One of the things that continues to boggle me is the breathtaking extremism on both sides of the Gaza conflict. On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist—a position that even the PLO abandoned 30 years ago. On the right, it's commonplace to argue that merely acknowledging the suffering of Gazans, let alone doing something about it, is appeasement and weakness. Here is a National Review piece about President Biden's plan to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza:
The White House’s proposed pier solution would endanger American lives, almost certainly experience mission creep that turns temporary into tem-permanent, and, because of Biden’s promise of “no boots” would require a third party to handle dissemination of supplies
....The United States can do almost anything to which it sets its mind. But can and should are two separate matters. Biden is terrified of the pro-Palestinian elements in his party and, in his fear, is creating a situation whereby the U.S. taxpayers are almost certain to aid Hamas in its fight against our regional partner while having to watch U.S. men and women in uniform get left high and dry just off the coast of one of the most volatile few square miles in the world.
This piece is depressingly typical, and it's hardly the worst thing I've read. You say not enough aid is getting into Gaza? Hell no. Too much aid is getting into Gaza. It should be turned into a modern day Biafra until every last Hamas militant is captured or killed.
Even given my squishy views on Gaza, it horrifies me anew whenever I read something like this. How can it be so easy to turn so many of us into brutal mass killers?
There's an "almost certainly" in each paragraph. A favorite rhetorical trope of the right which dependably means "I'm making a bullshit claim for which I have zero evidence."
Good catch! The sneaky weasel words (sorry, weasels!) that mislead, much like Senator Britt's kitchen rape nonsense of a few days ago.
Obviously, no one has any evidence, given that this is a prediction about the future.
However, past experience has not been good. For example, our mission to protect food aid deliveries in Somalia morphed into a war against Mohammad Adid and the Somali National Alliance as part of US Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali's personal grudge settling and the deaths of 18 US troops.
We're talking Israel here. No way in hell they would let U.S. troops in.
If they will let us build a floating pier I assume they would also let us send troops in. Why not?
Why?
Because MF's arguments require Israel to behave in certain ways, so, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they pretend that Israel will behave in that fashion, until such time as their arguments require that Israel behave otherwise.
No. Because it makes sense for Israel to welcome US boots on the ground.
We all know that at least some factions in Gaza will attack them. See how long the US stays sympathetic to Palestinians while they are shooting at US troops.
You really pay no attention to Israeli policy at all.
So please clarify.
Why wouldn't the Israelis be happy to see the US putting itself in a position where Palestinian factions would attack US troops so the US would harden its position on the Palestinians?
1) The Israelis have always insisted that they fight their own wars. This sort of independence is central to their national self-conception. They don't want foreign troops in their war zone.
2) The presence of American troops wouldn't just create targets for Hamas. It would also increase the chances that the Israelis would, accidentally or semi-deliberately, shoot at Americans. On balance, the public relations advantage would be largely outweighed. (Also, keep in mind that, of the various parties to this conflict, the only one that has actually attacked the American military is Israel.)
3) The Israelis have insisted on having free reign to attack Hamas wherever and whenever they choose. An American presence would interfere with that.
Shrug... if I was in charge of Israel's war effort, I would heartily endorse any US plan to put boots on the ground.
We all know the reason Biden is promising no US boots on the ground - he knows that at least some Gaza factions will attack US troops.
If I'm an Israeli government official, that's just peachy. Let's see how long the USG stays sympathetic to Palestinians while they are shooting at US troops. Perfect!
Yeah, the Israelis would just love having a foreign military create safe zones for the Palestinians that the Israelis can't attack.
As if they've ever not attacked.
No one is suggesting creating safe zones that Israel cannot attack other than actual aid distribution points.
But, key point - these would be zones that Palestinian factions could attack...
Either they create safe zones, or they run an extremely high risk of dropping ordnance on the Americans themselves. This is stupendously obvious, but either you failed to recognize it, or you're just skipping over it in order to make your arguments.
The U.S. is not going to put Americans ashore. Biden has already said that the we are working with the UN and NGOs to be on the shore. And it is on the
Israelis to protect the aid workers and the recipients. They had better improve at that; they did a terrible job with the last convoy of trucks in northern Gaza.
A war where...
...what war were were involved in, in Somalia, which was us handing over things on the beach?
So no war, no beach. Gotcha.
We were not handing things out on the beach. We were supposed to be protecting UN food distribution. Then we had mission creep.
It's amazing how short memories are. I guess you have forgotten about or were too young and never learned later about the Battle of Mogadishu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)
Read and learn.
Also: “On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist—a position that even the PLO abandoned 30 years ago.”
Citation, please. Because this sounds like a right-wing caricature of progressive views; in other words, sheer bullshit. Most progressives I know are perfectly capable of separating the Netanyahu government and the radical settler movement from the rest of Israeli society. And they’re capable of condemning the actions of both Hamas and the Israeli government.
Are there *some* progressives who have said things like that? Sure, you can nutpick to find some. But I don’t think it’s close to being “commonplace”; to the contrary, the few who have said such things have gotten swift pushback from other progressives.
Please don’t spread right-wing lies like this Kevin. You’re smarter than that.
Thank you.
"How can it be so easy to turn so many of us into brutal mass killers?"
They've always been killers. They're just out in the open now.
Exactly this. And it's because Trump has given them permission. "That rich successful TV star President is an overtly sociopathic asshole bigot, which means I can let MY freak flag fly!" No wonder they worship the ground he shambles on.
The black'n'white, either-or attitudes that we Americans -- or at least, what the infotainment industry reports -- are truly pathetic and it's no wonder "public debate" has been impossible.
Any sympathy for innocent Palestinian civilians, even newborn infants, means one is a Hitler-emulating Jew hater who loves and supports the actions of Hamas. Many states and (even more shamefully) universities have actually codified this: expressing support for Gaza is "antisemitism" and can get one expelled or fired.
When did we get so dumb?? I recall when Junior Bush's categorization of "good guys" and "bad guys" became all the rage, and deplored it then. But I was a fan of Al Gore, nerd and wonk. Since then, bad v good has become the mandatory dichotomy and apparetly the only way Americans get to think.
It doesn't help that our attention spans have diminished to mere seconds. Who wants "long form" anything?? BO-ring! (Ironically, it's been NPR and PBS fundraising season around here...) But without history, without context, without arguments that cover more than one, or even more than two, points of view, we can't effectively deal with the world, or anything else. We're reduced to knee-jerk simpletons.
And let's not even mention the totally separate information worlds that separate "red" and "blue" Americans. Talk about making a bad problem worse.
No one objects to sympathy for truly innocent Palestinian civilians.
𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘢𝘺 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘎𝘢𝘻𝘢? 𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘰. 𝘛𝘰𝘰 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘎𝘢𝘻𝘢. 𝘐𝘵 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘉𝘪𝘢𝘧𝘳𝘢 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘏𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘴 𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘳 𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥
This statement of Kevin's is a blatant lie. No one of any significance is saying this.
The question is priorities.
Just as in WWII, when it was totally reasonable and right to be sympathetic to the German and Japanese babies and innocent civilians who died, but the priority was winning the war, so, in this war, it is totally appropriate to be sympathetic to the innocents who are dying, but the priority is winning the war and rescuing the hostages (who, according to the UN, are being subjected to ongoing sexual abuse - Me Too Unless You're a Jew, right Salamander?).
The best thing the US can do to stop the suffering and innocent deaths is to put more pressure on Hamas. For example, we should try to force Qatar to expel the Hamas leaders... and then work with Israel to kill them wherever they flee to.
Do not feed this POS troll.
Translation: "These are good points that we cannot refute."
There. I fixed it for you.
Indeed. His username was well chosen. Given the frequency and single mindedness of his comments, he's probably pulling down a pretty good income from his hasbara.
Laugh... yes... those evil Jews manipulating public opinion by buying the media, right down to my comments on a third tier web site.
Tell us you are an anti-Semite without saying you hate the Jews.
Yeah, @Salamander, I am sure Israeli intelligence has identified Kevin's blog as one of the nexuses of American public opinion and has invested lots of money in MF to spread "hasbara" here.
C'mon man,
Oh, come on. Other foreign governments find it useful to stir the (turtles) of American opinion, and it doesn't have to be finely targeted. And lots of people like to flood the zone with ... er, their own heavily slanted opinions.
Amazingly, it's becoming clear that most rabid pro-Israel, anti-Palerstine stuff is being put out by gentiles. Do you have a word for that?
I have a sentence or two for that...
Decent people of all religions are disgusted by the Hamas atrocities of October 7 and the barely disguised anti-Semitism of its supporters like you. They are speaking out.
Bad claim, people do object to sympathy for truly innocent Palestinians.
People even object to sympathy for truly innocent Israelis, obviously.
Cite please....
PBS fundraising season? Now THAT's "BO-ring" with the same patter from "Babette" and "John" filmed a decade ago running in the breaks.
Totally in accord with you, Salamander
"On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist"
Bullshit. I know tons of folks, and they are not for eradicating Israel. This is a slander, and beneath you.
Unfortunately, it is true there is a slice of people who are wandering into the neverland of picturing the entire Israel history as illegitimate settler colonialists from the start. Those people don't have power in the Democratic party, but they make some noise. The problem is that Netanyahu is actively destroying the international standing of Israel, even among allies.
I would like to see a few names before I accept that members of the "progressive left" believe that Israel has no right to exist. And I would like to see a lot of names before I accept that it's "commonplace."
There is a world of difference between 'no right to exist as a nation state' and 'no right to exist as an explicit ethno nation state'.
Me, I don't think Israel has a 'right to exist', period. But that's because I'm an adult who uses words in an adult way, i.e., not in the the infantilized way they're being used in that discussion.
You won't see any names if you wait for someone else to find them for you.
Okay, that's it, no if's, and's or but's, you're a troll, plain and simple. FOAD, you POS.
For sure, Keith B.
Easy enough to throw out accusations. Gotta back them up. Or one might think it’s trolling…
Yeah, this reeks a little too much like “both sides”. Sure, there are people with extreme views on the issue, just like any other issue, but I certainly won’t ascribe the “progressive left” as rejecting the right of Israel to exist as a country. And discussing Israel controversial birth, like discussing the anomalous birth of every country on the planet, is not the same thing. These type of discussions exist to add depth to the issues at hand, like discussing slavery and the Indian genocide in the US. Nobody is discussing the US right to exist, but questions exist about what to do about the birthing pain.
Possibly because in that context everyone already knows that the US has no 'right to exist'.
I deny that states or any other organization have rights at all. Only people do.
Indeed. Got it in one. How did the dialogue get so infantilized that such ridiculous shibboleths go unanswered, let alone slapped down for the insultingly dishonest rhetoric it is?
Well said, raoul.
Too often, we are bullied to stop frank discussion of Israel’s failures. Recognizing that it’s not perfect doesn’t mean we are against Israel.
That’s no more legitimate than the old “American, Love it or Leave it” chant.
If we are not allowed to discuss faults and how to remedy them, how can we hope to coexist on a small planet?
Working on fixing faults can be a LOVING endeavor, too.
Kevin says "it's now commonplace." That doesn't mean universal. So if you know progressive lefties who don't want to eradicate Israel, that's great. It's not a rebuttal of what Keven said.
Yet another idiot who doesn't know Da Rules ... or pretends not to. Consider yourself warned.
Anyone who chants "From the river to the sea" is advocating elimination of Israel - that area encompasses all of Israel.
In 1977 the Israeli Likud Party said, as a public manifesto, "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." In January of *this year* Bibi said Israel should rule "west of the Jordan River", which means the same thing (look at a map).
MF believes the Likud Party wants to eliminate Israel. Which is weird.
1977 is 47 years ago.
You are lying about what Netayanhu said. Check the actual quote. He said nothing about ruling.
“In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu said. “This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?”
- from 18JAN2024
But you're right. I lied. "Security control" is nothing like rule. I confess. /s
Yup. Exactly.
The Western Allies retained security control of West Germany and Japan right up to the 1980s. But not rule.
Same thing.
No one is going to trust the Palestinians with weapons that they can use to attack Israel for a long time. Let them stop the incitement, stop pensions for terrorists, and demonstrate they no longer aspire to killing Jews.
No, the Allies did not retain security control of Germany and Japan up until the 1980s. You are either a liar, or you are unaware that the Germans and Japanese has their own police forces that were unbeholden to the Allies. You are either a liar, or you are unaware that the Bundeswehr was a full military, controlled by the West Germans. You are either a liar, or you are unaware that the Allied military presences in West Germany ad Japan were formalized by treaties that sovereign governments freely entered into.
My money is on you being a liar.
+1
The lack of control of their own trade and property rights is one of the major sticking points of why Palestine hasn't ever had a chance to exist as a country.
Well, this sure is funny. The Potsdam Agreement remained in force until 1990. The Bundeswehr existed with the permission (revocable at will) of the Western Allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Agreement
𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘞𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘎𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘢𝘥 𝘑𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘨𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰.
Actually, the Allied military presence in both countries was imposed at the point of a gun after each country's unconditional surrender at the end of WWII.
You either have no idea what you are talking about, or are, again, lying. That the Potsdam Agreement remained technically in effect until 1990 had nothing to do with the relations between the U.S., U.K., and the Bundesrepublik. It reflected that the entire apparatus for joint control of postwar Germany with the Soviets collapsed in 1945. The body that could have declared the Agreement ended never met after that.
In 1955, the Western Allies signed a final peace agreement with West Germany. As a part of it, they declared that the Bundesrepublik was fully sovereign, in all ways. There was a question as to whether or not they had the legal authority to do this, or if it required an agreement with a unified government of all Germany, which was obviously impossible prior to reunification in 1990. But West Germany was treated in all ways as if it were fully sovereign.
The exception was the city of Berlin. It operated under a different legal regime. In this limited area, the Allies, including the Soviets, did retain security control. But not in the rest of West Germany.
Even if you want to be hypertechnical and argue that Allied behavior has no bearing on whether West Germany was truly sovereign, and opt to agree with the legal argument that it required a unified Germany (which I am 100% certain you had no idea was the actual issue), it very clearly is entirely unlike the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. The Israelis do not, in any way, allow the Palestinians to run themselves as if they have sovereignty.
No, they're not, unless you apply the same to Israeli chants.
I've tended to think of Israel as the world's most horrible example of irredentism for way more than thirty years.
I also rolled my eyes at this. These type of pointless, evidence free Both-Sidisms are depressingly common and arent meant to be factual, instead this is Kevin establishing his 'impartiality' and wisdom before he makes a declaration that has some support.
I was your standard moderate liberal on Israel, but the radicalization of the Israeli right wing led me to examine the historical roots of Zionism. It's hard not to read the writings of the original Zionists without seeing the term "colonization" and acknowledgment that the inhabitants of Palestine would not acquiesce to Jewish settlements. Reading Herzl's The Jewish State, all the points he argued in favor of a Jewish state could just as easily be applied to the Palestinian Arabs living in the land he proposed to settle in. And unlike the European Jews, the Arabs had fought for their independence -- from the Ottoman Empire, on the side of the Great Britain, France and the U.S. during WWI.
So can I deny Israel's right to exist? No, that's politically impossible. But I cannot deny Palestine's right to exist either, by the same logic. So that leaves only a two-state solution or a single multi-ethnic state. Neither side will accept the latter OR the former. So what is an American voter to do?
A pox on both their houses. Stop supplying military aid to the Israelis and provide humanitarian aid to anyone in the Mideast who applies. I have a number of Jewish friends and family who have come to much the same conclusions.
Who knows what a lot of these things mean -things that sound reasonable in detail can be simplified into sounding extreme. There are certainly some people in Israel whose behavior matches what one thinks of with "settler colonialism." Just last week the WSJ has a story about armed civilians (and a few IDF members) forcefully kicking Palestinians out of their homes in the West Bank, demolishing those homes, and then building roads and outposts to cut Palestinian farmers off from their fields. Some people really are acting like Pa Ingalls in the Kansas territories (at least the US govt made the Ingalls family move somewhere else).
As for the destruction of Israel, many people on the left believe a 2 state solution is the right plan. That would "destroy" Israel as we currently know it by permanently shifting some land out of the country of Israel and into a separate country. Some others oppose any differences in rights for people living in a single state of Israel, which means it would stop being a Jewish state in the way it is now.
How can it be so easy to turn so many of us into brutal mass killers?
you assume there was a transition; i do not
As always, cruelty is the point.
Some Israelis are actively trying to block aid convoys into Gaza.
"We don't want to give food to people who murdered our people, who take them hostage."
I think our (humanity) tendency is to prefer to operate in a binary, un-nuanced world, where we cast people as completely evil or completely good, in order to justify our actions.
Dude, you were alive during Vietnam. You were a kid, but you were alive. Do you not remember the brutal callousness of our national policy and the massive support it had?
For that matter, do you not recall post-9/11 America, and our ridiculous bloodthirst then?
I’m guessing Orange County was pretty insulated from Vietnam protests and 9/11 nationalism. Orange County seems pretty insulated from most things happening in the rest of America.
I read this somewhere: "If the guy who serves you coffee has to live 40 miles away because he can't afford to live closer, then you don't live in a real city. You live in a theme park."
By that standard, the bulk of Orange County is actually a theme park.
Ooooh, good one! I'm gonna use this.
"On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist"
Well, my position is that the creation of modern Israel was a dumb idea. It shouldn't have been hard for the founders to see that creating a Jewish nation in a place already populated by a largely non-Jewish population could not be accomplished without grave injustice, which continues to this day. I mean, given that the Holocaust had just happened I understand why they did it. But still: dumb.
Is my position the same as Drum's quote? Discuss.
I think these people would be wary of you because you talk like a grownup.
I'll leave the comparison with Drum to others, but note that, charitably, that's an analysis from a particular starting point.
Leaving aside any arguments about the historical merits, your model doesn't seem to provide many options for thinking about the present in non-apocalyptic terms. It forces a complex multicultural, multinational set of sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating interests into frankly cartoonish Manichaeism terms that map really poorly to even the local drama, let alone the global tensions at play.
I do agree with your implicit point, that understanding history is absolutely essential to making sense of the present.
Early Zionists, up to maybe 1925, were more naive than evil. They really believed they were benefiting the locals, and this may have even been true up to around that time, when Jewish numbers were small enough to not be a political threat. This attitude grew increasingly untenable for the followers decade, as Palestinian voices rose again British rule and mass migration of Jews in increasing unison and volume. Sporadic violence also characterized this decade, uniquely being the only one where more Jews were killed than Arabs (though not by much, and the numbers were modest on both sides).
1936-1938 was the time of the first major Palestinian revolt, which the British eventually crushed. Larger scale violence and frequent terrorist attacks characterized this era, along with British military campaigns. Palestinians primary demands were an end to Jewish migration and land sales, which the British didn’t fully agree to and didn’t keep to what they promised. The Palestinians came out of this era disarmed and leaderless, leaving them too weak to win the war that came a decade later.
Your position is historically ignorant.
In 1947 the entire Palestine was about 1/3 Jewish. The plan, of course, was partition and the parts that were to be part of the Jewish state were majority Jewish.
Which was dumb, and led to exactly the situation we have today. Thank you for affirming my factual claims.
Well, wouldn't it be equally dumb to let the Palestinians rule the Jewish parts of the region?
Partition made sense.
Because that's called a 'false equivalence', MF.
In 1922, Palestine was about 8% Jewish. Then the British allowed large scale immigration by people ideologically committed to creating a state that definitionally excluded the other 92% from full citizenship.
The result has been pretty much exactly what anyone who seriously thought about it would have predicted.
Shrug. 2000 years ago Palestine was mostly Jewish. Then the Romans exiled / exterminated large numbers of them and other immigrants came in. Then there were Muslim invasions in the 8th century.
The result has been pretty much exactly what anyone who seriously thought about it would have predicted.
Why is the situation in 1922 privileged over that in 1949 or 1?
I am strongly of the opinion that the United States needs to cut off all diplomatic relations with and impose severe sanctions on the Roman Empire because o their policies of ethnic cleansing.
Why is the situation in 1922 privileged over that in 1949 or 1?
Because the rest of us aren't dishonest idiots.
Is Israel going to continue to exist? Yes, and it should. But, much like Americans understanding of the expansion of our country, Israelis need to grapple with the true history behind their country's founding. Until they do that, and understand that Israel was founded through illegal land theft and a racist commitment to overriding the rights of the people who already lived their, they will never be able to make peace, because they will never grasp that the Palestinians have extremely legitimate grievances.
You wish to help them persist in ignorance and evil.
There's not evidence it was 'mostly' then, either, MF.
@Five, so do you think that Jews should not have had a state of their own? Should the Jews of Europe have had to stay there in the shadows of the death camps? Should the Jews living in the extremely inhospitable Islamic Middle East been told to just suck it up, no state for you!
There are far too many questions where none of the answers are particularly good.
That is a very good question, in part because it is a common problem around the world. Many people are part of religious or ethnic minorities who are forced to live under constant threat, without a state of their own. The Karen, the Uighurs, and many others.
Right now we could be facing a third Congolese War, due to these same issues. When the group victimized by genocide becomes powerful enough to fight big wars, it can get very, very messy.
Not sure why you're ignoring the part where they're doing ethnic cleansing on the scale of the Romans, and often worse.
Kevin, I respect you and check in regularly to read your thoughts. But your “both sides are guilty” stances are bullshit. Israel is obviously a colonialist power. I believe that. But I don’t follow with the thought it has no right to exist.
More than half of all present day Israelis emigrated from or are descended from people who came from other parts of the Middle East, not Europe. Although the pre-1948 treatment of Jews in the Middle East wasn't as terrible as what happened in Europe, it wasn't great either. Additionally, while Jerusalem is a holy city to Muslims and Christians, it's the holiest city to Jews, their Mecca. Israel was also a rather sparsely populated area before 1948. It's Muslim population has expanded enormously since that time. Meanwhile, since that time, many Muslim countries used Israel as a way to force Jews out of their own populations.
I keep seeing people — regular people, not major politicians— trying to fit Jews and Muslims into the framework of "European colonist" vs. either Native Americans or Black Americans. It's not at all a good parallel, but it's a framing that Americans understand.
The idea that “we lived on this land a thousand years ago so we should be able to forcibly remove its current occupants and live there again” would be very interesting if applied to, say, any native people in the Americas or Australia. Sadly, this doctrine seems to only be allowable when it comes to Jewish people.
I don’t want to see Israel destroyed but it’s pretty obvious they’ve treated Palestinians terribly, starting with seizing their properties and forcing them all into reservations, and continuing with decades of stripping them of any equality, dignity or freedom.
No Palestinians are forced into reservations.
Palestinians who left Israel to allow the Arab armies free reign to kill every living person in the new nation are not allowed back. Palestinians who stayed are full citizens with the same rights and freedoms as every other Israeli citizen.
Israeli Arabs do not have the same rights as Israeli Jews. Here are two examples, though they are not the only ones:
1) Under the 1950 Law of Return, Israeli Jews are allowed to bring their families to the country, who are automatically granted citizenship. In 1970, this was extended to include non-Jewish spouses, children, and grandchildren.
Israeli Arabs do not have that right. If there families live in other Arab countries, or in the West Bank or Gaza, they are not allowed entry into Israel at all.
2) About 80% of the land in Israel is owned by three quasi-governmental organization, who lease it to individuals or businesses. (Interestingly, given the way Israel's supporters complain that the attempts to prevent land sales from public trusts to Jews was racist, these organizations are not permitted to sell land.) One of those three explicitly refuses to lease land to non-Jews. The other two just make it difficult.
Palestinians who left Israel to allow the Arab armies free reign to kill every living person in the new nation are not allowed back.
This is a violation of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel ratified in 1991.
MF, you are now lying.
Israel has treated the Palestinians badly. Netanyahu is a horrible person and a criminal and if I were an Israeli, I would hate Likud as much as I hate Republicans, maybe more. Their policies encouraging the illegal occupation of the Left Bank have made the problem far worse.
However, more than 60% of Israeli Jews are descended from immigrants/evictees from Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Morocco, etc. who more or less forcibly ejected them. The pressure to leave those countries started in the early 20th century, but increased in the 1940s. People were forced to leave their lives and possessions behind when they moved to Israel. If they weren't wanted in the Middle East or Europe where would they have been welcomed? How would you have moved hundreds of thousands of people out of the Middle East?
You undoubtedly have friends and neighbors who are Jewish. A few generations ago you wouldn’t have had anything to do with a Jew. Like the Roma, they were treated as pariahs at least from Roman times. It's a tiny worldwide population; 15 million vs 2 billion Christians and 2 billion Muslims.
"A few generations ago you wouldn’t have had anything to do with a Jew. Like the Roma, they were treated as pariahs at least from Roman times."
Nonsense. Saladin's personal physician was Moses Maimonides. Do not assume that everybody else treated Jews as badly as Christians did.
Ah. You were just talking about the 20th century, so your point is pretty much valid. My mistake.
That’s because Israel WAS a white European colonial project, including everything from the tremendously racist attitude that brown people had no more claim to their land than “dogs in a shed”, to quote Churchill, to early Zionists being wearing white safari hats being schlepped around by brown serfs as they toured the land they planned to colonize.
What went on during the Mandate era was clearly a grave injustice based on deep, pervasive racism, and until Israel comes to terms with its original sin and the reality that the colonial project was the first punch in the fight, there is no path to peace.
Since Israel doesn't want peace and never has, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait until the region has been ethnically cleansed for this understanding.
That’s because Israel WAS a white European colonial project...
One need not even go back to pre-WW2 times, the Balfour Declaration, the Ottoman Empire, and so forth.
Israel's post 1967 land grab and associated ethnic cleansing is pure conquest by force, aka colonialism. I mean, conquering a territory by force of arms; denying its inhabitants civil rights; and then proceeding to heavily subsidize and build settlements is pretty much the textbook definition of colonialism....and international law has ruled against Israel on this issue multiple times.
Do some Googling of Zionism.
Do some Googling of the Balfour Declaratiion.
Do some Googling of The British Mandate of Palestine.
The state of Israel was instigated by the UN
Did the UN ask the opinion of the Goyem of Palestine? Was there a plebiscite?
Seems to me the Palestinians got something shoved down their throats.
Do some Googling about the Gaza economy and how it has been wrecked by Israel and Egypt.
Here's an idea: Why don't we deduct the entire cost of the temporary pier operation and the relief supplies it brings, from the military aid we are now funneling into Israel.
Maybe that might get Bibi's attention.
Better... deduct it from the aid we are giving to the Palestinians. After all, the reason we are not setting up on shore at much lower cost is that we know that if we did so our troops would be attacked by the Palestinians they are supposed to be helping.
That makes sense if we were giving aid to the Palestinians. Especially military aid. Idiot.
Um... we are giving aid. We just airdropped some, apparently killing civilians.
We can't deliver aid without killing civilians but we expect Israel to root out Hamas without killing civilians - ridiculous.
But there is no question we are delivering aid.
Sigh. Israel's aid package from the U.S. under a 2016 Memorandum of Understanding was $38 billion over 10 years. That's $3.8 billion per year, or $10.4 million PER DAY. And that's before the floodgates opened after October 7th.
And let's see, we're airdropping a few Meals-Ready-to-Eat for the Palestinians.
Your sense of proportion seems a bit out of whack.
Deduct the aid from the aid?
MF, are you advocating genocide by starvation now?
How? As I've said before: I believe the defining feature of a conservative mind is a total lack of empathy for anyone you don't personally know.
Which means they suffer from a complete lack of imagination / a mirror neuron deficit, depending on your metaphysical stance on the subject.
The question then is what sort of say -- if any -- they should have in governance.
Both sides
DRINK!
meanwhile, the only place this sentiment exists
"On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist"
is in the fevered minds of reactionary centrists like Drum
...or you could read the comments above yours?
And then we all shake and tremble at how it was possible for 1938...how anyone could be so inhuman and monstrous. It doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
The "extremists" on the left believe that there is no right of the people who represent less than half of the population with a claim to a territory, and the one that largely came later, to have an ethnically defined state in that territory. Have liberals ever believed in such a right? Alternately the "right" could be thought to be that any state that exists has a right to continue to exist. But does any liberal actually think that apartheid South Africa had a right to exist on such a ground? Or that the collapse of the Soviet Union violated some right?
This is apparently being balanced by people who think that more than 2 million people should be starved to death. That is a pretty depressing bit of botherdiderism.
I would like to see a two state solution as probably the most practical way to get to peace. But it is absurd to think that this would be a matter of "right" As if the Jewish minority is entitled by right to control 78% of the territory shared by two people. It is silly to think this is a reflection of morality rather than a reflection of the power imbalance between the two sides.
The people who deny the right of Israel to exist should be considered more of a parallel with the extremists who believe the Palestinians do not have a right to a state. But, of course, that is not considered an extreme position at all.
Um... I do not think any serious historian disputes that the Jews came before the Palestinians.
In addition there is broad agreement pretty much everywhere except among Palestinians and their supporters, including in Israel, that the long term solution is a two state solution once Palestinians mostly stop trying to kill Israelis. Very few Israelis are demanding a Jewish state from the river to the sea. Can you say the same about Palestinians?
Other than the utterly obvious point that Judaism is older than Islam, what’s your point. Genetically Palestinians are just as related to the Biblical era tribesmen of that region as Jews. 80+ generations results in near complete homogenization.
Shrug. Lon Becker says the Jews came later. He is wrong. I pointed that out.
Culturally, of course, Palestinians are a product of Muslim Arab colonialism - they were converted at sword point by Muslim invaders.
No, you are wrong, about both the genetics and the culture; there are Palestinian Christians, and have been since the first century CE.
Denying that other religions and people existed. Interesting tack, MF, also bigoted.
Of course if the Palestinians are descended from the Philistines then the Palestinians were there first. But then the idea that people would make these claims on a Biblical basis rather than on the actual populations living in the region is absurd. I can't think of any other situation in which someone would make such a claim not expecting to look silly.
A few years back Egypt filed a lawsuit based on the fact that they controlled Israel prior to the Jews. It was clearly meant to mock this kind of argument, rather than as a serious legal argument.
When you say that almost nobody in Israel tales the side of controlling from the river to the sea is that because you are unaware that the democratically elected government of Israel takes that position? By contrast, the PA has accepted the idea of a two state solution. The only thing is that the want the Palestinian state to be an actual state, something that no Israeli government has seemed to agree about. What Barak was offering was not a state. What Olmert was offering was not a state. And those are the best offers that have been made by Israel in my lifetime.
That's why the slogan 'Israel has a right to exist!' is an expression of religious bigotry. 'My book is better than your book and my book says I can take your stuff because I'm special' has never been well-recieved when those precepts are baldly stated.
As with many of the defenses of Israel it is something that looks like a moral principle and can be used to defend Israel so it is spouted. But it does seem to just be a confusion of different ideas which are not spelled out because none of them actually works.
One is the idea that groups are entitled to a national state, and so Jews are. But then all of the groups that do not get their own states shows the unseriousness of this claim. I suspect this is the argument you are calling racist, and you certainly are not wrong.
But mixed with this I think is the idea that countries that exist generally have certain rights. The modern world, with its diminishment of war, is based on the idea that countries should not be invaded by their neighbors. But there are limits to this, a country on the territory that Israel controls has a right to exist, but there is no right for what is likely the Jewish minority to control that state. And even if it is a slight majority that would still not create a right to disregard the almost half the population that is not Jewish.
What is true is that Israel's founding is no less legitimate than the founding of the US or Australia on territory taken from local people. The difference, of course, is that the US and Australia are not currently maintaining apartheid states with efforts to convince the natives to move who knows where by making life for them miserable within Israel.
How can it be so easy to turn so many of us into brutal mass killers?
This is overwrought. There isn’t a damn thing you or I or anyone reading this can do to prevent what’s happening in Gaza. I won’t pick sides. It’s not my fault they hate each other. It’s not my fault bad things happened decades ago before any of us were born. And it’s not my fault most everyone there suffers from religious delusions.
Their gods must hate them to make them suffer so much. Maybe they’re all just fucking idiots who deserve it.
And if Mr. Drum made a chart showing deaths in war by year, I think he’d find 2023 showed a downward trend so we really ought to be celebrating the improvement.
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-years
You would not know it from the headlines, but today we're living through one of the most peaceful times in human history. This great chart from Oxford's Max Roser — which shows the global death rate from war over the past 600-plus years — shows just how lucky we are.
Lucky us! 😂
Pope Francis has said in an interview that Ukraine should have what he called the courage of the "white flag" and negotiate an end to the war with Russia that followed Moscow's full-scale invasion two years ago and that has killed tens of thousands.
Perhaps Hamas, which is losing so badly its own people are starving to death, should take pity on their friends and neighbors and surrender. Obviously the evil Jews are far more powerful and ruthless than Hamas so it's time to admit defeat.
It's not my fault either, but it is my responsibility.
It's not your fault, but it is also your responsibility.
It is nobody's fault, and it is everyone's responsibility to treat each other with respect. The failure to treat another person with respect enables disrespect. Respect is to enabling what up is to down.
And while I'm on the subject, justice is to retribution what up is to down.
Translation: enabling and retribution are two sides of the same coin.
Responsibility you say. I really don’t imagine anyone there cares much what I think about their religious blood feud.
This may surprise you but a good way to prevent people from starving to death is to provide them with food. Drum was talking about people arguing against providing food to starving people. The US is capable of providing food, although it is less clear how much it can do about distributing it in a war zone.
So your comment seems somewhat bizarre in this context. You seem to want to defend callousness even if it requires suggesting a lack of understanding of the situation.
There are a few other conflicts which feature innocent people being killed, but none of you can be bothered by those. You’ve got this Palestinian hobby horse to ride.
"The pro-starvation wing of conservatism is alive and well"
Kevin, Kevin, Kevin
They are not the pro starvation wing. They are watching the Gazan's diets!! Why, they are using incendiary bombs to start the fires the Gazans can cook over !!!!
Letting only some aid go through?
Intermittent fasting! (For the first of Ramadan, I'm sure)
You mis-characterize the conservatives approach!
Tsk, Tsk, Tsk........
I mean they proudly display their Christian crosses ala Kari Lake and Sen Britt!
You can believe EVRYTHING that comes out of their mouths................./s
Most people find it very difficult to hold two apparently contradictory ideas in their heads simultaneously. It’s easier for us to think about Russo-Ukraine, which is about as clear cut a bad guy—good guy situation as you’ll ever see in a war. In the Middle East at this point there’s very bad guys (Bibi) and even worse guys (Hamas), along with a bunch of people caught in the middle. Rather than face this unpleasant reality, we prefer to identify with one side (picked based on our pre-existing tribal identities), whitewash them, and demonize the other. It takes active mental work to resist this pull, as our brains are wired for dichotomous thinking.
You've got your bad-guy order relation wrong.
States do not have rights.
States do not have rights.
States do not have rights.
Surely we all agree on this. Anyone who beiieves otherwise is free to introduce arguments and evidence as to why this is not so; the only time I have heard this nonsense -- and I do mean the only time -- is in connection with Israel.
I agree. No-one ever says the Confederacy, the Soviet Union, or for that matter the Ottoman Empire etc. etc. had a right to exist, Every place in the world was previously part of some other country, or, even if it’s an island nation where the borders really do define ethnicity (such as Japan) they had a previous government they now claim to disavow, or, like England, their ruling clan owned themselves beaten in a previous war at some point (even though England’s next king will be named William, they’re not claiming the historical patrimony of William’s Normandy).
Personally I’ve always wondered why the Roman conquest doesn’t cancel out any Jewish right to a state. The Romans won fair and square according to the rules of war at the time, so why doesn’t that break the chain of title?
Anyhow, the Palestinians were always there, it’s clearly the same name as the Philistines of the Bible. So the fight now is the original Philistines vs. the original Zealots - of course it’s ugly.
People feel a need to say that the Israeli nation has a right to exist because a LOT of people and countries for a long time and still have said that it does not. That is not the case with England.
And as to your suggestion that the Roman conquest and expulsion might have ended the Jews rights to that land, if you were to apply the same logic to the current situation, well, Israel has been there over 80 years now...
Not trying to particularly disagree with you here; I am a 2-state solution guy
England does not define itself by its ethnicity.
The Jews do not have a right to their own state. No ethnic group does.
The Bosnian Serbs did not have a right to their own state.
Anglo-Canadians do not have a right to their own state, and neither do French-Canadians.
The Hutus did not have a right to their own state.
Romanians and Hungarians do not have a right to their own states.
The Bamar do not have a right to their own state.
The idea of national self-determination is widely viewed as the source of legitimacy for states and is considered to define a "Nation." Israel is clearly a national group who wish their own state. If a people considers itself a nation, we do not get to tell them that they are not (Ask the Ukrainians about that, for instance).
Your exclusion of ethnicity as a foundation for being a nation is ahistorical. The world is full of national groups defined by ethnicity, ranging from Kosovars to Vietnamese to Armenians to... well, most of Eurasia frankly. I am not sure why you are making this distinction.
Israel does not believe that Ukraine has the right to defend itself. Israel does not believe that Ukraine has the right to exist.
Notice the troll gives neither argument nor cites that 'states have rights', among them, 'the right to defend itself' and/or 'the right to exist'.
In fact, as in so many other things, this can be traced back to the stinky confections of a propaganda shop. Remember 'A land without a people for a people without a land'? Tango does. Tango does and he approves. Fuckin' troll.
So, are you arguing that the Bosnian Serbs did have a right to ethnically cleanse their Bosniak neighbors in order to create their own national state? Were the Hutus in the right for trying to eliminate the Tutsi presence in Rwanda? Are the tribal groups in Myanmar a threat to a Bamar state? Those are certainly the implications of your position.
National self-determination sounds like a good idea on the surface. In practice, it's a human rights disaster.
The Treaty of Westphalia is the closest thing to an endorsement of the notion that 'states have rights'. And it said nothing even close.
Are you kidding me? National self-determination has been the foundation of state legitimacy around most of the world since Versailles, has been enshrined in the UN charter, was the justification for states like Poland and Finland and later for decolonization. You may think its a bad idea but the world thinks otherwise, and I am not sure what alternative you had... perhaps you would like to bring back the Habsburg Empire?
The Israelis are without doubt a national group that wants their own state. As are the Palestinians.
You apparently believe that national groups based on ethnicity are somehow not deserving of self-determination and their own state?
You know, having your own ethnic national state does not inevitably mean that you mistreat or ethnically cleanse minorities. I did not imply it nor does it follow logically from my argument.
Word salad from a troll? I'm shocked, I tell, you, shocked.
Ever notice how these guys get increasingly incoherent the later the day gets? I suspect a fairish proportion of our trolls are enthusiastic drunk posters. That's the kindest way I can think of to explain this gibberish.
National self-determination has been the foundation of state legitimacy around most of the world since Versailles, has been enshrined in the UN charter, was the justification for states like Poland and Finland and later for decolonization.
The justification for the creation of Finland was the fall of Tsarist Russia. The justification for the creation of Poland was Allied victory in World War I. Decolonization happened because weakened European countries weren't capable of holding on to overseas territories. None required Woodrow Wilson calling for national self-determination.
The weakness, almost fraudulent, nature of national self-determination was apparent almost immediately. The Sudetenland remained a part of Czechoslovakia despite the wishes of its population, and it was absolutely the right thing to do, given Germany's implacable hostility to the existence of Czechoslovakia. The strife between Hungarians and Romanians was utterly unresolvable under a framework of national self-determination.
You may think its a bad idea but the world thinks otherwise, and I am not sure what alternative you had... perhaps you would like to bring back the Habsburg Empire?
My alternative is that states should not be determined be ethnicity. All citizens should be equal, and the identity of their ancestors has no place is determining whether or not they are considered full citizens.
The Israelis are without doubt a national group that wants their own state. As are the Palestinians.
That the century of deadly conflict about this hasn't clued you in to the dangers is very telling, mostly about your skills of observation.
You apparently believe that national groups based on ethnicity are somehow not deserving of self-determination and their own state?
Correct. They must, inevitably, share those states with those of different nationalities. Having defined their state by the ethnicity of the majority inherently means that they are casting those other ethnicities as outsiders.
You know, having your own ethnic national state does not inevitably mean that you mistreat or ethnically cleanse minorities.
Yes, it does. Casting your state as being that of one ethnicity necessarily implies that others do not really belong. That may not seem like much to you, but it's important.
I did not imply it nor does it follow logically from my argument.
That you cannot grasp such a basic idea as an ethnically defined state necessarily leading to inferior status for others is, again, very telling, in a way that does not reflect well on you.
Well argued. I would add that tango’s own examples contradict his premise; Finland has significant Swedish-speaking and Mari minorities. Poland was given the German provinces of Silesia and Pomerania as a consolation prize for having lost Galicia to Ukraine. As small as Netherlands is, it has a Frisian minority, as does neighboring Germany. Europe’s borders have been set as much by conquest, and by the marriages and procreation of the nobility, as by ethnicity.
This line of argument has to be the most bizarre yet from you folks who I broadly see as anti-Israel. I have never seen it ANYWHERE else (maybe because I usually do not read Jacobin or something) and if you presented this stuff to nearly anyone who was not in your niche ideological group, people would look at you all like WTF. Just utterly bizarro land.
Okay. How granular do you want to make this principle of national self-determination. There is currently a civil war ongoing in Myanmar between the central government, dominated by the Bamar ethnic group, and various tribal groups. Depending upon how you aggregate, there are somewhere between 7 and 134 other ethnic groups. Does every ethnicity have a right to its own state?
There is also the problem I have mentioned, through the Romanians and Hungarians, that ethnic groups are hopelessly intermingled. What does national self-determination tell us about how to resolve such a situation?
Where is the boundary for how far one ethnic group is allowed to go to establish its own state? The far boundary is the genocide in Rwanda. I strongly suspect that you don't think the should be allowed to go that far, but what is acceptable? Does it matter if the minority, in an attempt to exercise its own national self-determination, actively resists assimilation into someone else's ethic state?
National self-determination sounds like a great idea. In practice, it doesn't work. You can point to some examples where it does, but the principle is very obviously applied sporadically, and many ethnic groups around the world aren't allowed to exercise it.
I don’t know how to take ‘deserving’ in this context. There is no supranational authority* to decide who gets a state and who doesn’t. When I mention conquest and succession of nobility as determinants — these are just historical facts.
*The EU isn’t going to press for the creation of a Friesland, or encourage Catalonia to secede, but the European Constitution (Article 21) does prohibit any discrimination on ethnicity, language religion, gender, and a host of other factors within member states.
Agreed. I said the same above.
Even if I grant that states have some sort of pseudo-rights, my opinion towards Israel is that it earns them the day it reaches a fair and just settlement with the Palestinians. They have never come within a million miles of making a qualifying offer.
If you were to ask a Zionist in 1900 if 'Israel has the right to exist', they would have answered in the affirmative. Anyone who endorses the phrase is endorsing religious bigotry, nothing more, nothing less.
For what it's worth, I generally regard Mr Drum's extreme characterizations of extreme US political positions not as "figntin' words" but as hyperbole, designed to spur discussion.
Which they do. Well played, sir!
"On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist—a position that even the PLO abandoned 30 years ago."
I don't believe that nations have rights; only individual people do. If you accept that the people who formed Israel had the right to do it, you have to accept that the people who preceded them in the territory did not have the right to form their own state and to limit immigration to it. And you probably have to accept that the Zionists had the right to expel the Arabs from the territory they claimed for their state in order to have the ethnic makeup of the state that they wanted.
It is sometimes claimed that the Palestinians have had numerous opportunities to have peace, but they have rejected them all. These claims are almost entirely dishonest: they accept as "fair" whatever offers the Israelis made the Palestinians, and blame the Palestinians for not accepting them.
The reality is that the Zionists have had over a hundred years, and the Israelis have had seventy-five years, to make peace with the people whom they drove from the territory that became Israel, and they have failed to do so. They probably stopped trying a few decades ago, when they began the massive expansion of their illegal settlements in the West Bank.
The Western World has cut Israel A LOT of slack in what it has done because of historic European antisemitism and the Holocaust; I cut Israel a lot of slack because of this.
But Israel has squandered the goodwill of the world.
Any hope for a two state solution is dead, mostly at the hands of Israel. And Israelis have forever refused to admit the Palestinians into a one state solution as anything near equal citizens; really, some of the incentive for Israel's genocide of Gaza might be related to the fact that Israeli and Palestinian populations in Israel and the Occupied Territories combined are pretty close to equal now, giving lie to the notion that Israel is really a democracy. A few hundred thousand Palestinians killed or driven out tips the scales.
Anyway, the reasonable outcome I see is dismantling Israel. I expect that it will happen eventually, probably violently, whether the West wants it or not. It might be better if we try to encourage it to happen without violence.
My personal opinion regarding Israel. Once you give ‘someone’ something for free they either want more or they become greedy. Israel became greedy with their freebee.
Israel from its creation was a settler-colonialist state, as at the time indigenous Jews were already outnumbered by Zionists from Europe. In fact if one wants to go back to biblical times, the Holy Land was a setter-colonialist state from the time original inhabitants were genocided by escapees from Egypt. Nonetheless Liberal Zionism did recognize Palestinian rights and desired peace with them.
I think it all started going definitively wrong when Rabin was killed by a settler supporter. In panic at the thought that Jew could kill Jew, Israelis started appeasing the violent elements in their midst. Basically by giving them everything they wanted. Now 95% of the population thinks the slaughter and starvation in Gaza was either appropriate or insufficient. I'm not sure there's redemption when things get that bad.
But I think we on the outside should realize that the far right and settlers in Israel don't really believe they're victims. Others Jews do but they don't. They just use that card against the rest of the world. And this will lead Israel into isolation. People abroad won't be bludgeoned into calling babies Amalek. They'll continue to call them babies no matter how much the likes of Gallant and Netanyahu scream.