@Alon an emptier, less horrific, gaza could become a plausible bantustan for an increasingly pressured population on the west bank.
i don’t think, btw, that there’s anything disingenuous in israel’s proclaimed objective of dehamasization. i think the desired outcome would include greater political control over gaza (no neohamas tolerated), better conditions, and a reduced population, so that gaza and only gaza can become the eventual palestinian quasistate.
@Alon my conjectures are entirely just that, and i suspect you have a better handle on all this.
nevertheless, in my speculation the motivation wouldn’t be to resettle gaza, just to force a population transfer out. gaza would remain in the hands of those who remain. but i think there’s a view that the fewer there are (in gaza and the west bank combined), the smaller the long-term risks and the more manageable the situation.
it’s hard to be a parent in a world where such terrible things can happen to children. or to children with the audacity to grow up.
i fear the strategy is to get the entire population pressed against the southern wall in terrible circumstances until egypt feels compelled to open what will always be a one-way door.
@asbestos@toot.community Definitely. Like markets aim—imperfectly but not meaninglessly—to civilize greed and marriage aims—imperfectly but not meaninglessly—to civilize lust, I think we should think of modern formal states as institutions that aim—imperfectly but not meaninglessly—to civilize tribalism. States succeed when they find ways of both meeting citizens' affiliative yearnings while having them collaborate together in harmony. Not an easy circle to square, not always successful. But worth strivingfor.
@asbestos@toot.community i think a homeland is an idea, like home itself, that we can achieve only very imperfectly and contingently in the real world. we all want a true home. occasionally we feel at home. usually, we are more unsettled than that. and more in peril. we should do our best! but declaring our right to a thing we want doesn't make it ours. in fact, it often pushes it farther away. rather than assert a right, we have to find mutual agreement that it is right.
@asbestos@toot.community I don't think they have a right to self-determination that can be enforced in some way against the United States. I think it might be right for the United States to agree (or do a better job of living up to our agreeing) to let Native Americans (and other groups, it's not the past injustice that's determinative) have wide berth for self-determination.
@asbestos@toot.community The word "right" is a very tricky word. Very often when you have the right to do something, it is far from righteous for you to do it. Very often it is righteous to permit of others what you could have blocked, what is not their right. I think right—which offer liberties that prevail over others' strong objections—are both essential, but things whose assertion (rather than negotiated nonobjection) we should seek to minimize rather than celebrate.
@asbestos@toot.community My ethnic background is yours (though I'd call myself agnostic rather than atheist). I'd not exist but for the State of Israel. But there is no space humans can retreat to for safety. Our collective history makes the desire understandable, but we share a world, and no social fiction, no border, no state, can prevent violence if we do not mutually agree with others to enforce and give effect to that fiction. Peace can never be unilateral. There is no exit.
@desafinado i certainly agree that there are no simple formulas. each conflict has its own crucial facts. but to the degree we (on the outside) come in with priors—we start from simple formulas before the texture on the ground must leaven it—that formula should be mutually agreed settlement within the sovereign borders, rather than a right of national self-determination. i don't dispute there could be conditions that would overwhelm the presumption, but they'd be unusual and extreme conditions.
@rvr absolutely. it is so exhilarating to take a side and revel in ones own righteousness. you can tell yourself and others a very convincing story. but practices, however individually compelling, that compose to make mutual destruction a moral necessity should perhaps be revisited.
@desafinado we can try to change the behavior of states for the better. (supporting secessionism among minorities usually does the opposite.) relatedly, within territories, subgroups can withhold legitimacy, from civil disobedience to civil war, to try to win some accommodation with other groups that isn't persecution. but persecution is almost always in some sense mutual. power imbalance does not make the weaker party uniquely righteous. there's no such thing as "liberation", only settlement.
@desafinado i don't decree that territories must remain melded. but i do decree that subdivisions of territories must be peaceful and mutually agreed, or at least that third parties should not be in the business of supporting any other kind of subdivision. the lines are fictions. ultimately we live together. the question is, what kinds of institutions and process result in our best though deeply imperfectly living together?
@desafinado i'd submit that attempting by force to draw lines to match regional-majority-perceived nations has a track record. it is bloodbaths in the redrawings, new oppressions by the formerly oppressed, a long tail of instability between the new states. if borders are conditional as a matter of principle, they are always conditional and subject to revision. everywhere always has minorities, often with colorable claims to oppression in various degrees. segregation by violence doesn't end this.
@rvr (thank you! i was a bit nervous to publish it.)
[new draft post] National self-determination is a vicious idea https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/10/13/national-self-determination-is-a-vicious-idea/index.html
@melanie even on a purely instrumental, power basis (for good or for ill), it’s only effective over time if its credibility can be sustained. lots of lies have girded populations for wars (“remember the maine!”), but cycles of contestation happen much faster and more openly now. if effectively debunked, it can have the opposite instrumental effect from what was intended. 1/
@melanie apparently the Jerusalem Post is now claiming to confirm the story, though they seem to be conflating burning of corpses with decapitation. the story could prove true after all, or the conflation might work to make it true enough to not be discrediting of the broader story. regardless, running it loudly before there was evidence more than one man’s claim was foolish and potentially counterproductive. /fin
@mybarkingdogs right. with Ukraine, even if you discount specific, contested, claims of atrocity, there is still the uncontested fact that Russia has invaded, bombed, mined etc territory outside of its own sovereign borders. even if the Russians were behaving like Geneva Convention lawyers (no, they’re not, but even if), we have every reason to oppose them.
@GreenFire i won’t argue with that broader point! we will all always wonder what the alt-history would have been.
@mybarkingdogs yes. i think we should be very cautious about our own ability to know the truth, and we’ll be better prepared to act if we are cautious in what we accept as facts established than if we embrace exaggerations (intentional or not) and then have to reckon with our own credulity and with others’ accusations of fabrication or at best a very tendentious epistemology.
@GreenFire I do believe that Hamas terrorists viciously attacked specifically civilians too. I’m pretty sure of it, as sure as someone following events via distant media can be.
But there’s no evidence they beheaded babies. Journalistic orgs that spread that extraordinary claim w/o clear evidence have done harm to the likelihood of consensus Hamas viciously attacked specifically civilians. Which they absolutely did. But disinformation agents will say, “yeah, just like they beheaded babies.”
@GreenFire The quote that you give is probably the source of the story. But since the Israeli government is unwilling to confirm it, I think we should treat this person’s claim pretty skeptically. Journalists should have asked for evidence, or gotten multiple on-the-record confirmations, before repeating the story.
@GreenFire no national security experts say they have any evidence of such a thing. the US president has walked it back, says he hasn’t seen the photos he initially suggested he’d seen. the Israeli government has walked it back. what credible evidence remains for the story? https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/middleeast/israel-hamas-beheading-claims-intl/index.html
the beheading babies story is a microcosm of how the press sets the stage for misinformation to prevail.
hamas comitted terrible atrocities against children. intentional, close-quarters murder of children or civilians by any means is enough.
but they likely did not behead infants. press and even the president were eager to repeat what was basically salacious gossip, precisely because it dramatized an essential truth. but, though perhaps “inspired by a true story”, it was probably a lie. 1/
now, it will be easy for disinformation actors to paint the whole event with the same brush. there was no atrocity, all of that was lies and exaggeration by the Western lapdog press. they told you babies were beheaded, why should you believe them about anything?
reporters who perceive themselves as crusading for truth and justice, eager to tell the world of the horrors, instead make it more likely that the horrors will dissipate into a kind of he said, she said. 2/
the effect of this is catastrophic on our ability to reach consensus and act effectively. this is precisely how “russiagate” became the “russia hoax”, for example. /fin
before you blame the “deep state” for war-mongering bad intelligence, remember that 9/11, the Iraq War run-up, and now Israel’s catastrophe have been characterized by the elected executive ignoring the professional intelligence bureaucracy or tendentiously freelancing their own intelligence. cf #ElenaGrossfeld https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/11/israel-intelligence-gaza-hamas-war-1973/
Text: Grave warnings by Netanyahu's defense chief and the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel's domestic security service) on the impact of widespread conflict within Israeli society on military preparedness not only went unheeded but were used by the representatives of right-wing parties as further proof of the IDF and the intelligence community's bias and supposed left-wing prejudices. Rumors of Mossad-instigated protests, right-wing coalition partners blaming the military's soft approach to reservists threats to stop volunteering, and the persistent resistance of the Shin Bet to the policies proposed by the settler extremist turned national security minister showed the deep rift between politicians and some of the most respected Israeli institutions.
