I know nothing and am just sad.
Well, angry about all the kids who are orphaned and maimed in Gaza too.
I have had one really basic question that I'm too embarrassed to ask in public. The various US-facilitated peace processes were always pushing for a 2-state solution. Why was it never possible to have a multi-ethnic democracy in the region? It doesn't seem any less unfeasibke than a 2-state solution, but I know less than fuck-all about the history.
I have a question: what does the government of Lebanon think about all this? Hezbollah is state-sponsored, but by Iran, right? I can't imagine Lebanon happy about Israel's actions, but they seem weirdly absent from a lot of the coverage.
The reason I ask is due to a weird experience in grad school of visiting a Mediterranean restaurant with an Israeli classmate. The place was owned by a Lebanese immigrant who was very pro-Israel, which surprised me at the time -- didn't Israel invade? Yes, but from his perspective Israel had helped, because Lebanon didn't want Hezbollah (or their precursors) there, either, and couldn't get them out. This is the most Bobo comment ever, but it wasn't a salad bar, although we got some free falafel and dessert.
Most of the Lebanese in America are Maronite. Or that used to be the case.
Maybe the consociationalism of the Lebanese government (like Belgium, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia & Herzegovina) makes it hard for them to speak with a single voice on these matters?
There was a civil war. Israel was the ally of (most) Lebanese Christians.
I'm still boycotting Israel until someone pays me not to. And they'd need to pay my full rate.
War is bad. Childishly, I wish I understood why so many people, politicians included, demonstrate such deference to it and enthusiasm for it.
I'm still boycotting Israel until someone pays me not to.
Oh, does your state not have an explicit fucking law banning anyone who contracts or works for the state from boycotting Israel?
I should say, Israel or energy companies or firearm companies. You can't boycott any of those if you want to do business with Texas.
This whole thing is making me sick. I love Lebanon. I've traveled there and was even recently thinking of eventually retiring there. Beirut is fantastic. Great food, bars, nightclubs, arts and culture, beautiful country, and yes, beautiful women. I have friends there, I also have many Lebanese friends, coworkers, and acquaintances here: Sunni, Shi'i, and Maronite. The Lebanese are a remarkable people.
One of my friends' villages was bombed by Israel in the south, he's Christian and it's a Christian village. His parents refuse to evacuate. I have another friend and colleague who grew up between Beirut in Dahiya and Massachusetts (you wouldn't know she was Lebanese unless she told you) who lost family and friends there. Another friend also from a Maronite family told me close friends of his lost a lot of family members.
All the Maronites I know here support Hezbollah in some degree even when they can also be critical, but it's clear they see Hezbollah as defending their country against Israel and support them to that extent. There is zero desire to return to the days of the civil war.
I'm having a hard time thinking this is all due to Biden's utter fecklessness. For all his vaunted empathy it's been very clear that he doesn't see Arabs as human beings. He wants this. Fuck him. Also there is not a pit in hell deep enough, dark enough, or hot enough for Brett McGurk:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/30/us-israel-military-hezbollah-00181797
Shades of Bush's Iraq war all over again. Fucking hell.
Why is the US supporting this?!? I feel like I'm missing something. Biden himself can't possibly believe this will lead to peace, even if war hawks could convince themselves of that. It can't be out of fear that the American Jewish community will turn tail and vote for Trump. Or if it really is that, that's got to be a hallucination. The (democratic) Jewish community can't possibly be in lockstep support with Netanyahu in critical numbers.
I feel like you haven't been canvassing in my neighborhood.
It's not a question of lockstep. It's a question of losing or not losing a few tens of thousands.
Where can you today get the best of Muslim-sphere urbanity with the least impingement by war or obscene wealth? Morocco?
16 I lived in Morocco for a couple of years, it's great but the major cities are not nearly as cosmopolitan or fun as Beirut.
It's a tragedy and it's just awful everything that Lebanon has gone through.
13: Do we support it? It looks like Biden was ok with bombing Hezbollah leadership but has pretty clearly opposed invasion, am I missing something?
I'd have thought Istanbul? Though not so useful if you speak Arabic and not Turkish.
Oh yeah definitely Istanbul -wonderful city- but maybe less so under Erdogan, it's been a long time since I've been there
I absolutely loved my one visit to Istanbul in 2012. Easily one of my favorite cities I'd visited, and wildly exceeded my expectation. Absolutely stunning location, beautiful architecture, good food, interesting history, and just vibes-wise reminded me of the outer boroughs in a way that was really nice when I was living in Germany for 4 months after NYC.
Has anyone been to Sarajevo?
21: Isn't 11 about the pre-invasion stuff? It was published on the 30th.
22.last I have not but would love to
23 we've been supporting them doing genocide in Gaza for almost a full year. The WH has supported the bombing of Lebanon and their plans for the invasion. What makes you think we're stopping now?
Oh yes, Istanbul was definitely on my list already.
The WH is totally delusional and is in the grips of Cheney-Rumsfeld remake the Middle East disease.
And not only doesn't this serve US interests, how is it serving Biden's interests? He knows Bibi wants Trump to win and yet he's October surprised himself.
I don't think the White House is deluded in the same active way Cheney was - they're not managing the process with any vision in mind, they just think it would be political suicide to go against Israel in any material way. Which is almost equally complicit, just a different picture.
I'm at the point where I'm questioning why Israel-Turkey-Saudi Arabia are a better lot to throw our hats in with than Lebanon-Iran. Yes the Iranian government sucks a lot but so do the governments of Israel, Turkey, and SA. Iran was willing to play ball with us on the nuclear agreement until we unilaterally tore it up and they've been the adults in the room in the past year when it comes to deescalation.
I was also in Istanbul in 2012 and loved it. I didn't know what to expect but it exceeded my expectations. Even my partner enjoyed his visit which was a heavy lift because he's Armenian and his family was formally banned from living in Turkey in 1922.
I think Israel, Hamas, the US, Hezbollah, and Iran have discovered in that order that they were deluding themselves that they were in control of the situation.
29 Well, Turkey is a NATO ally for one.
I've long thought the natural geostrategic partner of the US in the region is Iran (because, among other things, fuck the KSA) but the regime is the issue. Not much to be done there until things change, and it will have to be the Iranian people who change it.
Why was it never possible to have a multi-ethnic democracy in the region?
The snarky answer is that the most prominent example of an attempt to build a multi-ethnic democracy in the region is... Lebanon! (Technically the diversity there is mostly religious rather than ethnic but the issues are largely the same.) Which has been a notorious basketcase and quasi-failed state pretty much since its creation, which came about when the French carved a piece out of their Syria mandate so that they could have an administrative unit with a Christian majority. (It no longer even has that, but the fragile political balance, such as it is, depends on the assumption that it does, so they haven't done a census in ~100 years.)
That's a bit of a sideline to the main question about Israel/Palestine, but it does illustrate why it's been very tough to get to a peaceful, mutually acceptable solution there. There are and have been proponents of a one-state solution for a long time (I've been one for ~20 years), and they seem to be gaining a little more traction in recent years as its become clearer that the two-state solution is unlikely any time soon, but still very much in the minority. The objection to 1SS has always been that the two groups have too much history and mutual animosity to live peacefully together in a single polity, but I think that objection really also applies to a 2SS, which would also involve living in close proximity but with an imaginary line separating them.
As for why this is the case, it's tough to untangle all the strands but ultimately I think the main issue is that ethnonationalism has been the primary ideology throughout the region ever since decolonization, and it points strongly in the direction of a separate state for each ethnically defined "nation." To the extent there has been any challenge to this primacy it's come from religious extremism rather than any sort of secular cosmopolitanism. This is all true just as much on the Israeli as on the Palestinian side.
It's all just unutterably sad, and unfortunately I think the most likely outcome for quite some time to come is continued violence all around.
There was an amazing 3 day conference here a couple of weeks ago put on by one of the American universities here on Reimagining Palestine that gave me a lot of hope - for the long term. The speakers and panelists was A list of academic experts, lawyers, activists, etc., Many Palestinian, Palestinian-American, Lebanese, Israeli, Jewish American. So many also remarked that there was no way they could have these kinds of discussions in the US. Absolutely no one takes the 2SS solution seriously, and imo they're right to do so. One single secular democratic state was the phrase I most often heard. Amen to that.
It's also enraging that State has told the almost 100,000 American citizens in Lebanon that they'll do fuck-all for them and they're on their own, especially when they routinely charter flights for American citizens caught in war zones as they did for Americans in Israel shortly after October 7.
35 s/b was made up of the A-list of...
I've long thought the natural geostrategic partner of the US in the region is Iran (because, among other things
To wit?
38 geographic position is critical (for hydrocarbon production and export, such that that is these days) and keeping the Russians in check and KSA in its place. Demography, large well-educated population, they could have an economy not totally dependent on hydrocarbon exploitation were it not for the sanctions and the repressive regime.
Why was it never possible to have a multi-ethnic democracy in the region?
Israel was born as a Jewish state, and not a multi-ethnic democracy, and the country has never wavered on that issue.
13: "Lockstep with Netanyahu" is not how these folks think of themselves. "Committed supporters of a Jewish state" is a more charitable characterization of the less repugnant Americans. The problem is that Netanyahu -- or something a lot like him -- is hard to avoid in that context.
The American Jewish Committee has an interesting discussion of the phrase "Zionism is racism." The AJC (currently led by former Democratic Representative Ted Deutch) argues that the phrase itself is inherently racist.
Here's where that argument goes off the rails:
[S]aying "Zionism is racism," a phrase which itself is a racist and religious distortion, conveys that the Jewish people--unlike all other people in the world--do not have a right to self-determination.
I don't think we have to reflect too long to come up with a group of people in the world that the AJC does not regard as having a right to self-determination.
Deutch and the AJC are representative of a lot of non-Republicans in the US. Are they bad people? I certainly find myself tempted to say, "It's complicated." Ta Nehisi-Coates, for one, strenuously objects to that view.
Are they bad people?
Like, in their heart of hearts?
If only I were able to canvas in Pennsylvania.
Every revival of the Lebanon fondly reminds me of Human League.
41.7: Ainu, Aland Islanders, Amish, Andaman Islanders... and many others before you even get to "P"
41: I know it was. But I don't know whether that's really a just solution given how many people have lived there over how many millennia. Carving it up and drawing lines seems kind of ridiculous as does an inferior status for non Jews living in Israel.
Zionism isn't racism, but there is a moral myopia and short sighted real politik present in the dominant strain of Zionism since its inception that still seems to have repercussions for Israel. Herzl's full-throated defense of the Hamidian massacres and his view of national determination as zero sum were extremely misguided. Herzl saw mass murder of the Armenians as good for the Jews because as long as another group was getting attacked it meant the Jews were safe, plus he saw Armenian nationalism as direct competition. Scholars have pretty persuasively argued that the Armenian genocide opened a horizon of possibility for the holocaust. Hitler's line that no one remembers the Armenians wasn't apocryphal. Similarly, aligning Israeli interests with increasingly open Nazis and antisemites, fomenting war across the Middle East, and alienating potential allies and international organizations incredibly short sighted. Right now it's bad for the Gazans and Lebanese but down the line making Israel a rightwing pariah state justifiably hated by its neighbors will be very bad for Israelis as well.
I mean, I know left Jewish people who are not Zionists, but I wouldn't want to force out the current Jewish Israelis either.
The JCC is controlled by the Jews.
It's kinda weird to me to refer to "Zionism" as as a concept when Israel's been around for almost a century now. Like regardless of whether you think founding Israel was a good idea, it exists now. Like I don't support the Turks taking over Constantinople, but it happened, and I wouldn't support a Greek invasion now, and that doesn't make me some kind of Turkish nationalist.
The occupation is bad, invasions are bad, but some version of Israel is baked in at this point. You can't send all the Mizrahi back to Baghdad and Yemen.
The fascinating thing about Israel/Palestine discourse is that both sides are basically misunderstanding the lessons of past waves of colonialism. (I did a long thread about this on Twitter recently but it was under my real name so I can't link it here.)
The upshot is that the populations are the same size and neither is going anywhere. That's a vanishingly rare situation compared to past colonial projects where one side or the other ended up with total demographic domination and ultimately converted that into total political control. So there aren't any plausible comparative models of how this is likely to turn out or what either side should do.
51
I was boycotting my JCC due to their Executive Director's militant support of Netanyahu except they're the only place that offers yoga in my neighborhood. So now I'm just mostly boycotting them.
They have a dude with a gun out front now. And the only pool in the area.
I mean Turkey and Greece doesn't seem *that* different. Eventually Greece ended up with a smaller independent state.
Ireland?
What happens is eventually the colonizing side draws a line and gives up further colonization and both sides have demographic and political control on one side, often with forced migration and ethnic cleansing, but with two states in the end.
Maybe the JCC is going to try to take over the Rite Aid. If they can actually keep the chips stocked, I think the neighbors would not protest much.
Those are thought-provoking! I'll have to think about how they fit into this framework. I was focused on waves of European colonialism outside Europe, but these comparisons are good to look at too.
I don't know what happened to my other comment. Maybe it will reappear after I post this one.
58: Is Dublin as important to the resident of Northern Ireland as Jerusalem is to the Palestinians?
I don't know what happened to my other comment. Maybe it will reappear after I post this one.
58: Is Dublin as important to the resident of Northern Ireland as Jerusalem is to the Palestinians?
Turkey and Greece is an especially interesting comparison, and not just because it's in the same region. Turkey isn't usually discussed as a "colonizing" power but of course there's an obvious sense in which it clearly is.
Doesn't really do much to undermine the "decades of further violence" prediction though.
Suriname, Fiji, New Caledonia.
Sri Lanka, Sikkim and various Indian NE.
66: Yeah. A whole lot of people were killed in that process.
Suriname, Fiji, New Caledonia.
Plantation colonies have their own weird demographics that are hard to compare to other countries. New Caledonia is distinctive in a lot of ways. (For one thing, it's still a colony!)
68: Who are the colonizers and the colonized in those situations? Sinhala/Tamil in Sri Lanka?
70: Cyprus seems like an extension or special case of the Turkey/Greece situation.
Another interesting case is Zanzibar. Even defining the different groups is hard there though.
It's interesting that de facto partition was the end result in Cyprus just as in Turkey/Greece.
Transniestria.
73.2: IDK. The Cypriots might have an opinion.
75: IDK if it needed to be. What if no Turkish intervention? What if Greek? Shrug.
73.1: Tamils yes. NE I don't really know, but it seems to be especially Bengalis (sometimes from present-day Bangladesh, for extra wrinkles) versus prior locals.
65 that gets fraught and tangled up in notions of empire. Does it really make sense to speak of colonialism before the modern era? I mean the Greeks had colonies throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea too.
And arguably the Ancient Greeks were a lot more like settler colonialism than the Ottomans
Dublin and Jerusalem aren't a great comparison, but Constantinople and Jerusalem is about as good a match for Jerusalem as you'll find. You also end up with centuries of conflict about the Hagia Sophia that isn't so different from the Temple Mount. (Of course all analogies and bad and banned.0
77: Yeah, it's complicated. I do think it makes sense to talk about colonialism for some pre-modern situations but they aren't necessarily directly comparable to modern ones. And not all colonialism is settler colonialism, which adds another wrinkle.
80 and why scholars who study colonialism do not apply it to the premodern period
The main Turkey/Greece stuff also just isn't *that* old. Like Constantinople/Istanbul changed hands in 1453, and we certainly talk about colonialism within one generation.
There are certainly premodernists who talk about colonialism, at least with regard to ancient Greek and Phoenician colonies, though I don't know how much they use concepts from modern colonialism studies. But yeah, like 82 says, all the situations we've been discussing here are pretty modern (or at least continued into modern times).
Colonialism as a framework for Israel is a weird fit in its own way (both because most Israeli Jews are from the Middle East, and because the timing is so late). In either case, we're stretching from the prototypical colonial scenario.
In either case, we're stretching from the prototypical colonial scenario.
We definitely are, which is kind of my point and also why these other comparisons are helpful even if they too stretch the "colonialism" framework.
One thing I've been increasingly intrigued by is the possibility of using a colonial framework to understand ancient Israel. Also maybe a stretch but it seems to have some definite parallels at certain times, in various ways.
How ancient? Like Roman colonization of the Levant (especially after Bar Kochba)? Certainly like Caesarea Maritima was a colony. Or you have in mind something older like Babylon or Assyria?
How ancient? Like Roman colonization of the Levant (especially after Bar Kochba)? Certainly like Caesarea Maritima was a colony. Or you have in mind something older like Babylon or Assyria?
Both, but especially the earlier periods, and in contexts where the Israelites/Jews were more colonizers than colonized (though as always, it's complicated!). E.g., the original Return to Zion under Zerubbabel/Ezra/Nehemiah has a lot of interesting parallels to modern Zionism. And even earlier (maybe!), there's Deuteronomy, which is largely a fictitious charter for colonization and genocide.
(This part's probably going to drive Barry even crazier than the other stuff.)
Yeah, I'm pretty skeptical of any historical value at all for anything before 650BC. But yeah the Return to Zion is interesting, with an elite from a different part of the world ruling locals ostensibly of the same ethnicity, but depends on how you construct it.
To my mind Israel is more obviously part of the ethnic cleansing campaigns of 20thC E/SE/E Europe (that is, ethno-national state formation) than settler colonialism.
84 Not at all, it's classic settler colonialism. The vast majority of Jewish settlers before 48 were from Europe, the early Zionists called it colonialism, there was even a Palestine Jewish Colonization Association that played a major role in buying land.
There's a reaction against it because colonialism is a pejorative turn and of course the Israeli Jews aren't going anywhere (other than those who've decided to vote with their feet and plane tickets out of the insane mess their country has become for peace and prosperity abroad), no more so than non-Native Americans are going to go back to wherever their ancestors came from.
Hence also the power of the vision of one secular democratic state for all.
92 Ethnic cleansing had a huge rule in many (most?) instances of settler colonialism.
(This part's probably going to drive Barry even crazier than the other stuff.)
Especially since it's past midnight here and I need to go to sleep.
It's always past midnight. I was never clear on why you could ever feed Gremlins.
One interesting situation is you do get lots of examples where the post-colonial leadership was British educated (Nehru, Ghandi) but I don't know scenarios where they were mostly in Europe for multiple generations.
Would be interesting if Cuban-Americans ever returned in large numbers to Cuba.
93 also why while I think it's important for understanding how we got here as I've expressed before I think it's of limited utility in any forward thinking of a just resolution.
I don't disagree with anything in 93 or 98, to be clear.
99: I think you're one of the closest parallels, in fact, and it's interesting how rarely that gets mentioned.
There's a large section of the left or at least a very vocal segment which runs with the settler colonial thing which is where you'll hear that reprehensible and moronic "go back to Poland" line. I mean maybe it had something to it back when Begin was PM but I don't know how to read it now other than straight up antisemitism.
And of course even back then there's no thought given to why just Jews couldn't go back to Poland
I'll also note that I heard not a peep of that kind of crap from a single one of the panelists or attendees at that incredible conference I mentioned above.
Sorry peep.
Clearly I can solve this if I stay up past 1
One last thing while it's on my mind, I've done this too because it's easy shorthand but Palestinians really hate the "Gazans" construction.
Like the HOA doesn't like my shed?
Yeah, I did think about Liberia (and Sierra Leone), but the African-American part was always so small, seems more like city-colonies (like Singapore or Goa) than la country.
Did US Slaves founding Liberia encounter negative push back from the locals?
Probably. It's hard to imagine they came from families that spent generations in America without at least some of them becoming huge assholes.
My friend's aunt and uncle just moved to Liberia. No direct ties, but they are African-American and maybe got sick of Florida.
I am also sick of Florida, but I'd still be sick of Florida even if I moved from Maryland to Liberia.
Google maps hates Maryland. It had me get on 68 going east for four miles and then go back west to the same exit.
52: Israel's been around for almost a century now. Like regardless of whether you think founding Israel was a good idea, it exists now.
First off, 76 is not "almost" 100. It's quite a bit less than that, in fact. Plenty of Palestinians who saw the Nakba begin are still with us today, still dispossessed and still calling for justice. Secondly, "it exists now" is a pretty poor argument for any aspect of the political structure of anything. Rhodesia "existed now" fairly recently. Does that mean it should have been propped up forever? And the wholly illegal, war-crime settlements "exist now" -- are we supposed to just suck it up because some of them have been around for a few decades?
Like it or not, every adult, Jewish, Israeli Zionist is participating in war crimes as we speak. War crimes exist now too, but they shouldn't, and we shouldn't be financing them.
I think of post-WWII Silesia as having been the model in mind at the founding of Israel: the Palestinians would just leave and more or less integrate into the surrounding countries. It didn't happen and apparently there wasn't a Plan B. Except to pretend that it did happen . . .
As I've mentioned long ago, I was at the AJC annual dinner in 2001 -- pre 9/11 -- and Shimon Peres sketched what seemed to the time to be a plausible way forward: economic integration, enough prosperity in Palestinian communities to take the edge off, with lots of money and encouragement coming from outside. In the wake of the killing of Rabin and Oslo, this seemed like it was all that was left. And then after 9/11, the US abandoned even the pretense of being useful.
There's a faction in the US security establishment that finds the idea of what seems to be something of a defeat for Iran to be pretty attractive. Israel really does seem to have accomplished something that might end up being meaningful wrt Hezbollah -- as we've seen with Al Qaeda, with non-state actors it might really be possible to decapitate your way into at least a longish though ultimately temporary victory.
115: In the current climate, I'm pretty opposed to selling Israel arms, but I don't think we can call for all of the Israelis to be kicked out.
What if we sell arms to Israel, but really fuck them over on the price?
Why is *every* adult Jewish Israel to blame, regardless of who they voted for, and not also Israeli Arabs who are after all also citizens?
116: I think that's mostly right, but misses a key point. Between 48 and 67 that plan basically "worked" (it's ethnic cleansing, but it happened). The problem is the post-67 occupation, and there I don't even think that was the plan, there just was no coherent plan.
Did US Slaves founding Liberia encounter negative push back from the locals?
It's not summarized in Wikipedia, but I would be surprised if they didn't, given the colonizers didn't let them vote and within a couple generations (at most) had set up an exploitative near-slavery labor system for mining, rubber, etc.
119 they don't vote Likud and they're second class citizens who have been living in a climate of fear for the past year. Palestinian citizens of Israel have been harassed, threatened, lost jobs, etc., merely for expressing sympathy for those in Gaza.
117 no one is doing that except for Hamas. They're not going anywhere and everyone knows it.
118 was originally a joke, but on reflection it seems like a good compromise.
123: I wasn't sure if Natilo was. I think some US-based activists might endorse that, but I don't know.
As I've said before, I heard IRL someone addressing a group of activists waiting to protest before City Council saying with an air of authority that all Israelis have second passports and will voluntarily decamp if they lose the ability to brutalize Palestinians.
121: They did, but it was complicated, as colonial situations often are. One difficulty early on, more in Sierra Leone than Liberia, is that the colonists refused to participate in the slave trade, which was still the mainstay of the local economy.
Well, if you look at the subsequent history of both colonies it's not so clear...
We set the bar, and then we went under it.
Like it or not, every adult, Jewish, Israeli Zionist is participating in war crimes as we speak.
I also would ask why this is limited to the Jews. Well, I think I know, because this is Natilo talking, and we're into that poisonous territory where he really enjoys being, but I still want to raise the point. Why doesn't an adult Muslim Israeli Zionist get the same description? He pays his taxes. He participates in Israeli society. He can even join the IDF.
Also, there is a very clear definition of "war crimes", and under it this statement is simply a lie.
One difficulty early on, more in Sierra Leone than Liberia, is that the colonists refused to participate in the slave trade, which was still the mainstay of the local economy.
One of the main industries of Sierra Leone was supporting the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, based in Freetown and largely crewed by local Kroo* sailors, whose mission was to suppress the slave trade; it would have been tricky to combine the two.
*Yes, they had Kroo crew. Many of their crewmen were Kroomen crewmen. But the Kroo are not called Kroo because they were often employed as crew; nor are crew called crew because they were often Kroo. The two words are etymologically entirely distinct. Every day a school day.
Today might not be a school day in Israel.
Also, Happy New Year where applicable.
One of the main industries of Sierra Leone was supporting the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, based in Freetown and largely crewed by local Kroo* sailors, whose mission was to suppress the slave trade; it would have been tricky to combine the two.
Certainly it made sense under the circumstances for them to take the position they did, but you can see how the local slave traders may not have been very enthusiastic about the whole thing.
Does this complicate simplistic moralizing about "colonizers" versus "indigenous peoples"? Why yes it does!
Asking out of a genuine interest to know: Have secular Israelis decided to leave in greater numbers under Netanyahu than before? The Israelis I know here well enough (none recent departures, all left as adults) to discuss politics are unhappy with him and basically grimace and shrug when I ask about Israeli society's future.
It looks like there's been a significant increase in emigration from Israel in the past two years compared to the previous baseline. This increase started before the war, probably driven by the judicial reforms pushed by the government and the large-scale protests. But good long-term data is really hard to find, everywhere I look keeps saying "emigration is hard to measure." Of course some of this, especially this year, could be driven by safety concerns and not moral concerns.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/society/artc-59-more-israelis-move-abroad-due-to-war-in-2024
That was me.
Does Nasrallah's death meaningfully change anything in Syria? I see reports of people leaving Lebanon for Syria; some people apparently travel back and forth pretty regularly. How bad is life in Syria now? Is there reliable water, power, banking? Are there local bloodthirsty warlords or other organizers of hostilities who will likely attack returnees? Still about 1M Syrians in Lebanon apparently.
Ok, any adult Israeli who is fully committed to the Zionist project and believes that Judea and Samaria are and have always been part of a cohesive Israeli nation and that the settlements are completely legitimate and ought to be expanded indefinitely, and that Palestinian people have no rights to self determination, nor any right of return, and that it's completely reasonable to insist that non-Jews in the West Bank need building permits to live in the house they're already living in, WITHOUT REGARD TO RELIGION OR CREED, those people are guilty of crimes against humanity.
For someone who has always been an apologist for apartheid, you're awfully quick to throw around a word like "poisonous".
Annexing the West Bank polls below 30%. Like it's a lot of people, but it's nowhere near most Israeli Jews.
Let's see if Moby makes a joke roughly the same as the one I decided not to make.
The one about the rabbit who walks into a bar with a priest and a minister and the bartender says "I think you're a typo"?
I can't find it now, but I saw the this joke on Reddit and laughed:
A father goes to his rabbi and cries, "My son says he wants to become Christian! What should I do?"
The rabbi says, "Funny you should ask me that! My son actually came to me, too, and said he wanted to become a Christian."
The father says, "Well, what did you do?"
The rabbi says, "What could I do? I opened my arms and asked God for help"
The father says, "What happened?!"
The rabbi says, "The clouds parted, a light shown down, and a voice came down that said Funny you should ask me that..."
141: exactly zero of those things are crimes against humanity, you colossal pillock.
Crimes are ACTIONS. They require you to DO THINGS. You can believe horrible things - as I know you do! - without being guilty of any crime. You are skating right up to the edge of saying "All adult Jewish Israeli Zionists deserve death, and killing them is not only legitimate but laudable" and I almost wish you'd just say it and get it out in the open, as you obviously want to.
Before I knew enough ethnic stereotypes to understand it properly, a priest told me two related jokes:
How do you know Jesus was Jewish? He lived at home until he was 30 and his mother thought he was God.
How do you know Jesus was actually Irish? He drank with 12 friends and thought his mother was a virgin.
I heard a good one on similar lines:
Mozart dies and finds himself at the Pearly Gates, and St Peter greets him with delight and welcomes him in. "We've been waiting for you!" he says. "Come this way!" and he leads Mozart into a vast and beautiful concert hall, where a choir and orchestra are performing music of sublime and unimaginable beauty. Sitting listening to it is the Lord God himself.
"Mozart!" says God. "I have a great honour for you. You will be the Kapellmeister of the Choir and Orchestra of Heaven. There could be no finer candidate."
Mozart says "Well, O Lord, I am of course deeply flattered by the honour, but am I really the best possible person? Surely Johann Sebastian Bach would..."
God gets a confused look on his face and says, "No, no. I'm Bach."
141, 142: Yeah, the carefully defined set of people in 141 is indeed odious and has way too much power and influence right now, but it's a very small portion of the Israeli population.
Stuff like saying "Judea and Samaria" isn't as fringe as it used to be, but it's still uncommon even among right-wing Israelis. Most people don't care what happens in the West Bank (or Gaza) one way or another and mostly want to stop hearing about it. Seeming to deliver that was for a long time the basis of Netanyahu's electoral success.
What's happening now is that the group in 141 is using the war as an opportunity to grab whatever parts of their agenda they think they can get because they and Netanyahu need each other for continued power, since October 7 discredited his reputation for keeping this calm but there's no way to force him out without them agreeing to it.
152: I heard it as he claimed to be a carpenter, went drinking with his friends, and lived with his mum, etc.
How do you know Jesus was Italian? He barely worked, hung out with 12 guys, lived with his mom until 30 and thought she was a virgin.
Why do gay men like Hanukkah?
Because the oil lasted for 8 days.
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I'm going to be in the NYC area the weekend of October 27th for my 50th high school reunion. I've got time free on Sunday the 27th and Monday the 28th, although I plan to visit with my aunt in NYC part of that time. Anyone interested in having a meetup while I'm back there? Is Fresh Salt still the place to go?
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This reminded me to check if the gym is open tomorrow. It's not.
Of all the people in the world who have had problems with Judaism, I'm suffering the most.
161: I'm in NYC now and I honestly forgot how many things are closed. Things close in Philadelphia, too, but not the same percentage.
Almost nothing closes here, but the gym is a JCC.
I think somewhere in the archives there is a story about someone (Becks??) having grown up in NYC and then starting their first job elsewhere after college, taking off one of the High Holidays, and then returning to befuddled colleagues who informed her that you only got time off if you were actually observant, not just a random vacation day for non-observers.
I think someone else also had that story, but I did as well: high school internship working at an SF magazine, and I blithely assumed that Rosh Hashanah was a school holiday, so I should mention that I wouldn't be coming in to work. That was no problem at all, until a month or so later I said something to the editorial assistant that made it clear I wasn't Jewish, and she told me not to let anyone else figure that out because I really shouldn't have taken the day off.
I think that was the story I remembered.
It was an honest mistake! No one expects you to be Christian to take Christmas off.
I always felt weird taking Good Friday off back when we used to have it, even though the library was closed and *everybody* was off. For some reason it felt much more like a religious statement than Christmas, even though rationally I recognize that that's absurd.
I also worked at a nonprofit where you got your choice of either Good Friday *or* Passover off. And then eventually they just changed it to a floating holiday, no restrictions. I can't remember if that was before or after we hired our first culturally Muslim employee (I don't think that place ever had an observantly Muslim employee -- it was tiny).
I've never gotten Good Friday off, except when I take it off. Easter Monday was a holiday at one place I worked.
Some genius decided to move Columbus Day to the Friday after Thanksgiving. That was nice.
169: It's not absurd. Fewer people observe Easter than Christmas, and fewer still observe Good Friday. Many people observe Easter (Chreasters) observe Easter by going to church and getting brunch. But plenty of people observe Christmas without going to church at all or talking about Jesus. They just get a tree and decorate it with lights. Even Jewish people have a ritual. In fact, much of Christmas seems to basically be a reversion to a Pagan Solstice Festival.
171: Tim's former employer dropped Columbus Day entirely and gave them an extra floating holiday. We still have it, but after George Floyd, my work has renamed it Indigenous People's Day high seemed like more of a West Coast kind of thing. Berkeley did that a long time ago, right?
We have Indigenous peoples and Italian heritage day.
Quibble:
Like Constantinople/Istanbul changed hands in 1453
It was contested seriously in ~1912-23, by when Greek (Russian, Bulgar?) nationalism had been invented. It isn't ancient history.
I remembering seeing Greeks protest that calling Macedonia "Macedonia" was an insult to their history. I knew from the papers that they were mad about it, officially, but I had no idea that actual people would take time out of their lives to protest to each other about it.
Right? Unfuckingbelievable.
Fair enough. There's this guy on reddit "mapporn" who does these really high quality maps of some of the late Ottoman census results but with pie graphs so you can actually see what the ethnic mix was, rather than just showing the majority. Here's Istanbul district in 1881:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/h7rv5e/oc_administrative_boundaries_and_districtwise/
European parts of the district that aren't in the city majority Greek (i.e. Greek Orthodox), Asian side mostly majority Turkish (i.e. Muslim). The city itself is complicated, with a Turkish plurality, but large Greek, Armenian, and "foreign" minorites, and a smaller but still substantial Jewish minority.
There's also a lot you can say about the post-transfer situation, where Greece suddenly had a new 20% of its population in refugees who shared a religion and language, but had lived elsewhere for millennia.
There's this one guy, Matthew Nimitz, who the Clinton administration put in charge of negotiations about the Macedonia naming dispute and who then worked for the UN just on the naming dispute. He started working on it in 1994 and a compromise was reached in 2019! 15 years where your job is just figuring out whether you can get people to finally agree on "Upper Macedonia" or "Northern Macedonia." I'm so glad he didn't die before it was done, and it's somehow both a huge accomplishment and also kinda hilarious to spend 15 years on that.
I asked for my carriers so often.
Here's Thessaloniki, where the city is very close to evenly split a third each of Jewish, Greek, and Turkish population. Then you go 20 miles north and you almost have a Bulgarian majority, despite almost no Bulgarians in the city. Ottoman empire was complicated!
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/g3dhag/a_new_selfmade_map_administrative_boundaries_and/
But yeah, the final forced expulsion of Greeks from Istanbul was in 1964. So really not that long ago at all. And 500 years from the initial invasion to finishing up the ethnic cleansing.
The Rhodesia comparison is fatuous. Settlers never over 7% of population, no recognition, no allies, no nukes, no economy to speak of, and accordingly lasting only 15 years; indeed only 5 once the Mozambican front opened.
182: 50 years. Stand to be corrected, but ethnic cleansing wasn't Turkish policy before the 20th century.
Annoyingly since the census results are by religion, you can't tell language-based distinctions like Turkish vs. Kurdish vs. Arab, which means you can't get the same kind of information in the southern and western parts of the empire. This also means you can't easily see things like Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox (e.g. Karamanlides) or Greek-speaking Muslims (a big chunk of Crete), though in the exchanges the governments in their wisdom decided that religion was all that mattered and so if you were a Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox person you were forced to move to Greece and learn Greek.
I meant eastern, not western, of course.
At any rate, irredentism is bad. Israel shouldn't take over Hebron (and Kiryat Arba should be buldozed), Greece shouldn't take over Istanbul, Turkey shouldn't take over Western Thrace or the rest of Cyprus, and Palestinians shouldn't get Tel Aviv. Eventually Cyprus will have to come to terms with Turkish Cyprus existing, and Serbia with Kosovo. Stable borders are good, invasions are bad, settlements are bad. The right answer is the boring one, but it's not popular and that's how you end up taking 15 years to get people to agree on "North Macedonia" even though that was the obvious answer from the beginning and didn't actually cost anyone anything (unlike land disputes with real stakes).
120 I don't agree that the dispossession of Palestinians within Israel proper was as well accepted as your comment implies, nor that those Palestinians who were dispossessed were able to integrate into neighboring countries. Israeli fears about the consequences of formalizing a right of return aren't unfounded -- there are definitely people who would exercise it.
Obviously, 1967 was a further watershed; the creation of what one might call Israel improper.
What do you mean by "dispossession"? All I meant to imply was that they were a clear demographic minority with little political power.
As for neighboring countries, it really depends on which country, and what you mean by "well-integrated." If you look at other situations (like Greek after the population exchanges to take one obvious example) there's often a lot of very serious unrest associated with that process. West Bank and Jordan were at least somewhat well integrated, but Egypt and Gaza not at all. Everything about Egypt and Gaza is extremely cursed. With Lebanon and Syria I'm having trouble seeing how many refugees there were from '48 (not '67), but it seems like at least in Syria the situation was better than with Egypt. But at any rate, the Egypt/Gaza situation was a huge and crucial counterexample to what I was saying.
At any rate, irredentism is bad. Israel shouldn't take over Hebron (and Kiryat Arba should be buldozed), Greece shouldn't take over Istanbul, Turkey shouldn't take over Western Thrace or the rest of Cyprus, and Palestinians shouldn't get Tel Aviv.
Also, Germany shouldn't take lands east of the Oder-Neisse. The modern, relatively homogeneous states in central and eastern Europe are largely the result of a combination of ethnic cleansing and border redrawing, pretty much all between 1900 and 1950. This book on ethnic cleansing covers some of the Europe-based examples mentioned in this thread.
On a lighter note, didn't the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia once march in an Olympic opening ceremony under an alphabetical position that corresponded to "Former" (or the equivalent word in the language of the host country)?
OT: I don't know if that's a roadie or Jason Isbell.
Germany there's the added bonus that even though Germany shouldn't take over any of Poland, if a German wants to move to Poland they can! Cause the EU is awesome.
195
Yes great idea!
150: those are the people responsible for murders, apartheid, torture, mass sexual assault, and all the other crimes against humanity currently being perpetrated. They're the ones who support the IDF, the Mossad, Shin Bet and whatever another RSAs the settler colonial state is using to exterminate Palestinians. 2% of Gazans have already been liquidated -- when do you admit it's a genocide? 5%? 12%? 75%? Netanyahu, Smotrich, and the rest of those fascist gangsters would have no compunction at all about making it 100% if they're allowed to get away with it. But sure, keep lying now, just like you'll lie when the dust settles and you're pretending you were always in the right.
"There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip." -- Avigdor Lieberman
The only acceptable bigotry today is anti-Palestinian bigotry. The Israeli terrorstate is enthusiastically, joyfully and effectively committing genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Genocidal Israeli politicians and the voters who have kept them in power are just as guilty as the IDF psychopaths who murder children, doctors, journalists and teachers for fun.
Still proud to be prematurely anti-genocide
191: In fact the rest was even funnier - thr UN seats countries in alphabetical order in English. Greece refused to accept them under M for Macedonia, and Macedonia refused to be seated under F for Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, so they ended up being seated under T, for The Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia.
I always liked the suggestion that in retaliation Macedonians should insist on referring to their neighbour as the Former Ottoman Colony Of Greece.
"Still proud to be prematurely anti-genocide"
Bad news on that. If you support indiscriminate killing of members of an ethnic group because of a perceived collective guilt, it turns out you are in fact pro-genocide.
The second sentence of 198.2 disproves the first.
202 care to elaborate? I'm not getting it.
Ok, I see that there is a third sentence in 198.2; I had overlooked the period.
Sentence one: "The only acceptable bigotry today is anti-Palestinian bigotry."
Sentences two and three: "The Israeli terrorstate is enthusiastically, joyfully and effectively committing genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon*. Genocidal Israeli politicians and the voters who have kept them in power are just as guilty as the IDF psychopaths who murder children, doctors, journalists and teachers for fun."
Emphases added. Loaded language like this is a hallmark of bigotry, and I presume Natilo Paennim finds it acceptable enough to post.
Ergo, the second and third sentences demonstrate an acceptable bigotry that is not anti-Palestinian.
* Lebanon? Really?
202: Uh... for fuck's sake? I sometimes have a problem with some of the ways people express themselves in this direction, but the language you're italicizing is reflecting anger about horrendous, unjustifiable atrocities. Calling it a "hallmark of bigotry" suggests you can't identify ways they're bigoted or even descriptively unfair, so you're just vaguely gesturing to it as bigotry-adjacent. Try to make arguments anyone can pin down.
Lieberman is a far-right populist, and far-right populists in every country say bigoted shit all the time. It's not "acceptable" any more than any other strain of bigotry, but it's also not even unusual, let alone unique.
What's more unusual is the actual war and atrocities, which is horrible but even that's not especially unique: see Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Armenia, Ukraine, Myanmar, Congo, etc.
205:
"Israel is a terrorist state" is a bigoted statement.
"Israel is committing genocide joyfully" is a bigoted statement.
"The IDF are psychopaths" is a bigoted statement.
"The IDF are killing people for fun" is a bigoted statement.
"Israeli voters are as guilty as the direct perpetrators of any atrocities" is a bigoted statement.
That Natilo considers these statements acceptable disproves the assertion in 198 that "The only acceptable bigotry today is anti-Palestinian bigotry." QED.
There is overwhelming evidence that IDF snipers have been killing children as young as 4 years old for sport. There is also ample video evidence taken by IDF soldiers themselves of them shooting unarmed Palestinian civilians for fun. I don't know how else one would describe it other than as psychopathy
Lots of evidence for the first two on your list too.
Until now I didn't think it was possible to be bigoted against a country's military. Actually, I still don't believe that.
Some people in the IDF are psychopaths. FIFY.
Similarly, some people in Hamas rape and murder people for fun, others just love their country. I expect the same is true in most militaries, though thankfully many militaries have better discipline than Hamas or the IDF. (And the IDF has at times had better discipline than it does now.)
I think the IDF not having as good of discipline as it used to is not just a random thing happening right now.
I agree! It's bad!
How about "Israel has deliberately weakened military discipline in such a way that the few people in the IDF who are psychopaths are able to create violent incidents that terrorize civilians in ways that generally support the near-term policy goals of the current leadership of Israel"?
I have no particular objection to that. I myself would probably say "The Israeli government" and not "Israel" (or perhaps "Israeli government and military leadership" if that's true, which I'm less sure on as some of the military leadership seems to maybe be upset, at a minimum upset that they can't even get their troops to stop filming themselves doing war crimes).
O.K. We'll make that edit and put it in the brochure.
Should we leave "Israel is committing genocide joyfully" for the marketing people?
Like the stock photos of women eating salad?
Here we go again. Because it was such fun last time.
Thank you Moby, heebie and Upetgi; I'll try to go back to having the discipline not to speak in the Israel-Palestine threads.
This is an Israel-Lebanon-pedant thread.
That's ridiculous, if you RTFA at all you'd remember that one weekend thread that got 10 comments and none of them were pedantic. *Almost all* threads are pedantry threads, you bigot.
How does Syria have so many more people than Lebanon? The coast would seem a better place to live.
Syria has close to as much coastline as Lebanon.
Plus a long stretch of the Euphrates and the relatively arable plateaus around Aleppo and Idlib.
In the interior the Syrian-Turkish border is stark.
Lebanon should unite it's factions and conquer Syria.
It probably has more Syrians than the Syrian Army does.
They probably aren't organized or trained though. Which is why Israel can do whatever it wants.
Speak of the Fijians and they shall appear:
https://www.abc.net.au/pacific/programs/pacificreview/pacific-review/104382702
First item, ~7 minutes total. Very interesting.
R/Belatedly, I've been meaning to read Majority minority for years.
In other low-lying news:
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius