“The Right Side of History”
This morning I was pondering one of the anti-Israel protesters’ favorite phrases—I promise, out of broad philosophical curiosity rather than just parochial concern for my extended family’s survival.
“We’re on the right side of history. Don’t put yourself on the wrong side by opposing us.”
Why do the protesters believe they shouldn’t face legal or academic sanction for having blockaded university campuses, barricaded themselves in buildings, shut down traffic, or vandalized Jewish institutions? Because, just like the abolitionists and Civil Rights marchers and South African anti-apartheid heroes, they’re on the right side of history. Surely the rules and regulations of the present are of little concern next to the vindication of future generations?
The main purpose of this post is not to adjudicate whether their claim is true or false, but to grapple with something much more basic: what kind of claim are they even making, and who is its intended audience?
One reading of “we’re on the right of history” is that it’s just a fancy way to say “we’re right and you’re wrong.” In which case, fair enough! Few people passionately believe themselves to be wrong.
But there’s a difficulty: if you truly believe your side to be right, then you should believe it’s right win or lose. For example, an anti-Zionist should say that, even if Israel continues existing, and even if everyone else on the planet comes to support it, still eliminating Israel would’ve been the right choice. Conversely, a Zionist should say that if Israel is destroyed and the whole rest of the world celebrates its destruction forevermore—well then, the whole world is wrong. (That, famously, is more-or-less what the Jews did say, each time Israel and Judah were crushed in antiquity.)
OK, but if the added clause “of history” is doing anything in the phrase “the right side of history,” that extra thing would appear to be an empirical prediction. The protesters are saying: “just like the entire world looks back with disgust at John Calhoun, Bull Connor, and other defenders of slavery and then segregation, so too will the world look back with disgust at anyone who defends Israel now.”
Maybe this is paired with a theory about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice: “we’ll win the future and then look back with disgust on you, and we’ll be correct to do so, because morality inherently progresses over time.” Or maybe it has merely the character of a social threat: “we’ll win the future and then look back with disgust on you, so regardless of whether we’ll be right or wrong, you’d better switch to our side if you know what’s good for you.”
Either way, the claim of winning the future is now the kind of thing that could be wagered about in a prediction market. And, in essence, the Right-Side-of-History people are claiming to be able to improve on today’s consensus estimate: to have a hot morality tip that beats the odds. But this means that they face the same problem as anyone who claims it’s knowable that, let’s say, a certain stock will increase a thousandfold. Namely: if it’s so certain, then why hasn’t the price shot up already?
The protesters and their supporters have several possible answers. Many boil down to saying that most people—because they need to hold down a job, earn a living, etc.—make all sorts of craven compromises, preventing them from saying what they know in their hearts to be true. But idealistic college students, who are free from such burdens, are virtually always right.
Does that sound like a strawman? Then recall the comedian Sarah Silverman’s famous question from eight years ago:
PLEASE tell me which times throughout history protests from college campuses got it wrong. List them for me
Crucially, lots of people happily took Silverman up on her challenge. They pointed out that, in the Sixties and Seventies, thousands of college students, with the enthusiastic support of many of their professors, marched for Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, and every other murderous left-wing tyrant to sport a green uniform and rifle. Few today would claim that these students correctly identified the Right Side of History, despite the students’ certainty that they’d done so.
(There were also, of course, moderate protesters, who merely opposed America’s war conduct—just like there are moderate protesters now who merely want Israel to end its Gaza campaign rather than its existence. But then as now, the revolutionaries sucked up much of the oxygen, and the moderates rarely disowned them.)
What’s really going on, we might say, is reference class tennis. Implicitly or explicitly, the anti-Israel protesters are aligning themselves with Gandhi and MLK and Nelson Mandela and every other celebrated resister of colonialism and apartheid throughout history. They ask: what are the chances that all those heroes were right, and we’re the first ones to be wrong?
The trouble is that someone else could just as well ask: what are the chances that Hamas is the first group in history to be morally justified in burning Jews alive in their homes … even though the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, Inquisitors, Cossacks, Nazis, and every other group that did similar things to the Jews over 3000 years is now acknowledged by nearly every educated person to have perpetrated an unimaginable evil? What are the chances that, with Israel’s establishment in 1948, this millennia-old moral arc of Western civilization suddenly reversed its polarity?
We should admit from the outset that such a reversal is possible. No one, no matter how much cruelty they’ve endured, deserves a free pass, and there are certainly many cases where victims turned into victimizers. Still, one could ask: shouldn’t the burden be on those who claim that today‘s campaign against Jewish self-determination is history’s first justified one?
It’s like, if I were a different person, born to different parents in a different part of the world, maybe I’d chant for Israel’s destruction with the best of them. Even then, though, I feel like the above considerations would keep me awake at night, would terrify me that maybe I’d picked the wrong side, or at least that the truth was more complicated. The certainty implied by the “right side of history” claim is the one part I don’t understand, as far as I try to stretch my sympathetic imagination.
For all that, I, too, have been moved by rhetorical appeals to “stand on the right side of history”—say, for the cause of Ukraine, or slowing down climate change, or saving endangered species, or defeating Trump. Thinking it over, this has happened when I felt sure of which side was right (and would ultimately be seen to be right), but inertia or laziness or inattention or whatever else prevented me from taking action.
When does this happen for me? As far as I can tell, the principles of the Enlightenment, of reason and liberty and progress and the flourishing of sentient life, have been on the right side of every conflict in human history. My abstract commitment to those principles doesn’t always tell me which side of the controversy du jour is correct, but whenever it does, that’s all I ever need cognitively; the rest is “just” motivation and emotion.
(Amusingly, I expect some people to say that my “reason and Enlightenment” heuristic is vacuous, that it works only because I define those ideals to be the ones that pick the right side. Meanwhile, I expect others to say that the heuristic is wrong and to offer counterexamples.)
Anyway, maybe this generalizes. Sure, a call to “stand on the right side of history” could do nontrivial work, but only in the same way that a call to buy Bitcoin in 2011 could—namely, for those who’ve already concluded that buying Bitcoin is a golden opportunity, but haven’t yet gotten around to buying it. Such a call does nothing for anyone who’s already considered the question and come down on the opposite side of it. The abuse of “arc of the moral universe” rhetoric—i.e., the calling down of history’s judgment in favor of X, even though you know full well that your listeners see themselves as having consulted history’s judgment just as earnestly as you did, and gotten back not(X) instead—yeah, that’s risen to be one of my biggest pet peeves. If I ever slip up and indulge in it, please tell me and I’ll stop.
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Comment #1 August 16th, 2024 at 6:46 pm
I don’t think reassurances that victory will come are so much meant for the audience as they are for the speaker. These are ordinary college kids on the way to jail – the emotional trials have to be almost universal between civil conflicts.
Comment #2 August 16th, 2024 at 7:13 pm
On Israel:
How come Israelis are allowed to defend their country by force against Muslim invaders raping their women, but young Brits on the streets of Rotherham aren’t allowed to defend their country by force against Muslim invaders raping their women?
How come Israelis are allowed to have a country but Englishmen aren’t?
Do you worry that you’re on the wrong side of history on this issue of mass Muslim invasion of Europe, and governments arresting citizens just for opposing it online?
Comment #3 August 16th, 2024 at 7:14 pm
> There were also, of course, moderate protesters, who merely opposed America’s war conduct—just like there are moderate protesters now who merely want Israel merely to end its Gaza campaign rather than its existence. But then as now, the revolutionaries sucked up much of the oxygen, and the moderates rarely disowned them.
Here is a less bleak interpretation of events for you to consider: Leninist* college professors have been calling for the destruction of Israel since forever: probably, given other examples, as a meaningless** result of virtue signalling spiraling over decades. Israel’s conduct in the war lead to a lot of upset college students; and there were the professors, waiting to provide a framework for their horror. Are the bulk of the students, who showed no interest in Israel’s condition before the war, protesting Israel itself, or the events that caused their involvement? No doubt, they are too confused and inarticulate to write the answer on a sign; but if the war ended, they would in all likelihood go home***. Should we interpret their closely guided expressions by what they mean, or as a silent signifier of the conditions we know are regulating them?
* Marx wrote positively about the civilizing influence of colonial empires. I don’t know how they square this with their actual ideology.
** People tend to start believing what they say… by “meaningless,” I mean with no basis, influence, or relationship to the possible.
*** I am not optimistic enough to say they would go home without negative conditioning from all of the really bad things that have been in the news.
Comment #4 August 16th, 2024 at 7:22 pm
This is a far more general problem — hardly anyone argues in a way that makes a real attempt at convincing someone who seriously disagrees. Most people are just terrible at understanding that those who disagree with them truly think about the matter entirely differently from them, rather than basically agreeing on the facts while having inverted values. (I believe the classic example is fundamentalist Christians who think that atheists actually do believe in the existence of a God, but are opposed to him. That’s not what an atheist is, but this misconception is definitely out there!) So many arguments I see come down to people talking past each other as they simply repeat arguments that are convincing to themselves.
If you want to actually convince someone else, who is coming from a very different starting point from you, rather than arguing over the issue in front of you, you need to trace things back and figure out the fundamental disagreement, and then you can argue about that. Otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere! But hardly anyone does this. To be fair, it’s a lot of work — and not always worth it, especially as a lot of times, your interlocutor is not themselves going to be really capable of tracing things back like that…
Comment #5 August 16th, 2024 at 7:23 pm
Obviously you’re entirely correct here, but I got nerd sniped by your question about who in the past supported enlightenment values and was wrong, and came up with two ideas:
1. The French revolution kicked off with a lot of rhetoric about various enlightenment things, and was inspired by the American revolution which was also in the same camp. But it turned incredibly bloody, with many many executions in the name of “reason”.
2. I’m not sure of a specific example, but wasn’t a lot of colonialism justified by being modern, scientific, reason-based governance to backwards societies that lacked it? And of course many colonial occupations ended up being incredibly brutal with effects that linger to today. The Congo, for instance, though I guess I don’t know that it was specifically justified by enlightenment values — but Leopold II did bring about a bunch of good enlightenment progress in Belgium at the same time his thugs terrorized the Congo.
Comment #6 August 16th, 2024 at 7:25 pm
“The Right Side of History” is the title of a 2019 book by Ben Shapiro. He is a big advocate of Israel, Trump, and Enlightenment values of reason and liberty.
I suspect that many of those supporting transgenderism today are mainly worried about being on the wrong side of history. That is, if they speak against a man winning a women’s Olympic gold medal, then someday they will be considered insensitive bigots, as if they wore blackface to a Halloween party.
Comment #7 August 16th, 2024 at 8:04 pm
Sam #2: Do you have any idea what if anything I think about UK immigration policy, or are you just assuming?
Since the UK’s policies are for the British to decide, I’m more comfortable talking about the American case. I’d like to see freer immigration to the US for people who accept the US’s basic principles (democracy, free speech, a market economy, church-state separation, and so on), and much more restricted immigration for people who reject those principles. I’m open to many different ideas for how best to achieve that goal.
Comment #8 August 16th, 2024 at 8:24 pm
Dave Orr #5: Clearly no principle could be immune to people doing great evil while wrongly invoking the name of the principle. I think a good rule of thumb is that if you’re regularly executing dissidents, or conquering faraway countries in order to extract wealth from them, you’ve probably left the path of liberalism and Enlightenment.
On the positive side, though, I don’t need to excuse atrocities with anything analogous to “real Communism has never been tried yet.” Real Enlightenment liberalism has been tried, and it’s worked! 🙂 Indeed not only has it worked, but better yet it’s self-corrected, repeatedly extinguishing evils that it had previously tolerated. Which is exactly what it’s designed to do.
Comment #9 August 16th, 2024 at 8:31 pm
Scott,
It’s really easy to read between the lines, because you’re such an outspoken “mainstream” Democrat, and practically every “mainstream” Democrat of importance has loudly condemned the protests in the UK (as has the NYT and WaPo—aren’t you such a big fan of those two)?
But I am curious to hear your take on immigration in the UK. “I’m not a UK citizen, so I can’t comment” is a cop-out answer. What do you think about mass Muslim migration into Europe? Mass migration from alien cultures that don’t share their values? What do uou think about Muslim rape gangs grooming thousands of English girls?
More importantly: What do you think about English citizens being arrested in the thousands for speaking up about this online? Keir Sturmer threatening to jail anyone for online speech supporting the protests? English police chiefs threatening to extradite Americans for online speech?
You realize that your “mainstream Democrats” are enthusastically supporting all of this and trying to bring UK speech policing home to America?
Comment #10 August 16th, 2024 at 8:36 pm
Sniffnoy #4
Most people are unaware of the reasoning that might support their positions because they got them in slogan form from friends they wanted to fit in with, or from print or media advertising. We can only share what we had to begin with!
Dave Orr #5
It depends if you are asking about the real Enlightenment or the remembered one. The remembered enlightenment matches the values of present-day intellectuals almost exactly so it’s never been wrong, but the real Enlightenment (the historical period, the writings of its figures) is full of class prejudice, colonialism, looking out the window and sneering at your lawn people (there was so much prejudice I added it twice 🙂 ) and almost every ethical flaw we had to collectively overcome in the intervening time. There were a few people who were liberal by today’s standards (Adam Smith is the only one I can think of!) but if your strategy in 1777 was to believe everything the intellectual leaders of the day believed, you’d be… someone from 1777. Maybe 1778.
Scott #7
Just make sure that everybody knows we have lots of very non-negotiable rights for women. 🙂
Comment #11 August 16th, 2024 at 8:52 pm
Sam #9: I’m very strongly and consistently against violent rioting, whether it’s done by Islamists or far-right nationalists or any other group. I’m very strongly and consistently in favor of free speech. And I think that immigration to a liberal multicultural society mostly only works if the immigrants accept the minimal ground rules of such a society or there’s a system in place to assimilate them to those values.
Your aggressive eagerness to impute other people’s views to me (wrongly, more often than not) and force me to answer for other people has annoyed me enormously, so this conversation is over, and all attempts to continue it will go to moderation.
Comment #12 August 16th, 2024 at 9:34 pm
Hi Scott, your characterisation of Ho Chi Minh as a leftwing tyrant struck me as slightly jarring. We are each welcome to our opinions naturally enough, but I’d be interested to learn if you know much about him?
Comment #13 August 16th, 2024 at 9:44 pm
Scott,
I have enjoyed reading your blog for years. Thank you so much for keeping it going. I cannot tell you how enriching it has been for me. You are a theoretical computer scientist, but I read this blog primarily for the occasional comments you make about various topics, especially big philosophical ones, that are so consistently insightful that it is always a source of amazement for me. Your casual thinking about these matters, scattered through offhand replies across hundreds of random blog posts you make to anonymous internet commenters and trolls (over decades), contain better ideas than I could ever have in devoting my full leisure time to thinking about these matters. I am angry you never became a philosopher, because philosophy could have made more progress this century if so. I despise the acts of cruel internet trolls, but they have at least allowed some your your latent philosophical talent to shine through for others to see, when you respond patiently to nonsense.
Enough praise. I enjoyed this post. The obvious big philosophical question it raises, that I would really love to know your opinion about, is metaethics. What do you think the most plausible metaethical account of moral terms and concepts are, or terms relating to rationality? People think they are on the ‘right’ side of history, but what exactly is the meaning you understand here, from a metaethical viewpoint? Is it a relativism, noncognitivism, error theory and fictionalist understanding, a realist but naturalistic reductionist account, a metaphysically basic non-naturalist account? What is the ontological status and metaphysical essence of ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, etc. that figure into these considerations, in your opinion? Will participants in this discussion forever be talking past each other, if people do not specify what the terms actually amount to in their preferred reading (after which we can then evaluate the merits of said reading). Imagine, for example, if a protester claiming to be on the ‘right side of history’, was a noncognitivist, or a relativist, or a fictionalist and error theorist?
As I have emotional sympathies with reasons-realism and moral realism, in particular, what level of plausibility would you assign to the recent increase in interest in non-natural moral realism (and ‘reasons realism’), of say, Shelley Kagan, Michael Huemer, Derek Parfit, David Enoch, Thomas Nagel, Russ-Shafer Landau, etc.? These writers provide arguments that there are stance-independent moral facts that are reasons-implying, where the ‘reasons’ are not merely Humean ‘means-end’ relations that reduce to desire states (like the reasons internalism of Bernard Williams). The authors have a more robust view of reasons as being external to the mental states of the individual, and actually existing. The ontological status of these value/reason properties are shady, but the ontological status of many things in philosophy are: (like the ontological status of the laws of nature themselves, or basic arithmetical truths and mathematical entities like the natural numbers, or metaphysical rules stipulating the conditions for personal identity over time and composition and part-whole relations, or the metaphysical status of possibilities in a quantum superposition before decoherence, etc.).
I think MIchael Huemer might say that because there are real mind-independent normative facts available that can be known, humans will through rational reflection make progress in coming to know them, just as truths about mathematics and science has progressed through rational reflection. What gives ‘the right side of history’ its rhetorical power is not the fact that there is a consensus of humans in the distant future, but that there are moral facts that are there to be known. The idea is that ‘ideal humans’, stripped of all irrational influences, would have a tendency to discover them. I know you know this. I just wanted to provoke you to comment on a philosophical topic. I apologize in advance, sincerely, if I should not have redirected to abstract philosophy in the middle of a very non-abstract issue arising on college campuses. Still, I think philosophy can help clarify matters here.
One final note. One day I would like to know your opinion of Shelly Kagan’s new book ‘Answering Moral Skepticism’. What do you think about his arguments? Given your recent post about the enormous reading burden you face daily, I know that will never actually happen. Nonetheless, a person can wish out loud. Just putting it on your radar. Good book.
Sincerely,
Tyler
Comment #14 August 16th, 2024 at 10:01 pm
Leopold in the Congo is inevitably the focus of anti-colonial rhetoric and understandably so, but who pulled the trigger not that important to the 6 million dead in recent decades due to internal conflict nor the 6 million displaced.
I cannot conclude that Britain’s colonial period in Nigeria was negative for the development of that country. In fact Britain built the country. Slavery was stopped and a system of representative government developed and international non-slave trade relations developed. There was considerable support inside Nigeria to become a full member of The Commonwealth equal to Canada and Australia that wasn’t mirrored in Britain. Educated Nigerians sometimes lament in times of social discontent that Britain left too soon.
Colonial periods deserve to be evaluated on a case by case basis independent of the barbaric taint of Leopold in the Congo.
Comment #15 August 16th, 2024 at 10:16 pm
Scott,
Perhaps what is missing from the discourse is a rigorous evaluation of the current world situation from Evolutionary perspective, which is the right level of abstraction. Humanity did get rid of its bad practices (slavery, world wars), but mainly because of scientific and technological progress, whose resulting productivity increase made these practices irrelevant for survival instincts of our species. Even natural phenomena afflicting humanity like famines are largely contained, with even war engaged Russia helping with food supply to Africa etc. So over a period of time productivity gains tend to percolate to the benefit of humanity, albeit very slowly. Surprisingly AI can help achieve that goal if done right, inspite of the pain of short term job losses in the white collar/intellectual segment.
Comment #16 August 17th, 2024 at 12:58 am
I agree with many of Scott’s criticisms of the concept. But I do think one important part of the appeal to ‘the right side of history’ is the implicit exhortation to think about the long run consequences and morality of one’s actions, not just the short term benefits to acting selfishly. To give some examples:
Slave owners feared abolition due to potential reprisals by freed slaves. This was not entirely out of the realm of possibility (e.g. see the 1804 Haitian massacre), but nevertheless, abolition was morally correct and inevitable. Delaying would have in fact increased the chance of violent revolt in the long term, as well as damaged race relations for far longer. Thus, long term considerations would have suggested immediate abolition.
During WW2, Japanese Americans were interned due to the suspicion that some would act as Japanese spies and saboteurs. Again, it was not unreasonable to think that some small number would– e.g. in the Niihau incident, a Japanese pilot who had bombed Pearl Harbor crash-landed on Niihau and three Japanese Americans on the island helped him make an escape attempt. However, apart from it being morally abhorrent to discriminate based on race in such a manner, mass internment seems in retrospect to have been completely pointless. German Americans were not interned at anywhere near the same scale and yet there were only a few ineffective Nazi espionage attempts on US soil during the war– there is no reason to think Imperial Japan would have been any more effective. The US instead robbed itself of valuable resources (e.g. consider how effective some Japanese Americans would have been in intelligence roles, as well as how Eisenhower was of German ancestry), brought shame to itself by betraying its ideals, and unnecessarily ruined the lives of thousands of Japanese Americans. A long term perspective would have precluded this sad chapter in history. We are fortunate that Norman Mineta, secretary of transportation during the 9/11 attacks, was a survivor of those very internment camps and drew upon that experience to forbid airlines from racially profiling after the attacks.
Many of the suspected communists during the Red Scare were in fact communists! But it shouldn’t have mattered– morally speaking, persecution was wrong as they should have been entitled to their political opinions regardless. And furthermore, communists barely shifted mainstream politics or societal mores, and so hysteria about their impact on society was far over-exaggerated.
The consequences of this principle for present-day politics are left as an exercise to the reader :).
Comment #17 August 17th, 2024 at 1:37 am
As a vegan who has probably used similar rhetoric (though I don’t think exactly this phrase) I wanted to have a go at putting into words what I think it means for me (in abstract, not making any comment on its relevance to Israel).
I do not think it is always supposed to be an actual empirical prediction about what people will believe in the future (although sometimes maybe some people do intend it in this way).
I also don’t think it is really a reference class tennis argument.
And I think it is also slightly more than an assertion that: “we are right”.
I think its intended purpose is just to make the people it is aimed at stop and think. I think you are trying to say something like:
“I think I am right on this and that you are wrong (obviously). But this isn’t just one of those normal disagreements that reasonable moral people have about complicated hard problems. I don’t think you’re making an understandable mistake. I think you’re making a glaring, terrible, mistake. How can it be such a bad mistake when so many people agree with you? Well consider all the times that a majority of the living population have made terrible mistakes in the past! I think you’re being led astray by your peers and going along with ideas that, in a hypothetical future world where people have the benefit of detachment, they will immediately recognize as abhorrent.”
Obviously you can’t just assert this, you should also carefully explain why you think this is the case. But making it clear to the person you’re talking to that this is the level of claim you are making is maybe useful sometimes? If for no other purpose than making them pause and consider what you are saying extra carefully.
Comment #18 August 17th, 2024 at 4:58 am
Toby #17: Thanks for the comment. FWIW, I’m not vegan (I was a pescatarian for years, but even that I was unable to keep up), but I agree with you that veganism is on “the right side of history,” in the sense that we might move beyond the era of factory farms, and if and when we do, we’ll then look back on factory farming as a moral horror, as we look back today on segregation and slavery. In practice, I expect that if anything brings this about, it’ll be the continuing revolution in synthetic and lab-grown meats and dairy products that are getting ever closer to “passing the Turing Test,” and the scale-up of their production and lowering of the cost. I’m trying to include more fake meat in my diet — I especially like vegan fried chicken, bacon, and cheese sandwiches, and veggie ham, shrimp, and duck in Thai restaurants. I see the recent move by Republican governors to ban synthetic meat as a particular moral horror (and as yet more proof that they never actually believed in the free market — only when it suits them).
This is actually an excellent example, because even many meat-eaters will concede that veganism is most likely “on the right side of history” in the sense you define — they just lack the willpower to give up their steak. I think an analogous thing was true of many slaveowners in the pre-Civil-War US; at any rate, this seems to have been Washington’s and Jefferson’s attitude.
By contrast, I’ve never known a single Zionist to muse, in public or in private, that eliminating Israel is on “the right side of history.” I wonder if this is the deep mistake anti-Zionists make: they imagine that even the Zionists must secretly agree with them, which means that if Hamas and Hezbollah just make life in Israel miserable enough, the Zionists will finally give up and “flee back to Poland” or wherever. They can’t imagine that anyone really, genuinely believes the basic narrative of Jewish history, that the Jews finally are home in Israel, that they’re indigenous there too, that they were murdered or expelled just about everywhere else on earth, that they have as much right to be in Israel as anyone does, that even the UN agreed with that when it voted for partition in 1947, so let’s find a way to coexist.
Comment #19 August 17th, 2024 at 9:16 am
The problem with a conflict where the leaders of both sides have chosen horrific violence against civilians is that supporters of both sides can then point out how terrible the other side is, somewhat correctly.
Comment #20 August 17th, 2024 at 9:18 am
Perhaps “we’re on the right side of history” should be understood as a speech act: somewhat like “I now pronounce you man and wife” or “your honor, I object”, it takes the form of a factual assertion, but at least in part it’s an attempt to cause the claimed fact to be true, by the act of asserting it. Of course, no single assertion that “we’re on the right side of history” can make that claim be true, but to the extent that morality is socially constructed, enough such assertions by enough different people can have that effect.
Comment #21 August 17th, 2024 at 10:29 am
Many people use this phrase because they think they can “improve on today’s consensus estimate”, borrowing your words.
This psychology permeates the daily discussion thread on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets through the rally cry “SPY to 560 EOW🚀🚀🚀” (EOW for end of week).
Rational investors should strive to avoid falling into such mindsets.
Since your essays display high levels of rationality through devil’s advocating, I find it hard to believe that you will ever indulge in such right side of history claims.
Comment #22 August 17th, 2024 at 10:40 am
fumin #21: I mean, clearly there are people who manage to improve over the consensus estimates, like the early investors in Apple, Google, or bitcoin. But the people worth listening to on empirical matters are generally full of uncertainty and of possible reasons why they might be wrong.
Comment #23 August 17th, 2024 at 11:04 am
Scott,
Glad that you found the time to write these nice reflections, instead of just reacting to current events. This indicates that you are on a good track to overcome your current troubles.
And I am also glad that you made it clear to Sam (#2, #9) that your conversation with him is over. More than any announcements that you will treat comments different than you used to, this indicates to me that you really have the strength to follow through on your plans to change your behavior to make your own life better.
And in your pontificatiest AI podcast ever, you look actually quite healthy. This also indicates that you have been successful in implementing beneficial changes to your lifestyle. Looks good!
Comment #24 August 17th, 2024 at 11:17 am
Some clarifying questions:
Comment #25 August 17th, 2024 at 11:23 am
I like the idea of ‘the right side of history’ implying long-term effects. So for example, the long term effects of the Gaza war are likely to include a long term occupation of the Gaza strip by Israel. In twenty years, that may be much more important than the things that seem important right now, such as hostages and POW abuses.
So ‘the right side of history’ may include (for example) holding out for a ceasefire agreement that hands over the strip to the PA, even if it prolongs the war right now. Protesters could invoke ‘history’ to justify doing that.
On a different point – I think the ‘Arab Spring’ is another counterexample to enlightenment values always being on the right side of history. What started out in 2011 looking like a giant march towards democracy ended up with anarchy and destruction.
Comment #26 August 17th, 2024 at 11:41 am
Nick Drozd #24: I simply meant that, when the principles of reason, liberty, etc. favor one side, then that side is right. And when they say that there are merits on both sides, then that is the truth of the matter.
Comment #27 August 17th, 2024 at 11:44 am
Zur Luria #25: The problem with the Arab Spring was not with the liberal Enlightenment people; it was rather that those people lost out to the Islamists! Same thing that happened in Iran in 1979. Extremely big danger to guard against.
Comment #28 August 17th, 2024 at 12:12 pm
Scott #18
I am not comfortable with the analogy to slaveholders, but the fraction of slaveholders who felt uncomfortable about slavery, or questioned it, was small enough that at the time you might not have known any.
Comment #29 August 17th, 2024 at 12:20 pm
“The right side of history” should mean an evolution closer to utopia, but that premise has become to seem completely naive to me, so I think the un-naive meaning is “we will bury you”.
I just finished “In the Belly of the Whale” by Michael Flynn. I have liked some of his books and not liked others. That one is his best for me, and one of my favorites overall. The Whale is a huge starship heading for Tau Ceti with 40,000 people on board, on a journey of 500 or so years. Offices (Captain, Head of Maintenance, etc.) have become hereditary, and the ordinary crew members have become oppressed and decide to revolt. After some deaths and some destruction, the survivors realize they must continue to fly the ship, maintain its engines and astrogation systems, maintain life-support, maintain food production, raise children, train them to take over these responsibilities, et cetera. In forming a new government, their biggest innovation is term-limits for high-level positions.
The analogy to our world is clear. (It is not a high probability that the Whale will ever reach its destination, but it is hard for most of the crew not to realize that they are all in it together.)
Comment #30 August 17th, 2024 at 12:25 pm
Regardless of whether they were morally right, the actions of the ‘enlightenment people’ in the Arab spring, and their support by western governments, led to regional disaster. From the point of view of history, their actions weere a horrible mistake.
A couple more examples:
1. The Gilad Shalit deal. Freeing a thousand political dissidents would seem to be in line with enlightenment values.
2. The Gaza withdrawal looked at the time like the only path to peace. I actually demonstrated in favor as a college student, certain that I was on the right side of history. But I was wrong!
My point is that I agree with what you said elsewhere – unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to guess what history will say.
Comment #31 August 17th, 2024 at 12:41 pm
I think that if you want to better understand the protestors’ claim to be on the right side of history, you should consider Nat Turner’s rebellion. A group of black slaves indiscriminately murdered white people. They were quickly suppressed, but fear of another, larger rebellion led to increased oppression of both slaves and free blacks.
I imagine that you with your modern-day values would have been opposed to that increased oppression without being in favor of indiscriminate murder. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I might have said something like “Indiscriminate murder is wrong, but the ultimate cause of this rebellion was slavery and the morally correct way to prevent future rebellions is to free the slaves.”
I’m not saying that I think the current situation in Israel is in fact analogous to this – I don’t and I could explain why but there’s no need to because you and I already agree. However, if you want to be a devil’s advocate for the protesters, it’s illustrative to consider a past incident where the side carrying out the indiscriminate murder was on the right side of history and the side trying to prevent more such murder wasn’t.
Comment #32 August 17th, 2024 at 12:47 pm
Zur Luria #30: Please don’t misunderstand me! The “pro-reason-and-Enlightenment” side can certainly flub its strategy and execution, and it has many times. Just as you say, being tricked by the dishonest and unscrupulous is one of the most common failure modes. On the other hand, I’ve found the criterion of “which side would sit under the shade of trees to debate what’s right, leaving no assumption unchallenged?” to be a nearly infallible moral guide.
Comment #33 August 17th, 2024 at 1:06 pm
Alex K #31: Yes, I fully understand that they see October 7 as analogous to the Nat Turner rebellion. And I assume that the full invasion of Israel and the slaughter of all of its Jews who haven’t escaped in time will be the analogue of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Comment #34 August 17th, 2024 at 1:11 pm
Scott,
As you note, college protest aims have invariably been messy, vague and incoherent. If so, it is hard to treat protesters and their views as monolithic. But if we were to do so, there are other possibilities for the ‘right side of history claim’ that involve Palestinian freedom. At least one aim appears to be to end US support for the occupation. The tactics are not aligned if that was the goal, but ‘Hamas burning civilians is justified’ is probably not a majority view, according to polls
Comment #35 August 17th, 2024 at 1:31 pm
RB #34: The very phrase “the occupation” is a motte-and-bailey. Does it refer to the West Bank settlements? If so, then the US (like me) has always wanted them dismantled, as part of a negotiated deal in which the Palestinians would recognize Israel’s right to exist. Or does “the occupation” refer to the entirety of Israel, which seems to be what most of the protesters mean by it now?
More broadly, I’ve just consistently supported the two-state solution since I was 12 years old. What’s incredible is how that used to be considered the “leftist” position, but by now the campus left has radicalized itself to such a degree that advocating the exact same position will get you called a right-wing fascist Zionist settler-colonialist.
Comment #36 August 17th, 2024 at 1:41 pm
Scott,
For me, it is the same as for you – a two-state solution. I cannot speak for the protesters.
Comment #37 August 17th, 2024 at 2:28 pm
Surely the people protesting against the Shah, many of whom were leftist secularists, though they were on the right side of history.
Comment #38 August 17th, 2024 at 2:33 pm
Elliot Lieb told me once that there were protests against the Korean War. A war that killed 15-20% of North Korea’s population. Definitely more of a “genocide” than the Gaza War. Anyway, I don’t think the protesters protesting the war against North Korea were on the right side of history.
Comment #39 August 17th, 2024 at 2:52 pm
Over-adjusting for your biases might help with the conundrum, you could try swapping the emotional with the banal in perspectives and see if that helps. Like this:
“if you truly believe your side to be right, then you should believe it’s right win or lose. For example, an anti-Zionist should say that, even if Israel continues killing babies, and even if everyone else on the planet comes to support it, still stopping Israel from commiting genocide would’ve been the right choice. Conversely, a Zionist should say that if Israel stops killing babies and the whole rest of the world celebrates the end of genocide forevermore—well then, the whole world is wrong.”
If you don’t even face the emotive aspects of the Zionist-vs-anti-Zionist perspective in framing the question, putting yourself in their (revolting as they may seem) shoes etc, then you’ll obviously end up with a conclusion that’s a wrapper around your emotions.
Comment #40 August 17th, 2024 at 3:05 pm
As a relative outsider, allow me to provide the following (very mild) rebuttal.
The phrase “right side of history,” I think, applies best to Nelson Mandela and South African apartheid (as you mentioned above). Perhaps I’m misreading things badly – very possible! – but I think that the majority of people protesting against Israel at this time refer to exactly that. The note of disagreement arises from directly drawing a bridge from that idea – that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, even before Oct. 7th, and most certainly after, is intolerable and indeed apartheid – and that opposing that means denying the right of Israel to exist (if I’ve misread you, all apologies!). Per Alex K’s remark (#31), I think that that the Nat Turner rebellion is an apt comparison, especially given the man’s own sense of madcap religiosity and indiscriminate and incoherent violence. The nuance here, I think, is that while Nat Turner’s specific goals (“Kill all whites irrespective of age or sex” ) was unquestionably evil, most would agree that the broader movement (emancipate the slaves and give rights to those without) is pretty much beyond reproach.
As to the nitty-gritties, I disagree with you on the notion that most of the protestors are for the destruction of the Israeli state. Sadly, aside from RB #34’s comment, I don’t have much polling data for you. And social media is a revolting cesspool, so…
Look, as best I see it, the truth of the matter is this: there are roughly 7 million Israelis and 7 million Palestinians (despite the right-wing’s best efforts to the contrary) living in a napkin-sized sliver of land and they must learn to live together respectfully, justly, and with equality. Both peoples have, in my view, **equal**, **unconditional**, **unalienable**, and **fundamental** rights to self-determination, and most importantly, cannot abrogate that right anywhere else. And this cannot manifest itself in a series of bantustans (as Sharon for instance believed was the best outcome), or a state where one group is driven into the desert and/or the sea. Whether this is in two (ideally secular, democratic) states, a single democratic state, or somewhere in between, I no longer have a damn clue. I used to think that the two state solution was the answer, but the settlement project raises the simple question: where will those two states be, and how will you make two viable nations (with adequate resources, access to water, food, security, etc) given the ugly reality on the ground?
Well, that’s enough rambling. Back to NeurIPS reviews for me.
Comment #41 August 17th, 2024 at 3:09 pm
Lim #39: I literally just expanded out the dictionary definition of Zionist (“someone who thinks a Jewish homeland of Israel should exist”) so as not to smuggle any conclusions in. It’s unclear how even to start a conversation with someone who gets to make any word mean anything they want it to.
Comment #42 August 17th, 2024 at 3:11 pm
Iran #37: See comment #32. The Iranian students were on the right side of history, and got tragically outmaneuvered by people on the wrong side of history. Far from the first or last time that’s happened.
Comment #43 August 17th, 2024 at 3:21 pm
Scott I appreciated the thoughtful analysis of the “of history” clause, I don’t recall it ever having been done before.
What I am confused about is the when you say
> if I were a different person, born to different parents in a different part of the world, maybe I’d chant for Israel’s destruction with the best of them. Even then, though, I feel like the above considerations would keep me awake at night, would terrify me that maybe I’d picked the wrong side, or at least that the truth was more complicated.
do you mean is that now you like awake at night thinking that maybe you picked the wrong side, as well?
Comment #44 August 17th, 2024 at 3:35 pm
Those that claim to be “on the right side of history” are also making a more subtle claim that I didn’t see mentioned here. (Please forgive me if I missed it.) It’s saying that our side is motivated by doing the right thing and, by implication, the other side is not. It’s a way to tell the audience that the opposition are the bad guys in this conflict without having to make a substantive argument that might be countered.
Comment #45 August 17th, 2024 at 3:40 pm
Robert #40 (and others who’ve made this argument):
I disagree with you on the notion that most of the protestors are for the destruction of the Israeli state.
If the protesters think that Israel should still exist as part of a two-state solution, a good way for them to communicate that would be say, “we think Israel should still exist as part of a two-state solution.”
Just saying that one sentence could massively increase their support base. The only reason not to say it, is if it goes against everything they believe.
In reality, from the interviews I’ve read with the protesters over the past year, I’ve been able to extract three stances:
(1) That there should be a single binational state. (Alas, any informed person knows that this is probably a fantasy, which would last for about 5 microseconds, or as long as it would take for Hamas or its successor organizations to attack the now-undefended Jews—thereby bringing us back to 1947, and to the reason why Israel was formed as an independent state in the first place.)
(2) That the Israelis should all “go back to Poland” (what if Poland doesn’t want them, as it didn’t want their grandparents? what about all the ones from Syria, Egypt, Iran?).
(3) That all Zionists, including presumably 99% of the Jewish population of Israel, should be murdered (this is the explicit position for example of Khymani James, the leader of the Columbia student encampment, the one that inspired all the other encampments).
Of course, the most common position by far is to decline to address the “what should ultimately happen?” question at all, thereby maintaining strategic ambiguity among (1)-(3).
Comment #46 August 17th, 2024 at 3:43 pm
I don’t think it’s an argument, it’s an attempt to trigger the bandwagon effect while making people feel righteous about their cause.
But there is one ironic point to make about the slogan and the idea underlying it: if it’s true that there is an arc of moral progress, then we’ll be inevitably passed by in the future. That is, we will necessarily be moral monsters to the people of the future, not heroes, at some point simply due to the inevitable march of progress.
Obviously I don’t actually believe that there is some inevitable fatalistic march of moral progress going on, but it’s interesting to see how the conclusion you get if you actually think through the implications of the underlying belief is very much at odds with the way the slogan is used.
Comment #47 August 17th, 2024 at 3:51 pm
Scott #35: I do not understand the two-state solution, after removing the Jewish settlements. Hasn’t this been proposed and rejected many times? Is the assumption that Jews would not be safe in a Palestinian Arab state? Or that you are accepting a right to a Palestinian Arab homeland that is free from Jews? Zionists do not argue that Arabs must be removed from the Jewish state. Why would Jews create a state where Jews are not welcome? The Palestinian Arabs will not accept any compromise anyway, so I do not see the point of advocating a two-state solution.
Comment #48 August 17th, 2024 at 3:52 pm
Scott #33: I’m not saying that I think slavery and the Civil War are a good analogy for the situation in Israel. I’m responding to your list of “Gandhi and MLK and Nelson Mandela” as people who were on the right side of history and “Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Pol Pot” as people who weren’t. The obvious pattern there is that the former group renounced violence but the latter group embraced it, and so the implication is that supporting the side which Hamas is on is misguided at best.
My claim is that this pattern is not universally true, so if you want to steelman the protesters, you should consider the case where there was a slaughter of civilians but abolitionists are still considered to be on the right side of history. That doesn’t mean you should change your mind and agree with the protesters. (I don’t.)
Comment #49 August 17th, 2024 at 3:55 pm
Tefilim #46: I mean, we build statues of people who we now realize were far ahead of their time (even if they weren’t fully caught up to us), and we tear down statues of people who we now realize were evil even for their time. That part makes sense. The question is why we take “join us because we’re on the right side of history” any more seriously than “invest in our company because our stock will go up.”
Comment #50 August 17th, 2024 at 4:23 pm
Thanks for the response!
Ok. So let’s break my response up:
1. As to the point about supporting the 2 state solution- I’m not going to condemn people who don’t proclaim support for it because I myself have basically lost hope for its feasibility. Given the encroachment of the settlers, I do not see how two genuine, viable states that aren’t bantustans can be built. That said, if, by some magic, the settlements could be reversed, the two state solution would be optimal. Would it suffice for people to say “the Jewish people have an inalienable right to self-determination”, or better yet “both peoples have an inalienable right to self determination in that land”?
2. The idiots who say “go back to Poland” or whatever are a concerning and moronic minority. The people who say that Zionists should be murdered are utterly disgusting. But for all their sound and fury, these people are a minority (albeit a stupid and violent one), as noted in RB’s poll numbers.
3. As to the notion of a single binational state – no such state could be created by fiat. Such a thing could only come to be after a serious reconciliation process, with political will from both sides. After all, allow me to gently point out that the Palestinians have every reason to fear being driven out of their homes and land (as they already are, see the recent atrocities in Jit, in the West Bank, if not the monstrous conduct of the IDF in Gaza) as well!
Comment #51 August 17th, 2024 at 4:32 pm
In the polls I linked to in #34, students appear to offer conflicting views regarding Hamas’ actions. According to the article
. Anecdotally, this seems correct. Quite a few polls though indicate that a majority of the college crowd blame Hamas for the attacks.
On the other hand, 34% of Americans oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. This is not aimed at people like Scott who support a two-state solution but let’s not ignore the substantial adult American opposition towards Palestinian independence and its impact on US policy.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/611375/americans-views-israel-palestinian-authority-down.aspx
Comment #52 August 17th, 2024 at 4:46 pm
Geoff #20
Enjoyed your link-thanks
I think the real meaning of this statement is-We are on the left of history, the far left of history where certainty and fervor reign.
Comment #53 August 17th, 2024 at 4:48 pm
Alex K #48: I agree that engaging in versus renouncing violence is not the distinction that “carves reality at the joints,” as the rationalists put it. We’d come closer with “proposing a reasonable compromise with some limiting principle vs. refusing even to say what one wants, because in reality it has no limit and involves murdering everyone on the other side, guilty and innocent alike.”
Pretty much every movement, even the ones that are most celebrated today (Civil Rights, anti-apartheid in South Africa) had violent aspects. But crucially, they also had peacemakers. What’s striking is that the Palestinians have never had a single leader even slightly analogous to MLK or Gandhi. If they did, I expect that there would soon be peace.
Comment #54 August 17th, 2024 at 4:53 pm
Scott #53: the most recent example may be Abu Artema whose family was bombed in Gaza recently.
His perspective in an interview conducted in 2019:
Comment #55 August 17th, 2024 at 5:04 pm
Robert #50: A quarter-century ago, there was a majority in Israel supporting a two-state solution that would entail uprooting almost all Jews from the West Bank — even, eg, in Hebron, where Jews have lived continuously for 3000 years. Then, at the last minute, Arafat walked away and launched a campaign of suicide bombings instead. A direct result of that was that support for the peace process collapsed among the Israeli public, and Israel became more and more of a Bibistan.
Now a new generation of idiots, who don’t know or care to know any of this history, imagine that Israel has always been Bibistan, and that Israelis have always opposed the peace process just because they’re evil baby-murdering settler-colonialists.
If a Palestinian Gandhi or MLK ever did arise, one who was actually serious about peace and had a real constituency, my expectation is that even today you could get a majority in Israel for a two-state solution that would entail the uprooting of most settlements.
Comment #56 August 17th, 2024 at 5:14 pm
Roger Schlafly #47: Yes, the idea is precisely to create a Palestinian state where no Jews are welcome, even though Israeli Arabs will continue to be full citizens of Israel. And I’m fine with that, if only the Palestinian side would agree! The idea is to pare down the demands to the absolute bare minimum that’s consistent with Jews having a viable homeland there. That way, if the Palestinians and the world’s protesters still throw the demand back in our faces, then there’s no lack of clarity about what they want.
Comment #57 August 17th, 2024 at 5:33 pm
Nimrod Novik in an interview with Ezra Klein
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-nimrod-novik.html
Comment #58 August 17th, 2024 at 5:44 pm
RB #57: Can you think of any dramatic Palestinian developments around 2007 that could’ve precipitated Netanyahu’s election in 2009?
Comment #59 August 17th, 2024 at 5:55 pm
Scott,
I’m not an expert, but are you referring to this
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/battle-for-gaza-hamas-jumped-provoked-and-pushed/
Comment #60 August 17th, 2024 at 6:10 pm
Shmi #43:
do you mean is that now you like awake at night thinking that maybe you picked the wrong side, as well?
I confess I’m rarely up at night wondering whether all the Jews in Israel should just be slaughtered, or should “go back to Poland.” But, yes, I’m constantly examining every subsidiary position to see what I might be mistaken about, particularly given the other side’s militant certainty.
Comment #61 August 17th, 2024 at 6:14 pm
On whether Arafat started the second intifada, my understanding is that the Mitchell Committee absolved him of blame.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/jcs/article/view/220/378
Comment #62 August 17th, 2024 at 6:55 pm
RB #61: Well, once it started, did Arafat do anything to stop it? If not, then given the near-certainty that someone would try reverting to terrorism and Arafat’s duty as head of the PA, you might as well call him responsible for what unfolded.
Comment #63 August 17th, 2024 at 8:22 pm
Scott #41 : Apologies! It’s hard to decipher someone’s empathy levels over text but I feel like I’m getting a sense now (we’re friends on Facebook but haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you in person). All the best to you sir.
Comment #64 August 17th, 2024 at 8:28 pm
Scott,
First of all, apologies for the lengthy, perhaps rambling nature of the following. Especially as I am not a regular commenter of yours, I completely understand if you choose not to publish it, though I would be extremely grateful if you read and considered it all the way through without preconceptions, regardless of whether you publish it or not. Indeed, even a succinct emailed answer would be a great honor, should you choose not to answer publicly. As a non-native speaker, I can only hope I got the tone right; if not, please forgive rhetorical excesses, and bear in mind that the following is meant with the utmost respect and sympathy for you. Let me also say that, although I sometimes say “we” in the following because I have significant common ground with the mainstream leftist/progressive views I outline, I am happy to say upfront that as things stand, I condemn Hamas, and support the continued existence of Israel. I just follow the other side’s reasoning a lot further than you seem to, despite rejecting the eventual conclusion.
I think an important error persists in your model of the “anti-Zionist” perspective. I almost want to call it a motte-and-bailey issue, though I’m quite certain it’s a sincere oversight in your reasoning, not an attempt at deception, so the term would be inappropriate. You had a commenter in another thread — I forget his name — who got close to it, but he was, I believe, against states altogether, and I think you (rightly) dismissed him as a non-representative radical on that basis. But one needn’t be ideologically against states to be ideologically against *nations*.
Essentially, what you keep missing (or at least underestimating) is: it is perfectly possible to simply believe that the Assyrians, Cossacks, Nazis, and so forth were unspeakably evil on the grounds that they persecuted and murdered huge numbers of thinking, feeling human beings. While *also* believing hat the mass-murderers targeted those particular people insofar as they were deemed “Jewish” is not an argument that the victims’ (or their descendants’) self-identification as the same should be treated as in some way sacrosanct. Analogously: the bloody wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants were abominations, and we must mourn their victims, but an atheist can do that much without ceding an inch on the basic point that both sides were deeply wrong about the God thing to begin with.
You write as though, if they supported Israel’s existence before, progressives must have been onboard with the basic idea of Zionism (that “the existence of a Jewish state”, in principle, was desirable or even necessary) — and so, you’re surprised at the sudden about-fact. I think that is where you’re wrong. Increasingly the default progressive position is to be deeply, deeply repelled by the idea of believing in a “nation”, in the same way that a committed atheist might be repelled by belief in God. States should be neutral administrative entities for overseeing vast areas of land, and do their best not to identify themselves with the majority residents’ personal cultural affiliations, lest the state become unwelcoming to the minorities; a truly *multicultural* state is viewed not just as a positive, but as something of a moral obligation, albeit not an overriding one, and nations don’t come into it. “There are cultures, and there are states, and their borders probably shouldn’t overlap: nations don’t enter into it.”
It is no coincidence that denunciations of Israel as an “ethno-state” often go hand in hand with accusations of it being a “theocracy”; we’re inclined to oppose one for the same reason any Enlightenment-values-supporting, reasonable person will oppose the other. “A country specifically for Jews” is intolerable not because of animus against Jews, but because we do not, for lack of a better term, *believe* in Jews.
Certainly we believe in the right of individual human beings to adhere to the quaint, archaic notion that a scrap of DNA and/or cultural traditions give them some kind of spiritual tie to the Israelites of the First Temple period. But, again, only in the sense that an atheist who isn’t also a Maoist-style totalitarian revolutionary respects the rights of individuals to believe in God and Satan and communication wafers turning to flesh. i.e. “we recognize that trying to actively suppress these beliefs will inevitably lead to horrible actions, so we won’t stop you; but we really, really, REALLY hope that you’ll leave that nonsense behind sooner than later, to the benefit of general human flourishing”. When the people who swear by the archaic superstitions move beyond using them as a basis for free association and quaint holidays, and towards using them as a justification for evil acts on a massive scale, evil acts meant to promote and perpetuate the most toxic forms of those superstitions — then, as we would act against theocratic Christians at home, so too our begrudging tolerance for people who believe in bloodlines and nations and races might begin to run thin in the face of other considerations.
I think *that*, for me, is what Zionism being “on the wrong side of history” fundamentally means. The idea of an ethno-state or indeed nation-state is on the way out; Israel is a straggler, a living fossil. Its continued reliance on a constitution which binds citizenship to ancestry has been *tolerated* by the developed world because its existence as a haven for people-who-were-persecuted-due-to-perceived-“Jewishness” was morally desirable enough to outweigh the awkwardness of a modern nation still embracing such principles — and because, having been founded in reaction to the horrors of Nazism, Israel couldn’t plausibly be embraced by the racist far-right as a precedent for creating more of its kind.
(How does any of this square with the cutting-edge left’s love of labels? Uneasily — most would rather avoid the question — but I think part of the answer is the importance of self-identification. What is intolerable about the Law of Return is that it hinges on who your grandparents were, rather than what you yourself feel in your heart; both in terms of whom it includes and whom it excludes. Were it to hypothetically be amended so that anyone who publicly identified as Jewish, regardless of ancestry or halakhic validity or what they mean by that term, fell within its purview, *then* I think it would become a much easier sell.)
(How this squares with unquestioning support for Palestinian nationalism is even harder to crack. Frankly I don’t think this one has an answer besides the “unquestioning”. Having been acknowledged as Worthy Victims, the Palestinians themselves’ rhetoric is now to be treated with the utmost respect regardless of whether it meshes with “our” own framework even remotely, which it doesn’t. Ironically, something like this, with Jews still carrying their worthy-victims-badge from the Holocaust, is also why I think most were formerly willing to politely overlook Israel’s ethno-nationalism.)
Now, of course, where I part from the college protesters on all this is that I don’t think Israel’s actions have passed beyond the threshold of tolerance under the circumstances. Wrong side of history or not, believing-in-Jews or not, I think more people will get displaced, tortured, and/or horribly murdered if Israel dissolved than if it continues on for the foreseeable future. Hence, I support “Israel’s right to continue to exist” as a proxy for supporting its citizens’ human right not to be displaced, tortured, or horribly murdered.
But I would believe the exact same thing if Israel had been founded by a few million hippies on the basis of a prophetic drug-trip undergone by some 1960s cult leader, grounding the hippies’ right to the land in something to do with reincarnation, lizard-people, and the secrets of Atlantis. In either case I believe, on a very deep level, that the “people”‘s putative “right” to “the land” is hogwash, and that it’s a worrying sign for civilization if it’s being treated as a reasonable argument rather than hogwash. I just also believe that people have a right to live by the canons of whatever harmless hogwash they like, and/or to keep living in homes their parents acquired because *they* believed in hogwash.
If you think my Hippieland is a cheap thought experiment, consider “manifest destiny”. Surely one can believe both that the Westward push was an ethical minefield whose alleged heavenly mandate was horrible nonsense; and *also* that modern white Americans have a right not to be murdered or shipped back to England, the Netherlands, etc. en masse. If the US government were suddenly to find itself at war with some holdout population of Native Americans, and people, in response to pro-Native calls to decolonize the US altogether, reacted by resurrecting manifest-destiny rhetoric as a justification for the US’s existence — I trust you can see how outrageous that would be, how wrongheaded. How much more difficult, too, that would make it for the reasonable, enlightened man to argue that *nevertheless this is no excuse for mass murder* and the pro-Native side should scale down its demands.
Again, I say this not to change your mind: I *agree* with you on the practical matter of “should Israel continue to exist”. But I hope this makes it easier for you to grasp why so many seemingly-well-intentioned people, not otherwise seeming to hold anti-semitic views, have such an instinctively negative view of Israel’s existence, whether or not they explicitly think of it in the terms I have outlined.
Comment #65 August 17th, 2024 at 9:07 pm
Let me begin by saying that I do not support the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and I am opposed to apartheid and to the occupation of Palestinian land. But I am not advocating for the destruction of Israel.
With that in mind, I would like you to consider the possibility that many (most?) of the protestors are advocating for the end of the genocide, but not for the extermination of Israeli Jews or the destruction of Israel (though some are certainly calling for the end of apartheid which many Zionists seem to view as synonymous with the destruction of Israel).
I don’t believe in objective morality or ethics. I believe that morality is something made by humans. Having said that, I think morality, like many other human-made ideas, is incredibly useful. Morality, for me, is about figuring out how to act to create the kind of world you want to live in. The problem is, we don’t all share the same values and we don’t agree on what kind of world we live in or how to get there.
In spite of these disagreements, there has been a general trend, in recent history, towards inclusiveness and equality (for example in the areas of ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, wealth). We’re at the point where even animals are being granted rights. From my point of view, this has been a good thing.
You could characterise this as a moral arc, but I think it’s worth noting that the continuation of this trend is by no means assured. It may continue (no doubt in fits and starts, with occasional setbacks), or we may witness a profound reversal of this trend. There are no guarantees.
Regardless of whether this trend continues, Israel’s conduct should be regarded as immoral today, based on the prevailing moral views of our present time. The actions of Hamas, however terrible, do not justify the measures taken by the State of Israel (the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the targeting of journalists, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and homes, the annexation of occupied land, etc). If the positions were reversed, I.e., if these things were being done to an ally of the US, I believe that the ‘morality’ of the situation would be abundantly clear to those who presently support Israel’s actions.
I would like to believe that in the future, many people in the US (and perhaps even people in Israel) will realise how wrong they were to support the genocide of Palestinians—or, perhaps, they will say that they were always opposed to the genocide in Palestine. However it is often quite difficult for people to admit when they are wrong. Consequently, I think it is more likely that their children or grandchildren will be the ones condemning the genocide of Palestinians (many of your children can already see how Israel’s conduct is incongruous with the values you proclaim to hold). However, even this future recognition is not guarantee—Imperialist propaganda is a force to be reckoned with. Even worse, fascism is growing in popularity in the US (and parts of Europe). We may be faced with an openly fascist USA in our lifetimes.
We cannot rely on the arc of history, because history is what we make it.
Comment #66 August 17th, 2024 at 9:23 pm
Scott #62,
In that case, you should place the blame on both Sharon and Arafat.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/mitchells-middle-east-hope/
And from the previous link in #60
Comment #67 August 17th, 2024 at 10:08 pm
Continuing from #15, Yual Harrari makes a sincere effort to portray the situation through the evolutionary sense, but lacks the rigor given his background. Dawkins gets the rigor right, but his solutions are extreme…Israel , in spite of having a strong technological base, has not made an attempt to make its talent multicultural. Basically can they not do a California – get talent to move from around the world with the incentives of capitalism ? This will address the problem at least partially ?
Comment #68 August 18th, 2024 at 12:31 am
Scott #60
If you read Catch 22, you’ll find the story of a pilot who lies awake at night wondering if bombing uninvolved German villages after the war is essentially won, for the purpose of helping his commanding officer get recognized, is the right thing to do. The straw counter-argument the book presents is that the other side are Nazis, therefore you’re on the right side, stop complaining about it and fly the plane.
The reason that counter-argument is wrong is that he was never presented with the option of siding with Nazis. He’s actually presented with the choice between either flying his missions as ordered, or deliberately dropping the bombs too early or late, missing the homes full of sleeping families, and putting himself at risk of severe disciplinary action. Framing the question as if it was whether he should fly Allied or Axis bombers, i.e. trying to focus on the “two sides,” is a smokescreen for the more fine-grained questions he’s actually faced with. On the other hand, the real questions are driving him insane.
The “right side of history” is about more than whether the United States was right to make war on Imperial Japan after Pearl Harbor, it’s also about whether the United States was right to (for example,) carry the firebombing campaigns to undefended Japanese cities, or if burning a hundred thousand people alive could really be justified by a reduction in defense production. Those are the questions a soul that’s already been born into a country on one side or the other is faced with. In this case the subsidiary question is the entire issue.
Comment #69 August 18th, 2024 at 12:49 am
Sorry for the delayed response. But here goes:
Responding to your comment #50, Arafat did screw the pooch when he rejected further negotiations after the Clinton parameters. Was it a wrong decision? Unequivocally yes, but it wasn’t entirely irrational either. One way or another, Arafat was stuck in a vise – accepting the deals on offer would have been a betrayal of either the refugee diaspora (owing to intransigence on the Israeli/US side on the right of return), or a betrayal of the population in situ (as we’re seeing play out so tragically right now). The plight of the refugees, forever stateless, aside from the incredibly lucky few who reach the west, is awful and has no place in the modern world. And this vise was held against the backdrop of Israel not having formally recognized the right to a Palestinian state!
Moreover, as RB’s comment #61 points out, the Mitchell commission did, in fact, absolve Arafat of his responsibility, not to mention Ami Ayalon. I disagree with your comment #62 apportioning blame to him entirely. Violence like that is generally a sign that things have spiraled beyond control, as we’re seeing Biden trying to avert now with the pressure for a ceasefire (and, most famously, as happened in 1914). Was he a flawed leader? Absolutely, and fatally so. Was he to blame for everything that followed Camp David? Certainly not.
As for Israel becoming Bibistan… sadly, it does seem to be the case. Moreover, I think that one cannot absolve Israel of this and simply blame the 2000-2002 intifada, especially as right-wing sentiment has taken hold in awful ways (read Omer Bartov’s article in the Guardian for an absolutely gut wrenching take on the matter). And worse yet, I do fear that the influence of the American white supremacist right-wing accelerates this enormously.
Also, let me emphasize this point: Jews living in Hebron have every much a right to be there as Christians, or Muslims, or Druze, or anybody else, and shouldn’t be forced out in the event of a 2SS! After all, if people coexisted relatively peacefully once, they surely can do so again, no? This even holds for the Nakba’s mirror in the ethnic cleansing of Mizrahi Jews from the Arab world – an unpardonable crime by any lens.
As to the point about a Palestinian Mandela, most people would agree that Marwan Barghouti fits that bill. The one person who could likely lead Palestine to a peaceful 2SS. And to preempt claims that he’s a terrorist, I would point out that the ANC was only delisted as a terror organization in 2008. But I think the appetite for that was gone as early as 2007, as seen by Shimon Peres’ broken promise to free him.
Ultimately, as the British found in Ireland, especially after Oct. 7 and the response to it, a critical and necessary step to the resolution of the conflict will be some sort of Good Friday agreement, following which a pathway to a final peaceful resolution in some form an n-state solution for n=1,2,3, with 3 representing a split between Gaza and the West Bank.
Comment #70 August 18th, 2024 at 3:13 am
As a sarcastic man once said, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it may be a spuriously detrended random walk.
Comment #71 August 18th, 2024 at 3:31 am
Edmund #64: Thanks so much for your thoughtful comment, which I didn’t find “rambling” at all! I’d of course happily settle for the “Israel should be destroyed” people becoming “merely as Zionist as you are.”
That said, one question about your position: would you also say that Japan is a living fossil, which needs to stop being tied in any way to the Japanese people and culture, and just become an administrative entity for anyone who happens to live on those islands, to which uncontrolled immigration must now be allowed? What about Thailand? Ecuador? Latvia?
I can totally get wanting to move someday to a globalized world with no nation-states anywhere. What I don’t get is making the dissolution of Israel, of all places, any sort of priority in that quest — particularly given Israel’s founding mandate of preventing a second Jewish Holocaust, and the extreme continuing relevance of that mandate, of which the world was reminded on Oct 7.
Also, one important correction: Israel does not have a constitution that binds citizenship to ancestry. Indeed it doesn’t have a constitution at all (which is sometimes a huge problem, as with the recent “judicial reform” battle). It has 2 million Arab citizens, as well as Druze and Bahai citizens and citizens of every other ancestry you can name (for example, the mother of Noa Argamani, the rescued hostage, was a Chinese Israeli citizen). Anyone can apply to immigrate to Israel, just like they can apply to immigrate to the US, outside the specific provisions of the Law of Return created in the wake of the Holocaust.
(And even the Law of Return isn’t ancestry-based only! Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that even Reform and Conservative converts to Judaism can invoke it. The overriding principle is, or should be: “if you’re Jewish enough for the world’s antisemites to want to kill you, then you’re Jewish enough for Israel to accept you as a refugee.”)
Comment #72 August 18th, 2024 at 3:42 am
Tom #65: I’m grateful that you don’t advocate for Israel’s destruction!
But if what’s happening in Gaza is a “genocide,” then so is every war that’s ever been fought in an urban area and that had civilian casualties. Eg, the US certainly committed genocides against Germany and Japan in WWII. In which case the word seems to lose all meaning: why not just say “urban war”?
There’s only one party to this conflict that openly, explicitly wants genocide in the original sense of the word, and that’s done everything it can to carry one out. That party is Hamas.
Comment #73 August 18th, 2024 at 3:54 am
Robert #69: I’m glad you agree that Arafat “screwed the pooch”! But when you speak of “US/Israeli intransigence about the right of return” — to the Israeli side, “the right of return” is just a euphemism for “Israel no longer gets to exist.” The entire point of a two-state solution is supposed to be to draw a boundary, as painful as that is for the members of both sides who wanted to live on the other side of it! Again, is there also going to be a right of return for the equally many Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim lands, including Palestine, around 1948 (a “Nakba” far more thorough than the Palestinian one, in which hundreds of thousands of Arabs who chose to join the Israeli side were allowed to, and became citizens of Israel)? If there won’t be, then why even breathe a word about a “right of return” for one side only?
Comment #74 August 18th, 2024 at 4:05 am
Concerned #68: I completely agree with you that, for an Allied pilot ordered to bomb Dresden, the most morally salient question is not whether the war is justified, but whether his particular mission is. And we could say exactly the same about an IDF soldier ordered to attack a school or hospital that Hamas is operating from. But neither of us are IDF soldiers. I see no reason why we shouldn’t ask whether the war is justified (just like we could ask whether the Allies were justified in WWII), as a prerequisite to asking about the morality of individual operations.
Comment #75 August 18th, 2024 at 5:24 am
Everyone: I think discussion has been 5000x higher-quality than the usual Israel/Palestine Internet discussion, so thank you! Nevertheless, I’ll be closing down the thread tonight, because I now need to prioritize quantum stuff and my return to teaching at UT.
Comment #76 August 18th, 2024 at 7:08 am
I realise now I had always assumed the Enlightenment represented warmth as well as light. That is why I feel so uneasy regarding the ongoing horrors in Gaza. There is no logical reason why it should stop other than the outrage it inflicts upon our humanity. “The Right Side of History” means little when weighed against the right side of this moment and the decisions that must be made right now, for the most holy of reasons – to reduce human suffering.
Comment #77 August 18th, 2024 at 7:32 am
David #76: Many of us share the goal of reducing human suffering—one of the central goals of the Enlightenment. The only question is what’s best going to further that goal in this case: leaving Hamas in power, so it can continue terrorizing both Palestinian and Israeli civilians? Or destroying Hamas while trying to minimize harm to innocents, but accepting that more will inevitably die? This is of course directly analogous to the question faced by the Allies bombing Germany in WWII; how would you have answered that one?
Comment #78 August 18th, 2024 at 7:56 am
1. First things first, since Oct 7, numerous experts on genocide, including Jewish and Israeli scholars, have written public statements arguing that Israel are committing genocide, or that they are at risk of committing genocide if they continue on their present course.
2. Genocide isn’t judged solely on the number of civilians killed, but I’m not aware of any recent wars (‘urban’ or otherwise) with comparable rates of civilian mortality.
3. Comparing Israel’s actions to the bombing campaigns of WWII doesn’t reflect well on Israel. After all, the Geneva conventions were established in the aftermath of WWII to limit precisely this kind of barbarity in war. Are you suggesting that it’s okay for Israel to disregard the Geneva conventions?
4. Hamas are engaged in armed resistence against occupation by the State of Israel. I don’t agree with all of their methods, but their cause seems more just than the Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Palestinians. What is the basis for your claim that Hamas want to commit genocide against the people of Israel (or Jews more broadly)? If you are planning on pointing me to the 1988 Hamas Charter I suggest you read the explanation of its origins provided by Ahmed Yousef in 2011. Furthermore, I’d urge you to consider that a lot has changed since 1988 (including the release of a new Hamas charter in 2017!).
6. I would also like to know whether you are similarly concerned about the Likud party platform of 1977: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”? Have Likud revised their position as Hamas have done? The rhetoric coming from a number of Israeli politicians in the last year (including ‘openly’ and ‘explicitly’ calling for genocide “in the original sense”) suggests that they have not.
7. Even if you believe that Hamas genuinely harbour genocidal intentions against the people of Israel there are two more points worth considering: (a) claims of acting in self-defense are not a defense against charges of genocide (it’s been tried before); (b) Israel have been much more effective at carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing against the people of Gaza than Hamas have ever been in their ‘supposed’ attempts to commit genocide against the people of Israel.
8. Lastly, setting aside questions of morality and legality, I believe it is not in Israel’s own best interests to continue bombing Gaza. Rightly or wrongly, they are increasingly becoming a pariah state and their actions, taken in the name of safeguarding a home for the Jewish people, are, almost certainly, making Jewish people around the world (including in Israel) less safe.
Comment #79 August 18th, 2024 at 8:11 am
Ok, it’s closing time, so I’ll try to be brief (though I’ll likely fail).
And you’re right, this has been an absolutely fantastic discussion indeed, and I certainly have learned a lot both in terms of historical facts as well as perspectives. Thanks for this, Scott, but also everyone else who’s contributed meaningfully.
1. I might be naive, but I don’t see the right of return for refugees to mean that Israel can no longer exist. Again, my perspective is an outsider’s, so I’ll happily concede that point.
2. As for the reciprocal right to return for Arab Jews to the Arab nations, I absolutely, 100% believe that to be a right, naive and idealistic though that may be. Why should Yemeni Jews have been expelled from Yemen? Why should Moroccan/Amazigh Jews not be able to, say, buy a house in Tangiers if there is a fair deal between consenting agents? As I said in my previous comment, the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab nations mirrored the Nakba.
Having said that though, I think it is a mistake to conflate Palestinians with Egypt/Syria/Yemen/Iraq/Morocco, etc, for the simple reason that they are all distinct countries with distinct cultures and not some great monolith. Even the dialects of Arabic they use hardly sound the same. So I feel that the right of return for Palestinians should be disentangled from Arab states principally because they had nothing (aside perhaps from being a convenient excuse) to do with the expulsions from other MENA states.
Comment #80 August 18th, 2024 at 8:31 am
Tom #78:
1. Israel has nuclear weapons. If Israel had wanted to commit a genocide in Gaza, no one would now be left alive in Gaza. In actuality, the percentage of.
Also: Jews are a notoriously self-critical people, so it’s not surprising that, in addition to being wildly overrepresented in physics, computer science, medicine, etc, they’re also wildly overrepresented in the fields of antisemitism and antizionism. But important context here is that, in many social sciences and humanities fields, denouncing Israel as a “genocidal settler-colonial entity” is now the price of admission, particularly for Jews.
2. Assad’s war on Syria? Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen? It’s hard even to know where to start with recent conflicts that have been far worse for civilians than the Gaza one, but which the world barely gave a shit about because “no Jews, no news.”
3. If the comparison of Israel to the WWII allies reflects poorly on Israel, then how does the corresponding comparison of Hamas to the Nazis reflect on Hamas? If I have to pick a side, I know which one I’m on, then as now.
4. That Hamas’s goal is a complete genocide of Israel’s Jews (at least, of those who don’t manage to flee in time) is not in serious question. They’ve continued to say it themselves, long after their 1988 charter! Eg, right after Oct 7, Ghadi Hamad boasted that they’ll repeat it a second, third, and fourth time until Israel is no more.
Incidentally, I’d say that Hamas’s charter no more needs to be “explicated” than Mein Kampf did! But there were plenty of pacifists and accommodationists in the 20s and 30s eager to explain why Mein Kampf didn’t mean anything like what a naive, simplistic reading would suggest it did.
6(?). Yes, I despise the Likud platform. But not even the craziest Likudniks, or Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, have called for a literal genocide of Palestinians as the government of Gaza calls for a literal genocide of Jews. (Just like even the worst war crime any IDF battalion has committed can’t hold a candle to October 7 in terms of gleeful savagery. Take a look and see!)
More importantly, the 1977 Likud platform did not prevent Israel from offering the Palestinians total autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1990s and 2000s. Once again, it was the Palestinian side that rejected the deal, because it would still leave a Jewish state in existence, and that ultimately proved too much for Arafat and Abbas to take. The main hope for peace today is that a future Palestinian leader will arise who will accept such a deal, as Israel accepted painful compromises in 1947 and 2000 … and, of course, that a future Israeli government will still offer it.
Comment #81 August 18th, 2024 at 9:18 am
Robert #79: On right of return, the short answer is yes, Israel could easily accommodate a few hundred thousand Palestinians. I even like the idea of creating a process by which Palestinians like this guy could apply for Israeli citizenship.
But what’s being demanded is for anyone who can trace any ancestry to pre-1948 Israel to be able to move there (even as Jews whose ancestors were expelled would have no similar right). At that point, not only would you soon no longer have a Jewish majority, you’d have a majority that could immediately vote to expel all the Jews. Far from being a paranoid fantasy, that’s something close to the explicit plan. “From the river to the river, Palestine will be Arab” — did you know that the Arabic version of that chant uses the word “Arab,” rather than the word “free”? So, at that point, Israel’s whole founding principle, that there should exist one tiny spot on the vast earth with a mandate to safeguard the remaining Jews from annihilation, would be no more.
Comment #82 August 18th, 2024 at 9:33 am
I think I have to push back against comment #79 a little bit.
1. Israel not using nukes implies Israel is not committing a genocide:
Israel’s nuclear weapons are primarily a deterrent against well-armed nations like Iran, and certainly not something to use to shoot fish in a barrel. Moreover, the proximity of Gaza and the West Bank to Israel would mean any fallout would also affect the areas around the strip that are literally Israel, so…
Another point about the genocide argument is this – one does not need nuclear weapons to commit genocide. In fact, never has any WMD been used in the commission of genocide, not in Darfur, not in Bosnia, not in Rwanda, not in Bangladesh, and not even in the Holocaust. One does not need weapons that can level a city or poison a county to commit genocide, when machetes will do the trick.
Moreover, I would urge you to carefully consider the arguments made by the likes of Omer Bartov [1] and Aryeh Neier [2], who are the world’s leading experts on the topic.
—
2. Comparisons to other conflicts:
There are two parts here. Firstly, Assad’s war in Syria has made that nation a pariah in pretty much every sense of the word. The only thing that stops the same from happening to Saudi Arabia for Yemen is base greed for oil and investment. One hopes Israel is better than that!
Moreover, in many ways, the conflict in Gaza IS worse than the above. For instance, more children have died in Gaza as of this March (5 months ago now!) than in the previous 4 years of conflict everywhere else in the world [3]. The number of dead children might actually be a severe underestimate, as noted by SaveTheChildren [4].
Another factor to consider is genocide requires specific intent, and incitement. I comment on this a little bit more in point 5 below.
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3. Comparisons to Allies/Nazis in world war 2:
I also question the comparison to World War 2 players. Hamas is not an industrially advanced nation, they’re a (mostly) ragtag terrorist organization reluctantly conjoined with an administrative body. Similarly, Israel is not the Allies fighting against an enemy of mostly comparable means either. And, as others have pointed out, the conduct of the war by the Allies was, at times, quite awful, all of which led to the establishment of the Geneva conventions.
—
4. Hamas’ Intentions:
While Hamas is an antisemitic organization, we do need to be clear-headed about what they actually are. Are they a terrorist organization? Yes, of course. Can they be defeated in battle? No, according to the IDF [5]. Can they be negotiated with? Possibly, as noted by the changes in their charter, neatly summarized here [6]. Are they rational actors when they need to be? Probably. As awful as they are, it does not do to make Bond villains out of real-world actors.
—
5. Calls for genocide by Israeli politicians:
Come now, there has been clear incitement to genocide, or at the very least, ethnic cleansing. What else must we think about the debates around torture at Sde Teiman, or the accelerationism in the West Bank? What of Smotrich talking about how it would be moral to starve 2 million Palestinians [7]? What of all the examples listed in this article [8], which clearly points to an incitement to genocide by members of the Israeli government?
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6. Likud’s platform and Palestinian control of the West Bank:
It should be mentioned that Likud have always, firmly been against the existence of a Palestinian state. Rabin died because of that belief held by Likudniks. Moreover, Israel has never acknowledged the Palestinian right to a state, not even in Oslo [9]. There’s a great deal of nuance here, but I think Shlomo Ben Ami’s article (from September last year!) [9], and his book, “Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy” for a more detailed look into things.
Edit: As concerns Comment #81: Fair enough, point well made. However, just as we saw in Ireland and even in Rwanda now, it is possible for people who warred violently (genocidally, even) to come to an accord of sorts. Naturally, as mentioned in my earlier comments, no true peace can be had without aa Good Friday style agreement, as well as a genuine truth and reconciliation commission. This would mean both sides abandoning the wish to expel the other permanently, perhaps codified in a real constitution with real teeth.
References.
[1] Bartov, Omer. “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel”. link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
[2] Neier, Aryeh. “Is Israel Committing Genocide?” link: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/06/06/is-israel-committing-genocide-aryeh-neier/ (alas, this is paywalled).
[3] Clarissa Jan-Lim. “More children killed in Gaza in four months than in four years of war globally: report”. link: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/death-toll-children-gaza-israel-rcna143269
[4] SaveTheChildren. “Gaza’s missing children:
Over 20,000 children estimated to be lost, disappeared, detained, buried under the rubble or in mass graves”. link: https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/over-20000-children-estimated-to-be-lost-in-gaza
[5] Da Silva, Chantal. “Can Israel defeat Hamas? Its own military doesn’t seem to think so, clashing with Netanyahu”. link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-military-spokesman-hamas-defeated-netanyahu-war-gaza-rcna157991
[6] The Wilson Centre. “Doctrine of Hamas.” link: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas
[7] The Guardian Staff and Editors. “Israel minister condemned for saying starvation of millions in Gaza might be ‘justified and moral’”. link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/08/israel-finance-minister-bezalel-smotrich-gaza-starve-2m-people-comments
[8] Sharon, Jeremy. “Rights group demands probes of potential genocide incitement in light of ICJ orders”. link: https://www.timesofisrael.com/rights-group-demands-probes-of-potential-genocide-incitement-in-light-of-icj-orders/
[9]. Ben-Ami, S. “The Slow, Tragic Death of the Oslo Accords”. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/israel-settlement-expansion-helped-doom-oslo-peace-process-by-shlomo-ben-ami-2023-09
Comment #83 August 18th, 2024 at 9:54 am
Scott #80
“Jews are a notoriously self-critical people, so it’s not surprising that, in addition to being wildly overrepresented in physics, computer science, medicine…”
Yes, precisely those competencies required to maximize the chance humankind will reach the right side of the future with goals say of minimizing human suffering and maximizing human potential.
Many of these arguments seem to include a tacit assumption that best to freeze certain conditions as they are no matter the impact on the future. I am optimistic that by our actions in the present we can create a better future for our descendants (the descendants of all humankind) and Jewish people have a large part to play in that improvement.
Small comment-the RAF had a policy of bombing civilian targets in Germany and the US refused to cooperate. The Dresden fire bombing was strictly an RAF operation. Having said that I can’t discount that Great Britain was in an existential conflict and attacking civilian populations did contribute to ending the war and fostered what we have today which is better for billions of people than the alternative. The US did of course bomb civilian targets in Japan and I would make the same argument.
Also I doubt that a single static world government is the best model for the continued progress of humankind under likely conditions for at least the medium and probably even the long term.
Comment #84 August 18th, 2024 at 10:32 am
Robert #82:
– Israel’s actual adversary is Iran, which is also an industrially advanced nation that could manufacture nuclear weapons right now if it wanted to, and which has sworn to destroy Israel (notice yet another asymmetry: Israel has never sworn to destroy another country, and you’d rightly scream bloody murder if it did). Hamas and Hezbollah are both Iranian proxies. Together, the three of them plausibly can wipe Israel out, and they’ll keep trying until they succeed, protected by the international community from consequences for each failed attempt. These are the real stakes, behind the day-to-day news from Gaza.
– I am not a Likudnik and I will not answer for them, let alone for the contemptible Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. I’ll note however that >90% of Israelis, including the entire center and center-left, support Israel’s defending itself against Hamas and Hezbollah. That’s not a specifically Likud position at all.
– I’ll also note that a majority of Israelis have supported a two-state solution in the past, and they could plausibly do so again, if they could be persuaded that it was sincere rather than yet another ruse for their annihilation. By contrast, a majority of Palestinians has never supported coexistence with Israel. This is what I see as the real heart of the problem, much more than the personalities of specific leaders.
– The debate within Israel about whether it’s possible to “defeat” Hamas seems mostly to come down to the definition of the word “defeat.” Hamas has already been severely weakened in its ability to wage war on Israel, so clearly that much is possible. It’s true that if Israel withdraws without putting a better government in place, Hamas could then reconstitute itself (and its missiles and its civilian-shielded tunnel system) in some number of years.
– The idea that Hamas are “rational actors” was what led to the prediction that surely they wouldn’t give Israel a pretext to destroy them by crossing into Israel to murder as many Jews as they could. Then again, a large fraction of the Western world was exhilirated by the October 7 massacre — the grislier the better — and rushed to take Hamas’s side, and to blame Israel even before it had retaliated. Given that, maybe Oct 7 was rational on Hamas’s part after all.
Comment #85 August 18th, 2024 at 12:02 pm
Scott #84,
1. I don’t actually think Iran+Hamas+Hezbollah can do a thing so long as the United States provides a security guarantee against them. Note the recent moves with an additional carrier and a squadron of F-22s moving to the Indian Ocean.
2. I know! And I too support Israel’s right to defend itself against it’s enemies. However, it is the manner in which this has been done – institutionalized torture, destruction of water treatment plants, killing of children, medical staff, journalists, academics – that I, and many many others take issue with.
3. I tend to disagree with this point somewhat. I saw some polls comparing Israeli and Palestinian support for two states between 2009 and 2024. In 09, a majority of both supported the 2 states (I think it was 60% or more of each thought it “acceptable”, “desirable”, or “critical” or something similar). By 2024, support for the 2SS had increased in Gaza, decreased dramatically in Israel and the West Bank. So I think that both peoples can be reasonably incentivized towards it, without much difficulty. And I think the sad truth is that perhaps the biggest obstacles to the 2SS are the Israeli and (most of all) American right wings.
4. To quote Hagari:
“Hamas is an idea. Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong… The political echelon needs to find an alternative — or it will remain.”
Unfortunately I can’t really add anything more that’s either useful or substantive beyond the quote. But I do not think that Bibi and his merry men are using any particular nuance when they speak of absolute victory.
5. I can’t really intuit Hamas’ logic either. But just because you and I may not be able to, it’s dangerous to believe that there isn’t some cold-blooded calculation behind their attack. But I can’t speak to their motives at all. I do disagree that a large fraction were thrilled by Oct. 7. I recall that most people were completely sympathetic to Israel’s plight at the time as suggested by polling at the time, if I remember correctly (sorry for the lack of a source, can’t find it at the moment). This loud and admittedly frightening group is just a minority.
Comment #86 August 18th, 2024 at 12:15 pm
Scott #84,
It’s not true that a majority of Palestinians have not supported a two-state solution ever. The support has varied over the years depending on the state of conflict (https://pcpsr.org/en/node/154). In 2021, for example, 51% of Palestinians supported a two-state solution (https://pcpsr.org/en/node/662) but the terms that they found acceptable were more hard-line than during earlier negotiations , 60% in 2009 as Robert #85 says (https://pcpsr.org/en/node/221). Both sides, according to polls, have a distorted perception of support for a two-state solution by the other. It seems that neither side can see past their own grievances and trauma. We now have another round of glorified ‘mowing of the grass’ at the cost of untold civilian misery that is seen as a war fought humanely and justly, while there is plenty of evidence to the contrary from an outsider’s perspective.
Comment #87 August 18th, 2024 at 12:22 pm
Robert #85: In the interest of time, let me end this thread the way I’ve ended many similar debates in the past. Namely: for all our disagreements, I predict that if they made me Israeli Prime Minister and put you in charge of the PA, we could hammer out a deal in about a day.
Comment #88 August 18th, 2024 at 12:44 pm
Cheers Scott!
Comment #89 August 18th, 2024 at 1:04 pm
RB #86: That’s interesting! I hadn’t known that as late as 2016, 51% of Palestinians said they supported a two-state solution. Of course a lot hinges on whether that includes the “right of return,” and if so what exactly the respondents mean by it. Again, if it means making Israel no longer be a Jewish state, then we’re no longer discussing a two-state solution at all. But if a (slight) majority of Palestinians have ever supported a real two-state solution, then maybe they could be convinced to do so again in the future, at least if Israel’s government changes … which is one of the hopeful signs I’ve learned about in years.
On Israel’s side, it’s clear that, for many different reasons, a central prerequisite to anything good is to call new elections and get rid of Bibi. First, though, Israel will presumably have to survive the next onslaught from Hezbollah and Iran.
Comment #90 August 18th, 2024 at 2:53 pm
Scott #71:
You’re very kind!
To answer your very reasonable question: I would say that other countries also need to move away from thinking of themselves as “nations”, yes. Certainly the broader progressive consensus would say so. You might have noticed they tend not to like “nationalist” political movements, in any country. Israel is, I think, singled out because it was actively founded on national principles within living memory, as opposed to being “a very old state that’s gradually shedding its national baggage but isn’t all the way there yet”. It’s not clear that we can hope for it to get away from that thinking when it owes its entire existence to it, whereas the hope is that Latvia or France or Japan can (if you’re optimistic and trust in the arc of History) be expected to grow out of the nationalist mindset non-violently, as a gradual, democratically-supported process.
Hence the dream of a binational one-state solution. In the Frictionless Progressive World, the Israel/Palestine map with its discontinuous territories and fiddly borders is anathema, and the region “should” be peacefully run by a single state authority not affiliated to one culture/language/ethnicity or another, like Belgium or Switzerland. Thus, the state of Israel’s dissolution is perceived (by some!) as a priority because Israel’s existence actively prevents the establishment of such a solution — prevents the region from “normalizing”. All France would need to do to conform to the anti-nation-state ideal is officially stop calling itself a nation, alter its immigration policies a little, and otherwise keep on as usual; so its continued existence is not a threat to the new normal. Israel doesn’t have that luxury.
Of *course*, the state of Israel opposes the one-state solution because it correctly recognises that handing the current Palestinian authorities the keys to a joint state would cash out in Holocaust 2.0 (with the only viable alternative being a Jewish-led one state run as an *actual* apartheid state, which they neither want on their conscience, nor want to be taken task for by the rest of the world all over again). Of *course*, Latvia and France and Japan would do the same in their place. But currently Israel is the only major developed country that has had to make this call with so many lives in the balance, and come out temporarily but pointedly rejecting the Path Of Perfect Frictionless Progress; so it gets taken to task first. I find it deeply unfortunate but not particularly surprising.
By the way, an important detail is that you can be against nation-states without necessarily supporting completely open borders/a globalized world-state. Personally I find the Other Scott’s writing about an ‘archipelago’ model very enticing, lots of states coexisting not based on national/ethnic criteria but simply to have a ‘free market’ of systems of government and economies. You can have a HOA with strict criteria, without needing to mythologize The Spirit Of The Local Community! i.e. you can choose to simply judge would-be immigrants based on whether allowing them in would cause undue instability to the region overseen by a given state, without cultural concerns/”will they fit into the nation” being the criterion used.
(So, for example, you could bar people who are outspokenly against democracy from immigrating to the US, not because you want them to assimilate to “American values” out of principle, but on the grounds if you let too many of them in, it would upset the machinery of state and prevent democracy as a process from sustaining itself. You can even make an argument that a willingness to learn the local common language, albeit not necessarily adopt it as your primary language, can also be justified as a requirement to immigration, again not because [Country X] ‘rightfully belongs’ to [Language]-speakers, but simply because you need to understand that language to be an involved citizen participating in democratic processes. You can require genuine integration without demanding assimilation.)
Oh, and a sincere thank you for the fact-checks. Some I knew (e.g. I only spoke of Israel having a “constitution” in a loose, off-handed sense, meaning “the laws based on which its machinery of state is run”; I didn’t mean to imply it had a formal, sacrosanct set of founding principles in quite the way the United States do), but others I didn’t really (Law of Return explicitly applying to converts).
As to Israel having a normal, non-Jewishness-based immigration policy separate from the Law of Return… well *I* knew that, but I strongly suspect most of the protesters and Twitter-warriors actually really, really don’t. That Israel has a large Arab population, they do know, but I think the guy on the street pictures that these must merely be Palestinians who were there from the start and whose citizenship was (begrudgingly) “grandfathered in” in 1948; and that it’d be basically impossible for a non-Jew, particularly an Arab, to become a full Israeli citizen *now*. Raising awareness of that simple fact might, it now occurs to me, actually be a good way to get everybody to chill out a bit.
Comment #91 August 18th, 2024 at 3:03 pm
FWIW, I just left in moderation a comment claiming that Zionism is a direct descendant of Nazism, and in fact the Zionists and Nazis were best friends, and the Zionists eagerly supported the Holocaust because that’s what would give them their evil pretext to create Israel. This is the sort of conspiracist batshit insanity that underlies the “Zionism=Nazism” thesis, and without which it would collapse.
The commenter adds that I have no right to talk about the Holocaust anyway, since my family made it to the US around 1905 and wasn’t murdered. If it matters, my wife’s family was almost entirely wiped out in the Holocaust. Two of her grandparents survived because they illegally immigrated to Israel in the 30s (when the British were blocking Jewish immigration for fear of Arab revolts). Her other two grandparents survived Auschwitz and labor camps, then languished in DP camps in Cyprus before Israel declaring its independence finally allowed them to live there.
Admittedly, I only learned all this directly from my wife’s parents and grandparents, rather than reading it on a conspiracy website. So my information might be unreliable.
Anyway, I’m leaving such comments in moderation not because I’m afraid, but rather because I’m unafraid.
Comment #92 August 18th, 2024 at 3:07 pm
I’m one of those who are confident that most of the current Israel apologists will end up on the wrong side of history, and the thicket of false dichotomies they use to defend Israel’s actions are a primary reason they are unable to see it.
Let’s start by saying, Israel defending itself and perpetuating its existence is not “the wrong side of history”. There are certainly people who reject Israel’s right to exist, but it seems to me the epitome of bad faith to assert that everyone who has a problem with mass dismemberment of children and raping hostages to death with electric rods is “wishing Israel to cease to exist”. There are very many people who have consistently opposed such things even when the Jewish state was not involved, for both moral and pragmatic reasons.
It is likewise bad faith to assert that all of the atrocities are prerequisites for Israel’s security. If anything, history has taught us that the opposite is true. As Omer Bartov has observed, such rationalizations were common in the most famous war crimes regime that has been left in the dustbin of history.
You mention “authoritarian governments like China”, but China is an existence proof that extremist Muslim terrorism can be subdued without dismembering thousands of children. And they did it in an area far larger and more porous than Gaza, against all sorts of bad faith opposition and misrepresentation from the West. Israel is full of intelligent and resourceful people, and there is no reason to believe Israel must necessarily be less competent than the CPC. I suspect the matter will eventually be solved in a manner similar to how China integrated Xinjiang (perhaps Israel will solve the problem with China’s help). But Israel’s current approach is neither productive nor necessary and will go down in history as an awful mistake and a terrible crime.
Comment #93 August 18th, 2024 at 3:30 pm
JSA #92: I’m glad you acknowledge that Israel gets to exist and defend itself.
But you completely lose me when you conflate supporting the military defeat of Hamas with supporting the rape of Palestinian prisoners. Most Israelis, like most Jews all over the world, support the former while abhorring the latter—exactly the same way one can support the Allied campaign in WWII without supporting the most horrific thing any Allied soldier ever did to any German POW.
Note, by contrast, how ludicrous it would be to support Hamas while condemning October 7. Hamas is October 7. The atrocities can’t be separated from the strategy because they are the strategy.
Regarding Xinjiang, you’ve got to be kidding me … do you have any idea what China has done to the Uyghurs? It’s fully as horrifying as anything Israel has done in Gaza. But there’s this absolutely crucial distinction: the Uyghurs have never tried to kill every Han Chinese person, or wipe China off the face of the earth. Where Israel’s campaign is one of horrible necessity, China’s campaign in Xinjiang (just like Russia’s in Ukraine) is one of horrible choice.
Comment #94 August 18th, 2024 at 3:39 pm
One just can’t force people to choose to be either a Zionist or an Anti-Zionist, or label them as Anti-Zionist if they don’t seem Zionist enough.
I.e. the vast majority of the world is “Don’t-Give-A-Shit-nist”.
If you find this shocking, well, what if I forced you to take a stance on whether Northern Ireland should be re-attached to Ireland, whether Belgium should be split or stay united, whether Macedonia belongs to Turkey or Greece, or the China/India border disputes, and which side of the Sudan civil war are you on?
If you think all those questions aren’t as important for the people living them as Zionism, then you need to broaden your perspective a bit. Everyone thinks their own tribe is just as special, if not more special, as the others, we all think we’re “the chosen ones”.
Second, as an American, shouldn’t one’s allegiance be to America first?
I’ve read on this blog that if Trump were to be elected again, i.e. if America turned fascist, it would be okay, as an American, to instantly flee and move abroad, and Israel comes up as a viable option again and again, even though it’s clearly being currently run by right-wing fascists.
Comment #95 August 18th, 2024 at 3:58 pm
fred #94: Weird comment.
I’m of course well aware that most of the world is “neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist,” but don’t-give-a-shit-ist or totally-uninformed-ist or which-side-has-beer-ist. When I write about this subject, I’m mostly writing for all the people in the middle.
Also, I absolutely love America — unlike most of the campus protesters, who were remarkably open about the fact that they not only hate Israel but hate America too (or did they mean to communicate something else by, eg, burning American flags? 🙂 ). I’ve spent my life doing what I can to Make America Great in theoretical computer science and am raising two patriotic American kids.
Indeed, one of the only things I love even more than America is my family, and I’ll make no apologies for doing whatever is needed to keep them safe. If, for example, America XOR Israel were completely overrun by crazy fascists, I’d naturally want my family in the one that wasn’t. If America and Israel were both overrun by crazy fascists, but only one of them by the kind of crazy fascists who’d target my family, then I’d prefer to have my family in the other one, though better still in a third place, like Canada or Australia, while I do whatever I can to help defeat the crazy fascists. Do you really imagine that I haven’t run through all the permutations, in this terrifying time for the world?
Comment #96 August 18th, 2024 at 4:15 pm
Scott #95:
> (or did they mean to communicate something else by, eg, burning American flags?)
I hate to post again when the thread nears closure and my earlier post has yet to be replied to, but: just popping in to say that this arguably adds to my thesis. I think the flag-burners are communicating that they hate *America-as-nation*. It doesn’t necessarily mean they hate the American population, culture, etc., or even that they hate the American state as an administrative system — what it means first and foremost is that they hate American nationalism, they hate “patriotism”, they hate the nigh-religious belief in the sacredness and importance of The Nation with its symbols and pomp and circumstance. They burn the flag as one might burn a false idol; getting rid of the Golden Calf doesn’t necessarily mean you have anything against cows.
I wouldn’t engage in such theatrical behavior in their place — as I said, if everyone’s behaving I’m happy to live-and-let-live with people who feel patriotism deep in their bones, just as I live-and-let-live with the religious; your way of “loving America” per the comment I’m replying to seems entirely harmless and wholesome — but I do think *that* is what is being attacked first and foremost. They burn flags to convey their contempt for people who think flags are sacred, not necessarily for what the flag represents in theory. (Certainly burning Confederate flags signals opposition to *the kind of people who like to wave Confederate flags*, not to the American South qua the American South or even really to the historical Confederacy.)
Comment #97 August 18th, 2024 at 4:36 pm
The other major issue that’s triggering a lot of people in America with the current Middle-East crisis is that we’re now told the WW3 is coming, yet it’s a one way street with billions of tax payer dollars all going through Bibi and his government of nut-jobs, with zero accountability. The guy is clearly pulling all the strings, gives no fuck about the Bidden government trying to get things under some control, and all he cares about is his own fate.
Compare that to Ukraine where things are on a way more reasonable footing.
Comment #98 August 18th, 2024 at 6:08 pm
Edmund #96: My mind is now swimming with semiotic possibilities! Maybe when they burn and stomp on the Israeli flag in Iran, they don’t actually mean to express opposition to Israel. Or maybe even the KKK didn’t really mean to express racism with its cross burnings… 😉
Comment #99 August 18th, 2024 at 6:33 pm
Scott #98:
Well if you’ll forgive me, it seems relevant that Klansmen who burn crosses aren’t actually expressing opposition to Christianity… But I think I must have expressed myself badly, regardless. I didn’t mean to *deny* that for all intents and purposes American pro-Palestine protesters who burn flags do so to say they hate ‘America’; I merely meant to highlight how the *sense* in which they hate America, what they hate *about* it, seems consistent with the account I gave in my prior comment. Chicanery was not intended.
Comment #100 August 18th, 2024 at 7:04 pm
Scott 95,
You know, for someone who says that they’re so patriotic and love this country, you’ve said a lot of profoundly un-American and unpatriotic stuff on this blog. You actually strike me as having some level of contempt for the American way of life, the American spirit and American values (for example, your enthusiasm for communist-adjacent politics).
Comment #101 August 18th, 2024 at 8:21 pm
Scott:
Random thoughts (keeping in mind that we agree on like 99% of things):
1. This *has* been a fairly good Israel/Palestine thread compared to the norm. Have you been moderating it differently?
2. I still think you over-index on “campus protesters”, given them far more influence than they deserve. Your vocation aside, the protesters represent like 0.5% of students or something, which itself represents a small percentage of people; yet you are constantly fighting their mostly-not-well-thought-out positions all the time.
3. I also get super-frustrated with the protesters and the “right side of history” idea, but it’s worth keeping in mind that they “hate Israel” in the same way they “hate America” or “hate Capitalism”. I’ll sometimes literally remind myself of this when arguing with someone online – they could just as easily give me a speech about how the US is the evil empire and that all bad things in the world are because of capitalistic exploitation.
That still makes them wrong (IMO, of course), but it reminds me to take their opinions as seriously and as representative-of-the-public as they deserve – namely not at all.
4. One of the few areas I think we might slightly disagree is the degree to which you seem to only blame Palestinians for the fact that there is no peace in place, and give a bit of a pass to Netanyahu. I think the “standard Israeli narrative” in which Israel pushed for peace and was met with terror, which killed the Israeli left wing, is mostly correct, up until 2009-ish (though even that view is a bit too one-sided).
But if we’re wondering why there is no Palestinians Gandhi today, we really have to recognize that Israel, since Netanyahu is in power, has worked actively to make sure there *isn’t* one. It’s weakened the PA, purposefully, arrested/killed people on purpose that could be potential partners for peace, and of course famously played a game of propping up Hamas to some degree.
This is on top of decades of trying to prevent the rise of a real, unified Palestinian identity, including among Palestinian Israelis (Israeli-Arabs officially in Israel). That’s the one community that could maybe form the best bridge to peace, having a foot in both worlds, but that community is in many ways “not allowed” to form a group pushing a path to peace. Not to mention, the segregation between Jews and Arabs in Israel is kind of crazy, and rarely truly remarked upon.
Maybe I’m just an optimist, but I think a rise of a Palestinian pro-peace movement really can happen – but it needs to be actively supported by Israel. And maybe I’m a pessimist, but I think Israeli society currently really is in a dark place regarding Palestinians, and it won’t be able to get any kind of peace without some social changes. (It’s also in a dark place in other respects – the much-commented-about slide towards dictatorship, the split within the country which seems to point towards civil war, etc.)
5. Have you seen/heard Haviv Retig Gur speak? If you haven’t seen him, I highly recommend listening to him on Jewish history, especially on the difference between the American Jewish experience and the Israeli Jewish experience, and on the way the Palestinians view Israel and why they (incorrectly) think they can drive Jews out of the land (your wondering about this is what prompted me to recommend him). He has two talks to Shalem college that are on YouTube on these two topics which I recently watched, highly recommended.
(Israelis: The Jews Who Lived Through History – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKoUC0m1U9E and, and
The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel – Haviv Rettig Gur – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK2mfYYm4U).
Comment #102 August 18th, 2024 at 9:18 pm
Edan Maor #101: Thanks for the thoughts!
1. Yeah, I’ve become more shameless about blocking anything that I personally decide is in bad faith for any reason. I’m still letting the vast majority of comments through though.
2. From my perspective, the campus protesters, misinformed though they might be, actually have incredible power. They’ve split the more progressive half of the US like nothing else in my lifetime has, and they might throw the upcoming election to Trump. They’ve also made a significant fraction of American Jews conclude that elite universities are no longer safe for them, which could have all sorts of ramifications down the line.
3. Sure, but from another perspective, the fact that the protesters actually want to demolish the US, global capitalism, the patriarchy, etc etc makes it all the more disturbing that they focus so obsessively on Israel, the one adversary small enough that they might be able to hit it.
4. I’m actually in violent agreement with you about Netanyahu, and the terrible responsibility he bears for how much worse things have gotten since 2009. That said, as deeply as I despised George W. Bush, when some people angry at GWB praised Osama bin Laden as morally superior I had not the slightest problem taking GWB’s side. The present case seems closely analogous.
5. As it happens, I became a HUGE fan of Haviv Rettig Gur a few months ago, after watching one of his lectures as well as his conversation with Bari Weiss!
Comment #103 August 18th, 2024 at 9:28 pm
Eric #100: WTF. I’m a moderate (and strongly anticommunist) Democrat, which puts me on the rightward fringe of academia and gets me constantly denounced by those to my left. If I’m “unpatriotic” or “Communist-adjacent” by your lights, then I’d imagine that more than half of Americans must be too. And, as many others have asked, how patriotic can the “true American patriots” really be, if they hate the majority of Americans, including anyone to the left of MAGA? 🙂
Comment #104 August 18th, 2024 at 10:34 pm
Scott #103
At this point MAGA see themselves as the only true American patriots, and anyone who’s anti-MAGA stands for the destruction of America, i.e. by definition they must be communist.
Sounds familiar?
Bibi and Trump are indeed a match made in heaven, they both thrive on such populist “you’re either with us or against us” black and white BS that leaves no room to the slightest subtlety and criticism.
Comment #105 August 19th, 2024 at 1:48 am
Haiti became independent in a slave revolt. But this slave revolt unfortunately included a genocide of white and mixed-race people including the anti-slavery ones. Haiti has been a basket case since forever, and is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Jamaica meanwhile had its slaves freed after the British bought them out. It becomes independent and today it’s much better off even though a huge proportion of its population (I would guess about 40%) including probably a huge majority of its talented people moved to the US and UK. The Haitian revolution in some ways was a lot like October 7. Of course Jews were not enslaving Palestinians and are indigenous to the Middle East, but in Haiti no one was indigenous and many of the victims were anti-slavery and/or black themselves too. Someone like Obama would have been shot on sight for existing.
Jamaica is richer than Jordan and Egypt. People go there for tourism. Anyway, the Haitian revolutionaries were definitely on the wrong side of history.
Comment #106 August 19th, 2024 at 1:55 am
Scott #89: First of all there was another poll showing that a majority of Palestinians in both the Gaza and the West Bank want to continue the conflict even after a two-state solution. Supporting a two-state solution means absolutely nothing if it doesn’t come with an end of all conflict and claims.
And the PCPSR also totally failed to predict the Hamas victory over Fatah in the election. It was off by something like 10 points. I wouldn’t put much stock in these polls. I’m sure you’ve also seen the recent polls that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians want to remove Israel and supported October 7. Nothing close to a majority have ever supported a real two-state solution.
Again when you ask people about a two-state solution they might well say yes if their ultimate goal is a Palestine next to a Palestine, and they just see the two-state solution as a steeping stone toward that goal.
Comment #107 August 19th, 2024 at 2:58 am
But you want AGI to be aligned with human values?
Which ones? Who’s?
The only sensible, if the hardest, way out of this mess is one Israel of two equal nations. Nothing novel. Bosna in Hercegovina had worked just fine for 40 years and there are *three* more or less equal size ethnic groups of three religious backgrounds there to point out one I have personal experience with. Were there problems rooted in the setup? Sure. Were they dealt with in somewhat heavy handed manner? Yes. But if you walked around Sarajevo as late as 1985 you’d be hard pressed not to admire what was achieved.
If we disregard immigration created multi-ethnicity (we shouldn’t since we are more or less all immigrants) there are states in operation where there are many more. Russia? China? Is it perfect? Hell no. Are they shooting at each other? Not really.
Establishing state of Israel would have been a mistake if ‘progenitors’ truly had done it as a consolation for all the shit Jews have taken even before WW2. We are three generations away from that. And demanding for things to return to 1944 is akin to all of us go and cram along African Rift.
Screw AI safety. Get that sucker up and running before we FUBAR everything. So it ‘wakes up’, looks around and says “That’s fucking enough!”.
Quellcrist Falconer (the real one) for president
Comment #108 August 19th, 2024 at 4:02 am
“(There were also, of course, moderate protesters, who merely opposed America’s war conduct—just like there are moderate protesters now who merely want Israel merely to end its Gaza campaign rather than its existence. But then as now, the revolutionaries sucked up much of the oxygen, and the moderates rarely disowned them.)
What’s really going on, we might say, is reference class tennis. Implicitly or explicitly, the anti-Israel protesters are aligning themselves with Gandhi and MLK and Nelson Mandela and every other celebrated resister of colonialism and apartheid throughout history. They ask: what are the chances that all those heroes were right, and we’re the first ones to be wrong?
The trouble is that someone else could just as well ask: what are the chances that Hamas is the first group in history to be morally justified in burning Jews alive in their homes … even though the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, Inquisitors, Cossacks, Nazis, and every other group that did similar things to the Jews over 3000 years is now acknowledged by nearly every educated person to have perpetrated an unimaginable evil? What are the chances that, with Israel’s establishment in 1948, this millennia-old moral arc of Western civilization suddenly reversed its polarity?”
Well, you can believe both if you believe that October 7 was barbaric but support a ceasefire and you think it’s been enough.
I am definitely not such a person. October 7 was barbaric, and Hamas needs to be eradicated. The war cannot end while Sinwar is alive, it would be like ending WWII without Hitler. But these two paragraphs are not contradictory at all.
Comment #109 August 19th, 2024 at 7:07 am
OK, as promised, I’m now closing the thread! Thanks to everyone for a much-better-than-usual discussion.
Comment #110 September 26th, 2024 at 12:45 am
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