given any examples to emulate, is more sympathetic than someone who understands but chooses evil. But I feel they're slightly less sympathetic than someone who is trying to be good and failing because of cognitive biases, which is my usual default assumption.
That's fair, but I've excerpted the part I most agree with. :D
I think it's unfair to blame the "people-people" for "refusing to discuss their true reasons," since as Duncan notes, if you did, "you'll be sneered at and derided and treated-as-lesser, and everybody knows this."
Personal loyalty is what I regard as my highest value, and since I'm not big on group conformity, I'll say it: I DO have other principles, but I will not BETRAY family or friends over them, and consider doing so monstrous. You can call it "choosing evil" if you like, but to me, YOURS is the irredeemable evil. (Which is part of why I like the "SS officer at the door" analogy: the people I am loyal to would be the metaphorical Jews in my basement, and there is no principle I hold to so dearly that I would not burn it to the ground to protect them.)
Suppose Alex is a murderer and the police are here to arrest him. Let's set aside for a moment the question of whether Alex's sister Beth should try to protect Alex. Would you agree that it's correct for the police to try to arrest Alex? Would you agree that if Beth tries to protect him, the police should overpower her and arrest Alex anyway? Would you agree that _most_ of civilization should be in an alliance against Alex, here, even if a few people close to Alex aren't part of that alliance?
Would you support measures today that are designed to ensure that murderers get caught in the future, in general, even if those measures _might_ someday be used against your personal loved ones?
If you're willing to participate in the general alliance-against-murderers up until the point you discover that one of your loved ones IS a murderer, then I think you and I are _basically_ on the same team, for issues like this. I still think that if your brother turns out to be a murderer then it's wrong for you to protect him, and I will endorse the police overpowering you with whatever force is necessary if that situation ever comes up, but getting your cooperation in that narrow special case is not so important that I'd jeopardize the rest of the alliance over that one issue, if I were making the call.
But I DO expect you to cooperate in establishing a police force that is capable of apprehending murderers in general, and NOT to preemptively carve out special exceptions that make you or your loved ones immune to that police force. Do you see why it's important to the success of the general alliance-against-murderers that you do that much?
----------------------------------------
Regardless of blameworthiness, the refusal of people-people to discuss their true reasons seems like it is CAUSALLY blocking productive discussion.
Possibly society should consider changing its strategy of when/how it punishes unprincipled behavior to try to make it easier to talk about, so that more people get more accurate information and there are more opportunities to persuade people. There are tradeoffs, though: we don't usually try to make it safe for, say, thieves, to admit to being thieves, because punishing thievery is typically more important than having frank discussions with thieves, and in the case of thievery I think that's basically the correct tradeoff to make. I'm less sure about the correct tradeoff here, but if you're going to have a civilization based on impartial enforcement of the rules, then at SOME level you do need to fight against people trying to apply the rules unfairly, or the alliance falls apart.
Also, like...sneering is not SO bad an outcome that avoiding it is normally considered a valid excuse for dishonesty or fraud. If a student cheated on a test because they would be sneered at for getting a bad score, we don't say "that's fine then", we say "that's no excuse; integrity is more important." If an automaker claimed their cars could travel at 80 mph, because they'd be looked down on if they admitted the cars can only make 60 mph, we don't tolerate that. If a scientist puts fake data into their research paper because they staked their reputation on one outcome and the true outcome was different, that doesn't make the fake data ok.
I think it's typically basically fine if you lie about your hobbies or your religion, because those lies don't (usually) involve making a promise/assurance to other people (there might be exceptions; e.g. priests probably shouldn't lie about their religion). But if you defect from the general-alliance-against-murderers, and then lie about your defection because you believe people would think poorly of you for defecting, I consider that an _explanation_ for your lie but not an _excuse_ and I think that it _is_ fair to blame you for lying about that.
How seriously am I to take a spiel on the Kantian imperative against lying from an SS officer asking me if I'm hiding Jews?
Sure, I guess you can assign blame to and condemn other people for following the incentives you set up if you want to. But if you want information you're telling people you're going to punish them for giving you, I'd say it's YOUR fault you're not getting it, not theirs.
I specifically cited the mildness of the "punishment" as a crux in my previous comment, and you are going back to an example that has the intensity turned up to 11. My argument about lying EXPLICITLY does not apply to the SS example. This is simply not a valid response to what I wrote.
And I don't even consider that the most important problem with your example. The most important problem is that you have different obligations when you are trying to cooperate with people to build a functioning civilization than when you are in a shooting war with them. Civilization is a positive-sum trade where you make some sacrifices (like giving up the ability to tell certain advantageous lies) to get some other benefits (like the ability to settle disputes without a shooting war), and it stops working if every individual person starts ignoring whichever parts are currently inconvenient for them.
But the lying isn't even my main concern. If a thief is questioned by the police, I do not consider it ethical that the thief lies, but my MAIN quarrel with the thief is that they are a thief, and the lying is a secondary issue.
If we're only going to discuss one point, I'd rather discuss any of the other points from my previous comment than this one. I asked you several explicit questions and you didn't respond to any of them.
I disagree with your assessment of how bad the incentives you've set up are. I note you you left out the "derided and treated-as-lesser" bit, for starters. Ultimately, I think that stance makes it so the prudent thing to do IS to treat someone like that as if you were in a shooting war, and not a kumbayah positive-sum civilization-building cooperative relationship.
I think your understanding of my views are so lacking that your questions are wrong, and I don't expect my answering them as stated to help clarify my position. I'll say that before signing on to any grand alliance on a matter of principle, I WOULD check that it doesn't end up net-negative in expectation for my friends and family, and if it WERE bad for me and mine and looked like it might go through without my cooperation, I would try to join it and undermine it from the inside.
> If a thief is questioned by the police, I do not consider it ethical that the thief lies,
There are principled disagreements with that position. The fifth amendment to the US constitution, for example, enshrines a right to avoid self-incrimination, which isn't exactly blanket approval to lie to the cops - perjury is still a thing - but does seem to imply contexts where it'd be ethically permissible.
Doctor-patient and attorney-client confidentiality are similarly protected, because those relationships are acknowledged as important enough to society's functioning (and expectation of privacy is necessary to the trust on which those relationships are built) to outweigh the benefit of punishing someone who couldn't be caught and convicted otherwise. Do you think the courts should be able to compel someone to testify against their spouse?
>how principles can be useful they'll start entertaining the idea that some people might actually have some
I think that Duncan's perspective is a bit too cynical, "people-people" do have principles, it's just that one of the principles is that the interests of the in-group trump other interests. I claim that the vast majority of "principles-people" also hold that principle, it's just that the more self-aware of them (like Scott) agonize about it from time to time.
If the DIFFERENCE between a "principles-person" and a "people-person" is that the "people-person" holds a principle that in-group trumps other interests, then how could it be the case that any "principles-people" also hold that principle? Wouldn't that just mean those principles-people are actually people-people?
No, the difference is that "people-people" don't have a deep yearning for a consistent moral system which could realistically determine your actions in most cases, something that hasn't been discovered yet despite millennia of trying.
So Duncan says that people-people don't have principles, they just pretend to have whatever principles would support whatever they currently want to do.
You say that's wrong, they have principles, but they don't aspire to consistency in following them.
I'm not clear on what the difference is supposed to be.
Well, Duncan is certainly correct that "people-people" proclaim that a consistent moral system is a desirable thing and that they try to adhere to one, and most of them would probably disclaim the in-group principle, but they don't really believe any of this. They mostly treat high-minded egalitarian principles as guidelines, something to take into account all-else-equal, and are happy about that.
Whereas "principles-people" outwardly also mostly behave in the same way, but inside they believe that this means that they are wrong and immoral, and beat themselves up about it, which I'd claim is useless suffering from which nobody benefits or could ever benefit, but sadly there's no acceptable mainstream alternative to totalizing morality, it's either that or "everything is permitted" nihilism.
The book “I You We Them” does a tremendous job at building a bridge between the statistic and the million individual stories that ended to create it, across a handful of genocides/corporate selective blindness episodes. Many reviews criticize the interweaving of the author’s autobiographical stories with the more scholarly work on desk-killers, but I think that’s crucial — it’s the through line that forces you to consider that every massacre killed that many individuals, each with a life as real and rich and detailed as the author (and as you).
Thanks, I might check it out! I've been trying to formulate a way to get people to understand that murdering people through denying aid is much worse than (eg) a school shooting, and finding it frustratingly difficult to express the simple intuition here.
Hmm... Your view seems similar to Peter Singer's in Famine Affluence, and Morality. _My_ intuition is to yeet him, his stance, and the entire project of ethics.
But... that sounds like a horrible thing to be forced to consider. Why would I want to read a book like that?
I can't possibly bear the weight of considering all the suffering in the world to happen to people who are just as real as myself and the people I care about. I can't fit that into my head any more than I can feel the distance to the stars, or to visualise every molecule in a glass of water.
If I really thought about all the suffering in the world I'd never be able to think about anything else. We all have different ways of dealing with this, and I'm not sure what the best way is.
Sorry to be so disagreeable when I don't even know you, but I think you're wrong about yourself here. If you're saying that truly considering all the suffering in the world is impossible, then sure maybe you're right. But *trying*, or at least expanding your circle of concern, doesn't have to paralyze you. I could try to make an argument, but really I'm just encouraging you, personally, to doubt your fears here. 👍
I'd say the fear of compassion fatigue is a very realistic fear that's not really worth doubting. Many of us have seen so many charity appeals, so many tragic stories, far more than we could donate to; it just makes you feel depressed. And that's just the stories that the news and charities manage to get in front of us. Why would we try to envisage even more?
That might be because activism has been pushing the line that if you're aware of some suffering or injustice, you need to *do something* (which in practice means posting on social media or some such), which is then potentially never *enough*. If you allow yourself to feel compassion at all, you're being threatened by guilt, as if you had just become more personally responsible for the situation than you were before.
The sane answer is to allow yourself to feel the compassion, and point a vague middle finger in the general direction of the guilt pushers.
Well, if a crack in the earth opened up at your feet and a devil popped out, offering a deal where you could save one random person at the cost of dooming ten others, and there was no other upside, you wouldn't want to sign, right? That'd just be stupid.
But if a non-supernaturally-contrived situation arose where you could save one person without dooming anybody, just facing some mild inconvenience and then being publicly praised afterward, presumably you'd want to go for that.
Studying all the suffering in the world - in moderation, possibly by cribbing the notes of someone who already did the hard parts - can help uncover (and thus avoid) situations where you might have, more or less, mistaken one of those scenarios for the other.
Sometimes problems don't have easy solutions, even after you've spent a lot of time poring over the alternatives to devise the optimal apotheosis of your grief. I don't think there will ever be peace between Israel and Gaza unless either one of the sides is wiped off the map, or at least conquered into submission. It's not that I don't *want* there to be a solution, I just don't think one exists. So all you're left with is either picking the side you'd prefer to continue existing, or accept the state of eternal war. I'm not saying this just to be cruel, I really do think it to be the case.
I think if you look at any historical conflict or injustice, it seemed to have no practical answer other than some form of extreme violence, right up until both sides finally got exhausted of the violence and decided to figure something else out.
Corollary: the de facto governing bodies of the palestinian territories have to become exhausted of the violence in order for there to be peace. If this isn't what the process looks like to get them there, then what is? The political will in Israel to continue the war would collapse the instant that a way out looked realistic.
I think that's possible; certainly, I don't think there's anything about reality that guarantees that sort of thing will never be true. But I think that given that that sort of thing may sometimes be true, it's important to become the sort of person who's good enough at recognizing solutions that you can spot whether there are actually other ways out, and good enough at judging impartially that people are inclined to recognize you as someone whose opinion carries weight to judge between potential solutions.
(There's always going to be demand for biased judges, but hopefully, people have enough capacity to recognize impartiality that when judging between adversarial parties is called for, they can notice who makes for an acceptable compromise candidate.)
Being conquered into submission is not necessarily a bad solution. Germany and Japan were both conquered into submission, resulting in vast improvements in the safety, rights, and quality of life of their people. I'm not saying that Israel will be as gentle an occupier as the US was, but when Hamas is the bar, doing better isn't very hard.
Gaza would look very different. WW2 ended with the allies governing Germany and running the country. Israel isn’t doing that, it’s just invading and retreating and invading and retreating. There’s no occupation government, with the corresponding obligation to police the place and keep it going. I can’t think of anything comparable on the modern era.
That requires submission. If Germany's leaders absolutely refused to surrender (and they aren't living in Germany so you can't kill them to death) and were hoping to just make the other side look really bad for all the Germans that had to be killed, how else would it have ended?
(Answer: I guess the US sits back and lets Russia do all the evil shit necessary.)
Bernie Sanders, not exactly shy about criticizing Israel, said the calls for a ceasefire were dumb, because you can't have a permanent ceasefire between Israel and an organization dedicated to chaos and destruction.
Maybe it just means permanent occupation of Gaza, forever.
But Israel still has a duty to feed the civilians of the territory it's conquered.
The problem is that they kind of have nowhere to go (the neighbouring countries don't want them), and most of them vehemently don't want to leave, anyway. The same applies to Israelis, I guess, albeit to a lesser extent.
The Gazans are a threat to Israel who aren't acceptable to their neighbors, the Rohingya are being subject to what's called a genocide by the Burmese government, maybe they could swap places to solve two problems at once :)
Both groups are Muslims. Gazans would face no better fate in 'Burma' than in Gaza. While the Rohingya might be better of, as they probably would not elect Hamas to rule them.
I think it would be a lot easier for the Israelis to find places to refugee to than the Gazans. They're on average richer and much more Westernized, plus there is a much smaller fraction of them who are part of an extremely bloody terrorist group.
Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s was seen as intractable, but they put their differences aside to work through a decades long peace process (mediated by the Clintons during their presidency, and Senator George Mitchell after that). In that process, the US was committed to peace - Mitchell spoke about spending months listening to the two sides list their grievances until they had talked themselves out. The system there now isn't perfect, but it's a stalemated political system and there hasn't been a bombing in years.
Plenty people said that no solution could exist even into the early 90s, and that it wouldn't last into the mid 2000s. I'm sure other conflicts have seemed intractable - it's not an excuse not to try to find a peaceful solution.
Sadly I don't think this is the case in the Israel/Gaza conflict. Peaceful solutions have been attempted countless times, and failed every time, regardless of who was handling the mediation.
I feel there are two arguments which you have not grappled with.
1. If you allow yourself to be swayed by anecdotal evidence and media stories, your sympathy follows not the area of greatest death (of which Gaza is currently #3 or #4 depending on how you count) but the one with the best media campaign. This makes you subject to effectively a case of the utility monster, someone who consumes and outsized amount of your attention and charitable and emotional attention because it has an endless appetite for it. In fact, in some ways it's worse, as the cause with the best media campaign is likely to be the one you are least likely able to affect and most likely to have other people trying to help.
2. You are a rationalist and advocate for the Effective Altruist movement. I'm not sure if you consider yourself one but I think it's fair to say you back their general principles. Their entire point of that movement is that charity should be allocated to maximize utility. I'd argue this necessarily extends to political advocacy as well. Thus, insofar as you have any control over your emotions and advocacy, you should shy away from trendy and prestigious things (like Gaza) and toward underserved things with asymmetric upsides. Gaza receives hugely disproportionate attention, support, and aid compared to every other conflict on earth. It may not be enough. But it's more than everyone else gets. And therefore is the least efficient use of your time, advocacy, and emotional energy.
Sudan has a population of 50 million, 25 times bigger than Gaza with 2 million. Gaza has received millions of tonnes of food aid. Sudan has received tens of thousands of tonnes since its conflict started. It has received less food aid in the last twenty years than Gaza has since the conflict started. I submit, by the same standards rationalists used to say ending PEPFAR was killing people, advocating for Gazans over conflicts like Sudan is killing people.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying Gazans don't deserve aid. I am saying that this is a very irrational way to maximize lives saved, one that is being driven by social pressures and media concerns, and that this directly means lives are going unsaved. I'm not interested in using the cheap "whatabout" trick. I don't really care if you have integrity. But I do wish someone would do this and you're the ones with the standards that say you ought to be more interested in this kind of stuff.
Re: 1: What exactly do you think Scott should do to correct for media bias, other than what he advocates in this post?
Re: 2: This would be a reasonable critique (albeit one I'd usually avoid voicing for politeness reasons) if Scott were investing significant time, money, or brainspace into pro-Palestinian activism, but AFAIK he's not in fact doing that, so I'm not sure who you're arguing with.
1. That's up to him. He's under no obligation to be rational. But if he does want to be rational then and take the idea of utility monsters and other such rationalist philosophy seriously then applying that lens, or at least grappling with it, would seem like a minimum.
2. He's a public figure with a moderately famous blog who has repeatedly talked about Palestine and, afaik, never talked about any other conflict in such detail. Not even the other trendy conflict Ukraine.
I have to say that if the only example you can think of is a poem written over a year ago, it doesn't really back up the "repeatedly talked about Palestine" point. I've just searched my emails for posts mentioning Gaza (I've been an ACX subscriber since the start, so before the current war in Gaza) and there are as far as I can tell no other posts in which it is the main topic. So I don't think he really has repeatedly talked about Palestine at all.
I'm pretty confident he's discussed the Ukraine conflict more than the Gaza one. For the first few months of Ukraine, every Mantic Monday had some discussion of the war outlook, whereas I can remember 2 offhand comments about Gaza on this blog before today. I'm sure I'm forgetting some but I do think Ukraine discussion outranks Gaza for Scott by a large margin. I think he quite deliberately shies away from discussing wars that his readers care passionately about, and the more passionate, the more he shies away. This is wise.
EAs generally budget some portion of their income (commonly 10%) for charity, for good reason. If Scott's blog achieves 10% of the optimal value it could in principle achieve, or 50% or 90%, that still leaves lots of room for writing that doesn't have a clear path to wider utility. Similarly, you can't always be thinking optimal thoughts, because your mind needs a bit of leeway to even function.
The Ukraine War is more of a stalemate between comparable opponents. Gaza didn't have a military that could hope to beat the IDF, they were just hoping the Israelis weren't as willing to fight to the bitter end as them (similar to the assumption made by Japan in attacking Pearl Harbor, though their military had been competent enough for earlier wars against Russia & China).
>I think he quite deliberately shies away from discussing wars that his readers care passionately about, and the more passionate, the more he shies away. This is wise.
His readers, on average, don't seem that interested in the Congo, Sudan, etc, as OP points out Scott never comments on.
He might shy away from certain cultural issues his readers thirst for more "Golden Age Scott" commentary on, but clearly there is a limit to how much he will shy away from certain topics.
1. Scott has already made it abundantly clear in prior posts why "you care about X, so you should devote 100% of your resources into X" is both impractical and incorrect.
2. Like others have said, you're seriously misrepresenting (perhaps misremembering) how often Scott has talked about Palestine vs Ukraine.
Scott sometimes *mentioned* Israel/Palestine. Sometimes Sudan, more often Ukraine. Name 3 post in the last 2 years where Gaza is the main topic, if you please. - Even more often he mentioned Trump - while obviously there are many much, much, nay: MUCH worse politicians in the world. How could an EA dare to!?!
I don't think it's apparent from this essay that Scott hasn't grappled with those issues? Personally, I agree that there are other more serious humanitarian crises in the world right now than Gaza, that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to acknowledge any of the stories coming out of Gaza as tragic, or that I should fight the urge to have any sort of emotional response to them.
I think it's reasonable for me to think that if I feel such a strong emotional response to any of them, I should suppose that crises going on in the world which generate even more tragedy would generate even more stories that would elicit emotional responses in me, if someone put in the work to cover them, and so I should want to allocate resources to those tragedies accordingly. But not only do I not think Scott has made it clear that he feels otherwise, I think he's done more than most other writers in the world to persuade people of that position.
I'm not saying you should fight the urge to have an emotional response. I'm saying that it's a bad use of limited time and resources and that I wish they went to other less served causes. And I don't see him grappling with this as much though perhaps I missed something.
Insofar as Scott has talked about his own charitable giving, I think he's made it pretty clear that it's not determined by who generates the most heartstring-tugging stories. As far as use of time goes, I think that ideally, we might spend our time in proportion to how important we rationally think various issues are, but practically, what we spend time and attention on is going to be heavily influenced by what people in our social circles expose us to, and attempting to avoid this will generally cost more time and attention than it can realistically save.
Most of the objective people who professionally assess such things do classify Gaza as the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world right now. It is also the only serious humanitarian crisis which could be halted almost as easily as flicking off a light switch.
The effective altruism of dropping billions of US tax dollars on one party and millions of tonnes food on the other doesn't seem to meet any rationalist outcome standard.
If that's your view then that's your view but considering PEPFAR, their general support of foreign aid, etc I do not think that is the rationalist view.
This is a strange comparison. On any proportional basis Gaza is the worst violence in the world right now. And the US is not involved in the Sudan situation, in fact has denounced it as a genocide and presumably is open to any reasonable/practical way of addressing it that does not involve US troops or other excessive costs
> On any proportional basis Gaza is the worst violence in the world right now.
This is incorrect unless you cherry pick the statistics. A lot of people want it to be true but it is not in fact true.
Also, why does per capita matter vs total lives saved? Are you going to go to Ukraine or Sudan and say, yes many more people died, but less died per capita so too bad?
> And the US is not involved in the Sudan situation
US allies are involved in Sudan. If you think the US is involved in Gaza in any way that is not "providing significant humanitarian aid" then the US is similarly involved in Sudan. Including significant military subsidies to nations who are influencing the fighting.
Please show your work on the completely ludicrous claim that the US is involved with the violence in Sudan in any way even vaguely analogous to the way that it is enabling the Gaza war
And per capita is in this case saying something very meaningful about the scale and ferocity of the violence in Gaza.
The US is clearly not as closely involved in the Sudanese civil war as it is in the Gaza war, but the US does have leverage over the UAE, which is (I would argue) has more ability to stop the war in Sudan than the US does to stop the war in Gaza (this might be too strong, but I'd at least argue that the degree of leverage is similar). This means that we likely do have substantial leverage to try to end the war.
I'm not going to argue about whether the amount of attention on Gaza is too much, too little, or just right, but I think that the amount of attention on Sudan, given our ability to influence it, is vastly too little. I can't think of a time that Biden, Harris or Trump were asked about Sudan, and I've never read an articulation of the US policy or approach to it. I think that Erusian's big-picture argument--that political advocacy around Sudan likely has a higher marginal value than political advocacy over other global conflicts right now--is likely correct.
I do think the fact that we’re just giving material to Israel free of charge (as well as selling, of course) is meaningfully different from selling material to the UAE at a profit. Cold blooded capitalism has its own logic independent of the morality, but giving aid implies that you believe in the cause/ think what is happening is righteous and worthy of charity. I don’t like the my government is implicitly asserting that
I agree that the US relationship with Israel is different in a lot of important ways from the relationship with the UAE (and even more the relationship with the RSF and the Sudanese Army). I think it's reasonable to feel that we have more responsibility for what's happening in Gaza, and agree that we do. But I think we are meaningfully involved in the war in Sudan and have meaningful leverage. And, from what I can see, there's essentially no public democratic pressure to use that leverage and very little media coverage. We're basically just trusting the American foreign policy establishment to get it right on our behalf, and I think the consequence is that our policy has a lot more to do with power politics and less to do with protecting people in Sudan than I'm comfortable with.
I’m fine with the idea that people should pay more attention to the Sudan case. But the notion that you should comb the earth for any horrific situation you can try to claim is as bad as Gaza and then call people anti-semitic if they are paying more attention to Gaza than that situation really does not hold water. Also, just FYI that the link you include does not say that the US sells $29 billion a year in weapons to the UAE — it is probably closer to $29 billion recorded in total over however many years contracting and record-keeping extends.
I don't think that paying attention to Sudan is about "combing the earth for any horrific situation you can try to claim is as bad as Gaza." The International Rescue committee says that Sudan is the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, and I believe has said so since 2023. Sudan is (if I understand correctly) the only place on earth where the IPC has declared a famine (https://www.unrefugees.org/news/famine-explained-definition-causes-and-facts/). It's also the largest refugee crisis in the world right now. My read is essentially that international institutions whose job is direct attention to the worst humanitarian crises on earth are pointing to Sudan as the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. I'm not particularly invested in the question of whether it's a better or worse situation than Gaza--clearly both are extremely bad. And I think that, if we think giving attention to international crises is worth anything, it's disgraceful how little attention Sudan is getting.
So I guess I'd argue that, rather than debating where it falls in the ranking of crises, anyone reading this comment should take some time to search for Sudan articles on the NY Times, Economist, Reuters, etc. to get some understanding of the situation and then write to your elected representatives. There's a good chance that you'll be one of the only people who does so, so might have an outsized impact on policy.
And thank you for the correction on the $29 billion. Re-reading it, this is described as $29 billion in "active government-to-government sales cases." I don't understand this language well enough to know if that is to-be-completed contracts or all historical sales, but I'm happy to accept that it is a total over all the years of this particular contracting system. The important question is how much diplomatic leverage the US has over the UAE, and I'm not terribly confident in the answer other than that it seems likely to be a considerable amount. I wish there was better reporting and analysis on this question.
The way it’s commonly understood , “genocide” implies that a high per-capita death toll within a specific group matters. That’s the reason the holocaust is often brought up as significant despite the absolute numbers being relatively small compared to e. g. the number of deaths in the soviet union.
During the ongoing Sudan conflict Arab militias in West Darfur have been going to Masalit tribe villages and killing every man, women, and child they can find. They also burned two refugee camps full of Masalit to the ground, killing everyone they could. They're stopping people at checkpoints and if they are Masalit they're killing them. In January the UN announced that they believe 10,000-15,000 Masalit were killed in the city of Geneina.
Now Geneina has a population of about half a million, so on a per capita basis a little under 3% have been killed. Does that mean it's not a genocide?
Per-capita doesn't tell us whether something is a genocide without context. People being systematically killed because they are a member of a specific ethnic group is genocide, even if not many die on a per-capita basis.
>> 1. "If you allow yourself to be swayed by anecdotal evidence and media stories, your sympathy follows not the area of greatest death (of which Gaza is currently #3 or #4 depending on how you count) but the one with the best media campaign. This makes you subject to effectively a case of the utility monster, someone who consumes and outsized amount of your attention and charitable and emotional attention because it has an endless appetite for it. In fact, in some ways it's worse, as the cause with the best media campaign is likely to be the one you are least likely able to affect and most likely to have other people trying to help."
Yes, this is the exact point I'm trying to make in this post.
>> 2. "You are a rationalist and advocate for the Effective Altruist movement. I'm not sure if you consider yourself one but I think it's fair to say you back their general principles. Their entire point of that movement is that charity should be allocated to maximize utility. I'd argue this necessarily extends to political advocacy as well. Thus, insofar as you have any control over your emotions and advocacy, you should shy away from trendy and prestigious things (like Gaza) and toward underserved things with asymmetric upsides. Gaza receives hugely disproportionate attention, support, and aid compared to every other conflict on earth. It may not be enough. But it's more than everyone else gets. And therefore is the least efficient use of your time, advocacy, and emotional energy."
Yes, this is why I've posted several times more material on PEPFAR than on Gaza. I kind of feel like you were waiting in the wings here to pounce on me for caring disproportionately about Gaza over everything else, when in fact I've posted about it once in a year and a half of bombing, and only to make a tangential point about moral reasoning.
But also, I think it's interesting that only Gaza gets this treatment. If I were to post about how puberty blockers were something something the poor children, everyone would praise me and say it's great that I'm finally standing up for this issue, even though puberty blockers are another thing that's less important than either Gaza or Sudan.
I think the general point that Gaza is a subject that generates disproportionate controversy is accurate, but I think it's odd that you bring up puberty blockers as a point of comparison, because I think that's another subject where, whatever position you staked out, you'd get a disproportionate amount of arguing over it in the comments. If anything, I think puberty blockers would feature pretty strongly in a list of most energetic scissor statements.
I think it is fair that Gaza claims more attention because when Sudanese are Killed it is just a sad thing it doesn't have intellectual sticking power, people don't really expect better from uncivilized countries and don't imagine themselves in the preparator's shoes. But Israel is a western civilized country with values closely aligned with even its greatest critics, and its actions are done under cover of moral justification, a logic that deep down we don't truly know how we would acct in their place. This causes excessive emotional involvement for strong evolutionary reasons, we need to be sure that if the situation effected us we would choose the correct path. This intellectual involvement allows the emotion to hold and fester as we find ourselves vicariously living both sides of the conflict.
Gaza will also continue to get more attention as long as the US is an ally of Israel. Political advocacy is much more likely to move US towards neutrality than encourage intervention in Sudan. Also, leftists are skeptical of intervention now anyways.
The argument that Gaza gets disproportionate attention feels weak. To me, Gaza is the moral issue of our time. As Mehdi Hasan puts it,
"We are doing this. Our governments. Our taxes. Our arms sales. This is our Holocaust. Our Cambodian killing fields. Our Balkans."
The claim that we should ignore Gaza because there are worse genocides is designed to solidify loyalty from supporters of Israel who are wavering in light of the images that we're all seeing. Implicitly denying the gravity of war crimes in Gaza helps keep people on board. And I've never encountered a very convincing or thoughtful argument that there are worse ongoing crimes against humanity at the moment. Instead, we get some vague gestures towards Sudan. The tactic is to assert confidently that Gaza is no big deal, get us to accept it as a premise, and then get us rationalize that supposed disproportionate support.
The argument's insinuation that people focused on Gaza are motivated by something other than genuine aversion to genocide serves this purpose as well. It's easier to maintain critical support from a key constituency, if that constituency views itself as a persecuted minority.
That only holds if you see this war as unambiguously qualitatively similar to events where there is a systemic effort to physically kill a people (I'll avoid the word because definition drift makes it useless). I think "Use the force necessary to remove Hamas from power" is a fundamentally acceptable goal, and is much more similar to what's actually happening than "End the conflict by reducing the population so much that they aren't a problem any more." The war is obviously a big deal and very bad for innocent people. That doesn't mean the alternative actions that Israel could unilaterally take are better.
So, it's not that there are "worse genocides" by number of fatalities or some other metric. It's that the other events one might point to are qualitatively morally worse, more gratuitously malicious, more excessively violent compared to the minimum force necessary for legitimate military objectives.
> think "Use the force necessary to remove Hamas from power" is a fundamentally acceptable goal, and is much more similar to what's actually happening than "End the conflict by reducing the population so much that they aren't a problem any more."
That's because you can't have the latter without first doing the former. Israel's actions in the West Bank aren't much less of a moral catastrophe, and Hamas-less Gaza won't fare any better.
For what it's worth, while I generally agree with Erusian on the issues around this war in general, I agree with you that you have shown a lot of virtuous restraint and have been careful in your writing about Gaza. I see what you're doing, and I approve (for what that's worth). You have stayed above the rage-filled clickbait that is filling my Substack feed.
Well-said. Reminds me of Kelsey and the "kids in cages" debacle of Trump 1; I don't think that attention issue ever resolved itself either. It just faded from view again, as the news cycles and life goes on.
One dimension that seems missing here is the question of who decides which stories we hear. The media don't just reflect our cognitive biases; they actively engineer and exploit them. Selective empathy might be inevitable at the individual level, but at the level of cultural narrative it’s often designed. There’s a pipeline through which our “heart of hearts” gets activated, and it’s never neutral.
I think Scott does gesture toward the emotional filtering problem, but I’m pointing one layer upstream: the conditions under which certain stories become tellable or resonant at all. It’s not just bias in the reader; it’s structural selectivity in the attention economy. Maybe that won't provide a simple call to action but it changes how seriously we take emotional salience as a proxy for moral urgency.
First, try to isolate yourself from hearing individual sob stories from war zones. If you find yourself reading one, find something else to read instead.
Secondly, for each story you hear, remind yourself of the existence of all the stories you didn't hear, and meditate on that for a while.
There's who decides which stories we hear, but also who tells us who is the villain in the story. We hear stories of suffering Gazans, but the slant is generally that the Israelis are to blame, rather than that Hamas is to blame, or the Gazans are themselves to blame for having voted for Hamas and not rising up against them. It's like in WW 2, where someone starved by our submarine blockade in bombed-out Tokyo had a choice between blaming the Americans or blaming the Japanese Army.
"the slant is generally that the Israelis are to blame, rather than that Hamas is to blame, or the Gazans are themselves to blame for having voted for Hamas and not rising up against them"
Ah yes, "the slant" of having a basic fucking understanding of history. The last election in Gaza was in 2006. That is, just shy of 20 years ago. Many of the current people of Gaza were not even *alive* at the time, much less of voting age.
As for "not rising up against them," it's always super convenient to blame the victims of repression for acts of their oppressors, isn't it? It's definitely more convenient than asking awkward questions about who in the Israeli government was helping keep Hamas in power.
There's a lot of clear water between rising up against Hamas and actively helping them.
Palestinian civilians celebrated the torture-murders on Oct 7. Palestinian civilians in their family homes held, and are still holding, innocent hostages.
I wouldn't blame an abused wife for failing to stand up to her husband, but I would blame her for enthusiastically joining in abusing the kids even when he's not watching.
I think this attributes far more intentionality to the media than is appropriate - especially in the contemporary world where media run by humans is almost secondary to media run by impersonal engagement-maximizing algorithms.
It still reflects intentionality at the level of platform design. Engagement-maximizing systems don’t arise in a vacuum. They’re built to optimize for behaviors like outrage, tribal loyalty, and identification, which in turn shape the kinds of stories that rise.
I'm not sure whether they're intentionally built to optimize for outrage and tribal loyalty and so on, or if they're intentionally built to optimize for engagement and as a result end up optimizing for outrage and tribal loyalty. I just had a thought that your previous comment was suggesting that there was intentionality about the object level of which particular stories come up, rather than at the twice-removed meta-level, with this particular object-level story just turning out to be a particularly good one for outrage and tribal loyalty.
That’s a helpful distinction, thanks. I meant that systems optimized for engagement reliably elevate certain kinds of stories, usually those with high visceral stakes, moral clarity, and/or tribal valence. Once that pattern becomes predictable, it usually starts to shape editorial and activist choices downstream, even if unconsciously.
That all seems right. Though for reasons Scott mentions in “The Toxoplasma of Rage”, it probably elevates stories that *don’t* have moral clarity, but can be *read* as having moral clarity in several different ways.
Does anyone know at what level of sophistication these algorithms run? IIRC, Facebook was tweaking its news feed to maximize engagement well before any of the GPT LLMs were available, so I'd expect
>elevates stories that _don’t_ have moral clarity, but can be _read_ as having moral clarity in several different ways
to probably be feasible _now_, but which I doubt were feasible before the GPT LLMs were first released.
Oh we each decide which stories we'll hear. I don't listen/ read the news and I remain in relative bliss about the state of things. 'Cause things look pretty good where I am. I have been listening to "Wrath of the Khans" by Dan Carlin, which gives me enough tragedy.
I am going to mostly stay away from the object level here, but I need to warn you.
1) Of all the issues that I have ever seen discussed on the internet, this one is MAXIMAL in terms of “evil lying about facts”.
2) I have made an extremely serious effort to get to the bottom of the situation as much as possible using all the epistemological tools at my disposal (and my track record on this is extremely good, every single hoax of the last 10 years or so failed to fool me)
3) NO discussion of what should be done in Gaza or who should do what can possibly cohere unless the *issues of fact* are first resolved
4) people who react negatively to attempts to find facts and argue with massive amounts of fallacies and sophistry are much more prominent on one side of this issue than the other
5) on the object level: Occam’s razor applies, my extremely throughly considered conclusion is that the side suffering the most deaths happens, in this case, to be the side that is usually correct in its factual claims, and the other side happens, in this case, to be the side engaging in lies and sophistry to a massive degree.
I do not wish to distract this thread with a big object-level discussion; I’ve said everything I have to say about it on X; but a feel that I owe you this summary of my conclusions.
The facts do matter, but the comment I replied to didn't get into them (for good reason—it would have been a discourse hell pit) and so doesn't break the fundamental symmetry of the situation for readers.
He made some pretty specific claims. You are free to disagree or ask him to provide evidence (or not), but the observation that other people think the opposite is content free criticism.
It's not criticism and so the comment doesn't need defense from it. It is only the note that the comment seemed unactionable to Taymon because of the symmetry of the situation (I'd personally argue that the symmetry seems like a useful tool for making use of this argument to fix things)
We rationalists have TOOLS for situations like this.
I have EMPLOYED these tools, and have said where to find my arguments on this, and am willing to (privately) discuss the matter to ARBITRARY LENGTH until a meeting of the minds has occurred.
My warning is *not to be lazy* about this and use procedural shortcuts that allow you to throw up your hands. The situation is epistemologically asymmetrical and if you think it is symmetrical you simply haven’t looked deep enough.
I’ll die on this hill (or, rather, I know I won’t die because I am very highly confident that if I am talking to RATIONALISTS, I will eventually prevail); but I’d prefer for Scott to create a separate thread for object level discussion.
I think I might be more pessimistic than you about the feasibility of reaching a meeting of the minds, basically for the reasons that were illustrated by the lab leak debate that Scott covered last year.
That debate was, in my opinion, an issue in which Scott performed very badly compared to his usual perspicacity, but this particular issue is far clearer than that one, with far more data available, if you know where to look.
Reading thousands of articles and accounts from media all over the world not just the U.S., and having an excellent memory, and being extremely well trained in evaluating arguments and spotting sophistry, and looking for the non-barking dogs, and following up on things the media wouldn’t follow up on after the initial stories, and noticing who was meeting whose points and who was ducking them, and keeping track of what had been “debunked” and which “debunkings” were themselves bogus arguments that existed not to persuade but to be pointed to, and most of all creating a master list of exactly who must be lying on each side if the other side was correct, and comparing those lists not merely in terms of numerosity but in terms of independence and dimensionality.
That very last point is subtle but critical, and the very last word of the post is the most important of all: the reason you have heard the word “antisemitism” so many more times than before is because it is necessary to reduce the dimensionality of those who criticize Israel and counter its arguments so that they may be more easily dismissed without sufficient consideration.
If you insist on something more explicit: the hypothesis that explains everything better than any other hypothesis is that, in Gaza, Israel has had, in addition to its widely supported agenda of destroying Hamas, a second agenda of ethnically cleansing Gaza, which is more important to them than the first agenda.
I don't understand this angle. ethnically cleansing the Gazans would have been very easy if Israel wanted to do it. Israel is basically fighting a terrorist organisation that still has 30-50 hostages and is not willing to surrender to save its citizens
I'm engaging because I'm genuinely curious in what you think the endgame is, and I have a lot less depth of familiarity. Just reasoning about it a priori, a hypothesis that seems more compelling to me is that Israel would happily accept a full surrender+exile of hamas and governance with security guarantees, and would maybe less happily accept fully reoccupying the strip. And if nothing else works, then they're on track to end in a stalemate of a humanitarian catastrophe, with people living indefinitely in tents getting free food from abroad, where maybe nobody will pay to build new civilian infrastructure on top of Hamas's tunnels that they still control, with no other way out than for Hamas to give up eventually. Maybe aid donors would start to condition aid on Hamas agreeing to a path to disarm or something, or sympathetic states would soften on accepting refugees, and that would weaken Hamas's resolve. This strategy seems to open a lot of doors to apply serious pressure on Hamas that are more effective per innocent person killed than full-on kinetic measures against where Hamas is actually hiding.
Either way, I think there's a big difference between a credible path toward ethnic cleansing being used as a means of negotiation leverage to achieve a peaceful resolution, vs preferring to get rid of the population as plan A. Given a lack of other options to stop the rockets flying at their cities and the occasional spectacular terror attack, I'm inclined to see this as a plausibly least bad option for Israel to pursue (in design if not fully in implementation), if it's the former. How would you distinguish between the two goals, especially at the level of the military establishment?
We’re all living in the monkey-sphere, and we have to be very cautious how we extrapolate outside of it, even though it is definitely necessary that we do so given the size of our society. How awful if we didn’t care, when faced with these stories.
On Sunday, the first reading at Mass was Genesis 18:20-32 (quoted below). I have always found it a striking passage, but this time I was crying to myself, tears down my face, and I didn’t really know why. Then later that day, I came across the usual discussion of saving innocent civilians vs rooting out evil Hamas, and how many members of Hamas are really left, and how innocent is anyone… and I understood the connection my heart had made.
> Then the Lord said, ‘How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know.’
> So the men turned from there, and went towards Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham came near and said, ‘Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?’ And the Lord said, ‘If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.’ Abraham answered, ‘Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?’ And he said, ‘I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.’ Again he spoke to him, ‘Suppose forty are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of forty I will not do it.’ Then he said, ‘Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.’ He answered, ‘I will not do it, if I find thirty there.’ He said, ‘Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.’ Then he said, ‘Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.’
That passage always bothered me. It ends there. What about nine? What about five? What about one? Why doesn't Abraham ask the last obvious followup questions?
The next chapter deals with Lot and his family, who were presumably the <10 righteous people in Sodom, and how God just told them to gtfo. But Abraham never asks.
In my heart of hearts, I’d rather see a hundred dead men than one dead woman and a hundred dead women before I saw one dead child. Call that whatever you want but it’s in my bones. Wish I could steal away every last kid in that place until this thing is finally over.
Very simple, the elimination of men does nothing to inhibit the reproductive potential of the current generation. Women are too valuable to be sent to war, because the limit on the number of children in society is the number of women to carry them. That's why ancient population could lose thousands of men in war, and wage war again in the next generation. If you lose your women, you are truly screwed.
This intuition is deeply seated in the human conscience for most people, and why men are expected to sacrifice their lives if it saves women or children. I had this conversation with my wife recently: if one of us had to die, we would both choose me.
If an alien spaceship parked itself over Gaza and opened a zoom call with Bibi and the Israeli security cabinet, IDF chiefs, and Knesset leaders, and offered them the following deal:
1. We will use our death rays to precisely target every single Hamas member and dissolve them into atoms.
2. We will use our other-something-ray to dissolve all weapons and weapon-making equipment in Gaza.
3. All of this will happen without a single child or civilian suffering so much as a paper cut.
4. All of the hostages and hostage bodies will be released and returned safely.
5. In exchange, you must withdraw every single soldier and piece of military equipment, and allow unlimited aid and rebuilding materials to come into Gaza.
I think this hypo needs to also stipulate that the ray in 2) stays on indefinitely, since otherwise the Gazans will resume their usual preparations for Jew-slaughtering about five minutes after the UFO leaves for hyperspace.
No, because it's quite obvious that the Gazans rearm and resume this war in, say, a decade, and they'd be sacrificing the momentum they have now for little gain.
Still seems a deal worth taking for ten years of peace. And with the elimination of every single Hamas member, there's at least the chance of a less horrible gang coming into power.
If you won't take the hypo, it's hard to imagine ever getting to peace in the real world, where the IDF definitely will not kill 100% of Hamas members or eliminate 100% of cached weapons.
The hypo forbids any sort of ongoing monitoring or security, which is not a restriction on real solutions (god knows I don't know enough to suggest anything— just pointing out a hole in the argument)
I say Israel does take the deal, because they're getting something they otherwise have to devote a lot of effort to, and there's nothing actually stopping them from coming back later (they did withdraw from Gaza decades ago).
I think probably, although I also think maybe 30% chance (totally unbased in anything, I'm just answering your hypothetical and I haven't done any research) that Netanyahu would try to hold off because he's using the war for political gain.
Bibi is in power with a very fragile coalition; there isn't the tiniest shred of probability that turning down this deal would help Bibi hold on to power. The Orthodox parties and Gideon Saar would immediately leave and collapse the government
Yeah, I think my claim is something like - if the aliens offered him this deal, he would have to accept for political reasons, but he would secretly be against this, and if there were some way he could throw out the deal without it being traceable to him, he might take it.
Also, I no longer believe any claim of the form "...and then some parties would leave and Bibi would be kicked out of power". He's never getting kicked out of power! When he's been dead, his corpse will still be Prime Minister of Israel! He's some kind of freak of nature +10 SD outlier on holding-onto-power ability! It would be beautiful if it wasn't having so many downstream effects.
It's really not that freaky or unnatural. The Israeli left has been disintegrating in slow-motion and falling out of touch with the Israeli mainstream ever since the first and second intifadas exposed the complete disaster that was Oslo and the land-for-peace paradigm. Bibi stepped into that vacuum and made Israel rich, diplomatically successful, and maintained a tolerable security status quo. The left couldn't unseat him, and the center didn't want to. Until the scandals started, you can think of him as a non-term limited Bill Clinton.
Once the scandals did start, the fact that they were originated and prosecuted by the last vestige of Leftist power made them a complete nothing-burger to the right, and the elements of the center that couldn't stomach him anymore were just replaced by further-right, previously fringy elements in his coalition.
Your perception of Bibi as a corrupt megalomaniac holding onto power by the skin of his teeth comes from the fact that you, like most people, have their perceptions of Israel shaped by left/liberal media (which should make you think a little bit about your understanding of Gaza too, side note). It is not at all a perception held by 70% plus of Israeli society. To them, Bibi is obvious and inevitable, until someone from the right can usurp him or someone from the Left can figure out how to talk to a larger slice of Israeli society.
It turns out that killing all of the aggressive young males in a population really super-duper improves life for everyone else.
There is no-the-fuck-way that, rid of Hamas and given access to literally unlimited resources, the women of Gaza would allow their little boys to culturally drift Hamas-ward again. They have *unlimited* aid and rebuilding materials, you say? Including access to fiber optic internet and Counterstrike 2?
You...ahahaha....you think....hahaha...*THOSE KIDS*....LOL!...are going to join Hamas?!
Sure good argument but I don't think the baboon evidence is worth anything. The women of Gaza may have their own opinions that differ from yours or mine or Israeli women's.
Not being aggressively warlike is such a meaningful constant amongst women that we can functionally consider it a universal. A large population of mostly female humans, freed of the physical stress of war imposed by men, would absolutely form a culture dedicated to maintaining a less warlike and more nurturing and calm way of life.
Especially if they don't have any competition for resources for themselves or their children.
Where would the aid come from? The aliens are not providing or demanding any, only making Israel not intervene if someone wants to aid the Gazans. Feeding millions of people for a couple of months until the public in Western countries is sympathetic is plausible, giving them great conditions long-term when they no longer want to be a thorn in Israel's side and just want to live peacefully would only work if *they* were expected to pay back with interest.
The aliens leave a thousand neutron bombs buried around Israel that automatically go off if Israel invades Gaza again (unless the super-intelligent AI that controls the bombs believes Israel is justified in doing so for existential security reasons). Does Israel take the deal?
Presumably Israel would need some way of checking in advance whether the AI thinks the situation has got to existential-security level seriousness, so they don't invade in response to another Oct 7-style attack, only to find that the computer doesn't think the attack is serious enough to warrant invasion and blows them all up.
There's an intercom installed next to the deep fryer in Falafel Uzi through which one can ask the AI for permission to invade. The AI will answer honestly and without shtick
I personally think they would. Ok, maybe a bit too late for that, but pre-Oct/7 they would.
Not with the West Bank, though.
And, unfortunately, the two issues are related. If people in the West Bank see that even though they play peacefully, try to negotiate and all, but still lose their land inch-by-inch (and Gazans see that, too), it is hard not to ask: why not die standing?
Do the aliens make any stipulation about what happens in Gaza after? Does the Israeli public know about this call?
I think if step 5 is taken to imply that resettlement of Gaza is off the table, I think Ben Gvir and Smotrich might threaten to leave the government if the deal is taken; how exactly Netanyahu responds after that I'm not sure: I think "literally every Hamas member is dead" might be a strong enough outcome that he'd feel good going to the Israeli people with that for a new election, and throw over Ben Gvir
(Edit: accidentally pressed Post too early)
But I think if 1 and 2 are weakened to "it might take twenty years for Hamas to reconstitute itself" or something like that, I suspect Bibi doesn't take the deal, at least if he thinks the details will never leak to the public.
What we are seeing in Gaza is too much. It’s just too much. Israelis deserve security and you can endlessly analyze such strategies but if the Israeli security framework led them here then that security framework has to go.
It’s like if your neighbor really is an asshole but somehow your response to that leads to killing his little kids. It’s no longer really about him being an asshole you have to look at your own behavior.
Unfortunately, adopting this theory allows your neighbor to come you and say “I will be as much as an asshole as I wish, and I will further take steps such that any response you mount will result in the deaths of my children.” If your refuse to respond to minor aggression because it would result in disproportionate harm to the aggressor, then the aggressor only has to ensure that any response by you will invariable harm them.
Rational agents do not give into blackmail like this. If Israel predictably did not give up their war, no matter how bad the suffering in Gaza got, and if the world predictably backed them in this, then Hamas would have no incentive to pursue policies which intentionally promote causalities among their people. Then, Israel and Hamas could strike a deal to ensure acceptable humanitarian conditions in Gaza and try kill each other separately— like civilized beings.
this analogy does not fit the situation in Gaza at all. The notiion that Hamas somehow forced Israel to destroy every structure in Gaza and starve the entire population is not reasonable. This is what I meant by if your security framework leads you to absurd conclusions and unconscionable actions you need to rethink your security framework. You shouldn't put ever greater efforts into trying to rationalize it with dubious analogies.
Thank you for the point about resolving the contradiction between the horrors that compel you and the ones that don't by being more consistently compelled rather than more consistently uncompelled.
Even when we don't feel willing or capable of any actions that can mitigate a harm, we should at least be willing to mitigate the additional harm of ignoring it.
"For his part, Hitler chose to isolate himself from the realities of war and from the suffering of his people. By now he had stopped making speeches and was rarely seen in public, preferring to spend his time secluded at his Wolf's Lair military headquarters in northeastern Germany or at his mountaintop villa at Berchtesgaden, along the German-Austrian border. He could not bring himself to tour cities wrecked by bombing or visit field hospitals. On one occasion, when his special Führer train momentarily stopped alongside a trainload of wounded, exhausted men returning from the Russian Front, Hitler promptly ordered his window shades pulled down."
There is a sweet spot between avoiding emotion-tugging situations entirely, and seeing so many that they dominate your decisionmaking.
Scott, the vast majority of those tragic children dying/starving stories are emotionally manipulative propaganda. Dozens of videos of “ambulance drivers speeding through streets while simultaneously doing cpr on a baby” while someone films him doing it? Have you asked yourself why the person filming doesn’t do the cpr? Have you asked yourself why they feel the need to film these videos? Those videos of mothers forcing sand down their childs mouth? While the camera pans to the mothers who themselves could be categorized as overweight? The man “burning his own artwork” to cook his food because there is “no fuel” in a video filmed inside a house with electricity on and wooden doors in the background.
There is a clip from an oscar-shortlisted documentary that will never leave my brain: its of a Palestinian mother holding her baby in an Israeli hospital, the baby had just been given an organ transplant. She is lovingly holding him in her arms, and we watch from a hidden camera as an Israeli speaking arabic ask her how she feels, and she coldly replies that she hopes he grows up to be a martyr against the Jews. The same Jews who gave the baby a second chance at life.
The NYT just put out a pitiful statement retracting the front page story they ran a few days ago, of a child born with congenital defects, his skeletal body they framed as a result of starvation. Read the NYT statement and its gross emotionally manipulative language, its a non-apology. Blood libel is alive today and a rationalist should know lying for the sake of maintaining a narrative is amongst the most dangerous sins that exist.
Watch just a few videos from the Ask Project on Youtube. Its extremely obvious to anyone who is not emotionally compromised to see that one side of this conflict is orders of magnitude more ideologically evil than the other. Every single Israeli soldier death is an act of incredible mercy to keep those kids alive and potentially have a future that is not ruled by a bronze age cult. This entire conflict is the easiest moral/ethical dilemma the 21st century has yet encountered, and it gives me immense anxiety to see people who are otherwise intelligent failing this test so badly.
I have not seen any particular ambulance footage, but everyone on all sides seems to agree that about 50,000 people have died so far, and that about 15,000 of those are children. Is your claim that none of those 15,000 child deaths had any feature that makes them emotionally moving? That by some miracle, all of those children died in sterile bloodless ways that it would be impossible for a healthy person to have emotions about?
And if not - if you agree that probably some of those children died in ways that were sad - is your claim that somehow the media magically failed to notice any of those sad child deaths, and had to fake other child deaths to make them look sadder than they really were?
I think you're doing the Just World thing where you desperately try to reassure yourself that everything is okay, because any bad thing that tugs on your heartstrings is a fake, and any bad thing that isn't a fake happened to someone who deserved it.
I think it's more honest to just accept your feeling that often children die and it's sad. You can still have some other feeling about "and maybe it was for the greater good" or "and also their side of the war is in the wrong".
Yes, I'm obviously devastated to see even a single dead child. But I think a single lie about a dead child is just as evil.
If I could make the world believe you killed a child, putting you in jail / sentencing you to death / making you a global pariah, is the ledger not balanced? What if I convinced your entire city that Scott Alexander's family is guilty of harvesting organs of children? (an accusation against Israelis that consistently goes viral in the doldrums of the algorithmic internet) If I can make the entire world believe lies about Israel, am I not sentencing them and their progeny to metaphysical death? We are both Jewish, and I know you study history. I dont know if your pattern recognizer has been fried by Bayes or the network of people you surround yourself with. You skipped over the core reason why Hen was making his argument. Lies against Jews are both lindy and exceptionally contagious. If it were a few embellishments here and there, or just a few outbursts of passionate violence, your argument would hold weight. But I see and hear the Palestinian woman's voice in that Israeli hospital. I've been to West Bank as I'm sure you have too. These are not people who will stop at small embellishments to get what they want. Until you grok that, it is my opinion that posts like this are severely emotionally manipulative and do nothing to solve the conflict or better people's understanding of it, as is the vast majority of media coverage.
I would prefer you and @benthamsbulldog avoid strawmanning me, and see I clearly described a lie in this context as "believed to the point of there being reciprocal consequences", in this case your life being taken from you by the state/other actors due to the existence of said lie. As one of you ironically has "utilitarian" in your bio, I would think you could easily understand this.
And even if the lie does not lead to the person being lied about's death, most individuals would have a profoundly horrible existence if the entire world was hoodwinked to believe they harvested children's organs. Reasonable enough to argue that this is better than being dead sure, but in practice social reputation is much more intertwined with your humanity and capacity to live than anyone cares to admit, and I would bet neither of you would last long.
This reminds me of a classic joke:
A backpacker is traveling through Ireland when it starts to rain. He decides to wait out the storm in a nearby pub. The only other person at the bar is an older man staring at his drink. After a few moments of silence the man turns to the backpacker and says in a thick Irish accent:
"You see this bar? I built this bar with my own bare hands. I cut down every tree and made the lumber myself. I toiled away through the wind and cold, but do they call me McGreggor the bar builder? No."
He continued "Do you see that stone wall out there? I built that wall with my own bare hands. I found every stone and placed them just right through the rain and the mud, but do they call me McGreggor the wall builder? No."
"Do ya see that pier out there on the lake? I built that pier with my own bare hands, driving each piling deep into ground so that it would last a lifetime. Do they call me McGreggor the pier builder? No."
So a more accurate phrasing is “a lie about a dead child is just as bad as a dead child if the lie causes actual real world outcomes that are equivalently bad to a child dying”?
I guess I can’t really disagree with the tautology you have provided, but it doesn’t seem particularly enlightening.
I agree lying is bad. It just doesn't seem relevant to this post, where I didn't repeat any particular lie (unless you have reason to think that the story of the kid with his brother is a lie). There have been many people lying on the Israeli side too (for example, just today, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israels-leader-claims-no-one-in-gaza-is-starving-data-and-witnesses-disagree ). Although everyone should call out these lies when they happen, I don't think you can object to a concern about starving children by bringing up that, unrelatedly, some people lied about a different thing, when in fact there are starving children. This is the sort of tribalism where if you prove that one person on a certain "side" lied, nobody can ever support that side in anything. But no "side" of any conflict could pass that test.
"but everyone on all sides seems to agree that about 50,000 people have died so far" - worth noticing that in early 2024 you wrote "Israel killed 50000 people" both greatly distorting the number and blaming literally all deaths on Israel.
Do you think that was bad? Do you think this may be relevant to how you perceived and are perceiving the conflict in Gaza? Do you understand (by which I don't mean "condone" or even "accept") how this could be taken as a not-great indication of unbiased well-informed sources?
Does it matter for you that under international law, when Hamas hides behind civilians and Israel attacks Hamas and the civilians are killed incidentally along with Hamas, the responsibility for the civilian deaths lies with Hamas not Israel?
Would you say that this law is good morally or not?
How on earth anyone misses that the Gaza genocide is one being directly enabled and funded by the US and its allies is beyond me. No shit an atrocity people's tax dollars are contributing to is going to get more attention, and that's not even getting into the AIPAC situation in the US.
It should be obvious that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza, and the proof for that is that Hamas systematically uses human shields. The purpose of using human shields is to protect the combatant from attack, because the attacker wants the shields not to be killed. This proves that in general, Israel is trying NOT to kill Gazan civilians.
This is supported by the behavior of even Israel-hostile international organizations: the ICJ said that was not a plausible case for genocide happening now but only a plausible case that Israel might decide on it at some point in the future; the ICC indicted Netanyahu for several war crimes but NOT for genocide (while it DID indict a dead Hamas leader for "extermination" aka genocide).
I think there's a legitimate argument over what tradeoff Israel should be making between military effectiveness and impact on civilians, and from very far away, it seems like they've got the slider bar pushed too far in the direction of killing civilians to achieve their military goals. This is a real issue worth discussing, but it's not genocide by any definition that makes sense.
That... doesn't quite follow, just from a logical standpoint. One side deliberately using human shields would certainly be sufficient to show that the other side's deliberate malice isn't the *sole possible cause* of civilian deaths, but...
Suppose there's a murder trial. Bob's body is found with a bullet hole in the chest and a knife wound to the femoral artery. Medical examiner figures either wound would have been fatal by itself, exact timing is unclear - both injuries happened within a few minutes of each other. Alice confesses to shooting Bob, but denies ever using a knife. Eve's defense attorney says "the fact that Alice admits to killing Bob proves that my client couldn't possibly have stabbed him in the leg." Does that argument hold water?
Israel can keep bouncing the rubble in Gaza indefinitely without any US support. We shouldn't be sending them aid (not because they're bad, just because they're rich enough not to need it), but that aid isn't what allows them to hammer Gaza.
My point is that military aid to Israel is an extremely obvious counterpoint to the idea that there's no good reason for westerners to be focusing on this particular atrocity over others (with the implied or explicitly stated conclusion that they are focusing on it for bad reasons, such as antisemitism)
"So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back."
Struck me as simply a lie. That is, I think, Scott is misrepresenting his own emotional state to his audience as a rhetorical flourish, to make his argument stick in the memory. I could be wrong, of course, but I think I'll roll doubt here.
I think he is accurately recounting a feeling, rather than a prediction of actions he would take. If someone threatened my family, I think there’s a good chance that if I had the means I would kill them (at least in the moment when my emotions were highest), even if it was unnecessary to keep my family safe. It’s what I would want to do. But I don’t think I *should* do that, and I think our justice system should be structured in a way that would keep my family safe without letting me give in to my vengance.
I am telling the truth when I say this is a strong feeling I have. I'm also telling the truth when I say I don't trust my strong feelings and I'm glad I have a cerebral cortex to translate them into more rational courses of action.
For the record, I feel you and I've had the discussion before where I recounted a similar feeling a friend responded as it I was all of an idiot, an animal, and someone reaching for virtue points unjustly.
It seems that this avenue of emotional expression is not equally obvious to everyone
Maybe I’m bad at reading, but Scott never wrote that Israel should give in, that Israel should grant Hamas a cease fire, that Israel is more culpable than Hamas, or anything like that. He simply wrote about his moral response to a horrific story. And that his instinctive, moral response was that he’d kill everyone on both sides to help the kid.
He also noted – and it should’ve been unnecessary but I understand why – that adults must try to understand their emotional responses, in context, that moral decisions are complex and that adults need to be aware of competing moral events and decisions.
I’m a supporter of Israel and sensitive to the anti-Semitism of the one-sided criticism of Israel. But this sensitivity goes too far if we must reject any moral response to the suffering of Gazans. Without moral emotions, we cannot be human or rational.
The emotion to take extreme action to save a suffering child is a moral response. Yes, if we actually took that action, it would be extremely 'immoral' because killing millions to save one is not 'moral' and the situation is complex.
I am a supporter of Israel and have believed that Hamas, not Israel, bears the primary and overwhelming culpability for the suffering of Gazans - thought that belief is wavering. But my personal belief, which likely is off in either direction, does not change my insistence that Scott's response is moral and that without these types of emotional responses [I am sure that many could argue about this particular response], we cannot be moral.
Re Mazzig, I think two of your classic essays, on isolated demands for rigor and superweapons, are very relevant. The first explains why it's right to be skeptical of people who claim to be motivated by a first principle, but conveniently only apply that principle to a limited subset of cases.
Here, to elaborate on the object-level issue you alluded to in your post, many activists and normies like Ms. Rachel are emphatic that the Israel-Gaza war, in which ~60,000 people have died so far, is such an appalling crime against humanity that they couldn't possibly remain silent. Yet, curiously, they felt no problem remaining silent about the wars/humanitarian crises in Yemen (300,000+ dead), Syria (600,000+ dead), Tigray (250,000+ dead), Sudan (100,000+ dead), Ukraine (300,000+ dead), etc. See this Zach Goldberg article in Tablet on the remarkable quantitative disparity in media coverage: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-manufactured-genocide-gaza
(To address a potential objection: "But the US is actually funding Israel, so activism could actually help." The US is a party to several of these other conflicts, e.g. it funded and armed Saudi Arabia during its intervention in Yemen. Furthermore, there's massive anti-Israel sentiment in e.g. European and Latin American countries that have relatively minimal ties to Israel.)
This leads one to conclude that they are either acting in good faith but largely ignorant about world affairs, or acting in bad faith and specifically biased against Israel/Jews. In either case, it would seem appropriate to discount their opinions if you're interested in arriving at the truth and making progress.
Your essay on superweapons explicitly gave Israel/Palestine being used as a building block for an anti-Semitism superweapon, so I won't belabor the point. I'll just note that it's empirically undeniable that this is now happening, with right-wing Twitter influencers like Nick Fuentes, Jake Shields, and Dan Bilzerian using anti-Zionism as a jumping off point for much more extensive anti-Semitism.
The problem with this is that it's almost a Fully General Counterargument, and hence false. (see link)
There are organisations that write enormous books evaluating the behaviour of every country in the world against some standard. This is a very worthy activity. But that's an exercise that occupies a group of people full time for many months. It's not reasonable to expect an individual to achieve that level of objectivity. But if they do not, your argument applies and you can dismiss them as antisemitic.
In the real world there are morally acceptable reasons to concentrate on specific cases.
One, for example, is a feeling of kinship. If your brother starts committing crimes, you are likely to want to object to this more strenuously than in the case of someone you don't know.
Another is that if you split your attention across every possible war crime, it will be too dissipated to have any useful effect. Unfortunately one of the only ways ordinary people can have a political effect is to participate in a "moment" in which public attention concentrates on some specific case. This can be dismissed as a pile-on, but they are a significant part of why politicians still, to some extent, can't completely ignore voters.
>This leads one to conclude that they are either acting in good faith but largely ignorant about world affairs, or acting in bad faith and specifically biased against Israel/Jews.
I suspect that a large chunk of the activist's activity is indeed antisemitism, but I suspect that there is another component as well.
I think that Israel, being democratic and technologically sophisticated, is also seen as an outpost of the West by activists. And one frequent part of Woke activists' ideology is to attempt to destroy the West. One chant that some of them use is "We can't wait for the Caliphate."
This is suicidally insane. We need to keep these people as far from the levers of power as possible.
Most people in the US/Europe simply do not know very much about the issue. What shows up on TV/the internet is what they know. The people who have read a few news articles about it and know what happened on Oct 7 and who Netanyahu is and can make a plausible guess about which river and which sea the Palestinians are chanting about are the unusually well-informed fringe. Honestly, that's probably the top 10%.
If most media sources emphasize the evils of Hamas and the virtues of Israel, most of that fringe (who, remember, are much better informed than the average voter or media consumer) will be pro-Israel. If most media sources flip that around, most of that fringe will be anti-Israel. This all functions without need for any antisemitism or any anti-Muslim hatred, though obviously both of those come into play somewhere as well.
Loss of privilege feels like oppression. For a bunch of structural and ideological reasons, most prestige news sources in 2025 are substantially more inclined toward criticizing Israel than they were in 1995. Worse, pretty overt anti-Semitism used to be mainly a fringe-right-wing thing, and now it has become somewhat common on the left as well. This surely feels very uncomfortable to a lot of American Jews who grew up in a media/cultural environment where both anti-Semitism and (to a lesser extent) opposition to Israel was strongly discouraged by most of high-status society.
Many Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the activists mouth slogans without even understanding what they refer to, "from the river to the sea" indeed being a prime example.
Many Thanks! Agreed to an extent. I agree that in the case of Gaza's attack on Israel, Gaza is militarily weaker. More generally, I think the Woke just label one group as "oppressed" and stick with the label regardless of who is actually weaker.
>More generally, I think the Woke just label one group as "oppressed" and stick with the label regardless of who is actually weaker.
To a degree, although note that in such cases people usually go to considerable effort to try and prove that their favoured group is also weaker, regardless of whether or not this is actually true.
Since everyone else seems to be taking the bait and going straight for the contentious bits, I'll take advantage of this and stake out some commenting territory for discussing 1) the difficulty of being thoroughly consistent in taking one's moral values to their logical conclusions, and 2) those uncommon people who stand out for doing just that: the righteous and the megalopsychoi.
I don't even necessarily disagree with Scott here, but at the end of the day, War is Hell, and it doesn't really inform anything else that terrible anecdotes happen.
I'm sure lots of people in Atlanta suffered terribly under Sherman, or in Germany under the allied Bombing, or in Poland under the Soviets, or in Hiroshima, Nagasake, and Tokyo.
If I think about what went on and connect it to my children it makes me very sad.
None of that means that what took place was or was not the best way to prosecute those wars. If anything, the experience of post-war Japan and Western Germany (compared to Germany post WWI, for instance) seems to be a point in favor of how things went.
Absolutely. I don't have anything to add to any conversation here, but I think someone writing something so earnest deserves to hear directly if they're having a real positive effect on people.
I feel like I should point out that the war in Sudan is very much *still* going on! I uh don't really know much of anything about it, but it is definitely still going on.
I am a simple man. If I see a state systematically segregating (bad), isolating (worse), and destroying (worst) a group of its most helpless and vulnerable citizens (actually evil) based on ethnicity (more evil still), I unequivocally condemn those actions. Absolutely none of it is excusable on any level.
And let’s not pretend that Israel did not effectuate the creation of Hamas through it’s longstanding practices if racial and religious segregation and isolation.
Let's say you are the Israeli prime minister. The prime minister before you pulled away completely from Gaza. Gaza is now self governed by Hamas. Hamas starts firing rockets at your citizens. You know if there's no sea blockade, they can get more rockets/missiles. If there's an airport, they can just do very successful air strikes. Hamas has stated that Israel should not exist as a country. What do you do? Please let me know your answer, that doesn't assume dead Israelis are better than dead Palestinians.
Buy every kid in Gaza a smartphone with Pokemon Go installed, plus some convenient method to cash out in-game successes for real-world prizes such as MREs, solar panels, and store credit at McMaster-Carr. Arrange for virtual "wild pokemon" to spawn - not exclusively, but more often - in and around suspected rocket launch sites or other legitimate military targets.
If the kids are allowed nearby enough to serve as human shields, resulting flood of geotagged photos hopefully allows construction of detailed 3D maps, enabling precisely planned strikes with zero collateral damage. If instead they're kept far away, that's an even better fix to the human-shield problem. If the Palestinian government tries to separate the kids from the phones, prop up whichever faction over there is willing to argue in favor of computer literacy, nutrition, and developing local industry - easier access to the classical "means of production" would presumably already give them an advantage in internal conflicts, just gotta translate that to winning elections.
Get some islamic theologians and professional advertisers together, have 'em lay out a concise, compassionate, meticulously accurate criticism of the specific apocalyptic prophecies which tend to motivate terrorism, break it up into bite-sized pieces, woven in with a bunch of wholesome kid-friendly edutainment about math, science, local history (without being blatantly pro-Israel), trade skills, critical thinking, and other stuff they won't want to miss out on. Sorta like a Levantine Arabic localization of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers Neighborhood? Though, ideally, a bit more directly interactive, to fully benefit from modern tricks for maximizing engagement.
And, of course, keep the Iron Dome loaded and guards on the border alert, but come down like a ton of bricks on any of my own guys who do atrocities, or even just step outside their assignment in some way that gives the other side an excuse to escalate.
Israeli Arabs are citizens of Israel who can vote, and the United Arab List was part of the ruling coalition in the Knesset up until Bibi returned to power at the end of 2022. Does Gaza have Jewish citizens? Not that anybody can vote there ever since the one election that brought Hamas to power decades ago.
If you were to rule with the policies this implies, it would be so catastrophic for your subjects that it would be positively virtuous for the most ruthless and bloodthirsty monster around to depose you and rule more sensibly.
That's the point, right? Each atrocity story seems to justify a crazy disproportionate response when you just respond to your emotions. You have to engage your reason to get back a sense of proportion and some weighing of costs and benefits and second-order effects.
Israel does not segregate Arabs, lol. Jews and Arabs have equal rights and mix freely in public life.
What is true is that in the West Bank Israeli citizens and non-citizens have unequal rights. But here too, Israeli Arabs have all the same rights that Israeli Jews do.
I don't think it's wrong to focus on the object, rather than meta, questions when it comes to the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict. The history and rights and wrongs of the situation are, I would argue, both more important to solve it and more controverted than the principle "people dying in war is a horrible, unnecessary tragedy."
I'm from a secular, non-Zionist Jewish background, and didn't know or care much about the conflict pre-10/7. I assumed that Israel was basically the aggressor, and Palestinian terrorism, while lamentable, was a response to oppression that would stop if the oppression stopped. I hadn't read much about it myself, but there was so much passion on the anti-Israel side, from the socialist left to the libertarian/paleocon anti-war right, I assumed it had something going for it.
10/7 made me want to learn more about the history. Doing so made me much more pro-Israel, and much more critical of how the media and pro-Palestine activists frame the conflict. I think pro-Palestine activists are wrong about the history of the conflict, which is highly pertinent to finding a just and lasting solution to it.
A shortlist of books I'd recommend:
Making David into Goliath by Joshua Muravchik
The War of Return by Einat Wilf
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
>I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some thing which was worse than Gaza and which not quite as many people had protested. Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism.
I'm not sure exactly how he phrased it, but this is a common weakman.
First of all, it's easy to claim that any tragedy is insufficiently like any other tragedy if you finely slice the differences enough.
Second, there are degrees of not protesting something. You might fail to protest it because it's only mentioned in some obscure paragraph on CNN's tenth web page. That doesn't mean much. On the other hand, if the things you fail to protest are well known and related to the same conflict you do protest, that might mean bias. And there's also a difference between not protesting as in doing nothing, and "not protesting" as in laughing at one side or diminishing their concerns or otherwise doing something that is negative rather than neutral.
Third, people with biases have a way to convince themselves with motivated reasoning, so someone may hate Jews, yet "not be antisemitic" in the sense that the things they say about Gaza look like ordinary arguments based on ordinary reasoning that doesn't even mention Jews.
Fourth, the whole thing isn't just "antisemitism logically follows from excess lack of charity to Israel". Consider not Gaza, but Holocaust denial. It is certainly logically possible to deny the Holocaust without hating Jews or otherwise having any bad ideas. You shouldn't be able to deduce that someone hates Jews just because he denies the Holocaust. Being incorrect isn't enough to be antisemitic. Yet somehow, even though it's logically possible to come to Holocaust denial through ordinary error, Holocaust deniers all do in fact hate Jews, barring edge cases like "raised by Nazis and doesn't know better". Sure, protesting Israel in an imbalanced way isn't as strong evidence for antisemitism as Holocaust denial, but it's not no evidence either; in fact it's pretty significant evidence.
Nobody hates Jews because of their intrinsic Jewishness, it’s always been because of some idea that they had about Jews doing something evil or bad. Of course, these ideas might be wrong, and that’s what “antisemitism” means: hatred of Jews based on some false belief about them doing something evil.
This makes a lot of sense when you think of historical Jews, who were mostly just living normal lives by themselves, and were hated based on false rumors about drinking the blood of Christians, or whatever.
But as for modern Israeli jews, which we *know* are doing a genocide that’s probably a lot more evil than whatever things the old antisemitic rumors imagined, do we really believe that there’s people that hate Jews not at all because of their real documented genocide, but because of some false belief about something else that they do? That somehow is even worse than genocide? If not, what is even the meaning of the term “antisemitic” anymore? Someone who hates Jews for their genocide now, but used to hate them for some false reason before?
Are you saying that it’s not worse than the imagined misdeeds? I guess that’s technically true if you imagine some really bad ones, but it was more of a point about real vs imagined misdeeds in general.
Or are you straight up denying that the genocide is happening? I’m genuinely surprised that this would be controversial. Or is this a semantic argument about the definition of genocide?
A lot of ceasefire advocates and Palestine supporters get falsely accused of antisemitism, but there are also plenty of people who blame Jews for most wars, corruption, communist atrocities, pornography, economic problems and other bad things in the world. These people think Jews are oppressing the whole world and killing tens of millions of people. They hate Jews no matter how pro-Palestine we are. They often praise Hitler. These people are antisemites, and while so far in the 21st century they haven’t done anything as bad as killing at least 3% of Gaza’s population, it’s definitely worth being careful to make sure they don’t gain power. Their ideas have a historical track record of causing extraordinary evil and suffering.
This clip is a good example of antisemitism. If folks like this take over the US government they’re not just gonna put an arms embargo on Israel (which I’d support), they’ll probably try to kick Jews out of the US or even kill us. https://youtu.be/82qDk9LX0yI?si=JXs6WNUH4k0Z0ENk
The posited obligation to object equally strongly at all times to all things that look similar (the 2nd quoted commenter) has always really bothered me. It reads to me like a defensive response to not wanting to have feelings about something that someone else is having feelings about. We don't need to feel offended or judged for not prioritizing something someone else is prioritizing.
Likewise we don't need to judge others for having a different priority than we do. It seems perfectly fine and normal to me that we humans have different arenas of concern, care, and priority. And that we can be secure enough in our own selves not to be threatened by someone being concerned about something that we think is not the very top most urgent priority in the whole world at any given moment (and good god, how do we measure that?).
Parsing arguments over whether one is focused on the number 4 biggest calamity or the number 3 biggest calamity seems absurd to me. Particularly if by "focus" we mean arguing on the internet about it or devoting time reading news about it.
If all Palestinians decided to lay down arms, they'd have peace and a state in 24 hours. If all Israelis decided to lay down arms, they'd all be dead in 24 hours.
If my children had been tortured and kidnapped and raped and murdered on 10/7, and I had access to nuclear weapons, Gaza would be a crater.
No matter how much I hated a nuclear-armed enemy or how much they'd wronged me, I wouldn't torture and kidnap and rape and murder their kids.
No matter how much I hated someone or how much they'd wronged me, I'd never attack them with rockets I'd hidden in my own kids' schools and playgrounds and hospitals.
When they love their kids more they hate ours, we'll have peace.
> If my children had been tortured and kidnapped and raped and murdered on 10/7, and I had access to nuclear weapons, Gaza would be a crater.
What would you do if you were a Palestinian father whose children got blown up on their way home from the store by an Israeli bomb on some random day after 10/7?
> No matter how much I hated a nuclear-armed enemy or how much they'd wronged me, I wouldn't torture and kidnap and rape and murder their kids.
But it does sound like you would turn them into radioactive ash, so I’m having trouble following the logic here.
It’s ok for you to want to completely liquidate the population that has wronged you, but it’s wrong of them to harbor similar feelings. Is this whole post just a might makes right argument that is going over my head?
I don’t think I’m extrapolating anything, I think the original post shows a fair amount of confused thinking where the OP considers theirs to be a righteous anger and any Palestinian anger to be unjustifiable and self defeating.
What is your reading of the second and third paragraph other than being completely contradictory?
There are a lot of things that can be said to this sort of "well, even if they're not consistently upset about other atrocities at least they care about one thing, better to err on the side of empathy, etc etc" argument. But I'll just focus on:
When you see people, not failing to get upset at, but ACTIVELY CELEBRATING the deaths and tortures being done to a different group of people (see the protests in support of October 7), when you see them DIRECTLY CONFRONTED with atrocities by Muslims (whether Hamas actions pr just the average run-of-the-mill Sharia law beheading) and shrugging and saying "so what?"...not just *failing* to go out of their way to find and condemn those things...then I think you can say with practical certainty that these people DO NOT GIVE TWO FUCKS about empathy for anyone. Even their "empathy" for the suffering Gazans is almost certainly closer to a gleeful "great! Now we have more justification to *hurt the people we hate!*"
I would INFINITELY rather someone who openly doesn't care about stopping anyone being hurt than someone who pretends to care about one group's hurt for the real purpose of actively hurting a different group.
It's like Scott is thinking of people who just oppose the gaza war without opposing anything else, while many of us are thinking of those who oppose the gaza war and actively defend, minimise, or try to shut down discussion of everything done by Muslims. The first group could be described as "having a small amount of unreflective empathy". The second, as "an active force for anti-empathy, disguised as empathy".
Of course, there are both groups. You can find people who were celebrating Oct 7, and you can find people who were horrified then by Hamas' attack and are horrified now by Israel's response.
Scott, it seems like you mention God more often lately. Is this a shorthand for luck/the laws of nature/the contingent present state of the world, or is it a real departure from atheism?
This question isn't meant as a gotcha, and it has no bearing, IMO, on the reasoning or conclusions in this post (with which I agree). I'm just idly curious. Please feel free not to reply, or to do it in a different time or place since I expect the comments on this post to be heated.
“On April 30, 1991 – on that one day – 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned it to my daughter, who was then seven years old, that is was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.
‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. ‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’”
> I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ tests after Jews outscored Aryans
The Nazis weren't inconsistent in banning IQ tests, IQ isn't what they valued. You might think less of them for not valuing IQ that highly, but then you've never been a Nazi. IQ tests were pioneered outside Germany by non-Nazis, and the people behind them weren't shocked by Nazis rejecting such tests because they didn't have the assumption that Nazis must like them. I'd say the bigger contradiction is Hitler's prioritization of himself over Germany, and his belief that Germany should be punished via things like his "Nero decree" for failing him in the war.
There is an extremely theoretical version of Nazism, which I am not familiar what it is about. BAP claims Nazism was “Immoral Aristocratic Radicalism” in theory. Who knows maybe that’s true
But there is an implementation version of Nazism which is not all that different from a corrupt totalitarian dictatorship with an added right wing populism on steroids. You only need to read a few books of people who lived under a Nazi government to confirm that. The SS repeatedly raped their own citizens, stole their property, denounced their own citizens as Jews or some other defect if it helped them, denounced each other as unpatriotic, schemed to have each other executed and so on. What strikes was the petty nature of the crimes committed by the SS and the rampant prevalence of it. For example, stealing a farmers land (conscripting for a factory), because he refused to let his daughter party in a club with the man. Claiming an 85 year old man was sympathetic to Jews and sending him to concentration camp because he refused to sell you his house at well below market price. And on and on
If Isreal/Gaza posted on AITA, it would be the biggest "everybody sucks here" ever. Hamas sucks for the October 7th attacks and holding on to hostages. Israel sucks for responding with horrifically over-the-top force and letting the actual ethnic cleansers (the pro-settlement crowd) drive policy. Its the people of Gaza that suffer while everyone else involved absolutely sucks.
I have a South Sudanese friend who is genuinely sad and hopeless about the state of his home country, it’s not just a handy rhetorical point to be made on the Internet.
"Is there a principle that people who have had their land stolen can launch terrorist attacks to get it back? If yes, those terrorist attacks might kill kids’ siblings; if no, land-stealing might be so costless that rights become meaningless and the world devolves into constant colonial conflict"
I think this is unreasonably charitable to Hamas. It was their grandparents land that was stolen (arguably, but I'll grant it). The question of 'should you be able to kill people if you have your land stolen' is different from 'should your descendants in perpetuity be able to kill people in a completely hopeless attempt to get the land that was stolen from their ancestors back?'
Maybe I'm misunderstanding that though and you weren't steel-manning the pro-Hamas position
Yes, I know, but they've gone through a sufficiently rigorous education process of learning absurdities that they no longer recognize simple concepts, and reversing that needs a different approach than teaching from scratch.
Of course the land was stolen. "Conquest" doesn't confer the right to expel people from their houses, take possession of those houses and all property inside, including furniture, clothes, photo albums, and children's toys. Every building more than 80 years old was quite literally stolen.
I don't know what "meglomaniacal claims" you're talking about, or why, unless I accept such claims, conquest does actually confer a right to ethnically cleanse and steal property.
I think saying 'Arabs were living in that land and got expelled' is a fairly accurate description of what happened. You could say the expulsion was the least bad option (my take) but you do have to sympathize with those who got expelled. And saying their land was stolen is fine
Dear old USA is literally founded on conquest--no that there is anything objectionable in that. All countries are so established. And no, they didn't respect any rights the conquered people were having.
Thoughtful people in the U.S. deplore native dispossession, rather than celebrate it from the stolen teepees they’re living in. Native Americans are citizens with equal rights, and not herded into concentration camps where they’re starved and bombed.. Marauding gangs aren’t rampaging through Indian villages, burning property, and killing people without legal consequence. Crimes motivated by racial bias are treated hate crimes and prosecuted accordingly. There is a general acknowledgement that a serious injustice took place.
You’re writing as if this “pacification” were a wonderful achievement, when the truth is that Native American rights should have been respected throughout.
Acknowledging the reality is prerequisite to doing good, and is preferable and more honorable than hand waiving about “conquest” while you’re living in a stolen house eating food grown on stolen land while sleeping in a stolen bed. In the Palestinian context, the legitimate owners are in many cases still alive and still have the key.
Hold up, conquest and stealing are two different things. One is about ownership and one is about sovereignty.
You can conquer land without stealing land -- you go in and put up your flag and say you're the government, but everyone currently owning land can continue to own it.
You can also steal land without conquering it, like if the government stole my land right now.
Even if you rightfully conquer land that doesn't necessarily give you the right to steal it as well.
There is little point to conquest if the previous ownerships continue.
Ownership exists within the nexus of laws of a particular polity. That nexus is displaced when the polity gets conquered and hence all previous ownership logically go out with it.
Thus, it is not incumbent on the conqueror to honor previous ownerships.
>There is little point to conquest if the previous ownerships continue.
Not necessarily. In fact, lots of historical conquerors have largely kept previous ownership intact, because it helps smooth other the conquest process and makes the land easier to rule.
So, the point is people of A are going to cry Stolen! Stolen! in any case, whether their actual property is touched or not.
It is not sufficient to say that only the govt is changed by conquest, not your actual property. Because property rights change in unpredictable manner with change in govt.
One real problem here is that almost every piece of land on Earth was taken by the sword multiple times in its history, so a general principle of "it's okay to do horrible things to people in response to historical taking of land" ends up justifying killing pretty much anyone who's not living in Antartica, Iceland, or some remote island that was only settled in the last few centuries.
If the Native Americans had the power to do so now, it would turn out they had the right to take back the land and kick out the descendants of the settlers. Many countries have had long periods of occupation and subjugation before getting their country back. I don't think there is any simple principle you can apply here.
According to Wikipedia, over five million Ukrainian refugees fled Ukraine to other parts of Europe. There are about two million people in Gaza. Let's assume half the people in Gaza want to leave. If several countries stepped in to help, surely this is doable?
The immediate answer seems to be that they're trapped. (I have heard that some get out by bribing Egyptian security guards.) But why haven't other countries done more to get them out? Shouldn't there be international pressure to make this happen?
There have been international efforts to get food in and stop the war, which should continue. But meanwhile, every refugee who leaves Gaza would be another person who is safe from bombing and starvation and all the other bad things that happen living in a conflict zone. And for the people who stay, it would be one less mouth to feed, and one less person for mostly-collapsed medical facilities to take care of.
It seems like a missing mood, or perhaps there are things happening that aren't very prominent in the news.
(Yes, I've brought this up before, but haven't seen any convincing answers yet.)
Why assume it would have to be a neighboring country? It's not that hard to charter planes. I bet Egypt could be convinced to cooperate if the ultimate destination were somewhere else.
I'm assuming an international diplomatic effort and some kind of agreement. It doesn't seem like any country has seriously tried?
(And since someone will bring it up, volunteering *some other country* to accept refugees without taking any yourself doesn't count as seriously trying.)
It would be very possible if *any* country wanted them. But European countries don't want a couple million more jihadists running around their cities any more than Middle Eastern countries do.
European countries were so generous in accepting Middle Eastern refugees around the time of the Arab Spring, that it created a substantial backlash. Inviting a lot of Palestinians in is not even remotely politically feasible this time around. Even if they could theoretically be absorbed, the general mood these days is like "why should we take them in? they're neither culturally similar nor particularly close by".
“Why isn't more done to help refugees leave Gaza?”
Because they will never, ever, be able to return to their homeland if they leave. This is not even a theory, just the raw fact of the matter. Israel unilaterally rejects to all Palestinians their right of return, while simultaneously giving “right of return” to any Jew anywhere in the world, regardless of their historic connection to the land, who don’t even speak the language. Meanwhile, a Palestinian can have literally been born there yet if they leave, they will be denied, for all eternity, right to return to their homeland by the Israeli government. Evacuating the population of Gaza (most of whom are already displaced or descendants of displaced people consistently denied right of return) simply offloads the moral burden of ethnic cleansing one step away from the Israeli government.
I am incredibly lucky to have been born in a place that is much, much nicer than the Gaza Strip. One of the nicest places in the world, in fact, a place so nice that almost every country in the world will let me enter their country, because they're fully confident that I'll go back home afterwards. I can't imagine what it would be like to be born in the Gaza Strip, which is not only one of the worst places on Earth, but a place that nobody will even give you a visa to enter their country from because they're pretty sure you'd never go back there.
But if I had been born in the Gaza Strip, and you told me "Hey, you can go live somewhere else, but on the condition that you can never go back to the Gaza Strip" I'd say "fuck yes, the Gaza Strip fucking sucks man".
Yes, many people would leave, never to return, and that is a heart-wrenching decision to make. It's not historically unprecedented, though. Many other immigrants have fled war, famine, and poverty. Back when travel was harder, return was very difficult if not impossible.
So I wouldn't expect everyone to take the offer. But if the other choice is staying in a conflict zone and getting bombed and starved to death, probably some people would?
I don't know how good this poll is, but it seems suggestive:
And certainly, having the option is better than being trapped. Some people call Gaza an "open-air prison," which doesn't seem quite right (it's more of a siege), but to the extent that's true, I think the world should do more to let them out of prison.
In effective altruism terms, it seems like a neglected cause? Or maybe I've missed something.
What? In all the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Israel always allowed for Palestinians to return to a future Palestinian state. Israel only rejected them to Israel.
The obvious problem is that there is a very effective and bloody terrorist group embedded in the Gazan population, so it's likely that when you bring in lots of Gazan refugees, you also bring in lots of Hamas.
Maybe you could do something like this for women and children?
I'm going to speculate here in order of plausibility:
1) because immigration is a hot yet rotten potato politically now, and in Europe much serious anti immigration populist animus started with GENUINE MIDDLE EASTER. REFUGEE situation in 2015 (Syrians).
2) Ukrainian refugees were readily accepted initially partially because of the implicit assumptions that they were coming temporarily, until the war ends. The war has not ended but the sentiment for example in Poland (which has has turned from overwhelmingly welcoming to more hostile/complicated). Also that's ethically similar people coming to a culturally roughly similar country / countries (tho in great numbers: about 1.6 million who stayed makes nearly 5% of the population in PL), softening usual racialized and future clash related fears. A better comparison would be with Syrians and that did not end super well politically or socially for the enthusiastically hosting countries (Merkel, I'm looking at you).
3) This is a contentious point, but it's not impossible that that would EXACTLY foster either the hidden or even only semi-conscious Israeli agenda, and would be an anathema to the Palestinian independence/statehood project which began with turning the vast majority of them into refugees (Gaza was technically a "refugee camp" itself, albeit grown into a city over the decades).
4) The idea could have been permanently marred by the association with Trump's Gaza Riviera proposal.
Yes, there’s certainly a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment. But given some pretty widespread support for Palestinians worldwide, you’d think that there would be advocates pushing for their own governments to do the right thing anyway. Maybe there are but we haven’t heard of them?
Aren’t there organizations dedicated to helping Syrian refugees, even though there are also lots of people who are anti-immigrant? I would expect it to be a controversial issue rather than something nobody talks about.
I think you're exaggerating popular support for your position. It would be kinda weird to support Palestinians (as many people do) and also think they're too dangerous to have around? Anti-immigrant sentiment is popular, but I don't think it's *that* popular?
I think it's quite unreasonable to assume that more than a small proportion of immigrants would be violent criminals. And, there are also native-born violent criminals, too! You need a criminal justice system to deal with them in any case.
>It would be kinda weird to support Palestinians (as many people do) and also think they're too dangerous to have around?
Revealed preferences are often different to stated preferences. Lots of middle-class liberals are fine romanticising third-worlders, criminals, the poor, the homeless, etc., but would throw a fit if a group of them moved in next door.
>I think it's quite unreasonable to assume that more than a small proportion of immigrants would be violent criminals.
I don't know what exactly you'd consider a "small proportion", but some groups have much higher rates of offending than others. For example, when looking at grooming gang related offences, British "Asians" (which, for those who don't know, in this sort of context is usually a euphemism for "Muslims") commit crimes at a rate 9-12 times higher (per capita) than British Whites, whilst British Blacks commit these sorts of crimes at a rate 9-10 times higher:
I'm wondering if it's really the case that there are people who are simultaneously pro-Palestinian and anti-Palestinian immigration for their own country. Revealed preference doesn't seem like quite enough. It seems like there would be people openly admitting to that?
I think (not passing any value judgements either way, just factual description of the situation) that no countries, neighboring or otherwise, will take Gaza refugees for one or more of the following reasons:
(1) dealing with them is of course a colossal first-order problem (~2 million starving refugees, an unknown percentage of which are militant extremists)
(2) letting refugees flee would make it easier for Israel to conquer or subjugate Gaza, simply because the populace would be lessened
(3) More Palestinian suffering within Gaza causes bad PR for Israel, which furthers the anti-Israel cause
I make no claim to know what balance is among these three reasons
Those seem like reasonable guesses for what some people might think, but I think it's a bit exaggerated. Why would any country need to take more refugees than they want to commit to?
I imagine some country saying "we'll take a thousand families if five other countries do the same. Who's with us?" This would be more of a symbolic gesture / pilot program, but it could be scaled up if it works out.
I feel like the crux of these meta-discussions is whether one more person adds anything to the discussion. Like does the world need more Americans talking about Gaza? It doesn't add anything, even after accounting for the "more voices might lead to change!" possibility that some people will treat like solid gold instead of the extremely weak we're-out-of-good-ideas option that it is.
People are allowed to rant of course, but that's just regression to the mean.
Scott was aiming to make a point that wasn't really about the Gaza conflict. I agree, though, that the comments section being dominated by arguments about it was a very predictable consequence of his using it as an example.
Very curious these concepts. Aristotle invented the "rational animal" but the "dignity" part had to wait till 18C philosophers of Enlightenment who were explicit that the Church was derogatory to the dignity of this "rational animal".
They were answered by Nietzsche, were they not? Without God, there must be a transvaluation of all values. Dignity is not for little people.
And with Julian Jaynes, the consciousness is itself discovered to be a metaphor and what kind of dignity a metaphor could have !
Self-righteousness of the Liberal is a dangerous thing to world peace. British, between the two wars, indulged in guilt over unfairness of Versailles. This self-pitying hardened into self-righteousness over sufferings of Sudeten Germans led to Munich.
In the entire post, there is not one word about jihad and how is it in Western interest to promote jihad or to stop it. Gazans were one of the very few people who openly celebrated 9/11. But the liberal is over all that. He is universal. Particularities do not exist for him.
Hen Mazzig's is presumptuous, a common pattern in pro-Israeli discourse. Some of the voices criticizing genocide on the internet come from Palestine. Anyone coming from outside who forms deep ties never leaves with their opinion unscathed. When the people being starved, bombed, humiliated, apartheided, stolen from, raped, imprisoned, and machine-gunned while searching for food are no longer "them over there", but my friends, my neighbors, my wife, and my kids, it changes things. You see the arbitrariness of genocider and genocidee. Westerners and Israelis in their arrogance think it inconceivable that the roles could be reversed, but it's not. It's in our interest that human rights are respected everywhere simply because the tables could turn. Until kids in Gaza are safe, none of our kids are safe.
People from the West don't understand the nature of sectarianism in the Middle East. Sectarianism there is like racism in the U.S., decent society and intellectuals, people you respect and want to be around, are not sectarian. With that context, the hyper-sectarian nature of Israeli society in unignorable. Take the lowest form of bigot, the type that finds the Ku Klux Klan too moderate, and amp it up with nuclear arms and F18s. They complain constantly, including in these comments, about how "all of them what to kill all of us", while they're in the midst themselves of killing "all of them." Every accusation is a confession - the easiest way in the Middle East to know someone is corrupt is that they're vocally against corruption. With that context, Yoav Gallant's statement that Palestinians are "human animals" is revealing. This view, that we must kill them because they want to kill us, itself taps into our animal instincts. Only a "human animal" sees an us and them, the Middle East authentically is cosmopolitan, multicultural, fluid and urban, a beautiful mix which they've been defacing, destroying, dismantling, and raping and pillaging for the past 80 years.
I appreciate Scott reading this story and thinking about his own kids. That story is a drop in the bucket, and it's unfortunate that so many Israelis, upon reading a story like that, are incapable of mustering empathy but instead joke about "pint-sized terrorists" and good target practice. This ugly rhetoric is out in the open, complementing their meticulously documented war crimes.
> Westerners and Israelis in their arrogance think it inconceivable that the roles could be reversed, but it's not.
I think most Israelis know very well that 1/3rd of the world's Jews were recently murdered in a genocide, and the fear of that recurring is a major motivator in Israel's decisions.
Having only 1/100th the population of a religion like Islam is inherently risky. If Muslims are willing to sacrifice their lives to kill Israelis, and Israel responds "proportionately" keeping the ratio at only 1:1 Muslim deaths to Jewish deaths, Muslims can wipe out the *entire* Israeli population at a cost of only 1/100th their population.
Consider Iran, which has a government sponsored clock counting down the "destruction of Israel" while pursuing nuclear weapons.
Do you think it's impossible that a crazy Iranian leader could nuke Israel (which is very tiny and dense) even at the cost of Israel nuking a few Iranian cities in response?
Iran is a weak state with an unpopular government ruled by an 86 year old dictator. Considering that Israel is committing genocide, it’s reasonable to be more concerned about Israel’s actual nuclear stockpile rather an a hypothetical one that a hypothetical “crazy leader” may one day obtain. This characterization reeks of racism that’s ingrained in Israel - those crazy Iranians can’t have nukes, but us good people, no problem. Hyping up Iran as a threat is another tactic to unify Israeli society behind its war criminal president, as nothing bonds people together like an external, existential enemy. The same is true in reverse, with the Iranian regime and Israel locked in codependent enmity for their own survival. In peacetime Israel would naturally disintegrate.
Given the recent admission from the NYT that the photo of the "starving" child was not actually starving, why do you believe the backpack story? Why do you believe that it must have been Jews were responsible? And that they did it intentionally? Why has there not been an unconditional surrender given the direction of the war has taken? And, finally, why no concern over Druze children and the horrors they're facing?
Some context on the version of Scott Alexander that wrote this.
Following 10/7/23, Scott refused to do the bare minimum of expressing sorrow about the victims of Hamas attacks. This basic thing, feeling like it was something to feel not-awesome about, was (and is) being denied in too many corners of the Western world. Mere public expression of compassion, without any taking of sides, would go far, - among a demographic he was well-positioned to impact. Scott not merely refused (indeed, in all the time that passed since, he couldn't find a single word about this in his eloquent heart of hearts. Not once) - he explicitly refrained from saying anything because these were events halfway across the world. A leader in the EA movement, the author of Newtonian Ethics, gave that as a reason to stay silent. Did somebody change the geography, Scott? Is Gaza closer than Beeri?
Nor was he speaking the truth about his intent to remain silent on the topic. Scott Alexander did find something to say. Early in 2024, he started a discussion by saying "Israel killed 50000 people". At that point, Hamas itself was claiming 35000 deaths (and the UN later quietly revised the estimate at the time to 22000). Given the 10-15K estimates of killed Hamas fighters, and the fraction of the civilians who were in fact fighting, Scott was in fact saying "Hamas, that well-known pro-Israeli source of information, has underestimated total deaths by almost a half, and the civilian:combatant death ratio by much more than that". And he was of course blaming every single of those deaths on Israel. Hamas rockets falling on hospitals? Hamas slaughtering Palestinians who were not maximally on board? Shooting at people following instructions to evacuate? Scott Don't Care. Note that this wasn't following a Scott-at-his-best analysis of fifty factors and a careful conclusion "so this is why I think conventional estimates are wrong". He... just threw it out like a reddit poster trolling someone.
Nor was this peculiar lack of standards and attention limited to the borders of Gaza. Minimizing campus antisemitism to the extent it was somehow news to Scott in September 2024? Endorsing Jill Stein (somehow missing the antisemitism issues associated with her campaign), learning about those issues and still keeping the endorsement (because it would sounds more elegant, mirroring the title of the 2016 endorsement post...)?
Remember the recent rant about USAID where Scott mentioned woke silliness as the worst argument one might bring against USAID? He never mentioned (never knew? never cared? who knows!) that top USAID charities may be handing millions to Hamas (not as a side effect of working in Gaza. As direct hand-to-hand transfers to Hamas leaders). Hasn't breathed a word about it, not even to refute it.
I could go on and on. I don't think there's a point. It's probably not a coincidence that Scott barely updates his Mistakes page these days, but if he'd be interested in genuinely examining his epistemics on the topic, this would have happened already.
So yes. Scott Alexander is a Singerian who used geographic distance to justify his continued inability to say as much as a single word about the victims of 7/10.
A rationalist writer who essentially amplified propaganda that was too radical for Hamas to push (Erdogan spoke of 46K deaths a year later) and never examined his most worst failures on the topic.
Did Scott refuse to express sympathy about 7/10? Was the distance argument made by him explicitly? You can point to a public text that disproves it, or you could ask him - I do hope he answers truthfully. Or I could share proof (which I am extremely reluctant to do. But it exists). I don't doubt he did think it was sad. Just didn't want to express said sadness or horror at a time when this mattered. Too far away. Too "conflict-theorist"-y.
The "Israel killed 50000 people" comment was made publicly a year and a half ago.
The endorsement for Stein is still proudly up in a post title. Comments in that endorsement post show Scott being made aware of the antisemitism of e.g. Stein's running mate (and thus being unaware prior to the post), and deciding that's not a sufficient reason to change the endorsement.
On the July links post, link 36 was to a twitter thread: "A humanitarian aid veteran analyzes what went wrong with food distribution in Gaza (X)." The author of that thread dispels without evidence the notion that Hamas diverts the aid.
The amplification of that specific thread led me to contemplate Scott's silence on the matter.
This is a topic where a Scott-like analysis could do great: Where are the numbers in discussion coming from? How are they calculated? Who has an agenda? What evidence is real/fake? How and why is the situation the way that it is?
There is so much to work with here, that I found Scott's silence to be jarring. Jarring enough that I realized he is being uncharacteristically non-critical of the current trendy liberal agenda. This post is a more explicit confirmation of the conclusion I arrived at earlier this month.
I was a paid subscriber since the launch of ACX. But I unsubscribed since that July links post for reasons that align with what you (BE) describe.
You are being maximally uncharitable to Scott. He hasn't pivoted to talking about Gaza a lot; in fact, this is, as far as I can remember, the first post where he kind-of-but-not-really centers the matter, and takes a recognizable position. To collect the scraps he put out over two years of one of the most reported-on conflicts ever and use them as an indictment of his epistemic integrity is frankly appalling.
Also, you didn't link the post where he made the claim of 50 000 deaths in Gaza, but I would be surprised if, upon pointing out that the estimate was well beyond most projections, he wouldn't have motivated it.
Your criticisms of him are honestly so tame, that the tone of indignation is baffling. To you, the evidence he betrayed his ethical convictions is:
1 - not having posted about Oct 7 after the fact.
2 - having mentioned in passing 50 000 killed in a post, when at the time the estimates suggested 35 000 killed.
3 - endorsing Jill Stein in the 2024 election.
4 - being at one point unaware of the extent of episodes of antisemitism in US college campuses
5 - not having mentioned, in his analysis of USAID pros and cons, that “top USAID charities may be handing millions to Hamas (not as a side effect of working in Gaza. As direct hand-to-hand transfers to Hamas leaders)”
I was going to address each point by point, but I think it would perhaps violate a space that should remain Scott's. I'll just say that about point 2, even if it turned out he was wrong or misguided or careless, it's as-objectively-as-a-subjective-opinion-can-be _more_ wrong to say that he “essentially amplified propaganda that was too radical for Hamas to push”. He is not off by an order of magnitude.
To Scott: I think your handling of the topic has been effective. Everyone already talks about it ad nauseam, and Open Threads regularly have multiple top-level comments amply discussing it. A “Much more than you needed to know” on any topic relating to the conflict would be interesting, but I also imagine that many of your acquaintances, family and friends would have strong reactions to you taking a stand either way. I wish the commentariat at large understood this, but here we are.
> real evolution fans don’t even love their own children - they donate to sperm banks and let other people invest resources in raising them
I think this is incorrect. Consider the question, who has more great-grandchildren: the average Amish man, or someone who donates sperm to 10 secular lesbian couples?
>Consistency matters because it’s how morality forms in the first place. Everybody has some moral impulses. Those become principles only under the influence of a desire for consistency and for the dignity of a rational being.
This seems quite underdeveloped or dubious. Sure, everyone has moral impulses, and a drive for consistency can potentially cement them into "principles," but why should we assume a priori that "principles" are good? Sure, they might be more coherent, but so what? This seems to just juggle words for their positive valences, without adding anything substantive: consistency is good, because it combines 'impulses' (neutral or negative implication) into "principles" (positive implication).
The whole point of the question is that principles can themselves be negative, such that consistency with them breeds evil. If "a desire for consistency can prevent you from being history’s greatest villain," then there's no reason to think that it couldn't lead you to being the greatest villain; it all depends which principles one is being consistent with. Perhaps it would be villainy which is more amenable to description than chance impulse, and at the abstract level, we might say that it's very nice that the villain retains the dignity of a human being in being able to describe why he's being evil, but that doesn't seem very satisfying, particularly within a consequentialist framework.
Thinking of discrete examples of negativity, it seems obvious that consistency wouldn't be preferred. If someone were to rape some people, while acting nice and wholesome with others, we wouldn't say that "the worst part is the hypocrisy" and that it would be better if the person would rape more people, allowing his base rape impulses to blossom into a more fully developed rape-ideology, thus embodying the dignity of a rational being. We'd say that the worst part is the rape and that consistency or lack thereof is hardly a consideration, and in the above example, would only make things worse.
If the question is whether people should consciously consider and plan their actions, developing more deliberate frameworks, or whether they should act on mere impulse, it seems that the answer is that they should think. But that's not because of the beauty of consistency - it's because each item that receives thought would presumably be likelier to end up more positively.
Maybe you just meant that it's generally good to think more and act less impulsively and that by doing so, principles, and thus consistency emerge organically, but then consistency is still mostly besides the point.
Incidentally, the original cited comment, questioning the value of consistency failed to appreciate the point it was responding to (from Hanania). The commenter heaps scorn on Hanania for preferring consistency, mocking him for his autism and accusing him of being a 'retard,' with this being a symptom of his illness.
But Hanania's point wasn't that consistency is necessarily to be desired. Indeed, he's praised those who've strayed from their general instincts to espouse positions that he approves of, rather throwing autistic fits about that, as he's accused of.
Instead, he noted that from a descriptive standpoint, consistency is associated with higher human capital. In that context, Hanania noted that liberals tend to hold more developed and internally consistent views than the populist-conservative coalition. Hanania opposes many of those, having written a book developing an approach to stop them from realizing those views.
But as is a major theme in Hanania's work, there are wide-ranging implications to EHC. Their value doesn't come from their internal consistency, per se, but through their extensive differences in behavior and preferences, as he describes.
> Hitler was a vegetarian, so he must have had some aversion to cruelty.
To be fair I think this presumes some things. There are other ways to come to vegetarianism than expanding your circle of concern from humans to animals - religious concerns, for example. You might also think that animals should be respected because they are morally pure and innocent, whereas humans do not get the same benefit - humans are all sinful and dirty and tainted. That's a hilariously misguided sentiment IMO but it's not even a very uncommon one. So someone might be a vegetarian, AND be the greatest villain of all time, AND be consistent.
Of course the lesson isn't that consistency bad, I think you're right about consistency, it's that consistency alone doesn't make a good moral system. But at least if you DO have decent starting axioms, then consistency will allow you to draw the right consequences from them.
This is perhaps the best writing I have read from you since your review of Chesterton's _What's Wrong with the World_ (which is essentially this sentiment sustained for multiple pages), and the extended analogy between active inference/predictive processing and early infant phenomenology:
> Since 2/3 of these are about Gaza, we’ll start there. And since there’s so much virtue-signaling and luxury-believing going around these days, I assure you that what I am about to share is my absolute most honest and deepest opinion, the one I hold in my heart of hearts.
A few months ago, I read an article by an aid worker in Gaza recounting the horrors he’d seen. Among a long litany, one stood out. A little kid came into the hospital with a backpack. The doctors told him he had to put it down so they could treat him, and he refused. The doctors insisted. The kid fought back. Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid’s dead brother. He couldn’t bear to leave him, so he carried them everywhere he went.
I am a Real Man and therefore do not cry. But I confess to getting a little misty at this story, and I know exactly why. When my 1.5-year-old son wakes up early, the first words out of his mouth when I extract him from his crib are “Yaya? Yaya?” which is how he says his sister Lyra’s name. No matter how I distract him, he’ll keep saying “Yaya? Yaya?” and pointing at the door to her room until she wakes up, at which point he’ll get a big smile and run over to her. It’s impossible for me to read this story without imagining her body parts in the backpack and him saying “Yaya? Yaya?” in an increasingly distressed voice, over and over again, until the doctors drag him away.
So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back.
I like this! And thank you for sharing your heart of hearts.
But I feel like you could’ve waited an extra day or two before publication, just to make the post a little more polished.
Specifically I think your take on consistency is wrong. You make it a moral trait, but I think the principal reason we value consistency is that it makes our life easier. If someone believes X today, I will model them as believing X or a consequence of X tomorrow. If they don’t, I’m upset because predicting them is more difficult. I think that’s pretty much it. We like consistency because consistency is helpful to our world modeling. I like it because it’s a nice thing to have.
But not because it’s a source of morality. Which I don’t even believe.
Not disagreeing with you, but maybe refining your point: I’d propose that consistency is specifically important for morality because morality is crucially important for how we treat others in society, and those others are going to want to know that they can trust me and that their moral standards are not founded on whim or what have you.
Scott, the answer to "why are people outraged more by one horrific thing than by another that's similar or worse" is missing the key dimension: whether you feel at least partially responsible for it. By act or by omission. This is qualitatively different from selective media coverage or anecdotal emotional connection. Some horrors are committed by actors where neither side claims to have any relation to you. Or, there's nothing you feel you can do about it. And some horrors are committed by actors that claim that they act in the name of your country, your values, your very name. Sometimes the claim is explicit (Vietnam war fought "for Americans"). Sometimes it is half explicit or implied (Israel "fighting for Western values"). So, the person more horrified by one horror than by another, is simply realizing that these things are done at least in part in their name. And, that there is something they could do about it. And then the horror really sinks in.
To an American, it might count that Gazans were overjoyed at 9/11. They have let themselves to be taken over by a jihadist cult and surely extirpation of jihad is no less urgent for the liberal West than the extirpation of Nazis.
Universal claims of morality, without particular context, tend not to satisfactory outcomes. No doubt, it is noble, but perhaps not conducive to good outcomes.
>Not commonly brought up on Reddit, but Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known by his nickname Hemedti. Hemedti is the commander of the RSF in Sudan, one of the primary belligerents in the Sudanese Civil War right now who is actively waging a campaign of genocidal annihilation against the country's African minorities in the Darfur region. He is largely responsible for the overall civil war in Sudan, which is killing more people than every other active war on the planet combined. It was recently estimated that more than 522,000 children have died of starvation in Sudan since the civil war began and hundreds of thousands of other people have been killed through massacres and the fighting. It could possibly be the bloodiest war of the whole 21st-century and yet you hardly ever hear a fucking peep about it in the Western world at all. Hemedti is one of this century's greatest villains and yet his name is hardly even known outside of a few niche circles. It's maddening
You know the rebuttal to this. You're not stupid. Why do n you pretend you just fell off a truck and never heard "we dont post for Dagalo's weapons and support everything he does"? You have heard this. Why are you pretending you haven't? Do you think there are a lot of people even dumber than you?
It is truly absurd Scott feels he has to carefully couch his views against the mass murder of children and women as somehow valid. The propaganda imperatives are immoral and monstrous from the pro Israel and pro war military colonial forces in the media. It shouldn't require an essay or argument to be strictly against the mass murder or even singular murder of any child anywhere in the world whenever one becomes aware of it.
In absolutely zero other cases or contexts is anyone ever reprimanded or discouraged from caring about child murder except in the case of Israel doing it. No moral super consistency speech police ever show up and complain to anyone raising awareness or seeking action to stop this. No where else is total God like comprehensive omniscience required in order to feel justified in holding any kind of moral opinion. Israeli propaganda often deploys these isolated demands for rigor.
It is all a distraction from their race based apartheid state which literally implementing their final solution in Gaza with a total blockade on food as their leaders openly and loudly demand total annihilation of all Palestinians. Thenwe are called crazy anti Judaism bigots for noticing them banging on the table with blood soaked hands foaming at the mouth about how there are no innocents in 2 million people while they annex the west bank and their settler militias openly murder and steal. While an israeli prison guard who was filmed raping Palestinian prisoners is paraded around on Israeli TV talking up his right to rape and saying the Palestinians are not human.
The propaganda is so extreme while it shouts a desire for genocide and also double speaks and tells you you're insane and denies they're doing what they are openly doing. Denying the nakbha happened while promising a second one and delivering it live on camera for all to see. It is crazy making to speak to anyone who operates in such bad faith and has an official motto of strength through deception.
Very simple. Child murder is wrong. Apartheid is wrong. Ethnosupremacy racism with violence is wrong. Starving people to deathnis wrong. Always. No ifs, ands, or buts. Any context, anywhere. Same with occupation and colonialism. I 100% do not submit myself to anyone else and do not need to explain or justify such views. I'm not here to allow myself moral ambiguity from the lying propaganda class of literal child killers who are taking a break from supporting a child killing serial killer on a spree to speak to me about how they should be allowed to do it and i ahiuod gladly pay them to do it snd guve them weapons to kill more people. They have a right to rape, a right to kill, and a right to exist..I accept they say those words, but I would never accept them as true or valid or worthy of even a moment of consideration.
Inspector child killer is on the scene demanding to gaslight me and make me explain myself with a framing thrust upon me that I'm the suspect under interrogation. Nope.
I agree with you that ultimately these are two entirely different arguments.
One argument is over whether it is ever justified to purposely kill, maim, or starve an innocent child or innocent person because you want to kill a bad guy who happens to be near them. And if it is sometimes okay, exactly how many innocents can be killed in one's attempts to kill the bad guys, before it becomes immoral.
The other argument is over which side has more bad guys, and whose bad guys are worse, and which side is more justified in their desire to murder the other side's bad guys.
The people who want to argue about the second question refuse to engage with the first, or even acknowledge it, though a very rare few will openly admit that they think it's perfectly fine to kill innocent children if it's necessary to kill the bad guys, and it almost doesn't matter how many. But mostly they simply don't want to address this question at all, and pretend it's not valid or is only a cover for taking sides, which is what they want to argue about, so they will always steer it back in that direction. Or perhaps they realize it's a futile argument to have bc they know they aren't going to convince the "killing innocents is always wrong" crowd, but they think they might be able to win over some people on the which bad guys are worse argument.
To people who primarily care about the first question, of course, the second question is totally irrelevant.
I do disagree with you, though, that it is only Israel who is protected from criticism for killing innocents. The same arguments occurred regarding the US wrt to both Vietnam and Iraq, and just the same, there were massive arguments and protests that it was immoral, accompanied by equally heavy handed attempts by those in favor of prosecuting those wars that such arguments needed to be silenced and that they were corrosive, dangerous, anti-American, taking the side of the enemies, etc etc.
There's absolutely no reason to engage in good faith with "why don't you care as much about Yemen/Sudan/North Korea/whatever". He knows the answer. It's not a hard or rare one. Maybe if he was some gormless bluecheck dipshit he's never heard the answer before, but if you're available professional Israel leghunper to that degree you've heard it. You just ignore it, because it's not even a question, or even an argument. It's just a way to call people deranged and bigoted for criticizing Israel.
> I won’t mention where I stand on these questions - partly because I don’t want to start WWIII in the comments
Almost like universal "care" and "empathy" leads to universalization of conflicts.
You say "generalizing towards callousness" when I say "just let’s not care about children at the other side of the world ?". I call this "subsidiarity", and I genuinely continue to think that it’s a good principle.
You might be interested in “Against Empathy” by rockstar psychologist Paul Bloom. He makes the argument that empathy is a very bad guide to moral decision making, because it’s manipulable and inconsistent.
I have consistent belief in "fair fight", "eye for an eye" principle. When Hamas is already crippled and has no capacity to retaliate, any further extended bombing/starving/killing is unnecessary, too over the top and fully qualified as genocide. As an outsider, I see Hamas vs IDF similar to a streetfight: It is ok to deal commensurate retaliation when being punched/provoked, it is not ok to continue punching when your opponent is already laydown and bleeding, it is not ok to permanently incapacitate him just because "if I spare him, he will hit me someday".
The number of death is not the problem per se. The problem is one-side killing.
If the opponent is bleeding but still continues to get up and try to punch you, you are justified in punching them to keep them down.
The parallel is that Hamas simply has to release the hostages and surrender and disarm, and Israel will stop attacking. But right now Hamas is refusing to even *negotiate* the terms of a ceasefire.
As long as there are still hostages in Gaza, this line of reasoning is unreasonable. If Hamas surrendered and released all the hostages, you might have a point, but as long as they continue to engage in warfare, it is bizarre to expect Israel to stop their war effort.
Also, your analogy is missing some key components of the situation. If someone tried to kill too multiple times, and publicly stated that they would not give up until you were dead, would you not eventually defend yourself with lethal force? That is a very different situation from a 1 off street fight. I personally would probably kill them the second time they tried to kill me, but I wouldn’t be so quick to proclaim the guilt if someone who did it the first time in that situation.
Are you familiar with the concept of surrender? And releasing hostages? This is a choice that Hamas has. I'm not saying that I agree with Israel's tactics (I don't) but to use your metaphor, the knocked down opponent is still gleefully throwing rocks at the larger fighter's face.
1/ Hamas did released many hostages, they only kept very few. I am not well-informed on how the negotiation process, but my impression is Hamas is not die-hard on keeping them forever.
2/ Hamas may gleefully throwing rocks and homemade rockets at IDF, but that is far far away from total annihilation of Israel. With eye-for-eye principle, IDF should only fire back at commensurate rate.
I think the facts support that this is one endgame, not necessarily that it's plan A. If I put myself in Bibi's shoes, I want all paths to lead to Israel being secure. If Hamas can be destroyed/exiled and replaced, awesome. If the people can be made to leave, that has many upsides. Every building Israel destroys makes Hamas's hand weaker in other ways too. In addition to the pressure for people to leave, it makes Gaza acutely dependent on foreign aid to rebuild, and who wants to pay to build civilian infrastructure on top of tunnels that Hamas still controls? Sympathetically interpreted, it looks to me like the point is to create an ultimatum for Hamas: there will be no more terrorism from gaza (at least at the scale seen before), either by the easy way or the hard.
I admit I'm much less factually deep on this issue, genuinely curious what you think about the Israeli defense establishment's goals and preferences.
«I’m not even sure I want to become a perfectly rational angelic being who has generalized every principle to the maximum extent - it sounds scarily inhuman. But to the extent that I do generalize, I would like to at least consider generalizing in the direction of more empathy (this one kid tugs at my heart - maybe I should also care about the war in Sudan!) rather than always in the direction of callousness (I didn’t notice the war in Sudan when it was happening - perhaps I’m not allowed to care about this kid either).»
No, it's not callousness, but respectful distance. You have no right, to consume a stranger's suffering like they're a tragic movie for you to indulge your desire for emotional catharsis.
Addiction to vicarious sentimental stimulation is not a virtue, but a dark passion.
Your sentimentality is dehumanizing yourself, as you voluntarily decouple your emotions, which are embodied beliefs about the world, from your actions.
> as you voluntarily decouple your emotions, which are embodied beliefs about the world, from your actions
Emotions have their own rhythm, they come in fast and strong, and they change quickly. Decoupling them from your choice of actions doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
The problems with inconsistency are not with the individuals, who are just reacting to what they see in the media.
The problems with selective and cherry picked outrage at urban war are similar to the problems with selective demands for rigor.
Take the genocide charge. I personally think it’s ridiculous to apply the charge to this war. But if one does, consistency would have applied it to Allied actions in WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, Mosul and Raqqa, to name a few. But if Korean War veterans were regularly called genociders, if South Korea was called a genocidal state (just look up what happened in the war and the rhetoric used if you don’t think the parallel is apt), eventually the term would have lost its emotional valence. The fact that it’s applied selectively creates the problem.
Or take the destruction of hospitals. If you consistently held armies to this standard, the standard would have to be changed because armies routinely violate it - because in fact it is legitimate to target a hospital if it’s used by combatants (this happened in Iraq). So selective outrage on this point creates an impossible standard, while consistency creates reasonable standards.
> because in fact it is legitimate to target a hospital if it’s used by combatants (this happened in Iraq)
It’s not legitimate without warning. It’s only legitimate if there is proof that there are enemy combatants there, perhaps munitions there, and the evidence has to be more satisfactory than a few pictures of a tunnel which could be from anywhere.
Even if the hospital was used as a source of enemy munitions then the lack of warning is still a violation. However Israel has also bombed field hospitals, including make shift tent hospitals built in the grounds of medical centres or just general field hospitals - there were three or so such attacks this year. I doubt if there were tunnels underneath.
And the bombings continue after a few years anyway, is Israel not capable of entering into hospitals in areas it controls to remove Hamas or equipment, if so why is it still bombing whatever remains of the health infrastructure necessary.
I do not often agree with progressives, but I do think Gaza is one issue where progressives are directionally much more correct than centrists/moderates/the grey tribe. Of course, as usual, progressives shoot themselves in the foot by failing to disavow the views of their most extreme members (calls for globalizing the intifada or the eradication of Israel are of course, abhorrent), but they much better adhere to the principle that "killing lots of people is bad". It's true that October 7th was abominable, but a response resulting in, quite plausibly, an order of magnitude more civilian deaths and two orders of magnitude more displaced, cannot be correct. Yet in moderate/grey tribe spaces, it seems the discourse is dominated by "look how different my views are than progressive ones", while explicit condemnations of whatever Israel is doing now (which is a moral catastrophe by any standard) are rare. This is a shame - I am doubtful current progressive ideology has the right epistemology to carefully and truthfully dissect Israel-Gaza relations, but as long as the moderate/grey tribe does not consistently apply the principle "killing lots of people is bad", it will have even less of an answer.
"and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans"
I am not sure that is the whole story. Perhaps it was a case of sour-grapes, but it seems they really did not believe in IQ, thought that IQ is just a "Jewish trickery" skill, and they thought Germans reach achievements through effort, not intelligence. And... yes, Germans are sometimes like that.
Example 1 is German football, which is entirely based on effort, "having four lungs", not style or skills.
Example 2 is Paul Lenard, yes, he was the one who came up with the ridiculous Nazi Physics. But he also had a Nobel. Now, the way he earned that Nobel was not the smart way, like Einstein. He just basically built a ton of equipment for doing physics experiments. So he was more of a "get hands dirty" working man than an abstract thinker. Someone like Edison basically.
Example 3 is basically every German business software ever. They cannot be implemented outside Germany. They are like spaceship consoles, it is one huge screen with a hundred data fields and a hundred buttons and it is clear the programmers did not put much thought into it, but much effort. And the users the same, they are just expected to put effort into learning when to press which button.
Example 4 Mennonites in Paraguay, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filadelfia . They arrived to Paraguay penniless, and the government gave them the worst farmlands (obv the good ones were already taken) and they turned into succesful farmers not by thinking, but by putting an incredible level of effort of testing the combination of every piece of land, every possible crop and so on. They just brute-forced the code of what and how to grow there, so to speak.
Indeed, this is a good metaphor. You can have a high IQ and figure out the password somehow. Or you just brute-force it by effort, trying a gazillion random passwords. Indeed, I would say, Germans often solve problems that way.
>Perhaps it was a case of sour-grapes, but it seems they really did not believe in IQ, thought that IQ is just a "Jewish trickery" skill, and they thought Germans reach achievements through effort, not intelligence.
And then those Jews made nukes for the Allies, so I think it's reasonable to call the Nazi approach to race science flawed.
"Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism."
No, that's a very blind thing to say. Basically a lot of Western people see Israel as a white colonial settler power oppressing brown natives. Thus the entire ire of the Western anti-racist, anti-colonial/post-colonial movement is hating Israel. Israel is sort of everybody's Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, blacks shot in the US by the police, Native Americans exterminated, British Raj in India and everything else like that, all the people who are pissed about all this happily project it to Israel, and project themselves (or generally the victims of all this) on Gaza.
Yeah, and Israel calls this anti-Semitism. They are of course unlucky somewhat that everybody else "civilized" managed to get their atrocities largely done before it became uncool...
1) When a superpower, namely the Soviet Union wants to make a small country look really bad, they generally succeed, even decades after the superpower is not even around, still the money they seeded keeps bringing fruit forth, so to speak.
2) Israel wants to be seen as a Western nation, and there are higher standards for those than the rest. Scotland got the chance to vote for independence twice, because that is the Western way of doing things. Russkies in Eastern Ukraine did not get it once, and it is accepted, because Ukraine is not Western. Austrian German speakers in South Tyrol, Italy, have some awesome levels of bilingual autonomy guaranteed by law. I would like Hungarians in Romania to get the same, but it is not happening, because Romania is not really Western and it is accepted. Despite being in the EU.
3) this truly unfortunate Israel is "white", Palestine is "not white" thing
Israel might call this Anti-Semitism, and this narrative had some success for decades because of the living memory of Nazism and Holocaust, but this is not really a clever or a long-run winning narrative. Everybody understands this is not really that historically typical kind - white kind - of Anti-Semitism. Not even when some Arabs like to read the Protocols. No, Hamas and their sympathizers are not dealing in those kinds of racial theories.
Well, there's no getting away from the fact that Jews are exceptional in many ways. Westernized but still aloof, civilized but without a homeland for millennia. The decision to establish an ethnostate in the middle of a region where they were disliked (and then hated) was both understandable and predictably disastrous. I'm pessimistic about any of this getting better any time soon, narratives included.
Re: the person arguing that people protesting genocide in Gaza are being performative. If the argument is that ethics aren't real ethics where they can't be consistently sustained, then this effectively is to argue that no one can be ethical any time, since no one can be genuinely concerned about anything consistently from day to day. At some point, I'm assuming that, whether you're protesting the war in Gaza, Whale fishing or whatever, obligation takes over. You don't feel *that* concerned about your moral cause today, so you rest on the general principle of social obligation to plug the gap, such that by the time a genuine sense of injustice "does" well up inside you again, you'll still be there to fight the good fight.
I don't think it takes too much self-analysis to see that this is how ethically motivated action happens in practice. I'm pretty sure, even though I'm not a parent, it's what motivates you to look after your kids even when you don't feel especially bonded to them on any given day.
Odd, you wouldn't need to kill everyone in the region to give this kid his brother back. All what was really necessary was not take hostages to begin with.
I don't blame you for your reaction to the story about a child carrying around body parts of family members in a backpack, I do blame you for believing it uncritically.
I think there is a real difference between "caring" in far mode and near mode. (I'd say that the first one is "feeling like you care but not actually caring", but you don't have to buy that description to agree there's a difference).
In general, caring in far mode makes you look for more outrage news, shout more, and do various things that won't help. Caring in near mode makes you look to do things that might actually work. It's the difference between the sort of desperately wanting to fly that makes you jump out of a window, and the sort that makes you spend two thousand hours getting a pilot license.
Some less inflammatory examples of this:
- during BLM, the "abolish the police" movement was mostly upper class white people who saw awful stories about police shootings but didn't have any personal stakes in it. So they put in a lot of effort in organizing protests, but mostly didn't put in the minimal effort required to check what might actually save more black people's lives (meanwhile actual black people, when polled, mostly said that while they wanted real police reforms they also didn't want less police overall because crime was a real problem. Because for them, it was near mode).
- more apolitically, a guy might react to a poster of, say, Sydney Sweeney by going "I'd walk over broken glass to sleep with her". But that same guy probably wouldn't actually be willing to do the hard boring work of maintaining a relationship and building a family with her the way he would with his actually-compatible wife.
I see this internally pretty strongly, even about the exact same issue. When I see a news article about the latest Hamas atrocities or suffering in Gaza or whatever, I get this deep-seated rage provoking me to say I support unspeakable things.
But I've also met a man whose child was being held hostage in Gaza. I've heard jets flying overhead after a night where I had four or five midnight runs for the bomb shelters because those Gazans kept launching rockets at me. And when that happened, my intellectual reaction was something like "reasonably, Hamas needs to be removed". But my emotional reaction was that I'd just had a really bad day, and whoever was on the other side of those jets was about to have an even worse one, and the idea of them getting hurt tore me up inside even if the plane successfully hit the exact people who launched the rockets and no one else. And my mental reaction when I think, not about rage inducing headlines, but about the actual man I met whose child is an actual hostage, is to want to do whatever is pragmatic and reasonable that will get his child back but also do the minimum possible harm to anyone else, even terrorists.
I recently ran into Ahmed Alkhatib, who seems like the one pro-palestinian guy who genuinely, desperately cares about helping the people there. And it's telling that when he writes about it he doesn't do it by ranting about how actually it's the other side who's pure evil and people just need to see that (although he does clearly hate Israel). He actually tries to say the things that might help, to work to understand international or Palestinian or Israeli politics enough to figure out where and how to push to make things better. And while I think he's often wrong or unfair in what he says about Israel, I've also noticed he only does that when the mistakes don't actually matter towards achieving his goals.
And this made me realize why the western pro-palestine movement infuriates me so badly. It's not that they seem to hate me personally. It's that they *don't care*. They care enough to shout, but not to actually do something to make things better (they overwhelmingly only do things that make the situation much, much worse for everyone involved). They don't care enough to learn enough about the situation to get basic facts right, or to come up with a plan to do something that might actually possibly make anything better for anyone involved. They want to win online flame wars, when for me it's about actual real people dying and I care enough to actually want to do what it takes to stop. I understand in principle that this is just how human psychology works, that people just aren't built to genuinely care about far mode. But this isn't in far mode for me, and I get infuriated by the people who see so much misery and don't care enough to actually do something that could make it better.
So I don't mind if Alkhatib calls me a war criminal just for growing up in Israel. At least he's doing it because he cares enough to want things to be better. The rest of the online Palestine movement can go straight to hell.
If my country is in the military supply chain for the IDF, and/or Israel depends on my country for diplomatic support, and my country is a democracy, that's not near-mode the way it is for yourself, but neither is it far-mode altogether. I feel bad for immigrants trying to get into the USA and getting deported but that is 100% not my responsibility. That's far mode. Who I vote for and what they do does make a (very modest) difference in the middle east, so there is a sense of responsibility.
Near mode vs far mode is about what affects you, not what you can affect. If you're a white American "ban the police" protestor your vote absolutely determines how the police is run, but you're not affected by it directly and you're operating in far mode.
Does every single person wanting to defund the police experience zero crime? Near/far is a spectrum. And the effect that choices have on the conscience is real, as cheap as that might seem to people who in the centre of a crisis.
Hamas has prioritized bringing international attention to their plight so as to pressure Israel into yielding through other countries' diplomacies, sanctions, and other pressures.
Israel has prioritized the difficult maneuver of a fighting a ground war in urban areas against combatants embedded within the civilian population. A population for whom they are also managing huminatarian aid provisions under chaotic and hostile conditions.
There of course are stories of dismemberment and family devastation from 10/7 as well. Many of these stories still haven't reached wide public visibility, not because they are Jewish stories, but because the Israeli government is respecting victims' family privacy and because religious authorities in Israeli follow strict guidelines around burial and the dignity of the deceased.
Hamas has stated hostage rescue operations will be met by summary executions, forcing Israel to rely solely on negotiations to liberate their captives. On this war's public relations front only, Hamas is clearly winning, and this makes hostage negotiations more difficult for Israel.
In wars, the party who can no longer endure the injuries the other opposing party inflicts has to surrender.
At this stage of the war, the losses Hamas tries to incur are in the realm of Israel's international relations, through media stories such as the one referenced.
Iran is a weak state with an unpopular government ruled by an 86 year old dictator. Considering that Israel is committing genocide, it’s reasonable to be more concerned about Israel’s actual nuclear stockpile rather an a hypothetical one that a hypothetical “crazy leader” may one day obtain. This characterization reeks of the Orientalist racism that’s a so ingrained in Israel - those crazy Iranians can’t have nukes, but us good people, no problem. Hyping up Iran as a threat is another tactic to unify Israeli society behind its war criminal president, as nothing bonds people together like an external, existential enemy. The same is true in reverse, with the Iranian regime and Israel locked in codependent enmity for their own survival. In peacetime Israel would naturally disintegrate.
“Orientalist racism” seems like a weird term considering that the wellspring of Israeli racism comes from the Mizrahim. You’re just shoving in meaningless academic lingo at that point. This is religious and ethnic resentment fueled by proximity, nothing to do with whatever you think orientalism means
In my world Orientalism stands for a form of anti Arab/Persian bias, but whatever. The stereotype of the crazy Iranian dictator is textbook Orientalism, according to how the term is used in my community. Concerning “religious resentment fueled by proximity”, assuming I read you correctly, I’d argue resentment is fueled by genocide, colonialism, land theft, starvation, and settler terrorism rather than simplistic “religious resentment.”
Orientalism is a loaded term in post-modern theory and implies a form of bias generated through imperfect perception of the “Other.” It’s somewhere in the space between idealization and infantilization. The term was invented as a cudgel to beat westerners with. It’s difficult to say that Mizrahi Jews view Arabs as “Other” in the sense intended by post-colonial scholars considering that they are ancient residents of the Middle East who have long lived among Arabs.
You misread me on the resentment part. I’m saying that Israel acts the way it does in part because of the ethnic and religious resentment felt by Mizrahi Jews towards Arabs, which is the driving populist force behind the Israeli far right. This is a resentment fueled in part by (1) a long history of living under Arab/persian/ rule; and (2) a more recent history of marginalization within Israeli society, where the elite and wealthy skew ashkenazi and can be prejudiced towards mizrahim, resulting in mizrahim tending to live at the margins near or among Palestinian Arabs.
No reason for the hostility, I agree with you that Israel is BAD. You just lack a bit of nuance in understanding the situation
Well it’s the portion of Israeli society that best fits the descriptor “racist.” The American far right would love for the United States to fall as well (even under the Trump admin, which they constantly feel betrayed by) but that doesn’t stop people from associating them with “fascist” actions of the government
So, you don't know. You aren't actually personally aware of these people, enough that you could ask for clarification.
The American Far Right isn't paying people to develop and get bad ideas into circulation in American politics (debatably, Joe Biden was. Don't get side-tracked).
Fascism is a current darling of the left, a standin for boogeyman.
Interestingly I never felt this kind of love for my own child when she was small. I mostly found her annoying the same way I find cats and dogs annoying, any being you cannot actually talk with, and occasionally leaks disgusting fluids, is basically just a waste of oxygen for me. Now that my child is pushing 12 I love her, partially because now we can be like friends and just chat about fun stuff, and partially because she is smart, successful and I am kinda proud that it partially came from my genetics.
It is kinda strange, I do understand that any well working evolution turns on a huge amount of love for your own baby/toddler, somehow it did not work for me. I wonder what is wrong with me, whether just being spectrumy can mean this or there is something even more wrong - I actually find it very hard to feel anything for people... I can get attached to people and thus miss them if they die, such as my parents, but somehow I am not really sure whether it is real love or just missing something you really got used to - I miss my old home just the same way as I miss them...
I think what you’re describing is generally more typical of males. It’s historically uncommon for men to be present at the birth or involved in infant childcare for a reason. Many honest fathers will tell you they felt pride and love, generally, at the birth, but did not feel any great connection (and maybe even had a bit of disgust) for the physical newborn infant itself.
yes but we keep being told we must be modern males now... I was even told that I am really expected to be present at birth. she sent me out in 10 min because all I could do was to pace around nervously and ask every 30 sec "are you sure you are okay?"
I think in general you're expected to hold her hand (and understand that she's only in pain some of the time, and have a conversation or something), and/or listen to her cursing your lineage. : - )
Yes, being on the spectrum entails a lot of disassociation from "normal". If you are convincingly able to "fake" being in love with the kid until she is of age to be interesting, you've done well enough for your genes to continue. Have a Cookie. Being a psychopath with enough forethought to fake having empathy is also not a sin.
For what is worth, I experimented a minor version of this too. Mi feelings for my small children also took a long time to develop, and still don't map to what "normies" report they feel about them. I still love them, and protect them, and care for them.
But the whole "inconditional, infinite love" experience is still absent. It's "just" a normal amount of love for another familiar person, like with the rest of my family (both close and extended). Not higher than for very close friends.
"Everybody has some moral impulses. Those become principles only under the influence of a desire for consistency and for the dignity of a rational being."
Eh. This must be rare. I think most people are moral the same way I am, simply not having any desires strong enough that would involve pissing someone off and thus suffering adverse consequences. And then we put on a pretense of goodness, because it is socially useful. Maybe we even believe it ourselves.
Would it change your mind if (hypothetically but not improbably) the boy was carrying around body parts of his dead brother because he had been a glorious martyr for Hamas, and those around him had been encouraging him to do so?
To me, that would signify a very sick and failed culture. And you could have all sorts of sympathy for the boy in that case, but you could still be quite willing to let that culture end.
>Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value.
I suspect a large part is that we lack the shared moral principles necessary for productive moral dicussions. In order to show that your interlocutor is morally in the wrong, you and he (and any lurkers reading) need to agree on what sorts of behaviour are actually right or wrong; if you don't agree on that, he'll likely just reject your framing altogether. So you basically have to start from moral first principles, prove that your system of morality is correct, and then prove that his position is contrary to this, which will take a lot of time, be very difficult, and is highly liable to get side tracked. On the other hand, showing that your opponent is a hypocrite is, in principle, much easier -- you don't need to show that your view of morality is superior to his, you just need to show that his actions and/or beliefs are inconsistent in some way.
(Of course, this assumes you actually understand your opponent's belief system well enough to recognise what is and isn't inconsistent with it, which a lot of people don't.)
From the post: "is there a principle that countries which suffer terrorist attacks have the right to defend themselves? If no, then kids might lose their siblings in terrorist attacks that haven’t been disincentivized; if yes, that “defense” might produce “collateral damage”. Is there a principle that people who have had their land stolen can launch terrorist attacks to get it back?"
Here's the difference: the terrorist attack is a fact, while the stealing of the land, in this context, is an empty slogan. Gaza stolen? Using an argument like this renders the subsequent discussion worthless.
Well, the idea is that the whole of Israel was stolen from the Palestinians. Obviously you can’t launch your terrorist attack from the stolen land (you don’t have it anymore), but the argument is that in order to discourage land stealings, terrorist activity upon stolen land is perhaps justifiable. Not sure that I agree (what land wasn’t stolen from someone at some point), but it is logically consistent.
That's clear, but the abstraction level is different: that "the whole of Israel was stolen from the Palestinians" is, as you say, an idea, albeit a marginal one, whereas the terror attack is a stark and very graphic reality. Israel chose not to make the pictures of decapitated babies public, not giving Scott a chance to commiserate. Virtue-signalling can come "from the heart", too.
Israel says a lot of things. Not all of them are true. The horrors of the "terror attack" are bad enough that they'd give you nightmares if you had to watch them. Israel has no need to exaggerate, but they do so anyway.
Granted, no decapitated babies, bad exaggeration. Btw, why is it? Are you certain it's an exaggeration? If you are, can you be certain of any "horrors", even minor ones? Any ranking of those?
The worst of the horrors are ones that you'd really rather never read about. They involve medics keeping soldiers alive for longer, in order to keep torturing them. For money, you know? This is for donations...
You listen to non-biased parties (or ones that can be said to be "wish death on all their souls"), you learn things. Certain people have jobs that entail "distinguishing truth from fiction." You listen to them, you learn things. I'm pretty damn certain, because I like my friends' track records and ability to access and interpret sensitive information.
Prediction: The norms against speaking out against Israel in US politics and media were eroding over time before, due to structural and ideological changes in journalism and demographic change in the country, among other things. But the Gaza war has accelerated this massively. Those norms are nearly gone.
Individual media or political figures in the US will still be pro or anti Israel for whatever reason, but the norm that prevented most criticism of Israel by those folks is probably gone for good--I suspect that will be a permanent knock-on effect of this war. That would probably not have been true if Israel had fought the war/handled the invasion and occupation differently, but I think that ship has sailed now. Netanyahu can lose power today, a new coalition can stop the bombing and most of the shooting and make sure there's enough food in Gaza for everyone, and the end result will still be that this norm is gone for good in the US.
I expect this will have some very big consequences in the next 20 years.
What direction do you think the impact would be? 20 years ago it might have been larger. Right now Israel has historic levels of peace and trade with its neighbors and the trend is for more. It is economically viable enough on its own that the subsidy provided by the US isn’t existential. If the US treats Israel more neutrally - what kind of impacts do you anticipate?
I don't have much intuition for how it's going to work out for Israel overall, but it sure seems like there was a very different set of norms about how Israel was discussed in mainstream US news before the Oct 7 attacks, and how it will be discussed going forward.
Consistency doesn’t quite capture the idea well. I want to be able to learn and adapt to new information, which means that I may learn that principles i was using are inappropriate. But then i want to find new principles that are appropriate, rather than just do whatever I feel like. And deep down, principles are heuristics that won’t work every time, so emergencies may arise where it is obviously better for everyone to ignore the principle, but openly and giving restitution to anyone who gets trampled. But then it gets too easy to use motivated reasoning. Darn.
As I replied elsewhere: inconsistency is just a proxy heuristic for identifying flawed reasoning. The problem isn’t inconsistency but lack of epistemological process. It just gets weaponized as rhetorical method beyond its heuristic value. A rationalist seeing inconsistency should question if there is actually a differing data or principles that justify that difference or if the person is just self-rationalizing something in their own interest, with tribal blinders, or just unexamined surface opinion. It probably does end up being a good heuristic for average people encountering barrages of bullshit, outside of more intellectual circles.(within such circles plenty of bullshit exists but you need more that inconsistency to identify the flaw)
I think an important virtue of consistency is that it provides "ability to model another actor well enough to form compromises with them".
If someone says they believe life begins at conception, that's a reasonable position. It's not one I personally hold, but I can certainly understand that (vs viability, or implantation, etc) as being where to draw the line.
If the person believes that consistently, then maybe we can collaborate to advance policy goals that we both find acceptable, if not ideal. E.g. they might support long-term contraceptives that prevent ovulation, or something like vasagel that makes sperm unviable.
Maybe we even form some sort of alliance, and I cede on their position banning early-term abortion, but know I can count on them to support my efforts for prenatal nutrition.
But if that person has no objection to IVF, then how can we form an alliance? Their beliefs shift by the topic or the moment: they have no internal integrity, and so I can't count on their actions later to be **consistent** with their actions now.
This gets at the real point. It isn’t about consistency. Changing your mind because you learn more about something might be good. It is about epistemic foundations. Consistency is just a weak heuristic for assessing various epistemic flaws: such as the lack of having a rational basis for forming beliefs.
Scott’s moral position in this piece reminds me of the New Zealand moral philosopher (& Kant-scholar) Jonathan Bennett (1930 - 2024 ).
In particular Bennett’s discussion of how we ought to juggle the relationship between our general moral principles (our strive for moral consistency) and the emotional pull of our sympathies and antipathies (the emotions triggered by the Gaza child carrying the remains of his brother in his rucksack, including emotions toward those who caused his suffering).
Here's the Reader’s Digest version of Bennett. See if you agree that this is rather Scott-like:
…“sympathy”: I use the term to cover every sort of fellow-feeling, as when one feels pity over someone’s loneliness, or horrified compassion over his pain, or when one feels a shrinking reluctance to act in a way which will bring misfortune to someone else. These feelings must not be confused with moral judgments. My sympathy for someone in distress may lead me to help him, or even to think that I ought to help him; but in itself it is not a judgment about what I ought to do but just a feeling for him in his plight.
…
Obviously, feelings can impel one to action, and so can moral judgments; and in a particular case sympathy and morality may pull in opposite directions…. For example, a small child, sick and miserable, clings tightly to his mother and screams in terror when she tries to pass him over to the doctor to be examined. If the mother gave way to her sympathy, that is to her feeling for the child’s misery and fright, she would hold it close and not let her doctor come near; but don’t we agree that it might be wrong for her to act on such a feeling? Quite generally, then, anyone’s moral principles may [sometimes] apply to a particular situation in a way which runs contrary to the particular thrusts of fellow-feeling that he has in that situation.
….
…one can live by principles and yet have ultimate control over their content. And one way such control can be exercised is by checking of one’s principles in the light of one’s sympathies. This is sometimes a pretty straightforward manner. It can happen that a certain moral principle becomes untenable – meaning literally that one cannot hold it any longer when one sees what the principle leads to. One’s experience may play a large part here; experience evokes feelings, and feelings force one to modify principles.
…
…we cannot look at our own moralities and declare them bad. This is not arrogance: it is obviously incoherent for someone to declare the system of moral principles that he accepts to be bad, just as one cannot coherently say of anything that one believes it but it is false.
Still, although I can’t point to any of my beliefs and say “This is false”, I don’t doubt that some of my beliefs are false; and so I should try to remain open to correction. Similarly, I accept every single item of my morality – that is inevitable – but I am sure that my morality could be improved, which is to say that it could undergo changes which I should be glad of once I had made them. So I must try to keep my morality open to revision, exposing it to whatever valid pressures there are – including pressures from my sympathies.
(Extracts from J. Bennet: The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn. First published in Philosophy, 1974.)
“Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid’s dead brother.”
Some time last year a Gazan father publicly displayed the body of his own daughter, killed in the Israeli destruction of their apartment building, by hanging her (what was left of her) by the neck with piano wire at the site of the ruined apartment building.
I think it’s a lot less likely that Gazans are expressing such intense grief for the loss of loved ones (that they believe, with all sincerity and conviction, are now residing eternally and perfect in Allah’s hereafter) that they lose their minds and do things that we don’t understand, and more that the culture of Gaza simply doesn’t have our Western taboo about the desecration of human bodies. Gazan hospitals were “depositing” the remains of their own in bulldozed mass graves even before the war started.
I’m not a cultural relativist- cultural values can be wrong. But plenty of cultural differences needn’t have any specific moral value. What makes any kind of view of bodily desecration good or bad?
>"I won’t mention where I stand on these questions - partly because I don’t want to start WWIII in the comments, partly because I’m not that sure myself - but I want to defend considering them."
The Schelling point answers are international law: with useful guides including e.g. UN groups, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice, and human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
Bret Weinstein, in addressing the Glenn Greenwald controversy, make an important point. Whatever your personal default position is on the morality of his actions, you should take a maximally charitable stance in light of the circumstances of the leak. Otherwise you're handing the bad guys a weapon that could be used against almost anyone who falls out of their favor.
I think there's a similar consideration when it comes to Gaza. There's nothing wrong with saying you personally relate to and feel outraged by some particular tragedy for subjective reasons. But what the analysis is missing is how and why the outrage came to your attention. There's nothing organic about it. It's a narrative consistently pushed in a single direction by some very bad actors, carefully crafted to pull on your heartstrings. They're cynically using your sympathy to perpetuate the very suffering you find so horrific. For that reason alone, you should be very skeptical of your knee-jerk reactions.
These article and recent events made me decide to finally attempt to write my own article on scope sensitivity and the banality of evil.
I'm nowhere near as eloquent at you with emotional writing (or in general), and I usually don't try to go for emotional writing as a result. Normally, I prefer some combination of direct statements and try, "above it all" humor. But here's my best attempt to date:
>the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans
This isn't true. It's an urban legend that arises from a conflation of a few different facts.
In 1938, Erich Jaensch, a noted Nazi psychologist, publicly denounced the Binet-Simon Test on the grounds that it was a Jewish invention (which was partly true -- Binet and Simon were not Jewish themselves, but the Jewish psychologist William Stern had played an important role in helping to develop their formula), and that it rewarded "an intelligence type strongly prevailing among Jews". A few years later, in 1942, the Luftwaffe abolished aptitude tests for pilots, and the German Army soon did the same for officers.
However, the tests that were abolished weren't the same ones that had been previously denounced as "Jewish", and the reasons given had nothing to do with the prior denunciations. At that stage of the war, it was more about streamlining the recruitment process in order to address their crippling manpower shortage. And in any event, removing tests from the recruitment process is not the same as a blanket ban on IQ research generally.
Putting all of that aside, even if this *had* happened as stated, I'm not sure what you think would be "inconsistent" about it. Suppressing any research that could be used to justify favouring Jews over "Aryans" seems entirely consistent with Nazi ideology to me.
>So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back.
Interesting to see there's still a human there underneath all the crufted up utilitarian epicycles.
The autocrat who thinks they are good? They'll make your life hell, and that'll never stop. They are incentivized to do it continually, to devise systems, even, to make sure that you keep on getting keelhauled.
As a non-Jewish person with no skin in that game, my take on any situation where your neighbor is committed to the annihilation of your society is simple:
The threatened state should promise that any act of war will be met with overwhelming force until such a time as those in charge of the neighboring state make binding and credible promises to live in peace and harmony. My advice to Israel would be to step it up before toning it down. I see Israel as 99% in the right, and the Palestinians as 99% wrong.
The choice is clear. The weaker neighbor needs to concede the stronger neighbor’s right to exist, or face the consequences of their beliefs. Failure to make this concession and cease in all hostilities can result in total annihilation.
Seems Scott’s claim contradicts the ethos of effective altruism. Assuming there’s a limited amount of diplomatic attention the world can aim towards a given conflict, then the massive amount attention Western citizens demand be focused on Israel surely must reduce the international community’s capacity towards solving other conflicts with way higher death tolls.
Why isn’t the utilitarian strategy EAs employ not relevant here?
What a brilliant and poignant demonstration of how the heart and brain interact. Having really young kids makes those "heart-strings" extra fine-tuned. Must have something to do with depressed testosterone levels (look it up) that come with raising your own kids rather than going the sperm-bank route to natural selection.
My oldest was 2-3 years old when those awful photos of Alan Kurdi washing up on the Turkish beach were in the news. When I first saw the photos I was a mess for the rest of the day. Like your example with Gaza I would have done anything to bring that poor kid back but of course nothing could be done about the past and things to 'never again' this awful thing were rather hard to imagine with any degree of certainty.
And in retrospect although I still feel horrible about Alan, I'm also aware that the image was partly responsible for the EU opening the gates to unlimited migration of refugees, which in part led to Brexit and Trump. And I can't help but wonder if the world would have been better off if those photos were never taken.
I am genuinely so glad to hear that you are a parent! I had worried for a while now that you might not partake in that part of the human experience, but the world could definitely use more of you!
It’s amazing the knots people will contort themselves into, the empty mantras they repeat, the mental walls they put up, all to avoid confronting the simple reality of Israel slaughtering, starving, maiming and immiserating the people whose land Israel took to make way for Israel. Yes, the pro-Palestinian position is full of annoying and misinformed people, yes Hamas bad, but those fundamentals are the simple truth. There’s a reason why most of the world feels this way; believe your eyes.
I feel like this is all making things needlessly complicated for no reason. I'm not even Jewish, but to me it seems evident that the only question worth asking is: if the shoe were on the other foot, would Hamas treat the Jews less bad, or worse, than Israel is treating the Palestinians? Since the answer is obviously worse, therefore, anything Israel does in the prosecution of this war is morally acceptable. Optimal? No, but we never get optimal, so who cares about that. Acceptable? Yes.
At such time as the Israelis have exterminated ten million Palestinians, which I guess would require invading Jordan or something, at such time as we have a recording of an IDF soldier ecstatically calling his parents saying "Ma! I bagged ten Palestinians with my own hands! Ten!", I will agree that both sides are equally bad and that it doesn't matter who wins the war, it's a coinflip and I don't care. If the Israelis do something *worse* than this, I will agree they are the bad side and should not have been allowed a free hand; however, just reading this should make it obvious to everyone how preposterous even the vaguest possibility of such an outcome is. Once properly framed, it's clearly absurd.
Until that time comes, literally anything that ends the war with a durable victory for Israel is fine by me. I would *prefer* if the Gazans were all deported per the Trump-Netanyahu plan (and in analogy with e.g. the displacement of three million Germans from now-Polish territory after WWII), but if they have to kill all of them, we're still eight million up on the balance sheet, so go hog wild.
I think that "is Israel acting worse than a randomly picked Arab country / nation [would]?" and "is Israel acting worse than a civilized Western liberal democracy would?" are two distinct questions, and pretending like the whole situation can be summed up in the former one is a huge logical mistake.
I think if Israel would be treated just like Azerbaijan, and it would be supported by Western powers (first and foremost the US) just as they support Azerbaijan, no one would care (except the Jews and the anti-semitists, of course).
"Randomly picked"? Hamas are not a randomly picked alternative timeline, they're exactly and specifically the enemy side in the war that has been prosecuted for the last decades, and thus the appropriate subject of the only actually relevant alternative outcomes worth discussing. Talking about randomly picked Arab nations is, excuse me, nothing more than a sophism intended to shuffle away the concrete reality precisely in favor of talking about abstractions where Israel's conduct can be criticized as not living up to some irrelevant optimum, instead of acknowledging that the actual, real ghouls with whom they are really grappling are worse, and would do worse if the shoe were on the other foot.
I think you misunderstood my comment in two distinct ways.
The first is that, pretty much, you cannot pick an Arab country which fares better than Israel in practically anything, would the situation reverse. Yes, they are, to borrow a phrase from a parallel thread of comments, "less barbaric" than even Tunisians or Moroccans, probably, but to Egyptians or Yemenis or Saudis or Palestinians (I mean, Gazans -- the West Bank looks like a completely different type for some reason), it is a no-brainer.
But the second is that you seem to stick to a tangential idea, completely missing the point (can't tell if deliberately or by mistake). Even if Israel is "less barbaric" than any random Arab country in general, or the Gazans in particular, would act in their shoes, they can still be "barbaric" -- at least, "a lot more barbaric than any Western democratic country should be". Committing war crimes on a daily basis, or doing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or maintaining an apartheid state sameplace, those are things which Russia and Turkey and Azerbaijan do, and if Israel joins this club, it should be treated likewise.
I feel like we’re all living in Omelas but there’s no magic behind having to torture the kid, it’s just that if you talk about the kid too much you lose the election to people who actively want to go down there and punch the kid in the face. The kid is Gaza and the climate and animal suffering and all the rest. It sucks that the only real way to win large amounts of power in our system is to just talk a lot about how much you love fracking and cutting taxes on tips or whatever.
Another of the many recent articles I just stopped reading after the first lines. The older I get the more I internalize the old recommendation: don't care about things you cannot change. 40 years ago daily TV and news were exactly the same: a war, unemployment, a natural desaster and Israel and Palestine trying to kill each other - and random people shouting at each other about caring for the one or the other ...
As the father of twins I think that all four members of your family would be better off if you moved the little ones into the same bedroom! Not being alone at night is enormously comforting for young children.
My view on these discussions, especially around something unpleasant like war, is that there's too much effort spent on just enumerating bad things that everyone agrees are bad. I'm not saying there's no value at all in doing this - for example maybe it helps people to be reminded of the horrors of war so that they will have some hesitancy before jumping to conflict in the future.
But in terms of actually deciding what's the right thing to do now (either for the parties directly involved or for others) I think the effort spent on calling bad things bad is pretty useless. In a scenario like war there's pretty much nothing but bad things. The choice is always among two or more evils. So if all you do is say "well this is clearly bad" then you never get anywhere.
And yet that's the dominant mode of discussion I see on the topic. Either you have the extremists who just list their opponents' atrocities, or you have the moderates who faithfully report the badness on both sides and then have nothing more to say. The whole "is there a principle..." part of your epicycle is essentially nonexistent.
Thanks for writing this, Scott. It’s ridiculous to believe that the corrective to (unavoidable) emotional hypocrisy is to suppress all emotion, rather than to expand our emotional capacity. As a future physician and Jewish American who has followed your writing for many years, I am glad that you have chosen to publicly defend humanism in this moment, despite the guaranteed fallout.
I was actually astounded talking to people after Avengers Infinity War; that so many thought Loki giving Thanos the space stone (as a hostage ransom for Thor); and Gamora giving him the soul stone (as hostage ransom for Nebula) were correct decisions.
"I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back."
"Hitler was a vegetarian, so he must have had some aversion to cruelty."
You cannot be serious.
He had IBS or something and occasionally ate meat. He was in-fact a very cruel person, as evidenced on a grand scale by his leaving Germany to be destroyed instead of surrendering, the Holocaust, and on a more intimate scale by either psychologically torturing his niece into suicide, or killing her himself.
You're being very unfair to the people you quote, Scott and misrepresenting or misunderstanding his viewpoint.
I'm try again.
They're drawing attention to the sinister side of the attention around Gaza.
Let's take another example. Say a Canadian TV news station, chooses to every hour of every day broadcast details of Chinese people beating people up. Never anyone else, Chinese people are actually less likely to beat people up than non-Chinese people, and it's all happening a million miles away so it's unclear why it's so important to the Canadian news station.
(The Canadian news station explains they're just really upset about people being beaten up; and why are you complaining about them talking about an important issue? Don't you care about the people being beaten up that they're reporting on? What are you a monster?)
Mysteriously, sentiment on Chinese people goes down. Book publishers don't want to publish stories about Chinese people. Chinese establishments get their windows smashed. People start openly talking about China shouldn't exist. Chinese people start pretending to be Japanese in public. Stories of Chinese tourists being attacked around the world happen every day, but only in Chinese news sources.
People like Hen Mazzig comment that something is really dodgy here. The activity (total focus on one group who do a tiny and much lower than per capita level of beating people up) doesn't make sense given the stated goals (to draw attention to upsetting things)...
... Hen Mazzig suggests maybe the reason might be that someone at the news station hates Chinese people and wants everyone else to hate them to?
And you make fun of him and write an essay that you just care too much about people being beaten up because you have a baby.
Scott, many of us have babies. One of my older ones gets beaten up and yelled at at school for being Jewish. Hopefully yours won't experience this, but statistically it's highly likely they will.
Talking of your posts years ago. I remember you drawing attention to many bloggers and news stories focusing on the very small proportion of nerdy awkward men as rapists despite them being a small minority; and complained that they were just demonizing these men for the sake of it. (And compared it to Nazi propaganda.)
Maybe have a chat with that version of Scott and ask him why he just doesn't care enough about women getting raped?
Out of all things to bring up here, Hamas' lack of support for a Jewish state seems unusually weak. After all, the current government of Israel is ideologically committed to there being no Palestinian state in the region. Should that make me feel less bad for the victims of the October 7th attack?
Was the source for the story Youmna El Sayed? Wasn't she the same Al Jazeera reporter who reported that Hamas was trying to release hostages for humanitarian reasons and Israel was refusing to receive them? She's not the most reliable person in the world I'm afraid. Also, common sense here, that backpack would vomit-inducingly stink. Like it would be hard to stand around. So the thing "after a while the doctors looked in the backpack" thing is ringing red alarm bells for me.
I don't think whether it's true or not matters for the wider argument because obviously there's no shortage of horrible things in war.
But if you're distressed by the story maybe it might reduce your distress to look into the reliability of the author.
So Scott, if you or anyone else like you ever bothered to notice the pattern, by which Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described - you’d figure out where Hen Mazzig’s accusation of antisemitism comes from. By the same token, if any of you noticed that the alleged victims of Jews’ ontological evil are always worthy of the emotional reactions you described, you’d get why Hen identifies the cause as antisemitism.
Yes, I know you’re Jewish. And yes I know that the story of this Gazan boy reached you whereas the 6 year old boy abused in Hamas’ dungeons after they killed his father in front of him, apparently, did not. And yet somehow you and people like you have endless capacity to ignore suffering and abstract away specifics in this region - right until the suffering serves the purpose of undermining the security of 10 million Israelis, at which point suddenly you’re attentive.
> Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told
Everything else aside, surely this isn't true? I can think of like three oscar winning Holocaust movies in the span of typing this sentence (Zone of Interest, Schindler's List, The Pianist). Also I think the Old Testament ended up being fairly important in the grand scheme of things. I'm not sure I could, off the top of my head, name *any* oscar winning movies or important cultural touchstone books about, like, Punjabi Sikhs. (That's not to say that one is more important than the other or comment at all on the moral validity of anything above. It's just that this comment immediately struck me as hyperbolic and probably hurts your larger point like...a lot.)
Yes. I'm Jewish, a supporter of Israel, and I'm even someone who is slow to criticize the war in Gaza (essentially Haviv Rettig Gur speaks for me: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/ask-haviv-anything/episodes/Episode-28-The-Gaza-Paradox-e35idco).
But the idea that Jews are treated uniquely unsympathetically is ridiculous. The reasons Israel gets more attention than other countries are clear (U.S. support, the many ties between American and Israeli Jews, and the fact that it's in many ways a Western country--it's even in Eurovision). And while anti-semites certainly join in the criticism of Israel, I recognize that the vast majority of Israel's critics are motivated by genuine and real compassion for suffering Palestinians, even when I think their criticisms are misplaced or one sided.
Jews are treated about as the South African whites/Indians are treated. Prove me wrong. (Nobody's talking about the people eating beating children's hearts either).
In both Israel and South Africa's case, there are ideological reasons for "information promotion and suppression."
Here's my attempt to rewrite this with the exaggeration removed: The current Israeli government [not Jews in general] are treated almost as badly by US progressives [not by everyone, certainly not conservatives] as the people making claims of genocide against South African whites.
What in what I wrote was exaggeration? You're attempting to switch both parts of the analogy. My discussion is with people, not with governments. Therefore, my examples and my core understanding is with people.
Edited: upon reread (did you edit? not sure): You can switch Jews to Israelis, that's fine, include the Druze if you want.
I don't know what this comment even means. And I don't see anyone talking about people eating beating children's hearts (I'm sure someone has made that claim about someone, but it's not something even the far left believes, much less being a mainstream idea).
> (Nobody's talking about the people eating beating children's hearts either).
I legitimately have no idea what that could be referring to. Do you have a cite?
Did I not just mention information suppression?
Here's a cite to the particular timeframe:
https://kprcradio.iheart.com/featured/walton-and-johnson/content/2021-07-16-only-place-not-looted-in-south-african-mall-was-the-bookstore/
You can also read about the coverup of the "only place not looted was the bookstore" -- because it's off narrative, so needed to be "corrected". Ahem, did I not say "fact-checked"?
No mention of children, hearts, or eating in the text behind that link. Source it cites in turn wants me to sign in, so that's inaccessible. I'm not calling you a liar, there's just this frustrating thing where you're... "gesturing at an emotive context," I suppose, rather than making explicit, factual claims with enough detail to be independently checked.
> Did I not just mention information suppression?
If I made a credible effort to 'keep up with the news,' that could be relevant. I don't, and that policy has been notably beneficial for my mental health. Accordingly, I have very limited patience for claims about what some third party strives to prevent me from finding out. Please, stop dancing like the kind of person who has secrets they might soon share, and start actually communicating. https://dresdencodak.com/2012/09/26/dark-science-21/
https://dresdencodak.com/2017/05/15/dark-science-76-the-epistemological-impasse/
"The reasons Israel gets more attention than other countries are clear (U.S. support, the many ties between American and Israeli Jews, and the fact that it's in many ways a Western country--it's even in Eurovision)."
Surely this should all lead to *less* criticism of Israel and *more* leeway for them to do as they please, rather than the opposite which is what we actually see. Positive attention instead of absurd isolated demands for moral rigor.
No. It leads to much more rigor, especially from the left, because it puts Israel in the "oppressor" category of its oppressor/victim paradigm. If people began to die in police custody in France, you would see far, far more attention than if it were to happen in Niger or Surinam or Indonesia.
"No. It leads to much more rigor, especially from the left, because it puts Israel in the "oppressor" category of its oppressor/victim paradigm."
Right, that's what *does* happen, but it's not what rationally *ought* to happen.
"If people began to die in police custody in France, you would see far, far more attention than if it were to happen in Niger or Surinam or Indonesia."
Only because we don't expect civilized nations to act like brutes; it's a man-bites-dog situation, newsworthy because surprising. That's not analogous to Israel/Palestine, where people are *actively rooting for the barbarians to win* and trying their best to trip up the Israelis. The analogous situation for your France example would be if people insistently claimed that it's better to live in Indonesia because there 33% of people in police custody die mysteriously, instead of just 0.001% like in France. Actively taking the absurdly wrong side on purpose.
I think there are elements of angry agreement here. The original poster observed that Israel is held to a higher standard than the Palestinians, and concluded this must be because of antisemitism.
Gordon has argued that Israel is being held to a higher standard than the Palestinians, especially by the left, but not because of antisemitism but because of the left's oppressor/victim paradigm.
I think you're arguing that the oppressor/victim paradigm isn't very rational, which is often true. But it might be helpful to pause and notice that we all agree the left are holding Israel to a higher standard, and that it's probably got more to do with the left's paradigms than specific antisemitism*.
(*Life is complicated and exceptions exist. Parts of the left have spent so long hating on Israel for oppressor/victim paradigm reasons, and have found Muslims such useful electoral recruits, that their views seem to have set into something pretty indistinguishable from antisemitism, but mostly its helpful to remember that the Israel haters are less racist, and more stuck in an oppressor/victim mindset that gives unequal weights to different parts of the dataset.)
Yeah this struck me too. To claim that Jewish stories are always considered unworthy of being told just seems objectively false. To me, the overwhelming pattern is that Jews/Israel recieve a massively disproportionate share of both positive and negative media and political attention (at least in the West) compared to the actual number of Jewish people. It's true we hear a disproportionate amount about Gaza too - but this is because Israel is one of the participants in this conflict.
Given that, one can argue there is coverage bias and whether it is motivated by antisemitism; there is a whole genre of meta-argument about the level of this bias. But consider it would be very hard to have an argument about the media bias regarding, say, the TPLF vs Ethiopia, Indonesia vs the Free Papua Movement, or the Rakhine people/Arakan Army vs the Myanmar government/Tatmadaw - the media about those conflicts barely exists to begin with.
Information suppression seems to be the tactic being used in the Ukraine, in order to let us write the narrative how we like, sure. Genocide? Must have been Russians!
Wait, you mean it's actually Jews killing the Ukrainians? This explains so much. \S
Zelensky is Jewish, no? ("early life").
This is the Ukraine, there are actual neo-Nazi synagogues. (Yes, yes, I know neo-Nazi is coded very differently in Ukraine than other places).
To be fair, nobody else has space lasers to take down all those drones....
"Every single time" isn't literally true, but it's trying to say something. Prominent examples of Jewish suffering are made known either by Jews, by reds (who are sympathetic to Jews), or by people using them to promote a political agenda (such as people who like to see their enemies as Nazis).
What I wrote in my other comment also applies: there's a difference between not protesting when you don't care and not protesting when you hate someone. Just replace "not protesting" with "not making a movie about". We don't see many movies about Sikhs, but if someone did make one, it would be accepted by the people who normally play, watch, and review independent movies, A pro-Jewish film about Gaza would be rejected.
Dogmatic films tend to get rejected on sight, sure. A nondogmatic film (like, um, Dogtooth) would probably pass muster. Incendies passed muster, for god's sake, and that has *spoiler* *spoiler* in it.
I looked those up. Neither has Jews. "A film that shows horrible things is acceptable" doesn't mean "a film that shows horrible things happening to Jews would be acceptable", unless it's divorced from any modern political conflict.
Beaufort. Operation Thunderbolt. Waltz with Bashir. Ajami (this is less military, but still showing horrible things happening to Jews). Foxtrot.
If you look closely, you'll see that Israel hasn't nominated a lot of war films recently. (or, alternatively, Israel is locked in a constant war, and therefore nominates "small pictures" of the constant struggle).
Are we done now? This is just quickly pulled from "what's been nominated for an Oscar". War movies tend to get put up for Oscars for quite a lot of reasons (expense being one of them -- incentivizes advertising).
> A pro-Jewish film about Gaza would be rejected.
Yes, for exactly the same reason that a pro-Nazi film about the holocaust, or a pro-Russian film about the Bucha massacre would also be been by many people as leaving a very bad taste in the mouth.
Propaganda is propaganda, and woe be the filmmaker that tries to unseat it, eh?
It's not obvious to me what point you're trying to make. I suggest in future you write in as clear and simple way as possible, to maximise information transfer.
I am suggesting that "foundational myths" used to destroy entire civilizations are not easily shaken off, in no small part because there are agents who would actively intervene to make sure a film vivisecting them Does Not Get Made.
(You can compare Nazis to the Lost Cause, which was funded for ... about a hundred years. And the subsequent dropoff in belief after the propaganda stopped flowing.)
I think that the quote isn't right, but I heard a far. better one recently: "Jews are only likeable when they're the victims". That's basically antisemitism with an exception. Such person will disapprove of Holocaust or the Hamas attack but other than that Jews are an epitome of evil - for leftists because they are CEOs of owners of big corporations, for conservatives because George Soros funds liberal causes, for everyone oppression of poor Gazans...
As per Gaza I too am torn - on the one hand what Israel does there is terrible, on the other hand even after the attack Hamas still had 70% approval in Gaza and from my point of view they can stop it anytime be releasing all the hostages. Until then I'm not gonna support either party...
I think the current conflict represents a significant vibe shift, in that immediately after 10/7, before Israel went into Gaza or anything, there were factions that expressed condemnation toward Israel (e.g. the famous Harvard letter). Which was a change from the old status quo you reference of “Jews are likeable when they’re victims.” (For more on the latter see Dara Horn’s book, _People Love Dead Jews_.)
Okay, but *most people* are only 'likeable' in that sense when they're the victims. We have a whole saying about how everyone likes the underdog. That's not unique.
Victims != underdog. "Run Faster" and cheering for the last person isn't calling them a victim.
This isn’t unique or complicated. Everyone’s likeable when they’re a victim.* Cf. Rohingya, Ukrainians, Palestinians, Yazidis etc etc. People naturally sympathise with people who are suffering.
If you want people to like you when you’re not a victim, that’s something you have to earn by being, well, likeable. Israelis are generally not very good at this, and come across as a weird mixture of self-pitying, self-serving and mildly sadistic. This tends to make people want to side with their victims even more.
*This may just be a European gentile thing as a result of Christianity, but those are the people we’re talking about.
If people naturally sympathized with people who are suffering, we'd disband the Ukraine entirely. And Orban would stop posting anti-Semitic memes.
You don't need to be likeable -- you need to avoid being both a Gigantic Asshole to everyone around you, and being a Psycho "Attack First" hyperactive nutcase. Afghanistan is not "likeable" (they pay soldiers in "marriages to virgins" so yeah, lotta rape). But they also aren't going around attacking their neighbors and causing suffering outside their borders.
When did Orban post an anti-semitic meme last time?
(And we haven't even touched the question that is portraying George Soros as one of the Ultimate Evils anti-semitic just because he is Jewish? Others portrayed as the Ultimate Evils are not Jewish, not that I know of, that is.)
Ukraine has decided to perform "cultural genocide" on the transcarpathian population (who wave Hungarian flags, and would quite frankly rather be Hungarian). Orban posted a meme conflating rats and Zelensky (might have been wiped, but I saw it before they walked it off the internet, if so).
If you can say that "every person of this category" gets portrayed as one of the Ultimate Evils (like Koch for example), then no, it's not anti-semitic. Other influential jews (like the one backing the Azov militia threatening to murder Zelensky if he stopped bombing Ukrainians...) aren't mentioned in the same way either.
I've known several Israelis, and they were likeable. Their government isn't. None of the groups in power in that area deserve any sympathy. Many of the people do.
OTOH, the existence of Israel was a mistake. I understand some of the reasons why it was created, but it was still a mistake. (OTOH, I don't know what *should* have been done.) It was a culture war from the very beginning. That tends to lead to government led strife, and it did in this case.
I can't agree with that, historically Jews seem to be disliked far more than they ought to. Pogroms on Jews used to be favorite pastime in middle-age Europe (and if we believe the book of Esther even long before that).
And if we look at Israel we find the only well functioning country in the region, great technology, agriculture (while not being oil producers), only country that's actually LGBTQ friendly around there... And they get tons of hate even from woke groups (and it's not like it started only with invasion).
It’s an awkward one, but Jews have a tendency to be a bit grating, especially en masse. Specifically loud, materialistic and self-absorbed (eg Jeff/Suzy from Curb Your Enthusiasm). Plenty of the better ones aren’t, but they come across as less noticeably Jewish. Your arguments are also kind of a case in point; if someone says you’re not likeable, stating that everyone irrationally hates you and then rattling off a list of reasons why you’re actually better than everyone else is… an argument against that’s evidence for.
are you trying to prove your stereotype with a character from movie or something? Maybe you should just admit that you're also antisemitic
It's certainly true that Israel is the most similar to a western nation in terms of tech, agriculture, and lgbtq friendliness. It's much easier to maintain a general economic and social trend of improvement situation when the development and security of your nation is heavily subsidized by a foreign government.
A population of 10 million or so today has received ~$300 billion in aid over the last 80 years (2022 dollars). https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
it's pretty dishonest to include military aid in that number - how does that help in development, except by ensuring that Israel isn't wiped off the map?
Anyway, why don't you compare it to foreign aid that Palestine got ( that was only economical obviously)?
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aid to Palestinians totaled over $40 billion between 1994 and 2020. That's only 26 years for half the population and unlike 80 billions over 80 years for Israel not even inflation adjusted.
Palestinians got at least 5 times more economic subsidies per capita from foreign countries and what do they have to show for it?
> they can stop it anytime be releasing all the hostages
I'm not sure this is true. Israel's actions are not even close to the path you would pursue if rescuing hostages was your main objective. They're using this as an opportunity to pursue their other national security objectives and that won't stop when the hostages are returned.
Well, Netanyahu is obviously asshole and doesn't do what is the best for the Israel/hostages, but that doesn't mean that what I wrote isn't true.
Can you imagine international response if all the hostages were released and Israelis continued with the offensive even if it goes against all of their previous proclamations?
Munich? The Debt? 7 Days in Entebbe?
I think if you don’t register that the Holocaust is the exception that proves the rule, you should consider the extremely extensive history of violent Jewish persecution - both immediately before and after the Holocaust, both in Europe and in the Middle East - and consider, again, why the error only goes in one direction.
now you're shifting goal posts AND cherry picking responses (you dropped the mention of the old testament for eg), both of which again do not make you look truthful and hurt your position
Exceptions do not prove rules, they weaken them.
I'd agree that, if there was a prize for "widely hated and repetitively hunted", Jews score nightmarishly high. That gets harder to judge as we look further back (due to a lack of record-keeping). Also I think such group-level score-keeping is overrated. But if you and me were both ordered to score that prize, I suspect we'd vote the same way.
But you did make a much, much stronger claim: ""*always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described.""
You don't need to do that. Just, stretch it to something easily-refuted, by the universal acclaim that Schindler's List gets. Everyone including non-Jews (like me) praises that film, deservedly. And FWIW there are loads of other atrocities we all collectively forget to feel bad about. I think there's a big hole left in film history, that no equivalent of Schindler's List was ever made for what Imperial Japan did to Chinese people.
China's making one right now about that. Or at least "shelving" it... as in it's made and not being shown.
Thanks. To be fair there have been films made about e.g. the Nanjing Massacre. But none were anywhere near the cultural impact or acclaim as Schindler's List. Almost nobody (myself included) even knows who the leader of Japan was at that time, but we all know Hitler.
Eh... I liked JoJo Rabbit better (also directed and starring a Jew).
In the phrase "The exception proves the rule" the meaning of "prove" is "test". And it doesn't test the rule. Consider the fate of the Gypsies at that same time an place. Also blacks, but there weren't many present. It was a generalized persecution of many "non-Aryan" minorities. Jews were the most commonly visible of such.
There *is* a long thread of persecution of Jews, but in Europe that was because they refused to accept the "state church", and they were the largest group to do so. OTOH, this did become sort of a tradition, and now many folk seem to have a tradition of persecuting Jews.
Consider "The Merchant of Venice". Why was Shylock a money-lender? Because Jews were forbidden to own real estate. If you were moderately wealthy and you wanted to invest your money, and you couldn't buy land, what should you do? But money lenders are always hated. So wealthy (i.e. visible) Jews were essentially forced into a profession where they would be hated for other reasons that not holding the proper religion. (There's a lot more to the story, but that gives the general direction as I see it. And there's a lot of "family tradition" that's a part of it.)
Indeed. And it turns out that in developing economies, money lending is a pretty amazing way to build wealth. Are jewish families overrepresented in global wealth management? Sure. Did they choose that or were they sort of forced into it? I don't know enough to answer.
You misunderstand the meaning of "the exception that proves the rule." Exceptions don't prove rules, right? They disprove them. Duh. What the phrase actually means is *the exception that tests the rule.*. So here's this exception, and it seems to disprove the rule. Does it? Or is there some explanation for the exception, some way in which it actually a disguised instance of phenomena following the rule? Get the idea?
Given the actual meaning of the phrase, your little paragraph makes no sense. If you gonna hate on Jews you have to be brighter than them. Otherwise you just come off as a dummy with a gripe.
3!?! Look at your foreign film oscars/top5 nominees (something like a third of the time there's at least one holocaust movie in the top 5). Hollywood LOVES the holocaust. There's NoMan'sLand about Bosnia, so people tend to put whatever looks dramatic into the Oscar Contention. (And Incendies is even about the Middle East, so it's not like these don't get play -- that's a nomination not an Oscar, but when you have 200+ contenders, top 5 is a useful stat).
Without saying anything about who's right on the object level, I want to note that this is *exactly identical* to how people on the other side of the conflict experience the discourse. This has implications, if not for figuring out who's right, then at least for thinking about what kinds of arguments are likely to convince anyone.
This is what works:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper
Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
Yes.
The Holocaust is the most well-known genocide in history. It's definitely the one I learned the most about from school, the media, and popular discourse. And I'm not saying it shouldn't be! I'm saying that your claim that "Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told" is completely wrong.
Exactly! I grew up knowing as rock-solid certainty that neither of the two God-chosen nations, Israel and America, could ever do anything wrong ever(slavery and Jim Crow notwithstanding; cognitive dissonance). Later on I learned otherwise. That doesn't mean I switched to thinking that the Holocaust was okay or that it never happened. Or that the Russian pogroms were okay. Or that the actions of certain members of the Rothschild family (not everyone of that surname) were somehow more wrong than those of other robber-baron type people because of their ethnicity. Or that when a synagogue gets vandalized or bombed it's somehow less bad than when it happens to a different building. My parents were devout followers of Jesus and brought me up during the Cold War to believe in the separation of the inherently evil Soviet government from the human-natured-good-mixed-with-bad Russian people, a concept which in my opinion stood me in good stead when learning about world history and politics. I don't have a solution to people killing each other in the Middle East over land/religion/identity any more than I have the power to prevent my fellow citizens doing it here in the US. What kind of world is it where someone praying, "I wish nobody anywhere was hurting or killing any children anywhere" is translated as "I wish every Jewish person all over the whole world was struck dead"?
I don't know. I feel that Israel and by extension the Jews there got a lot of empathy after the October attacks. I heard many horrifying stories about that day and the aftermath. Israel received extensive emotional, political and kinetic support from the international community.
Having sympathy for the fact that Israel was attacked first doesn't preclude sympathy for the people and children of Gaza. How much more death is needed to balance the scales? What is even Israel's strategic endgame that is served by this level of death, starvation and terror?
I don't know about how other people feel, but I was willing to give Israel a lot of latitude in their response. For quite some time now, I have lost the ability to defend the morality of their actions.
I mean Hamas could just surrender. The Palestinian people could work to get Hamas to surrender instead of this apparent strategy to have the world come galloping to their rescue because of the deaths of their own civilians and somehow Palestine will be free someday.
I'm guessing that p-ssing off Hamas is bad for your life expectancy as a random Gazan.
Random Gazan definitely doesn't think in terms of their life expectancy, if they did, there would be no Hamas.
What a nonsensical, disgusting comment. If you're caught between a person near you with a gun threatening to kill you if you do try to X and a person far from you with a gun threatening to kill you if you don't do X, you are probably fucked either way. But maybe a little less fucked if you don't try X, because that threat is near and immediate.
As far as I can tell, this is little more than another attempt to shift the blame of the genocide being inflicted on them *onto the Gazans.* Hamas bears some significant fraction of the responsibility. So does the IDF. So does Netanhayu, who helped Hamas old onto power because it was politically convenient for him. But the kid with the backpack? Exactly none of the responsibility for this is on him.
Unlike me and probably you, Gazans are Muslims and most are probably serious about it, they believe in martyrdom and afterlife in heaven. Unlike many people here, they don't examine GDP vs life expectancy correlations charts and P(B|A).
Israeli politicians have helped (for some degree) to prop up Hamas to power, but they couldn't invent it out of nothing.
Of course, the kid has none responsibility but he is forcibly educated to believe in what Islam teaches and maybe the kid's uncle is currently genociding minorities in Syria.
even after the Hamas terrorist attack (and before the Israel launching invasion of Gaza) they had 70% approval rating according to AP. It seems more true that most Palestinians are Hamas(adjacent) than that they are hostages.
"You could just surrender, therefore any amount of atrocities I inflict on you is just YOUR fault, really" is not how just war theory or the Geneva convention work. Especially when the party in power in question isn't even really a democratic expression of the current living population - they won one election, ONCE, and then simply never left.
if you look at polls it's not like they didn't have public support. In December 2023 57% Gazans still supported the attack ( www.pcpsr.org/en/node/963 ) . I'm pretty sure that before the retaliations it was far more.
Under foreign pressure, the support of the government typically increases.
Are they even being offered survivable surrender terms?
Bingo.
Hamas cannot possibly surrender unless Israel promises that all Hamas militants who surrender will not be punished.
Otherwise known Hamas militants who hand over themselves can expect to be put in those Israeli dungeons where people get raped (there are videos) and can expect to be prosecuted as terrorists (the prosecutor for the trial of those captured for the Oct 7 raid has asked the death penalty for everyone just for having taken part in the raid, regardless of any crime committed individually).
Unless Israel makes that promise, thousands of Hamas militants will continue to resist, if anything to save themselves.
Even if the Israelis made that promise, I can't imagine them abiding by it, and I'm sure Hamas militants can't imagine it either. The right wing voters of the Israeli government want the heads of the "terrorists", not mercy.
On top of that, if Hamas surrendered, nothing would stop the Israelis from claiming that there are still "terrorists" in Gaza (with good reason as there are warmongering militant groups other than Hamas, and they would continue to resist, but even if there was not any such group, Israel can just claim that there are still terrorists because Israel says so), and use that excuse to continue destroying and starving Gaza just like they're doing now, with the endgame of forcing everyone into a concentration camp and opening up Gaza for settlers. Meaning that the surrender of Hamas would not change anything.
Even if Hamas or the Gazans have responsibility, that fact does not make Israel less responsible.
Responsibility is not zero-sum.
you're right, but it makes it far easier to shrug and look away
Only if you subscribe to the doctrine of joint and several liability.
"Responsibility is not zero-sum." - this is a great phrase
Hamas cannot end the war by surrendering.
The Israeli goal is ethnic cleansing. Their endgame may look like this: every Gazan still living has been forced into a concentration camp ("humanitarian city") from which the only way out is to other countries ("voluntary emigration").
If Hamas surrendered, there would be other groups in Gaza that continue to fight back against Israel, and Israel would use those as an excuse to keep starving and destroying Gaza (since that's how you achieve the endgame described).
I don't know if it's even possible for Hamas to surrender, even if their leaders declare a surrender. Of the tens of thousands of Hamas militants, surely many would continue to resist, all the more so since they know that if they hand over themselves, Israel will put them in dungeons where people get tortured and raped, and will prosecute them as "terrorists".
As long as there is a single Gazan with a kalashnikov hidden in some hole, Israel will use that guy as an excuse to claim there are still "terrorists" and continue the ethnic cleansing. And even in the case that the guy with a Kalashnikov does not exist, nothing prevents the IDF from claiming that he exists and continue the ethnic cleansing.
It's not about balancing the scales; it's about ending Hamas rule in Gaza. And the analogy I always raise is the Allies' decision in early 1945 to demand nothing short of unconditional surrender rather than to accept any ceasefire that would leave the Nazis and Japanese High Command in charge. What I ask critics of Israel in Gaza (and that includes myself at times) is why if it was legitimate for the Allies to demand that surrender (and to kill many hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese women and children in the last months of the war in order to achieve that goal) and not for Israel to insist on it?
Haviv Rettig Gur is the person who best speaks for me about Gaza (https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/ask-haviv-anything/episodes/Episode-28-The-Gaza-Paradox-e35idco).
That being said, I can also understand why others may think very differently.
{Edit: I had just made this comment elsewhere so I didn't make it here originally, but I should add that I think that Lorem is right that Israel DID receive tons of support in the wake of October 7th. I totally agree about that. My comment is just a response to his second paragraph.}
Over 100,000 civilians were killed every month in the lead-up to the end of the WWII in China alone. I think "some civilian deaths is necessary to prevent a greater number of ongoing civilian deaths elsewhere" is prima facie a good reason for the US to have dropped the atomic bombs if they believed that the atomic bombs could have sped up the Japanese surrender by a few months. In contrast, nobody has presented a similar case for urgency for why Gazan civilians ought to be bombed or starved.
That argument by itself doesn't explain why nothing short of unconditional surrender was acceptable; the usual narrative is that that was driven by longer-term considerations.
Yes it was very possible that the US did not do the best job negotiating there, especially since they (empirically) covered up a bunch of Japanese war crimes and evacuated Japanese and German scientists after the "unconditional surrender" anyway.
Japanese and German scientists were "booty" -- I'd maintain they were part of looting the power structure to cripple the other side, AND making out like a bandit.
Linch: I don't know anything about the Japanese killing a 100,000+ Chinese civilians a month in 1945. Would appreciate a link or a cite of where I can learn more.
Meanwhile, even if true, I have never heard that was a significant factor in the decision to drop the atomic bomb. From what I understand that decision was all about preventing the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in an invasion of Japan (the same reason that the Israelis drop bombs instead of relying only on tactics that would reduce civilian casualties).
And regardless, it doesn't explain why the Allies decided to insist on an unconditional surrender. They could have ended the war at any time in 1945 (and immediately stopped any deaths in China) by simply offering a ceasefire that would have left the Japanese High Command in control.
Wikipedia is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War#Casualties
"I don't know anything about the Japanese killing a 100,000+ Chinese civilians a month in 1945" Yeah this isn't a knock on you, it's really common for people in the West to just vaguely know WWII Japan is vaguely bad and fashy, as a junior partner to Germany, like if they were Italy or something.
I have a comment on LW briefly describing how evil they were, relative to the Nazis (TW: lots of bad stuff):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s58hDHX2GkFDbpGKD/linch-s-shortform?commentId=ywf8R3CobzdkbTx3d
"tl;dr: Imperial Japan did worse things than Nazis. There was probably greater scale of harm, more unambiguous and greater cruelty, and more commonplace breaking of near-universal human taboos."
This all makes some guy's earlier point about how people uniquely ignore Jewish victims rather odd to me.
And yet Bryan Caplan claimed the Japanese were the least bad faction in the Second Sino-Japanese war https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1831195462688211064
Worth mentioning (not as a disagreement, though) that some Nazi units were particularly bad, such as the Dirlewanger Brigade, lead by Oskar Dirlewander, himself a serious POS.
How and why the decision was made to drop the atomic bombs is complicated, and there are a lot of misconceptions floating around. I like https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/ and some other posts from the same blog.
Thanks Tamon. Looks interesting.
That said, as an fyi for others, I don't think it really speaks to the issue of this thread: whether there are differences which explain why it was legitimate for the Allies to demand the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers but not for Israel to demand the unconditional surrender of those behind October 7th.
"From what I understand that decision was all about preventing the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in an invasion of Japan"
As I recall, keeping Stalin out of the conflict--so that he would have less leverage in the negotiations that followed the surrender--was a significant part of it. One could consider it one of the opening moves of the Cold War.
Ironically enough, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria contributed a lot in the Japanese surrender (of course, Western common knowledge knows only about the two atomic bombs).
Wasn't a Soviet commitment to declare war on Japan part of Potsdam? So, if keeping the Soviets out was a goal, it was a very new one.
A, this is a very modern, fairly revisionist take.
B...if this is true, then Japan, and Hokkaido especially, owes the US a yearly thank you letter for not letting North Japan go through the same ordeal as North Korea and East Germany.
The simpler answer is just that the atomic bombs weren't remotely justified, we only pretend they were because we're the victors.
Actually Japan was already trying to offer conditional surrender; the US used nukes because it wanted to call the surrender unconditional.
> And the analogy I always raise is the Allies' decision in early 1945 to demand nothing short of unconditional surrender rather than to accept any ceasefire that would leave the Nazis and Japanese High Command in charge.
When I see arguments like this, I go back to a now 21 year-old editorial written on the Iraq war [https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/05/09/a-proven-formula-for-how-many-troops-we-need/5c6dbfc9-33f8-4648-bd07-40d244a1daa4/]. It contrasted the scale of the US invasion there (1 coalition uniform to 160 Iraqis) to the scale of the allied occupation of Germany (1 armed forces member per 40 Germans). It argues that pacifying and rebuilding an initially hostile territory is inherently difficult, and there is no substitute for scale.
Applying that ratio to Gaza – population circa 2 million – implies that Israel would need to commit to a long-term occupation of 50,000 personnel. The goals of an occupation would need to be nearly generational, providing low-corruption political stability and well-run infrastructure to ultimately improve material conditions and eliminate the socioeconomic pull to resistance.
That kind of effort is hideously expensive, and it is evidently not Israel's strategic goal. Operationally, it does not seem to be setting the stage for a Marshall Plan.
I submit that without a goal of productive occupation for the benefit of civilians, a demand for unconditional surrender is morally suspect. The significant rebuilding of both Germany and Japan (even if also driven for geopolitical reasons) retroactively justified the strict demands; note that we think more kindly of the western Allies' occupations than the Soviet ones.
Modern war is expensive, and Israel faces the same sort of constraints as the United States. Grand objectives cannot be achieved with an occupation-lite force that heavily relies on airpower, but such an operation can do a fine job of eroding foreign goodwill. As part of its own domestic political compromises, it seems to have chosen to speed-run the Iraq war with all its quagmires and PR problems.
Unconditional surrender is unconditional, it does not come with conditions of "productive occupation". The US occupied West Germany & Japan in the context of the Cold War. The "Morgenthau Plan" was to remove German industry that could be used to re-arm, which would have made more sense viewing defeated Germany as the big remaining threat (as it was after WW1) rather than the USSR.
Do you know of any alternate history fiction in which the Morgenthau Plan was implemented?
Japan is also the analogy I used, seeing as how the US was so ticked at them for attacking Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war, and how we bombed the hell out of them rather than rolling the tanks in like with Germany.
1) The allies bombed the hell out of Germany
2) Japan’s an archipelago
My understanding is that Germany was more defended against bombing, which the Brits responded to operating at night, and the Americans by bombing at higher altitudes (expecting the Norden Bomb Sight to still provide accuracy). Japan was relatively defenseless, and its buildings more vulnerable to fire-bombing, to the extent that many cities were taken off the list of atom bomb targets because they'd been so thoroughly bombed already that there wasn't much left to destroy.
Germany was better defended, so we spent a great deal more effort and materiel on bombing it. Since it was closer, we were also able to spend more time doing so.
I don’t think this is evidence of an increased resentment for Pearl Harbor.
>why if it was legitimate for the Allies to demand that surrender
The thing is, I am not sure it was legitimate. It was sort of legitimized. This it now how war happened throughout history, a king losing a war did not mean the eradication of his entire regime. Of course, these regimes were more terrible than those. Still, the democratic regimes replacing them can be I think honestly interpreted as puppet governments. At least initially... and they were allied with a regime just as terrible, Stalins. I don't think the actions of the Allies were entirely legitimate...
They were legitimized because winners write history, as simple as that. So there is no such thing as objective history about relatively recent events.
Imagine if the Soviets win the Cold War and the whole world becomes communist. What is in the history books. "After 1945 the imperialist powers installed capitalist puppet governments in Germany and Japan" etc.
Good arguments can be made that Nazi Germany winning might have actually saved lives, in the endgame. Stalin and Mao did much evil, after all.
Color me skeptical.
Hitler didn’t get the opportunity to ethnically cleanse everyone he wanted to. That’s not actually an argument that we should have let him.
Ethnic cleansing -- the removal of people... do we have to add in what the Israelis did to the Africans now as well? I was just going on "number of lives lost" in the Great Leap Forward and various Stalinist purges.
Good points. Just a side note to puppet governments. Japan is currently governed by the LDP party, established in 1955 (and financed by millions of dollars in the following decades by the CIA). Out of the past 70 years, it ruled Japan in 67. Does not look like a real democracy to me.
Note that "unconditional surrender" is not the norm; WWII was a major exception. Even WWI was a negotiated armistice.
(At least for Japan, I think it was clearly illegitimate. They wanted to conditionally surrender; the US wanted it unconditional, so it nuked two cities and might have kept nuking more until it got what it wanted. I think that was obviously just the US waging a massive deliberate terror campaign against civilians including the threat of genocide, and in a just world Truman would have also hanged at Nuremberg.)
If you believe that Truman should have been hanged at Nuremberg, then I think it makes sense total sense to believe that Netanyahu should be hanged at the Hague. I respect that consistency.
But I also think it's an absurd opinion. Not only would it have been considered laughable at the time, but the history of post World War Ii Japan and Germany (especially compared to post WW-I Germany) have largely validated the wisdom of the demands for unconditional surrender.
>Not only would it have been considered laughable at the time
Why would it have been considered laughable, if not for the reason that Truman was a leader on the winning side and the winning side conducted the Nuremberg Trials?
Because if you told the vast majority of people that Truman should be hung for that decision they would literally have laughed at you.
The decision was understood for what it was: a tactic made during a full fledged war in an effort to force an enemy to surrender and minimize the loss of American lives. The idea that it was out of bounds to attack cities had long gone by the wayside. And the folks hung at Nuremberg were not German military leaders who had bombed English cities as part of the war effort. They were folks who directed the systematic slaughter of millions of civilians or thousands of prisoners of war, which even Germans were ashamed over.
The idea that the Nuremberg Trials were simply "victor's justice" is one of those edgy opinions that sounds sophisticated but collapses when one looks closely.
The situations feel different enough that it feels like a bad analogy. Not least of which because the ability of Japan to rapidly industrialize and militarize looks like a completely different scale than what Palestinians are capable of, even if you adjust for comparing a regional conflict to a global one. If Palestine had the level of industrial and military capacity that Japan had relative to its size, it would be more like Iran, and could probably insist on being treated like a nation instead of its current status.
I'm afraid I don't understand why Japan's size and military might make it a bad analogy.
I was guessing that part of the Allies consideration was whether Japan could rebuild itself in a generation, and the fact that they had gone from a feudal society to fighting on equal footing with Russia and then the US and British within less than half a century probably factored into that math. Although I admit I'm making a lot of assumptions. Anyway, the idea that if Israel left Gaza, Hamas might rebuild itself and attempt another Oct 7th is a rational fear, but the idea that they would pose the same level of threat to Israel's security as Japan posed to the Pacific at the height of its power seems to require a lot more steps (like an investment from Iran, Egypt, or Lebanon that has so far not manifested).
Ah, I see. I guess my response is that there are 2 million plus Palestinians, all living within a few miles of Israel. And as was demonstrated on October 7th, not much industrial capacity is needed to make them a threat.
I don't think it's unreasonable for the Israelis to think of Hamas in the same way that the Allies thought of the Nazis and the Japanese High Command: as threats that have to be completely rooted out.
Japan did not unconditionally surrender. How many lives would it have been worth to demand the execution of the Emperor?
Crimes went unpunished, unpunished crimes cause incentives. It wasn't a costless decision. But there isn't some universal rule of demanding unconditional surrender from evil.
it's worth noting that Palestinian Authority news write about *Hamas* murdering Palestinians trying to get aid. Egypt and even Qatar of all places are openly advocating for Hamas to step down. Western news? Barely gives it a mention. But oh, Israel did this and that and the other thing, how dare it!
The UN Security Council routinely passes more resolutions against Israel than against the rest of the world *combined*. Because obviously Israel is worse than Russia and Syria and Sudan and Iran and North Korea and all of those places put together.
How much death is needed? I don't know, but it's clearly apparent even to other Arabs that Hamas is at least a large percentage of the problem, if not the entirety of it.
Probably because the West views the Palestinians as the perpetually wronged party (despite their consistently belligerent history.) and doesn’t view them as having any agency over Hamas. Hamas is some force that arose and then, according to the West, is propped up by external actors like cunning Israel and Iran, but certainly not by Europeans and the UN. The poor Palestinians are suffering under the yoke of these terrorists who they certainly don’t support, but if they do it’s understandable because Israel.
It’s like these news stories I am seeing about the UK ready to recognize a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Authority holds elections? After the last Gaza elections and freaking Brexit, Keir Starner really believes we’re all going to like what comes out of a Palestinian election?
I'd guess it goes the other way. Everyone already knows Hamas is a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists, so we expect nothing better of them than what they do. But Israel is a first world democracy, so we expect more from them.
Explicitly yes. This has been my view of the conflict for quite some time. Both sides are behaving quite badly, but one side has a huge, *huge* advantage in prosperity, security and above all ability to influence their government. I naturally expect more from those who have more. And thus I am much more angry when I see them not only doing worse, but doing entire orders of magnitude worse[1]. Add to that the fact that Palestinians as a people have effectively never been allowed full autonomy[2], and the conflict does indeed look *extremely* one-sided to me, no matter how little I care for the ideologies of many of the Palestinians.
[1] The number of Gazens killed in the current conflict is 30-40x the number of Israelis, so at least one order of magnitude. I don't even want to try to count in terms of something like QUALYs, but it must surely be a much greater disparity still given how immense the privation and misery being heaped upon those in Gaza currently is.
[2] Before Israel it was the British pushing them around, and before the British it was the Ottomans. And I'll add that yes, I'm aware that the Jewish people have also had huge and tragic historical issues with autonomy and being victimized by more powerful groups controlling the lands where they lived. But the decision to establish the State of Israel *was* an exercise of their autonomy as a people, as has been everything that State has done afterwards, and it's fair to judge those exercises.
> I naturally expect more from those who have more
Right, this is what I find morally incoherent, abominably so. I expect everybody to follow the same rules.
>Both sides are behaving quite badly, but one side has a huge, *huge* advantage in prosperity, security and above all ability to influence their government.
You say that as if Israel's advantages in these things were assigned entirely randomly and arbitrarily. In reality, most good societies are good because they're made up of pro-social people, and most bad societies are bad because they're made up of anti-social people, so when you say "People from good societies should be held to a higher standard than people from bad societies," what you actually end up doing is supporting the anti-social over the pro-social.
The decision to establish the State of Israel was an episode of British Trolling. Many such cases.
You're saying this like America doesn't have a lock on Israel's government, and veto power too.
"I naturally expect more from those who have more."
Maybe not even that. I think it is more like "the party which tends to view itself as the 'only democracy of the Middle East', and which is treated as the only Western country in the region, is expected to act like one".
I mean, if you hear Azerbaijan to ethnic cleanse Mountain Karabah, well, yeah, things like this happen all the time in the world. However, would you hear the Netherlands taking over Belgium and ethnic cleansing the Wallons (the French-speaking half of Belgium), you might bet would induce different reactions.
(Or the USA conquering and annecting Greenland by force -- while similar stuff happens in Africa, I bet, all the time.)
> Probably because the West views the Palestinians as the perpetually wronged party
Well not the West as such, but certainly the western Left, which I've always thought of as an ideology that could be replaced by a rock that says "whichever side appears more pathetic is right".
I don't know if non-western countries really have a left, at least not in the same sense.
"Egypt and even Qatar of all places are openly advocating for Hamas to step down. Western news? Barely gives it a mention. "
I don't think the are many people anywhere that don't consider Hamas to be some percentage of the problem. The difference you seem to be missing between Egyptian and Qatari media and Western media is *who they can hope to influence.*
There is approximately a 0.00% chance that saying any further bad things about Hamas[1] in Western media will have any influence whatsoever on Hamas' decisions of when, where and how to exercise their power. There is a slightly more than 0% chance that Egyptian and Qatari media might. By contrast, Western countries--the U.S. in particular--have quite a bit of influence with the State of Israel[2]. So if Western journalists are at all interested in seeing Israel tone down the murder at least a little bit--and I guarantee you a lot of them are--it makes perfect sense to focus their attentions on the side of the conflict where they might *possibly* have an effect.
[1] Who already have a very poor reputation in the West.
[2] Whose reputation is much higher--and thus more susceptible *at least in theory* to downward pressure--with at least a subset of Westerners.
> There is approximately a 0.00% chance that saying any further bad things about Hamas[1] in Western media will have any influence whatsoever on Hamas' decisions of when, where and how to exercise their power.
Strong disagree. I think Hamas's whole war strategy is entirely about the Western media -- their primary KPIs are not the number of Israeli soldiers they kill but the number of dead kid stories that find their way into western media. Recently it's been working great, they've managed to kill enough of their own kids to get the likes of Macron and Starmer onside.
100% agree with this.
Also it's terrible geopolitical game theory to say "we put pressure and criticize the side that's more likely to listen to us". The just incentivizes both sides to publically show that they're less likely to listen. It's saying to Israel: "Be more like the terrorists and prove nothing will make you change your ways".
I think this is a reasonable concern in the abstract, but it's really not like the west puts no pressure on Hamas: it is a designated terrorist group basically everywhere; all the BDS demands about Israel are basically already satisfied w.r.t. the relationship between western countries and Hamas; no western country supplies Hamas with weapons; many western countries have been happy to supply Israel with weapons for the explicit purpose of dismantling Hamas.
By any reasonable measure, western countries put *immensely* more pressure on Hamas than they do on Israel; and there are presumably diminishing returns to applying more. I'm not opposed to the west trying to do so: if someone suggested leaning on Turkey/Qatar in some way to make them less supportive of Hamas I think that's reasonable; but all the big ticket items are already in play.
It's true that western countries are *increasing* pressure on Israel more than on Hamas, but I think this has to reckon with the fact that pressure on Hamas is more or less maxed out.
"I think Hamas's whole war strategy is entirely about the Western media...." I think you are conflating Hamas and TicTok. Pretty clearly, their "whole war strategy" is not about "likes."
Now apply this logic to the Ukraine. Perhaps you might want to increase your uncertainty of "Very Very Bad Military Actions" being blamed on Russia?
... Russia did in fact bomb a village because they rebuilt too many houses. The village's name was something like "ten houses" and whenever they'd build more than ten, it would get bombed. Russian humor.
"Hamas killing their own kids" is such BS. Nobody forced Israel to resort to mass starvation and other inhumane tactics.
Winning a war is a zero sum game. If one side gets closer to victory the other gets closer to defeat. Dead kids brings closer to victory which side? If Hamas were the side that benefits from dead kids, Israel wouldn't be trying so hard to starve kids dead.
And yes, Israel is still starving Gaza. The amount of food that the "Gaza humanitarian foundation" is giving out is insufficient to feed Gaza, by a long shot. It's a ridiculous amount. The purpose of the GHF is to pretend they're not starving Gaza while they starve Gaza.
Regarding inhumane tactics other than mass starvation, such as shooting civilians unnecessarily, the reason it's harder to convince people that Israel is committing those crimes is that the Israelis don't allow Western press into Gaza, which proves they're in bad faith. But the argument remains: if an army is so evil they will resort to MASS STARVATION, how can you believe that the same army is trying to minimize civilian casualties when it comes to bullets and bombs? Obviously this is an immoral army.
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Of course when I say "winning a war is a zero sum game" there's the counterargument that Israel isn't actually playing that game, they don't want to defeat Hamas, their goal is to get rid of the civilian population of Gaza (call it genocide, ethnic cleansing, "voluntary emigration", making Gaza unlivable, whatever) and they're letting Hamas survive so they have an excuse to complete the genocide. All the more so, the international community should make Israel stop.
A brief look at the UN Security Council's resolutions doesn't leave me very convinced of your claim. Perhaps it depends on exactly what makes a resolution count as "against" a particular party. But the great majority of UNSC resolutions have nothing to do with Israel, and most of them are like "Recalling this, remembering that, noting the other, and mindful of yet another thing, we urge all parties concerned to abide by their agreements of such-and-such dates and to act in accordance with our resolution of such-and-such other date".
Also, they're mostly concerned with _war_. The fact that they don't say much about North Korea, for instance, says nothing about how _bad_ NK is, it says that NK's badness is a matter of oppressing its own population rather than attacking anyone else.
I do agree that Hamas is a lot of the problem. I don't see how it follows from that that unlimited amounts of death are going to be helpful. There's a definite sense of "beatings will continue until morale improves" here for me; when you have a population that feels mistreated and oppressed and is sympathetic to terrorists who promise to do something about the mistreatment and oppression, attacking that population is not generally an effective way to solve the problem. Not that I can think of anything that _would_ be an effective way to solve the problem. But, again, "there is no good way forward; therefore we're going to massacre thousands upon thousands of people in pursuit of an obviously-unattainable goal" doesn't seem like great reasoning either.
My understanding was that it's actually the UN *General Assembly* that has a strong anti-Israel bias.
This just adds credence to the argument that the average Gazan should be thought of more as a hostage than a genuine Hamas sympathizer. But many people in this comment section seem convinced that the average Palestinian is 100% pro-Hamas.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the average Gazan", but at least last summer Hamas had a ~75% popularity rating. in March of 2024, 71% of polled Gazans said that the decision of Hamas to attack Israel on Oct 7 was the correct decision.
The escalating war dramatically reduced both of those numbers.
I don't know the methodology being used here, but it seems to me like popularity polls are dubious when you are being asked to choose between a side that is raining missiles on you and a side that will shoot you or put you exactly where the missiles are falling, or at least starve you if it gets back to them that you voiced criticism.
I mean, this side of the blogosphere was filled a couple years ago with people proclaiming up and down that they were terrified to voice anti-woke sentiments at bar with friends on the off chance it got back to the wrong people and they lost their job, but suddenly its hard to understand why you might not be very vocally supportive of the local warlords in a time of war?
That being said, even if that number is 100% solid, the fact that its going down as the situation gets worse proves that Gazans are not mindless death-cultists who embrace martyrdom at any cost, as several commentors here are insisting. They respond rationally to obvious changes in the situation.
I feel like Jews very often get their stories told! For example, I think I've heard about equal discussion of the 10/7 attacks and the Gaza bombing, despite the latter affecting 10-20x more people, though maybe this is only after some kind of hard-to-notice mental adjustment for one of them being a single attack and the other a protracted campaign.
One of them is an act of war, the other is an act of terror. Would you use the same comparison between 9/11 and the Afghanistan war?
Exactly.
I would now, because it’s basically right both as a comparison (ill-thought-out revenge invasion that achieved nothing) and a contrast (established an occupation then tried to set up a new government and win popular support vs mindlessly storming around killing people and blowing up buildings, then trying to starve the population)
You’re comparing the actions of a religious death cult with a government.
Why do think that an unreasonable thing to do? Is it simply that the latter is (significantly) more powerful?
If you can't see the difference between a death cult and a government, then we're at an impasse.
I’m comparing Hamas to Al Qaeda and Israel to the US
Alright, but my point was the comparison between the combatants, rather than the wars themselves.
Many people got paid (halliburton?) That's not nothing.
Kitty History.
And yet, somehow, the story I mentioned - which happened - either didn’t reach you, or didn’t elicit an emotional reaction. Which was it? And how do you, of all people, not register the bias only going in one direction?
No amount of prior tragedy gives a nation the right to starve millions of people they dislike to death in open air prisons. It was wrong when the nazis did it to the jews of Europe and its still wrong now that its Israel doing it to the Palestinians. Religious fundamentalists are truly the worst people on Earth.
Can you explain how the last sentence in your comment follows from the first two?
Are you willing to entertain an extremely loose definition of religion? \S
Are you saying there are no religious fundamentalists in Israel who wish for such things? Are you saying that Israeli policy is in no way motivated by the decisions of such figures in the executive and legislature?
Hamas (not known for lying to make Israel look good) says that only around 100 people have starved to death throughout the entire war. Presumably that includes the ones who starved due to congenital metabolic conditions rather than lack of food, as these are the ones whose pictures are published on the front page of every newspaper. So "starving millions of people to death" would be quite the exaggeration, even if Israel weren't fighting international opposition to be able to *feed* Gazans through the GHF.
There are plenty of Jews out there whose “story” does not consist of support for an apartheid government’s campaign of genocide. I’m proud to call some of them friends
I've heard the "apartheid" charge a few times but I'm confused what it actually entails.
I mean, I'm prepared to believe that the Israeli government does discriminate in favour of Jews and against Muslims and other groups in some ways, I'm just not sure exactly what it entails in practice and how it compares to Apartheid South Africa.
When I use the word "apartheid", I mean, roughly, "one government, ruling over two peoples, chosen by (and, therefore, only concerned with the interests of) only one of them".
I think that Israel's treatment of the minority of Palestinians it permits citizenship is merely "extreme racism that should exclude it from the community of civilized nations", not "apartheid", but its treatment of the remainder is actual, literal apartheid, and if anything compares unfavorably to white South Africans treatment of non-whites.
That is ridiculous. Nowhere in Israel or Palestine does the Israeli government discriminate based on ethnicity. Israeli citizens of any race have the same rights everywhere, whether they are Jewish or Arab. This is true in both Israel and the West Bank.
Also you might have forgotten how Israel just intervened to prevent the genocide of Druze in Syria, even though Druze are not Jewish. Hard to argue that is due to exclusive concern for Jews.
Now if you want actual apartheid there is plenty of it in the region. Starting with the Palestinian Authority where selling land to a Jew (yes, Jew not Israeli) is a crime punished by death. But of course all the people talking about apartheid don't actually care about apartheid, they just want an excuse to ostracize Jews.
Israel only requires military service out of certain people, and not others. Some of this is religious in nature, some of it is race, but Jews also want to be both a religion and a race.
I do not forget the Druze, as in my first sentence. They do serve in the Israeli military after all.
This is an important elision that causes much confusion, whether purposefully or not. By conflating Israeli Arab citizens, who do have most rights afforded to them, and subjects of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza, who do not have equal rights, one is able to pretend that the treatment of the latter group is not the responsibility of Israel. All of the Palestinians in Gaza are not freely allowed to leave that area. Movement of non-Jews in the West Bank is also highly constricted. The Israeli government and its military are the controlling power in these regions. To claim that this is not unequal treatment is facile
The Israeli government effectively rules the West Bank, and the situation there is clearly apartheid. Israeli citizens can vote, are subject to civilian law and courts, and have their own road network. They can also easily get building permits, including on Palestinian land, which the Israeli government regularly expropriates (without compensation) to give to them.
Palestinians can’t vote. They are subject to military law and courts, where they have ~0 rights; a 17-year-old recently starved to death in an Israeli prison after being held for months without trial. They have to use a different and worse road network full of roadblocks and checkpoints, and the authorities can close off passage entirely, at any time, for any reason or none. They can effectively never get a permit to build anything. If an Israeli attacks a Palestinian, the law will take the side of the Israeli ~100% of the time. There are even bantustan equivalents (Areas A and B).
The credible charge is about the occupied territories: Palestinians in the West Bank are ruled by Israel, on land that Israel kinda-sorta regards as part of Israel, they live alongside Jews who are citizens of Israel--but they themselves aren't citizens, can't vote, and on the basis of not being Jews have no prospect of them or their children ever becoming citizens or gaining the rights that their Jewish neighbours have.
In some places in the territories, especially I believe in the area of Hebron, there's a bunch of infrastructure that is available for use by Jewish residents but not Palestinians: roads and highways and such. In theory, the distinction is between Israeli citizens and non-citizens, but since Palestinians have no hope of becoming citizens, and since Israel quasi-officially refuses to recognize them as citizens of any other state, this is basically an ethnicity-based group whom Israel insists it has the legal right to rule over, without giving them political rights.
The Israeli government ethnically cleansed their nation of Eritreans/Ethiopians. Ya with me?
I don't buy that caring about the death of a 6 year old ought to be operationalized as not caring about the deaths of other children, or even seeing such acts as revenge, or leverage, or torture.
"So Scott, if you or anyone else like you ever bothered to notice the pattern, by which Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described"
How could one possibly notice such a pattern in this conflict? To date, a grand total of 2,000 Israelis have been killed in this conflict, and the vast majority of those were nearly two years ago. By contrast, something like 60-80,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of those very recent, with the real possibility of that number rising very sharply and very soon. I certainly heard heartbreaking stories of Israeli tragedy told at the time they were current. But even setting aside the current factor, if you *actually* heard 1 such story of an Israeli death for every 30 or 40 such of Palestinians, would you notice? Truth be told, I suspect you have heard them rather more frequently than that, and *still* round it off to "*always and every single time* unworthy of having their stories told."
"if any of you noticed that the alleged victims of Jews’ ontological evil are always worthy of the emotional reactions"
While I don't doubt there are some terrible humans out there convinced of "Jews' ontological evil," those that I talk to seem far, FAR much more concerned with the very REAL, very *non-hypothetical evil* which the State of Israel is carrying out right this moment as it murders and maims and mutilates and starves thousands upon thousands of people, with no end in sight. When THAT evil is ended, perhaps it will seem less galling to hear this sort of complaint.
When I see this sort of utterly hyperbolic and tone-deaf complaint, the only reasonable belief I can form is "here is a person who values Palestinian lives and zero, if not less." The degree to which these human fucking beings--living, breathing men women and children--are being treated as irrelevant and disposable is nothing short of disgusting. I don't want to live in world where that happens. I *also* don't want to live in a world where harms and tragedies that happen to Jewish people are ignored or discounted or overlooked. But complaints like this certainly bring us closer to such a world, not further.
> Jews are *always and every single time* unworthy of their stories being told, unworthy of empathy, unworthy of the emotional reactions you described
This is a wild thing to say when Holocaust related literature and filmography are essentially their own genre.
The problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Jews happen to belong to the side that has the most guns and the biggest army and the most wealth and industrial might, and is using those to punch down repeatedly a handful of people living in abject poverty in something that can't even be called a country. And therefore the focus moves to the underdog because it seeks to balance things out. Jews were the underdog in 1936 Germany. Jews aren't the underdog in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(it's not even that right to just say "Jews", mind you; a 1:1 identification of Israel with Jews is a powerful rhetorical tool but in practice while virtually anyone who counts for something in Israel is a Jew, not every Jew is Israeli since Jew remains a religion/ethnicity with many members around the world, and anyway even Israel has its own internal politics and isn't a monolith)
Now you can say that Israel here *actually* is the underdog because it's at risk of being wiped out by its neighbours and must always act first and hard to have a chance to come up on top. But that is a bit of a rhetorical mugging - it presumes we have to accept that everything will play out exactly like the most hawkish of hawks say unless we do as they say we should do. At the very least, at that point we are in the merit of the war, what counts as necessary war, how far you can go to prevent future harms to your country even if it means you are now the aggressor, and so on so forth. Which is a lot more complex than just "the only reason why people think that Israel's attacks on Palestine are worse than what Hamas inflicted on them is that they hate Jews". When the October 7 attacks happened, plenty of solidarity was expressed with Israel, and the brutality of the crimes committed against its civilians. But that solidarity doesn't usually last past inflicting even worse brutalities and killing even more civilians in retaliation. At some point it begins feeling like even being the victim of that attack doesn't justify it all any more. Just like being the victims of 9/11 hardly justified the US to wage two wars in response (not even against the direct culprits), and those were actually waged with far stricter rules of engagement than Israel seems to follow.
Oh, I'm sorry, do we need more people telling the story of "completely safe crybully gasbag complaining that he doesn't get enough sympathy and special treatment"? I thought you guys hated idpol
Nobody's telling the story about the IDF soldier being tortured by Hamas for fundraising purposes because it's brain-scarring even in text format. If you want to tell it, you can be my guest.
Semites play cards with suffering. Who's got the worst suffering today? Who hit whom? Who hit whom FIRST?
You'd probably be on stronger grounds arguing that "American Genocides are generally not reported" and pulling a level of anti-Semitism out of that. Aka "the powers that be" are anti-semetic. Which, um, totally. Who else but the jews think that pissing off the diving board is a good place to be? They do it again and again. So the powers that be put the Jews in as frontmen. It's to their purposes to make the Jews hated and look bad. Next pogrom is coming...
As others have mentioned this is just not true of course, as we saw and continue to see memorial events and outpouring of support for victims of October 7. It is also the very first thing most Western news anchors bring up before they talk about Gaza, ironically.
But you should ask yourself why you have this perception. Is it because you yourself are a slave to your news feed? Do you situate yourself mentally based on what you just saw online? Or is it maybe that you personally, in your life, feel as though you aren't getting enough attention and no one is listening to your story?
Or the secret third possibility: You are a bad actor who is repeating a talking point you heard online because it's politically convenient for your side.
Daniel, shut up.
I'm fed up of everyone reaching for anti-Semitism! the Holocaust! Jews are being persecuted! when there's any criticism of what the Israeli government and the Israeli Defence Forces are doing.
Yes, they're Jewish. But they claim to be a secular state, not a theocratic one. So they get judged by the same civil standards as every other state.
They ought not to claim to be a secular state, any more than Iran is. They're about equivalent in terms of theocraticness.
The claim to be secular is for American consumption. I don't know that they do that domestically.
They do it... enough, domestically. Like, I'm sure India claims to be a democracy, even if there's a lot of discrimination (or downright population displacement) against muslims. Not everyone's getting the "we are the only liberal democracy in the Middle East" but Israelis are hearing that as part of public school.
Oh, I'm sure they tout the democracy part domestically too, yes. What I question is the SECULAR bit.
Secular gets sold to the gays, to the Druze, to the Palestinians... because the impossibly religious aspects really only apply to Jews (can't be converted by the majority of Jewish synagogues in the United states, say...)
The claim to be secular is more like in Turkey, where it's a part of the founding ideology. It's also still very much a live ideology in Israel, both culturally and politically; nearly half of Israelis identified as _hilonim_--secular-- in 2018.
As in Turkey, religious parties have been growing more powerful, eroding the secular nature of the state, but the claim that it's just for American consumption I think is over the top: it's still the desired mode of government for a large minority of the country, and probably is still overrepresented in many governing institutions (though I don't know enough to feel confident about this; I'm thinking of the Israeli Supreme Court here, which I'd guess is more committed to a secular view of Israel than the average Knesset member), and has the weight of history behind it yet even as those advantages wane.
Oh? Then what's the Israeli equivalent of the Ayatollah?
Chief Rabbinate of Israel. There's apparently two schmucks who tell Jews in Israel that they can't be married by Reform or Conservative Rabbis, and tell Jewish converts in America (who are converted by reform or conservative traditions) that they aren't Jewish. I can continue on, but if you haven't seen gett the trial of viviane amsalem you probably should.
Are you kidding? The Ayatollah wields supreme political power and formally sits above the elected government. The Rabbinate is a bureaucratic organ within a democratic parliamentary state. It isn't even close to a reasonable comparison.
When the Rabbinate governs who can get married, who can get divorced (and when women cannot get divorced without their husband's consent), who can be a Jew (and this is important for immigration purposes. for Aliyah!) The rabbinate governs who can marry people -- conservative rabbis, reform rabbis cannot marry people in Israel.
The Ayatollah "wield supreme political power" in name only. He is like King Charles. The queen of England is NOT the proper comparison. The favorite beer in Iran is labeled BEER -- this is not a state where the Ayatollah is the sole power. Iran is a very complex state, please don't try to tell me that you think it's communist china.
I won't repeat other criticisms of this argument. But I will say that, to the extent that it's true, you don't have to invoke antisemitism to explain it. I think it's a manifestation of Western progressives giving a lot of moral weight to what they view as oppression, and in this case they view the average Palestinian as the oppressed and the Israeli government as the oppressor. That's not to say there aren't antisemites criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza -- of course there are. But I don't think it's driving the narrative.
As many have pointed out this comment severely undermined itself via overstatement, yet the point that Western liberals might hear about this Palestinian boy but are very unlikely to hear about the Israeli boy seems clearly correct.
You need to look further. When the white Jewish soldier boots the brown Jew in the staging area in the teeth, who reports it? (Not a real incident, but indicative of the pervasive racism in Israeli Jewish Culture). Ain't nobody whose narrative that supports, so ain't nobody talking about it. Except, of course, the folks witnessin' it.
I think another important point, 𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦 the value of consistency, is that having inconsistent values often means that one will, in trading them off against each other, end up in a worse situation than if one had had decided upon a consistent set (Dutch books / "money pumps").
That's true, but I think non-exploitability in this sense is much weaker than what people mean by moral "consistency."
Good point—I guess I might say that here we at least have a /lower bound/ for "the value of consistency" (i.e., maybe there's no reason to be consistent as long as you're not vulnerable to a "morality pump", so to speak, but /at least/ that level of consistency ought to be maintained).
I'm also sort of imagining that Scott's opponents here are saying stuff like "why bother trying to reason out any moral principles at all?!"... which might not actually be the case (but I've seen people say it! questions of this sort often seem to arise in debates wherein far-fetched hypotheticals are involved, I think).
Yes. But from a third-party perspective, the person who is consistent and has values very different from mine makes things worse for what I think matters with nearly every action, while the inconsistent person, who makes things always worse according to their *own* values, is sometimes making things better and sometimes making things worse.
True—also a very good point, now that I think of it. Hmm...
...perhaps this suggests that we ought to—in secret—encourage our friends to be consistent, but (publicly / in front of our enemies) decry consistency as pointless...?
I don't think we should worry about consistency per se, one way or another! We should worry about people aligning to the correct values (or to our values, or to the values we like, or whatever it is). Just because they're friends doesn't mean that their attempts at consistency will bring them closer to the correct values - it might bring them away!
Excellent point, again. I think I'd definitely agree that the more important question is 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 values someone holds, in general; whether they consistently {order / apply / trade off} those values is far & away a lesser concern.
After all, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘧 we assume (undoubtedly wrongly) that ideological allies won't move away from the Correct™ moral values upon reflection, there are still—as you pointed out initially—many, many folks for whom consistency would be, from my perspective (i.e. the 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 one), an unalloyed minus.
...but, 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘰, in the spirit of Scott's post (or something):—
>𝘑𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺'𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯'𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘴 - 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺!<
Well... one might assume that (ideological) friends would 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘺 end up aligning their values in a(n ideologically) friendly way, such that it is at least as likely that their inconsistency costs you(r "side") some number of morilons¹ as that it will turn out to have benefitted you, relative to the "now they're aligned—but maybe not exactly as you'd wish?" counterfactual...
...but there's no guarantee, true enough. Perhaps the likelihood of benefit drops off as one's values depart farther from the mainstream, since this might imply that one got there by some combination of unusual intuitions or unusual(ly 𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥!) reasoning—like, maybe the modal individual who agrees with my own values only got there by chance, and I don't want them reflecting upon 'em, very much...
...sort of depends on the faith one has in their (& one's own) reasoning abilities, I suppose.²
(Probably there are also a good number of cautionary historical examples wherein "group decides to take its principles more seriously & reason out a nice logical formulation of the same" turns out to be worse than "let's all just do our collective best off of our vague moral intuitions", heh.)
--------------------------
¹: "𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘴", 𝘴𝘦𝘦?–
²: I, personally, don't have very much faith in the average—nor even in the modal!—person, I'm afraid. I might go so far as to say that I'm not sure very many people actually 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 any sort of coherent moral framework at all (nor, really, much in the way of any other coherences); pushing such individuals to "reflect & perfect" probably just pushes 'em closer to the values of those around them / the dominant culture in their area. I dunno, I'm just spit-ballin' here, aight–
This tactic is known as "being inconsistent".
𝘛𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 inconsistent (𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 consistency)!
I guess for some degree, people value consistency more than alignment. This is solely based on that traitors are usually avoided by everyone, even when they rebel from enemy side to your side. Inconsistent people can't be trusted to hold what they say, by definition. At least you can predict what an opposite-aligned people would do.
An adversary known to have internally-consistent, maximalist goals can simply be ruthlessly crushed, which is ugly but hasn't really been a hard problem (in the grand scheme of things) since at least WWI. http://tangent128.name/depot/toys/freefall/freefall-flytable.html#2447 Someone with inconsistent, imperfectly-understood goals has to be dealt with more diplomatically, which requires a lot more deep thinking - not least because any visibly consistent diplomatic policy, being an axiomatic system, has flaws. Decision thresholds have to be drawn somewhere, and once they are, deliberately constructed edge cases can provide opportunities for bad-faith actors - potentially including those with covert maximalist goals - to slip through the cracks, inflicting attrition while avoiding scrutiny. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout , and the fans of popular media which they've antagonized, laying siege to payment-processors' customer service departments with deliberately time-wasting calls, as another example from current events.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
Did Walt Whitman have a problem with his values?
FWIW, my go-to thing to point out about most Gaza discourse isn't "why aren't you mentioning other larger-scale tragedies", it's "why aren't you mentioning the context that the ruling government of Gaza is ideologically committed to there being no sovereign Jewish state in the region, not in the dog whistle or squint sense, but in the explicit say-it-out-loud, that's-really-their-main-thing sense and the majority of their constituents are on board".
"the majority of their constituents are on board".
I'm skeptical of this. I mean, to start with, how would you know? I doubt Gallup has a poll in the field. And even if its true, in some abstract sense, that the majority of Gazans would nod and say yes to the proposition "there should not be a Jewish state here" that is probably in conflict with their lived experience in a way that is certainly going to impact their pragmatic goals.
I'm sure if you polled most Irish people in the majority of the 20th century, they would say there is no part of Ireland that should be part of the British Empire, but that doesn't mean every single one of them supported the tactics of the IRA or thought it was worth the Troubles to have that victory. I'm sure its beneficial for Hamas to claim they have a mandate from the Palestinian people, but that doesn't make it true.
There's at least one organization that does have polls in the field: https://www.pcpsr.org/en
Many Thanks!
Your comment is a great representation of what we're dealing with. Westerners just don't believe the Palestinians' own clear statements that they definitely WILL NOT STAND for a sovereign Jewish state in the region. When they say things like "we value death more than they value life", it's because they just really want sovereign Jewish Israel to not exist, at any price - it's their top ideological religion-linked priority. It's more important *to them* than economic flourishing. *They* only want economic flourishing in a non-sovereign-Jewish-state world.
You'll forgive me, I spent my formative years hearing very similar arguments about Muslims in general, that we had to treat every single one of them like a suspected suicide bomber because it was just fundamentally a religion of violence. And its not like there were no imams, and no terror attacks to support the argument! But ultimately the horde of radicalized sleeper agents never materialized. I recognize that the situation is different, but this idea that religion or ethnic tribalism overrides all other concerns is just not convincing to me.
There was one free election in Palestine ever. It was won by Hamas, a group which since its founding has been openly committed to the extermination of Jews. Since then, Hamas has consistently been far more popular in opinion polls than its opponent, the Palestinian Authority.
I do not think this is intrinsic to Islam or anything like that. I just think this is the outlook of most Palestinians in recent decades (as they repeatedly say and demonstrate), and is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as well.
Hamas won that election,not on "exterminate the jews" but on an anti-corruption bent. Same as Zelensky. Hamas didn't realize they were going to win that election, so I doubt the Protest Vote that got them elected realized it either.
There is a pretty clear pattern of antagonism and violence between Jews and Arabs that stretches back...I dunno, a century or so, in its modern incarnation. Not sure what else would convince you at this point.
It is possible for one thing to be false and then for a different thing to be true.
https://nonzionism.com/p/israel-is-a-borderline-failed-state/comment/139992907
How many children participated in this poll? How many women? What is the seven year old's opinion on the geopolitical status of the State of Israel?
We can similarly inquire about how many German women and children didn't actively support the Nazi party in WWII. I would just make sure to notice the crucially important observaton that Nazi Germany was really big on the Final Solution and the Allies weren't big on anything analogous/symmetrical.
There are of course plenty of people who argue that both the firebombing of Dresden as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were immoral and injustied acts even if by some utilitarian calculus they could be argued to have saved more lives in the long run. To me this is simply a larger disagreement about whether or not it's okay to kill civilians, especially women and children under the thumb of a particularly murderous and barbaric regime of men, for the actions of those murderous men in charge. I think you will find that there are many more men than women on the "yes it's morally acceptable" side of that equation, but then, that is not surprising since it is men who prosecute wars.
I have this disagreement with my husband. We are both in agreement that when it comes to Hamas, or even just the general political and social order of Palestine, vs Israel, Israel is the clear winner and side we are on - there is zero dispute there. The difference is, that he believes it's therefore okay to starve/bomb/kill their women and children, to eradicate Hamas, and I do not. He views it as Hamas' fault for hiding behind them as shields. I think that's irrelevant, as we've already established that Hamas are barbarians, and that doesn't change the moral calculation of making children suffer the punishment for the sins of their fathers.
I don't think this should be such a controversial position. It reflects the position we've undergirded in our own rule of law, which is that it is worse, morally, to convict and punish an innocent man than it is to let a criminal go free, if you have to weigh those things as opposing moral considerations that require bias one way or the other.
Hmm how about a simple hypothetical where it's a high-ranking Hamas leader sheltering in a tunnel located under 1 sleeping civilian woman, and let's say the only way to target him is to target the whole building+tunnel complex. Obviously there's no good option here, but are you saying you consider the better option to be that targeting him isn't allowed in that situation? Because the problem is that then he can walk around with babies strapped to him and he's invincible right?
well, after repeatedly seeing photos of Palestinian children playacting as killing Jews, this is a question you probably wouldn't like an answer to...
youtu.be/4QRYCXm42Wg
And I wish Israel was a sovereign state not captured by genocidal maniacs
Ask anybody who's currently being shot at what their top priority is, it'd be kinda shocking if the answer WASN'T "stopping those guys who are shooting at us." When they stop being in continuous mortal danger, and economic flourishing looks like a real option rather than a distracting theory, answer tends to change.
I think if you look at the actions of the Irish or South Africans over the last 75 years of their respective conflicts and compare it to Palestinian conduct over the same period, it will reveal the preferences of their respective populations.
Because the South Africans and Irish did not ever commit acts of terror? Or because the Palestinians never engaged in a protracted period of nonviolent direct resistance?
Because the Palestinians have never shown the capability of pivoting to non-violence.
There are several organizations that routinely poll Gazans. In the immediate aftermath of Oct 7, 52% of Gazans and 85% of the population of the West Bank explicitly stated that Oct 7 was the correct thing to do.
That averages out to about 72% of all Palestinians.
There is a tiny bit of difference between "Ireland shouldn't be part of the British Empire" and "Britain shouldn't exist", especially when you have a long history of murdering British civilians.
The time between October 7th probably feels like twenty years if you are actually living in Gaza, its certainly thousands of deaths ago. See also Taymon Beal's post above. Doesn't seem like anyone is ready to unilaterally disarm but they seem pretty dispirited.
Also, the Irish DID murder British civilians, its a debated number, and I don't pretend to be an expert on the history, but a quick google shows the lowball projection over nearly 100 years of violence to be at least 30% civilian. I don't actually think "Ireland shouldn't be a part of the British empire" is that different from "Israel should not exist" when you consider that in the end the Irish still agreed to give up 1/6th of the country.
"There is a tiny bit of difference between "Ireland shouldn't be part of the British Empire" and "Britain shouldn't exist", "
Is there? Or rather, does the difference map in any sensible way to this case?
Irish people wanted to be in full and complete control *of Ireland* as they recognized it. I doubt they very much cared what British people did over in Britain, as long as they did it *in Britain* and not in Ireland.
If in a counterfactual universe a giant chasm had opened up and swallowed the island of Great Britain, with the survivors fleeing to Ireland and declaring parts of the island to be "New Britain" to which they had eternal and sovereign claim, I doubt too many of the Irish people of this counterfactual universe would budge very much on their view that Irish people should have full and sovereign control of Ireland--the whole of Ireland--regardless of what the newcomers called parts of it.
I have enough basic empathy that I can understand how and why Palestinians feel the same way. To be crystal clear: I don't think they should get what they want. Israelis also deserve homes and also deserve peace and security and prosperity, and as fraught as the area where they live is, there's not really an alternative. But when a foreign group shows up on land that your group has lived on for centuries and starts pushing you around and telling you that parts of it are no longer your and never will be, wanting them gone is a pretty damn natural reaction.
Notice, though, that even in this universe--even without the inconvenience of an giant chasm and a disappearing Britain forcing the issue--the Irish didn't actually get everything they wanted. A large chunk of their island is *still* under British control. And that is and has been a very, very contentious issue that has produced a lot of really shocking violence in the past. But several decades of mutual peace and prosperity have done quite a lot to cool off that lingering resentment. It's not gone. But it's probably closer to gone than anyone 50 years ago would have imagined. Funny how that works.
> the Irish didn't actually get everything they wanted
I mean you can't really generalise about what "The Irish" wanted, that's the point. The Southern Irish wanted to be a separate country, and they got that. The Northern Irish wanted to be part of the UK, and they got that too. This is about as happy a compromise as you could hope for, except that a bunch of Southerners decided that they wanted the North to be part of their country too and were willing to kill random civilians to try to get it.
You can try to map this onto Israel-Palestine if you like but the analogy isn't all that useful. The Southern Irish may have wanted to conquer the North but I doubt they would have exterminated all the Northern Irish if they'd done it, whereas the Palestinians would absolutely kill every Jew if they had the chance.
This is, to put it lightly, not a very accurate description of Irish history. The entire problem is that a large minority of northern Irish wanted (and still want) to be part of a united Ireland, independent of the UK. A narrow majority, who are descendents of British planters, wanted (and still want) to remain part of the UK, and view themselves entirely as British.
At the foundation of the Irish state a compromise was struck to partition the island, which ended the war of independence. This compromise then started a civil war in Ireland, because it was viewed by some as a betrayal of the Northern Irish Catholics who were left living as second class citizens in the newly created Northern Ireland. This simmering problem re-ignited in the late 1960s first as a peaceful civil rights movement and then subsequently as a horrific multi-decade series of terrorist attacks and reprisals, between the mostly Northern Irish Provisional IRA, Northern Irish Unionist terrorist groups and the British Army.
Eventually all sides saw fit to end the madness by accepting messy diplomatic compromises that made their most fervent members very angry. The most consequential of these compromises was an agreement to hold a refedendum on uniting Ireland, if it appears likely to pass. Given demographic trends it has looked like this is an eventual inevitability, but that may be changing. Hopefully we do not look back on the last 20 years of peace in Northern Ireland as an abberation.
Let me push back against that. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in either polling, or Gaza, or Israel.
I assume you're talking about the AWRAD poll published in November 2023; you can find the report under https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023%20-%20Tables%20of%20Results.pdf.
First, it was relatively small, with under 400 respondents in the West Bank and under 300 in Gaza. I can only assume that the response rate would have been very low, too.
Second, there are the usual limitations of polling during a war, and of polling in an authoritarian, violent state; in this case, the two are combined, and the results should surely be taken with a pinch of salt.
Third, and more importantly, the respondents didn't "explicitly state that Oct 7 was the correct thing to do". The question asked was: "How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?" I think we can agree that this question might, shall we say, cautiously imply a possible answer.
More generally, I strongly suspect (and here I'm definitely just speculating) that, like the absolute majority of Russians on Ukraine or even most Germans under the Nazis, most Palestinians don't actually support mass violence, terror and the killing of civilians. I was struck by someone pointing out the Arab Wikipedia article on Dalal Mughrabi (https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AF%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%BA%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A; I don't speak Arabic, but your browser's translate funcion will do fine). If you don't know who she is (I didn't): you ca start with the English version (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalal_Mughrabi), but, in short, she led the Coastal Road massacre, killing numerous civilians. The Arab version doesn't mention any of this; it just stated she was a freedom fighter, and that around 30 Israelis (implied later in the article to have been soldiers) were killed in a shootout. People generally (generally!) don't root for murderers.
I presumably got it wrong; the numbers you quote are a closer fit with a different poll, the one here: https://pcpsr.org/en/node/963
Here's the first paragraph of its "Main findings":
Most of the questions asked in this last quarter of 2023 revolved around the October 7 offensive and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. It also covered the debate about the future of the Gaza Strip after the war and the Palestinian perception of the positions of the various relevant countries and actors. Findings indicate that a majority of the respondents believe that Hamas' decision to carry out the offensive is correct, and believe that the attack came in response to “settler attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque and West Bank residents, and for the release of Palestinian prisoners.” It is worth noting that there are significant differences between the attitudes of the residents of the West Bank compared to those of the Gaza Strip, in terms of the “correctness” of the Hamas' decision (and other matters), as the attitudes of Gazans tend to show a greater degree of skepticism about that decision. It is clear from the findings that believing in the “correctness” of Hamas' decision does not mean support for all acts that might have been committed by Hamas fighters on October 7. The overwhelming majority of respondents say that they have not seen videos from international or social media showing atrocities committed by Hamas members against Israeli civilians that day, such as the killing of women and children in their homes. Indeed, more than 90% believe that Hamas fighters did not commit the atrocities contained in these videos. When asked what is or is not allowed in war, under international humanitarian law, the findings indicate that the vast majority believes that attacking or killing civilians in their homes is not permissible. The majority (except in the Gaza Strip) also believe that taking civilians as hostages or prisoners of war is also not permissible.
The PCPSR has been doing opinion polling of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for decades. Feel free to look it up.
A lot of confusion about this conflict rests on simple ignorance of Palestinian goals re: killing every Jew they can get their hands on.
So let's grant your premise that most Palestinians are ideologically committed to there being no Jewish sovereign state in the region, including little children somehow. How does that justify starving those people to death? The majority of Israelis support, at a minimum, 'expelling' Gazans (https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jewish-israelis-support-expelling-gazans). Does that justify October 7? Would it justify a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv?
First let's agree there's an asymmetry here. Most Israelis are absolutely NOT ideologically opposed to having a sovereign Muslim Gaza, they just don't want to be existentially threatened, which unfortunately they are. If Gazans would just *say* "hey we're cool with sovereign Jewish Israel", my own view is representative of the median Israeli's - we'd be like "oh really? Let's move toward a 2-state-solution peace process then". But they won't say it! Again, it's not dog whistle level. It's explicit, ideological, and religious. If you think this is hyperbole or symmetrical to a description of median Israelis, then you & I are at an impasse.
I'm curious about this, I feel like your perspective laid out here is rarely covered. For example, I hear plenty of content about settlers who seem pretty set on a Jewish dominated Palestine/Judea and Samaria, and statements by the current Minister of National Security, but I accept their views may be a small minority within Israel.
What are the different political parties' positions on this - do any list out conditions under which they would recognise a sovereign Gaza/West Bank? Is there popular support for any unilateral actions which may engender some future goodwill and compromise?
You can search for videos where people walk around Israel and Palestine and engage people on the street with these simple questions like "do you want to coexist with your neighbor in peace, yes or no" - this is absolutely the key difference. The fact that my comment is news or treated as hard to believe by so many people is pretty incredible because neither side is even trying to be coy.
To your question, Israel has religious extremists just like Palestine does. The difference is we're talking a low % fringe (not sure how much, maybe 10%), while in Palestine it really is *their thing*, similar to the rest of the neighboring Arab world which is 100% Jew-free by law.
Couldn't some of that be related to the actual status quo situation (Israelis have a state, Palestinians do not)? I mean, it's much easier to say you want peaceful coexistence when it's your army which is in control!
I don't mean to discount your point entirely - clearly there is a lot of religious-hatred/racism among Palestinians and the wider Arab world. It just seems a bit glib to imply, 'yeah we'd totally give them what they want (a state), if only they were nice and peaceful like us'. It doesn't look that way from my (admittedly, outside and uninformed) perspective; for example it seems like Israel's West Bank policy is to put ever more settlers in, making it ever harder to create/compromise on a feasible, independent Palestinian state, and further aggravating tensions in the region.
Am I wrong? If 90% of Israelis really want peaceful coexistence and only really care about security, shouldn't there be strong domestic criticism and opposition to that policy? Is there? Hence my question to you about Israeli politics - I don't hear much from the 'peace and compromise' side.
I admit to being confused on the whole "West Bank Settlers" thing. I mean, why don't the West Bank Police just go and arrest these people?
Israeli politics is much more lively than American politics about israel, because they don't have AIPAC breathing down their necks. Lots of views, many Jews, all opinions, including Green Leaf (the marijuana party).
>"Most Israelis are absolutely NOT ideologically opposed to having a sovereign Muslim Gaza"
What about a sovereign Muslim Jerusalem? Have there been any Israeli two-state solution proposals that involve completely ceding Jerusalem? I can totally get why Israel would think they shouldn't have to give up Jerusalem, but from the rhetoric that gets tossed around in the Western world you would think this is a secondary issue. I think it is actually a crux.
This isn't my area of expertise but I believe the Camp David deal on the table would have involved splitting Jerusalem so both sides got control over their holy half or something.
I think the time when the Palestinians were getting any part of "real" Jerusalem (as opposed to some outlying area they can call Jerusalem) is long past. The deal is going to do nothing but get worse the longer it gets drawn out.
This assumes Israel survives. I'm giving it pretty long odds on that, at the moment. Palestinians get Jerusalem by default.
Big if true, random internet user.
How is Israel existentially threatened by Gaza, or how would it be by a sovereign Gaza?
Israel has fought off 5+ neighbours before, each better resourced than Palestine / Sovereign Gaza would ever be, let alone current Gaza.
But you avoided the question:
Never mind israeli sentiment about Gaza -- does palestinian or Hamas anti-Israel sentiment justify Israel's actions?
Just because you're wearing body armor doesn't mean you should tolerate someone stabbing you repeatedly.
And if that person loudly declares that their goal is to kill you and destroy everything you care about, and you know that they are absolutely sincere, letting them go free is stupid. You know they'll try again and again until they succeed. Tying them up in your basement isn't the best idea, but there isn't a police in this analogy, and you're fresh out of better options.
Thank you for being honest. But I will point out that states are not humans. Even among humans I think your conclusion would be pretty suspect. But among states--where long-simmering conflicts are pretty much the norm--admitting that you cannot possibly tolerate the existence of another state that holds itself hostile to you is pretty much announcing your intention to tyranny.
The vast, vast majority of states current and historical simply do not have that luxury. I'm sure Ukraine would be more comfortable is Russia didn't exist, China would be more comfortable if the U.S. didn't exist, Taiwan would be more comfortable if China didn't exist, India would be more comfortable if Pakistan didn't exist and so on and so forth down the list of (often legitimate) fears and grievances. But states are much, much harder to get rid of than people. The *only* circumstance in which a state can realistically decline to tolerate the existence of a hostile and untrustworthy neighbor is the circumstance in which that neighbor is *not* an existential threat: the circumstance in which the power differential is so vast that ending that state becomes a reliable and realistic option. So when you hear somebody say that Israel *must* subdue Gaza or *must* bar Palestinian statehood because not doing so is allowing an existential threat, you can be sure that this person is either being dishonest with you or dishonest with themselves.
The reality, of course, is that Israel's own conduct in this conflict has been much, much more of an existential threat to its existence than Gaza ever could have been. Internal strife and international isolation are both more dangerous forces by far to *any* nation state than terrorism.
I find this to be one of the key arguments, and one that I (if I understand it correctly) strongly disagree with.
It takes
- Hamas is a terrorist organization bent on destroying Israel and killing Jews (relatively undisputed)
- Many or most Palestinians support Hamas (somewhat disputed)
- Many or most Palestinians supported October 7, and support killing Jews generally (disputed)
and synthesize it it "their goal is to kill you and destroy everything you care about".
(I've also noticed that these arguments almost always use "they," so much so I've actually started to notice it creep up in many different charged discussions. Is "they" more or less a prerequisite for motte-and-bailey arguments?)
In this case, you're talking about a comparison, but, here, too, it's unclear who the "person" stands for. Hamas? Many Palestinians? Most Palestinians? All Palestinians? How many righteous wilt though destroy with the wicked?
I agree that there is a strong case for justified self-defense after October 7 (Putting aside the question of to what extent are past Netanyahu governments responsible for keeping Gaza in the state it is in, and keeping Hamas in power), and indeed most of the West has stood beside Israel as long as it was a strategic, measured response.
It is a thorny question how much responsibility you have in this case for minimising civilian casualties while trying to achieve your strategic objective (which surely is neutralising Hamas, right?)
But currently we are clearly beyond this point, right? It no longer looks like the goal is "neutralise Hamas while minimising civilian casualties".
>How is Israel existentially threatened by Gaza, or how would it be by a sovereign Gaza?
Hamas' founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jews and rejects any peaceful resolution of the Israel/Palestine problem.
Now, it's true Hamas-controlled Gaza isn't in a position to seriously threaten Israel's existence. But that's an argument for keeping Gaza down for as long as it's ruled by Hamas so that Hamas can't threaten Israel, not for letting Gaza get stronger so they can pose a threat. Geopolitics isn't a sports tournament where you want to make sure every team has a decent chance of winning.
There's also an argument to keep Hamas around, so the two-state solution would never seem realistic. I hear Bibi was a fan of that for a long time...
"Most Israelis are absolutely NOT ideologically opposed to having a sovereign Muslim Gaza, they just don't want to be existentially threatened, which unfortunately they are. "
So "they're absolutely NOT opposed to X, they're just absolutely and utterly unwilling to consider any realistic possibility that includes X in any way."
If you think that's an unfair characterization, I'll invite you to take a look at the phrase "existentially threatened." Are they? Are they really? By GAZA? The utmost effort of the most powerful, hateful and militant group in Gaza, with many years of planning and literal suitcases of foreign cash managed to kill roughly as many Israelis as a really bad train wreck. Yes, I'm aware that Hamas *wants* Israel gone. But I tolerate the--genuinely far more threatening--existence of North Korea every single day, despite what the leadership of North Korea wants, because I know they won't get it.
So when I hear "Hamas in Gaza is an existential threat to Israel," I can interpret this in one of two ways. Either the speaker is so wildly anxious and poor at risk evaluation as to be unable to tolerate *any* neighbor with any sort of bad blood or history of conflict. Or the speaker is using the term in bad faith, as an excuse to justify things that could otherwise not be justified. Either way, it's hard to read something like this and come away with the conclusion that Gazans or even Hamas are the actual problem here.
> If you think that's an unfair characterization, I'll invite you to take a look at the phrase "existentially threatened." Are they? Are they really? By GAZA?
Israelis are individually existentially threatened by Hamas, even if the existence of their entire country is not. You can hardly expect me to be happy about being murdered just because hey, my country will survive.
Obviously you shouldn't be happy about it, but there are lots of things that have a probability of killing the citizens of a state without threatening the state itself. Usually, we judge what responses to such a threat based on how factors like the distribution of risk across the population, and what the cost is to mitigate that risk. I don't see why Hamas violence should be any different.
COVID killed ~5 times as many Israelis as October 7; it would be weird to describe COVID as an existential threat to Israelis on the basis that any individual has some (small) percent of being killed by it.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Centuries ago the Jews who controlled Palestine were conquered by Muslim peoples, these then were conquered by the Turks, who in turn were conquered by the British. In the meantime, Europe spent approx. 1500 years doing their level best to exterminate the Jews (Hitler wasn't the first, he just had better technology) and, by the end of WWII, there was basically nowhere on earth where Jews were allowed to live in peace. The British, who had decided to leave the region, refused to allow the Jews a state in Palestine because they needed to be all pally with the Jordanians and Arabians for their oil. The Jews finally had no other choice but to declare their own state (in their original homeland!), at which point all of the Muslims living in the area left, expecting that the five Muslim countries that immediately declared war on Israel the day of its birth, would wipe it off the map after which they could happily return home in the following days. Instead they ended up in Gaza. My feeling is that post British empire, there was more than enough space and more than enough reason for there to be a Jewish state (and a right to exist, means a right to defend itself). It also accepted a two state solution which Palestinians refused and tried to give Gaza to Egypt but they refused. My question, what should the Jews/Israel have done differently to avoid this situation? 'Cause I can't think of anything.
> My question, what should the Jews/Israel have done differently to avoid this situation? 'Cause I can't think of anything.
Not done the Nakba. The Israeli Arabs (i.e. Arab Muslims who live in internationally recognized Israel and have since before 1948, not Mizrahi Jews &c) are perfectly fine members of Israeli society who, so far as I am aware, have done less terrorism than the actual Jewish citizens of Israel; 18% of Israelis are Muslims.
Yahya Sinwar was the child of people who were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba. In the universe where his parents were not ethnically cleansed, he probably would act like all the other people who were demographically similar but whose parents were not ethnically cleansed by Israel, and not organized a horrible terrorist attack.
(Whether or not you got cleansed in the Nakba was basically random because there was no central command on the subject; it's not the case that the most volatile Palestinian populations specifically were chosen for cleansing.)
Maybe just call it "killed" because "ethnically cleansed" just seems a ridiculous usage of the English language. If they were killed specifically because of their race, you could use the word "genocide" but "cleansed" has no meaning when referring to a specific person who was killed.
>If you think that's an unfair characterization, I'll invite you to take a look at the phrase "existentially threatened." Are they? Are they really? By GAZA?
The reason they're not currently existentially threatened is precisely that the IDF tends to stamp down on anything that looks like a military build-up, precisely the thing you say they shouldn't do. You might as well say "You claim that this man needs to stay in prison because he's a dangerous criminal, but how can he be a danger to anyone when he's locked up?"
>But I tolerate the--genuinely far more threatening--existence of North Korea every single day, despite what the leadership of North Korea wants, because I know they won't get it.
Also because North Korea doesn't sent commando raids to the mainland US to kidnap, rape, and murder American citizens. If they ever did such a thing, the US response would make the IDF look like a bunch of Zen Buddhists by comparison.
Strictly speaking it wasn't responding to a raid *on the mainland US,* but Operation Paul Bunyan seems comparable to the scenario you describe in most other ways, and yet involved zero civilian casualties - no North Korean fatalities at all, to my understanding. It was also a complete success, tactically and strategically.
The Oct 7th attack killed about 1200 and took hostage 250 in a country of 10 million. 9/11 killed about 3000 people in a country of 300 million, and I sure remember the furor over that.
Comparisons to "a really bad train wreck" are at best misleading, even if terrorism is not a large cause of overall mortality.
Didn't Israel offer Gaza to Egypt at one point (being as it was traditionally Egyptian territory I think) and Egypt refused?
Egypt ruled over Gaza after the 48 war, as Jordan did over the West Bank. Unlike Jordan, which I believe gave citizenship to those living in the West Bank, Egypt basically ruled Gaza as a military occupation, though until 1959 they had a puppet client state there.
Sure, I will grant that there is an asymmetry, though I think it has more to do with history and material realities than some inherent quality of your average olive farmer in Gaza. My point is, it's irrelevant to the horrifying situation in Gaza right now.
It's effectively saying, "but the people we're slaughtering really really hate us!"
Okay, so why does the median Israeli keep voting for a party which is constitutionally opposed to a sovereign Muslim Gaza?
I'm interested in dropping the second half of your argument.
Let's assume that many or most Palestinians oppose the existence of Israel. Few of them will be actually terrorists, but let's assume many or most support Hamas, one way or another. Let's assume it means Israel has to continue having the security measures and efforts it had for the past decades (which I think would be absolutely extraordinary for any other "developed" state), and still have the occasional terror attack, and - say, once in ten years - even a October, 7 (again, absolutely extraordinary by Western standards).
Does this justify what's happening in Gaza now?
This is an extremely important point. For some reason, "Palestine" as a nation is constantly discussed as if its political leaders (i.e. Hamas) are a wholly separate and irrelevant entity. There are tons of people who are pro-Palestine but neutral/allegedly opposed to Hamas, which is like being pro-Russia but anti-Putin. Or pro-Germany but anti-Nazi during WW2. Generally, when one sides with a country in a war, that would be understood as some sort of endorsement of that country's political leadership.
Or more to the point, how many pro-Palestinians are so careful to distinguish between “the Netanyahu government” and “innocent Israelis”?
How many Israelis are so careful to make a similar distinction about Palestinians? Or any distinction, really? I really don’t understand where the asymmetry is supposed to be. If anything, the only asymmetry is that for Palestinians, we’re just speculating about what they would do if they had the means, while with Israelis, we don’t have to speculate, we can just look at recent and past history.
I’m not really talking about either the Israelis or the Palestinians, directly. I’m referring to the debate in the US and Europe, where on the one hand it’s very common to rhetorically separate Hamas from the Gazans, but not to separate Israelis from their government. It’s a part of the general trend of downplaying the degree to which Gaza has had any agency in its own downfall.
I mean, how much you can actually impact what your government does should matter when deciding if that government should be considered separately from the citizens of the country in question.
For example, most people don't consider an authoritarian dictator to accurately represent the people of their country. It's clear that you can separate the two, because the people (by definition) don't have any say over the choices of the dictator.
On the other side, a direct democracy (you vote on everything) would mean the citizens are functionally inseparable from the government. If the people of a country voted to go to war, it's fair to say that they support that war.
Anything in between is going to be shades of gray, but it falls on one end or the other of this spectrum.
IMO, I think that's why Hamas gets separated from the Palestinian people, whereas the Netanyahu government isn't. The Palestinian people don't really have a say in how Hamas handles things, whereas Israel is a parliamentary democracy. You can probably argue about whether or not Israel's government is doing what the citizens want (I'm not an expert on their political dynamics), but I think that difference is enough to make the views logically consistent.
You can construct that argument, and perhaps you yourself hold it sincerely, but I don’t think it’s one that is held in good faith by a lot of people. It’s certainly not a distinction we make regularly, at least not to that degree, in other conflicts even when the belligerents are non democratic (there appears to be little sympathy for the people of Russia right now, for example).
Fundamentally I think people believe there is a massive Palestinian “peace party” among “average innocent Gazans” not because of the structure of Palestinian politics, or because of any evidence on the ground they have carefully researched, but because it is comforting to believe that, and it makes it easier to cast Israel as a clear villain. Hell I suspect even most supporters of Israel want “innocent average Gazans” to be true since it seems to be the only hope for long term peace.
Whereas to admit that Gazans were broadly supportive of Hamas, their warmongering, and even Al Aqsa Flood itself, muddies the waters.
If Gazans are not enslaved victims of Hamas, but rather their coconspirators and fellow travelers, then it’s harder to maintain a black and white view where they are the blameless targets of a one sided genocide, rather than a belligerent in a very badly lopsided war they chose to start (and continue to fight) anyway.
Was what happened on 10/7 “speculation”?
I’m married to an Israeli and am very critical about Netanyahu so I make this distinction all the time. However, I have noticed my Arab friends tend to accept the distinction less because they have been critical of multiple Israeli governments.
In my experience, a lot of people who consider themselves "pro-Palestinian" more mean they support Palestine's right to exist and have some degree of sovereign freedom and viability, not that they support the policy platforms of the Palestinian governments. The reason this is different from your rule-of-thumb that supporting a country implies endorsement of its leadership, is that normally the country in question isn't being denied sovereignty or at risk of ethnic cleansing.
So yeah, if somebody says they're pro-Russia, it's a reasonable guess that they at least somewhat endorse Putin's leadership. If somebody says they're pro-Catalonia, it's a less reliable guess that they endorse Salvador Illa's leadership. They might just believe in the Catalonian people's right to self-determination.
This is why I'm careful to always refer to "Palestine" if I'm referring to the set of people who live in Gaza + West Bank or "Gaza" if I'm referring to the set of people who live in Gaza or "the democratically elected representative government of Gaza" if I'm referring to HAMAS
>"Generally, when one sides with a country in a war, that would be understood as some sort of endorsement of that country's political leadership."
It depends what you mean by "sides with in a war". I don't want Hamas to "win" the current war in Gaza; insofar as I want a ceasefire it's because I think Israel has already "won" the war, not because it is secretly a way for Hamas to stay in power.
I agree there are some (many?) people who genuinely do want Gaza to "win" but a) I think a good number of these people are pretty explicit about their support of Hamas, and b) are completely delusional about the prospects of this happening.
For the rest of us, we only "side with" Gaza over Israel in the sense that we think that either much of what Israel is doing isn't a valid war aim; or insofar as it is advancing war aims it's doing so at too a high cost relative to the value of those aims.
>I think Israel has already "won" the war, not because it is secretly a way for Hamas to stay in power.
But if Israel disengages, Hamas will stay in power, openly even. The only victory that Israel will accept at this point seems to be re-imposing total occupation, and that hasn't been achieved yet.
Sure, I don't think Israel should just disengage in the sense of, leave and walk away. I have no problem with Israel holding out for reasonable terms of victory, and to the extent those are on offer and Hamas is refusing, that's on them.
But I also suspect that some of what Israel is doing is not for the purpose of securing reasonable terms, but rather to accommodate the desires of the resettle Gaza faction.
And to the extent that Israel is being reasonable about terms, it still can't pursue just totally arbitrary measures to achieve that.
So, I want Israel to win, but only if "win" is construed reasonably, and if reasonable measures are used to secure victory. Any sense in which I "support Gaza in war" is just: I am doubtful if those conditions and think it's reasonable to apply pressure on Israel to meet them. It's a far cry from that to, "must support the Gazan government"
>rather to accommodate the desires of the resettle Gaza faction
Not to mention the "keep Bibi out of jail" faction.
>And to the extent that Israel is being reasonable about terms
Well, deal or no deal, there will be plenty of misery in Gaza for many years to come...
No disagreement about that
The ruling government of Israel is ideologically committed to there being no sovereign Palestinian state in the region (they even gave Hamas billions of dollars to stop it from happening), and the majority of their constituents agree. What is your point, exactly?
No, there's a big and critical asymmetry with what you're saying. Right now the position of the Israeli government, and most Israelis, and me personally, is that it's crazy to talk about a neighboring state that is explicitly and ideologically opposed to the non-existence of sovereign Jewish Israel *as their #1 priority* for god's sake. But if we could go back to Camp David and have Palestinians actually accept it and drop the whole "let's make it our #1 priority to take down sovereign Jewish Israel" thing - which unfortunately doesn't seem like something they'd be willing to trade *anything* for - then most of us Israelis would! We don't have a fundamental/ideological problem with these guys having a Palestinian state dude.
Putting aside the issue of which faction currently has more intrinsic genocidal animus, the practical realities of what it would take to create a genuinely independent and self-governing Palestinian state would raise a whole host of fundamental/ideological problems for Israel.
"Putting aside which faction has more genocidal animus"? I'm telling you this is the key asymmetry. I personally have zero genocidal animus for Palestinians, yet I'm strongly pro-Israel, and that goes for all my friends & family. We are the same normal people with normal views you meet in Silicon Valley, New York, etc.
how is this an asymmetry? do you think the kids in gaza being slaughtered hold bloodthirsty views towards jews in silicon valley? look at the the guys like shaun maguire in silicon valley lol.. "normal people"
Yes. The settlers are not going to go quietly. The messianic/radical faction is willing and eager to kill and conduct terror attacks if that is what it takes. That’s what they did to Rabin. And their leader controls the Israeli police
Right now, Palestine’s neighboring state Israel is explicitly and ideologically opposed to the existence of sovereign Palestinian Palestine *as their #1 priority*:
• They gifted Hamas terrorists billions of dollars in the service of this cause. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas” —Prime Minister Netanyahu, March 2019
• They have a government minister dedicated entirely to this: Orit Strook, the Minister of Settlements.
• They are sacrificing the lives of their own hostages in order to prolong the war and prevent a sovereign Palestine.
• “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River. This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?” —Prime Minister Netanyahu, January 2024
So again, you & I have an impasse if you think the situation of who is ideologically committed from preventing the other's sovereign governance is anything like symmetrical. I will die on the hill that it's not (i.e that my personal experience with Israeli family/friends/acquaintances NOT being ideologically committed to Muslim non-sovereignty generalizes to the majority of Israelis) and I think if we can't even agree on that, nothing else will make sense.
But again, like I've tried to explain, the quote from Netanyahu is still consistent with what me & everyone I know supports *as long as the Palestinians are explicitly all about being determined to eliminate sovereign Jewish Israel*.
If there is any “big and critical asymmetry here”, it’s the asymmetry between worries about what a hypothetical Palestinian state could theoretically possibly maybe end up doing in the unknown future, versus what the actually existing State of Israel is doing in the present reality right this second.
So just to repeat, because I am hereby laying down and dying on this hill: The Palestinians are *fundamentally, ideologically committed* to no Jewish sovereign Israel.
The majority of Israelis are making a *practical determination* that empowering Palestinians near our border right now with state-level capabilities means empowering a "let's do everything we can to take back sovereign control over Israel including mass-scale terror" society.
Do you have any evidence for these statements, beyond “I know some Israelis, and that’s what they tell me they think, and I don’t know any Palestinians, so I just assumed”?
Of course, the reality is that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are a monolith. And just as many Israelis would be more willing to accept a Palestinian state were it not for Palestinian terrorists regularly attacking innocent civilians, more Palestinians would be willing to accept Israel if Israel’s government wasn’t killing and oppressing them every day.
If the Palestinians were doing the same kind of practical determination, based on Israel’s behavior in the past, would you expect them to behave any differently? If not, what else is making you so sure of this minor difference of intent? Do you have any evidence for this?
That position does not explain the support the Israeli government gave Hamas over the years.
>worries about what a hypothetical Palestinian state could theoretically possibly maybe end up doing in the unknown future
Hamas explicitly rules out any sort of peaceful co-existence in its founding charter, and kills Jews any chance it gets. It is literally as obvious as anything in international relations that, if a Hamas-led Palestinian tate got control over Israel, it would try to commit genocide.
A hypothetical Palestinian state *might* end up being led by Hamas. (I think it’s not the most likely outcome, and there are many ways to ensure it doesn’t happen, but it’s not impossible). And Hamas *might* end up trying to start something—and fail miserably, due to the vast gulf in technological capabilities. They were able to do October 7 only because the incompetent political leadership of Israel disregarded all the repeated warnings from their intelligence agencies.
In contrast, the State of Israel is not just trying to commit genocide; it’s actually succeeding, right now.
Great comment!
nit:
>neighboring state that is explicitly and ideologically opposed to the non-existence of sovereign Jewish Israel
looks like a typo/dropped minus sign
anyone with a brain in 2025 understands the two-state solution zionists push for is a farce and will always be akin to apartheid and oppression+occupation lol no one is buying this shit anymore - you are a genocide apoligist
The reason they don't want there to be a Palestinian state is that October 7th but with a state army would be undesirable, for everyone involved
Meanwhile either Gazans support Hamas and want Israel to not exist on principle, or they are Hamas' true hostages. Neither of these options are improved by preventing the destruction of Hamas, it just sets up the next round and makes the world happier on net, with a high discount rate, by reducing their own distress as soon and as much as possible
I don't understand why the Israeli position isn't just "The West Bank is part of Egypt, Egypt please come and clean up your mess".
Egypt really really doesn't want any of that? FWIW Gaza being an Israeli territory was a *concession* to Egypt in the peace negotiations.
I know they don't want it, but can they somehow be diplomatically forced to take it?
This is a tangential comment, and I do not mean it as an ad hominem sort of thing, but I feel this might be a good public forum to discuss, and it is extremely important.
I think you, Liron, should think through more deeply if you should be taking on the role of communicating about existential risks from AI.
In this comment thread, I think you exhibit:
- a strong personal bias on a topic, with a very high, not-very-much-updating prior (Call it overconfidence? Arrogance?)
- Being partial to your "ingroup", without making any acknowledgement of the death and suffering of thousands of people
- As far as I can tell, in some cases engaged in ~demagogic arguments.
I admit I haven't watched all your content on YouTube, but I do seem to remember at least cases when you come across arrogant and overconfident as well as make arguments that sound convincing but have certain holes.
I don't know if the empathy point will be relevant soon in AI advocacy, but it very well could be.
I think public advocacy is important, and the AI Safety community has been neglecting it for too long -- I have respect for you for trying to actually do something.
But I'm extremely worried that you will burn "our" credibility very quickly.
(I hope this sort of comment is okay to leave, and I am open to being corrected.)
Hey Gugu, I'm making a specific, narrow, factual point about the majority of Palestinians want in their own words. Why make this about me? If I didn't represent their position, we can argue about that. But I would just go look up the facts about what actual Palestinians are saying about whether it's at all acceptable for sovereign Jewish Israel to exist in any capacity.
But thanks for your thoughtful feedback that my convincing-sounding arguments have "certain holes".
What's your point?
If there are "certain holes" in the argument he is making here, please just point them out.
If he is being arrogant here, please just point that out.
The position of Hamas since 2017 is that they would accept the existence of Israel with a Palestinian state within 1967 borders and the right of return.
That's not acceptable to the Israelis, but it's frankly much closer to a fair resolution than what Netanyahu wants, which is for Gaza to be ethnically cleansed and the entirety of the West Bank settled except for a few Palestinian cantons.
Yes, precisely - the idea that Hamas (let alone the Palestinian population as a whole!) is explicitly ideologically committed to Israel's destruction and therefore peace is impossible is just ludicrously false. Hamas's own charter says they'd settle for a two-state solution!
That's false. Their 2017 document literally says "Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea."
And then in literally the next sentence it says "However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus."
Put the two together and you get "If the national consensus wants to sign an agreement removing Israel from half of Palestine, we will not oppose the agreement, but afterwards we will fight to destroy what's left of Israel".
That's one way to resolve the incoherence of that self-contradictory paragraph of the charter, I suppose. But I think the much more logical interpretation is that you put the two together and get "Look, we can't officially say, as the government of Gaza, that we accept 1967 borders, since then we'd be relinquishing a negotiating chip without securing anything in return, but look, obviously, we'd accept the 1967 borders in exchange for statehood".
Accepting a two-state solution and then continuing to fight in an attempt to destroy Israel sounds... obviously impossible? Why would Palestinians fight for such Hamas in a world where they have a state? How would Hamas retain power? I would think that Hamas immediately ceases to exist as a significant player if a two-state solution happens, and I would think they know it.
(Their offers during the current fighting to disband in exchange for a two-state solution reinforce this interpretation of the charter.)
>Why would Palestinians fight for such Hamas in a world where they have a state?
To get more land, because they don't recognise Israel as a legitimate country and don't want to give up half their rightful land to it, revenge, because they don't like the idea of Muslim territory being occupied by non-Muslims...
>How would Hamas retain power? I would think that Hamas immediately ceases to exist as a significant player if a two-state solution happens, and I would think they know it.
I think you're typical-minding pretty hard here TBH.
Read the actual revised 2017 Hamas charter. Hamas did not offer to recognize Israel and sign a peace treaty normalizing relations—the kind of normal relations that exist between e.g. the US and Mexico. It offered a temporary truce as a matter of expediency while maintaining its position that Israel is illegitimate and should be destroyed.
Obviously, given Hamas’ pedigree and history as the faction totally *opposed* to the peace process, Israelis are inclined to think Hamas was exaggerating, rather than underselling, its commitment to peace here. (As minimal as that stated commitment was.)
Hamas stated that Palestinian national consensus is for there to be a Palestinian state within '67 borders. Truces are often precursors to permanent peaces; sometimes they just continue indefinitely. North Korea and South Korea are still at armistice. Japan and Russia are still at armistice.
Hamas has, within the last decade, participated in steps towards the peace process and enforced ceasefires that Israel broke. They are frankly more committed to a two-state solution that Likud is, which will not even theoretically accept one under any circumstances.
>a Palestinian state within '67 borders.
Yes...as a prelude to eventually establishing a Palestinian state within all the pre-1949 borders, sans Israel and its Jewish inhabitants?
>Truces are often precursors to permanent peaces
And they're also often precursors to future wars. For example, the 1994 ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan left the status of Nagorno-Karabakh unsolved, hence the 2020 and 2023 wars. The 1973 Paris Peace Accords were shortly followed by North Vietnam's invasion and destruction of South Vietnam. (North Vietnam, of course, did not recognize South Vietnam as a legitimate state under the provisions of the Accords.)
Notably, the specific Islamic concept of hudna used by Hamas originates from a truce between Mohammed and Mecca, which was followed by Mohammed's conquest of Mecca. I'm not sure if the peace agreements in the Crusades were considered hudanāt, but they're instructively similar: temporary pauses in fighting, without recognition of legitimacy, that were followed by Islamic conquest.
>Hamas has, within the last decade, participated in steps towards the peace process and enforced ceasefires that Israel broke.
And we saw with 10/7 that Hamas has no problem using a period of calm to premeditate and prepare an attack on Israel in conjunction with its regional allies. (To clarify, as reported by NYT, Hamas asked both Hezbollah and Iran pre-10/7 to join it, but neither were enthusiastic.)
Again, Hamas' rise in the 1990s was in *opposition* to the actual Oslo peace process. It was the faction you joined if you thought the PLO was selling out Palestine with the Oslo negotiations. They were orchestrating suicide bombings *before* the Second Intifada. Call me crazy, but when these dictatorial religious fanatics turn around and say "time for a ceasefire!," I don't actually believe it's because they've secretly done a complete ideological 180.
> They are frankly more committed to a two-state solution that Likud is
I absolutely agree that Likud, considering its ideological pedigree and actions, is not committed to a two-state solution. But if we used the same credulous and generous standards that people like Robert Wright apply to Hamas' statements, we could conclude that Likud supports a 2SS.
For example, Netanyahu famously said in his 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech:
"In my vision of peace, there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbor's security and existence."
If you're familiar with Netanyahu's biography and Likud's politics, you have every reason to be skeptical that this is the most accurate reflection of his private understanding of the conflict. (As discussed in Anshel Pfeffer's biography.) It's a political ploy. But if you used the same kid gloves often applied to Hamas' statements, you'd conclude that, wow, Netanyahu was really interested in making a deal to create a Palestinian state.
“No sovereign Jewish state” isn’t doing it justice. They drafted extensive plans to kill or enslave any Jew in the region. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-05/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/hamas-actually-believed-it-would-conquer-israel-and-divided-it-into-cantons/0000018e-ab4a-dc42-a3de-abfad6fe0000
Yes. Ironic how you never see the people complaining about "genocide" upset about this. Apparently genocide by their side is OK.
War is not an accident activated by bad political mechanisms; it is a perennial state brought about by human enmity, which abounds and is going nowhere. Like Winter, it inevitably arrives.
My opinion on the war in Gaza is that it's not my war, and it is not my place to be involved. Why would it be my place to be involved. The participants must sort it out for themselves.
Hamas are evil. More evil than the Israeli government as a whole. Even more evil than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
But (a) that doesn't mean anyone is allowed to commit war crimes against Gazans. (This would be true even if all those Gazans supported Hamas.)
And (b), more to the point, my government isn't supporting Hamas. If arms manufacturers in my country were selling missiles and bombs to Hamas, I'd be out in the streets demanding that they stop. But they're not, they're selling them to Israel instead. And yes, I'm out on the streets from time to time demanding that they stop, not quite as fervently as I would if they were selling to Hamas, but still with passion.
So to give a little symmetry to your post, my go-to when people say "why aren't you mentioning other large-scale tragedies" is that my government doesn't view the perpetrators of those other tragedies as allies. Israel isn't the worst perpetrator of crimes against humanity in the world, but I think it probably is the worst one that has widespread popular support in my and other western countries. The only one that it's reputationally risky to challenge.
This is mostly irrelevant. Hamas is a shell of its former self. It barely even exists anymore. The function of this line of argumentation serves primarily to excuse and justify, not to explain.
I think the reason that gets left out of those conversations is because that does not justify war crimes and letting children starve to death on purpose, even if they’re the kids of people that hate you.
It’s simply irrelevant to the question if the current behavior by Israel is acceptable (it’s not).
I'm afraid this simple two-node causal model you're referring to, "Israel's actions --> children starving to death", isn't a sufficiently accurate capturing of the situation. Try adding other relevant causal nodes.
I’m not really interested in arguing about wether Israel is committing war crimes or causing a famine. That wasn’t the point of my comment at all, and I don’t think the position that they’re not deserves to be taken seriously in 2025 anymore.
I was simply answering why people leave out how bad Hamas is in discussions like this; because it is irrelevant to the question if the behavior of the Israeli government is justified (its not).
I still understand you to be reasoning from a two-node causal model, and actions that seem bad in such an “all things equal model”, like “causing kids to die”, often turn out to actually be the best of bad alternatives when you make the causal model larger.
I don’t think I’ve ever seem anything come as close to an explicit admission of motivated reasoning.
No, it's a fact of causal analysis and average human morality that a two node model "military makes explosion --> baby dies" can in some unusual circumstances be a net good action. For instance, Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar was targeted hiding under a hospital, and killing him is good even if there are nonzero civilians above him. Fortunately this one is a purely hypothetical example as Israel heroically managed to target him without killing civilians.
Funny you mention that. Actually, this was the main argument of ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan regarding the charges against Netanyahu -- that Israel, as an occupying power, has the duty of preventing famines in Gaza.
(As someone watching from another country, I have the impression that, for the most of these 2.5 years, Israel, without a doubt, could not care less.)
There is a nice interview with him on CNN, available online.
See, when you say "explicit say-it-out-loud" I counter with "Iran says that too. And they damn well don't really mean it." Perhaps Hamas really does mean it, but if they lack any tools to make it happen, we'll never be able to judge by their behavior, unlike Iran, which does/did have the tools to destroy Israel.
I think it is highly probable that the little boy carrying around pieces of his brother in a backpack will be committed to the end of Israel for the rest of his life. He may never get to act on it, but surely he will hate every Israeli forever.
I really don't know how you deal with that. Ten years from now, if you interviewed that now-grown kid and he told you the backpack story and told you that of course he wants every Israeli dead, what would you say to him?
In a few years Gaza will more likely than not be wiped off the map, and the number of Israelis harmed in the conflict will be a very tiny drop in a very large lake full of mostly Palestinian bodies. And it will seem afterwards very strange indeed to place at the root of the horrors that have followed: Gaza's historically helpless and ineffectual opinion on whether Israel should exist.
But if we must . . . I think it's generally pretty easy to speak of perceived ideological commitments beyond official policies and principles of a party.
*Officially*, the government of Gaza is committed only to a return to the original 1948 borders of the Balfur declaration.
So if we want to move beyond official commitments (on the grounds that purported goals need not align with *actual* goals):
I quite clearly perceive that the government of Israel is ideologically committed to there being no sovereign Palestinian state in the region. (By the history of their military actions, by their activity in the West Bank, and sometimes even by the things they're just willing to say out loud)
In effect, this particular question cancels out on each side's moral ledger. And we can just assume both sides have equally strong sentiments supporting each other's right to exist somewhere else.
We're left then to ask only "which side is being more consistently and mercilessly horrific toward the other?"
And the answer is, by basically any random sample of horrificness metrics you care to draw from a hat, very obvious.
(Go get some horrificness metrics from people who don't know why you're asking, and then try drawing then from a hat at home!)
Again, I'm happy to die on the hill that only one side makes it their whole thing to be ideologically, religiously committed to not allowing the other side to have a state. I see that as the root of Westerners' misunderstandings. It's not like "oh two sides both don't want the other to have a state". No my friend. "Palestine" isn't the state they want. Just go ask random Palestinians - they're not going to lie. (I've already asked random Israelis for you, and can tell you we are 100% OK ideologically / in principle with Palestine being a state.)
Duncan Sabien's post from a few days ago, The People vs. The Principles, might be somewhat relevant: https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/the-people-vs-the-principles. It argues that for most people
> espousing a principle is like wearing a shirt. Someone demanding that you lay out a defensible, coherent description of what shirts you will and won’t wear, with the palpable intent to hold you to it for all time and catch you out in a lie if you ever wear a shirt that doesn’t match, is like an SS officer at the door asking if you’re harboring Jews in the basement. They’re already an enemy (or at least not clearly someone to trust), so there’s no moral obligation to tell them the truth. You just describe the shirt you’re currently wearing and hope they go away.
That quote, out of context, did a pretty poor job of communicating to me what the linked post was about.
I would summarize the linked post something like: There's a lot of people (Duncan suggests at least two-thirds and perhaps 95%) who care about personal loyalty and group conformity, who have never cared about principles, but who pretend to care about principles BECAUSE that is the group-conforming thing to do (because our society praises principles). They assume that everyone else is doing the same thing and so they don't realize they're even fooling anyone with the pretense, but they can't STOP pretending because that wouldn't be group-conforming. And perhaps you should try arguing with those people by talking about that difference, instead of by accusing them of being unprincipled (since they were never trying to be principled, and don't understand that you ever expected them to be).
I don't actually understand how Duncan imagines that hypothetical argument going. Aren't the people-people just going to continue insisting that they're actually principles-people and interpret any counterclaim as a dishonest social attack? How would that argument be different from the "I am being principled and you are not" line that the principles-people usually say? It seems like the fundamental problem is that people-people are refusing to discuss their true reasons for things, and there isn't an obvious way to solve this from the principles-people side.
I suppose maybe you could talk about instrumental reasons for principles (rather than ethical reasons), and hope that if they understand how principles can be useful they'll start entertaining the idea that some people might actually have some?
I also think that Duncan is trying to make his readers feel sympathy for people-people but that this mostly failed for me. I suppose a person who doesn't understand how to be good, who was never taught what goodness was or given any examples to emulate, is more sympathetic than someone who understands but chooses evil. But I feel they're slightly less sympathetic than someone who is trying to be good and failing because of cognitive biases, which is my usual default assumption.
That's fair, but I've excerpted the part I most agree with. :D
I think it's unfair to blame the "people-people" for "refusing to discuss their true reasons," since as Duncan notes, if you did, "you'll be sneered at and derided and treated-as-lesser, and everybody knows this."
Personal loyalty is what I regard as my highest value, and since I'm not big on group conformity, I'll say it: I DO have other principles, but I will not BETRAY family or friends over them, and consider doing so monstrous. You can call it "choosing evil" if you like, but to me, YOURS is the irredeemable evil. (Which is part of why I like the "SS officer at the door" analogy: the people I am loyal to would be the metaphorical Jews in my basement, and there is no principle I hold to so dearly that I would not burn it to the ground to protect them.)
Suppose Alex is a murderer and the police are here to arrest him. Let's set aside for a moment the question of whether Alex's sister Beth should try to protect Alex. Would you agree that it's correct for the police to try to arrest Alex? Would you agree that if Beth tries to protect him, the police should overpower her and arrest Alex anyway? Would you agree that _most_ of civilization should be in an alliance against Alex, here, even if a few people close to Alex aren't part of that alliance?
Would you support measures today that are designed to ensure that murderers get caught in the future, in general, even if those measures _might_ someday be used against your personal loved ones?
If you're willing to participate in the general alliance-against-murderers up until the point you discover that one of your loved ones IS a murderer, then I think you and I are _basically_ on the same team, for issues like this. I still think that if your brother turns out to be a murderer then it's wrong for you to protect him, and I will endorse the police overpowering you with whatever force is necessary if that situation ever comes up, but getting your cooperation in that narrow special case is not so important that I'd jeopardize the rest of the alliance over that one issue, if I were making the call.
But I DO expect you to cooperate in establishing a police force that is capable of apprehending murderers in general, and NOT to preemptively carve out special exceptions that make you or your loved ones immune to that police force. Do you see why it's important to the success of the general alliance-against-murderers that you do that much?
----------------------------------------
Regardless of blameworthiness, the refusal of people-people to discuss their true reasons seems like it is CAUSALLY blocking productive discussion.
Possibly society should consider changing its strategy of when/how it punishes unprincipled behavior to try to make it easier to talk about, so that more people get more accurate information and there are more opportunities to persuade people. There are tradeoffs, though: we don't usually try to make it safe for, say, thieves, to admit to being thieves, because punishing thievery is typically more important than having frank discussions with thieves, and in the case of thievery I think that's basically the correct tradeoff to make. I'm less sure about the correct tradeoff here, but if you're going to have a civilization based on impartial enforcement of the rules, then at SOME level you do need to fight against people trying to apply the rules unfairly, or the alliance falls apart.
Also, like...sneering is not SO bad an outcome that avoiding it is normally considered a valid excuse for dishonesty or fraud. If a student cheated on a test because they would be sneered at for getting a bad score, we don't say "that's fine then", we say "that's no excuse; integrity is more important." If an automaker claimed their cars could travel at 80 mph, because they'd be looked down on if they admitted the cars can only make 60 mph, we don't tolerate that. If a scientist puts fake data into their research paper because they staked their reputation on one outcome and the true outcome was different, that doesn't make the fake data ok.
I think it's typically basically fine if you lie about your hobbies or your religion, because those lies don't (usually) involve making a promise/assurance to other people (there might be exceptions; e.g. priests probably shouldn't lie about their religion). But if you defect from the general-alliance-against-murderers, and then lie about your defection because you believe people would think poorly of you for defecting, I consider that an _explanation_ for your lie but not an _excuse_ and I think that it _is_ fair to blame you for lying about that.
How seriously am I to take a spiel on the Kantian imperative against lying from an SS officer asking me if I'm hiding Jews?
Sure, I guess you can assign blame to and condemn other people for following the incentives you set up if you want to. But if you want information you're telling people you're going to punish them for giving you, I'd say it's YOUR fault you're not getting it, not theirs.
I specifically cited the mildness of the "punishment" as a crux in my previous comment, and you are going back to an example that has the intensity turned up to 11. My argument about lying EXPLICITLY does not apply to the SS example. This is simply not a valid response to what I wrote.
And I don't even consider that the most important problem with your example. The most important problem is that you have different obligations when you are trying to cooperate with people to build a functioning civilization than when you are in a shooting war with them. Civilization is a positive-sum trade where you make some sacrifices (like giving up the ability to tell certain advantageous lies) to get some other benefits (like the ability to settle disputes without a shooting war), and it stops working if every individual person starts ignoring whichever parts are currently inconvenient for them.
But the lying isn't even my main concern. If a thief is questioned by the police, I do not consider it ethical that the thief lies, but my MAIN quarrel with the thief is that they are a thief, and the lying is a secondary issue.
If we're only going to discuss one point, I'd rather discuss any of the other points from my previous comment than this one. I asked you several explicit questions and you didn't respond to any of them.
I disagree with your assessment of how bad the incentives you've set up are. I note you you left out the "derided and treated-as-lesser" bit, for starters. Ultimately, I think that stance makes it so the prudent thing to do IS to treat someone like that as if you were in a shooting war, and not a kumbayah positive-sum civilization-building cooperative relationship.
I think your understanding of my views are so lacking that your questions are wrong, and I don't expect my answering them as stated to help clarify my position. I'll say that before signing on to any grand alliance on a matter of principle, I WOULD check that it doesn't end up net-negative in expectation for my friends and family, and if it WERE bad for me and mine and looked like it might go through without my cooperation, I would try to join it and undermine it from the inside.
> If a thief is questioned by the police, I do not consider it ethical that the thief lies,
There are principled disagreements with that position. The fifth amendment to the US constitution, for example, enshrines a right to avoid self-incrimination, which isn't exactly blanket approval to lie to the cops - perjury is still a thing - but does seem to imply contexts where it'd be ethically permissible.
Doctor-patient and attorney-client confidentiality are similarly protected, because those relationships are acknowledged as important enough to society's functioning (and expectation of privacy is necessary to the trust on which those relationships are built) to outweigh the benefit of punishing someone who couldn't be caught and convicted otherwise. Do you think the courts should be able to compel someone to testify against their spouse?
The people people have a huge advantage in numbers, so you have to respect that, even if you don't have sympathy for them.
Yes, as a matter of strategy it's a very important point (to whatever extent it's true, which I'm uncertain about).
>how principles can be useful they'll start entertaining the idea that some people might actually have some
I think that Duncan's perspective is a bit too cynical, "people-people" do have principles, it's just that one of the principles is that the interests of the in-group trump other interests. I claim that the vast majority of "principles-people" also hold that principle, it's just that the more self-aware of them (like Scott) agonize about it from time to time.
If the DIFFERENCE between a "principles-person" and a "people-person" is that the "people-person" holds a principle that in-group trumps other interests, then how could it be the case that any "principles-people" also hold that principle? Wouldn't that just mean those principles-people are actually people-people?
No, the difference is that "people-people" don't have a deep yearning for a consistent moral system which could realistically determine your actions in most cases, something that hasn't been discovered yet despite millennia of trying.
So Duncan says that people-people don't have principles, they just pretend to have whatever principles would support whatever they currently want to do.
You say that's wrong, they have principles, but they don't aspire to consistency in following them.
I'm not clear on what the difference is supposed to be.
Well, Duncan is certainly correct that "people-people" proclaim that a consistent moral system is a desirable thing and that they try to adhere to one, and most of them would probably disclaim the in-group principle, but they don't really believe any of this. They mostly treat high-minded egalitarian principles as guidelines, something to take into account all-else-equal, and are happy about that.
Whereas "principles-people" outwardly also mostly behave in the same way, but inside they believe that this means that they are wrong and immoral, and beat themselves up about it, which I'd claim is useless suffering from which nobody benefits or could ever benefit, but sadly there's no acceptable mainstream alternative to totalizing morality, it's either that or "everything is permitted" nihilism.
The book “I You We Them” does a tremendous job at building a bridge between the statistic and the million individual stories that ended to create it, across a handful of genocides/corporate selective blindness episodes. Many reviews criticize the interweaving of the author’s autobiographical stories with the more scholarly work on desk-killers, but I think that’s crucial — it’s the through line that forces you to consider that every massacre killed that many individuals, each with a life as real and rich and detailed as the author (and as you).
Thanks, I might check it out! I've been trying to formulate a way to get people to understand that murdering people through denying aid is much worse than (eg) a school shooting, and finding it frustratingly difficult to express the simple intuition here.
Hmm... Your view seems similar to Peter Singer's in Famine Affluence, and Morality. _My_ intuition is to yeet him, his stance, and the entire project of ethics.
But... that sounds like a horrible thing to be forced to consider. Why would I want to read a book like that?
I can't possibly bear the weight of considering all the suffering in the world to happen to people who are just as real as myself and the people I care about. I can't fit that into my head any more than I can feel the distance to the stars, or to visualise every molecule in a glass of water.
If I really thought about all the suffering in the world I'd never be able to think about anything else. We all have different ways of dealing with this, and I'm not sure what the best way is.
Sorry to be so disagreeable when I don't even know you, but I think you're wrong about yourself here. If you're saying that truly considering all the suffering in the world is impossible, then sure maybe you're right. But *trying*, or at least expanding your circle of concern, doesn't have to paralyze you. I could try to make an argument, but really I'm just encouraging you, personally, to doubt your fears here. 👍
I'd say the fear of compassion fatigue is a very realistic fear that's not really worth doubting. Many of us have seen so many charity appeals, so many tragic stories, far more than we could donate to; it just makes you feel depressed. And that's just the stories that the news and charities manage to get in front of us. Why would we try to envisage even more?
That might be because activism has been pushing the line that if you're aware of some suffering or injustice, you need to *do something* (which in practice means posting on social media or some such), which is then potentially never *enough*. If you allow yourself to feel compassion at all, you're being threatened by guilt, as if you had just become more personally responsible for the situation than you were before.
The sane answer is to allow yourself to feel the compassion, and point a vague middle finger in the general direction of the guilt pushers.
Well, if a crack in the earth opened up at your feet and a devil popped out, offering a deal where you could save one random person at the cost of dooming ten others, and there was no other upside, you wouldn't want to sign, right? That'd just be stupid.
But if a non-supernaturally-contrived situation arose where you could save one person without dooming anybody, just facing some mild inconvenience and then being publicly praised afterward, presumably you'd want to go for that.
Studying all the suffering in the world - in moderation, possibly by cribbing the notes of someone who already did the hard parts - can help uncover (and thus avoid) situations where you might have, more or less, mistaken one of those scenarios for the other.
Interesting recommendation! Any other books you'd like to rec as alternatives or as follow-ups?
Hopefully this isn't too abstract, but I'm reminded of one of my favorite poems, "Faint Music" by Robert Hass, which begins,
"Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days—
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears."
+1
Sometimes problems don't have easy solutions, even after you've spent a lot of time poring over the alternatives to devise the optimal apotheosis of your grief. I don't think there will ever be peace between Israel and Gaza unless either one of the sides is wiped off the map, or at least conquered into submission. It's not that I don't *want* there to be a solution, I just don't think one exists. So all you're left with is either picking the side you'd prefer to continue existing, or accept the state of eternal war. I'm not saying this just to be cruel, I really do think it to be the case.
I think if you look at any historical conflict or injustice, it seemed to have no practical answer other than some form of extreme violence, right up until both sides finally got exhausted of the violence and decided to figure something else out.
Exactly, thank you.
If you cherry-pick the ones that DIDN'T end with one side gaining complete victory, sure, all of those ended in some sort of negotiated peace.
Corollary: the de facto governing bodies of the palestinian territories have to become exhausted of the violence in order for there to be peace. If this isn't what the process looks like to get them there, then what is? The political will in Israel to continue the war would collapse the instant that a way out looked realistic.
I think that's possible; certainly, I don't think there's anything about reality that guarantees that sort of thing will never be true. But I think that given that that sort of thing may sometimes be true, it's important to become the sort of person who's good enough at recognizing solutions that you can spot whether there are actually other ways out, and good enough at judging impartially that people are inclined to recognize you as someone whose opinion carries weight to judge between potential solutions.
(There's always going to be demand for biased judges, but hopefully, people have enough capacity to recognize impartiality that when judging between adversarial parties is called for, they can notice who makes for an acceptable compromise candidate.)
Being conquered into submission is not necessarily a bad solution. Germany and Japan were both conquered into submission, resulting in vast improvements in the safety, rights, and quality of life of their people. I'm not saying that Israel will be as gentle an occupier as the US was, but when Hamas is the bar, doing better isn't very hard.
"Conquered into submission" isn't really an option in this war.
An Israel conquered by Hamas would surely end with all the Jews being exterminated or fleeing.
And a Gaza Strip conquered by Israel would look... pretty much exactly like it does now.
I expect the Gaza Strip would like a bit more like the West Bank, where the leadership knows better than to try to wage war against Israel.
Gaza would look very different. WW2 ended with the allies governing Germany and running the country. Israel isn’t doing that, it’s just invading and retreating and invading and retreating. There’s no occupation government, with the corresponding obligation to police the place and keep it going. I can’t think of anything comparable on the modern era.
That requires submission. If Germany's leaders absolutely refused to surrender (and they aren't living in Germany so you can't kill them to death) and were hoping to just make the other side look really bad for all the Germans that had to be killed, how else would it have ended?
(Answer: I guess the US sits back and lets Russia do all the evil shit necessary.)
Bernie Sanders, not exactly shy about criticizing Israel, said the calls for a ceasefire were dumb, because you can't have a permanent ceasefire between Israel and an organization dedicated to chaos and destruction.
Maybe it just means permanent occupation of Gaza, forever.
But Israel still has a duty to feed the civilians of the territory it's conquered.
> But Israel still has a duty to feed the civilians of the territory it's conquered.
I believe the American precedent is to call them "disarmed enemy combatants," to get around that.
> kill them to death
I'll be borrowing this phrase
Then the world will never forgive either of them, and they will be so corrupted by the atrocity it won't actually be a win.
I sorta agree, but I think at least letting Gazans leave would be some sort of start
The problem is that they kind of have nowhere to go (the neighbouring countries don't want them), and most of them vehemently don't want to leave, anyway. The same applies to Israelis, I guess, albeit to a lesser extent.
The Gazans are a threat to Israel who aren't acceptable to their neighbors, the Rohingya are being subject to what's called a genocide by the Burmese government, maybe they could swap places to solve two problems at once :)
Both groups are Muslims. Gazans would face no better fate in 'Burma' than in Gaza. While the Rohingya might be better of, as they probably would not elect Hamas to rule them.
I think it would be a lot easier for the Israelis to find places to refugee to than the Gazans. They're on average richer and much more Westernized, plus there is a much smaller fraction of them who are part of an extremely bloody terrorist group.
No one wants that. No one is protesting "Let the Gazans In!". In fact, they would protest against it.
That is because it is not about the Palestinians as persons, it is about the Palestinian cause.
I pick Gaza
The odds are against it.
That would be a really clever thing to say if I was betting on a horse race rather than taking a moral position
No, the situation is the same regardless of what your motivation was.
Gaza being wiped off the map seems wildly likelier than the same for Israel.
Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s was seen as intractable, but they put their differences aside to work through a decades long peace process (mediated by the Clintons during their presidency, and Senator George Mitchell after that). In that process, the US was committed to peace - Mitchell spoke about spending months listening to the two sides list their grievances until they had talked themselves out. The system there now isn't perfect, but it's a stalemated political system and there hasn't been a bombing in years.
Plenty people said that no solution could exist even into the early 90s, and that it wouldn't last into the mid 2000s. I'm sure other conflicts have seemed intractable - it's not an excuse not to try to find a peaceful solution.
Sadly I don't think this is the case in the Israel/Gaza conflict. Peaceful solutions have been attempted countless times, and failed every time, regardless of who was handling the mediation.
I feel there are two arguments which you have not grappled with.
1. If you allow yourself to be swayed by anecdotal evidence and media stories, your sympathy follows not the area of greatest death (of which Gaza is currently #3 or #4 depending on how you count) but the one with the best media campaign. This makes you subject to effectively a case of the utility monster, someone who consumes and outsized amount of your attention and charitable and emotional attention because it has an endless appetite for it. In fact, in some ways it's worse, as the cause with the best media campaign is likely to be the one you are least likely able to affect and most likely to have other people trying to help.
2. You are a rationalist and advocate for the Effective Altruist movement. I'm not sure if you consider yourself one but I think it's fair to say you back their general principles. Their entire point of that movement is that charity should be allocated to maximize utility. I'd argue this necessarily extends to political advocacy as well. Thus, insofar as you have any control over your emotions and advocacy, you should shy away from trendy and prestigious things (like Gaza) and toward underserved things with asymmetric upsides. Gaza receives hugely disproportionate attention, support, and aid compared to every other conflict on earth. It may not be enough. But it's more than everyone else gets. And therefore is the least efficient use of your time, advocacy, and emotional energy.
Sudan has a population of 50 million, 25 times bigger than Gaza with 2 million. Gaza has received millions of tonnes of food aid. Sudan has received tens of thousands of tonnes since its conflict started. It has received less food aid in the last twenty years than Gaza has since the conflict started. I submit, by the same standards rationalists used to say ending PEPFAR was killing people, advocating for Gazans over conflicts like Sudan is killing people.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying Gazans don't deserve aid. I am saying that this is a very irrational way to maximize lives saved, one that is being driven by social pressures and media concerns, and that this directly means lives are going unsaved. I'm not interested in using the cheap "whatabout" trick. I don't really care if you have integrity. But I do wish someone would do this and you're the ones with the standards that say you ought to be more interested in this kind of stuff.
Re: 1: What exactly do you think Scott should do to correct for media bias, other than what he advocates in this post?
Re: 2: This would be a reasonable critique (albeit one I'd usually avoid voicing for politeness reasons) if Scott were investing significant time, money, or brainspace into pro-Palestinian activism, but AFAIK he's not in fact doing that, so I'm not sure who you're arguing with.
1. That's up to him. He's under no obligation to be rational. But if he does want to be rational then and take the idea of utility monsters and other such rationalist philosophy seriously then applying that lens, or at least grappling with it, would seem like a minimum.
2. He's a public figure with a moderately famous blog who has repeatedly talked about Palestine and, afaik, never talked about any other conflict in such detail. Not even the other trendy conflict Ukraine.
" who has repeatedly talked about Palestine"
Has he? Can't remember any other post about Palestine.
Yes, e.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/verses-on-five-people-being-killed (possibly others as well, but I remembered this one, and was able to find it.)
I have to say that if the only example you can think of is a poem written over a year ago, it doesn't really back up the "repeatedly talked about Palestine" point. I've just searched my emails for posts mentioning Gaza (I've been an ACX subscriber since the start, so before the current war in Gaza) and there are as far as I can tell no other posts in which it is the main topic. So I don't think he really has repeatedly talked about Palestine at all.
Ok, fair. I guess I should have restricted my "Yes" to the
>Can't remember any other post about Palestine.
sentence. Many Thanks!
I'm pretty confident he's discussed the Ukraine conflict more than the Gaza one. For the first few months of Ukraine, every Mantic Monday had some discussion of the war outlook, whereas I can remember 2 offhand comments about Gaza on this blog before today. I'm sure I'm forgetting some but I do think Ukraine discussion outranks Gaza for Scott by a large margin. I think he quite deliberately shies away from discussing wars that his readers care passionately about, and the more passionate, the more he shies away. This is wise.
EAs generally budget some portion of their income (commonly 10%) for charity, for good reason. If Scott's blog achieves 10% of the optimal value it could in principle achieve, or 50% or 90%, that still leaves lots of room for writing that doesn't have a clear path to wider utility. Similarly, you can't always be thinking optimal thoughts, because your mind needs a bit of leeway to even function.
The Ukraine War is more of a stalemate between comparable opponents. Gaza didn't have a military that could hope to beat the IDF, they were just hoping the Israelis weren't as willing to fight to the bitter end as them (similar to the assumption made by Japan in attacking Pearl Harbor, though their military had been competent enough for earlier wars against Russia & China).
>I think he quite deliberately shies away from discussing wars that his readers care passionately about, and the more passionate, the more he shies away. This is wise.
His readers, on average, don't seem that interested in the Congo, Sudan, etc, as OP points out Scott never comments on.
He might shy away from certain cultural issues his readers thirst for more "Golden Age Scott" commentary on, but clearly there is a limit to how much he will shy away from certain topics.
1. Scott has already made it abundantly clear in prior posts why "you care about X, so you should devote 100% of your resources into X" is both impractical and incorrect.
2. Like others have said, you're seriously misrepresenting (perhaps misremembering) how often Scott has talked about Palestine vs Ukraine.
Scott sometimes *mentioned* Israel/Palestine. Sometimes Sudan, more often Ukraine. Name 3 post in the last 2 years where Gaza is the main topic, if you please. - Even more often he mentioned Trump - while obviously there are many much, much, nay: MUCH worse politicians in the world. How could an EA dare to!?!
I don't think it's apparent from this essay that Scott hasn't grappled with those issues? Personally, I agree that there are other more serious humanitarian crises in the world right now than Gaza, that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to acknowledge any of the stories coming out of Gaza as tragic, or that I should fight the urge to have any sort of emotional response to them.
I think it's reasonable for me to think that if I feel such a strong emotional response to any of them, I should suppose that crises going on in the world which generate even more tragedy would generate even more stories that would elicit emotional responses in me, if someone put in the work to cover them, and so I should want to allocate resources to those tragedies accordingly. But not only do I not think Scott has made it clear that he feels otherwise, I think he's done more than most other writers in the world to persuade people of that position.
I'm not saying you should fight the urge to have an emotional response. I'm saying that it's a bad use of limited time and resources and that I wish they went to other less served causes. And I don't see him grappling with this as much though perhaps I missed something.
Insofar as Scott has talked about his own charitable giving, I think he's made it pretty clear that it's not determined by who generates the most heartstring-tugging stories. As far as use of time goes, I think that ideally, we might spend our time in proportion to how important we rationally think various issues are, but practically, what we spend time and attention on is going to be heavily influenced by what people in our social circles expose us to, and attempting to avoid this will generally cost more time and attention than it can realistically save.
Most of the objective people who professionally assess such things do classify Gaza as the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world right now. It is also the only serious humanitarian crisis which could be halted almost as easily as flicking off a light switch.
The effective altruism of dropping billions of US tax dollars on one party and millions of tonnes food on the other doesn't seem to meet any rationalist outcome standard.
Perhaps it would all be better spent elsewhere.
If that's your view then that's your view but considering PEPFAR, their general support of foreign aid, etc I do not think that is the rationalist view.
This is a strange comparison. On any proportional basis Gaza is the worst violence in the world right now. And the US is not involved in the Sudan situation, in fact has denounced it as a genocide and presumably is open to any reasonable/practical way of addressing it that does not involve US troops or other excessive costs
> On any proportional basis Gaza is the worst violence in the world right now.
This is incorrect unless you cherry pick the statistics. A lot of people want it to be true but it is not in fact true.
Also, why does per capita matter vs total lives saved? Are you going to go to Ukraine or Sudan and say, yes many more people died, but less died per capita so too bad?
> And the US is not involved in the Sudan situation
US allies are involved in Sudan. If you think the US is involved in Gaza in any way that is not "providing significant humanitarian aid" then the US is similarly involved in Sudan. Including significant military subsidies to nations who are influencing the fighting.
Please show your work on the completely ludicrous claim that the US is involved with the violence in Sudan in any way even vaguely analogous to the way that it is enabling the Gaza war
And per capita is in this case saying something very meaningful about the scale and ferocity of the violence in Gaza.
My understanding is that the RSF is heavily supplied by the United Arab Emirates, which supplies them with both money and weapons (one of many articles discussing this here: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2025/04/16/the-uae-preaches-unity-at-home-but-pursues-division-abroad)
The US has designated the UAE as a "Major Defense Partner" and has about 29 billion dollars a year of weapons sales to the UAE (https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-the-united-arab-emirates#:~:text=The%20Defense%20Cooperation%20Agreement%2C%20which,deployment%20in%20Africa%20and%20Asia.).
The US is clearly not as closely involved in the Sudanese civil war as it is in the Gaza war, but the US does have leverage over the UAE, which is (I would argue) has more ability to stop the war in Sudan than the US does to stop the war in Gaza (this might be too strong, but I'd at least argue that the degree of leverage is similar). This means that we likely do have substantial leverage to try to end the war.
I'm not going to argue about whether the amount of attention on Gaza is too much, too little, or just right, but I think that the amount of attention on Sudan, given our ability to influence it, is vastly too little. I can't think of a time that Biden, Harris or Trump were asked about Sudan, and I've never read an articulation of the US policy or approach to it. I think that Erusian's big-picture argument--that political advocacy around Sudan likely has a higher marginal value than political advocacy over other global conflicts right now--is likely correct.
I do think the fact that we’re just giving material to Israel free of charge (as well as selling, of course) is meaningfully different from selling material to the UAE at a profit. Cold blooded capitalism has its own logic independent of the morality, but giving aid implies that you believe in the cause/ think what is happening is righteous and worthy of charity. I don’t like the my government is implicitly asserting that
I agree that the US relationship with Israel is different in a lot of important ways from the relationship with the UAE (and even more the relationship with the RSF and the Sudanese Army). I think it's reasonable to feel that we have more responsibility for what's happening in Gaza, and agree that we do. But I think we are meaningfully involved in the war in Sudan and have meaningful leverage. And, from what I can see, there's essentially no public democratic pressure to use that leverage and very little media coverage. We're basically just trusting the American foreign policy establishment to get it right on our behalf, and I think the consequence is that our policy has a lot more to do with power politics and less to do with protecting people in Sudan than I'm comfortable with.
I’m fine with the idea that people should pay more attention to the Sudan case. But the notion that you should comb the earth for any horrific situation you can try to claim is as bad as Gaza and then call people anti-semitic if they are paying more attention to Gaza than that situation really does not hold water. Also, just FYI that the link you include does not say that the US sells $29 billion a year in weapons to the UAE — it is probably closer to $29 billion recorded in total over however many years contracting and record-keeping extends.
I don't think that paying attention to Sudan is about "combing the earth for any horrific situation you can try to claim is as bad as Gaza." The International Rescue committee says that Sudan is the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, and I believe has said so since 2023. Sudan is (if I understand correctly) the only place on earth where the IPC has declared a famine (https://www.unrefugees.org/news/famine-explained-definition-causes-and-facts/). It's also the largest refugee crisis in the world right now. My read is essentially that international institutions whose job is direct attention to the worst humanitarian crises on earth are pointing to Sudan as the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. I'm not particularly invested in the question of whether it's a better or worse situation than Gaza--clearly both are extremely bad. And I think that, if we think giving attention to international crises is worth anything, it's disgraceful how little attention Sudan is getting.
So I guess I'd argue that, rather than debating where it falls in the ranking of crises, anyone reading this comment should take some time to search for Sudan articles on the NY Times, Economist, Reuters, etc. to get some understanding of the situation and then write to your elected representatives. There's a good chance that you'll be one of the only people who does so, so might have an outsized impact on policy.
And thank you for the correction on the $29 billion. Re-reading it, this is described as $29 billion in "active government-to-government sales cases." I don't understand this language well enough to know if that is to-be-completed contracts or all historical sales, but I'm happy to accept that it is a total over all the years of this particular contracting system. The important question is how much diplomatic leverage the US has over the UAE, and I'm not terribly confident in the answer other than that it seems likely to be a considerable amount. I wish there was better reporting and analysis on this question.
>why does per capita matter vs total lives saved?
The way it’s commonly understood , “genocide” implies that a high per-capita death toll within a specific group matters. That’s the reason the holocaust is often brought up as significant despite the absolute numbers being relatively small compared to e. g. the number of deaths in the soviet union.
During the ongoing Sudan conflict Arab militias in West Darfur have been going to Masalit tribe villages and killing every man, women, and child they can find. They also burned two refugee camps full of Masalit to the ground, killing everyone they could. They're stopping people at checkpoints and if they are Masalit they're killing them. In January the UN announced that they believe 10,000-15,000 Masalit were killed in the city of Geneina.
Now Geneina has a population of about half a million, so on a per capita basis a little under 3% have been killed. Does that mean it's not a genocide?
Per-capita doesn't tell us whether something is a genocide without context. People being systematically killed because they are a member of a specific ethnic group is genocide, even if not many die on a per-capita basis.
> On any proportional basis Gaza is the worst violence in the world right now
There are particular square metres of soil out there where 100% of the people are currently being murdered.
You’re so clever. pro-Israel web commenters make a better case against Israel than anybody
I'm not pro-Israel, my preferred solution is to turn the whole area into a nature preserve.
Perhaps a strategic trinitite reserve.
> by the same standards rationalists used to say ending PEPFAR was killing people, advocating for Gazans over conflicts like Sudan is killing people.
Heh, gottem.
>> 1. "If you allow yourself to be swayed by anecdotal evidence and media stories, your sympathy follows not the area of greatest death (of which Gaza is currently #3 or #4 depending on how you count) but the one with the best media campaign. This makes you subject to effectively a case of the utility monster, someone who consumes and outsized amount of your attention and charitable and emotional attention because it has an endless appetite for it. In fact, in some ways it's worse, as the cause with the best media campaign is likely to be the one you are least likely able to affect and most likely to have other people trying to help."
Yes, this is the exact point I'm trying to make in this post.
>> 2. "You are a rationalist and advocate for the Effective Altruist movement. I'm not sure if you consider yourself one but I think it's fair to say you back their general principles. Their entire point of that movement is that charity should be allocated to maximize utility. I'd argue this necessarily extends to political advocacy as well. Thus, insofar as you have any control over your emotions and advocacy, you should shy away from trendy and prestigious things (like Gaza) and toward underserved things with asymmetric upsides. Gaza receives hugely disproportionate attention, support, and aid compared to every other conflict on earth. It may not be enough. But it's more than everyone else gets. And therefore is the least efficient use of your time, advocacy, and emotional energy."
Yes, this is why I've posted several times more material on PEPFAR than on Gaza. I kind of feel like you were waiting in the wings here to pounce on me for caring disproportionately about Gaza over everything else, when in fact I've posted about it once in a year and a half of bombing, and only to make a tangential point about moral reasoning.
But also, I think it's interesting that only Gaza gets this treatment. If I were to post about how puberty blockers were something something the poor children, everyone would praise me and say it's great that I'm finally standing up for this issue, even though puberty blockers are another thing that's less important than either Gaza or Sudan.
I think the general point that Gaza is a subject that generates disproportionate controversy is accurate, but I think it's odd that you bring up puberty blockers as a point of comparison, because I think that's another subject where, whatever position you staked out, you'd get a disproportionate amount of arguing over it in the comments. If anything, I think puberty blockers would feature pretty strongly in a list of most energetic scissor statements.
I think it is fair that Gaza claims more attention because when Sudanese are Killed it is just a sad thing it doesn't have intellectual sticking power, people don't really expect better from uncivilized countries and don't imagine themselves in the preparator's shoes. But Israel is a western civilized country with values closely aligned with even its greatest critics, and its actions are done under cover of moral justification, a logic that deep down we don't truly know how we would acct in their place. This causes excessive emotional involvement for strong evolutionary reasons, we need to be sure that if the situation effected us we would choose the correct path. This intellectual involvement allows the emotion to hold and fester as we find ourselves vicariously living both sides of the conflict.
Gaza will also continue to get more attention as long as the US is an ally of Israel. Political advocacy is much more likely to move US towards neutrality than encourage intervention in Sudan. Also, leftists are skeptical of intervention now anyways.
Very well said. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard this expressed so clearly, but it rings true to me.
The argument that Gaza gets disproportionate attention feels weak. To me, Gaza is the moral issue of our time. As Mehdi Hasan puts it,
"We are doing this. Our governments. Our taxes. Our arms sales. This is our Holocaust. Our Cambodian killing fields. Our Balkans."
The claim that we should ignore Gaza because there are worse genocides is designed to solidify loyalty from supporters of Israel who are wavering in light of the images that we're all seeing. Implicitly denying the gravity of war crimes in Gaza helps keep people on board. And I've never encountered a very convincing or thoughtful argument that there are worse ongoing crimes against humanity at the moment. Instead, we get some vague gestures towards Sudan. The tactic is to assert confidently that Gaza is no big deal, get us to accept it as a premise, and then get us rationalize that supposed disproportionate support.
The argument's insinuation that people focused on Gaza are motivated by something other than genuine aversion to genocide serves this purpose as well. It's easier to maintain critical support from a key constituency, if that constituency views itself as a persecuted minority.
That only holds if you see this war as unambiguously qualitatively similar to events where there is a systemic effort to physically kill a people (I'll avoid the word because definition drift makes it useless). I think "Use the force necessary to remove Hamas from power" is a fundamentally acceptable goal, and is much more similar to what's actually happening than "End the conflict by reducing the population so much that they aren't a problem any more." The war is obviously a big deal and very bad for innocent people. That doesn't mean the alternative actions that Israel could unilaterally take are better.
So, it's not that there are "worse genocides" by number of fatalities or some other metric. It's that the other events one might point to are qualitatively morally worse, more gratuitously malicious, more excessively violent compared to the minimum force necessary for legitimate military objectives.
> think "Use the force necessary to remove Hamas from power" is a fundamentally acceptable goal, and is much more similar to what's actually happening than "End the conflict by reducing the population so much that they aren't a problem any more."
That's because you can't have the latter without first doing the former. Israel's actions in the West Bank aren't much less of a moral catastrophe, and Hamas-less Gaza won't fare any better.
"puberty blockers are another thing that's less important than either Gaza or Sudan."
Are you sure? Wars have been forever but puberty blockers are new and capable of doing great mischief to fundamental social relations.
Yes, because puberty blockers are not allowed by be discussed by civil society whereas Gaza is talked about non-stop.
For what it's worth, while I generally agree with Erusian on the issues around this war in general, I agree with you that you have shown a lot of virtuous restraint and have been careful in your writing about Gaza. I see what you're doing, and I approve (for what that's worth). You have stayed above the rage-filled clickbait that is filling my Substack feed.
I guess now you have to publish your take on puberty blockers!
*waiting for the fireworks*
Well said. It feels like we already have a very good Peter Singer/Will MacAskill approach to these questions from the global poverty EA era. In fact, Scott himself wrote an excellent summation of it in this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/
Is this not just exactly the points he was arguing against in the post?
Well-said. Reminds me of Kelsey and the "kids in cages" debacle of Trump 1; I don't think that attention issue ever resolved itself either. It just faded from view again, as the news cycles and life goes on.
Apparently the question of what motivated Hitler's vegetarianism, and in particular whether aversion to cruelty had anything to do with it, is controversial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
Also relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany
One dimension that seems missing here is the question of who decides which stories we hear. The media don't just reflect our cognitive biases; they actively engineer and exploit them. Selective empathy might be inevitable at the individual level, but at the level of cultural narrative it’s often designed. There’s a pipeline through which our “heart of hearts” gets activated, and it’s never neutral.
Same reply as to Erusian: What should a media consumer do about this, if not what Scott advocates in this post?
I think Scott does gesture toward the emotional filtering problem, but I’m pointing one layer upstream: the conditions under which certain stories become tellable or resonant at all. It’s not just bias in the reader; it’s structural selectivity in the attention economy. Maybe that won't provide a simple call to action but it changes how seriously we take emotional salience as a proxy for moral urgency.
I think it's tricky, but here are some steps:
First, try to isolate yourself from hearing individual sob stories from war zones. If you find yourself reading one, find something else to read instead.
Secondly, for each story you hear, remind yourself of the existence of all the stories you didn't hear, and meditate on that for a while.
There's who decides which stories we hear, but also who tells us who is the villain in the story. We hear stories of suffering Gazans, but the slant is generally that the Israelis are to blame, rather than that Hamas is to blame, or the Gazans are themselves to blame for having voted for Hamas and not rising up against them. It's like in WW 2, where someone starved by our submarine blockade in bombed-out Tokyo had a choice between blaming the Americans or blaming the Japanese Army.
Yes, once a story is visible, framing becomes the next site of distortion. The sequence matters.
"the slant is generally that the Israelis are to blame, rather than that Hamas is to blame, or the Gazans are themselves to blame for having voted for Hamas and not rising up against them"
Ah yes, "the slant" of having a basic fucking understanding of history. The last election in Gaza was in 2006. That is, just shy of 20 years ago. Many of the current people of Gaza were not even *alive* at the time, much less of voting age.
As for "not rising up against them," it's always super convenient to blame the victims of repression for acts of their oppressors, isn't it? It's definitely more convenient than asking awkward questions about who in the Israeli government was helping keep Hamas in power.
There's a lot of clear water between rising up against Hamas and actively helping them.
Palestinian civilians celebrated the torture-murders on Oct 7. Palestinian civilians in their family homes held, and are still holding, innocent hostages.
I wouldn't blame an abused wife for failing to stand up to her husband, but I would blame her for enthusiastically joining in abusing the kids even when he's not watching.
I think this attributes far more intentionality to the media than is appropriate - especially in the contemporary world where media run by humans is almost secondary to media run by impersonal engagement-maximizing algorithms.
It still reflects intentionality at the level of platform design. Engagement-maximizing systems don’t arise in a vacuum. They’re built to optimize for behaviors like outrage, tribal loyalty, and identification, which in turn shape the kinds of stories that rise.
I'm not sure whether they're intentionally built to optimize for outrage and tribal loyalty and so on, or if they're intentionally built to optimize for engagement and as a result end up optimizing for outrage and tribal loyalty. I just had a thought that your previous comment was suggesting that there was intentionality about the object level of which particular stories come up, rather than at the twice-removed meta-level, with this particular object-level story just turning out to be a particularly good one for outrage and tribal loyalty.
That’s a helpful distinction, thanks. I meant that systems optimized for engagement reliably elevate certain kinds of stories, usually those with high visceral stakes, moral clarity, and/or tribal valence. Once that pattern becomes predictable, it usually starts to shape editorial and activist choices downstream, even if unconsciously.
That all seems right. Though for reasons Scott mentions in “The Toxoplasma of Rage”, it probably elevates stories that *don’t* have moral clarity, but can be *read* as having moral clarity in several different ways.
Ragebait by way of interpretive pliability?
Does anyone know at what level of sophistication these algorithms run? IIRC, Facebook was tweaking its news feed to maximize engagement well before any of the GPT LLMs were available, so I'd expect
>elevates stories that _don’t_ have moral clarity, but can be _read_ as having moral clarity in several different ways
to probably be feasible _now_, but which I doubt were feasible before the GPT LLMs were first released.
Oh we each decide which stories we'll hear. I don't listen/ read the news and I remain in relative bliss about the state of things. 'Cause things look pretty good where I am. I have been listening to "Wrath of the Khans" by Dan Carlin, which gives me enough tragedy.
I am going to mostly stay away from the object level here, but I need to warn you.
1) Of all the issues that I have ever seen discussed on the internet, this one is MAXIMAL in terms of “evil lying about facts”.
2) I have made an extremely serious effort to get to the bottom of the situation as much as possible using all the epistemological tools at my disposal (and my track record on this is extremely good, every single hoax of the last 10 years or so failed to fool me)
3) NO discussion of what should be done in Gaza or who should do what can possibly cohere unless the *issues of fact* are first resolved
4) people who react negatively to attempts to find facts and argue with massive amounts of fallacies and sophistry are much more prominent on one side of this issue than the other
5) on the object level: Occam’s razor applies, my extremely throughly considered conclusion is that the side suffering the most deaths happens, in this case, to be the side that is usually correct in its factual claims, and the other side happens, in this case, to be the side engaging in lies and sophistry to a massive degree.
I do not wish to distract this thread with a big object-level discussion; I’ve said everything I have to say about it on X; but a feel that I owe you this summary of my conclusions.
Again, this is identical to how the other side experiences the discourse, which makes it hard to use it to get anywhere.
The facts matter here. Talking about how people experience it is pretty meaningless
The facts do matter, but the comment I replied to didn't get into them (for good reason—it would have been a discourse hell pit) and so doesn't break the fundamental symmetry of the situation for readers.
He made some pretty specific claims. You are free to disagree or ask him to provide evidence (or not), but the observation that other people think the opposite is content free criticism.
It's not criticism and so the comment doesn't need defense from it. It is only the note that the comment seemed unactionable to Taymon because of the symmetry of the situation (I'd personally argue that the symmetry seems like a useful tool for making use of this argument to fix things)
Ha!
You couldn’t have missed my point more obtusely.
We rationalists have TOOLS for situations like this.
I have EMPLOYED these tools, and have said where to find my arguments on this, and am willing to (privately) discuss the matter to ARBITRARY LENGTH until a meeting of the minds has occurred.
My warning is *not to be lazy* about this and use procedural shortcuts that allow you to throw up your hands. The situation is epistemologically asymmetrical and if you think it is symmetrical you simply haven’t looked deep enough.
I’ll die on this hill (or, rather, I know I won’t die because I am very highly confident that if I am talking to RATIONALISTS, I will eventually prevail); but I’d prefer for Scott to create a separate thread for object level discussion.
I think I might be more pessimistic than you about the feasibility of reaching a meeting of the minds, basically for the reasons that were illustrated by the lab leak debate that Scott covered last year.
That debate was, in my opinion, an issue in which Scott performed very badly compared to his usual perspicacity, but this particular issue is far clearer than that one, with far more data available, if you know where to look.
Feel free to share your conclusions regarding how you resolved the "issues of fact." I am genuinely curious.
Reading thousands of articles and accounts from media all over the world not just the U.S., and having an excellent memory, and being extremely well trained in evaluating arguments and spotting sophistry, and looking for the non-barking dogs, and following up on things the media wouldn’t follow up on after the initial stories, and noticing who was meeting whose points and who was ducking them, and keeping track of what had been “debunked” and which “debunkings” were themselves bogus arguments that existed not to persuade but to be pointed to, and most of all creating a master list of exactly who must be lying on each side if the other side was correct, and comparing those lists not merely in terms of numerosity but in terms of independence and dimensionality.
That very last point is subtle but critical, and the very last word of the post is the most important of all: the reason you have heard the word “antisemitism” so many more times than before is because it is necessary to reduce the dimensionality of those who criticize Israel and counter its arguments so that they may be more easily dismissed without sufficient consideration.
so are you gonna share your conclusions on the "issues of fact? yes or no?
I already did!! See point 5 of my original comment. Privately, or on a dedicated thread, I’ll say much more.
If you insist on something more explicit: the hypothesis that explains everything better than any other hypothesis is that, in Gaza, Israel has had, in addition to its widely supported agenda of destroying Hamas, a second agenda of ethnically cleansing Gaza, which is more important to them than the first agenda.
I don't understand this angle. ethnically cleansing the Gazans would have been very easy if Israel wanted to do it. Israel is basically fighting a terrorist organisation that still has 30-50 hostages and is not willing to surrender to save its citizens
I'm engaging because I'm genuinely curious in what you think the endgame is, and I have a lot less depth of familiarity. Just reasoning about it a priori, a hypothesis that seems more compelling to me is that Israel would happily accept a full surrender+exile of hamas and governance with security guarantees, and would maybe less happily accept fully reoccupying the strip. And if nothing else works, then they're on track to end in a stalemate of a humanitarian catastrophe, with people living indefinitely in tents getting free food from abroad, where maybe nobody will pay to build new civilian infrastructure on top of Hamas's tunnels that they still control, with no other way out than for Hamas to give up eventually. Maybe aid donors would start to condition aid on Hamas agreeing to a path to disarm or something, or sympathetic states would soften on accepting refugees, and that would weaken Hamas's resolve. This strategy seems to open a lot of doors to apply serious pressure on Hamas that are more effective per innocent person killed than full-on kinetic measures against where Hamas is actually hiding.
Either way, I think there's a big difference between a credible path toward ethnic cleansing being used as a means of negotiation leverage to achieve a peaceful resolution, vs preferring to get rid of the population as plan A. Given a lack of other options to stop the rockets flying at their cities and the occasional spectacular terror attack, I'm inclined to see this as a plausibly least bad option for Israel to pursue (in design if not fully in implementation), if it's the former. How would you distinguish between the two goals, especially at the level of the military establishment?
We’re all living in the monkey-sphere, and we have to be very cautious how we extrapolate outside of it, even though it is definitely necessary that we do so given the size of our society. How awful if we didn’t care, when faced with these stories.
On Sunday, the first reading at Mass was Genesis 18:20-32 (quoted below). I have always found it a striking passage, but this time I was crying to myself, tears down my face, and I didn’t really know why. Then later that day, I came across the usual discussion of saving innocent civilians vs rooting out evil Hamas, and how many members of Hamas are really left, and how innocent is anyone… and I understood the connection my heart had made.
> Then the Lord said, ‘How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know.’
> So the men turned from there, and went towards Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Then Abraham came near and said, ‘Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?’ And the Lord said, ‘If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.’ Abraham answered, ‘Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?’ And he said, ‘I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.’ Again he spoke to him, ‘Suppose forty are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of forty I will not do it.’ Then he said, ‘Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak. Suppose thirty are found there.’ He answered, ‘I will not do it, if I find thirty there.’ He said, ‘Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.’ Then he said, ‘Oh do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.’ He answered, ‘For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.’
That reading stirred me, too, how great was His mercy. It's kind of insane that God would lend ear to Moses' inane bargaining, but He did.
That passage always bothered me. It ends there. What about nine? What about five? What about one? Why doesn't Abraham ask the last obvious followup questions?
The next chapter deals with Lot and his family, who were presumably the <10 righteous people in Sodom, and how God just told them to gtfo. But Abraham never asks.
I always assumed that everyone would consider it chutzpah to ask for mercy for the sake of even less
Banned for this comment.
In my heart of hearts, I’d rather see a hundred dead men than one dead woman and a hundred dead women before I saw one dead child. Call that whatever you want but it’s in my bones. Wish I could steal away every last kid in that place until this thing is finally over.
I get the child priority, not the female priority. Am a woman if that matters. Bisexual
Men have long been the expendable sex. They fight the wars, and kill each other more often in regular homicides.
Reminds me of Hillary Clinton's "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat."
Plus tampons are harder to get in wartime. QED.
I *CACKLED*!
God, I _HATED_ that. I'm a man, and there is no way in hell that I'd support any system that treats me as expendable. Not in any way, shape, or form.
Females are equally expendable. Esp young girls.
expendable in the sense that people don't care about their experiences, perhaps
expendable in the sense of their actual lifespan? no
Expendable in strictly biological and evolutionary sense.
For females, selection takes place in early childhood. If found superfluous to existing situation of family/band,. they are culled.
Males get selected in early maturity, when they must fight.
Very simple, the elimination of men does nothing to inhibit the reproductive potential of the current generation. Women are too valuable to be sent to war, because the limit on the number of children in society is the number of women to carry them. That's why ancient population could lose thousands of men in war, and wage war again in the next generation. If you lose your women, you are truly screwed.
This intuition is deeply seated in the human conscience for most people, and why men are expected to sacrifice their lives if it saves women or children. I had this conversation with my wife recently: if one of us had to die, we would both choose me.
Hypothetical.
If an alien spaceship parked itself over Gaza and opened a zoom call with Bibi and the Israeli security cabinet, IDF chiefs, and Knesset leaders, and offered them the following deal:
1. We will use our death rays to precisely target every single Hamas member and dissolve them into atoms.
2. We will use our other-something-ray to dissolve all weapons and weapon-making equipment in Gaza.
3. All of this will happen without a single child or civilian suffering so much as a paper cut.
4. All of the hostages and hostage bodies will be released and returned safely.
5. In exchange, you must withdraw every single soldier and piece of military equipment, and allow unlimited aid and rebuilding materials to come into Gaza.
Do you think the Israelis would take this deal?
I think this hypo needs to also stipulate that the ray in 2) stays on indefinitely, since otherwise the Gazans will resume their usual preparations for Jew-slaughtering about five minutes after the UFO leaves for hyperspace.
Assume no such stipulations. One time offer, the aliens are sick of earth and are never coming back. Do you think Israel takes the deal?
No, because it's quite obvious that the Gazans rearm and resume this war in, say, a decade, and they'd be sacrificing the momentum they have now for little gain.
Still seems a deal worth taking for ten years of peace. And with the elimination of every single Hamas member, there's at least the chance of a less horrible gang coming into power.
If you won't take the hypo, it's hard to imagine ever getting to peace in the real world, where the IDF definitely will not kill 100% of Hamas members or eliminate 100% of cached weapons.
The hypo forbids any sort of ongoing monitoring or security, which is not a restriction on real solutions (god knows I don't know enough to suggest anything— just pointing out a hole in the argument)
Then probably not without real security guarantees. The track record here is rather poor.
I say Israel does take the deal, because they're getting something they otherwise have to devote a lot of effort to, and there's nothing actually stopping them from coming back later (they did withdraw from Gaza decades ago).
I think probably, although I also think maybe 30% chance (totally unbased in anything, I'm just answering your hypothetical and I haven't done any research) that Netanyahu would try to hold off because he's using the war for political gain.
Bibi is in power with a very fragile coalition; there isn't the tiniest shred of probability that turning down this deal would help Bibi hold on to power. The Orthodox parties and Gideon Saar would immediately leave and collapse the government
Yeah, I think my claim is something like - if the aliens offered him this deal, he would have to accept for political reasons, but he would secretly be against this, and if there were some way he could throw out the deal without it being traceable to him, he might take it.
Also, I no longer believe any claim of the form "...and then some parties would leave and Bibi would be kicked out of power". He's never getting kicked out of power! When he's been dead, his corpse will still be Prime Minister of Israel! He's some kind of freak of nature +10 SD outlier on holding-onto-power ability! It would be beautiful if it wasn't having so many downstream effects.
It's really not that freaky or unnatural. The Israeli left has been disintegrating in slow-motion and falling out of touch with the Israeli mainstream ever since the first and second intifadas exposed the complete disaster that was Oslo and the land-for-peace paradigm. Bibi stepped into that vacuum and made Israel rich, diplomatically successful, and maintained a tolerable security status quo. The left couldn't unseat him, and the center didn't want to. Until the scandals started, you can think of him as a non-term limited Bill Clinton.
Once the scandals did start, the fact that they were originated and prosecuted by the last vestige of Leftist power made them a complete nothing-burger to the right, and the elements of the center that couldn't stomach him anymore were just replaced by further-right, previously fringy elements in his coalition.
Your perception of Bibi as a corrupt megalomaniac holding onto power by the skin of his teeth comes from the fact that you, like most people, have their perceptions of Israel shaped by left/liberal media (which should make you think a little bit about your understanding of Gaza too, side note). It is not at all a perception held by 70% plus of Israeli society. To them, Bibi is obvious and inevitable, until someone from the right can usurp him or someone from the Left can figure out how to talk to a larger slice of Israeli society.
>"and maintained a tolerable security status quo."
Well, uh, on that last point...
I think the confusion is over Bibi staying in power *past Oct 7* when that argument rather decisively blew up.
He's lost power before, as recently as 2021. But he's come back multiple times.
Do you think Israel having a norm against prosecuting political leaders, and instead giving them exile to, say, America, would have been a good thing?
That experiment was already conducted here on Earth, in real life, with real primates (in this case, baboons):
https://www.science.org/content/article/kinder-gentler-baboon
It turns out that killing all of the aggressive young males in a population really super-duper improves life for everyone else.
There is no-the-fuck-way that, rid of Hamas and given access to literally unlimited resources, the women of Gaza would allow their little boys to culturally drift Hamas-ward again. They have *unlimited* aid and rebuilding materials, you say? Including access to fiber optic internet and Counterstrike 2?
You...ahahaha....you think....hahaha...*THOSE KIDS*....LOL!...are going to join Hamas?!
LOLOLOLOL!
Reminds me of the theory that Europe became such a nice place because European states spent several centuries executing all their violent criminals.
Sure good argument but I don't think the baboon evidence is worth anything. The women of Gaza may have their own opinions that differ from yours or mine or Israeli women's.
Not being aggressively warlike is such a meaningful constant amongst women that we can functionally consider it a universal. A large population of mostly female humans, freed of the physical stress of war imposed by men, would absolutely form a culture dedicated to maintaining a less warlike and more nurturing and calm way of life.
Especially if they don't have any competition for resources for themselves or their children.
Humans are as smart as baboons.
Where would the aid come from? The aliens are not providing or demanding any, only making Israel not intervene if someone wants to aid the Gazans. Feeding millions of people for a couple of months until the public in Western countries is sympathetic is plausible, giving them great conditions long-term when they no longer want to be a thorn in Israel's side and just want to live peacefully would only work if *they* were expected to pay back with interest.
They would probably take the deal and then re-occupy Gaza when the aliens leave
The aliens leave a thousand neutron bombs buried around Israel that automatically go off if Israel invades Gaza again (unless the super-intelligent AI that controls the bombs believes Israel is justified in doing so for existential security reasons). Does Israel take the deal?
Presumably Israel would need some way of checking in advance whether the AI thinks the situation has got to existential-security level seriousness, so they don't invade in response to another Oct 7-style attack, only to find that the computer doesn't think the attack is serious enough to warrant invasion and blows them all up.
There's an intercom installed next to the deep fryer in Falafel Uzi through which one can ask the AI for permission to invade. The AI will answer honestly and without shtick
I personally think they would. Ok, maybe a bit too late for that, but pre-Oct/7 they would.
Not with the West Bank, though.
And, unfortunately, the two issues are related. If people in the West Bank see that even though they play peacefully, try to negotiate and all, but still lose their land inch-by-inch (and Gazans see that, too), it is hard not to ask: why not die standing?
Do the aliens make any stipulation about what happens in Gaza after? Does the Israeli public know about this call?
I think if step 5 is taken to imply that resettlement of Gaza is off the table, I think Ben Gvir and Smotrich might threaten to leave the government if the deal is taken; how exactly Netanyahu responds after that I'm not sure: I think "literally every Hamas member is dead" might be a strong enough outcome that he'd feel good going to the Israeli people with that for a new election, and throw over Ben Gvir
(Edit: accidentally pressed Post too early)
But I think if 1 and 2 are weakened to "it might take twenty years for Hamas to reconstitute itself" or something like that, I suspect Bibi doesn't take the deal, at least if he thinks the details will never leak to the public.
What we are seeing in Gaza is too much. It’s just too much. Israelis deserve security and you can endlessly analyze such strategies but if the Israeli security framework led them here then that security framework has to go.
It’s like if your neighbor really is an asshole but somehow your response to that leads to killing his little kids. It’s no longer really about him being an asshole you have to look at your own behavior.
Unfortunately, adopting this theory allows your neighbor to come you and say “I will be as much as an asshole as I wish, and I will further take steps such that any response you mount will result in the deaths of my children.” If your refuse to respond to minor aggression because it would result in disproportionate harm to the aggressor, then the aggressor only has to ensure that any response by you will invariable harm them.
Rational agents do not give into blackmail like this. If Israel predictably did not give up their war, no matter how bad the suffering in Gaza got, and if the world predictably backed them in this, then Hamas would have no incentive to pursue policies which intentionally promote causalities among their people. Then, Israel and Hamas could strike a deal to ensure acceptable humanitarian conditions in Gaza and try kill each other separately— like civilized beings.
this analogy does not fit the situation in Gaza at all. The notiion that Hamas somehow forced Israel to destroy every structure in Gaza and starve the entire population is not reasonable. This is what I meant by if your security framework leads you to absurd conclusions and unconscionable actions you need to rethink your security framework. You shouldn't put ever greater efforts into trying to rationalize it with dubious analogies.
Thank you for the point about resolving the contradiction between the horrors that compel you and the ones that don't by being more consistently compelled rather than more consistently uncompelled.
Even when we don't feel willing or capable of any actions that can mitigate a harm, we should at least be willing to mitigate the additional harm of ignoring it.
"For his part, Hitler chose to isolate himself from the realities of war and from the suffering of his people. By now he had stopped making speeches and was rarely seen in public, preferring to spend his time secluded at his Wolf's Lair military headquarters in northeastern Germany or at his mountaintop villa at Berchtesgaden, along the German-Austrian border. He could not bring himself to tour cities wrecked by bombing or visit field hospitals. On one occasion, when his special Führer train momentarily stopped alongside a trainload of wounded, exhausted men returning from the Russian Front, Hitler promptly ordered his window shades pulled down."
There is a sweet spot between avoiding emotion-tugging situations entirely, and seeing so many that they dominate your decisionmaking.
Scott, the vast majority of those tragic children dying/starving stories are emotionally manipulative propaganda. Dozens of videos of “ambulance drivers speeding through streets while simultaneously doing cpr on a baby” while someone films him doing it? Have you asked yourself why the person filming doesn’t do the cpr? Have you asked yourself why they feel the need to film these videos? Those videos of mothers forcing sand down their childs mouth? While the camera pans to the mothers who themselves could be categorized as overweight? The man “burning his own artwork” to cook his food because there is “no fuel” in a video filmed inside a house with electricity on and wooden doors in the background.
There is a clip from an oscar-shortlisted documentary that will never leave my brain: its of a Palestinian mother holding her baby in an Israeli hospital, the baby had just been given an organ transplant. She is lovingly holding him in her arms, and we watch from a hidden camera as an Israeli speaking arabic ask her how she feels, and she coldly replies that she hopes he grows up to be a martyr against the Jews. The same Jews who gave the baby a second chance at life.
The NYT just put out a pitiful statement retracting the front page story they ran a few days ago, of a child born with congenital defects, his skeletal body they framed as a result of starvation. Read the NYT statement and its gross emotionally manipulative language, its a non-apology. Blood libel is alive today and a rationalist should know lying for the sake of maintaining a narrative is amongst the most dangerous sins that exist.
Watch just a few videos from the Ask Project on Youtube. Its extremely obvious to anyone who is not emotionally compromised to see that one side of this conflict is orders of magnitude more ideologically evil than the other. Every single Israeli soldier death is an act of incredible mercy to keep those kids alive and potentially have a future that is not ruled by a bronze age cult. This entire conflict is the easiest moral/ethical dilemma the 21st century has yet encountered, and it gives me immense anxiety to see people who are otherwise intelligent failing this test so badly.
I have not seen any particular ambulance footage, but everyone on all sides seems to agree that about 50,000 people have died so far, and that about 15,000 of those are children. Is your claim that none of those 15,000 child deaths had any feature that makes them emotionally moving? That by some miracle, all of those children died in sterile bloodless ways that it would be impossible for a healthy person to have emotions about?
And if not - if you agree that probably some of those children died in ways that were sad - is your claim that somehow the media magically failed to notice any of those sad child deaths, and had to fake other child deaths to make them look sadder than they really were?
I think you're doing the Just World thing where you desperately try to reassure yourself that everything is okay, because any bad thing that tugs on your heartstrings is a fake, and any bad thing that isn't a fake happened to someone who deserved it.
I think it's more honest to just accept your feeling that often children die and it's sad. You can still have some other feeling about "and maybe it was for the greater good" or "and also their side of the war is in the wrong".
Yes, I'm obviously devastated to see even a single dead child. But I think a single lie about a dead child is just as evil.
If I could make the world believe you killed a child, putting you in jail / sentencing you to death / making you a global pariah, is the ledger not balanced? What if I convinced your entire city that Scott Alexander's family is guilty of harvesting organs of children? (an accusation against Israelis that consistently goes viral in the doldrums of the algorithmic internet) If I can make the entire world believe lies about Israel, am I not sentencing them and their progeny to metaphysical death? We are both Jewish, and I know you study history. I dont know if your pattern recognizer has been fried by Bayes or the network of people you surround yourself with. You skipped over the core reason why Hen was making his argument. Lies against Jews are both lindy and exceptionally contagious. If it were a few embellishments here and there, or just a few outbursts of passionate violence, your argument would hold weight. But I see and hear the Palestinian woman's voice in that Israeli hospital. I've been to West Bank as I'm sure you have too. These are not people who will stop at small embellishments to get what they want. Until you grok that, it is my opinion that posts like this are severely emotionally manipulative and do nothing to solve the conflict or better people's understanding of it, as is the vast majority of media coverage.
I don't think that a single lie about a dead child is as evil as killing a child, actually.
See my reply to @ruralfp
Related: do you think a false rape accusation is as evil as a rape?
Depends on who the lie is told to, I suppose, and the legal penalty for the crime, but it seems it should round to about the same in a just system.
Assuming you believe the justice system in any given place works correctly, it is exactly as bad.
The punishment the person will receive if your false accusation is believed will be exactly what he deserves if he actually did it.
That would make a false accusation just as bad as the act in question.
> Yes, I'm obviously devastated to see even a single dead child. But I think a single lie about a dead child is just as evil.
Do you actually think that? Because I would much prefer the world filled with lies about dead kids than the one filled with actual dead kids.
I would prefer you and @benthamsbulldog avoid strawmanning me, and see I clearly described a lie in this context as "believed to the point of there being reciprocal consequences", in this case your life being taken from you by the state/other actors due to the existence of said lie. As one of you ironically has "utilitarian" in your bio, I would think you could easily understand this.
And even if the lie does not lead to the person being lied about's death, most individuals would have a profoundly horrible existence if the entire world was hoodwinked to believe they harvested children's organs. Reasonable enough to argue that this is better than being dead sure, but in practice social reputation is much more intertwined with your humanity and capacity to live than anyone cares to admit, and I would bet neither of you would last long.
This reminds me of a classic joke:
A backpacker is traveling through Ireland when it starts to rain. He decides to wait out the storm in a nearby pub. The only other person at the bar is an older man staring at his drink. After a few moments of silence the man turns to the backpacker and says in a thick Irish accent:
"You see this bar? I built this bar with my own bare hands. I cut down every tree and made the lumber myself. I toiled away through the wind and cold, but do they call me McGreggor the bar builder? No."
He continued "Do you see that stone wall out there? I built that wall with my own bare hands. I found every stone and placed them just right through the rain and the mud, but do they call me McGreggor the wall builder? No."
"Do ya see that pier out there on the lake? I built that pier with my own bare hands, driving each piling deep into ground so that it would last a lifetime. Do they call me McGreggor the pier builder? No."
"But ya fuck one goat.."
Why is an Irishman named McGreggor?
So a more accurate phrasing is “a lie about a dead child is just as bad as a dead child if the lie causes actual real world outcomes that are equivalently bad to a child dying”?
I guess I can’t really disagree with the tautology you have provided, but it doesn’t seem particularly enlightening.
I agree lying is bad. It just doesn't seem relevant to this post, where I didn't repeat any particular lie (unless you have reason to think that the story of the kid with his brother is a lie). There have been many people lying on the Israeli side too (for example, just today, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israels-leader-claims-no-one-in-gaza-is-starving-data-and-witnesses-disagree ). Although everyone should call out these lies when they happen, I don't think you can object to a concern about starving children by bringing up that, unrelatedly, some people lied about a different thing, when in fact there are starving children. This is the sort of tribalism where if you prove that one person on a certain "side" lied, nobody can ever support that side in anything. But no "side" of any conflict could pass that test.
I think what became obvious in the last almost-3-years is that Israeli officals lie all the time, literally.
Of course, Hamas does that as well, but that was not really a surprise.
"but everyone on all sides seems to agree that about 50,000 people have died so far" - worth noticing that in early 2024 you wrote "Israel killed 50000 people" both greatly distorting the number and blaming literally all deaths on Israel.
Do you think that was bad? Do you think this may be relevant to how you perceived and are perceiving the conflict in Gaza? Do you understand (by which I don't mean "condone" or even "accept") how this could be taken as a not-great indication of unbiased well-informed sources?
In 2024, the death toll was about 40,000. Now it's about 60,000. Over 90% of casualties were killed by Israel. There's no contradiction in any of this. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#/media/File:Gaza_death_toll_since_October_7th,_2023_(Last_update_on_May_22nd,_2025).png .
Does it matter for you that under international law, when Hamas hides behind civilians and Israel attacks Hamas and the civilians are killed incidentally along with Hamas, the responsibility for the civilian deaths lies with Hamas not Israel?
Would you say that this law is good morally or not?
How on earth anyone misses that the Gaza genocide is one being directly enabled and funded by the US and its allies is beyond me. No shit an atrocity people's tax dollars are contributing to is going to get more attention, and that's not even getting into the AIPAC situation in the US.
That is the biggest lie?
You know what Israel has to do to kill Gazans? Literally nothing. Just stop providing water, fuel, electricity and food. That's it.
The only reason it doesn't happen is because of US support.
It should be obvious that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza, and the proof for that is that Hamas systematically uses human shields. The purpose of using human shields is to protect the combatant from attack, because the attacker wants the shields not to be killed. This proves that in general, Israel is trying NOT to kill Gazan civilians.
This is supported by the behavior of even Israel-hostile international organizations: the ICJ said that was not a plausible case for genocide happening now but only a plausible case that Israel might decide on it at some point in the future; the ICC indicted Netanyahu for several war crimes but NOT for genocide (while it DID indict a dead Hamas leader for "extermination" aka genocide).
I think there's a legitimate argument over what tradeoff Israel should be making between military effectiveness and impact on civilians, and from very far away, it seems like they've got the slider bar pushed too far in the direction of killing civilians to achieve their military goals. This is a real issue worth discussing, but it's not genocide by any definition that makes sense.
Absolutely. That is the question of proportionality, perhaps the main question in modern war (at least, wars involving democracies).
That... doesn't quite follow, just from a logical standpoint. One side deliberately using human shields would certainly be sufficient to show that the other side's deliberate malice isn't the *sole possible cause* of civilian deaths, but...
Suppose there's a murder trial. Bob's body is found with a bullet hole in the chest and a knife wound to the femoral artery. Medical examiner figures either wound would have been fatal by itself, exact timing is unclear - both injuries happened within a few minutes of each other. Alice confesses to shooting Bob, but denies ever using a knife. Eve's defense attorney says "the fact that Alice admits to killing Bob proves that my client couldn't possibly have stabbed him in the leg." Does that argument hold water?
Israel can keep bouncing the rubble in Gaza indefinitely without any US support. We shouldn't be sending them aid (not because they're bad, just because they're rich enough not to need it), but that aid isn't what allows them to hammer Gaza.
My point is that military aid to Israel is an extremely obvious counterpoint to the idea that there's no good reason for westerners to be focusing on this particular atrocity over others (with the implied or explicitly stated conclusion that they are focusing on it for bad reasons, such as antisemitism)
This line,
"So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back."
Struck me as simply a lie. That is, I think, Scott is misrepresenting his own emotional state to his audience as a rhetorical flourish, to make his argument stick in the memory. I could be wrong, of course, but I think I'll roll doubt here.
I think he is accurately recounting a feeling, rather than a prediction of actions he would take. If someone threatened my family, I think there’s a good chance that if I had the means I would kill them (at least in the moment when my emotions were highest), even if it was unnecessary to keep my family safe. It’s what I would want to do. But I don’t think I *should* do that, and I think our justice system should be structured in a way that would keep my family safe without letting me give in to my vengance.
I am telling the truth when I say this is a strong feeling I have. I'm also telling the truth when I say I don't trust my strong feelings and I'm glad I have a cerebral cortex to translate them into more rational courses of action.
For the record, I feel you and I've had the discussion before where I recounted a similar feeling a friend responded as it I was all of an idiot, an animal, and someone reaching for virtue points unjustly.
It seems that this avenue of emotional expression is not equally obvious to everyone
Maybe I’m bad at reading, but Scott never wrote that Israel should give in, that Israel should grant Hamas a cease fire, that Israel is more culpable than Hamas, or anything like that. He simply wrote about his moral response to a horrific story. And that his instinctive, moral response was that he’d kill everyone on both sides to help the kid.
He also noted – and it should’ve been unnecessary but I understand why – that adults must try to understand their emotional responses, in context, that moral decisions are complex and that adults need to be aware of competing moral events and decisions.
I’m a supporter of Israel and sensitive to the anti-Semitism of the one-sided criticism of Israel. But this sensitivity goes too far if we must reject any moral response to the suffering of Gazans. Without moral emotions, we cannot be human or rational.
"he’d kill everyone on both sides to help the kid."
Must be the oddest thing I ever read being dignified by the term "moral response"?
Why the qualifier "moral"? What is moral about its outpouring of emotion?
You should reading the article.
The emotion to take extreme action to save a suffering child is a moral response. Yes, if we actually took that action, it would be extremely 'immoral' because killing millions to save one is not 'moral' and the situation is complex.
I am a supporter of Israel and have believed that Hamas, not Israel, bears the primary and overwhelming culpability for the suffering of Gazans - thought that belief is wavering. But my personal belief, which likely is off in either direction, does not change my insistence that Scott's response is moral and that without these types of emotional responses [I am sure that many could argue about this particular response], we cannot be moral.
I am not sure any emotion can be called "moral" or "immoral".
If anything, it looks like a type of wrath--which is a vice.
Now wrath can be impotent --not translatable into action--but it still leaves its mark on the soul of one who indulges in wrath,
Re Mazzig, I think two of your classic essays, on isolated demands for rigor and superweapons, are very relevant. The first explains why it's right to be skeptical of people who claim to be motivated by a first principle, but conveniently only apply that principle to a limited subset of cases.
Here, to elaborate on the object-level issue you alluded to in your post, many activists and normies like Ms. Rachel are emphatic that the Israel-Gaza war, in which ~60,000 people have died so far, is such an appalling crime against humanity that they couldn't possibly remain silent. Yet, curiously, they felt no problem remaining silent about the wars/humanitarian crises in Yemen (300,000+ dead), Syria (600,000+ dead), Tigray (250,000+ dead), Sudan (100,000+ dead), Ukraine (300,000+ dead), etc. See this Zach Goldberg article in Tablet on the remarkable quantitative disparity in media coverage: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-manufactured-genocide-gaza
(To address a potential objection: "But the US is actually funding Israel, so activism could actually help." The US is a party to several of these other conflicts, e.g. it funded and armed Saudi Arabia during its intervention in Yemen. Furthermore, there's massive anti-Israel sentiment in e.g. European and Latin American countries that have relatively minimal ties to Israel.)
This leads one to conclude that they are either acting in good faith but largely ignorant about world affairs, or acting in bad faith and specifically biased against Israel/Jews. In either case, it would seem appropriate to discount their opinions if you're interested in arriving at the truth and making progress.
Your essay on superweapons explicitly gave Israel/Palestine being used as a building block for an anti-Semitism superweapon, so I won't belabor the point. I'll just note that it's empirically undeniable that this is now happening, with right-wing Twitter influencers like Nick Fuentes, Jake Shields, and Dan Bilzerian using anti-Zionism as a jumping off point for much more extensive anti-Semitism.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
The problem with this is that it's almost a Fully General Counterargument, and hence false. (see link)
There are organisations that write enormous books evaluating the behaviour of every country in the world against some standard. This is a very worthy activity. But that's an exercise that occupies a group of people full time for many months. It's not reasonable to expect an individual to achieve that level of objectivity. But if they do not, your argument applies and you can dismiss them as antisemitic.
In the real world there are morally acceptable reasons to concentrate on specific cases.
One, for example, is a feeling of kinship. If your brother starts committing crimes, you are likely to want to object to this more strenuously than in the case of someone you don't know.
Another is that if you split your attention across every possible war crime, it will be too dissipated to have any useful effect. Unfortunately one of the only ways ordinary people can have a political effect is to participate in a "moment" in which public attention concentrates on some specific case. This can be dismissed as a pile-on, but they are a significant part of why politicians still, to some extent, can't completely ignore voters.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/fully-general-counterargument
The problem is when *everyone* is focusing on a super - specific point.
>This leads one to conclude that they are either acting in good faith but largely ignorant about world affairs, or acting in bad faith and specifically biased against Israel/Jews.
I suspect that a large chunk of the activist's activity is indeed antisemitism, but I suspect that there is another component as well.
I think that Israel, being democratic and technologically sophisticated, is also seen as an outpost of the West by activists. And one frequent part of Woke activists' ideology is to attempt to destroy the West. One chant that some of them use is "We can't wait for the Caliphate."
This is suicidally insane. We need to keep these people as far from the levers of power as possible.
Most people in the US/Europe simply do not know very much about the issue. What shows up on TV/the internet is what they know. The people who have read a few news articles about it and know what happened on Oct 7 and who Netanyahu is and can make a plausible guess about which river and which sea the Palestinians are chanting about are the unusually well-informed fringe. Honestly, that's probably the top 10%.
If most media sources emphasize the evils of Hamas and the virtues of Israel, most of that fringe (who, remember, are much better informed than the average voter or media consumer) will be pro-Israel. If most media sources flip that around, most of that fringe will be anti-Israel. This all functions without need for any antisemitism or any anti-Muslim hatred, though obviously both of those come into play somewhere as well.
Loss of privilege feels like oppression. For a bunch of structural and ideological reasons, most prestige news sources in 2025 are substantially more inclined toward criticizing Israel than they were in 1995. Worse, pretty overt anti-Semitism used to be mainly a fringe-right-wing thing, and now it has become somewhat common on the left as well. This surely feels very uncomfortable to a lot of American Jews who grew up in a media/cultural environment where both anti-Semitism and (to a lesser extent) opposition to Israel was strongly discouraged by most of high-status society.
Many Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the activists mouth slogans without even understanding what they refer to, "from the river to the sea" indeed being a prime example.
There's also the postmodern instinct to side with whichever side is weaker in any dispute.
Many Thanks! Agreed to an extent. I agree that in the case of Gaza's attack on Israel, Gaza is militarily weaker. More generally, I think the Woke just label one group as "oppressed" and stick with the label regardless of who is actually weaker.
>More generally, I think the Woke just label one group as "oppressed" and stick with the label regardless of who is actually weaker.
To a degree, although note that in such cases people usually go to considerable effort to try and prove that their favoured group is also weaker, regardless of whether or not this is actually true.
Many Thanks! That sounds plausible.
I for one am glad that Scott Alexander is not a moral saint. Think of how insipid and barren the comment section would be.
Since everyone else seems to be taking the bait and going straight for the contentious bits, I'll take advantage of this and stake out some commenting territory for discussing 1) the difficulty of being thoroughly consistent in taking one's moral values to their logical conclusions, and 2) those uncommon people who stand out for doing just that: the righteous and the megalopsychoi.
Voluminous details here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZqHdPdtC6EeykvC45/notes-on-righteousness-and-megalopsychia
I don't even necessarily disagree with Scott here, but at the end of the day, War is Hell, and it doesn't really inform anything else that terrible anecdotes happen.
I'm sure lots of people in Atlanta suffered terribly under Sherman, or in Germany under the allied Bombing, or in Poland under the Soviets, or in Hiroshima, Nagasake, and Tokyo.
If I think about what went on and connect it to my children it makes me very sad.
None of that means that what took place was or was not the best way to prosecute those wars. If anything, the experience of post-war Japan and Western Germany (compared to Germany post WWI, for instance) seems to be a point in favor of how things went.
This was beautiful. Thank you for writing it.
Absolutely. I don't have anything to add to any conversation here, but I think someone writing something so earnest deserves to hear directly if they're having a real positive effect on people.
I'll join the support train. I don't agree with everything Scott said but think it's admirable that he said it.
I feel like I should point out that the war in Sudan is very much *still* going on! I uh don't really know much of anything about it, but it is definitely still going on.
I am a simple man. If I see a state systematically segregating (bad), isolating (worse), and destroying (worst) a group of its most helpless and vulnerable citizens (actually evil) based on ethnicity (more evil still), I unequivocally condemn those actions. Absolutely none of it is excusable on any level.
And let’s not pretend that Israel did not effectuate the creation of Hamas through it’s longstanding practices if racial and religious segregation and isolation.
Let's say you are the Israeli prime minister. The prime minister before you pulled away completely from Gaza. Gaza is now self governed by Hamas. Hamas starts firing rockets at your citizens. You know if there's no sea blockade, they can get more rockets/missiles. If there's an airport, they can just do very successful air strikes. Hamas has stated that Israel should not exist as a country. What do you do? Please let me know your answer, that doesn't assume dead Israelis are better than dead Palestinians.
Buy every kid in Gaza a smartphone with Pokemon Go installed, plus some convenient method to cash out in-game successes for real-world prizes such as MREs, solar panels, and store credit at McMaster-Carr. Arrange for virtual "wild pokemon" to spawn - not exclusively, but more often - in and around suspected rocket launch sites or other legitimate military targets.
If the kids are allowed nearby enough to serve as human shields, resulting flood of geotagged photos hopefully allows construction of detailed 3D maps, enabling precisely planned strikes with zero collateral damage. If instead they're kept far away, that's an even better fix to the human-shield problem. If the Palestinian government tries to separate the kids from the phones, prop up whichever faction over there is willing to argue in favor of computer literacy, nutrition, and developing local industry - easier access to the classical "means of production" would presumably already give them an advantage in internal conflicts, just gotta translate that to winning elections.
Get some islamic theologians and professional advertisers together, have 'em lay out a concise, compassionate, meticulously accurate criticism of the specific apocalyptic prophecies which tend to motivate terrorism, break it up into bite-sized pieces, woven in with a bunch of wholesome kid-friendly edutainment about math, science, local history (without being blatantly pro-Israel), trade skills, critical thinking, and other stuff they won't want to miss out on. Sorta like a Levantine Arabic localization of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers Neighborhood? Though, ideally, a bit more directly interactive, to fully benefit from modern tricks for maximizing engagement.
And, of course, keep the Iron Dome loaded and guards on the border alert, but come down like a ton of bricks on any of my own guys who do atrocities, or even just step outside their assignment in some way that gives the other side an excuse to escalate.
In short, break the enemy's will to fight, the way that actually works, instead of the grimdark "hard men making hard decisions" way that macho revenge fantasies wish it did. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
Israeli Arabs are citizens of Israel who can vote, and the United Arab List was part of the ruling coalition in the Knesset up until Bibi returned to power at the end of 2022. Does Gaza have Jewish citizens? Not that anybody can vote there ever since the one election that brought Hamas to power decades ago.
You are perhaps a too simple man. Such simplicity doesn't belong to politics. Leave it to devious scum
If you were to rule with the policies this implies, it would be so catastrophic for your subjects that it would be positively virtuous for the most ruthless and bloodthirsty monster around to depose you and rule more sensibly.
That's the point, right? Each atrocity story seems to justify a crazy disproportionate response when you just respond to your emotions. You have to engage your reason to get back a sense of proportion and some weighing of costs and benefits and second-order effects.
Israel does not segregate Arabs, lol. Jews and Arabs have equal rights and mix freely in public life.
What is true is that in the West Bank Israeli citizens and non-citizens have unequal rights. But here too, Israeli Arabs have all the same rights that Israeli Jews do.
I don't think it's wrong to focus on the object, rather than meta, questions when it comes to the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict. The history and rights and wrongs of the situation are, I would argue, both more important to solve it and more controverted than the principle "people dying in war is a horrible, unnecessary tragedy."
I'm from a secular, non-Zionist Jewish background, and didn't know or care much about the conflict pre-10/7. I assumed that Israel was basically the aggressor, and Palestinian terrorism, while lamentable, was a response to oppression that would stop if the oppression stopped. I hadn't read much about it myself, but there was so much passion on the anti-Israel side, from the socialist left to the libertarian/paleocon anti-war right, I assumed it had something going for it.
10/7 made me want to learn more about the history. Doing so made me much more pro-Israel, and much more critical of how the media and pro-Palestine activists frame the conflict. I think pro-Palestine activists are wrong about the history of the conflict, which is highly pertinent to finding a just and lasting solution to it.
A shortlist of books I'd recommend:
Making David into Goliath by Joshua Muravchik
The War of Return by Einat Wilf
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
>I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some thing which was worse than Gaza and which not quite as many people had protested. Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism.
I'm not sure exactly how he phrased it, but this is a common weakman.
First of all, it's easy to claim that any tragedy is insufficiently like any other tragedy if you finely slice the differences enough.
Second, there are degrees of not protesting something. You might fail to protest it because it's only mentioned in some obscure paragraph on CNN's tenth web page. That doesn't mean much. On the other hand, if the things you fail to protest are well known and related to the same conflict you do protest, that might mean bias. And there's also a difference between not protesting as in doing nothing, and "not protesting" as in laughing at one side or diminishing their concerns or otherwise doing something that is negative rather than neutral.
Third, people with biases have a way to convince themselves with motivated reasoning, so someone may hate Jews, yet "not be antisemitic" in the sense that the things they say about Gaza look like ordinary arguments based on ordinary reasoning that doesn't even mention Jews.
Fourth, the whole thing isn't just "antisemitism logically follows from excess lack of charity to Israel". Consider not Gaza, but Holocaust denial. It is certainly logically possible to deny the Holocaust without hating Jews or otherwise having any bad ideas. You shouldn't be able to deduce that someone hates Jews just because he denies the Holocaust. Being incorrect isn't enough to be antisemitic. Yet somehow, even though it's logically possible to come to Holocaust denial through ordinary error, Holocaust deniers all do in fact hate Jews, barring edge cases like "raised by Nazis and doesn't know better". Sure, protesting Israel in an imbalanced way isn't as strong evidence for antisemitism as Holocaust denial, but it's not no evidence either; in fact it's pretty significant evidence.
Nobody hates Jews because of their intrinsic Jewishness, it’s always been because of some idea that they had about Jews doing something evil or bad. Of course, these ideas might be wrong, and that’s what “antisemitism” means: hatred of Jews based on some false belief about them doing something evil.
This makes a lot of sense when you think of historical Jews, who were mostly just living normal lives by themselves, and were hated based on false rumors about drinking the blood of Christians, or whatever.
But as for modern Israeli jews, which we *know* are doing a genocide that’s probably a lot more evil than whatever things the old antisemitic rumors imagined, do we really believe that there’s people that hate Jews not at all because of their real documented genocide, but because of some false belief about something else that they do? That somehow is even worse than genocide? If not, what is even the meaning of the term “antisemitic” anymore? Someone who hates Jews for their genocide now, but used to hate them for some false reason before?
themotte has a rule about not claiming consensus. Unfortunately we don't seem to have one here.
> which we *know* are doing a genocide that’s probably a lot more evil
is exactly the toxic kind of consensus-forming that should be banned.
Are you saying that it’s not worse than the imagined misdeeds? I guess that’s technically true if you imagine some really bad ones, but it was more of a point about real vs imagined misdeeds in general.
Or are you straight up denying that the genocide is happening? I’m genuinely surprised that this would be controversial. Or is this a semantic argument about the definition of genocide?
A lot of ceasefire advocates and Palestine supporters get falsely accused of antisemitism, but there are also plenty of people who blame Jews for most wars, corruption, communist atrocities, pornography, economic problems and other bad things in the world. These people think Jews are oppressing the whole world and killing tens of millions of people. They hate Jews no matter how pro-Palestine we are. They often praise Hitler. These people are antisemites, and while so far in the 21st century they haven’t done anything as bad as killing at least 3% of Gaza’s population, it’s definitely worth being careful to make sure they don’t gain power. Their ideas have a historical track record of causing extraordinary evil and suffering.
This clip is a good example of antisemitism. If folks like this take over the US government they’re not just gonna put an arms embargo on Israel (which I’d support), they’ll probably try to kick Jews out of the US or even kill us. https://youtu.be/82qDk9LX0yI?si=JXs6WNUH4k0Z0ENk
The posited obligation to object equally strongly at all times to all things that look similar (the 2nd quoted commenter) has always really bothered me. It reads to me like a defensive response to not wanting to have feelings about something that someone else is having feelings about. We don't need to feel offended or judged for not prioritizing something someone else is prioritizing.
Likewise we don't need to judge others for having a different priority than we do. It seems perfectly fine and normal to me that we humans have different arenas of concern, care, and priority. And that we can be secure enough in our own selves not to be threatened by someone being concerned about something that we think is not the very top most urgent priority in the whole world at any given moment (and good god, how do we measure that?).
Parsing arguments over whether one is focused on the number 4 biggest calamity or the number 3 biggest calamity seems absurd to me. Particularly if by "focus" we mean arguing on the internet about it or devoting time reading news about it.
If all Palestinians decided to lay down arms, they'd have peace and a state in 24 hours. If all Israelis decided to lay down arms, they'd all be dead in 24 hours.
If my children had been tortured and kidnapped and raped and murdered on 10/7, and I had access to nuclear weapons, Gaza would be a crater.
No matter how much I hated a nuclear-armed enemy or how much they'd wronged me, I wouldn't torture and kidnap and rape and murder their kids.
No matter how much I hated someone or how much they'd wronged me, I'd never attack them with rockets I'd hidden in my own kids' schools and playgrounds and hospitals.
When they love their kids more they hate ours, we'll have peace.
> If my children had been tortured and kidnapped and raped and murdered on 10/7, and I had access to nuclear weapons, Gaza would be a crater.
What would you do if you were a Palestinian father whose children got blown up on their way home from the store by an Israeli bomb on some random day after 10/7?
> No matter how much I hated a nuclear-armed enemy or how much they'd wronged me, I wouldn't torture and kidnap and rape and murder their kids.
But it does sound like you would turn them into radioactive ash, so I’m having trouble following the logic here.
It’s ok for you to want to completely liquidate the population that has wronged you, but it’s wrong of them to harbor similar feelings. Is this whole post just a might makes right argument that is going over my head?
I don't think there would be much you could do.
If one says "I would do that"-- it is not the claim "it is right for me to do that". Nor it is the claim "It is wrong for them to do that".
You extrapolate from what was clearly put down.
I don’t think I’m extrapolating anything, I think the original post shows a fair amount of confused thinking where the OP considers theirs to be a righteous anger and any Palestinian anger to be unjustifiable and self defeating.
What is your reading of the second and third paragraph other than being completely contradictory?
There are a lot of things that can be said to this sort of "well, even if they're not consistently upset about other atrocities at least they care about one thing, better to err on the side of empathy, etc etc" argument. But I'll just focus on:
When you see people, not failing to get upset at, but ACTIVELY CELEBRATING the deaths and tortures being done to a different group of people (see the protests in support of October 7), when you see them DIRECTLY CONFRONTED with atrocities by Muslims (whether Hamas actions pr just the average run-of-the-mill Sharia law beheading) and shrugging and saying "so what?"...not just *failing* to go out of their way to find and condemn those things...then I think you can say with practical certainty that these people DO NOT GIVE TWO FUCKS about empathy for anyone. Even their "empathy" for the suffering Gazans is almost certainly closer to a gleeful "great! Now we have more justification to *hurt the people we hate!*"
I would INFINITELY rather someone who openly doesn't care about stopping anyone being hurt than someone who pretends to care about one group's hurt for the real purpose of actively hurting a different group.
It's like Scott is thinking of people who just oppose the gaza war without opposing anything else, while many of us are thinking of those who oppose the gaza war and actively defend, minimise, or try to shut down discussion of everything done by Muslims. The first group could be described as "having a small amount of unreflective empathy". The second, as "an active force for anti-empathy, disguised as empathy".
Of course, there are both groups. You can find people who were celebrating Oct 7, and you can find people who were horrified then by Hamas' attack and are horrified now by Israel's response.
Scott, it seems like you mention God more often lately. Is this a shorthand for luck/the laws of nature/the contingent present state of the world, or is it a real departure from atheism?
This question isn't meant as a gotcha, and it has no bearing, IMO, on the reasoning or conclusions in this post (with which I agree). I'm just idly curious. Please feel free not to reply, or to do it in a different time or place since I expect the comments on this post to be heated.
“On April 30, 1991 – on that one day – 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned it to my daughter, who was then seven years old, that is was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.
‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. ‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’”
Annie Dillard - The Wreck of Time
> I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ tests after Jews outscored Aryans
The Nazis weren't inconsistent in banning IQ tests, IQ isn't what they valued. You might think less of them for not valuing IQ that highly, but then you've never been a Nazi. IQ tests were pioneered outside Germany by non-Nazis, and the people behind them weren't shocked by Nazis rejecting such tests because they didn't have the assumption that Nazis must like them. I'd say the bigger contradiction is Hitler's prioritization of himself over Germany, and his belief that Germany should be punished via things like his "Nero decree" for failing him in the war.
There is an extremely theoretical version of Nazism, which I am not familiar what it is about. BAP claims Nazism was “Immoral Aristocratic Radicalism” in theory. Who knows maybe that’s true
But there is an implementation version of Nazism which is not all that different from a corrupt totalitarian dictatorship with an added right wing populism on steroids. You only need to read a few books of people who lived under a Nazi government to confirm that. The SS repeatedly raped their own citizens, stole their property, denounced their own citizens as Jews or some other defect if it helped them, denounced each other as unpatriotic, schemed to have each other executed and so on. What strikes was the petty nature of the crimes committed by the SS and the rampant prevalence of it. For example, stealing a farmers land (conscripting for a factory), because he refused to let his daughter party in a club with the man. Claiming an 85 year old man was sympathetic to Jews and sending him to concentration camp because he refused to sell you his house at well below market price. And on and on
Indeed, true Nazism has never been tried!
The cartoon version of what Nazis believed is very different to what Nazis actually believed.
If Isreal/Gaza posted on AITA, it would be the biggest "everybody sucks here" ever. Hamas sucks for the October 7th attacks and holding on to hostages. Israel sucks for responding with horrifically over-the-top force and letting the actual ethnic cleansers (the pro-settlement crowd) drive policy. Its the people of Gaza that suffer while everyone else involved absolutely sucks.
I wish people would stop bringing up Sudan as the archetypal Thing We’re Supposed To Care About, But Don’t.
Why is that?
I have a South Sudanese friend who is genuinely sad and hopeless about the state of his home country, it’s not just a handy rhetorical point to be made on the Internet.
"Is there a principle that people who have had their land stolen can launch terrorist attacks to get it back? If yes, those terrorist attacks might kill kids’ siblings; if no, land-stealing might be so costless that rights become meaningless and the world devolves into constant colonial conflict"
I think this is unreasonably charitable to Hamas. It was their grandparents land that was stolen (arguably, but I'll grant it). The question of 'should you be able to kill people if you have your land stolen' is different from 'should your descendants in perpetuity be able to kill people in a completely hopeless attempt to get the land that was stolen from their ancestors back?'
Maybe I'm misunderstanding that though and you weren't steel-manning the pro-Hamas position
The term "stealing the land" is inaccurate and cause for much mischief.
The land for conquered. But the liberal theory has no concept of "conquest". Hence "stolen".
But you see, people admire conquerors and put up their statues. Thieves are not admired.
Yes, but it DOES have a concept of "eminent domain." I wonder if there's a way of using that to teach the concept of "conquest."
"Eminent domain" is an unprincipled exception that liberal states employ --without these exceptions the liberal state doesn't work at all.
Conquest is much more simpler to understand. All children do so intuitively
Yes, I know, but they've gone through a sufficiently rigorous education process of learning absurdities that they no longer recognize simple concepts, and reversing that needs a different approach than teaching from scratch.
Of course the land was stolen. "Conquest" doesn't confer the right to expel people from their houses, take possession of those houses and all property inside, including furniture, clothes, photo albums, and children's toys. Every building more than 80 years old was quite literally stolen.
Only true if you believe the megalomaniacal Arab claims that all the land should have been theirs when the Ottoman Empire was decolonized.
I don't know what "meglomaniacal claims" you're talking about, or why, unless I accept such claims, conquest does actually confer a right to ethnically cleanse and steal property.
"Rights" only exist within a nexus of laws.
The fact of conquest changes the laws and renders all previous rights moot.
I think saying 'Arabs were living in that land and got expelled' is a fairly accurate description of what happened. You could say the expulsion was the least bad option (my take) but you do have to sympathize with those who got expelled. And saying their land was stolen is fine
Arabs were not living on all of the land that is now Israel and not all of them were expelled.
Dear old USA is literally founded on conquest--no that there is anything objectionable in that. All countries are so established. And no, they didn't respect any rights the conquered people were having.
Thoughtful people in the U.S. deplore native dispossession, rather than celebrate it from the stolen teepees they’re living in. Native Americans are citizens with equal rights, and not herded into concentration camps where they’re starved and bombed.. Marauding gangs aren’t rampaging through Indian villages, burning property, and killing people without legal consequence. Crimes motivated by racial bias are treated hate crimes and prosecuted accordingly. There is a general acknowledgement that a serious injustice took place.
The native Americans have been thoroughly pacified and the pacification was not gentle.
You’re writing as if this “pacification” were a wonderful achievement, when the truth is that Native American rights should have been respected throughout.
And what good this deploring does?
Do they plan to return the stolen land to the rightful owners?
Acknowledging the reality is prerequisite to doing good, and is preferable and more honorable than hand waiving about “conquest” while you’re living in a stolen house eating food grown on stolen land while sleeping in a stolen bed. In the Palestinian context, the legitimate owners are in many cases still alive and still have the key.
Hold up, conquest and stealing are two different things. One is about ownership and one is about sovereignty.
You can conquer land without stealing land -- you go in and put up your flag and say you're the government, but everyone currently owning land can continue to own it.
You can also steal land without conquering it, like if the government stole my land right now.
Even if you rightfully conquer land that doesn't necessarily give you the right to steal it as well.
There is little point to conquest if the previous ownerships continue.
Ownership exists within the nexus of laws of a particular polity. That nexus is displaced when the polity gets conquered and hence all previous ownership logically go out with it.
Thus, it is not incumbent on the conqueror to honor previous ownerships.
>There is little point to conquest if the previous ownerships continue.
Not necessarily. In fact, lots of historical conquerors have largely kept previous ownership intact, because it helps smooth other the conquest process and makes the land easier to rule.
They may do so for their own convenience but they are not required to.
Suppose in country A, a landowner also owns mineral rights under his land (like USA).
And country A gets conquered by country B (like Europe) where the govt owns the mineral rights.
So, will you say that as a land owner in A your property has been stolen when B absorbs A (and imposes its laws on A) ?
Yes?
So, the point is people of A are going to cry Stolen! Stolen! in any case, whether their actual property is touched or not.
It is not sufficient to say that only the govt is changed by conquest, not your actual property. Because property rights change in unpredictable manner with change in govt.
Historically, conquest is very often followed by taking land and goods and forcibly relocating or killing people that were on that land.
One real problem here is that almost every piece of land on Earth was taken by the sword multiple times in its history, so a general principle of "it's okay to do horrible things to people in response to historical taking of land" ends up justifying killing pretty much anyone who's not living in Antartica, Iceland, or some remote island that was only settled in the last few centuries.
The native americans had a right to fight the colonists and even kill them. Their descendants do not. That is all I am saying
If the Native Americans had the power to do so now, it would turn out they had the right to take back the land and kick out the descendants of the settlers. Many countries have had long periods of occupation and subjugation before getting their country back. I don't think there is any simple principle you can apply here.
Why isn't more done to help refugees leave Gaza?
According to Wikipedia, over five million Ukrainian refugees fled Ukraine to other parts of Europe. There are about two million people in Gaza. Let's assume half the people in Gaza want to leave. If several countries stepped in to help, surely this is doable?
The immediate answer seems to be that they're trapped. (I have heard that some get out by bribing Egyptian security guards.) But why haven't other countries done more to get them out? Shouldn't there be international pressure to make this happen?
There have been international efforts to get food in and stop the war, which should continue. But meanwhile, every refugee who leaves Gaza would be another person who is safe from bombing and starvation and all the other bad things that happen living in a conflict zone. And for the people who stay, it would be one less mouth to feed, and one less person for mostly-collapsed medical facilities to take care of.
It seems like a missing mood, or perhaps there are things happening that aren't very prominent in the news.
(Yes, I've brought this up before, but haven't seen any convincing answers yet.)
Isn't it because it's basically impossible and neighboring countries don't want them?
Why assume it would have to be a neighboring country? It's not that hard to charter planes. I bet Egypt could be convinced to cooperate if the ultimate destination were somewhere else.
I'm assuming an international diplomatic effort and some kind of agreement. It doesn't seem like any country has seriously tried?
(And since someone will bring it up, volunteering *some other country* to accept refugees without taking any yourself doesn't count as seriously trying.)
It would be very possible if *any* country wanted them. But European countries don't want a couple million more jihadists running around their cities any more than Middle Eastern countries do.
Are there even a million jihadists total, worldwide? I kinda doubt that. Most people aren't violent.
European countries were so generous in accepting Middle Eastern refugees around the time of the Arab Spring, that it created a substantial backlash. Inviting a lot of Palestinians in is not even remotely politically feasible this time around. Even if they could theoretically be absorbed, the general mood these days is like "why should we take them in? they're neither culturally similar nor particularly close by".
“Why isn't more done to help refugees leave Gaza?”
Because they will never, ever, be able to return to their homeland if they leave. This is not even a theory, just the raw fact of the matter. Israel unilaterally rejects to all Palestinians their right of return, while simultaneously giving “right of return” to any Jew anywhere in the world, regardless of their historic connection to the land, who don’t even speak the language. Meanwhile, a Palestinian can have literally been born there yet if they leave, they will be denied, for all eternity, right to return to their homeland by the Israeli government. Evacuating the population of Gaza (most of whom are already displaced or descendants of displaced people consistently denied right of return) simply offloads the moral burden of ethnic cleansing one step away from the Israeli government.
I mean, okay?
I am incredibly lucky to have been born in a place that is much, much nicer than the Gaza Strip. One of the nicest places in the world, in fact, a place so nice that almost every country in the world will let me enter their country, because they're fully confident that I'll go back home afterwards. I can't imagine what it would be like to be born in the Gaza Strip, which is not only one of the worst places on Earth, but a place that nobody will even give you a visa to enter their country from because they're pretty sure you'd never go back there.
But if I had been born in the Gaza Strip, and you told me "Hey, you can go live somewhere else, but on the condition that you can never go back to the Gaza Strip" I'd say "fuck yes, the Gaza Strip fucking sucks man".
Yes, many people would leave, never to return, and that is a heart-wrenching decision to make. It's not historically unprecedented, though. Many other immigrants have fled war, famine, and poverty. Back when travel was harder, return was very difficult if not impossible.
So I wouldn't expect everyone to take the offer. But if the other choice is staying in a conflict zone and getting bombed and starved to death, probably some people would?
I don't know how good this poll is, but it seems suggestive:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/almost-half-gazans-willing-leave-survey-finds-2025-05-06/
And certainly, having the option is better than being trapped. Some people call Gaza an "open-air prison," which doesn't seem quite right (it's more of a siege), but to the extent that's true, I think the world should do more to let them out of prison.
In effective altruism terms, it seems like a neglected cause? Or maybe I've missed something.
What? In all the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Israel always allowed for Palestinians to return to a future Palestinian state. Israel only rejected them to Israel.
What countries are offering to take them?
The obvious problem is that there is a very effective and bloody terrorist group embedded in the Gazan population, so it's likely that when you bring in lots of Gazan refugees, you also bring in lots of Hamas.
Maybe you could do something like this for women and children?
I'm going to speculate here in order of plausibility:
1) because immigration is a hot yet rotten potato politically now, and in Europe much serious anti immigration populist animus started with GENUINE MIDDLE EASTER. REFUGEE situation in 2015 (Syrians).
2) Ukrainian refugees were readily accepted initially partially because of the implicit assumptions that they were coming temporarily, until the war ends. The war has not ended but the sentiment for example in Poland (which has has turned from overwhelmingly welcoming to more hostile/complicated). Also that's ethically similar people coming to a culturally roughly similar country / countries (tho in great numbers: about 1.6 million who stayed makes nearly 5% of the population in PL), softening usual racialized and future clash related fears. A better comparison would be with Syrians and that did not end super well politically or socially for the enthusiastically hosting countries (Merkel, I'm looking at you).
3) This is a contentious point, but it's not impossible that that would EXACTLY foster either the hidden or even only semi-conscious Israeli agenda, and would be an anathema to the Palestinian independence/statehood project which began with turning the vast majority of them into refugees (Gaza was technically a "refugee camp" itself, albeit grown into a city over the decades).
4) The idea could have been permanently marred by the association with Trump's Gaza Riviera proposal.
Yes, there’s certainly a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment. But given some pretty widespread support for Palestinians worldwide, you’d think that there would be advocates pushing for their own governments to do the right thing anyway. Maybe there are but we haven’t heard of them?
Aren’t there organizations dedicated to helping Syrian refugees, even though there are also lots of people who are anti-immigrant? I would expect it to be a controversial issue rather than something nobody talks about.
>Why isn't more done to help refugees leave Gaza?
Because nobody wants to bring in a load of violent jihadists to their country.
I think you're exaggerating popular support for your position. It would be kinda weird to support Palestinians (as many people do) and also think they're too dangerous to have around? Anti-immigrant sentiment is popular, but I don't think it's *that* popular?
I think it's quite unreasonable to assume that more than a small proportion of immigrants would be violent criminals. And, there are also native-born violent criminals, too! You need a criminal justice system to deal with them in any case.
>It would be kinda weird to support Palestinians (as many people do) and also think they're too dangerous to have around?
Revealed preferences are often different to stated preferences. Lots of middle-class liberals are fine romanticising third-worlders, criminals, the poor, the homeless, etc., but would throw a fit if a group of them moved in next door.
>I think it's quite unreasonable to assume that more than a small proportion of immigrants would be violent criminals.
I don't know what exactly you'd consider a "small proportion", but some groups have much higher rates of offending than others. For example, when looking at grooming gang related offences, British "Asians" (which, for those who don't know, in this sort of context is usually a euphemism for "Muslims") commit crimes at a rate 9-12 times higher (per capita) than British Whites, whilst British Blacks commit these sorts of crimes at a rate 9-10 times higher:
https://ispruk.substack.com/p/uk-grooming-gangs-deriving-per-capita
Everything we know about Palestinian society suggests they'd be one of the high-crime groups.
>And, there are also native-born violent criminals, too!
So what, there are native-born violent criminals, therefore we should all make our violent criminal problem worse for... reasons?
I'm wondering if it's really the case that there are people who are simultaneously pro-Palestinian and anti-Palestinian immigration for their own country. Revealed preference doesn't seem like quite enough. It seems like there would be people openly admitting to that?
I think (not passing any value judgements either way, just factual description of the situation) that no countries, neighboring or otherwise, will take Gaza refugees for one or more of the following reasons:
(1) dealing with them is of course a colossal first-order problem (~2 million starving refugees, an unknown percentage of which are militant extremists)
(2) letting refugees flee would make it easier for Israel to conquer or subjugate Gaza, simply because the populace would be lessened
(3) More Palestinian suffering within Gaza causes bad PR for Israel, which furthers the anti-Israel cause
I make no claim to know what balance is among these three reasons
Those seem like reasonable guesses for what some people might think, but I think it's a bit exaggerated. Why would any country need to take more refugees than they want to commit to?
I imagine some country saying "we'll take a thousand families if five other countries do the same. Who's with us?" This would be more of a symbolic gesture / pilot program, but it could be scaled up if it works out.
This is really good.
I feel like the crux of these meta-discussions is whether one more person adds anything to the discussion. Like does the world need more Americans talking about Gaza? It doesn't add anything, even after accounting for the "more voices might lead to change!" possibility that some people will treat like solid gold instead of the extremely weak we're-out-of-good-ideas option that it is.
People are allowed to rant of course, but that's just regression to the mean.
Scott was aiming to make a point that wasn't really about the Gaza conflict. I agree, though, that the comments section being dominated by arguments about it was a very predictable consequence of his using it as an example.
"Dignity of a rational animal"
Very curious these concepts. Aristotle invented the "rational animal" but the "dignity" part had to wait till 18C philosophers of Enlightenment who were explicit that the Church was derogatory to the dignity of this "rational animal".
They were answered by Nietzsche, were they not? Without God, there must be a transvaluation of all values. Dignity is not for little people.
And with Julian Jaynes, the consciousness is itself discovered to be a metaphor and what kind of dignity a metaphor could have !
Self-righteousness of the Liberal is a dangerous thing to world peace. British, between the two wars, indulged in guilt over unfairness of Versailles. This self-pitying hardened into self-righteousness over sufferings of Sudeten Germans led to Munich.
In the entire post, there is not one word about jihad and how is it in Western interest to promote jihad or to stop it. Gazans were one of the very few people who openly celebrated 9/11. But the liberal is over all that. He is universal. Particularities do not exist for him.
Hen Mazzig's is presumptuous, a common pattern in pro-Israeli discourse. Some of the voices criticizing genocide on the internet come from Palestine. Anyone coming from outside who forms deep ties never leaves with their opinion unscathed. When the people being starved, bombed, humiliated, apartheided, stolen from, raped, imprisoned, and machine-gunned while searching for food are no longer "them over there", but my friends, my neighbors, my wife, and my kids, it changes things. You see the arbitrariness of genocider and genocidee. Westerners and Israelis in their arrogance think it inconceivable that the roles could be reversed, but it's not. It's in our interest that human rights are respected everywhere simply because the tables could turn. Until kids in Gaza are safe, none of our kids are safe.
People from the West don't understand the nature of sectarianism in the Middle East. Sectarianism there is like racism in the U.S., decent society and intellectuals, people you respect and want to be around, are not sectarian. With that context, the hyper-sectarian nature of Israeli society in unignorable. Take the lowest form of bigot, the type that finds the Ku Klux Klan too moderate, and amp it up with nuclear arms and F18s. They complain constantly, including in these comments, about how "all of them what to kill all of us", while they're in the midst themselves of killing "all of them." Every accusation is a confession - the easiest way in the Middle East to know someone is corrupt is that they're vocally against corruption. With that context, Yoav Gallant's statement that Palestinians are "human animals" is revealing. This view, that we must kill them because they want to kill us, itself taps into our animal instincts. Only a "human animal" sees an us and them, the Middle East authentically is cosmopolitan, multicultural, fluid and urban, a beautiful mix which they've been defacing, destroying, dismantling, and raping and pillaging for the past 80 years.
I appreciate Scott reading this story and thinking about his own kids. That story is a drop in the bucket, and it's unfortunate that so many Israelis, upon reading a story like that, are incapable of mustering empathy but instead joke about "pint-sized terrorists" and good target practice. This ugly rhetoric is out in the open, complementing their meticulously documented war crimes.
> Westerners and Israelis in their arrogance think it inconceivable that the roles could be reversed, but it's not.
I think most Israelis know very well that 1/3rd of the world's Jews were recently murdered in a genocide, and the fear of that recurring is a major motivator in Israel's decisions.
Having only 1/100th the population of a religion like Islam is inherently risky. If Muslims are willing to sacrifice their lives to kill Israelis, and Israel responds "proportionately" keeping the ratio at only 1:1 Muslim deaths to Jewish deaths, Muslims can wipe out the *entire* Israeli population at a cost of only 1/100th their population.
The same sectarian thought pattern. Muslims this, muslims that. Do you actually know any muslims?
Consider Iran, which has a government sponsored clock counting down the "destruction of Israel" while pursuing nuclear weapons.
Do you think it's impossible that a crazy Iranian leader could nuke Israel (which is very tiny and dense) even at the cost of Israel nuking a few Iranian cities in response?
Iran is a nation which, I think uniquely, marched their own children into minefields during the Iran-Iraq war. Deterring them is ... difficult.
Iran is a weak state with an unpopular government ruled by an 86 year old dictator. Considering that Israel is committing genocide, it’s reasonable to be more concerned about Israel’s actual nuclear stockpile rather an a hypothetical one that a hypothetical “crazy leader” may one day obtain. This characterization reeks of racism that’s ingrained in Israel - those crazy Iranians can’t have nukes, but us good people, no problem. Hyping up Iran as a threat is another tactic to unify Israeli society behind its war criminal president, as nothing bonds people together like an external, existential enemy. The same is true in reverse, with the Iranian regime and Israel locked in codependent enmity for their own survival. In peacetime Israel would naturally disintegrate.
I think this is one of your best pieces of writing.
Given the recent admission from the NYT that the photo of the "starving" child was not actually starving, why do you believe the backpack story? Why do you believe that it must have been Jews were responsible? And that they did it intentionally? Why has there not been an unconditional surrender given the direction of the war has taken? And, finally, why no concern over Druze children and the horrors they're facing?
Some context on the version of Scott Alexander that wrote this.
Following 10/7/23, Scott refused to do the bare minimum of expressing sorrow about the victims of Hamas attacks. This basic thing, feeling like it was something to feel not-awesome about, was (and is) being denied in too many corners of the Western world. Mere public expression of compassion, without any taking of sides, would go far, - among a demographic he was well-positioned to impact. Scott not merely refused (indeed, in all the time that passed since, he couldn't find a single word about this in his eloquent heart of hearts. Not once) - he explicitly refrained from saying anything because these were events halfway across the world. A leader in the EA movement, the author of Newtonian Ethics, gave that as a reason to stay silent. Did somebody change the geography, Scott? Is Gaza closer than Beeri?
Nor was he speaking the truth about his intent to remain silent on the topic. Scott Alexander did find something to say. Early in 2024, he started a discussion by saying "Israel killed 50000 people". At that point, Hamas itself was claiming 35000 deaths (and the UN later quietly revised the estimate at the time to 22000). Given the 10-15K estimates of killed Hamas fighters, and the fraction of the civilians who were in fact fighting, Scott was in fact saying "Hamas, that well-known pro-Israeli source of information, has underestimated total deaths by almost a half, and the civilian:combatant death ratio by much more than that". And he was of course blaming every single of those deaths on Israel. Hamas rockets falling on hospitals? Hamas slaughtering Palestinians who were not maximally on board? Shooting at people following instructions to evacuate? Scott Don't Care. Note that this wasn't following a Scott-at-his-best analysis of fifty factors and a careful conclusion "so this is why I think conventional estimates are wrong". He... just threw it out like a reddit poster trolling someone.
Nor was this peculiar lack of standards and attention limited to the borders of Gaza. Minimizing campus antisemitism to the extent it was somehow news to Scott in September 2024? Endorsing Jill Stein (somehow missing the antisemitism issues associated with her campaign), learning about those issues and still keeping the endorsement (because it would sounds more elegant, mirroring the title of the 2016 endorsement post...)?
Remember the recent rant about USAID where Scott mentioned woke silliness as the worst argument one might bring against USAID? He never mentioned (never knew? never cared? who knows!) that top USAID charities may be handing millions to Hamas (not as a side effect of working in Gaza. As direct hand-to-hand transfers to Hamas leaders). Hasn't breathed a word about it, not even to refute it.
I could go on and on. I don't think there's a point. It's probably not a coincidence that Scott barely updates his Mistakes page these days, but if he'd be interested in genuinely examining his epistemics on the topic, this would have happened already.
So yes. Scott Alexander is a Singerian who used geographic distance to justify his continued inability to say as much as a single word about the victims of 7/10.
A rationalist writer who essentially amplified propaganda that was too radical for Hamas to push (Erdogan spoke of 46K deaths a year later) and never examined his most worst failures on the topic.
But let's talk about the virtues of consistency!
BS
So. Specifically.
Did Scott refuse to express sympathy about 7/10? Was the distance argument made by him explicitly? You can point to a public text that disproves it, or you could ask him - I do hope he answers truthfully. Or I could share proof (which I am extremely reluctant to do. But it exists). I don't doubt he did think it was sad. Just didn't want to express said sadness or horror at a time when this mattered. Too far away. Too "conflict-theorist"-y.
The "Israel killed 50000 people" comment was made publicly a year and a half ago.
The endorsement for Stein is still proudly up in a post title. Comments in that endorsement post show Scott being made aware of the antisemitism of e.g. Stein's running mate (and thus being unaware prior to the post), and deciding that's not a sufficient reason to change the endorsement.
On the July links post, link 36 was to a twitter thread: "A humanitarian aid veteran analyzes what went wrong with food distribution in Gaza (X)." The author of that thread dispels without evidence the notion that Hamas diverts the aid.
The amplification of that specific thread led me to contemplate Scott's silence on the matter.
This is a topic where a Scott-like analysis could do great: Where are the numbers in discussion coming from? How are they calculated? Who has an agenda? What evidence is real/fake? How and why is the situation the way that it is?
There is so much to work with here, that I found Scott's silence to be jarring. Jarring enough that I realized he is being uncharacteristically non-critical of the current trendy liberal agenda. This post is a more explicit confirmation of the conclusion I arrived at earlier this month.
I was a paid subscriber since the launch of ACX. But I unsubscribed since that July links post for reasons that align with what you (BE) describe.
You are being maximally uncharitable to Scott. He hasn't pivoted to talking about Gaza a lot; in fact, this is, as far as I can remember, the first post where he kind-of-but-not-really centers the matter, and takes a recognizable position. To collect the scraps he put out over two years of one of the most reported-on conflicts ever and use them as an indictment of his epistemic integrity is frankly appalling.
Also, you didn't link the post where he made the claim of 50 000 deaths in Gaza, but I would be surprised if, upon pointing out that the estimate was well beyond most projections, he wouldn't have motivated it.
Your criticisms of him are honestly so tame, that the tone of indignation is baffling. To you, the evidence he betrayed his ethical convictions is:
1 - not having posted about Oct 7 after the fact.
2 - having mentioned in passing 50 000 killed in a post, when at the time the estimates suggested 35 000 killed.
3 - endorsing Jill Stein in the 2024 election.
4 - being at one point unaware of the extent of episodes of antisemitism in US college campuses
5 - not having mentioned, in his analysis of USAID pros and cons, that “top USAID charities may be handing millions to Hamas (not as a side effect of working in Gaza. As direct hand-to-hand transfers to Hamas leaders)”
I was going to address each point by point, but I think it would perhaps violate a space that should remain Scott's. I'll just say that about point 2, even if it turned out he was wrong or misguided or careless, it's as-objectively-as-a-subjective-opinion-can-be _more_ wrong to say that he “essentially amplified propaganda that was too radical for Hamas to push”. He is not off by an order of magnitude.
To Scott: I think your handling of the topic has been effective. Everyone already talks about it ad nauseam, and Open Threads regularly have multiple top-level comments amply discussing it. A “Much more than you needed to know” on any topic relating to the conflict would be interesting, but I also imagine that many of your acquaintances, family and friends would have strong reactions to you taking a stand either way. I wish the commentariat at large understood this, but here we are.
> real evolution fans don’t even love their own children - they donate to sperm banks and let other people invest resources in raising them
I think this is incorrect. Consider the question, who has more great-grandchildren: the average Amish man, or someone who donates sperm to 10 secular lesbian couples?
I don’t think that the answer to this is obvious at all?
Might depend on how many generations later you're looking.
Doesn't the comment specify ("who has more great-grandchildren")?
>Consistency matters because it’s how morality forms in the first place. Everybody has some moral impulses. Those become principles only under the influence of a desire for consistency and for the dignity of a rational being.
This seems quite underdeveloped or dubious. Sure, everyone has moral impulses, and a drive for consistency can potentially cement them into "principles," but why should we assume a priori that "principles" are good? Sure, they might be more coherent, but so what? This seems to just juggle words for their positive valences, without adding anything substantive: consistency is good, because it combines 'impulses' (neutral or negative implication) into "principles" (positive implication).
The whole point of the question is that principles can themselves be negative, such that consistency with them breeds evil. If "a desire for consistency can prevent you from being history’s greatest villain," then there's no reason to think that it couldn't lead you to being the greatest villain; it all depends which principles one is being consistent with. Perhaps it would be villainy which is more amenable to description than chance impulse, and at the abstract level, we might say that it's very nice that the villain retains the dignity of a human being in being able to describe why he's being evil, but that doesn't seem very satisfying, particularly within a consequentialist framework.
Thinking of discrete examples of negativity, it seems obvious that consistency wouldn't be preferred. If someone were to rape some people, while acting nice and wholesome with others, we wouldn't say that "the worst part is the hypocrisy" and that it would be better if the person would rape more people, allowing his base rape impulses to blossom into a more fully developed rape-ideology, thus embodying the dignity of a rational being. We'd say that the worst part is the rape and that consistency or lack thereof is hardly a consideration, and in the above example, would only make things worse.
If the question is whether people should consciously consider and plan their actions, developing more deliberate frameworks, or whether they should act on mere impulse, it seems that the answer is that they should think. But that's not because of the beauty of consistency - it's because each item that receives thought would presumably be likelier to end up more positively.
Maybe you just meant that it's generally good to think more and act less impulsively and that by doing so, principles, and thus consistency emerge organically, but then consistency is still mostly besides the point.
Incidentally, the original cited comment, questioning the value of consistency failed to appreciate the point it was responding to (from Hanania). The commenter heaps scorn on Hanania for preferring consistency, mocking him for his autism and accusing him of being a 'retard,' with this being a symptom of his illness.
But Hanania's point wasn't that consistency is necessarily to be desired. Indeed, he's praised those who've strayed from their general instincts to espouse positions that he approves of, rather throwing autistic fits about that, as he's accused of.
Instead, he noted that from a descriptive standpoint, consistency is associated with higher human capital. In that context, Hanania noted that liberals tend to hold more developed and internally consistent views than the populist-conservative coalition. Hanania opposes many of those, having written a book developing an approach to stop them from realizing those views.
But as is a major theme in Hanania's work, there are wide-ranging implications to EHC. Their value doesn't come from their internal consistency, per se, but through their extensive differences in behavior and preferences, as he describes.
> Hitler was a vegetarian, so he must have had some aversion to cruelty.
To be fair I think this presumes some things. There are other ways to come to vegetarianism than expanding your circle of concern from humans to animals - religious concerns, for example. You might also think that animals should be respected because they are morally pure and innocent, whereas humans do not get the same benefit - humans are all sinful and dirty and tainted. That's a hilariously misguided sentiment IMO but it's not even a very uncommon one. So someone might be a vegetarian, AND be the greatest villain of all time, AND be consistent.
Of course the lesson isn't that consistency bad, I think you're right about consistency, it's that consistency alone doesn't make a good moral system. But at least if you DO have decent starting axioms, then consistency will allow you to draw the right consequences from them.
This is perhaps the best writing I have read from you since your review of Chesterton's _What's Wrong with the World_ (which is essentially this sentiment sustained for multiple pages), and the extended analogy between active inference/predictive processing and early infant phenomenology:
> Since 2/3 of these are about Gaza, we’ll start there. And since there’s so much virtue-signaling and luxury-believing going around these days, I assure you that what I am about to share is my absolute most honest and deepest opinion, the one I hold in my heart of hearts.
A few months ago, I read an article by an aid worker in Gaza recounting the horrors he’d seen. Among a long litany, one stood out. A little kid came into the hospital with a backpack. The doctors told him he had to put it down so they could treat him, and he refused. The doctors insisted. The kid fought back. Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid’s dead brother. He couldn’t bear to leave him, so he carried them everywhere he went.
I am a Real Man and therefore do not cry. But I confess to getting a little misty at this story, and I know exactly why. When my 1.5-year-old son wakes up early, the first words out of his mouth when I extract him from his crib are “Yaya? Yaya?” which is how he says his sister Lyra’s name. No matter how I distract him, he’ll keep saying “Yaya? Yaya?” and pointing at the door to her room until she wakes up, at which point he’ll get a big smile and run over to her. It’s impossible for me to read this story without imagining her body parts in the backpack and him saying “Yaya? Yaya?” in an increasingly distressed voice, over and over again, until the doctors drag him away.
So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back.
I like this! And thank you for sharing your heart of hearts.
But I feel like you could’ve waited an extra day or two before publication, just to make the post a little more polished.
Specifically I think your take on consistency is wrong. You make it a moral trait, but I think the principal reason we value consistency is that it makes our life easier. If someone believes X today, I will model them as believing X or a consequence of X tomorrow. If they don’t, I’m upset because predicting them is more difficult. I think that’s pretty much it. We like consistency because consistency is helpful to our world modeling. I like it because it’s a nice thing to have.
But not because it’s a source of morality. Which I don’t even believe.
Not disagreeing with you, but maybe refining your point: I’d propose that consistency is specifically important for morality because morality is crucially important for how we treat others in society, and those others are going to want to know that they can trust me and that their moral standards are not founded on whim or what have you.
Not wishing to get into any arguments, just wanted to say thanks for such a touching and thoughtful post.
Scott, the answer to "why are people outraged more by one horrific thing than by another that's similar or worse" is missing the key dimension: whether you feel at least partially responsible for it. By act or by omission. This is qualitatively different from selective media coverage or anecdotal emotional connection. Some horrors are committed by actors where neither side claims to have any relation to you. Or, there's nothing you feel you can do about it. And some horrors are committed by actors that claim that they act in the name of your country, your values, your very name. Sometimes the claim is explicit (Vietnam war fought "for Americans"). Sometimes it is half explicit or implied (Israel "fighting for Western values"). So, the person more horrified by one horror than by another, is simply realizing that these things are done at least in part in their name. And, that there is something they could do about it. And then the horror really sinks in.
To an American, it might count that Gazans were overjoyed at 9/11. They have let themselves to be taken over by a jihadist cult and surely extirpation of jihad is no less urgent for the liberal West than the extirpation of Nazis.
Universal claims of morality, without particular context, tend not to satisfactory outcomes. No doubt, it is noble, but perhaps not conducive to good outcomes.
nit re
>Again, he’s bad at examples - most of the things he names are less bad than the massacres in Gaza
There was a reddit thread where this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1mc2ios/comment/n5qwd1z/ was:
>Not commonly brought up on Reddit, but Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known by his nickname Hemedti. Hemedti is the commander of the RSF in Sudan, one of the primary belligerents in the Sudanese Civil War right now who is actively waging a campaign of genocidal annihilation against the country's African minorities in the Darfur region. He is largely responsible for the overall civil war in Sudan, which is killing more people than every other active war on the planet combined. It was recently estimated that more than 522,000 children have died of starvation in Sudan since the civil war began and hundreds of thousands of other people have been killed through massacres and the fighting. It could possibly be the bloodiest war of the whole 21st-century and yet you hardly ever hear a fucking peep about it in the Western world at all. Hemedti is one of this century's greatest villains and yet his name is hardly even known outside of a few niche circles. It's maddening
Sufficient example?
You know the rebuttal to this. You're not stupid. Why do n you pretend you just fell off a truck and never heard "we dont post for Dagalo's weapons and support everything he does"? You have heard this. Why are you pretending you haven't? Do you think there are a lot of people even dumber than you?
Malicious idiot, I was _specifically_ responding to a paragraph about examples. I cited an example. Can you understand that much, at least?
I think you should answer the question
I refuse.
It is truly absurd Scott feels he has to carefully couch his views against the mass murder of children and women as somehow valid. The propaganda imperatives are immoral and monstrous from the pro Israel and pro war military colonial forces in the media. It shouldn't require an essay or argument to be strictly against the mass murder or even singular murder of any child anywhere in the world whenever one becomes aware of it.
In absolutely zero other cases or contexts is anyone ever reprimanded or discouraged from caring about child murder except in the case of Israel doing it. No moral super consistency speech police ever show up and complain to anyone raising awareness or seeking action to stop this. No where else is total God like comprehensive omniscience required in order to feel justified in holding any kind of moral opinion. Israeli propaganda often deploys these isolated demands for rigor.
It is all a distraction from their race based apartheid state which literally implementing their final solution in Gaza with a total blockade on food as their leaders openly and loudly demand total annihilation of all Palestinians. Thenwe are called crazy anti Judaism bigots for noticing them banging on the table with blood soaked hands foaming at the mouth about how there are no innocents in 2 million people while they annex the west bank and their settler militias openly murder and steal. While an israeli prison guard who was filmed raping Palestinian prisoners is paraded around on Israeli TV talking up his right to rape and saying the Palestinians are not human.
The propaganda is so extreme while it shouts a desire for genocide and also double speaks and tells you you're insane and denies they're doing what they are openly doing. Denying the nakbha happened while promising a second one and delivering it live on camera for all to see. It is crazy making to speak to anyone who operates in such bad faith and has an official motto of strength through deception.
Very simple. Child murder is wrong. Apartheid is wrong. Ethnosupremacy racism with violence is wrong. Starving people to deathnis wrong. Always. No ifs, ands, or buts. Any context, anywhere. Same with occupation and colonialism. I 100% do not submit myself to anyone else and do not need to explain or justify such views. I'm not here to allow myself moral ambiguity from the lying propaganda class of literal child killers who are taking a break from supporting a child killing serial killer on a spree to speak to me about how they should be allowed to do it and i ahiuod gladly pay them to do it snd guve them weapons to kill more people. They have a right to rape, a right to kill, and a right to exist..I accept they say those words, but I would never accept them as true or valid or worthy of even a moment of consideration.
Inspector child killer is on the scene demanding to gaslight me and make me explain myself with a framing thrust upon me that I'm the suspect under interrogation. Nope.
I agree with you that ultimately these are two entirely different arguments.
One argument is over whether it is ever justified to purposely kill, maim, or starve an innocent child or innocent person because you want to kill a bad guy who happens to be near them. And if it is sometimes okay, exactly how many innocents can be killed in one's attempts to kill the bad guys, before it becomes immoral.
The other argument is over which side has more bad guys, and whose bad guys are worse, and which side is more justified in their desire to murder the other side's bad guys.
The people who want to argue about the second question refuse to engage with the first, or even acknowledge it, though a very rare few will openly admit that they think it's perfectly fine to kill innocent children if it's necessary to kill the bad guys, and it almost doesn't matter how many. But mostly they simply don't want to address this question at all, and pretend it's not valid or is only a cover for taking sides, which is what they want to argue about, so they will always steer it back in that direction. Or perhaps they realize it's a futile argument to have bc they know they aren't going to convince the "killing innocents is always wrong" crowd, but they think they might be able to win over some people on the which bad guys are worse argument.
To people who primarily care about the first question, of course, the second question is totally irrelevant.
I do disagree with you, though, that it is only Israel who is protected from criticism for killing innocents. The same arguments occurred regarding the US wrt to both Vietnam and Iraq, and just the same, there were massive arguments and protests that it was immoral, accompanied by equally heavy handed attempts by those in favor of prosecuting those wars that such arguments needed to be silenced and that they were corrosive, dangerous, anti-American, taking the side of the enemies, etc etc.
How many US elite college students, state representatives, and city councils felt no need to "couch" their views in support of terrorism and gangrape? https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1950410768333361285
There's absolutely no reason to engage in good faith with "why don't you care as much about Yemen/Sudan/North Korea/whatever". He knows the answer. It's not a hard or rare one. Maybe if he was some gormless bluecheck dipshit he's never heard the answer before, but if you're available professional Israel leghunper to that degree you've heard it. You just ignore it, because it's not even a question, or even an argument. It's just a way to call people deranged and bigoted for criticizing Israel.
> I won’t mention where I stand on these questions - partly because I don’t want to start WWIII in the comments
Almost like universal "care" and "empathy" leads to universalization of conflicts.
You say "generalizing towards callousness" when I say "just let’s not care about children at the other side of the world ?". I call this "subsidiarity", and I genuinely continue to think that it’s a good principle.
You might be interested in “Against Empathy” by rockstar psychologist Paul Bloom. He makes the argument that empathy is a very bad guide to moral decision making, because it’s manipulable and inconsistent.
I have consistent belief in "fair fight", "eye for an eye" principle. When Hamas is already crippled and has no capacity to retaliate, any further extended bombing/starving/killing is unnecessary, too over the top and fully qualified as genocide. As an outsider, I see Hamas vs IDF similar to a streetfight: It is ok to deal commensurate retaliation when being punched/provoked, it is not ok to continue punching when your opponent is already laydown and bleeding, it is not ok to permanently incapacitate him just because "if I spare him, he will hit me someday".
The number of death is not the problem per se. The problem is one-side killing.
If the opponent is bleeding but still continues to get up and try to punch you, you are justified in punching them to keep them down.
The parallel is that Hamas simply has to release the hostages and surrender and disarm, and Israel will stop attacking. But right now Hamas is refusing to even *negotiate* the terms of a ceasefire.
As long as there are still hostages in Gaza, this line of reasoning is unreasonable. If Hamas surrendered and released all the hostages, you might have a point, but as long as they continue to engage in warfare, it is bizarre to expect Israel to stop their war effort.
Also, your analogy is missing some key components of the situation. If someone tried to kill too multiple times, and publicly stated that they would not give up until you were dead, would you not eventually defend yourself with lethal force? That is a very different situation from a 1 off street fight. I personally would probably kill them the second time they tried to kill me, but I wouldn’t be so quick to proclaim the guilt if someone who did it the first time in that situation.
Are you familiar with the concept of surrender? And releasing hostages? This is a choice that Hamas has. I'm not saying that I agree with Israel's tactics (I don't) but to use your metaphor, the knocked down opponent is still gleefully throwing rocks at the larger fighter's face.
1/ Hamas did released many hostages, they only kept very few. I am not well-informed on how the negotiation process, but my impression is Hamas is not die-hard on keeping them forever.
2/ Hamas may gleefully throwing rocks and homemade rockets at IDF, but that is far far away from total annihilation of Israel. With eye-for-eye principle, IDF should only fire back at commensurate rate.
I think the facts support that this is one endgame, not necessarily that it's plan A. If I put myself in Bibi's shoes, I want all paths to lead to Israel being secure. If Hamas can be destroyed/exiled and replaced, awesome. If the people can be made to leave, that has many upsides. Every building Israel destroys makes Hamas's hand weaker in other ways too. In addition to the pressure for people to leave, it makes Gaza acutely dependent on foreign aid to rebuild, and who wants to pay to build civilian infrastructure on top of tunnels that Hamas still controls? Sympathetically interpreted, it looks to me like the point is to create an ultimatum for Hamas: there will be no more terrorism from gaza (at least at the scale seen before), either by the easy way or the hard.
I admit I'm much less factually deep on this issue, genuinely curious what you think about the Israeli defense establishment's goals and preferences.
A million deaths is a million tragedies not a statistic
Human minds can't directly comprehend a million deaths, so we work with statistics.
«I’m not even sure I want to become a perfectly rational angelic being who has generalized every principle to the maximum extent - it sounds scarily inhuman. But to the extent that I do generalize, I would like to at least consider generalizing in the direction of more empathy (this one kid tugs at my heart - maybe I should also care about the war in Sudan!) rather than always in the direction of callousness (I didn’t notice the war in Sudan when it was happening - perhaps I’m not allowed to care about this kid either).»
No, it's not callousness, but respectful distance. You have no right, to consume a stranger's suffering like they're a tragic movie for you to indulge your desire for emotional catharsis.
Addiction to vicarious sentimental stimulation is not a virtue, but a dark passion.
Your sentimentality is dehumanizing yourself, as you voluntarily decouple your emotions, which are embodied beliefs about the world, from your actions.
> as you voluntarily decouple your emotions, which are embodied beliefs about the world, from your actions
Emotions have their own rhythm, they come in fast and strong, and they change quickly. Decoupling them from your choice of actions doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
The problems with inconsistency are not with the individuals, who are just reacting to what they see in the media.
The problems with selective and cherry picked outrage at urban war are similar to the problems with selective demands for rigor.
Take the genocide charge. I personally think it’s ridiculous to apply the charge to this war. But if one does, consistency would have applied it to Allied actions in WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, Mosul and Raqqa, to name a few. But if Korean War veterans were regularly called genociders, if South Korea was called a genocidal state (just look up what happened in the war and the rhetoric used if you don’t think the parallel is apt), eventually the term would have lost its emotional valence. The fact that it’s applied selectively creates the problem.
Or take the destruction of hospitals. If you consistently held armies to this standard, the standard would have to be changed because armies routinely violate it - because in fact it is legitimate to target a hospital if it’s used by combatants (this happened in Iraq). So selective outrage on this point creates an impossible standard, while consistency creates reasonable standards.
> because in fact it is legitimate to target a hospital if it’s used by combatants (this happened in Iraq)
It’s not legitimate without warning. It’s only legitimate if there is proof that there are enemy combatants there, perhaps munitions there, and the evidence has to be more satisfactory than a few pictures of a tunnel which could be from anywhere.
Even if the hospital was used as a source of enemy munitions then the lack of warning is still a violation. However Israel has also bombed field hospitals, including make shift tent hospitals built in the grounds of medical centres or just general field hospitals - there were three or so such attacks this year. I doubt if there were tunnels underneath.
And the bombings continue after a few years anyway, is Israel not capable of entering into hospitals in areas it controls to remove Hamas or equipment, if so why is it still bombing whatever remains of the health infrastructure necessary.
> the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans
Amusing if true!, can you cite?
I do not often agree with progressives, but I do think Gaza is one issue where progressives are directionally much more correct than centrists/moderates/the grey tribe. Of course, as usual, progressives shoot themselves in the foot by failing to disavow the views of their most extreme members (calls for globalizing the intifada or the eradication of Israel are of course, abhorrent), but they much better adhere to the principle that "killing lots of people is bad". It's true that October 7th was abominable, but a response resulting in, quite plausibly, an order of magnitude more civilian deaths and two orders of magnitude more displaced, cannot be correct. Yet in moderate/grey tribe spaces, it seems the discourse is dominated by "look how different my views are than progressive ones", while explicit condemnations of whatever Israel is doing now (which is a moral catastrophe by any standard) are rare. This is a shame - I am doubtful current progressive ideology has the right epistemology to carefully and truthfully dissect Israel-Gaza relations, but as long as the moderate/grey tribe does not consistently apply the principle "killing lots of people is bad", it will have even less of an answer.
Amen to all of this
"and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans"
I am not sure that is the whole story. Perhaps it was a case of sour-grapes, but it seems they really did not believe in IQ, thought that IQ is just a "Jewish trickery" skill, and they thought Germans reach achievements through effort, not intelligence. And... yes, Germans are sometimes like that.
Example 1 is German football, which is entirely based on effort, "having four lungs", not style or skills.
Example 2 is Paul Lenard, yes, he was the one who came up with the ridiculous Nazi Physics. But he also had a Nobel. Now, the way he earned that Nobel was not the smart way, like Einstein. He just basically built a ton of equipment for doing physics experiments. So he was more of a "get hands dirty" working man than an abstract thinker. Someone like Edison basically.
Example 3 is basically every German business software ever. They cannot be implemented outside Germany. They are like spaceship consoles, it is one huge screen with a hundred data fields and a hundred buttons and it is clear the programmers did not put much thought into it, but much effort. And the users the same, they are just expected to put effort into learning when to press which button.
Example 4 Mennonites in Paraguay, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filadelfia . They arrived to Paraguay penniless, and the government gave them the worst farmlands (obv the good ones were already taken) and they turned into succesful farmers not by thinking, but by putting an incredible level of effort of testing the combination of every piece of land, every possible crop and so on. They just brute-forced the code of what and how to grow there, so to speak.
Indeed, this is a good metaphor. You can have a high IQ and figure out the password somehow. Or you just brute-force it by effort, trying a gazillion random passwords. Indeed, I would say, Germans often solve problems that way.
>Perhaps it was a case of sour-grapes, but it seems they really did not believe in IQ, thought that IQ is just a "Jewish trickery" skill, and they thought Germans reach achievements through effort, not intelligence.
And then those Jews made nukes for the Allies, so I think it's reasonable to call the Nazi approach to race science flawed.
I keep thinking of Barry Gewen's exceptional book, "The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World".
"Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism."
No, that's a very blind thing to say. Basically a lot of Western people see Israel as a white colonial settler power oppressing brown natives. Thus the entire ire of the Western anti-racist, anti-colonial/post-colonial movement is hating Israel. Israel is sort of everybody's Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, blacks shot in the US by the police, Native Americans exterminated, British Raj in India and everything else like that, all the people who are pissed about all this happily project it to Israel, and project themselves (or generally the victims of all this) on Gaza.
Yeah, and Israel calls this anti-Semitism. They are of course unlucky somewhat that everybody else "civilized" managed to get their atrocities largely done before it became uncool...
I have multiple Israel-theories:
1) When a superpower, namely the Soviet Union wants to make a small country look really bad, they generally succeed, even decades after the superpower is not even around, still the money they seeded keeps bringing fruit forth, so to speak.
2) Israel wants to be seen as a Western nation, and there are higher standards for those than the rest. Scotland got the chance to vote for independence twice, because that is the Western way of doing things. Russkies in Eastern Ukraine did not get it once, and it is accepted, because Ukraine is not Western. Austrian German speakers in South Tyrol, Italy, have some awesome levels of bilingual autonomy guaranteed by law. I would like Hungarians in Romania to get the same, but it is not happening, because Romania is not really Western and it is accepted. Despite being in the EU.
3) this truly unfortunate Israel is "white", Palestine is "not white" thing
Israel might call this Anti-Semitism, and this narrative had some success for decades because of the living memory of Nazism and Holocaust, but this is not really a clever or a long-run winning narrative. Everybody understands this is not really that historically typical kind - white kind - of Anti-Semitism. Not even when some Arabs like to read the Protocols. No, Hamas and their sympathizers are not dealing in those kinds of racial theories.
Well, there's no getting away from the fact that Jews are exceptional in many ways. Westernized but still aloof, civilized but without a homeland for millennia. The decision to establish an ethnostate in the middle of a region where they were disliked (and then hated) was both understandable and predictably disastrous. I'm pessimistic about any of this getting better any time soon, narratives included.
Re: the person arguing that people protesting genocide in Gaza are being performative. If the argument is that ethics aren't real ethics where they can't be consistently sustained, then this effectively is to argue that no one can be ethical any time, since no one can be genuinely concerned about anything consistently from day to day. At some point, I'm assuming that, whether you're protesting the war in Gaza, Whale fishing or whatever, obligation takes over. You don't feel *that* concerned about your moral cause today, so you rest on the general principle of social obligation to plug the gap, such that by the time a genuine sense of injustice "does" well up inside you again, you'll still be there to fight the good fight.
I don't think it takes too much self-analysis to see that this is how ethically motivated action happens in practice. I'm pretty sure, even though I'm not a parent, it's what motivates you to look after your kids even when you don't feel especially bonded to them on any given day.
Odd, you wouldn't need to kill everyone in the region to give this kid his brother back. All what was really necessary was not take hostages to begin with.
I don't blame you for your reaction to the story about a child carrying around body parts of family members in a backpack, I do blame you for believing it uncritically.
I think there is a real difference between "caring" in far mode and near mode. (I'd say that the first one is "feeling like you care but not actually caring", but you don't have to buy that description to agree there's a difference).
In general, caring in far mode makes you look for more outrage news, shout more, and do various things that won't help. Caring in near mode makes you look to do things that might actually work. It's the difference between the sort of desperately wanting to fly that makes you jump out of a window, and the sort that makes you spend two thousand hours getting a pilot license.
Some less inflammatory examples of this:
- during BLM, the "abolish the police" movement was mostly upper class white people who saw awful stories about police shootings but didn't have any personal stakes in it. So they put in a lot of effort in organizing protests, but mostly didn't put in the minimal effort required to check what might actually save more black people's lives (meanwhile actual black people, when polled, mostly said that while they wanted real police reforms they also didn't want less police overall because crime was a real problem. Because for them, it was near mode).
- more apolitically, a guy might react to a poster of, say, Sydney Sweeney by going "I'd walk over broken glass to sleep with her". But that same guy probably wouldn't actually be willing to do the hard boring work of maintaining a relationship and building a family with her the way he would with his actually-compatible wife.
I see this internally pretty strongly, even about the exact same issue. When I see a news article about the latest Hamas atrocities or suffering in Gaza or whatever, I get this deep-seated rage provoking me to say I support unspeakable things.
But I've also met a man whose child was being held hostage in Gaza. I've heard jets flying overhead after a night where I had four or five midnight runs for the bomb shelters because those Gazans kept launching rockets at me. And when that happened, my intellectual reaction was something like "reasonably, Hamas needs to be removed". But my emotional reaction was that I'd just had a really bad day, and whoever was on the other side of those jets was about to have an even worse one, and the idea of them getting hurt tore me up inside even if the plane successfully hit the exact people who launched the rockets and no one else. And my mental reaction when I think, not about rage inducing headlines, but about the actual man I met whose child is an actual hostage, is to want to do whatever is pragmatic and reasonable that will get his child back but also do the minimum possible harm to anyone else, even terrorists.
I recently ran into Ahmed Alkhatib, who seems like the one pro-palestinian guy who genuinely, desperately cares about helping the people there. And it's telling that when he writes about it he doesn't do it by ranting about how actually it's the other side who's pure evil and people just need to see that (although he does clearly hate Israel). He actually tries to say the things that might help, to work to understand international or Palestinian or Israeli politics enough to figure out where and how to push to make things better. And while I think he's often wrong or unfair in what he says about Israel, I've also noticed he only does that when the mistakes don't actually matter towards achieving his goals.
And this made me realize why the western pro-palestine movement infuriates me so badly. It's not that they seem to hate me personally. It's that they *don't care*. They care enough to shout, but not to actually do something to make things better (they overwhelmingly only do things that make the situation much, much worse for everyone involved). They don't care enough to learn enough about the situation to get basic facts right, or to come up with a plan to do something that might actually possibly make anything better for anyone involved. They want to win online flame wars, when for me it's about actual real people dying and I care enough to actually want to do what it takes to stop. I understand in principle that this is just how human psychology works, that people just aren't built to genuinely care about far mode. But this isn't in far mode for me, and I get infuriated by the people who see so much misery and don't care enough to actually do something that could make it better.
So I don't mind if Alkhatib calls me a war criminal just for growing up in Israel. At least he's doing it because he cares enough to want things to be better. The rest of the online Palestine movement can go straight to hell.
If my country is in the military supply chain for the IDF, and/or Israel depends on my country for diplomatic support, and my country is a democracy, that's not near-mode the way it is for yourself, but neither is it far-mode altogether. I feel bad for immigrants trying to get into the USA and getting deported but that is 100% not my responsibility. That's far mode. Who I vote for and what they do does make a (very modest) difference in the middle east, so there is a sense of responsibility.
Near mode vs far mode is about what affects you, not what you can affect. If you're a white American "ban the police" protestor your vote absolutely determines how the police is run, but you're not affected by it directly and you're operating in far mode.
Does every single person wanting to defund the police experience zero crime? Near/far is a spectrum. And the effect that choices have on the conscience is real, as cheap as that might seem to people who in the centre of a crisis.
Excellent comment, great near vs far mode comparison.
Hamas has prioritized bringing international attention to their plight so as to pressure Israel into yielding through other countries' diplomacies, sanctions, and other pressures.
Israel has prioritized the difficult maneuver of a fighting a ground war in urban areas against combatants embedded within the civilian population. A population for whom they are also managing huminatarian aid provisions under chaotic and hostile conditions.
There of course are stories of dismemberment and family devastation from 10/7 as well. Many of these stories still haven't reached wide public visibility, not because they are Jewish stories, but because the Israeli government is respecting victims' family privacy and because religious authorities in Israeli follow strict guidelines around burial and the dignity of the deceased.
Hamas has stated hostage rescue operations will be met by summary executions, forcing Israel to rely solely on negotiations to liberate their captives. On this war's public relations front only, Hamas is clearly winning, and this makes hostage negotiations more difficult for Israel.
In wars, the party who can no longer endure the injuries the other opposing party inflicts has to surrender.
At this stage of the war, the losses Hamas tries to incur are in the realm of Israel's international relations, through media stories such as the one referenced.
Iran is a weak state with an unpopular government ruled by an 86 year old dictator. Considering that Israel is committing genocide, it’s reasonable to be more concerned about Israel’s actual nuclear stockpile rather an a hypothetical one that a hypothetical “crazy leader” may one day obtain. This characterization reeks of the Orientalist racism that’s a so ingrained in Israel - those crazy Iranians can’t have nukes, but us good people, no problem. Hyping up Iran as a threat is another tactic to unify Israeli society behind its war criminal president, as nothing bonds people together like an external, existential enemy. The same is true in reverse, with the Iranian regime and Israel locked in codependent enmity for their own survival. In peacetime Israel would naturally disintegrate.
“Orientalist racism” seems like a weird term considering that the wellspring of Israeli racism comes from the Mizrahim. You’re just shoving in meaningless academic lingo at that point. This is religious and ethnic resentment fueled by proximity, nothing to do with whatever you think orientalism means
In my world Orientalism stands for a form of anti Arab/Persian bias, but whatever. The stereotype of the crazy Iranian dictator is textbook Orientalism, according to how the term is used in my community. Concerning “religious resentment fueled by proximity”, assuming I read you correctly, I’d argue resentment is fueled by genocide, colonialism, land theft, starvation, and settler terrorism rather than simplistic “religious resentment.”
Orientalism is a loaded term in post-modern theory and implies a form of bias generated through imperfect perception of the “Other.” It’s somewhere in the space between idealization and infantilization. The term was invented as a cudgel to beat westerners with. It’s difficult to say that Mizrahi Jews view Arabs as “Other” in the sense intended by post-colonial scholars considering that they are ancient residents of the Middle East who have long lived among Arabs.
You misread me on the resentment part. I’m saying that Israel acts the way it does in part because of the ethnic and religious resentment felt by Mizrahi Jews towards Arabs, which is the driving populist force behind the Israeli far right. This is a resentment fueled in part by (1) a long history of living under Arab/persian/ rule; and (2) a more recent history of marginalization within Israeli society, where the elite and wealthy skew ashkenazi and can be prejudiced towards mizrahim, resulting in mizrahim tending to live at the margins near or among Palestinian Arabs.
No reason for the hostility, I agree with you that Israel is BAD. You just lack a bit of nuance in understanding the situation
Are we talking the Israeli far right that wants Israel to fall? Or is that a different Israeli far right?
Well it’s the portion of Israeli society that best fits the descriptor “racist.” The American far right would love for the United States to fall as well (even under the Trump admin, which they constantly feel betrayed by) but that doesn’t stop people from associating them with “fascist” actions of the government
So, you don't know. You aren't actually personally aware of these people, enough that you could ask for clarification.
The American Far Right isn't paying people to develop and get bad ideas into circulation in American politics (debatably, Joe Biden was. Don't get side-tracked).
Fascism is a current darling of the left, a standin for boogeyman.
But when you speak with people outside "your community" , it is not useful to use meanings peculiar to "your community".
Interestingly I never felt this kind of love for my own child when she was small. I mostly found her annoying the same way I find cats and dogs annoying, any being you cannot actually talk with, and occasionally leaks disgusting fluids, is basically just a waste of oxygen for me. Now that my child is pushing 12 I love her, partially because now we can be like friends and just chat about fun stuff, and partially because she is smart, successful and I am kinda proud that it partially came from my genetics.
It is kinda strange, I do understand that any well working evolution turns on a huge amount of love for your own baby/toddler, somehow it did not work for me. I wonder what is wrong with me, whether just being spectrumy can mean this or there is something even more wrong - I actually find it very hard to feel anything for people... I can get attached to people and thus miss them if they die, such as my parents, but somehow I am not really sure whether it is real love or just missing something you really got used to - I miss my old home just the same way as I miss them...
I think what you’re describing is generally more typical of males. It’s historically uncommon for men to be present at the birth or involved in infant childcare for a reason. Many honest fathers will tell you they felt pride and love, generally, at the birth, but did not feel any great connection (and maybe even had a bit of disgust) for the physical newborn infant itself.
If you’re a woman maybe there’s something wrong
yes but we keep being told we must be modern males now... I was even told that I am really expected to be present at birth. she sent me out in 10 min because all I could do was to pace around nervously and ask every 30 sec "are you sure you are okay?"
I think in general you're expected to hold her hand (and understand that she's only in pain some of the time, and have a conversation or something), and/or listen to her cursing your lineage. : - )
Yes, being on the spectrum entails a lot of disassociation from "normal". If you are convincingly able to "fake" being in love with the kid until she is of age to be interesting, you've done well enough for your genes to continue. Have a Cookie. Being a psychopath with enough forethought to fake having empathy is also not a sin.
For what is worth, I experimented a minor version of this too. Mi feelings for my small children also took a long time to develop, and still don't map to what "normies" report they feel about them. I still love them, and protect them, and care for them.
But the whole "inconditional, infinite love" experience is still absent. It's "just" a normal amount of love for another familiar person, like with the rest of my family (both close and extended). Not higher than for very close friends.
"Everybody has some moral impulses. Those become principles only under the influence of a desire for consistency and for the dignity of a rational being."
Eh. This must be rare. I think most people are moral the same way I am, simply not having any desires strong enough that would involve pissing someone off and thus suffering adverse consequences. And then we put on a pretense of goodness, because it is socially useful. Maybe we even believe it ourselves.
Must have been a very stinky backpack.
I’m struck by your notion that other animals prima facie lack dignity, whatever that means.
They have other dignities but not the dignity of “being a rational animal”
Would it change your mind if (hypothetically but not improbably) the boy was carrying around body parts of his dead brother because he had been a glorious martyr for Hamas, and those around him had been encouraging him to do so?
To me, that would signify a very sick and failed culture. And you could have all sorts of sympathy for the boy in that case, but you could still be quite willing to let that culture end.
Thank you for this, Scott.
The "Hen Mazzig on Twitter" link goes to his account not to the Tweet in question.
>Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value.
I suspect a large part is that we lack the shared moral principles necessary for productive moral dicussions. In order to show that your interlocutor is morally in the wrong, you and he (and any lurkers reading) need to agree on what sorts of behaviour are actually right or wrong; if you don't agree on that, he'll likely just reject your framing altogether. So you basically have to start from moral first principles, prove that your system of morality is correct, and then prove that his position is contrary to this, which will take a lot of time, be very difficult, and is highly liable to get side tracked. On the other hand, showing that your opponent is a hypocrite is, in principle, much easier -- you don't need to show that your view of morality is superior to his, you just need to show that his actions and/or beliefs are inconsistent in some way.
(Of course, this assumes you actually understand your opponent's belief system well enough to recognise what is and isn't inconsistent with it, which a lot of people don't.)
From the post: "is there a principle that countries which suffer terrorist attacks have the right to defend themselves? If no, then kids might lose their siblings in terrorist attacks that haven’t been disincentivized; if yes, that “defense” might produce “collateral damage”. Is there a principle that people who have had their land stolen can launch terrorist attacks to get it back?"
Here's the difference: the terrorist attack is a fact, while the stealing of the land, in this context, is an empty slogan. Gaza stolen? Using an argument like this renders the subsequent discussion worthless.
Well, the idea is that the whole of Israel was stolen from the Palestinians. Obviously you can’t launch your terrorist attack from the stolen land (you don’t have it anymore), but the argument is that in order to discourage land stealings, terrorist activity upon stolen land is perhaps justifiable. Not sure that I agree (what land wasn’t stolen from someone at some point), but it is logically consistent.
That's clear, but the abstraction level is different: that "the whole of Israel was stolen from the Palestinians" is, as you say, an idea, albeit a marginal one, whereas the terror attack is a stark and very graphic reality. Israel chose not to make the pictures of decapitated babies public, not giving Scott a chance to commiserate. Virtue-signalling can come "from the heart", too.
Israel says a lot of things. Not all of them are true. The horrors of the "terror attack" are bad enough that they'd give you nightmares if you had to watch them. Israel has no need to exaggerate, but they do so anyway.
Granted, no decapitated babies, bad exaggeration. Btw, why is it? Are you certain it's an exaggeration? If you are, can you be certain of any "horrors", even minor ones? Any ranking of those?
The worst of the horrors are ones that you'd really rather never read about. They involve medics keeping soldiers alive for longer, in order to keep torturing them. For money, you know? This is for donations...
You listen to non-biased parties (or ones that can be said to be "wish death on all their souls"), you learn things. Certain people have jobs that entail "distinguishing truth from fiction." You listen to them, you learn things. I'm pretty damn certain, because I like my friends' track records and ability to access and interpret sensitive information.
Prediction: The norms against speaking out against Israel in US politics and media were eroding over time before, due to structural and ideological changes in journalism and demographic change in the country, among other things. But the Gaza war has accelerated this massively. Those norms are nearly gone.
Individual media or political figures in the US will still be pro or anti Israel for whatever reason, but the norm that prevented most criticism of Israel by those folks is probably gone for good--I suspect that will be a permanent knock-on effect of this war. That would probably not have been true if Israel had fought the war/handled the invasion and occupation differently, but I think that ship has sailed now. Netanyahu can lose power today, a new coalition can stop the bombing and most of the shooting and make sure there's enough food in Gaza for everyone, and the end result will still be that this norm is gone for good in the US.
I expect this will have some very big consequences in the next 20 years.
What direction do you think the impact would be? 20 years ago it might have been larger. Right now Israel has historic levels of peace and trade with its neighbors and the trend is for more. It is economically viable enough on its own that the subsidy provided by the US isn’t existential. If the US treats Israel more neutrally - what kind of impacts do you anticipate?
I don't have much intuition for how it's going to work out for Israel overall, but it sure seems like there was a very different set of norms about how Israel was discussed in mainstream US news before the Oct 7 attacks, and how it will be discussed going forward.
Eh, I think that as soon as Gaza fades from the front pages, Israel will be treated largely the same as before. We're allies, it's complicated, etc.
Consistency doesn’t quite capture the idea well. I want to be able to learn and adapt to new information, which means that I may learn that principles i was using are inappropriate. But then i want to find new principles that are appropriate, rather than just do whatever I feel like. And deep down, principles are heuristics that won’t work every time, so emergencies may arise where it is obviously better for everyone to ignore the principle, but openly and giving restitution to anyone who gets trampled. But then it gets too easy to use motivated reasoning. Darn.
As I replied elsewhere: inconsistency is just a proxy heuristic for identifying flawed reasoning. The problem isn’t inconsistency but lack of epistemological process. It just gets weaponized as rhetorical method beyond its heuristic value. A rationalist seeing inconsistency should question if there is actually a differing data or principles that justify that difference or if the person is just self-rationalizing something in their own interest, with tribal blinders, or just unexamined surface opinion. It probably does end up being a good heuristic for average people encountering barrages of bullshit, outside of more intellectual circles.(within such circles plenty of bullshit exists but you need more that inconsistency to identify the flaw)
I think an important virtue of consistency is that it provides "ability to model another actor well enough to form compromises with them".
If someone says they believe life begins at conception, that's a reasonable position. It's not one I personally hold, but I can certainly understand that (vs viability, or implantation, etc) as being where to draw the line.
If the person believes that consistently, then maybe we can collaborate to advance policy goals that we both find acceptable, if not ideal. E.g. they might support long-term contraceptives that prevent ovulation, or something like vasagel that makes sperm unviable.
Maybe we even form some sort of alliance, and I cede on their position banning early-term abortion, but know I can count on them to support my efforts for prenatal nutrition.
But if that person has no objection to IVF, then how can we form an alliance? Their beliefs shift by the topic or the moment: they have no internal integrity, and so I can't count on their actions later to be **consistent** with their actions now.
This gets at the real point. It isn’t about consistency. Changing your mind because you learn more about something might be good. It is about epistemic foundations. Consistency is just a weak heuristic for assessing various epistemic flaws: such as the lack of having a rational basis for forming beliefs.
Scott’s moral position in this piece reminds me of the New Zealand moral philosopher (& Kant-scholar) Jonathan Bennett (1930 - 2024 ).
In particular Bennett’s discussion of how we ought to juggle the relationship between our general moral principles (our strive for moral consistency) and the emotional pull of our sympathies and antipathies (the emotions triggered by the Gaza child carrying the remains of his brother in his rucksack, including emotions toward those who caused his suffering).
Here's the Reader’s Digest version of Bennett. See if you agree that this is rather Scott-like:
…“sympathy”: I use the term to cover every sort of fellow-feeling, as when one feels pity over someone’s loneliness, or horrified compassion over his pain, or when one feels a shrinking reluctance to act in a way which will bring misfortune to someone else. These feelings must not be confused with moral judgments. My sympathy for someone in distress may lead me to help him, or even to think that I ought to help him; but in itself it is not a judgment about what I ought to do but just a feeling for him in his plight.
…
Obviously, feelings can impel one to action, and so can moral judgments; and in a particular case sympathy and morality may pull in opposite directions…. For example, a small child, sick and miserable, clings tightly to his mother and screams in terror when she tries to pass him over to the doctor to be examined. If the mother gave way to her sympathy, that is to her feeling for the child’s misery and fright, she would hold it close and not let her doctor come near; but don’t we agree that it might be wrong for her to act on such a feeling? Quite generally, then, anyone’s moral principles may [sometimes] apply to a particular situation in a way which runs contrary to the particular thrusts of fellow-feeling that he has in that situation.
….
…one can live by principles and yet have ultimate control over their content. And one way such control can be exercised is by checking of one’s principles in the light of one’s sympathies. This is sometimes a pretty straightforward manner. It can happen that a certain moral principle becomes untenable – meaning literally that one cannot hold it any longer when one sees what the principle leads to. One’s experience may play a large part here; experience evokes feelings, and feelings force one to modify principles.
…
…we cannot look at our own moralities and declare them bad. This is not arrogance: it is obviously incoherent for someone to declare the system of moral principles that he accepts to be bad, just as one cannot coherently say of anything that one believes it but it is false.
Still, although I can’t point to any of my beliefs and say “This is false”, I don’t doubt that some of my beliefs are false; and so I should try to remain open to correction. Similarly, I accept every single item of my morality – that is inevitable – but I am sure that my morality could be improved, which is to say that it could undergo changes which I should be glad of once I had made them. So I must try to keep my morality open to revision, exposing it to whatever valid pressures there are – including pressures from my sympathies.
(Extracts from J. Bennet: The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn. First published in Philosophy, 1974.)
“Finally someone opened the bag. It was some body part fragments from the kid’s dead brother.”
Some time last year a Gazan father publicly displayed the body of his own daughter, killed in the Israeli destruction of their apartment building, by hanging her (what was left of her) by the neck with piano wire at the site of the ruined apartment building.
I think it’s a lot less likely that Gazans are expressing such intense grief for the loss of loved ones (that they believe, with all sincerity and conviction, are now residing eternally and perfect in Allah’s hereafter) that they lose their minds and do things that we don’t understand, and more that the culture of Gaza simply doesn’t have our Western taboo about the desecration of human bodies. Gazan hospitals were “depositing” the remains of their own in bulldozed mass graves even before the war started.
They just don’t care because they’re bad people.
I’m not a cultural relativist- cultural values can be wrong. But plenty of cultural differences needn’t have any specific moral value. What makes any kind of view of bodily desecration good or bad?
>"I won’t mention where I stand on these questions - partly because I don’t want to start WWIII in the comments, partly because I’m not that sure myself - but I want to defend considering them."
The Schelling point answers are international law: with useful guides including e.g. UN groups, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice, and human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
E.g. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/27/how-does-international-humanitarian-law-apply-israel-and-gaza; https://www.btselem.org/international_law
Bret Weinstein, in addressing the Glenn Greenwald controversy, make an important point. Whatever your personal default position is on the morality of his actions, you should take a maximally charitable stance in light of the circumstances of the leak. Otherwise you're handing the bad guys a weapon that could be used against almost anyone who falls out of their favor.
I think there's a similar consideration when it comes to Gaza. There's nothing wrong with saying you personally relate to and feel outraged by some particular tragedy for subjective reasons. But what the analysis is missing is how and why the outrage came to your attention. There's nothing organic about it. It's a narrative consistently pushed in a single direction by some very bad actors, carefully crafted to pull on your heartstrings. They're cynically using your sympathy to perpetuate the very suffering you find so horrific. For that reason alone, you should be very skeptical of your knee-jerk reactions.
These article and recent events made me decide to finally attempt to write my own article on scope sensitivity and the banality of evil.
I'm nowhere near as eloquent at you with emotional writing (or in general), and I usually don't try to go for emotional writing as a result. Normally, I prefer some combination of direct statements and try, "above it all" humor. But here's my best attempt to date:
https://linch.substack.com/p/a-tribute-to-luke-farritor-american
>the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans
This isn't true. It's an urban legend that arises from a conflation of a few different facts.
In 1938, Erich Jaensch, a noted Nazi psychologist, publicly denounced the Binet-Simon Test on the grounds that it was a Jewish invention (which was partly true -- Binet and Simon were not Jewish themselves, but the Jewish psychologist William Stern had played an important role in helping to develop their formula), and that it rewarded "an intelligence type strongly prevailing among Jews". A few years later, in 1942, the Luftwaffe abolished aptitude tests for pilots, and the German Army soon did the same for officers.
However, the tests that were abolished weren't the same ones that had been previously denounced as "Jewish", and the reasons given had nothing to do with the prior denunciations. At that stage of the war, it was more about streamlining the recruitment process in order to address their crippling manpower shortage. And in any event, removing tests from the recruitment process is not the same as a blanket ban on IQ research generally.
Putting all of that aside, even if this *had* happened as stated, I'm not sure what you think would be "inconsistent" about it. Suppressing any research that could be used to justify favouring Jews over "Aryans" seems entirely consistent with Nazi ideology to me.
Ended up writing a post in response:
https://apxhard.substack.com/p/your-emotions-arent-your-heart-of
>So my absolute most honest and deepest opinion on the war in Gaza, the one I hold in my heart of hearts, is: I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back.
Interesting to see there's still a human there underneath all the crufted up utilitarian epicycles.
Counterpoint to "Ideological Consistency":
Evil sleeps. Corrupt people make deals.
The autocrat who thinks they are good? They'll make your life hell, and that'll never stop. They are incentivized to do it continually, to devise systems, even, to make sure that you keep on getting keelhauled.
As a non-Jewish person with no skin in that game, my take on any situation where your neighbor is committed to the annihilation of your society is simple:
The threatened state should promise that any act of war will be met with overwhelming force until such a time as those in charge of the neighboring state make binding and credible promises to live in peace and harmony. My advice to Israel would be to step it up before toning it down. I see Israel as 99% in the right, and the Palestinians as 99% wrong.
The choice is clear. The weaker neighbor needs to concede the stronger neighbor’s right to exist, or face the consequences of their beliefs. Failure to make this concession and cease in all hostilities can result in total annihilation.
Seems Scott’s claim contradicts the ethos of effective altruism. Assuming there’s a limited amount of diplomatic attention the world can aim towards a given conflict, then the massive amount attention Western citizens demand be focused on Israel surely must reduce the international community’s capacity towards solving other conflicts with way higher death tolls.
Why isn’t the utilitarian strategy EAs employ not relevant here?
What a brilliant and poignant demonstration of how the heart and brain interact. Having really young kids makes those "heart-strings" extra fine-tuned. Must have something to do with depressed testosterone levels (look it up) that come with raising your own kids rather than going the sperm-bank route to natural selection.
My oldest was 2-3 years old when those awful photos of Alan Kurdi washing up on the Turkish beach were in the news. When I first saw the photos I was a mess for the rest of the day. Like your example with Gaza I would have done anything to bring that poor kid back but of course nothing could be done about the past and things to 'never again' this awful thing were rather hard to imagine with any degree of certainty.
And in retrospect although I still feel horrible about Alan, I'm also aware that the image was partly responsible for the EU opening the gates to unlimited migration of refugees, which in part led to Brexit and Trump. And I can't help but wonder if the world would have been better off if those photos were never taken.
Your last paragraph is extremely on point. Especially for a consequentialist, it seems weird to not care about the consequences.
I am genuinely so glad to hear that you are a parent! I had worried for a while now that you might not partake in that part of the human experience, but the world could definitely use more of you!
It’s amazing the knots people will contort themselves into, the empty mantras they repeat, the mental walls they put up, all to avoid confronting the simple reality of Israel slaughtering, starving, maiming and immiserating the people whose land Israel took to make way for Israel. Yes, the pro-Palestinian position is full of annoying and misinformed people, yes Hamas bad, but those fundamentals are the simple truth. There’s a reason why most of the world feels this way; believe your eyes.
This is Addressed to the poor lost apologists in these comments, not the thoughtful original post
I feel like this is all making things needlessly complicated for no reason. I'm not even Jewish, but to me it seems evident that the only question worth asking is: if the shoe were on the other foot, would Hamas treat the Jews less bad, or worse, than Israel is treating the Palestinians? Since the answer is obviously worse, therefore, anything Israel does in the prosecution of this war is morally acceptable. Optimal? No, but we never get optimal, so who cares about that. Acceptable? Yes.
At such time as the Israelis have exterminated ten million Palestinians, which I guess would require invading Jordan or something, at such time as we have a recording of an IDF soldier ecstatically calling his parents saying "Ma! I bagged ten Palestinians with my own hands! Ten!", I will agree that both sides are equally bad and that it doesn't matter who wins the war, it's a coinflip and I don't care. If the Israelis do something *worse* than this, I will agree they are the bad side and should not have been allowed a free hand; however, just reading this should make it obvious to everyone how preposterous even the vaguest possibility of such an outcome is. Once properly framed, it's clearly absurd.
Until that time comes, literally anything that ends the war with a durable victory for Israel is fine by me. I would *prefer* if the Gazans were all deported per the Trump-Netanyahu plan (and in analogy with e.g. the displacement of three million Germans from now-Polish territory after WWII), but if they have to kill all of them, we're still eight million up on the balance sheet, so go hog wild.
I think that "is Israel acting worse than a randomly picked Arab country / nation [would]?" and "is Israel acting worse than a civilized Western liberal democracy would?" are two distinct questions, and pretending like the whole situation can be summed up in the former one is a huge logical mistake.
I think if Israel would be treated just like Azerbaijan, and it would be supported by Western powers (first and foremost the US) just as they support Azerbaijan, no one would care (except the Jews and the anti-semitists, of course).
"Randomly picked"? Hamas are not a randomly picked alternative timeline, they're exactly and specifically the enemy side in the war that has been prosecuted for the last decades, and thus the appropriate subject of the only actually relevant alternative outcomes worth discussing. Talking about randomly picked Arab nations is, excuse me, nothing more than a sophism intended to shuffle away the concrete reality precisely in favor of talking about abstractions where Israel's conduct can be criticized as not living up to some irrelevant optimum, instead of acknowledging that the actual, real ghouls with whom they are really grappling are worse, and would do worse if the shoe were on the other foot.
I think you misunderstood my comment in two distinct ways.
The first is that, pretty much, you cannot pick an Arab country which fares better than Israel in practically anything, would the situation reverse. Yes, they are, to borrow a phrase from a parallel thread of comments, "less barbaric" than even Tunisians or Moroccans, probably, but to Egyptians or Yemenis or Saudis or Palestinians (I mean, Gazans -- the West Bank looks like a completely different type for some reason), it is a no-brainer.
But the second is that you seem to stick to a tangential idea, completely missing the point (can't tell if deliberately or by mistake). Even if Israel is "less barbaric" than any random Arab country in general, or the Gazans in particular, would act in their shoes, they can still be "barbaric" -- at least, "a lot more barbaric than any Western democratic country should be". Committing war crimes on a daily basis, or doing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or maintaining an apartheid state sameplace, those are things which Russia and Turkey and Azerbaijan do, and if Israel joins this club, it should be treated likewise.
I feel like we’re all living in Omelas but there’s no magic behind having to torture the kid, it’s just that if you talk about the kid too much you lose the election to people who actively want to go down there and punch the kid in the face. The kid is Gaza and the climate and animal suffering and all the rest. It sucks that the only real way to win large amounts of power in our system is to just talk a lot about how much you love fracking and cutting taxes on tips or whatever.
Another of the many recent articles I just stopped reading after the first lines. The older I get the more I internalize the old recommendation: don't care about things you cannot change. 40 years ago daily TV and news were exactly the same: a war, unemployment, a natural desaster and Israel and Palestine trying to kill each other - and random people shouting at each other about caring for the one or the other ...
As the father of twins I think that all four members of your family would be better off if you moved the little ones into the same bedroom! Not being alone at night is enormously comforting for young children.
My view on these discussions, especially around something unpleasant like war, is that there's too much effort spent on just enumerating bad things that everyone agrees are bad. I'm not saying there's no value at all in doing this - for example maybe it helps people to be reminded of the horrors of war so that they will have some hesitancy before jumping to conflict in the future.
But in terms of actually deciding what's the right thing to do now (either for the parties directly involved or for others) I think the effort spent on calling bad things bad is pretty useless. In a scenario like war there's pretty much nothing but bad things. The choice is always among two or more evils. So if all you do is say "well this is clearly bad" then you never get anywhere.
And yet that's the dominant mode of discussion I see on the topic. Either you have the extremists who just list their opponents' atrocities, or you have the moderates who faithfully report the badness on both sides and then have nothing more to say. The whole "is there a principle..." part of your epicycle is essentially nonexistent.
Thanks for writing this, Scott. It’s ridiculous to believe that the corrective to (unavoidable) emotional hypocrisy is to suppress all emotion, rather than to expand our emotional capacity. As a future physician and Jewish American who has followed your writing for many years, I am glad that you have chosen to publicly defend humanism in this moment, despite the guaranteed fallout.
I was actually astounded talking to people after Avengers Infinity War; that so many thought Loki giving Thanos the space stone (as a hostage ransom for Thor); and Gamora giving him the soul stone (as hostage ransom for Nebula) were correct decisions.
"I would kill everyone in the entire region, on both sides, if it would give that kid his brother back."
Including your own child?
"Hitler was a vegetarian, so he must have had some aversion to cruelty."
You cannot be serious.
He had IBS or something and occasionally ate meat. He was in-fact a very cruel person, as evidenced on a grand scale by his leaving Germany to be destroyed instead of surrendering, the Holocaust, and on a more intimate scale by either psychologically torturing his niece into suicide, or killing her himself.
Jesus wept.
You're being very unfair to the people you quote, Scott and misrepresenting or misunderstanding his viewpoint.
I'm try again.
They're drawing attention to the sinister side of the attention around Gaza.
Let's take another example. Say a Canadian TV news station, chooses to every hour of every day broadcast details of Chinese people beating people up. Never anyone else, Chinese people are actually less likely to beat people up than non-Chinese people, and it's all happening a million miles away so it's unclear why it's so important to the Canadian news station.
(The Canadian news station explains they're just really upset about people being beaten up; and why are you complaining about them talking about an important issue? Don't you care about the people being beaten up that they're reporting on? What are you a monster?)
Mysteriously, sentiment on Chinese people goes down. Book publishers don't want to publish stories about Chinese people. Chinese establishments get their windows smashed. People start openly talking about China shouldn't exist. Chinese people start pretending to be Japanese in public. Stories of Chinese tourists being attacked around the world happen every day, but only in Chinese news sources.
People like Hen Mazzig comment that something is really dodgy here. The activity (total focus on one group who do a tiny and much lower than per capita level of beating people up) doesn't make sense given the stated goals (to draw attention to upsetting things)...
... Hen Mazzig suggests maybe the reason might be that someone at the news station hates Chinese people and wants everyone else to hate them to?
And you make fun of him and write an essay that you just care too much about people being beaten up because you have a baby.
Scott, many of us have babies. One of my older ones gets beaten up and yelled at at school for being Jewish. Hopefully yours won't experience this, but statistically it's highly likely they will.
That's what Hen Mazzig is getting at.
Oh. I should credit the source for the Chinese analogy. It was you in a post years ago.
Talking of your posts years ago. I remember you drawing attention to many bloggers and news stories focusing on the very small proportion of nerdy awkward men as rapists despite them being a small minority; and complained that they were just demonizing these men for the sake of it. (And compared it to Nazi propaganda.)
Maybe have a chat with that version of Scott and ask him why he just doesn't care enough about women getting raped?
Out of all things to bring up here, Hamas' lack of support for a Jewish state seems unusually weak. After all, the current government of Israel is ideologically committed to there being no Palestinian state in the region. Should that make me feel less bad for the victims of the October 7th attack?
Was the source for the story Youmna El Sayed? Wasn't she the same Al Jazeera reporter who reported that Hamas was trying to release hostages for humanitarian reasons and Israel was refusing to receive them? She's not the most reliable person in the world I'm afraid. Also, common sense here, that backpack would vomit-inducingly stink. Like it would be hard to stand around. So the thing "after a while the doctors looked in the backpack" thing is ringing red alarm bells for me.
I don't think whether it's true or not matters for the wider argument because obviously there's no shortage of horrible things in war.
But if you're distressed by the story maybe it might reduce your distress to look into the reliability of the author.