So basically, Kriss needs to discipline Alkhatib for failing to perform a Palestinian's rightful role as an opponent of American imperial power, construed as the entire order of liberal-ish nation-states linked up through international institutions, irrespective of whether that's actually in the best interests of Alkhatib as an individual or Palestinians' as a nation.
Sorry, but I have real problems engaging seriously with someone who can't bother to find the shift key on their keyboard so they can use capital letters. Does that make me a snob? Maybe.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the foggy style of argumentation outlined in the article here. I think that a deep scepticism think-tanks is warranted, and their beneficiaries deserve an extra critical eye, but in the end it has to actually lead somewhere.
In the spirit of the scientific method, your hunches don't have to be strictly rational (although it does help to have a finely tuned intuition), but you need to back them up with hard data before claiming them as fact.
Without the ability to back up your beliefs with hard evidence, you're at best a well tuned hypothesis generator. Potentially useful, but a lot of work is needed to make your output into something rigorous.
It's a lot of "begging the question" fallacy. sloppy transitive property use. I've already declared X to be evil so I don't have to burn any valuable ATP making my brain have to process or articulate how Y is also bad. Neocons = evil, Israel = genocide, therefore ... bla bla bla.
The sad thing is that what passes for "advocacy" for Palestinians necessarily increases their risk of death. They must reject Zionism. They musn't give an inch on any of their demands. What happens to the 7 million Jews in Israel, that's their problem. They know more Palestinians will die in this zero-sum world and they relish it. They fetishize Palestinian suffering because it adds rocket fuel to their burning white hot self-righteousness.
"you wanna know what a good person I am? just look how outraged I am about Palestinian suffering!!!"
So, to be clear, if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard funded a pro-peace group that also said the right things condemning Hamas, would you support it?
I think this is a weak article. Kriss’ point is perfectly clear. Your point is perfectly clear. The question is “do this group’s public statements and actions suffice to overcome distrust people might have regarding its foundation/funders”.
You could call Kriss cynical, he could call u naive. I lean towards Kriss’ perspective here, cause I have difficulty seeing the org taking positions that are strategically bad for the West, beyond condeming the current violence, which is absolutely necessary to remain credible. However, I could be convinced of the opposite, if you gave me reason to.
I certainly would have a lot of burning questions & wouldn't fault anyone for being suspicious, but unless I can point to a nefarious outcome I see no reason why I shouldn't support a genuine pro-peace group, even if it's funded by the IRGC.
"strategically bad for the West" is ambiguous here. If the Palestine territories somehow turned into a vibrant prosperous state imbued with liberal values, that would be an unambiguously positive outcome that simultaneously would also be "strategically good for the West", would it not?
I won’t claim to know what Kriss’ opinion is on RfP’s actual policy positions but I will say that anyone (or any organization) who is still thinks a two-state solution is realistic, given the “facts on the ground” as the saying goes, is either ignorant or delusional. The military effort alone required to remove the illegal West Bank settlements would be like opening another front of the Gaza war, except the IDF would be doing it to their own citizens. If you think the Israeli public or political establishment has the appetite for taking military action against 450,000 well-armed Jewish Israelis, you are on another planet. (Or are a deliberately mendacious think tank…)
Alkhatib also loves talking about using the rubble in Gaza to create a shipping pier for humanitarian aid. I find this and the two-state solution to be delusional, but at the same time the fact that Alkhatib is pursuing them so earnestly is also what I admire about the guy. There's just no question in my mind that his heart is in the right place.
If it comes to it, they could just plop a whole bunch of busses in front of the settlements, tell them they have a month to pack up their stuff and get on the bus back to Israel-proper, and if they don't, they can take their chances as part of the state of Palestine.
That's a long way down the road, of course. Two-states are dead as long as something like RfP doesn't basically become the dominant position among the Palestinian population.
“The settlers” are a constant red herring of the left. The Palestinians are the ones who said no to a state of their own at least 5 times already, simply because it required them to accept an independent Jewish state next door. Had they wanted a state in 1947, it would have been approved by the UN, same as Israel. They gambled that they’ll win the war they started, commit and ethnic cleansing of 630K Jews, but they lost, and catastrophically to those weak, religiously mandated second-class dhimmis, the Jews. So on and on they went with their belligerence, not stopping when Israel gave them Judenfrei territory in the mid 1990s to prove they can be a peace partner (that failed into 1000 Israelis murdered in the second intifada). Your Pals also got a Judenfrei Gaza Strip in 2005 to show they can self govern a peaceful territory, and that also failed into a forward operating base for the Islamic Republic of Iran, billions of aid poured into hundred of miles of underground military infrastructure, tens of thousand of rockets shot at Israeli civilians, and the biggest massacre of Jews since the Nazi SS. In all cases, Israel has been the only country to ever give the Palestinians land for a state.
First: reread the second half of my comment: "That's a long way down the road, of course. Two-states are dead as long as something like RfP doesn't basically become the dominant position among the Palestinian population."
I don't mean to be condescending, really, but please: read what I'm about to say carefully and in as much good faith as you can muster - and yes, I'm not perfect at that kind of thing either.
Not only am I very familiar with the litany you laid out: I pretty much agree. But two things can be true at the same time:
1) most of what you said;
2) that the settlers aren't exactly a red herring: in practice they're still extremely shitty for Palestinians going about their daily lives in the west bank and largely not thinking about politics when they can help it, and, therefore, are an exploitable thing for the maximalists and the maximalist tendencies that, and I agree with you here, most Palestinians are inclined to believe in as a rather fundamental thing - at present. And they have to be defeated first. They have to lose the war of return, as Einat Wilf calls it.
But if that does change? then yes: the settlements do have to be dealt with somehow, because were the Palestinians to truly, deeply accept a two state future, than they would have a right to it, and contingent upon that happening, they do. They, too, are indigenous to the area, and some compromise that isn't just "move to Jordan, losers, lmao" is a necessity, and not just because it seems more moral to most people, but because not doing it would send a message that its open season whole populations if they get, mostly through no fault of their own, captured by shitty ideologies. I believe if would be morally unhealthy for Israel to win in this fashion and would affect the character of the country into the future, even regardless of how the world would respond, and the punishments non-Israeli Jews would have to endure as a result, especially if they refuse to swear off Israel entirely.
To point out why the constant focus on “the settlers” is a giant attempt by progressives to bothsides an issue that has never been even (Palestinians on a whole reject peace, a two state solution, Israelis on a whole have always agreed to it, and offered 90+ percent of the so-called “occupied territories” multiple times), focus on the actual numbers.
450K Jews live in Judea and Samaria _outside_ Oslo Accord Areas A&B, where 80% of the “West Bank” Palestinians live, Jew-Free. That’s 4.5% of the population of Israel, a tiny minority. Most of them live in Jerusalem neighborhoods or cities like Ariel. When you get down to it a fraction of a fraction are the problematic kooks living in the mostly empty of people Area C, illegally (by Israeli law) settling in the area, butting heads with similarly small groups of Palestinians that are also illegally settling in the land. Palestinians assault and murder them more frequently than they do such things to these Palestinians- both are violent and crazy, not some evil vs victim passion play. Those retarded leftists that got an Oscar for their fabricated documentary have been documented instigating violence multiple times themselves, for example.
So in the event of that future peace deal the Palestinians never actually agree to (must be the fault of the Jews the Palestinians take “land for peace” to mean “land for more terrorism”), most settlers will take the compensation and move back to Israel. The one who don’t need to be offered Palestinian citizenship, and live as a Jewish minority under Palestinian law. What can’t be accepted is that Israel MUST be a democracy for Jews and Arabs, which it is, but the Palestinians are granted the right to be ethnically cleansed of Jews, a Sunni Arab ethnostate. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and progressives should grow up and stop accusing Israel for the racism and savage violence of the Palestinians. That’s always been the problem and responsibility of their Pals.
Again: I agree with you and pretty much all of this. My point is that it's not **JUST** a red herring. It is that for progressives, including Peace Now in how they frame the issue, never mind B'Tselem. But that doesn't mean that, were Palestinians truly decisevly on board with a two-state solution, that Areas A and B alone would make for a reasonable version of a state. Outside of the main blocks there would have to be "the bus option" as I put it. Also, if you see my other comments here, you'll see that I think that if the Palestinians would accept RfP, then maybe they could accept most of the non-big-block settlers as a minority, in a way sort of similar to how South Africa more or less still accepts their white minority. But there is also a scenario where that just isn't realistic, where Palestinian politics is in a place where they really are down for two states but really can't be down for their 20%-of-mandate-Palestine state having a minority of settlers associated, fairly or not, with the behavior and politics of their worst members. Politics is the art of the possible. That might end up being the possible. If it is, yes, Israel should take the deal, but as my comment said, they wouldn't have to do Gaza 2005 or Yamit all over again - they could do the one month bussing thing. My point was to help reinforce the idea that there are potentially more options than people think, but not to be naive about it one way or another.
Areas A&B were never intended to be the end-state of a Palestinian state. They were a series of steps where the Palestinians got increased autonomy, and were supposed to prove that they can govern and provide security (meaning eradicate Palestinian terrorism against Israelis). Unfortunately, they failed at both - the first out of standard regional incompetence and corruption, the second because they never intended to provide any peace, but rather exploit the land given to create more capable terrorism bases closer to larger Israeli population centers. In terms of self-governance, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamastan are kleptocracies. Hamastan is far worse, with more millionaires and billionaires among the Hamas leadership, thanks to far greater slushing of Qatari petrodollars to the Strip and obvious siphoning of international aid into their pockets. Both canceled democratic elections after the very first round. Both are totalitarian. Both indoctrinate children to antisemitism and glorifying of terrorism. Both engage in lawfare against their alleged peace partner. Every single one of the sadistic, genocidal Palestinian monsters carrying out October 7 was educated in an UNRWA school courtesy of funds provided by Western democracies and allegedly normal gulf states. Remember that we already agreed that Israel gave the Palestinians all of the Gaza Strip and offered 93% of the "West Bank", and that Israel is the only country to _ever_ give land to the Palestinians for a state. Between 1948 and 1967 the West Bank Palestinians were Jordanian citizens, living on the ancestral land of the Jews (literally Jews are from Judea) after ethnically cleansing Jews from what had been continuous Jewish settlement for many centuries before the imperialist invasion of Arab armies. This was the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (FKA Transjordan). They were not "Palestinians" in 1948, Jordan didn't create an independent or even autonomous Palestine in the West Bank, and the Palestinians never agitated for such a state. Neither did Egypt create a Palestine in Gaza in that period.
I come from a (literal) socialist Israeli background, and was a deep believer in the two-state peace process, unwilling to accept reality even when the second intifada massacres of Israelis were happening, a 'reward' for the peace negotiations and land given to the Palestinians for autonomous rule. Even then I didn't sober up. It took 2021 and onward to comprehend that Free Palestine cult members like Kriss are not 'peace activists' nor 'pro Palestinian', but rather propagandists for Hamas and fully aligned on the Hamas goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing for Israel's 7.7 million Israeli Jews and domestic terrorism against the other half of Jews who live in the diaspora. The fact is, there is a huge majority of the Palestinians whose idea of 'liberation' is the savagery of October 7. You're right that "politics is the art of the possible" - and it is impossible to have a two-state solution with the Palestinians. They have not grown out of their 105 year delusion of ethnically cleansing the Jews from Israel, and they're stuck in a sunk cost fallacy that victory, no matter how gigantic their defeats are, is just a matter of starting more wars, murdering more Jews, and losing those wars harder.
The Palestinians want war, and we are lucky they swung for the fences and missed. Had a two-state peace agreement happened, it is highly likely Hamas would have taken over the entire country, focused on preparing military infrastructure for a decade plus, as it did in Gaza. The West, ever appeasing to Arab interests would have forced Israel to "show restraint" as it did on Gaza, despite all this preparation for war by the Palestinians. And Hamas would have launched a far bloodier, genocidal war from not just Gaza, but also the West Bank, adjacent to Israel's biggest population centers. This war would have ended in a desperate nuclear exchange after tens of thousands of Israelis civilians raped, tortured and murdered, in a more successful, coordinated multi-front attack on Israel from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen. The only good thing about October 7 is that Hamas jumped the gun on Iran's carefully planned multi-front genocidal attack, appeased and acquiesced to by a series of 'progressive' US and EU governments. Syria has evaporated from Iran's proxy axis, Hezbollah has been crushed, Hamas degraded to a rabble of guerrillas from a massive, well-armed, well-trained terrorist army. Iran took a series of punches to the head, its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs. The Houthi barbarians got their supply lines of ballistic missiles from Iran cut, and their head punched. All of this not because the Palestinians want peace, but because they tried for the latest round of their genocidal dreams too soon.
So you think 450,000 Israeli settlers will simply acquiesce to living a Palestinian state without armed resistance? They already take every opportunity to murder Palestinian civilians and seize land, what makes you think they'll be interested in a peaceful transition to Palestinian sovereignty?
I probably should put it out there that I’m fairly confident that a small minority of the settlers commit the violent or even disrespectful acts. Something that’s easy to check. Haviv Rettig Gur has a podcast on it I’ve been meaning to listen to - he’s always great on this stuff.
Also, the large blocs adjacent to Israel, which make up 75% or so IIRC, are still on the table for land swaps.
There’s a bit more flexibility than is commonly acknowledged, though yes this does depend on the Palestinians surrendering the war of return.
I don’t. I think this works if they are both outmanned and outgunned by the WB Palestinians. That should provide the incentive for the vast majority. The hardcore minority will be making a choice to get slaughtered, or try to reason / do business with the majority, I guess. Mind you, if the Palestinians do accept RfP, maybe that’s not so far fetched - maybe South Africa post-apartheid can happen after all, just for the West Bank only.
(And there’s probably a way to make sure that whatever arms the WB Palestinians do have are enough to outgun the settlers but not enough to threaten Israel whatsoever. But I’m sure there are pro-settler military analysts who would disagree. Suffice it to say I do t trust them)
It sounds like your best-case scenario for a two-state solution would be something like the partition of India, which killed a million people, displaced millions more, and was such a catastrophe that the geopolitical hostility persists to this day and could someday result in a nuclear war. What a great idea!
Except Palestine will never be as powerful as Pakistan, nor nuclear. Nobody with half a brain in the world wants that.
Remember: I’m not saying do any of this until the Palestinians can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they fully get that 1948 is over and they lost and thats that, and are willing to squash any dead-Enders; basically, Sinn Fein quashing the provisional IRA. (I don’t think that’s precisely how the Good Friday Agreement actually managed to work, but you get my point).
Look, i do think ethnic cleansing should be a true last resort, and for what it’s worth I think Jewish ethics probably agrees with me. Oslo can’t be started up again, and nobody worth listening to is saying that. But they should be given a real chance to finally clue in that they can’t go on like this or they *will* lose everything. Maybe 10, maybe 20 years. Yes, that means some more deaths in the meantime. But precisely because the Jews remembered for 2000 years, you can’t expect the Palestinians not to do the same - supported by an insane self-righteous blob of the NGOs, the progressive and even non-socialist-liberal world, and a great deal of the Muslim world of course. My sense is it would end up worse for everyone overall of you jumped to cleansing as anything other than a last resort.
You’re right, it’s probably less than half but I was trying to be charitable.
It’s true that the Israeli government has basically given up on the idea of a two state solution over the last 10-15 years, which IMHO is a huge tragedy. But the Palestinian leadership (such as it is) has never once in the last 70 years come even close to embracing the idea, and that is at least half the problem.
The thing is, I don’t see why Israel would have to evacuate a hundreds of thousands of citizens at all. If Israel decided tomorrow that they’re willing to do a 2SS with the PA they can kind of write their own ticket here. If Israel says we’re keeping “East Jerusalem and 90% of the settlements, deal with it,” then any rational PA leader either has to jump at it and make it work, or reject it, and allow Israel to dine out on making a third rejected reasonable offer to give the Palestinians a state, but now in a situation where Israel is a much more hardened target than during the first two intifadas, and has already normalized relations with the Gulf States. And if you reject the offer, you don’t know when the next, irrevocably worse offer will come.
A good faith offer to cede land to the Palestinian authority? The rational thing for the PA would be to accept it, which practically guarantees it won’t. Then somehow it will be Israeli’s fault, and we might get another intifada.
Kriss is the kind of far-leftist so completely ‘committed’ as to mansplain to Palestinians less savage than Hamas that they deserve imprisonment, torture and death for ‘collaborating’. The kind of ‘peace activist’ unflinchingly supportive of the delusional forever war of the Palestinians, of the Hamas goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing for 7.7 million Israeli Jews, even if by means slightly less rapey and family-murdery than Hamas.
A zealot happy to send generations of Palestinians into the meat grinder of their irredentist stupidity.
well since we’re just accusing people of random things here, you’re a holocaust denier. you deny the holocaust because you want to repeat it, but the jewish people will overcome you and your hate
Yassine, I read the exchange between you and Kriss about the killing of the young couple in DC. It did seem clear to me that Kriss was making a real distinction between killing people BECAUSE they are Jews, and killing people because they represent a government that one hates, and they also happen to be Jews. Whether or not the guy who killed them made that distinction, I don't know.
I think that permitting killing uninvolved civilians because they "represent a government that one hates" is a pretty weak moral position, since to be clear, this would equally justify Hamas' attempts to destroy Israel, and Israel wiping out the population of Gaza.
Hamas' charter, and record of action, would certainly justify Israelis hating it. If it's acceptable to kill uninvolved people in an entirely different country because you hate the government they represent, surely it's acceptable for the Israeli army to kill the people of Gaza, even if they're not directly involved with Hamas?
For anyone who's unhappy with Israel's policy towards Gaza, I think they should take a hard look at themselves if their response is to descend to an even lower moral standard.
I don't believe the distinction between antisemitism and antizionism is either coherent nor useful in the vast majority of cases. I've tried to get clarity from Kriss but it's been a tedious exercise for the same reasons I outlined above. He's not engaging with my actual argument and instead just asserting that they're not the same. I would love to talk to him in real-time about this so that I can better understand his position but alas.
Sorry, somehow I missed that post so I hadn't seen the argument before.
I don't know what the embassy staffers did exactly, but I imagine it's quite a stretch to hold them to account for Israel's military actions. So, killing them because of Anti-Zionism is functionally equivalent to killing them because they're Jews. And to be 100% clear I condemn violence whether it's anti Zionist or antisemitic. Thanks for the reply.
You guys are being awfully dense. The atlantic council is simply NOT under any circumstances going to help/support any organization that is doing meaningful anti-zionist work because their position on the matter is zionist.
To use an analogy that should be awfully clear:
If organization A has far more money/resources than group B and is financially supporting group B, and group A is clearly pro-choice, what are the chances that group B is actually pro-life?
Your comment is predicated on what you mean by "zionism". Anyone who supports a two-state solution is by definition zionist, because they're accepting it's ok for Israel to exist. So if your criticism over RfP and the Atlantic Council is that they don't want Israel to cease to exist...then yes they're guilty as charged.
So basically, Kriss needs to discipline Alkhatib for failing to perform a Palestinian's rightful role as an opponent of American imperial power, construed as the entire order of liberal-ish nation-states linked up through international institutions, irrespective of whether that's actually in the best interests of Alkhatib as an individual or Palestinians' as a nation.
Well there’s a hot take
Sorry, but I have real problems engaging seriously with someone who can't bother to find the shift key on their keyboard so they can use capital letters. Does that make me a snob? Maybe.
Actually, it makes him the snob.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the foggy style of argumentation outlined in the article here. I think that a deep scepticism think-tanks is warranted, and their beneficiaries deserve an extra critical eye, but in the end it has to actually lead somewhere.
In the spirit of the scientific method, your hunches don't have to be strictly rational (although it does help to have a finely tuned intuition), but you need to back them up with hard data before claiming them as fact.
Without the ability to back up your beliefs with hard evidence, you're at best a well tuned hypothesis generator. Potentially useful, but a lot of work is needed to make your output into something rigorous.
I agree
I'm a Sam Kriss fan, but this is a great piece and applies to quite a bit of the rhetorical style of discourse on here.
It's a lot of "begging the question" fallacy. sloppy transitive property use. I've already declared X to be evil so I don't have to burn any valuable ATP making my brain have to process or articulate how Y is also bad. Neocons = evil, Israel = genocide, therefore ... bla bla bla.
The sad thing is that what passes for "advocacy" for Palestinians necessarily increases their risk of death. They must reject Zionism. They musn't give an inch on any of their demands. What happens to the 7 million Jews in Israel, that's their problem. They know more Palestinians will die in this zero-sum world and they relish it. They fetishize Palestinian suffering because it adds rocket fuel to their burning white hot self-righteousness.
"you wanna know what a good person I am? just look how outraged I am about Palestinian suffering!!!"
I wish this was false
So, to be clear, if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard funded a pro-peace group that also said the right things condemning Hamas, would you support it?
I think this is a weak article. Kriss’ point is perfectly clear. Your point is perfectly clear. The question is “do this group’s public statements and actions suffice to overcome distrust people might have regarding its foundation/funders”.
You could call Kriss cynical, he could call u naive. I lean towards Kriss’ perspective here, cause I have difficulty seeing the org taking positions that are strategically bad for the West, beyond condeming the current violence, which is absolutely necessary to remain credible. However, I could be convinced of the opposite, if you gave me reason to.
I certainly would have a lot of burning questions & wouldn't fault anyone for being suspicious, but unless I can point to a nefarious outcome I see no reason why I shouldn't support a genuine pro-peace group, even if it's funded by the IRGC.
"strategically bad for the West" is ambiguous here. If the Palestine territories somehow turned into a vibrant prosperous state imbued with liberal values, that would be an unambiguously positive outcome that simultaneously would also be "strategically good for the West", would it not?
I won’t claim to know what Kriss’ opinion is on RfP’s actual policy positions but I will say that anyone (or any organization) who is still thinks a two-state solution is realistic, given the “facts on the ground” as the saying goes, is either ignorant or delusional. The military effort alone required to remove the illegal West Bank settlements would be like opening another front of the Gaza war, except the IDF would be doing it to their own citizens. If you think the Israeli public or political establishment has the appetite for taking military action against 450,000 well-armed Jewish Israelis, you are on another planet. (Or are a deliberately mendacious think tank…)
Alkhatib also loves talking about using the rubble in Gaza to create a shipping pier for humanitarian aid. I find this and the two-state solution to be delusional, but at the same time the fact that Alkhatib is pursuing them so earnestly is also what I admire about the guy. There's just no question in my mind that his heart is in the right place.
If it comes to it, they could just plop a whole bunch of busses in front of the settlements, tell them they have a month to pack up their stuff and get on the bus back to Israel-proper, and if they don't, they can take their chances as part of the state of Palestine.
That's a long way down the road, of course. Two-states are dead as long as something like RfP doesn't basically become the dominant position among the Palestinian population.
“The settlers” are a constant red herring of the left. The Palestinians are the ones who said no to a state of their own at least 5 times already, simply because it required them to accept an independent Jewish state next door. Had they wanted a state in 1947, it would have been approved by the UN, same as Israel. They gambled that they’ll win the war they started, commit and ethnic cleansing of 630K Jews, but they lost, and catastrophically to those weak, religiously mandated second-class dhimmis, the Jews. So on and on they went with their belligerence, not stopping when Israel gave them Judenfrei territory in the mid 1990s to prove they can be a peace partner (that failed into 1000 Israelis murdered in the second intifada). Your Pals also got a Judenfrei Gaza Strip in 2005 to show they can self govern a peaceful territory, and that also failed into a forward operating base for the Islamic Republic of Iran, billions of aid poured into hundred of miles of underground military infrastructure, tens of thousand of rockets shot at Israeli civilians, and the biggest massacre of Jews since the Nazi SS. In all cases, Israel has been the only country to ever give the Palestinians land for a state.
But sure, the problem is “the settlers”.
"My Pals"?!?
First: reread the second half of my comment: "That's a long way down the road, of course. Two-states are dead as long as something like RfP doesn't basically become the dominant position among the Palestinian population."
I don't mean to be condescending, really, but please: read what I'm about to say carefully and in as much good faith as you can muster - and yes, I'm not perfect at that kind of thing either.
Not only am I very familiar with the litany you laid out: I pretty much agree. But two things can be true at the same time:
1) most of what you said;
2) that the settlers aren't exactly a red herring: in practice they're still extremely shitty for Palestinians going about their daily lives in the west bank and largely not thinking about politics when they can help it, and, therefore, are an exploitable thing for the maximalists and the maximalist tendencies that, and I agree with you here, most Palestinians are inclined to believe in as a rather fundamental thing - at present. And they have to be defeated first. They have to lose the war of return, as Einat Wilf calls it.
But if that does change? then yes: the settlements do have to be dealt with somehow, because were the Palestinians to truly, deeply accept a two state future, than they would have a right to it, and contingent upon that happening, they do. They, too, are indigenous to the area, and some compromise that isn't just "move to Jordan, losers, lmao" is a necessity, and not just because it seems more moral to most people, but because not doing it would send a message that its open season whole populations if they get, mostly through no fault of their own, captured by shitty ideologies. I believe if would be morally unhealthy for Israel to win in this fashion and would affect the character of the country into the future, even regardless of how the world would respond, and the punishments non-Israeli Jews would have to endure as a result, especially if they refuse to swear off Israel entirely.
To point out why the constant focus on “the settlers” is a giant attempt by progressives to bothsides an issue that has never been even (Palestinians on a whole reject peace, a two state solution, Israelis on a whole have always agreed to it, and offered 90+ percent of the so-called “occupied territories” multiple times), focus on the actual numbers.
450K Jews live in Judea and Samaria _outside_ Oslo Accord Areas A&B, where 80% of the “West Bank” Palestinians live, Jew-Free. That’s 4.5% of the population of Israel, a tiny minority. Most of them live in Jerusalem neighborhoods or cities like Ariel. When you get down to it a fraction of a fraction are the problematic kooks living in the mostly empty of people Area C, illegally (by Israeli law) settling in the area, butting heads with similarly small groups of Palestinians that are also illegally settling in the land. Palestinians assault and murder them more frequently than they do such things to these Palestinians- both are violent and crazy, not some evil vs victim passion play. Those retarded leftists that got an Oscar for their fabricated documentary have been documented instigating violence multiple times themselves, for example.
So in the event of that future peace deal the Palestinians never actually agree to (must be the fault of the Jews the Palestinians take “land for peace” to mean “land for more terrorism”), most settlers will take the compensation and move back to Israel. The one who don’t need to be offered Palestinian citizenship, and live as a Jewish minority under Palestinian law. What can’t be accepted is that Israel MUST be a democracy for Jews and Arabs, which it is, but the Palestinians are granted the right to be ethnically cleansed of Jews, a Sunni Arab ethnostate. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and progressives should grow up and stop accusing Israel for the racism and savage violence of the Palestinians. That’s always been the problem and responsibility of their Pals.
Again: I agree with you and pretty much all of this. My point is that it's not **JUST** a red herring. It is that for progressives, including Peace Now in how they frame the issue, never mind B'Tselem. But that doesn't mean that, were Palestinians truly decisevly on board with a two-state solution, that Areas A and B alone would make for a reasonable version of a state. Outside of the main blocks there would have to be "the bus option" as I put it. Also, if you see my other comments here, you'll see that I think that if the Palestinians would accept RfP, then maybe they could accept most of the non-big-block settlers as a minority, in a way sort of similar to how South Africa more or less still accepts their white minority. But there is also a scenario where that just isn't realistic, where Palestinian politics is in a place where they really are down for two states but really can't be down for their 20%-of-mandate-Palestine state having a minority of settlers associated, fairly or not, with the behavior and politics of their worst members. Politics is the art of the possible. That might end up being the possible. If it is, yes, Israel should take the deal, but as my comment said, they wouldn't have to do Gaza 2005 or Yamit all over again - they could do the one month bussing thing. My point was to help reinforce the idea that there are potentially more options than people think, but not to be naive about it one way or another.
Areas A&B were never intended to be the end-state of a Palestinian state. They were a series of steps where the Palestinians got increased autonomy, and were supposed to prove that they can govern and provide security (meaning eradicate Palestinian terrorism against Israelis). Unfortunately, they failed at both - the first out of standard regional incompetence and corruption, the second because they never intended to provide any peace, but rather exploit the land given to create more capable terrorism bases closer to larger Israeli population centers. In terms of self-governance, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamastan are kleptocracies. Hamastan is far worse, with more millionaires and billionaires among the Hamas leadership, thanks to far greater slushing of Qatari petrodollars to the Strip and obvious siphoning of international aid into their pockets. Both canceled democratic elections after the very first round. Both are totalitarian. Both indoctrinate children to antisemitism and glorifying of terrorism. Both engage in lawfare against their alleged peace partner. Every single one of the sadistic, genocidal Palestinian monsters carrying out October 7 was educated in an UNRWA school courtesy of funds provided by Western democracies and allegedly normal gulf states. Remember that we already agreed that Israel gave the Palestinians all of the Gaza Strip and offered 93% of the "West Bank", and that Israel is the only country to _ever_ give land to the Palestinians for a state. Between 1948 and 1967 the West Bank Palestinians were Jordanian citizens, living on the ancestral land of the Jews (literally Jews are from Judea) after ethnically cleansing Jews from what had been continuous Jewish settlement for many centuries before the imperialist invasion of Arab armies. This was the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (FKA Transjordan). They were not "Palestinians" in 1948, Jordan didn't create an independent or even autonomous Palestine in the West Bank, and the Palestinians never agitated for such a state. Neither did Egypt create a Palestine in Gaza in that period.
I come from a (literal) socialist Israeli background, and was a deep believer in the two-state peace process, unwilling to accept reality even when the second intifada massacres of Israelis were happening, a 'reward' for the peace negotiations and land given to the Palestinians for autonomous rule. Even then I didn't sober up. It took 2021 and onward to comprehend that Free Palestine cult members like Kriss are not 'peace activists' nor 'pro Palestinian', but rather propagandists for Hamas and fully aligned on the Hamas goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing for Israel's 7.7 million Israeli Jews and domestic terrorism against the other half of Jews who live in the diaspora. The fact is, there is a huge majority of the Palestinians whose idea of 'liberation' is the savagery of October 7. You're right that "politics is the art of the possible" - and it is impossible to have a two-state solution with the Palestinians. They have not grown out of their 105 year delusion of ethnically cleansing the Jews from Israel, and they're stuck in a sunk cost fallacy that victory, no matter how gigantic their defeats are, is just a matter of starting more wars, murdering more Jews, and losing those wars harder.
The Palestinians want war, and we are lucky they swung for the fences and missed. Had a two-state peace agreement happened, it is highly likely Hamas would have taken over the entire country, focused on preparing military infrastructure for a decade plus, as it did in Gaza. The West, ever appeasing to Arab interests would have forced Israel to "show restraint" as it did on Gaza, despite all this preparation for war by the Palestinians. And Hamas would have launched a far bloodier, genocidal war from not just Gaza, but also the West Bank, adjacent to Israel's biggest population centers. This war would have ended in a desperate nuclear exchange after tens of thousands of Israelis civilians raped, tortured and murdered, in a more successful, coordinated multi-front attack on Israel from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen. The only good thing about October 7 is that Hamas jumped the gun on Iran's carefully planned multi-front genocidal attack, appeased and acquiesced to by a series of 'progressive' US and EU governments. Syria has evaporated from Iran's proxy axis, Hezbollah has been crushed, Hamas degraded to a rabble of guerrillas from a massive, well-armed, well-trained terrorist army. Iran took a series of punches to the head, its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs. The Houthi barbarians got their supply lines of ballistic missiles from Iran cut, and their head punched. All of this not because the Palestinians want peace, but because they tried for the latest round of their genocidal dreams too soon.
So you think 450,000 Israeli settlers will simply acquiesce to living a Palestinian state without armed resistance? They already take every opportunity to murder Palestinian civilians and seize land, what makes you think they'll be interested in a peaceful transition to Palestinian sovereignty?
I probably should put it out there that I’m fairly confident that a small minority of the settlers commit the violent or even disrespectful acts. Something that’s easy to check. Haviv Rettig Gur has a podcast on it I’ve been meaning to listen to - he’s always great on this stuff.
Also, the large blocs adjacent to Israel, which make up 75% or so IIRC, are still on the table for land swaps.
There’s a bit more flexibility than is commonly acknowledged, though yes this does depend on the Palestinians surrendering the war of return.
I don’t. I think this works if they are both outmanned and outgunned by the WB Palestinians. That should provide the incentive for the vast majority. The hardcore minority will be making a choice to get slaughtered, or try to reason / do business with the majority, I guess. Mind you, if the Palestinians do accept RfP, maybe that’s not so far fetched - maybe South Africa post-apartheid can happen after all, just for the West Bank only.
(And there’s probably a way to make sure that whatever arms the WB Palestinians do have are enough to outgun the settlers but not enough to threaten Israel whatsoever. But I’m sure there are pro-settler military analysts who would disagree. Suffice it to say I do t trust them)
It sounds like your best-case scenario for a two-state solution would be something like the partition of India, which killed a million people, displaced millions more, and was such a catastrophe that the geopolitical hostility persists to this day and could someday result in a nuclear war. What a great idea!
Except Palestine will never be as powerful as Pakistan, nor nuclear. Nobody with half a brain in the world wants that.
Remember: I’m not saying do any of this until the Palestinians can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they fully get that 1948 is over and they lost and thats that, and are willing to squash any dead-Enders; basically, Sinn Fein quashing the provisional IRA. (I don’t think that’s precisely how the Good Friday Agreement actually managed to work, but you get my point).
Look, i do think ethnic cleansing should be a true last resort, and for what it’s worth I think Jewish ethics probably agrees with me. Oslo can’t be started up again, and nobody worth listening to is saying that. But they should be given a real chance to finally clue in that they can’t go on like this or they *will* lose everything. Maybe 10, maybe 20 years. Yes, that means some more deaths in the meantime. But precisely because the Jews remembered for 2000 years, you can’t expect the Palestinians not to do the same - supported by an insane self-righteous blob of the NGOs, the progressive and even non-socialist-liberal world, and a great deal of the Muslim world of course. My sense is it would end up worse for everyone overall of you jumped to cleansing as anything other than a last resort.
You outline half the reason the two state solution is unlikely, yes. I’m guessing that RfP is addressing the other half.
The word "half" is doing a lot of work there
You’re right, it’s probably less than half but I was trying to be charitable.
It’s true that the Israeli government has basically given up on the idea of a two state solution over the last 10-15 years, which IMHO is a huge tragedy. But the Palestinian leadership (such as it is) has never once in the last 70 years come even close to embracing the idea, and that is at least half the problem.
The thing is, I don’t see why Israel would have to evacuate a hundreds of thousands of citizens at all. If Israel decided tomorrow that they’re willing to do a 2SS with the PA they can kind of write their own ticket here. If Israel says we’re keeping “East Jerusalem and 90% of the settlements, deal with it,” then any rational PA leader either has to jump at it and make it work, or reject it, and allow Israel to dine out on making a third rejected reasonable offer to give the Palestinians a state, but now in a situation where Israel is a much more hardened target than during the first two intifadas, and has already normalized relations with the Gulf States. And if you reject the offer, you don’t know when the next, irrevocably worse offer will come.
A good faith offer to cede land to the Palestinian authority? The rational thing for the PA would be to accept it, which practically guarantees it won’t. Then somehow it will be Israeli’s fault, and we might get another intifada.
i expected better. https://substack.com/@samkriss/note/c-152173816?r=8i9z7&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Kriss is the kind of far-leftist so completely ‘committed’ as to mansplain to Palestinians less savage than Hamas that they deserve imprisonment, torture and death for ‘collaborating’. The kind of ‘peace activist’ unflinchingly supportive of the delusional forever war of the Palestinians, of the Hamas goal of a genocide and ethnic cleansing for 7.7 million Israeli Jews, even if by means slightly less rapey and family-murdery than Hamas.
A zealot happy to send generations of Palestinians into the meat grinder of their irredentist stupidity.
well since we’re just accusing people of random things here, you’re a holocaust denier. you deny the holocaust because you want to repeat it, but the jewish people will overcome you and your hate
LOL. Dumbass Rabbi Kriss said his drasha.
shame on you, antisemite
You disingenuous clown. The nominal token Jew of the Free Palestine cult uses the word “antisemite”. What an amusing projection.
https://youtu.be/KKWPKp3GzaE?si=hst0X2ilanDZSgqs
jew-haters never prosper. history will erase you and your vile antisemitic lies
You’re more likely to get murdered by one of your Free Palestine cult friends than me.
I sure did unsubscribe from Kriss recently for unrelated reasons.
Yassine, I read the exchange between you and Kriss about the killing of the young couple in DC. It did seem clear to me that Kriss was making a real distinction between killing people BECAUSE they are Jews, and killing people because they represent a government that one hates, and they also happen to be Jews. Whether or not the guy who killed them made that distinction, I don't know.
I think that permitting killing uninvolved civilians because they "represent a government that one hates" is a pretty weak moral position, since to be clear, this would equally justify Hamas' attempts to destroy Israel, and Israel wiping out the population of Gaza.
Hamas' charter, and record of action, would certainly justify Israelis hating it. If it's acceptable to kill uninvolved people in an entirely different country because you hate the government they represent, surely it's acceptable for the Israeli army to kill the people of Gaza, even if they're not directly involved with Hamas?
For anyone who's unhappy with Israel's policy towards Gaza, I think they should take a hard look at themselves if their response is to descend to an even lower moral standard.
I almost addressed that in this post but then decided against it because I was essentially just repeating my argument from here: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/slicing-the-kosher-hate-salami
I don't believe the distinction between antisemitism and antizionism is either coherent nor useful in the vast majority of cases. I've tried to get clarity from Kriss but it's been a tedious exercise for the same reasons I outlined above. He's not engaging with my actual argument and instead just asserting that they're not the same. I would love to talk to him in real-time about this so that I can better understand his position but alas.
Sorry, somehow I missed that post so I hadn't seen the argument before.
I don't know what the embassy staffers did exactly, but I imagine it's quite a stretch to hold them to account for Israel's military actions. So, killing them because of Anti-Zionism is functionally equivalent to killing them because they're Jews. And to be 100% clear I condemn violence whether it's anti Zionist or antisemitic. Thanks for the reply.
Yes I agree, it's more useful to directly examine the action's morality rather than getting distracted over which label to affix to it.
"Whether or not the guy who killed them made that distinction, I don't know."
The fact that he targeted a *Jewish* institution rather than an *Israeli* institution is suggestive.
That distinction might have been meaningful, were it not for the fact that the ultimate reason for his hatred towards Israel is antisemitism.
It seems to me that you are pointing to yet another case of “Postmodernist Epistemology in Action”. The great fault line of our times. I wrote about it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/theliminallens/p/the-perilous-dance-of-philosophy?r=dvftt&utm_medium=ios
You guys are being awfully dense. The atlantic council is simply NOT under any circumstances going to help/support any organization that is doing meaningful anti-zionist work because their position on the matter is zionist.
To use an analogy that should be awfully clear:
If organization A has far more money/resources than group B and is financially supporting group B, and group A is clearly pro-choice, what are the chances that group B is actually pro-life?
Your comment is predicated on what you mean by "zionism". Anyone who supports a two-state solution is by definition zionist, because they're accepting it's ok for Israel to exist. So if your criticism over RfP and the Atlantic Council is that they don't want Israel to cease to exist...then yes they're guilty as charged.