Follow-Up On That Jewish Conspiracy

My post on the Israel-Palestine affair was the most widely-read thing I ever wrote; not something I anticipated from what was originally intended to be a learning exercise for myself. I’ve been meaning to address some of the thoughtful feedback I received but I’ve been busy. There were (alhamdulillah) no factual errors to correct and my overall thesis has not materially changed, but some connective context was missing and some of my points were badly articulated. I’ll try to keep this post self-contained but you’ll likely miss some context if you hadn’t read the first part.

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Why the Discourse™ is so Fucked

Before we get into specifics, it’s important to first sketch out the discourse battlelines on this issue. Special shout-out again to

Inverse Florida

who wrote Denial by a thousand cuts barely a week after Hamas’s attacks regarding the unusually prevalent campaign of factual denial by the Left/Progressives/“Woke”¹ on the pro-Palestinian side. Their essay helped me understand the dynamics more than any other piece of writing, and it was thoroughly depressing because Inverse makes an airtight argument I don’t want to be true.

Woke ideology overwhelmingly spawned out of American left-of-center spaces and its core tenet is the Manichean worldview that neatly divides everyone into stark binary categories of oppressor versus oppressed. Because of its origins, the splits generally reflect only the tensions prevalent within U.S. culture wars (cis vs trans, white vs black, colonizer vs indigenous, and so on) and so the parody/reality for how it’s applied to foreign conflicts is to ask: who is the white person in this dispute? Whoever that may be is automatically and permanently adjudicated as the malefactor, and so for the Israel-Palestine conflict, Jews are the ‘white person’ not because of their genetics but because they’re shoehorned as fitting into the white/oppressor archetype (colonizers, imperialists, Western-aligned, successful, rich, etc).

Because of the oppression binary, Inverse Florida points out that another core tenet for Leftists is they see themselves as perpetually powerless, no matter how untrue that might be. Taken altogether, the typical defense mechanisms against Leftist criticism tends to boil down to “Maybe this Leftist did a bad thing, but you the observer are worse for noticing and drawing attention to something so insignificant.” If significance swells past the point of viable dismissal, then the only option remaining is to deny, deny, deny. Whatever accusation is levied cannot be true and therefore is not true, all to protect the worldview from falling apart.

This translates into serious ire against anything whatsoever that deigns to complicate the cleanly-drawn villain/victim narrative. Because Oppressed = Virtuous, and because Hamas = Oppressed, condemning their rampage is impossible without severe cognitive malaise. Similarly, because Israel = Villain, any atrocities against Israelis must by definition be justified, and if you haven’t found a reason it’s because you need to keep looking. Any potential threat to this binary framework is a pestering gnat that must be immediately crushed in order to keep the gnawing cognitive dissonance at bay.

Again, I do not want to be right about this, but I have encountered no other plausible explanation why for example posters of kidnapped Israelis has whipped up so many into a frothy rage. This confrontation with two poster rippers is four tedious minutes long and not once are either of them able to articulate a modicum of justification for their actions. Only the ‘pestering gnat’ theory makes sense.

I’ve also experienced exactly the same dynamic recently with close friends I had known for years. I maintain an iron curtain between my writing and my personal social media accounts, but about two months ago I posted what I believed to have been a tepidly-worded condemnation of anti-Jewish elements among the pro-Palestinian movement. The vitriolic response was painfully predictable. I set alerts and within minutes a friend I had known for 13 years blocked me without explanation, an acquaintance excoriated me for bringing attention to something so insignificant, and another claimed ignorance about whether the bigotry I described even existed. Another close friend I’ve known for a decade to her credit tried to have a conversation about the topic, but then blocked me. Her final straw appears to have been when I pointed out the serious inaccuracies with the map she sent me. Dismiss, deny, and if those fail, disavow.

It’s disturbing seeing so many folks on the pro-Palestinian side (to be clear, not all) robotically Beep Boop Beep into this position.² I have long viewed Woke ideology with some measure of guarded concern, but because of its blatant recurring incoherence, I figured it would eventually burn itself out into irrelevance after it has generated enough podcasting material. But it’s clear I have severely underestimated the enduring influence of this ideology.

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Pestering Gnats Everywhere

Once you have the ‘pestering gnat’ theory in mind, previously inexplicable behavior neatly falls into place. I mentioned the problem of media outlets blatantly lying by omission on this topic, but it’s far worse than just one Vox video about Gaza. Amnesty International is a widely respected international human rights advocacy organization that issued a fucking 280-page novel in 2022 lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers. They outline scores of legitimate concerns (which I’ll get to later) but across those hundreds of pages, not once does the report say anything about the rash of suicide bombings that prompted construction of the barriers and checkpoints. The only reference I could find was near the end on page 263 where they obliquely mention Israel justifies its policies on unspecified “security grounds”. Amnesty International can’t pretend to be ignorant here, as they already condemned the practice of Palestinian child suicide bombers in 2005.

It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that Israel’s security barrier is unjustified because it’s too ineffective, or too costly, or too onerous, or too abusive — and I definitely would love to hear those arguments — but playing ostrich is anti-persuasive as I assume you’re hiding something for a reason. Anyone who reads only this report (all 280 pages!) to educate themselves about the topic would be left with the bizarre and misleading impression that Israel chose to dedicate immense resources into building up an elaborate security apparatus because…they’re mean I guess?

Similarly, the sanewashing is absolutely egregious. I was shocked to find out that everyone’s favorite geographic chant has a completely different meaning in the original Arabic, conveniently transmogrifying “Palestine will be free” from the far less palatable “Palestine is Arab” in the original. It’s so well known that throngs of protestors in front of the White House, far away from the region, know it well enough to repeat it.

This is plainly what a cognitive dissonance defense mechanism looks like. Anyone who exhibits this level of aversion towards tackling issues head-on in a transparent and honest manner is openly incriminating themselves. They’re revealing lack of confidence in their advocacy, demonstrating a belief their position is indefensible without obfuscation.³

Maybe they’re internally conflicted yet psychologically unwilling to directly confront the dissonance, or maybe they’re consciously choosing to deceive. Regardless of the reason, it’s an extremely worrisome development to see take hold on any topic.

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Now, back to addressing some of my claims in the original post.

Apartheid: Same but Different

Given the scores of readers who misunderstood my point on this topic, I have to take responsibility for doing a terrible job articulating it. Under the section titled “Apartheid State”, I discussed the economic status of Arab-Israelis but in doing so I painted an unintentionally misleading picture of the Apartheid condemnation levied against Israel.

Some demographic clarification is necessary here. Before the founding of Israel, the common trait among the overwhelming majority of Mandatory Palestine’s population is that they spoke Arabic. Hence, Arabs. After Israel was founded some of those Arabs remained within Israel’s borders, were granted Israeli citizenship, and are colloquially referred to as 48-Arabs. While the other Arabs, the ones displaced from Israel’s borders are referred to as Palestinians. After the 1967 Six Day war, Israel has fully occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and all of its Palestinian residents. The point here is the two Arab groups were virtually indistinguishable genetically/culturally/religiously before the schism, and any differences today is the result of cultural and political forks. Besides a limited family reunification program, Israel never made a meaningful attempt to offer Palestinians citizenship or otherwise integrate them. Instead, Palestinians have remained mired in a legal purgatory within isolated enclaves.

When we talk about “Apartheid” we’re conjuring up South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial segregation that began in 1948⁴ and served as a humiliating stain on the country’s reputation until widespread diplomatic condemnation forced its end in the early 1990s. So when Israel is described as an Apartheid state — as a state with institutionalized racial segregation — this denunciation can be understood as a reference to the Arabs (read: Palestinians) under Israeli military occupation, but it’s incoherent when applied to Arabs who are full Israeli citizens. So is the dividing line actually based on race, or something else entirely?

I’m generally agnostic about vocabulary choices and what matters far more than which lexical denominator to affix is describing Palestinian conditions straightforwardly. Sam Kriss (whose writing I highly recommend) chimed in the comments with lurid details about the “calculated unfreedom” Palestinians live under. There is no denying that Palestinians endure abject poverty that is made even worse by the intrusive security apparatus and the passively-tolerated spate of settler violence. The occupation’s legal system is explicitly bifurcated not along territorial boundaries, but along individual legal status. Jewish settlers in the West Bank fall under the jurisdiction of a civil justice system, while Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military tribunals staffed entirely by Israeli soldiers (including the prosecutors, judges, and translators), with far lower evidentiary standards and an expanded scope of what counts as a criminal offense.

The comparison I aimed to draw with Arab-Israelis was a means of contemplating reasons why a hypothetical full Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories and its people would be seen as anathema, at least from a material standpoint. If Arab citizens of Israel suffered a horrendous quality of life under Israeli sovereignty now, I could begin to understand some of the intense resistance to Israeli governance from Palestinian Arabs. But as I noted, Arab-Israelis enjoy far higher quality of life than almost anywhere else in the Arab world, so that potential explanation was a total dead-end to me.

However, it is worthwhile to examine whether the Arab-Israeli living arrangement, who are only 21% of all Israelis, can scale.

Ethnostate but Democratic

It’s worth pointing out that the 48-Arabs did not always enjoy the legal equality they have today. The Zionists didn’t really have a plan for how to integrate Arabs into Israel, and though they were granted ‘citizenship’ they were subject to martial law until 1966. This means that throughout Israel’s existence, the only period when Israel did not have a bifurcated legal system split along ethnic lines was a brief window of time between 1966 and the beginning of its Palestinian occupation in 1967.

It’s also worth pointing out that the hypothetical full Israeli annexation (including full citizenship to Palestinians) I mentioned would be supported by virtually nobody, least of all by Israel. The Muslim world would be howling with rage at what would be seen as the extinction of the Palestinian Cause, while worldwide condemnation would focus on the baseline disdain against territorial acquisition. Israel meanwhile, as a country explicitly founded as a refuge for Jews from across the world, would be unwilling to absorb the voter demographic shock.

Israel rightfully prides itself as a democratic enterprise, but there is no question that this adherence to democratic principles is at least in part conditional on not having too many of the wrong kind of voters. As Freddie DeBoer pointed out, the objective of an ethnostate will always be in tension with expanding the voter franchise. Arab-Israelis have full voting rights, but they’re also only 21% of the population and therefore not a threat to Jewish voting supremacy on policy issues that fall along religious/ethnic lines. That calculus changes completely if the 4.9 million Palestinians living in occupied territories are added to Israel’s 9.7 million population and its voter rolls. To the extent that ethnicity and religion can predict political stability within this region of the world, it’s also reasonable to be concerned whether a one-state solution would repeat the same downward spiral neighboring Lebanon charted.

I notice a pointed discomfort among Israeli supporters in the West when I describe Israel as an ethnostate. It is! An ethnostate is any country organized along ethnic lines, and undeniably that’s what Israel is! The label may have distasteful connotations, but that doesn’t make it inaccurate! You may argue that an ethnostate is justified on this narrow exception because of the persistent history of Jewish oppression et cetera yadda yadda, and I’m sympathetic to those arguments but I have no patience for reality denial.

My preferred policy palette is basically libertarian, though I refer to myself as an anarchist because my overriding priority would be to see an archipelago of diverse systems of customized governance. You can call this the “Voltairean” vision of government in that I may disagree with someone’s preferred form of government, but I will defend their right to establish it. “Let a hundred flowers of distinct governance systems bloom” as Mao famously said. I have severe disagreements with any government that cleaves along racial or ethnic lines, but I support anyone’s right to found one.

I’m at peace with my position, but supporters of Israel who feel conflicted about the ethnostate/democracy tension are responsible for undergoing their own soul-searching to figure out what to prioritize at the margins. How much national Jewish identity is worth potentially sacrificing at the altar of expanding the democratic franchise? I can’t answer that for you.

Violence for Thee, but not for Me

I’m not a pacifist and I transparently outlined the principles I rely upon to evaluate whether any application of violence is justified. It depends on how much the violence is oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility. I applied these principles to denounce the depressingly common Palestinian practice of indiscriminate attacks against orthogonal civilian targets. Some of the pointed criticism I received in response to my essay carried the implication that I would be unwilling to denounce Israeli violence which fails to satisfy these principles, but I hold no such aversion.

1. A History of Jewish Violence

In fairness, I can understand the basis for such a suspicion. When I decried Israel’s history of lying to cover up its war crimes, I cited only two examples from the IDF. There were illustrative examples, never intended to serve as a comprehensive list of all Zionist atrocities. Faceless Craven pointed out several omissions of atrocities by the Jewish side from across the history of the conflict, many I admittedly was not aware of at the time. Some notable examples I did not mention include the 1946 King David Hotel bombing by the Irgun which killed 91 people, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre which was directly perpetrated by Christian Lebanese militias but with the support of the IDF and resulted in 460 to 3,500 dead civilians, or the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre where one far-right Zionist killed 29 people and injured 125.

Beyond specific acts, it’s perfectly relevant to examine how much the Israeli government tacitly encourages a culture of indemnity for gratuitous violence perpetrated by its own. In 2004, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Iman Darweesh Al Hams was shot and killed by an IDF commander who emptied his machine gun into her. The commander expressed no regrets, saying he would’ve done the same had she been 3-years-old, and was cleared of any wrongdoing by a military court. The same issue can be examined regarding broader Israeli culture as reflected by who gets elected to its highest office. Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun and the guy responsible for the King David Hotel bombing, was elected Prime Minister in 1977. Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of the Stern Gang, a Zionist terrorist group that splintered from the Irgun because they weren’t radical enough was elected Prime Minister in 1986. As did Ariel Sharon in 2001, despite his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre and a list of antics way too insane and numerous to get into here. One of the dominant political entity in Israel today is the right-wing Likud party, and it was founded by Sharon and Begin.

Evidently in the realm of Israeli politics a history of egregious violence against non-Jews is not a drawback, but potentially a sought-after qualification for a significant portion of the electorate. You could be charitable and maybe argue this simply reflects a legitimate desire for leaders who have a demonstrated commitment to national security, and with direct experience in armed conflict. But just as I denounced homicidal bloodthirst within Palestinian culture, I must do the same for Israeli culture. I would be betraying my principles otherwise.

2. Ceasefire When?

Relatedly, my post was published as Israel’s pulverization of Gaza was ramping up but it was quiet on that specific issue. That was not obfuscation, I just do not have the information or expertise to play armchair commander. I can’t fully trust casualty numbers from Hamas but even halving their claims leaves you with at least 10,000 Gazans killed by Israel, a number far beyond my capacity to comprehend. The IDF already admitted their proportionality calculus accepts the obliteration of 50 civilians in exchange for a chance to kill one Hamas commander. The IDF may claim to care about minimizing civilian casualties, but if 3 Israeli hostages waving white flags can get mistakenly killed by the IDF, we have plenty of reasons to question that commitment’s veracity. Israel may be pursuing a perfectly justifiable objective (destroying Hamas), and the preceding examples are all absolutely damning indicators against sufficient proportionality and humility, but it’s not conclusive without answering the question: compared to what?

I admit without any hesitation that Israel’s actions in Gaza have been immensely destructive. But as noted by the highly recommended Trembling Mad, raw numbers alone are insufficient for adjudicating moral culpability, no matter how far off-the-charts they might be. The falsifiability argument would be to imagine a hypothetical Israel that is pursuing the exact same military objectives, but whose commitment towards minimizing collateral destruction is earnest and unimpeachable. I fully expect the civilian death toll accumulated by this hypothetical Israel to be lower than it is in reality, but it cannot be zero. This is purely a result of the baseline challenges of confronting a surreptitious belligerent within a dense urban environment. And yet, unless we have viable alternatives to contrast Israel’s behavior against, it’s difficult to accurately evaluate Israel’s level of misconduct (and again, I already said there are ample reasons for suspicion).

The calls for an Israeli ceasefire are directly implicated by this question. I’ve repeatedly asked and desperately searched for any suggestions for how Israel should conduct its war differently, and it’s near-impossible to get a straight answer because so many ceasefire advocates outright reject the premise that Israel has any justifiable objectives whatsoever. Watch AOC’s serious discomfort in reaction to this very simple question. To his credit, Cenk Uygur is the only pro-Palestinian advocate I’ve come across willing to articulate an alternative, but his idea that Israel should just send special forces into Hamas’s tunnels is advertising serious ignorance about the subject matter. If you’ve come across any other viable alternatives, I’m desperate to see them.

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I anticipate perplexity for how it’s possible for me to express support for Israel in spite of what I wrote above, and the simple answer is my support should be understood as a comparative ranking relative to the alternatives within this conflict. Nobody is under any obligation to pick any side — and more power to you if you choose to abstain — but I picked to avoid the simplistic nihilism that comes along with decrying everyone’s hands as equally dirty. I disagree that they are, and I stake my position from a place of clear-eyed transparency, fully acknowledging Israel’s sins. Because it would be another betrayal of my principles for me to engage in the same dismissal and denial I condemn in others.

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In Which I Solve Everything

There’s no reason for anyone to listen to what I have to say here regarding any potential solutions — Wikipedia binging hasn’t deluded me to that extreme — but I’ll offer more scattered thoughts.

Popular Israeli support for Likud and its hardline focus on security has historically risen in response to heightened Palestinian violence. Right now Netanyahu and Likud appear to be reviled by most Israelis for their massive fuck-up on October 7th, but it seems highly unlikely to expect appetite for a two-state solution (which necessarily requires accepting increasing Palestinian autonomy) to do anything but continue to crash among the Israeli public.

An argument I’ve regularly encountered from more honest advocates on the pro-Palestinian side is they first acknowledge the concerns over Palestinian violence as legitimate, but then they claim that Israeli’s intrusive security measures are ultimately counterproductive because they provoke further radicalization and thus further violence. This strikes me as a naive argument, but I admit I have no way of falsifying it except through hypotheticals. Imagine Israel suddenly announcing a complete policy shift: every military checkpoint and every concrete barrier will be completely dismantled, and every Palestinian will have full autonomy to move about wherever they please within Israel, free of any security screening of any kind…how many Jews do you expect to be murdered the next day? I can’t give an exact number beyond “a fucking fuckton”.

I don’t see how any mutual de-escalation can be viable given the fanatical devotion commanded by Palestinian militancy. Richard Hanania is correct to argue that Palestinians are maxed out on hatred, with Hamas’s military wing (al-Qassam Brigades) garnering the highest approval rating among Palestinians, polling at 89%. If you want to draw an equivalency between al-Qassam and the terrorizing violence doled out by extreme Zionist settlers, that’s fair! But the comparison cannot hold regarding overall societal sentiment, as Israelis demonstrably express far more disagreement on the application of military deterrence and other issues. As recently as July 2023, 15% of Israelis were willing to negotiate on a resolution with Hamas, despite the group’s penchant for rocket barrages.

When I cite the insanity of Palestinian militancy, I wonder how many think I’m exaggerating. If you didn’t learn about Farfour the Mouse last time, here’s another chance to see the level of fanatical indoctrination aimed at Palestinian children. I can’t stress how illuminating it is to see footage from the Hamas TV show Tomorrow’s Pioneers. I cannot claim that this show is representative of Palestinian opinion (and the linked video highlights many who expressed public disagreement) but the detail I found most unsettling were the number of young callers to the show readily naming and singing from a disturbingly long roster of songs all about genocidal martyrdom.

This image will haunt your soul once you understand its context.

I would hope it’s apparent how much of an outlier this level of unbridled animosity is, inculcated from a very young age. For everyone’s sake, Palestinians are in urgent need of severe deradicalization, but I cannot fathom what that process could look like.

And finally, where should Palestinians live? I’m writing this from the comfort of my home as someone who has never known displacement, and my immigration story involved a cushy plane seat, so discount what I have to say accordingly. In my previous post, I did not but should have addressed the issue of displaced Palestinians’ right of return. Matt Yglesias examined this issue in greater detail, and his article highlights one of the core tensions I already touched upon though. Let’s assume the worst case displacement scenario (a scenario I am explicitly not endorsing and bringing up solely to analyze its ramifications) where Israel rounds up and forcibly deports all 4.9 million Palestinians currently living under Israeli occupation. What happens next?

If we consider all the major Arab countries who claim to be ardent supporters of the Palestinian people (e.g. Egypt population 100 million, Saudi Arabia 35M, Algeria 43M, Iran 83M, etc.), what would prevent any of them from opening their borders to the survivors of a second Nakba? Countries all over the world regularly accomodate refugees and mass migrations. Over the course of the ongoing Syrian civil war, Turkey (population 85 million) already has accepted 3.3 million Syrian refugees in what is functionally a permanent arrangement. If Turkey managed this influx on its own (to be clear, not without strife or hardship) I don’t see what would prevent the aforementioned countries from enacting a similar endeavor.

The answer is while there may not be practical barriers towards accommodating millions of Palestinian refugees, there are serious political hurdles. Remember that from 1948 to 1967, Gaza was part of Egypt and the West Bank was part of Jordan. When Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, Egypt was offered Gaza back but they declined and instead renounced any territorial claims over it. Jordan pulled a similar move and relinquished its claims over the West Bank in 1988 and eventually stripped West Bank Palestinians of the Jordanian citizenship they had.

To recap my main thesis again, none of this makes any sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain stuck where they are, playing their role as the downtrodden in this grand theatrical production, all to ensure the jihadi casus belli against the Jews is maintained. This is what makes this conflict so perverse, so many people are just fucking pawns. Had Gaza been re-absorbed and became assimilated as just another governorate of Egypt, or had the share of Jordanians with Palestinian descent continued to increase beyond the estimated 50% it already is today, what remaining grievances would be worth the self-immolation remedy?

The key takeaway in understanding the intractability of this conflict is that much is deliberately constructed to remain that way. While I can’t claim to offer any viable solutions, its perpetuity will remain partly a result of the aversion towards transparent acknowledgements of reality, and a result of the persistent unwillingness to critically examine the actual motivations of those involved.

1. Words are very fuzzy beasts and I’m normally very reluctant to use terms like ‘Woke’ because of its charged ambiguity, but unfortunately there are scant other alternatives available to uncontroversially describe an undeniably real phenomenon.

2. What I’m describing is simply a particularly intense variant of cognitive dissonance, and it’s not at all exclusive to just Western Leftists. Anyone else who ever experiences the serious mental discomfort upon realizing their closely-held beliefs could be in jeopardy of being contradicted by reality is susceptible to similarly severe reactions.

3. Just because an advocate believes dishonesty is necessary to advance their cause does not mean they’re correct!

4. Quelle coïncidence.