Let me be the first to suggest Adam Serwer.

I actually hadn't even connected this line of thought with the cruelty of the Trump administration. There, the sadism has not been invisible at all to me, because it's coming from such a position of power. But yes.

I guess I connect the Israel with the Trump administration more or less automatically now. If that's common, it represents the complete collapse of prior Israeli policy.

I guess I've been focusing on the scale of interactions like the ones in the book - failures to show sufficient respect on demand, constantly cheating someone out of their fair wages or overcharging them, constantly coping with any inconvenience of life by blaming a nearby black person, letting them get beat up or killed, and then the inconvenience resolves itself, or doesn't, completely independently from the torture and/or murder.

So, the level of private quiet small scale interactions. But yes. The sadism goes all the way to the TOP!

I guess my other point is that if you like behaving sadisticly, voting Trump is an extremely rational choice. Plenty of people got away with (or were rewarded for) deliberate cruelty.

Whenever I need to be reminded about the capabilities of human beings and of Americans, I think of lynching postcards. It's not just the cruelty, but the pride in the cruelty.

6: I feel like you're just trying to hurt me now.

6: With Israel-Palestine, liberals will invariably talk about how the latest outrage will harm Israel's standing with the US or will otherwise damage the interests of Israel -- damage them even by the standards of Likud.

Truth is, Israel-Palestine is more like US-Native Americans than it is like South Africa. The winning move -- for certain values of "winning" -- is genocide.

But yeah, the liberals are right that the US could change that equation, were the US so inclined.

Richard White's "Republic for Which It Stands" goes into a lot of detail about this. During reconstruction, southern whites responded to black people's freedom by trying to kill as many of them as possible-- if they weren't slaves, they shouldn't be there. A violent refusal to engage with blacks as people much less as equals.

For prideful status-obsessed people who have internalized hierarchy, any experience of percieved inequity or of those above kicking down will translate into an impulse to abuse someone weaker. Part of the poison is the idea of honor.

2: I swear I don't mean this as a gotcha, but if you or anyone else haven't read Serwer's original essay, it starts with a reflection on the joyful faces of white spectators of lynchings in the South (and has virtues beyond the punchy title).

Truth is, Israel-Palestine is more like US-Native Americans than it is like South Africa. The winning move -- for certain values of "winning" -- is genocide.
I don't think so, not at this point, anyway. AIUI Israel has been working successfully to eliminate its need for Palestinian labor; that done, they can stand on the Green line and stand the sniping indefinitely. This is what apartheid wanted to be, but never had the population ratio to get to.
(Caveats later.)

I don't think the US could change the equation. Germany would never support a boycott of Israel, for certain awkward reasons of history. Russia and China have no reason to boycott. China would be happy to bankroll genocide in Palestine in return for military secrets and technology. The last time the US probably could have done something about Israel was under Obama. The US should try to do something, but the scope is now limited.

12: Yes, I could see it as not exactly genocide, more like a boot stamping on a human face forever.

I hope it's not too sadistic that I absolutely cracked up over this response to fascist rhetoric. Truth is the first casualty!

We used to have an Israeli commenter, Awl; I've been thinking of them lately. I recently caught up with a friend who is temporarily in Tel Aviv over Zoom -- I was transfixed by the brilliant sunlight -- and our discussion ran along the lines of Walt's 13, among many other things. 12 is fair too, although the strike was apparently costly. But I think the open questions about international influence have to do with the nature of democracy in both the U.S. and Israel, i.e. how much power and interconnection different factions have at different points. (There was real synergy between Trump and Netanyahu and their people, it was too horrible to gaze at for long, and I lost track of the plot around 2017.) I am too braindead, as always, to spin this out into anything concrete.

12: that done, they can stand on the Green line and stand the sniping indefinitely.

Likud, at least, has no interest in standing on the Green Line, and my guess is that Likud has overwhelming support of the Israeli people in this. When I talk about Israel's interests, I'm talking about those interests as perceived by the Israeli people and their government.

13: You're right. I fell into the exact trap I was trying to avoid: Imagining that there is an achievable, reasonable solution.

There was real synergy between Trump and Netanyahu and their people, it was too horrible to gaze at for long, and I lost track of the plot around 2017

I think I may mentioned this horrifying sight from my visit to Israel in 2019

https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-uses-trump-in-election-campaign-posters/

12 assumes (not unreasonably, I fear*) that no pro-Palestinian coalition is ever likely to pose an intolerable conventional threat to Israel (Iran or Turkey have the potential, but not soon; and their regimes have deep problems and other fish to fry); I'll assume deterrence will hold above the nuclear threshold.
*Inasmuch as that assumption implies chronic underachievement by MENA states.

18: You correctly infer my assumptions.

And assumes that Israel will forever tolerate the costs of grass-mowing wars in Palestine and Lebanon; talking out of my ass, Israeli demographics and AIUI the exemption of ultra-Orthodox and settlers from conscription suggest this too will hold; and the same reasons suggest that Western ostracisation will have little effect.
What I left out above was the Arab Israelis; I gather they are treated as second-class in significant ways; I don't know how this compares to apartheid (though, hugely, they can vote); nor if there's any realistic endgame in which they are expelled; nor whether Jewish Israelis have the demographics and disposition to maintain the status quo indefintely (though the reasons above again suggest to me they do).

And finally (pwned on preview), just how much expansion and annexation the Israeli right will demand and receive; that I don't know, but that trend does point eventually to genocide territory.

19 to 20 and 21. I think we have achieved comity.

13 is utterly mistaken. US military aid (not counting credit lines) is equivalent to more than a third of Israeli military spending; the US is Israel's largest export market; the US secondary sanctions system is able to crush the life out of entities with which the US does not even have significant trade, witness Iran and Huawei; Germany is a joke, unable in the face of those US sanctions even to complete the last 1% of Nordstream 2 (a core national project fully backed by Merkel and by Schroder before her) inside its own waters. The US lacks only for desire, not power.
(As to the attitudes of the other states mentioned, no argument; and I'd add that France would be happy to sell high end weapons.)

Also, eliminated/ing dependence on Palestinian water through desalination.

I'm not at all an expert on Palestine, but I do know a lot about apartheid. Some salient points:

1 - there was actually a point in SA history when black and white approached demographic parity, although that point was over well before 1948.

2 - there are also several points in South African history when groups of black people did have the right to vote. Most importantly, the Cape had a property-based franchise that wasn't completely repealed until 1958 (although it was substantially narrowed many times before that, most importantly in 1936, when Black Africans were removed from the common voters roles but other non-whites were allowed to remain). In fact, there was *some* form of franchise for some part of the non-white population almost continuously in the modern period. The exception is the years from 1970-1984. Coloured voters in the Cape continued to vote on a separate voters role for a limited number of electoral seats until 1970, and from 1984-1994, the Tricameral Parliament had separate chambers for white, Indian, and Coloured citizens. As this description makes clear, this representation was always limited, sometimes farcically so, but there are some parallels to the Israeli willingness to tolerate the franchise among Israeli Arabs as part of the pretext to denying it to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

3 - South Africa never fully weaned itself off of the reliance on black labour, particularly in the agricultural and domestic sectors. But there was a major shift in the 1970s when the manufacturing and mining sectors engaged in intensive investment in new technologies that made most of their unskilled workforce redundant. Interestingly, the big political effect in South Africa was to increase pressure on the government to end apartheid. The mining sector in particular was politically very influential, and it no longer had a vested stake in using apartheid to maintain a large pool of unskilled and desperately poor laborers. Instead, they started to want to hire skilled black workers to help drive down the wages that they were paying to white workers, which required ending the segregated educational system that relegated most black students to poorly funded vocational schools. And they also got increasingly nervous about the risks of sanctions and boycotts. This shift is a very significant reason that apartheid ended when it did.

An addendum: well into the early 20th century, not only had something like demographic parity been achieved, many white South Africans were convinced that black South Africans were a degenerate/dying population. They thought they were on the path to Australia or New Zealand, or *maybe* the US (ie, genocidal indeed).

When I said the US lacks only for desire, I was ineptly trying to say what lk does, that US action is constrained overwhelmingly by internal US politics, not international relations.

The difference in state capacity and technology between Israel and Iran is immense. A sanctions-level rupture between the US and Israel would be the decisively step for China to supplant the United States as the world's leading power. Right now China is constrained because they lack leading semiconductor expertise. Do you know who has leading semiconductor expertise? Israel.

US contributions to Israel amount to around 2% of Israeli GDP, I think. Do you think they wouldn't spend 2% of GDP to keep their hold over the Palestinian territories? And right now Israel is somewhat constrained by world opinion. You try to force the issue, and it's a coin flip on whether they fold, or turn to mass ethnic cleansing.

And while I don't think Germany has a particularly effectual foreign policy establishment, what stops Germany is not the United States, but the rest of Europe. Europe would rather be pushed around by the US, which is far away, than by Germany, which is so very close.

How long is China realistically likely to be constrained by a shortage of semiconductor expertise? If that's the main thing stopping them from being the preeminent world power, surely they'll solve it before long with or without Israeli assistance.

28: Yes, Israel could replace US aid out of domestic revenue, and it would be very politically painful: as you say, measured in percentage of GDP. The technological capacity of Israel does not protect it from sanctions. Comprehensive US entity sanctions stop everything from moving. Any part of the Israeli economy that crosses any border at any point would stop. Israel is far more internationally integrated than Iran; it would be crushed.
Israel has fab expertise? Enough for China to catch up to TSMC and Samsung? News to me. And Israeli firms will bet on China over the whole world? Huawei was 20% of TSMC's sales; they gave it all up in the face of US sanctions. And what are the demographics of the relevant Israeli experts? How many of them will stay in pariah Israel or move to pariah China, rather than literally anywhere else?
Israel only looks 10 feet tall compared to the amateurs around it. At the global level it's a midget.

28-29: I didn't say the exercise of US influence would make things better: I said simply the US has influence; it is abundantly capable of changing the equation, in your words.
I didn't say that Germany is or would be constrained by the US or by Europe; I said that Germany would be incapable of effectively opposing US sanctions.
30: The choke point is manufacturing, not design. Fab expertise sits in the ROC and ROK (and Intel, flailing to catch up); key supply chain expertise there and in the US, UK, Netherlands, Japan. AIUI the best guess is PRC is at least 10 years behind.

32 me. Note the PRC has spend, and is spending, truly colossal sums on manufacturing R&D, with to date very poor results.

To be fair to them, lots of their best people are working here.

25.1 Is a huge surprise to me, I would have guessed it'd never gone above 20%.

34 is a joke, but its point is real: the US draws on the best talent of the entire world, including Israel; the PRC draws almost solely on its own. Diverting a few Israelis to China will not tip the balance.

33. To the contrary, not disagreeing with return:expenditure being poor:
Russia apparently does not foresee the current revenue stream from arms sales to PRC to continue indefinitely, as Chinese jet engines become more reliable.

Semiconductor manufacturing is the fastest-paced most capital-intensive industry in the world. 2019's factories are not worth much, roughly speaking. China isn't yet making reliable high-performance jet engines, but they are making cars, trains, and slightly out-of-date semiconductor components, as well as solar panels. Those last have basically no market value, but that's not cause for complacency.

TikTok's AI recommender system (greedy for data to do better) is absolutely world-class.

China retains the absolutely highest-scoring test takers for classified work apparently; the best people here are the ones who tested below 95%. Tests aren't everything, but maybe 10-15% of Chinese scientists/software people in my professional circles have returned, and my circles skew older.

35: Look at the place on satellite. SA is mostly arid or semi-arid, African agriculture was mostly mixed pastoral and extensive agriculture. Population densities were generally pretty low pre-20th C.

31: Israel designs most of the CPUs for a little company known as Intel. Intel also has a 14nm fab in Israel, and they are building a 10nm fab (though most of their fabs are in the US).

Obviously Israel would be seriously hurt by sanctions. It seems equally obvious to me that their response would be to double-down and thrown in with China. It would also possibly cripple Intel, and make the US even more dependent on Taiwan.

I'm trying to imagine a counterfactual world where the US doesn't merely cut off aid to Israel, but puts that country in a sanctions category with Iran. I'm not sure what Israel or China would do in that world, but I'm pretty sure the government of Atlantis and the Loch Ness Monster would be pissed.

38: Colonial conquest also killed a whole lot of people. Straightforward genocide of the San in the 18th century. Frontier wars and death by starvation after significant famine in the mid-19th. And truly appalling rates of child mortality in African communities in the late 19th.

39
Israel designs most of the CPUs for a little company known as Intel
I repeat: the choke point is manufacturing, not design. China is designing perfectly good chips already; they don't know how to make them.
Intel also has a 14nm fab in Israel, and they are building a 10nm fab
TSMC is at 5nm, working on 3. They're building as many as 6 fabs in Arizona, starting at 5nm, maybe going down to 3nm. At the high end atm it's TSMC, Samsung, or nothing.
41: Yes. I'm not up on the demographics on that.

42 is a little too strong. Intel manufacturing isn't over, but is far behind. Intel's recent reorganization admits as much, splitting design and manufacturing. Officially they're still saying they're going to catch up on manufacturing, but that's a brutal hill to climb.

You need an electric bike for hills.

And where are those made? I'll give you three guesses.

China?

ROC?

Leeds?

My bicycle was made in Birmingham.

The Chinese know their bicycles.

49. The one in England or the one in Alabama?

The English one.

Sadism has been the central tenet of the Republican party since 2001 at least.

Talking about semiconductors, is there any practical chance that governments begin to take action against cryptocurrencies on the grounds that their overconsumption of critical resources like GPUs, energy obviously, now SSDs amount to a national security threat? Setting aside the obvious fact that cryptocurrencies facilitate ransomware and other criminal transfers of money, it would seem that a measurable percentage of production being diverted into a zero or even negative-sum endeavor is suboptimal.

This is a good interview that is quite frustrating to read, because it reflects fairly accurately how frustrating the situation is.

Do I think they will have unity or that they should go back into elections? I don't: both parties are still living in a zero-sum game, and the crisis is bigger than either faction. But we still need to be talking about elections as a way to PLO resuscitation, rather than to a unity government under the PA. Palestinians still need to rethink how Hamas and Fatah can both sit alongside other parties in a national liberation project.

This is not at the level of Atlantis and Nessie, exactly, but it's such a fucking miserable problem with ten times as many ways to go wrong as right. And look at the occupation government they're facing!*

If the elections were just about institutionally healing the division between Gaza and the West Bank, we're past that rhetoric in some ways, because there is a sense of a shared struggle. The sense in Ramallah is that they're protesting for Gaza -- which the PA didn't allow in 2014 -- and the sense in Gaza is that this [is] a united Palestinian struggle, though with some resentment that they're the ones paying the price.

That last line is rather heartbreaking.

* Piece is by Isabel Kershner, whose objectivity is dubious, but it was handy and I didn't feel like scrolling through Ha'aretz or whatever.

I didn't really think this one was going to be the genocide, but I have little doubt that the big one is coming sooner rather than later. Gaza is the world's largest prison camp, and when these incidents occur, it becomes a death camp.

Honestly, there's just no room for moral suasion here. A large proportion of Israelis are hell bent for Palestinian extermination. The rest of 'em won't do shit to stop it. The crimes of that guilty land will not be purged except by blood and fire.

If you can write that, I think you can sign it.

it would seem that a measurable percentage of production being diverted into a zero or even negative-sum endeavor is suboptimal.

I'm sure that governments will take action against this sort of thing right after they ban (or tax) high-frequency trading.

I'm the one who brought the word "genocide" into this conversation, and it probably wasn't a good choice. Israel's goals and methods are very, very long-term and peep's discussion in 14 of "not exactly genocide" is closer to my actual view of Israel's achievement and intent.

It is weirdly difficult to find a good, linkable map of the West Bank, but (with the caveat that I don't know anything about this website) I'm pretty sure this map is a reasonable representation of the change over time of Israel/Palestine.

The trend here highlights both the long-term Israeli plan and the country's success in executing that plan. We are about 50 years from the annexation of the West Bank. What do we think Israel intends the West Bank to look like 50 years from now?

I remember a few decades ago, an interview with one of the Hamas leaders. He said Hamas didn't intend genocide, or indeed any kind of violence, against Israel; it would be perfectly all right for the Jews to go live in Montana. A key difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians is that Israel has the wherewithal to forcibly displace Palestinians from the land.

If 55 is someone new, let me suggest "Jenn O. Cyde" as a pseud.

Shouldn't Jenn be Irish?

You might recall that in a moment of poor judgment, one of the regulars briefly adopted "Ray Cyst."

My contribution to that thread was this.

Which, honestly, is still great.

Hi, lurid! I still lurk occasionally. I don't exactly know what to say, so two small anecdotes: a friend quit Ha'aretz this week because he thought the coverage of Arab-Israeli protests was too accepting of the version of events put out by the police. They've since published an article about the protests in Jaffa which I think is meant to head off his publicizing of his resignation. He's going to try to open a think tank to promote a single state solution - we'll see how that goes. Another pair of friends sent us a recording of their call to the police, when they called to report that they were seeing an Arab-Israeli being lynched on live TV with no police forces responding. The person on the other end of the line told them not to yell (they might have raised their voice, because, um, live lynch on TV) and eventually hung up on them. My friends, family and myself are horrified and feel completely powerless - Netanyahu has hijacked the whole state apparatus and has pseudo-journalists pushing his talking points slavishly on almost every channel. I think Netanyahu instigated much of what is going on right now in order to avert the possibility of a coalition that doesn't include him, but even if he will be removed from the political field, the racism and dehumanization here seem to have pushed past a tipping point. Lots of people I know (myself included) are considering emigration. After a year of COVID, this is even crazier. Sorry if this text is disjointed - I have too many thoughts and feelings about what's going on. You all are very well informed so I don't think there's much in the way of facts I can contribute, but if you have any questions for a local, ask away.

Awl! I'm glad to hear your take, and it's all so awful, and I'm sorry.

Hey Awl, it's nice to see you. I have a friend who moved back to Israel in 2014 after living in the US for about 5 for a post-doc. She returned after a year, and all she would say on the topic was that it felt different, no longer like home. Do you have the same sense that things have changed in a way even someone fairly nonpolitical would feel it so strongly?

Also, thanks for taking the time to weigh in. I hope things get better (and that your path to bettrr is an easy one). My imagination utterly fails me when imagining what it's like on either side of the conflict.

Awl! Obviously, if anyone can sympathize with what it feels like when your government is doing awful things, it's Americans, and I'm so sorry for you and your family being in this position.

Every genocide is unique, and the North American-style solution so many in Israel seem to want, driven by the same kind of Manifest Destiny purportedly decreed the same asshole god, qualifies as a form, imo.

Not so fast there buddy.

Thomas Friedman made his reputation as a Middle East reporter, so I figured I'd check out his latest. It is, as per 9, yet another bit of wishful thinking that this time Israel has committed an outrage on a scale that will ultimately be damaging to the country's expansionist goals.

It's also really, really dumb for other reasons that are more Friedman-specific. Friedman would profit from an analogy ban, but it would require draconian enforcement measures: An eye for an analogy, a tooth for a metaphor. The Hamas attack and its consequences resemble the Yom Kippur War in pretty much no way whatsoever.