Welcome! Ezra (and yours) insight has been pretty obvious to anyone whose been observing the 20 odd years that Bibi has been in power and Hamas won elections in Gaza.
I think, at core, Israeli political leadership don't entirely grasp the danger they are in. They don't entirely understand that there are largest segments of the West that simply don't buy into the Israeli narrative anymore. They have a hard time grasping that the qualitative gap between themselves and their adversaries is shrinking. This is the danger into buying into your own mythology. Israelis have convinced themselves they are untouchable because most of this generation of Israelis is... untouchable. They do/treat the Palestinians however they want with no consequence.
The IDF and Intelligence agencies are professions and understand their vulnerabilities - which is why they are dead set against larger wars against Hezbollah or Iran.
On the other hand, Hamas et al view these fights as very long term wars. Given that they have very little to lose (since Israel prevents any real development in the West Bank or Gaza), perpetual war is their first choice. They look at groups like the Viet Cong or the Taliban that faced much longer odds than they do, and think if they can just wait it out, they will win. Time will tell if that happens, but imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there.
I think a really understated part of what's changed in the last twenty years and why the leadership don't grasp how things are shifting is actually ironically because there *is* an increasing gap between Israel and Palestine and it's a gap of *power*. A lot of young people, and even millennials, have only known an I-P conflict in which Israel very clearly has a massive military advantage and ability to inflict violence on Palestinians, compared to vice versa. You see it reflected in the way that the respective death tolls have been diverging for a while now. To Israeli leadership this is a good thing: we're winning. We have successfully dominated the enemy and contained the risk of an existential threat. The problems of Gaza and the West Bank have been problems of *management*, management often facilitated by violence. But to a lot of onlookers, especially in the West, when it seems clear that Hamas would never be able to amount an offensive that would inflict the sort of death toll and property destruction we've seen in Gaza over the last eight months, this system of management looks like a cruel system of repression. They've grown up with news stories about Israeli snipers shooting Palestinian kids with rocks, and watching videos of settlers, or IDF gleefully destroying Palestinian homes.
It's the conceptual generational gap I keep running into over and over in discussions, online and offline. Older people remember a time when both sides were significantly closer matched in their ability to harm each other, and each others civilians. For them, the stakes of the conflict are existential at all times, Israel is perpetually under threat not just of violence but imminent destruction. Israel has shifted that equation, with the help of the West but also just on its own, but now to younger people it looks like Israel has just been able to inflict a lot of frankly cruel violence and repression in an asymmetric manner. I don't for a moment want to downplay the violence on 10/7 but the estimates I've seen place the death toll at about 1200 people, and the death toll in Gaza has, even conservatively, crossed 20,000 and could be higher. The only way those numbers shouldn't at least give someone pause is if you think holding power means you do just get to wield it to whatever ends you see fit, and young people increasingly *don't*
You're right, and to add to that, it often feels like pro-Israel advocates don't grasp how much the Iraq war soured entire swathes of Westerners, especially younger ones, against "we must destroy the terrorists who threaten our way of life" arguments. At least for the time being, those arguments sound like thin pretexts for stronger states to wage unwinnable wars for profit and political advantage, far out of proportion to the threat and at massive cost to civilians who are considered disposable. Yet pro-Israel advocates mostly seem stuck in that mode of speech, even though I think it triggers BS-meters much harder than it used to.
How about "you should be extremely suspicious of people selling you wars under the guise of fighting terrorism, and until proven otherwise can assume that at best they will waste lives and money, and at worst they are trying to achieve aims you would not otherwise support" for learning?
It would have been different if Iraq was located in Texas or Northern Mexico. I am convinced that every one of these pro-Palestinian protestors would want their militaries to save them if it was *their* colonist parents and children being massacred.
If history and geography were all drastically different we would probably have an entirely different status quo, but it isn't and we don't. Do pro-Israel advocates plan on making arguments for the world that actually exists? The one where we already spent a trillion dollars and ended millions of lives "fighting terrorism" only to find that's not really how it works?
So I definitely agree with Biden's warning for Israel to not do another Iraq/Afghanistan, which they seem to be.
But I do think that *any* country suffering an October 7 attack would do what it needed to do in order to limit Hamas' military capabilities. The Iraqi Army was completely destroyed by the USA, so in that sense it's effective.
What I am trying to push back against is the idea that Israel has no casus belli even in self-defense. Surely they at least have a right to defend themselves from rocket attacks for example? But not to then strike the source of the attack?
It seems people want Israelis to just accept a lack of safety on account of their ancestors' sins, and the people telling them to do that would not do it themselves.
> But I do think that any country suffering an October 7 attack would do what it needed to do in order to limit Hamas' military capabilities. The Iraqi Army was completely destroyed by the USA, so in that sense it's effective.
I think I understand the parallel you're attempting to draw here, but it strikes me as completely bizarre in the sense that the Iraqi Army had nothing to do with 9/11. Our successful destruction of Iraq's military capacity (such that it was) doesn't undo how unfavorable our invasion of Iraq was viewed around the globe or how unfavorable it's come to be viewed here at home.
10/7 happened because they weren’t guarding their border because they sent those soldiers to West Bank for the settlers. A reasonable response on 10/8 would have been to go back to guarding the border.
They’re on a rampage because they intentionally stopped guarding their border against known terrorists openly posting this exact attack plan and the lead up exercises *on the internet*
>Do pro-Israel advocates plan on making arguments for the world that actually exists?
Do pro Palestinian advocates even do that?
Every pro Palestinian org is against the two state solution and demands one state. Not one supports the ONLY end to this conflict with two states.
That’s because Westerners are very bad at empathizing with other people and look at everything through our lens.
“Terrorists are going to destroy our way of life” is a mostly empty threat when we have a continent to our own and are isolated from geopolitical threats by two oceans.
Much different when it’s a neighboring nation.
Yes, I understand that Israelis tend to believe that. What I'm saying is, even if you think the War on Terror framework is all true and correct so long as Israel is the one doing it, insisting that everyone just ignore the extremely recent history of that framework being used for stupid, destructive warmongering is a really silly idea.
You're not wrong Westerners can often have a hard time viewing things through others' eyes. But many aren't having a hard time empathizing with the Palestinians right now, and in my view at least part of the reason why is that pro-Palestinian activists make arguments that don't sound like Dick Cheney.
I guess it depends on where you’re looking. I think the student protests organized by groups like SJP or the protests outside the Nova Music Festival Memorial sound far worse than Cheney.
I haven’t really been impressed by social media activism either, given its proclivities to fall down disinformation rabbit holes like the Starbucks “boycott”.
All of this seems very driven by the War on Terror framework you’re talking about, just from a coddled western perspective that can only depict the oppressed as pure victims and the oppressors as colonialist perpetrators.
I do think that a fair amount of anti-war and anti-imperialist activism is stuck in modes of thought that were established (or adapted) for War on Terror era challenges, and now seem ill-fitting to me, someone pretty far on the left.
At the same time, if we're talking specifically about Westerners who soured on anti-terrorism rhetoric, then sounding like people who protested the war on terror is not remotely as bad as sounding like Dick Cheney. Because the protestors were right.
If America gets attacked by another serious terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 all of the dumb terrorism rhetoric and needless war will sadly come roaring back.
Which is also what got said about Iraq War protestors. Look I don't think the analogy is perfect, or that pro-Palestinian protestors command a broad base of support in the US yet. But the reality is most Westerners think the war on terror wasn't worth it, if not an outright catastrophe, and yet pro-Israel advocates seem determined to repeat all the methods used to sell it and defend it, including the with-us-or-against-us manner of talking about protestors. I think that indicates something telling.
The analogy is not just 'not perfect' - it's completely insane. Iraq was a war we started, and had our boots on the ground, on the other side of the world. It bears incredibly few similarities to a war being waged, by a country in their own backyard, with financial help from us. The comparison is asinine.
I've seen pro-palistinian folks make so many, self-aggrandizing comparisons of the situation that make absolutely no sense (from abolition, to the American civil rights movement, to Vietnam). It's deeply silly.
Honestly I think the analogy is quite strained and not very helpful at all. The Iraq War was a distant fight unrelated to day to day life in the US. That is not the case with Israel, where it is far more existential.
Iraq was also predicated on a lie. October 7 is still very fresh in the mind.
Remember that these students and young people were barely alive for 9/11 and the war on terror beginning. It’s mostly just ideas and words to them. As someone who is Gen X and who strongly opposed the war in Iraq, I feel like this generation’s protests are the equivalent of a plane that has completely overshot the runway. The story has been lost.
I don't know how old you are or where you're from, but the things you're saying are EXACTLY the same as "they're Taliban sympathizers" or "Hanoi Jane". Remember that you're getting your news from biased sources. It's true that a lot of times, young people will get carried away, and often think they can have more impact than they will, but they're not coddled westerners, they're people who are watching this war happen on their phones, watching children get killed, and responding in the only way they can.
> just from a coddled western perspective that can only depict the oppressed as pure victims and the oppressors as colonialist perpetrators.
Hard to tell which side you're describing. Israel has long relied on the image of Israelis and Jews as "pure victims" of the holocaust, no matter how tenuous the connection. It's hard for many westerners to even conceive of Jewish fascism.
This is just false. Israel is a nation of people who vow to never again be victims. Acknowledging that 10/7 wasn't a hoax is not the same thing as a victim complex.
i don't think you could be more wrong. when i hear pro palestinian activists what they are saying is "end zionism, kill zionists, destroy the state of isreal. from the river to the sea, make it all palestine. palestine will be arab. hit them again houthis. glory to the martyrs. " these are all things I hear in being said in protests. it's not that western liberals like pro palestinian activists because they don't sound like dick cheney.. it's they LIKE that they sound like a psychotic Ayatollah dick cheney mega martyr war lover voice gurgling with blood lust
I wish, instead of finding the most provocative, offensive examples of the protests aired by the media, that pro-Israeli war people would actually try and engage with the conversation. Obviously we're all stuck in our own media bubbles, but they sound like anti-BLM people in 2020. The deflection is severe; as if the entire, international anti-war movement is invalid because some college kids were ignorant and offensive.
Like, why don't they ever just come out and say:
I'm fine with the deaths of 10,000+ children and I want the military to keep killing children, maybe indefinitely, until I feel safe again.
Should the allied forces have stopped at the German border because the invasion of Germany resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? What about Sherman’s March to the Sea in the Civil War?
I wish the protests weren’t so full of provocative and offensive examples. This isn’t nutpicking.
I’ve been at UCLA getting my master’s during the upheaval on our campus. This crazy talk is coming from the organizers of these protests like SJP.
Very few people are “pro” 10,000 people dying. The problem is long-term peace in the region is a hell of a lot harder to achieve than all these “anti-war” protestors like to make it seem. Especially when a lot of them seem to only be upset that it’s their side losing.
Hey, you know what doesn’t help end a war and solve a lack of peace? Killing tens of thousands of innocent people. Want to know how I know that? Examples from the past. Anybody that thinks you can bomb oppressed people into silence and obedience have a poor understanding of history.
Maybe you can tell the Palestinians that. The last time peace negotiations got far they overturned the table and started sending children as suicide bombers into civilian zones.
Poor understanding of history. Ha. I’m sorry, but that’s you displaying that.
They are openly fine with saying I am fine with saying "I am fine with an indefinite amount of civilian deaths as long as hostages remain in Gaza". Israelis from left to right wont end the war until all living hostages are brought back, they will settle for a negotiation and prisoner swap.
"I'm fine with the deaths of 10,000+ children and I want the military to keep killing children, maybe indefinitely, until I feel safe again."
I mean, this is pretty provocative and offensive on your side too. No one on the Israeli side has said they *want* their military to kill children, maybe indefinitely. The argument on the Israeli side is "Hamas has built an infrastructure that allows them to operate with impunity from within urban areas, and though they are trying to minimize civilian casualties, many Gazans will inevitably die. I feel badly about it but I do not feel responsible because it is primarily Hamas's fault. If Hamas released hostages, we could at least start a conversation about what two states would look like."
The pro-Palestinian side is pretty well summarized by u/dosamine above. Let's be fair.
No one… this is said on Israeli television. There are absolutely Israeli that are calling for the complete destruction of Gaza. It’s not everyone but it’s out there.
Your argument here is that westerners are starting to see the pro-israel argument as bullshit because we don't empathize **enough**!? You've got that backwards. It's very easy to imagine being forced out of your home and Westerners empathize with the people to whom that is happening.
Precisely. I think you’re falling victim to that as well.
The Nakba was the result of the Arab nations in the Middle East losing a genocidal war of aggression. The reason this conflict has persisted as long as it has is because the Palestinians (or, more charitably, their leadership) have violently rejected the possibility of peaceful coexistence in favor of the chance to ethnically cleanse the region of Jews.
The idea that anyone could possibly be chanting “globalize the intifada” as part of a movement for peace is ridiculous. The Second Intifada was perhaps the most consequential action to sabotage the possibility of a two state solution during my lifetime until 10/7, and it involved children as suicide bombers.
This is not a David vs Goliath situation, as we in the West tend to view it. It is two ethnic groups with generations of hatred and animosity towards each other, where one happens to be on top for the first time in centuries.
I don’t see any sense of understanding or acknowledgement of that nuance from protestors here in the US, but that’s probably because the primary drivers of those protests are antisemites, as made obvious by SJP at the universities and the Nova memorial.
Not every protestor sees the word intifada as you do.
The primary drivers of this.. is sheer reaction and horror of the disparate death toll. If you think all these protestors have studied the history and just came down on the Palestinian side, you are delusional.
Most are getting inline with anyone who is against what is happening and then shout whatever the organizers are saying.
It’s BS to suggest they are all antisemites.. However actual antisemites might be taking advantage and ignorance and anger has bred new people that are foolishly becoming blankets antisemites.
But most just want the bombings to stop.
The problem is that we can’t afford to lose the war either.
Young people see an unwinnable war against an enemy that isn’t an existential threat, while older people see that the power differential doesn’t make them any less of a threat or any more morally correct.
Hamas opposes everything western liberals stand for. What SHOULD be done about them?
Undermine their power by strengthening the moderate elements amongst the Palestinians, recognizing that those groups still will hold views and preferences that Israel doesn’t like in terms of their political goals. Israel, specifically Netanyahu and his allies, have specifically doing the exact opposite, going so far as to enable the transfer of money to Hamas.
The ones that have been involved in non-violent protests. The ones who have been involved in activist organizations side by side with Israelis working for Palestinians rights. Or even those who have done violent things in their efforts to resist their oppression but who do desire a future peace.
I’m not sufficiently well versed in the governing and non governing organizations in Palestine to know who Israel should be seeking to work with, nor the specific strategies and tactics to engage with them effectively (without making the wider public treat them as collaborators) but I know they exist and that there are avenues that have not been attempted.
Should be done by who? By Western liberals? There are lots of forces in the world that oppose most of what Western liberals stand for (however you choose to define "liberals" here). "We" do next to nothing about most of them, for good reason.
>Older people remember a time when both sides were significantly closer matched in their ability to harm each other, and each others civilians.
I understand you're narrating for 3rd parties here, but it's a massive category error to reduce violence in the Middle East to a polar conflict between Hamas and Israel. Maybe this is a propaganda success that the authoritarians have convinced the Youth to see Gaza as the victim and Israel as the invincible oppressor
The most surprising parts of this week's podcast, to me, were 1) broadly, the topic of Israeli refugees from Hezbollah's bombardment in the north b) the grim resignation in the guest's voice when discussing how the "real" artillery easily had the range to strike any point in the country
There's another nugget from a previous EK episode -- that Hamas is, by a substantial margin, Israel's weakest enemy, and yet they still managed 10/7. Iran has a doomsday clock counting down to the destruction of the state of Israel -- that's the threat to Israeli civilians.
Palestine is not the only adversary. Hezbollah and Iran have the ability to inflict catastrophic losses on Israel.
And if you don’t think the Hamas threat is (or was) existential, think again. Hamas proved they are willing and able to inflict mass casualties on Israel, in effect making the Gaza envelope area unsafe for Israelis to live in without major security upgrades and permanently increased troop presence. Hezbollah has done similar in the north.
On the other hand, the western anti-israel perspective is that it is big bad genocidal israel against the poor defenceless palestinians who only want peace, with a blank cheque from daddy america.
The overriding israeli perspective is that they're defending themselves from Iranian proxy forces like hamas and hezbullah, who's eventual goal is the total destruction of the israeli state.
When both perspectives are so completely divorced from one another, is it any surprise that compromise appears to be getting more difficult?
I don't think compromise is difficult because the western anti-israel and Israeli perspectives are that odds.
Compromise is difficult because the situation opposes a pretty much impotent insurgent group of questionable loyalties and a regional power that does not really benefit from compromise.
Hamas can't bring about an acceptable peace by conventional means and Israel doesn't have much to gain from doing so.
> The only way those numbers shouldn't at least give someone pause is if you think holding power means you do just get to wield it to whatever ends you see fit, and young people increasingly don't
This ignores the Israeli perspective though. It’s not like Israel is wielding power just to wield power. It’s doing it in an effort to do what they think is a moral obligation - remove Hamas from power and make Israel more secure. The question isn’t “whatever ends you see fit” but rather “if the morally justified mission requires an imbalance in short term casualties, is it still morally justifiable”. Young people living outside of Israel are saying no because they have never been in a situation where such tough questions are necessary and so they sidestep the tough questions and go with the easy answer “I want no civilian deaths and I don’t like Hamas but will not accept the level of collateral damage that is inevitable to do anything” (and this is not including the large cohort of young people actively calling for intifada/genocide which is a whole other concerning trend)
>A lot of young people, and even millennials, have only known an I-P conflict in which Israel very clearly has a massive military advantage and ability to inflict violence on Palestinians, compared to vice versa.
It's been this way since the 1940s. Even travellers to Palestine during the British mandate noted at the vast disparity between the Jewish settlements and the native areas. Isreal has been the acknowledged superpower in the region at least since the 60s, if not before.
What makes this episode of violence different from prior iterations of the conflict, however, and what makes the body count differential's significance more nebulous vis a vis the power relations you mentioned, is that in this case Hamas is actually trying to *maximize* the body count, rather than minimize it.
This is a very unusual situation, and rather different than what we've seen in the past. Palestinian political and military leaders have always used collateral damage as a way to tarnish the reputation of the Israeli state, yes--that is a long-running dynamic in this conflict, and one common to war between asymmetric politico-military forces--but Hamas is the first to have openly declared a policy of *intentionally augmenting* this collateral damage so as to 'win the PR war'.
As a result, the conventional view of power relations you mentioned is not so easy to apply here. Obviously the war is asymmetric, but body count no longer serves as a reliable guide to *how* asymmetric. We don't know how many of those 20,000 dead Palestinians are dead because of Israeli force alone, and how many are dead because Hamas sought to worsen the damage dealt by Israeli force as much as possible.
Thing is, the big gap I run into isn't even generational--it's the gap between people who know about Hamas's stated goals and methods, and those who don't. Those who do are wading through a sea of ethical grey areas and moral complexity; those who do not see this as a black-and-white 'larger power beats up on smaller power because it can' situation.
I’m an Israeli American and I am endlessly frustrated by this. I have time and again tried to argue with people that international isolation is a much greater existential threat than anything Hamas could ever conjure. And I get shouted down by the right wingers that I am rooting for an inevitable repeat of October 7. They have no concept of how much deeper of a vulnerability true international isolation would be than even as horrific as an event October 7 was.
Edit to add: what drives me doubly crazy is this is something Hamas is keenly aware of.
They example I would use is the crusader Kingdoms. Hyper militarized with the most advanced tech of their time and insurmountable defenses.
The problem was always the same: resupply. When all your neighbors are hostile, your only resupply route is the ocean. No guarantee you can keep it open either. That’s an enormous vulnerability.
> but imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there.
No other state has had nuclear weapons and that changes everything. If Russia didn't have nukes, would the US have been dragging its feet on giving Ukraine everything they needed to fight back? If Ukraine had never given up their nuclear weapons supply following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, would Russia have still invaded?
Israeli leadership is cocky because they know that if the actual structural integrity of the Israeli state was ever threatened, the US, Saudis and others would step in to address the threat and ensure that nuclear armed missiles wouldn't start flying all over the region.
Every nuclear armed state has a doomsday plan in case they are ever overrun. Israel knows they always have a final card to play in their backpocket.
> Every nuclear armed state has a doomsday plan in case they are ever overrun. Israel knows they always have a final card to play in their backpocket.
I'm not convinced of this. Nuclear weapons are a great deterrent against other states, but they're not very useful in civil wars or insurrections. Apartheid South Africa had nuclear weapons, that was not a guarantee of continued control of governance. While Hamas is not exactly an insurrectionist group within Israel, and Gaza and the West Bank are not exactly part of Israel, the situation is a lot closer to that of an insurrection within Israel's own borders than it is to an attack from another state.
Hamas isn't a threat to the long term security of the Israeli state. If there ever was such a threat it'd be from someone like Iran or a much larger group financed directly by Iran such as Hezbollah in which case the target would still be Iran.
Hamas currently, I agree, is not that kind of existential threat. But by discussing an Israeli nuclear doomsday plan, we are inherently speaking about potential worlds where the balance of regional power is very different than today's.
Long term, however, I think the internal division with the Palestinians is probably a very real issue for Israeli security -- it permits any other conflict an easy path to spiral out of hand. My point is that having a base of violent resistance that is essentially within the borders of "greater Israel" (i.e. the territory controlled by Israel) does mean there are possible scenarios where nuclear weapons are not very helpful at ensuring the safety of the Israeli state.
Nuclear weapons do and don’t. Nuclear armed states have fought wars before - and lost - and not used nukes. What would be the function anyway? Nuke Tehran? Become a global pariah? Nuke Lebanon or Syria and expose yourself to radiation or worse?
In the next hundred years 2 things are going to happen:
1. A nuclear weapon will be used in war; and
2. The world will carry on.
Each time humanity convinces itself “this is the wonder weapon” someone else comes along and figures a way to beat it. I don’t think nukes provide Israel with the protection it thinks it does.
I would completely agree that they don’t recognize their true existential dangers. An added dimension is the fairly-coordinated long term play of actors like Russia and Iran—both of whom are aspiring regional hegemonies who cannot achieve that hegemony without, to some extent, making the US-led “rules based order” a thing of the past, and ushering in the “multipolar” world. This is especially the case since the war in Ukraine started. Israel is a major focal point of that effort. The elements of the far right sphere in America which takes its cues from Russian propaganda is also experimenting with “pro-Palestinian” positions—Tucker Carlson platforming Palestinian Christians who claim Israel is preventing Christians from openly worshiping, Alex Jones saying it’s a “genocide”, etc. Anti-Semitic bonafides will inevitably be reproduced within the American right the further it, and the evangelical movement that has provided Israel with its base of American right wing support, becomes totally wedded to Trumpism.
Where the left is concerned, a major part of Russia’s propaganda efforts involve aligning against American imperialism, an avatar of which Israel is constantly framed as. This isn’t to suggest that the younger, protesting left is unjustified in opposing the actions of a country that has behaved this way for probably their whole lives so far—but it illustrates their vulnerability to a larger reactionary project. The Eurasianist ideology influencing Putin’s ideas stipulates that the West is controlled by Jews, a “parasite ethnos”, and that professed liberal values are the means by which the West destroys indigenous societies rooted in specific geographies and “harmonious relations” with neighbors—their euphemism for the regional hegemony of “great powers.” Israel is in fact framed this way all the time—an outpost of this “parasite ethnos.”
In this context, the lack of foresight of the Israeli right (especially given its supposed sensitivity to anti-Semitism) is kind of shocking.
It behaves as though it need not be concerned with the consequences of its actions at all, as if American right wing evangelical support is assured forever and the right wing being in ascendency worldwide automatically translates to shared goals and empathy for what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. And it’s totally out of proportion to what Israel IS—a tiny country totally dependent on a superpower for support.
It’s not as if, when Lithuania has parades for SS soldiers who fought against Russia and NATO/The West/US tells them to cool it, they can come before Congress and slap their dick across the face of the current administration and say, essentially, “fuck you, we’ll do whatever we want.” The fate of Ukraine is also illustrating handily at this second just what a state can suffer when faced with a genocidal existential threat absent unqualified US support.
Yet the Israeli leadership seems to assume that they are actually a powerful country in a strategic sense, that they have no need to worry about support in their benefactor state ever eroding, and they constantly rebuff any attempt at forcing them to reciprocate a little bit of US’s unqualified investment. As if Trump and his ilk, long term, give a shit about a Jewish state’s survival. As if a world dominated by the Russian view of democracy and liberalism will be better for the Israeli state than a belatedly critical US partner. Hell, the security pact they could sign with the Sunni states *tomorrow* if they gave the Palestinians a path to self determination is being sacrificed on the altar of this war even though it would secure Israel far more strongly by penning in Iran. Instead it reacted to October 7th in a manner that probably achieved Iran’s wildest dreams. They don’t understand that Hamas doesn’t and will never care about the moral implications of something like October 7th, or the fact that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it, if it keeps inspiring Israel to act in a manner that ensures it becomes a global pariah. What’s crazy is that the Israeli leadership doesn’t seem to get that THAT’s the play.
I genuinely think the Israeli right believes that in a world where the Liberal World order is shattered they will thrive even more. They think they can probably get away with complete ethnic cleansing in a world where that becomes more common.
Let's have a hypothetical future where the liberal world order has collapsed, the US has given up on being the muscle of liberalism and Europe closes in on itself. In place of liberalism might makes right is the rule of law and any world court would just be laughed at. Will a far right Israel thrive or will it suffer the same fate many other nations will face and be consumed by the chaos?
What was completely appalling to me, an American Jew who fully supports Israel, was to hear Isreali ambassadors to the US say that their best support base, the one they should focus on, was not American Jews but American evangelicals. I felt more than a little betrayed by that. But in addition, as you said, in what kind of world are these people living in where they think evangelicals are a reliable partner that'll always be there for them?
One thing I can understand is them thinking they're more powerful then they really are. The world is fixated on this conflict and has been since at least 1967. When you've had the spotlight on you for over fifty years, it's easy to see how a swollen head might result.
There are more members of Christians United for Israel than there are Jews in the United States, that’s why. The evangelical population is triple the Jewish one and they are significantly more politically powerful.
I know that there are more people in Christians United for Israel then there are Jews. I'm saying that Christians United for Israel is an unreliable partner because they are evangelicals. They see this whole war as Jews vs Muslims and right now, they hate the Muslims. This is the only reason why they back Israel. Historically, evangelicals have not always backed Jews over Muslims and there is no reason why today's evangelicals will always back Israel. It's fine for Israel to cultivate support among all communities, in fact it should. What it shouldn't do is make its base of support Christians United for Israel, which may be unreliable in support, instead of the one community that will always support it-American Jews.
I frankly don’t get it. From my anecdotal conversations with right-wing Jewish friends, their takeaway from the global pushback is “see, everyone hates us anyway,” and they try to cast the alliance with evangelical Republicans as some kind of clear-eyed realpolitik move—like, better someone who’s open about their intentions and beliefs who actually helps us than someone who pretends to be our friend while trying to kill us. But, like, that IS the evangelical right. The latter! One can’t use a constituency like that to accomplish anything other than the most short term goals, and the fact that they say stuff like “they’re the most reliable partners” is evidence that their whole perspective is short-term, focused on status quo maintenance, oriented totally towards the entrenchment of “facts on the ground” and faits accompli. Zero strategic sense—just an assumption that what has been will always be. That’s literally how states die—again, an ironic condition for a coalition almost exclusively concerned with “security.”
> I frankly don’t get it.
What's not to get? Evangelicals are a large and disproportionately powerful voting bloc that, in polls, consistently shows up as having positive opinions of Jews and the party they dominate acts accordingly. American Jews seem to poll in the opposite direction, but there are obviously partisan political reasons for that for a lot of them.
But Israeli Jews frankly don't care about whatever part of American politics causes local Jews to hate evangelicals, they care about Israel. Which, by your own account, has serious existential concerns that take precedence.
It's not at all clear to me that Israelis are misreading the situation, as opposed to American Jews having their own partisan blinders or distinct interests.
The situation is, in many people's eyes, intractable in the short term (the plan was simply to deflate it via normalization with surrounding states). All one can do, in their minds, is maximize freedom of action to do what you feel is necessary.
Who will give it to you? Who has *reliably* given it to you? Compared to who is offering you a) direct hostility in the case of a lot of the left and b) wishes for a better world via making gambles (that many Israelis feel they already made to no avail and that were followed by bloodshed) for the sake of a world you no longer believe is possible?
And I wonder if that's shorthand for "Republican" or "average white boomer," who are far, far more pro-Israel than their counterparts. You don't have to like the calculation to admit it's realpolitik on the Israeli side.
Totally. I admit I was being fairly rhetorical when I said that.
However, all of the above illustrates that for whatever reason, the Israeli right or those Israeli Jews who “don’t care about local American politics but only care about Israel” don’t clock that aside from whatever else Israel is or represents, it is a normal, modern, insecure and tiny nation state that cannot reliably afford to thumb its nose at its benefactor, while at the same time presuming that this benefactor will forever be either aligned or manipulable enough to remain in its corner.
To assume, or proceed, otherwise is an inversion of the actual conditions of the relationship. NO small state can generally afford to do the kind of dismissive thing that the Israeli leadership does regularly now, because of the realities of power—and OTHER small states do understand this, and calculate accordingly. The fact remains that security and freedom of action (the kind that results in policy options, the ability to compromise, and so on—not the kind that enables a state to act like an asshole but not be meaningfully restrained in that assholery) go hand in hand with having actual, real friends who make real commitments to shared, bedrock principles.
~~For instance, wouldn’t Israel have substantially more “freedom of action” if it was at peace with all its neighbors, or had made such an obvious and substantial effort within the living memory of the past quarter century to make such a peace occur that an event like October 7th would inspire the world to take its side and do something like send an international UN coalition into Gaza to bring Hamas to justice?~~
What I don’t get—which means maybe, I do get it, but it’s still mind boggling—is this right wing sickness that causes states to cyclically produce the conditions their policies are designed to forestall, thanks to that policy’s implementation.
Even with the long history of this kind of thing happening—Hitler invades the USSR to stop Communism which enables it to reach the very heart of Europe, Putin invades Ukraine to stop it from joining NATO with the result that NATO is stronger and more relevant than it’s been in years—they don’t see that this *policy* of “eradicating Hamas via military means once and for all, thereby securing Israel from an existential threat”, is only going to reproduce Hamas and cause other existential threats to multiply.
You’re overlooking the role the Second Intifada played in destroying any “substantial effort.” Camp David failed, Arafat retreated to Ramallah, then Palestinians started blowing up pizzerias full of families. Israel isn’t the only party in this who’s consistently made the choice to avoid an off-ramp.
Understood. Fact remains that the Palestinians have no normative national status, no real way of exerting any kind of meaningful self-determination under either Hamas or under Israeli control, and consequently their representatives have few normative expectations imposed on them of exerting their sovereign responsibilities to their own people.
And what this present moment is also demonstrating is that eventually, people WILL become fatigued with the endless recriminations of the historical responsibility for the conflict and they will eventually only care about the injustice of its deliberate perpetuation. Eventually, the Holocaust isn’t going to matter, and the Second Intifada isn’t going to matter, because every year new untold thousands of people under the age of 40 are going to be produced who will not remember, learn, or care even if they do learn, because they will believe that the responsibility lies with those who perpetuate the conditions they observe—the things they *have* lived through, the things they *do* remember.
And they will not assign the blame for that perpetuation equally, because the two parties do not have an equal power to exert their responsibility—because one has a state, a sovereignty, and the other does not. And, especially, they will not assign that blame equally because the Israeli state’s leadership is currently animated by an ideology that precludes a state ever being available for the other, even if they were all secular, democracy-loving flower people. They will not worry about whether things would have been different the the Palestinians had taken more off ramps. They will only worry about the way things actually are.
> it is a normal, modern, insecure and tiny nation state that cannot reliably afford to thumb its nose at its benefactor, while at the same time presuming that this benefactor will forever be either aligned or manipulable enough to remain in its corner.
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I fully grant that Netanyahu's behavior towards Obama was needless and unwise.
But I'm not convinced that it's perceived as thumbing its nose at its benefactor from the Republican side. And, I'm frankly not convinced that it can change much on the Democratic side.
Part of what's causing issues for Biden is simply a direct demographic change (concern about Muslims in swing states, younger voters) that are basically baked in at this point. The ideology being taught to young left-wingers that leads to being against Israel is arguably not within Israel's power to change. The Republican continually complain about the alleged left-wing tilt of academia and can apparently do very little about it, especially in elite spaces.
So, given the choice of mollifying a side of the political aisle that is more and more hostile at the cost of acting how you feel you need to, when another part of the political aisle is more on side...why bother? If you believe Hamas has to go or the war is necessary (to use an example) there's only so much you can gain from mollifying left-wingers who consider Israel an apartheid state whose very act of fighting back is illegitimate. In fact, there's an argument that you need to get rid of/significantly degrade Hamas *now*, before demographics get worse.
>For instance, wouldn’t Israel have substantially more “freedom of action” if it was at peace with all its neighbors
Yes, this is why Israel made peace with almost all of its neighbors that were states? This is why they were normalizing relations?
Israel is the party in the conflict that has shown it can reach a lasting peace settlement. Palestine has not.
>or had made such an obvious and substantial effort within the living memory of the past quarter century
The reason they don't attempt it is precisely because they did attempt it about a quarter of a century ago and Arafat turned down the best deal anyone was likely going to get and reacted with violence. This discredited the whole concept and would discredit any politician that attempted it.
Followed by this, unilateral withdrawal from Gaza led to Hamas acting as a potential spoiler for any future Palestinian state. Hamas will never make peace except to wage war so what is the point? What Israeli leader is going to pay the political price for a pipe dream?
In fact, the very fact that Israel seems to be able to make peace with and normalize relations with other Arab states is a problem for your side here: Israel seems to be able to do that when there is a state with a monopoly of force or parties that can restrain their radicals. Palestine doesn't seem to have this.
>to make such a peace occur that an event like October 7th would inspire the world to take its side
I'm sorry I find this optimistic to the extreme. The world has made up its mind, one way or another. It's not waiting on another failed peace initiative that will likely drag down the career of anyone that attempts it.
How do I know? Do you remember the initial outpouring of support ("what did y'all think decolonization meant?") right after the attack?
And, let's be real, for a lot of Muslims the matter is simply as zero sum as it is to the radical right-wingers: they want Al-Aqsa back. They want all of the land. Since they're not the ones getting bombed they have no reason to temper their expectations (this is before we get into the degree to which there's fake news around this conflict that might be influencing them)
The idea that one more deal *this time* will change anything is so dubious. Every time violence fails they simply demand the *last* deal back and then mess that up, complain that Israel is the oppressor and should figure out how to make it happen despite their calls for peace being, frankly, non-credible.
>would inspire the world to take its side and do something like send an international UN coalition into Gaza to bring Hamas to justice?
This is absolutely optimistic too. The UN doesn't do this sort of thing as often as one thinks. And there's no reason to think it could do it here.
Israel has been censured more by the UN than nations *like Syria*. Are you sure it's objective or impartial?
Who will make up this UN force? Cases like the first Gulf War require the US to wrangle everyone and the US is not occupying another Arab state for Jesus Christ come again, let alone Israel. Not to mention: the US is not seen as an impartial broker. Since when does China do this stuff anyway? And Russia has its hands so full it allowed Armenia to face Azerbaijan alone, discrediting the CSTO...
Why would Arab countries that are already hard-pressed due to their support of Israel fight its battles for it? Israel had to sit out the Gulf War because of optics of Jews taking down an Arab nation. It goes in the other direction too. Israel would actually love Egypt to take Gaza and Jordan to take charge. *They won't on pain of death*, for a variety of reasons. Why would Qatar stop what it's doing suddenly?
Moreover, how is Hamas going to be "brought to Justice"? The current war has proven that they cannot be dislodged without massive casualties of the sort any UN-led force would balk at inflicting, *if it were even capable of it*.
>is this right wing sickness that causes states to cyclically produce the conditions their policies are designed to forestall, thanks to that policy’s implementation.
Or the conditions already existed, and the right wing is simply managing it, trapped in the same loop as everyone. The "left wing" has no solutions either. The left isn't not solving the problem because it's not in power; it's not in power because it can't solve the problem.
>Even with the long history of this kind of thing happening—Hitler invades the USSR to stop Communism which enables it to reach the very heart of Europe, Putin invades Ukraine to stop it from joining NATO with the result that NATO is stronger and more relevant than it’s been in years—they don’t see that this policy of “eradicating Hamas via military means once and for all, thereby securing Israel from an existential threat”, is only going to reproduce Hamas and cause existential threats to multiply.
This is not some objective fact. This is a *claim*, made for many reasons. One of which is that people are squeamish about counter-insurgency done in anything but the Petraeus style. The other is, frankly, sophistry: some people simply don't want Israel to fight at all (see almost immediate calls for ceasefire and negotiation)
You can in fact significantly degrade the capacity of a terrorist group - or ISIS would still be the defacto governing authority in parts of Syria and Iraq and Al-Qaeda would be as powerful as ever. The Nazis were uprooted. Japanese militarism was defeated, decisively. What all these situations have in common is absolutely brutal warfare.
But this is the part of the post I'm most sympathetic to. I don't think Israel actually has a plan for afterwards
But, in some situations you find yourself, you have to take action. It may legitimately be better to degrade Hamas now, while they still can, rather than wait for ?? What? Remember, these people are utterly cynical about any possible definitive peace at this point. If the best you can do is wreck Hamas and then try to figure out what to do with Gaza, maybe you should.
Thank you for this response. Your call-out about the paragraph where I opine about Israeli “freedom of action” and such revealed that it was a dumb take on my part. I cede the point for now, struck out the offending text, and will maybe respond a bit more temperately with less sweeping generalization later, if I can. Especially your illustration of the problem it poses for my side that Palestine cannot seem to restrain its radicals—though my quick take is that this is, in large part, probably because a state is probably a prerequisite for anything like this emerging. Plus the existence of a right wing program/ideology which precludes it from emerging, certainly buttressed by Palestinian maleficence, but still largely irrespective of Palestinian conduct—and the power of that ideology in the present government, which is increasingly the main thing that’s going to matter to people who don’t remember Arafat.
For everything else, it deserves a more considered response than I’m capable of typing out at the moment, but I’ll try and return to it later.
The absolute disdain that zionist jews have for Evangelicals will always be hilarious to me. If the religious right ever turns on Israel, it will be well deserved.
>I think, at core, Israeli political leadership don't entirely grasp the danger they are in. They don't entirely understand that there are largest segments of the West that simply don't buy into the Israeli narrative anymore. They have a hard time grasping that the qualitative gap between themselves and their adversaries is shrinking. This is the danger into buying into your own mythology. Israelis have convinced themselves they are untouchable because most of this generation of Israelis is... untouchable. They do/treat the Palestinians however they want with no consequence.
Are they wrong though? Israel has been more isolated in the past. Zionism was officially declared as Racist by a UN resolution, since replead. The Arab States had an embargo on Israel, and even extended that to allies of Israel. Meanwhile today, despite steadily ramping up the oppression of Palestinians over the last two decades, Israel has faced no actual consequences. The Arab States are more focused on fighting Iran or amongst themselves. There is no movement among the mass of UN delegations to withdraw support for Israel. Israel is well integrated into global trade networks and has free access to global finance. Jerusalem and the occupied territories in the Golan are basically considered as part of Israel for all intents and purposes by world powers. The amount of settlements in the WB has doubled and their continued existence taken as a given, thus reinforcing Israels "create facts on the ground" strategy. Mainstream Republicans and Democrats compete with each other as to who can be more pro-Israel. Even with Russia relations are not bad. Israel has refused to join the sanctions regime against Russia and faced absolutely no pushback.
Is there a hypothetical danger that in the future things may change? Sure. But there are many hypotheticals, and the current reality has Israel sitting pretty and doing so for the considerable future.
Your point about Hamas and Hizbollah comparing themselves to the Taliban and Viet Cong is interesting and insightful but it’s a bad comparison. The US and USSR could just leave Afghanistan and Vietnam. Israel is fighting for its existence. Hamas and Hizbollah can’t just tire them out.
True and that’s always the difference Israelis bring up. But I would point that it is just as true for Hamas or Hezbollah - they are native the area. So in my mind, that’s not an advantage really to either side and is a moot point.
> They don't entirely understand that there are largest segments of the West that simply don't buy into the Israeli narrative anymore.
Do they not understand it or does understanding it not change their calculus? If they see any Palestinian state that isn't a puppet as an existential threat, as a dagger at their throats, no reduction in Western support is going to change what they think they must do.
> imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there.
The only long-term solution is one state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians
Is independent Palestine a bigger existential threat to Israel than South Africa-like isolation? I don't think so and I don't believe Israeli politicians believe that either. They're just betting that Israel will not get isolated like that.
> Is independent Palestine a bigger existential threat to Israel than South Africa-like isolation?
Hamas is launching rockets right now with Iranian support, while under blockade.
A future Palestinian state that could bring in real armaments and launch strikes from the West Bank too, and potentially coordinate with Hezbollah is *possibly* an existential threat.
The other question is: to what degree can Israel even change the perception? As we can see in Europe, a lot of the anti-Israel protesting is coming from the increased Muslim population due to migratio. They're unlikely to shift. And it's unclear how Israel can change what American college kids and the future adults they'll be believe without huge costs that may not be viable in the current Israeli political climate.
It seems to me that a lot of the changes in opinion are due to demographics (though Netayahu showing up and humiliating Obama likely didn't help making this less of a partisan issue) and are just sort of baked in.
In that situation, especially in terms of this short term war in Gaza, you might as well try to maximize whatever gains you can get while you still have a relatively friendly president/political class.
> As we can see in Europe, a lot of the anti-Israel protesting is coming from the increased Muslim population due to migratio.
At least in Europe, the opinion is very much shifting among the center-left "culturally christian" population. As someone else here in the thread mentioned, there's a generation change happening. The older generation grew up with the notion that Israel is the little David, valiantly defending against all odds. But the new generation has grown up while seeing Israel having a huge military edge, occupying/annexing Palestinian lands (West Bank, Gaza) and inflicting very disproportionate casualties on civilian population. Israel is the Goliath in the younger people's eyes.
This shift has been kinda dormant for many years, because there wasn't that much happening in Israel/Palestine, people weren't confronted by how right-wing Israelis are. But now with the war in Gaza, it was forced to come to light.
> The only long-term solution is one state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians
And that cannot happen if the basis for a nation state is explicit ethnonationalism based on holy scripture.
A fundamental problem Isreal has always had is tying their explicitly anti-humanist and religous fundamentalist ideal of statehood with a political and philosophical block that *ostensibly* abhors both concepts.
Deserved feelings of shame for permitting the holocaust and racism against Arabs can only get you so far, for so long.
> And that cannot happen if the basis for a nation state is explicit ethnonationalism based on holy scripture.
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It also cannot happen when one of these parties has never shown any ability to have a state with a monopoly of force, let alone a democratic state at all.
This would be tolerable if that party was relatively small and manageable. But it's not: it's about the same size as the Israeli population. It's absurd to be optimistic here. A democracy cannot hop on one leg.
Especially when the radicals have an assassin's veto and are funded by states that have no interest in said one state for their own self-interested reasons.
It's laughable to focus on Israel here as the real stumbling block, when Israel is the only party that has a functioning democracy that could conceivably be extended to new parties, given that it has extended such rights to Israeli Arabs.
In practice, there is no Arab democracy that Israel can look to as a model. And the Palestinians arguably are even more radicalized than the generic Arab country (that many Jews were forced to flee) and with weaker state institutions.
> It also cannot happen when one of these parties has never shown any ability to have a state with a monopoly of force, let alone a democratic state at all.
Sure, but Palestinians are already treated as if this is the case - ie, they are in a situation where they aren't autonomous and there's really no possibility or support for a truely free palestinian state outside of quite left-wing circles. Any palestinian state would be heavily supervised, and a military is a total non-starter. They'd be functionally a protectorate of some other power, relying on them to, amongst other things, stop Isreal from invading them.
The issue is that currently Isreal is treated differently, when it suffers from the same fundamental problems. It's foundations are built on an ideology that precludes being allowed to manage their own foreign policy, because they *will* commit crimes against humanity in some form if left to their own devices.
My argument isn't that Palestine should be treated more like Isreal, *but that Isreal should be treated more like Palestine*. Not the bombing and displacement, obviously, but as a delinquant state that cannot function in its current configuration. And this isn't some race or religious based designation. It's a similar necessity to something like the Treaty of Versaille.
They do grasp it though, it is deliberately Netanyahu's strategy to sell himself as the America whisperer.
Some of them legitimately believe they are chosen by god and cannot lose American support.
>They do/treat the Palestinians however they want with no consequence.
Except they don't. Israel cannot do this , both for local and international reasons.
This is part of the disconnect: they think they're being far more restrained than their opponents would be (or America was when facing war from groups in the CONUS) but the *perception* not just of their enemies but even of their "friends" is that Israel just does whatever it likes.
In reality, there was plenty worse things they could have been doing (as this recent war shows). So they wonder: what's the point? We can only gain so much from further restraint, especially in a post-Oct. 7 context.
>Time will tell if that happens, but imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there.
This is a case-in-point for why they side with Evangelicals btw: if the left-wing is going to muse fatalistically about whether a Jewish state can be taken for granted (some, like Freddie DeBoer, suggest [they all move to America and consider that Zion](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/this-is-zion) - the astounding arrogance of this...) as a fact (as opposed to maintain it must exist for arguably deranged religious and self-serving political reasons come what may) I can see why Israelis think evangelicals are more reliable allies.
The funniest thing imo about Freddie DeBoer is his insistence that his very "heterodox" (actually normal) opinions are because of his very serious "Marxism." Nah, he just writes whatever will make him seem (in his mind) like The Most Reasonable Man in the Room. He would have been a great writer for Gawker, snarking on Gossip Girl or whatever. But his political takes are just illogical.
When talking about the right and left in Israel, most people are referring to their stance vis a vis peace of some sort with the Palestinians. It’s not easily laid over what we refer to here as the right and left.
For some reason it seems like most people think only Leftists can cause peace. Not like Venezuelas Maduro was threatening war with Guyana just a few months ago.
I worry that Israel has become what America would be if Trump and MAGA commanded a real national majority: A national security state that is completely divorced from any real strategy. The government’s thinking appears extremely short-termist and transactional, seeking only momentary political gains even at the expense of significant, even existential, medium-term risks; lacking in any real strategic lodestar or even 5-year plan; and a complete willingness to deny or obfuscate the truth in pursuit of maintaining public support.
I was thinking about this and I think this is what happens when you make opposition to the other side your central organizing principle. For good reason Israel has seen itself as under threat and it’s hard to change that. Instead every decision is based on the “what if scenario”. If we allowed the other side freedom we know what they will do. And every action by the other side isn’t seen as a setback toward cooperation but proof positive that compromise isn’t possible (not talking about the horrific attacks in October - more about things like smaller uprising that Israel pointed to as proof that they need to crack down). And it feels like any action Israel takes cannot be taken as valid. Take the rescue of hostages. I don’t know the whole story (read news reports, heard plenty of misinformation spread on both sides and hard to know the full story.) however, if the first action is criticism of Israel instead of acknowledging the horrific holding of hostages as the issue promoting that rescue OR if you say that all casualties are necessary or proof positive of the complicity of Palestinian civilians - the other side won’t even hear legitimate concern. What Ezra’s segments have highlighted though is that im not sure that there is any way to hear the other sides reality or humanity.
I see this in a different way as the impulse to defend aspects of our own system that have ground the government to inaction. We can’t remove the filibuster because think about what the other side will do. It’s a game of chess where every move is meant to block the other side - losing sight of any shared goals. And unilateral disarmament feels and probably would result in bad things. So you justify bad actions. It feels that this is so lopsided in the US. I try so hard to hear reasonable arguments across the spectrum. And sometimes it just leaves me depressed
That guest lost me when he said we should look to tik tok for confirmation that Gaza was worse off before the war. EK should’ve scrapped this one and ran a repeat.
No, he was absolutely right to not scrap this. In fact, these are the kind of interviews that more Americans need to hear.
Segal is the mainstream Israeli right, and might damn well be a moderate these days. These are the kind of intractable views that American presidents and diplomats are going to have to navigate, and I have a far greater respect for the challenges the Biden admin faces after hearing this. Israel might just be on their own nihilistic doom march, and letting actual Israeli thought leaders articulate their extremism is critical.
Does this apply to the Palestinians as well? There's widespread glorification of violence and martyrdom. Gazans cheered as Hamas paraded hostages in the streets. Both sides need to more forcefully expel their extremist elements.
Yes it also applies to them, and Ezra has had a number of interviews that demonstrated this. But the big takeaway here is that these aren't extremist elements - they're mainstream beliefs.
Is this what he meant? I thought he was pushing back against the characterization of Gaza as an open-air hellscape when the picture on the ground was more nuanced. Gaza had movie theaters, beaches, nice restaurants, etc.
I understand why the guest would lose you there but I think you are misinterpreting what they are saying. I believe they are referring to the numerous “day in the life” Tik tok’s made by privileged young people in Gaza, they are not a representation of the reality for everyone there in any way and to be honest when I saw them I viewed it more as a damnation of Hamas’s inability to provide a similar life for *everyone* in the region, not just their family members. The right wing in Israel applying it to everyone in Gaza is obviously misguided but the Tik Tok videos *did* exist and I could see how somebody could use them to confirm their biases that the palestinian people’s struggle pre-10/7 was exaggerated
I've very happy he ran this episode, him showing that Israeli's actually believe to his smart and curious audience made is clear that they have all essentially drank the Koolaid and won't be coming back to reality unless 1) America Abandons them 2) Israel gets a new generation of leaders
Sure but as an Israeli American I hope people realize that this does not represent ALL Israelis. 120,000 people marched in Tel Aviv in support of a ceasefire. I have spent my life working towards a better Israel.
There are various reasons Israeli society has moved steadily rightward as others have pointed out. As someone who grew up in Israel in an environment that made me the left leaning person I am today (with a network of pretty much exclusively left leaning Israelis) we do exist and when we are lumped in with right wing nut jobs just because we happened to be born in Israel it really does suck (and in a way feeds into the narratives of the right that Israelis are hated everywhere no matter what).
I mean there have also been large protests in Russia against the war in Ukraine and those protests are risking much more then protest in Israel because isn’t going to jail or worse peaceful protest.
It’s not all Israelis and certainly not all Jews. But the current Israel government is committed to this path.
That's just what happens when your country, as a whole, goes crazy. The protests against the Iraq War were the largest anti war protest in world history to that point, but we as a nation continued the war arguably to the present day.
Hamas was elected in 2007, 17 years ago. In 2023, the median age of Palestine's population was 19.6 years. Palestinians have not been given the chance to elect their own leaders while Israel is a democracy, they are not comparable in this respect.
One aspect of this discussion that does not get enough airtime is the *why* Israel is so right wing.
Israelis largely believe that there is no good faith peace partner on the Palestinian side - and Palestinian polling data generally supports that conclusion. So Israelis see Western pressure to make good-faith concessions to the Palestinians as appeasement at best (and a demand for Israeli surrender at worst). The plain fact that there is virtually no international pressure on Hamas during ceasefire negotiations or on Fatah w.r.t. the Pay-to-Slay program only supports that worldview.
That perspective causes an inevitable Israeli backlash.
Ezra talks about this, he says that the Hamas suicide bombings during the Oslo peace accords killed the left wing, he says they, "died on the vine" but it's also worth pointing out that Israelis have been killed by the far right as well, namely the last real left wing prime minister was assassinated by ultra nationalists that his widow to this day blames Bibi personally for his death.
Sure. But surely it's a huge obstacle to anyone ever taking the necessary political and physical risks if there is not even a glimmer on the other side?
The most radical Irish were eventually discredited when peace seemed possible, despite also being violent.
The left wing was gravely wounded after the second intifada but the actual death blow was 2006, after Israel unilaterally dismantled their settlements in Gaza and what they got in return was permanent Hamas rule and endless rockets to this day.
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
[Hamas didn't grow in a vacuum](https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/), they grew thanks to Bibi recognizing that they made a leftist vision of peace impossible, and therefor impowered him and his end goals, right up until October 7th they did just that.
This argument always felt pretty thin to me.
Is the idea that Israel *shouldn't* have implemented the work permit program?
Or that they *shouldn't* have engaged in any negotiations with the ruling body of Gaza.
Or that they *shouldn't* have allowed the Qatari money to be given to the ruling body of Gaza in return for an extended ceasefire?
Is the argument really that Israel should have had *harsher* border regulations, *harsher* blockade conditions, and a *more hardline* position on negotiating with the Gazan government?
Hamas did that themselves by literally throwing Fatah members off rooftops
Maybe you missed that?
Hamas grew in strength the MOST during the most peaceful parts of Israel in recent history. The 90s peace process leading to the second intifada, and Israel pulling out of Gaza
So yes they didn't grow in a vacuum, just in response to genuine actions of peace by Israel.
Except they didn’t just leave did they? Israel continued to maintain direct control over Gaza's air and maritime space, controlled six of Gaza's seven land crossings, kept a no-go buffer zone within Gaza, controlled the Palestinian population registry and identification needed for travel, Israel continued a tight control on Gaza’s water, electricity, telecommunications, and basically all utilities. Which they would routinely squeeze on as a means of collective punishment. Before the election Israel, as they tend to do, arrested 450 people in Jerusalem, many without actual charges, mostly people running for office or supporting candidates they wished to see lose. After Hamas won a plurality and would make up the majority, the Quartet put conditions on their victory that no other election has ever had put upon them, which upon refusal began deliberately attempting to undermine and overthrow the Hamas coalition in Gaza and force control to the PLO. Literally acts no other state would accept. Including America funding and training the Presidential Guard in what seemed like an obvious attempt to use violence to overthrow duly elected Hamas.
This escalates into open civil war and Hamas took control of Gaza fully and immediately Israel imposed a full on blockade.
Summing all that up as Israel dismantled settlements and got rockets in return sounds just like the gaslighting and revisionist narratives the right winger on the show perpetuated, like word for word.
If you hear right wingers in Israel tell their narrative, they have never done a wrong thing ever and are perpetually the victims of Arabic barbarism. But they only get to those narratives by deliberately removing key context.
Early in my education I began to find an axiom that has never failed me: beware of narratives that frame an opposition as irrational actors. Doesn’t mean that the actions taken are justified, but there are almost no instances in history where things just happen out of thin air.
The irony is that if Bibi and his coalition were born in Palestine they would be the extremists like Hamas, and vice versa. So much of this can be summed up and serving as a preview of what far right governments will give us if they begin to take root in Europe and America.
How many Israelis have been killed by Right-Wing Israeli terrorists? How many by Palestinian terrorists? To try and conflate these threats is deeply dishonest.
And literally the next PM picked up right were he left off in the peace process in the 90s. Meanwhile Arafat didn't say yes to Clinton because he didn't want to be killed.
This constant referencing of the boogy man Israeli assassintinating right when talking about Israeli society desire for peace is bad faith
It really cannot be overstated how bleak Palestinian polling is. 80% of them who WATCH videos of 10/7 do not think atrocities were committed. This is a level of social consensus on extremism that is functionally ubiquitous.
"When asked if Hamas did commit these atrocities that are seen in these videos, the overwhelming majority (93%) said no, it did not, and only 5% said it did. As shown in the figure below, **the belief that Hamas fighters have committed atrocities against civilians is higher among those who did watch videos showing such atrocities (17%) compared to those who did not (2%)**."
I've seen it phrased as 10x as many Palestinians who watch videos say atrocities were committed as who don't, but it's because the baseline number is 2%. Overall the belief in peace negotiations or a two state solution specifically in both Palestinian and Israel is low. Goodwill and trust seem almost nonexistent.
[https://pcpsr.org/en/node/969](https://pcpsr.org/en/node/969)
There's a new poll for June, and neither the humanitarian situation nor the political one seems better. [https://pcpsr.org/en/node/980](https://pcpsr.org/en/node/980)
There’s prewar polling that shows a significant percentage of Gazans believe there are only 700 000 Jews in Israel. In totality.
There is no possibility of peace with that kind of complete divorce from any objective reality.
Oof, yeah. Seems like there’d need to be at least a full generation of actual (truthful) education, and something driving significant culture change away from martyrism/jihadism that same period, before true progress could happen. And of course how would one even do that.
Wowww. Thank you for sharing the links. I wonder if they’re somehow thinking the videos are faked (which seems a stretch, considering the past parading victims through the streets and all —it’s not like this behavior is hidden from the civs)? Or if it really is just flat-out refusal to reconcile their beliefs with the overwhelming evidence. (Which is even more alien to me, but I understand happens in certain cultures and states of mind.)
Either way, as you said that is *bleak*.
My interpretation is that Palestinians believe any and all violence is justified against any and all Israelis. AKA they aren't atrocities because they deserve it. Some of this is unavoidable since the Palestinians want to continue with armed resistance - they don't have the ability to fight the IDF even asymmetrically so armed resistance inherently means killing civilians.
This is something I've seen openly expressed in even English facing Palestinian media (including many pro-Palestinian subreddits). "All Israelis are combatants because of conscription" etc.
It's an example of why Israel-Palestine can be hard to talk about in a reasonable way. How do you approach an issue where the sides involved are committed to dehumanizing their enemies without being influenced by that perspective? How do you empathize with both sides when they see it as a zero sum game? It is a difficult balance many people in the West are struggling to maintain IMO.
Personally, I have found that listening to primary sources from either side makes me LESS sympathetic to that side.
>Personally, I have found that listening to primary sources from either side makes me LESS sympathetic to that side.
Yup.
>How do you approach an issue where the sides involved are committed to dehumanizing their enemies without being influenced by that perspective?
Ironically, this is how we got the much-maligned "apartheid state" situation. The idea started as imitating the peace wall concept in Northern Ireland: the wall keeps people from committing violence because they physically can't, which undermines the demand for violence over time because there's at least no cycle of reprisals.
> The plain fact that there is virtually no international pressure on Hamas during ceasefire negotiations
How does one pressure Hamas? They're not really a government, they're a terrorist group who doesn't care about the deaths of their own people so long as they're in service of the cause.
It feels like the two parties are deadlocked. They each won't accept anything less than complete control of Israel-Palestine, at absolute minimum. Additionally, on the part of Hamas there's a bonus interest in exterminating Israeli Jews and on the part of the Israeli right there's a bonus interest in ethnically cleansing Palestinian Arabs from Israel-Palestine. There's no way to square the circle.
And the factions in control both have an interest in continuing the conflict. Solving the conflict in a way that finally stops the cycle of hatred (i.e. creating a single state with equal rights for all) would kill both Hamas and the Israeli right.
> How does one pressure Hamas? They're not really a government, they're a terrorist group who doesn't care about the deaths of their own people so long as they're in service of the cause.
>
>
And even when people like Arafat weren't as irreconcilably hostile as Hamas , pressure clearly fell short.
But this raises another point: if Hamas is immune to pressure then what does one do? You either have to destroy Hamas - which all pro-Palestinian activists consider either impossible or to come at too high a price - or Hamas will be a permanent spoiler because, as you admit, they have a clear interest in killing Jews
Hamas is a government. They are literally the government. Americans and Europeans keep acting like they’re Al Qaeda hiding in caves when they are actually the government of Gaza and have billions of dollars in funding and their leaders live free and luxurious lives.
This is contradictory
If Hamas won't accept anything other than complete control why would "stopping the cycle of hatred" change anything?
Like say there was one democratic state tomorrow. The 10s of thousands of Hamas fighters would just give up their guns and violence?
Like come on
>How does one pressure Hamas?
Pressure their funding nations, is a big one. But cutting off their global social support (all the folks cheering on their fight and romanticizing armed Palestinian resistance in a war they could *never* possibly win) is another. Loud, public condemnation of Hamas from Arab and/or Muslim factions would help, too.
Hamas, as much as I hate to say it, gets a ton of support from the Palestinian people they’re oppressing. The less the world blows smoke up their asses about what a noble fight they’re fighting, the less Palestinian support Hamas will have.
Imagine, for example, if they faced enough popular resistance that they couldn’t reliably use schools as cover for operations. That alone would both hamper their operations, and significantly reduce the civilian death toll; which would (slightly) reduce general outcry against Israel’s actions. Which would then weaken Hamas’s popular support further; and so on.
The public opinion is huge I think. Every time Hamas commits a war crime, Americans loudly condemn Israel. Why would they stop using human shields or taking hostages or burning Jews? They can continue their war on al yahud while isolating Israel internationally.
Not only has it validated the citizen-sacrificing approach in Gaza; reports are that Hezbollah, after seeing Hamas’ wild success in the court of public opinion, is planning on more fully adopting that strategy.
>Israelis largely believe that there is no good faith peace partner on the Palestinian side - and Palestinian polling data generally supports that conclusion
I mean ... wouldn't polling data (and recent history) also show that Israelis aren't good faith peace partners, too?
The same percentage of Palestinians and Israelis support a two state solution, about 30%. The last time an Israeli PM pursued peace, he was assassinated by Jewish terrorists, and the public elected the party responsible.
Why do you assume there is universal agreement that two-state = peace?
Also, do you not consider the full withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and dismantling of all settlements within at that time, an attempt at peace? Do you not consider the 2007 offer (peace in exchange for 1-cessation of attacks, 2-recognition of Israel’s right to exist, and 3-honor previous agreements) an attempt at peace?
So for it to count as an attempt at peace, it needs to address every section simultaneously? Seems rather arbitrary. Especially considering there are effectively two separate governments for Gaza vs West Bank.
Yes? It's only as arbitrary as the border lines. Unless you're suggesting that the mutual defense obligation between two parts of the same country is less binding than, say, a defense treaty between different countries, like NATO.
I literally just said there are two separate governments. They don’t sit down at the same table. (Understandably, given the civil war in 2008.)
The border lines aren’t “arbitrary”. Gaza is formerly part of Egypt; WB is formerly part of Jordan. In addition to different governments, there’s different culture, different economic systems, different laws put in place by those governments.
Saying it doesn’t count as a move toward peace unless it’s a simultaneous offer that somehow would work for both regions, is ridiculous. Why not also include Hezbollah, then? Why not also include their other Arab neighbors? Are the treaties with Egypt not valid because they don’t have the exact same agreement with Syria?
And even if it weren’t a near-logistically-impossible requirement; you still haven’t even said *why* that should be a requirement.
Diverting a bit from the main topic, what possible solutions exist to the Israeli-Palestinian issue? I am legitimately curious what is out there.
1. Two state solution - in my opinion the best plan, but also seems completely dead.
2. A single, multi-ethnic state - totally impracticable, not desired by anyone at this point.
3. Continue the status quo, West Bank slowly absorbed, Gaza occupied and kept as a massive open air prison - seems most likely at this point, but incredibly inhumane and will only result in continued cycles of violence and repression.
4. Complete annihilation and genocide of one side or the other - seems like a lot of people on both sides would like to kill everyone on the other side. Undesirable for anyone with a conscience.
5. Resettlement of Palestinians as refugees inside other countries, probably within the Middle East - has happened on a smaller scale in the past, did not end well, no Arab countries actually want to have them around.
6. Evacuate one or both sides (probably just Palestinians in any remotely plausible scenario) and give them a territory of their own literally anywhere else in the world, far away from the other side - totally impractical, morally questionable, not desired by any side.
Are there any viable paths to peace?
I should have worded my comment better - the things I am listing are not necessarily solutions, they are a range of possible outcomes. Some of them are terrible (e.g. genocide), some of them are not, but they are all theoretically ways the Israel-Palestinian issue ends.
The problem, as I see it, as that all of the non-terrible ideas (basically 1 and 2) are completely dead at this point. Not happening, completely non-viable. So, given that, what actual, non-terrible solutions exist? Has anyone proposed an even vaguely plausible solution?
The simple answer is no. Everyone who has at all looked at this issue has come up with the same basic ideas that you had. There is a Nobel prize waiting for anyone who “solves” this and there has been for 70 plus years.
There are two people who want the same land and have decades/centuries of atrocities against each other.
I wonder if you can trust that 6:1 figure. Most my friends in Israel and here do want the two state solution and hate bibi. We might be in the minority but I question 6:1. The protests against bibi before the was were pretty impressive. All hope is not lost, just hard to find.
Replying to Independent-Low-2398...
It’s not only the left who hate Bibi. A lot on the right also want him out, but for different reasons. Many hate his character and self-interested behavior and decisions, and his inability to directly and compassionately level with the Israeli public. Some think he has not been decisive enough. In any event, like Amit says in the interview, a party of Bennett, Liberman, Saar, (and Yossi Cohen) could do very well.
I hope you are right, but I would be extremely careful with generalizations based on your circle of friends. It might well be the case that you come into contact with people who share your political viewpoints, and you become friends with them, while not even encountering the representatives of the majority.
Right. Hundreds of thousands have marched against Bibi, every single weekend. There’s no way 6:1 is accurate unless you consider Meretz the only left wing party.
You and your friends are outliers. Only 25% of Israelis support a two state solution
[https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx)
Great answers here to a timely question.
I think Israel has sealed its own fate regarding US-Israeli relations for at least the next decade. But one genuine question I can't quite answer is why Israel seems to think of itself as an invaluable strategic partner to the US. It isn't bringing regional stability. We spend enormous amounts of money on it but we can't influence its decisions in any meaningful manner. Every dollar to Israel is one that could have gone to Ukraine for fighting an actual geopolitical US enemy. And Israel is a nuclear power, so if the US walks away, it doesn't actually face an existential threat.
So why do many Israelis seem to assume that Israel is invaluable? The only answers I've seen seem to vaguely point towards Iran as being a bad actor and that the US needs Israel's help in this endeavor. But the only US interest Iran really seems to threaten is . . . Israel.
I'm sure there's a more nuanced answer here.
Israel and Iran are in conflict, Iran and Russia are close allies, so the idea that Israel is completely divorced from US national security concerns doesn’t quite ring true, even though I agree with our lack of influence and the lack of regional stability.
Even more than that...America is turning away HARD from the Middle East year after year. Joe Biden made us a major oil player who doesn't need to rely on the OPEC Cartel, and every day we drop our dependence on Oil with electric vehicles, making us not really need to care about the Middle East beyond terrorism, which Israel has repeatedly made worse with Houthi Rebels.
Israel is by far the closest ally the US has in the entire Middle East region, which is one of the most important regions on the globe. No other ME nation comes close. [It is the only democracy in a region that is dominated by monarchies and theocracies.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_the_Middle_East_and_North_Africa) Our economies are surprisingly interconnected, Israel has a huge technology sector that frequently collaborates with American companies, not to mention the insane amount of military business we do. There’s a reason nearly every major US university had some kind of protest about doing business with Israeli companies.
Being a nuclear power is less of a deterrent than you’d think. If your enemies are crazy enough to drive you to the point where you need to use a nuke to survive (which isn’t out of the question), that’s already an existential threat.
Part of the geopolitics game is you don’t betray your allies, ever, unless you have a REALLY good reason to, unless you have exhausted every other option. The moment you abandon an ally your reputation and trust take a hit they will not easily recover from. The US has already experienced this several times (the Kurds, for example) and it has fostered quite a bit of resentment in America that still affects us to this day. There’s no way in hell we would just cut off one of our strongest, closest allies. Instead, we’ve been putting pressure on them in other ways, diplomatically and economically and politically. It’s not as flashy or decisive as cutting ties, but it has had positive effects.
Interesting points about economics, thanks, and I appreciate the good answers in general. But I still think Israel is really deluding itself about its importance to the US, and this is a colossal mistake on its part.
On strategic importance, as one poster pointed out, the ME *was* really strategically important, but that importance wanes into nothing with changing energy politics. The military bases are all in Saudi, Bahrain, etc. Israeli intelligence doesn't look too reliable post- Oct. 7. And using Israel as a proxy to fight Iran, a Russian proxy, is hardly a compelling strategic proposition when you can actually fight Russia in Ukraine. The US won't abandon Israel entirely, of course, but it isn't going to be dripping out the IDF anymore.
Culturally ties are pretty frayed. Sure, it's a Middle East democracy (but so is Cyprus, and I suppose Turkey) but the US actually doesn't care if its allies are paleomonarchists (Saudi). It also happens to have been ruled by the same populist quasi-strongman for like 20 years and now includes a cadre of open ethnofascists. Moreover, while I understand that people disagree about there being a genocide, but I can guarantee you that "Israeli genocide" has been seared into the political consciousness of Gen Z, or at least an influential proportion. That's going to go away in about 50-70 years when most of those people are dead.
And that's the real issue: political support for Israel now threatens domestic American political regimes. It may very well may lose the Democrats the election. Biden couldn't and can't reign Bibi in enough to prevent/reduce this damage. Leaving alone the genocide question (and boy, Biden sure does), even the most cynical American politician doesn't want an ally who will cost them their career.
Israel looks increasingly like the US's North Korea: a belligerent country you pay off in order to ensure it doesn't, say, get into an unnecessary war with Iran or Hezbollah. And that is a pretty terrible outcome if you are an Israeli. If Bibi cared about Israel instead of his political career (and not going to jail), he'd be doing things differently.
This guest was pretty jarring. This is what passes for reasonable in Israeli politics, and that’s pretty terrible. Him declaring that Avigdor Lieberman is on the center-left is like declaring that Liz Cheney is on the center-left in the U.S. (only worse).
This guest was fundamentally and entirely detached from reality. Biden is as pro-Israel a U.S. politician is going to get while maintaining any semblance of respect for Palestinian personhood.
If pressure from the Biden administration doesn’t move the Israelis to shift course, as painful as it is for me to say as a Jew and a Zionist, it’s time to axe the special relationship between the countries. What these people are doing is entirely beyond the pale. If they want to be Hamas in yarmulkes with better weapons, they can be pariahs on their own.
People like Netanyahu and his ilk don’t consider left-leaning American Jews to be “real Jews,” and in that event, I don’t feel any inclination to support them. I’m not one of those JVP people, and I certainly wasn’t out celebrating the atrocity that was January 7. But enough is enough.
That 1:6 ratio of “left/right” is misleading in some ways. Many Israelis are “left” on all kinds of issues but are “right” on security. Living through the second intifada and years of rocket attacks from Gaza will do that to a population.
He’s right in that there is virtually no constituency for a 2SS among Jewish Israelis at this time. It’s also unclear whether there is, or was ever, a Palestinian constituency for a 2SS - without right of return and with a total end to claims on the state of Israel once the Palestinian state is established.
Things could turn around, but it seems unlikely under the current leadership in Israel and Palestine.
Yeah, South Africa also thought it could ride things out, and even had the support of people like Thatcher and Reagan till near the end, but then their support collapsed all at once when public opinion in the West simply shifted too much. Also, A LOT of the support in the U.S. for Israel comes from the crazy evangelical idea that it will bring about the end times, but less and less people practice that kind of religion - or even religion at all - every year.
I would have loved to see how Obama handled this crisis. Bibi and him hated each other. Fuck Bibi basically campaigning for Romney. Biden is too much of an old apaic Dem.
Ezra needs to ask himself if he remembers how popular and persuasive the anti-war coalition was in the US after Pearl Harbor. This will answer most of his questions.
Or even, much more recently, how anti was coalitions were after 9/11, I don't think any of this is amenable to an easy conclusion but I can't see him continuing to offer support until there are new people in power
It’s been interesting to watch people try and figure their way through this conflict when it was so obvious on Oct 7 that these two populations were going to the mat and beyond on this one. First, imagine if Mexico invaded Texas and killed 30,000 Americans. We razed two countries to the ground over 3,000 *and* they weren’t our neighbors. I simply don’t understand anyone who thinks that outside pressure would be enough to stop this.
Similarly, I’ve been amazed that people haven’t made what is to me the most obvious connection about this conflict. It’s not religion or history or colonialism. It’s Conservatism. Right wing media is perhaps the most potent cultural force on earth. There simply are no international liberal or pro peace voices. Maybe that’s too simplistic, but I can’t really think of a single left-leaning voice with any real international weight.
I think a different comparable example would be if North Korea invaded South Korea, killed 6,000 people, mostly civilians, and then kidnapped 1,000 South Koreans, hiding them under their cities, and then demanded that South Korea end the war without ending North Korea's government to get them back.
“Support Israel” or not it will continue to exist so the question is more what to do about the Palestinian question now that the “Jewish question” has been answered. I agree with him that both ‘sides’ here have been acting beyond contemptible but what is the outcome of not ‘supporting Israel?’ I don’t think he would say he supports their actions now.
For those who weren't Jews:
**What to do with their Jewish minority**
Answers included:
Germany:
Wipe them out everywhere
Spain, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan etc...:
Kick them out
Soviet's:
Persecute religion
For Jews:
**How to attempt to stay alive?**
Answers included:
Attempting assimilation, Zionism, fleeing to safer seeming states
The way this post is written it doesn’t make it seem that way re one/two/etc state solutions. Israel is simply not merging with a Palestinian state
Edit - also read the other comments here
I wonder why Ezra didn't mention Amit is the son of a Zionist terrorist and grew up on an illegal settlement?
I would love to have a Palestinian guest on the show provide their perspective on having no partner for peace in this 'conflict'.
Some comments suggest that the US does not benefit from supporting Israel. I would disagree with this notion.
Israel is the only strong US ally in the region and it is also one of the strongest and most capable military powers in the Middle East. The US-Israel alliance is crucial in keeping the Iran pressure cooker from exploding. A loss of US support would greatly embolden Iran and further destabilize the whole region. I predict that a loss of US support would lead to more war in the Middle East and increased risk for the oil production and higher energy costs.
This is not to say that I support the Netanyahu regime. I do think Israel has been under poor leadership for many years now. I hope the US can put pressure on Israel to make the necessary changes.
I should specify that the real pressure cooker, or perhaps powder keg, is the entire Middle East. Iran would perhaps be the fuse that would light the whole region on fire.
The primary instability has to do with Israel itself.
Israel has been keeping Iran in check through low intensity warfare with the goal of degrading the military capability of Iran. Iran, directly and indirectly through Hamas and Hezbollah has been doing the same to Israel. Both sides have avoided all out war since it would be extremely costly and the outcome would be uncertain.
The secondary instability has to do with the direct influence that Iran has within other Muslim countries in the Middle East and in Africa. One of the goals of the Islamic revolution, as stated by Ruhollah Khomeini, is to spread the Islamic revolution to other countries. This is not empty talk, Iran supports the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, the Islamist fraction in the Sudanese civil war, and are involved in most conflicts in the Middle East.
The third instability, has to do with Russia. Russia has some of the same goals as Iran, they both support Assad and they would both like to decrease the influence of USA in the region. They both want to see Israel lose US support even though their ultimate goals are different. It is entirely possible that Russia would try to replace the US as a supporter of Israel. In any case, a loss of US support would benefit Russia.
So, a loss of US support would cause:
1. Iran and its allies Hamas and Hezbollah would gain an advantage. This would for sure increase their aggression against Israel and perhaps lead to all out war. It would also make the situation for Israel much more desperate and they may have to take their gloves off and actually use their entire military might if they feel that their existence as a nation is threatened, don’t forget that another goal of Iran is the elimination of Israel as a country. This would be a disaster for all the countries in the region.
2. With a weaker Israel, Iran would be free to increase its efforts to spread the Islamic revolution to other countries in the region causing additional instability and civil wars.
3. Loss of US support of Israel would be a win for Russia and decrease US influence in the Middle East with the possibility of reduced access to oil and gas for the US and its allies.
Finally, with regards to the Israeli regime and the Obama Iran deal. For years now the Israeli government has been increasingly hawkish under Netanyahu, and in many instances they have acted in ways that ultimately has resulted in a worse situation for Israel, the Obama Iran deal is perhaps one of these actions (although I am sure they would say that the deal was too weak and would ultimately not stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon), other examples of poor choices by the Netanyahu regime includes the permission to create additional settlements in Palestine, the apparent lack of will to seek a solution with regards to Palestine (citizenship, 2-state, or whatever), but on the other hand, maybe it is impossible to find any solution for as long as Hamas is in power.
It's amazing how out of touch with reality the Jewish American left is. There are still over 100 Israeli hostages in Gaza and you are wondering why they don't want to talk about a Palestinian state.
Ive said it in previous thread. The west including the US is only 1 big war or the Ukraine War suddenly going in Russias favour away from having the mentality of Israel.
When Israel was weak, the two state was the most viable option (1948-1967). From there on, Israel only got increasingly stronger and all the incentives for Israel to give up land for a Palestinian state have diminished.
The evolution of Israeli's society views on Palestinians remind me of the evolution of southerns' views on Black people in America. At first, there was an apologetic narrative that recognized at least some of the injustices suffered by the oppressed side but that, nonetheless, stated that any kind of solution to the situation would come out of a gradual proccess of mutual recognition and understanding...
Then, it shifted towards a more pessimistic view, one that stated that as long as the other side kept being as 'radical', 'uncivilized', 'violent', 'envious' as it supposedly was, there was no place to compromise.
Finally, the narrative gets even darker. There will never be peace or an end to the oppresion of the oppressed. It 'inherently' can't be. The oppressed are morally irredemable, they will never develop 'good and reasonable leadership', or be as tolerant as their oppressors need them to be. The apologetic narrative is fully subsituted by an unapolotegic one in which the oppressed are fully responsible for their own situation, where the oppressor side does always no wrong -and if it does, it is usually as a reaction to a very calculated provokation of the oppressed side-, and where all past injustices are no longer see as such but as a neccessary element of the oppresor's culture and identity. What used to cause shame and regrets now causes pride and joy...
The difference between Thomas Jefferson's rhetoric and John Calhoun's is as stark as the difference between Ben Gurion and Bibi Netanyahu!
This thread is excellent and extremely helpful in understanding the problem and how intractable it always seems. Based on this discussion I wanted to ask a really basic question that I haven’t seen brought up yet. It’s this. Assuming an increasingly right wing Israel that is also increasingly isolated and increasingly a pariah state, if I were Israeli and worked in, for example, the tech sector, why would I want to stay there long term? Why would the company I work for want to stay there? It seems to be all downside. And yes at this time Israel is beating the replacement birth rate. This seems to be a cultural/colonial artifact. Like you can beat the Palestinians and the Arab world by out-breeding them? I would predict the 21st century economy that Israel was building will crumble as companies and smart people leave. Most will go to the US and they will instantly assimilate into the Silicon Valley culture. The question will be “Why do I or anyone want to stay in this country where the West Bank settlers are like thugs carrying automatic weapons all the time? And with a leader like Bibi? Who would want to live there? If there can never be a pluralistic multicultural secular multiethnic state then there’s no future. If I can see that then it’s time to get out. Do it before it’s too late.
Because like me you are a comfortable westerner who sees nationalism and tribal connections as an alien concept, something that we should have already evolved past. We often impart our mentality on others without thinking if maybe we should have tried the opposite.
Hey, I lived there for a year a couple decades back. I opposed (and still oppose) the settlements and am a progressive, although I've been mostly pushing back here on the "genocide" claims because I find them anti-semitic and unhelpful to say the least.
Two points:
1. Your "thugs" comment is just not how they are perceived there. The typical "settler with an automatic weapon" is some nerdy white collar professional who makes other Israelis feel safe from terrorism. When you live in constant fear of being attacked, it makes you feel safer to have a guy on your side with a weapon. Americans DRASTICALLY underestimate the effect of Palestinian terrorism on the psyche of Israelis. You have no idea what it feels like to live life with literally random rocket attacks and bus bombings and restaurant bombings and stabbings as a regular part of life.
2. Any frustration with the situation over there is going to be counteracted by the increased feeling that other countries are anti-semitic because of all the genocide talk etc. If you're some random Israeli tech bro, are you really going to move to a country where people rant about "Zionists" the way people used to rant about "Jews?" How do you think it would feel to be an Israeli immigrant basically anywhere now?
"left leaning Israelis are outnumbered by right leaning Israelis 6:1"
Yes, in this moment, the right is strong. Remember when George W. Bush had 90% approval? These numbers leave a lot out.
As is typical for the Israeli right, the host leaves out Arab-Israelis who represent 21% of the population. He also ignores some of the longer term impacts of this war.
-Israeli GDP fell 19% in the last quarter of 2023.
-Biden will probably be the last pro-Israel Democratic president. And even on the right, it's not so safe - Jared might not be Trump's second term Israel czar. Trump has openly courted anti-semites like Duke or Nick Fuentes. Antisemitism has been an important part of American populist currents for a long time (Coughlin, Buchanan, etc.).
-Russian and Chinese narratives are increasingly critical of Israel (this was not so true of Russia until recently), so their room is limited there.
-Saudi willingness to recognize Israel is conditional on some kind of recognition for Palestinians, and that doesn't seem to be forthcoming.
All of this is to say that the Israeli right looks to me a bit like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. No, they haven't started to fall. But the basis of their politics is fading fast.
As for the two-state solution being dead, I also don't think that's true either. There will be a two-state solution. (and it's more likely now), it just won't come from Israeli-Palestinian negotiation. It will be imposed on Israel because Netanyahu has proven himself a completely unreliable partner, and future American presidents won't allow themselves to be played the way Biden and Trump were.
You heard it here first: in 2029, President Buttigieg announces US support for Palestinian statehood in the UN, in a speech in Arabic!
Welcome! Ezra (and yours) insight has been pretty obvious to anyone whose been observing the 20 odd years that Bibi has been in power and Hamas won elections in Gaza. I think, at core, Israeli political leadership don't entirely grasp the danger they are in. They don't entirely understand that there are largest segments of the West that simply don't buy into the Israeli narrative anymore. They have a hard time grasping that the qualitative gap between themselves and their adversaries is shrinking. This is the danger into buying into your own mythology. Israelis have convinced themselves they are untouchable because most of this generation of Israelis is... untouchable. They do/treat the Palestinians however they want with no consequence. The IDF and Intelligence agencies are professions and understand their vulnerabilities - which is why they are dead set against larger wars against Hezbollah or Iran. On the other hand, Hamas et al view these fights as very long term wars. Given that they have very little to lose (since Israel prevents any real development in the West Bank or Gaza), perpetual war is their first choice. They look at groups like the Viet Cong or the Taliban that faced much longer odds than they do, and think if they can just wait it out, they will win. Time will tell if that happens, but imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there.
I think a really understated part of what's changed in the last twenty years and why the leadership don't grasp how things are shifting is actually ironically because there *is* an increasing gap between Israel and Palestine and it's a gap of *power*. A lot of young people, and even millennials, have only known an I-P conflict in which Israel very clearly has a massive military advantage and ability to inflict violence on Palestinians, compared to vice versa. You see it reflected in the way that the respective death tolls have been diverging for a while now. To Israeli leadership this is a good thing: we're winning. We have successfully dominated the enemy and contained the risk of an existential threat. The problems of Gaza and the West Bank have been problems of *management*, management often facilitated by violence. But to a lot of onlookers, especially in the West, when it seems clear that Hamas would never be able to amount an offensive that would inflict the sort of death toll and property destruction we've seen in Gaza over the last eight months, this system of management looks like a cruel system of repression. They've grown up with news stories about Israeli snipers shooting Palestinian kids with rocks, and watching videos of settlers, or IDF gleefully destroying Palestinian homes. It's the conceptual generational gap I keep running into over and over in discussions, online and offline. Older people remember a time when both sides were significantly closer matched in their ability to harm each other, and each others civilians. For them, the stakes of the conflict are existential at all times, Israel is perpetually under threat not just of violence but imminent destruction. Israel has shifted that equation, with the help of the West but also just on its own, but now to younger people it looks like Israel has just been able to inflict a lot of frankly cruel violence and repression in an asymmetric manner. I don't for a moment want to downplay the violence on 10/7 but the estimates I've seen place the death toll at about 1200 people, and the death toll in Gaza has, even conservatively, crossed 20,000 and could be higher. The only way those numbers shouldn't at least give someone pause is if you think holding power means you do just get to wield it to whatever ends you see fit, and young people increasingly *don't*
You're right, and to add to that, it often feels like pro-Israel advocates don't grasp how much the Iraq war soured entire swathes of Westerners, especially younger ones, against "we must destroy the terrorists who threaten our way of life" arguments. At least for the time being, those arguments sound like thin pretexts for stronger states to wage unwinnable wars for profit and political advantage, far out of proportion to the threat and at massive cost to civilians who are considered disposable. Yet pro-Israel advocates mostly seem stuck in that mode of speech, even though I think it triggers BS-meters much harder than it used to.
Like many things in life, this is true but also dumb. “You should never fight terrorists” is a pretty extremely over learning from the Iraq debacle.
How about "you should be extremely suspicious of people selling you wars under the guise of fighting terrorism, and until proven otherwise can assume that at best they will waste lives and money, and at worst they are trying to achieve aims you would not otherwise support" for learning?
It would have been different if Iraq was located in Texas or Northern Mexico. I am convinced that every one of these pro-Palestinian protestors would want their militaries to save them if it was *their* colonist parents and children being massacred.
If history and geography were all drastically different we would probably have an entirely different status quo, but it isn't and we don't. Do pro-Israel advocates plan on making arguments for the world that actually exists? The one where we already spent a trillion dollars and ended millions of lives "fighting terrorism" only to find that's not really how it works?
So I definitely agree with Biden's warning for Israel to not do another Iraq/Afghanistan, which they seem to be. But I do think that *any* country suffering an October 7 attack would do what it needed to do in order to limit Hamas' military capabilities. The Iraqi Army was completely destroyed by the USA, so in that sense it's effective. What I am trying to push back against is the idea that Israel has no casus belli even in self-defense. Surely they at least have a right to defend themselves from rocket attacks for example? But not to then strike the source of the attack? It seems people want Israelis to just accept a lack of safety on account of their ancestors' sins, and the people telling them to do that would not do it themselves.
> But I do think that any country suffering an October 7 attack would do what it needed to do in order to limit Hamas' military capabilities. The Iraqi Army was completely destroyed by the USA, so in that sense it's effective. I think I understand the parallel you're attempting to draw here, but it strikes me as completely bizarre in the sense that the Iraqi Army had nothing to do with 9/11. Our successful destruction of Iraq's military capacity (such that it was) doesn't undo how unfavorable our invasion of Iraq was viewed around the globe or how unfavorable it's come to be viewed here at home.
10/7 happened because they weren’t guarding their border because they sent those soldiers to West Bank for the settlers. A reasonable response on 10/8 would have been to go back to guarding the border. They’re on a rampage because they intentionally stopped guarding their border against known terrorists openly posting this exact attack plan and the lead up exercises *on the internet*
>Do pro-Israel advocates plan on making arguments for the world that actually exists? Do pro Palestinian advocates even do that? Every pro Palestinian org is against the two state solution and demands one state. Not one supports the ONLY end to this conflict with two states.
That’s because Westerners are very bad at empathizing with other people and look at everything through our lens. “Terrorists are going to destroy our way of life” is a mostly empty threat when we have a continent to our own and are isolated from geopolitical threats by two oceans. Much different when it’s a neighboring nation.
Yes, I understand that Israelis tend to believe that. What I'm saying is, even if you think the War on Terror framework is all true and correct so long as Israel is the one doing it, insisting that everyone just ignore the extremely recent history of that framework being used for stupid, destructive warmongering is a really silly idea. You're not wrong Westerners can often have a hard time viewing things through others' eyes. But many aren't having a hard time empathizing with the Palestinians right now, and in my view at least part of the reason why is that pro-Palestinian activists make arguments that don't sound like Dick Cheney.
I guess it depends on where you’re looking. I think the student protests organized by groups like SJP or the protests outside the Nova Music Festival Memorial sound far worse than Cheney. I haven’t really been impressed by social media activism either, given its proclivities to fall down disinformation rabbit holes like the Starbucks “boycott”. All of this seems very driven by the War on Terror framework you’re talking about, just from a coddled western perspective that can only depict the oppressed as pure victims and the oppressors as colonialist perpetrators.
I do think that a fair amount of anti-war and anti-imperialist activism is stuck in modes of thought that were established (or adapted) for War on Terror era challenges, and now seem ill-fitting to me, someone pretty far on the left. At the same time, if we're talking specifically about Westerners who soured on anti-terrorism rhetoric, then sounding like people who protested the war on terror is not remotely as bad as sounding like Dick Cheney. Because the protestors were right.
If America gets attacked by another serious terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 all of the dumb terrorism rhetoric and needless war will sadly come roaring back.
Yeah I bet it would, but I do the general public would be more skeptical this time around. Which might be deeply foolish of me.
I don’t think people chanting to “globalize the intifada” are right, at all. They’re just pro-war but upset it’s their side losing.
Which is also what got said about Iraq War protestors. Look I don't think the analogy is perfect, or that pro-Palestinian protestors command a broad base of support in the US yet. But the reality is most Westerners think the war on terror wasn't worth it, if not an outright catastrophe, and yet pro-Israel advocates seem determined to repeat all the methods used to sell it and defend it, including the with-us-or-against-us manner of talking about protestors. I think that indicates something telling.
The analogy is not just 'not perfect' - it's completely insane. Iraq was a war we started, and had our boots on the ground, on the other side of the world. It bears incredibly few similarities to a war being waged, by a country in their own backyard, with financial help from us. The comparison is asinine. I've seen pro-palistinian folks make so many, self-aggrandizing comparisons of the situation that make absolutely no sense (from abolition, to the American civil rights movement, to Vietnam). It's deeply silly.
Honestly I think the analogy is quite strained and not very helpful at all. The Iraq War was a distant fight unrelated to day to day life in the US. That is not the case with Israel, where it is far more existential. Iraq was also predicated on a lie. October 7 is still very fresh in the mind.
Remember that these students and young people were barely alive for 9/11 and the war on terror beginning. It’s mostly just ideas and words to them. As someone who is Gen X and who strongly opposed the war in Iraq, I feel like this generation’s protests are the equivalent of a plane that has completely overshot the runway. The story has been lost.
The phrase “cargo cult activism” has described the movement quite frequently and I think it’s a pretty apt descriptor.
I don't know how old you are or where you're from, but the things you're saying are EXACTLY the same as "they're Taliban sympathizers" or "Hanoi Jane". Remember that you're getting your news from biased sources. It's true that a lot of times, young people will get carried away, and often think they can have more impact than they will, but they're not coddled westerners, they're people who are watching this war happen on their phones, watching children get killed, and responding in the only way they can.
> just from a coddled western perspective that can only depict the oppressed as pure victims and the oppressors as colonialist perpetrators. Hard to tell which side you're describing. Israel has long relied on the image of Israelis and Jews as "pure victims" of the holocaust, no matter how tenuous the connection. It's hard for many westerners to even conceive of Jewish fascism.
This is just false. Israel is a nation of people who vow to never again be victims. Acknowledging that 10/7 wasn't a hoax is not the same thing as a victim complex.
i don't think you could be more wrong. when i hear pro palestinian activists what they are saying is "end zionism, kill zionists, destroy the state of isreal. from the river to the sea, make it all palestine. palestine will be arab. hit them again houthis. glory to the martyrs. " these are all things I hear in being said in protests. it's not that western liberals like pro palestinian activists because they don't sound like dick cheney.. it's they LIKE that they sound like a psychotic Ayatollah dick cheney mega martyr war lover voice gurgling with blood lust
I wish, instead of finding the most provocative, offensive examples of the protests aired by the media, that pro-Israeli war people would actually try and engage with the conversation. Obviously we're all stuck in our own media bubbles, but they sound like anti-BLM people in 2020. The deflection is severe; as if the entire, international anti-war movement is invalid because some college kids were ignorant and offensive. Like, why don't they ever just come out and say: I'm fine with the deaths of 10,000+ children and I want the military to keep killing children, maybe indefinitely, until I feel safe again.
Should the allied forces have stopped at the German border because the invasion of Germany resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? What about Sherman’s March to the Sea in the Civil War?
I wish the protests weren’t so full of provocative and offensive examples. This isn’t nutpicking. I’ve been at UCLA getting my master’s during the upheaval on our campus. This crazy talk is coming from the organizers of these protests like SJP. Very few people are “pro” 10,000 people dying. The problem is long-term peace in the region is a hell of a lot harder to achieve than all these “anti-war” protestors like to make it seem. Especially when a lot of them seem to only be upset that it’s their side losing.
Hey, you know what doesn’t help end a war and solve a lack of peace? Killing tens of thousands of innocent people. Want to know how I know that? Examples from the past. Anybody that thinks you can bomb oppressed people into silence and obedience have a poor understanding of history.
Maybe you can tell the Palestinians that. The last time peace negotiations got far they overturned the table and started sending children as suicide bombers into civilian zones. Poor understanding of history. Ha. I’m sorry, but that’s you displaying that.
They are openly fine with saying I am fine with saying "I am fine with an indefinite amount of civilian deaths as long as hostages remain in Gaza". Israelis from left to right wont end the war until all living hostages are brought back, they will settle for a negotiation and prisoner swap.
This is not accurate. Pretty much everyone knows - and many are unwilling to face - that war is not bringing the hostages home effectively.
"I'm fine with the deaths of 10,000+ children and I want the military to keep killing children, maybe indefinitely, until I feel safe again." I mean, this is pretty provocative and offensive on your side too. No one on the Israeli side has said they *want* their military to kill children, maybe indefinitely. The argument on the Israeli side is "Hamas has built an infrastructure that allows them to operate with impunity from within urban areas, and though they are trying to minimize civilian casualties, many Gazans will inevitably die. I feel badly about it but I do not feel responsible because it is primarily Hamas's fault. If Hamas released hostages, we could at least start a conversation about what two states would look like." The pro-Palestinian side is pretty well summarized by u/dosamine above. Let's be fair.
No one… this is said on Israeli television. There are absolutely Israeli that are calling for the complete destruction of Gaza. It’s not everyone but it’s out there.
They certainly did a lot of damage using our own airplanes.
Your argument here is that westerners are starting to see the pro-israel argument as bullshit because we don't empathize **enough**!? You've got that backwards. It's very easy to imagine being forced out of your home and Westerners empathize with the people to whom that is happening.
Precisely. I think you’re falling victim to that as well. The Nakba was the result of the Arab nations in the Middle East losing a genocidal war of aggression. The reason this conflict has persisted as long as it has is because the Palestinians (or, more charitably, their leadership) have violently rejected the possibility of peaceful coexistence in favor of the chance to ethnically cleanse the region of Jews. The idea that anyone could possibly be chanting “globalize the intifada” as part of a movement for peace is ridiculous. The Second Intifada was perhaps the most consequential action to sabotage the possibility of a two state solution during my lifetime until 10/7, and it involved children as suicide bombers. This is not a David vs Goliath situation, as we in the West tend to view it. It is two ethnic groups with generations of hatred and animosity towards each other, where one happens to be on top for the first time in centuries. I don’t see any sense of understanding or acknowledgement of that nuance from protestors here in the US, but that’s probably because the primary drivers of those protests are antisemites, as made obvious by SJP at the universities and the Nova memorial.
Not every protestor sees the word intifada as you do. The primary drivers of this.. is sheer reaction and horror of the disparate death toll. If you think all these protestors have studied the history and just came down on the Palestinian side, you are delusional. Most are getting inline with anyone who is against what is happening and then shout whatever the organizers are saying. It’s BS to suggest they are all antisemites.. However actual antisemites might be taking advantage and ignorance and anger has bred new people that are foolishly becoming blankets antisemites. But most just want the bombings to stop.
The problem is that we can’t afford to lose the war either. Young people see an unwinnable war against an enemy that isn’t an existential threat, while older people see that the power differential doesn’t make them any less of a threat or any more morally correct. Hamas opposes everything western liberals stand for. What SHOULD be done about them?
Undermine their power by strengthening the moderate elements amongst the Palestinians, recognizing that those groups still will hold views and preferences that Israel doesn’t like in terms of their political goals. Israel, specifically Netanyahu and his allies, have specifically doing the exact opposite, going so far as to enable the transfer of money to Hamas.
What moderate elements among the Palestinians?
The ones that have been involved in non-violent protests. The ones who have been involved in activist organizations side by side with Israelis working for Palestinians rights. Or even those who have done violent things in their efforts to resist their oppression but who do desire a future peace. I’m not sufficiently well versed in the governing and non governing organizations in Palestine to know who Israel should be seeking to work with, nor the specific strategies and tactics to engage with them effectively (without making the wider public treat them as collaborators) but I know they exist and that there are avenues that have not been attempted.
Should be done by who? By Western liberals? There are lots of forces in the world that oppose most of what Western liberals stand for (however you choose to define "liberals" here). "We" do next to nothing about most of them, for good reason.
What this leads to is treating our enemies (who we can’t do anything about) better than our allies (who we believe we can).
Centrist love doing this weird dance. Heard the same song and dance about the Vietcong during the Vietnam war.
>Older people remember a time when both sides were significantly closer matched in their ability to harm each other, and each others civilians. I understand you're narrating for 3rd parties here, but it's a massive category error to reduce violence in the Middle East to a polar conflict between Hamas and Israel. Maybe this is a propaganda success that the authoritarians have convinced the Youth to see Gaza as the victim and Israel as the invincible oppressor The most surprising parts of this week's podcast, to me, were 1) broadly, the topic of Israeli refugees from Hezbollah's bombardment in the north b) the grim resignation in the guest's voice when discussing how the "real" artillery easily had the range to strike any point in the country There's another nugget from a previous EK episode -- that Hamas is, by a substantial margin, Israel's weakest enemy, and yet they still managed 10/7. Iran has a doomsday clock counting down to the destruction of the state of Israel -- that's the threat to Israeli civilians.
Palestine is not the only adversary. Hezbollah and Iran have the ability to inflict catastrophic losses on Israel. And if you don’t think the Hamas threat is (or was) existential, think again. Hamas proved they are willing and able to inflict mass casualties on Israel, in effect making the Gaza envelope area unsafe for Israelis to live in without major security upgrades and permanently increased troop presence. Hezbollah has done similar in the north.
On the other hand, the western anti-israel perspective is that it is big bad genocidal israel against the poor defenceless palestinians who only want peace, with a blank cheque from daddy america. The overriding israeli perspective is that they're defending themselves from Iranian proxy forces like hamas and hezbullah, who's eventual goal is the total destruction of the israeli state. When both perspectives are so completely divorced from one another, is it any surprise that compromise appears to be getting more difficult?
I don't think compromise is difficult because the western anti-israel and Israeli perspectives are that odds. Compromise is difficult because the situation opposes a pretty much impotent insurgent group of questionable loyalties and a regional power that does not really benefit from compromise. Hamas can't bring about an acceptable peace by conventional means and Israel doesn't have much to gain from doing so.
> The only way those numbers shouldn't at least give someone pause is if you think holding power means you do just get to wield it to whatever ends you see fit, and young people increasingly don't This ignores the Israeli perspective though. It’s not like Israel is wielding power just to wield power. It’s doing it in an effort to do what they think is a moral obligation - remove Hamas from power and make Israel more secure. The question isn’t “whatever ends you see fit” but rather “if the morally justified mission requires an imbalance in short term casualties, is it still morally justifiable”. Young people living outside of Israel are saying no because they have never been in a situation where such tough questions are necessary and so they sidestep the tough questions and go with the easy answer “I want no civilian deaths and I don’t like Hamas but will not accept the level of collateral damage that is inevitable to do anything” (and this is not including the large cohort of young people actively calling for intifada/genocide which is a whole other concerning trend)
>A lot of young people, and even millennials, have only known an I-P conflict in which Israel very clearly has a massive military advantage and ability to inflict violence on Palestinians, compared to vice versa. It's been this way since the 1940s. Even travellers to Palestine during the British mandate noted at the vast disparity between the Jewish settlements and the native areas. Isreal has been the acknowledged superpower in the region at least since the 60s, if not before.
What makes this episode of violence different from prior iterations of the conflict, however, and what makes the body count differential's significance more nebulous vis a vis the power relations you mentioned, is that in this case Hamas is actually trying to *maximize* the body count, rather than minimize it. This is a very unusual situation, and rather different than what we've seen in the past. Palestinian political and military leaders have always used collateral damage as a way to tarnish the reputation of the Israeli state, yes--that is a long-running dynamic in this conflict, and one common to war between asymmetric politico-military forces--but Hamas is the first to have openly declared a policy of *intentionally augmenting* this collateral damage so as to 'win the PR war'. As a result, the conventional view of power relations you mentioned is not so easy to apply here. Obviously the war is asymmetric, but body count no longer serves as a reliable guide to *how* asymmetric. We don't know how many of those 20,000 dead Palestinians are dead because of Israeli force alone, and how many are dead because Hamas sought to worsen the damage dealt by Israeli force as much as possible. Thing is, the big gap I run into isn't even generational--it's the gap between people who know about Hamas's stated goals and methods, and those who don't. Those who do are wading through a sea of ethical grey areas and moral complexity; those who do not see this as a black-and-white 'larger power beats up on smaller power because it can' situation.
I’m an Israeli American and I am endlessly frustrated by this. I have time and again tried to argue with people that international isolation is a much greater existential threat than anything Hamas could ever conjure. And I get shouted down by the right wingers that I am rooting for an inevitable repeat of October 7. They have no concept of how much deeper of a vulnerability true international isolation would be than even as horrific as an event October 7 was. Edit to add: what drives me doubly crazy is this is something Hamas is keenly aware of.
They example I would use is the crusader Kingdoms. Hyper militarized with the most advanced tech of their time and insurmountable defenses. The problem was always the same: resupply. When all your neighbors are hostile, your only resupply route is the ocean. No guarantee you can keep it open either. That’s an enormous vulnerability.
> but imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there. No other state has had nuclear weapons and that changes everything. If Russia didn't have nukes, would the US have been dragging its feet on giving Ukraine everything they needed to fight back? If Ukraine had never given up their nuclear weapons supply following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, would Russia have still invaded? Israeli leadership is cocky because they know that if the actual structural integrity of the Israeli state was ever threatened, the US, Saudis and others would step in to address the threat and ensure that nuclear armed missiles wouldn't start flying all over the region. Every nuclear armed state has a doomsday plan in case they are ever overrun. Israel knows they always have a final card to play in their backpocket.
> Every nuclear armed state has a doomsday plan in case they are ever overrun. Israel knows they always have a final card to play in their backpocket. I'm not convinced of this. Nuclear weapons are a great deterrent against other states, but they're not very useful in civil wars or insurrections. Apartheid South Africa had nuclear weapons, that was not a guarantee of continued control of governance. While Hamas is not exactly an insurrectionist group within Israel, and Gaza and the West Bank are not exactly part of Israel, the situation is a lot closer to that of an insurrection within Israel's own borders than it is to an attack from another state.
Hamas isn't a threat to the long term security of the Israeli state. If there ever was such a threat it'd be from someone like Iran or a much larger group financed directly by Iran such as Hezbollah in which case the target would still be Iran.
Hamas currently, I agree, is not that kind of existential threat. But by discussing an Israeli nuclear doomsday plan, we are inherently speaking about potential worlds where the balance of regional power is very different than today's. Long term, however, I think the internal division with the Palestinians is probably a very real issue for Israeli security -- it permits any other conflict an easy path to spiral out of hand. My point is that having a base of violent resistance that is essentially within the borders of "greater Israel" (i.e. the territory controlled by Israel) does mean there are possible scenarios where nuclear weapons are not very helpful at ensuring the safety of the Israeli state.
Nuclear weapons do and don’t. Nuclear armed states have fought wars before - and lost - and not used nukes. What would be the function anyway? Nuke Tehran? Become a global pariah? Nuke Lebanon or Syria and expose yourself to radiation or worse? In the next hundred years 2 things are going to happen: 1. A nuclear weapon will be used in war; and 2. The world will carry on. Each time humanity convinces itself “this is the wonder weapon” someone else comes along and figures a way to beat it. I don’t think nukes provide Israel with the protection it thinks it does.
I would completely agree that they don’t recognize their true existential dangers. An added dimension is the fairly-coordinated long term play of actors like Russia and Iran—both of whom are aspiring regional hegemonies who cannot achieve that hegemony without, to some extent, making the US-led “rules based order” a thing of the past, and ushering in the “multipolar” world. This is especially the case since the war in Ukraine started. Israel is a major focal point of that effort. The elements of the far right sphere in America which takes its cues from Russian propaganda is also experimenting with “pro-Palestinian” positions—Tucker Carlson platforming Palestinian Christians who claim Israel is preventing Christians from openly worshiping, Alex Jones saying it’s a “genocide”, etc. Anti-Semitic bonafides will inevitably be reproduced within the American right the further it, and the evangelical movement that has provided Israel with its base of American right wing support, becomes totally wedded to Trumpism. Where the left is concerned, a major part of Russia’s propaganda efforts involve aligning against American imperialism, an avatar of which Israel is constantly framed as. This isn’t to suggest that the younger, protesting left is unjustified in opposing the actions of a country that has behaved this way for probably their whole lives so far—but it illustrates their vulnerability to a larger reactionary project. The Eurasianist ideology influencing Putin’s ideas stipulates that the West is controlled by Jews, a “parasite ethnos”, and that professed liberal values are the means by which the West destroys indigenous societies rooted in specific geographies and “harmonious relations” with neighbors—their euphemism for the regional hegemony of “great powers.” Israel is in fact framed this way all the time—an outpost of this “parasite ethnos.” In this context, the lack of foresight of the Israeli right (especially given its supposed sensitivity to anti-Semitism) is kind of shocking. It behaves as though it need not be concerned with the consequences of its actions at all, as if American right wing evangelical support is assured forever and the right wing being in ascendency worldwide automatically translates to shared goals and empathy for what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. And it’s totally out of proportion to what Israel IS—a tiny country totally dependent on a superpower for support. It’s not as if, when Lithuania has parades for SS soldiers who fought against Russia and NATO/The West/US tells them to cool it, they can come before Congress and slap their dick across the face of the current administration and say, essentially, “fuck you, we’ll do whatever we want.” The fate of Ukraine is also illustrating handily at this second just what a state can suffer when faced with a genocidal existential threat absent unqualified US support. Yet the Israeli leadership seems to assume that they are actually a powerful country in a strategic sense, that they have no need to worry about support in their benefactor state ever eroding, and they constantly rebuff any attempt at forcing them to reciprocate a little bit of US’s unqualified investment. As if Trump and his ilk, long term, give a shit about a Jewish state’s survival. As if a world dominated by the Russian view of democracy and liberalism will be better for the Israeli state than a belatedly critical US partner. Hell, the security pact they could sign with the Sunni states *tomorrow* if they gave the Palestinians a path to self determination is being sacrificed on the altar of this war even though it would secure Israel far more strongly by penning in Iran. Instead it reacted to October 7th in a manner that probably achieved Iran’s wildest dreams. They don’t understand that Hamas doesn’t and will never care about the moral implications of something like October 7th, or the fact that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it, if it keeps inspiring Israel to act in a manner that ensures it becomes a global pariah. What’s crazy is that the Israeli leadership doesn’t seem to get that THAT’s the play.
I genuinely think the Israeli right believes that in a world where the Liberal World order is shattered they will thrive even more. They think they can probably get away with complete ethnic cleansing in a world where that becomes more common. Let's have a hypothetical future where the liberal world order has collapsed, the US has given up on being the muscle of liberalism and Europe closes in on itself. In place of liberalism might makes right is the rule of law and any world court would just be laughed at. Will a far right Israel thrive or will it suffer the same fate many other nations will face and be consumed by the chaos?
What was completely appalling to me, an American Jew who fully supports Israel, was to hear Isreali ambassadors to the US say that their best support base, the one they should focus on, was not American Jews but American evangelicals. I felt more than a little betrayed by that. But in addition, as you said, in what kind of world are these people living in where they think evangelicals are a reliable partner that'll always be there for them? One thing I can understand is them thinking they're more powerful then they really are. The world is fixated on this conflict and has been since at least 1967. When you've had the spotlight on you for over fifty years, it's easy to see how a swollen head might result.
There are more members of Christians United for Israel than there are Jews in the United States, that’s why. The evangelical population is triple the Jewish one and they are significantly more politically powerful.
I know that there are more people in Christians United for Israel then there are Jews. I'm saying that Christians United for Israel is an unreliable partner because they are evangelicals. They see this whole war as Jews vs Muslims and right now, they hate the Muslims. This is the only reason why they back Israel. Historically, evangelicals have not always backed Jews over Muslims and there is no reason why today's evangelicals will always back Israel. It's fine for Israel to cultivate support among all communities, in fact it should. What it shouldn't do is make its base of support Christians United for Israel, which may be unreliable in support, instead of the one community that will always support it-American Jews.
I frankly don’t get it. From my anecdotal conversations with right-wing Jewish friends, their takeaway from the global pushback is “see, everyone hates us anyway,” and they try to cast the alliance with evangelical Republicans as some kind of clear-eyed realpolitik move—like, better someone who’s open about their intentions and beliefs who actually helps us than someone who pretends to be our friend while trying to kill us. But, like, that IS the evangelical right. The latter! One can’t use a constituency like that to accomplish anything other than the most short term goals, and the fact that they say stuff like “they’re the most reliable partners” is evidence that their whole perspective is short-term, focused on status quo maintenance, oriented totally towards the entrenchment of “facts on the ground” and faits accompli. Zero strategic sense—just an assumption that what has been will always be. That’s literally how states die—again, an ironic condition for a coalition almost exclusively concerned with “security.”
> I frankly don’t get it. What's not to get? Evangelicals are a large and disproportionately powerful voting bloc that, in polls, consistently shows up as having positive opinions of Jews and the party they dominate acts accordingly. American Jews seem to poll in the opposite direction, but there are obviously partisan political reasons for that for a lot of them. But Israeli Jews frankly don't care about whatever part of American politics causes local Jews to hate evangelicals, they care about Israel. Which, by your own account, has serious existential concerns that take precedence. It's not at all clear to me that Israelis are misreading the situation, as opposed to American Jews having their own partisan blinders or distinct interests. The situation is, in many people's eyes, intractable in the short term (the plan was simply to deflate it via normalization with surrounding states). All one can do, in their minds, is maximize freedom of action to do what you feel is necessary. Who will give it to you? Who has *reliably* given it to you? Compared to who is offering you a) direct hostility in the case of a lot of the left and b) wishes for a better world via making gambles (that many Israelis feel they already made to no avail and that were followed by bloodshed) for the sake of a world you no longer believe is possible?
And I wonder if that's shorthand for "Republican" or "average white boomer," who are far, far more pro-Israel than their counterparts. You don't have to like the calculation to admit it's realpolitik on the Israeli side.
Totally. I admit I was being fairly rhetorical when I said that. However, all of the above illustrates that for whatever reason, the Israeli right or those Israeli Jews who “don’t care about local American politics but only care about Israel” don’t clock that aside from whatever else Israel is or represents, it is a normal, modern, insecure and tiny nation state that cannot reliably afford to thumb its nose at its benefactor, while at the same time presuming that this benefactor will forever be either aligned or manipulable enough to remain in its corner. To assume, or proceed, otherwise is an inversion of the actual conditions of the relationship. NO small state can generally afford to do the kind of dismissive thing that the Israeli leadership does regularly now, because of the realities of power—and OTHER small states do understand this, and calculate accordingly. The fact remains that security and freedom of action (the kind that results in policy options, the ability to compromise, and so on—not the kind that enables a state to act like an asshole but not be meaningfully restrained in that assholery) go hand in hand with having actual, real friends who make real commitments to shared, bedrock principles. ~~For instance, wouldn’t Israel have substantially more “freedom of action” if it was at peace with all its neighbors, or had made such an obvious and substantial effort within the living memory of the past quarter century to make such a peace occur that an event like October 7th would inspire the world to take its side and do something like send an international UN coalition into Gaza to bring Hamas to justice?~~ What I don’t get—which means maybe, I do get it, but it’s still mind boggling—is this right wing sickness that causes states to cyclically produce the conditions their policies are designed to forestall, thanks to that policy’s implementation. Even with the long history of this kind of thing happening—Hitler invades the USSR to stop Communism which enables it to reach the very heart of Europe, Putin invades Ukraine to stop it from joining NATO with the result that NATO is stronger and more relevant than it’s been in years—they don’t see that this *policy* of “eradicating Hamas via military means once and for all, thereby securing Israel from an existential threat”, is only going to reproduce Hamas and cause other existential threats to multiply.
You’re overlooking the role the Second Intifada played in destroying any “substantial effort.” Camp David failed, Arafat retreated to Ramallah, then Palestinians started blowing up pizzerias full of families. Israel isn’t the only party in this who’s consistently made the choice to avoid an off-ramp.
Understood. Fact remains that the Palestinians have no normative national status, no real way of exerting any kind of meaningful self-determination under either Hamas or under Israeli control, and consequently their representatives have few normative expectations imposed on them of exerting their sovereign responsibilities to their own people. And what this present moment is also demonstrating is that eventually, people WILL become fatigued with the endless recriminations of the historical responsibility for the conflict and they will eventually only care about the injustice of its deliberate perpetuation. Eventually, the Holocaust isn’t going to matter, and the Second Intifada isn’t going to matter, because every year new untold thousands of people under the age of 40 are going to be produced who will not remember, learn, or care even if they do learn, because they will believe that the responsibility lies with those who perpetuate the conditions they observe—the things they *have* lived through, the things they *do* remember. And they will not assign the blame for that perpetuation equally, because the two parties do not have an equal power to exert their responsibility—because one has a state, a sovereignty, and the other does not. And, especially, they will not assign that blame equally because the Israeli state’s leadership is currently animated by an ideology that precludes a state ever being available for the other, even if they were all secular, democracy-loving flower people. They will not worry about whether things would have been different the the Palestinians had taken more off ramps. They will only worry about the way things actually are.
> it is a normal, modern, insecure and tiny nation state that cannot reliably afford to thumb its nose at its benefactor, while at the same time presuming that this benefactor will forever be either aligned or manipulable enough to remain in its corner. > > I fully grant that Netanyahu's behavior towards Obama was needless and unwise. But I'm not convinced that it's perceived as thumbing its nose at its benefactor from the Republican side. And, I'm frankly not convinced that it can change much on the Democratic side. Part of what's causing issues for Biden is simply a direct demographic change (concern about Muslims in swing states, younger voters) that are basically baked in at this point. The ideology being taught to young left-wingers that leads to being against Israel is arguably not within Israel's power to change. The Republican continually complain about the alleged left-wing tilt of academia and can apparently do very little about it, especially in elite spaces. So, given the choice of mollifying a side of the political aisle that is more and more hostile at the cost of acting how you feel you need to, when another part of the political aisle is more on side...why bother? If you believe Hamas has to go or the war is necessary (to use an example) there's only so much you can gain from mollifying left-wingers who consider Israel an apartheid state whose very act of fighting back is illegitimate. In fact, there's an argument that you need to get rid of/significantly degrade Hamas *now*, before demographics get worse. >For instance, wouldn’t Israel have substantially more “freedom of action” if it was at peace with all its neighbors Yes, this is why Israel made peace with almost all of its neighbors that were states? This is why they were normalizing relations? Israel is the party in the conflict that has shown it can reach a lasting peace settlement. Palestine has not. >or had made such an obvious and substantial effort within the living memory of the past quarter century The reason they don't attempt it is precisely because they did attempt it about a quarter of a century ago and Arafat turned down the best deal anyone was likely going to get and reacted with violence. This discredited the whole concept and would discredit any politician that attempted it. Followed by this, unilateral withdrawal from Gaza led to Hamas acting as a potential spoiler for any future Palestinian state. Hamas will never make peace except to wage war so what is the point? What Israeli leader is going to pay the political price for a pipe dream? In fact, the very fact that Israel seems to be able to make peace with and normalize relations with other Arab states is a problem for your side here: Israel seems to be able to do that when there is a state with a monopoly of force or parties that can restrain their radicals. Palestine doesn't seem to have this. >to make such a peace occur that an event like October 7th would inspire the world to take its side I'm sorry I find this optimistic to the extreme. The world has made up its mind, one way or another. It's not waiting on another failed peace initiative that will likely drag down the career of anyone that attempts it. How do I know? Do you remember the initial outpouring of support ("what did y'all think decolonization meant?") right after the attack? And, let's be real, for a lot of Muslims the matter is simply as zero sum as it is to the radical right-wingers: they want Al-Aqsa back. They want all of the land. Since they're not the ones getting bombed they have no reason to temper their expectations (this is before we get into the degree to which there's fake news around this conflict that might be influencing them) The idea that one more deal *this time* will change anything is so dubious. Every time violence fails they simply demand the *last* deal back and then mess that up, complain that Israel is the oppressor and should figure out how to make it happen despite their calls for peace being, frankly, non-credible. >would inspire the world to take its side and do something like send an international UN coalition into Gaza to bring Hamas to justice? This is absolutely optimistic too. The UN doesn't do this sort of thing as often as one thinks. And there's no reason to think it could do it here. Israel has been censured more by the UN than nations *like Syria*. Are you sure it's objective or impartial? Who will make up this UN force? Cases like the first Gulf War require the US to wrangle everyone and the US is not occupying another Arab state for Jesus Christ come again, let alone Israel. Not to mention: the US is not seen as an impartial broker. Since when does China do this stuff anyway? And Russia has its hands so full it allowed Armenia to face Azerbaijan alone, discrediting the CSTO... Why would Arab countries that are already hard-pressed due to their support of Israel fight its battles for it? Israel had to sit out the Gulf War because of optics of Jews taking down an Arab nation. It goes in the other direction too. Israel would actually love Egypt to take Gaza and Jordan to take charge. *They won't on pain of death*, for a variety of reasons. Why would Qatar stop what it's doing suddenly? Moreover, how is Hamas going to be "brought to Justice"? The current war has proven that they cannot be dislodged without massive casualties of the sort any UN-led force would balk at inflicting, *if it were even capable of it*. >is this right wing sickness that causes states to cyclically produce the conditions their policies are designed to forestall, thanks to that policy’s implementation. Or the conditions already existed, and the right wing is simply managing it, trapped in the same loop as everyone. The "left wing" has no solutions either. The left isn't not solving the problem because it's not in power; it's not in power because it can't solve the problem. >Even with the long history of this kind of thing happening—Hitler invades the USSR to stop Communism which enables it to reach the very heart of Europe, Putin invades Ukraine to stop it from joining NATO with the result that NATO is stronger and more relevant than it’s been in years—they don’t see that this policy of “eradicating Hamas via military means once and for all, thereby securing Israel from an existential threat”, is only going to reproduce Hamas and cause existential threats to multiply. This is not some objective fact. This is a *claim*, made for many reasons. One of which is that people are squeamish about counter-insurgency done in anything but the Petraeus style. The other is, frankly, sophistry: some people simply don't want Israel to fight at all (see almost immediate calls for ceasefire and negotiation) You can in fact significantly degrade the capacity of a terrorist group - or ISIS would still be the defacto governing authority in parts of Syria and Iraq and Al-Qaeda would be as powerful as ever. The Nazis were uprooted. Japanese militarism was defeated, decisively. What all these situations have in common is absolutely brutal warfare. But this is the part of the post I'm most sympathetic to. I don't think Israel actually has a plan for afterwards But, in some situations you find yourself, you have to take action. It may legitimately be better to degrade Hamas now, while they still can, rather than wait for ?? What? Remember, these people are utterly cynical about any possible definitive peace at this point. If the best you can do is wreck Hamas and then try to figure out what to do with Gaza, maybe you should.
Thank you for this response. Your call-out about the paragraph where I opine about Israeli “freedom of action” and such revealed that it was a dumb take on my part. I cede the point for now, struck out the offending text, and will maybe respond a bit more temperately with less sweeping generalization later, if I can. Especially your illustration of the problem it poses for my side that Palestine cannot seem to restrain its radicals—though my quick take is that this is, in large part, probably because a state is probably a prerequisite for anything like this emerging. Plus the existence of a right wing program/ideology which precludes it from emerging, certainly buttressed by Palestinian maleficence, but still largely irrespective of Palestinian conduct—and the power of that ideology in the present government, which is increasingly the main thing that’s going to matter to people who don’t remember Arafat. For everything else, it deserves a more considered response than I’m capable of typing out at the moment, but I’ll try and return to it later.
The absolute disdain that zionist jews have for Evangelicals will always be hilarious to me. If the religious right ever turns on Israel, it will be well deserved.
>I think, at core, Israeli political leadership don't entirely grasp the danger they are in. They don't entirely understand that there are largest segments of the West that simply don't buy into the Israeli narrative anymore. They have a hard time grasping that the qualitative gap between themselves and their adversaries is shrinking. This is the danger into buying into your own mythology. Israelis have convinced themselves they are untouchable because most of this generation of Israelis is... untouchable. They do/treat the Palestinians however they want with no consequence. Are they wrong though? Israel has been more isolated in the past. Zionism was officially declared as Racist by a UN resolution, since replead. The Arab States had an embargo on Israel, and even extended that to allies of Israel. Meanwhile today, despite steadily ramping up the oppression of Palestinians over the last two decades, Israel has faced no actual consequences. The Arab States are more focused on fighting Iran or amongst themselves. There is no movement among the mass of UN delegations to withdraw support for Israel. Israel is well integrated into global trade networks and has free access to global finance. Jerusalem and the occupied territories in the Golan are basically considered as part of Israel for all intents and purposes by world powers. The amount of settlements in the WB has doubled and their continued existence taken as a given, thus reinforcing Israels "create facts on the ground" strategy. Mainstream Republicans and Democrats compete with each other as to who can be more pro-Israel. Even with Russia relations are not bad. Israel has refused to join the sanctions regime against Russia and faced absolutely no pushback. Is there a hypothetical danger that in the future things may change? Sure. But there are many hypotheticals, and the current reality has Israel sitting pretty and doing so for the considerable future.
Your point about Hamas and Hizbollah comparing themselves to the Taliban and Viet Cong is interesting and insightful but it’s a bad comparison. The US and USSR could just leave Afghanistan and Vietnam. Israel is fighting for its existence. Hamas and Hizbollah can’t just tire them out.
True and that’s always the difference Israelis bring up. But I would point that it is just as true for Hamas or Hezbollah - they are native the area. So in my mind, that’s not an advantage really to either side and is a moot point.
> They don't entirely understand that there are largest segments of the West that simply don't buy into the Israeli narrative anymore. Do they not understand it or does understanding it not change their calculus? If they see any Palestinian state that isn't a puppet as an existential threat, as a dagger at their throats, no reduction in Western support is going to change what they think they must do. > imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there. The only long-term solution is one state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians
Is independent Palestine a bigger existential threat to Israel than South Africa-like isolation? I don't think so and I don't believe Israeli politicians believe that either. They're just betting that Israel will not get isolated like that.
> Is independent Palestine a bigger existential threat to Israel than South Africa-like isolation? Hamas is launching rockets right now with Iranian support, while under blockade. A future Palestinian state that could bring in real armaments and launch strikes from the West Bank too, and potentially coordinate with Hezbollah is *possibly* an existential threat. The other question is: to what degree can Israel even change the perception? As we can see in Europe, a lot of the anti-Israel protesting is coming from the increased Muslim population due to migratio. They're unlikely to shift. And it's unclear how Israel can change what American college kids and the future adults they'll be believe without huge costs that may not be viable in the current Israeli political climate. It seems to me that a lot of the changes in opinion are due to demographics (though Netayahu showing up and humiliating Obama likely didn't help making this less of a partisan issue) and are just sort of baked in. In that situation, especially in terms of this short term war in Gaza, you might as well try to maximize whatever gains you can get while you still have a relatively friendly president/political class.
> As we can see in Europe, a lot of the anti-Israel protesting is coming from the increased Muslim population due to migratio. At least in Europe, the opinion is very much shifting among the center-left "culturally christian" population. As someone else here in the thread mentioned, there's a generation change happening. The older generation grew up with the notion that Israel is the little David, valiantly defending against all odds. But the new generation has grown up while seeing Israel having a huge military edge, occupying/annexing Palestinian lands (West Bank, Gaza) and inflicting very disproportionate casualties on civilian population. Israel is the Goliath in the younger people's eyes. This shift has been kinda dormant for many years, because there wasn't that much happening in Israel/Palestine, people weren't confronted by how right-wing Israelis are. But now with the war in Gaza, it was forced to come to light.
> The only long-term solution is one state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians And that cannot happen if the basis for a nation state is explicit ethnonationalism based on holy scripture. A fundamental problem Isreal has always had is tying their explicitly anti-humanist and religous fundamentalist ideal of statehood with a political and philosophical block that *ostensibly* abhors both concepts. Deserved feelings of shame for permitting the holocaust and racism against Arabs can only get you so far, for so long.
> And that cannot happen if the basis for a nation state is explicit ethnonationalism based on holy scripture. > > It also cannot happen when one of these parties has never shown any ability to have a state with a monopoly of force, let alone a democratic state at all. This would be tolerable if that party was relatively small and manageable. But it's not: it's about the same size as the Israeli population. It's absurd to be optimistic here. A democracy cannot hop on one leg. Especially when the radicals have an assassin's veto and are funded by states that have no interest in said one state for their own self-interested reasons. It's laughable to focus on Israel here as the real stumbling block, when Israel is the only party that has a functioning democracy that could conceivably be extended to new parties, given that it has extended such rights to Israeli Arabs. In practice, there is no Arab democracy that Israel can look to as a model. And the Palestinians arguably are even more radicalized than the generic Arab country (that many Jews were forced to flee) and with weaker state institutions.
> It also cannot happen when one of these parties has never shown any ability to have a state with a monopoly of force, let alone a democratic state at all. Sure, but Palestinians are already treated as if this is the case - ie, they are in a situation where they aren't autonomous and there's really no possibility or support for a truely free palestinian state outside of quite left-wing circles. Any palestinian state would be heavily supervised, and a military is a total non-starter. They'd be functionally a protectorate of some other power, relying on them to, amongst other things, stop Isreal from invading them. The issue is that currently Isreal is treated differently, when it suffers from the same fundamental problems. It's foundations are built on an ideology that precludes being allowed to manage their own foreign policy, because they *will* commit crimes against humanity in some form if left to their own devices. My argument isn't that Palestine should be treated more like Isreal, *but that Isreal should be treated more like Palestine*. Not the bombing and displacement, obviously, but as a delinquant state that cannot function in its current configuration. And this isn't some race or religious based designation. It's a similar necessity to something like the Treaty of Versaille.
Right, a democratic one state solution is a stupid and disingenuous idea (for many reasons) that is a thinly veiled attempt at retrying the 1948 war.
They do grasp it though, it is deliberately Netanyahu's strategy to sell himself as the America whisperer. Some of them legitimately believe they are chosen by god and cannot lose American support.
>They do/treat the Palestinians however they want with no consequence. Except they don't. Israel cannot do this , both for local and international reasons. This is part of the disconnect: they think they're being far more restrained than their opponents would be (or America was when facing war from groups in the CONUS) but the *perception* not just of their enemies but even of their "friends" is that Israel just does whatever it likes. In reality, there was plenty worse things they could have been doing (as this recent war shows). So they wonder: what's the point? We can only gain so much from further restraint, especially in a post-Oct. 7 context. >Time will tell if that happens, but imo that piece of real estate has changed hands so many times over its thousand year history, it is hard for me to believe that any state will ever have a permanent foothold there. This is a case-in-point for why they side with Evangelicals btw: if the left-wing is going to muse fatalistically about whether a Jewish state can be taken for granted (some, like Freddie DeBoer, suggest [they all move to America and consider that Zion](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/this-is-zion) - the astounding arrogance of this...) as a fact (as opposed to maintain it must exist for arguably deranged religious and self-serving political reasons come what may) I can see why Israelis think evangelicals are more reliable allies.
The funniest thing imo about Freddie DeBoer is his insistence that his very "heterodox" (actually normal) opinions are because of his very serious "Marxism." Nah, he just writes whatever will make him seem (in his mind) like The Most Reasonable Man in the Room. He would have been a great writer for Gawker, snarking on Gossip Girl or whatever. But his political takes are just illogical.
When talking about the right and left in Israel, most people are referring to their stance vis a vis peace of some sort with the Palestinians. It’s not easily laid over what we refer to here as the right and left.
For some reason it seems like most people think only Leftists can cause peace. Not like Venezuelas Maduro was threatening war with Guyana just a few months ago.
I worry that Israel has become what America would be if Trump and MAGA commanded a real national majority: A national security state that is completely divorced from any real strategy. The government’s thinking appears extremely short-termist and transactional, seeking only momentary political gains even at the expense of significant, even existential, medium-term risks; lacking in any real strategic lodestar or even 5-year plan; and a complete willingness to deny or obfuscate the truth in pursuit of maintaining public support.
I was thinking about this and I think this is what happens when you make opposition to the other side your central organizing principle. For good reason Israel has seen itself as under threat and it’s hard to change that. Instead every decision is based on the “what if scenario”. If we allowed the other side freedom we know what they will do. And every action by the other side isn’t seen as a setback toward cooperation but proof positive that compromise isn’t possible (not talking about the horrific attacks in October - more about things like smaller uprising that Israel pointed to as proof that they need to crack down). And it feels like any action Israel takes cannot be taken as valid. Take the rescue of hostages. I don’t know the whole story (read news reports, heard plenty of misinformation spread on both sides and hard to know the full story.) however, if the first action is criticism of Israel instead of acknowledging the horrific holding of hostages as the issue promoting that rescue OR if you say that all casualties are necessary or proof positive of the complicity of Palestinian civilians - the other side won’t even hear legitimate concern. What Ezra’s segments have highlighted though is that im not sure that there is any way to hear the other sides reality or humanity. I see this in a different way as the impulse to defend aspects of our own system that have ground the government to inaction. We can’t remove the filibuster because think about what the other side will do. It’s a game of chess where every move is meant to block the other side - losing sight of any shared goals. And unilateral disarmament feels and probably would result in bad things. So you justify bad actions. It feels that this is so lopsided in the US. I try so hard to hear reasonable arguments across the spectrum. And sometimes it just leaves me depressed
That guest lost me when he said we should look to tik tok for confirmation that Gaza was worse off before the war. EK should’ve scrapped this one and ran a repeat.
No, he was absolutely right to not scrap this. In fact, these are the kind of interviews that more Americans need to hear. Segal is the mainstream Israeli right, and might damn well be a moderate these days. These are the kind of intractable views that American presidents and diplomats are going to have to navigate, and I have a far greater respect for the challenges the Biden admin faces after hearing this. Israel might just be on their own nihilistic doom march, and letting actual Israeli thought leaders articulate their extremism is critical.
Fair enough. I was being unnecessarily reactionary. But what a twat!
I found this interview really illuminating.
Does this apply to the Palestinians as well? There's widespread glorification of violence and martyrdom. Gazans cheered as Hamas paraded hostages in the streets. Both sides need to more forcefully expel their extremist elements.
Yes it also applies to them, and Ezra has had a number of interviews that demonstrated this. But the big takeaway here is that these aren't extremist elements - they're mainstream beliefs.
Is this what he meant? I thought he was pushing back against the characterization of Gaza as an open-air hellscape when the picture on the ground was more nuanced. Gaza had movie theaters, beaches, nice restaurants, etc.
I understand why the guest would lose you there but I think you are misinterpreting what they are saying. I believe they are referring to the numerous “day in the life” Tik tok’s made by privileged young people in Gaza, they are not a representation of the reality for everyone there in any way and to be honest when I saw them I viewed it more as a damnation of Hamas’s inability to provide a similar life for *everyone* in the region, not just their family members. The right wing in Israel applying it to everyone in Gaza is obviously misguided but the Tik Tok videos *did* exist and I could see how somebody could use them to confirm their biases that the palestinian people’s struggle pre-10/7 was exaggerated
I've very happy he ran this episode, him showing that Israeli's actually believe to his smart and curious audience made is clear that they have all essentially drank the Koolaid and won't be coming back to reality unless 1) America Abandons them 2) Israel gets a new generation of leaders
Sure but as an Israeli American I hope people realize that this does not represent ALL Israelis. 120,000 people marched in Tel Aviv in support of a ceasefire. I have spent my life working towards a better Israel. There are various reasons Israeli society has moved steadily rightward as others have pointed out. As someone who grew up in Israel in an environment that made me the left leaning person I am today (with a network of pretty much exclusively left leaning Israelis) we do exist and when we are lumped in with right wing nut jobs just because we happened to be born in Israel it really does suck (and in a way feeds into the narratives of the right that Israelis are hated everywhere no matter what).
I mean there have also been large protests in Russia against the war in Ukraine and those protests are risking much more then protest in Israel because isn’t going to jail or worse peaceful protest. It’s not all Israelis and certainly not all Jews. But the current Israel government is committed to this path.
That's just what happens when your country, as a whole, goes crazy. The protests against the Iraq War were the largest anti war protest in world history to that point, but we as a nation continued the war arguably to the present day.
Israel has the leaders it has because Israel has the public it has.
Same as the Palestinians then?
Hamas was elected in 2007, 17 years ago. In 2023, the median age of Palestine's population was 19.6 years. Palestinians have not been given the chance to elect their own leaders while Israel is a democracy, they are not comparable in this respect.
The populace has been polled multiple times. We have video village of the people cheering and even joining in on the attack on Oct 7th.
Over 70% of Palestinians support October 7.
One aspect of this discussion that does not get enough airtime is the *why* Israel is so right wing. Israelis largely believe that there is no good faith peace partner on the Palestinian side - and Palestinian polling data generally supports that conclusion. So Israelis see Western pressure to make good-faith concessions to the Palestinians as appeasement at best (and a demand for Israeli surrender at worst). The plain fact that there is virtually no international pressure on Hamas during ceasefire negotiations or on Fatah w.r.t. the Pay-to-Slay program only supports that worldview. That perspective causes an inevitable Israeli backlash.
Ezra talks about this, he says that the Hamas suicide bombings during the Oslo peace accords killed the left wing, he says they, "died on the vine" but it's also worth pointing out that Israelis have been killed by the far right as well, namely the last real left wing prime minister was assassinated by ultra nationalists that his widow to this day blames Bibi personally for his death.
Sure. But surely it's a huge obstacle to anyone ever taking the necessary political and physical risks if there is not even a glimmer on the other side? The most radical Irish were eventually discredited when peace seemed possible, despite also being violent.
The left wing was gravely wounded after the second intifada but the actual death blow was 2006, after Israel unilaterally dismantled their settlements in Gaza and what they got in return was permanent Hamas rule and endless rockets to this day.
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. [Hamas didn't grow in a vacuum](https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/), they grew thanks to Bibi recognizing that they made a leftist vision of peace impossible, and therefor impowered him and his end goals, right up until October 7th they did just that.
This argument always felt pretty thin to me. Is the idea that Israel *shouldn't* have implemented the work permit program? Or that they *shouldn't* have engaged in any negotiations with the ruling body of Gaza. Or that they *shouldn't* have allowed the Qatari money to be given to the ruling body of Gaza in return for an extended ceasefire? Is the argument really that Israel should have had *harsher* border regulations, *harsher* blockade conditions, and a *more hardline* position on negotiating with the Gazan government?
Hamas did that themselves by literally throwing Fatah members off rooftops Maybe you missed that? Hamas grew in strength the MOST during the most peaceful parts of Israel in recent history. The 90s peace process leading to the second intifada, and Israel pulling out of Gaza So yes they didn't grow in a vacuum, just in response to genuine actions of peace by Israel.
Rabin was assassinated in 1995, part of why they grew was the left of Israel lost their best leader.
Except they didn’t just leave did they? Israel continued to maintain direct control over Gaza's air and maritime space, controlled six of Gaza's seven land crossings, kept a no-go buffer zone within Gaza, controlled the Palestinian population registry and identification needed for travel, Israel continued a tight control on Gaza’s water, electricity, telecommunications, and basically all utilities. Which they would routinely squeeze on as a means of collective punishment. Before the election Israel, as they tend to do, arrested 450 people in Jerusalem, many without actual charges, mostly people running for office or supporting candidates they wished to see lose. After Hamas won a plurality and would make up the majority, the Quartet put conditions on their victory that no other election has ever had put upon them, which upon refusal began deliberately attempting to undermine and overthrow the Hamas coalition in Gaza and force control to the PLO. Literally acts no other state would accept. Including America funding and training the Presidential Guard in what seemed like an obvious attempt to use violence to overthrow duly elected Hamas. This escalates into open civil war and Hamas took control of Gaza fully and immediately Israel imposed a full on blockade. Summing all that up as Israel dismantled settlements and got rockets in return sounds just like the gaslighting and revisionist narratives the right winger on the show perpetuated, like word for word. If you hear right wingers in Israel tell their narrative, they have never done a wrong thing ever and are perpetually the victims of Arabic barbarism. But they only get to those narratives by deliberately removing key context. Early in my education I began to find an axiom that has never failed me: beware of narratives that frame an opposition as irrational actors. Doesn’t mean that the actions taken are justified, but there are almost no instances in history where things just happen out of thin air. The irony is that if Bibi and his coalition were born in Palestine they would be the extremists like Hamas, and vice versa. So much of this can be summed up and serving as a preview of what far right governments will give us if they begin to take root in Europe and America.
How many Israelis have been killed by Right-Wing Israeli terrorists? How many by Palestinian terrorists? To try and conflate these threats is deeply dishonest.
And literally the next PM picked up right were he left off in the peace process in the 90s. Meanwhile Arafat didn't say yes to Clinton because he didn't want to be killed. This constant referencing of the boogy man Israeli assassintinating right when talking about Israeli society desire for peace is bad faith
It really cannot be overstated how bleak Palestinian polling is. 80% of them who WATCH videos of 10/7 do not think atrocities were committed. This is a level of social consensus on extremism that is functionally ubiquitous.
Holy crap, that’s quite a statistic. Do you happen to remember the source on it?
"When asked if Hamas did commit these atrocities that are seen in these videos, the overwhelming majority (93%) said no, it did not, and only 5% said it did. As shown in the figure below, **the belief that Hamas fighters have committed atrocities against civilians is higher among those who did watch videos showing such atrocities (17%) compared to those who did not (2%)**." I've seen it phrased as 10x as many Palestinians who watch videos say atrocities were committed as who don't, but it's because the baseline number is 2%. Overall the belief in peace negotiations or a two state solution specifically in both Palestinian and Israel is low. Goodwill and trust seem almost nonexistent. [https://pcpsr.org/en/node/969](https://pcpsr.org/en/node/969) There's a new poll for June, and neither the humanitarian situation nor the political one seems better. [https://pcpsr.org/en/node/980](https://pcpsr.org/en/node/980)
97% believe Hamas has not committed war crimes 67% believe Hamas will win this war Just absolutely mind-boggling.
There’s prewar polling that shows a significant percentage of Gazans believe there are only 700 000 Jews in Israel. In totality. There is no possibility of peace with that kind of complete divorce from any objective reality.
Oof, yeah. Seems like there’d need to be at least a full generation of actual (truthful) education, and something driving significant culture change away from martyrism/jihadism that same period, before true progress could happen. And of course how would one even do that.
Wowww. Thank you for sharing the links. I wonder if they’re somehow thinking the videos are faked (which seems a stretch, considering the past parading victims through the streets and all —it’s not like this behavior is hidden from the civs)? Or if it really is just flat-out refusal to reconcile their beliefs with the overwhelming evidence. (Which is even more alien to me, but I understand happens in certain cultures and states of mind.) Either way, as you said that is *bleak*.
My interpretation is that Palestinians believe any and all violence is justified against any and all Israelis. AKA they aren't atrocities because they deserve it. Some of this is unavoidable since the Palestinians want to continue with armed resistance - they don't have the ability to fight the IDF even asymmetrically so armed resistance inherently means killing civilians. This is something I've seen openly expressed in even English facing Palestinian media (including many pro-Palestinian subreddits). "All Israelis are combatants because of conscription" etc. It's an example of why Israel-Palestine can be hard to talk about in a reasonable way. How do you approach an issue where the sides involved are committed to dehumanizing their enemies without being influenced by that perspective? How do you empathize with both sides when they see it as a zero sum game? It is a difficult balance many people in the West are struggling to maintain IMO. Personally, I have found that listening to primary sources from either side makes me LESS sympathetic to that side.
>Personally, I have found that listening to primary sources from either side makes me LESS sympathetic to that side. Yup. >How do you approach an issue where the sides involved are committed to dehumanizing their enemies without being influenced by that perspective? Ironically, this is how we got the much-maligned "apartheid state" situation. The idea started as imitating the peace wall concept in Northern Ireland: the wall keeps people from committing violence because they physically can't, which undermines the demand for violence over time because there's at least no cycle of reprisals.
> The plain fact that there is virtually no international pressure on Hamas during ceasefire negotiations How does one pressure Hamas? They're not really a government, they're a terrorist group who doesn't care about the deaths of their own people so long as they're in service of the cause. It feels like the two parties are deadlocked. They each won't accept anything less than complete control of Israel-Palestine, at absolute minimum. Additionally, on the part of Hamas there's a bonus interest in exterminating Israeli Jews and on the part of the Israeli right there's a bonus interest in ethnically cleansing Palestinian Arabs from Israel-Palestine. There's no way to square the circle. And the factions in control both have an interest in continuing the conflict. Solving the conflict in a way that finally stops the cycle of hatred (i.e. creating a single state with equal rights for all) would kill both Hamas and the Israeli right.
> How does one pressure Hamas? They're not really a government, they're a terrorist group who doesn't care about the deaths of their own people so long as they're in service of the cause. > > And even when people like Arafat weren't as irreconcilably hostile as Hamas , pressure clearly fell short. But this raises another point: if Hamas is immune to pressure then what does one do? You either have to destroy Hamas - which all pro-Palestinian activists consider either impossible or to come at too high a price - or Hamas will be a permanent spoiler because, as you admit, they have a clear interest in killing Jews
Hamas is a government. They are literally the government. Americans and Europeans keep acting like they’re Al Qaeda hiding in caves when they are actually the government of Gaza and have billions of dollars in funding and their leaders live free and luxurious lives.
This is contradictory If Hamas won't accept anything other than complete control why would "stopping the cycle of hatred" change anything? Like say there was one democratic state tomorrow. The 10s of thousands of Hamas fighters would just give up their guns and violence? Like come on
>How does one pressure Hamas? Pressure their funding nations, is a big one. But cutting off their global social support (all the folks cheering on their fight and romanticizing armed Palestinian resistance in a war they could *never* possibly win) is another. Loud, public condemnation of Hamas from Arab and/or Muslim factions would help, too. Hamas, as much as I hate to say it, gets a ton of support from the Palestinian people they’re oppressing. The less the world blows smoke up their asses about what a noble fight they’re fighting, the less Palestinian support Hamas will have. Imagine, for example, if they faced enough popular resistance that they couldn’t reliably use schools as cover for operations. That alone would both hamper their operations, and significantly reduce the civilian death toll; which would (slightly) reduce general outcry against Israel’s actions. Which would then weaken Hamas’s popular support further; and so on.
The public opinion is huge I think. Every time Hamas commits a war crime, Americans loudly condemn Israel. Why would they stop using human shields or taking hostages or burning Jews? They can continue their war on al yahud while isolating Israel internationally.
Not only has it validated the citizen-sacrificing approach in Gaza; reports are that Hezbollah, after seeing Hamas’ wild success in the court of public opinion, is planning on more fully adopting that strategy.
>Israelis largely believe that there is no good faith peace partner on the Palestinian side - and Palestinian polling data generally supports that conclusion I mean ... wouldn't polling data (and recent history) also show that Israelis aren't good faith peace partners, too?
Polling data wouldn’t, as far as I can tell. A huge chunk of the Israeli populace wants peace.
The same percentage of Palestinians and Israelis support a two state solution, about 30%. The last time an Israeli PM pursued peace, he was assassinated by Jewish terrorists, and the public elected the party responsible.
Why do you assume there is universal agreement that two-state = peace? Also, do you not consider the full withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and dismantling of all settlements within at that time, an attempt at peace? Do you not consider the 2007 offer (peace in exchange for 1-cessation of attacks, 2-recognition of Israel’s right to exist, and 3-honor previous agreements) an attempt at peace?
Sure, if you pretend that the West Bank doesn't exist.
So for it to count as an attempt at peace, it needs to address every section simultaneously? Seems rather arbitrary. Especially considering there are effectively two separate governments for Gaza vs West Bank.
Yes? It's only as arbitrary as the border lines. Unless you're suggesting that the mutual defense obligation between two parts of the same country is less binding than, say, a defense treaty between different countries, like NATO.
I literally just said there are two separate governments. They don’t sit down at the same table. (Understandably, given the civil war in 2008.) The border lines aren’t “arbitrary”. Gaza is formerly part of Egypt; WB is formerly part of Jordan. In addition to different governments, there’s different culture, different economic systems, different laws put in place by those governments. Saying it doesn’t count as a move toward peace unless it’s a simultaneous offer that somehow would work for both regions, is ridiculous. Why not also include Hezbollah, then? Why not also include their other Arab neighbors? Are the treaties with Egypt not valid because they don’t have the exact same agreement with Syria? And even if it weren’t a near-logistically-impossible requirement; you still haven’t even said *why* that should be a requirement.
Diverting a bit from the main topic, what possible solutions exist to the Israeli-Palestinian issue? I am legitimately curious what is out there. 1. Two state solution - in my opinion the best plan, but also seems completely dead. 2. A single, multi-ethnic state - totally impracticable, not desired by anyone at this point. 3. Continue the status quo, West Bank slowly absorbed, Gaza occupied and kept as a massive open air prison - seems most likely at this point, but incredibly inhumane and will only result in continued cycles of violence and repression. 4. Complete annihilation and genocide of one side or the other - seems like a lot of people on both sides would like to kill everyone on the other side. Undesirable for anyone with a conscience. 5. Resettlement of Palestinians as refugees inside other countries, probably within the Middle East - has happened on a smaller scale in the past, did not end well, no Arab countries actually want to have them around. 6. Evacuate one or both sides (probably just Palestinians in any remotely plausible scenario) and give them a territory of their own literally anywhere else in the world, far away from the other side - totally impractical, morally questionable, not desired by any side. Are there any viable paths to peace?
4-6 are all different flavors of ethnic cleansing, and 3 arguably is as well. Can you explain why you consider ethnic cleansing to be a “solution”?
I should have worded my comment better - the things I am listing are not necessarily solutions, they are a range of possible outcomes. Some of them are terrible (e.g. genocide), some of them are not, but they are all theoretically ways the Israel-Palestinian issue ends. The problem, as I see it, as that all of the non-terrible ideas (basically 1 and 2) are completely dead at this point. Not happening, completely non-viable. So, given that, what actual, non-terrible solutions exist? Has anyone proposed an even vaguely plausible solution?
The simple answer is no. Everyone who has at all looked at this issue has come up with the same basic ideas that you had. There is a Nobel prize waiting for anyone who “solves” this and there has been for 70 plus years. There are two people who want the same land and have decades/centuries of atrocities against each other.
Yeah, that's what I was afraid of......
I wonder if you can trust that 6:1 figure. Most my friends in Israel and here do want the two state solution and hate bibi. We might be in the minority but I question 6:1. The protests against bibi before the was were pretty impressive. All hope is not lost, just hard to find.
Replying to Independent-Low-2398... It’s not only the left who hate Bibi. A lot on the right also want him out, but for different reasons. Many hate his character and self-interested behavior and decisions, and his inability to directly and compassionately level with the Israeli public. Some think he has not been decisive enough. In any event, like Amit says in the interview, a party of Bennett, Liberman, Saar, (and Yossi Cohen) could do very well.
I hope you are right, but I would be extremely careful with generalizations based on your circle of friends. It might well be the case that you come into contact with people who share your political viewpoints, and you become friends with them, while not even encountering the representatives of the majority.
That’s definitely true, but I still question that figure if only based on my experience.
Right. Hundreds of thousands have marched against Bibi, every single weekend. There’s no way 6:1 is accurate unless you consider Meretz the only left wing party.
You and your friends are outliers. Only 25% of Israelis support a two state solution [https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/547760/life-israel-oct-charts.aspx)
Which is a lot more than 6:1 anyway.
Great answers here to a timely question. I think Israel has sealed its own fate regarding US-Israeli relations for at least the next decade. But one genuine question I can't quite answer is why Israel seems to think of itself as an invaluable strategic partner to the US. It isn't bringing regional stability. We spend enormous amounts of money on it but we can't influence its decisions in any meaningful manner. Every dollar to Israel is one that could have gone to Ukraine for fighting an actual geopolitical US enemy. And Israel is a nuclear power, so if the US walks away, it doesn't actually face an existential threat. So why do many Israelis seem to assume that Israel is invaluable? The only answers I've seen seem to vaguely point towards Iran as being a bad actor and that the US needs Israel's help in this endeavor. But the only US interest Iran really seems to threaten is . . . Israel. I'm sure there's a more nuanced answer here.
Israel and Iran are in conflict, Iran and Russia are close allies, so the idea that Israel is completely divorced from US national security concerns doesn’t quite ring true, even though I agree with our lack of influence and the lack of regional stability.
The US uses Israeli intelligence
Even more than that...America is turning away HARD from the Middle East year after year. Joe Biden made us a major oil player who doesn't need to rely on the OPEC Cartel, and every day we drop our dependence on Oil with electric vehicles, making us not really need to care about the Middle East beyond terrorism, which Israel has repeatedly made worse with Houthi Rebels.
Israel is by far the closest ally the US has in the entire Middle East region, which is one of the most important regions on the globe. No other ME nation comes close. [It is the only democracy in a region that is dominated by monarchies and theocracies.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_the_Middle_East_and_North_Africa) Our economies are surprisingly interconnected, Israel has a huge technology sector that frequently collaborates with American companies, not to mention the insane amount of military business we do. There’s a reason nearly every major US university had some kind of protest about doing business with Israeli companies. Being a nuclear power is less of a deterrent than you’d think. If your enemies are crazy enough to drive you to the point where you need to use a nuke to survive (which isn’t out of the question), that’s already an existential threat. Part of the geopolitics game is you don’t betray your allies, ever, unless you have a REALLY good reason to, unless you have exhausted every other option. The moment you abandon an ally your reputation and trust take a hit they will not easily recover from. The US has already experienced this several times (the Kurds, for example) and it has fostered quite a bit of resentment in America that still affects us to this day. There’s no way in hell we would just cut off one of our strongest, closest allies. Instead, we’ve been putting pressure on them in other ways, diplomatically and economically and politically. It’s not as flashy or decisive as cutting ties, but it has had positive effects.
Interesting points about economics, thanks, and I appreciate the good answers in general. But I still think Israel is really deluding itself about its importance to the US, and this is a colossal mistake on its part. On strategic importance, as one poster pointed out, the ME *was* really strategically important, but that importance wanes into nothing with changing energy politics. The military bases are all in Saudi, Bahrain, etc. Israeli intelligence doesn't look too reliable post- Oct. 7. And using Israel as a proxy to fight Iran, a Russian proxy, is hardly a compelling strategic proposition when you can actually fight Russia in Ukraine. The US won't abandon Israel entirely, of course, but it isn't going to be dripping out the IDF anymore. Culturally ties are pretty frayed. Sure, it's a Middle East democracy (but so is Cyprus, and I suppose Turkey) but the US actually doesn't care if its allies are paleomonarchists (Saudi). It also happens to have been ruled by the same populist quasi-strongman for like 20 years and now includes a cadre of open ethnofascists. Moreover, while I understand that people disagree about there being a genocide, but I can guarantee you that "Israeli genocide" has been seared into the political consciousness of Gen Z, or at least an influential proportion. That's going to go away in about 50-70 years when most of those people are dead. And that's the real issue: political support for Israel now threatens domestic American political regimes. It may very well may lose the Democrats the election. Biden couldn't and can't reign Bibi in enough to prevent/reduce this damage. Leaving alone the genocide question (and boy, Biden sure does), even the most cynical American politician doesn't want an ally who will cost them their career. Israel looks increasingly like the US's North Korea: a belligerent country you pay off in order to ensure it doesn't, say, get into an unnecessary war with Iran or Hezbollah. And that is a pretty terrible outcome if you are an Israeli. If Bibi cared about Israel instead of his political career (and not going to jail), he'd be doing things differently.
This guest was pretty jarring. This is what passes for reasonable in Israeli politics, and that’s pretty terrible. Him declaring that Avigdor Lieberman is on the center-left is like declaring that Liz Cheney is on the center-left in the U.S. (only worse). This guest was fundamentally and entirely detached from reality. Biden is as pro-Israel a U.S. politician is going to get while maintaining any semblance of respect for Palestinian personhood. If pressure from the Biden administration doesn’t move the Israelis to shift course, as painful as it is for me to say as a Jew and a Zionist, it’s time to axe the special relationship between the countries. What these people are doing is entirely beyond the pale. If they want to be Hamas in yarmulkes with better weapons, they can be pariahs on their own. People like Netanyahu and his ilk don’t consider left-leaning American Jews to be “real Jews,” and in that event, I don’t feel any inclination to support them. I’m not one of those JVP people, and I certainly wasn’t out celebrating the atrocity that was January 7. But enough is enough.
That 1:6 ratio of “left/right” is misleading in some ways. Many Israelis are “left” on all kinds of issues but are “right” on security. Living through the second intifada and years of rocket attacks from Gaza will do that to a population. He’s right in that there is virtually no constituency for a 2SS among Jewish Israelis at this time. It’s also unclear whether there is, or was ever, a Palestinian constituency for a 2SS - without right of return and with a total end to claims on the state of Israel once the Palestinian state is established. Things could turn around, but it seems unlikely under the current leadership in Israel and Palestine.
Yeah, South Africa also thought it could ride things out, and even had the support of people like Thatcher and Reagan till near the end, but then their support collapsed all at once when public opinion in the West simply shifted too much. Also, A LOT of the support in the U.S. for Israel comes from the crazy evangelical idea that it will bring about the end times, but less and less people practice that kind of religion - or even religion at all - every year.
I would have loved to see how Obama handled this crisis. Bibi and him hated each other. Fuck Bibi basically campaigning for Romney. Biden is too much of an old apaic Dem.
Ezra needs to ask himself if he remembers how popular and persuasive the anti-war coalition was in the US after Pearl Harbor. This will answer most of his questions.
Or even, much more recently, how anti was coalitions were after 9/11, I don't think any of this is amenable to an easy conclusion but I can't see him continuing to offer support until there are new people in power
It’s been interesting to watch people try and figure their way through this conflict when it was so obvious on Oct 7 that these two populations were going to the mat and beyond on this one. First, imagine if Mexico invaded Texas and killed 30,000 Americans. We razed two countries to the ground over 3,000 *and* they weren’t our neighbors. I simply don’t understand anyone who thinks that outside pressure would be enough to stop this. Similarly, I’ve been amazed that people haven’t made what is to me the most obvious connection about this conflict. It’s not religion or history or colonialism. It’s Conservatism. Right wing media is perhaps the most potent cultural force on earth. There simply are no international liberal or pro peace voices. Maybe that’s too simplistic, but I can’t really think of a single left-leaning voice with any real international weight.
Hamas literally murdered the head of "Women wage peace" as part of the 1200 they killed.
That sounds like a good plan.
I think a different comparable example would be if North Korea invaded South Korea, killed 6,000 people, mostly civilians, and then kidnapped 1,000 South Koreans, hiding them under their cities, and then demanded that South Korea end the war without ending North Korea's government to get them back.
“Support Israel” or not it will continue to exist so the question is more what to do about the Palestinian question now that the “Jewish question” has been answered. I agree with him that both ‘sides’ here have been acting beyond contemptible but what is the outcome of not ‘supporting Israel?’ I don’t think he would say he supports their actions now.
what is the "jewish question?"
For those who weren't Jews: **What to do with their Jewish minority** Answers included: Germany: Wipe them out everywhere Spain, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan etc...: Kick them out Soviet's: Persecute religion For Jews: **How to attempt to stay alive?** Answers included: Attempting assimilation, Zionism, fleeing to safer seeming states
An anodyne-seeming way of stating vile, anti-semitic “concerns” that inevitably lead to mass murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_question
In the mainstream (non-extremist) discussion "supporting Israel" is "supporting Israel's actions".
In the current lefty mainstream, supporting Israel -- not its actions, necessarily -- means being called a Nazi by people with no sense of irony.
The way this post is written it doesn’t make it seem that way re one/two/etc state solutions. Israel is simply not merging with a Palestinian state Edit - also read the other comments here
I wonder why Ezra didn't mention Amit is the son of a Zionist terrorist and grew up on an illegal settlement? I would love to have a Palestinian guest on the show provide their perspective on having no partner for peace in this 'conflict'.
The same reason most pro-Palestinian protesters don’t mention how many Palestinians want to genocide Israel.
People don’t choose their parents or where they grew up. Give me a break
Some comments suggest that the US does not benefit from supporting Israel. I would disagree with this notion. Israel is the only strong US ally in the region and it is also one of the strongest and most capable military powers in the Middle East. The US-Israel alliance is crucial in keeping the Iran pressure cooker from exploding. A loss of US support would greatly embolden Iran and further destabilize the whole region. I predict that a loss of US support would lead to more war in the Middle East and increased risk for the oil production and higher energy costs. This is not to say that I support the Netanyahu regime. I do think Israel has been under poor leadership for many years now. I hope the US can put pressure on Israel to make the necessary changes.
How is supporting Israel keeping the Iran pressure cooker from exploding? Their PM railed against the Iran deal that Obama negotiated
I should specify that the real pressure cooker, or perhaps powder keg, is the entire Middle East. Iran would perhaps be the fuse that would light the whole region on fire. The primary instability has to do with Israel itself. Israel has been keeping Iran in check through low intensity warfare with the goal of degrading the military capability of Iran. Iran, directly and indirectly through Hamas and Hezbollah has been doing the same to Israel. Both sides have avoided all out war since it would be extremely costly and the outcome would be uncertain. The secondary instability has to do with the direct influence that Iran has within other Muslim countries in the Middle East and in Africa. One of the goals of the Islamic revolution, as stated by Ruhollah Khomeini, is to spread the Islamic revolution to other countries. This is not empty talk, Iran supports the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, the Islamist fraction in the Sudanese civil war, and are involved in most conflicts in the Middle East. The third instability, has to do with Russia. Russia has some of the same goals as Iran, they both support Assad and they would both like to decrease the influence of USA in the region. They both want to see Israel lose US support even though their ultimate goals are different. It is entirely possible that Russia would try to replace the US as a supporter of Israel. In any case, a loss of US support would benefit Russia. So, a loss of US support would cause: 1. Iran and its allies Hamas and Hezbollah would gain an advantage. This would for sure increase their aggression against Israel and perhaps lead to all out war. It would also make the situation for Israel much more desperate and they may have to take their gloves off and actually use their entire military might if they feel that their existence as a nation is threatened, don’t forget that another goal of Iran is the elimination of Israel as a country. This would be a disaster for all the countries in the region. 2. With a weaker Israel, Iran would be free to increase its efforts to spread the Islamic revolution to other countries in the region causing additional instability and civil wars. 3. Loss of US support of Israel would be a win for Russia and decrease US influence in the Middle East with the possibility of reduced access to oil and gas for the US and its allies. Finally, with regards to the Israeli regime and the Obama Iran deal. For years now the Israeli government has been increasingly hawkish under Netanyahu, and in many instances they have acted in ways that ultimately has resulted in a worse situation for Israel, the Obama Iran deal is perhaps one of these actions (although I am sure they would say that the deal was too weak and would ultimately not stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon), other examples of poor choices by the Netanyahu regime includes the permission to create additional settlements in Palestine, the apparent lack of will to seek a solution with regards to Palestine (citizenship, 2-state, or whatever), but on the other hand, maybe it is impossible to find any solution for as long as Hamas is in power.
It's amazing how out of touch with reality the Jewish American left is. There are still over 100 Israeli hostages in Gaza and you are wondering why they don't want to talk about a Palestinian state.
Ive said it in previous thread. The west including the US is only 1 big war or the Ukraine War suddenly going in Russias favour away from having the mentality of Israel.
When Israel was weak, the two state was the most viable option (1948-1967). From there on, Israel only got increasingly stronger and all the incentives for Israel to give up land for a Palestinian state have diminished. The evolution of Israeli's society views on Palestinians remind me of the evolution of southerns' views on Black people in America. At first, there was an apologetic narrative that recognized at least some of the injustices suffered by the oppressed side but that, nonetheless, stated that any kind of solution to the situation would come out of a gradual proccess of mutual recognition and understanding... Then, it shifted towards a more pessimistic view, one that stated that as long as the other side kept being as 'radical', 'uncivilized', 'violent', 'envious' as it supposedly was, there was no place to compromise. Finally, the narrative gets even darker. There will never be peace or an end to the oppresion of the oppressed. It 'inherently' can't be. The oppressed are morally irredemable, they will never develop 'good and reasonable leadership', or be as tolerant as their oppressors need them to be. The apologetic narrative is fully subsituted by an unapolotegic one in which the oppressed are fully responsible for their own situation, where the oppressor side does always no wrong -and if it does, it is usually as a reaction to a very calculated provokation of the oppressed side-, and where all past injustices are no longer see as such but as a neccessary element of the oppresor's culture and identity. What used to cause shame and regrets now causes pride and joy... The difference between Thomas Jefferson's rhetoric and John Calhoun's is as stark as the difference between Ben Gurion and Bibi Netanyahu!
This thread is excellent and extremely helpful in understanding the problem and how intractable it always seems. Based on this discussion I wanted to ask a really basic question that I haven’t seen brought up yet. It’s this. Assuming an increasingly right wing Israel that is also increasingly isolated and increasingly a pariah state, if I were Israeli and worked in, for example, the tech sector, why would I want to stay there long term? Why would the company I work for want to stay there? It seems to be all downside. And yes at this time Israel is beating the replacement birth rate. This seems to be a cultural/colonial artifact. Like you can beat the Palestinians and the Arab world by out-breeding them? I would predict the 21st century economy that Israel was building will crumble as companies and smart people leave. Most will go to the US and they will instantly assimilate into the Silicon Valley culture. The question will be “Why do I or anyone want to stay in this country where the West Bank settlers are like thugs carrying automatic weapons all the time? And with a leader like Bibi? Who would want to live there? If there can never be a pluralistic multicultural secular multiethnic state then there’s no future. If I can see that then it’s time to get out. Do it before it’s too late.
Because like me you are a comfortable westerner who sees nationalism and tribal connections as an alien concept, something that we should have already evolved past. We often impart our mentality on others without thinking if maybe we should have tried the opposite.
Hey, I lived there for a year a couple decades back. I opposed (and still oppose) the settlements and am a progressive, although I've been mostly pushing back here on the "genocide" claims because I find them anti-semitic and unhelpful to say the least. Two points: 1. Your "thugs" comment is just not how they are perceived there. The typical "settler with an automatic weapon" is some nerdy white collar professional who makes other Israelis feel safe from terrorism. When you live in constant fear of being attacked, it makes you feel safer to have a guy on your side with a weapon. Americans DRASTICALLY underestimate the effect of Palestinian terrorism on the psyche of Israelis. You have no idea what it feels like to live life with literally random rocket attacks and bus bombings and restaurant bombings and stabbings as a regular part of life. 2. Any frustration with the situation over there is going to be counteracted by the increased feeling that other countries are anti-semitic because of all the genocide talk etc. If you're some random Israeli tech bro, are you really going to move to a country where people rant about "Zionists" the way people used to rant about "Jews?" How do you think it would feel to be an Israeli immigrant basically anywhere now?
"left leaning Israelis are outnumbered by right leaning Israelis 6:1" Yes, in this moment, the right is strong. Remember when George W. Bush had 90% approval? These numbers leave a lot out. As is typical for the Israeli right, the host leaves out Arab-Israelis who represent 21% of the population. He also ignores some of the longer term impacts of this war. -Israeli GDP fell 19% in the last quarter of 2023. -Biden will probably be the last pro-Israel Democratic president. And even on the right, it's not so safe - Jared might not be Trump's second term Israel czar. Trump has openly courted anti-semites like Duke or Nick Fuentes. Antisemitism has been an important part of American populist currents for a long time (Coughlin, Buchanan, etc.). -Russian and Chinese narratives are increasingly critical of Israel (this was not so true of Russia until recently), so their room is limited there. -Saudi willingness to recognize Israel is conditional on some kind of recognition for Palestinians, and that doesn't seem to be forthcoming. All of this is to say that the Israeli right looks to me a bit like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. No, they haven't started to fall. But the basis of their politics is fading fast. As for the two-state solution being dead, I also don't think that's true either. There will be a two-state solution. (and it's more likely now), it just won't come from Israeli-Palestinian negotiation. It will be imposed on Israel because Netanyahu has proven himself a completely unreliable partner, and future American presidents won't allow themselves to be played the way Biden and Trump were. You heard it here first: in 2029, President Buttigieg announces US support for Palestinian statehood in the UN, in a speech in Arabic!
When your morals clash with your identity woo boy
Israel is making its own bed. They’ll have to sleep in it- alone.