Sorry to be late to the party. I think what MLK, Gandhi, Mandela and other people who created positive social change realize is that you have to make it safe for the other party to grant concessions. To put it another way, if you're fighting a democracy, you have to convince a certain proportion of the people that the change you want is in their interest. This is something most Palestinians and all the loudest supporters in the West have utterly failed to do. There is a very clear pattern since 1973: make peace with Israel, get land back (see: Egypt), or: make peace with Israel, and Israel will not attack you (see: Jordan.) Fail to make peace with Israel, and let your extremists sabotage the negotiations, and you get war. See: first Intifada, second Intifada, Lebanon War(s), Gaza war(s), etc.
I'm a middle-aged Jewish Zionist who has spent a fair amount of time in both Israel and some of the occupied (sic) territories, and would consider myself a leftist. But there's a reason the Left in Israel, which was ready to compromise and used comprise a pretty big part of the population, is now a mere shadow of its former self: they failed, over and over, to successfully conclude negotiations that would bring peace. That's not entirely their fault, but after Barak and then Olmert put almost everything on the table and got bupkis in return, the Right basically said: see, we told you this would never work. (Also, the religious right has more babies, but I think the first reason is bigger.)
To put it a third way, I'd love some of the noodleheads at the Gaza encampments to answer a very simple question: what would it take for the Knesset to vote to withdraw entirely from Gaza and the West Bank? How would you get there? When I have tried to ask this question, usually online, the answer is usually something like: Free Palestine, Palestine must be free, because Israel is a settler-colonial state.
OK, OK, great, Israel is a settler-colonial state, but it also has a badass army and nuclear weapons. You aren't going to convince Iran or Turkey to help you invade Tel Aviv and risk their capitals becoming holes in the ground. So maybe, just MAYBE, try behaving in a way that convinces Israelis that you're not trying to kill them all? So they vote for center and center-left parties that might cut a deal with you?
I read recently that the attacks on Jews in DC, Boulder, the worst of the encampment rhetoric, is ultimately such a self-own because the OG theory of Zionism is that we need a Jewish state because Jews aren't safe in the Diaspora. Well, fucking duh, every time you attack a Jewish event yelling "Free Palestine," you. . . . validate Zionist ideology and create Zionists.
Well done, Palestine activists.
PS: the lack of ability to connect your ideal vision of the future to concrete, practical steps to enact it in a democracy is hardly limited to Palestine activists. I used to travel more often in environmentalist circles and you'd hear "to stop climate change we need to totally change the economy from Earth-raping capitalism!" To which I'd ask: OK, great, how do we get there? How do we do that, with the Senate in the US set up the way it is? What Constitutional changes would you like to allow us to overthrow capitalism and how do you think we should go about getting those passed? Blank stares. . . . "to stop climate change we need to overthrow capitalism!"
Well... the third-largest political party in South Africa is currently chanting "Kill the Boer" with apparent legal impunity and Karmelo Anthony is a millionaire courtesy of donors writing "death to the white man", so... I mean, I could give other examples, but you get my drift.
One thing I would add: be prepared to take the win. Fundamentally, what most people will want from most protests is for them to shut up and go away. If the public/politicians/<insert whoever can grant your demands here> thinks that you will just find something else to protest even if they capitulate on everything…well then why would they capitulate in the first place?
Yes that's a good point. That's already included under the "have a coherent cause" principle, unless your cause is really just "perpetual & indefinite protests".
I think the observations being made in sections 3 and 4 are especially underrated. There's often this long chain of causation between the target of a protest and what's actually being protested. Since nothing tangible gets accomplished here, I suspect that these movements are more about the illusory feeling of importance and belonging to "something bigger".
Also, I have normal liberal politics when it comes to Israel, but what alienates me most from the pro-Palestine movement is that its most vocal members just don't seem to know very much. I'm not even talking about things like the depths of Israel's military capabilities, but even just recent historical context, the Israeli electoral landscape, stuff like that. I get irritated when (e.g.) someone calls Israel a "settler colonial state" (because it's incoherent). Online I notice that Gaza obsessives get fixated on minutia, so when they *do* know things, it's mostly a distraction. Some of my own neuroses are at play here for sure, but I can only associate myself with a cause if it puts a premium on literal truth - if it lets little inaccuracies slide for the sake of more provocative sloganeering, then they've lost me.
What are “normal liberal politics” on Israel? I am thinking like “generally pro-Israel and anti-Hamas but critical of the settlements, critical of Netanyahu, wanting a hostage deal”. Supporting the Democratic Party in the US and Yair Golan’s The Democrats in Israel. Being a big fan of Amos Oz. That kind of thing.
I used to be more like that but I got red-pilled on the Palestinian issue. Reality hits you hard. I still detest Smotrich and Ben-Gvir types to be clear.
The huge brained take is that the Smotrich and Ben Gvir types are making the same mistakes as the Palestinians. Living a good and peaceful life is much more important than grabbing some shitty land, even aside from all the other problems with it.
I don’t think the land is shitty. It’s warm and it’s nice hills and such. But yes in general irredentism is dumb. The only reason anyone should want to acquire land is to have a good life and advance human flourishing.
I find it sad, because there’s a lot the US government could do to pressure Israel that would genuinely make Palestinian’s lives better - dismantling outposts outside the “settlement blocks”, cracking down on settler violence, etc. It’s just that all these things center around a tacit agreement towards a two state solution, which these protesters fundamentally disagree with.
Patrick Radden Keefe described the split between the Irish community in the US vs the one the North Ireland during the Good Friday agreements - the Americans were far more radical than the Irish, mostly because they didn’t have to live with the consequences of their maximalism and thus had no incentive to moderate. I think there’s something similar happening in the pro-Palestinian movement as well.
I always hated concern trolling from Western leftists who oppose the settlements but also oppose the war. Winning the war and not resettling Gaza would undermine one of the Israeli right’s core arguments, that settlements are necessary to have security and no Hamas takeover.
I agree with every word. I recently got accused of being evil on X because I insist on treating all people as human. Even the ones who hate me. I am learning Arabic so that I can communicate with Muslim people.
Thanks for writing and sharing. I enjoy almost everything you write.
2) To fuck over their enemies and hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth of their women
The problem is, you can't always get what you want, and what you want isn't always what you need. The majority of Palestinians have arguably prioritized 2) over 1), and it's the policy of progressive leftists to defer to the minority group to define what is good for them and uncritically support it. Thus they end up supporting Hamas and their violent actions. Whether 2) is better than 1) or even possible is not taken into consideration.
Agree wholeheartedly with this. The incoherence you mention in step 1 is particularly frustrating because I don't even know where the good-faith starting point for talking to these people are. Parsing what they ACTUALLY believe is exhausting.
I generally agree, but to steelman some of the things pro Palestinians have done:
"either you feed me, or else I’ll starve myself" - isn't this effectively what unions do when they stop working and get paid nothing because they want to get paid more?
"there is a serious risk that an arms embargo would make that worse!" - a pro Palestinian deontologist would say you can't know the consequences of these actions, so you should do what's right and not try for a triple bank shot rationalization.
The union analogy is really good. Labor strikes are analogous to the Uncommitted movement in the sense of "I predict you'll capitulate because I'm gambling that this will hurt you more than it will hurt me". The distinction is that unions know to never disrupt operations past the point what a business can financially endure. Striking a business into insolvency is a fatal overshot that helps no one. The same applies to protesting a political party into helping you to the point where it can no longer help you.
You're correct that a pro-Palestinian deontologist could hold that position and be logically consistent. I am skeptical that this deontologist exists but if they do I would love to interrogate their prioritizations.
No, unions are damaging the business along with themselves, in exchange for a directly actionable demand that accomplishes exactly what they want, while being completely legal.
Hunger strikes are just self-inflicted damage that only work if the university is on your side. Otherwise they can just tell you to have fun starving. Plus the demands are usually tangentially related to the cause at best.
The section on Israel's arms industry, highly informative though it is for people new to the topic, doesn't quite do it justice.
One might wonder how a highly unpopular country the size of New Jersey came to be the world's 8th largest arms exporter, which implies something more than a strong domestic arms industry explained by past embargoes. The answer is that in terms of sophistication, Israel's arms industry (especially Rafael) isn't just world-class, it's world-leader. The easiest way to see this is by noting that Israel exports high-tech weapons systems to the US, a distinction shared by no other country. Having a good or even great product won't get you past the US defense contractors' lobby; what you need is something truly unique. The Trophy APS and Spike NLOS are two such systems, both made by Rafael. The SPICE family mentioned in the post is in fact *more* precise than the JDAM and SDB; those are mostly guided by GPS (with some variants also using laser in the terminal phase), while the SPICE family combines GPS with electro-optical guidance (*). It's really only the aircraft themselves that Israel can't produce locally, and even that might not have been the case had a certain Israeli cabinet meeting gone slightly differently (see IAI Lavi).
(*) This only somewhat contradicts the post's claim in this context, since JDAM's and SDB's are cheaper and plentiful compared to the higher-quality SPICE family
That’s very interesting! I hadn’t done a deep enough dive to know about the Lavi. Do you have sources or articles about Israel’s military or industrial capabilities that you think I would benefit from reading?
Unfortunately, no. My knowledge comes from working in, uh, an adjacent field. I tried looking for a good comprehensive source, but no such luck. Best I found is this:
I’m glad that these people are making huge tactical mistakes. The more they shoot themselves in the foot the better.
The worst would be an extremely nonviolent movement that renounces all violence and condemned Hamas but called for boycotts and sanctions until you had a Palestinian state in place of Israel. That would actually have some chance of success. Replacing Israel with a failed third-world Zimbabwe-like or Syria-like or Lebanon-like state would of course be awful. That was called “BDS” and had *some* victories, though it was more effective when just focused on the West Bank (as left-Zionists like Amos Oz supported) and not against Israel itself. Though it’s probably too late for that now thanks to Nvidia.
I understand and empathize with this dimension. For example, I'm really glad that MAGA is staffed full of thoroughly incompetent imbeciles! My motivation for writing this should be apparent; it was primarily to flex that my critiques are not just based on a disagreement on mission.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake!
But don’t worry. The CUAD crowd isn’t getting tips on how to protest from Yassine.
How related do you think the craziness of the protest movement and the craziness of its goals are? I think there’s some positive correlation. A movement that wants something crazy like the end of Israel will attract crazier people.
Probably in general it’s not a perfect correlation. Still I don’t think that this movement is any less crazy than a movement with such crazy goals can be.
My implicit message is that this protest movement isn't actually crazy _provided_ you accurately identify their actual goal. Their actions make perfect sense viewed through the right lens.
I empathize with Palestinians. To the extent the cause is just: there's a lot of materiel to work with as thousands of Palestinian civilians are dying. They are a stateless people trapped between Arab countries (whose governments do not like them) and Israel (who basically hates them). I think a Pro-Palestinian movement could gain a lot of legs, but their first priority should be to kick the bums leading Palestine out of office. Abbas and Hamas are dreadful: get them out and their job becomes a lot easier.
You would need to look at the polls. Depends on which Israelis. Ben-Gvir hates the Palestinians. Given that it wasn’t too long ago that most Israelis supported a two-state solution, you are probably right about most Israelis.
You get it wrong. You see someone like Ben Gvir strongly fighting for Jewish Israeli lives and you assume he hates Arabs/Palestinians. Not so. He doesn't trust them. He believes what they say in Arabic and not what they say in English.
Ben-Gvir is a fascist who was banned from serving in the IDF because he is too extremist. Smotrich said he wouldn't want his wife to give birth in the same room as an Arab. I don't think most Israelis really hate Palestinians but a minority definitely does.
I emphasize with Palestinian civilians too. Unfortunately Palestinian nationalists oppose any solution to the conflict where Israel continues to exist and as such prioritize their crazy nationalistic dreams over the welfare of the Palestinian people. Polls showed 3/4 of Palestinians supporting 10/7 when it happened even though it was a huge disaster for them.
"endless manhours were wasted on fruitlessly trying to convince some universities to divest from some index funds which include some companies with some operations in Israel"
Ok yeah, it didn't work, but in general, divestment seems like a good nonviolent way to extract pain on groups you don't like.
You point out the money was in index funds, but it seems pretty straightforward for something the size of a university to create its own index fund sans the "bad" companies
I agree that divestment can indeed be effective, particularly within illiquid or local markets. Boycotts can be devastating if you get enough adherents, or if the target is small enough.
The problem here is that the actions were several steps removed to a useless degree. Columbia U's endowment is a formidable $15 billion but it's spread across several hedge and index funds. Capital markets are the textbook definition of liquid and fungible, and you need to divest a fuuuuuuckton of money to have any appreciable impact because there's millions of buyers ready to snap up whatever assets fall a penny below market value. Even ginormous sovereign wealth funds handling trillions in assets would struggle to make a blip with their actions.
I uhh... hadn't thought it through like that. I see now, in an efficient market the only way you can hurt a company by divestment is to withdraw enough money to squeeze thier free cash, which isn't really feasible. You're not going to hurt thier stock price unless you're able to attack thier fundamentals. One fewer thing in the protest toolkit...
I really hate that the most you can expect from divestment is making some stock investor without your scruples some extra money by letting them buy the bad company at a discount...
But the deontologist in me says you should do it anyway if it's something seriously bad, regardless of what you can expect to accomplish
I understand the sentiment. A good illustrative case is the Russian oil sector, where international sanctions have drastically narrowed their export market. China and India are still willing to buy Russian oil but only at a ~20% discount.
I wouldn't want to buy Russian oil because the money funds killing Ukrainians. I'd have to think about it more but I might not have any deontologist beliefs.
Sorry to be late to the party. I think what MLK, Gandhi, Mandela and other people who created positive social change realize is that you have to make it safe for the other party to grant concessions. To put it another way, if you're fighting a democracy, you have to convince a certain proportion of the people that the change you want is in their interest. This is something most Palestinians and all the loudest supporters in the West have utterly failed to do. There is a very clear pattern since 1973: make peace with Israel, get land back (see: Egypt), or: make peace with Israel, and Israel will not attack you (see: Jordan.) Fail to make peace with Israel, and let your extremists sabotage the negotiations, and you get war. See: first Intifada, second Intifada, Lebanon War(s), Gaza war(s), etc.
I'm a middle-aged Jewish Zionist who has spent a fair amount of time in both Israel and some of the occupied (sic) territories, and would consider myself a leftist. But there's a reason the Left in Israel, which was ready to compromise and used comprise a pretty big part of the population, is now a mere shadow of its former self: they failed, over and over, to successfully conclude negotiations that would bring peace. That's not entirely their fault, but after Barak and then Olmert put almost everything on the table and got bupkis in return, the Right basically said: see, we told you this would never work. (Also, the religious right has more babies, but I think the first reason is bigger.)
To put it a third way, I'd love some of the noodleheads at the Gaza encampments to answer a very simple question: what would it take for the Knesset to vote to withdraw entirely from Gaza and the West Bank? How would you get there? When I have tried to ask this question, usually online, the answer is usually something like: Free Palestine, Palestine must be free, because Israel is a settler-colonial state.
OK, OK, great, Israel is a settler-colonial state, but it also has a badass army and nuclear weapons. You aren't going to convince Iran or Turkey to help you invade Tel Aviv and risk their capitals becoming holes in the ground. So maybe, just MAYBE, try behaving in a way that convinces Israelis that you're not trying to kill them all? So they vote for center and center-left parties that might cut a deal with you?
I read recently that the attacks on Jews in DC, Boulder, the worst of the encampment rhetoric, is ultimately such a self-own because the OG theory of Zionism is that we need a Jewish state because Jews aren't safe in the Diaspora. Well, fucking duh, every time you attack a Jewish event yelling "Free Palestine," you. . . . validate Zionist ideology and create Zionists.
Well done, Palestine activists.
PS: the lack of ability to connect your ideal vision of the future to concrete, practical steps to enact it in a democracy is hardly limited to Palestine activists. I used to travel more often in environmentalist circles and you'd hear "to stop climate change we need to totally change the economy from Earth-raping capitalism!" To which I'd ask: OK, great, how do we get there? How do we do that, with the Senate in the US set up the way it is? What Constitutional changes would you like to allow us to overthrow capitalism and how do you think we should go about getting those passed? Blank stares. . . . "to stop climate change we need to overthrow capitalism!"
Very well said. The inability for activists to cleanly articulate how they can achieve their goals is the best indicator of a performative mission.
I agree with a lot of this, but in retrospect it’s pretty debatable whether MLK and Mandela’s vision of ‘social change’ was entirely positive.
Oh? What about MLK's vision wasn't positive in your view?
Nu, say more.
Well... the third-largest political party in South Africa is currently chanting "Kill the Boer" with apparent legal impunity and Karmelo Anthony is a millionaire courtesy of donors writing "death to the white man", so... I mean, I could give other examples, but you get my drift.
Great article
One thing I would add: be prepared to take the win. Fundamentally, what most people will want from most protests is for them to shut up and go away. If the public/politicians/<insert whoever can grant your demands here> thinks that you will just find something else to protest even if they capitulate on everything…well then why would they capitulate in the first place?
Yes that's a good point. That's already included under the "have a coherent cause" principle, unless your cause is really just "perpetual & indefinite protests".
I think the observations being made in sections 3 and 4 are especially underrated. There's often this long chain of causation between the target of a protest and what's actually being protested. Since nothing tangible gets accomplished here, I suspect that these movements are more about the illusory feeling of importance and belonging to "something bigger".
Also, I have normal liberal politics when it comes to Israel, but what alienates me most from the pro-Palestine movement is that its most vocal members just don't seem to know very much. I'm not even talking about things like the depths of Israel's military capabilities, but even just recent historical context, the Israeli electoral landscape, stuff like that. I get irritated when (e.g.) someone calls Israel a "settler colonial state" (because it's incoherent). Online I notice that Gaza obsessives get fixated on minutia, so when they *do* know things, it's mostly a distraction. Some of my own neuroses are at play here for sure, but I can only associate myself with a cause if it puts a premium on literal truth - if it lets little inaccuracies slide for the sake of more provocative sloganeering, then they've lost me.
What are “normal liberal politics” on Israel? I am thinking like “generally pro-Israel and anti-Hamas but critical of the settlements, critical of Netanyahu, wanting a hostage deal”. Supporting the Democratic Party in the US and Yair Golan’s The Democrats in Israel. Being a big fan of Amos Oz. That kind of thing.
I used to be more like that but I got red-pilled on the Palestinian issue. Reality hits you hard. I still detest Smotrich and Ben-Gvir types to be clear.
The huge brained take is that the Smotrich and Ben Gvir types are making the same mistakes as the Palestinians. Living a good and peaceful life is much more important than grabbing some shitty land, even aside from all the other problems with it.
I don’t think the land is shitty. It’s warm and it’s nice hills and such. But yes in general irredentism is dumb. The only reason anyone should want to acquire land is to have a good life and advance human flourishing.
Yes.
I find it sad, because there’s a lot the US government could do to pressure Israel that would genuinely make Palestinian’s lives better - dismantling outposts outside the “settlement blocks”, cracking down on settler violence, etc. It’s just that all these things center around a tacit agreement towards a two state solution, which these protesters fundamentally disagree with.
Patrick Radden Keefe described the split between the Irish community in the US vs the one the North Ireland during the Good Friday agreements - the Americans were far more radical than the Irish, mostly because they didn’t have to live with the consequences of their maximalism and thus had no incentive to moderate. I think there’s something similar happening in the pro-Palestinian movement as well.
I always hated concern trolling from Western leftists who oppose the settlements but also oppose the war. Winning the war and not resettling Gaza would undermine one of the Israeli right’s core arguments, that settlements are necessary to have security and no Hamas takeover.
I agree with every word. I recently got accused of being evil on X because I insist on treating all people as human. Even the ones who hate me. I am learning Arabic so that I can communicate with Muslim people.
Thanks for writing and sharing. I enjoy almost everything you write.
Is this legal advice? But thanks for the connection! Would he be willing to subscribe to my substack?
Briefly: there are two things most peoples want.
1) To live a good life
2) To fuck over their enemies and hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth of their women
The problem is, you can't always get what you want, and what you want isn't always what you need. The majority of Palestinians have arguably prioritized 2) over 1), and it's the policy of progressive leftists to defer to the minority group to define what is good for them and uncritically support it. Thus they end up supporting Hamas and their violent actions. Whether 2) is better than 1) or even possible is not taken into consideration.
This is 100% correct, and in fact something I'm planning to write about.
Agree wholeheartedly with this. The incoherence you mention in step 1 is particularly frustrating because I don't even know where the good-faith starting point for talking to these people are. Parsing what they ACTUALLY believe is exhausting.
I generally agree, but to steelman some of the things pro Palestinians have done:
"either you feed me, or else I’ll starve myself" - isn't this effectively what unions do when they stop working and get paid nothing because they want to get paid more?
"there is a serious risk that an arms embargo would make that worse!" - a pro Palestinian deontologist would say you can't know the consequences of these actions, so you should do what's right and not try for a triple bank shot rationalization.
The union analogy is really good. Labor strikes are analogous to the Uncommitted movement in the sense of "I predict you'll capitulate because I'm gambling that this will hurt you more than it will hurt me". The distinction is that unions know to never disrupt operations past the point what a business can financially endure. Striking a business into insolvency is a fatal overshot that helps no one. The same applies to protesting a political party into helping you to the point where it can no longer help you.
You're correct that a pro-Palestinian deontologist could hold that position and be logically consistent. I am skeptical that this deontologist exists but if they do I would love to interrogate their prioritizations.
"I am skeptical that this deontologist exists."
It's not me lol. Well...at least not beyond feeling bad for the people trapped there who don't support Hamas.
No, unions are damaging the business along with themselves, in exchange for a directly actionable demand that accomplishes exactly what they want, while being completely legal.
Hunger strikes are just self-inflicted damage that only work if the university is on your side. Otherwise they can just tell you to have fun starving. Plus the demands are usually tangentially related to the cause at best.
The section on Israel's arms industry, highly informative though it is for people new to the topic, doesn't quite do it justice.
One might wonder how a highly unpopular country the size of New Jersey came to be the world's 8th largest arms exporter, which implies something more than a strong domestic arms industry explained by past embargoes. The answer is that in terms of sophistication, Israel's arms industry (especially Rafael) isn't just world-class, it's world-leader. The easiest way to see this is by noting that Israel exports high-tech weapons systems to the US, a distinction shared by no other country. Having a good or even great product won't get you past the US defense contractors' lobby; what you need is something truly unique. The Trophy APS and Spike NLOS are two such systems, both made by Rafael. The SPICE family mentioned in the post is in fact *more* precise than the JDAM and SDB; those are mostly guided by GPS (with some variants also using laser in the terminal phase), while the SPICE family combines GPS with electro-optical guidance (*). It's really only the aircraft themselves that Israel can't produce locally, and even that might not have been the case had a certain Israeli cabinet meeting gone slightly differently (see IAI Lavi).
(*) This only somewhat contradicts the post's claim in this context, since JDAM's and SDB's are cheaper and plentiful compared to the higher-quality SPICE family
That’s very interesting! I hadn’t done a deep enough dive to know about the Lavi. Do you have sources or articles about Israel’s military or industrial capabilities that you think I would benefit from reading?
Unfortunately, no. My knowledge comes from working in, uh, an adjacent field. I tried looking for a good comprehensive source, but no such luck. Best I found is this:
https://www.amazon.com/Weapon-Wizards-High-Tech-Military-Superpower/dp/125008833X
Spike NLOS making headlines
https://www.twz.com/news-features/spike-missiles-that-destroyed-air-defenses-from-inside-iran-were-remotely-operated
Wild
I’m glad that these people are making huge tactical mistakes. The more they shoot themselves in the foot the better.
The worst would be an extremely nonviolent movement that renounces all violence and condemned Hamas but called for boycotts and sanctions until you had a Palestinian state in place of Israel. That would actually have some chance of success. Replacing Israel with a failed third-world Zimbabwe-like or Syria-like or Lebanon-like state would of course be awful. That was called “BDS” and had *some* victories, though it was more effective when just focused on the West Bank (as left-Zionists like Amos Oz supported) and not against Israel itself. Though it’s probably too late for that now thanks to Nvidia.
I understand and empathize with this dimension. For example, I'm really glad that MAGA is staffed full of thoroughly incompetent imbeciles! My motivation for writing this should be apparent; it was primarily to flex that my critiques are not just based on a disagreement on mission.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake!
But don’t worry. The CUAD crowd isn’t getting tips on how to protest from Yassine.
How related do you think the craziness of the protest movement and the craziness of its goals are? I think there’s some positive correlation. A movement that wants something crazy like the end of Israel will attract crazier people.
Probably in general it’s not a perfect correlation. Still I don’t think that this movement is any less crazy than a movement with such crazy goals can be.
My implicit message is that this protest movement isn't actually crazy _provided_ you accurately identify their actual goal. Their actions make perfect sense viewed through the right lens.
“I don’t blame you for rolling your eyes at the last paragraph, though I’m still . “
Did you forget to finish the sentence?
Look, we all know that the best proofreading happens after you hit send
Amazing. I started to read, and I thought to myself, “Well, a good first step is not to be repeating genocidal slogans.”
And your very first point was that h the cause must be just!
I empathize with Palestinians. To the extent the cause is just: there's a lot of materiel to work with as thousands of Palestinian civilians are dying. They are a stateless people trapped between Arab countries (whose governments do not like them) and Israel (who basically hates them). I think a Pro-Palestinian movement could gain a lot of legs, but their first priority should be to kick the bums leading Palestine out of office. Abbas and Hamas are dreadful: get them out and their job becomes a lot easier.
Israel doesn't hate Palestinians, we have lost any illusions of them being willing to live alongside us in peace. Lack of trust does not equal hate.
You would need to look at the polls. Depends on which Israelis. Ben-Gvir hates the Palestinians. Given that it wasn’t too long ago that most Israelis supported a two-state solution, you are probably right about most Israelis.
You get it wrong. You see someone like Ben Gvir strongly fighting for Jewish Israeli lives and you assume he hates Arabs/Palestinians. Not so. He doesn't trust them. He believes what they say in Arabic and not what they say in English.
Again, don't conflate lack of trust with hate.
Ben-Gvir is a fascist who was banned from serving in the IDF because he is too extremist. Smotrich said he wouldn't want his wife to give birth in the same room as an Arab. I don't think most Israelis really hate Palestinians but a minority definitely does.
Ben Gvir was not drafted because of his extremist views, yes. Does being a Kahanist mean one hates Jews? Not necessarily. Not trust, definitely.
I'll agree with you re Smotrich. And sure, there are Israelis who hate Arabs. But most of us don't hate -- we don't trust.
Most Israelis don't hate Arabs yes. But a sizable minority do.
Wow. You're such a nice guy
I emphasize with Palestinian civilians too. Unfortunately Palestinian nationalists oppose any solution to the conflict where Israel continues to exist and as such prioritize their crazy nationalistic dreams over the welfare of the Palestinian people. Polls showed 3/4 of Palestinians supporting 10/7 when it happened even though it was a huge disaster for them.
Go away you shitty "Yassine Meshkout" impersonator. Why did you even add the ' ? You didn't even spell his name correctly.
Much of this could be repeated for the LA Riots.
It works for everything!
"endless manhours were wasted on fruitlessly trying to convince some universities to divest from some index funds which include some companies with some operations in Israel"
Ok yeah, it didn't work, but in general, divestment seems like a good nonviolent way to extract pain on groups you don't like.
You point out the money was in index funds, but it seems pretty straightforward for something the size of a university to create its own index fund sans the "bad" companies
I agree that divestment can indeed be effective, particularly within illiquid or local markets. Boycotts can be devastating if you get enough adherents, or if the target is small enough.
The problem here is that the actions were several steps removed to a useless degree. Columbia U's endowment is a formidable $15 billion but it's spread across several hedge and index funds. Capital markets are the textbook definition of liquid and fungible, and you need to divest a fuuuuuuckton of money to have any appreciable impact because there's millions of buyers ready to snap up whatever assets fall a penny below market value. Even ginormous sovereign wealth funds handling trillions in assets would struggle to make a blip with their actions.
I uhh... hadn't thought it through like that. I see now, in an efficient market the only way you can hurt a company by divestment is to withdraw enough money to squeeze thier free cash, which isn't really feasible. You're not going to hurt thier stock price unless you're able to attack thier fundamentals. One fewer thing in the protest toolkit...
Now I've got two thoughts about this:
I really hate that the most you can expect from divestment is making some stock investor without your scruples some extra money by letting them buy the bad company at a discount...
But the deontologist in me says you should do it anyway if it's something seriously bad, regardless of what you can expect to accomplish
I understand the sentiment. A good illustrative case is the Russian oil sector, where international sanctions have drastically narrowed their export market. China and India are still willing to buy Russian oil but only at a ~20% discount.
I wouldn't want to buy Russian oil because the money funds killing Ukrainians. I'd have to think about it more but I might not have any deontologist beliefs.
> I don’t blame you for rolling your eyes at the last paragraph, though I’m still .
Were there some words missing after "still"?
nope, woopsies