My Passover press release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – From the university campuses of Assyria to the thoroughfares of Ur to the palaces of the Hittite Empire, students across the Fertile Crescent have formed human chains, camel caravans, and even makeshift tent cities to protest the oppression of innocent Egyptians by the rogue proto-nation of “Israel” and its vengeful, warlike deity Yahweh. According to leading human rights organizations, the Hebrews, under the leadership of a bearded extremist known as Moses or “Genocide Moe,” have unleashed frogs, wild beasts, hail, locusts, cattle disease, and other prohibited collective punishments on Egypt’s civilian population, regardless of the humanitarian cost.
Human-rights expert Asenath Albanese says that “under international law, it is the Hebrews’ sole responsibility to supply food, water, and energy to the Egyptian populace, just as it was their responsibility to build mud-brick store-cities for Pharoah. Turning the entire Nile into blood, and plunging Egypt into neverending darkness, are manifestly inconsistent with the Israelites’ humanitarian obligations.”
Israelite propaganda materials have held these supernatural assaults to be justified by Pharoah’s alleged enslavement of the Hebrews, as well as unverified reports of his casting all newborn Hebrew boys into the Nile. Chanting “Let My People Go,” some Hebrew counterprotesters claim that Pharoah could end the plagues at any time by simply releasing those held in bondage.
Yet Ptahmose O’Connor, Chair of Middle East Studies at the University of Avaris, retorts that this simplistic formulation ignores the broader context. “Ever since Joseph became Pharoah’s economic adviser, the Israelites have enjoyed a position of unearned power and privilege in Egypt. Through underhanded dealings, they even recruited the world’s sole superpower—namely Adonai, Creator of the Universe—as their ally, removing any possibility that Adonai could serve as a neutral mediator in the conflict. As such, Egypt’s oppressed have a right to resist their oppression by any means necessary. This includes commonsense measures like setting taskmasters over the Hebrews to afflict them with heavy burdens, and dealing shrewdly with them lest they multiply.”
Professor O’Connor, however, dismissed the claims of drowned Hebrew babies as unverified rumors. “Infanticide accusations,” he explained, “have an ugly history of racism, Orientalism, and Egyptophobia. Therefore, unless you’re a racist or an Orientalist, the only possible conclusion is that no Hebrew babies have been drowned in the Nile, except possibly by accident, or of course by Hebrews themselves looking for a pretext to start this conflict.”
Meanwhile, at elite academic institutions across the region, the calls for justice have been deafening. “From the Nile to the Sea of Reeds, free Egypt from Jacob’s seeds!” students chanted. Some protesters even taunted passing Hebrew slaves with “go back to Canaan!”, though others were quick to disavow that message. According to Professor O’Connor, it’s important to clarify that the Hebrews don’t belong in Canaan either, and that finding a place where they do belong is not the protesters’ job.
In the face of such stridency, a few professors and temple priests have called the protests anti-Semitic. The protesters, however, dismiss that charge, pointing as proof to the many Hebrews and other Semitic peoples in their own ranks. For example, Sa-Hathor Goldstein, who currently serves as Pithom College’s Chapter President of Jews for Pharoah, told us that “we stand in solidarity with our Egyptian brethren, with the shepherds, goat-workers, and queer and mummified voices around the world. And every time Genocide Moe strikes down his staff to summon another of Yahweh’s barbaric plagues, we’ll be right there to tell him: Not In Our Name!”
“Look,” Goldstein added softly, “my own grandparents were murdered by Egyptian taskmasters. But the lesson I draw from my family’s tragic history is to speak up for oppressed people everywhere—even the ones who are standing over me with whips.”
“If Yahweh is so all-powerful,” Goldstein went on to ask, “why could He not devise a way to free the Israelites without a single Egyptian needing to suffer? Why did He allow us to become slaves in the first place? And why, after each plague, does He harden Pharoah’s heart against our release? Not only does that tactic needlessly prolong the suffering of Israelites and Egyptians alike, it also infringes on Pharoah’s bodily autonomy.”
But the strongest argument, Goldstein concluded, arching his eyebrow, is that “ever since I started speaking out on this issue, it’s been so easy to get with all the Midianite chicks at my school. That’s because they, like me, see past the endless intellectual arguments over ‘who started’ or ‘how’ or ‘why’ to the emotional truth that the suffering just has to stop, man.”
Last night, college towns across the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile were aglow with candelight vigils for Baka Ahhotep, an Egyptian taskmaster and beloved father of three cruelly slain by “Genocide Moe,” in an altercation over alleged mistreatment of a Hebrew slave whose details remain disputed.
According to Caitlyn Mentuhotep, a sophomore majoring in hieroglyphic theory at the University of Pi-Ramesses who attended her school’s vigil for Ahhotep, staying true to her convictions hasn’t been easy in the face of Yahweh’s unending plagues—particularly the head lice. “But what keeps me going,” she said, “is the absolute certainty that, when people centuries from now write the story of our time, they’ll say that those of us who stood with Pharoah were on the right side of history.”
Have a wonderful holiday!
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Comment #1 April 22nd, 2024 at 4:42 pm
This is not funny. People are dying. Hostages are suffering. Even if you think it’s all Hamas’s fault, this is in poor taste.
Comment #2 April 22nd, 2024 at 4:55 pm
Carlana #1: Well, I thought hard about it. But then I reflected that Jews made jokes even about the Holocaust while it was in progress (I could tell you some), as a way to cope with the reality. And also, that I’d only make a joke if it was at least 70% milder than something that The Onion (say) would do from its “Zionists love killing babies” perspective.
Comment #3 April 22nd, 2024 at 5:43 pm
You should be ashamed of yourself for using Passover as an opportunity to make a joke about an ongoing genocide. This is beyond smug.
Comment #4 April 22nd, 2024 at 5:52 pm
You know, Scott, Goldstien had a point. Why didn’t the creator of the universe simply teleport everybody somewhere safe? I had always seen that story as more of a resigned observation of the way things are (as in, yes, you *will* pay the price if you let a blockhead become Pharaoh, even if you didn’t vote for him), than a template for mankind’s attempts at justice. Supposing the wrong person won the next presidential election, it would be likely that we’d all be caught up in whatever plagues were in store, but I am not so resigned that I would say I had deserved them.
Comment #5 April 22nd, 2024 at 6:04 pm
Sam #3: The whole point is that framing what’s happening as an “ongoing genocide” requires as much willful denial of relevant context, as framing the Exodus as “the story of God’s genocide of the righteous and innocent Egyptians” (as, I concede, some people would also in all seriousness do). Anyway, anyone who wants the long, earnest version can read my previous post.
Comment #6 April 22nd, 2024 at 6:18 pm
Concerned #4: Oh, of course he has a point! Did you think I could write such a piece without giving voice to the serious arguments on the Egyptian side? (Of course, once you’ve assumed an omnipotent god, your moral problems then get hopelessly tangled up with the usual problems of theodicy.)
Comment #7 April 22nd, 2024 at 6:32 pm
Great writing, Scott!
Please ignore those who pretend to chastise you for it. They know well it’s *satire*, which is different from a “joke”.
Comment #8 April 22nd, 2024 at 8:00 pm
I think there are limits when it comes to humor, and some topics are just too personal and painful to laugh at.
For my family, it’s the Holocaust, because my grandfather died in a Nazi concentration camp.
One night he was on watch duty, drunk as usual, and was found dead the next morning, mauled by Rex, his loyal German shepherd.
Comment #9 April 22nd, 2024 at 8:17 pm
fred #8: The version I’d heard involves a far-right politician who refutes the charge of antisemitism by pointing out that he, too, had a loved one die in Auschwitz (by falling off the guard tower).
Comment #10 April 22nd, 2024 at 8:39 pm
Scott, I can see what you’re going for. But, as a joke – it doesn’t work for me. It almost backfires. I’ve found the aspect of the killing of the firstborn to be especially creepy. That’s the whole name of the holiday – “pass-over”. It’s basically “Our superpower patron, after committing repeated acts of terrorism against the civilian population of Egypt, literally killed a bunch their children, but we didn’t take any casualties – and finally, escalating the terrorism to baby-killing worked! YAY US!”. Is that really a morality you want? Just what lesson do you think is going to be drawn from it? The whole plagues story is rife with the concept of “All civilians are collectively guilty and acceptable targets since they’re part of the oppressive group”. Again, do you want to be supporting that?
Step back for a moment and consider stuff like “assaults to be justified by Pharoah’s alleged enslavement of the Hebrews” is going to map uncomfortably well to “assaults to be justified by Israel’s alleged theft of land from Palestinians and turning them into refugees”. Note, I am not saying the latter is a correct claim. But if you write a supposed satire with the idea of “isn’t mass terrorism completely obviously justified by oppression?”, it’s not a good idea to rely on an implicit assumption “but my oppression was true and your oppression is false” – especially where there’s a lot of misery to go around.
Yeah, what about all those “shepherds, goat-workers”, etc? Too bad for them, wrong place, wrong time, they should have opposed Pharoah (even though they’d be killed)? They were probably Pharoah-supporters, so making them suffer and die was good, or at most regrettable? Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs? Brr … Again that’s why it doesn’t work.
Comment #11 April 22nd, 2024 at 8:59 pm
I remember back in the 2000s, when the main Internet discourse was about creationism and the New Atheist movement and the like, the things I saw write on the topic were generally aligned with the New Atheists. It is easy, especially now that those flames have died down, to think of that New Atheist rhetoric as cringey and overblown, attacking all religion based on very literal interpretations that only a small minority believe in. This post is good demonstration for why New Atheists used such extreme rhetoric.
The God of Abrahamic scripture is an evil creature, and we are better off with him not existing. We have progressed far beyond the ancient morality these texts teach. Appealing to them as a guide to morality is only acceptable if it is not done seriously, but instead reading selectively to make them appear to match what we know now. It’s not just Exodus; the Bible depicts God committing and sanctioning constant atrocities against the enemies of his “Chosen People”, based on the Bronze Age morality where it is only bad to kill members of the ingroup, and honorable to kill members of the outgroup. And also the creation of Hell, and so on.
A major source of conflict, tho not the only source, in the Middle East comes from people taking seriously the terrible parts of scripture as a guide. I expected better from you.
Comment #12 April 22nd, 2024 at 9:01 pm
Seth Finkelstein #10: In a moral comparison, I would indeed say that the IDF comes off incomparably better than the Yahweh of Exodus. Yahweh killed innocent Egyptian babies even though, being Yahweh, he obviously could’ve found some way to get the Israelites out of Egypt without doing that. (Although what’s one more drop in the bucket, alongside all the innocent suffering throughout history that Yahweh caused or failed to prevent?)
On the other hand, the Hebrews of Exodus are sort of absolved of guilt by Yahweh doing all the killing rather than them. (Well, Moses is at least an accessory to the violence.) And certainly the story presents the Hebrews as having an extremely legitimate grievance against Pharoah and everyone loyal to him, so that discussing Egyptian suffering while conspicuously never mentioning Egypt’s enslavement and genocide of the Hebrews would be as morally bankrupt as (say) discussing Palestinian suffering without mentioning the Grand Mufti’s and Muslim Brotherhood’s and PLO’s and Hamas’s century of genocidal intent toward the Jews and rejection of peace proposals, from which the tragic suffering is downstream. And this aggressive erasure of moral context is precisely the thing that the global left now does at 300-decibel volume.
Comment #13 April 22nd, 2024 at 9:06 pm
I have no horse in this race – wishing Jews well, as much as any other random culture on Earth, etc etc.
But since you mention Jahweh repeatedly, I do wonder sometimes, if being the one culture to successfully go around claiming that their God was true and everyone else’s wasn’t, may have been the original seed of discord that brought the Jewish people to their peculiar, uncomfortable place within human history, for three millennia and counting.
Maybe I’m weird, but I believe in the power of beliefs. And it’s a testimony to the symbolic power of this act of affirmation that, thousands of years later, the world’s biggest religions have inherited the Jewish God. Not Quetzalcoatl or Zeus or Dionysus or Ra or Rudra or Odin, but the one God from a small tribe who gave it this unprecedented asymmetric push.
Culture and nations are, at some level, peers upon the Earth. But what kind of peer can a tribe be, and be taken for, when they claim the Universe’s Singular Creator as their uniquely direct ally and friend?
Just idle thought here, no attempt at being constructive or proposing practical solutions for anything. Not even a bit of humor, sorry. But I do have a general feeling that these symbolic things matter, and that a large part of the animosity that arises even today towards Israel is ultimately connected to the sheer brazenness of this founding myth.
Comment #14 April 22nd, 2024 at 9:20 pm
Well it’s… definitely satire, yes. And I guess I can see what you were trying for? But it lands *really* badly for me.
Comment #15 April 22nd, 2024 at 9:47 pm
Itai Bar-Natan #11: The notion that I’d be unaware of just how far the Bronze Age morality of the Book of Exodus falls short of modern enlightened liberalism is … something!
Yes, there’s an excellent reason why Jews all over the world, at their Seders tonight, will be doing their best to gloss over the various barbarities in their culture’s origin story. They should squirm with discomfort at them (the drops of wine placed on one’s plate to remember the sufferings of the Egyptians are a good step in the right direction; I never omit that part).
But then it’s precisely the immensity of the gap between then and now that makes it so remarkable that the theme of “wildly improbable Jewish survival in the face of powerful despots obsessed with annihilating the Jews,” and even a bunch of ancillary themes connected to that theme (fear and resentment of Jews’ economic success, Jews blamed when they finally strike back against their oppressors, etc), are entirely as relevant right now as they were 3000 years ago.
Look, this morning I woke up to the news that Columbia University has moved all its classes to Zoom, essentially because the university can no longer ensure the physical safety of its Jewish students in the face of anti-Israel protests that have now crossed over into overt antisemitism and violence. So, right there on the Upper West Side, today, is an incipient 1938 Germany, being held in check only by the Enlightenment ideals of the United States and the physical power of the NYPD. Wouldn’t it be bizarre to celebrate Passover without thinking about that — about how much has changed over the millennia, but also how little?
Comment #16 April 22nd, 2024 at 10:46 pm
urghan k #13: Well, you can probably blame Judaism for introducing the idea “our tiny little tribe has a special covenant with the Creator of the Universe, which gives us special obligations, but all the other peoples on earth can live happy, fulfilled lives without needing to accept the special covenant, unless they choose it.” But you should probably credit Christianity and then Islam for the key further innovation, “we have a special relationship with the Creator of the Universe, and therefore we ought to help everyone else on the planet enjoy that special relationship as well, by persuasion or, if that doesn’t work, force.”
Comment #17 April 22nd, 2024 at 11:43 pm
Post soviet era ironically also seemed like a post religious society in the West, with rapid progress in economy, digital technologies and social empowerment. Alas until religion reared its head back again into the mainstream, bringing along the extreme view points of wokeism.
Wish this attached video provides an optimistic viewpoint, turns out to be true. Is there any way science(including AI) can predict human behavior to the point where optimism for human future is valid based on scientific method than mere hope ? Ron talks about “blossoming awareness reaching critical mass” – how is this more science based than faith based ? A recent counter example is the response to pandemic as society as a whole. With the science and technology at our disposal, the response for this should have been a cakewalk. However response across the world was far more primitive. And the notable exception of Australia in their superb way of handling gets no appreciation..
Comment #18 April 23rd, 2024 at 12:18 am
My belief continues to be that tribal conflicts continue for the Jewish tribe that result from a genetic heritage that confers above average intelligence and engenders jealousy.
Jewish religion it seems to me was similar to Egyptian religion with an afterlife and judgement of the soul but just simplified matters with a single God. It doesn’t seem to me a revolutionary development. It is however much easier to attribute war making to theology-so let’s take their land and treasure-rather than the observation that they are more competent than we are-so let’s take their land and treasure. Jewish traditions have served to preserve key components of the gene set through these thousands of years and jealousy still a component of human motivation. Jewish people have land and treasure and there are tribes who are covetous and will strike to take when circumstances allow.
The real treasure of the Jewish tribe is their DNA and that can’t be stolen until genetic engineering advances sufficiently.
Comment #19 April 23rd, 2024 at 4:26 am
Scott #15:
> anti-Israel protests that have now crossed over into overt antisemitism and violence
> right there on the Upper West Side, today, is an incipient 1938 Germany
Seems hyperbolic to me.
Reuters: “no reports of any physical harm against any student”
(https://www.reuters.com/world/us/columbia-university-cancels-in-person-classes-after-pro-palestinian-protests-2024-04-22/)
Columbia Spectator: “The NYPD reported no violence or injuries associated with the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.””
(https://www.columbiaspectator.com/city-news/2024/04/18/adams-nypd-announce-over-108-arrests-during-gaza-solidarity-encampment-sweep/)
Comment #20 April 23rd, 2024 at 5:42 am
Richard M #19: Have you read firsthand accounts of Jewish students who were attacked? It’s bad enough that Columbia took the drastic step of moving all classes online, and that universities struggling to contain a 1968-like breakdown of order is literally the top story in the NYT right now. Like with everything else about this conflict, there seem to be alternate realities depending where you look.
Comment #21 April 23rd, 2024 at 6:32 am
From my position of probably being too ignorant of all the history, I think it would be nice if the Palestinians and Jews could kiss and make up. The current situation is making nobody happy.
People go on about how incompatible the desires of the two are, but they thinking too linearly. One side says Palestine should be ‘from the river to the sea’ – that is, from the Mediterranean sea to the river Jordan. And they claim that this leaves no space for Israel to exist.
This is obviously nonsense. Gaza is on the Mediterranean and the Golan heights are on the river already, and all we need to do is link them up – land is essentially two-dimensional at scale. Israel should decide whether it wants to be to the north or south, and give up a little strip of land around the other edge.
Problem solved, let’s move on.
Comment #22 April 23rd, 2024 at 6:44 am
Scott #16: But you should probably credit Christianity and then Islam for the key further innovation, “we have a special relationship with the Creator of the Universe, and therefore we ought to help everyone else on the planet enjoy that special relationship as well, by persuasion or, if that doesn’t work, force.”
My thoughts exactly. To put it in crude judgmental terms, early Judaism stumbled upon the toxic idea of theistic exclusivity, and if you buy my loose argument, suffered historically for it. But at least they had the decency to keep that to themselves! Fast forward a number of centuries, and the early Christians took the same toxic pill and felt the need to share it with the whole world, turning into a much stronger poison. Islam came even later, by that time it was old news but it didn’t help that they also took it.
Then again, I don’t think it’s very helpful to think in terms of blame for things that happened millennia ago. In a way it’s an impersonal memetic gradient descent, if an idea becomes available, it only takes one person to stumble into it, and mouth it into a milieu that may or not resonate. The very idea of theistic exclusivism probably had precedents in Egypt and in early Zoroastrianism, so if Moses hadn’t run with it somebody else probably would. But I stand by my stated belief that these kinds of beliefs can have strong, painful and far-reaching historical consequences.
Comment #23 April 23rd, 2024 at 7:00 am
Obviously Notusingreal McName #21: Like P versus NP, or like the white rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has a gargantuan history of well-meaning people asking “how hard could this possibly be?” … and then painfully learning the answer to their question.
“Just give each side a piece of the territory and be done with it” is, I believe, essentially correct, and indeed has been the position of liberal Zionists like myself since forever!
The trouble is that, once avenging the “humiliation” of Israel’s creation became the central political goal of a huge part of the Islamic world, once multiple generations were brought up marinated in that ideology, and once a predictable counter-reaction developed on the Israeli side … then this was no longer a real estate dispute. “Solving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict” came to look more and more like “getting the people of the Middle East and their leaders to agree that liberalism and the Enlightenment are good things.” (Or maybe it was just an illusion that it was ever anything else?)
If you’d like to watch one thing to explain this, you could do a lot worse than this interview by Bari Weiss of the brilliant Haviv Rettig Gur.
Comment #24 April 23rd, 2024 at 7:14 am
That part in “A Modest Proposal” where folks ate babies landed really badly and was in poor taste. But let’s not kid ourselves. Babies are fun to make and fun to eat.
Anyone who shits on satire for being in poor taste is telling me almost everything I need to know about them. The only question is whether or not the satire is good, which roughly also means trenchant. Here I’m not gonna lie, it could be tightened up. But I see a good kernel in it.
Comment #25 April 23rd, 2024 at 7:37 am
This is fantastic and a joy to read. Well done, and thank you.
Comment #26 April 23rd, 2024 at 7:40 am
urghan k #22
The Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Persian, Dynastic Egyptian, etc all had theologies but were lost to time while the Jewish theology and culture remain. The historical consequences were clearly worse for the others. The Babylonians had to deal with the actual theft of the god Marduk that was invested in an idol.
Religions come and go but tribal conflicts for land and treasure remain. If there was never religion of any kind tribes would still butcher others to acquire something they covet.
Comment #27 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:05 am
urghan k #22: Well, I’m not sure! I’d love to visit one of the counterfactual worlds where Judaism never existed, and where Western civilization developed entirely from Greek and Roman (and Persian, Babylonian, Sumerian, etc) traditions. On the one hand, I feel like those worlds would’ve been spared a great deal of misery. On the other hand, would they even have the modern concept of morality, as something that makes universal claims and that’s totally decoupled from political power and valor in battle and all the other qualities that the ancients admired and constantly conflated with moral right? Maybe the clearest place one finds that concept, independent of Judaism, is Socrates?
Comment #28 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:32 am
I have pledged to myself that upcoming in my reading queue is The Christian Bible, The Hebrew Bible, and The Koran. I am most interested in placing things in their proper time and place. I understand that Asimov has a book on the Christian Bible replete with maps that does a good job with historical context. Any suggestions for the others appreciated. I am not that interested in the metaphysics but rather understanding time and place.
I must acknowledge that I don’t even know how the Hebrew Bible differs from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Complete mystery to me at this time.
Comment #29 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:39 am
Cannibal #24: I was inspired to write this piece by McSweeney’s classic “retelling” of Lord of the Rings by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, from the perspective that Sauron is obviously good, Gandalf is obviously the villain, and you’re an idiot if you disagree.
See, I actually enjoy this sort of moral inversion exercise! You can do it for Sauron, you can do it for Emperor Palpatine, you can do it for Stalin and Mao, you can do it for Hamas and Hezbollah, you can do it for the Pharoah of the Exodus. But then, once you understand how easy it is, you might tire of it, and want to consider all evidence, even evidence that supports the boring, non-cleverness-requiring narrative of the “good guys” actually being good and the “bad guys” actually being bad.
Anyway, I concede that I didn’t achieve even 1% of the awesomeness of the McSweeney’s dialogue here.
Comment #30 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:44 am
From what I could see in the media, the goal of the movement at Columbia is to ask the University to divest of any investment or project tied to Israel.
It’s very similar to what happened at Google.
Of course Columbia and Google are both private, and Google decided to fire the employees who were involved, but one expects a University to let his students express themselves more freely, as long as it’s in a way that’s safe for everyone – and it’s up to the University to decide whether it’s the case, it just takes a few morons to make it unsafe, especially when the students are divided on the topic (when I was in engineering school in Europe when the first Golf War started, we had fist fights between students in the classes).
Obviously there’s a tradition of free speech and protests in Universities.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/04/22/columbia-protests-civil-rights/
Comment #31 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:47 am
OhMyGoodness #28: The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible differ in minor ways, like how the books are divided up and ordered, but they’re mostly the same texts, with the biggest difference being in how Jews and Christians interpret them (complete in themselves or gigantic foreshadowing of Jesus?).
Asimov’s Guide to the Bible is superb for both the Old and New Testaments.
Comment #32 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:51 am
To be more accurate, it seems the goal of the protest is to
“divest from corporations profiting from the war in the Middle East.”
Comment #33 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:54 am
Scott #31
Thanks for the info-much appreciated.
Comment #34 April 23rd, 2024 at 8:55 am
fred #30: Columbia students are absolutely free to ask the university to divest from Israel, and (regardless of the rightness of that cause) they should be! What they’re not free to do is take over the center of campus with a tent city, blockade campus entrances, and all the other things they did in violation of university policy. At that point, the question is no longer one of their free speech, but of everyone else’s freedom to go to class and do their research and so on.
Comment #35 April 23rd, 2024 at 9:05 am
Scott #34
the tent city in the middle of the campus is on a lawn that really doesn’t bother much.
As I was saying it’s up to the campus to decide when some red lines are crossed.
Anyway, as far as I’m concerned (I got a master degree at Columbia), I’ve become very cynical about the way US Universities have evolved… they’ve turned into hedge funds, feeding on outrageous tuition fees, while it’s doubtful that the students are even getting their money’s worth (by a wide margin)… So I’m not that surprised that for 100K$ a year the students do feel like it’s okay to set up tents on a freakin’ lawn (and the administration itself relies on those students’ tuition).
As a New Yorker it’s not too shocking since we had to coexist with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement for quite a while (which was way more disruptive because in the city streets)…
Comment #36 April 23rd, 2024 at 9:45 am
fred #35: Sure, the students in the tent city are paying $100K/year. But the Jewish student who had objects thrown at him, whose Israeli flag was burned, and who was told to “go back to Poland” was presumably paying $100K/year too!
Of course, the anti-Israel people have also been shutting down streets in cities around the US (including the Bay Bridge, which created a serious problem for ambulances).
Comment #37 April 23rd, 2024 at 9:59 am
Scott #36
The American flag gets burned on a daily basis around the globe, and, as far as I understand, the burning of the American Flag is allowed in the US under free speech.
So, sure, the burning of the Israeli flag may not be covered by this (wherever you burn it)… unless of course the burning of the Israeli flag, or any flag for that matter, ought to be as serious as burning the Koran?
Comment #38 April 23rd, 2024 at 10:08 am
“the anti-Israel people have also been shutting down streets in cities around the US”
Serious disruption of activity in cities in the name of a cause isn’t correlated to the validity of the cause, it just shows that the protesters care a lot about it.
E.g. when once in a blue moon the NYC subway was shutdown by the MTA workers going on strike (which isn’t even legal), and even though it’s always a major pain in the ass for New Yorkers, the vast majority often support the movement.
It’s even more habitual in Europe, e.g. in France where trains/planes are routinely disrupted or farmers block highways, etc. They still do get significant support from the population.
What’s not supported is rioting (i.e. setting private property on fire, etc).
Comment #39 April 23rd, 2024 at 10:23 am
I am fairly sure that Columbia teaches anti-colonialism as part of the leftist ideals curriculum so the demonstrations are a demonstration they have been successful in educating the best and brightest students the world has ever known (even in sarcasm that is difficult to write).
Comment #40 April 23rd, 2024 at 10:34 am
Anyway, I’m pretty sure things are gonna become way more chaotic on all campuses and spill over onto the streets, that’s just the way those things work when the youth is driven by some cause (right or wrong).
Comment #41 April 23rd, 2024 at 11:02 am
fred #37: No, please read the article. They grabbed the pro-Israel student’s Israeli flag away from him and burned that one.
I’m not delusional enough to think that this in itself is Kristallnacht, but I’d hope we’d have learned enough from history to stamp out anything like this at the earliest sign.
Comment #42 April 23rd, 2024 at 11:40 am
Nice job.
On Twitter yesterday I saw a satirical news report someone made portraying a similar thing, showing a news anchor reporting on the poor treatment of the Egyptians suffering from the ten plagues, and demonizing Moses for his mistreatment of the indigenous population, etc. Sadly, I can’t seem to find it now no matter what I search for.
Comment #43 April 23rd, 2024 at 12:10 pm
Scott #37
> I’m not delusional enough to think that this in itself is Kristallnacht, but I’d hope we’d have learned enough from history to stamp out anything like this at the earliest sign.
The earliest signs were clearly visible on and shortly after Oct 7. Some especially prescient people saw them over a decade ago:
https://martinkramer.org/2010/10/15/start-with-two-palestinians/
For others, though, I fear even a genuine Kristallnacht will not suffice to shake them loose from the face-eating leopards’ party.
Comment #44 April 23rd, 2024 at 12:20 pm
OhMyGoodness
right, I didn’t make that point because as I’ve been saying already in past threads, it all boils down to Israel = white = colonial power, Palestine = brown = oppressed and every other crisis that’s seen as brown vs brown is just happily ignored because it’s seen as a positive sign of brown emancipation.
But I can’t honestly say what part of this is due to the faculty of Universities vs the massive influence of social media on the youth (and Universities are just playing along in order to stay relevant with each new generation).
I don’t think we’ll get over this until there’s a new World War where the major players are non-white (e.g. China vs India or something like that).
Comment #45 April 23rd, 2024 at 12:31 pm
Scott #41
“but I’d hope we’d have learned enough from history to stamp out anything like this at the earliest sign.”
Well, the keyword here is “we”.
As time passes the old is replaced by the new, and the new sees whatever truths/wisdom they’re inheriting from the old with suspicion/skepticism.
Like, in a milder way, how we now consider the Vietnam war compared to how it was perceived at the time by the average American.
As for history books, they’ve been superseded by TikTok/Twitter trending topics where real-time high-definition “facts” spread to millions within an hour.
Comment #46 April 23rd, 2024 at 12:43 pm
In other terms, the old generation can’t blame the new generation for the state of confusion it’s in.
It’s the responsibility of the old generation to correctly teach and prepare the new generation, one can’t blame it on free will or other bullshit idea, it’d be like trying to reverse the relation between cause and effect.
And that’s something the new generation always gets (no matter how confused they are), but the old generation never gets, because it’s too painful a sign of failure.
Comment #47 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:03 pm
I clicked that link and there was exactly one account of a student being injured, being hit in the face with a flagpole, and not being seriously injured. This occurred at Yale. I am still not convinced that Columbia has descended into lawless violence.
Comment #48 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:26 pm
Israel’s main problem is PR.
They assume the world knows what a “Jew” is… in reality, not only the vast majority of 18-year-olds have never heard of “Kristallnacht”, but their only contact with Jewish “culture” has been during the last 6 months through tiktok/twitter IDF debriefs given by tough looking middle-aged white dudes wearing camouflaged military outfits… at a minimum the IDF should have forced those guys to dress in traditional Ultra-Orthodox Jewish outfits… confusing, yes, but at least the opposite of what one expects a colonialist oppressor to look like.
Comment #49 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:30 pm
Do you ever go back and read your posts on israel/palestine from like ten years ago? Somehow I recall you having not-unhinged takes back then.
Comment #50 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:31 pm
Thanks Scott, very nice!
Passover is a holiday which is
exhausting and full of family
drama, read
the last supper passages
in the new testament
for an early account.
Its inception is directly
tied to the beginning of monotheism as we know it, Josiah’s reforms and also to the origins of Jewish guilt, to paraphrase, what do you mean, why you should only worship one good? Look at all the things he/she (but not they) has done for you, parted the sea for you…fed you…freed you…brought you to the land of Israel…how ungrateful can you be, not giving your full attention. It is also a testament to the source of Jewish priviledge, Jewish parents, regardless of their socio economic status. And, it is indigenous, having been celebrated in Jerusalem 2648 years ago.
Comment #51 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:36 pm
Richard M #47: I never said that Columbia “descended into lawless violence,” but that seems to be in large part because the NYPD was called in before that could happen. Certainly the videos of students wearing kippot being surrounded and mobbed looked pretty scary, and certainly the administration was sufficiently worried that they’ve now taken the extraordinary step of moving classes online for the rest of the semester.
Comment #52 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:37 pm
Richard M
yea, and while the situation is evolving fast and degenerate,
the other thing I saw was that the people in the tent camp weren’t preventing anyone from entering Columbia. The gates are controlled by Columbia security, and the only requirement was that you needed a student ID to get in…
Also the news showed a Jewish student/spokeperson going on and on that they were now “facing terrorists” on campus because a few morons on the other side showed some support for Hamas. But what that dude doesn’t seem to realize (he’s probably too young) is that New Yorkers do know very well what *actual* terrorism is like.
Shouting racist insults at each other isn’t terrorism, violent arguing isn’t terrorism… flying airliners into buildings is terrorism.
Comment #53 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:38 pm
Nice job, Scott! So appropriate particularly on Passover “celebrations” by jihadists on US college campuses. Thank you.
Comment #54 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:49 pm
Nick #49: Oh, my most basic views about Israel/Palestine haven’t really changed since I was a teenager in the 90s, mourning the murder of Rabin. I still support a two-state solution, the instant there’s a governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza that’s seriously committed to one. I’m still on the left by Israeli standards. And I reiterated those unchanged views on this blog as recently as a month ago.
On the other hand, I probably did assume ten years ago that, if Iran and Hamas ever actually commenced their plan to complete the Nazi Holocaust, the whole world would immediately rally to Israel’s side and would see the need for a war against those murderous regimes (and that yes, urban war is tragic and kills civilians). I certainly didn’t imagine that college students all around the world would be cheering for Hamas to finish the job and destroy Israel. So I was wrong about something major and have updated accordingly.
Comment #55 April 23rd, 2024 at 1:50 pm
Scott #48
that might be true, if not for the fact that some of the people in the tent camp seem to be Jewish…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TPB2YKDEPWVTLHNBZGDXJ4NHVA.jpg&w=916
As the conflict drags, the idea of equating being Jewish with supporting Israel could be totally falling apart.
Comment #56 April 23rd, 2024 at 2:41 pm
fred #55: Obviously there are Jews who hate Israel and non-Jews who love and support it. (I even included an anti-Zionist Jew in the very post you’re commenting on!)
Obviously criticizing the Israeli government is a favorite pastime for Jews and Israelis, just like criticizing the American government is for Americans (and everyone else), and is not even in the same universe as antisemitism.
Obviously wishing for Israel’s destruction is a totally different story. You might still not be an antisemite, but (one might say) the ball is now very firmly in your court to prove it.
Obviously, when the anti-Israel people correctly point out that “anti-Zionism is different from antisemitism,” they then rather undermine their case when (as it often turns out) they’re also antisemites.
Comment #57 April 23rd, 2024 at 2:46 pm
Protests are not monolithic and Jewish students here certainly do not deserve to be harassed for what is happening in Gaza. A few counterpoints to what you wrote on your previous post
– the evidence that Israel is fighting with caution to minimize casualties is weak (e.g. the Lavender and habsora programs )
– UNRWA is not swarming with terrorists wildly cheering in a telegram channel
– I have previously described why Israeli “offers” of peace, which you say were repeatedly rejected, were never made sincerely, starting with Ben-Gurion. Israel has always held all the cards.
– when a place like Gaza has been under continuous blockade whether or not military troops were physically stationed inside, it is the responsibility of that country to provide for food, water etc
Comment #58 April 23rd, 2024 at 3:03 pm
Scott #54
Thanks Scott for the clarification.
I’m done posting here… but, to end on a lighter note, still with a hope for peace and celebrate the Jewish holiday,
two of my favorite songs from the 80s, one from Balavoine (featuring his Moroccan Jewish wife) and one from Ofra Haza (of Yemenite Jewish decent, born in Tel-Aviv).
Comment #59 April 23rd, 2024 at 3:26 pm
This is great.
Re the points about the old testament God being evil – I think a cynical reading (even taking his existence in the story at face value) is that he’s not nearly as all-powerful as he claims to be, and things like “oh the pharaoh is only hardening his heart because I made him” are transparent excuses from an entity who has the power to drop a few plagues but not to subtly control or manipulate humans in order to get social change directly”.
And I think this is relevant to the metaphor – a lot of protestors think western militaries are all-powerful organizations that can get any results they want without bloodshed (I’ve seen “why don’t they just arrest Hamas leaders”), but they aren’t, and fighting Hamas, a large well-trained, armed and entrenched organization. at all (let alone while keeping a relatively low level of civilian casualties by historical urban warfare standards) is at the limits of what they can do.
Comment #60 April 23rd, 2024 at 3:35 pm
sha #59: Yeah, theodicy at least makes sense when directed at God, less so when directed at Western militaries!
I wonder if Israel is a victim of its own past successes. I.e. after seeing what they did in the Six-Day War, the Entebbe raid, etc, the world now really does believe that IDF commandos could just magically teleport to Sinwar in his tunnel and arrest him if they really wanted to. (Though you’d think that image would’ve been shaken by the catastrophic security failure of 10/7…)
Comment #61 April 23rd, 2024 at 4:41 pm
Vladimir #43: I’ll simply continue to support whichever candidate seems closest to the ideals of Enlightenment and classical liberalism, which I regard as the best ideals for all humanity (and as one special case, the best for Jews and Israel). In the 2024 presidential election, that candidate is clearly Biden. Most of the Republican Party has by now fully, openly abandoned liberalism for strongman authoritarianism — the system where “elections are valid only if we win.” If at this moment there happen to be more philosemites than antisemites among the right-wing authoritarians — well, that’s a small relief but an extremely temporary one, as we already see for example with Tucker Carlson’s evolution into a Father Coughlin figure.
Within the Democratic Party, there’s still a fight to be had against the radical illiberals, and I’m trying to do my small part for that fight! Within the Republican Party, alas, the fight is already lost.
Comment #62 April 23rd, 2024 at 5:09 pm
It was late, maybe midnight
When we opened the door for Elijah
Fully expecting Aunt Ida, in sable.
But it was Pharaoh that walked in to the wine and the whining
And asked for a seat at the little kids table
Saying he had a few questions for us.
He said his son would have asked them
Had he been able to attend, that is, had we not killed him.
But that was then, and they, not we, we hastened to mention,
and even they, one supposes, were decent of intention.
Our mother later insisted he’d been a perfect gentleman.
But for his beard, and the bandages he could have been one of us.
Oh, and except for the dust in the shake of his hand
It isn’t on all other nights, he began that you toast the anniversary of a slaughter of lambs, the painting of blood on the side of a door.
My son died Erev Pesach. What for?
To teach me my place?
You didn’t see the look on his face
when the embalmers came to powder and pump and wrap him into immortality.
They drained him like a crank case.
You didn’t see the look on his face.
But what of the faces whose traces you bear,
As a mirror bears ancestors
As if you were there
Sandcrazy, sunblind, crowdcrazy, chainblind, scared of the dark and the blood in the street, Tired of freedom and nothing to eat
But half-baked masonry that tasted like sweat
Aching to remember and afraid to forget what slavery was like.
Admit it.
By the waters that parted you sat down and wept when you remembered Goshen.
Once you were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt
And once, for a while, you were free.
But now you are masters with burdens more pressing than dressing a desert in perfect triangles of mud.
You failed your God when he sent a second flood to make of a people, a Noah and more. What for?
Some thanks he got. A pawnshop in the wilderness.
“Let’s see something in a god we can pen up and milk.”
You needed that calf in its 14 carat clothes.
But just who were you fooling with the ring in its nose?
Tonight the celebration of the killing of lambs,
Their blood dried to doorposts, horseradish jam on the table it took you a week to set.
At least a week more, ‘fore you get your digestion back right.
You couldn’t leave Egypt if you wanted to tonight.
When they came to tell me about my son
In that dialect that doctors affect
The big words snaking past you like bad handwriting,
“In cases such as yours,” they began, “let’s speak frankly,in cases of … amputation,
It is not uncommon to encounter the selfsame itches, burns, ticklishness shooting as before from the direction of the … amputee.”
As if nothing had occurred.
As if I hadn’t heard correctly.
As if he were still a part of me.
In cases such as mine, the good news is the area to which the damage has been confined:
To my son, and another in every family in the land.
An extra place-setting at every household tonight,
Except for the ones with the blood on the door.
What for?
A lesson to mothers, drowning slowly in loss?
To fathers, who went quicker, strapped to chariots?
To horses, perhaps, their eyes bulging back against life, against sea.
And all so that you could be free.
Mine is the son unable to ask questions.
His is the blood in the libel of generations.
His, the wineglass untouched at the table.
His, the line that descends from Abel.
He will quietly crash your celebrations.
He will spike your festival punch with a vague taste of cracked glass.
Why on this night do you so carefully spill his blood
Onto your best china?
Next year in Jerusalem,
Or Hebron, or Shechem, don’t say I didn’t warn you
When playing the master has shaken and torn your dreams to small sandy pieces.
Your God never did sell his property. He only lets leases.
So shackle that promised land of yours.
Take, as your deed, your birth.
But know how much a promise is worth.
For once you were promised to me.
(Originally from Haaretz, posted by Bradley Burston; https://www.haaretz.com/2006-04-12/ty-article/a-place-at-the-table/0000017f-e113-d7b2-a77f-e317a7430000; the version I found screwed up the line-breaks and capitalisation and I may have put them back in wrong.
Comment #63 April 23rd, 2024 at 5:36 pm
Jacob Steel #62: Thanks; I hadn’t seen that. Basically, Bradley Burston wanted to do the same thing I did—
(1) retell Exodus with Pharoah as the good guy, and
(2) treat the obvious problem of Pharoah’s guilt for monstrous injustice against the Jews in the same way that the pro-Hamas college students treat that problem (with a loud and aggressive silence, making clear that only Jews’ shortcomings are of any interest).
The difference is that what I did as satire, Burston does as Brow-Furrowingly Serious Poetry. Apparently he actually means it.
Comment #64 April 23rd, 2024 at 6:02 pm
I don’t think that your 1) is a fair summary.
What Burston does is not try and make Pharaoh the/a good guy (there’s no comment either way on his character) but to highlight that in the Passover story God is very much a bad guy.
It’s absolutely fair to say that he doesn’t talk about Pharaoh’s treatment of the Jews, but I don’t view that as a failing of the poem, because *it wasn’t Pharaoh who got killed*.
Comment #65 April 23rd, 2024 at 6:41 pm
Jacob Steel #64: Pharoah is very obviously presented sympathetically, getting in endless clever digs against the Jews while the question of Pharoah’s own guilt is never raised.
As for Pharoah’s son and all the other innocent Egyptians who got slaughtered— it’s true that the Bible never reflects on the injustice of that. But it also never reflects on the injustice of Job’s whole family getting killed because God wanted to test Job, or likewise in countless similar cases! This seems like a universal failing of Bronze Age morality. The entire concept that even when a nation commits monstrous injustice, you still need to separate out which individuals within the nation were responsible for the injustice and which weren’t, is a thoroughly modern one (at most the Bible allows for isolated “righteous” individuals in wicked places, like Lot or Rahab).
And even today the rejection of “blood guilt” applied to entire nations isn’t anywhere close to consistent! Here, for your reading pleasure, is a gigantic compilation of “antiwar” activists who’d put the blood of every Gazan child tragically killed as the IDF bombed Hamas onto Zionists’ consciences forever, yet who also cheered, every last one of them, when they learned that Hamas went from house to house slaughtering Jewish women and children in hiding. I wonder whether Bradley Burston will ever write a poem to explore those activists’ worldview.
Comment #66 April 23rd, 2024 at 9:36 pm
When I first heard about it in Sunday School at around the age of nine, the Moses story made no sense to me and sounded like a very tall tale. (Having read Seus’s “Bartholomew and the Oobleck” and knowing that stories don’t have to be factual.) A few details that bothered me: 1) Why did the Angel of Death need to have dwellings of Jews specially marked so he wouldn’t kill their children–sounds more like something a non-omniscient terrorist gang would need; 2) after seeing ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, why did about 30% of the Israelites decide they could make a more effective god by melting some trinkets and casting them into the rough shape of a calf, with no blowback? 3) In the Christian Bible version, Pharaoh was ready to throw in the towel after some plagues but Yahweh “hardened his heart” so as to get more licks in and gain more glory thereby. (I’m sure there are learned apologists with learned explanations of such things.) Since then the last I heard was that there isn’t any collaborative egyptian historical evidence of any consecutive plagues or slave exodus.
So the analogy fell very flat for me. Hard to get interested in a recasting of a story I didn’t believe in the first place. The Romans and Masada event might have worked better (as a metaphor), for me.
Secondarily, or maybe more importantly, it seemed quite one-sided, whereas I see some blame on both sides. At this point I wouldn’t be totally surprised to learn that Netanyahu’s faction had intelligence that a Hamas atrocity was coming and deliberately let it happen so as to be able to justify a war to the finish. I don’t believe it now, but wouldn’t be totally surprised.
If that is offensive, let me know and I’ll ban myself from this website.
Comment #67 April 23rd, 2024 at 9:52 pm
Anyone who claims that what’s happening at Columbia right now is fine, peaceful and not a threat to Jews, should read a report in CNN by the director of the ADL, who visited campus and spoke to numerous Jewish students who broke down in sobs relating how they were specifically targeted, not as Zionists, but as Jews.
Comment #68 April 23rd, 2024 at 9:58 pm
I’m disappointed by your support for settlements you have mentioned in a previous post. In my mind the blockade of Gaza and the settlements in the west bank are an injustice on the Palestinian people, just as October the 7th was an injustice on the Israeli people, less acute and over a longer time frame to be sure. I’m well aware not doing this increases the risk to their life for someone living in Israel, but I think these two things, when done with no seeming end on sight, will predictably exacerbate the hostility of the people living there, and I don’t think increasing risk to yourself is something impossible to do, I’ve done it when I chose to work there for some time. You also seem to be mocking people like me who would prefer not to dwell on the atrocities of the past in the pursuit of peace for the now, Israel can point to October 7th, Palestinians can point to settlements in the west bank and the blockade in Gaza, Israel can point to the rockets and suicide bombings that made these policies attractive, and on and on until you’re left debating which atrocity came first 75 years ago when nobody who participated in it is probably alive today, I find that sort of thing kind of tiring. I definitely don’t know which policy will be best going forward, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, so I guess I can just wish you guys best of luck on finding lasting peace.
Comment #69 April 23rd, 2024 at 10:44 pm
anton #68: When the hell did I say that I supported settlements?!? I’ve been a lifelong opponent of settlements. I want all the West Bank settlements that are preventing a Palestinian state to be uprooted (as the Gaza settlements were already uprooted in 2005), as soon as the Palestinians decide that a peaceful state next to Israel is what they want.
The heart of this entire conflict—the thing that most of the world utterly fails to understand—the analog here of “quantum computers only give exponential speedups for specialized problems,” the thing that never stays explained no matter how many times you explain it, because it goes too far against what people want to be true—is that the Palestinian leadership and a majority of the Palestinian people do not want a Palestinian state next to Israel. We know because they’ve turned that down every single time it was offered to them.
They want the destruction of Israel, and the exile or massacre of its Jewish inhabitants. That is what they want. That is the heart of this. Are there words that would make it clearer to people?
Every single other aspect of the conflict—the blockade of Gaza, the checkpoints in the West Bank, the election of Netanyahu, etc.—is downstream from that one fundamental ur-fact. They are all results of Israel’s desperate attempts to live next to people who are militarily weaker but who, by and large, are theologically committed to murdering or expelling all Jews. Not “tearing down apartheid” and living as equals like in South Africa, but murdering or expelling. They can justify it by saying it’s just like Algeria, but unlike the French in Algeria, most Israeli Jews don’t have any mother country to return to. So if their neighbors are committed to killing or expelling them, then they have no choice but to stay and fight.
Most Jews, from the very beginning of the Zionist movement, were ready to live next to Arabs in peace. But the first well-known Palestinian leader, al-Husseini, decided that no Jews should live in Palestine/Israel/Judea at all (or indeed, anywhere on earth—al-Husseini spent WWII in Germany, trying to assist the Final Solution).
The massive support for Hamas tells us that the majority of Palestinians still don’t want there to be any Jews there. And the more international condemnation there is of Israel and the more support Hamas gets from Iran, the more the Hamasniks believe they can finally achieve their fantasy. That is the heart of this. This has always been the heart of it.
The one good thing about the ghoulish pro-Hamas rallies that have now overrun the planet, is that so many people are now saying this openly who previously wouldn’t have dared to. “We don’t want no two states, we want ’48!” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab!” Will this finally make the truth clearer to people?
So what’s the solution? A whole generation of Palestinians has to be brought up with liberal Enlightenment values, rather than martyr values. The minority of Palestinians who are working for that have to be fervently supported. And then Israel can rein in its own Hamas-like extremists (an easier problem). We know from the examples of Germany and Japan how much change can come in one generation. That’s the reason for hope.
Someday I’ll find the words that will make this clearer.
Comment #70 April 23rd, 2024 at 10:57 pm
Yes, I know of Palestinian hostility towards Israel, I am not blind to it. I think this hostility is not an unchangeable fact come down from heaven, but instead it can be affected by the situation on the ground. A period of military occupation and de-radicalization is reasonable, but I do not believe something like the settlements as they are now are achieving this aim (instead, I think it’s doing the opposite). Pointing that Palestinians can have their own state when they are not trying to destroy Israel was what most people in support of settlements were saying before October 7th, I was not blind to the dangers of it back then, and I am not blind to it now either.
Comment #71 April 24th, 2024 at 1:39 am
The reason you struggle to explain it ‘permanently’ Scott is that it is irrational. You draw arbitrary lines that delimit a logical starting point that makes you clearly right that Israel could never have been the aggressor, is therefore blameless in their essential fear of Palestinians and can therefore justify violence against them. It only takes a small shift outside the limited scope of your perspective to see a lot of gaps in your foundational arguments and I think that makes people like me quickly want to question your entire chain of logic. I’ll take a brief shift for example, who in the first occurrence in the modern borders was given land that belonged already to another people? Not that we have to try and rewind to that time, Israel is a state now and that is fine with me, but I think your point is not as strong as you think about al-Husseini.
I’ve tried a few reasoned ideas with you on this topic and mostly you seem to refuse to engage when someone seeks to pull you outside the absurdly narrow bounds of your beliefs on this topic. Positing moral hypotheicals that just try to retell your original point in biblical terms isn’t very good literature to me, but that is subjective. I think when I read things like https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ I find the claim that it is so clear that the IDF is really trying to limit civillian casualties to be a pretty hard pill to swallow. It just tastes like a blatant lie that is told to make it a bit easier to stomach the tens of thousands of dead women and children. It reads more like a way to efficiently eliminate their targets, regardless and sometimes expecting dozens of collateral deaths.
I really only wish for peace and don’t mean to cause you mental anguish but I have personally lost a lot of respect for you over your embracing of this murderous campaign. I have to ask you though, is there a number of dead Palestinians that would make this genocidal violence? If not, why not?
And because the basic claim of the whole thing is that it will make Israel safer, do you really think that if Israel killed the last Hamas fighter tomorrow and pulled it’s troops out Israelies will feel safer? I doubt it, and they will likely have to ask for IDF occupation of Gaza to feel safer and then are you really going to support such a thing? Is that really the opinion of someone following enlightenment values? That a country should be occupied and it’s population policed by a foreign country that just finished murdering their family and/friends? Then count me fully out, and expect that the cycle of violence will just continue.
Comment #72 April 24th, 2024 at 1:51 am
Anton #70
I agree with you concerning settlements. But the tragedy in Gaza is a clear demonstration that dismantlement of settlements and unilateral ending the occupation is even more catastrophic. In fact, the disengagement was viewed at the time by most Israelis (including myself) as a critical test of the theory that the rage induced by the occupation is what makes peace negotiations impossible. During the 2nd Intifada I used to read Amira Hess from Ha’aretz and she explained to us that the peace process of the 90’s was viewed by the Palestinians as a sham because all they saw was increased settlements, check points, and administrative detentions. This theory must have made some sense not just to me but to a large majority of Israelis, seeing as the result of the 2nd intifada was not just a disillusionment with the idea that we might have a parner for peace on the other side, but also strong enthusiastic support for unilateral ending of the occupation. PM Olmert ran on such a platform and won the election! And this was after Hamas won an election. Yet, much as this goes unacknowledged, this theory failed a critical test in Gaza. The so called blockade of Gaza was imposed by Israel, Egypt, the US and the European Union, in response to Hams’s turning Gaza into a launchpad for attacks on Israel, not the other way around. It is now clear that unilaterally ending the occupation can actually be a lot worse. October 7 has demonstrated that there is zero margin of error. So, in the interest of humanity, the experiment must never ever be repeated.
The idea of Israel deradicalizing the Palestinian population is easier said than done. I doubt Israel has the ability to deradicalize its own fanatic groups, let alone the Palestinians. We Jews have a long history of outside powers trying to “deradicalize” us or change our religion and way of life, from the ancient Greeks in Syria, to the Czars of Russia. They usually failed. There is no reason to believe Israel could have any influence over the Palestinian mindset.
The Palestinian hostility may be changeable, but it’s not within Israel’s hands to cause that change. Anyone criticizing Israel is obligated to suggest an alternative approach which seriously contends with this basic fact.
Comment #73 April 24th, 2024 at 2:47 am
Scott #63 – Beware the Fallacy Of The Excluded Middle. It’s not necessary to retell Exodus with Pharaoh as the good guy, to ponder the scary implications of cheering what’s essentially terrorism-porn, saying how great and *effective* it is, and that it’s fine since the civilian targets are Bad People. Note ref #12, The problem with “… discussing Egyptian suffering while conspicuously never mentioning Egypt’s enslavement and genocide …” is that the “Egypt” there is a kind of motte-and-bailey between the general population and the government. Or for analogy, it’s something like “… discussing men’s romantic suffering while conspicuously never mentioning men’s rape and historical denial of women’s human rights …”. And how often do you think the Nakba should be conspicuously mentioned in connection with Palestinian terrorism?
Keep in mind that there’s a nigh-infinite amount of stupidity available on the Internet. “Look, here’s a stupid person somewhere in the world saying a stupid thing!” is a very bad counter-argument to anything. Remember, for example, an actual Israeli minister – someone with real power in government, not some random ranter – talked about dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip!
https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-minister-says-nuking-gaza-an-option-pm-suspends-him-from-cabinet-meetings/
Wow – “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”.
Pre-emptive rebuttal – even though he was disavowed, it’s pretty easy to contend that it was not for the ideas themselves, but for the gaffe of saying the quiet part loud.
Though I’m coming to consider that the Two-State Solution is indeed untenable, because it’s basically the joke “Why can’t the Jews and the Arabs just sit down together and settle this like good Christians?” But I’m not going to solve Israel/Palestine, and I doubt anyone here will either.
Comment #74 April 24th, 2024 at 4:37 am
fred #44
but where were the social media folks educated?
Comment #75 April 24th, 2024 at 7:49 am
Nate #71: I’m sorry if you’ve lost a lot of respect for me, but I can assure you that the feeling is mutual. I, too, have lost a lot of respect for huge swathes of the planet these past six months.
Should that very fact make me stand back and reevaluate whether I’m the one who’s wrong? Well, you might call it a basic matter of intellectual consistency. If you want me to accept a whole vast intellectual framework that says that my family members and I, being “privileged oppressors,” have no right to defend ourselves when someone comes to kill us, then I ought bravely to embrace the conclusion and kill myself right now—or at least consign my in-laws and cousins in Israel to being shot or burned alive. If I’m not going to do that, then it means I have to reject the intellectual framework. It’s really that simple.
You can of course deny that those are my only choices. But if so, the burden is firmly on you to say: what is Israel to do instead? I notice that, like 99% of critics, you never confront that one question at the center of everything. Do they lay down their arms and hope for the best? Withdraw from Gaza with Hamas battalions intact, so that Hamas can rebuild its tunnels in preparation for the next attack? Unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank as they unilaterally withdrew from Gaza decades ago … even though the result of the latter was Hamas’s proto-Holocaust? Once there’s some proposal on the table, we can then talk about whether the proposal is better than “just lay down and die,” which is precisely the proposal that demonstrators around the world (chanting, eg, “burn Tel Aviv to the ground”), like their predecessors in Europe 90 years ago, have become increasingly vocal and explicit about over the last week.
Comment #76 April 24th, 2024 at 8:16 am
It is not a surprise that Israel would respond to October 7. There were many other possibilities such as
– evacuate civilians to a refugee camp in the Negev prior to the offensive.
– A more targeted campaign. The fact that 60-70% of the casualties are women and children shows that the IDF combatant claim has no basis. The description of Lavender and Habsora indicates that there wasn’t much attention being paid to minimizing civilian casualties.
– Do not hinder relief agencies from performing the work of getting food and water to starving civilians. UNRWA employees have been vetted by Israel for years
– Since the goal of eliminating Hamas is not practical, make unpleasant compromises that focus on releasing the hostages. Strengthening the border would be lower cost in money and lives and more effective for security than creating a whole new generation of people seeking revenge. India did not respond in kind to the Mumbai attacks
– longer term, do not disable leadership on the other side and say that there is no partner for peace; make sincere attempts at peace. The record shows that Palestinians rejected bad ungovernable deals. The last workable plan was by Olmert who was forced out of office and his successors did not continue discussions.
– Bring a unilateral end to settlement construction and begin settlement withdrawal to create the conditions for peace
Comment #77 April 24th, 2024 at 8:30 am
Regarding the Olmert plan, Abbas claims that Olmert did not show him the proposed map and wanted him to agree first without showing it to his advisors. Politically, he needs to strike a face saving deal regarding the “right to return” also and it appears that part of the negotiations had not concluded.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-never-said-no-to-2008-peace-deal-says-former-pm-olmert/
Comment #78 April 24th, 2024 at 10:10 am
OhMyGoodness #74
“but where were the social media folks educated?”
Ultimately, and by definition, the older generation is collectively entirely responsible for bringing up and teaching the new generation. That includes parents, teachers, entrepreneurs, politicians, artists.
A 10-year-old kid born today never asked for social media. Social media was created by boomers/gen-x to make a buck and/or out of delusional ideas about bettering society. They bear the responsibility for this.
The same goes about colleges, they’re run by boomers/gen-x.
It’s something the new generation (no matter how confused) knows very well, while the old generation is always in denial, because this sort of failure is too painful to bear. So they make the new generation entirely responsible for how it turned out… and they also blame the generation before them for the mess. And the cycle repeats.
PS: in the above I adopt the traditional idea of “blame” based on the illusion of “free will”, etc. No matter what, the idea that effect comes after the cause always applies.
Comment #79 April 24th, 2024 at 10:34 am
Seth Finkelstein #73: I have to hand it to you. Describing the Exodus—foundational narrative not only for Jews but for all of Western civilization, for the American pilgrims, abolitionists, civil rights leaders, etc. etc. etc.—as “essentially terrorism-porn” … that’s a brilliant turn of phrase, one for the ages. I’d put it right up there with Andrea Dworkin’s description of romantic love as “rape with meaningful looks.”
Comment #80 April 24th, 2024 at 11:38 am
fred #78
There was an intentional effort starting about 50 years ago (wake of Viet Nam) by a group of left wing activist intellectuals to modify the US educational system to reflect leftist ideals. They have been shockingly successful. One of principals (Bill Ayer’s) was the reported ghost writer for a former president’s autobiography. He actually received his Masters and PhD in education from Columbia. One of his critics noted that calling Ayer’s an education reformer is like calling Stalin an agrarian reformer. Ivy League faculties came to be in the vanguard of this effort.
Comment #81 April 24th, 2024 at 11:40 am
One difficulty I’m having is that the pounding of Gaza is often justified as the front-line of the defense of modern “enlightenment” values (Scott has used this word like 6 times in this thread), therefore claiming that they’re fighting it in the name of the entire “West”, i.e. the wiping out of Hamas is the only way to bring Gaza up to modern standards… and then simultaneously justify the tit-for-tat historical context of the conflict by digging up supposed thousands of years old “facts” about one amongst dozens of tribes in the middle east, when pretty much the entire world was on the polar opposite of what constitutes modern enlightened values (which, as far as I know, sprung out of 17th and 18th century Europe).
Of course, for a Jew, those tribal historical details going back thousands of years may mean something important, but to the rest of the world they mean nothing. Just like details of the Roman Empire wiping out my Gallic ancestors or the tribulations of the Qin dynasty mean nothing in terms of modern Enlightenment values.
Comment #82 April 24th, 2024 at 11:45 am
Anyway, I’m closing down this thread now — as relaxing, enjoyable, and refreshing as it is to continue arguing about Israel/Palestine, I’m now at the Simons Institute in Berkeley to give two quantum talks, neither of which I’ve prepared yet, so I’d better reorient my mind around that little side hobby.