My October 7 post
For weeks I agonized over what, if anything, this post should say. How does one commemorate a tragedy that isn’t over for millions of innocents on either side? How do I add to what friend-of-the-blog Boaz Barak and countless others have already written?
Do I review the grisly details of Black Shabbat, tell the stories of those murdered or still held hostage? Do I rage about the shocking intelligence and operational failures that allowed it to happen? Talk about the orders-of-magnitude spikes in antisemitic incidents all over the world in the past year, which finally answered the question of whether I was going to deal with “the burden of having been born Jewish” as a central concern of my life, rather than only a matter for holidays and history books and museums? Mourn the friends I’ve lost—not, interestingly, my Iranian friends (who were the first to ask after the safety of my Israeli family after October 7) or my other Gentile friends, but mostly my far-left Jewish former friends, the ones who now ludicrously argue that worldwide violence against Jews is justified, and will stop if only we give in and dismantle Israel? I wrote many drafts only to delete them.
The core problem was that there seemed to be nothing I could say that would move the needle, that wouldn’t just be a waste of electrons. From the many times I’d already waded into this minefield of minefields since October 7, 2023, I already knew exactly how it would play out:
- Those who support Israel’s continued existence (Jews and non-Jews) would applaud what I said—but they wouldn’t need to hear it anyway.
- Those who oppose Israel’s continued existence would send me hate mail, spam my comment section with threats and attacks under invented identities, and otherwise do what they could to make my life miserable.
- Everyone else would ignore my post, waiting for me to get back to quantum computing or AI.
What could I do to break through? What could I say to all the people who call themselves “anti-Israel but not antisemitic” that would actually move the conversation forward?
Finally I came up with something. Look: you say you despise Zionism, and consider October 7 to have been perfectly understandable (if somewhat distasteful) resistance by the oppressed? Fine, then.
I urge you to lobby your country to pass a law granting automatic refugee status and citizenship to any current citizen of Israel—as an ultimate insurance policy to incentivize Israel to take greater risks for peace, even with neighbors who openly proclaim the Jews’ extermination as their goal.
When the Jews of Europe faced annihilation in my grandparents’ time, not one country offered to rescue them in more than token numbers. That’s a central reason why, in 1947, the newly-formed UN voted to partition the former British Mandate for Palestine and give the Jews a piece of it: not only because of Jews’ historic connection to the land, predating the Islamic conquest of the Middle East by thousands of years, but also, crucially, because the survivors literally had nowhere else on earth to go.
So, you say you want the hated “settler-colonialists” to leave Palestine. Very well then: give them a place to go. All of them, not just the minority who are dual citizens or otherwise have options.
If the US or UK or Australia or France or Germany or any other country actually passed such an immigration law—well, I can’t determine how the Israelis would respond. I expect that tens of thousands of Israelis would quickly take your country up on its offer, while the majority wouldn’t. I expect that some Jewish and Israeli institutions would criticize you, seeing a desire for Israel’s end in your offer even if you were careful never to say as much.
But I can tell you how I’d respond, and I don’t think I’d be alone in this. I would move to the left on Israel/Palestine. For the first time, the Israeli Jews would plausibly no longer be in an existential struggle, a struggle not to be exterminated by neighbors who tried to exterminate them at every opportunity from 1929 to 1948 to 1967 to 1973 to 2002 to 2023. For the first time there’d be a viable backup plan.
As a direct consequence, I’d advocate that the Israelis take bigger gambles for peace: for example, that they unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank to allow a Palestinian state there, even at the risk that the West Bank turns into a much bigger Gaza, another Hamas staging-ground from which to invade Israel and destroy it. At least there’d be an insurance policy if that happened.
Many will ask: shouldn’t the Palestinians also be offered refuge in other lands? I say, by all means! But crucially, that’s not for me to advocate: if I did, I’d be accused of secretly plotting ethnic cleansing and Israeli expansionism. This is between the Palestinian people and all the other nations, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that for generations could’ve offered refuge to displaced Palestinians (as Israel offered refuge to the displaced Jews from Arab lands) but that chose not to.
And what of all the world’s other oppressed peoples? I promise to praise and honor any nation that saves anyone from oppression or genocide by offering them refuge. But, particularly since last October, the left is obsessed with Israel, which it considers uniquely evil among all nations to have ever existed—so that’s the conflict about which I’m proposing a positive step.
And if the anti-Israel people throw the proposal back in my face, tell me it’s not their job to resettle the hated settlers: then at least we know where we stand. They’ve then told me, not merely that they want half the world’s Jews evicted from their homes, but that they’re totally unconcerned with what happens to them afterward—fully aware that last time, the answer was pits full of corpses, piles of ash, plumes of black smoke.
And that’s the exact point where we reach the end of discussion and argument, such as can happen on blogs. The remaining disagreement can (alas) only be settled on the battlefield. For whatever it’s worth, the Jews famously outlasted the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids, Romans, Soviets, Nazis, and other continent-spanning empires that tried to destroy us. Whether we need missiles, planes, ground invasions, or (yes) exploding pagers, I predict that we’ll survive this latest existential war too, against the Ayatollah regime and its proxies and its millions of Western dupes. Or at least, I predict that we’ll win in the physical world, even while our enemies continue to dominate Facebook and Twitter and the comments section of the Washington Post, where they’ll continue ordering Israelis to “GO BACK TO POLAND,” totally uninterested in the question of whether Poland will take them. I can probably teach myself to live with that. At any rate, better offline victory and online defeat than the other way around.
Follow
Comment #1 October 7th, 2024 at 12:28 pm
Dear Scott,
Mostly I just listen to stories from many sides.
Thanks for a distinctive & thoughtful viewpoint.
Regards,
Jon
Comment #2 October 7th, 2024 at 12:32 pm
Well done. I need to absorb this for a while to really get it. Thank you. The book “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yiddish_Policemen%27s_Union
Comment #3 October 7th, 2024 at 1:12 pm
I agree with the proposal to guarantee automatic citizenship to any citizen of Israel so that the West can make amends for their acts in Germany or in not giving refuge elsewhere. Regardless of whatever bad thoughts the Grand Mufti may have had. I also would like to see a unilateral agreement to pull out from the West Bank. But this is wishful thinking and the West Bank occupation seems to be past the point of no return. Israelis may feel that their nation is facing an existential risk in the face of an attack that was a security failure and likely exceeded expectations. Palestinians face a risk of their very existence. In the midst of their own fears, most Israelis seem to be apathetic towards the death of so many innocent people, including more than 7000 children under the age of 12 , rationalizing the ‘collateral damage’, the denial of whatever little aid except under US pressure, because this is a question of the existence of Israel. Israel exists, it is the superpower and can operate with no red lines. Moderate Arabs question the dehumanizing rhetoric that demeans Arab lives and treats them as expendable. This regional conflict is just the most recent among the many wars of the West and its allies such as the Iraq war which had a confluence of goals (including of the neocons and the Israel lobby) of remaking the Middle East resulting in 2 Trillion spent and more than half a million Iraqi lives lost. The solution for peace here is apparently always more wars. Of course, there is a parallel and perhaps even bigger humanitarian crisis brewing in Sudan. One could hardly tell from the news.
Comment #4 October 7th, 2024 at 1:15 pm
Haven’t you gotten hate comments from the right-wing pro-Israel side? I definitely remember reading some.
Comment #5 October 7th, 2024 at 1:53 pm
@Scott
I’m sure you mean well. I’m sure you will in fact endorse much of what I will write below. And yet I find the entire framework above deeply problematic – as indeed you yourself anticipate. The “they have nowhere else to go” reason to “keep Jews in Israel for a while until we might find an alternative” seems to be fundamentally ignoring all the ways in which Israel is not, say, Uganda. It’s not just a random piece of land that the world kindly gave to Jews after the Holocaust. You’re mentioning this explicitly in the post- in a few words, only to abandon this line of reasoning. If all Jews found shelter elsewhere- a million here, a few thousand there- it would _not_ be an acceptable solution. Better than complete eradication? Sure. That’s just a tiny bit of a low bar, though.
Similarly, seeing mass immigration (that is, escape) as a legitimate insurance against the utter failure of any peace-oriented strategy should not be acceptable. If you anticipate the destruction of the State of Israel to be a likely outcome of some policy- correctly, I believe- then this is a bad policy, and “oh but most of you won’t literally die because you’ll be possibly able to escape” is not enough to justify moving to the left enough to trigger such outcomes.
Finally, this perspective seems to reward terrorism. You’re saying, in effect, that the world’s response to Hamas should be to accept that it would be more likely to win, in fact deliver it some of its goals, because the world would be willing to accept Israeli refugees.
To put it simply- the logic in your post sees “let’s move to the left and willingly risk Israel’s survival because we have a back up plan” as acceptable. It is not. Having a policy of sheltering refugees? Yes. Following this policy with deliberately making this “insurance” more likely to be needed? No. Peltzman effect indeed.
Comment #6 October 7th, 2024 at 2:16 pm
Addendum: I want to make clear that I was not arguing against having positions that are to the left of the ones you (or I, for that matter) currently hold. I do think such views are wrong, but that’s besides the point. The argument is against updating to the left specifically because of an insurance policy as described in the post.
Comment #7 October 7th, 2024 at 2:41 pm
scapacity #4: I mean, I’ve gotten some right-wing Zionists angry that I’ll be voting for Harris, but nothing terrifying or stalkerish like what I’m now getting from the anti-Zionist side.
Comment #8 October 7th, 2024 at 2:48 pm
Scott,
I am a member of group 1: “Those who support Israel’s continued existence (Jews and non-Jews) [who] would applaud what I said…”
I write to express encouragement and solidarity. I judge your perspective to be wise and morally good. I think the perspective you fight against is rationally unjustified, and in its darkest manifestations, evil. You are doing the world and Israel good by expressing your perspective on this blog.
Comment #9 October 7th, 2024 at 2:51 pm
Uh, what have you ever gotten from the anti-Zionist side that’s “terrifying and stalkerish” as opposed to merely angry? I’ve read almost every one of your Israel-Palestine threads. Haven’t seen any comments that count as “terrifying or stalkerish.” I’ve only seen many pro-Palestine commenters very angry at your viewpoints. They are likely angry because they are seeing every day the devastation and the death in Gaza. Are there some comments you haven’t shown us that are “terrifying and stalkerish?”
Comment #10 October 7th, 2024 at 2:53 pm
B_Epstein #5: I’m sympathetic to the view that, even if an insurance policy existed — taking, let’s suppose, physical annihilation in a second Holocaust completely off the table — that should move Zionists only somewhat to the left, willing to take (let’s say) 1.5x or 2x greater risks for peace. Being exiled again would still be traumatic and horrible and unjust.
My central point is that the insurance policy doesn’t exist. Total physical annihilation is still very much on the table, as we were all reminded on 10/7. The anti-Zionist side has not done the absolute bare minimum that you might expect it to do, in the “reassurance of no second Holocaust” department.
That being so, taking annihilation off the table would seem like a pure win for the world’s “anti-Zionist-but-not-antisemites,” given what they claim to want. So either they can advocate for it, in which case I’d say that both sides win: Israelis get a survival insurance policy, anti-Zionists get (probably) Israelis willing on the margin to concede more and risk more for peace. Or they can not advocate for it, in which case we’ve cleanly separated what the anti-Zionists claim to want from what they actually want.
Comment #11 October 7th, 2024 at 2:59 pm
scapacity #9:
Are there some comments you haven’t shown us that are “terrifying and stalkerish?”
Yes.
Comment #12 October 7th, 2024 at 3:01 pm
Hi Scott,
I just wanted to say thanks for being a voice of reason in all things, including this. I’ll be attending an Oct. 7 commemoration event here in Berkeley tonight, and your public words are appreciated.
Comment #13 October 7th, 2024 at 3:48 pm
I have to say, I’ve been refreshing this blog, hoping to hear what you have to say on October 7th. Your voice on this issue is one that I always like to hear more of.
That said, I’m not sure I like the premise of this post. Allow me to express my misgivings.
Offering Jews refuge in 1947, or before, made a lot of sense and would’ve been the moral thing to do. But now? When Israel exists? Whatever else anyone may think of its founding, it is a sovereign nation, recognized by almost all countries, and has a history as long as many other countries in the post-WW2 period (e.g. Pakistan).
The very idea of being willing to dismantle such a state upends the major premise of sovereign nations that has been enforced by the world since WW2, and which is the foundation of the relative peace we’ve enjoyed since then. That’s why Russia’s war against Ukraine, trying to annex it, is *so* bad, and why any move to dismantle Israel, even if just in the imaginations of some crazy anti-Zionists (and, y’know, Iran), is so destabilizing and wrongheaded.
On a more practical level, while I think Israel should be *far* to the left of where it is now, I don’t think this insurance policy is a good reason to do so. Specifically, this would not make me any more likely to say “let’s do a Gaza-style disengagement from the WB”, because my worry from the WB isn’t that they’ll manage to actually destroy Israel – it’s just that they’ll kill a lot of Israelis trying. the Palestinians *aren’t* an existential threat to Israel via force, but not being an existential threat doesn’t mean they can’t kill a lot of people along the way.
In that sense, the insurance policy simply protects against the wrong thing vis-a-vis the WB.
Lastly – you’re constantly arguing and framing arguments against the Anti-zionists of the world. I really, sincerely believe that in the Western World, they make up a tiny tiny fraction of people, and are just not worth arguing with. There are a lot of valid criticisms of Israel and plenty of invalid ones and double standards, but almost no one serious actually has a “dismantle Israel” agenda. I’m just not sure why you want to “platform” these people on your blog and in your mind.
Comment #14 October 7th, 2024 at 4:19 pm
Edan Maor #13: I take your point about addressing the wrong fear. But regarding this:
almost no one serious actually has a “dismantle Israel” agenda. I’m just not sure why you want to “platform” these people on your blog and in your mind.
What reality are you living in and how do I get to it? The “dismantle Israel” agenda now completely dominates academic social science and humanities, elite universities more generally outside business and STEM, teachers’ unions, art and literary festivals, NGOs, aid organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the UN, mainstream news organizations and magazines, and pretty much every online forum that isn’t explicitly right-wing or Zionist.
As a believer in Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, it would be more than enough to make me question my own sanity, if I didn’t have evidence completely independent of Israel that every single institution I mentioned had been deeply penetrated by ignoramuses and moral cretins.
Comment #15 October 7th, 2024 at 4:28 pm
Thanks for post and the support.
As someone who doesn’t like social media, and feels my real people are the readers of this blog raher than users of some hell- site or other, I’ll use this tiny stage to say:
I served in reserve about 200 days of the last 365. I’m tired, but more than to do what it takes to survive here, and am surrounded by people who feel the same. We are strong, we are determined and we truly have no other choice. May we all live to see more peaceful times again.
Comment #16 October 7th, 2024 at 4:49 pm
Scott, my comment is specific about “colonialism” and “settler” angle:
The hated settlers are not Jews who ran away from persecution in the aftermath of Nazi persecution in 1940s. But those who go to west bank in 2020s and forcefully displace Arab Bedouine farmers and harass other Arab families who are living there forever. You get the point.
I’m not surprised about the apathy of “enlightened west” towards Palestinians either (save some tokenism such as sanctions against some settlers whose numbers could be counted in one hand), because ideology of Zionism has strong parallels in this regard to early colonialism. My roots are in a part of world which was colonized by Europeans for centuries – colonizers legitimized their persecution of local population (which included even some Jews living as minority next to Muslims) by appealing to a “superior civilization”. Civilization argument is what is one of the most pro-Israeli argument that we hear nowadays in Western political discourse and every Israeli leader from Ehud Barak to Netanyahu used that.
Israel is clever in playing it both ways to west – sometimes as a victim by appealing to past persecution by their ancestors and some other times as a baton holder of a supposedly superior “Judeo-Christian” civilization.
Comment #17 October 7th, 2024 at 5:03 pm
Zen (Muslim) #16: So much depends on strategic equivocation on the meaning of that word “settler.” Since 10/7, the global left has reaffirmed over and over that its goal is the total eradication of the State of Israel, all of which it regards as an “illegitimate settler colony.” And yet, whenever that position becomes inconvenient, it can retreat to talking about the nutty settlers in the West Bank.
That said: if you ultimately want Israel to continue to exist, with settlements uprooted to make way for a Palestinian state also … then you and I are on the same side, and we should stand together against our respective communities’ extremists.
Comment #18 October 7th, 2024 at 5:17 pm
Dear Scott, perhaps it was so difficult to come up with something to say on this tragic anniversary day, because mourning in silence or a song sometimes is best, and there israel history has plenty of the most beautiful songs for peace , and mourning for the loved ones lost
Such as https://youtu.be/AEvCZI5yuQo?si=lEG9bFEZphwZYLCy
Comment #19 October 7th, 2024 at 5:26 pm
Funny, coming from the far left i guess, came to a similar idea, the virtual state of Judea
Consider a virtual state, that is a member of EU, NATO, UN, INTERPOL, etc. – it allows the citizen to live, work and study all over the EU, it has embassies, schools and culture centers, maybe even prisons, hospitals and elderly houses, but it lacks sovereign land. Like any EU citizen out of their nation country, the virtual state citizens live the life of a privileged expat. The taxes are paid generally to the host state, according to the international agreements, though the social and health insurance are EU wide.
The twist is that the citizenship criteria will match the immigration criteria of the state of Israel – a Jew grandparent by blood or religion.
Why the EU needs it? Population wise it is not the worst of immigration criteria. It also makes sense in terms of historical justice. But most importantly it provides a morally justified alternative over supporting Israel. EU would be able to raise economic sanctions or cut diplomatic ties with Israel without the accusations in antisemitism. Not necessarily should, but it could. Maybe that alone would promote the resolution of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Why do the Jews need it? Mostly because the Jewish question never got a satisfactory answer. For a short period of time it looked like it did, but it does not seem that the compulsory Palestinian exile of 1948 is going to heal anytime soon. Establishing a virtual Jewish state grants the individuals protection on the EU level – as long as the union exists, no single state will be able to harm the Jews. Mechanisms of naturalization can be designed for the case of a Brexit. Of course it is not a 100% insurance, but what is – not a national state in a conflict zone, apparently
Comment #20 October 7th, 2024 at 5:41 pm
Thank you for this post. I have always wondered why American Jews haven’t advocated for something similar to the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 which provided Cuban migrants fleeing communism unique status. Such a law would certainly make sense purely from a humanitarian perspective given the unique risks Jews in Israel face as a small minority surrounded by a much larger hostile population and also from a practical standpoint, Jewish migration to the US is likely to cause little cultural friction. I suspect most liberals would be fine with such a law and perhaps even some of the misguided leftwing critics of Israel also would be OK with it. I am not sure though that the evangelical right that provides much of the political support within the US for Israeli expansionist policy because of biblical prophecies, would agree to relocating Jews away from the holy land ahead of Jesus’ second-coming.
Comment #21 October 7th, 2024 at 5:46 pm
I suspect a lot of people saying things like this you are unfortunately being too charitable to; not in that they have some horrific end goal in mind, but that they’re not thinking about it in a consequentialist manner at all. Possibly they’re thinking in a frame where “it’s understandable, so it’s justified” (a logic I’ve often seen used to defend rioters — “Wouldn’t you be angry, too?” Well, yes, but that doesn’t justify their actions; as Yudkowsky says, there is no license to be human) or applying some sort of perverse anti-colonial deontology (when we debate consequentialism vs deontology, this isn’t usually the sort of thing we’re thinking of, but…?). If so, your question isn’t going to do much good by itself — first you have to convince them that thinking about where this is going is important at all!
Comment #22 October 7th, 2024 at 5:53 pm
@Scott: It is not about isolated “”nutty” settler’s actions – it has become the state policy of capturing land through (further) violence and there is even the claim of a “Greater Israel”. Add to it the above comment of “civilizational superiority”, something which has colonialist roots. Even an otherwise nice Professor of computer science whose name is Jeff Ullman argued along that line. That is the colonial angle.
Now, coming to politics of survival, few countries have any leverage over Israel at the moment and Israel is given a free ticket by West (and probably even by certain Sunni Arab states selfishly) to “finish the job”. However, human costs are significant and I’m not sure how this will evolve. Wind has been blowing against Palestinians for at-least one decade – failed Arab spring, generational shift in wealthier donor Gulf countries and overall political uselessness by virtue of not sitting on oil etc., on top of their own internal issues. However, this war has shown that Palestine still has broad appeal to many people in the world, regardless of their religion or ethnicity. Agreed, many who once cared (incl. many Muslims) don’t care anymore, but they’re replaced by new, diverse set of activists. Israeli leadership on the other hand, has now theocratic elements in it who are asking why offer compromise to a weaker enemy when circumstances (or god according to them) are on their side. I see way higher chance that Israel will survive easily, whereas Palestinian cause may remain an “activism” similar to climate activism.
Comment #23 October 7th, 2024 at 5:55 pm
It’s good that we can all align on the case for Ukraine and against Russia. However, as Matt Duss says here
It is hard to believe now that there was so much hand-wringing over the Al-Shifa hospital incident.
Comment #24 October 7th, 2024 at 7:00 pm
As an Arab, on this day I can only offer sincere condolences to the families of the victims of Oct. 7th. With all my heart I wish every surviving hostage will be freed and reunited with their loved ones very soon.
To Arabs and Muslims I say stop being so enraged by Israel and channel your outrage instead to our own continued extremism that led to all this. If nothing else, admit that many of us have a huge gap in our education on Jewish history, and if you are one of those then find a good history textbook and just read.
Comment #25 October 7th, 2024 at 10:15 pm
Scott, it’s an interesting proposal, but I have to say that my grandparents were many-generations citizens of Germany in the 1930s, but it didn’t help them. No matter what country decides to give us a place now, we are all very aware that those countries can *change their minds*. A colleague related a story about his mother: she was a young adult on a date at a friend’s house when *her* mother knocked on the door and said “…come with me; we need to pack—president Rooseveldt has just died.”
Related pertinent anecdote: one of the speakers at our memorial today said he has this famous quote from Golda Meir stuck to his monitor, and it gives him strength: “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.”
Comment #26 October 7th, 2024 at 10:24 pm
I cannot really applaud what you wrote here. Your proposal seems to reinforce the impression I described in a comment on an earlier blog post, that you see Israel as little more than a Jewish survival bunker, to be dismantled as soon as it is safe to step outside.
I want to believe that you don’t actually think that way (evidence that you don’t: your reply to my comment on that earlier blog post, and comment #10 on this post), and your proposal is just a theoretical exercise to get the totally-not-antisemites to see the flaw in their worldview.
However, if Israel means more to you than just a Jewish survival bunker, why on Earth would you write something as absurd as, “For the first time, the Israeli Jews would plausibly no longer be in an existential struggle, a struggle not to be exterminated by neighbors who tried to exterminate them at every opportunity […]. For the first time there’s be a viable backup plan.”
There would still be an existential struggle, for those Israeli Jews who have a stubborn attachment to their ancestral homeland and would refuse to leave except maybe at gunpoint. A Western country offering an generous immigration policy to Israeli Jews would do nothing to calm down the bloodthirsty antisemites that nearly surround Israel and assault the country on a daily basis.
Again, I would be able to dismiss all of this as a mere theoretical exercise, a way for the antizionists-not-antisemites to prove that they really do care about Jewish lives, by giving them a scenario where Israel can be undermined in a way that does not target Jews.
However, I then saw this paragraph, which leaves me completely shocked:
“As a direct consequence, I’d advocate that the Israelis take bigger gambles for peace: for example, that they unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank to allow a Palestinian state there, even at the risk that the West Bank turns into a much bigger Gaza, another Hamas staging-ground from which to invade Israel and destroy it. At least there’d be an insurance policy if that happened.”
If Israel were to withdraw from Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), whether unilaterally or via an agreement, it would not be a “risk” that it turns into another Gaza; rather it would be a complete certainty. Hamas would take it over rapidly, whether by ballot or by bullet, and Israel’s main population centers would be easy pickings for the terrorists via short-range rockets, mortars, artillery, and frequent Oct. 7-style invasions. Israel is barely surviving a war whose origins can be traced to the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. A withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would certainly end the country. And what is the reason that Israel should inflict on itself such a mortal strategic blunder? Because there is an insurance policy, where Western countries are willing to automatically admit Jews?
Either 1. this dovetails perfectly with the “survival bunker” thesis, where Israel is disposable once the barriers to Jewish refuge in Western countries are lowered, or 2. you believe Israel can take such a “risk” as withdrawing from Judea and Samaria and survive as a country.
1. contradicts what you wrote earlier, about how you know that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and that “Being exiled again would still be traumatic and horrible and unjust.”
2. implies that you did not absorb any of the harsh lessons for Israel’s survival, lessons painfully learned over the last 33 years of suicide bombings, shooting sprees, rocket attacks, and now the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The lessons can be summarized like this: appeasement does not work.
The Oslo accords did not work, they led to the 90s terror wave, and then to the Second Intifada. The 2000 Lebanon withdrawal did not work, it led to Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon, the 2006 Lebanon war, and now the northern front of the current war, with about 60k – 80k Israelis still exiled from their homes in the north while Hezbollah, even after decapitation, still bombards Israel with rockets. The 2005 Gaza disengagement did not work, it led to Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, the bombardment of Israel with increasingly longer-range rockets, several Gaza wars before 2023, and (it bears mentioning again), the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Given all of that, how could you possibly propose something as absurd as yet another withdrawal, and label it as a mere “risk”, for “peace”? And for what? An “insurance policy” of Jews being stateless and exiled again?
Please help me make sense of this.
Comment #27 October 7th, 2024 at 10:28 pm
The insurance is nuclear weapons.
Tens of millions of arabs will die before Israel falls, regardless of immigration opportunities. If Israel takes more risk that scenario becomes more likely. Hence the emphasis on de-escalation through escalation.
Comment #28 October 8th, 2024 at 12:49 am
Color me impressed.
A thankless brief, but you nailed it.
A shockingly constructive and actionable post on history’s most contentious topic.
I don’t imagine it will go over very well with much of anyone, but kudos for finding even a tiny step forward.
Blessings, Ernie P.
Comment #29 October 8th, 2024 at 1:51 am
RB #23
The idea of hiding behind civilians is not new. It is well established that hospitals, ambulances, kindergartens, schools, and private homes are used for military purposes in Gaza and in Lebanon (yet the press is perpetually shocked when these are targeted). International law claims that using Hospitals for military purposes is a war crime, but this has no real life consequences and will not prevent another October 7th.
The reaction from the international community showed us that the Jewish people are to be sacrificed for some political reasons. Something about slavery, colonialism and white guild? Or was it about getting Muslim votes in some regional elections in California? Anyway, we’ve been there before, and knowing we have the moral high ground was never easier.
In most previous wars in Gaza, Israel tried to reduce the risk to civilians to a minimum because we were willing to suffer some loss of life of our soldiers and civilians. However, since October 7th, we understand that Gaza has become an existential risk, and the bounds of what we allow ourselves to attack are looser. That’s common sense.
The damage to Gaza and the casualties could in principle move us closer to a cold war, while keeping Hamas in power would adiabatically lead us to a mutual destruction.
Comment #30 October 8th, 2024 at 2:14 am
Hi Scott,
I’ve read your posts on Israel for a year, but not really commented. I might have commented once. I’ve commented on some of your political posts prior to a year ago.
I’ve tried to read and listen to your point of view, as you’re a commentator whose opinion I almost always respect, even when I disagree with it, and I have long found your commentary incredibly valuable as a touchstone to ensure I am not entirely within an echo chamber.
I have no personal stake in the conflict, on either side, nor do I consider myself to have a political stake on either side. I tend left of center, but without much tribal loyalty, so I try not to let my principles get flushed away by the flood of politics. And your commentary has, as always, proved invaluable, especially your “Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter”.
Personally, I’ve never considered myself Zionist or anti-Zionist. Before the conflict re-erupted a year ago, I was relatively uneducated with respect to it, my political positions with respect to Israel were fairly simplistic.
Now, I’ve been forced to educate myself more (maybe not as much as I should, but alas), and I’ve been forced to come to more fleshed-out opinions. I’ve also learned, in some cases, more than I wanted to about the opinions of some of my friends or former friends. Loathe as I am to praise any aspect of this deplorable conflict, I can say that at least someone like myself has more room to criticize Israel’s policies without being labeled an antisemite. It used to be so bad that even my Jewish roommate in undergrad had an on-the-record position of “Don’t ask me about Israel.”
It wasn’t worth the cost, not by a long shot, but it’s something I suppose.
I tried to find more to say, but I don’t really have somewhere I’m going with this. I don’t have a question to answer. I’ve reexamined my opinions and come out in roughly the same place, but now with much more force behind it. I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly a Zionist, as I can’t quite arrive at the position that Jews have some intrinsic right to an ethnic and/or religious state, but I am very emphatically *not* an anti-Zionist, because I think forcibly relocating everyone out of Israel is a *terrible* solution, and, in the context of Israel as it exists today, probably still a genocide regardless of the historical mess that gave birth to it. If I were at the negotiating table, I would absolutely take total annihilation off the table. With prejudice.
I love your refugee proposal for the political daring, but it’s also obviously unworkable in the context of the politics of refugees today in the Western world—I don’t think it would be the effective backup plan that you suppose, I don’t think it would be stable, and I don’t think it would have the effect of shifting politics the way you claim… which may well be your point.
All that said, Scott, I don’t see quite the same cause for fear that you do. It’s entirely possible that I just have on rose-coloured not-my-problem glasses, or am not looking hard enough, or maybe things are just different here in Canada, but from my vantage point I haven’t seen what you claim to have seen, that “dismantle Israel” is now a consensus across a broad swath of society. A lot of folks are questioning the current Israeli government, that’s for sure, and there is probably even a consensus that the status quo ex ante will not do: even if Hamas were to surrender, that Israel should not be permitted to continue to isolate, control, and settle the Gaza strip like it has for years. But I don’t think that extends to a consensus that all the Jews need to leave.
It’s not to say I’m not afraid. The situation in the Middle East is looking more dire by the day, with a risk of even more players entering the game. An old, old pattern of escalation is playing out: every side’s tit is the other side’s tat, and the retaliations seem on trajectory to grow and grow with possibly no end.
Maybe what I’m most afraid of, though, is having to pick a side.
Comment #31 October 8th, 2024 at 2:34 am
This line,
“But, particularly since last October, the left is obsessed with Israel, which it considers uniquely evil among all nations to have ever existed—so that’s the conflict about which I’m proposing a positive step.”
as well as your previous post on the matter has made me reflect on why I myself am singling out Israel among all other nations in my own politics. Because yes, I am against all atrocities committed by any nation, but Israel’s actions clearly make me angrier than those of Iran, China, US and others, and moves me to more urgently want to oppose the Israeli state and military.
The thing that makes me feel this way, and makes Israel so singular, is not Judaism or any other feature of its people, but the fact that Israel was supposed to be one of us. A liberal nation fighting for universalism and human rights. And now, as those principles are being betrayed, they still receive full support from my Western European government. Any other state would either be heavily sanctioned for such actions, or be a superpower too strong for such sanctions to hurt anyone but my own state.
I would propose that this hypocrisy from our governments is an important part of what makes the left obsessed. I hope peaceful coexistence and demilitarisation will come to both Israel and Palestine one day. Condolences on October 7th.
Comment #32 October 8th, 2024 at 3:00 am
I think the trajectories as presented in this post are not realistic. Israel has the backing of the US. It has nuclear weapons. It is not under existential threat even if a Palestinian state were to come about.
Also there’s middle grounds between withdrawal from West Bank and the current course of action.
For example the escalation with Iran is completely needless and risks dragging the US into a war with Iran – yes, Iran itself is provocative and reckless but would a war with Iran really increase Israel’s security?
Yes, not leveling Gaza would mean a slightly elevated risk to Israel but it hardly would be an existential risk and would have prevented a lot of (tho by no means all) innocent deaths and not have created this level of backlash and hatred throughout the Arab and Muslim world for Israel. Does the latter really enhance Israel’s long term security?
For that matter, does alienating the young population of the US – which is the main guarantor Israel’s security really enhancing Israel’s security?
Comment #33 October 8th, 2024 at 3:32 am
As a non-Jewish, non-anti-semitic, anti-Zionist, I suppose this proposal is aimed at me. Well I readily accept. Really, it’s an easy call. I live in the US, the country with the second largest Jewish population in the world. I regard Jewish contributions to American arts, culture, business and scientific progress as central — the US is not the US as we know and love it without the Jews. I regret that the US did not accept more Jewish refugees during the 30s and 40s. As an opponent of most immigration restrictions, I think this country could easily absorb all the Israelis (and all the Palestinians) who wish to move here, and would be better for it. If this proposal was intended as some kind of gotcha, consider me emphatically not got.
Of course, I also think it would be extremely regrettable if this proposal was ever needed. A forced population transfer of Jews out of Israel, or a mass flight due to intolerable conditions, would be a grotesque and world-historical injustice.
My own vision for the resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is that every resident of the region stays exactly where they currently live, and becomes a citizen of a country in which they have full and equal rights. I think that my commitment to liberalism, secularism and pluralism demands no less. Practically speaking, this vision is most likely to be realized by a two-state solution, although I have no objection to a one-state solution, should the parties mutually agree to that.
My problem with Zionism is that it is incompatible with this simple vision. Zionism is the proposition that there must exist a state where the Jews are the dominant ethnic group, in possession of all meaningful political power, even though, under every conceivable configuration, that state will be home to a very large number of non-Jews.
I can hear the objections: How can the Jews live on equal terms with the Arabs when the Arabs are murderous savages bent on their extermination? But the displacement, dispossession and subjugation of the Arabs of Palestine has been occurring since the birth of Israel. The Nakba was not an aberrant deviation from Zionism, but inexorably entailed by its fundamental premises.
One can witness the inherent tensions in this very post. Scott laments that other Arab countries did not accept Palestinian refugees in 1948. But why didn’t Israel, their homeland, re-admit the refugees in the first place? Because Israel is a Jewish state, not a state for the Palestinians. Scott also suggests that other countries should accept more Palestinian immigrants today. But why doesn’t Israel, a country with one of the largest Palestinian populations in the world, accept more Palestinian immigrants? Because Israel is a Jewish state, not a state for the Palestinians.
I would be very gratified if someone on this forum would put forth a positive defense of Zionism, rather than responding with the deflection that merely raising the issue makes me an anti-semite, or with some whataboutism involving Iran or North Korea or Saudi Arabia.
Comment #34 October 8th, 2024 at 3:53 am
@anon arab
“To Arabs and Muslims I say stop being so enraged by Israel and channel your outrage instead to our own continued extremism that led to all this. If nothing else, admit that many of us have a huge gap in our education on Jewish history, and if you are one of those then find a good history textbook and just read.”
———
I do not see your point here. Jews used to live persecution free in Muslim lands. Palestinian struggle is not extremism, though there may be extremists among them like any other movement. Also, the movement enjoyed widespread support among non Muslims ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Nelson Mandela. I do agree that for Arab regimes, Israel was often a convenient external enemy to be used as a distraction, but that is a different point.
Now how do you see current Israeli cabinet, evangelical supporters of Israel in USA etc.? Moderates? The idea that Muslims are extremists is a convenient and often politically useful idea promoted by Western political establishment and sometimes parroted by autocrats in Muslim countries itself to justify various measures. Even a terror org. like Al qaeda was not created in vacuum, there were politics behind it (cold war), but still they did not gain mass traction among Muslim public. If you do not trust own kind, there is enough written about these by Jews ranging from Noam Chomsky to Uri Avnery.
Comment #35 October 8th, 2024 at 4:01 am
Scott #14:
> What reality are you living in and how do I get to it? The “dismantle Israel” agenda now completely dominates academic social science and humanities, elite universities more generally outside business and STEM, teachers’ unions, art and literary festivals, NGOs, aid organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the UN, mainstream news organizations and magazines, and pretty much every online forum that isn’t explicitly right-wing or Zionist.
I’m living in the reality in which I already believed that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN etc are all extremely biased and unreliable actors. That never really changed for me, October 7th didn’t cause me to update my views.
But also in the reality in which, despite the very prevalent “defund the police” rhetoric that seemingly took over the Democratic party, probably 95% of Democrats would actually be *against* that message.
Likewise, I think that if you actually asked people, even the people in the protests, 95% of them (upon actually understanding the issue!) will be against the idea of “dismantling Israel”.
Not saying this is not a problem or a threat, just that by arguing against *them*, and “offering deals to them”, you’re actually platforming them and amplifying their voice, as opposed to engaging with the people who both a) have legit criticisms of Israel, and b) are not insane.
I’m not always sure how I feel about the whole “should we platform Nazis” issue, but to the extent that you agree we shouldn’t be platforming Nazis, maybe you shouldn’t be doing the equivalent by platforming anti-zionists. Both on the blog and in your actual head.
(Mostly I say this for *your* sake, not because of any impact, btw.)
Comment #36 October 8th, 2024 at 4:34 am
Zen (Muslim) #34:
Jews used to live persecution free in Muslim lands.
HAHAHAHAHA. It’s true (and important) that they weren’t persecuted or massacred as often as they were as in medieval Christendom, but they were never really safe either—as shown from the beginning by Mohammad’s massacres of the Jews, and much later by the alliance of al-Husseini and other Muslim leaders with Hitler, and then, of course, by the mass expulsions of Jews from Islamic lands, and confiscation of their property, following the founding of Israel. The Muslim countries could have said, as the campus protesters do today, “we distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. Jews are welcome to stay with us.” But they didn’t. The question was put to the test just as it was in Europe, and the Jews ended up being safe only in their own state.
Comment #37 October 8th, 2024 at 4:45 am
Edan Maor #35: From my perspective as an American, there’s now an entire generation of young progressives the vast majority of whom regard Israel’s existence as fundamentally illegitimate, and who (as they chant) “will not stop and will not rest” until they’ve achieved its dismantlement. And at least in its openness and brazenness, this strikes me as new since Oct. 7, and genuinely terrifying—because in 10-20 years, these are the people who will run our universities, schools, nonprofits, and media outlets and who will fill the ranks of the Democratic Party.
And the right in America keeps telling me that the only way I can stop this is by throwing in my lot, just as they have, with literal fascist autocrats who put one man’s will above reality or the law. And the fascist autocrats haven’t won me over, not even close, but I can now for the first time imagine plausible futures where they would. And that’s probably the most terrifying part of all.
Comment #38 October 8th, 2024 at 5:09 am
US #33: I regard my proposal less as a “gotcha” than as a “plea for survival.” Either way, though, I’m very glad that at least one anti-Zionist supports it!
Crucially, though, if you want me to support (e.g.) unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, even after the same experiment in Gaza produced a Hamas terror base, then it’s not enough for you or other individual anti-Zionists to support my proposal. Governments need to get on board with it. The “actual insurance policy for the Jews to survive” part is load-bearing for me.
To address the rest of your comment: for me, the fundamental justification for a Jewish homeland, even with all its ethnocentric implications, is simply that when it counted, the world catastrophically failed to protect the Jews’ bare physical existence in other way. Meanwhile, the fundamental justification for a Jewish homeland in the Jews’ historical, indigenous home of Israel is history: the world, in a brief act of contrition for the genocide it had enabled, voted for a partition of that former British colony into Jewish and Arab parts, and the Jews said yes, and the Arabs not only said no, but attempted a second Jewish genocide instead, and lost—thus proving, for all future generations, why the Jews did indeed need to retain demographic dominance in the part of their homeland that they kept. But in case anyone forgot the lesson, the Arab side again attempted Jewish genocide several more times in the ensuing years (!), pretty much whenever it saw an opportunity. Most recently a year ago.
Rather than calling the people who do these things “savages,” I find it more useful to say that they’re under the grip of a savage ideology—as anyone in Israel who calls for Arab genocide is as well. And I genuinely believe that the destruction of these savage ideologies will be a boon, not merely for Israel, but for the Arab world too.
Comment #39 October 8th, 2024 at 5:29 am
Opt #32:
Israel has the backing of the US. It has nuclear weapons. It is not under existential threat even if a Palestinian state were to come about.
Aha, these are precisely the ideas that October 7 was meant to shatter, and did.
Israel will retain the backing of the US, to the limited extent it has it, only until the tentifada people are the ones running its institutions, which might come in 10-20 years.
And nuclear weapons are helpful for deterring a rational adversary. They’re less helpful for deterring someone who celebrates suicide bombings as martyrdom with a heavenly reward.
Also, the Ayatollahs will probably have deliverable nuclear weapons in the next year or two. Once they do, their obvious strategy will be to keep ratcheting up conventional attacks, both directly and via proxies, until Israel is no longer a viable place to live, and all those who can flee it do. The Ayatollahs will judge, correctly, that Israel probably won’t respond even then by nuking Iranian cities—and even if it does, well, the heavenly bliss of martyrdom awaits.
I think it’s entirely plausible that this strategy will succeed. In fact I’d bet on it—unless Israel, together with the majority of Iranian people who despise the Ayatollah regime even more than the Israelis do, and any other nations who decide to join, strike the regime hard while there’s still a window of opportunity.
Comment #40 October 8th, 2024 at 5:41 am
Andy #31:
The thing that makes me feel this way, and makes Israel so singular, is not Judaism or any other feature of its people, but the fact that Israel was supposed to be one of us. A liberal nation fighting for universalism and human rights. And now, as those principles are being betrayed, they still receive full support from my Western European government. Any other state would either be heavily sanctioned for such actions, or be a superpower too strong for such sanctions to hurt anyone but my own state.
Thank you for saying that! Your clarity lets me pinpoint the exact place where you and I part ways. I say: if your tiny country were surrounded by neighbors who’d rejected every proposal for peace and coexistence, and tried instead to exterminate all its men, women, and children at every opportunity, from 1929 through this past year—then I’d be impressed to see it respond with 10% as much restraint as Israel has. The singular feature here, the thing that cries out for explanation and that the left ought to obsess about, is not Israel’s response to the situation, but rather the fact that the situation exists in the first place. Why can’t Muslims begrudge Jews 0.2% of the Middle East—where even within that 0.2%, Muslims are 20% of the population and serve in parliament and the Supreme Court—while Muslims get to enjoy the remaining 99.8%, completely Jew-free because they expelled the Jews? This is the part that I find harder to reconcile with the ideals of liberalism, universalism, and human rights—you might even say, 500 times harder.
Comment #41 October 8th, 2024 at 5:52 am
Scott #37:
> From my perspective as an American, there’s now an entire generation of young progressives the vast majority of whom regard Israel’s existence as fundamentally illegitimate, and who (as they chant) “will not stop and will not rest” until they’ve achieved its dismantlement. And at least in its openness and brazenness, this strikes me as new since Oct. 7, and genuinely terrifying—because in 10-20 years, these are the people who will run our universities, schools, nonprofits, and media outlets and who will fill the ranks of the Democratic Party.
Well admittedly you probably have a better sense of this than I do, considering that you actually live in the States.
My main counter is that I think progressives as a whole are losing a lot of power, certainly if you e.g. compare Kamala Harris’s campaign this year vs. her (and others’) campaigns four years ago.
But yes, this is a real concern. Especially since progressives losing power could mean Universities/experts/etc losing power, which might be narrowly good for Israel but terrible in other ways.
Comment #42 October 8th, 2024 at 6:10 am
US #33:
> I would be very gratified if someone on this forum would put forth a positive defense of Zionism, rather than responding with the deflection that merely raising the issue makes me an anti-semite, or with some whataboutism involving Iran or North Korea or Saudi Arabia.
Sure. It’s actually pretty easy. You said:
> My own vision for the resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is that every resident of the region stays exactly where they currently live, and becomes a citizen of a country in which they have full and equal rights. I think that my commitment to liberalism, secularism and pluralism demands no less. Practically speaking, this vision is most likely to be realized by a two-state solution, although I have no objection to a one-state solution, should the parties mutually agree to that.
Well great. That’s a perfectly sensible and totally Zionist position.
Israel continuing to exist as part of a two-state solution, if that’s the path it chooses, *is Zionism*. You seem to think differently, cause you also write:
> My problem with Zionism is that it is incompatible with this simple vision. Zionism is the proposition that there must exist a state where the Jews are the dominant ethnic group, in possession of all meaningful political power, even though, under every conceivable configuration, that state will be home to a very large number of non-Jews.
Yeah. The original Zionist position was that Jews needed a state for themselves, a position that was obviously proven extremely correct. But now Israel exists, and default Zionism is pretty much default “Frenchism” – just believing that Israel should continue to exist. Nothing else.
You’re right that the probable way a two-state solution will be reached, will still involve Israel having a ~20% Arab minority. But that minority already exists in Israel today! Arabs in Israel today have the same rights as Jews. There are a lot of issues, of course, and there are answers that Israel will need to resolve, but as long as you’re in favor of Israel continuing to exist, great, you’re a Zionist. It’s really not a radical position; this is pretty much the default thing people think about 193 out of 194 countries in the world, really – they exist and should just continue to exist.
Of course some extremists have a definition of Zionism which includes Israel capturing all of “Greater Israel”, but this is a minority POV in Israel.
> But the displacement, dispossession and subjugation of the Arabs of Palestine has been occurring since the birth of Israel. The Nakba was not an aberrant deviation from Zionism, but inexorably entailed by its fundamental premises.
That’s not true. Jews, mostly refugees, legally migrated into Palestine and built communities there that lived alongside the Arabs of Palestine. Then, under British rule, where it was unclear what would happen to the region, there was some back-and-forth violence between the Jewish settlers and the Arabs. It definitely wasn’t a “subjugation” of the Arabs by the Jews, by any means (the Jews were a minority).
And I don’t think the Nakba is entailed by Zionism. Jews accepted the very sensible compromise of “well we have two groups living on this land right now, both want to stay here and have historic ties to it and nowhere else to go… so let’s just split it and give each side part of it”. You can certainly argue over the details of how this should be implemented, but this is the basic idea that any child will reach for how to resolve this kind of dispute – and indeed it’s what every single person in charge of this land has decided is the sensible solution, from the 1937 proposal, to 1947, to the current “let’s push a two state solution” idea.
It is a really unfortunate fact that the Palestinians have just rejected that proposal for 85 years, and have instead resorted to trying to use violence to capture all the land. That is the underlying source of all the problems.
> One can witness the inherent tensions in this very post. Scott laments that other Arab countries did not accept Palestinian refugees in 1948. But why didn’t Israel, their homeland, re-admit the refugees in the first place? Because Israel is a Jewish state, not a state for the Palestinians.
Because they were part of the people that had just literally waged war on the country. You don’t, in general, get to flee a country and try to annihilate it, then say “oops we lost, have us back please”.
> Scott also suggests that other countries should accept more Palestinian immigrants today. But why doesn’t Israel, a country with one of the largest Palestinian populations in the world, accept more Palestinian immigrants? Because Israel is a Jewish state, not a state for the Palestinians.
Yes, but that’s like saying “why doesn’t the US just welcome in 300 million Chinese immigrants”. No country on Earth would agree to an immigration policy of doubling its size with a culturally distinct and politically distinct population, especially one that has been literally *waging war on you* for years.
I mean, let’s be realistic – what the hell is the, say, LGBT population of Israel supposed to say? “Yes, let’s add 100% more voters who are fundamentally opposed to gay rights to the voting base”? Do you really think that’s a *good* idea? That’s not even considering the fact that, again, most Palestinians fundamentally oppose the idea of an Israeli state, and many would be happy to “get rid” of all Jews from the land.
Comment #43 October 8th, 2024 at 6:17 am
AF #26, and all others who criticized me from the right: I think about it this way.
In 1947, the UN voted to partition the British Mandate into an Arab part, and a narrow, almost pathetic little Jewish part that completely excluded Jerusalem.
Then Ben-Gurion made one of the most farsighted, inspiring decisions in all the millennia of Jewish history. He said: we accept your shitty proposal. We accept it because we’ll take whatever lets us survive.
And as we all know, the Arabs rejected the proposal (much better than anything they could’ve gotten subsequently) and launched a war of Jewish extermination instead. When Israel won that war, it had both victory and righteousness—righteousness, because the world had once again seen that even the minimum that would let the Jewish people survive, was more than the maximum that its enemies would accept.
This was the history that moved me as a child, that made me see Israel’s destiny as forever intertwined with my own and with everything I regarded as good in the world. It still moves me today. It has all the drama of the Exodus—of Pharoah rejecting every peace offering one after another, only to face divine vengeance in the end—but also much better attestation in the historical record. 😀
So I say, let’s do as Moses did and as Ben-Gurion did 3200 years later. Let’s ask the world, formally, to grant something close to the bare minimum that we or any people would need to survive.
Then, if the world says yes, we survive!
And if the world says no, then every justice-obsessed man, woman, and child in every future generation will remember the world’s answer, and perhaps find the meaning of his or her own life in the story of our survival despite the world’s answer.
Comment #44 October 8th, 2024 at 7:56 am
Perhaps the best way to commemorate October 7 would be to ensure that a large number of people watch what Konstantin Kisin has to say:
https://x.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1843352287525384452
Comment #45 October 8th, 2024 at 8:18 am
I support Israel and despise radical antizionists, but to say there is a risk of another holocaust is simply delusional. Israel is in the safest position since its founding. It has by far the most powerfull army in the region and her enemies are small paramilitaries (Iran is too far away). I have no doubts that if they could they would exterminate every jew in israel… But they can’t.
Comment #46 October 8th, 2024 at 8:33 am
Y #29
It is entirely appropriate for America to be focused on local electoral politics, critical states and whether foreign governments are trying to influence their elections. It is also up to the electorate if they want their government to be against war crimes committed around the world in their name. This may well be the time that Israel is able to bomb its way to security. The successes on the battlefield are obvious. Time will tell.
Comment #47 October 8th, 2024 at 8:45 am
There’s a Hindi idiom that applies here. Ulta chor kotwal ko daante. It means, “Opposite world : The thief scolds the police ”
I agree things seem upside down in many places, with this. People who merely want to exist, attacked on Oct 7th. And then scolded for wanting to exist.
Bizarroworld.
Comment #48 October 8th, 2024 at 9:40 am
I for one would vote YES, in a referendum in Taiwan to grant asylum for Israelis!
Scott, I wonder if you have discussed this proposal to any of your friends from East Asia?
I kind of feel the culture here as less “tentifada”, and more mercantilist and materialistic.
Comment #49 October 8th, 2024 at 10:46 am
Scott #43:
I see things differently.
First, even though Ben-Gurion accepted the shitty UN proposal, once the Arab armies attacked, he directed the newly founded IDF to take more territory than the UN proposal allowed. Israel is all the safer and more prosperous for it, even though it give the antisemites an extra map they could add to their BS “disappearing Palestine” propaganda posters.
Second, and this is a generalization of the first point: when it comes to its own security, Israel is usually better off telling the world to go fuck itself rather than kneeling and begging the world for mercy. There are many historical cases like this: seizing the Sinai in 1956, launching a preemptive strike on Egypt and Syria in 1967 (against the direct orders of its greatest “ally” at the time, France, which then declared an arms embargo), the Entebbe raid, the destruction of Saddam’s Osirak reactor, and Operation Defensive Shield to crack down on the Second Intifada. More recently, Israel basically told Biden, Harris, Macron, etc. “fuck you” by continuing and “escalating” the Swords of Iron war in Rafah, Lebanon, etc. If Israel had not done that, Hamas would control Rafah and get continuous resupply from the Philadelphi corridor tunnels, while Hezbollah would regroup and find its footing again after Israel’s brilliant decapitation attack.
Likewise, there are many moments in Israel’s history where the country did listen to the world, did choose “de-escalation”, and paid a terrible price in terms of security. These include things like accepting the never-enforced UN resolution 1701 after the 2006 Lebanon war, accepting Reagan’s orders to allow the PLO to flee Beirut in the mid-1980s, and every major territorial withdrawal since 1991, whether negotiated or unilateral.
Now that I think about it, the Moses narrative, too, involves the people of Israel telling the world “fuck you”, from fleeing Pharaoh and bringing the Red Sea down on him, to fighting Amalek and Midian, to the bloody conquest of Canaan under Moses’s successor, Joshua. I don’t actually believe that narrative given the lack of evidence, but it is striking that the Biblical authors knew what a sovereign people need to do to survive.
The modern left’s strategy, on the other hand, seems more optimized for the centuries of exile and statelessness that occurred between stretches of sovereignty. In those dark days, there really was no choice but to beg the world for mercy. For me, one of the main aspects of Zionism is taking a look at that terrible situation, and telling it, “fuck you”.
So, no I don’t think Israel should once again be asking the world for the “bare minimum” needed for Jewish survival.
Comment #50 October 8th, 2024 at 11:25 am
Scott, I would be willing to leave Israel, the minute after all Asians, Africans, and European leave the US and return the land to the Native Americans.
RB #46, if I’ll need to write to you on the havoc the US foreign policy has caused in the middle east, it would take me the whole day. Here’s some reading material:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36431160
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/was-hamas-elected-to-govern-gaza-george-w-bush-2006-palestinian-election.html
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/obama-didnt-give-iran-150-billion-in-cash/ (the difference between “give” and “unfreeze” is not important to me)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-funds-aided-2015-campaign-to-oust-netanyahu-senate-probe-finds/
Comment #51 October 8th, 2024 at 11:26 am
AF #49: I don’t think we actually disagree that much. The strategy is inherently a two-part one. First you ask the world for the bare minimum needed to survive—not for pity or charity, but maybe just a tiny piece of land where you can feed and defend yourself. Then, if the world refuses you even that bare minimum and tries to exterminate you instead, you fight back, with the righteous justice of eternity. You’re even justified at that point to take more than the bare minimum, from those who had the choice and offered you nothing but death. But even with your gun in one hand, you keep an olive branch in the other, ready for friendship with any former enemy as soon as it stops trying to murder you (and means it). This is Zionism as I understand it. Applications to all other areas of life are left as exercises.
Comment #52 October 8th, 2024 at 11:38 am
Y #50,
I already wrote in #3 about the most recent American disaster of the half a million lives lost in Iraq which involved a confluence of neocon goals of remaking the Middle East. Bush looks pleasant in comparison with Trump now but his terms were a disaster. Cheney left with a 13% approval rating. Biden was a party to those decisions too. Moral clarity requires pointing out the calamitous consequences of the Iraq intervention and vengeful wars as well.
Comment #53 October 8th, 2024 at 11:52 am
Scott #51:
Yes, this makes sense.
My problems with the proposal are
1. it asks for so little, even less than what Ben-Gurion accepted in 1947,
2. the concessions you were offering in return are incompatible with Israel’s continued existence, which should be obvious to everyone now even if it was only obvious to some in the last few decades, and,
3. Israel and the Jewish people are **way** past the first stage in your list, and have no reason to go back.
I think the first mistake though, was when you asked, “What could I do to break through? What could I say to all the people who call themselves ‘anti-Israel but not antisemitic’ that would actually move the conversation forward?”
In my opinion, there is no reason to “move the conversation forward”, or to engage with the totally-not-antisemites at all. If we are holding an olive-branch in the other hand, it is only to be extended to those willing to become **former** antizionists, and the concessions we offer along with the olive branch should be a price we are actually willing and able to pay. This is how it went with the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, the UAE, etc. Extending an olive branch to those who would never accept us in turn, such as the PLO, Hamas, or the totally-not-antisemitic activists in the West, is an exercise in futility. The moderate center-left, both in the West and in Israel, would be a lot better if it finally managed to internalize that.
Comment #54 October 8th, 2024 at 12:02 pm
Since it’s about October 7th:
For a year, each time I’ve brought up on this blog that it’s important to find out how Hamas was so shockingly successful that day (the security lapses, the very slow response of the IDF, etc), I’ve been told “of course!”.
But then I heard that the Bibi government has been refusing to open an official investigation. Apparently the only investigation (non official) is conducted by citizens and families of the victims.
Is this true?
Comment #55 October 8th, 2024 at 12:09 pm
fred #54: Yes, it’s true that Bibi is blocking an October 7 investigation such as any other prime minister would’ve ordered by now. It’s beyond disgraceful, and in my opinion is the single clearest reason (though there are others) why Bibi should not be prime minister.
Comment #56 October 8th, 2024 at 12:26 pm
I’m no expert in the topic, but I can’t help but draw some comparisons with how the mormons were being pushed around inside the US (supposedly the kand of religious freedom), and eventually settled and founded Salt Lake City.
There are currently 6.5 million mormons in the US.
The US still has a shocking enormous amount of free land (eg in Oregon, etc)
Comment #57 October 8th, 2024 at 12:30 pm
Scott #39
“Israel will retain the backing of the US, to the limited extent it has it, only until the tentifada people are the ones running its institutions, which might come in 10-20 years.”
I think a lot of that is a function of sympathy for Israel as well as whether the US elites/public view the alliance with Israel fruitful for the US. Losing the court of public opinion with the young people in the US (even if it increases deterrence somewhat for a little while) is going to lose Israel the former. Losing the court of world public opinion and making things much harder geopolitically for the US in the Middle East and elsewhere is going to cause a rethink of the latter.
And yes, US and other countries like China can behave very differently and get away with it. They can do so because they have far more power and leverage over the rest of the world. Israel does not.
And I don’t think it’s an either-or thing — that Israel has to level Gaza or it has to not respond at all to the attacks (let alone withdraw from West Bank). There are middle grounds some of which may lead to much better outcomes.
“And nuclear weapons are helpful for detering a rational adversary. They’re less helpful for deterring someone who celebrates suicide bombings as martyrdom with a heavenly reward.”
That may be true of individual suicide bombers. But the entire Palestinian population is not suicidal. I would be surprised if even the majority of Hamas is suicidal.
“Also, the Ayatollahs will probably have deliverable nuclear weapons in the next year or two. Once they do, their obvious strategy will be to keep ratcheting up conventional attacks, both directly and via proxies, until Israel is no longer a viable place to live, and all those who can flee it do.”
I agree that if they can do that they will do that. I certainly agree that they want to do that.
“The Ayatollahs will judge, correctly, that Israel probably won’t respond even then by nuking Iranian cities—and even if it does, well, the heavenly bliss of martyrdom awaits.”
I think the Iranian leadership (let alone the common Iranians) are even less suicidal than Palestinians. Heated rhetoric is very different from actual incentives and actions — for ex see the rhetoric Iran has had since Oct 7 vs them not backing their rhetoric with even remotely the level of actions you would expect. They blinked for instance when Haniyeh was killed.
“I think it’s entirely plausible that this strategy will succeed. In fact I’d bet on it—unless Israel, together with the majority of Iranian people who despise the Ayatollah regime even more than the Israelis do, and any other nations who decide to join, strike the regime hard while there’s still a window of opportunity.”
If Israel can credibly threaten the existence of Iran (as Iran can do for Israel if it acquired nukes), then I don’t think it will. And Israel can do that if it acquires ~1K nuclear weapons. Proxies will still be a challenge but Israel can deter by making it a stated policy to consider an attack by Iranian proxies to be an attack by Iran.
Comment #58 October 8th, 2024 at 12:31 pm
Scott #55
No Israeli prime minister would order such an investigation while the war is ongoing.
Comment #59 October 8th, 2024 at 12:33 pm
AF #53: I think for an academic like me, the urge is irresistible to say “I believe X, but supposing I believed Y, here’s what I’d be doing.”
If I were a passionate anti-Zionist who nevertheless wanted the Jews to live, I’d be spending all my time not condemning Israel, but lobbying governments to provide a different home for the 7 million Israeli Jews, once “Palestine is Arab from the river to sea.” Why do they not do this? I can’t understand it, and I also have a personality where I can’t help but point it out.
Comment #60 October 8th, 2024 at 12:47 pm
@Scott
When I wrote “used to”, it should be obvious that it is until the creation of Israel. Historically, noone got perfect treatment all the time – it is instructive to ask how many Muslims got killed in Sunni-Shia civil wars and how many Christians got killed in various crusades (I’m not mentioning here 300k+ Muslims who got killed in Iraq in modern history by Judeo-Christian cultural army). Prophet Mohammed himself was persecuted for his faith by Arabian Pagans who often collaborated with local Jews, so history is to be seen in context.
After creation of Israel, Jewish intellectuals in general is less honest in acknowledging the historically better treatment their ancestors got from Istanbul to Muslim Spain, to medieval Arabia. Now given that you frequently write about existential angst, I might well ask why Jews and especially Zionists are remarkably silent when it comes to daily calls of expulsion of Muslims from Europe and USA by right wing parties, which are ardent supporters of Israel..
Comment #61 October 8th, 2024 at 12:53 pm
True to form that idiot Bush and his minions chose the wrong darn country for regime change.
Whatever country admitted the Israeli population would enjoy a windfall of technical competence assuming the right people emigrated there.
I thought that in fact Jewish people that emigrated from the Soviet Union were provided a choice of US or Israel and many chose the US. I may be mistaken and there was likely a horrific number of forms to be filed if not mistaken.
Comment #62 October 8th, 2024 at 1:24 pm
Great post. I understand your argument, but like others have pointed out, I don’t think denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination is fair.
Actually, Israel is one of the most legitimate countries in the world. The Jewish people are indigenous to the land (culturally and historically going back 3,000 years), while Palestinian Muslims are not indigenous to Israel (they are overwhelmingly descendants of recent immigrants from neighboring countries, some are descendants of Arab colonizers from the 7th century, or originate from southern Syria). But additionally, Israel is the only country that was affirmed through a vote by the international community!
Comment #63 October 8th, 2024 at 1:33 pm
Theorist Israel #62: To be perfectly clear, this blog stands firmly behind the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, and it will continue to do so forever, whatever the personal or professional consequences for me.
All I did, was advise the anti-Zionists on what I’d be doing if I were them, that might actually succeed at moving some Zionists like me further to the left. And it involved creating new Jewish survival options, not canceling the most important one we currently have.
Comment #64 October 8th, 2024 at 1:41 pm
You are the man, Scott. Keep going!
Comment #65 October 8th, 2024 at 1:42 pm
Zen (Muslim) #60: How long have you been reading this blog? 🙂 I spent years here condemning Trump for his Muslim ban specifically, and for 5000 other horrible things he did or tried to do. And the majority of American Jews are to my left.
Since Oct 7, you can read ten thousand handwringing think-pieces by left-aligned American Jews, saying some variant of “I stood up for Black Lives Matter, I stood up for MeToo, I stood up for Muslim immigration, I stood up for LGBTQ, but now that my relatives in Israel are being slaughtered my former leftist allies are celebrating it, and not one of them will stand up for us.” That was a ridiculously common experience.
Comment #66 October 8th, 2024 at 2:06 pm
Zen (Muslim) #60:
> I might well ask why Jews and especially Zionists are remarkably silent when it comes to daily calls of expulsion of Muslims from Europe and USA by right wing parties, which are ardent supporters of Israel
That’s an easy one: because those parties are opposed not to Muslims but to Islamists.
Comment #67 October 8th, 2024 at 3:05 pm
Scott #63
The position of our country on this is that self-determination means being forced to fight it out. I’m glad it’s slowly dawning on people how anti-Jewish the US version of being pro-Israel can be. The refugees that founded Israel were sent there as an *alternative* to allowing them to immigrate here. It’s worth reading about why by the time Truman was faced with the choice of what to do for the Holocaust survivors living in temporary camps, they were still in them.
Theorist #62
> Israel is one of the most legitimate countries in the world. The Jewish people are indigenous to the land (culturally and historically going back 3,000 years), while Palestinian Muslims are not indigenous to Israel.
This is one of those arguments that only sounds good to the people who came up with it, because by this logic Israel’s most important and only ally is not legitimate at all. 🙂 (Not to worry, it doesn’t offend, it’s just incongruent.)
Comment #68 October 8th, 2024 at 3:15 pm
First of all, my condolences to all people impacted by October 7th and its aftermath.
I was originally hesitant on the war considering the destruction of Hamas seemed a difficult aim militarily. However, since then I think they’ve been weakened to an extent that has disproved my pessimistic expectations, for this same reason I think calls for a ceasefire are premature and misguided, I’m happy to let the people in charge keep going until they think they’ve done whatever else they can. Harsh as it is for the remaining hostages and their family, I hope there is no prisoner exchange, this would strengthen Hamas, better to think of them as most likely casualties, collateral damage if you will.
I’m also worried the aftermath of the war is mishandled and whatever hope for establishing lasting peace is squandered, I hope this pessimistic expectation is also refuted. Listening to right wing extremist online is a depressing experience, their view of the future looks like a quasi-permanent occupation of Gaza in the West Bank model, they can point to the small amount of violence coming from the west bank, compared to Gaza say. Usually I would believe this is not effective at quelling this sort of terrorist violence, but Israel is so singularly effective I could easily believe they could achieve this pacification of Palestine. I presume you have a better read on the pulse of the Israeli politics, so I would be interested in your estimate of how likely there is to be a military occupation of Palestine in the medium term, say 10 years from now, what do you think?
I suspect most people opposed to the war are queasy with the casualties of Palestinians compared to the initial butchery of Israelis, I would be interested in a utilitarian calculation of the war, comparing lives saved by future peace and the economic peace dividends compared to the current casualties and economic costs of the war (like the destruction of buildings and so on). I understand there is likely quite a lot of uncertainty here, but I expect a first order approximation might do a lot to assuage at least some of the rationalist crowd (including me). If you know of anyone who has tried that, let me know.
Comment #69 October 8th, 2024 at 4:04 pm
100% agree with your policy suggestion. It is horrible that America did not take in more Jewish refugees before and during WW2. The least we could do to compensate now is to offer US citizenship to all Israelis. I don’t think Democrats or Republicans could in good conscience refuse (although right-wing Christian Zionists, alt-righters, and left-wing antisemites might grumble). Any concerns that we would receive the Ben-Gvirs and Smotrichs of Israel should be allayed by the fact that they are the least likely to accept the offer.
In fact, the policy would make sense even from a self-interested US perspective, disregarding the security/political context entirely. US science in the 20th century was largely driven forward by Jewish refugees: Erdos, Wigner, Von Neumann, Einstein, Kac, Ulam, etc. We should be trying as hard as we can to recruit Israeli talent to galvanize further US research progress in STEM.
Although I have only an ancestral tie to India, and no political agency there, I have also always felt that India should be open to Jewish refugees. They would be welcomed with open arms by the vast majority of the Hindu and Christian populations there. Unfortunately the Muslim population statistically speaking is fairly antisemitic, and the Indian campus left is far more extreme than that here. The current complaints of Brahmanical oppression would be augmented by complaints of Jewish oppression before long. And it would be a step down in terms of cleanliness, misogyny, etc. But nevertheless, the option should exist.
Comment #70 October 8th, 2024 at 4:06 pm
anton #68
> I would be interested in […] comparing lives saved by future peace and the economic peace dividends compared to the current casualties and economic costs of the war
Going by the cost of the permanent, fine-grained, occupation of the West Bank, you are unlikely to find much solace in the prospect of creating a second one with higher density.
Comment #71 October 8th, 2024 at 4:33 pm
I hope Scott will also give his opinion on the BCG/McKinsey reports on trillions in quantum computing value creation in the next ten years.
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/long-term-forecast-for-quantum-computing-still-looks-bright
Comment #72 October 8th, 2024 at 4:50 pm
Scott #37:
If your fear here comes to pass, I will be sad and angry and despairing.
But I don’t think it will. As Eden Maor has proven an example of here in this thread, even “anti-Zionism” doesn’t always mean the same extreme position of physically exiling all Jews from the territory of Israel, even to those who identify using the term. This dilutes the underlying position.
And the extremes don’t often get to the point of wielding major power in the US, particularly on the left. One might have thought that the peace protests of the 70s would lead to a shift in US foreign policy, but they didn’t do much in the long run. Right now, the anti-Zionist coalition is fairly broad, with a lot of support.
But how did it get that way? Early on, a primary demand of a lot of pro-Palestine protests was simply a ceasefire. That drew people in, an easy cause they could support—and one that doesn’t mean that they’re immediately going to go to the extreme and support a genocide of Israelis.
On top of that, there was a backlash against the double standard of criticism. Almost a Streisand effect: the more criticism was tried to shut down, the more those of us closer to the center said “well hang on, why can we criticise all these countries but not Israel?” Once we had the opportunity to do so, the criticisms exploded… And then this was compounded with attacks from both sides pushed everyone further to the edges, because if you held a middle-ground position, *everyone* was yelling at you.
So we ended up with a broad anti-Zionist coalition on the left, but it’s not even in internal agreement about what anti-Zionism means. Some folks in that coalition are getting fully radicalised, but I don’t think it’s so many that the coalition will stick together once the circumstances giving rise to it no longer exist. If there’s a regime change and Bibi is no longer making things worse. If there’s a ceasefire. Or, most strongly, if there’s a peace deal. Yeah, the radicals might whine that a peace deal isn’t good enough, but I don’t think they’ll sway the majority of the bloc.
I suspect the more the conflict spreads, too, the weaker the coalition will be. The more it is clearly Israel vs the Middle East, as opposed to Israel vs. Palestine, the weaker it will get. Because people who rationalised Israel as an aggressor receiving retaliation on Oct 7 don’t necessarily extend that rationalisation to Lebanon and Iran trying to intervene. Especially Iran, given its history.
Comment #73 October 8th, 2024 at 6:25 pm
Scott #37:
Who created this entire generation of young progressives? They won’t hesitate to physically attack (as we speaking – https://nypost.com/2024/10/07/us-news/democratic-majority-of-israel-co-founder-attacked-bloodied-by-pro-palestinian-protesters/) or even kill you if they can without consequence, and your former jewish leftist friends (their support for Hamas mean nothing to them when the time comes), reflecting by their slogan “by all means” which we all know what it means, yes, it means “from river to the sea”. Note that same as you, I am not talking about Palestinian protestors, I am talking about the western born leftists professors, students, and “journalist”.
The answer is your former (who you unfriended or unfriended you) and current leftist friends, and partially you(e.g., by always vote the left), jew or not, who dominate more than 90% of the media, and almost the whole “education” system. More than 90% of Harvard professor are democrats, most are probably leftists judging from what happened from Oct 7 till now at Harvard. OK, the definition of leftist are subjective, but let say Bill Maher and you are a liberal not a leftist. Your media and your colleague (from elementary to college to graduate school) together created those progressives who are now dominate NYT, WP, MSNBC, ABC, …, and Hollywood, and not even mention almost all the colleges and school boards. Those media and school boards called asian American, latino Americans and muslim Americans “white supremacist” or “side with white supremacist” or “domestic terrorists” when they DARED to protest again Harvard discriminating asians, to protest the school board for refusing their parental rights to opt out “sex education” for their first grader children. My friends who is, as myself, a minority, were called such by your media.
On the other hand, about those on the right, I once thought the media only hate DJT, but obviously that not the truth, they hate every single one of the republican, except when they become useful like Dick Cheney. Funny how the media liked DJT when he was their democrat friend and donor. Most called nazi by the media are less conservative than their parents and grandparents who died in Omaha Beach saving Jew from the nazi.
Comment #74 October 8th, 2024 at 8:08 pm
Israel is the only developed country on Earth with a healthy fertility rate. Even secular Israelis are at replacement. Non-Haredi Israelis are at 2.5ish. That is very precious. It’s not something I would want to lose, even if other countries opened their doors to Israelis.
The destruction and “decolonization” of Israel by terrorists would be awful, and would set an awful precedent. Just think about how often South Africa is used as a precedent for Israel by the far left. Of course with South Africa they had a stronger case. Israel is very different than South Africa, and is obviously the good guy, unlike in South Africa where there were no good guys (National Party and ANC both suck). Israel is a democracy where Arabs vote, whereas in apartheid South Africa of course only whites could vote. But still, in the eyes of the far-left Israel is like South Africa, and they think what they view as their “victory” in South Africa (this is a lie, the system was already cracking before the sanctions) can be extended to Israel.
The far-left cannot be allowed to win anything. They will just take more. They hate civilization and want to burn it down.
Comment #75 October 8th, 2024 at 8:23 pm
TFR #74: I’ve sometimes wanted to ask the people who demand Israel’s destruction (but claim to have nothing against Jews), whether they could at least have the decency to wait for the world’s Jewish population to recover to what it was in 1939, before they expose us to the next genocide. If Israel keeps up its current birthrate, that recovery should actually happen soon, I think.
Comment #76 October 8th, 2024 at 9:09 pm
A science-fiction author whom I read long ago (and can’t recall the name of) wrote that if you take an ant from an ant nest, paint it red, and release at the same nest, the other ants will attack it because it is different. Whether or not that is true, certainly tribal behavior goes back a long way in Earth’s genetic heritage. Speculation: if Jewish descendants had not maintained their distinct identities/culture over thousands of years, would they have received so much group persecution? Obviously not, I suppose, but easier said than done, also for tribal reasons. (In my country Republicans and Democrats have grown to hate each other through long identification as such.)
Anyway, I found the post thought-provoking as usual. I took it as a bank-shot to expose illiberalism in its opponents. Although it would be a better world which would implement it.
As Theodore Sturgeon said, what we need is a war with aliens (with obvious tribal differences to us) to unite us.
Comment #77 October 8th, 2024 at 11:09 pm
Scott #38:
“The fundamental justification for a Jewish homeland in the Jews’ historical, indigenous home of Israel is history”
Jews should be allowed to settle in Israel even if they have no historical ties to the land. But they should not be allowed to dominate the indigenous people, forcibly displace them, or render them second class citizens.
“The world, in a brief act of contrition for the genocide it had enabled, voted for a partition of that former British colony into Jewish and Arab parts.”
‘The world’ did no such thing. The Arabs were unanimously opposed to partition.
“The Jews did indeed need to retain demographic dominance in the part of their homeland that they kept…”
I am marveling at this. In a single sentence, you admit that “demographic dominance” is an explicit Zionist goal, and also decry resistance to that goal as attempted genocide!
“If you want me to support (e.g.) unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank…”
All one needs to support unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank is to believe that Palestinians have the right to self-determination. If you want to condition that right on some other criteria, then you do not believe it is a right.
Your defense of Zionism is notably missing any application of universal principles. Every reason you cite for Jewish dominance over non-Jewish populations in Israel-Palestine — a history of persecution by other parties, longstanding ties to the land, the judgment of international bodies — could be applied with equal force towards arguing that the Palestinians should be the dominant group.
Comment #78 October 9th, 2024 at 12:32 am
Edan Maor #42:
“The original Zionist position was that Jews needed a state for themselves, a position that was obviously proven extremely correct. But now Israel exists, and default Zionism is pretty much default ‘Frenchism’ – just believing that Israel should continue to exist. Nothing else.”
Your description of Zionism is incomplete. The Zionist position is that the Jews need a state for themselves, and that any non-Jews living in that state shall have inferior rights relative to the Jews. The concept of a “Jewish state” isn’t even coherent without that addendum. And this is not just the historical Zionist position, but also the present one. Jewish supremacy is encoded in the basic laws of the state of Israel. The entire edifice of apartheid is detailed here:
https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202101_this_is_apartheid_eng.pdf
France is not like this. Not many countries are like this. Israel should continue to exist, and Jews should continue living there. But Jewish supremacy must end.
Comment #79 October 9th, 2024 at 1:00 am
I don’t really think Iran and their proxies pose the level of danger towards Israel that you think. Their two attempts to lob missiles at Israel failed, and their proxies in both Lebanon and Gaza are no match for the IDF, as we are seeing. October 7 occurred because the Israelis didn’t expect anything like it. Had they prepared, it would not have occurred.
This talk of dismantling Israel is all internet blather. They have no reason to leave. They are the most powerful country in the region, by far, with many nuclear weapons, an advanced military in many ways, and are a leader in advances in computer science such as AI. My opinion is that the Israelis have been successfully terrorized into holding the deluded belief that the terrorist groups around them are a great threat to them, due to October 7 and more, and this is why they are doing so much damage to Gaza and are ok with the civilian deaths. Because they are irrationally afraid of Holocaust II. They should just calm down, finish off Hezbollah, and ease up on Gaza since Hamas no longer poses a threat.
Comment #80 October 9th, 2024 at 6:49 am
Michael Z #79
Iran targeted hardened sites and still in fact missiles did get through the anti missile defense. Satellite reconnaissance suggests missile strikes were within a hair’s breadth of destroying new Israeli F 35’s. If a similar mass attack targets Tel Aviv the results could be horrific. Are you suggesting turning the other cheek to ballistic missiles?
Comment #81 October 9th, 2024 at 6:57 am
No doubt in my mind that Israeli and Iranian engineers are working furiously now to improve performance of their respective systems.
Comment #82 October 9th, 2024 at 7:11 am
US #77, #78: The reason why Jews need to demographically dominate one part of Palestine is that, every single time an opportunity arose, the Arabs tried to slaughter all the Jews, and demographic dominance of one part of Palestine was found to be the only way of preventing that. Do you understand or acknowledge this point? It’s extremely important.
And yet, even in the part that they demographically dominate (and must continue to demographically dominate, until the other side gives up its genocidal ambition), Israel still gives vastly more rights to its 20% Arab minority than virtually any Arab country gives to Jews (most of them expelled their Jews and confiscated their property). Equal rights for religious minorities are right there in the founding declaration, and Arabs study at all of Israel’s top universities and serve in the Knesset and the Supreme Court. Can you imagine Jews being suffered to do the same in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, or Gaza, without cracking up? The Israeli Arabs — i.e., the ones who, in 1948, chose to live in peace with the Jews rather than slaughtering them — are also nearly the richest Arabs in the Middle East, other than those of the petro-states.
Comment #83 October 9th, 2024 at 8:13 am
> US #78:
> Your description of Zionism is incomplete. The Zionist position is that the Jews need a state for themselves, and that any non-Jews living in that state shall have inferior rights relative to the Jews.
No. That’s not part of the definition of Zionism. Not mine, and not most Zionist’s as far as I know.
> The concept of a “Jewish state” isn’t even coherent without that addendum.
The question of in what way Israel is even a Jewish state is a complicated one, I agree, and one that Israel has long wrestled with.
Nevertheless, in Israel *today*, the Arab-Israeli minority has all the same rights as Jews.
> France is not like this. Not many countries are like this. Israel should continue to exist, and Jews should continue living there. But Jewish supremacy must end.
France is exactly like this. If I move to France on a travel or work visa, I’ll have some rights, but not all rights. If the country chooses to have a pathway to becoming a citizen, which some countries do and some countries don’t, then I can become a full citizen. If it chooses not to allow me to become a citizen, I won’t.
This is the same as the situation in Israel.
Comment #84 October 9th, 2024 at 8:48 am
OhMyGoodness #80 Missiles getting through to Tel Aviv would cause damage, but the response from Israel into Tehran would be catastrophic, and I don’t believe the Iranians would try that. All I’m saying is that the threat posed by Iran and their allies doesn’t justify this doomsday fear, talk of abandoning Israel, or the level of destruction being wrought upon Gaza. Once Hezbollah and Hamas are gone, Iran won’t have any proxies as lines of defense and I believe they’d never start a war with Israel because they know perfectly well how much damage it would cause to themselves.
Comment #85 October 9th, 2024 at 9:32 am
Michael Z #84: I hope you turn out to be right! I’ll comment only that, throughout the millennia, there were countless Jews who said some variant of “enough doomsday fears, calm down, they’re not going to try to kill us all and even if they try they’ll fail,” etc. etc., and most of those Jews ended up being slaughtered. Those of us who you see today are therefore preferentially descended from the crazy, irrational, paranoid ones.
Comment #86 October 9th, 2024 at 10:32 am
Michael Z #84
In that case why wouldn’t the Israelis launch a retaliatory strike now. The scenario you outline suggests no risk in doing so because the Iranian proxies are no more, their missiles are ineffective, and they are afraid to attack softer Israeli targets. In that case an effective just-in-time strike against against their nuclear weapons facilities would dramatically simplify the future existential calculus for the Israelis.
The Iranian clerics are absolutely committed to falsifying your premise that Israel will continue to exist. This isn’t the end game just a brief phase of this conflict and Iran set to queen a pawn with home grown nuclear weapons.
Attacking their hydrocarbon production facilities would financially impede their ability to re form their militias and to finance mischief throughout the ME.
Comment #87 October 9th, 2024 at 10:33 am
Michael Z #84
Seeing as launching hundreds of ballistic missiles apparently doesn’t constitute starting a war in your book, can you tell us what does?
Comment #88 October 9th, 2024 at 11:00 am
So long as the hard line clerics rule in Iran Israel will be in a state of existential threat. The proxies will reform and perform their wretched duties, the missiles will improve , the destructive power to be used against Israel will increase, and the anti Israel rhetoric will continue unabated.
Comment #89 October 9th, 2024 at 11:01 am
OhMyGoodness #86, and anyone else still reading:
I really, really strongly recommend this essay by Shany Mor. It introduces a huge number of useful terms and ideas for understanding Israel’s current situation, including the “Avocado Theory of Deterrence.” Just like an avocado is not ripe yet, not ripe yet, not ripe yet, until suddenly it’s overripe, so (in Western minds) Hezbollah and Iran are too weak to justify Israel striking them until suddenly they’re too strong for Israel to risk striking them. If this is true, of course, then Israel never had any actual deterrence at all, and just has to consent to living under threat of annihilation.
Comment #90 October 9th, 2024 at 11:09 am
Scott #89
I will read it and as always thanks for the reading suggestion-always a true delight for me.
Comment #91 October 9th, 2024 at 12:36 pm
Scott #89
I read the article thanks for the suggestion, I appreciate it. It’s kind of hard to try and guess what solutions the writer proposes. I think he might like a military occupation of Gaza+West Bank without a civilian presence. He expects this will reduce Palestinian violence and resentment, and improve their well being. This sounds reasonable, do you think this is politically viable in Israel at the moment? and do you think this will reduce Palestinian anti-Israel animus?
The avocado thing specifically, I think this is not a paradox, it’s just a description of a stalemate. For example before US involvement in WWII British navy was strong enough that a German ground invasion or the plan of starving it out with sub warfare was increasingly unlikely (Britain was too strong), but at the same time a ground invasion of the continent was not military feasible (Britain was too weak). In situations like this I expect one needs a diplomatic concession that requires “eating a few frogs”/”rewarding murderous violence” as he puts it, distasteful as this is. Thankfully Japan with Pearl Harbor and the USSR invasion broke the stalemate in the WWII, and Israel seems to be having some military success so this might not apply here either, but my understanding is that this situation is relatively common.
I also don’t understand this problem with the UNRWA providing aid or Israel providing electricity and water. I recall you dislike that too from your previous writing. Cutting that off would surely lead to starvation right? How many do you expect, and would that be justified in this case? Or is the hope to have an unconditional surrender before a recreation of Holodomor? Or maybe the hope is that the UNRWA keeps providing food but stops supporting Israel’s destruction in the education they provide? Can they even do this in territory controlled by Hamas? If they can do this and don’t do it anyway out of hatred for Israel, is there any way we can influence them to do so? It’s unclear what the hoped for changes are here.
There are a few more things that I did not find convincing, e.g. Gaza not being economically successful is given as evidence that Hamas cares more about Israel’s destruction than the well being of people in their control, but doesn’t the blockade make it hard to build and nurture economic prosperity even if they wanted to? They point to Hizballah better equipment as an example to show that the blockade is effective, I agree the blockade is effective, the question is whether it is worth the cost (including the cost the Palestinians bear), this I am not sure of either way. Also, he mentions at the November ceasefire Hamas released some hostages which were “moral and logistical hazards”, but they have no intention to go further. Again, this might be true (it may even be likely true), but as a bald assertion it is not convincing. How come capturing women and children is a moral hazard but men is not? How come they released them as part of the November ceasefire, but they can not be convinced to release the rest with the right negotiation conditions? A naive observer might even interpret this gesture as a measure of good will to try and open further negotiations, but I am not sure of this either way anyway. My current mostly uninformed belief is that if Hamas destruction is worth significant Palestinian civilian suffering (and I think it does), it certainly is also worth the hostages suffering too, releasing them as part of a deal that strengthens them makes no sense. Anyway, sorry for this rambling paragraph.
Comment #92 October 9th, 2024 at 2:02 pm
anton #91: I agree that the article has very little in the way of its own proposals, however devastating and convincing it is about the willful blindness and idiocy of what’s been tried.
As I see it, the core of the problem is (and always has been) to get commanding majorities on each side to abandon the fantasy of making the other side just disappear. Israel has actually achieved that, eg in the 1940s and 1990s, although it sadly moved further and further to the right after its overtures failed. The Palestinian side has yet to achieve it even once.
Yes, I think reforming education in the West Bank and Gaza is absolutely crucial—“peace processors” keep ignoring that and it keeps coming back to sting them, as yet another generation is raised on martyrdom and jihad and fantasies of “return.”
But then there’s also the education provided by needing to build a real economy. That brings us to the role of UNRWA, which (as Mor points out) is like an enabler of a violent drug addict, or some other dysfunctional codependent relationship. When UNRWA takes over most of the normal functions of a government (with Israel taking over the rest, like electricity and water), it allows the actual “government” — Hamas — to focus all its energies on murdering Jews. Somehow the Gazans need to be given more responsibility for their own economy and society.
Finally there’s the “education” provided by overwhelming defeat in war — the kind of “education” the Germans and Japanese had received by the end of WWII, which was what finally (and spectacularly) succeeded at making them give up their imperial and genocidal ambitions.
I’d say that those Palestinians who remain intent on eradicating Israel need to be educated out of it by some combination of those three means, ideally the first two. What other solution is there?
Comment #93 October 9th, 2024 at 2:33 pm
OhMyGoodness #88 and Vladimir #87: The 180 ballistic missiles fired at Israel represented about 5 percent of their total arsenal and caused little damage. They could fire them all at once I suppose, but what they would accomplish would not resemble destroying Israel. An average day in Beirut nowadays is worse than anything the Iranians can do right now. If they developed nukes of course that would be a different story, but if Israel took the strategy of removing Hezbollah and Hamas, keeping them weak, and then only going after Iran if it looked like they were developing nukes, I think Israel would be quite safe. If on the other hand they went after Iran now, they’d run the risk of living in the long-term misery of endless war with Iran with Iranian missiles being periodically fired at them, sort of like Gaza traditionally has been, but on a national scale. The threat doesn’t justify that right now in my opinion. It’s best not to panic and deal with these things in a sane fashion.
Comment #94 October 9th, 2024 at 2:39 pm
“I urge you to lobby your country to pass a law granting automatic refugee status and citizenship to any current citizen of Israel—as an ultimate insurance policy to incentivize Israel to take greater risks for peace, even with neighbors who openly proclaim the Jews’ extermination as their goal.”
I am not sure that in the hypothetical case of your suggestion being adopted it would necessarily lead Israeli government to “take greater risks for peace”. As I understand it, the current strategy of the Iranian regime is not a major all-out war but “death by a thousand cuts” — making Israel increasingly unlivable for its current citizens (what happened last year in the South and in the North is a stark illustration of this strategy in action). Highly educated Israelis are already in effect capable of leaving Israel and finding work (and eventually permanent residency) elsewhere; the adoption of your proposed law would make this possibility available for all Israelis. Israeli government response to this “challenge” is apt to be to focus on ensuring that Israel is a safe and secure place to live for its citizens (this is indeed the main responsibility of any government of any sovereign state). Whether this would necessarily imply “taking greater risks for peace” is not immediately clear to me.
Comment #95 October 9th, 2024 at 3:09 pm
AG #94: Yes, as I said, I can’t predict with confidence how Israel would respond if anti-Zionists seriously pursued my proposal. On the other hand, it seems like just a pure win from the anti-Zionists’ perspective, if they’re sincere about not wanting another Holocaust. So I thought I should telegraph that I, at least, will support them if they pursue this, and will treat it as a strong signal that they don’t want my family dead. Of course, if they completely reject the need for any alternative Jewish survival plan, then that’s a strong signal as well.
Comment #96 October 9th, 2024 at 3:38 pm
It’s all well and good to advocate for ‘no ceasefire’, and death and destruction from the comfort of distant homes. But I don’t see how WW2 is a good parallel. Since Palestinians do not have a state, the situation is not the same. Hamas and Hezbollah are guerrilla units, not state actors. The perception, reinforced by continuous state-sponsored loss of territory, appears to be that Palestinians have nothing to lose. If you had to think of it in conventional military defeat terms, they have always been overwhelmingly defeated. On the plus side of Scott’s article is the reference to the northern West Bank where Palestinians who were not threatened with territory loss had relatively peaceful existence, until settler encroachments were re-established.
Comment #97 October 9th, 2024 at 4:01 pm
Michael Z #93
Not sure why you’ve mentioned my comment while completely ignoring it. I asked what’s your idea of a declaration of war seeing as launching hundreds of ballistic missiles (are you unaware of the Iranian attack which took place in April?) doesn’t cut it for you, not whether Israel will be destroyed in said war. Let me also remind/inform you that the complete destruction the enemy was neither the outcome nor even the goal of the vast majority of wars in history. Similarly, practically no war has ever started with one side using 100% of its arsenal.
Comment #98 October 9th, 2024 at 4:16 pm
Scott #65
Trump’s travel ban was not a Muslim ban per se. The initial nations on the list were Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen. These are the exact 7 nations that were on Obama’s “nations of concern” list, on which he imposed tighter restrictions than other nations. Later Trump added North Korea and Venezuela. All of these are troubled nations with which the US does not have established vetting policies. Of course, Obama’s list was common sense exhibited by a statesman, while Trump’s exact same list was horribly racist, or something.
Some 90% of the world’s Muslim population were not affected by the ban.
But if you think Trump harbors some suspicion toward Muslim immigrants in general, you’re almost surely right. If you think that is unwarranted, that is your prerogative. I wish Israel the best.
Comment #99 October 9th, 2024 at 5:02 pm
IJK #98: Obviously I support rigorous screening for people from countries of concern, and properly funding INS to do that screening expeditiously. What we got instead was an attempted blanket ban (even on green card holders!), which came close to ruining the lives of a bunch of Iranian academics and their families who have nothing to do with the Ayatollah regime and probably despise the regime. And just like the family separation thing, it was implemented in a slapdash, chaotic, incompetent way that would’ve been comical if not for the cruelty — not notifying the relevant agencies, basically just sending goons to the airports to turn people away. That’s why I spoke out against the “Muslim ban” at the time and continue to oppose it now.
Comment #100 October 9th, 2024 at 5:09 pm
RB #96: I’m a staunch advocate of no death and no destruction. To get there, as I said, the crucial prerequisite is that both sides acknowledge the other’s permanent existence in the region, and right to exist in it: otherwise we’ll never have peace, just one-sided “ceasefires” and brief pauses between shootings, bombings, and missile attacks.
I still wish Arafat had accepted the Camp David offer, which would’ve uprooted the settlements you rightly deplore and established a Palestinian state, in exchange for nothing more than an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to exist, and a repudiation of the “river to the sea” fantasy. Since Arafat refused to do that, I wish we can someday get back to that point with a better Palestinian leader. Do you wish for something else?
Comment #101 October 9th, 2024 at 5:30 pm
Scott,
I have several times here disagreed with the notion that there were sustained peace efforts. There were many unresolved issues with Camp David as Aaron Miller describes here and here .
I don’t expect that we will agree on this. Nevertheless, I hope Israel will give the space for Palestinians to have leaders that can have standing that is not eroded by their lack of ability to stand up against the Israeli settler/military/judiciary alliance. Then, maybe there will be a chance for peace that you and I hope for.
Comment #102 October 9th, 2024 at 6:39 pm
Vladimir #97 A declaration of war is a formal legal act announcing that the country is at war with another. Iran viewed their 180 missiles as a one-time event in response to the assassination of Nasrallah. They are likely hoping to avoid a full-scale war. So Iran did not in fact declare war on Israel. In this conflict the only official declaration of war that I know of is Israel’s declaring war on Hamas. That having been said, official declarations of war are generally the exception rather than the rule nowadays. Obviously much of what going on here is warfare, declared or not.
Comment #103 October 9th, 2024 at 7:04 pm
Michael Z #102
The Ukrainians will no doubt rejoice to discover they’re not at war, as neither Russia nor Ukraine formally declared it.
Comment #104 October 9th, 2024 at 7:08 pm
Vali Nasr analyzes it as Iran’s missile attack was not so much a bid to deter Israel but to compel the US to do so. Excerpts from paywalled article:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/03/iran-israel-hezbollah-biden-netanyahu-war/
Comment #105 October 9th, 2024 at 7:08 pm
Firing 180 ballistic missiles constitutes an act of war or casus belli (as does, for example, Russian invasion of Ukraine — even if Putin keeps referring to it as a “special military operation”).
Comment #106 October 9th, 2024 at 7:21 pm
About the Palestinians and the negotiations of the 1990s… it’s pretty clear now that they would never have accepted a two-state solution. That’s really been their position from the beginning. Barak and the other negotiators from that period now generally believe that they were being tricked by the Palestinians. In general, I don’t think it’s possible for the two sides to come to a peace agreement, as both are utterly convinced the other side shouldn’t be there at all. What is strange to me about the Palestinians though, is how they make such huge demands from a position of such weakness. Gaza has essentially been destroyed and yet Hamas continues to roll out maximalist demands. I guess they are hoping for a war between Iran and Israel to save them, but that really won’t happen. It’s interesting that the Palestinians share with the Israelis this belief that Israel can be destroyed by Iran though.
Comment #107 October 9th, 2024 at 7:50 pm
Michael #106:
I don’t think it’s possible for the two sides to come to a peace agreement, as both are utterly convinced the other side shouldn’t be there at all.
And yet, when the chips were down, Barak did make a pretty good offer — certainly more generous than the offer that Israel accepted in 1947. And if Arafat had been a different person, he would’ve accepted the offer. And if Rabin had lived, maybe even the actual Arafat would’ve accepted the offer.
Comment #108 October 9th, 2024 at 8:55 pm
Scott,
I really detest how you seem to have started to slide into laughing at your critics and even to name calling the Jewish people who disagree with your stance. You seem so convinced of your rightness and ‘enlightenment’ ideals that you don’t really seem to question your core beliefs anymore. I think this really stands out in the absurdity that you state a ‘ethnic domination’ of Jews in Israel is necessary, but only ‘until’ peace and tranquility. That isn’t how human beings work. That is an absurd idea to posit as a reason to continue an apartheid state (that is the definition of what you are stating, not just my words).
That idea really is something I think you should question. I don’t have an easy answer for you on how to go about it but maybe start with, ‘why do I keep positing situations for the past as though we are doomed to repeat them without any possibility that we could have a better outcome to peace this time?’ I think hope for humans to do better in new situation is all we can really have, that’s where I try to start at least.
Comment #109 October 9th, 2024 at 11:17 pm
Scott #89: Thank you very much for this reference! This is one of the most penetrating essays I read on this subject over the past year — in particular the culminating section IV.
Comment #110 October 9th, 2024 at 11:55 pm
Scott #82:
Every single time an opportunity arose, the Arabs tried to slaughter all the Jews … Do you understand or acknowledge this point?
From the very start of the Zionist project, the people of Palestine, almost none of whom were Jewish, clearly expressed that they did not want to live in a Jewish state, nor did they want to vacate their land to make room for one. When that state was created anyway, they fought back, and over the years a huge number of them have been killed, displaced, dispossessed or forced to live under military occupation. To summarize that history as bloodthirsty Arab aggression is extremely tendentious.
The rest of your reply is whataboutism, although I was amused to read
Equal rights for religious minorities are right there in the founding declaration [of Israel]
The Iranian constitution has a similar provision. I guess you owe the Iranians an apology!
In a Jewish state, the institutions of the state must remain under Jewish control. If you do not understand why such an arrangement must systematically disadvantage the non-Jewish citizens of that state, then you have not really internalized the lessons of liberalism.
Comment #111 October 10th, 2024 at 12:04 am
Edan Maor #83:
Almost all land in Israel is owned by the state, and administered by an agency that chooses half of its directors from the Jewish National Fund, a non-profit that explicitly discriminates against non-Jews. Do the French have a comparable land policy? In the US, where I live, such an arrangement would be flagrantly unconstitutional.
A Jewish state that grants equal rights to its non-Jewish citizens is a contradiction on its own terms, the same as an Islamic state or a Christian state. In 2018, a group of Arab MKs proposed a basic law that would have enshrined the equality of all Israeli citizens. It was denied even a debate in the Knesset, and the Supreme Court ruled that the bill was “attempting to effect … a political program and worldview that negate the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state.”
Read the proposed law for yourself. If this law is incompatible with Zionism, what does that say about Zionism?
Comment #112 October 10th, 2024 at 12:14 am
Incidentally, Israelis (and not just them — any “foreign citizen and stateless individual”) who “share ‘traditional’ Russian values” can obtain residency in the Russian Federation:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/08/19/putin-signs-decree-granting-residency-to-foreigners-who-share-traditional-russian-values-a86074
Comment #113 October 10th, 2024 at 1:22 am
I am inclined to agree with your culminating paragraph’s assesment that (at least at the moment) Israel appears to be “winning” in the “real” world while “losing” in the “virtual” one — a somewhat paradoxical situation for “People of the Book”.
Comment #114 October 10th, 2024 at 2:58 am
Michael Z #93
Iran launched about 200 missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. The land area of Israel (some of it sparsely populated) is about 800 square miles. Including the sparsely land area yields an attack density of 1 per 4 sq miles. Ratioing this up to the US land area, for comparison purposes, yields an equivalent attack on the US of about 1 million missiles. I reasonably consider the last barrage a mass missile attack on Israel.
I, like Vladimir, believe that you ignored content and particularly the content of post #98. Life is not a single frame at the present. There are frames in the past to learn from and frames in the future to plan for. From past frames-Israel intended to effectively guard against what has transpired with Hamas and Hezbollah but were not sufficiently successful.
From future frames-it is reasonable to assume that left to proceed freely as it chooses Iran’s attack capabilities will only improve. Their destructive capacity will increase. Iran is not frozen in a photograph of the present.
Considering what has transpired in the past, and reasonably expected what will happen in the future, my conclusion is that the Israelis are justified in not leaving Iran untouched to proceed as it chooses.
Israel has land area of 800 square miles and a population of 9 million while Iran has area of 65 thousand square miles and population of 91 million. The practical logistics of Israel benignly policing Iran, that is fundamentally dedicated to its extinction, are beyond formidable.
There are reasonable arguments to be made about Type I versus Type II expectation errors in serious matters regarding health/safety/existence of an entire country but surely not necessary to go through here in detail.
Comment #115 October 10th, 2024 at 3:57 am
RB #104:
> I have several times here disagreed with the notion that there were sustained peace efforts. There were many unresolved issues with Camp David as Aaron Miller describes here and here .
I think your view on this is largely incorrect, for a few reasons:
1. Most importantly, one specific offer isn’t the full extent of what “sustained peace efforts” means. Rabin, who was elected, worked towards peace during the 1990s, and *did* reach actual agreements.
Then, Barack was elected again, again to word towards peace. Camp David surely maybe wasn’t the best deal for the Palestinians, but it also wasn’t the *last* deal offered. After Camp David came the Taba talks under the Clinton parameters, which were a better deal.
Sharon, despite being very hawkish, made some movements towards peace, most notably pulling entirely out of Gaza unilaterally. I don’t think this was necessarily handled properly, but it *was* something that gave the Palestinians something they wanted.
Later Olmert, who again was originally a more hawk-ish figure, also held negotiations.
2. As far as I know, at no point in any of these talks have the Palestinians countered with a proposal that will be acceptable to them. Rejection of all approaches is one thing, but not countering with anything else is another.
3. And as a reminder, while the Israeli public elected multiple times people working towards peace, some Palestinians were hard at work on terror attacks, in many cases with the express purpose of preventing peace.
4. I’m not a historian. I assume you aren’t either. But we’re both looking at this from the context of 2024, far removed from the situation as it was. I feel like there’s just been a historical revision on all of this. At the time, most people involved were pretty clear that the Palestinians had a real option for peace, and walked away from the negotiations. Not just Israelis saying this – the US as well. Clinton very explicitly said this multiple times.
Sure, twenty years of nitpicking the details of the agreements is important, but to pretend there wasn’t a real-faith effort on the part of Israel to achieve peace is simply historically inaccurate.
> I don’t expect that we will agree on this. Nevertheless, I hope Israel will give the space for Palestinians to have leaders that can have standing that is not eroded by their lack of ability to stand up against the Israeli settler/military/judiciary alliance.
I do agree that the last 15 years have seen Israel do a lot to *foil* attempts at peace, e.g. Netanyahu’s infamous propping up of Hamas in order to serve as a counter to the PA.
Comment #116 October 10th, 2024 at 4:04 am
Scott:
This is a bit of an aside, but have you seen the wars over on Wikipedia on articles related to Israel/Palestine, etc? It is *shocking* the degree of bias there, though I have little strength to try and change it.
E.g. the article on Zionism, here’s the text of the first paragraph from June (I edited it a bit):
> Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century that aimed for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people through the colonization of a land outside of Europe, with an eventual focus on Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became an ideology that supports the development and protection of Israel as a Jewish state.
I quibble with the “colonization of a land outside of Europe”, that’s bad enough.
But the same article today. Note the sentence I highlighted with asterisks:
> Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe. With the rejection of alternative proposals for a Jewish state, it eventually focused on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history. *Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.* Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel’s national or state ideology.
Such a biased and misleading sentence.
Maybe you’re right to be as worried as you are about the next generation.
Comment #117 October 10th, 2024 at 4:18 am
A few videos associated with the mass missile attack
Tel Aviv near Mossad HQ, impact crater
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/iran-missile-strike-israel-video-massive-crater-near-mossad-hq-after-irans-big-missile-offensive-6697549
Tel Nof Airbase
https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1841196373925929247?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1841206275050479719%7Ctwgr%5E9d826419971f0ced383567f6aea084eb517f946c%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fworld-news%2F2024%2F10%2F01%2Firanian-missiles-rain-down-israel-air-base%2F
Nevatim Airbase where F 35’s are based-
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/irans-missiles-punch-a-hole-in-israels-nevatim-base-housing-f-35-jets-satellite-pics-show/vi-AA1rCTWB
I am sure there are others but these videos alone suggest more than just an ineffective lark by the Iranians.
Comment #118 October 10th, 2024 at 4:33 am
There is an inverse relationship between distance and perception of severity. If thousands of miles away then low perceived severity but if under the flight paths or near the impact then high perceived severity. The near are concerned for their existence and the far for their intellectual analysis.
Comment #119 October 10th, 2024 at 7:26 am
US #110:
From the very start of the Zionist project, the people of Palestine, almost none of whom were Jewish, clearly expressed that they did not want to live in a Jewish state, nor did they want to vacate their land to make room for one. When that state was created anyway, they fought back, and over the years a huge number of them have been killed, displaced, dispossessed or forced to live under military occupation. To summarize that history as bloodthirsty Arab aggression is extremely tendentious.
You’ve just described in favorable words what ‘Arab aggression’ literally means: they “don’t wish to live with Jews” (as equal citizens – no one asked them to vacate their land), and behave aggressively with force, war of declared genocidal intent, massacres, and sustained war crimes, as if the fact that they have grievances entitle them to such aggression.
Everyone has grievances, but that doesn’t grant anyone an automatic right to kill those they hold responsible for them.
Comment #120 October 10th, 2024 at 7:35 am
On a slightly related topic-
The incredible political and military genius of Themistocles arguably saved all of Europe from Xerxes’ Persians at the battle of Salamis. Themistocles may have been corrupt in multiple ways but he was undeniably a genius that simply out thought the overwhelming forces commanded by Xerxes. His genius and impact is insufficiently recognized in European history in my opinion.
Comment #121 October 10th, 2024 at 7:45 am
US #111
> Read the proposed law for yourself. If this law is incompatible with Zionism, what does that say about Zionism?
That it’s not a suicidal ideology. If you can’t tell what’s wrong with Israeli citizenship being granted to any “person whose arrival or stay in the State is in accordance to a right that is based on international law and United Nations resolutions”, you really have no business commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Comment #122 October 10th, 2024 at 8:06 am
Edan Maor #115,
Granted I’m not a historian and there may be revisionist readings of history. Nevertheless, regarding Taba, I know Norm Finkelstein may not likely be the most palatable source for you, but here is an interview with him and Shlomo Ben Ami where Finkelstein says
Shlomo Ben Ami adds
By then, Barak also was at the end of his tenure and trailing before the elections.
Aaron Miller in the previously posted link says
Dennis Ross did paint it as a Palestinian failure.
Regarding the Olmert discussions, it is true that it is not going to be any better for the Palestinians but Abbas claims that Olmert wanted him to agree without showing him the map.
Olmert was out and his successors aborted the process.
I will agree with you that the Palestinians should have made a counter offer. At the same time, a 75 year problem doesn’t get resolved without ironing out the details in a sustained process. And it is Israel which holds the cards. The reason the Oslo process began was because the PLO position was weak .
Arafat was a weak leader coming off exile and this process was not going to happen with a proposal made in December 2000 to be agreed upon within a month and various issues such as the ‘right of return’ unresolved.
Comment #123 October 10th, 2024 at 8:48 am
I debated whether to submit this, but I feel it has to be said — I think there’s a key piece missing in Scott and others’ understanding of the young progressive protestors’ worldview. It is not to their honor, though it should IMO lessen Scott’s concern that the reason they don’t seem to care is that they are, in fact, anti-semitic in the “would genuinely be okay with a second Holocaust” sense.
It is this: whenever the conversation turns back to the simple point of “but if the Palestinians and Jews are left to live together in a single, ostensibly democratic state, the Arabs will just kill all the Jews”, what you all keep missing is that the uneducated progressive worldview *denies this*. It denies this fiercely and confidently, however many times the relevant Muslim authorities make their aims plain. To believe that a majority of Arabs want to murder the Jews — to believe that a majority of Arabs are anti-Semites — would sound racist. And therefore cannot possibly be true.
This is the great conversation-stopper, the unseen crux. You tearfully shout “but the Arabs will kill us!” and the protestors shut you out not because they wouldn’t care if what you say were true, but because they take it about as seriously as Hitler saying “but the Jewish conspiracy will destroy Germany”. They cannot bear the thought of a world in which a majority of the designated victimized-good-guys might also happen to genuinely be pro-genocide. It doesn’t compute. No amount of reasonable argument can talk them out of that state of horrified denial because they’ll block it out as conscientiously as they’d block out genuine Aryan-supremacist rhetoric about the genetic superiority of white blonde German; because they refuse to countenance the remotest chance that the bottom line of “most Palestinians would horribly mistreat the Jews if they were in charge” could be anything more than the hate-filled ravings of racist monsters.
I don’t know what to do about this, especially when (as typified by the Muslim-ban talk above) genuine racism against Arabs is alive and well. But that, in my view, is the root of the rift Scott is feeling — not a secret font of active animus against Jews in the younger Blue Tribe generation. They *genuinely think you’d have to be a horrible racist to believe that Jews would have it rough in a majority-Arab Palestinian state*.
Comment #124 October 10th, 2024 at 9:35 am
Edmund #123: On reflection, you’re almost certainly right. In arguing that some group wants to kill all Jews, I constantly slip into imagining that facts like
1. They say, loudly and graphically, that they want to kill all Jews
2. They actually tried to kill all Jews every chance they got in the past
3. They continue to try to kill all Jews right now
4. They celebrate the Holocaust when not denying that it happened
… would suffice to make the case. But to someone with a strong enough prior that this can’t be true, because it would be racist if it were true, you’re right: none of this evidence suffices.
Such a person will say: “well, at least put half the world’s Jews under this group’s control right now, so they can prove how they’ve changed by not killing them all this time around.”
Maybe it would help if I said: I see no evidence, zero, that murderous antisemitism has anything to do with genetic predispositions. We’ve seen people of every ethnic background (even, alas, many Jews themselves) infected with this disease or with willful blindness to it, and also people of every ethnic background able to recognize it for what it is.
It instead seems to be a matter of upbringing and education. And that observation lets us estimate the minimum timescale for freeing a people from this mind-disease: namely, one generation.
Comment #125 October 10th, 2024 at 9:47 am
Edmund #123
> They *genuinely think you’d have to be a horrible racist to believe that Jews would have it rough in a majority-Arab Palestinian state*.
This might be convincing were it not for the obvious fact (which Edan Maor nevertheless had to point out in #42) that *every* Western-minded person would have it rough in a majority-Arab Palestinian state.
Comment #126 October 10th, 2024 at 9:52 am
Nate #108:
I don’t have an easy answer for you on how to go about it but maybe start with, ‘why do I keep positing situations for the past as though we are doomed to repeat them without any possibility that we could have a better outcome to peace this time?’ I think hope for humans to do better in new situation is all we can really have, that’s where I try to start at least.
See, but my perspective is a hopeful one. I’m hopeful that modern values like peace and progress and coexistence will ultimately triumph all over the world, gaining majority support even in the West Bank and Gaza. Once the West Bank and Gaza both have governments more interested in improving the lives of their people than in the fantasy of eradicating Israel—then there can be a Palestinian state. And ultimately, if murderous antisemitism were to die and be replaced by liberal Enlightenment values throughout the Middle East, the Jews there would no longer even need a separate state in which to defend themselves.
But it does have to happen in that order. Putting 7 million Jews under the control of murderous antisemites before any progress has been made on the murderous antisemitism problem is unlikely to go well—do you understand that?
My perspective, I think, is the most hopeful, idealistic one you can possibly have while still remaining sane and cognizant of the relevant history. Indeed, you can find right-wingers in this very thread criticizing me for being too hopeful and idealistic. But they can say whatever they want. I’ll continue to hope, to the absolute maximum extent permitted by sanity.
Comment #127 October 10th, 2024 at 9:57 am
US #110: You know what happened to Brit Shalom, right? They lost popularity after massacres of Jews in 1929. This was well before there was any Jewish state. You know that al-Husseini was an ally of Hitler and went to do Berlin to do Nazi propaganda, right? Again, before the establishment of the Jewish state. Bi-nationalism was tried and failed, because of the Palestinian antisemitism. There’s a reason that what happened to Jews in Arab countries happened to them. Pro-Nazi propaganda, antisemitic conspiracy theories etc. It’s just an empirical fact that Arab states cannot tolerate a Jewish minority the way the Jewish state tolerates an Arab minority. It’s very important to acknowledge this asymmetry if you want to understand the world.
Comment #128 October 10th, 2024 at 10:08 am
Scott #126 That reminds me of the old neocon attitude… in the right circumstances, Middle Easterners would become more like us and things would be hunky-dory. Unfortunately, one’s own identity and culture takes priority, and as we are seeing with Trump and others, the West is sliding into less liberal and democratic attitudes as we mingle more with people from non-western countries, not the other way around as you dream of. If you look at Palestine, their current trajectory is to essentially be under Israeli military control. This is already basically the case in the West Bank, and despite the endless talk of peace and ceasefires in Gaza I believe the same will be true with Gaza. I find it laughable that Netanyahu thinks he could change the attitude of the Gazan people… think of how much the West Bank Palestinians hate the Israelis, or even how the Czarist regime tried and failed to change the attitude of your ancestors. The Palestinians are really no more likely to develop more peaceful and pro-Western attitudes than you are to convert to Islam.
Comment #129 October 10th, 2024 at 10:15 am
Perhaps this is a fallacy, but the recent past seems to fly in the face of Steven Pinker’s optimism about the human condition getting overall less violent.
My head is filled, still and always, with images of the terrified, injured little kids on all sides of this conflict. Kids maimed in their beds, kids bombed, kids kidnapped. To ask any parent on any side of this conflict for forbearance is, well, darkly optimistic. For all the Enlightenment values in the world, I would not forgive, were my kids harmed. And yet, such acts of forgiveness will become necessary if there is to be peace, and can only occur under acts of incredible moral leadership.
I hope reasonable people can agree this failure to provide safety guarantees to non-combatants , this is a stain on our collective consciences. We must be able to guarantee the safety of all kids in the region. We’ve failed utterly and miserably. I hear no side proposing: hey, we’ll guarantee the safety of the children of our enemy. Yet this is a precondition for any conversation. So much of the bitter anguish is people saying: you don’t *see* just how deep my pain goes. Even if we see all the pain, it’s not enough if people fear existentially for their lives, hate viscerally for their losses.
We can assign blame until the cows come home, and not change anything, because someone else wil assign the blame elsewhere. Hell, the cows -are- home.
If there’s any movement to be made, it will have to come from very simply guaranteeing that kids in the region will not be harmed. I hear crickets.
It’s in this light that your blog really resonates, Scott. It may the the first piece of writing in a long time when someone honestly articulated just how critical this guarantee of safety is to those involved, how empty much of the prevailing discussion is at large. You’re calling an important bluff.
Comment #130 October 10th, 2024 at 10:17 am
Michael Z #128: I’ll push back a bit against that. It seems that Israeli Arabs have adopted at least relatively peaceful and pro-Western attitudes compared to Palestinians. Israeli Arabs are not as anti-LGBT as Arabs in the Arab world, and support a free press, democracy, and all of that. Another example is that while African countries are very anti-LGBT (South Africa is a notable exception), not democracies, etc, if you look at black people in the US, UK, Israel, etc, they are much more pro-LGBT, pro-democracy, etc than Black Africans. Perhaps in both cases it’s not as much as the majority population in these countries, but the attitudes seem to be very different.
So I don’t think what you write is totally true. I agree it’s an open question if the Palestinians will hold a gay pride parade in 50 years. Who knows. Perhaps religious people having more kids will cause backsliding. But I don’t think this is impossible in principle.
Comment #131 October 10th, 2024 at 10:18 am
@Vladimir #125:
I mean, I’m not trying to be “convincing” — I thought it was plain from my post that I think of the worldview I describe as a wildly irrational, and highly dangerous mass delusion. That it comes from a slightly more sympathetic set of core values than the alternative is cold comfort at best; road, Hell, good intentions, etc.
(If that’s your sticking point, the worldview in question would *also* deny that “every Western-minded person would have it rough in a majority-Arab Palestinian state”; in fact it preemptively denies just about any negative claim a Westerner might make about what a majority-Muslim state will be like, on principle.)
@Scott #124:
Yes, exactly. This on all points.
I didn’t think to spell it out in my first comment, and I expect you got the point, but to explicitly relate this to your original post: the reason the anti-Zionist block won’t accept your eminently reasonable proposal is that they would consider it offensive to the Arabs. ‘How dare you imply that the Jews would *need* to flee?’ It’s appalling, but it is what it is.
Comment #132 October 10th, 2024 at 10:28 am
Michael Z #128:
The Palestinians are really no more likely to develop more peaceful and pro-Western attitudes than you are to convert to Islam.
It seems to me that someone with your outlook would have to have said in 1943: the Germans and Japanese will always be murderous, imperialistic conquerors; that’s just their nature. (Or for that matter, in 1896: “Jews will always be effete city-dwellers, with no ability to grow crops, fight wars, or countless other things needed to run one’s own state.”) This sort of essentialism has now been tested by history, and convincingly falsified.
Closer to home, your outlook also has trouble explaining the millions of people throughout the Muslim world who have adopted Western Enlightenment values—often risking their lives to do so. In those Muslim countries where pro-Western liberals are a large minority, what principle prevents them from becoming a majority? In those countries like Iran where they already are a majority, what principle prevents them from regaining the levers of power?
It’s true that the US has now catastrophically failed at bringing the Enlightenment to Afghanistan, and had only partial success (at vast expense) at bringing it to Iraq. But that could mean many things other than “the goal is impossible”: for example, that the US (or the Bush Administration) just really really sucked at it, or that the US lost abilities that it had in WWII.
Comment #133 October 10th, 2024 at 10:38 am
Scott #130: Germany was already an advanced society, and after they lost WW II they saw what fascism gave them and were ready to repudiate it. They were generally friendly with the Western allies who occupied them. Japan had developed rapidly, and once they got to know the Americans the hostility rapidly left. One of my older relatives was in the US occupation force in Japan and described to me how within days they were friends with the children, and the rest of the population shortly thereafter. In both cases there was no land dispute like we have in the Middle East.
The situation with the Palestinians and their allies could not be more different. They are convinced that the Israelis are invaders taking over their land. They have much long-term familiarity with occupiers, mainly Israelis in the occupied territories but also the US in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the Israelis there is pure unadulterated hate, and often the Americans are not that far off. Nothing that is happening makes me think this will change in a positive direction. Their religion is not very amenable to Western values it seems, and at any rate the Islamists in control in Palestine show no signs of becoming less popular in favor of Western ideas. Certainly nothing the Israelis are doing these days will assist in that direction.
Comment #134 October 10th, 2024 at 10:43 am
Scott #86
I was very impressed with the essay and thank you for bringing it to my attention. My view is that it is brutally honest at a time when brutal honesty is necessary. My view of Netanyahu, cultivated by his management of the media apparently, is a strong resolute man of action. Very surprised to see the assessment that he has in fact been a typical political man of inaction. It does ring true and reasonable.
As far as the inordinate power of the Settlers due to fragile coalition-my view is that there are so many people now populating the Earth and the human technical environment is complicated to the point that political systems largely do not operate all that well and particularly in times of crisis.
His comments about the international community ring especially true. The situation reminds me of the usual story about rape victim. Once she starts testifying clear that she is on trial and the accused sits and smirks. I attribute the attitudes of the international community, including anti Zionism and anti Semitism, to pervasive leftist ideologies. I am sure you disagree but assuming anything can remotely, and no matter how tenuously, be linked to colonialism then unacceptable . I watched Arafat videos and he harped at length about Israel and colonialism. Any people that routinely show results of productive activities are not distributed equally then unacceptable. His discussion of Gaza being a net food exporter before Israeli farmers left reminded me of this.
In any event thank you for the link and I will now look at avocados in a different light. Great analogy.
Comment #135 October 10th, 2024 at 10:53 am
US#110
Please bother googling before you spread your ignorance.
“From the very start of the Zionist project, the people of Palestine, almost none of whom were Jewish, clearly expressed that they did not want to live in a Jewish state, nor did they want to vacate their land to make room for one. When that state was created anyway, they fought back, and over the years a huge number of them have been killed, displaced, dispossessed or forced to live under military occupation. To summarize that history as bloodthirsty Arab aggression is extremely tendentious.”
Jews were always present in the holy land (using the name Palestine seems confusing and colonial). For example, my family arrived at the early 19th century, before Zionism which is dated to 1880s.
You can check the first British census here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1922_census_of_Palestine
where Jews were 10% of the land. I’m not even sure what are the borders of the census, since nowadays Jordan was also part of “Palestine” at that time.
The first military-like Jewish forces were caused by the raids of Arabs on the northern villages, and the Hebron Massacare.
There was no Palestinian nationality at the time, they called themselves Arabs.
There were various attempts to find a way for Jews and Arabs to live in the land. See Canaanism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanism
The strongest Arab families was the Nashashibi and the Al-Husainy (the ones that aligned with Hitler). The former accepted the partition plan.
About vacating the land – the first times Arab villages were razed was just before the declaration of independent, becasue they were actively supporting the siege of Jerusalem, and theJews in Jerusalem were starving (no one gave us humanitarian aid). Many Arabs live in Israel today, some of them are even serving in the IDF.
Hope this helps!
Comment #136 October 10th, 2024 at 11:09 am
Edmund #131
> I mean, I’m not trying to be “convincing” — I thought it was plain from my post that I think of the worldview I describe as a wildly irrational, and highly dangerous mass delusion
I meant it’s not convincing as an explanation/description of such people’s mindset.
> […] it preemptively denies just about any negative claim a Westerner might make about what a majority-Muslim state will be like
We don’t need to guess what a majority Muslim state will be like, as there already exist plenty of majority Arab Muslim states and no reason I’ve ever heard of to think Palestine would be different. Good intentions can’t be ascribed to people who categorically deny objective reality.
Comment #137 October 10th, 2024 at 11:16 am
Everyone: I’ll close down the thread later today, simply because I no longer have time to keep up with it (particularly now that the scope has expanded, as it always does, to every facet of the conflict). Thanks for participating!
Comment #138 October 10th, 2024 at 11:55 am
@Vladimir #136:
All I can say is that little in the past five thousand years of human civilization leads me to the conclusion that people’s mindsets can’t be wildly irrational. I describe these people’s mindsets, you tell me “can’t be, that doesn’t make any sense”… I mean, all I can say back to that is “indeed, it doesn’t make any sense, these people are wrong and crazy”? Which surely is something we agree about regardless — that they’re crazy and wrong. (Which accounts for the second half of your message. You’re right, there’s no *rational* reason to believe an Islamic state of Palestine would be any nicer to live in than all the other theocracies… but these people aren’t being rational! That’s my point!)
That being the case, I don’t see why an irrationally rose-tinted view of the people they’re defending (i.e. Palestinians) is a less plausible kind of crazy to ascribe to them than an arbitrarily negative view of the people they’re attacking (i.e. Israel).
Why do you find it harder to believe that they irrationally love Arabs, than that they irrationally hate Jews? You write: “Good intentions can’t be ascribed to people who categorically deny objective reality.”
But that seems like a very strange assertion! How else would you describe religious zealots, motivated by a sincere but wrong-headed certainty that they’re — literally — doing the Lord’s work? If it can explain Hamas, I don’t see why an atheistic version of the same idea can’t explain its defenders and useful idiots. “Good intentions” combined with a worldview out of step with objective reality isn’t just *possible*, it’s at the root of half the moral atrocities in human history from the Crusades to the Soviets.
…But as our good host says, I feel like we’re starting to go in circles.
Comment #139 October 10th, 2024 at 12:07 pm
Scott, you pose an interesting yet rhetorical hypothetical; but putting that aside: what if every Israeli citizen were given the opportunity for citizenship in any other country of their choice? If all UN member states agreed, could this lead to an argument for a single Israeli state where the designation of a “Jewish” state is removed, transforming Israel into a fully democratic state governed solely by policies and laws passed by elected representatives? In this scenario, all residents within Israel’s current borders, including the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, would receive immediate citizenship and full voting rights in the newly revised democratic state of Israel.
This could serve as a fascinating experiment, revealing the true intentions of the Muslim Palestinian population—which we already know, as they openly declare them to the world! Would they enact legislation targeting Jews and others, or would they integrate and take advantage of the many opportunities Israeli society currently has to offer: renowned universities, a thriving tech sector, and vibrant cities? I suspect we might see a situation similar to that in Lebanon, where Hezbollah led a once-thriving country beloved by tourists (and now subjugated Christian Arabs) into turmoil.
Would Israeli Jews take such a risk? Likely not, as Jewish history is long and filled with vivid examples of persecution and the persistent threat of their destruction.
Comment #140 October 10th, 2024 at 12:36 pm
Before the thread closes, will add one last word on the Olmert proposal. As previously noted, Barak was done by the time the Taba proposals came around. The same was also true for Olmert. He was asking Abbas to essentially initial something that Abbas did not have the legitimacy to unilaterally decide on. Besides, the negotiations were not complete. Here is more:
Which is why in #101, I said there were no sustained peace efforts. There is a substantial part of the political elite in Israel that believes that Jews are entitled to all of the land between the river and the sea, and this remains an obstacle to peace.
The last time I wrote about this here in detail, Scott said I reminded him of the Kennedy conspiracy theorists and why didn’t the Palestinians do what Ben-Gurion did i.e. accept any proposal. Adam Shatz quotes from Ben-Gurion’s diary that while he was prepared to accept anything, his aims were always maximalist.
Comment #141 October 10th, 2024 at 1:12 pm
Instead of asking for Yavneh and the wise people, Rabban Yochanan should have asked Vespasian how to build a legion and an empire instead…
The big question for Judeism and for Jews all over the world today: what did you learn after two thousand years of studying that the Romans didn’t know already?
Comment #142 October 10th, 2024 at 2:30 pm
Ok, imagine that Jews get refuge in some European country.
What happens if this country becomes neo-Nazi and decides to do what they do to Jews?
Or, even better (or worse), it becomes Muslim-majority and implements sharia laws and all that stuff? What next?
Comment #143 October 10th, 2024 at 3:43 pm
Just curious #142: I recognize that there’s no absolute security for anyone in this world, Jewish or non-Jewish. In any country, we could all be killed by an asteroid strike or a pandemic or a nuclear war or runaway climate change or an unaligned AI.
But there’s better or worse security. All else equal, as Jews become more secure in their existence on earth, I support Israel taking greater risks for peace.