Come in Agent Netanyahu, mission almost accomplished

I thought CT had a policy of not commenting on Israel-related issues, since the ensuing discussions are unpleasant and unproductive. Maybe I am misremembering. Let the fun begin.

US statement to the UNSC refuses to criticise Israel in any form, instead blames the peaceful activists and, of course, Hamas, for this act of terrorism and piracy. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but somehow I still am.

There was something recently in the NYRB arguing that young Jews in the US mostly don’t support, or even have much interest in, Israel. The exceptions are the orthodox/fundamentalist Jews. If they turned against Israel, US support may weaken in coming decades.

[aeiou] “Jesus facepalming Christ. I might as well just cancel my unwritten rule of trying to avoid Israel/Palestine as the twat-magnet it is.”
Begin by blaming both sides. Not a good start.
“I thought CT had a policy of not commenting on Israel-related issues”
That’s because Israel is to the middling left what abortion is to the middling right.
1)”Abortion is murder”
2)”Then charge the women who have them with murder”
1)”This is different.”

1)”The Jews have a right to a Jewish State”
2)”Do the Germans have the right to a German state?”
1)”Jews are different”

Peter Beinart
“I’m not asking Israel to be Utopian. I’m not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I’m not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I’m actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel’s security and for its status as a Jewish state.”

Liberal Israeli Jews want the Palestinians to leave. Do you defend that?: Yes or no.
It’s middling liberal agnotology. Either defend the notion that a race based state can be modern and democratic or don’t. As to Hamas, the facts are what they are: They have offered negotiations, the have held truces Israelis have broken them. Google “Nancy Kanwisher hamas” I don’t want to risk the spam filter. Israel kidnaps and tortures people for non-violent resistance.

I could pound you with facts and you could only respond with a defense of a Jewish state; one that by its very nature discriminates against its minority population, never mind that the state is ringed by refugees who are trapped between countries, just as Mexican refugees would be penned in Guatemala if they were driven across the border. Palestinians are Palestinians and Israel is Palestine.

Ahmad Tibi, a member of Israel’s parliament, on being an Arab lawmaker in Israel:

There is a continuous delegitimization campaign against us. We are described as betrayers. But I can’t betray something I’m not part of. I’m not part of the army. I’m not part of the Zionist ideology. I’m a victim of Zionism…. It’s inhumane to demand that we be loyal to Zionism or accept Israel as a Jewish state. I can’t accept a definition that strengthens the discrimination against non-Jews in Israel.
You don’t accept Israel as a Jewish state?
I want it to be a state of its own nationalities, and the Arab minority to be recognized as a national minority. Israel is, according to the law, defined as a Jewish and democratic state. But there is a contradiction between the two values. If you are democratic, you should believe in equality. But if you define the nation by a Jewish ethnicity, you are saying any Jewish person is superior to a non-Jewish person.
How you do define yourself?
I’m a Palestinian-Arab citizen of Israel. We are part of the Palestinian people but citizens of Israel.

As a matter of logic it’s pretty simple, but something gets in the way. And that something is a form of unreason.

I thought CT had a policy of not commenting on Israel-related issues, since the ensuing discussions are unpleasant and unproductive

No, we have a policy of demanding that people taking part in such discussions remain civil and ontopic, and of ruthlessly enforcing said policy with deletions and bans. Let’s not have any “fun” beginning.

Ontopic, says d2. Yet you published Clod L-S.

That article has William Hague on “the wrong side” in the “battle for civilization” because he deplores the loss of life.

I’m not sure that the word “civilization” means what Melanie thinks it means…

[aeiou] “Ontopic, says d2. Yet you published Clod L-S.”
Neil ,
Every reference I’ve heard to Beinart in the liberal press concerns how he has been nobly fighting the Likudniks. I found that quote linked on the web page of As’ad AbuKhalil, whom liberals ignore. Feel free to defend it or not. The other is a plea for democracy from an Israeli legislator. Please tell us how you define a modern democratic state.

And if you want citations on Israelis arguing for a two state solution so that the Israeli born Palestinians can leave, then I can get you those too. The two state solution was always a lesser evil, but it was and is predicated on Jewish ethnic separatism which was never defensible as liberal. Yet it has been defended as such again and again. Never mind that Likud has destroyed any hope for it, it was never a noble cause. But if it had been allowed, would you want that for your own lives? Whatever your ethnicity would you want your children to grow up in such an environment? So why the identification with those who do? Why would people who live happily in multi-ethnic countries and who would vote against racial barriers where they live support them in another country? Why should anyone find their choice worthy of respect?

There has been almost no response from liberal Zionists to the secret letter of agreement between South Africa and Israel. “In this letter, dated 11 November 1974,[!] Peres says Israel and the South African apartheid government share a ‘common hatred of injustice’ and urges a ‘close identity of aspirations and interests’ “. No one has denied the letter’s authenticity.
I am not shouting, I am not ranting. I am not claiming sainthood for anyone. But I get the very real sense that the struggle to ignore the absolute failure of Israel is something akin to the last hope of those who thought the Soviet Union could reform itself. There is a blindness to the facts, none of which are new. So yes this is a critique of the myopic dreams of “agnotology”.
Power does not corrupt others, it corrupts. We all have blind spots. This one has resulted in American liberals getting smacked. What’s troubling and what’s always been troubling is that so many of them operate as if that were not even possible.

Israel has been allowed to pretend it is a modern democratic state. It never has been. The only people who have understood this fully are Jews and Arabs fighting for something better. The west has been paralyzed or worse by the memory of its complicity the last time.

(cf. doomsday machine, Kayser Sozhe, etc.)

The X-Files thread is underneath.

The question is, can the project of Israel as a Jewish state be sustained without escalating acts of state violence like this one? I agree with Clod Levi-Strauss that past attempts to maintain ethnically-exclusive states are relevant to the answer.

josh marshall links to this:
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100531_flotillas_and_wars_public_opinion?utm_source=GWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=100531&utm_content=readmore&elq=ec0dbb5abd264ff39b3645c5d73e93b4

which is interesting.

“Jewish ethnic separatism which was never defensible as liberal. ”

I really don’t understand this. The modern liberal state is founded on the concept of ethnic identity. That’s what Wilsonian liberalism was all about. And virtually every modern state has an ethnic identity. Those that don’t – e.g., Belgium – are in continuous danger of falling apart. Well, maybe Switzerland manages it. But it’s a very special case.

”Do the Germans have the right to a German state?”
Well, yes, they do, and no liberal contends to the contrary. That’s what the unification of Germany was about, wasn’t it? Remember Wir sind ein Volk?

“Why would people who live happily in multi-ethnic countries and who would vote against racial barriers where they live support them in another country? ”

Almost no one “lives happily” in “multi-ethnic” countries. Every modern nation-state is modeled on the mono-ethnic creations of the early modern era, and the degree to which they work as states is closely correlated to the success of the imposition of mono-ethnicity. You can have a state with significant populations of minority cultures as long as the minorities recognize and accept minority status, but you can’t have a state with two ethnic groups of roughly equal population who don’t share religion, language, history, or culture. That’s a prescription for civil war.

“Israel has been allowed to pretend it is a modern democratic state. It never has been.”

Israel has more of the institutions of a modern democratic state than any other state outside of Europe and North America: honest courts, a free press, labor unions, free universities, freedom of religious practice, independent political parties that regularly alternate in power. And if there were to be a unified single state in Palestine, it would without any doubt be far less democratic than the current Israeli state.

I do agree with you that Israel has placed itself on a path to its own destruction. Where we differ is that you think that the destruction of Israel will be a good thing, whereas anyone who is paying attention realizes that the lives of real people, whether or Jewish or Palestinian, will be far worse after the destruction of Israel than they are now.

And if there were to be a unified single state in Palestine, it would without any doubt be far less democratic than the current Israeli state.

One of the most damaging things for the Israelis about the current incident is that it will remind people that the residents of Gaza exist. Or I should say, it will remind some people of this. Others will talk about how the residents of Gaza and the West Bank would have it so much worse were the blessings of Israeli democracy withdrawn.

anyone who is paying attention realizes that the lives of real people, whether or Jewish or Palestinian, will be far worse after the destruction of Israel than they are now.

You seem to have identified the problem here: Those Palestinians just aren’t paying attention.

Perhaps the problem is that most Jewish Americans consider themselves, you know, Americans?

Bloix @ 24:

“And virtually every modern state has an ethnic identity. Those that don’t – e.g., Belgium – are in continuous danger of falling apart. Well, maybe Switzerland manages it. But it’s a very special case….. ….Almost no one “lives happily” in “multi-ethnic” countries. Every modern nation-state is modeled on the mono-ethnic creations of the early modern era, and the degree to which they work as states is closely correlated to the success of the imposition of mono-ethnicity. You can have a state with significant populations of minority cultures as long as the minorities recognize and accept minority status, but you can’t have a state with two ethnic groups of roughly equal population who don’t share religion, language, history, or culture. That’s a prescription for civil war.”

If I recall correctly, there is this country called Canada, which was founded in the 1860s as a bilingual, bi-cultural country (English-Protestant and French Catholic) and which, in the intervening 150 years, has evolved into a widely admired example of a happily functioning multi-ethnic society. For the last forty years, Canada has had a policy of explicitly fostering and encouraging ethnic diversity. Toronto is proudly one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. Aside from some separatist rabble-rousers in Quebec (who are comparable to similar ethnic-separatist rabble rousers in have a dozen other modern democracies), Canada has had impeccable political stability since its inception.

Actually, the United States, Australia, New Zealand are also crushing counterexamples to your assertion, because these are all happily multicultural countries which are populated by an ethnically heterogeneous mixture of immigrants from all over the planet. Of course, you could say that the US or Australia are really `mono-ethnic’, in the sense that these immigrants are assimilated into the dominant `American ethnicity’ or the `Australian ethnicity’. But if you define `ethnicity’ in this way, then your statement is totally vacuous as a defense of Israel. Israel aspires to be `mono-ethnic’ in the sense of being religiously homogeneous and `racially pure’. Countries like the US, and Australia are `mono-ethnic’ only in the sense that most people watch the same TV shows and participate in roughly the same mass-market culture.

By the way, your assertion that “Every modern nation-state is modeled on the mono-ethnic creations of the early modern era”’ might be correct, but it is also irrelevant. I might also observe that many modern nation states began as aggressively expansionist military dictatorships, or as the colonies or imperial holdings of such dictatorships. Fortunately, most `modern’ nation-states have evolved out this militaristic and mono-ethnic phase.

I find it a little disturbing in itself how many posts focus on the impact of this attack on Israel, while hardly mentioning the impact of the ongoing blockade on the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza. When was the last time a Jewish child in Israel died from malnutrition or lack of adequate medicine?

To me this is a PR disaster for Israel, but it is more than that. It illustrates what the nation of Israel has degenerated into: a xenophobic, racist, militaristic and paranoid State with the weapons of a military superpower. They are a nasty regional bully, propped up by United States politicians pandering to the Jewish vote. How can any American wonder why Arab terrorists target them when they don’t even have the moral courage to condemn this? The only winner today was Al Quaida. Their recruiting will soar.

For the record, I am an atheist with Finnish grandparents. I despair of both sides.

@Bloix

The actions of Hamas are not consistent with attempting to create a Palestinian state. Each time there is an attempt to get a peace process under way they sabotage it with a series of suicide bombings.

That is entirely consistent with a strategy of waiting out the demographics till the number of non Jews living within the borders controlled by Israel outnumber the Jews. At that point I think it is going to be rather hard for the rest of the world to justify a ‘Jewish state’. What could such a state be but an oppression of non-Jews? Recourse to citizenship versus non-citizenship is going to be equally hard when the Palestinians are denied citizenship on the historically spurious grounds that they were the victims of ethnic cleansing.

It will all get really ugly and rather hard for the West to support. But the other challenge for Zionists is the one that Beinart identified in his New York Review of books piece: Young American Jews consider Israel to be ‘them’ not ‘us’. And why on earth should anyone who is younger than 40, whose memories post-date the ’73 war consider Israel to be the perpetual underdog? Most memories will begin with the invasion of Lebanon, the ever expanding settlements. Very few will remember the period when the PLO was a terrorist movement rather than the moderate faction.

It has been a very long time since I heard anyone attempt to make a positive case for Israel. The standard argument relies on the somewhat dubious claim that Israel is a more enlightened Liberal state than the others in the region. That may well be true on some measures – particularly so if you are a Jew. But lets face it, is there any particular reason that the US has to have a permanent alliance with the least shitty government in a region where all the governments are pretty nasty? And after the exercise in relativism fails to convince they call their opponents either a NAZI/anti-semite or ‘self-hater’ as if there really can be no possibility of any criticism of Israel being justified ever.

Netanyahu’s objective is to keep his government together for the next few years and kick every important decision down the road till there is a more favorable government in the US. But what happens in 10, 20 years time? By then the winds of change will be blowing through the rest of the gulf as the oil starts to run out. Iran was a democracy before the US and the CIA began their meddling.

Contrast Netanyahu’s strategy with that of Hamas which is clearly playing a long term game whatever their final strategy might be. The worst outcome for the Likudnicks would be if Hamas decided in the wake of their success that the current circumstances now favor non-violent resistance over their earlier tactics.

@29:
The general idea makes sense to me, although I’m not convinced that Israel was necessary or even instrumental in killing off substantial anti-Semitism in the US. Isn’t this essentially a counterfactual argument–it’s hard to observe a mechanism at work here, and we can’t go back and see what the late 20th century would have been like w/o Israel.

@28
I would expect that liberal Jewish Americans are less interested in organizations like Hillel, the AJC, etc., and thus don’t find themselves in positions of leadership where they might exercise influence.

Perhaps the problem is that most Jewish Americans consider themselves, you know, Americans?

So do you mean, instead, that for the most part, liberal Jewish Americans have virtually no connection at all to these organizations–that seeing themselves simply as Americans amounts to having little or no involvement in organized Jewish life/Jewish community organizations? Do you think that growing up in a Jewish family/community has not, on average, shaped the outlook (e.g. towards Arabs, the Middle East) of Jews under 30 differently from how the outlook of Christian Americans of a similar age is shaped?

Just to clarify my point above, I meant that “pro-Israel” advocates include many (otherwise-) liberal Jewish Americans, with many more playing a less direct but not unimportant role (assuming organizations like the AJC, Hillel, and so on get some support from young and/or liberal Jewish Americans); thus, that a sea change in the attitude of liberal Jewish Americans would be enough to change things.

@31
Didn’t Hamas essentially stop using violent force against Israel around the time of Cast Lead (they adhered to a ceasefire for a few months before).

@Clod Levi-Strauss

There are many contradictions in the ‘two-state’ ‘solution’. But one of the most glaring is the fact that there is neither constituency has the slightest interest in accepting one.

When Yassir Arafat and Rabin were alive there was a realistic possibility of some form of settlement. But that was in the wake of the first Iraq war when the US was still a trusted intermediary, the peace faction could command a majority in the Knesset and the PLO were the elected representatives of the Palestinians.

For the past ten years it has been abundantly clear that neither of the two belligerents has the slightest interest in a two -state solution. Hamas rejects it on principle as does Likud. The settlements continue to expand and the US is currently trusted by neither party.

The only reason that the two-state solution remains on the table is that the possibility that there might be a settlement in the future allows US Jews to continue to feel good about Israel existing as a Jewish State. Admit that Obama can no more get the parties to agree to a two state solution than he could stop the Deepwater Horizon spill and the props are pulled from an edifice already threatening to collapse under its own weight.

If the cost of the ‘Jewish State’ is the perpetual occupation of the territories it is much harder to justify. People might even start to think about what the phrase might actually mean in practice or ask awkward questions about some animals being more equal than others.

A good part of the Political Philosophy of the late 20th Century is also going to have to be rewritten. All those essays and treaties on fairness and peoples on such which have to dance around the elephant in the room. Mention it of course and you will end up like Juan Cole, denied tenure.

“So do you mean, instead, that for the most part, liberal Jewish Americans have virtually no connection at all to these organizations…”

I mean the Jewish Americans I know view Israel as a Bizarro Disneyland for religious fanatics.

Is it really necessary to point out that the goal of the Palestinian Liberation Organization is ethnic self-determination?

no it’s not, because it’s not. The goal of the PLO is the existence of Palestine, which includes Jewish, Christian and Muslim Palestinians, and the right of return, which also extends to Palestinians of all ethnicity. Their goal specifically is national self-determination, which is often ethnically-based but not so much in a country whose political leaders come from 2 different religious traditions (you might recall, for example, a certain Hanan Ashrawi).

Israel made it possible for American Jews to have no need of Israel.

This is not true, stated as if there were never a world war 2 or any kind of immigration policy in the US, or a cultural history of Jewish people and their own struggle, within the US. It’s a massive over-simplification.

There are actually quite a few multi-ethnic or multi-religious states in the world, which manage to hold together, or which fall apart for very non-ethnically related reasons. And there are democracies outside of America and Europe functioning relatively well, thank you very much, despite in some cases having up to 40% of their population born overseas, or having strong religious groups with strong historical grievances who seem to, mostly, get along. If South Africa can do it, presumably Israel can – especially since apparently they share the same “opposition to historical injustice” (hahahahahahaha).

@Kaveh, Bliox

My point was that Hamas has been fairly consistent in using particular types of violence as a means to disrupt meaningful peace negotiations.

There is a general tendency to present all violence aimed at the US or US allies as being irrational, the work of insane madmen. You see the same thing in the history of the British Empire as well. Gordon of Khartoum didn’t just fight any old Mahdi, he fought the ‘Mad Mahdi’. The fact that the Mahdi’s military tactics were a lot sounder than Gordon’s seem to have escaped the imperial reporters.

Insanity is used to explain motives that are incompatible with the governing ideology.

If the Mahdi does not want the benefits of colonial rule, the only explanation must be insanity. If people are blowing themselves up in opposition to a generous peace proposal, the only explanation is insanity.

Although there is currently a ceasefire, I don’t think it would last very long if Obama tried to duplicate Bush’s tactic of ignoring Hamas and trying to cut a deal with Fatah. Nor is that very likely to be attempted with Abbas having no real legitimacy at this point and there being no real prospect of elections.

@Clod Levi-Strauss

One of the conditions for a non-violent resistance approach to work is the existence of a media willing to report its activities.

Which is precisely why I have spent the better part of my life working to create a media that would. The Web was from the start a political project in my view. I was in contact with people running Web Servers in Sarajevo during the siege.

We are not quite there yet. Note that the establishment media report the flotilla crew attacking the soldiers. Which given the fact that the soldiers were the ones initiating the attack is a rather contentious point of view if we accept the claims of the Israeli government as true. Which given their past history of prevarication is rather unlikely.

@ someone
Israel made it possible for American Jews to have no need of Israel.

Where is the Irish Catholic Israel? Where is the Black Israel? What wars have they fought and won?

I think the idea that the ’67 war ended anti-semitism in the US to be rather difficult to credit. The election of Kennedy in ’60 and the civil rights act had already happened before the ’67 war.

A more accurate statement would be that anti-semitism ceased to be an acceptable, let alone a fashionable position in the wake of WWII and the holocaust, that is a quarter century before the six day war.

“Where is the Irish Catholic Israel?”
Umm, in Ireland?

Bloix, the association between the Holocaust and weakness was certainly true in Israel, but I’d like to see any evidence of its being true in the United States. The reflexive use of the descriptor Judeo-Christian (“our Judeo-Christian values”) seems to have come in by the 50s.

“Operation Cast Lead was a response to Hamas rocket attacks on Sderot.”

That leaves out so many details it’s wildly misleading. It makes Hamas out to be the villain and Israel the victim which overreacted, and this is false.

link

Bloix @36
I personally believe that Hamas continued these attacks for the purpose of persuading the Israeli public to vote Likud into office. …Hamas’s long-term strategy is the destruction of Israel and the creation of a theocratic state

In general, I think this kind of cycle of mutual provocation happens more often than people realize–Bush and Ahmadinejad for example, or Ahmadinejad and Bibi–each provoking the other side so they can unite their constituents around conflict with an external threat.

I’m skeptical that this is what’s motivating Hamas. Apart from the contrary evidence that Clod cited, your explanation would be giving them credit for an incredibly patient, long-term outlook and willingness to disregard very real threats to the safety of most Hamas officials. Ahmadinejad and Bush aren’t likely to be bombed in their own capitals. Maybe the Hamas leadership have an outlook (based on belief in afterlife or whatever) that makes this kind of patience possible, but I think there’s a better explanation for their Islamic state platform: the big danger posed by any Palestinian political force to Palestinians is that they can be coopted by Israel. The Islamic state platform and “maximalist” rhetoric is not an unexpected response to these circumstances.

Further to that Bloix, the Guardian is putting together an account from international (mainly Middle Eastern?) sources which strongly suggests that there was some kind of military act before the helicopters dropped their payload of paintball skirmishers:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/31/israeli-attacks-gaza-flotilla-activists

It appears that the “action” began some time before the video we saw, and so for example we have this:

Reporting for Press TV, an Iranian state-run channel, one said: “We are being hit by tear gas, stun grenades. We have navy ships on every side and helicopters ahead. We are being attacked on every side.”

which suggests that the ships were under attack “on every side” before the helicopters reached them. There were quite a few journalists on that ship whose accounts we aren’t going to get for a few days, and I suspect what we hear is not going to support the claim that these people were terrorists who attacked first.

I am waiting for the Australians on the Turkish ship to be released. Paul McGeough and Kate Geraghty have done some okay coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I would expect their accounts to be quite balanced (for journalists!) Currently they’re being denied consular access by the Israelis (because, you know, attacking an unarmed ship in international waters isn’t good enough; holding 500 people without charge and attacking journalists is important too), which I suspect will happen just long enough for them to get the worst of the publicity out of the way.

“the Welsh actually have their own language”
Yes, and 20% of the Welsh can speak a bit of it! If they want to read the news, though, they have to read it in English, as there are no Welsh language newspapers (a pretty good gauge of demand, unlike radio and TV, which are tax-funded). Which is not a problem, because there are no Welsh speakers under 90 who don’t also speak English.

And my God, you’re recommending Nigeria and Zaire as models of multi-ethnicity? Hell. why not Rwanda and Yugoslavia? Or Afghanistan?

“countries like NZ with smaller populations seem to have found a way to refresh their political classes occasionally” – ie countries that are mono-ethnic can have such narrow divisions between their political parties that it doesn’t much matter which one is in power, since everyone agrees on almost everything of importance anyway.

Donald Johnson – this is not a melodrama with villains and victims. But my point was that Operation Cast Lead was a PR exercise that the Israeli administration engaged in for political, not security purposes. Olmert could not be seen to be passive if Kadimah was to have a chance to win the election. Certainly the fact that innocents would die didn’t bother him, just as it did not bother Hamas. In the end his party lost the election and Hamas was strengthened. I don’t view Israel as a victim in the context of Gaza.

That’s why I put it in brackets, Bloix.

I wasn’t recommending Nigeria and Zaire as models of multi-ethnicity, just pointing out to you that, contra your own assumptions about the nature of states, they can’t exist without finding such models. Also, again, just because a state with diverse ethnic populations has big social problems doesn’t mean that the problems are the fault of the ethnic divide.

Your claim that multi-ethnic states are “a recipe for civil war” or that most successful states are monocultural just doesn’t wash, and there’s no reason why it should apply to a supposedly robustly democratic state like Israel.

Finally, NZ isn’t mono-ethnic – it has two languages and a significant minority of its population is Maori or Islander. Your argument, in any case, doesn’t seem to match the mono-ethnicity claim. Surely a stable mono-ethnic country the size of NZ (half the population of Israel) would be prone to recycling its political classes, but it doesn’t – it has a democratic tradition of refreshing political parties’ leaderships after they lose power. Israel, on the other hand, bastion of democracy that it is, seems to keep cycling the same small coterie of psychotic lunatics through the halls of power and has done since what, the 80s? There’s a very small military-political establishment controlling things in Israel, and it may be superficially democratic but the continuous reappearance of old faces gives me cause to question the vitality of their democracy.

Ah, yes, multi-cultural Australia. 92% white European.

Speaking as an Australian, I hadn’t realised that “white European” was a culture, let alone a “mono-ethnic” one. My understanding was such adjectives were grouped under a different taxonomic label – a less euphemistic one.

In practice people in the US have redefined white to include a steadily expanding cast of people: non-British Europeans, for example. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see basically the same thing for immigrants from Mexico and South/Central America. And it is true that there is a nationalist culture, at least in the USA, which is neither ethnic nor religious. Israel is much more explicitly religious and problematic.

You do realise there’s another ship out there, that was delayed leaving port, and which has basically got away?

“the Welsh actually have their own language”

Not only do the Welsh have their own language, the Scots have two: Gaelic and Scots. And the Scots now have their own Parliament again, so I think they haven’t yet assimilated into being English.

India and South Africa have already been cited as examples of multi-ethnic democracies. I suggest Indonesia as another potential candidate. The Philippines might be on the list too, although some recent developments are worrisome.

If you consider religion as part of ethnicity, which is not unconnected to the Israel/Palestine issue, then Germany is also a multi-ethnic state, having a Protestant part and a Catholic part, that speak related but not exactly the same languages.

Pre-WWI there were a lot of relatively stable multi-ethnic empires: Russia, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire. They were not democracies, of course.

I think it’s interesting how much of the modern world was created at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Wilson wanted to break up the multi-ethnic empires into ethnic nation-states. That left the Sudeten Germans as an issue for the next war, among other things. Of course the principle didn’t apply to the winners of WWI, so the Irish, Vietnamese, etc., were left out in the cold, despite sending delegations to the conference. They had to deal with these issues on their own.

Initially the Zionists and the Arab Nationalists worked together to influence what would happen to the Ottoman Empire. However, the Sykes–Picot Agreement (revealed by the Bolsheviks) turned out to be a stumbling block. The Zionists decided to dump the Arabs and cut a deal with the British, leading to the Balfour Declaration. (This was in the run-up to Versailles, in 1917.)

The Ottoman Empire contained Arab, Greek and other Christians, Jews and Arab Muslims. I don’t want to say that the Ottoman Empire was an example of good governance. All of these groups were united only by their hatred of the Turks. The Greeks were mostly ethnically cleansed right after the end of WWI, but the Zionists had entered the picture and became increasingly influential, all the more so after the Holocaust.

Modern countries like Iraq, Syria and Jordan were created by the Sykes–Picot Agreement. In the longer run, going back as far as the Crusades, through WWI, you can look at cities as power centres in the region: Damascus, Baghdad and Jerusalem. (Plus Istanbul/Constantinople, of course, but that is fairly solidly Turkish now.)

Taking a longer-term viewpoint, patterns emerge. But in the short term there is jockeying for immediate advantage.

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, there have been two basic parties in Arab politics. One is a secular socialist party, the other is a more religious party. The Baathists and the Muslim Brotherhood, although the names vary. The West has usually reluctantly supported the socialists over the other bunch. “Reluctantly” because otherwise they would look to the Communists for aid. Saddam Hussein for one example.

A real resolution starts with sitting all interested parties at the table. Interested parties are those who can claim a certain level of popular support. Right now we are at the stage of “So and so doesn’t deserve to be at the table because of blah blah blah.”

The Bush administration said “we are going to have elections in Palestine, isn’t that wonderful?”. But when the democratic result was “PLO have not gotten us anywhere, we will try the other guys”, all of a sudden it was “you voted for the wrong side, we are cutting you off”.

I’m not saying that Hamas is so wonderful, but if you lived there you have a restricted set of choices to go with.

I see everyone jockeying for short-term advantage at the expense of the big picture. There needs to be a Gandhi or a Mandela.

I didn’t check any references, so I welcome clarifications.

Diverse Britain? Diverse Britain? Britain is 92 percent white, 1.3 percent Pakistani, 1 percent Black.

Are you a racist? Or else how are we to interpret your claim that diversity is only due to race? The UK is full of white people who are very diverse culturally and yet for the most part people get along just fine. And London, which is incredibly diverse, hasn’t descended into chaos yet, in fact its diversity is its major strength.

Also, people might want to add Iran as an example of a very diverse nation (yeah, I know the current government sucks, but the country has been around for a while before that…).

In fact, I’m not actually sure that talking about the Welsh, Scottish, English etc. as some form of unified cultural bloc actually makes much sense in the first place.

Bloix: whether or not it’s advantageous for a state to be monoethnic is totally beside the point when you’re speaking of an area that, unless huge numbers of people are forcibly expelled (again), cannot plausibly be divided into neat monoethnic enclaves. You build democracy with the people you have, not the people you want to have.

“countries like NZ with smaller populations seem to have found a way to refresh their political classes occasionally” – ie countries that are mono-ethnic can have such narrow divisions between their political parties that it doesn’t much matter which one is in power, since everyone agrees on almost everything of importance anyway.

Just going out on a limb here to speculate that Bloix is not well-acquainted with New Zealand political history.

NZ isn’t mono-ethnic – it has two languages
Ahem. Three. Everyone forgets the official status of Sign.

“But the point is that Palestinians don’t want to assimilate into Israeli culture, and Israelis don’t want to assimilate into Palestinian culture.”, and the problem is that many of both believe that’s really the point and that they do not share for instance the common culture of hoping their kids are all right. But full marks for the P-I-I-P schema.

Actually I take my footnote back. Although I think the blockade on Hamas is justified, I think the decision to intercept these ships looks like a poor one (particularly with hindsight).

If Israel was trying to send a sotto voce signal of ruthlessness, then why would they A. raid the boat in international waters, rather than waiting for them to enter territorial waters where their shield of deniability would be much stronger and B. conduct the raid in a way that makes their supposedly highly skilled and ruthless killers look like a troupe of hapless incompetents.

The argument presented is that the image projected was, looked at from vari0us angles: A. ruthless but not deniable enough; B. deniable but not ruthless enough? That’s not a very conclusive argument, is it. Image of ruthlessness/plausibility of denial is pretty much a trade-off, and I’m saying that Israel are willing to go pretty far toward the ruthlessness end of the scale.

Getting the soldiers attacked is enough for a bit of (implausible) deniability. Gunning down a load of civilians gets you the ruthlessness.

The error, if any, might have been in looking incompetent (to the extent that they did). But that’s almost always a cost of deniabilityin less than entirely covert ops (i.e. it’s cock-up rather than conspiracy) – and the aim of projecting ruthlessness means it couldn’t possibly be entirely covert.

(And this appeal to fear of appearing incompetent involves a kind of bootstrapping of the error thesis – it depends on the Israelis having expected those to whom the message is being sent to accept that this was a manifestation of incompetence rather than a deliberate provocation of violence to provide a pretext for massacre.)

In any case, some slight appearance of incompetence is not a big problem. Anyone who might come into contact with the IDF or specials is not going to be thinking about how silly they looked being beaten with sticks. They are going to be thinking about who ended up dead. If a known killer is pointing a gun at you, the fact that it’s a type that tends to jam is not going to figure very highly in your calculations.

we should presume that this debacle, at least at the tactical level, was the product of rank incompetence If you say so. More importantly, we should conclude that the mission, at least at a strategic level, was successful.

It’s pretty simple. Tactical instructions: killing civilians is better than backing down. So never back down and kill civilians in preference to doing so.

Strategic awareness: killing civilians from time to time projects fearsome power. It can be arranged with a modicum of deniability/impunity by issuing the above rules of engagement in whatever informal terms seems appropriate.

In this case, it beggars belief (pace Bloix) that the likelihood of resistance didn’t occur to planners, and thus that the lethal response wasn’t expected to a highish degree, which means this outcome was in the contemplation of those who planned the action and decided to go ahead.

Just seen Tom’s comment: You seem to think it should be easy to drop a few soldiers down and subdue an angry mob of 60 or so people who hat your and your country without any risk to the lives of those soldiers. Have I interpreted you correctly?I think I’ve probably answered your question. Just to be clear: no, I don’t think that. Quite the opposite – I’m saying the cock-up thesis supposes that Israeli planners thought that. I’m pretty sure a blockade (if blockacould have been maintained without loss of life, though, if it is to be maintained at all.

@Tim: Starting from the assumption that that Israel must search all shipments to Gaza because of threat of Iran and Syria arming them (you may not agree with this but please accept it as a hypothesis for a though experiment) how should the Israeli command have dealt with the flotilla?

If Israel searched all shipments to Gaza – and let through everything that wasn’t a weapon – this situation wouldn’t have arisen. But when Israel refuses to let chocolate, concrete, jam and coriander through, they are operating a system of collective punishment.
The convoy was not carrying weapons, but they were carrying things that Israel has refused to allow into Gaza.

Bloix @ 61

Ah, yes, multi-cultural Australia. 92% white European. How many Asians? Less than 7%.

Since you are interested in throwing around statistics, I will point out that over 30% of the population of Vancouver is East Asian (mostly Chinese), and almost 50% is `non-white’ (see this chart).
Likewise, almost 50% of Toronto’s citizens are `non-white’ (chart), although the ethnic mixture is more uniformly drawn from around the whole world. And this doesn’t even include the very large proportions of white ethnic minorities (Poles, Italians, Greeks, Ukranians, etc.).

Australia and Canada, like the US, have historically managed immigration to make sure that immigrants will learn the language and assimilate rapidly – within a generation or two.

You seem to be confusing some issues here. Clearly, it is in the best interests of everyone (including the immigrants themselves) for them to learn (one of) the official languages of the country (Canada has two official languages, BTW). Otherwise these people will be unable to participate economically or politically. However, Canada does not force its immigrant populations to `assimilate’ in any way. To the contrary, our government spends a great deal of money subsidizing various multicultural organizations explicitly designed to preserve people’s ethnic identities.

There’s no commitment to the indefinite maintenance of true ethnic separatism.

Why don’t you just remove the word `ethnic’ from that sentence? Last time I checked, there was no country on Earth which encouraged `separatist’ groups of any kind, for obvious reasons. However, `ethnic’ is not the same as `separatist’.

When too many immigrants threaten to create culturally sustainable minorities, the doors are closed for a spell.

False.

Canada has the problem of the unassimilable French minority, but for historical reasons – primarily the shared desire of Anglophones and Francophones not to be gobbled up by the US – the Canadian federation has survived.

You know, it’s funny, but we in Canada do not regard the `unassimilable French Minority’ as a `problem’. In fact, our laws and constitution explicitly recognize and protect this minority. Indeed, for most of the last 40 years, the Prime Minister of Canada has been a member of this problematic unassimilable French minority (first Trudeau, then Chretien). For some reason, this did not lead to the destruction of the country.

What part of ‘international waters’ do you not understand?

Well, but Israel ignored that part anyway, didn’t they? In for a penny … And it’s not as if international waters stopped Israel from attacking the USS Liberty and murdering American sailors, with the dire consequences to US-Israeli reactions that we all no doubt remember.

@sg, 91:

Could you please answer my question in post 86 and describe to me how the Israelis should have conducted the operation? I suspect whatever they did you would have criticised them, but I’d like to be proved wrong.

Would boarding in Gaza’s territorial waters during the day have been acceptable, perhaps?

I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean about my “hate you and your country” line.

@ajay, 95:

1. It was going to dock in Gaza. Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%27s_unilateral_disengagement_plan

2. The ship was not intending to enter Israeli waters, only Gazan, i.e. enemy, waters.

3. The flotilla refused to give consent.

Do you have a 4. to suggest?

Gaza isn’t a sovereign state. Particularly relevant to this issue: under the Oslo Accords, Israel retains interim control over its airspace and its territorial waters (there is in fact no such thing as “Gazan waters”) and maintains a naval patrol 6 nm off the Gazan coast. So 2) is in fact perfectly feasible.

A blockade against a sovereign state is an act of war. The blockade against Gaza doesn’t quite fall into this category, Gaza not being a sovereign state, but, as documented above, it’s still an act of unnecessary and arbitrary cruelty that has gone far beyond the need to stop importation of weapons.
Forcible boarding of a ship flying a foreign flag in international waters is an act either of war or of piracy.

Starting from the assumption that that Israel must search all shipments to Gaza …. please accept it as a hypothesis for a though experiment)

Why should we engage in this thought experiment?

Why not engage in the following thought experiment:

Suppose for the sake of argument that there’s a humanitarian obligation to help people who are in dire strits like many of the Palestinians are. What should someone do who wants to fulfil this obligation, given that the IDF are prepared to use armed force in order to maintain a blockade that is at least partly punitive and economic and not merely a matter of preventing arms from getting in to the country?

Strictly speaking, a state operating an effective blockade can visit-and-search ships in international waters if this is necessary and proportionate, and the visit-and-search can involve diverting the ship to a port of their choice. And you can use proportionate force to stop the ship if they refuse to be visited and searched.

However, this brings with it a whole lot of implied statements.

Implication 1) Israel is operating a formal blockade – this implies that a) there is a state of war, b) war legally exists among nations, so this kinda implies that the other party to this war is a state, c) and further that Israel has a responsibility to permit necessary humanitarian supplies to pass (the San Remo manual is quite clear on this point)

Implication 2) A blockade needs to be effective to have legal force – I believe they’ve tolerated a runner in the past at least once, so this is arguable at best.

Implication 3) The legitimacy of their claim to a legal blockade is affected by whether or not they are acting in good faith in processing cargoes they detain for visit-and-search. You can’t just declare blockade on the world and seize every ship you can catch, like a Barbary pirate king of old.

Implication 4) there is no international sovereign and therefore the recourse in international law is often “self help” – if you think they’re just ripping off all the searched cargo, you can invoke the International Court of Arbitration, but you may also decide to make a run for it.

Implication 5) Their action was necessary and proportionate. They were 12 hours’ sail from land; couldn’t they have waited for daylight and brought a ship alongside?

If any of the 5 implications doesn’t hold together, their action was illegal.

I should probably do a post about this…

[aeiou] The relation if Jews to Palestinians is about as close as that of the native tribes of the British Isles or Germany. And Germany and The Netherlands are also 20% non-native ethnic at this point. But that’s just the beginning. Modern Israel was not founded by people native to the region in modern times. 2000 had passed before this return. 3/4 of a million people were cleansed from the land. You’d think perhaps this should have been done in Europe if this were payback of some sort. So this is ethnic self-determination for immigrants on colonial territory by colonial means. And genetic studies have shown most recently that the Jews are from farther north of the area, so “we were here first” even at that absurd level does not apply.
Maybe the Jews should have been given the Rhineland. Sounds more fair, doesn’t it?
And Germany forced to disarm.

Also interesting to watch people spend the effort asking how else Israel could have managed the raid. Since the reports are now that they came in shooting before they boarded that’s not a hard question. But that ignores the question of the blockade itself, which is simply criminal.

Israel has a population of about 5.5 Million Jews. It is the primary authority, by elected office and in a much larger proportion by military power over a total of 5.5 million Palestinians. Defend the refugee camps. Defend refugee camps full of Mexicans in Guatemala and Honduras. That’s the logical parallel.

On Hamas etc. the response is always more from assumption than fact. “But they’re terrorists” means nothing. An army can terrorize and the IDF does. More blood, more death more terror, to what just end? I supplied facts. Why not respond with questions? Same with Hezbollah as Nir Rosen and others keep trying to explain

guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/07/israel1
How 90 Peruvians became the latest Jewish settlers
“When a delegation of rabbis travelled to Lima to convert a group of South American Indians to Judaism, they added just one condition: come and live with us in Israel. As soon as these new Jews arrived in the country, they were bussed straight to settlements in the disputed territories.”

The various defenses if Israeli policy are just sad. Israel was a racist state in its inception.
Start with that fact and other things become more clear. If that had been the common assumption 50 years ago this situation would not have gotten so almost out of hand.

Tom 06.01.10 at 1:57 pm

“1. It was going to dock in Gaza. Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005:”

If we don’t count shooting into it, bombing it, or maintaining a siege.

Re #103: Bloix, please! Don’t use Canada as an example of how multi-ethnic states fail. And please don’t use it to justify Israeli actions — it’s personally offensive to those of us whose multi-ethnic countries manage to get through whole weeks without sectarian violence.

If Israel’s cultural divide was like Canada’s, Israeli Jews would be putting their children on waiting lists at birth to enrol in Arabic immersion schools as a sign of loyalty to the ideal of a multi-cultural Israel (and because it’s a prerequisite for government jobs), while the Palestinians would use every legal dodge they could find to get their children a solid Jewish education that would give them a financial leg up. Fluent Arabic would be a tacit requirement to be the leader of Likud even if no Arab would be caught dead voting for them. Israeli Jews would be publicly aghast at the notion that race, ethnicity or religion have anything to do with their country. Palestinians would complain about how Arab children don’t know anything about Islam. Israel’s principal form of patriotism would be a smug self-assurance that they’re not as barbaric as Americans. And it would be very fashionable for Arab men to take their Jewish girlfriends to the bars in Ramallah, which would be open for four hours later on Saturday nights than the ones in Tel Aviv.

Oh, and Israel’s greatest existential crisis would end with 50% of Palestinian voters chosing to remain Israelis in a referendum dominated by Jews pleading with them to consider Israel their country while Palestinian politicians tell them that they could retain Israeli citizenship even after declaring their own state. Militant nationalism would be something people associate with the Druze and the Bedouins, who would complain constantly that the whole area belonged to them until the Crusades; while the most nationalist, ethnocentric, racist position any Israeli Jew would *dare* to publicly express would be a desire for the Palestinians to declare independence and take all the West Bank colonies with them, simply so that they wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore.

I think if that was the worst thing Israel was facing, you’d say something very different about it. The degree to which the above sounds like a utopian fairy-tale compared to the actual state of the region is a sign of how much the kind of blood-and-soil nationalism that Israel — admittedly among others — uses to justify its policies has no basis in comparisons with other multi-ethnic states.

It’s true: We regard our French minority as a “problem” less often than Americans do their own minorities. One of the major reasons is *because* the francophones have enough power not to take that kind of crap, and with some exceptions pretty much always did. And over the course of the 20th century, under no conditions, not even when Quebec nationalism was at its strongest, not even when the FLQ was running around Montreal kidnapping people, did Canada’s inter-ethnic problems come close to the level of violence of the non-ethnic, non-sectarian political unrest of more demographically uniform nations, including the US and *all* the American nations to its south. And you know why? Because even the most braindead redneck from the most backwards corner of Alberta acknowledges that the French are as much a part of Canada as long winters. People hate those too, but if you can’t take it, you should move somewhere else. It’s only in Israel where people seem to think living in the Middle East doesn’t mean having to live with Arabs.

Well, the discussion has certainly been unpleasant and unproductive, as I anticipated, and only someone with a strong will to believe could describe it as civil or on topic. Not that it isn’t fun to read the spewing venom.

@Ray, 105: I’m not trying to construct an argument, I’m trying to understand the situation. One way of doing this is testing hypothesis on people who are more knowledgeable than myself.

Fundamentally I’d like to know why international condemnation of this incident has been so strong. One way of understanding that is to ask people how they would have responded if the boarding had been done withing the territorial waters of Israel or Gaza.

So, what would have been the difference?

Hold on a minute, declaring an attack on citizens of your country and private organizations as being an “act of war” by agents of another state is making shit up or otherwise being silly?

Don’t tell my cousing who’s on his third tour of Afghanistan (or any of his platoon buddies, some of them who’ve been there from the start 10 years ago). They might get a little miffed.

Oh wait, I get it. Much like the piracy argument, we should seek refuge in the semantics of law.

To quibble about someone’s use of these terms and to do so not based on commonly understood conventions or meanings is to give pride of place to a particular viewpoint that only undermines the acknowledgement that such actions are more than “illegal” or “regrettable”. But hey why not use the language of international law to examine the situation. It’s not like said language has ever come up short before in attempting to reconcile the problem.

we are talking here about two ethnic groups that both descend from Christian European settler communities, with very similar cultures, values and histories

In other words, “Catholic? Protestant? All those white guys look the same anyway…”

@100 I agree, the implication (which starts with the original post and the linked article) that the issue of greatest consequence here is whether Israel should have handled the PR situation differently is bizarre, to say the least!

So, on to more pertinent things:

Suppose for the sake of argument that there’s a humanitarian obligation to help people who are in dire strits like many of the Palestinians are. What should someone do who wants to fulfil this obligation, given that the IDF are prepared to use armed force in order to maintain a blockade that is at least partly punitive and economic and not merely a matter of preventing arms from getting in to the country?

The point of running the blockade is mainly political–to draw attention to the existence of the blockade, the existence of Gaza. Getting a few wheelchairs and bags of cement through is good but not the ultimate goal. What is striking to me about how things have played out in the last couple days is how much of it seems to be driven by countries other than the US. The fact that the American media and political classes (along with the BBC–their coverage… yuck!) are still totally ossified (with still only small exceptions, limited to “high brow” papers, to the complete shut-out of Palestinian views), but Things are Happening, like the (first-ever?) UNSC condemnation of Israel.

Turkish democracy in action matters a lot more here than I think most people realize.

@113 Wasn’t the civil war in Lebanon to a great extent incited by foreign powers (esp. Syria)? Whether a binational Israeli-Palestinian state could avoid serious conflict like civil war would depend a lot on what kind of outside interference happens. Also, it matters that there will surely be a lot of international interest in keeping things sane, the Holy Land is not a place where Americans, Europeans, and Middle Easterners can just ignore serious problems the way they do in Africa (not without a very determined campaign of disinformation designed to force them to ignore the problems).

Shorter y81 @110: “Nothing to see here, move along please!”

What is dislked? The blockade on Gaza per se?

Yes.

Israel’s policy was summed up by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, earlier this year. ‘The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,’ he said. The hunger pangs are supposed to encourage the Palestinians to force Hamas to change its attitude towards Israel or force Hamas out of government.

That’s not about weaponry.

#122: the problem is pretty simple Tom. You’re assuming that people critical of this action are operating in bad faith, hate Israel no matter what, and so on. It’s impossible to disprove something like this, and it’s pretty insulting to ask it. I could construct all sorts of counterfactuals about ways that Israel could have come out of this looking good, or at least less terrible. The fact that they boarded a boat in the open sea and killed a lot of people is a reflection of what actually happened in the real world.

What’s really stunning to me, to paraphrase Tallyrand, is that it is a perfect example of something which is worse than a crime. It’s a mistake. I’m not surprised by tribal brutality in the Israeli-Palestine cage match. But doing something so incredibly self-destructive is more rare. (Losing a long-term ally, Turkey, permanently is something that a sane country might consider unwise even if they lacked morals.)

It’s pretty stunning to board ships of a *military ally*, on a humanitarian mission, in the open sea, and kill people. You really don’t need much more information than that to find it shocking and very hard to defend. Add in the absurdity of “his face got in the way of my fist” sort of defences as a sort of cherry on top.

Tom,

Turkey is a democracy. Democracies don’t prohibit their citizens from doing acts that are legal under their law for the public relations convenience of an ally. If a ship is registered in Turkey, it flys the Turkish flag, end of story.

What your comments amount to is ‘why didn’t someone stop us damaging ourselves’.

And now Turkey is no longer an Israeli ally, the problem no longer arises.

And I think you are probably right that there are other motives at work. But not actually the one that you thing. Many people have been utterly disgusted by Israeli behavior for decades. The government has lied and repeatedly broken its word, it has committed acts that have been used as a pretext by Islamic terrorists attacking the West.

Throughout all of this many people felt that they had to avoid being too strenuously critical of Israel lest they be called an anti-semite. Well now Israel has officially declared itself a lawless aggressive bully. And its payback time.

Because popular sentiment in the Turkish democracy is overwhelmingly on the side of a humanitarian mission? You know, one where the President’s wife helped raise the money? As far as blockages go, this one is not recognized as legitimate by anyone except the US and Israel, so it’s hardly surprising that Turkey allowed the boats to leave.

Marc, your “fist” comment brings to mind this (via Josh Marshall):
“the flotilla achieved its strategic mission. It got Israel to take violent action against it. In doing so, Israel ran into its own fist.”
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100531_flotillas_and_wars_public_opinion

“And you know why? Because even the most braindead redneck from the most backwards corner of Alberta acknowledges that the French are as much a part of Canada as long winters.”
One as an Albertan I am offended by your comment. Two, you obviously have never been to Alberta. at least half of the population would be happy to see Quebec leave.

Which nation’s flag they flew and where they were boarded seems to be irrelevant to me.

And plainly it seemed irrelevant to the IDF as well. But I beg to submit that you should not find it surprising that the nation whose flag they flew, may well have a different measure of “relevance.”

… Re: int’l waters, I Am Not An Admiralty Lawyer, but my impression of the relevant law is that it’s deliberately kept fuzzy by countries with big navies, who are least likely to approve of any restrictions on their doing whatever the hell they want.

Since Israel, like the U.S. and many other nations, does not consider itself bound by any laws in practice, talking about “illegality” etc. is fun but not terribly pertinent. Did Israel act in such a manner that it will be forced to change its practices materially, or not? The answer to that question is not going to have much to do with any treaty provisions.

Bloix,

Fortunately for you and the rest of this wide world, the question of whether or not Glen Tomkins is criminally insane, or just an idiot, is one of those unpleasant little matters that you are at leisure to ignore. I’m not politically successful. I don’t have the IDF at my disposal.

We don’t have this luxury of ataraxia over the question of whether the state of Israel is criminally insane, or just overtaken by idiocy. A whole country, especially one with an IDF at its disposal, doesn’t get to be considered merely idiotic, because the consequences of even mere idiocy rapidly reach to criminal insanity.

Of course, a death toll of just 15 suggests that this affair hardly can compete with the Holocaust in terms of criminal insanity. But in terms of sheer idiocy, I don’t think it’s wrong to compare the thinking behind this action of Israel’s with the Dolchstosslegende. No monumental atrocities, yet, but belief in some pretty monumental absurdities.

People who believe absurdities tend to commit atrocities, but belief in the absurdities has to come first. The acceptance of the absurd beliefs is the rest of the world’s warning sign of impending atrocities of matching size to the absurdities.

If all those Holocaust memorials are supposed to help insure that “Never Again” should the same thing happen, you can’t wait until there is criminal insanity reaching Holocaust proportions. That’s too late. You haven’t prevented anything. You have to do something when you see beliefs of the level of absurdity of the Dolchstosslegende gain currency, when you see the trend lines on a nation’s understandable tendency to see itself as the perpetual martyr going the wrong way, when you see people as idiotic as the present leadership of Israel winning elections that put them in charge of a Wehrmacht or an IDF.

“This just in: sky now blue.”

Actually, this is different, I think. Under this government, the Israelis have been absolutely contemptuous of countries whose good will they really do need – the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, using British, Irish and other states’ forged passports; the childish humiliation of the Turkish ambassador; the announcement of new construction in Jerusalem during George Mitchell’s visit in March; and now this. None of these countries give a fig for Palestine, but they cannot be expected to put up with repeated insults to their own dignity.

This sort of thing is new. Israel has never paid attention to the collective remonstrations of the international community, but it has not gone out of its way to poke specific allies and potential allies in the eye for no reason. Now that’s what it is doing.

To me, this style is what you might call Putinesque, and I put it down not just to Netanyahu, but also to foreign minister Avigdor Leiberman.

Glen Tomkins- you seem to be a decent fellow, so I won’t call you names again. I’ll just say that, in terms of deployment of persuasive rhetoric, it’s not productive to tell Jews that they’re acting like Nazis or thinking like Nazis or doing anything like Nazis. Fascist, yes. You can say that Liebermann is a fascist or that revisionist Zionism has fascist tendencies, and you can legitimately expect a reasoned response. But Nazi, no. Not okay.

But re. Kaveh’s post:
I am 43 years old. I agree with Beinart, who is a little younger than me, about almost nothing when it comes to specifics. Unlike him, apparently, I am old enough to remember the period before 1979 and the period before 1992. Beinart ought to be old enough to remember 1995. Maybe it is possible to explain his observations by the fact that those he’s identifying as “young Jewish Americans” are really non-Jews of Jewish descent, but I am embarrassed to have been a member of Young Judaea when I was sixteen.

Anderson @109

… ??? Have you been to the United States? Or at least read about it?

Actually, I lived in the US for more than two years, in three different states.

( BTW, those kinds of snarky personal remarks are so classy.)

Welfare, immigration, tax policy, healthcare, are all Giant Flashing Signals of Non-Happy Multiculturalism. Racial issues permeate all of those, and more.

First of all, describing `immigration’ as a `signal of non-happy multiculturalism’ is wrong on so many levels that I’m not even sure how to respond. I will give you credit and assume that, by `immigration’, what you really meant is `the heated debate over US immigration policy’. However, I wouldn’t describe this heated debate as a problem with `multiculturalism’. I would describe it as a problem with racist yahoos who don’t like multiculturalism. In Canada, we do not consider immigration to be a `problem’, and it is not a subject of heated national debate.

Welfare, tax policy, and healthcare are also not problems of `multiculturalism’. They are problems of economics and public policy. In the US, the debate on these issues may have racial overtones, but this is probably due to the baleful legacy of slavery and segregation, and the fact that the American right often uses libertarian rhetoric as a `dog whistle’ to appeal to racist voters. Canada has a very well-functioning welfare state and public health care system, and we have never seen a contradiction between these things and our official multiculturalism.

Chris @121: Fair enough.

mds @136: So Israel still has the only long-term ally that matters.

I’m not so sure that it’s the only one that matters. I think US hyperpowerness is waning significantly, and I think people mostly haven’t really appreciated yet the extent to which this is happening. Turkey has grown economically and looks increasingly to be a stable democracy whose gov’t will act in a way that’s roughly in accord with domestic popular opinion. I don’t think we can simply count on the generals to maintain the special relationship with Israel, not even a military relationship.

Tom @122, 126: It really seems like you’re fishing for something in particular here.

In which case they have to explain how Israel can ensure Syria and Iran do not supply arms to Hamas.

No, I don’t think they/we do. What should be considered is making sure that Hamas doesn’t make unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians, but this is different from keeping them completely unarmed. Just for starters, it requires that Hamas have access to small arms and police facilities that it can use to effectively police territory under its political authority. That you make this statement suggests a very simplistic, cartoonish understanding of the situation. (Obvious objections being, why isn’t it also an imperative to keep Likud et al unarmed? …and so on…)

bianca steele:

Maybe it is possible to explain his observations by the fact that those he’s identifying as “young Jewish Americans” are really non-Jews of Jewish descent

No. They–we–are non-Orthodox Jews who are sick and tired of being treated as second-class Jews by Israel (and by the Orthodox in America). I would say that the majority of the younger people I know who have a halachically Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother consider themselves Jewish, at least to some degree. They are, in my admittedly anecdotal experience, more likely to attend Jewish services than Christian ones. They are people who can be Jewish in America, but aren’t Jewish in Israel — so for them, the *religious* practice of Judaism actively pushes them away from Zionism. “Reform” does not mean “secular”, and you can raise that to an exponent for Jewish Renewal and Reconstructionism.

Sg- multicultural Australia. Hilarious. It’s like bright beige.

And do you think people should be allowed to marry whoever they want? Well, then, you’re for assimilation.

Do you think people should eat whatever they want? Well, then, you’re for cancer.

There you go again Bloix, sneering at stuff you know nothing about.

How can you argue that Belgium is in danger of falling apart due to its three competing ethnicities (which are all white European), then argue that Australia is not a multi-ethnic state because it is 92% white European? There are more Greeks in Melbourne than Flemish in Brussels, yet strangely you argue Melbourne is not “multi-ethnic” and in danger of falling apart, while Belgium is? In fact, there are more Vietnamese or Lebanese in Melbourne than there are Flemish in Brussels.

Your arguments of course also ignore the fact that the Israeli Jewish population is very multi-ethnic (one of the most multicultural in the world, by some accounts) and there is as much cultural distance between Israeli ethnic and Jewish groups as in any other modern multicultural state.

And tour statistics about Australia are wrong, in any case. There is no online source (including the ABS and wikipedia) that matches them, and any kind of nuanced investigation of ABS data will show that you’re talking about a non-existent country.

“The English, the Irish, the Greeks, the Germans, the Hungarians, the Balts. All the same culture, don’t you know, but different from, say, the Chinese, or the Lebanese, or the Indo-Fijians.”

well, as a white protestant right winger from America, Aussie-christian lebs are a-ok, it is the Muslim-Araaabh ones that we here have a problem with. Aussie-Greeks aren’t clear cut – orthordox sounds jewish to us …

But, yes, your point is taken – Australia is a unique multicultural society and a bastion of the south pacific. South is the mississippi delta, but if you just separate us hicks as “white” or “black” to do you analysis, you’re missing a lot

I get it, which will perhaps be enough for mds.

Oh, definitely. [NOTCHES KEYBOARD]

In my tepid defense:

(1) It was fairly gentle ridicule, just barely beyond tweaking. Many commenters have been far grouchier, particularly about the Antipodes.

(2) I actually (vainly?) desire Israel’s continued existence in a more enlightened form, but “It’s ironic but true that the 67 War was the turning point, by creating a way to be Jewish without being a victim. Israel made it possible for American Jews to have no need of Israel” is more hyperbolic than an escaping comet. And internet hyperbole must be met with the fury of a thousand exploding suns.

It’s fascinating to watch Bloix move seamlessly between ethnicity, race, and language as necessary, in defense of the proposition that a misguided, romantic, and sentimental early 20th century notion of ‘nation-states’ defines 21st century statecraft.

“For those who think the US should venture some kind of public criticism or condemnation: what, exactly, has Israel done here that we haven’t explicitly allowed for ourselves? What can we possibly say while keeping a straight face?”

That misses the point. The US government is Israel’s biggest cheerleader and supporter–their sins are also our sins. And I don’t expect the US government to condemn Israeli war crimes precisely because our government commits the same sorts of crimes–the US isn’t going to support a war crimes trial for a high ranking Israeli official because of the precedent it would set.

Now as a private citizen I don’t see any reason why I can’t criticize both Israel and the US.

“In fact, there are more Vietnamese or Lebanese in Melbourne than there are Flemish in Brussels.”
God, how touchy about two centuries of race-based immigration policy. Australia is 92 percent white and 7 percent Asian, by the design of its Anglo-Saxon founders, who set something up that works pretty well. It’s great that you can get pho in Melbourne, but the accommodation that the ordinary Australian has to make in his or daily life due to the presence of Asians in the country is non-existent. I’m not sneering at Australia, but I am sneering at anyone who thinks that some pleasant multi-culturalism is a model for a genuinely multi-ethnic state.

Well, sg covers it, so I needn’t bother, though I will say it’s nice to see Bloix is as paralysingly ignorant of Australian history as he is of Australian demographics.

A useful illustration of the inherent meaningless of the concept of ethno-nationalism is found in the weird tendency of those Oz commentators who subscribe to said mental pathology to talk about a mythical ethnicity known as “Anglo-Celtic”. Coz, y’know, they decided the Irish were white folks after all.

I just do not get why people’s instinctive reaction is to criticise Israel for lowering soldiers onto a boat whilst at the same time giving a bunch of thugs the benefit of the doubt.

Have you all seen the video of the “peace activists” clubbing the soldiers and throwing them off the balcony? Would Ghandi or MLK be proud of what they did there?

The PLO doesn’t want a multi-ethnic state. It wants a Palestinian state.

Palestinian state would be a state of, by, and for the population of Palestine; people who happen to be born in Palestine, and those whose parents were born there and expelled from there. Regardless of how ethnocentric weirdos may want to classify parts or the whole of this population.

Getting shirty is a little bit different from worldwide condemnation.

It’s a tragedy that the operation was so poorly planned that people lost their lives, but the impression I’m getting is one of anger rather than one of grief. This suggests that the international community places the blame solely at the feet of Israel, whilst at the same time avoiding criticism of an extremely naive collection of true peace lovers who gave legitimacy to a bunch of violent thugs by sailing on the same boat as them.

How can anyone watch the videos of the soldiers being beaten by people who clearly want to beat them within an inch of their lives, whilst at the same time refusing to criticise those hooligans and also the well-meaning idiots who supported them.

This is not to suggest Israel doesn’t deserve condemnation for a botched operation, and it’s not to say Israel’s Gaza policy is correct, but for the criticism of Israel to be credible the criticisers need to show they do not support those extremist thugs.

Tom, have you perhaps not been following the news? I posted links to accounts way up thread and there are more out now. The facts as they are being presented by the people on the boat (you know, the ones whose camera footage was confiscated and destroyed by your “honest” soldiers) are:
– the IDF opened fire from other boats before landing commandos on the boats
– one person was killed before anyone landed on the boats
– “Human shield” type tactics were broken up with rubber bullets, tazers and possibly live ammunition
– the Captain of the 8000 was shot, even though there is no evidence of resistance on that boat
– at least some activists were tortured after being removed from the boats
– some journalists were denied consular assistance for at least a day

Now you can continue to pretend that it was just a “botched operation,” but opening fire from navy ships on boats that the navy itself admits had no projectile weapons is not a sign that the IDF ever intended to deal with the situation peacefully, nor that the deaths that occurred were a mistake. So perhaps you should do a little more investigating of what actually happened before concluding that these people were thugs. Also, you might like to consider this quote from Obama about the Captain of the Maersk Alabama when it repelled pirates a year ago:

“I share the country’s admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew. His courage is a model for all Americans.”

When Americans do it it’s a model of courage, but when Turks do it they are “thugs”?

I’m coming to the conclusion that the knee-jerk condemnation says more about the condemners than it does about Israel.

Well Ray’s post 177 is a perfect example of that. Thanks Ray!

No Tom, currently there is a single set of eyewitness reports – from a large number of activists, and some journalists who broadcast during the attack – and a single grainy video released by the IDF that shows only a very very small section of the action. Conveniently the IDF have confiscated all other videos – why do you think they have done that?

“to humiliate Israel internationally”. Oh, hohoho. I think we have pretty conclusive evidence from the last 45 years or so that the State of Israel doesn’t give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks of it, especially when it comes to the smiting. That the Israeli right manages to take that stance, while at the same time having a chip on its shoulder big enough to bridge the Jordan with, is just one of those crazy things, I guess.

Anyway, as this thread went ballistic about 175 comments ago, will enough be enough soon?

1. do you think the reports of the IDF soldiers count for nothing?

They report that some of them were attacked when they landed on the ships. Those reports do count for something, I am quite ready to believe them. But where is the context?

Why did they land on the ships? To stop aid from getting to Gaza.
How did they land on the ships? Rappeling down from helicopters.
When did they land on the ships? In the middle of the night.
Where did they land on the ships? In international waters.
Who were they attacked by? People using the ‘weapons’ that came to hand, while the IDF were armed.
What was the result of their landing on the ships? At least ten dead – none of them Israeli soldiers.

What more should the reports of the IDF soldiers count for?

2. why do you think you do not need to wait for more facts to arrive before passing judgement?

What other facts are the IDF going to release that could make a better case for their actions? They have searched the ships, they found no weapons, no contraband, just the aid that was declared. They have released the footage that presents their actions in the best light, they have given their side of the story. What else are thy going to say?

On the other hand, the people that were attacked – all of their recording equipment was confiscated, and many of them are still in Israeli prisons. There are eyewitness accounts already that contradict the IDF account, and no doubt there will be many more, but the IDF themselves have ensured that no other video footage will come to light.

I guess the question is (regardless of the ethical status of the Israeli operation):

Was the behavior of the leaders of the flotilla, and particularly the behaviour of the club-armed thugs the kind of behaviour the free world should be proud of? If not, does it in fact deserve condemnation?

Tom@188: Yes – it’s called self-defense. It may in some cases be stupid to resist criminals illegally attacking you who happen to be stronger than you are, but it’s always legitimate. Israel certainly accepts that principle, judging by the justifications it gives for its own attacks on Gaza; oddly enough, the moment Palestinians or their supporters are doing the self-defending, pro-Israelis suddenly start insisting that only passive resistance is acceptable.

yx@175:
Or does that not matter—ethnic nationalism is racist, so we should force peoples together even if they have no desire to live in a unified political entity?

For a unified political entity, all you need to “force” people to do is not attack their neighbours. Most people tend to regard this as a legitimate use of force. But if you want an ethnic nationalist solution, you are going to have to force a lot of people to move (at best, hundreds of thousands of settlers who should have known better; at worst, millions of Palestinians) – and you are going to have to endorse the results of having forced a whole lot of people to move in 1948. “Peoples” don’t get forced – individuals do.

Map Maker @ 191: You want German comparisons? OK: suppose that the Poles had spent decades before WWII openly attempting to take over Germany, rather than vice versa; and that they hadn’t had 10% of their population killed by Germans; and that now, 60+ years later, Germany was still ruled by Poland, with the partial exception of some tiny enclaves isolated from each other and with no control over their borders or natural resources. In such circumstances, would you seriously be urging the refugees of 1945 to forget about their claims to the land they were forced out of?

187- sounds a little bit like the defense of the rapist saying he was provoked into the deed, does it not?

Tom, if you want to engage in intellectual debate, why not go back to post 100 and answer the question that I asked you there.

The question wasn’t : ‘Why engage in thought experiments? ‘ The question was ‘Why engage in the thought experiment you propose rather than this other thought experiment?’

If you’d rather not answer that precise question, perhaps you should engage in the other thought experiment.

Done that?

OK, now a quick thought, and another question for you. Here’s the thought.

Both thought experiments involve abstracting away from elements of the situation which are controversial. (In the thought experiment you asked us to perform , you asked us, explicitly, to abstract away from questions of whether the blockade was justified. In your discussion with substance mcgravitas you seemed to acknowledge that this was something which one could doubt in good faith. You can decide for yourself which controversial aspects of the situation the second thought experiment involves abstracting away from)

Here’s the question:

Why do you think that it comes more naturally to some people here to see the second thought experiment as capturing as much, if not more, of what is important in this situation as the first?

If the first – or worse still – the only answer to that question which occurs to you is ‘anti-semitism’, then you may be mislocating the source of the failure to have an honest discussion.

Tom@188:

Was the behavior of the leaders of the flotilla, and particularly the behaviour of the club-armed thugs the kind of behaviour the free world should be proud of?

Fuck yes. The Gaza embargo is a CRIME, and it is to the lasting shame of the supposedly civilized world that nothing has been done about it. All honor to the people who attempted to right a glaring wrong and help people in dire need.

@198, Steve LaBonne:

Well I suppose your comment takes us to the root of the matter. Many people see Israel’s behaviour towards Gaza as a crime that must be ended immediately. I’m not prepared to accept that because I can see that the whole situation is hugely complex and has evolved over the last 60 years. I find it very hard to assign the blame solely to Israel.

@Ian Whitchurch, 195:

Sorry Ian, I can’t understand how be hit with non-lethal force, that made the recipient “feel unwell” is anything to write home about. There are important issue to address about how the operation was carried out. Deaths are important. Talking about tasering is just clouding the issue.

@Ray, 123:

I suspect the blockade is justified, based on what I know about the situation. That being said, it’s not all about facts, it’s also about interpretation, and whether one believes that Israel being surrounded by a sea of arab states who do not accept its existence allows that country a bit of leeway to defend itself that we don’t grant states who do not have existential threats.

I may be wrong.

I’d like to know if my thinking differs from other people here on anything other than the justification for the blockade. If it does, I’ll consider my position on those things. If it doesn’t, I’ll save time and just consider the blockade.

So, if Israel had boarded in their territorial waters and/or the blockade was entirely justified, how would thoughful people here respond? I’d like to know.

Tom, I am collecting more information – witness accounts, and they aren’t supporting the IDF story, so unless the IDF can come up with a counter-explanation for why they opened fire on a peaceful ship in international waters, it’s case closed.

It’s consistent with so many other situations, you really don’t need much intelligence to work out which way the chips are going to fall in a situation like this. Only the wilfully ignorant are doing otherwise.

If the blockade was entirely justified, it should have been handled differently. It should have taken place during daylight. Neutral observers should have been allowed. Independent media on the ships should not have had their recording equipment confiscated. Soldiers should not have rappelled down from helicopters.
Do you agree?

Do you accept that the IDF are blocking humanitarian aid – not just arms – in the blockade? How do you justify it?

If the blockade is unjustified because it is a collective punishment that blocks genuine humanitarian aid, then what?

Israel being surrounded by a sea of arab states who do not accept its existence

Tom has recently arrived here from the early 1970s. Say hi, everyone.

ARAB STATES AND ENTITIES SURROUNDING ISRAEL
Syria
Lebanon
Jordan
Egypt
West Bank
Gaza

ARAB STATES AND ENTITIES THAT HAVE ACCEPTED ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO EXIST
Egypt (1979)
Jordan (1994)
West Bank (1993)

PERCENTAGE OF ISRAEL’S TOTAL LAND BORDERS WHICH ABUTS ARAB COUNTRIES THAT HAVE ACCEPTED ITS RIGHT TO EXIST
80%

DEGREE TO WHICH ISRAEL “SURROUNDED”
20%

CAN YOU EVEN BE 20% SURROUNDED?
No, don’t be silly

@Ray, 208:

I think it would have been better from a PR point of view if the incident had happened as you suggest. But I do not see why you cannot give the IDF the benefit of the doubt on this one and assign their choice of conditions to a desire to protect their troops and the get the incident over with asap, and protect non-combatants, including the media by not encouraging them to enter a combat zone.

How would you propose they stopped the ship without sending troops onto it? Is there a better way than deploying by helicopter?

I do not agree that Israel is blocking humanitarian aid. Do you have an independent and reliable source for that? As I have no reason to think otherwise, and am not anti Israel I will give Israel the benefit of the doubt until someone provides me with evidence. When the evidence is supplied, I shall change my mind. However, dual use supplies such as concrete do not count. I hope you can see that Hamas should not be permitted to reinforce bunkers.

If the blockade is unjustified because it is a collective punishment that blocks genuine humanitarian aid, then what?

Then I support the flotilla and I’ll donate money to the next one.

(Sorry for the double post. I realised I’d included Syria and Lebanon by accident)

The killings were a feature, not a bug. They were intended for generalised intimidatory and deterrent purposes.

The beatings which the, er, elite Special Forces troops dangled themselves into were also expected/planned.

How on earth can you possibly know this? How about reserving judgement? I can see you might expect that to be the case, but it does make me rather suspicious of your motives.

@Doctor Science, 219:

That’s a good start, but an original source please, not a secondary one. I’m not sure I consider any of those things humanitarian supplies either. Perhaps I’m being naive. Is there an accepted definition of humanitarian supplies?

Tom, food is generally considered to count as humanitarian supplies.

As are medical supplies.

Have the Israelis been blocking medical supplies?
Yes.

Can I prove that with an original source?
Yes.
Hundreds of items of equipment have been waiting to enter Gaza for up to a year, procured by WHO and other organizations, says Mr Tony Laurance, head of WHO’s office for Gaza and the West Bank. These items include CT scanners, x-rays, fluoroscopes, infusion pumps, medical sterilization gasses, laboratory equipment, UPS (uninterrupted power supply) batteries, and spare parts for support systems like elevators. “It is impossible to maintain a safe and effective healthcare system under the conditions of siege that have been in place now since June 2007,” Mr Laurance says. “It is not enough to simply ensure supplies like drugs and consumables. Medical equipment and spare parts must be available and be properly maintained.”

Source: WHO statement. http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/ASHU-85ZMVN?OpenDocument&RSS20=18-P

Tom, if you’re going to be a troll, at least be an entertaining one for chrissakes. This stuff is just lame.

@ajay, 222:

OK that’s fine. Perhaps I should have said that I think it’s permissible for Israel to block medical supplies and food as long as enough medical supplies and food get through. Some of those items, especially CT scanners and X-ray machines sound weaponisable.

What does enough mean? I don’t know. Good question. That’s a flaw in my reasoning.

Can Gaza get by without this aid? Will people die without this aid? I guess yes and no respectively, which is why I support the blockade, but I don’t have any solid evidence to prove that. I would welcome solid evidence the other way if you have any.

I don’t dispute the the situation in Gaza is appalling. I do dispute that it is solely Israel’s fault.

I also dispute that this is a collective punishment. Collective punishment means to me that the punisher is discouraging an individual from commiting and action by making him feel guilty for the suffering of his comrades. I highly doubt Hamas feel guilty for the suffering of their fellow Palestinians.

Tom,

The state of affairs may render your request for an original, non-NGO documentation of Israeli blockade policy impossible to produce. This is, of course, by design. From the link in the economist piece to GISHA’s statement:

It is based on information from Palestinian traders and businesspersons, international organizations, and the Palestinian Coordination Committee, all of whom “deduce” what is permitted and what is banned based on their experience requesting permission to bring goods into Gaza and the answers they receive from the Israeli authorities (approved or denied). It is not possible to verify this list with the Israeli authorities because they refuse to disclose information regarding the restrictions on transferring goods into Gaza.

Now, in a narrow sense it’s correct that one could sustain bare life with a steady supply of items appearing only on the ‘permitted’ list. But when you stand between desperately impovershed people (who remain desperately impovershed in no small part because you’ve adopted a set of policies that prohibit them from having an economy) and needed supplies because they’re not on an arbitrary list, you’re denying humanitarian aid, full stop.

(By the way, using your stated policy of interpretive charity and assuming only the purest of motives regarding Israel, perhaps you can enlighten me as to how prohibiting the import of fishing rods and dried fruit is necessary for Israeli security. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation, but my mind is evidently too clouded by irrational Israel-hate to figure it out.)

oops, I swore and now I’m in moderation – could take forever. I thought I was being polite! Oh well, here’s the key paragraph:

tom did you reserve judgement when you called the people on the boat “thugs?” No. what about when you observed that the Israelis were faced with a boat “full of people who hate israel and israelis”? Was that you studiously reserving judgement, or you being a w**&%r?

@ajay

You don’t understand. It is not ‘Israel’s right to exist’ that is at stake here, it is ‘Israel’s right to exist as an apartheid state for Jews’.

Since none of the countries surrounding Israel accept the concept of a ‘Jewish state’ where non-Jews are second class citizens at best, Israel is ‘surrounded’ by states that reject the Likud world view.

That is why the apologia for Israel always have to start off with attempts to frame the argument in ways that exclude the grievances of the other side. The Israeli history we are allowed to consider ends in 50AD, has a 1900 year gap and then restarts in 1948.

Its a bit like the Israeli tape that begins after the soldiers have boarded the ships. CNN just played an interview with one who admitted firing his weapon after landing on the deck. Didn’t sound like it was a paint ball gun from the way he was talking (so thats one probable lie in the official account). So according to his own account he attacked first and shot first.

Putting on a uniform does not turn a thug into a soldier.

Perhaps I should have said that I think it’s permissible for Israel to block medical supplies and food as long as enough medical supplies and food get through.

In the opinion of the WHO not enough medical supplies are getting through. See the quoted statement: it is currently impossible to maintain a safe and effective health care system in Gaza.

Therefore you must either a) conclude that Israel’s actions are not permissible, even by your own lights, or b) conclude that the WHO is lying. I wonder which way

I think I know which way you’re going to jump. Leaving aside the horrible statement that it’s OK to block food supplies. Not even “it’s OK to intercept and search food supplies because they might be concealing weapons” but “it’s OK to stop people getting food supplies even if you know it’s nothing but food”.

CT scanners and X-ray machines sound weaponisable.

Well, sure. You could use them to build an arc-reactor-powered repulsor ray. After all, TONY STARK DID IT IN A CAVE! WITH A BUNCH OF SCRAPS!

Not to mention the fact that a CT scanner is extremely heavy. If you dropped it on someone’s foot, you’d probably break a bone or two.

-the suspected motive please

-Well I don’t know, that’s something that only you can tell us

Wow. Just wow.

(Well, not just wow. There is a mildly interesting point of semantics/rhetoric there (commonly seen in connection with ‘terrorist’): ‘alleged’ and ‘suspected’ create intensional contexts and are not ordinary modifying adjectives. E.g. an alleged terrorist is not a species of terrorist, but a species of accused person. But I think this fact is often overlooked, at least at a subconscious level.)

I think it would have been better from a PR point of view if the incident had happened as you suggest.

Not from a moral point of view, or an ethical point of view, I notice. But it would have made better public relations.

I asked if you would still support the blockade if it was proven to block humanitarian aid. You said you wouldn’t, that you would donate to the next flotilla.

Now you say it is okay to block humanitarian aid, as long as some is allowed through, that it is okay to block medical equipment if it could possibly be repurposed into weapons. (How can an x-ray machine be made into a weapon? How can anything not be made into a weapon, by that logic?)

If you weren’t arguing against such biased knee-jerk anti-Israelis, one might almost think you had a prejudiced view of the situation that you were determined not to change.

@Tim Wilkinson, 237:

What do you expect me to say Tim? The distinction I want to draw is whether your motive for criticism of the incident comes

1. solely from the details of the incident and the situation in Gaza, or
2. from a wider impression of Israel you’ve formed over a longer time.

I’m suspecting 2. That’s fine. I’m not criticising it. Just pointing out that for my understanding of this incident itself your point of view is unlikely to be revealing to me.

235: thank you.

Leaving aside the creepy insinuations and back on topic:

For the benefit of the hard of understanding, may I just explain that it appears very likely that the clip of danglers being fed to an angry crowd does not depict the first interaction between the IDF and those on board. It also appears likely that at least one earlier interaction involved unarmed people being shot to death with bullets from a gun.

If that is the case (and my own assessment, from an imperfect epistemic position and drawing on all kinds of background knowledge, is that it very probably is), then the anger or panic of the crowd appears quite understandable, doesn’t it.

In what sense is blockading medical supplies not a collective punishment?

If these were super-special x-ray machines that would only work on Hamas members, okay. If you could demonstrate that the x-ray machines would be stolen by Hamas when they arrived, and would only ever be used by it’s members, you would have a case.

But if you stop an x-ray machine from being shipped to an open hospital, you are denying x-rays to the people in that hospital, for the crime of living in Gaza. Collective punishment.

Barton, Deakin, Watson, Reid, Fisher, Cook, Hughes, Bruce, Scullin, Lyons, Page, Menzies, Fadden, Curtin, Forde, Chifley, Holt, McEwen, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd.
Which one is the Vietnamese?

If I had to guess: Menzies.

Can Gaza get by without this aid? Will people die without this aid? I guess yes and no respectively

Given that this is for meanings of “get by” without hospitals having adequate equipment you should probably revise that second answer.

For what it’s worth, we’re arguing intricacies when actually I think we all mostly agree.

The situation in Gaza is terrible. I knew this before yesterday and before I joined this thread. Something must be done ASAP to ameliorate the situation, which includes pressuring Israel and Egypt to open the borders to more aid, and also pressing for a peace process.

What I was really trying to understand with this thread is why there’s so much anti-Israeli sentiment, and only anti-Israeli sentiment.

The whole situation is so messed up [I mean the situation since 1967 or before, not since 2005], yet I’ve heard no condemnation of Egypt, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. I know that Monday’s incident was down to Israel, but these very blunt, unsophisticated attacks on Israel seem very unhelpful.

If Israel is collectively punishing, then Egypt must be party to that too right, since they control some of the border? Where’s the outrage at Egypt’s collective punishment of Gaza? That is what I want to understand.

But I haven’t. And I don’t think I will here.

What I was really trying to understand with this thread is why there’s so much anti-Israeli sentiment, and only anti-Israeli sentiment.

Because only Israeli forces boarded an aid flotilla and killed ten people.
Some things are not that complicated.

How do I know they destroyed the video?

Are you denying that the IDF jammed communications and confiscated all video recording equipment, telephones, etc when they boarded?
Or do you think the IDF was only being careful that none of this got lost, and everything will be handed back intact to the rightful owners/a independent international investigation any day now?

Anyway, bye everyone.

Thanks for being sparring partners. I understand much more about the situation and the middle east in general than I did two days ago.

What I was really trying to understand with this thread is why there’s so much anti-Israeli sentiment, and only anti-Israeli sentiment.

As someone who only casually skimmed this thread, what puzzled me was the opposite: how little of it seems to be about Israel and how much of it, by comparison, is about Australia, New Zealand, Wales, and wherever else. I guess the world should be grateful for courageous commenters like Bloix and Tom who are prepared to shine a spotlight on the most pressing issue here: ethnic prejudice in Llangollen.

What I was really trying to understand with this thread is why there’s so much anti-Israeli sentiment, and only anti-Israeli sentiment.

Because this thread is not about the entire Israel/Palestine conflict, but about a specific incident in which (a) Israel initiated the incident and (b) many people on this thread believe Israel was in the wrong in the way they initiated, conducted, and/or attempted to control information regarding the incident.

Certainly, there are many issues related to the conflict in which parties other than Israel are in the wrong, but they’re not the subject of this thread.

I really wonder what planet Tom lives on, and I don’t like to make such a snarky comment, but Israeli brutality toward Palestinians is constant, and well documented by the UN and lots of other international entities. I recently heard that 400 Palestinians have died inside Gaza because of lack of medicine or medical care; (Care; there’s a word for you!) 60% of children in Gaza are malnourished, many are traumatised, (some bear wounds from white phosphorus and even more horrible wounds) unable to go to school. Scholarship winners were not allowed to leave the country to accept them, Israel legalized torture in its jails years ago, and has kept thousands of Palestinian children in them where they can’t be visited by their parents. Throughout their realm, if the Israeli government suspects you may have a relative who has fought to defend his homeland, they just bulldoze your entire home. Or if they want to build an apartheid wall where your house is, they do that, or just bulldoze part of it, along with anyone standing in front of the bulldozer, like Rachel Corrie. Have you not heard of any of these things being documented? There’s lots more, too, Tom, so much so that the burden of proof of anything it says is necessarily on the Israeli government.

I really wonder what planet Tom lives on

It’s called “the United States.” If you limit your news intake to “mainstream” US sources, “Everybody just has it in for poor little Israel” is every bit as plausible as “They hate us for our freedom.”

They’re two sides of the same coin, really.

engels@260
To be fair, the question of the multicultural nature or otherwise of Australia and Canada is intertwined with the question of Zionism, and Bloix was only repeating the standard line on what’s necessary to maintain a state. If multicultural states are possible, and in fact multicultural states exist, then one of the original arguments in favor of the establishment of the State of Israel becomes moot. If multicultural states are impossible, and there is no Jewish state, the question arises where the Jews are to go, given that the Holocaust (though it did occur) did not accomplish its goal, and given some other facts about the nature of antisemitism as it actually arose in mid-20th century Germany. As for that standard line, it is thus understandable why it has become the neoconservative line in particular, but I’m not confident about the direction of causation, and to the best of my knowledge it is still the standard line in academia and on most of the political spectrum (it was, for example, enshrined in the constitution of the USSR).

Sorry after having read over the charter carefully the bit I wrote about the Tropic of Cancer is irrelevant as it clearly states the ‘North Atlantic’. The key para is here (edited for clarity).

‘For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack….on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over …the Mediterranean Sea.’

If the Mavi Marmara counts, officially, as a ‘vessel’ of Turkey and if its location is, technically, in the Mediterranean, then NATO rules would seem to state that some response against Israel, possibly military, is not just optional but required, not just by Turkey but by NATO as a whole. However I’m not a legal expert and am willing to stand corrected on this matter (not that it matters because international law is whatever the United States says it is, but I’m a pedant).

Milosevic, dammit.

I saw a seemingly authoritative argument that from Hudson Strait and Lancaster Sound westward, it all belongs to Canada.

Canada is more ambitious than the norm in its claims to the seas. Every once in a while the US will send a boat between some Arctic islands without asking permission and the super-patriots go bananas.

Furthermore, my assumption that “Mavi Marmara” is Turkish for “Sea of Marmara” was wrong too (according to Wikipedia it’s “Marmara dinizi). Having a bad day here, sorry.

[aeiou] I guess that was another in Bertram’s series of vaguely passive-aggressive line of comments; which actually includes this post since it centers on the failure of a conquering army to run a competent campaign.

Is there one liberal blog where the commenters aren’t ahead of the management on the politics of Israel, Gaza and the occupation?

But seriously, in a world of real people who are willing to kill each other so that they are really dead, I submit that the way to provide real security and the prospect of genuine development and democracy is to impose a two-state solution on Palestine.

Which I agree with, provided it’s a REAL two-state solution and not a system of Bantustans governed by puppets of Israel and the US.

Which I agree with, provided it’s a REAL two-state solution and not a system of Bantustans governed by puppets of Israel and the US.

Hence the problem with needing the US to “impose” it. First, the US is about as likely to do so as it is to replace its air force with flying unicorns. Second, even if we somehow got past the first point, the US has already squandered any claim to even-handed legitimacy that would avoid the impression that it’s all a Bantustan ploy. And impressions would matter.

@280. It seems unlikely, though, that an individual living in a refugee camp in Lebanon (or Gaza), whose parents were kicked out of their farm in 1948, is going to be convinced by arguments about stable democracy. He wants his farm back, and the usurpers punished; he wants justice. And as long as he is not satisfied, this is not going to end.

For a unified political entity, all you need to “force” people to do is not attack their neighbors. Most people tend to regard this as a legitimate use of force. But if you want an ethnic nationalist solution, you are going to have to force a lot of people to move (at best, hundreds of thousands of settlers who should have known better; at worst, millions of Palestinians) – and you are going to have to endorse the results of having forced a whole lot of people to move in 1948. “Peoples” don’t get forced – individuals do.

Most of the hundreds of thousands of settlers would prefer to move than to live in a joint state (and the current situation is already the result of forced movements of millions of Palestinians). In any case, why do you think the settlers would be able to keep their land in a multiethnic state? Any just solution requires returning land to the Palestinians, and yes, that would require some of the current occupants to leave. That said, minority rights should be protected even in ethnic nationalist states, and if the settlers would prefer to stay and submit to Palestinian authority, we should encourage any Palestinian state to treat them humanely.

He wants his farm back, and the usurpers punished; he wants justice. And as long as he is not satisfied, this is not going to end.

The funny thing is that if you subscribe to views about justice which are pretty popular around here, the refugee getting his farm back has precisely nothing to do with justice.

@279 Is there one liberal blog where the commenters aren’t ahead of the management on the politics of Israel, Gaza and the occupation?

Not that I’ve seen. Well, maaaaaaybe Huffpo. A good reminder that we shouldn’t be too cocky about the liberal blogosphere being on the bleeding edge, and not vulnerable to the same pitfalls as older, established media.

I am sure the majority of refugees are much more sensible about things than Henri is.

Oh sure. Obviously it is impossible for me to know how the majority of refugees feel; you know, not having spent all my life in refugee camps, under military occupation, blockade, digging tunnels, occasionally being bombed, massacred, etc. All for the sake of a stable monoethnic democracy. I’m just guessing, of course.

ISTM that by Bloix’s definitions (as well as by any reasonable meaning of “ethnic”), the US is multi-ethnic; and although we have certainly had problems with our multi-ethnic status and continuing arguments over whether our various groups are genuinely treated equally even today, I would still estimate that it would be a huge step up for most Palestinians to be treated only as badly as a black American. (I have a hard time imagining the U.S. military blockading Compton, let alone bombing it, and there would be a much bigger uproar *within the U.S.* if it did.)

Is there anything more detached from reality than the notion of creating another Yugoslavia in the eastern Mediterranean ?

The advocates make Herzl sound sane by comparison.

Bloix, your most recent comment is much more reasonable but it’s still question-begging, and the tautology has been pointed out above. You still haven’t addressed the disparity between your claims about “multi-ethnic” Belgium and “mono-ethnic” Australia, which is actually by your Belgian definition more “multi-ethnic” than anywhere in Western Europe. Your Yugoslavian example is interesting too, because I don’t think you could claim Serbs and Croats are different ethnicities (I wouldn’t think Bosnians were either, but then your slipperiness about religion and ethnicity gives you a pass there). Also aside from a few soccer riots, all 3 nationalities get along fine in Australia.

It might please you to know that Australia is multi-ethnic enough that 3 of the commandos doing the killing (and the roughing up of the Aussie journalists) on that ship were Australian-Israelis. As is the slippery spiv spokesman doing the rounds comparing the dead people to terrorists. Multiculturalism, it’s a gift that just keeps on giving!

To let you all into a secret, I save my most radical statements for comments on other blogs under a pseudonym.

Hang on, “Bert Marchris” is you?

sg- I define “ethnicity” in the way that the people who hold the ethnicity define it and the way that the people it’s being defined against define it. Croats don’t think that they are Serbs, and Serbs don’t think Croats are Serbs, so Croats aren’t Serbs. Neither Croats nor Serbs think that Bosniaks are Croats or Serbs, so they’re not Croats or Serbs. It’s the concept that’s slippery, not me.

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic state that by any measure should have been able to make a transition to democracy. A single language (some differences and different alphabets, but mutually intelligible), no visible differences between ethnicities (all the same color, etc), lots of intermarriage, many secular people with only weak ties to the their religious traditions, strong civil institutions, a reasonably free press, good economic development, a large, well-educated middle class, reasonably high standard of living overall, integrated cities, no meddling neighbors, good prospects for economic growth, nothing to gain and everything to lose from war, and located on the continent of Europe, where you’d have thought the Western nations would have been mortally embarrassed to permit ethnic warfare leading to genocide. And what happened?

That’s right Bloix, your description of Yugoslavia makes it sound almost as if ethnicity wasn’t the issue, until someone made it so…

s.g.
‘I don’t think you could claim Serbs and Croats are different ethnicities’
The term ‘ethnicity’ is as misleading as ‘race’, especially in the light of recent genetic studies that show e.g. that Hungarians have more genes in common with Croats or Serbs than the ‘Slav’ Poles do. But Serbs and Croats certainly are distinct nations, just as English, Scots and Welsh are. This is why the post-1945 Yugoslavia was established as a multi-national – not ‘multi-ethnic’ – federation.

Bloix
The foregoing comment is a reply also to your post at l:01 a.m., which is undermined by treating Yugoslavia as a ‘multi-ethnic state’ rather than a ‘multi-national federation’.
Apart from the fact that some of your supposed facts are simply wrong (e.g. there was no single language, even if five out of eight federal units did have mutually comprehensible spoken tongues, though with different literary standards), the wars of the 1990s were not ‘ethnic warfare’ in origin or in essence, even though they sometimes degenerated into that locally. Those wars were about power and what political form the coming post-communist society should take.
A ‘transition to democracy’ was theoretically possible only if the model that Slovenia was beginning to explore in the late 1980s had been followed elsewhere in the federation. But the rise of Milosevic in Serbia represented a direct and anti-democratic challenge to that model, through war if necessary.
But you are right to express surprise that the Western nations were so ready to permit war and genocide on the continent of Europe.

Bloix @306:

Suppose for the sake of argument that, as you seem to believe, only mono-ethnic states could be functioning democracies (though that claim has been thoroughly taken apart here). What on earth would then make you think that it was better to turn a Tito-style multiethnic non-democracy into a post-Tito-esque bunch of monoethnic democracies? Democracy is nice, but do you really think it’s worth exiling and murdering hundreds of thousands of people for?

How many rockets flying in Kosovo?

I don’t know the details, but I imagine not many, since the refugees had come back to their farms. Had they not been allowed to come back home (as it’s usually assumed in the west in regards to the Palestinian refugees/two-state solution), I’m sure the KLA would’ve been still shooting and blowing up shit all over the place.

And how can it be any different? Don’t you know that people hate being kicked out of their farms into refugee camps abroad? What is your point, can you state your thesis?

Henri, my thesis is – simply put – that you’re wrong. People can hate a thing and still move on, if the alternative is to become a miserable miser.

Nobody got shafted by Me (not even You) and I am not a part of any Us – so keep on knocking.

What I meant is that westerners overwhelmingly identify with Israel, and view the Palestinian refugees as a nuisance; if only they disappeared somehow, got assimilated somewhere, moved on already…

But that’s exactly the opposite of what this same situation looks like from other parts of the world. They see the place being temporary conquered and colonized by westerners, who eventually are going to move on and disappear.

Your solutions don’t make sense to them; theirs to you.

@313
In fact, in all the discussion about one-state and two-state solutions for a future Palestine, I am surprised that federal forms of territorial and/or political organization never seem to figure.

Yes. I’ve been wondering about that too. That *might* satisfy the apparently strong desire a lot of Israelis and some Palestinians have to live in a state where large accommodations are made for them to be able to live by confessional laws.

322- I don’t identify with Israël, at all. I think I am like most Westerners here. I do not think of Palestinians mainly as farmers that want to get their land back.

@326 I do not think of Palestinians mainly as farmers that want to get their land back.

What are they, then?

Even if the refugees outside of historic Palestine had been offered, and accepted, citizenship in other countries ten years ago, that would leave the Palestinians under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, who, together with Israeli Palestinians, are almost as numerous as Israeli Jews, and are living on land that Israelis want to take.

Many (more) of them are farmers who *don’t want to lose* their land to Israeli settlers.

mds wins.

Croats don’t think that they are Serbs, and Serbs don’t think Croats are Serbs, so Croats aren’t Serbs.

Scots don’t think that they are English, and English don’t think Scots are English, so Scots aren’t English. I can sort of see an argument for declaring the US a racially divided hellhole (but Israel is clearly worse; even improving to the US’s imperfect standard would be a huge step forward), but is the UK a failed state now too? In some respects the formal political system governing Scotland is like a bantustan with a higher standard of living, but in terms of actual outcomes for the people, ISTM that there is a substantial range of multiethnic outcomes from the UK to Yugoslavia or Israel, regardless of where you put the US on that continuum, and that movement in the UK-ward direction would be desirable, if possible. (And that if it is not possible, the reason must be something other than the bare fact of multiethnicity.)

ISTM that by your own definition, you’d have to conclude that as Earnest O’Nest put it, multiethnic states are the norm. At least four of the largest democracies in the world are multiethnic (US, UK, Canada, India), regardless of the argument about whether Australia is multiethnic “enough”.

P.S. I express no opinion on clod levi-strauss because (a) I don’t know who Seth Edenbaum is and why it might be significant that someone is a pseudonym of his, and (b) this isn’t my blog anyway.

I also am sorry to see Clod Levi-Strauss disemvowelled. His comments on this thread were civil and on-topic (and often quite insightful, IMO.) Is sharing an IP address really dispositive?

Croats don’t think that they are Serbs, and Serbs don’t think Croats are Serbs, so Croats aren’t Serbs

And by the same token and for the same reasons — political separation over a period of time — Czechs and Slovaks really are different nations. Because they think so. (Or rather, because enough of them thought so, and because those who thought so had enough power of one kind or another to bring about a divorce.) Nothing to do with genes, nothing to do with mutual intelligibility of language.

What I wonder is whether 40 years was long enough for the same thing to happen in Germany. Are Ossies and Wessies going to turn out to be different nations? I have no personal basis for an opinion at all. I would be interested to hear from those who do.

I live in a city in which English has become a minority first-language very quickly. There are large populations of people from all over the world. Half the people I work with were not born here.

It’s understandable that some of the people I work with might want to kill me, but thus far I detect no animus between them towards each other and on a larger scale my city is not threatening to become a smoking ruin. There is no notable ethnic violence, and indeed one of the more dangerous bunches of criminals is called the UN gang. The area’s population is close to Gaza’s.

What has gone wrong for us?

the Serbs and Croats had bad leaders who magically mesmerized them.

This is sarcasm but it’s not obvious to me why the idea that the quality and choices of political leadership matters is inherently silly. Certainly plenty of people have argued convincingly (e.g. Catharine Samary in Yugoslavia Dismembered) that the Yugoslav wars were not inevitable but the result of specific political decisions both in and outside of Yugoslavia.

On the flipside, if you go back and read Tocqueville on the American South, he is sure there’s no way the former slaveowners could ever live as equals with their former slaves. He says emphatically that the only possible outcomes post-slavery are mass emigration of the freedmen or else race war. And then you turn to someone like Woodward on the history of segregation in the South and you see how much the Jim Crow South was a deliberate political creation decades after the Civil War.

In general ISTM that the more you study the history of specific ethnic conflicts, the more you see that it’s a mistake to regard ethnic divisions as natural and immutable and pre-political. A single state of all its citizens between the Mediterranean and the Jordan is hard to imagine right now, but history is full of things that were hard to imagine until they did.

336- OK. No complaints, then, from me.

“That’s a model for successful nation-building?”
Despite the implication here, nation and state building were and are long term violent undertakings.

@343
Of course that’s true. Although the Jews that presently live on the west bank will have to evacuate, the Arabs that live in Israel proper will continue to live there, as they’ve done for the last 60 years. So what?

This sounds less like an educated guess based about the future based on evidence and improve our understanding of the situation than a a way to repeat a mantra of “Jews are more tolerant than Arabs”.

First off, if this were true, why would it be true? Palestinian Israelis have been willing to live as an out-of-power minority in Israel, despite significant discrimination, without too-serious objections to their own situation (that is, they haven’t all just up and left, they’ve learned Hebrew and tried to build lives in Israel). If Jews in the West Bank aren’t willing to do that, why? Maybe because many of them are machine gun-toting settlers whose entire purpose in living in the W Bank is to drive the Palestinians living there out of their homes? Because they’re not now living among Arabs as neighbors and equals, but as a colonizing force in the purest possible sense, many of them armed to the teeth, many of them regularly abusing, dumping sewage and throwing garbage at their Arab neighbors, driving to and from Israel on Israeli-only roads?

Yet you present this as an off-hand remark about the prospects of cosmopolitanism.

If on the other hand you take the position that Israelis simply need to allow Palestinians the same right to statehood that they themselves enjoy, you have a chance of influencing events.

As I said, I am undecided on this question. But a lot depends on the statement you’ve made here. If the evidence of Israeli politics supported it, I’d be more sympathetic to your position. Unfortunately, in recent years, it does not.

Bloix,
This series of comments is coming off as much more anti-Zionist than I really am (though on the other hand the attitude of the Israeli government since Obama was elected, not to mention the settlements policy, has been provoking). But I am tempted to reply to your @347 with the line I was given twenty years ago at those Young Judaea meetings: they have a democratically elected government, they live with the danger themselves on a daily basis, it is their decision how to deal with that, and we American Jews are outsiders and should stay out of it. Why should outsiders have a say in policy (unless, of course, the plan is to take money given for charity and send it to the Likud campaign fund), regardless of the outsiders’ religion or ethnicity?

Bloix@343:
“Although the Jews that presently live on the west bank will have to evacuate, the Arabs that live in Israel proper will continue to live there, as they’ve done for the last 60 years. ”

Like Lemuel@348, if I thought the first half of this were at all likely, I might be more inclined to support settling for a two-state solution, even at the expense of all the Arabs that used to live in “Israel proper” (a distinctly ill-defined term.) It’s not. The best any foreseeable Israeli government is likely to offer is evacuating a couple of the worst-located settlements, and keeping pretty much everything outside the wall plus the Jordan Valley, and probably a few corridors to split the West Bank for good measure. Whatever piece of Swiss cheese is left over – with any international trade or tourism, not to speak of water supplies, at the mercy of Israel – is going to be no more than a reservation, whether or not they deign to call it a state. Might as well hoist them on the petard of their own non-stop expansionism, and say openly and loudly that a two-state solution is no longer feasible.

Lemuel@345:
“But practicality counts for more when practical progress seems to be being made. Right now I don’t see much cost to us Western leftists standing on principle.”

Well put – and, in fact, there is a cost to not standing on principle. It makes people tend to forget that the two-state solution is a rather besmirched practical compromise that leaves more than half the Palestinian population out in the cold, and start imagining that it represents some kind of ideal.

So it’s back to two state solution. Which I’m fine with. I want the situation to stabilize with a minimum of further human misery, and that’s about it. Single-ethnic, multi-ethnic, I don’t care, I just want a solution, and two state will looks more viable than one, if one is to be achieved iwhtout genocide or ethnic cleansing (which would violate the “minimum of misery” requirement).

In terms of what is politically possible, though, we are now in uncharted waters. Egypt has lifted the embargo. Near as I can tell, completely lifted it, not just made it more reasonable by only excluding actual weapons. So I expect weapons to show up in Gaza real soon now, though they may not be used right away (never get in the way of an enemy destroying itself). And it will be very hard for Israel to find any friends.

Doesn’t Israel see that they cannot win this? I don’t just mean this event; I mean their whole recent policy. That’s what I don’t understand. Hamas and Hez don’t need to reach military equality with Israel; they just have to get exploding warheads and some targetability on those rockets. That’s certainly doable. I don’t understand what Netayahu sees as his end game. Genocide? Apartheid in a single state? I don’t see how Israel or even the US is powerful enough to force the world to accept those things, particularly how the world needs oil much more than Israel. Without the moral high ground, Israel has nothing. Well, the US. But we have just shown, in Iraq, our own limitations in imposing our will on this region. And, at some point, you would think the US would have to realize that both its cynical self-interest and high-minded moral claims point against simply backing Israel no matter what they do. Given how much Muslim money and oil there is to counterbalance Israel, I don’t even see why Israeli influence in the US is so hegemonic. Both countries appear to be mad.

@353 If you say you’re for a single state, and you can’t articulate a way to get there from here, then you’re not for a single state, you’re for war.

We already have war. An on-again-off-again war, but it’s definitely war. Israel and Gaza are for all intents and purposes in a state of war. The West Bank is under occupation. And Lebanon was bombed, and Iran keeps getting threatened. What’s at stake is how the war is fought, who is at risk, and whether the battles being fought push us closer to a resolution we like, or one we don’t like. That is, to echo a previous comment, configuring states is a violent affair, but the choice isn’t between configuring states and not doing so, it’s between continuing to configure them indefinitely or configuring them with a clear, humane end-game in mind.

Henri, perhaps that was viable in 1948. What is going to make the Israelis do it now? With all the bad blood under the bridge at this point, can Israelis and non-Israeli Palestinians live in peace? Not in principle, but in fact? Likely consequence if it somehow was tried: massive Israeli attacks on the repatriated populace and massive Arab attacks in retaliation or anticipation on Israeli and American interests, dwarfing any we have seen. Followed by failure of the repatriation; in extremis, failure through genocide. It’s one thing to say, this is how it should all work in principle, but the real world consequences of trying that do not look remotely promising. And if the Israelis want to commit genocide against the Palestinians within Israel, who is going to stop them? Who is going to make them accept these people in the first place? Perhaps the US could, but the US is not even strong enough to condemn this flotilla attack, which is utterly indefensible. Any proposed solution has to accept the status quo as given, because it is, and account for how the various players will or at least can be made to behave, not how they should behave. To paraphrase my granma “Go normative in one hand; sh1t in the other. See which one gets full first.”

That said, I think it is worth keeping in mind as a reference point that the “existence of Israel” as a specifically Jewish nation in Palestine is a very questionable normative commitment, especially in the face of how much violence and instability it has entailed. But Israel is there, the majority of its population evidently wants the refugees out and will support extreme measures, lubricated with transparent hypocrisy, to achieve this. OK,we can acknowledge the fundamental injustice that has been done to the Palestinians. But let’s not pretend that it can simply be undone.

@358, what about South Africa, wasn’t there a lot of bad blood as well? And what would make them accept it is the same: economic sanctions and political/cultural isolation. It’s been done, done recently, it’s not some wild fantasy.

I’m curious about Martin Bento’s statement that the US is not even strong enough to condemn the flotilla attack. Why is this? Is it because the US can’t survive without Middle Eastern oil? And somehow it needs Israel in order to buy that oil? Is it that the US can’t afford to buy oil, and so we have to invade the Middle East and take it?

General Petraeus told the White House he wanted his command expanded to include the Middle East because it’s making his job harder anyway. (That got hushed up pretty quick, I know.) Is there no strategic advantage for the US to be seen as fair to Palestine? Do US leaders really want to make war on Iran?

I’m curious about Martin Bento’s statement that the US is not even strong enough to condemn the flotilla attack. Why is this?

Partially because the US is a two-party state, where one party is beholden to actual right-wing Zionists, and the other is beholden to apocalyptic Christian right-wing Zionists. So if nothing else, it lacks the moral strength and political will to condemn the flotilla attack.

Is it that the US can’t afford to buy oil, and so we have to invade the Middle East and take it?

More that someday everyone will have a hard time buying oil, and so we have to invade the Middle East and secure it, because otherwise the Chinese will do it. Or something.

Is there no strategic advantage for the US to be seen as fair to Palestine?

Of course there is. Enormous advantage. But see the first point above.

Do US leaders really want to make war on Iran?

Yes, for certain subsets of “US leaders.” Most of the rest don’t really care strongly enough, whereupon see the first point above.

More on-topic link with accounts from the passengers on the ship, detailing horrendous abuses by IDF soldiers.
… for anyone is still following this thread

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-212103-100-israel-killed-more-than-9-threw-wounded-into-sea-witnesses-say.html

You know this is a remarkably short comments section for an Israel/Palestine discussion.

Tim Wilkinson:

Only for certain values of ‘no-one’

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-212202-turkish-prosecutors-go-after-israeli-politicians.html

@371 If you had a palatial house, olympic pool, second vacation home. etc., those would not be taken from you. How could a Palestinian right of return operate on this basis? The land taken from Palestinians, ultimately all of Israel, is currently used by someone, not necessarily the ones who took it.

This is virtually a non-sequiteur, in that I’ve never heard any advocate of Right of Return even suggest that Israelis should be thrown out of their homes. What RoR means is that Palestinians will have the right to settle–somewhere–in Israel and gain citizenship; that they will be able to return to old properties that aren’t now in use; that if the properties are in use, they would be compensated enough that they can buy some other property in Israel.

Pragmatists also argue that many refugees should be compensated and given citizenship somewhere else, and given that choice, many refugees would not go back to Palestine.

The big problem with granting Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Jordanian, or Kuwaiti, or whatever citizenship to Palestinian refugees is that it gives Israel an incentive to create even more refugees, knowing that these refugees will cease to be a problem once they resettle and some time has passed.

Israelis might think of themselves as more European than Middle Eastern (one Israeli told me as much, not great even for anecdotal evidence, but I think he wasn’t alone in feeling that way), even though about as many are of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) descent as Ashkenazi. But S Africans can speak English, and most of them are still in S Africa, no? I don’t know how many Israelis speak English, maybe a good number, but I’d bet most of them don’t. And where else do people speak Hebrew?

If I have misunderstood what “right of return” advocates want, I apologize, but it seems to me my reading is the natural one of the UN language:

Res 194:

“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

Homes plural suggests to me specific residences, not just the general region. perhaps repossession is covered under “loss”, but then there is this:

Res 3236

“reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return”

Property in this context does suggest to me real estate among other things.

Compensation? By all means. That should be doable. I thought it was on the table in 2000, but could be mistaken.

Ew. Everything through “added” should have been in italics.

Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied and it’s their land.

As long as there’s occupation and refugees are prevented from returning, this is the most natural sentiment (as I said in 322).

But we were talking about a different situation, the situation where there is no occupation and right of return is accepted. At that point it becomes a technical problem. There is a precedent: the UN Compensation Commission (UNCC), established in 1991 to deal with the aftermath of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.

Why am I supposed to believe Helen Thomas saying creepy, anti-Semitic things is pertinent to whether a hypothetical Jewish minority can live in a hypothetical Arab state is relevant to this discussion at all?

There are no Arab countries in which a Jewish minority is afforded equal rights.

And that’s totally an inherent feature of Arabs, Arab countries, and Jewish minorities, and not a reversible consequence of recent history.

The Israelis did well – they got their story out quickly with an arresting visual image, while suppressing alternative accounts long enough for the first draft of history to have been written.

A side comment – this is one of those irritating off-made assertions that Just Ain’t So. No, they didn’t do well – in fact most of the civilized world detests what this horrible little state has become (in fact, a few people even predicted this; kudos to them.)

This is like the narrative that ‘X is a genius’ for various propaganda values: no, Karl Rove is not a genius, he has a compliant and corporate-owned media apparatus to get his messaging out. No, the Israelis didn’t do well – they had a compliant and corporate-owned media to get their message out. And so on and so forth.

LFC: totally wrong in every way.

CENTCOM doesn’t include Israel, it’s part of EUCOM.

In January this year, “Petraeus sent a paper to the White House requesting that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command — or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus’s reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged in the region’s most troublesome conflict.”

When he sent that paper, he’d been head of CENTCOM for almost two years – he got the command in April 2008.

Source: http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/14/the_petraeus_briefing_biden_s_embarrassment_is_not_the_whole_story

ajay @386:
Thanks for the info and clarification. I did not know that Israel/West Bank/Gaza is part of EUCOM nor that Petreaus requested Israel be switched to his command, but given what A. de Tocqueville wrote — she referred not to Israel specifically but to “the Middle East” — I had no idea she was talking about Petraeus’s Jan. request re Israel.

I was correct btw that CENTCOM includes ‘the Middle East’ as loosely used — the first sentence of the FP post you link to says so. I was also correct that Petreaus’s elevation to CENTCOM in ’08 represented a promotion. That’s what I thought A. de Tocqueville, who referenced “the Middle East,” was referring to.

except that’s not true is it, Bloix? Jews have equal rights in Turkey, were excluded from Jordan by Churchill (and the Jordanian prime minister refused to aid Iraq in expelling Jews to Palestine in 1947), and had equal rights in Lebanon until the civil war (which Israel was involved in). The claim “never yet been seen on the face of the earth” is doubly false, since the middle eastern countries that expelled Jews all did so between 1947 and the 1960s, and they were getting on together before then, though not perfectly well. It’s almost as if something changed in the region around about that time, and nationalist dictatorships used it as an excuse for certain activities that nationalist dictatorships are fond of.

Your claims about the impossibility of races and religions living together, your constant slippery movement between ethnicity, language, culture and religion, and your unwillingness to believe that Jews and non-Jews can live together; they’re all hallmarks of classic racial essentialism, the key underpinnings of fascism; and we see repeatedly here that they rely on a heavy dose of historical revisionism, poisonous opinions about Muslims and Arabs, and sneering disregard for anywhere that isn’t Israel. If this is the toxic combination on which the justification of Israel as a Jewish state depends, no wonder it has a bit of a PR problem.