'Just gonna drop this tiktok of a random Israeli 19 year old being an idiot here and walk away' is not a sincere way to contribute to a debate, it's kinda a troll move.
Fair but I do think it's perfectly appropriate to show examples of something that Palestinians have been saying for ages - that aside from the inherent violence of the occupation, IDF soldiers are callous about Palestinian life. There are other examples such as the t-shirts with Palestinian children in crosshairs.
I think if you want to make that argument, which I don't even really disagree with, using a TikTok video where a girl does a version of the "I'm so crazy" joke we've all heard a million times is not a serious way to go about it. If you need to show examples of Israelis saying terrible stuff about Palestinians...it's really easy! It's super easy to find the opposite too. Why would anyone need to resort to a forced reading of a dumb tiktok?
Somebody on twitter trying to make a misinterpretation of a stupid tiktok go hate-viral highlights how much of a game this is even for people who act like they take this seriously.
Freddie, this person is either not a current soldier (perhaps a former soldier donning her old uniform and acting like a psychopath online) or she put in fake nails right before posting this video. There are zero units in the IDF that would allow nails. She would be immediately ticketed and told to remove them, not to Maron that actually posting a video like that while serving (though obviously shitty IDF soldiers have posted awful things) would also earn you discipline.
I think you should remove this video as it's not just unverified, it's really, really, really unlikely to be an IDF soldier. Would you leave up a video of a Palestinian militant saying similar things if there were credible reasons to believe the video was not in fact from a Palestinian militant? There are so many real examples of IDF abuse. Why not link to one of them instead? It will you make your point better, anyway.
Boiled down, the Arabs - Palestinians included - went all in on a military victory. And lost. They left no wiggle room for real compromise with Israel. When even Arab countries gave up on the idea of attacking Israel yet again (and losing), the Palestinians went all in on terror (bus bombings, etc.). Then the Israelis took that card out of their hands by building a wall. They have no more cards to play against Israel, yet are still clinging to this fantasy of a military victory, driving Jews out of Jerusalem, etc. It's frankly nuts.
The Arabs simply lost the decades long war, and lost it without ever coming up with a real plan to negotiate peace, or figure out what's next. There could be a Marshall plan type peace arrangement, if they wanted it, but they don't. Not yet, anyway.
This does not, of course, make sympathy for people in the West Bank or Gaza Strip antisemitic - far from it. But rather, the onus is also on the Palestinian leadership to surrender, like any other party that has clearly lost a war, and has to move on to a real peace plan. The revanchist fantasy of "liberating Al Quds" has long since been proven impossible. Israel would love nothing more to get rid of this problem, but ironically, it is the Palestinian leadership clinging to the existence of the problem itself as their best, and only, card to play.
There's a lot I could say, but you and I are not likely to agree, and that's OK. The question that leaps out immediately though is... who are "the Arabs"?
And it is not inaccurate, either, since Israel is the actual Jewish state, and the Palestinians - who are Arabs as well - threw in their lot with the Arab League Nations.
For all practical intents and purposes, with some overwhelmingly Jewish outliers in the West advocating for the Palestinian cause (and even then, it's a minority) - it's still an accurate representation globally in terms of who-supports-who. What changed over the decades was the real world politics based on current needs (IE, Arab governments who care more about Iran than Israel) and the simple fact that Israel won the war.
Right. That said, I agree with Freddie that a secular state that included everyone as citizens would be the best solution. But neither extreme wing from either side would ever accept that. Right?
Israel would, and did after the wars in forties. 20% of Israeli citizens - who have full political rights - are Arabs. But they are citizens in a state that is and will ever be a Jewish state.
The two state solution is dead. It is unworkable from a pragmatic point of view because it's logistically impossible at this point.
The most realilstic option is a "formal" surrender and a political plan from both sides to make Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on an equal footing with Israel's existing Arab population.
That is not realistic because it does not account for the fact that Muslims see Jews as an "unclean" (ungodly, corrupt) culture that has only come to power because something went horribly wrong with the kosmic order that needs to be righted by (re)subjugating Jews as per Islamic law.
Like it or not, that is the basic mindset in Muslim culture.
Everything about the middle east (climate, geopolitics, economics, evolutionary psychology, western imperialism, etc.) works against anyone trying to promote "progress" and modernization.
Native Palestinians living within the Israeli state do not have equal political rights to Israelis.
'Formal surrender' would be meaningless. Israel's intention is to remove all Palestinians from the territory and create a perennial ethnically Jewish state. Why would Palestinians saying 'we give up, do what you will', change that? Every agreement, ceasefire and treaty signed by Israel has only led to worsening conditions for Palestinians. They are beyond bad faith and - despite now owning and controlling the entirety of Palestine - increasingly sadistic.
The political leadership in the Gaza Strip (Hamas) and the West Bank (Fatah). Remember the PLO, who used to speak for "all" Palestinians? Well, that changed, too. But even then, the Palestinian leadership threw in with the Arab League cause of "liberation".
Now, the Arab League abandoned the cause. They haven't cared in decades. They are more concerned with normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel as a powerful ally against Iran than the long lost, fantasy, activist cause of "Palestinian liberation". That ship sailed literally decades ago.
"The Arabs" being the Arab League nations (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, et al) who promised a military victory over Israel, and paid lip service (which is essentially what it was) to the Palestinian cause. After losing a number of wars, and having other problems to deal with, they have long since ceased even paying lip service, with more and more Arab nations actually normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. The last Arab leader to even launch a military attack against Israel was Saddam Hussein lobbing SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv 20 years go. And since then, nothing. Israel effectively won the war against the Arab League nations ever since.
There is no Arab Cavalry coming to save Hamas or Fatah, but they still cling to the fantasy that there might be someday. So no military support from Arab countries. No more terror card to play. No political plan to negotiate what is, realistically, a military defeat.
Yes, you could argue the Israelis should find some "face saving" plan, but since that military victory fantasy where Israel is defeated means essentially abolishing Israel, it's impossible. The Palestinian leadership has painted themselves into a corner, and did so a very, very long time ago.
I'm not as versed in the conflict as many others, but I've often thought about what RW is suggesting. "You lost. Why don't you surrender?" When people point out that Hamas sends it's "rockets" first defenders of Hamas like to say, "It's nothing compared to Israel's military power! It's not a fair fight!"
YES! It's NOT a fair fight. You know what happens when there are fair fights? WW fucking 2 or 3. That's what happens.
Many have this problem now. "Never surrender". If you never surrender then you'll never have peace. Someone's gotta' lose a war for it to end. As a nation the US has been dealing with losing since Vietnam. Afganistan is a lost war too.
(NOTE: Even though Israel is technically a secular democracy, it would never accept defeat either. Keep that in mind. Hamas isn't Al Queda and Israel isn't Williamsburg Brooklyn. But if both societies lost their religious nuts you'd have a possibility of peace. You never will while they hold any kind of power.)
Counterpoint: the Arab League states trying to conquer Israel all had very generous material support from the USSR. It just happens that they failed anyway.
The Arab League governments solved their "Jewish problem" with pogroms, expropriations, and expulsion.
What would the reaction be in the Western left if Israel adopted the approach the Arab League took to their Jews with the West Bank and Gaza? Can we imagine this?
Israel is a colonialist outpost founded by terrorists who bombed the British Mandate office.
From a rational, objective perspective moral comparisons won't work because both "sides" are constantly: gaslighting, cherry picking facts and evidence to best support their victim narratives, lying, distorting facts, scapegoating the other side, etc.
1. both Israel and the Palestinians are pawns in larger geopolitical games
2. you fail to see that the Iran-Shia-China-Russia bloc has had a lot of relative success, within the limits of what is possible given Israel's nukes, against the USA-Saudi-Sunni-Israel bloc.
3GW (WW2 style industrialized war) has yielded to 4GW (insurgencies)
Insurgencies "win" over the long run when an occupying empire can't economically or politically sustain the occupation.
All of the "anti-semitism" talk and pro-Zionist bullying won't ultimately prevail when americans realize that the corrupt elements of the Zionism are almost perfectly aligned with the most corrupt elements of USA politics.
And by all means - do say! I would be interested to hear it. I think a large part of the identity of the Western Left is - even when it doesn't realize it - built around the Foucaultian idea of power being The Problem To Solve.
But what does the left do when the underdog isn't necessarily the hero? That seems to be something it struggles with. It's uncomfortable, and makes some people squirm uncomfortably.
There is a tendency on the left to make fun of the idea of other people seeing things in black and white good guy/bad guy terms, but when situations like the Arab/Israeli conflict come up, and when that default always-champion-the-underdog moral calculus doesn't yield answers which look like you expected - then what?
The dominant party historically was Islam, which has a mixed history of sometimes being tolerant of minorities (such as during the Spanish Inquisitions), especially Jews, but for the last 200-300 years scapegoating them as Muslim power declined and European power rose.
Look for signs in Muslim politics of a return to the kind of medieval tolerance of Jews that actually existed, and is required by the Qur'an. Long wait.
I love this comment. Just saying. It's a morality that becomes essentially amoral because it shifts with the wind, and is untethered from a solid set of principles of any sort. An eternally moving set of goalposts is intrinsically hostile to a principled moral stance.
Again, the Qur'an takes the stance that Jews corrupted the (originally pure) Abrahamic tradition, and that Islam replenishes that tradition, and requires that Jews be subjugated to ensure (kosmic) "peace".
A Jewish state is by definition a corrupt abomination to Islamic moral principles.
Muhammad claims to be a direct descendent of Abraham, with hereditary and prophetic rights.
From a modern-rational perspective that is all horrible and absolutist, but it is a profound error to say it lacks a "principled moral stance".
You may disagree with the mythic/theological basis of the morals, but to say they don't even exist is beyond absurd.
Your apparent ignorance of one of the most basic elements of Muslim belief is itself evidence of the appalling arrogance of your "side" in the argument.
The cultural left is incapable of transcending victim narratives.* There is nothing beyond the cultural left's postmodernism, narcissism and nihilism, only doom, something like a cross between ethnic prison gangs, Idiocracy and Mad Max.
* when people transcend cultural leftism they abandon the primacy of victim narratives and move onto something else, such as meta-rational construct-awareness.
There are many examples of insurgencies eventually prevailing against colonialism, sometimes after 100s of years.
Israel was on the verge of being destroyed militarily in one of the early 1970s wars when they ran out of bullets, but the USA was able to resupply Israel at the last minute via a new airlift system that by-passed refueling stops in western Europe which had banned such refueling stops.
Israel is now one part of the emerging geopolitics of Shi'a-Sunni conflict, on the Saudi-USA-Sunni side, against the China-Russia-Iran-Shia bloc.
If USA influence continues to decline, Israel will be doomed unless it re-aligns with China (against its current USA and Saudi allies).
You seem to be under the misconception that superpower support in that conflict was one sided. It was not.
And this is not an insurgency in the same style of Afghanistan or Vietnam. The West Bank and Gaza Strip are highly contained. The governments of Jordan and Egypt no longer want anything to do with them. The Israelis literally walled them off.
They have no cards left to play - militarily, or politically. They do not control a majority of territory. They do not have the foreign backing they need for a military option. And Israel defused the terror option.
If that isn't a checkmate in the conflict - what is, in your opinion?
I'm not under any misconception about superpower support, you don't seem to understand that the Iranian-Shia-Russia-China bloc has a lot of potential to expand its influence as the Saudi-Sunni-USA-Israel bloc's influence declines.
Your thinking seems absolutist, selective and convenient, typical traits of mythic thinkers (including most Muslims, who have a simple belief based on the contents of the Qur'an that Jews corrupted the Abrahamic tradition).
The insurgency is tied into deep civilizational themes in Islam: ritualized martyrdom, sacrifice and persecution. (Muhammad describes the kosmic and worldly battle against corruption, which specifically includes the corruption of Jews, Christians and Pagan who were also his economic and military enemies.)
You are attempting to argue against the basic idea in Islam of how salvation is attained. Good luck with that.
Near the end you say that Israel could end the conflict if they wanted to. Can you expand on that? I don't see how. (Might be more full entry sized than comment sized, but if you were emperor of Israel, what would you do?)
Long and complicated, as you suggest, but in a sense simple: institute political and legal equality between the people of Israel and those in the territories. One shared liberal democratic egalitarian state. Of course, this is in a sense the end of the Zionist project, so, yeah. Not gonna happen.
I don't know. Can multicultural democracy work? Hard to say. Self-segregation would be likely, and is in fact common in many ways in the United States, though not on this scale. But think of Mormons and the separate systems they have built for themselves, or think of if all of the Chinatowns in the country were contiguous. I'd like to think it's possible. If it isn't, what's the future we're trying to build anywhere?
This may work on a cultural/community level, but in terms of national, popular governance? You must realize these fissures would translate into war via politics, policy-making, and governing. Look at what republicans are doing in the US with voting laws and gerrymandering, etc, and now imagine an even stronger religious undercurrent to the political conflict - imagine the laws attempted and likely passed to cement the rule of one over the other.
I don't take you as naive, but I do think your idea is not remotely workable in real life.
I think were this 1865 you'd be saying the exact same thing about integrating millions of African slaves into a preexisting representative democracy. Has that effort gone smoothly? Obviously not. Is it still worth trying? Yes, yes I think it is.
When it was going smoothly, it was morally intolerable (Jim Crow, etc). To hear the complaints (not to mention the riots), the situation is still morally intolerable, but at least it's no longer going smoothly.
When wealthy, peaceful multicultural democracies like the UK and Spain are struggling to keep things together, what are the odds that melding together two populations filled with right-wing extremists who have a century of bad blood is gonna work out? I think it's hard to look at the trajectories of multicultural democracies in the world and come to the conclusion that things have been heading in a good direction.
Both are failed/declining empires, originally premised on classically liberal values that became over-extended and regressive to corporate-state despotism under conditions of colonial economics (Absolutist Spain after 1492, see Leonard Liggio).
Israel is a colonialist outpost pretending (farcically) to be a modern nation state.
Martin Van Creveld predicted that the modern nation state system was crumbling in the 1900s. Since then techno-economic disruption has been pervasive, (postmodern, neomarxist) left-totalitarianism is on the rise, mainly opposed by far right neoconfederate tribalism and regression.
There is some evidence that a positive future will have to be post-multiculturalist (post-postmodern).
Postmodern social conditions (including multiculturalism) can only exist after there is a transition to suburban consumer culture, which is an unsustainable disaster that is highly fragile to disruption such as network effects (see Jordan Hall's description of the "Blue church").
The problem is that the modern nation state system is failing. See Martin Van Creveld (who pointed this out to the US military in the 1900s).
Multiculturalism in the real world usually translates into the New Clerisy (Kotkin), which is corrupt. (postmodern deconstruction, neomarxism, nihilism-narcissism, left-totalitarianism.)
There are proposals for post-multicultural values, culture, economics, and politics, such as John Vervaeke's "religion of no religion" (trans-ideological, construct-aware, meta-rationalism). Evolutionary psychology is one of the tools used in such proposals.
Do you have a Goodreads account? Can you recommend some stuff on evopsych, geopolitics (esp. colonialism and imperialism), utopia and utopianism, leftism, and multiculturalism and its future?
Neomarxism is the New Left. Cultural revolution replaced class revolution. The revolution was/is against "capitalism". See Marcuse on degenerate suburban consumer culture. The DSA fiasco with Dr. Adolph Reed is very instructive.
I do not have a Goodreads account.
Evopsych: standard reference is Jonathon Haidt and his colleagues, but there is lots of other stuff.
Geopolitics: Keith Preston (this is an obscure reference, I know him personally, but his web site has a lot of good material and useful references). Sociologist, college lecturer, heterodox thinker. He knows how to write very pithy summaries of big picture stuff.
Utopia: Rosseau, the counter-enlightenment, middle eastern supernaturalism (vs Greek rationalism).
There's a great bit in Yes, Minister, alleging [with a significant degree of humorous credibility] that the British did this consistently and on purpose: partitioning any newly independent former colony into two or more ethnic enclaves, each of whose basic existence (or at least ownership and political control of real estate) is fundamentally intolerable to the other. The characters cynically remark that, in the cases of Ireland, Israel, India, and Cyprus, yes, it always lead to a massive civil war, but on the plus side, it kept the countries in question busy and internally oriented and saved the Foreign Office from having to develop policy around them.
Too many bad eggs want the entire Jewish population of the Levant obliterated, which remains the biggest challenge to any one state solution. Plenty of surveys suggest most Palestinians will not be satisfied with legal equality and political representation in the Knesset.
Even with a perfectly behaved Israel, which is a fairy tale in itself, the Middle East is steeped in antisemitism. I don't see how a one state solution can work. I appreciate that your piece here does not gloss over antisemitism and that you went through a process of understanding the antisemitism that was/is around you. I am not Jewish. I really hold no position on Israel/ Palestine as I feel I do not understand it enough. But I do understand, to some degree, antisemitism. I have worked internationally and with an international client base for 20 + years. I have lived in many diverse cities and have traveled extensively. I will tell you that nobody is as universally hated as the Jewish people. It's impossible for me to believe that antisemitism wouldn't have sprouted in the holy mecca of Texas, if that was where the Jewish state had inexplicably been born.
As you'll probably see a lot of today, I'm going to preface this with the fact that I'm Jewish, was raised in a religious school and am more attached to it as a religion, culture, group identity than even many Zionists are.
Your drunk dad metaphor is very apt.
I have a nonscientific theory that what Zionism means to most Jewish men is this: I may be a nice and non-abusive guy, but it's great to know that if I were one, it would not only be OK, but would be me living up to my identity as a Jew.
A Jewish man can spend 70 years never setting foot on Israel or facing an iota of anti-semitism outside of deciding to take offense at being called cheap (I was one of those guys - I once got into a message board debate in 2007 regarding a Jew joke in a Kinks song), without having the courage or true sociopathy to walk into someone's backyard and say "If I wasn't going to steal your house, someone else would," but he can know that if he did want to be a total asshole, not only would it be OK, but he would actually be the victim.
"I'm not a drunk, I'm something better. I'm a guy who could be one if he wanted, and it would be good."
I'm convinced that if most Zionists confronted that belief pattern in therapy (they won't) they wouldn't be Zionists anymore.
I'm glad you wrote this, I think you really *get it* without getting swept up in the politicking. A big issue with this whole clusterfuck is that people seem to only see both Palestinians and Israelis as like... abstract groups; a bit of a tangent but have you seen people who say they hate men and when confronted they say they're referring to "men as a class"? It seems to me people try to do the same thing with this conflict, thinking of the groups as classes rather than actual human beings. To me, that's just viscerally wrong and horrifying. I know it's not a particularly logical or "objective" view, but I think it doesn't have to be. The idea that gunning down civilians in a place of worship is an immoral act is trivially true.
Here's my personal perspective on the oppression of Jews constantly being brought up: I come from the Balkans (won't specify which specific country bc it's bad infosec and they're all the same anyway) and I can see a clear parallel between pro-Israeli-aggression arguments and people's attitude here. You see, between the 14th and early 20th centuries, the whole region was under the rule of the Ottoman empire. Various atrocities were committed at that time but the most relevant point is that people were oppressed on a religious basis. Christians and Jews were not afforded the same rights as Muslims and any other religion was right out. Let me reiterate, this took place for *6 centuries*. It's understandably stayed in the minds of many and it fuels much animosity against Muslims in present day.
So, if we follow the logic of pro-aggression arguments, is it then acceptable for paramilitary groups to seek out Syrian refugees and the like at the boarders and threaten them with violence? They're Muslim invaders, after all, can't have that. Would it be fine for the descendants of Ottoman Muslims to be attacked and cast out of the country for the misdeeds of their ancestors? Does it justify the Bosnian genocide? What if we consider the Armenian genocide? If one is of a strong Islamophobic and/or nationalist disposition, they might enthusiastically say yes to all of these questions, but somehow, I doubt a lot of progressive pro-Isreal folks would be comfortable associating with such individuals.
I will say, one might argue that Jews have suffered for longer therefore, they have "more" of a right to aggression, but that's such a cynical worldview I don't even want to consider it, frankly.
To bring it back to the main issue, I think the common online narratives about this conflict are colored by the fact that a significant amount of people come from nations which were historical oppressors, rather than historically oppressed like the Balkan nations. So American aggression is obviously seen as wrong in the progressive sphere, but some people justify Israeli aggression because of the history of oppression. But as someone who doesn't have that white guilt-esque feeling about it, such logic seems wrong to me since I would for one would never justify violence against Muslims in my country or any other country in the region.
I have more thoughts on all of this, but my comment is long enough and I already expressed a lack of desire to prove my anti-violence stance by using the term "trivially true" (for context, it's a math term you'd use for a statement you don't feel the need is necessary to prove because whoever is reading your proof csn figure it out themselves). So I dunno, people can take it or leave I guess.
By definition, an anti-violence stance is going to lose in a violent conflict, unless there are outside influences against the use of violence. But those outside influences will themselves require the use of violence, or its threat, to stop the local violence. Gandhi and MLK Jr. are the obvious examples in other contexts, but there are no Gandhi's in Israel or Palestine at this time. (Jesus restricted his utopia to the metaphysical.)
1. Muslim had declined from its high point as a world civilization and become weak, corrupt, and decadent long before European colonialization (1700s-1900s). The Ottomans were the exception to weakness, but they were descended from barbaric Mongolians and lacked the cosmopolitan sophistication (and aversion to the use of brutality for political purposes) of Muslim culture at its medieval high point.
2. Israel is little more than a colonialist outpost that adapted itself to the needs of western geopolitics (imperialism lite), protection of trade routes and oil business after WW2, during the cold war, and so forth.
Those two fundamental problems mean that the middle east is doomed in the short run unless something drastic (more drastic than has been the case for 15 years) happens.
Freddie, you're killing it on Substack. I've got lots of disagreements with this article, and am still blown away by your prose, your arguments and your convictions. I'll be thinking about what you've written here forever. That's got to be high praise, no?
Thanks for it, and thanks for being at the forefront of a small but expanding group of writers who can do more than sing to the choir. We're climbing out of a dark pit.
This is what kills me about this "The mythmaking about all of the opportunities they squandered does not make a lick of moral difference. I don’t think, for a second, that the PLO was offered some amazing deal at Taba. This mythical amazing deal that, for some reason, the Palestinians declined and that the Israelis offered once and then decided they could never offer again, despite the fact that it has so often been represented as mutually beneficial."
It's blatantly, historically erroneous. It implies Israel offering 1 deal, 1 time, which is not remotely accurate. I'd love to hear more about this supposed "mythmaking" - why is it a myth that Palestinians were offered a (more favorable to them) partition in the 40s, an *immediate* return of the land captured in 67 (from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria - not Palestine) - were the Three No's a myth?
And the offers in 99, 00, 07 - again, why exactly are they not considered real or legitimate? (Also, when you have the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia in disbelief at Arafat not accepting this deal... there is a reason countries decreased the pressure on Israel after this, they realize there was no offer, none, that the Palestinians would ever accept after rejecting these offers - and were they perfect? No - find me a perfect compromise between two warring peoples, I'll wait).
"The moral obligation falls on the dominant party, and Israel is beyond dominant." - I only agree with this fundamentalist view to a point. When I look at the record of that dominant party making concessions, only to be spurned time and time again, at some point agency and responsibility has to be asked of the other party.
A simple, imperfect (they often are) analogy to bipartisanship in the US - republicans accuse democrats of not legislating on a bipartisan basis while withholding their cooperation, thereby confirming a partisan process. There is a similar dynamic here - all Palestinians have to do is continue to never negotiate, and because of your fundamentalist position, you will simply always blame Israel for lack of progress.
It's obvious we disagree on this, I'm just trying to point out where I don't believe what you wrote holds up to historical or practical scrutiny.
1. You can't solve this problem with reference to history because the relevant parties will never agree on what the history actually is. I'm sure you're aware that there are pro-Palestinian scholars who would dispute every last one of your historical claims. Are they right? I don't know. It's a pointless road to go down; we can't relive the past or relitigate what happened then. All we can do is move forward.
2. The operative question is always "would you yourself consent to live under the conditions the Palestinians live now, or the way you're proposing they live after a deal?" The Palestinians have never been offered control of their own airspace, waterways, or borders, to pick a glaring example. Israel would never allow it. Ask yourself honestly: how many of the world's peoples would consent to live without control of the land, air, and sea in their territory? Very, very few.
3. The moral question remains: what do you owe to a Palestinian child who has never had anything to do with the conditions they live under now?
2. Let's take your analogy to slavery from my other comment - by this logic, why would the slaves ever agree to be free if they didn't immediately have full voting and land ownership rights? The progress may not have been total, but it *was* progress. The peace agreements and conditions weren't meant to be unchangeable pacts. Look at Sinai - when Israel pulled out, conditions were placed on both Egypt and Israel regarding acceptable levels of military infrastructure. Israel allowed Egypt to violate those rules to deal with attacks and other conflicts in Sinai, because after 30 years it trusted that Egypt would not then launch an offensive on Israel.
3. Doesn't this same question apply to an Israeli child who is the victim of terrorism who also doesn't have anything to do with the conditions they were born into?
1. By this logic, we need to find common ground with republicans who believe election was stolen - it doesn't matter what actually, really, observably happened, b/c there are people on the other side who believe the complete opposite, therefore historical context is meaningless. And yes - I'm saying I don't believe Palestinian scholarship holds up to historical scrutiny.
But hey, genuine thanks for the engagement - I may not come off like it, but I would love two states for two peoples living in peace and cooperation next to each other. While it would be hard for a government charged with defending its citizens to accept this - there is a level of risk Israel must accept to offer statehood and peace.
re: "I don't believe Palestinian scholarship holds up to historical scrutiny."
His point is that history is always a matter of interpretation and bias, so it is as likely to be part of the problem as it is a solution.
Both sides are going to tend to gaslight, cherry pick facts and distort or lie about history in service of their values, religion, political goals, etc.
Nothing will change until those values change. Assuming that the values and beliefs in question are largely shaped by geopolitics, developmental level, environment and climate, and evolutionary psychology, that seems unlikely.
Both sides hold regressive, tribalistic, premodern-mythic beliefs that are full of internal contradictions and irrationalism.
The cultural gravity well of the middle east can't sustain liberal, rational values, anyone attempting to do so is doomed until something drastic happens, such as China coming to dominate trade as UA/western influence declines. Or a giant meteorite destroys the whole region, or there is a nuclear war.
A tree burning inside the al-Aqsah mosque compound. (Would you believe people don't agree on what started the fire?) Outside Israeli youth cheer and chant "Death to Palestine."
My one huge point of disagreement is on the possibility of a one-state solution. Given both the radical bigotry of groups on both sides and the structure of Israeli government I see literally no situation where it doesn't instantly become literally Weimar Germany. Large minority parties founded explicitly on the oppression of the other side will come into power and block all legislation and essentially shut down the government until they are put in power. Once in power they have the ability to oppress and will use the full force of that ability freely. With Arabs being the majority and (in my eyes) more unified on the concept of outright oppression I would imagine the most likely outcome would be what the return home for Jews was explicitly done to prevent - the crushing oppression of Jewish identity. But that doesn't really matter because it's pretty damn likely one side will do it and it's totally not acceptable regardless. I think you have to be a kumbaya liberal to look at a group who raided Al-Aqsa Mosque and a group that banned Jews from the Temple Mount and say "they will live in peace and harmony and there will not be a perpetual state of terror and dysfunction".
You can say "well ethno-states are bad" but literally every major religious group has either an autonomous territory (Punjab is a weird situation as of now, but for most of Indian independence this was the state of the region) or a state in which they are the VAST majority. You don't need an explicitly Buddhist state when you have Bhutan - a Buddhist monarchy where 3/4ths of the population is Buddhist. Jews are the only people that, without a two-state solution, have literally nowhere to go if another group decides to get their religious oppression on.
I imagine brokering the one-state solution would involve some structures and bargains to protect both sides, not just "Okay, everybody cast your vote and we'll see what happens."
The argument that religious groups need to control a state in case of persecution elsewhere has always been strange to me. Religious persecution happens all over the world, and people don't flee to the one special place where they're in charge -- they come here, for example, to the United States seeking asylum. We should ensure that everyone can live in a place where they're free from harm, and free to practice their religion. That doesn't mean a chunk of land where a religious group controls the state.
Which leads to the useless but interesting historical counterfactual: the land where Jews should have been given a permanent home that protects and nurtures them, after the Holocaust, should have been in the United States. Either just integrated into preexisting society or, like, carved out of Texas.
The one problem I see with that is it runs into the subtle cruelty of the reservation system - itself CLEARLY a bad solution that is only better because outright cultural genocide is worse. It'd be land that nobody wants and end up in a state of near-perpetual economic turmoil. If you gave the Navajo the choice between where their tribal lands are now and Santa Fe or Phoenix they'd take the latter and cry tears of joy. It's just tough given that Jews were never able to gain enough power while every other religious group cleared out their nice patch of independence back in an era where casual ethnocide was in vogue.
Also the Balfour Declaration issue. It would have looked and gone HORRIBLE post-Holocaust to go "well we promised you this but actually you get this uninhabited chunk of Texas". It's an interesting but ultimately nearly impossible counterfactual.
Well, yes, but then the Balfour Declaration was made by an imperial power who were currently dominating the Palestinians and did not even pretend to include them in the process, so it's bad looks all around.
That "choice by domination" is present in most contemporary plans. The real historical what-if that is VERY realistic and lacks the same degree of domination is "what if Britain held onto the area for 10 more years and then did the same thing they did in the partition of India?". It'd be messy and full of forced relocation a-la Indian Partition, but you'd at the very least have two states created via democratic processes.
It was originally a Neanderthal territory, up to something like 40,000 years ago.
From a mythic perspective, the Bible states that the Israelites stole the land from the Cannanites, time to give it back! (joke)
If Israel claims it is a modern, industrialized, democratic state, how can its claims to existence fall back on the mythic constructs of premodern, nomadic-tribal goat herders?
Why not return "Palestine" to the Ottoman Empire or whatever Arab monarch/warlord controlled "Palestine" before the Ottomans? They have a historic religious relationship to the region.
Islam accepts the divinity of all the Abrahamic prophets, but sees their revelations as having been corrupted. Thus, it is an Islamic responsibility to correct the errors of Jewish and Christian religion.
Mythic religion isn't part of the solution, it is a main part of the problem along with the human tendency to be tribalistic as an evolutionary survival strategy.
Tribalism does not fit well with modern social conditions. (Henrich @ Harvard on WEIRD society.)
I'm using the term "mythic" culture to refer to premodern (prerational, preliberal, tribal-dynastic) societies in general. Kegan stage 3.*
The basic element of the myth is spiritual purity: the world is full of evil, sin and suffering, and ritual atonement/confession is required for the believer to gain access to salvation.
The economic mode that corresponds to purity myth civilizations is agrarian settlement, walled cities.
Warren Porter, indeed. Whenever people say that a Jewish homeland could have been carved out of a place to which we have no historical or cultural tie, I know that they really don't understand what it means to be a Jew with a cultural and historical tie to a particular piece of geography. You don't have to be a Zionist for that connection to run deep.
Exactly right. I have been saying this for years. In fact, I think we should do this NOW.
Alas, the irrational emotional attachment to specific land would also have to be overcome. I think of this as "I must be able to piss on the land my ancestors pissed on." I've never been able to grok this sentiment, but it seems quite strong in many people all over the world.
Most indigenous peoples have an emotional attachment to the land of their ancestors, and they have throughout history. It's only a very recent Western phenomenon to have lost that attachment.
I'm a Jew, but I'm not a Zionist, I've never been to Israel, I never intend to visit Israel, and I have no emotional tie to any modern nation-state, including Israel. And yet, I feel a tie to the place that my people began, and my life would be much the poorer without it.
Many peoples see their ancestral lands as sacred, including Jews, and I see nothing wrong with it and a good deal right with it. The problem comes when that tie results in bloodshed and the oppression of other people.
That's one approach. Probably something to ensure equal or meaningful representation for the minority, plus a constitution with certain protections and guarantees to both sides. But I don't claim to know the best system.
I've previously toyed with the idea of a democracy under a constitutional monarchy with a Jewish royal family and Palestinian voting majority, but then it sounds too much like the nightmare in Bahrain and I try to forget the idea.
re: "Jews are the only people that, without a two-state solution, have literally nowhere to go if another group decides to get their religious oppression on."
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comment: that doesn't sound quite right. Yazidis, Kurds, numerous indigenous people on various continents, including nomadic or formerly nomadic tribes...
Great post. At the time, I was one of the people who opposed talking about Israel at the Iraq war protests, simply because we were already failing at our primary purpose -- and bringing up Israel turned a lot of people off.
We already had such a huge problem with coherent messaging. I went to DC protest in September 2005 (organized by ANSWER) and it was chaos. Every damn group in the world that wanted attention showed up. Iraq, Israel, IMF, racism in general, legalize pot, abortion, gay rights, free the Idaho Eight or whatever -- or no cause at all, just signs with various jokes and slogans about how Bush was stupid.
But the Israel messaging probably turned the most people off because it was so prominent (from the podium, not just the crowd) and controversial. People on the ground around me were complaining about it. Someone on the Metro told me she would have gone, but she refused to support anything hostile to Israel.
But I agree with you about Israel. In this situation, they're the powerful one. Nothing in history could justify what they're doing to the Palestinian people. I also agree that there should be one state with equality for all citizens. I always liked what Edward Said wrote, and it still makes a lot of sense to me today.
Excellent post, and I agree with all of it - barring the notion that the accusations against Jeremy Corbyn were 'weak tea' and stuck simply because he was an easy far left target. You are clear at the start of this piece that there is a rancid antisemitism in left-wing spaces, and, observing this, it's very difficult to understand how this wouldn't include Corbyn as such an example.
His supporters and the man himself are still insisting that the many examples of his antisemitism are simply smears by 'Rothschilds', 'Zionists', 'The Israeli Lobby' etc. who, ahem, control the media.
He described Hamas as a force for social justice and peace in the Middle East; Hamas whose charter is explicitly antisemitic and calls for the death of all Jews. This incident alone should have ended his career outside of the crank zone, let alone the debate as to whether he is antisemitic or not.
On March 4, 1996, a suicide bomber blew himself up, along with 13 others—12 civilians, 1 soldier—outside Dizengoff Center, the largest shopping mall in Tel Aviv, located on one of the busiest streets in the country. A former partner of mine was about 6, and headed to a birthday party at the mall’s arcade. He was there, and while he remained physically unscathed, he did not walk away unharmed. Do you know what it looks like after a bombing? Do you know what it looks like to a child? This person is a good Tel Avivi lefty—votes Meretz, refers to “the occupation,” not “the territories,” not “Israel-proper” or “Judea and Sumeria” (in Israel, the words you use to describe “the situation” are designators of your politics, and the only issue with political salience is “the situation.”) But does this good leftist go to the protests? No. He cannot be in crowds. He is traumatized. He is not a wall. A bomb is not an egg.
I have another friend, a Palestinian woman a few years younger than my ex. Technically, she is an “Israeli Arab,” but she would never call herself that, least of all to her parents in Jerusalem who have suffered violence and theft and hate, who cannot visit their parents in Gaza, whose parents in Gaza are poor and stuck and have never known safety. My friend will never know her grandparents because Gaza is 5 billion miles away from everywhere. Gaza in on the moon. Though she doesn’t, her family hates Jews because the boot on the neck of all Palestinians is a Jewish boot.
So how exactly does a one-state solution work? The Jews will be pushed to the sea. The Palestinians will be slaughtered. There will be no successful power-sharing arrangement. Most of the Palestinians living under brutal occupation do not want to live in a secular democracy alongside Jews, and the Israelis do not want to live in a secular democracy alongside Arabs. A one-state solution in a Western fairytale that the people in the region are untied in rejecting.
I like the idea of the one state solution, but it would require a huge shift in attitudes and beliefs. It's something I dream might happen in a few generations, not a few years.
Like it or not, the modern nation state system is an invention of the west that was imposed on the middle east during the colonial era.
The claim that modernism would liberate the middle east from mythic culture, despotism, poverty, ignorance, illiteracy and disease is peculiar in that context.
There are more forces supporting regression to premodern culture in the middle east than to progress to modernism.
"There is and has always been only one conclusion that could bring this tilted world into balance: a shared state in the land between the river and the sea..."
Nothing has happened in recent history to suggest that the Arabs see the conflict as anything but zero sum. They don't want a balanced conclusion. Isn't it kind of dishonest then to hold Israel accountable unilaterally for achieving that conclusion?
I studied Islamic history informally for 30 years, and it became clear that the basic Muslim belief is that Jews (as well as Christians) corrupted the originally pure Abrahamic tradition. Muhammad claimed to be a direct descendent of Abraham and to have a divine revelation that was meant to re-establish the spiritual purity of the Abrahamic tradition.
That reflects a mythic level of awareness (as per evolutionary psychology).
Israel's claim to be better than Arabs/Muslims (justifying occupation) is based on being a more modern-rationalist culture, but that position contains some serious contradictions.
This seems like the type of thing you'd criticize someone else for doing in another context.
Why?
'Just gonna drop this tiktok of a random Israeli 19 year old being an idiot here and walk away' is not a sincere way to contribute to a debate, it's kinda a troll move.
Fair but I do think it's perfectly appropriate to show examples of something that Palestinians have been saying for ages - that aside from the inherent violence of the occupation, IDF soldiers are callous about Palestinian life. There are other examples such as the t-shirts with Palestinian children in crosshairs.
I think if you want to make that argument, which I don't even really disagree with, using a TikTok video where a girl does a version of the "I'm so crazy" joke we've all heard a million times is not a serious way to go about it. If you need to show examples of Israelis saying terrible stuff about Palestinians...it's really easy! It's super easy to find the opposite too. Why would anyone need to resort to a forced reading of a dumb tiktok?
Somebody on twitter trying to make a misinterpretation of a stupid tiktok go hate-viral highlights how much of a game this is even for people who act like they take this seriously.
Freddie, this person is either not a current soldier (perhaps a former soldier donning her old uniform and acting like a psychopath online) or she put in fake nails right before posting this video. There are zero units in the IDF that would allow nails. She would be immediately ticketed and told to remove them, not to Maron that actually posting a video like that while serving (though obviously shitty IDF soldiers have posted awful things) would also earn you discipline.
That is suspicious...
I think you should remove this video as it's not just unverified, it's really, really, really unlikely to be an IDF soldier. Would you leave up a video of a Palestinian militant saying similar things if there were credible reasons to believe the video was not in fact from a Palestinian militant? There are so many real examples of IDF abuse. Why not link to one of them instead? It will you make your point better, anyway.
OK
I am an Israeli Jew (living in NYC) and that was perfect. Thank you.
Boiled down, the Arabs - Palestinians included - went all in on a military victory. And lost. They left no wiggle room for real compromise with Israel. When even Arab countries gave up on the idea of attacking Israel yet again (and losing), the Palestinians went all in on terror (bus bombings, etc.). Then the Israelis took that card out of their hands by building a wall. They have no more cards to play against Israel, yet are still clinging to this fantasy of a military victory, driving Jews out of Jerusalem, etc. It's frankly nuts.
The Arabs simply lost the decades long war, and lost it without ever coming up with a real plan to negotiate peace, or figure out what's next. There could be a Marshall plan type peace arrangement, if they wanted it, but they don't. Not yet, anyway.
This does not, of course, make sympathy for people in the West Bank or Gaza Strip antisemitic - far from it. But rather, the onus is also on the Palestinian leadership to surrender, like any other party that has clearly lost a war, and has to move on to a real peace plan. The revanchist fantasy of "liberating Al Quds" has long since been proven impossible. Israel would love nothing more to get rid of this problem, but ironically, it is the Palestinian leadership clinging to the existence of the problem itself as their best, and only, card to play.
There's a lot I could say, but you and I are not likely to agree, and that's OK. The question that leaps out immediately though is... who are "the Arabs"?
And it is not inaccurate, either, since Israel is the actual Jewish state, and the Palestinians - who are Arabs as well - threw in their lot with the Arab League Nations.
For all practical intents and purposes, with some overwhelmingly Jewish outliers in the West advocating for the Palestinian cause (and even then, it's a minority) - it's still an accurate representation globally in terms of who-supports-who. What changed over the decades was the real world politics based on current needs (IE, Arab governments who care more about Iran than Israel) and the simple fact that Israel won the war.
Right. That said, I agree with Freddie that a secular state that included everyone as citizens would be the best solution. But neither extreme wing from either side would ever accept that. Right?
Israel would, and did after the wars in forties. 20% of Israeli citizens - who have full political rights - are Arabs. But they are citizens in a state that is and will ever be a Jewish state.
The two state solution is dead. It is unworkable from a pragmatic point of view because it's logistically impossible at this point.
The most realilstic option is a "formal" surrender and a political plan from both sides to make Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on an equal footing with Israel's existing Arab population.
That is not realistic because it does not account for the fact that Muslims see Jews as an "unclean" (ungodly, corrupt) culture that has only come to power because something went horribly wrong with the kosmic order that needs to be righted by (re)subjugating Jews as per Islamic law.
Like it or not, that is the basic mindset in Muslim culture.
Everything about the middle east (climate, geopolitics, economics, evolutionary psychology, western imperialism, etc.) works against anyone trying to promote "progress" and modernization.
Native Palestinians living within the Israeli state do not have equal political rights to Israelis.
'Formal surrender' would be meaningless. Israel's intention is to remove all Palestinians from the territory and create a perennial ethnically Jewish state. Why would Palestinians saying 'we give up, do what you will', change that? Every agreement, ceasefire and treaty signed by Israel has only led to worsening conditions for Palestinians. They are beyond bad faith and - despite now owning and controlling the entirety of Palestine - increasingly sadistic.
Again - which Palestinians?
The political leadership in the Gaza Strip (Hamas) and the West Bank (Fatah). Remember the PLO, who used to speak for "all" Palestinians? Well, that changed, too. But even then, the Palestinian leadership threw in with the Arab League cause of "liberation".
Now, the Arab League abandoned the cause. They haven't cared in decades. They are more concerned with normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel as a powerful ally against Iran than the long lost, fantasy, activist cause of "Palestinian liberation". That ship sailed literally decades ago.
Perhaps you might go to the open-air prison that is Gaza and observe conditions there and see if you maintain your disdain.
"The Arabs" being the Arab League nations (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, et al) who promised a military victory over Israel, and paid lip service (which is essentially what it was) to the Palestinian cause. After losing a number of wars, and having other problems to deal with, they have long since ceased even paying lip service, with more and more Arab nations actually normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. The last Arab leader to even launch a military attack against Israel was Saddam Hussein lobbing SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv 20 years go. And since then, nothing. Israel effectively won the war against the Arab League nations ever since.
There is no Arab Cavalry coming to save Hamas or Fatah, but they still cling to the fantasy that there might be someday. So no military support from Arab countries. No more terror card to play. No political plan to negotiate what is, realistically, a military defeat.
Yes, you could argue the Israelis should find some "face saving" plan, but since that military victory fantasy where Israel is defeated means essentially abolishing Israel, it's impossible. The Palestinian leadership has painted themselves into a corner, and did so a very, very long time ago.
(deleted first comment because of typos and resubmitted, btw)
I'm not as versed in the conflict as many others, but I've often thought about what RW is suggesting. "You lost. Why don't you surrender?" When people point out that Hamas sends it's "rockets" first defenders of Hamas like to say, "It's nothing compared to Israel's military power! It's not a fair fight!"
YES! It's NOT a fair fight. You know what happens when there are fair fights? WW fucking 2 or 3. That's what happens.
Many have this problem now. "Never surrender". If you never surrender then you'll never have peace. Someone's gotta' lose a war for it to end. As a nation the US has been dealing with losing since Vietnam. Afganistan is a lost war too.
(NOTE: Even though Israel is technically a secular democracy, it would never accept defeat either. Keep that in mind. Hamas isn't Al Queda and Israel isn't Williamsburg Brooklyn. But if both societies lost their religious nuts you'd have a possibility of peace. You never will while they hold any kind of power.)
Short version:
The "loss" by the Arabs/Palestinians was contingent on USA military intervention in the early 1970s and subsequent support.
An insurgency (4GW) can outlast such contingencies (outside military support) over the long run. Example: the US "withdrawal" from Afghanistan.
Counterpoint: the Arab League states trying to conquer Israel all had very generous material support from the USSR. It just happens that they failed anyway.
The Arab League governments solved their "Jewish problem" with pogroms, expropriations, and expulsion.
What would the reaction be in the Western left if Israel adopted the approach the Arab League took to their Jews with the West Bank and Gaza? Can we imagine this?
Counter-counterpoint:
Israel is a colonialist outpost founded by terrorists who bombed the British Mandate office.
From a rational, objective perspective moral comparisons won't work because both "sides" are constantly: gaslighting, cherry picking facts and evidence to best support their victim narratives, lying, distorting facts, scapegoating the other side, etc.
1. both Israel and the Palestinians are pawns in larger geopolitical games
2. you fail to see that the Iran-Shia-China-Russia bloc has had a lot of relative success, within the limits of what is possible given Israel's nukes, against the USA-Saudi-Sunni-Israel bloc.
3GW (WW2 style industrialized war) has yielded to 4GW (insurgencies)
Insurgencies "win" over the long run when an occupying empire can't economically or politically sustain the occupation.
All of the "anti-semitism" talk and pro-Zionist bullying won't ultimately prevail when americans realize that the corrupt elements of the Zionism are almost perfectly aligned with the most corrupt elements of USA politics.
And by all means - do say! I would be interested to hear it. I think a large part of the identity of the Western Left is - even when it doesn't realize it - built around the Foucaultian idea of power being The Problem To Solve.
But what does the left do when the underdog isn't necessarily the hero? That seems to be something it struggles with. It's uncomfortable, and makes some people squirm uncomfortably.
There is a tendency on the left to make fun of the idea of other people seeing things in black and white good guy/bad guy terms, but when situations like the Arab/Israeli conflict come up, and when that default always-champion-the-underdog moral calculus doesn't yield answers which look like you expected - then what?
The dominant party historically was Islam, which has a mixed history of sometimes being tolerant of minorities (such as during the Spanish Inquisitions), especially Jews, but for the last 200-300 years scapegoating them as Muslim power declined and European power rose.
Look for signs in Muslim politics of a return to the kind of medieval tolerance of Jews that actually existed, and is required by the Qur'an. Long wait.
I love this comment. Just saying. It's a morality that becomes essentially amoral because it shifts with the wind, and is untethered from a solid set of principles of any sort. An eternally moving set of goalposts is intrinsically hostile to a principled moral stance.
Again, the Qur'an takes the stance that Jews corrupted the (originally pure) Abrahamic tradition, and that Islam replenishes that tradition, and requires that Jews be subjugated to ensure (kosmic) "peace".
A Jewish state is by definition a corrupt abomination to Islamic moral principles.
Muhammad claims to be a direct descendent of Abraham, with hereditary and prophetic rights.
From a modern-rational perspective that is all horrible and absolutist, but it is a profound error to say it lacks a "principled moral stance".
You may disagree with the mythic/theological basis of the morals, but to say they don't even exist is beyond absurd.
Your apparent ignorance of one of the most basic elements of Muslim belief is itself evidence of the appalling arrogance of your "side" in the argument.
re: "then what?"
Dystopia?
The cultural left is incapable of transcending victim narratives.* There is nothing beyond the cultural left's postmodernism, narcissism and nihilism, only doom, something like a cross between ethnic prison gangs, Idiocracy and Mad Max.
* when people transcend cultural leftism they abandon the primacy of victim narratives and move onto something else, such as meta-rational construct-awareness.
There are many examples of insurgencies eventually prevailing against colonialism, sometimes after 100s of years.
Israel was on the verge of being destroyed militarily in one of the early 1970s wars when they ran out of bullets, but the USA was able to resupply Israel at the last minute via a new airlift system that by-passed refueling stops in western Europe which had banned such refueling stops.
Israel is now one part of the emerging geopolitics of Shi'a-Sunni conflict, on the Saudi-USA-Sunni side, against the China-Russia-Iran-Shia bloc.
If USA influence continues to decline, Israel will be doomed unless it re-aligns with China (against its current USA and Saudi allies).
You seem to be under the misconception that superpower support in that conflict was one sided. It was not.
And this is not an insurgency in the same style of Afghanistan or Vietnam. The West Bank and Gaza Strip are highly contained. The governments of Jordan and Egypt no longer want anything to do with them. The Israelis literally walled them off.
They have no cards left to play - militarily, or politically. They do not control a majority of territory. They do not have the foreign backing they need for a military option. And Israel defused the terror option.
If that isn't a checkmate in the conflict - what is, in your opinion?
I'm not under any misconception about superpower support, you don't seem to understand that the Iranian-Shia-Russia-China bloc has a lot of potential to expand its influence as the Saudi-Sunni-USA-Israel bloc's influence declines.
Your thinking seems absolutist, selective and convenient, typical traits of mythic thinkers (including most Muslims, who have a simple belief based on the contents of the Qur'an that Jews corrupted the Abrahamic tradition).
The insurgency is tied into deep civilizational themes in Islam: ritualized martyrdom, sacrifice and persecution. (Muhammad describes the kosmic and worldly battle against corruption, which specifically includes the corruption of Jews, Christians and Pagan who were also his economic and military enemies.)
You are attempting to argue against the basic idea in Islam of how salvation is attained. Good luck with that.
Thank you for this. Another reminder of why I subscribe.
Near the end you say that Israel could end the conflict if they wanted to. Can you expand on that? I don't see how. (Might be more full entry sized than comment sized, but if you were emperor of Israel, what would you do?)
Long and complicated, as you suggest, but in a sense simple: institute political and legal equality between the people of Israel and those in the territories. One shared liberal democratic egalitarian state. Of course, this is in a sense the end of the Zionist project, so, yeah. Not gonna happen.
And if the two groups in this shared egalitarian state want nothing to do with each other? What then?
I don't know. Can multicultural democracy work? Hard to say. Self-segregation would be likely, and is in fact common in many ways in the United States, though not on this scale. But think of Mormons and the separate systems they have built for themselves, or think of if all of the Chinatowns in the country were contiguous. I'd like to think it's possible. If it isn't, what's the future we're trying to build anywhere?
This may work on a cultural/community level, but in terms of national, popular governance? You must realize these fissures would translate into war via politics, policy-making, and governing. Look at what republicans are doing in the US with voting laws and gerrymandering, etc, and now imagine an even stronger religious undercurrent to the political conflict - imagine the laws attempted and likely passed to cement the rule of one over the other.
I don't take you as naive, but I do think your idea is not remotely workable in real life.
I think were this 1865 you'd be saying the exact same thing about integrating millions of African slaves into a preexisting representative democracy. Has that effort gone smoothly? Obviously not. Is it still worth trying? Yes, yes I think it is.
When it was going smoothly, it was morally intolerable (Jim Crow, etc). To hear the complaints (not to mention the riots), the situation is still morally intolerable, but at least it's no longer going smoothly.
The freed slaves weren't part of an organization dedicated to killing all white people, though.
When wealthy, peaceful multicultural democracies like the UK and Spain are struggling to keep things together, what are the odds that melding together two populations filled with right-wing extremists who have a century of bad blood is gonna work out? I think it's hard to look at the trajectories of multicultural democracies in the world and come to the conclusion that things have been heading in a good direction.
Both are failed/declining empires, originally premised on classically liberal values that became over-extended and regressive to corporate-state despotism under conditions of colonial economics (Absolutist Spain after 1492, see Leonard Liggio).
Israel is a colonialist outpost pretending (farcically) to be a modern nation state.
Martin Van Creveld predicted that the modern nation state system was crumbling in the 1900s. Since then techno-economic disruption has been pervasive, (postmodern, neomarxist) left-totalitarianism is on the rise, mainly opposed by far right neoconfederate tribalism and regression.
There is some evidence that a positive future will have to be post-multiculturalist (post-postmodern).
Postmodern social conditions (including multiculturalism) can only exist after there is a transition to suburban consumer culture, which is an unsustainable disaster that is highly fragile to disruption such as network effects (see Jordan Hall's description of the "Blue church").
The problem is that the modern nation state system is failing. See Martin Van Creveld (who pointed this out to the US military in the 1900s).
Multiculturalism in the real world usually translates into the New Clerisy (Kotkin), which is corrupt. (postmodern deconstruction, neomarxism, nihilism-narcissism, left-totalitarianism.)
There are proposals for post-multicultural values, culture, economics, and politics, such as John Vervaeke's "religion of no religion" (trans-ideological, construct-aware, meta-rationalism). Evolutionary psychology is one of the tools used in such proposals.
What is your definition of "neomarxism"?
Do you have a Goodreads account? Can you recommend some stuff on evopsych, geopolitics (esp. colonialism and imperialism), utopia and utopianism, leftism, and multiculturalism and its future?
Neomarxism is the New Left. Cultural revolution replaced class revolution. The revolution was/is against "capitalism". See Marcuse on degenerate suburban consumer culture. The DSA fiasco with Dr. Adolph Reed is very instructive.
I do not have a Goodreads account.
Evopsych: standard reference is Jonathon Haidt and his colleagues, but there is lots of other stuff.
Geopolitics: Keith Preston (this is an obscure reference, I know him personally, but his web site has a lot of good material and useful references). Sociologist, college lecturer, heterodox thinker. He knows how to write very pithy summaries of big picture stuff.
Utopia: Rosseau, the counter-enlightenment, middle eastern supernaturalism (vs Greek rationalism).
Ideology, postmodern social conditions, etc.:
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
and:
https://medium.com/deep-code/understanding-the-blue-church-e4781b2bd9b5
There's a great bit in Yes, Minister, alleging [with a significant degree of humorous credibility] that the British did this consistently and on purpose: partitioning any newly independent former colony into two or more ethnic enclaves, each of whose basic existence (or at least ownership and political control of real estate) is fundamentally intolerable to the other. The characters cynically remark that, in the cases of Ireland, Israel, India, and Cyprus, yes, it always lead to a massive civil war, but on the plus side, it kept the countries in question busy and internally oriented and saved the Foreign Office from having to develop policy around them.
Too many bad eggs want the entire Jewish population of the Levant obliterated, which remains the biggest challenge to any one state solution. Plenty of surveys suggest most Palestinians will not be satisfied with legal equality and political representation in the Knesset.
Even with a perfectly behaved Israel, which is a fairy tale in itself, the Middle East is steeped in antisemitism. I don't see how a one state solution can work. I appreciate that your piece here does not gloss over antisemitism and that you went through a process of understanding the antisemitism that was/is around you. I am not Jewish. I really hold no position on Israel/ Palestine as I feel I do not understand it enough. But I do understand, to some degree, antisemitism. I have worked internationally and with an international client base for 20 + years. I have lived in many diverse cities and have traveled extensively. I will tell you that nobody is as universally hated as the Jewish people. It's impossible for me to believe that antisemitism wouldn't have sprouted in the holy mecca of Texas, if that was where the Jewish state had inexplicably been born.
As you'll probably see a lot of today, I'm going to preface this with the fact that I'm Jewish, was raised in a religious school and am more attached to it as a religion, culture, group identity than even many Zionists are.
Your drunk dad metaphor is very apt.
I have a nonscientific theory that what Zionism means to most Jewish men is this: I may be a nice and non-abusive guy, but it's great to know that if I were one, it would not only be OK, but would be me living up to my identity as a Jew.
A Jewish man can spend 70 years never setting foot on Israel or facing an iota of anti-semitism outside of deciding to take offense at being called cheap (I was one of those guys - I once got into a message board debate in 2007 regarding a Jew joke in a Kinks song), without having the courage or true sociopathy to walk into someone's backyard and say "If I wasn't going to steal your house, someone else would," but he can know that if he did want to be a total asshole, not only would it be OK, but he would actually be the victim.
"I'm not a drunk, I'm something better. I'm a guy who could be one if he wanted, and it would be good."
I'm convinced that if most Zionists confronted that belief pattern in therapy (they won't) they wouldn't be Zionists anymore.
Like most of the world, it is a religion that is regressive, mythic and patriarchal, but with a thin veneer of modern rationalism.
Telling the truth is far more difficult than telling lies.
You and Scott Alexander are both dragging me down memory lane and this one is more painful by a long shot.
I'm glad you wrote this, I think you really *get it* without getting swept up in the politicking. A big issue with this whole clusterfuck is that people seem to only see both Palestinians and Israelis as like... abstract groups; a bit of a tangent but have you seen people who say they hate men and when confronted they say they're referring to "men as a class"? It seems to me people try to do the same thing with this conflict, thinking of the groups as classes rather than actual human beings. To me, that's just viscerally wrong and horrifying. I know it's not a particularly logical or "objective" view, but I think it doesn't have to be. The idea that gunning down civilians in a place of worship is an immoral act is trivially true.
Here's my personal perspective on the oppression of Jews constantly being brought up: I come from the Balkans (won't specify which specific country bc it's bad infosec and they're all the same anyway) and I can see a clear parallel between pro-Israeli-aggression arguments and people's attitude here. You see, between the 14th and early 20th centuries, the whole region was under the rule of the Ottoman empire. Various atrocities were committed at that time but the most relevant point is that people were oppressed on a religious basis. Christians and Jews were not afforded the same rights as Muslims and any other religion was right out. Let me reiterate, this took place for *6 centuries*. It's understandably stayed in the minds of many and it fuels much animosity against Muslims in present day.
So, if we follow the logic of pro-aggression arguments, is it then acceptable for paramilitary groups to seek out Syrian refugees and the like at the boarders and threaten them with violence? They're Muslim invaders, after all, can't have that. Would it be fine for the descendants of Ottoman Muslims to be attacked and cast out of the country for the misdeeds of their ancestors? Does it justify the Bosnian genocide? What if we consider the Armenian genocide? If one is of a strong Islamophobic and/or nationalist disposition, they might enthusiastically say yes to all of these questions, but somehow, I doubt a lot of progressive pro-Isreal folks would be comfortable associating with such individuals.
I will say, one might argue that Jews have suffered for longer therefore, they have "more" of a right to aggression, but that's such a cynical worldview I don't even want to consider it, frankly.
To bring it back to the main issue, I think the common online narratives about this conflict are colored by the fact that a significant amount of people come from nations which were historical oppressors, rather than historically oppressed like the Balkan nations. So American aggression is obviously seen as wrong in the progressive sphere, but some people justify Israeli aggression because of the history of oppression. But as someone who doesn't have that white guilt-esque feeling about it, such logic seems wrong to me since I would for one would never justify violence against Muslims in my country or any other country in the region.
I have more thoughts on all of this, but my comment is long enough and I already expressed a lack of desire to prove my anti-violence stance by using the term "trivially true" (for context, it's a math term you'd use for a statement you don't feel the need is necessary to prove because whoever is reading your proof csn figure it out themselves). So I dunno, people can take it or leave I guess.
By definition, an anti-violence stance is going to lose in a violent conflict, unless there are outside influences against the use of violence. But those outside influences will themselves require the use of violence, or its threat, to stop the local violence. Gandhi and MLK Jr. are the obvious examples in other contexts, but there are no Gandhi's in Israel or Palestine at this time. (Jesus restricted his utopia to the metaphysical.)
1. Muslim had declined from its high point as a world civilization and become weak, corrupt, and decadent long before European colonialization (1700s-1900s). The Ottomans were the exception to weakness, but they were descended from barbaric Mongolians and lacked the cosmopolitan sophistication (and aversion to the use of brutality for political purposes) of Muslim culture at its medieval high point.
2. Israel is little more than a colonialist outpost that adapted itself to the needs of western geopolitics (imperialism lite), protection of trade routes and oil business after WW2, during the cold war, and so forth.
Those two fundamental problems mean that the middle east is doomed in the short run unless something drastic (more drastic than has been the case for 15 years) happens.
Freddie, you're killing it on Substack. I've got lots of disagreements with this article, and am still blown away by your prose, your arguments and your convictions. I'll be thinking about what you've written here forever. That's got to be high praise, no?
Thanks for it, and thanks for being at the forefront of a small but expanding group of writers who can do more than sing to the choir. We're climbing out of a dark pit.
This is what kills me about this "The mythmaking about all of the opportunities they squandered does not make a lick of moral difference. I don’t think, for a second, that the PLO was offered some amazing deal at Taba. This mythical amazing deal that, for some reason, the Palestinians declined and that the Israelis offered once and then decided they could never offer again, despite the fact that it has so often been represented as mutually beneficial."
It's blatantly, historically erroneous. It implies Israel offering 1 deal, 1 time, which is not remotely accurate. I'd love to hear more about this supposed "mythmaking" - why is it a myth that Palestinians were offered a (more favorable to them) partition in the 40s, an *immediate* return of the land captured in 67 (from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria - not Palestine) - were the Three No's a myth?
And the offers in 99, 00, 07 - again, why exactly are they not considered real or legitimate? (Also, when you have the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia in disbelief at Arafat not accepting this deal... there is a reason countries decreased the pressure on Israel after this, they realize there was no offer, none, that the Palestinians would ever accept after rejecting these offers - and were they perfect? No - find me a perfect compromise between two warring peoples, I'll wait).
"The moral obligation falls on the dominant party, and Israel is beyond dominant." - I only agree with this fundamentalist view to a point. When I look at the record of that dominant party making concessions, only to be spurned time and time again, at some point agency and responsibility has to be asked of the other party.
A simple, imperfect (they often are) analogy to bipartisanship in the US - republicans accuse democrats of not legislating on a bipartisan basis while withholding their cooperation, thereby confirming a partisan process. There is a similar dynamic here - all Palestinians have to do is continue to never negotiate, and because of your fundamentalist position, you will simply always blame Israel for lack of progress.
It's obvious we disagree on this, I'm just trying to point out where I don't believe what you wrote holds up to historical or practical scrutiny.
1. You can't solve this problem with reference to history because the relevant parties will never agree on what the history actually is. I'm sure you're aware that there are pro-Palestinian scholars who would dispute every last one of your historical claims. Are they right? I don't know. It's a pointless road to go down; we can't relive the past or relitigate what happened then. All we can do is move forward.
2. The operative question is always "would you yourself consent to live under the conditions the Palestinians live now, or the way you're proposing they live after a deal?" The Palestinians have never been offered control of their own airspace, waterways, or borders, to pick a glaring example. Israel would never allow it. Ask yourself honestly: how many of the world's peoples would consent to live without control of the land, air, and sea in their territory? Very, very few.
3. The moral question remains: what do you owe to a Palestinian child who has never had anything to do with the conditions they live under now?
2. Let's take your analogy to slavery from my other comment - by this logic, why would the slaves ever agree to be free if they didn't immediately have full voting and land ownership rights? The progress may not have been total, but it *was* progress. The peace agreements and conditions weren't meant to be unchangeable pacts. Look at Sinai - when Israel pulled out, conditions were placed on both Egypt and Israel regarding acceptable levels of military infrastructure. Israel allowed Egypt to violate those rules to deal with attacks and other conflicts in Sinai, because after 30 years it trusted that Egypt would not then launch an offensive on Israel.
3. Doesn't this same question apply to an Israeli child who is the victim of terrorism who also doesn't have anything to do with the conditions they were born into?
1. By this logic, we need to find common ground with republicans who believe election was stolen - it doesn't matter what actually, really, observably happened, b/c there are people on the other side who believe the complete opposite, therefore historical context is meaningless. And yes - I'm saying I don't believe Palestinian scholarship holds up to historical scrutiny.
But hey, genuine thanks for the engagement - I may not come off like it, but I would love two states for two peoples living in peace and cooperation next to each other. While it would be hard for a government charged with defending its citizens to accept this - there is a level of risk Israel must accept to offer statehood and peace.
re: "I don't believe Palestinian scholarship holds up to historical scrutiny."
His point is that history is always a matter of interpretation and bias, so it is as likely to be part of the problem as it is a solution.
Both sides are going to tend to gaslight, cherry pick facts and distort or lie about history in service of their values, religion, political goals, etc.
Nothing will change until those values change. Assuming that the values and beliefs in question are largely shaped by geopolitics, developmental level, environment and climate, and evolutionary psychology, that seems unlikely.
Both sides hold regressive, tribalistic, premodern-mythic beliefs that are full of internal contradictions and irrationalism.
The cultural gravity well of the middle east can't sustain liberal, rational values, anyone attempting to do so is doomed until something drastic happens, such as China coming to dominate trade as UA/western influence declines. Or a giant meteorite destroys the whole region, or there is a nuclear war.
What is the video in this tweet showing / what point were you trying to make by sharing it?
https://twitter.com/AyOdeh/status/1391851115776466951
I have some idea but I'm seeing conflicting descriptions online.
A tree burning inside the al-Aqsah mosque compound. (Would you believe people don't agree on what started the fire?) Outside Israeli youth cheer and chant "Death to Palestine."
My one huge point of disagreement is on the possibility of a one-state solution. Given both the radical bigotry of groups on both sides and the structure of Israeli government I see literally no situation where it doesn't instantly become literally Weimar Germany. Large minority parties founded explicitly on the oppression of the other side will come into power and block all legislation and essentially shut down the government until they are put in power. Once in power they have the ability to oppress and will use the full force of that ability freely. With Arabs being the majority and (in my eyes) more unified on the concept of outright oppression I would imagine the most likely outcome would be what the return home for Jews was explicitly done to prevent - the crushing oppression of Jewish identity. But that doesn't really matter because it's pretty damn likely one side will do it and it's totally not acceptable regardless. I think you have to be a kumbaya liberal to look at a group who raided Al-Aqsa Mosque and a group that banned Jews from the Temple Mount and say "they will live in peace and harmony and there will not be a perpetual state of terror and dysfunction".
You can say "well ethno-states are bad" but literally every major religious group has either an autonomous territory (Punjab is a weird situation as of now, but for most of Indian independence this was the state of the region) or a state in which they are the VAST majority. You don't need an explicitly Buddhist state when you have Bhutan - a Buddhist monarchy where 3/4ths of the population is Buddhist. Jews are the only people that, without a two-state solution, have literally nowhere to go if another group decides to get their religious oppression on.
I imagine brokering the one-state solution would involve some structures and bargains to protect both sides, not just "Okay, everybody cast your vote and we'll see what happens."
The argument that religious groups need to control a state in case of persecution elsewhere has always been strange to me. Religious persecution happens all over the world, and people don't flee to the one special place where they're in charge -- they come here, for example, to the United States seeking asylum. We should ensure that everyone can live in a place where they're free from harm, and free to practice their religion. That doesn't mean a chunk of land where a religious group controls the state.
Which leads to the useless but interesting historical counterfactual: the land where Jews should have been given a permanent home that protects and nurtures them, after the Holocaust, should have been in the United States. Either just integrated into preexisting society or, like, carved out of Texas.
The one problem I see with that is it runs into the subtle cruelty of the reservation system - itself CLEARLY a bad solution that is only better because outright cultural genocide is worse. It'd be land that nobody wants and end up in a state of near-perpetual economic turmoil. If you gave the Navajo the choice between where their tribal lands are now and Santa Fe or Phoenix they'd take the latter and cry tears of joy. It's just tough given that Jews were never able to gain enough power while every other religious group cleared out their nice patch of independence back in an era where casual ethnocide was in vogue.
Also the Balfour Declaration issue. It would have looked and gone HORRIBLE post-Holocaust to go "well we promised you this but actually you get this uninhabited chunk of Texas". It's an interesting but ultimately nearly impossible counterfactual.
Well, yes, but then the Balfour Declaration was made by an imperial power who were currently dominating the Palestinians and did not even pretend to include them in the process, so it's bad looks all around.
That "choice by domination" is present in most contemporary plans. The real historical what-if that is VERY realistic and lacks the same degree of domination is "what if Britain held onto the area for 10 more years and then did the same thing they did in the partition of India?". It'd be messy and full of forced relocation a-la Indian Partition, but you'd at the very least have two states created via democratic processes.
At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Palestine was dominated by the Ottoman Empire.
This ignores the longstanding historical relationship between Judaism and the Levant.
It was originally a Neanderthal territory, up to something like 40,000 years ago.
From a mythic perspective, the Bible states that the Israelites stole the land from the Cannanites, time to give it back! (joke)
If Israel claims it is a modern, industrialized, democratic state, how can its claims to existence fall back on the mythic constructs of premodern, nomadic-tribal goat herders?
Why not return "Palestine" to the Ottoman Empire or whatever Arab monarch/warlord controlled "Palestine" before the Ottomans? They have a historic religious relationship to the region.
Islam accepts the divinity of all the Abrahamic prophets, but sees their revelations as having been corrupted. Thus, it is an Islamic responsibility to correct the errors of Jewish and Christian religion.
Mythic religion isn't part of the solution, it is a main part of the problem along with the human tendency to be tribalistic as an evolutionary survival strategy.
Tribalism does not fit well with modern social conditions. (Henrich @ Harvard on WEIRD society.)
The Hasmonean dynasty was not a myth.
I'm using the term "mythic" culture to refer to premodern (prerational, preliberal, tribal-dynastic) societies in general. Kegan stage 3.*
The basic element of the myth is spiritual purity: the world is full of evil, sin and suffering, and ritual atonement/confession is required for the believer to gain access to salvation.
The economic mode that corresponds to purity myth civilizations is agrarian settlement, walled cities.
The previous stage: nomadic hunter/gatherers ("nature worship", shamanism, tantra, etc). Kegan stage 2.
The following stages:
modern rationalism, industrialism. Kegan stage 4.
postmodern pluralism, information economy: Kegan stage 5 (network structures replace hierarchies)
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* https://meaningness.com/political-understanding-stages
The Bible is a good deal more complicated than "entirely mythical" or "historically accurate in every respect."
There is a Jewish people that took root in that part of the world. We have an historic relationship to the region.
(Again) so, do Neanderthals, Cannanites and many others.
Special pleading is a problematic rhetoric.
Warren Porter, indeed. Whenever people say that a Jewish homeland could have been carved out of a place to which we have no historical or cultural tie, I know that they really don't understand what it means to be a Jew with a cultural and historical tie to a particular piece of geography. You don't have to be a Zionist for that connection to run deep.
or maybe brainwashed with propaganda
Kinky Freidman ran for governor of Texas saying he would lower the speed limit to 49.95
Exactly right. I have been saying this for years. In fact, I think we should do this NOW.
Alas, the irrational emotional attachment to specific land would also have to be overcome. I think of this as "I must be able to piss on the land my ancestors pissed on." I've never been able to grok this sentiment, but it seems quite strong in many people all over the world.
Most indigenous peoples have an emotional attachment to the land of their ancestors, and they have throughout history. It's only a very recent Western phenomenon to have lost that attachment.
That is quite correct. And IMO, that loss is a great good. It should be encouraged wherever and whenever possible.
I thoroughly disagree.
I'm a Jew, but I'm not a Zionist, I've never been to Israel, I never intend to visit Israel, and I have no emotional tie to any modern nation-state, including Israel. And yet, I feel a tie to the place that my people began, and my life would be much the poorer without it.
Many peoples see their ancestral lands as sacred, including Jews, and I see nothing wrong with it and a good deal right with it. The problem comes when that tie results in bloodshed and the oppression of other people.
Are you talking about a Lebanon-type governmental arrangement?
That's one approach. Probably something to ensure equal or meaningful representation for the minority, plus a constitution with certain protections and guarantees to both sides. But I don't claim to know the best system.
I've previously toyed with the idea of a democracy under a constitutional monarchy with a Jewish royal family and Palestinian voting majority, but then it sounds too much like the nightmare in Bahrain and I try to forget the idea.
re: "Jews are the only people that, without a two-state solution, have literally nowhere to go if another group decides to get their religious oppression on."
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comment: that doesn't sound quite right. Yazidis, Kurds, numerous indigenous people on various continents, including nomadic or formerly nomadic tribes...
And Tibetans. And Native American tribes.
Great post. At the time, I was one of the people who opposed talking about Israel at the Iraq war protests, simply because we were already failing at our primary purpose -- and bringing up Israel turned a lot of people off.
We already had such a huge problem with coherent messaging. I went to DC protest in September 2005 (organized by ANSWER) and it was chaos. Every damn group in the world that wanted attention showed up. Iraq, Israel, IMF, racism in general, legalize pot, abortion, gay rights, free the Idaho Eight or whatever -- or no cause at all, just signs with various jokes and slogans about how Bush was stupid.
But the Israel messaging probably turned the most people off because it was so prominent (from the podium, not just the crowd) and controversial. People on the ground around me were complaining about it. Someone on the Metro told me she would have gone, but she refused to support anything hostile to Israel.
But I agree with you about Israel. In this situation, they're the powerful one. Nothing in history could justify what they're doing to the Palestinian people. I also agree that there should be one state with equality for all citizens. I always liked what Edward Said wrote, and it still makes a lot of sense to me today.
Excellent post, and I agree with all of it - barring the notion that the accusations against Jeremy Corbyn were 'weak tea' and stuck simply because he was an easy far left target. You are clear at the start of this piece that there is a rancid antisemitism in left-wing spaces, and, observing this, it's very difficult to understand how this wouldn't include Corbyn as such an example.
His supporters and the man himself are still insisting that the many examples of his antisemitism are simply smears by 'Rothschilds', 'Zionists', 'The Israeli Lobby' etc. who, ahem, control the media.
He described Hamas as a force for social justice and peace in the Middle East; Hamas whose charter is explicitly antisemitic and calls for the death of all Jews. This incident alone should have ended his career outside of the crank zone, let alone the debate as to whether he is antisemitic or not.
On March 4, 1996, a suicide bomber blew himself up, along with 13 others—12 civilians, 1 soldier—outside Dizengoff Center, the largest shopping mall in Tel Aviv, located on one of the busiest streets in the country. A former partner of mine was about 6, and headed to a birthday party at the mall’s arcade. He was there, and while he remained physically unscathed, he did not walk away unharmed. Do you know what it looks like after a bombing? Do you know what it looks like to a child? This person is a good Tel Avivi lefty—votes Meretz, refers to “the occupation,” not “the territories,” not “Israel-proper” or “Judea and Sumeria” (in Israel, the words you use to describe “the situation” are designators of your politics, and the only issue with political salience is “the situation.”) But does this good leftist go to the protests? No. He cannot be in crowds. He is traumatized. He is not a wall. A bomb is not an egg.
I have another friend, a Palestinian woman a few years younger than my ex. Technically, she is an “Israeli Arab,” but she would never call herself that, least of all to her parents in Jerusalem who have suffered violence and theft and hate, who cannot visit their parents in Gaza, whose parents in Gaza are poor and stuck and have never known safety. My friend will never know her grandparents because Gaza is 5 billion miles away from everywhere. Gaza in on the moon. Though she doesn’t, her family hates Jews because the boot on the neck of all Palestinians is a Jewish boot.
So how exactly does a one-state solution work? The Jews will be pushed to the sea. The Palestinians will be slaughtered. There will be no successful power-sharing arrangement. Most of the Palestinians living under brutal occupation do not want to live in a secular democracy alongside Jews, and the Israelis do not want to live in a secular democracy alongside Arabs. A one-state solution in a Western fairytale that the people in the region are untied in rejecting.
I like the idea of the one state solution, but it would require a huge shift in attitudes and beliefs. It's something I dream might happen in a few generations, not a few years.
Like it or not, the modern nation state system is an invention of the west that was imposed on the middle east during the colonial era.
The claim that modernism would liberate the middle east from mythic culture, despotism, poverty, ignorance, illiteracy and disease is peculiar in that context.
There are more forces supporting regression to premodern culture in the middle east than to progress to modernism.
"There is and has always been only one conclusion that could bring this tilted world into balance: a shared state in the land between the river and the sea..."
Nothing has happened in recent history to suggest that the Arabs see the conflict as anything but zero sum. They don't want a balanced conclusion. Isn't it kind of dishonest then to hold Israel accountable unilaterally for achieving that conclusion?
I studied Islamic history informally for 30 years, and it became clear that the basic Muslim belief is that Jews (as well as Christians) corrupted the originally pure Abrahamic tradition. Muhammad claimed to be a direct descendent of Abraham and to have a divine revelation that was meant to re-establish the spiritual purity of the Abrahamic tradition.
That reflects a mythic level of awareness (as per evolutionary psychology).
Israel's claim to be better than Arabs/Muslims (justifying occupation) is based on being a more modern-rationalist culture, but that position contains some serious contradictions.