this may be slightly pedantic, but the kingdoms of israel and judah are not even close to being "the only cogent jewish political entities to have ever existed." for one, the religion they practiced isn't really recognisable as judaism, but something scholars call "yahwism," which was maybe closer to a pagan polytheistic cult with a part…
this may be slightly pedantic, but the kingdoms of israel and judah are not even close to being "the only cogent jewish political entities to have ever existed." for one, the religion they practiced isn't really recognisable as judaism, but something scholars call "yahwism," which was maybe closer to a pagan polytheistic cult with a particular focus on one local canaanite storm-god, yahweh, and his wife, asherah. the emergence of judaism proper was slow and mostly took place in exile; the religion in its modern form doesn't fully emerge until after the destruction of the temple in 70 ad with the compilation of the talmud.
but there were plenty of other jewish polities! there was a jewish kingdom called adiabene in northern mesopotamia under the parthian empire, and another, briefer jewish state nearby in mahoza. the jewish himyarite kingdom ruled yemen in late antiquity; a huge swathe of russia and ukraine was under the jewish khazar khaganate. there may have been a jewish state in northern ethiopia, and some historians have even proposed a (very contentious) jewish princedom around narbonne in present-day france under the carolingian empire. and while it might be tiny, a figment of stalin's megalomania, and on the far side of the world, there was (and still is!) the jewish autonomous oblast...
anyway, i don't really agree with a lot of what you've said here. on several points, but i'll restrict myself here to your preference for israeli governance and culture. yes, israeli political institutions are more democratic and seem to generate more general prosperity than palestinian political institutions - but only *if you're israeli.* this is not a conflict between states! israeli political institutions are the ones that ultimately determine all outcomes for both sides, including the relative poverty of the palestinians of the west bank and the absolute poverty of the palestinians of gaza. every international observer recognises that the israeli state holds sovereign authority in the west bank and gaza, but the palestinian population is not represented in that state.
israeli politicians are fairly open about the fact that the relative wealth and freedom of israel directly depends on the suppression of the palestinians. there's even a separate israeli law code for west bank palestinians! a palestinian in area c lives under the same direct authority as their israeli neighbours, but if they commit a crime they face very different systems. the israeli will be tried in a civil court under ordinary israeli law. the palestinian will be tried by a uniformed army officer in a military court. these courts prosecute acts that are only criminal for palestinians, and not israelis. they will try 16 year olds as adults, while israeli civil courts set the age of majority at 18. they almost never grant bail, even for traffic offences, and the conviction rate is a very democratic 99.7%. this, more than the position of the israeli arabs, is why israel can be accurately defined as an apartheid state.
i don't think it's a question of choosing to support israeli or palestinian institutions as they presently exist, like these are football teams. as far as i can see, the only possible just solution, however distant it might seem right now, is one in which these (as you note, superior) israeli governance models are expanded to democratically represent the palestinian population, even if it means that the state loses its specifically jewish character. there have been other jewish states in the past. there will, i'm sure, be other jewish states in the future. but this one - frankly, it isn't worth it.
Sam, I'm a big fan of your writing in part because of your historical pedantry, so please don't ever be shy about flying your freak flag here.
I wasn't at all aware of Judaism/Yahwism's history, or the various other polities (Jewish Khaganate wtf!). I did the thing where you squish "Jewish" into a ball by eliding the distinction between ethnicity/religion, so I guess it depends how you draw the contours of the category here.
I didn't articulate my point about the comparative benefit of Palestinian institutions as well as I should've. Under the best hypothetical circumstances, there's no reason to think it would surpass neighboring Arab institutions, and Israel is already miles above those. I don't understand how it could be worth the bloodshed to become on par with mediocrity.
I agree that Israel holds sovereign authority over the territories. I concede I don't know enough about the civil prosecution system, and don't find anything you're saying to be implausible. But I don't fully understand the connection about how Israel's relative wealth and freedom is predicated on Palestinian suppression. The security apparatus, the vigilance, and the constant turmoil would seem to only be a net drain on Israel's bourse no?
I personally don't value Jewish character so I think an expansion of Israeli democracy would be a worthwhile trade-off. The only question would be if the democracy would survive that expansion, given the ever-present noxious ideologies in play.
yeah the jewish khaganate is an amazing quirk of history, but what i love about history is that when you start looking closely at it, it's practically nothing but quirks. sixteenth-century african kingdoms adopting european coats of arms, samurai touring aztec pyramids; everything is much closer and weirder than we think.
anyway, the less fun bit: yeah, i see no reason to think that a truly independent palestinian state in gaza and the west bank wouldn't be roughly as dysfunctional and sclerotic as most arab states. this is not such a bad thing, depending on your tastes; i think i would much rather live in a dysfunctional but gregarious mediterranean state like italy than a highly functional but autistic state like finland or south korea. but i find it very hard to imagine that a palestinian state would have anything like israel's gdp per capita, scientific and consumer innovations, obnoxious dance culture, genuinely excellent fine dining scene, etc etc etc. (it would, however, have much, much better poets.)
but i really don't see the value in comparing this hypothetical palestinian state to israel itself; you have to compare it to the actual present-day palestine under israeli occupation. the unemployment rate in the west bank is 24.4%; compare 7% in egypt and 10% in syria. there's very little private capital in palestine, and much of that actually ends up being invested in jewish settlements, since that's where the growth is and they're less likely to be capriciously torn down by israeli bulldozers. the palestinian authority's public funds, meanwhile, are often unavailable; israel has a habit of withholding the taxes it collects on the pa's behalf. in much of the west bank, it's virtually impossible for palestinians to acquire a building permit, accentuating a massive artificial housing crisis. the checkpoint regime means that there's absolutely no freedom of movement within the west bank for palestinians, who are also forbidden from driving on many of its arterial roads. there's also the fact that settlers now routinely enact "price tag" pogroms against palestinian homes and villages, destroying crops, vandalising homes, and sometimes burning them with children inside. plus there are frequent idf raids in which ordinary people, including children, are shot and killed, and israel's systematic targeting of palestinian civil society figures for arrest and extrajudicial execution, and the general indignity of living in a state of calculated unfreedom. and this is only in the west bank: in gaza, meanwhile, the unemployment rate is 45% and gdp per capita is, according to some estimates, lower than anywhere else on the planet. also in gaza, as i write, israel is wiping out entire families, three generations exterminated with a single bomb. children are collecting the tattered body parts of their siblings in plastic bags. you can watch footage of mohammed al-ran, the head of surgery at gaza's indonesia hospital, discovering that his family had been targeted in an israeli airstrike. the israeli military knows exactly who lives in which houses. they killed his family deliberately. what i can't get over is the fact that al-ran simply has no recourse. his family was killed by a democratic state, but there's nobody to ask why, nobody who will ever need to explain the decision, nobody who will ever be held accountable for pushing the button that incinerated his entire life. this is what it means to live under occupation: under a state that has total power over your life, but is not in any sense responsible to you.
i don't think it's ever going to happen, and it's not my preferred solution, but i think, for most people, an ordinary, mediocre, dysfunctional arab state would be preferable to that.
obviously we're at an extreme point in a long-running cycle of violence, and palestinian factions have also done their part in getting us to where we are. but i don't think the choice was ever between relative peace and prosperity under israel, and violence and dysfunction if the palestinians kept pushing for their own state. israel in its pre-1967 borders was never a fully viable, defensible state. the distance between tel aviv and the west bank is less than the length of manhattan, and the palestinians now inhabit the high ground overlooking the coastal plain. i've been to hebron; you can literally see the skyscrapers of tel aviv from there. israel is simply never going to allow this land to pass to a genuinely independent and sovereign palestinian state. but simply absorbing the palestinians into israel isn't an option without sacrificing the jewish identity of the state. which means that the palestinians must be kept from full self-determination through a continual state of surveillance, repression, and terror. this is why i say that israel's wealth and freedom is predicated on palestinian suppression. (although, in fact, the occupation is also big business. you say net drain on the public bourse, i say constant rolling state stimulus to the israeli security industry, much of it financed with american aid.) agan, israeli politicians are very open about this. they have no preferred solution to the conflict; their preferred solution is to just keep things exactly as they are, in the eternal grey limbo of an interminable peace process as settlers slowly swallow up more palestinian land and a few kids are periodically splattered in gaza. the hamas attack last month was an attempt to break out of that limbo, and i suppose it worked. we're in something else now. something worse, but something else.
You make several points I readily concede. I have no reason to question the calculated unfreedom you describe in lurid detail. Perhaps I should have spent more time outlining the Palestinian's repression as relevant context, but I am not sure how it would have changed my overall analysis.
The core thesis here remains the need to critically evaluate the self-professed motivations behind the Palestinian cause, to see which ones hold up with the facts. The problem is genuine valid grievances like the untenable life under occupation get shoved into the same overflowing laundry hamper to provide cover for objective insanity, like suicidal rage over stolen family land someone's grandparents never set foot on.
I already described how the Israeli camp is full of bad actors who are intent in maintaining/escalating the conflict and annexing more dirt. But if we average each respective side, I'm more likely to believe that Israel is the one that would be content with being left alone.
I’m sure the Palestinians would be content with being left alone, unfortunately that option was taken away from them by a combination of British imperialists, neighboring Arab nations, militant Zionists, Israeli politicians, the U.S. military-industrial apparatus, and their own sclerotic leadership.
Can we start with you giving the Khazar story a rest? It's a well known myth, mainly used by pro Palestinians to try and sever a connection between Jews (especially Ashkenazi ones) and Israel. Unfortunately for the antisemitic asses who love to point to it, DNA shows a strong connection between all Jews, and to a pre-diaspora origin in Israel.
Next, what an amazing thing to say that Israel's wealth is predicated on Palestinian suppression. Are you aware how much of Israel's GDP goes into its military and security, and the tax burden that funds it? At 5.3% it's far higher than any western democracy, and that's without the military assistance Israel had secured (along with Egypt) at the signing of peace with Egypt. Your skipping right over Israel's massive high-tech industry, which I'm quite sure is not built on the backs of the Palestinians is also very odd. No, despite a progressive urge to tie every damn thing in the universe with the Palestinians, the innovation and energy of Israel's tech sector has little to do with 'occupation'.
Who exactly are you to rewrite history? "Israel would never give up the West Bank" is a crock of shit, friend. Take a look at the many maps sincerely discussed since Oslo I accords. Take a look at maps from the 2008 Annapolis conference. Israel was absolutely planning to trade nearly all that land for peace. However, the Gaza disengagement in 2005 does raise some serious concerns, not due to 'economics' as you try to suggest (those greedy Jews, eh?), but purely security related once (shocking, Israelis don't like being massacred, tortured, raped and kidnapped by islamist terrorists. Such bad Zionists!). It took Hamas less than two years to snatch Gaza from the Palestinian Authority. It's hard to trust the PA with securing the entire West Bank in return for that land. So personally, while I believe in a two state solution, and having very little trust in the Palestinian's desire for peace, I wouldn't accept any land-for-peace deal that didn't require a demilitarized Palestine. This massacre lost Palestinians the right to have a military.
Cool blood libel about Israel murdering specific doctors, and knowing where every person lives. Considering Israel is trying to eliminate the military leadership, that imaginary knowledge would have been really useful. Maybe end your personalized spy info to the IDF, to hurry up the war with less casualties.
It's fantastic that you're are digging up excuses for the Hamas massacre. We're definitely in something else now - Hamas getting charges lowered into their tunnels, burying those war criminals inside them.
no, the khazar khaganate is not a myth. there really was a jewish polity on the southern pontic steppe during the early middle ages. i'm aware that some people use the existence of the khazar khaganate to argue that ashkenazi jews are unrelated to the historical israelites. (the first person to make that argument was, incidentally, himself a jew; he wanted to defang antisemitism by removing the notion that jews were collectively responsible for the crucifixion of jesus.) as far as i can tell, that argument is untrue and genetic studies have concluded that ashkenazi jews are more or less levantine and not pontic in origin. as an ashkenazi jew myself, none of this genetic pedantry is particularly interesting to me; i don't believe it's valid to make moral claims on the basis of distant ancestry. but the khazar khaganate is real, and it's interesting. a lot more interesting than you.
i'm not really going to respond to the rest of your post, because it's all more of the same. you don't actually know anything about the khazars, but you know they're something the people you don't like bring up sometimes, so when i bring it up you just say that they're a myth. you're not responding to what i actually said, you're pecking the "blood libel" lever like a trained pigeon. you try to insinuate i'm a hamas supporter and an antisemite. well, you can go and read what i wrote about the hamas massacre, it's right here on substack. please be less tedious in the future.
We see what your Palestinian liberation looks like, Sam. You're the one trying to ignore reality. You're not into claims on the basis of ancestry, but you're also cool denying refugees the right to purchase land and build a life on it, apparently. You're into denying Jews the right to escape virulently antisemitic Europe and Arab World and arrive as refugees to where their religion and history is based, to live a life alongside another native people. You're into denying the right of Jews to defend themselves when attacked during a civil war. Alrighty, very British of you.
Send a photo next to the people shouting "Khaybar, Khaybar", Sam. That's some interesting historical chant, especially in the context of pro Hamas protests, right?
Just to be clear: the democratic one-state solution Sam dreams of here is basically nonsense. Israelis have every right to suspect that, if Palestinians are given equal rights in a single state, the end result will be Jews exiled from that single state or worse. A two-state solution is the valid alternative to today -- though it's a dim possibility with little support by either side.
ps: i feel like it's probably a very bad idea to try to get any kind of factual information about anything from chatgpt. i just got it to provide a list of the kings of yareach shelanu, a ninth-century jewish polity on the moon, which begins with a medieval jewish astronaut called king miriam ii.
Yes, I would never claim that chatGPT should be relied upon exclusively. I never take anything it tells me at face value and use it only to more efficiently island hop across other sources (my most common question was "what's a good wikipedia page for this"). Sometimes you get very pressing but minor questions, and it's a much more efficient lodestar to finding the answer than cracking open a 326-page PDF.
It's much much much faster at getting at the core of the issue. I found this out when I was watching Narcos: Mexico, where digging wells was a central plot point. I got curious about that topic and quickly realized that googling "mexico 1980s digging wells law" was going to be an absolute slog, whereas chatGPT pointed me in the right direction immediately.
Well, is the West Bank part of Israel, or is it “illegally occupied territory” that by rights should be an independent state? Hasn’t the UN ruled that the West Bank is “occupied” rather than actually Israel?
I think this puts Israel in a Catch-22 - on the one hand, they are not allowed to actually exercise sovereign authority over the West Bank and Gaza, or they are condemned as “occupiers”. On the other hand, you want to hold them responsible for the crappy conditions in places where Israel has mostly ceded sovereign authority to the Palestinians, and that gets labeled “apartheid”.
You seem to be saying that Israel ought to basically absorb Gaza and the West Bank and make everyone there an equal Israeli citizen. But in addition to the practical integration concerns, wouldn’t that be met by extreme howling rage by the “international community”?
Sam Kriss, I have followed you since the time of Idiot Joy. You are a great and amazing writer of poetic literature.
As a commentator on social events and politics, you are the despicable child of privilege that has always delighted in spitting in the silver spoon from his mouth. I remember the numberless articles in which you prostituted your exquisite prose to the service of all the latest illiberal fads produced by a certain type of maximalist left -- you called yourself a bolshevik-in-your-youth, for being a revolutionary is posh. You have embraced every new anti-racist-colonialist-imperialist-patriarchal-heteronormative trend that has come up, and yet you have never become Owen Jones. And that is very likely a point to your credit. (But I have a strong suspicion that you resent not being Owen Jones).
You speak of a situation and a conflict of which you know very little -- oh, you have visited Israel, what am I saying! -- with the condescending manner of those who know, and begin with erudite attempts at discrediting the very racial identity of some Jews in order to discredit the fact that the Jews are indigenous to Palestine -- an old antisemitic ploy. It is painful to watch you play with words (oh so beautifully, because you can work beautifully with words) and make the blood of people, 100 years of blood, both Jewish blood and Arab blood, into an abstraction of theoretical power relations that shows how clever you are.
You are the very kind of intellectual of which we could truly do without in this type of discussions.
look i'm aware i had the misfortune to be acting out my slightly embarrassing and jejune maoist period in public, but anti-heteronormativity? give me a break.
i've responded to the khazar thing above, but basically if you think any mention of the khazar khaganate is antisemitic, you are very tedious and i'm not interested in talking to you. similarly, you seem to think i'm trying to reduce the conflict to abstract power relations, when everything i've written about the current phase was written precisely against that kind of reduction. i don't expect everyone to read everything i write, but if you're going to pull this creepy i've-been-following-you shtick it might help to reacquaint yourself with the material! and yes, it's true that i have visited israel. does it change anything that on my first visit, i didn't arrive through ben-gurion airport, but through a birth canal?
what's the basis of your scepticism? i know some historians are iffy on the authenticity of the khazar correspondence but there's also the schechter letter in the cairo geniza, plus the fact that archaeologists have found stones inscribed with menorahs and hebrew letters in sarkel, and khazar coinage inscribed with reference to moses. obviously we don't know if the conversion to judaism was a mass phenomenon or restricted to the elite and i'm always willing to hear out alternate theories but as a historical event it seems pretty incontrovertible!
Well, we've arrived at Sam laying out his pro Hamas credentials - I did see that charming note that you're going protesting along with all the good people raising "from the river to the sea" and "by any means" and similar genocide supporting slogans.
I have minor patience arguing with disingenuous people who are looking to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews by any means, but since you raised the absurd "apartheid" claim of the pro Hamas universe, I'll put out some resources.
this may be slightly pedantic, but the kingdoms of israel and judah are not even close to being "the only cogent jewish political entities to have ever existed." for one, the religion they practiced isn't really recognisable as judaism, but something scholars call "yahwism," which was maybe closer to a pagan polytheistic cult with a particular focus on one local canaanite storm-god, yahweh, and his wife, asherah. the emergence of judaism proper was slow and mostly took place in exile; the religion in its modern form doesn't fully emerge until after the destruction of the temple in 70 ad with the compilation of the talmud.
but there were plenty of other jewish polities! there was a jewish kingdom called adiabene in northern mesopotamia under the parthian empire, and another, briefer jewish state nearby in mahoza. the jewish himyarite kingdom ruled yemen in late antiquity; a huge swathe of russia and ukraine was under the jewish khazar khaganate. there may have been a jewish state in northern ethiopia, and some historians have even proposed a (very contentious) jewish princedom around narbonne in present-day france under the carolingian empire. and while it might be tiny, a figment of stalin's megalomania, and on the far side of the world, there was (and still is!) the jewish autonomous oblast...
anyway, i don't really agree with a lot of what you've said here. on several points, but i'll restrict myself here to your preference for israeli governance and culture. yes, israeli political institutions are more democratic and seem to generate more general prosperity than palestinian political institutions - but only *if you're israeli.* this is not a conflict between states! israeli political institutions are the ones that ultimately determine all outcomes for both sides, including the relative poverty of the palestinians of the west bank and the absolute poverty of the palestinians of gaza. every international observer recognises that the israeli state holds sovereign authority in the west bank and gaza, but the palestinian population is not represented in that state.
israeli politicians are fairly open about the fact that the relative wealth and freedom of israel directly depends on the suppression of the palestinians. there's even a separate israeli law code for west bank palestinians! a palestinian in area c lives under the same direct authority as their israeli neighbours, but if they commit a crime they face very different systems. the israeli will be tried in a civil court under ordinary israeli law. the palestinian will be tried by a uniformed army officer in a military court. these courts prosecute acts that are only criminal for palestinians, and not israelis. they will try 16 year olds as adults, while israeli civil courts set the age of majority at 18. they almost never grant bail, even for traffic offences, and the conviction rate is a very democratic 99.7%. this, more than the position of the israeli arabs, is why israel can be accurately defined as an apartheid state.
i don't think it's a question of choosing to support israeli or palestinian institutions as they presently exist, like these are football teams. as far as i can see, the only possible just solution, however distant it might seem right now, is one in which these (as you note, superior) israeli governance models are expanded to democratically represent the palestinian population, even if it means that the state loses its specifically jewish character. there have been other jewish states in the past. there will, i'm sure, be other jewish states in the future. but this one - frankly, it isn't worth it.
Sam, I'm a big fan of your writing in part because of your historical pedantry, so please don't ever be shy about flying your freak flag here.
I wasn't at all aware of Judaism/Yahwism's history, or the various other polities (Jewish Khaganate wtf!). I did the thing where you squish "Jewish" into a ball by eliding the distinction between ethnicity/religion, so I guess it depends how you draw the contours of the category here.
I didn't articulate my point about the comparative benefit of Palestinian institutions as well as I should've. Under the best hypothetical circumstances, there's no reason to think it would surpass neighboring Arab institutions, and Israel is already miles above those. I don't understand how it could be worth the bloodshed to become on par with mediocrity.
I agree that Israel holds sovereign authority over the territories. I concede I don't know enough about the civil prosecution system, and don't find anything you're saying to be implausible. But I don't fully understand the connection about how Israel's relative wealth and freedom is predicated on Palestinian suppression. The security apparatus, the vigilance, and the constant turmoil would seem to only be a net drain on Israel's bourse no?
I personally don't value Jewish character so I think an expansion of Israeli democracy would be a worthwhile trade-off. The only question would be if the democracy would survive that expansion, given the ever-present noxious ideologies in play.
yeah the jewish khaganate is an amazing quirk of history, but what i love about history is that when you start looking closely at it, it's practically nothing but quirks. sixteenth-century african kingdoms adopting european coats of arms, samurai touring aztec pyramids; everything is much closer and weirder than we think.
anyway, the less fun bit: yeah, i see no reason to think that a truly independent palestinian state in gaza and the west bank wouldn't be roughly as dysfunctional and sclerotic as most arab states. this is not such a bad thing, depending on your tastes; i think i would much rather live in a dysfunctional but gregarious mediterranean state like italy than a highly functional but autistic state like finland or south korea. but i find it very hard to imagine that a palestinian state would have anything like israel's gdp per capita, scientific and consumer innovations, obnoxious dance culture, genuinely excellent fine dining scene, etc etc etc. (it would, however, have much, much better poets.)
but i really don't see the value in comparing this hypothetical palestinian state to israel itself; you have to compare it to the actual present-day palestine under israeli occupation. the unemployment rate in the west bank is 24.4%; compare 7% in egypt and 10% in syria. there's very little private capital in palestine, and much of that actually ends up being invested in jewish settlements, since that's where the growth is and they're less likely to be capriciously torn down by israeli bulldozers. the palestinian authority's public funds, meanwhile, are often unavailable; israel has a habit of withholding the taxes it collects on the pa's behalf. in much of the west bank, it's virtually impossible for palestinians to acquire a building permit, accentuating a massive artificial housing crisis. the checkpoint regime means that there's absolutely no freedom of movement within the west bank for palestinians, who are also forbidden from driving on many of its arterial roads. there's also the fact that settlers now routinely enact "price tag" pogroms against palestinian homes and villages, destroying crops, vandalising homes, and sometimes burning them with children inside. plus there are frequent idf raids in which ordinary people, including children, are shot and killed, and israel's systematic targeting of palestinian civil society figures for arrest and extrajudicial execution, and the general indignity of living in a state of calculated unfreedom. and this is only in the west bank: in gaza, meanwhile, the unemployment rate is 45% and gdp per capita is, according to some estimates, lower than anywhere else on the planet. also in gaza, as i write, israel is wiping out entire families, three generations exterminated with a single bomb. children are collecting the tattered body parts of their siblings in plastic bags. you can watch footage of mohammed al-ran, the head of surgery at gaza's indonesia hospital, discovering that his family had been targeted in an israeli airstrike. the israeli military knows exactly who lives in which houses. they killed his family deliberately. what i can't get over is the fact that al-ran simply has no recourse. his family was killed by a democratic state, but there's nobody to ask why, nobody who will ever need to explain the decision, nobody who will ever be held accountable for pushing the button that incinerated his entire life. this is what it means to live under occupation: under a state that has total power over your life, but is not in any sense responsible to you.
i don't think it's ever going to happen, and it's not my preferred solution, but i think, for most people, an ordinary, mediocre, dysfunctional arab state would be preferable to that.
obviously we're at an extreme point in a long-running cycle of violence, and palestinian factions have also done their part in getting us to where we are. but i don't think the choice was ever between relative peace and prosperity under israel, and violence and dysfunction if the palestinians kept pushing for their own state. israel in its pre-1967 borders was never a fully viable, defensible state. the distance between tel aviv and the west bank is less than the length of manhattan, and the palestinians now inhabit the high ground overlooking the coastal plain. i've been to hebron; you can literally see the skyscrapers of tel aviv from there. israel is simply never going to allow this land to pass to a genuinely independent and sovereign palestinian state. but simply absorbing the palestinians into israel isn't an option without sacrificing the jewish identity of the state. which means that the palestinians must be kept from full self-determination through a continual state of surveillance, repression, and terror. this is why i say that israel's wealth and freedom is predicated on palestinian suppression. (although, in fact, the occupation is also big business. you say net drain on the public bourse, i say constant rolling state stimulus to the israeli security industry, much of it financed with american aid.) agan, israeli politicians are very open about this. they have no preferred solution to the conflict; their preferred solution is to just keep things exactly as they are, in the eternal grey limbo of an interminable peace process as settlers slowly swallow up more palestinian land and a few kids are periodically splattered in gaza. the hamas attack last month was an attempt to break out of that limbo, and i suppose it worked. we're in something else now. something worse, but something else.
You make several points I readily concede. I have no reason to question the calculated unfreedom you describe in lurid detail. Perhaps I should have spent more time outlining the Palestinian's repression as relevant context, but I am not sure how it would have changed my overall analysis.
The core thesis here remains the need to critically evaluate the self-professed motivations behind the Palestinian cause, to see which ones hold up with the facts. The problem is genuine valid grievances like the untenable life under occupation get shoved into the same overflowing laundry hamper to provide cover for objective insanity, like suicidal rage over stolen family land someone's grandparents never set foot on.
I already described how the Israeli camp is full of bad actors who are intent in maintaining/escalating the conflict and annexing more dirt. But if we average each respective side, I'm more likely to believe that Israel is the one that would be content with being left alone.
I’m sure the Palestinians would be content with being left alone, unfortunately that option was taken away from them by a combination of British imperialists, neighboring Arab nations, militant Zionists, Israeli politicians, the U.S. military-industrial apparatus, and their own sclerotic leadership.
Can we start with you giving the Khazar story a rest? It's a well known myth, mainly used by pro Palestinians to try and sever a connection between Jews (especially Ashkenazi ones) and Israel. Unfortunately for the antisemitic asses who love to point to it, DNA shows a strong connection between all Jews, and to a pre-diaspora origin in Israel.
Next, what an amazing thing to say that Israel's wealth is predicated on Palestinian suppression. Are you aware how much of Israel's GDP goes into its military and security, and the tax burden that funds it? At 5.3% it's far higher than any western democracy, and that's without the military assistance Israel had secured (along with Egypt) at the signing of peace with Egypt. Your skipping right over Israel's massive high-tech industry, which I'm quite sure is not built on the backs of the Palestinians is also very odd. No, despite a progressive urge to tie every damn thing in the universe with the Palestinians, the innovation and energy of Israel's tech sector has little to do with 'occupation'.
Who exactly are you to rewrite history? "Israel would never give up the West Bank" is a crock of shit, friend. Take a look at the many maps sincerely discussed since Oslo I accords. Take a look at maps from the 2008 Annapolis conference. Israel was absolutely planning to trade nearly all that land for peace. However, the Gaza disengagement in 2005 does raise some serious concerns, not due to 'economics' as you try to suggest (those greedy Jews, eh?), but purely security related once (shocking, Israelis don't like being massacred, tortured, raped and kidnapped by islamist terrorists. Such bad Zionists!). It took Hamas less than two years to snatch Gaza from the Palestinian Authority. It's hard to trust the PA with securing the entire West Bank in return for that land. So personally, while I believe in a two state solution, and having very little trust in the Palestinian's desire for peace, I wouldn't accept any land-for-peace deal that didn't require a demilitarized Palestine. This massacre lost Palestinians the right to have a military.
Cool blood libel about Israel murdering specific doctors, and knowing where every person lives. Considering Israel is trying to eliminate the military leadership, that imaginary knowledge would have been really useful. Maybe end your personalized spy info to the IDF, to hurry up the war with less casualties.
It's fantastic that you're are digging up excuses for the Hamas massacre. We're definitely in something else now - Hamas getting charges lowered into their tunnels, burying those war criminals inside them.
no, the khazar khaganate is not a myth. there really was a jewish polity on the southern pontic steppe during the early middle ages. i'm aware that some people use the existence of the khazar khaganate to argue that ashkenazi jews are unrelated to the historical israelites. (the first person to make that argument was, incidentally, himself a jew; he wanted to defang antisemitism by removing the notion that jews were collectively responsible for the crucifixion of jesus.) as far as i can tell, that argument is untrue and genetic studies have concluded that ashkenazi jews are more or less levantine and not pontic in origin. as an ashkenazi jew myself, none of this genetic pedantry is particularly interesting to me; i don't believe it's valid to make moral claims on the basis of distant ancestry. but the khazar khaganate is real, and it's interesting. a lot more interesting than you.
i'm not really going to respond to the rest of your post, because it's all more of the same. you don't actually know anything about the khazars, but you know they're something the people you don't like bring up sometimes, so when i bring it up you just say that they're a myth. you're not responding to what i actually said, you're pecking the "blood libel" lever like a trained pigeon. you try to insinuate i'm a hamas supporter and an antisemite. well, you can go and read what i wrote about the hamas massacre, it's right here on substack. please be less tedious in the future.
I read it. I even responded to how many fucking words it took you to wrench out a condemnation of Hamas. https://substack.com/@arrrbee/note/c-41610862?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1mebvk
We see what your Palestinian liberation looks like, Sam. You're the one trying to ignore reality. You're not into claims on the basis of ancestry, but you're also cool denying refugees the right to purchase land and build a life on it, apparently. You're into denying Jews the right to escape virulently antisemitic Europe and Arab World and arrive as refugees to where their religion and history is based, to live a life alongside another native people. You're into denying the right of Jews to defend themselves when attacked during a civil war. Alrighty, very British of you.
i asked you to be less tedious and you haven't. bye
Send a photo next to the people shouting "Khaybar, Khaybar", Sam. That's some interesting historical chant, especially in the context of pro Hamas protests, right?
Reminds me of this article: https://substack.com/home/post/p-138689635
Just to be clear: the democratic one-state solution Sam dreams of here is basically nonsense. Israelis have every right to suspect that, if Palestinians are given equal rights in a single state, the end result will be Jews exiled from that single state or worse. A two-state solution is the valid alternative to today -- though it's a dim possibility with little support by either side.
What do you mean by "I personally don't value Jewish character "?
"Jewish character in a *state*" in response to Sam's comment.
ps: i feel like it's probably a very bad idea to try to get any kind of factual information about anything from chatgpt. i just got it to provide a list of the kings of yareach shelanu, a ninth-century jewish polity on the moon, which begins with a medieval jewish astronaut called king miriam ii.
Yes, I would never claim that chatGPT should be relied upon exclusively. I never take anything it tells me at face value and use it only to more efficiently island hop across other sources (my most common question was "what's a good wikipedia page for this"). Sometimes you get very pressing but minor questions, and it's a much more efficient lodestar to finding the answer than cracking open a 326-page PDF.
What's the advantage of using ChatGPT for a wikipedia page rather than google?
The only use I've had for it is editing, including code.
It's much much much faster at getting at the core of the issue. I found this out when I was watching Narcos: Mexico, where digging wells was a central plot point. I got curious about that topic and quickly realized that googling "mexico 1980s digging wells law" was going to be an absolute slog, whereas chatGPT pointed me in the right direction immediately.
Good point. It's also helpful for summarizing an article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/technology/chatbots-hallucination-rates.html
I'm not denying this risk. Like I said, never take anything it tells you at face value.
Would it be better if we got information from on-campus pro Palestinian propaganda?
Well, is the West Bank part of Israel, or is it “illegally occupied territory” that by rights should be an independent state? Hasn’t the UN ruled that the West Bank is “occupied” rather than actually Israel?
I think this puts Israel in a Catch-22 - on the one hand, they are not allowed to actually exercise sovereign authority over the West Bank and Gaza, or they are condemned as “occupiers”. On the other hand, you want to hold them responsible for the crappy conditions in places where Israel has mostly ceded sovereign authority to the Palestinians, and that gets labeled “apartheid”.
You seem to be saying that Israel ought to basically absorb Gaza and the West Bank and make everyone there an equal Israeli citizen. But in addition to the practical integration concerns, wouldn’t that be met by extreme howling rage by the “international community”?
Only one thing to all of this drivel.
Sam Kriss, I have followed you since the time of Idiot Joy. You are a great and amazing writer of poetic literature.
As a commentator on social events and politics, you are the despicable child of privilege that has always delighted in spitting in the silver spoon from his mouth. I remember the numberless articles in which you prostituted your exquisite prose to the service of all the latest illiberal fads produced by a certain type of maximalist left -- you called yourself a bolshevik-in-your-youth, for being a revolutionary is posh. You have embraced every new anti-racist-colonialist-imperialist-patriarchal-heteronormative trend that has come up, and yet you have never become Owen Jones. And that is very likely a point to your credit. (But I have a strong suspicion that you resent not being Owen Jones).
You speak of a situation and a conflict of which you know very little -- oh, you have visited Israel, what am I saying! -- with the condescending manner of those who know, and begin with erudite attempts at discrediting the very racial identity of some Jews in order to discredit the fact that the Jews are indigenous to Palestine -- an old antisemitic ploy. It is painful to watch you play with words (oh so beautifully, because you can work beautifully with words) and make the blood of people, 100 years of blood, both Jewish blood and Arab blood, into an abstraction of theoretical power relations that shows how clever you are.
You are the very kind of intellectual of which we could truly do without in this type of discussions.
Arr Bee above says the rest better than I.
look i'm aware i had the misfortune to be acting out my slightly embarrassing and jejune maoist period in public, but anti-heteronormativity? give me a break.
i've responded to the khazar thing above, but basically if you think any mention of the khazar khaganate is antisemitic, you are very tedious and i'm not interested in talking to you. similarly, you seem to think i'm trying to reduce the conflict to abstract power relations, when everything i've written about the current phase was written precisely against that kind of reduction. i don't expect everyone to read everything i write, but if you're going to pull this creepy i've-been-following-you shtick it might help to reacquaint yourself with the material! and yes, it's true that i have visited israel. does it change anything that on my first visit, i didn't arrive through ben-gurion airport, but through a birth canal?
If you think anything about Khazar crap is true you have a reality problem.
what's the basis of your scepticism? i know some historians are iffy on the authenticity of the khazar correspondence but there's also the schechter letter in the cairo geniza, plus the fact that archaeologists have found stones inscribed with menorahs and hebrew letters in sarkel, and khazar coinage inscribed with reference to moses. obviously we don't know if the conversion to judaism was a mass phenomenon or restricted to the elite and i'm always willing to hear out alternate theories but as a historical event it seems pretty incontrovertible!
Well, we've arrived at Sam laying out his pro Hamas credentials - I did see that charming note that you're going protesting along with all the good people raising "from the river to the sea" and "by any means" and similar genocide supporting slogans.
I have minor patience arguing with disingenuous people who are looking to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews by any means, but since you raised the absurd "apartheid" claim of the pro Hamas universe, I'll put out some resources.
* The Apartheid Accusation Against Israel is Baseless – and Agenda-Driven (definitely Sam has an agenda here too): https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-apartheid-accusation-against-israel-lacks-is-baseless-and-agenda-driven/
* Why Allegations that Israel Is An 'Apartheid' State Are False under International Law: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4343950
* Injecting 'Apartheid' Into the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Will Make It Worse : https://www.newsweek.com/injecting-apartheid-israeli-palestinian-conflict-will-make-it-worse-opinion-1588559