>Hitler was really as bad as they say, but any news story regarding another child (lots to pick from here) dying in gaza ought to be examined with the utmost scrutiny
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.
There are some interesting ideas here, but also odd assumptions. Most notably - winning elections in Gaza? What elections? Hamas was *originally* elected but their policy since then has been to literally kill competing political parties. Israel could try to hold elections, but no one would trust the results (which is reasonable), and without a powerful Israeli presence on the ground with tight control Hamas could just kill competing politicians / people with smartphones.
I was responding to a hypothetical, including "The prime minister before you pulled away completely from Gaza. Gaza is now self governed by Hamas." which I took to mean that the situation had changed significantly, with something much closer to a stable, internationally-recognized government making at least some token pretense of deriving legitimacy from a democratic mandate.
There is zero chance that an Israeli policy which assumes that dead Palestinians are nearly as bad as dead Israelis looks like this. What you are seeing is the result of a policy that most likely thinks that dead Palestinian children is actually a good thing because it makes the long term difficulty of managing Palestinians easier.
So their goal, their desire, is dead Palestinian children. Now, someone might object: "Tim, couldn't they quite easily kill many, many more Palestinian children if that was their goal?"
This person doesn't have Tim's understanding of the cleverness of the Je... Israelis. If they killed too many, people would condemn them and stop them. Sure, people are already doing that, but they'd do it even more, enough to stop them.
So what the Je... Israelis do is, they kill EXACTLY the right number of children. Too few and it makes long term difficult of managing Palestinians harder. Too many and it invites (additional) international condemnation. So they do it on purpose, but at PRECISELY this desired amount. No more, no less.
They actually have a Kanban where they track dead kids against the algorithm-defined perfect frontier of dead children over time and then dial up or down their airstrikes to stay close to the target.
You know... that or your theory is insane driven by an incomprehensible bigotry. Either or.
P.S. You just maaaaaaybe might want to reconsider your Substack title. Unless it's meant to be ironic.
It's certainly not the *only* goal. Doing a lot of things at once, without an unlimited budget for hardware - or an unlimited number of competent people willing to do ugly, dangerous jobs - means some projects fail, or take a long time to fully succeed. Carthage wasn't crushed in a day.
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.
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?
if any other government just allowed people like these to serve and actively cultivated this culture? Same goes for Daniela Weiss and the 80 settlements she founded on the Israeli taxpayers' dime etc.
You can argue that yeah, every other culture would be this cruel (and tolerant of cruelty) after the second intifada and Oct 7th. But that's not how public sentiment works. People usually don't judge others based on the most charitable possible contextualization. Negative judgements about contemporary Israeli policies and culture do not stem from some sort of double standard, they stem from applying the standard most westerns would apply to themselves and their own countries.
*YOU* are the one arguing for a double standard, and positing that Israel's unique history and circumstances warrants a completely different standard from those used when judging say, Bulgaria. And maybe you're right. But at least be aware of who's asking to be graded on a curve here.
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).
Also even zooming in on this conflict: the Bogo massacre rivals Oct 7th for letality, the perpetrators had a similar ideological matrix as Hamas, yet I don't remember Nigerian flags being projected on every national monument of the West. I don't remember every head of state offering condolences on world tv. I don't remember dozens of articles about it and interviews to the survivors in all main newspapers.
The truth is simply that Israel in particular, but to an extent the whole region in general (think of how Rojava became a cause célèbre), has a lot of cameras pointed on it. This means automatic good PR when your enemies do bad things, and automatic bad PR when you do bad things. Israel supporters obviously would like the former but not the latter, but that's just another way of asking the whole media landscape to become their unpaid propaganda arm, which... is not exactly a reasonable ask.
I think most supporters of Israel would like it if the whole conflict and the whole region just got much less media attention, which is a reasonable ask. Hopefully Israel crushing Iran helps with that.
Anyway Nigeria has a GDP that's like a third of Israel's and doesn't have more of NVIDIA's workforce than any foreign country not named America. So of course people care less about what happens there.
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 were 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 every Gazan into a concentration camp and opening up Gaza for settlers. Meaning that the surrender of Hamas would not change anything.
If Hamas returned all the hostages and surrendered, support for the war would vanish.
You guys are all bulldozing over the fact that Hamas *won the election*, and polls indicate that they would win it even more handily if it happened today. This is even true in the West Bank, where Hamas isn't in charge!
Hamas is popular in part because their strategy completely worked. Many countries are now recognizing Palestine, and many more are set to do so, simply because Israel has the gall to cut off aid to Hamas. Oct 7 is practically their July 4.
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.
The inevitable mass starvation implied in that plan would have made West Germany obviously ungovernable and the occupation govt would have had to deal with daily bread riots.
The only realistic outcomes would have been:
1. The USSR stays put, the riots are suffocated in blood, the repression engenders other riots, anarchy and dysfunction until it becomes functionally equivalent to a genocide, and 40M dead later the traumatized West Germans are finally able to go back to the land and live the pastoralist paradise Morgenthau envisioned for them.
2. The riots and photos of starving civilians make clear how unworkable the plan is, and Truman reaches the same conclusion he reached in real history, except with a lot more gratuituous cruelty to tarnish his name
3. The USSR capitalizes on the discontent in West Germany and either enters or keeps running guns for Communist groups in the Western occupation zone to the point WW3 starts and well, that's the most interesting (if most deadly) scenario I guess
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.
I am doubtful those existential wars are a thing really. Which case do you mean, WW2 or the Israel stuff?
Let's talk about WW2. Japan obviously did not want to conquer America or the world. "A rifle behind every leave of grass" etc. Basically they wanted to hurt America enough to retract that ultimatum and let them do in Asia whatever they want. The Co-Prosperity Sphere i.e. empire had limited goals, not the whole planet.
Hitler basically wanted a Lebensraum eastward, Poland/Soviet Union. Again not the whole world. It was Britain and France who declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Originally they did not want anything from the West. So this is why they attacked France. Now why they attacked Denmark, Norway or the Netherlands is I don't know, that sounds indeed a bit too much like wanting to conquer everything. Anyhow they made repeated peace offers to Britain and the armistice with France was more or less fair.
In other words, a war concluded with a compromise would have resulted in this. As long as Hitler lives, things go on as before. Yes unfortunately that also means the Holocaust, but let's take into consideration that the Allies did not even know about the Holocaust at Jalta. It was very secret. After Hitler dies, I would see a Soviet trajectory: destalinization, gradual detente, eventual collapse.
In Asia, well Japan did not have the forces to make the Chinese border airtight, weapons get in there, likely Soviet ones, and then a huge Chinese revolt.
Ultimately I do not know the total human suffering in the real vs. the imaginary scenario. Luckily, I am not a utilitarian. There is a big part of me that the Allies were right to send a strong message to the whole world to not even try such a thing again. And no one did. Fascist-like systems did exist from Franco to Peron, but they did not start wars and did not engage in ethnic mass murder. I guess the message got through.
But I cannot be really sure such a gamble with human lives was legitimate.
Well, that’s quite an alternative history you’ve written. Hitler had already stabbed Britain in the back once by screwing Neville Chamberlain at Munich.
France and Britain had a mutual defence pact with Poland and that did not stop Hitler from invading it which he had promised not to do in the Munich agreement. So essentially let Hitler make a deal which allows him to completely consolidate his power on the continent and then go from there. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and declares war on the United States and Germany declares war on the United States as well. Russia is still an ally of Germany at this point although that’s uneasy ( nobody trusts Hitler.) and then of course there’s the issue of what life is like in a Nazi political social sphere. Whether that’s something that people want. And what life might be like when the Germans and the Russians duke it out ( which is inevitable in either scenario as far as I’m concerned.)
And remember, we’re still coming out of the 30s and the big fear of Communism in the West. The fact that this fear was overcome in order to ally with Russia against Germany and Japan is a pretty good indicator of how seriously things were being taken.
There was a lot going on and I imagine it felt pretty existential. Was it really existential? I guess it depends on whose existence you’re thinking about.
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.
This is not the story I have read. Basically that would have required an unanimous action of the Supreme War Council. Shigenori Togo, Kantaro Suzuki, and Mitsumasa Yonai wanted that. Korechika Anami, Yoshijiro Umezu, and Soemu Toyoda did not. The Emperor was rather neutral on the topic until the nukes as he was supposed to be above such concerns. So yes there were influential people who wanted conditional surrender, but there weren't enough of them to really put the government behind it.
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.
Perhaps Palestine would have more industrial capacity if they spent the billions of dollars in aid they've received on industry rather than the world's most intricate tunnel system.
There are Hamas propaganda videos of them tearing up irrigation pipes to make rockets to fire at Israeli cities. They are proud to choose war over prosperity, and they believe that showing this choice to other Palestinians will make them more popular (and they seem to be right).
The whole thing is very very hard to understand, and most who claim, do not. Sam Kriss has a simple and appealing explanation: both sides hate each other so much, most other people in the world just can't imagine how much, we just never seen such hatred. So yes, many Palestinians would rather kill some Jews than irrigate their lands. But many Israelis also think shooting Palestinians, Hamas or not Hamas, is the best thing in life.
A bit too simple and appealing, unfortunately. It's appealing because it's kind of gross to think that the weaker side might also be in the moral wrong.
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.
The Allies should have negotiated with Japan instead of demanding unconditional surrender. The war could have ended a lot earlier, saving endless lives.
If only the Allies had been willing to negotiate, they would probably have been able to avoid staining themselves with gigantic war crimes such as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the indiscriminate firebombing of Japanese cities (as opposed to more precise and humane bombing with high explosives as the US had widely done in Germany).
If the Allies had told the Japanese "if only you go back to your borders as they were before the war, and promise to stay there, we'll stop fighting you", the Japanese would have been very happy; it would have been a better outcome than they hoped for. Call this the bare minimum.
This does NOT mean that this is what the Allies should have demanded. The Allies should have found an ideal middle between the bare minimum, and unconditional surrender.
Any such middle would have been easier to obtain from Japan than unconditional surrender, and would have meant a shorter war, less tragedy, and less likelihood that atomic war crimes become necessary.
For example, here's the first thing that the Allies should have done differently: they should have promised that no Japanese leader would be put on trial. How could Japanese leaders agree to end the war, if they themselves risked execution? How much easier would it have been to end the war, by making that little concession?
Negotiating with Japan would have been in line with how wars throughout history have normally ended. Nearly all historical wars between great powers ended with peace negotiations, not surrender. Individual bodies of troops surrendered, entire countries did not usually surrender. Cornwallis surrendered, the UK did not, and if the Americans had demanded too much the British would have kept fighting. There is this bizarre notion going around that true war requires seeking the complete surrender of your enemy. No it does not, it only looks like that if your knowledge of history doesn't go further back than the world wars.
Caba: The argument against this is that World War I ended the way you're calling for and 20 years, the continent was on fire again. The decision to fight until unconditional surrender was largely about preventing history from repeating itself that way again. And it's worth noting that history has provided some validation for this decision. I won't argue with you if you push back and make the case that this could still have been achieved even with limited demands (I simply don't know enough to be able to evaluate such an argument either way), but I don't think it will ever be possible to really know.
Regardless, I think a similar argument holds true for Gaza. Israel has been fighting limited wars with Hamas for the last 20 years. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to conclude that the time for those kinds of cease fires is over and this war will continue until Hamas surrenders, flees, or is destroyed.
"as opposed to more precise and humane bombing with high explosives as the US had widely done in Germany"
Yes, because in Germany, such as Dresden or Hamburg, the British volunteered to do the firebombing, so that the USAF could have an easier conscience, but I don't think this makes such a big difference.
"There is this bizarre notion going around that true war requires seeking the complete surrender of your enemy. No it does not, it only looks like that if your knowledge of history doesn't go further back than the world wars."
I see this point, but I also see the point that certain countries, leaders and ideologies were getting increasingly fanatical and not long-term agreement-capable. We are seeing this with Russia now, I think a lot of Western leaders think an armistice would just give Putin time to rearm and try it again.
Or perhaps a different angle. Regime change was often not necessary, because the regime would have been overthrown anyway. Remember how President Wilson always considered the democratization of Germany necessary for future peace, nevertheless he did not intend to occupy Germany and force it. It happened anyway. Like how losing the Franco-Prussian war was the end of Louis-Napoleon. These things could be expected.
However one can make the argument the grip of these regimes was too tight.
A bit of material context here: if what I've heard is correct, it wasn't actually possible to transfer the "precise" bombing campaigns done in Germany to Japan, because Japanese industry was highly dispersed throughout the cityscape instead of gathered up in clusters.
Note that "precise" is a very relative term in this case.
That's obviously a completely meaningless comparison. In order to make it somehow poignant, let's imagine an ucronia.
In this ucronia, it is 1948. The Allies have been occupying Germany for 3 years now, and have complete control of it (or at least potential control. There might be some village without any Allied soldier there, but it's just a political choice to save manpower: they could have boots on the ground anywhere in Germany within a few hours with no casualties).
There is no German state to speak of. Thieves roam the streets, prisons are open, and disputes are adjudicated by village priests, former magnates and other informal leaders, if at all. Still, there is a loose confederation of guerriglia groups calling itself "III Reich", who manages to kill maybe a single digit of Allied soldiers and a couple dozen collaborators a month. That's what's left of Hitler's (found hiding like a rat and promptly eliminated in 1946) regime.
And yet, 70% of German building lie in ruins. The terror, ahem, morale bombings continue uninterrupted. There is no functioning hospital. The few Red Cross volunteers trying to offer a little relief have a, uh, suspiciously high mortality rate. Same goes for journalists documenting the situation. The naval blockade is stronger and stricter than ever. German civilians die like flies from starvation, curable diseases and bombings, but the Great Three are unanimous: until the III Reich surrenders, the "war" will go on. Also, there is this plan going on to have German survivors "voluntary emigrate" somewhere else, and turn Germany into essentially a bucolic playground for Communist party cadres and American tycoons, but surely that's unrelated: the priority is and always has been the defeat of the III Reich, after all.
Now, maybe it would have been a colorable stance. But it is materially different from the one the Allies took in actual history in 1945.
Ten Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza last week, Hamas still holds 50 hostages, and at the last cease fire (when I'm guessing you would have argued Israel already had total control) Hamas claimed victory.
Unfortunately, the 350 miles of tunnels have created a uniquely challenging environment for an invading army. Unfortunate for the Israelis, but even more unfortunate for innocent Gazans.
The fundamental point is that using interstate war as an example for what at this point is a police operation is deeply misguided and a fig leaf for genocide.
There will always be some asshole calling itself "Hamas", even after (as it happened) the entire leadership has been eliminated.
10 soldiers KIA is less than the cops that die in the US every week, expect nobody (other than Donny) would argue that we are at war with the gangs and thus the USgovt would be completely justified to blockade Detroit and let millions starve "until the Purple Gang surrender".
Also nice dodge of the point about intention: Bibi has been saying they want to "thin out" Gaza population for years
Now, that is clearly a political goal of this govt. The incentive you are setting is that he's justified in pursuing that goal as long as he claim there is still Hamas in Gaza. Do you think Hamas will ever be eradicated then? Why would you expect a "war" to ever be won if the state of war is just an unalloyed advantage for one of the belligerents?
167 polices officers died in the line of duty in 2024 in the U.S, but even that overstates the number as a comparison because most of those deaths were things like heart attacks, duty related illnesses, car crashes or being hit but not while in pursuit, etc.:
The number of officers killed by the people they were trying to apprehend or stop was less than 70. You are off by about an order of magnitude.
Also, I'm unaware of any "policing operations" where the criminals have been holding hostages for years.
It's clearly not a policing situation. It's obviously much more like Afghanistan. Or, if you really want to compare it something "recent" on U.S. soil, it would be Waco.
As for intention, there are certainly folks in the Israeli government who would like to resettle Gaza and expel the Palestinians. I don't know if that includes Netanyahu or whether he is just saying things to stay in power given his coalition; I think everything he did while in power before October 2023 demonstrated that he cared only about the West Bank and not Gaza.
Regardless, if the hostages were freed today and the Hamas leadership surrendered (or even agree to leave Gaza), I guarantee the war would end immediately and there would be no Israeli resettlement of Gaza. And that's been clear all along. Anyone who cares about Palestinians in Gaza should have been calling for Hamas' surrender every day since the start of the war.
This was very well written, even if not entirely accurate, make that III Reich somewhat stronger (like single digit Allied soldiers killed per week, 50 hostages) and it fits. Still broadly you are right.
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.)
This is one possible explanation, yes. Israel keeps trying to look like or become like a Western country, and to some extent succeeds. There are Prides. Western tourists feel about at home on the beaches of Jaffa, there are bikini girls, gay couples and McD and plenty of Arab citizens with full rights and before the current events these citizens were mostly supportive of Israel, because their rights were respected. So one expects more, yes.
OTOH... Scotland voted on independence twice, and Austrians in the South Tyrol in Italy enjoy bilingual autonomy. This is the Western way of doing things. Hungarians in Romania, Russians in Ukraine do not get this, and everybody is okay with that, because they are not really that much Western.
The question is, just how much Western is Israel? People who travel there for business, not tourists, say imagine them like a typical Levantine country, similar to Lebanon or Turkey. For example, bribery is a normal part of doing business.
Perhaps Israle is trying to look more Western than they actually are.
> 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.
Offtopic but why are you reformed Hegelian? A I am trying to get into Hegel's very complicated thought, not out of it. You say it does not worth it? The reason I am going to try is that I found that Marxism despite many great insights seems fundamentally flawed, so simply trying to take one step back from Marx and then figure.
"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.
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.
This is a tweet where Smotrich endorsed a plan laid out by Israeli strategist Giora Eiland (who according to Wikipedia is the author of the "General's Plan" for blocking all aid to the northern part of Gaza, which was effectively implemented in late 2024, and which was clearly a precursor to the generalized starvation policy of 2025).
Use Google translate if needed. This clearly calls for creating an artificial "humanitarian crisis" and making the civilian population suffer as a pathway to victory. Hamas needs not “kill its own kids”. Israel is happy to starve those kids dead.
If Hamas would stop stealing aid, then the GHF would be unnecessary. You are not obligated to feed enemy combatants in a war --- cutting off enemy supplies is a valid tactic. If the army steals humanitarian aid, it stops being humanitarian aid and starts being enemy supplies.
Yes, and as soon as those dopes (Macron Starmer) did that, Hamas hardened their demands.
I don’t understand the confusion about Israel’s strategic game here. They are bound and determined to get Hamas out of Gaza and the West Bank. They do not want to deal with them anymore. Any ceasefire and temporary truce and negotiation with Hamas will only lead back to the same thing happening again in 10 or 15 years because Hamas’s whole goal is to get the Jews out- gone. It’s pretty obvious. Even the Arab states are saying Hams needs to go. As to what to do with the place once they have succeeded at that?
> 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
I don’t think this is true. Public opinion in the west has a big influence on the politicians of the west. The vocal support for Hamas and the Palestinians increases political pressure on Israel from their allies in the west. It makes a difference. Not to mention that the coverage in western media of this situation is so biased it is not even funny
I think the biggest problem is a complete lack of historical perspective. Two or three generations have grown-up just seeing the stricken Gazans, with no real context of how it got here.
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.
It's not about balancing the scales. It's about making sure Hamas can't do Oct 7 again. It's about deterring other organizations from doing the same.
The endgame is that Hamas falls apart. This is part of why cutting off Hamas from stealing humanitarian aid is so important --- their theft of these supplies allows them to continue operations. When Hamas runs out of supplies, they will be unable to operate effectively.
Will another terrorist organization with a similar ideology take over? Maybe! Or maybe not! But that second terrorist organization will know that if they pull an Oct 7, they can experience the same fate as Hamas.
To be clear, by supplies we are talking about rice. Your argument is that rice must be withheld from everyone so that hamas does not have rice either. That is to say that general population starvation is a weapon that Israel is consciously using to achieve its end goal.
My question to you is if there is anything that Israel could do in the pursuit of their war goals that would be morally reprehensible? Because to me, starving out children is way across the line. I wonder where your line is.
I think you should update on the food situation in Gaza. There is lots of food waiting to get into Gaza, the problem being that the trucks are being looted immediately. There is all kind of profiteering going on.
It would be trivial to flood so much food into Gaza as to make profiteering moot. For the cost of a few missiles we could drop millions of small food packages dispersed all over Gaza from the air.
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)
Hamas is the government of Gaza. They won the election, and they would win it again today. This is even true in the West Bank, where they do not rule and hence there is no reason for people to lie to pollsters.
I agree with you, but the fact that Palestinians voted for a religious death cult doesn’t make Hamas’ actions comparable to those of a normal government.
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?
What's your (and Scott's) expectation of a radical fundamentalist jihadist terrorist organization, and what's the expectation of a seemingly democratically elected government-supervised war of self-defense?
The larger the prediction error the more it hurts, right?
Handling the emotions is important (especially if we get into a psychopatological state due to absurd expectations), but calibrating our expectations is probably even more so (because it can cause the aforementioned trapped state).
It seems you also have some strange expectations regarding Scott's media consumption (and bias), and a strong preference for this antisemitic framing.
“Seemingly”? Are you claiming that Israel’s government was not democratically elected? Or that it is not engaged in a war of self-defense?
Anyway, my expectation is that a democratically elected government supervising a war of self-defense would try to win the war and try to defend its citizens, and that it would prioritize that above all else. I suggest you consider what your expectations are for an (objectively) democratically elected government supervising a war of self-defense.
And having said all that, note that none of this bears, at all, on what I actually said.
I was trying to communicate that behind the state of Israel is a very violent recent recent past (with a very harrowing continuous treatment of the West Bank), and behind that many numerus clausus quotas, pogroms, expellings, the Holocaust, and many other factors that motivated (and obviously to this day still motivate) the Zionist movement.
I'm trying to say that this topic is so large and complex that trying to bias police people is a bit ridiculous, especially without know when they started to pay attention to it (and how much).
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?
"\S" means "sarcasm/snark," and usually means the post is rhetorical and not intended to provoke debate. The post being referenced said that Israel and Nazis did bad thing and then blamed religious fundamentalists. I was jokingly suggesting that if the reader replying (who seemed to be objecting to nazis being deemed religions fundamentalists) was willing to adequately loosen his definition of religion, then perhaps naziism would qualify.
A nation trapped between a rock and a hard place whipped itself into a complete irrational self-destructive frenzy. This happened to post-WWI Germany, post-failed-peace Israel, and .... oh Gaza too, of course. (And Japan in WWII, and whatever the fuck is going on in the US now is also a strong candidate.)
Religion is a psychological toolkit, mostly to ignore utilitarianism, steel people's will, invert normal reasoning by inserting axiomatically true arguments. This translates marvelously to ultranationalism (we are the best, we deserve the best, it's our destiny, it's hard but it's worth it, so fight, endure more, give more, we can do it, it's worth it, blablabla), and this provides the critical mass for an authoritarian takeover, then the process is largely self-sustaining (until it burns out).
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.
Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza says 111 people have now died from famine and malnutrition in recent weeks.
Ten new deaths linked to famine and malnutrition have been recorded during the past 24 hours by hospitals in the Gaza Strip, according to the Ministry of Health.
2025-07-23 AlJazeera
The deaths bring the total number of people who have died due to hunger since the conflict began nearly two years ago to 180 people, including 93 children, the ministry said.
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 West Bank and Gaza are best thought of as a foreign territory under military occupation (in the case of the West Bank) or rigorously enforced arms embargo (in the case of Gaza, which hasn't been occupied since 2006). They are under occupation because the population refuses to move on from the war they lost.
Imagine if the Nazis never surrendered and remained hugely popular, even after the Allies occupied the whole country. At some point the Allies decide to give peace a chance, and withdraw unilaterally from part of Germany and hold elections, and then the Nazis win the election, with explicit genocidal intent toward the Slavs, the Jews, etc.
So the Allies consider re-invading, but instead they put up an arms embargo and hope that the Germans just cool it on the whole Nazi thing eventually. But instead the Nazis control the schools and raise a whole generation on Nazi ideology. And then at some point a group of Nazis slip past the Allies' border guards and murders thousands of people.
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).
It's almost as though they should give up violent resistance so that Israel can end the military occupation.
EDIT: By "violent resistance" I mean maybe they should give up murdering Jews in Israel. If all they did was attack IDF soldiers, and gave up on conquering Israel, and stopped killing Jewish civilians, autonomy would be on the table.
When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, we tragically saw what happens when Palestinians get autonomy.
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.
There is very strong apartheid in the West Bank, between Israeli settlers and Palestinians.
Israel apologists would say: apartheid is discrimination between citizens. Since Palestinians are not citizens, there’s no apartheid.
Clearly, this definition of apartheid doesn't work. Imagine if South Africa had played the same trick. There is no apartheid in South Africa, all citizens are treated the same way! Those black people over there? They're not citizens!
Palestinians in the West Bank have no Israeli citizenship, even though they've always lived there (that is to say, they’re not illegal immigrants).
82% of the West Bank territory is policed by Israel (the remaining 18% consists of Bantustans). Israeli security forces treat Palestinians and Israelis VERY, VERY differently. Their job description is to protect Israelis from Palestinians, not the other way around. Because of the one-sided policing, as the Freedom House (not a far left source) report on the West Bank states in its opening, West Bank Israeli settlers “enjoy relative impunity for violence against Palestinians”.
Israel routinely keeps West Bank Palestinians in jail for many years without any charge ("administrative detention"), a policy you'd expect from China rather than a democracy. They do not treat Israelis in the same way.
Area C covers 61% of the West Bank. This area is in practice reserved for the growth of Israeli settlements. Palestinians are almost never allowed to build new buildings there, even when they own the land and live there.
In Area C (again, 61% of the region), Palestinians are legally under martial law which deprives them of many rights.
Israelis move around easily, there are apartheid roads reserved only for Israelis, while Palestinians must constantly go through checkpoints and their freedom of movement is limited in many ways.
Israel apologists will say that Israelis aren't allowed into Area A (the Bantustans, 18% of the territory). My answer is that the map is designed so Palestinians must constantly cross Area C to go from place to place, while Israelis can go everywhere without ever having to cross Area A.
Advocates for this system will say that it's necessary because of Palestinian terrorism. In any case this is what many people mean by apartheid, necessary or not. If it's necessary, it's only necessary because the Israeli state want to encourage the expansion of settlements in order to make a two states solution impossible. I also question the whole narrative that West Bank terrorism is such a big problem. For the 20 years prior to October 7, a white American in America was more likely to be murdered, than an Israeli settler in the West Bank. And yet, Israeli police in the West Bank killed each year between 5 and 10 times as many Palestinians as the number of Israeli settlers killed by Palestinians in the same year. This is an extraordinary level of police brutality, without a corresponding extraordinary level of crime.
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.
I feel bad responding here because I agree with most of your comment, but I think you express something a lot of other people have been saying pretty directly, that I don't totally agree with:
>"This is a wild thing to say when Holocaust related literature and filmography are essentially their own genre"
I think it's not unreasonable (though I don't know that I fully endorse it) to say that, this is really just evidence that there is exactly one Jewish story that is reliably deemed worthy of being told; and to the point that Jewish stories deviate from it, i.e. by Jews being anything other than pure, perfect, innocent victims, they are judged by comparison.
I think the phrase is, "everyone loves dead Jews"--Jews undergoing the Holocaust are noble, tragic, doomed--but otherwise, Jews are pushy, obnoxious, demanding... Maybe they're a little bit asking for it?
Like I say, I don't think I endorse this point of view, but I do think there's _something_ to it: it's definitely noticeable that there's a certain kind of person who thinks what's admirable about Judaism is a certain kind of perennial underdog-ness; an archetypal cosmopolitanism; you'll see this even from certain Jews for whom the core of Judaism seems to be a kind of Bundist/socialist universalism predicated on always being oppressed, and not anything that actually has to do with, y'know, Judaism.
TBC I'm not saying you're guilty of this, and I think most of this discussion is completely non-sequitur to the question of whether what Israel is doing in Gaza is justified... But I do kind of get what the original poster is saying, and see why he thinks all the responses about the Holocaust are maybe missing the point.
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.
...but, 𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘰, in the spirit of Scott's post (or something):—
One might suppose 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—and I'm not very sure about this probabilistic argument, either. Perhaps the likelihood of benefit drops off as one's values depart from the mainstream: very divergent values (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...?²
(Undoubtedly there are also a 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.)
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¹: "𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘴", 𝘴𝘦𝘦?–
²: Sort of depends on the faith one has in their (& one's own) reasoning abilities, I suppose! I fear I don't have very much faith in the average (nor, even, in the modal!) person, personally... I'm not sure very many people actually 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 any sort of coherent moral framework 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦—I think most folks just sort of go by vibes & environment.
Pushing such individuals to "reflect & perfect" probably just pushes 'em closer to the values of those around them... or does it?—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.
Cool, why are your taxes going toward subsidizing that 10% Why does the IDF (constituted mostly by youths drafted from the most secular 40% of society) watches in amusement while that 10% runs amok to destroy Palestinian villages? Why since 2009 the party in goverment is the one whose entire raison d'etre (like literally their charter states "from the sea to the Jordan") is catering to the settler enterprise? Why did settlements start pretty much the split second Israel got hold of the WB rather that at some point after? If Israelis are, or have ever been, so much aligned on Rabin's vision, why is the man who relentlessly instigated his murder in power since 2009?
Come on, you might not be coy but surely you are misrepresing the facts.
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).
Probably more important is the structure of the legislature. All 120 seats voted on by the entire country with seats just given proportionally to all parties that get above 3.25%. This means that any party that is able to get that small fraction of vote is going to get a seat so there's some representation of extreme or fringe views.
And that's after reform. The cutoff used to be 1%.
>"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.
Hostile states tolerate each other all the time. Typically because the cost of war is high, victory is uncertain, more recently because mutually assured destruction became a thing, or because of shared economic or geopolitical interests etc.
If not for those reasons above, the traditional response to a hostile state at your border is, in fact, to subdue them and to not allow them to exist. You don't allow am enemy at the border if you can help it.
\> 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
Nobody is saying that. You don't need another state to be an existential threat to want to subdue them.
Otherwise, if I I promise I'm only going to beat you half to death, there's no right for you to subdue me, is there?
The first thing is, Gaza nor Palestine is a state or ever was one. The second thing is, you can abide the neighbor who might be hostile to you as long as they’re not launching rockets at you every day and occasionally sending suicide bombers into your cities and having friends in the north of your country do the same in solidarity, while a larger entity known as Iran picks up the tab. It’s not just a border dispute.
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?
To me it doesn't matter what this person stands for. If you want to stretch the metaphor, assume that this person represents the Palestinian people, and he just happens to have a brain parasite called Hamas that's driving his violent impulses.
Sure, it's not their fault that they have a brain parasite that compels them to attack you. Unfortunately you're not a brain surgeon so all you can do is to restrain them in your basement and can't get their hands on anything sharp. It's not really fair to them and you sincerely wish that there's something else you could do, but every time you try turning this guy loose he makes another attempt some time later.
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".
You shouldn't "tolerate" it, but neither are you licensed to take literally any measures whatsoever to stop it. And yes, "you're wearing body armour so your risk is low" is a totally reasonable factor to consider in deciding when you've gone too far.
Sure, tempering your response is good grace, if you have the luxury of being able to afford to. But in the end you're still responding to a murder attempt.
And also, if the same attack is tried again, you'd be well within your rights to escalate your response. We're several rounds into the escalation game by now, I'm afraid.
>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.
Hamas violence is different because Hamas explicitly and proudly says it plans to escalate the violence and mass murders until Israel is destroyed.
COVID does not behave the same way. Our failure to prevent COVID from causing more deaths does not mean that it will get stronger and more deadly every year, until the whole country is destroyed. If COVID did have this property, it would be an existential threat as well.
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.
I acknowledge the long history of European antisemitism but this (“In the meantime, Europe spent approx. 1500 years doing their level best to exterminate the Jews”) is such ridiculous hyperbole that it renders your entire comment sheer nonsense.
>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.
Dear gods, mate, the year is 2025 in case you didn't notice. 9/11 was nearly a quarter-century ago. Is ANYONE still pretending the U.S. response to it was *remotely sane*? I was only a few years out of grade school when it happened and *even then* I clocked the response as a massive, harmful overreaction. I think you could not have picked a better example to illustrate my point if you tried.
A sane response to 9/11 would have looked like public anger, mourning, a vow to find and punish those responsible and then...nearly nothing. No overt change in behavior from the nation write large. U.S. intelligence services might have changed methods or tactics or focus to both find those responsible[1] and keep similar things from happening in the future. But exactly none of the massive assaults on civil liberties and pointless and expensive foreign wars that followed should have occurred. None of that produced ANY value for the U.S. nor improved its security situation in any way. Quite the opposite.
And yes, before anyone asks, I'd gladly apply this same logic to mass shootings. The purpose of any sort of terroristic violence it to cause a political (over)reaction from the target. Bragging about how readily you oblige the terrorists in achieving their goals is a fool's game.
[1] Which, to be clear, *should* have been set as very high priority in the aftermath. A targeted retaliation against the *specific* people responsible is very different from a "go find someone vaguely adjacent to beat up so everyone knows your tough" response, the latter being what the U.S. actually did.
Nonetheless, it is a data point. A model that does not take into account typical emotional responses of the average person will produce incorrect results. In this case, it leads to confusion over why Israelis would see Gaza as an existential threat even when from a wider view it looks less severe than that.
Edit: I see downthread that you do not live in the US, which unfortunately means a piece of what I wanted to communicate to you (connect this conflict now to the emotional experience of your neighbors 25 years ago) was lost, because those people weren't your neighbors. Instead the experience you have to connect it to is watching from afar as the US does some things that don't look like they make sense. Well, I guess now you get to do that again.
Why do you believe Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2006? It was a trial run on a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians immediately elected Hamas, which has the stated goal of destroying Israel.
You may not believe Hamas is an existential threat to Israel, but that's only because Israel has worked hard to make it that way. There are two reasons Hamas was "only" able to kill 1200 Israelis and kidnap 250: Israel enforced an arms blockade, Israel conducts continuous counter-terrorism operations, and Israel developed rocket-interception technology to shoot down their rockets, which they routinely fire at cities.
North Korea is not firing rockets at your city. If North Korea managed to kill 1200 Americans and kidnapped 250 more, that would be the end of North Korea.
Please also consider that Israel's Arab neighbors, including Palestinians, made a real go of destroying Israel many times over the years (1948, etc.). Israel is a tiny country with basically no ability to absorb losses. If Israel loses even one war, that's it. They can't afford to mess around.
"North Korea is not firing rockets at your city. If North Korea managed to kill 1200 Americans and kidnapped 250 more, that would be the end of North Korea."
First, I'm not remotely convinced this would even be the end of the Kim regime. Attacking North Korea would be *hugely* costly.
Second, this is transparently a "might makes right" argument. Other peoples and other nations have suffered FAR greater injuries and insults without engaging in the wholesale destruction of their neighbors. Insofar as I don't believe that might *does* make right, I reject it on those grounds.
But third, even in a hypothetical in which the U.S. DID remove the Kim regime for such an offense, there's a really rather large difference between "well, that's the end of the Kims" and "well, that's the end of any Korean state, anywhere, ever." Trying to conflate the two is either very careless or very dishonest.
"It was a trial run on a Palestinian state"
I notice that people who are not Palestinians don't generally have this attitude leveled at them. As arrogant as the often U.S.[1] is, it at least restrains itself to merely *toppling governments.* When it invaded Iraq in 2003 under the thin pretext of looking for weapons of mass destruction, at no point did anyone say "well, clearly having Saddam in charge means that the Iraqi people can't be trusted to have a state of their own." Or to choose an even starker example, after Germany helped start a titanic, globe-spanning conflict twice in just over two decades, with the later conflict involving some of the worst genocides in history, the response from the victors was emphatically NOT "I guess Germans are just inherently too aggressive and warlike to entrust with a State--better leave Germany a permanent rump-state beholden to the whims of the French and British[2]." The victors enforced surrender terms and a change of government but didn't (as far as I know) ever seriously question the idea that there needed to be a sovereign political entity in which Germans ordered their own affairs and represented themselves on the international stage[3].
Now, Palestinians are in some sense a harder case because they have never had a state: they had already been denied self-determination for many years by the time Israel was formally founded. And that does matter: there's no stabilizing continuity to fall back on. But aside from plainly horrific things like outright ethnic cleansing, I have heard no other serious proposals for what *should* happen to Palestinians: just dishonest evasions and thin appeals to the (entirely inadequate) status quo ante.
[1] Which isn't where I live, despite what you seem to think.
[2] Acute observers of history will notice that this *is* sort of close to what happened at the end of the FIRST world war. Which illustrates so neatly why its such a bad idea.
Palestinians had free elections and total control over Gaza since 2006 as Israel unilaterally pulled out. This is pretty dang close to a state!
Palestinians elected Hamas, and polls indicate they would do it again today, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Iraqis did not elect Saddam. I feel like you keep ignoring this because it is painful to consider, but this is what most Palestinians wanted, and even more of them want it today.
What should happen to the Palestinians is they should give up on conquering Israel and live in peace with their neighbors. Peace has been available to them this whole time, and remains available now.
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!"
Well we're decades after the last realistic proposed 2 state solution and what Israel's good faith efforts to reduce the blockade and allow more Palestinian workers into the country resulted in is more missile fire, a minor regional war involving Hezbollah and Iran, a huge terrorist attack with 100s of people taken hostage, etc. There's not really a politically viable path to a Palestinian state because it would just be a terrorist state dedicated to destroying Israel at this moment in politics.
I thought I responded but it didn't show up, so sorry to leave you hanging. I can agree that there's an asymmetry, I think most Israelis are frustrated and want to live in peace. I happen to think most Gazans feel the same way (though frustrated is a massive understatement at this point) and that any asymmetry is born of history and economic inequality rather than some inherent hatred.
But my point was and is that it's beside the point. What I hear you saying is, "the people Israel is slaughtering hate Israel." True or not, this does not justify massacre and man made starvation of an entire region.
Likud was founded in 1973 (which security threat did Palestinians pose then?) explicitely on the premise that 1. Israeli soverignty was "from the sea to the Jordan" 2. No more Arabs would have ever been extended citizenship.
During the same years, Likud's main adversary, Golda Meir's Labor, had no qualms using chemicals weapons to remove Arab civilians and start new settlements
again with the explicit aim of making Israeli presence permanent.
So, no, empirically you are not speaking for the median Israeli, as pretty much any party which actually ended up governing made clear in words and action that it was ideologically committed to the settlement enterprise and the apartheid regime it entailed.
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.
Just for what it's worth, in my personal experience, the answer is "all of them". I don't personally know any "pro-Palestinian" observers who do not distinguish Netanyahu's government from the Israeli population. Granted, the world is highly sorted by homophily.
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
Well they've gotten more numerous and crazier since then and would be an impediment to a peace process, but yeah they weren't that big a problem historically.
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.
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.
>with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled
Yea they want unlimited right to return or leave proposals ambiguous so that unlimited right of return is an acceptable interpretation under a putative agreement. This is done in service of eventually inviting a sufficient amount of Palestinians into Israel to destroy it from the inside out, either via Second Intifada tactics or by abusing the Democratic process to elect parties like Hamas into power. (Also it's stupid to want to "return" to a home your great grandpa got kicked out of 80 years ago.)
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.
Obviously there is a pro-Hamas faction who are insane about this, but for the vast majority of the people you'll be arguing with here, the reason they are dismissive of this is because they think Hamas has a ~0% chance of achieving this: they are multiplying the badness of each side's worst impulses by the probability of success, and finding that p(Hamas is in a position to genocide Israeli Jews) to be so small that Israeli crimes dominate any reasonable prioritization of issues.
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.
I agree that Hamas's actions are also an important node, but given Israel's overwhelming military dominance of Hamas, it's not prima facie unreasonable to expect that "Israel's actions" are more important causally to most outcomes in Gaza right now.
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.)
I agree that the left media try to frame the Gazans as innocent victims, when in fact they (or their parents) had voted for Hamas.
However, while I believe that Hamas should be wiped from the face of the Earth, I also strongly believe that a people can not be hostis humani generis.
In my opinion, the Gazans should get the same treatment as the German population got in 1945: getting militarily defeated (which might kill a lot of their soldiers and accidentally also civilians), then getting occupied (optionally in different zones), and then stay under foreign military jurisdiction for a decade or two while the occupiers try to re-educate the population into being less murderous.
What they should not get is deliberate starvation, though.
> 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?
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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.
There's a long-running trend I've noticed of certain commenters loudly condemning the concept of morality, ethics, and/or altruism. Like the people who got upset that Scott advocated kidney donation.
>Does 'yeeting' ethics strike you as a good thing to do?
YES! An _excellent_ thing to do! When a would-be control freak like Singer makes an outrageous ask, the sane thing is to show him the door with all the force available.
Do not overvalue ethics. At absolute best, they are a tool for us to live together. And they are mostly used as way to demonize the outgroup. A much better tool is negotiation, and quid pro quo bargains between factions.
I think ethics are necessary as the alternative to bargaining/negotiation is murder, which is always on the table and frequently both easier and more attractive without ethics as a constraint.
>the alternative to bargaining/negotiation is murder
Um... I'm saying that bargaining/negotiation is better than ethics. Ethics are usually used for demonizing a group or person who would be better bargained with.
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.
I think it can be useful to re-visceralize the extent to which this is not a just world, to remind yourself that real people are suffering to a tremendous extent, to consider whether you personally are responsible for increasing or decreasing that suffering, and to give yourself an injection of exogenous conscience that could inspire you to do *something*. In my case, it reminded me to really, truly care about professional ethics, and inspired me to donate a far larger sum of money than is my typical annual donation in recognition of the unbelievable fortune I have had to *not* be one of the tens of millions of people who died unimaginably brutal death and are only remembered insofar as they contributed to a death toll.
There's a list of companions the author suggests at the end -- a few include Jean Amery, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. I haven't engaged with any of these companion's works yet myself, though.
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.
I'm not sure you are right here. Israel gets a lot from its relationship with the US, but it is not a charity case. The cost to the US from intervention in a weak poor country is trivial relative to changing it's middle east strategy that profoundly
I don't think it is the full explanation, but not supporting intervention is not evidence for much. Allies of the US do many bad things though, so I think it have more to do with need for a semi-plausible scapegoat for colonialism
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.
If you had to choose which moral catastrophe to suffer, you would choose West Bank every time. And of course israel can reduce the Gazan population as much as it wants with or without Hamas. How does Hamas even try to prevent it? What would Hamas have done if Israel chose to do the real genocide thing where you simply poison all the water, burn all the tents, and shoot whoever run out? How long would it take israel to kill a million Gazans if it was the policy?
By attracting attention to Palestine through doing 10/7 type stuff.
>What would Hamas have done if Israel chose to do the real genocide
Not much of course, but since Israel is "civilized" and would never do anything so crude this is an empty hypothetical. Slow strangulation is much more palatable and doesn't attract many headlines.
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 don't think it is truely comparable, but for the sake of consistency: there are far too many people posting about something something puberty blockers in a world with much bigger problems, and it would be a waste of your intelect to feed further that attention-beast
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.
This has been happening a lot lately
>Hitler was really as bad as they say, but any news story regarding another child (lots to pick from here) dying in gaza ought to be examined with the utmost scrutiny
You need to log off
> Including your own child?
His children are not in the region.
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/
There are some interesting ideas here, but also odd assumptions. Most notably - winning elections in Gaza? What elections? Hamas was *originally* elected but their policy since then has been to literally kill competing political parties. Israel could try to hold elections, but no one would trust the results (which is reasonable), and without a powerful Israeli presence on the ground with tight control Hamas could just kill competing politicians / people with smartphones.
I was responding to a hypothetical, including "The prime minister before you pulled away completely from Gaza. Gaza is now self governed by Hamas." which I took to mean that the situation had changed significantly, with something much closer to a stable, internationally-recognized government making at least some token pretense of deriving legitimacy from a democratic mandate.
Fair enough.
There is zero chance that an Israeli policy which assumes that dead Palestinians are nearly as bad as dead Israelis looks like this. What you are seeing is the result of a policy that most likely thinks that dead Palestinian children is actually a good thing because it makes the long term difficulty of managing Palestinians easier.
So their goal, their desire, is dead Palestinian children. Now, someone might object: "Tim, couldn't they quite easily kill many, many more Palestinian children if that was their goal?"
This person doesn't have Tim's understanding of the cleverness of the Je... Israelis. If they killed too many, people would condemn them and stop them. Sure, people are already doing that, but they'd do it even more, enough to stop them.
So what the Je... Israelis do is, they kill EXACTLY the right number of children. Too few and it makes long term difficult of managing Palestinians harder. Too many and it invites (additional) international condemnation. So they do it on purpose, but at PRECISELY this desired amount. No more, no less.
They actually have a Kanban where they track dead kids against the algorithm-defined perfect frontier of dead children over time and then dial up or down their airstrikes to stay close to the target.
You know... that or your theory is insane driven by an incomprehensible bigotry. Either or.
P.S. You just maaaaaaybe might want to reconsider your Substack title. Unless it's meant to be ironic.
> if that was their goal?
It's certainly not the *only* goal. Doing a lot of things at once, without an unlimited budget for hardware - or an unlimited number of competent people willing to do ugly, dangerous jobs - means some projects fail, or take a long time to fully succeed. Carthage wasn't crushed in a day.
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.
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.)
why are Palestinians the 'barbarians' in your analogy..?
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).
The Ukrainian Jewish neo-Nazi forces are genociding the Aryan Russian Antifa Army, did I get it approximately right?
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?
Just out of curiosity, how "likeable" do you think this would be considered
https://x.com/ireallyhateyou/status/1849815744436904077
if any other government just allowed people like these to serve and actively cultivated this culture? Same goes for Daniela Weiss and the 80 settlements she founded on the Israeli taxpayers' dime etc.
You can argue that yeah, every other culture would be this cruel (and tolerant of cruelty) after the second intifada and Oct 7th. But that's not how public sentiment works. People usually don't judge others based on the most charitable possible contextualization. Negative judgements about contemporary Israeli policies and culture do not stem from some sort of double standard, they stem from applying the standard most westerns would apply to themselves and their own countries.
*YOU* are the one arguing for a double standard, and positing that Israel's unique history and circumstances warrants a completely different standard from those used when judging say, Bulgaria. And maybe you're right. But at least be aware of who's asking to be graded on a curve here.
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.
Fiddler on the Roof has been on Broadway six times
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).
Also even zooming in on this conflict: the Bogo massacre rivals Oct 7th for letality, the perpetrators had a similar ideological matrix as Hamas, yet I don't remember Nigerian flags being projected on every national monument of the West. I don't remember every head of state offering condolences on world tv. I don't remember dozens of articles about it and interviews to the survivors in all main newspapers.
The truth is simply that Israel in particular, but to an extent the whole region in general (think of how Rojava became a cause célèbre), has a lot of cameras pointed on it. This means automatic good PR when your enemies do bad things, and automatic bad PR when you do bad things. Israel supporters obviously would like the former but not the latter, but that's just another way of asking the whole media landscape to become their unpaid propaganda arm, which... is not exactly a reasonable ask.
I think most supporters of Israel would like it if the whole conflict and the whole region just got much less media attention, which is a reasonable ask. Hopefully Israel crushing Iran helps with that.
Anyway Nigeria has a GDP that's like a third of Israel's and doesn't have more of NVIDIA's workforce than any foreign country not named America. So of course people care less about what happens there.
> oscar winning Holocaust movies
Much more fun doing it after the jews involved are dead. We got much less of that in real time
> Old testament
It's not the other side. It's like 90% of the problem.
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.
Hamas is also popular in the West Bank (where Hamas does not rule), and would win if an election were held there today.
"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 were 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 every Gazan into a concentration camp and opening up Gaza for settlers. Meaning that the surrender of Hamas would not change anything.
If Hamas returned all the hostages and surrendered, support for the war would vanish.
You guys are all bulldozing over the fact that Hamas *won the election*, and polls indicate that they would win it even more handily if it happened today. This is even true in the West Bank, where Hamas isn't in charge!
Hamas is popular in part because their strategy completely worked. Many countries are now recognizing Palestine, and many more are set to do so, simply because Israel has the gall to cut off aid to Hamas. Oct 7 is practically their July 4.
Gazans, yes. Hamas members, I think so. Hamas as an organisation, no.
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
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?
The inevitable mass starvation implied in that plan would have made West Germany obviously ungovernable and the occupation govt would have had to deal with daily bread riots.
The only realistic outcomes would have been:
1. The USSR stays put, the riots are suffocated in blood, the repression engenders other riots, anarchy and dysfunction until it becomes functionally equivalent to a genocide, and 40M dead later the traumatized West Germans are finally able to go back to the land and live the pastoralist paradise Morgenthau envisioned for them.
2. The riots and photos of starving civilians make clear how unworkable the plan is, and Truman reaches the same conclusion he reached in real history, except with a lot more gratuituous cruelty to tarnish his name
3. The USSR capitalizes on the discontent in West Germany and either enters or keeps running guns for Communist groups in the Western occupation zone to the point WW3 starts and well, that's the most interesting (if most deadly) scenario I guess
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.
In the context of all-out existential war, what would you consider legitimate?
I am doubtful those existential wars are a thing really. Which case do you mean, WW2 or the Israel stuff?
Let's talk about WW2. Japan obviously did not want to conquer America or the world. "A rifle behind every leave of grass" etc. Basically they wanted to hurt America enough to retract that ultimatum and let them do in Asia whatever they want. The Co-Prosperity Sphere i.e. empire had limited goals, not the whole planet.
Hitler basically wanted a Lebensraum eastward, Poland/Soviet Union. Again not the whole world. It was Britain and France who declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Originally they did not want anything from the West. So this is why they attacked France. Now why they attacked Denmark, Norway or the Netherlands is I don't know, that sounds indeed a bit too much like wanting to conquer everything. Anyhow they made repeated peace offers to Britain and the armistice with France was more or less fair.
In other words, a war concluded with a compromise would have resulted in this. As long as Hitler lives, things go on as before. Yes unfortunately that also means the Holocaust, but let's take into consideration that the Allies did not even know about the Holocaust at Jalta. It was very secret. After Hitler dies, I would see a Soviet trajectory: destalinization, gradual detente, eventual collapse.
In Asia, well Japan did not have the forces to make the Chinese border airtight, weapons get in there, likely Soviet ones, and then a huge Chinese revolt.
Ultimately I do not know the total human suffering in the real vs. the imaginary scenario. Luckily, I am not a utilitarian. There is a big part of me that the Allies were right to send a strong message to the whole world to not even try such a thing again. And no one did. Fascist-like systems did exist from Franco to Peron, but they did not start wars and did not engage in ethnic mass murder. I guess the message got through.
But I cannot be really sure such a gamble with human lives was legitimate.
Well, that’s quite an alternative history you’ve written. Hitler had already stabbed Britain in the back once by screwing Neville Chamberlain at Munich.
France and Britain had a mutual defence pact with Poland and that did not stop Hitler from invading it which he had promised not to do in the Munich agreement. So essentially let Hitler make a deal which allows him to completely consolidate his power on the continent and then go from there. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and declares war on the United States and Germany declares war on the United States as well. Russia is still an ally of Germany at this point although that’s uneasy ( nobody trusts Hitler.) and then of course there’s the issue of what life is like in a Nazi political social sphere. Whether that’s something that people want. And what life might be like when the Germans and the Russians duke it out ( which is inevitable in either scenario as far as I’m concerned.)
And remember, we’re still coming out of the 30s and the big fear of Communism in the West. The fact that this fear was overcome in order to ally with Russia against Germany and Japan is a pretty good indicator of how seriously things were being taken.
There was a lot going on and I imagine it felt pretty existential. Was it really existential? I guess it depends on whose existence you’re thinking about.
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.
"Japan wanted to conditionally surrender;"
This is not the story I have read. Basically that would have required an unanimous action of the Supreme War Council. Shigenori Togo, Kantaro Suzuki, and Mitsumasa Yonai wanted that. Korechika Anami, Yoshijiro Umezu, and Soemu Toyoda did not. The Emperor was rather neutral on the topic until the nukes as he was supposed to be above such concerns. So yes there were influential people who wanted conditional surrender, but there weren't enough of them to really put the government behind it.
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.
Perhaps Palestine would have more industrial capacity if they spent the billions of dollars in aid they've received on industry rather than the world's most intricate tunnel system.
There are Hamas propaganda videos of them tearing up irrigation pipes to make rockets to fire at Israeli cities. They are proud to choose war over prosperity, and they believe that showing this choice to other Palestinians will make them more popular (and they seem to be right).
The whole thing is very very hard to understand, and most who claim, do not. Sam Kriss has a simple and appealing explanation: both sides hate each other so much, most other people in the world just can't imagine how much, we just never seen such hatred. So yes, many Palestinians would rather kill some Jews than irrigate their lands. But many Israelis also think shooting Palestinians, Hamas or not Hamas, is the best thing in life.
A bit too simple and appealing, unfortunately. It's appealing because it's kind of gross to think that the weaker side might also be in the moral wrong.
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.
The Allies should have negotiated with Japan instead of demanding unconditional surrender. The war could have ended a lot earlier, saving endless lives.
If only the Allies had been willing to negotiate, they would probably have been able to avoid staining themselves with gigantic war crimes such as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the indiscriminate firebombing of Japanese cities (as opposed to more precise and humane bombing with high explosives as the US had widely done in Germany).
If the Allies had told the Japanese "if only you go back to your borders as they were before the war, and promise to stay there, we'll stop fighting you", the Japanese would have been very happy; it would have been a better outcome than they hoped for. Call this the bare minimum.
This does NOT mean that this is what the Allies should have demanded. The Allies should have found an ideal middle between the bare minimum, and unconditional surrender.
Any such middle would have been easier to obtain from Japan than unconditional surrender, and would have meant a shorter war, less tragedy, and less likelihood that atomic war crimes become necessary.
For example, here's the first thing that the Allies should have done differently: they should have promised that no Japanese leader would be put on trial. How could Japanese leaders agree to end the war, if they themselves risked execution? How much easier would it have been to end the war, by making that little concession?
Negotiating with Japan would have been in line with how wars throughout history have normally ended. Nearly all historical wars between great powers ended with peace negotiations, not surrender. Individual bodies of troops surrendered, entire countries did not usually surrender. Cornwallis surrendered, the UK did not, and if the Americans had demanded too much the British would have kept fighting. There is this bizarre notion going around that true war requires seeking the complete surrender of your enemy. No it does not, it only looks like that if your knowledge of history doesn't go further back than the world wars.
Caba: The argument against this is that World War I ended the way you're calling for and 20 years, the continent was on fire again. The decision to fight until unconditional surrender was largely about preventing history from repeating itself that way again. And it's worth noting that history has provided some validation for this decision. I won't argue with you if you push back and make the case that this could still have been achieved even with limited demands (I simply don't know enough to be able to evaluate such an argument either way), but I don't think it will ever be possible to really know.
Regardless, I think a similar argument holds true for Gaza. Israel has been fighting limited wars with Hamas for the last 20 years. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to conclude that the time for those kinds of cease fires is over and this war will continue until Hamas surrenders, flees, or is destroyed.
"as opposed to more precise and humane bombing with high explosives as the US had widely done in Germany"
Yes, because in Germany, such as Dresden or Hamburg, the British volunteered to do the firebombing, so that the USAF could have an easier conscience, but I don't think this makes such a big difference.
"There is this bizarre notion going around that true war requires seeking the complete surrender of your enemy. No it does not, it only looks like that if your knowledge of history doesn't go further back than the world wars."
I see this point, but I also see the point that certain countries, leaders and ideologies were getting increasingly fanatical and not long-term agreement-capable. We are seeing this with Russia now, I think a lot of Western leaders think an armistice would just give Putin time to rearm and try it again.
Or perhaps a different angle. Regime change was often not necessary, because the regime would have been overthrown anyway. Remember how President Wilson always considered the democratization of Germany necessary for future peace, nevertheless he did not intend to occupy Germany and force it. It happened anyway. Like how losing the Franco-Prussian war was the end of Louis-Napoleon. These things could be expected.
However one can make the argument the grip of these regimes was too tight.
A bit of material context here: if what I've heard is correct, it wasn't actually possible to transfer the "precise" bombing campaigns done in Germany to Japan, because Japanese industry was highly dispersed throughout the cityscape instead of gathered up in clusters.
Note that "precise" is a very relative term in this case.
That's obviously a completely meaningless comparison. In order to make it somehow poignant, let's imagine an ucronia.
In this ucronia, it is 1948. The Allies have been occupying Germany for 3 years now, and have complete control of it (or at least potential control. There might be some village without any Allied soldier there, but it's just a political choice to save manpower: they could have boots on the ground anywhere in Germany within a few hours with no casualties).
There is no German state to speak of. Thieves roam the streets, prisons are open, and disputes are adjudicated by village priests, former magnates and other informal leaders, if at all. Still, there is a loose confederation of guerriglia groups calling itself "III Reich", who manages to kill maybe a single digit of Allied soldiers and a couple dozen collaborators a month. That's what's left of Hitler's (found hiding like a rat and promptly eliminated in 1946) regime.
And yet, 70% of German building lie in ruins. The terror, ahem, morale bombings continue uninterrupted. There is no functioning hospital. The few Red Cross volunteers trying to offer a little relief have a, uh, suspiciously high mortality rate. Same goes for journalists documenting the situation. The naval blockade is stronger and stricter than ever. German civilians die like flies from starvation, curable diseases and bombings, but the Great Three are unanimous: until the III Reich surrenders, the "war" will go on. Also, there is this plan going on to have German survivors "voluntary emigrate" somewhere else, and turn Germany into essentially a bucolic playground for Communist party cadres and American tycoons, but surely that's unrelated: the priority is and always has been the defeat of the III Reich, after all.
Now, maybe it would have been a colorable stance. But it is materially different from the one the Allies took in actual history in 1945.
Ten Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza last week, Hamas still holds 50 hostages, and at the last cease fire (when I'm guessing you would have argued Israel already had total control) Hamas claimed victory.
Unfortunately, the 350 miles of tunnels have created a uniquely challenging environment for an invading army. Unfortunate for the Israelis, but even more unfortunate for innocent Gazans.
The fundamental point is that using interstate war as an example for what at this point is a police operation is deeply misguided and a fig leaf for genocide.
There will always be some asshole calling itself "Hamas", even after (as it happened) the entire leadership has been eliminated.
10 soldiers KIA is less than the cops that die in the US every week, expect nobody (other than Donny) would argue that we are at war with the gangs and thus the USgovt would be completely justified to blockade Detroit and let millions starve "until the Purple Gang surrender".
Also nice dodge of the point about intention: Bibi has been saying they want to "thin out" Gaza population for years
https://theintercept.com/2023/12/03/netanyahu-thin-gaza-population/
Now, that is clearly a political goal of this govt. The incentive you are setting is that he's justified in pursuing that goal as long as he claim there is still Hamas in Gaza. Do you think Hamas will ever be eradicated then? Why would you expect a "war" to ever be won if the state of war is just an unalloyed advantage for one of the belligerents?
167 polices officers died in the line of duty in 2024 in the U.S, but even that overstates the number as a comparison because most of those deaths were things like heart attacks, duty related illnesses, car crashes or being hit but not while in pursuit, etc.:
https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2024
The number of officers killed by the people they were trying to apprehend or stop was less than 70. You are off by about an order of magnitude.
Also, I'm unaware of any "policing operations" where the criminals have been holding hostages for years.
It's clearly not a policing situation. It's obviously much more like Afghanistan. Or, if you really want to compare it something "recent" on U.S. soil, it would be Waco.
As for intention, there are certainly folks in the Israeli government who would like to resettle Gaza and expel the Palestinians. I don't know if that includes Netanyahu or whether he is just saying things to stay in power given his coalition; I think everything he did while in power before October 2023 demonstrated that he cared only about the West Bank and not Gaza.
Regardless, if the hostages were freed today and the Hamas leadership surrendered (or even agree to leave Gaza), I guarantee the war would end immediately and there would be no Israeli resettlement of Gaza. And that's been clear all along. Anyone who cares about Palestinians in Gaza should have been calling for Hamas' surrender every day since the start of the war.
This was very well written, even if not entirely accurate, make that III Reich somewhat stronger (like single digit Allied soldiers killed per week, 50 hostages) and it fits. Still broadly you are right.
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.)
This is one possible explanation, yes. Israel keeps trying to look like or become like a Western country, and to some extent succeeds. There are Prides. Western tourists feel about at home on the beaches of Jaffa, there are bikini girls, gay couples and McD and plenty of Arab citizens with full rights and before the current events these citizens were mostly supportive of Israel, because their rights were respected. So one expects more, yes.
OTOH... Scotland voted on independence twice, and Austrians in the South Tyrol in Italy enjoy bilingual autonomy. This is the Western way of doing things. Hungarians in Romania, Russians in Ukraine do not get this, and everybody is okay with that, because they are not really that much Western.
The question is, just how much Western is Israel? People who travel there for business, not tourists, say imagine them like a typical Levantine country, similar to Lebanon or Turkey. For example, bribery is a normal part of doing business.
Perhaps Israle is trying to look more Western than they actually are.
> 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.
Offtopic but why are you reformed Hegelian? A I am trying to get into Hegel's very complicated thought, not out of it. You say it does not worth it? The reason I am going to try is that I found that Marxism despite many great insights seems fundamentally flawed, so simply trying to take one step back from Marx and then figure.
"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.
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.
This is a tweet where Smotrich endorsed a plan laid out by Israeli strategist Giora Eiland (who according to Wikipedia is the author of the "General's Plan" for blocking all aid to the northern part of Gaza, which was effectively implemented in late 2024, and which was clearly a precursor to the generalized starvation policy of 2025).
https://x.com/bezalelsm/status/1726198721946480911
Use Google translate if needed. This clearly calls for creating an artificial "humanitarian crisis" and making the civilian population suffer as a pathway to victory. Hamas needs not “kill its own kids”. Israel is happy to starve those kids dead.
If Hamas would stop stealing aid, then the GHF would be unnecessary. You are not obligated to feed enemy combatants in a war --- cutting off enemy supplies is a valid tactic. If the army steals humanitarian aid, it stops being humanitarian aid and starts being enemy supplies.
Unfortunately, Israel is right to distrust external press. I've been a lifelong liberal, so it pains me to cite Fox News, but see: https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-admits-using-misleading-cover-photo-emaciated-gaza-child
If Israel wanted to kill all the Gazans, why do they have evacuation notices before they hit a structure? Russia doesn't do that.
Yes, and as soon as those dopes (Macron Starmer) did that, Hamas hardened their demands.
I don’t understand the confusion about Israel’s strategic game here. They are bound and determined to get Hamas out of Gaza and the West Bank. They do not want to deal with them anymore. Any ceasefire and temporary truce and negotiation with Hamas will only lead back to the same thing happening again in 10 or 15 years because Hamas’s whole goal is to get the Jews out- gone. It’s pretty obvious. Even the Arab states are saying Hams needs to go. As to what to do with the place once they have succeeded at that?
> 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
I don’t think this is true. Public opinion in the west has a big influence on the politicians of the west. The vocal support for Hamas and the Palestinians increases political pressure on Israel from their allies in the west. It makes a difference. Not to mention that the coverage in western media of this situation is so biased it is not even funny
I think the biggest problem is a complete lack of historical perspective. Two or three generations have grown-up just seeing the stricken Gazans, with no real context of how it got here.
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.
It's not about balancing the scales. It's about making sure Hamas can't do Oct 7 again. It's about deterring other organizations from doing the same.
The endgame is that Hamas falls apart. This is part of why cutting off Hamas from stealing humanitarian aid is so important --- their theft of these supplies allows them to continue operations. When Hamas runs out of supplies, they will be unable to operate effectively.
Will another terrorist organization with a similar ideology take over? Maybe! Or maybe not! But that second terrorist organization will know that if they pull an Oct 7, they can experience the same fate as Hamas.
To be clear, by supplies we are talking about rice. Your argument is that rice must be withheld from everyone so that hamas does not have rice either. That is to say that general population starvation is a weapon that Israel is consciously using to achieve its end goal.
My question to you is if there is anything that Israel could do in the pursuit of their war goals that would be morally reprehensible? Because to me, starving out children is way across the line. I wonder where your line is.
I think you should update on the food situation in Gaza. There is lots of food waiting to get into Gaza, the problem being that the trucks are being looted immediately. There is all kind of profiteering going on.
It would be trivial to flood so much food into Gaza as to make profiteering moot. For the cost of a few missiles we could drop millions of small food packages dispersed all over Gaza from the air.
Trickled aid and lack of will is the problem IMO.
Yeah well there’s definitely a political element to what’s going on. I agree.
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.
Hamas is the government of Gaza. They won the election, and they would win it again today. This is even true in the West Bank, where they do not rule and hence there is no reason for people to lie to pollsters.
I agree with you, but the fact that Palestinians voted for a religious death cult doesn’t make Hamas’ actions comparable to those of a normal government.
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?
What's your (and Scott's) expectation of a radical fundamentalist jihadist terrorist organization, and what's the expectation of a seemingly democratically elected government-supervised war of self-defense?
The larger the prediction error the more it hurts, right?
Handling the emotions is important (especially if we get into a psychopatological state due to absurd expectations), but calibrating our expectations is probably even more so (because it can cause the aforementioned trapped state).
It seems you also have some strange expectations regarding Scott's media consumption (and bias), and a strong preference for this antisemitic framing.
“Seemingly”? Are you claiming that Israel’s government was not democratically elected? Or that it is not engaged in a war of self-defense?
Anyway, my expectation is that a democratically elected government supervising a war of self-defense would try to win the war and try to defend its citizens, and that it would prioritize that above all else. I suggest you consider what your expectations are for an (objectively) democratically elected government supervising a war of self-defense.
And having said all that, note that none of this bears, at all, on what I actually said.
I was trying to communicate that behind the state of Israel is a very violent recent recent past (with a very harrowing continuous treatment of the West Bank), and behind that many numerus clausus quotas, pogroms, expellings, the Holocaust, and many other factors that motivated (and obviously to this day still motivate) the Zionist movement.
I'm trying to say that this topic is so large and complex that trying to bias police people is a bit ridiculous, especially without know when they started to pay attention to it (and how much).
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?
"\S" means "sarcasm/snark," and usually means the post is rhetorical and not intended to provoke debate. The post being referenced said that Israel and Nazis did bad thing and then blamed religious fundamentalists. I was jokingly suggesting that if the reader replying (who seemed to be objecting to nazis being deemed religions fundamentalists) was willing to adequately loosen his definition of religion, then perhaps naziism would qualify.
Why the /s?
A nation trapped between a rock and a hard place whipped itself into a complete irrational self-destructive frenzy. This happened to post-WWI Germany, post-failed-peace Israel, and .... oh Gaza too, of course. (And Japan in WWII, and whatever the fuck is going on in the US now is also a strong candidate.)
Religion is a psychological toolkit, mostly to ignore utilitarianism, steel people's will, invert normal reasoning by inserting axiomatically true arguments. This translates marvelously to ultranationalism (we are the best, we deserve the best, it's our destiny, it's hard but it's worth it, so fight, endure more, give more, we can do it, it's worth it, blablabla), and this provides the critical mass for an authoritarian takeover, then the process is largely self-sustaining (until it burns out).
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.
I was curious and looked up these statements:
Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza says 111 people have now died from famine and malnutrition in recent weeks.
Ten new deaths linked to famine and malnutrition have been recorded during the past 24 hours by hospitals in the Gaza Strip, according to the Ministry of Health.
2025-07-23 AlJazeera
The deaths bring the total number of people who have died due to hunger since the conflict began nearly two years ago to 180 people, including 93 children, the ministry said.
2025-08-04 ABC News
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 West Bank and Gaza are best thought of as a foreign territory under military occupation (in the case of the West Bank) or rigorously enforced arms embargo (in the case of Gaza, which hasn't been occupied since 2006). They are under occupation because the population refuses to move on from the war they lost.
Imagine if the Nazis never surrendered and remained hugely popular, even after the Allies occupied the whole country. At some point the Allies decide to give peace a chance, and withdraw unilaterally from part of Germany and hold elections, and then the Nazis win the election, with explicit genocidal intent toward the Slavs, the Jews, etc.
So the Allies consider re-invading, but instead they put up an arms embargo and hope that the Germans just cool it on the whole Nazi thing eventually. But instead the Nazis control the schools and raise a whole generation on Nazi ideology. And then at some point a group of Nazis slip past the Allies' border guards and murders thousands of people.
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).
It's almost as though they should give up violent resistance so that Israel can end the military occupation.
EDIT: By "violent resistance" I mean maybe they should give up murdering Jews in Israel. If all they did was attack IDF soldiers, and gave up on conquering Israel, and stopped killing Jewish civilians, autonomy would be on the table.
When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, we tragically saw what happens when Palestinians get autonomy.
Who is “they”?
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?
There is very strong apartheid in the West Bank, between Israeli settlers and Palestinians.
Israel apologists would say: apartheid is discrimination between citizens. Since Palestinians are not citizens, there’s no apartheid.
Clearly, this definition of apartheid doesn't work. Imagine if South Africa had played the same trick. There is no apartheid in South Africa, all citizens are treated the same way! Those black people over there? They're not citizens!
Palestinians in the West Bank have no Israeli citizenship, even though they've always lived there (that is to say, they’re not illegal immigrants).
82% of the West Bank territory is policed by Israel (the remaining 18% consists of Bantustans). Israeli security forces treat Palestinians and Israelis VERY, VERY differently. Their job description is to protect Israelis from Palestinians, not the other way around. Because of the one-sided policing, as the Freedom House (not a far left source) report on the West Bank states in its opening, West Bank Israeli settlers “enjoy relative impunity for violence against Palestinians”.
Israel routinely keeps West Bank Palestinians in jail for many years without any charge ("administrative detention"), a policy you'd expect from China rather than a democracy. They do not treat Israelis in the same way.
Area C covers 61% of the West Bank. This area is in practice reserved for the growth of Israeli settlements. Palestinians are almost never allowed to build new buildings there, even when they own the land and live there.
In Area C (again, 61% of the region), Palestinians are legally under martial law which deprives them of many rights.
Israelis move around easily, there are apartheid roads reserved only for Israelis, while Palestinians must constantly go through checkpoints and their freedom of movement is limited in many ways.
Israel apologists will say that Israelis aren't allowed into Area A (the Bantustans, 18% of the territory). My answer is that the map is designed so Palestinians must constantly cross Area C to go from place to place, while Israelis can go everywhere without ever having to cross Area A.
Advocates for this system will say that it's necessary because of Palestinian terrorism. In any case this is what many people mean by apartheid, necessary or not. If it's necessary, it's only necessary because the Israeli state want to encourage the expansion of settlements in order to make a two states solution impossible. I also question the whole narrative that West Bank terrorism is such a big problem. For the 20 years prior to October 7, a white American in America was more likely to be murdered, than an Israeli settler in the West Bank. And yet, Israeli police in the West Bank killed each year between 5 and 10 times as many Palestinians as the number of Israeli settlers killed by Palestinians in the same year. This is an extraordinary level of police brutality, without a corresponding extraordinary level of crime.
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.
I feel bad responding here because I agree with most of your comment, but I think you express something a lot of other people have been saying pretty directly, that I don't totally agree with:
>"This is a wild thing to say when Holocaust related literature and filmography are essentially their own genre"
I think it's not unreasonable (though I don't know that I fully endorse it) to say that, this is really just evidence that there is exactly one Jewish story that is reliably deemed worthy of being told; and to the point that Jewish stories deviate from it, i.e. by Jews being anything other than pure, perfect, innocent victims, they are judged by comparison.
I think the phrase is, "everyone loves dead Jews"--Jews undergoing the Holocaust are noble, tragic, doomed--but otherwise, Jews are pushy, obnoxious, demanding... Maybe they're a little bit asking for it?
Like I say, I don't think I endorse this point of view, but I do think there's _something_ to it: it's definitely noticeable that there's a certain kind of person who thinks what's admirable about Judaism is a certain kind of perennial underdog-ness; an archetypal cosmopolitanism; you'll see this even from certain Jews for whom the core of Judaism seems to be a kind of Bundist/socialist universalism predicated on always being oppressed, and not anything that actually has to do with, y'know, Judaism.
TBC I'm not saying you're guilty of this, and I think most of this discussion is completely non-sequitur to the question of whether what Israel is doing in Gaza is justified... But I do kind of get what the original poster is saying, and see why he thinks all the responses about the Holocaust are maybe missing the point.
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.
Hamas is driving the narrative . I will leave it to you to decide what their motivations are.
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.
...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!<
One might suppose 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—and I'm not very sure about this probabilistic argument, either. Perhaps the likelihood of benefit drops off as one's values depart from the mainstream: very divergent values (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...?²
(Undoubtedly there are also a 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: Sort of depends on the faith one has in their (& one's own) reasoning abilities, I suppose! I fear I don't have very much faith in the average (nor, even, in the modal!) person, personally... I'm not sure very many people actually 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 any sort of coherent moral framework 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦—I think most folks just sort of go by vibes & environment.
Pushing such individuals to "reflect & perfect" probably just pushes 'em closer to the values of those around them... or does it?—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?
You might want to include the fire bombing of Coventry by the Germans, which provoked them to bomb Dresden.
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.
> The Northern Irish wanted to be part of the UK, and they got that too.
This is a bit of a simplification don’t you think?
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?
Cool, why are your taxes going toward subsidizing that 10% Why does the IDF (constituted mostly by youths drafted from the most secular 40% of society) watches in amusement while that 10% runs amok to destroy Palestinian villages? Why since 2009 the party in goverment is the one whose entire raison d'etre (like literally their charter states "from the sea to the Jordan") is catering to the settler enterprise? Why did settlements start pretty much the split second Israel got hold of the WB rather that at some point after? If Israelis are, or have ever been, so much aligned on Rabin's vision, why is the man who relentlessly instigated his murder in power since 2009?
Come on, you might not be coy but surely you are misrepresing the facts.
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).
Probably more important is the structure of the legislature. All 120 seats voted on by the entire country with seats just given proportionally to all parties that get above 3.25%. This means that any party that is able to get that small fraction of vote is going to get a seat so there's some representation of extreme or fringe views.
And that's after reform. The cutoff used to be 1%.
>"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.
Hostile states tolerate each other all the time. Typically because the cost of war is high, victory is uncertain, more recently because mutually assured destruction became a thing, or because of shared economic or geopolitical interests etc.
If not for those reasons above, the traditional response to a hostile state at your border is, in fact, to subdue them and to not allow them to exist. You don't allow am enemy at the border if you can help it.
\> 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
Nobody is saying that. You don't need another state to be an existential threat to want to subdue them.
Otherwise, if I I promise I'm only going to beat you half to death, there's no right for you to subdue me, is there?
The first thing is, Gaza nor Palestine is a state or ever was one. The second thing is, you can abide the neighbor who might be hostile to you as long as they’re not launching rockets at you every day and occasionally sending suicide bombers into your cities and having friends in the north of your country do the same in solidarity, while a larger entity known as Iran picks up the tab. It’s not just a border dispute.
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?
To me it doesn't matter what this person stands for. If you want to stretch the metaphor, assume that this person represents the Palestinian people, and he just happens to have a brain parasite called Hamas that's driving his violent impulses.
Sure, it's not their fault that they have a brain parasite that compels them to attack you. Unfortunately you're not a brain surgeon so all you can do is to restrain them in your basement and can't get their hands on anything sharp. It's not really fair to them and you sincerely wish that there's something else you could do, but every time you try turning this guy loose he makes another attempt some time later.
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".
You shouldn't "tolerate" it, but neither are you licensed to take literally any measures whatsoever to stop it. And yes, "you're wearing body armour so your risk is low" is a totally reasonable factor to consider in deciding when you've gone too far.
Sure, tempering your response is good grace, if you have the luxury of being able to afford to. But in the end you're still responding to a murder attempt.
And also, if the same attack is tried again, you'd be well within your rights to escalate your response. We're several rounds into the escalation game by now, I'm afraid.
>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.
Hamas violence is different because Hamas explicitly and proudly says it plans to escalate the violence and mass murders until Israel is destroyed.
COVID does not behave the same way. Our failure to prevent COVID from causing more deaths does not mean that it will get stronger and more deadly every year, until the whole country is destroyed. If COVID did have this property, it would be an existential threat as well.
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.
I acknowledge the long history of European antisemitism but this (“In the meantime, Europe spent approx. 1500 years doing their level best to exterminate the Jews”) is such ridiculous hyperbole that it renders your entire comment sheer nonsense.
>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.
Dear gods, mate, the year is 2025 in case you didn't notice. 9/11 was nearly a quarter-century ago. Is ANYONE still pretending the U.S. response to it was *remotely sane*? I was only a few years out of grade school when it happened and *even then* I clocked the response as a massive, harmful overreaction. I think you could not have picked a better example to illustrate my point if you tried.
A sane response to 9/11 would have looked like public anger, mourning, a vow to find and punish those responsible and then...nearly nothing. No overt change in behavior from the nation write large. U.S. intelligence services might have changed methods or tactics or focus to both find those responsible[1] and keep similar things from happening in the future. But exactly none of the massive assaults on civil liberties and pointless and expensive foreign wars that followed should have occurred. None of that produced ANY value for the U.S. nor improved its security situation in any way. Quite the opposite.
And yes, before anyone asks, I'd gladly apply this same logic to mass shootings. The purpose of any sort of terroristic violence it to cause a political (over)reaction from the target. Bragging about how readily you oblige the terrorists in achieving their goals is a fool's game.
[1] Which, to be clear, *should* have been set as very high priority in the aftermath. A targeted retaliation against the *specific* people responsible is very different from a "go find someone vaguely adjacent to beat up so everyone knows your tough" response, the latter being what the U.S. actually did.
Nonetheless, it is a data point. A model that does not take into account typical emotional responses of the average person will produce incorrect results. In this case, it leads to confusion over why Israelis would see Gaza as an existential threat even when from a wider view it looks less severe than that.
Edit: I see downthread that you do not live in the US, which unfortunately means a piece of what I wanted to communicate to you (connect this conflict now to the emotional experience of your neighbors 25 years ago) was lost, because those people weren't your neighbors. Instead the experience you have to connect it to is watching from afar as the US does some things that don't look like they make sense. Well, I guess now you get to do that again.
Why do you believe Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2006? It was a trial run on a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians immediately elected Hamas, which has the stated goal of destroying Israel.
You may not believe Hamas is an existential threat to Israel, but that's only because Israel has worked hard to make it that way. There are two reasons Hamas was "only" able to kill 1200 Israelis and kidnap 250: Israel enforced an arms blockade, Israel conducts continuous counter-terrorism operations, and Israel developed rocket-interception technology to shoot down their rockets, which they routinely fire at cities.
North Korea is not firing rockets at your city. If North Korea managed to kill 1200 Americans and kidnapped 250 more, that would be the end of North Korea.
Please also consider that Israel's Arab neighbors, including Palestinians, made a real go of destroying Israel many times over the years (1948, etc.). Israel is a tiny country with basically no ability to absorb losses. If Israel loses even one war, that's it. They can't afford to mess around.
"North Korea is not firing rockets at your city. If North Korea managed to kill 1200 Americans and kidnapped 250 more, that would be the end of North Korea."
First, I'm not remotely convinced this would even be the end of the Kim regime. Attacking North Korea would be *hugely* costly.
Second, this is transparently a "might makes right" argument. Other peoples and other nations have suffered FAR greater injuries and insults without engaging in the wholesale destruction of their neighbors. Insofar as I don't believe that might *does* make right, I reject it on those grounds.
But third, even in a hypothetical in which the U.S. DID remove the Kim regime for such an offense, there's a really rather large difference between "well, that's the end of the Kims" and "well, that's the end of any Korean state, anywhere, ever." Trying to conflate the two is either very careless or very dishonest.
"It was a trial run on a Palestinian state"
I notice that people who are not Palestinians don't generally have this attitude leveled at them. As arrogant as the often U.S.[1] is, it at least restrains itself to merely *toppling governments.* When it invaded Iraq in 2003 under the thin pretext of looking for weapons of mass destruction, at no point did anyone say "well, clearly having Saddam in charge means that the Iraqi people can't be trusted to have a state of their own." Or to choose an even starker example, after Germany helped start a titanic, globe-spanning conflict twice in just over two decades, with the later conflict involving some of the worst genocides in history, the response from the victors was emphatically NOT "I guess Germans are just inherently too aggressive and warlike to entrust with a State--better leave Germany a permanent rump-state beholden to the whims of the French and British[2]." The victors enforced surrender terms and a change of government but didn't (as far as I know) ever seriously question the idea that there needed to be a sovereign political entity in which Germans ordered their own affairs and represented themselves on the international stage[3].
Now, Palestinians are in some sense a harder case because they have never had a state: they had already been denied self-determination for many years by the time Israel was formally founded. And that does matter: there's no stabilizing continuity to fall back on. But aside from plainly horrific things like outright ethnic cleansing, I have heard no other serious proposals for what *should* happen to Palestinians: just dishonest evasions and thin appeals to the (entirely inadequate) status quo ante.
[1] Which isn't where I live, despite what you seem to think.
[2] Acute observers of history will notice that this *is* sort of close to what happened at the end of the FIRST world war. Which illustrates so neatly why its such a bad idea.
[3] There are actually some interesting inherent questions here--see for example https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-gets-self-determination
But as far as I can tell, nobody's really grappling with them in this case. They're just reaching for convenient excuses for repressive policies.
Palestinians had free elections and total control over Gaza since 2006 as Israel unilaterally pulled out. This is pretty dang close to a state!
Palestinians elected Hamas, and polls indicate they would do it again today, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Iraqis did not elect Saddam. I feel like you keep ignoring this because it is painful to consider, but this is what most Palestinians wanted, and even more of them want it today.
What should happen to the Palestinians is they should give up on conquering Israel and live in peace with their neighbors. Peace has been available to them this whole time, and remains available now.
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?
Well we're decades after the last realistic proposed 2 state solution and what Israel's good faith efforts to reduce the blockade and allow more Palestinian workers into the country resulted in is more missile fire, a minor regional war involving Hezbollah and Iran, a huge terrorist attack with 100s of people taken hostage, etc. There's not really a politically viable path to a Palestinian state because it would just be a terrorist state dedicated to destroying Israel at this moment in politics.
I thought I responded but it didn't show up, so sorry to leave you hanging. I can agree that there's an asymmetry, I think most Israelis are frustrated and want to live in peace. I happen to think most Gazans feel the same way (though frustrated is a massive understatement at this point) and that any asymmetry is born of history and economic inequality rather than some inherent hatred.
But my point was and is that it's beside the point. What I hear you saying is, "the people Israel is slaughtering hate Israel." True or not, this does not justify massacre and man made starvation of an entire region.
Likud was founded in 1973 (which security threat did Palestinians pose then?) explicitely on the premise that 1. Israeli soverignty was "from the sea to the Jordan" 2. No more Arabs would have ever been extended citizenship.
During the same years, Likud's main adversary, Golda Meir's Labor, had no qualms using chemicals weapons to remove Arab civilians and start new settlements
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-06-23/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/israel-poisoned-palestinian-land-to-build-west-bank-settlement-in-1970s-documents-reveal/00000188-e8aa-df52-a79d-fcabdd200000
again with the explicit aim of making Israeli presence permanent.
So, no, empirically you are not speaking for the median Israeli, as pretty much any party which actually ended up governing made clear in words and action that it was ideologically committed to the settlement enterprise and the apartheid regime it entailed.
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?
That poll by Tamir Sorek is wrong!
https://archive.is/iJoEJ
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.
Just for what it's worth, in my personal experience, the answer is "all of them". I don't personally know any "pro-Palestinian" observers who do not distinguish Netanyahu's government from the Israeli population. Granted, the world is highly sorted by homophily.
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
And yet, the IDF forcibly removed all the settlers from Gaza in order to give Gazans autonomy in 2006. We can't blame the settlers anymore.
Well they've gotten more numerous and crazier since then and would be an impediment to a peace process, but yeah they weren't that big a problem historically.
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
Banned for this comment.
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.
>with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled
Yea they want unlimited right to return or leave proposals ambiguous so that unlimited right of return is an acceptable interpretation under a putative agreement. This is done in service of eventually inviting a sufficient amount of Palestinians into Israel to destroy it from the inside out, either via Second Intifada tactics or by abusing the Democratic process to elect parties like Hamas into power. (Also it's stupid to want to "return" to a home your great grandpa got kicked out of 80 years ago.)
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.
This is an outstanding comment.
“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.
Obviously there is a pro-Hamas faction who are insane about this, but for the vast majority of the people you'll be arguing with here, the reason they are dismissive of this is because they think Hamas has a ~0% chance of achieving this: they are multiplying the badness of each side's worst impulses by the probability of success, and finding that p(Hamas is in a position to genocide Israeli Jews) to be so small that Israeli crimes dominate any reasonable prioritization of issues.
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.
I agree that Hamas's actions are also an important node, but given Israel's overwhelming military dominance of Hamas, it's not prima facie unreasonable to expect that "Israel's actions" are more important causally to most outcomes in Gaza right now.
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.)
I agree that the left media try to frame the Gazans as innocent victims, when in fact they (or their parents) had voted for Hamas.
However, while I believe that Hamas should be wiped from the face of the Earth, I also strongly believe that a people can not be hostis humani generis.
In my opinion, the Gazans should get the same treatment as the German population got in 1945: getting militarily defeated (which might kill a lot of their soldiers and accidentally also civilians), then getting occupied (optionally in different zones), and then stay under foreign military jurisdiction for a decade or two while the occupiers try to re-educate the population into being less murderous.
What they should not get is deliberate starvation, though.
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.
Does 'yeeting' ethics strike you as a good thing to do? Is your intuition perhaps the thing which ethics is meant to override?
There's a long-running trend I've noticed of certain commenters loudly condemning the concept of morality, ethics, and/or altruism. Like the people who got upset that Scott advocated kidney donation.
Many Thanks!
>Does 'yeeting' ethics strike you as a good thing to do?
YES! An _excellent_ thing to do! When a would-be control freak like Singer makes an outrageous ask, the sane thing is to show him the door with all the force available.
Do not overvalue ethics. At absolute best, they are a tool for us to live together. And they are mostly used as way to demonize the outgroup. A much better tool is negotiation, and quid pro quo bargains between factions.
I think ethics are necessary as the alternative to bargaining/negotiation is murder, which is always on the table and frequently both easier and more attractive without ethics as a constraint.
Many Thanks!
>the alternative to bargaining/negotiation is murder
Um... I'm saying that bargaining/negotiation is better than ethics. Ethics are usually used for demonizing a group or person who would be better bargained with.
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.
> Why would I want to read a book like that?
I think it can be useful to re-visceralize the extent to which this is not a just world, to remind yourself that real people are suffering to a tremendous extent, to consider whether you personally are responsible for increasing or decreasing that suffering, and to give yourself an injection of exogenous conscience that could inspire you to do *something*. In my case, it reminded me to really, truly care about professional ethics, and inspired me to donate a far larger sum of money than is my typical annual donation in recognition of the unbelievable fortune I have had to *not* be one of the tens of millions of people who died unimaginably brutal death and are only remembered insofar as they contributed to a death toll.
Interesting recommendation! Any other books you'd like to rec as alternatives or as follow-ups?
There's a list of companions the author suggests at the end -- a few include Jean Amery, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. I haven't engaged with any of these companion's works yet myself, though.
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.
I'm not sure you are right here. Israel gets a lot from its relationship with the US, but it is not a charity case. The cost to the US from intervention in a weak poor country is trivial relative to changing it's middle east strategy that profoundly
You know, you’re right, my middle sentence is incorrect. The first and last I still think are accurate
Yeh i agree with both
I don't think it is the full explanation, but not supporting intervention is not evidence for much. Allies of the US do many bad things though, so I think it have more to do with need for a semi-plausible scapegoat for colonialism
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.
If you had to choose which moral catastrophe to suffer, you would choose West Bank every time. And of course israel can reduce the Gazan population as much as it wants with or without Hamas. How does Hamas even try to prevent it? What would Hamas have done if Israel chose to do the real genocide thing where you simply poison all the water, burn all the tents, and shoot whoever run out? How long would it take israel to kill a million Gazans if it was the policy?
>How does Hamas even try to prevent it?
By attracting attention to Palestine through doing 10/7 type stuff.
>What would Hamas have done if Israel chose to do the real genocide
Not much of course, but since Israel is "civilized" and would never do anything so crude this is an empty hypothetical. Slow strangulation is much more palatable and doesn't attract many headlines.
"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*
I don't think it is truely comparable, but for the sake of consistency: there are far too many people posting about something something puberty blockers in a world with much bigger problems, and it would be a waste of your intelect to feed further that attention-beast
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?
Same experience, flipped polarity.
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.