"It would be easy, really easy, to debunk 95% of anti-Zionism, but the problem is that the only weapon you have to do so is truth and then, uh-oh, poof that’s your Zionism gone too."
How so? I mean Benny Morris is still a Zionist and he's pretty clear-pilled on the whole thing, in a pinch Haviv Rettig-Gur can be alright too all things considered. I mean hell I'm still Zionistic after everything I've learned, I just became less zealous in a lot of areas. I just don't see why Zionism and objectivity have to be mutually exclusive. I have a lot of respect for your goals with this blog, and I think it can do a lot of good for Am Yisroel, but occasional lines like this only serve to turn off Jewish normies before they have a chance to get into the meat of your arguments.
Otherwise good article, I hope you and yours have a joyous Purim.
I think I covered it with "Unless you are a major psycho, if you have a reasonably accurate view of what happened in this place over the past 140 years, you’re going to end up, at most, a very tepid kind of Zionist. You’ll sympathise with Zionists up to a point, but you’ll think it was a pretty dumb idea because of basic facts they should have been able to figure out." Benny Morris would be considered an anti-zionist by most Israelis. Many would call him an antisemite.
Good article as usual, but I think you overestimate how influential V-neck Arab elites are in Arab society, and even if they were they're also mostly ideologically captured and ( sometimes ) Islamists themselves.
You asked at one point about an Arab version of nonZionism and the closest example you could find was a Lebanese Christian living abroad, Muslim Arabs are becoming more and more chauvinistic about both their Islam and their Arabism but moreso their Islam.
And Islamists are getting whitewashed as well, just look over the border at Syria and you can see for your own eyes, so really there's no incentive for the average Sunni Arab not to double down even harder and proclaim that Jihadist Islamism is the only way forward. You may counter that Sunni Islamism is on the rise due to Israel decapitating the Shia axis but you'll be met with blank stares.
Israel is hawkishly militant for a reason, you and I may disagree with the strategy but on a geopolitical level this hawkish militancy is the reason it still exists and really the only reason Israel is respected in the region.
I think Israelis have tried to win over Arab elites one way or another but hit a brick wall, realizing that it's really tribal leaders and tinpot dictators that they need to "win over", and that can be done most efficiently with force.
My understanding is that religious ardour is on the decline across a large chunk of the MENA region, especially among the young, roughly coincident with collapsing TFR. So I'd be a little surprised if Jihadist Islamism went on the upswing over the coming decades, although maybe a more detailed demographic breakdown would suggest patterns I'm not aware of?
I guess liberal-progressive arguments against Zionism can always be trotted out to replace quotations from the Hadith.
I'd like to see a source for that because anecdotally Islamic conservatism is on the rise even here in Israel.
Sunni Salafist Jihadism will likely morph into Sunni chauvinism or supremacy rather than die off completely. The point of Jihadism was to fight the infidel invadors and now that they've fucked off from say, Afghanistan, what did we get? An Islamist, predominantly Sunni, Salafist government.
It's the same in Syria, after defeating the "infidel" Alawite regime the STG, despite marketing themselves as "pragmatic", are still a de facto Sunni supremacist organization and government.
Jihadism is but one face of Islamism, a means to an end with the end being the establishment of an Islamist state, one where the lack of education combined with religious fervor and fanaticism lead to oppression, poverty and frequent pogroms against perceived infidels or saboteurs.
A huge oversimplification. Aside from the fact that as others have pointed out about Taliban being anti salafism, the Afghan regime today is much more pragmatic about non Muslims than their predecessors or even democratic Islamic states in Turkey (this is in fact a problem of democracies in general; appealing to the people invariably means appealing to sectarianism, racism, and whatever garden variety bigotry that is popular with the masses)
It looks like the overall trend is downward, but there's increased polarisation as well, so both the secular and fundamentalist bloc may be growing simultaneously. The secular trend is most pronounced among young men, interestingly.
This is mostly true in North Africa and far away from Israel, you can see how in Jordan and the Palestinian territories the chart barely budges in that BBC article.
Interesting, I didn't know that Deobandism was not also based in the literal interpertations of the hadith and Quran that Salafism espouses. Thanks for clarifying!
You’re obviously correct that the conflict is not, fundamentally, about Islam. (However, Israel is right to push this false narrative - here in Britain, where most people used to be pretty indifferent to the conflict, expressing support for Israel has recently become a way of expressing your hostility to Muslim migration so the propaganda is working.)
However, I’m baffled by your assertion that Israeli and Arab views of the conflict are equally false and I don’t understand why you say the Arab view is “completely ridiculous”. The Arab view, as you say, is that Zionists got together with imperialists to facilitate Jewish settlement in Palestine and then later on the Arabs attacked the Jews and kicked them out. This is, more or less, what happened. Every attempt by Israel defenders to claim that this is not what happened comes down to a refusal to see the wood for the trees.
As ever, your main argument suffers from a glaring foundational weakness: You implicitly pretend that an alternative to Zionism ever existed or that an alternative to Zionism exists now. It's unbelievable to me that you can remain intellectually satisfied with this state of affairs.
For instance, you write that anyone today can see that "Zionism was a bad idea." But it's simply too intellectually dishonest to stop at that. You must ask: What were the other options? What was the better, less bad option? The reason why you don't ask, of course, is that the answer is obvious.
Similarly, it's simply too easy to state that you wouldn't mind to see the state dismantled, it's just not feasible right now. Yeah, no shit. And it never will be, so there you have it. That's Zionism. It's as banal as Churchill's defense of democracy, really.
And this is also to say: Of course you're a Zionist. You know way too much not to be one. Nothing you have written suggests that, when pushed, you are actually a "NonZionist." Because in all honesty you know what it would entail to be one.
You tell me: What would have been the consequence for Europe's Jews if they had not had the chance to move to Israel after the rest of the world either started killing them or shut its doors to them and left them to their own devices? And what would happen to Israel's Jews today if Israel ceased to exist?
I'm genuinely interested in your answers.
In real-world material reality Zionism is not about creating some kind of model state that is a light unto the nations. It's merely about Jews never again being left to their own devices in a hostile foreign state. It's really that simple, everything else is just ideological varnish (similar to the ideological varnish of all similar concepts). The State of Israel was not a "good" or "bad" idea. It was the only viable option for the world's Jews. If it had not been the only viable option, it would never have come to exist.
"What would have been the consequence for Europe's Jews if they had not had the chance to move to Israel after the rest of the world either started killing them or shut its doors to them and left them to their own devices?"
I can't correct all of the thousands of misapprehensions you have as result of your Zionist conditioning all at once, you have to work with me. Instead of asking rhetorical questions, ask actual questions starting with the premise that everything you think you know is probably wrong, because that's the situation.
When you address me, please do me the courtesy of pretending that you're not on the internet. However difficult that may be for you. I'd appreciate at least the attempt.
The fact that Jews at some point also couldn't move to Palestine does not mean that many thousands did not move to Palestine before Jews were not allowed to do so. As did the Holocaust survivors after 1945 who no European country wanted even then. As did Jews from Arab countries etc. My point is that I would like you to account for the many Jews who did manage to move to Israel. What would have happened to them if they had not had that option? We can also just go with your 1936 cut-off. At that point they indeed could not move to Palestine. How does that in any way refute the Zionist project? Also, when you say that the Zionist project totally failed by 1936, what, then, made it not fail subsequently?
You don't know anything about my misapprehensions. Again: Pretend you're not online. The questions I ask you are extremely simple: For many decades only a small number of ideologically lunatic Jews wanted to be Zionists and make aaliyah. Because very few Jews saw the point of living in a poverty and disease stricken swamp just based on ideological fervor. But eventually, millions moved to Israel. Why is that? Is it simply due to misguided apprehensions of a "bad idea"? Obviously not. People don't do something that insane at scale without a life or death impetus.
So: What do you propose - in the actual material reality of the 20th and the 21st centuries - as an alternative to the state of Israel for Israeli Jews?
The Jews who moved to Israel could have moved to other countries where land was cheaper and there weren't hostile natives. As I have written, for the cost of settling a single family in Israel, dozens could have been settled in Argentina. The Zionist movement was a big money sink that ended in failure, and the failure was 'fixed' through the Nakba, and so here we are today.
What I propose is actually very simple: we stop acting like fools and try to make the best of the mess we made instead of making it worse.
“Islam stiffens the Palestinian cause; it adds transcendence, after a fashion, intransigence, fanaticism, courage in the face of death, persistence in the face of hardship, that kind of stuff, plus, best of all, it gives a lot of excuses for teleological suspension of the ethical, which come in handy when there’s a granny to stab, a child’s throat to be slit. Islam isn’t necessarily better per se at winding up numnutses to do crazy nonsense than Arab nationalism, but it’s more timeless, less vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of ideological fashion. Islamicizing the conflict also gets you support from countries like Indonesia and Pakistan, that don’t objectively have anything to do with the dispute, but do share your religion.”
This is precisely why it is mostly about Islam. Sans the ‘slam, it would just be an ordinary territorial conflict adjudicated similarly to the thousands that came before it. Israel whooped that trick and that would have been the end of it. Instead, Islam injects an irrationality into it that perpetuates things past their logical conclusion.
Without Islam, they wouldn't have the support of a 2 billion Ummah that controls 70% of the world's oil reserves. So they would have stopped around the time others fighting for territorial claims, i.e, Jordan and Egypt, stopped.
That's silly. There's no way for the Palestinians to 'stop' - they're under occupation by the Israelis and terrorism amounts, in fine, to them lashing out.
Palestinians in Jordan - roughly half of that state's citizenry - aren't attacking Israel. Can you guess what primarily distinguishes them from their brethren in the occupied territories?
Today, Palestinian terrorism is, as you say, basically lashing out, but the 1st and 2nd intifadas were planned with specific goals in mind, none of which have been achieved. The basic reason for this is that Palestinian intellectuals decided that their model was the Algerian nationalist, and this was just completely wrong.
My sense is that the 1st Intifada was largely a bottom-up event that was only co-opted by the PLO after it broke out.
Meanwhile, the 2nd Intifada was planned. I agree that the assumptions of the PLO/Fatah leadership were faulty, albeit I don't know how much the Algerian model played a role here - in 2000 the PLO had abandoned its initial goal of reversing '48.
If anything, it appears to me that the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon had a bigger impact on Palestinian leadership assumptions than Algeria at the time.
I guess weakly corroborating this thesis is that although you do have non-Arab Muslim countries like Iran and Pakistan, which are very hostile to Zionism, historically Israel has had much more success with the non-Arab Muslim states than the Arab ones. E.g. Azerbaijan, Turkey (historically), Iran (historically), Somaliland, Turkmenistan, etc.
The only Arab party in this country that is not explicitly in favour of ending the state of Israel is Islamic. It's pretty obvious when you take a step back.
I agree with your basic premise that Islam is not really the most important factor here, more of an accelerator or intensifier, a way to shape a people into cannon fodder.
I don't agree, though, that the hatred of the Arabs towards Israel is especially relevant, at least until Israel fully loses U.S. sponsorship, which who knows if and when that will ever happen. Until that day comes there is no Arab state will actually go to war with Israel.
The only actual security concern is the Palestinians, and the hate Palestinians have for Israel is not a solvable problem. But that hate is not the reason they fight, they fight because they think they can and will eventually win. That's it. There is no other reason. The second they come to believe that they cannot win, fighting will stop.
How to solve that problem, how to convince the Palestinians that they can't win, is a good question. I think the war in Gaza was a positive step in that direction, as horrible as it was. It reinforced the idea that Israel can and will go to extreme measures to protect itself when actually threatened, which I think people have not seen in a while. That was probably a good reminder for the Palestinians.
It's possible that it will only end if there's a similar October 7th-style attempt in the West Bank that is then successfully repulsed and forces the IDF to launch massive retaliatory and strategic operations that kill many, many, West Bank Palestinians and force many, many of them of the land, and again reinforce Israel's willingness to be brutal in order to survive.
I don't know how serious the small arms and machine guns and bombs being moved around by heavy drone through the Negev and into the West Bank actually is. The alarmist settler types are being very alarmist about it, but that kind of thing may be a precursor and a trigger for this kind of attack. If it plays out the way Gaza post 10/7 did, it might be the thing that actually breaks the Palestinian spirit for good.
In a sense, yes. The vast majority of their elites would likely emigrate, and for those that remain, many would suddenly become amenable to less violent ways of resolving the issue, such as becoming Israeli Arabs or seeking Jordanian annexation of geographic chunks or accepting a less-than-sovereign polity within Israel proper, maybe following Native American Rez style.
Over time, Palestinian identity itself would fade. A nation that defines itself by its eternal war with an existential enemy ceases to exist when it decisively loses that eternal war.
Israel won't let them become Israeli Arabs - even though current demographic trends wouldn't threaten to end the Jewish majority, to give them citizenship and the vote would completely upend Israeli politics.
Besides, Israel's future is Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. The country is closer to genocide - actual, eliminationist genocide, not what's been done to Gaza - than to absorbing millions of Palestinians as equal citizens.
20 years ago the Israeli polity looked very different than it does today, and 20 years from now it can look very different again. Smotrich and Ben Gvir exist because the "negotiate" faction conclusively lost their war with reality and delegitimized their position for a generation.
If facts on the ground change, and the threat Israel faces from local Arabs recedes, there will almost certainly be a new appetite for negotiation and integration.
Too late for that. Not to excuse how the Arabs have behaved historically, but it's out of their hands now. Go down to Kfar Chabad and talk to your guys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NDJq_bTgnU.
I must confess I don't have your ability to mine deep wisdom from 20 second clips of young men dancing with a controversial celebrity. Maybe use more words to make your point.
Great article. I always look forward to them and rarely do they disappoint. It would be nice if, for some (or even one) of your articles, you could have the target audience be Jewish normies, or at least not include stuff that would completely shut them off. I often want to send your articles to my Zio friends and family but your stuff is either too “R rated”/offensive/radical to send (for example it’s hard to send this to a hasbaratard lite). It’s not your style which I understand but unfortunately there is no PG version of you
I think you do a bit of a bait and switch here: "the problem is that the only weapon you have to do so is truth and then, uh-oh, poof that’s your Zionism gone too"
What I think you mean is that zionism was a flawed idea, and that it's not clear that Jews are better off with Israel than in the counterfactual. But that's not the currently relevant question. Zionism now means should the current Jews have a current state.
Yes, I don't care at all if Jews have a state. If there's a way of dissolving this state that improves the situation, that's fine. For the time being, keeping the state of Israel seems preferable to any other option. That's where I think anyone ends up once they take the red pill, and that's not Zionism.
If there was an option for the population to live in US style security without having to uproot their families, and it was a stable enough political situation that everyone was confident it would last a very long time, but it required a totally different political arrangement, then I'm sure that would split the zionist coalition and many would agree with you. But that possibility is total fantasy, so we are where we are.
The first step to peace is to debunk anti-Zionist narratives. On this much I agree with the Zionists. The problem is that if they actually want to do it, they will have to debunk Zionist narratives. The nemesis can only be destroyed by also destroying what produced it.
I see myself circling round back to a basic imperialist interpretation. Meaning that political Islamism is simply some regions‘ formula for generic anti-imperialism? Pakistan and Ireland may share their reasons for opposing Zionism. In this sense, Islamism is a modern phenomenon that mainly increases in aggression during military threat/struggle.
The fact that the outward appearance of Zionism has been entangled (or even dominated) in the West by American WASPs alongside the US military relationship make Israel look like a pawn of the Empire.
To ruin the obvious mashul: Islam is the ideological baby skull seaker. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for violence, but is quite optimized and uniquely useful to maximize it.
Surveys of Lebanese public opinion might give us insight into how a conflict between Israel and a 95% Christian Palestine might have evolved differently:
"One poll conducted immediately after October 7 by Hezbollah’s Consultative Centre for Studies and Documentation (CCSD) found that 80% of Lebanese supported the attacks, including 98% of Shi’ites, 86% of Sunnis and Druze and 60% of Christians."
"In contrast to the majority perception in other Arab countries, Lebanese are split as to whether there will have to be eventual “political negotiations for a Palestinian-Israeli agreement” as opposed to a “military solution.” 53% of Lebanese agreed with this proposal overall, with drastically different attitudes depending on sect. Only 25% of Shia agree with such a statement, as compared to 56% of Sunni and 75% of Christians."
The framing of a 1-10 historic perception is still firmly rooted in the dumb Zio/Arab kvetch matrix.
The actual matter at hand is violence, how much is necessary, and how much is advisable.
For the Arabs, the best they could hope for is a clever combo of emphasizing industry, and building up an unmanagable enclave of defensive capacity. They actually achieved this in Gaza, but then ofc "the cause" and Islam had to have their deformed baby on October 7th.
For Jews the equation is a little simpler. We have to deal with the guys who occasionally want to lap blood and stab you or whatever. The Zionist narrative world-building is secondary cope (the religious stuff is reliable and load bearing).
Whatever your opinion on how "Evil" or short sighted the militant chimp outs are, the real problem is that they at least temporarily work way better at reducing the blood juice box behavior than whatever enlightened gnosis you prefer.
The response to "muh middle east" can't be "the cost of doing business(in the middle east)".
I think this is mostly not true. The IDF has been going into Jenin and dealing with terrorist cells, and in general there has been a massive crackdown, much stricter checks at checkpoints, huge proportions of the West Bank essentially under quasi house arrest.
The Breslev guys are mostly dealing with bedouins who are non-political and just random people who get in their way. This makes *them* safer because the bedouins are willing to scrap with them over their hilltops, but it really makes no difference for the mass of the Israeli population. This has massive negative medium-term consequences for Israel for concentrated benefits for them and their heretic religion.
In theory, if Breslev militias would go in and have a shootout with the Al Quds brigade in Nablus, then that would be a win-win, but that's not what's happening.
"It would be easy, really easy, to debunk 95% of anti-Zionism, but the problem is that the only weapon you have to do so is truth and then, uh-oh, poof that’s your Zionism gone too."
How so? I mean Benny Morris is still a Zionist and he's pretty clear-pilled on the whole thing, in a pinch Haviv Rettig-Gur can be alright too all things considered. I mean hell I'm still Zionistic after everything I've learned, I just became less zealous in a lot of areas. I just don't see why Zionism and objectivity have to be mutually exclusive. I have a lot of respect for your goals with this blog, and I think it can do a lot of good for Am Yisroel, but occasional lines like this only serve to turn off Jewish normies before they have a chance to get into the meat of your arguments.
Otherwise good article, I hope you and yours have a joyous Purim.
I think I covered it with "Unless you are a major psycho, if you have a reasonably accurate view of what happened in this place over the past 140 years, you’re going to end up, at most, a very tepid kind of Zionist. You’ll sympathise with Zionists up to a point, but you’ll think it was a pretty dumb idea because of basic facts they should have been able to figure out." Benny Morris would be considered an anti-zionist by most Israelis. Many would call him an antisemite.
Look, a kid called someone אנטישמי at school yesterday because he didn't want to kill everyone in Gaza.
Judging by your responses, I highly doubt you are from עדות המזרח😀
At least in the part of Israeli opinion that I can sample, Benny Morris is now considered pretty mainstream.
That's good to hear
Good article as usual, but I think you overestimate how influential V-neck Arab elites are in Arab society, and even if they were they're also mostly ideologically captured and ( sometimes ) Islamists themselves.
You asked at one point about an Arab version of nonZionism and the closest example you could find was a Lebanese Christian living abroad, Muslim Arabs are becoming more and more chauvinistic about both their Islam and their Arabism but moreso their Islam.
And Islamists are getting whitewashed as well, just look over the border at Syria and you can see for your own eyes, so really there's no incentive for the average Sunni Arab not to double down even harder and proclaim that Jihadist Islamism is the only way forward. You may counter that Sunni Islamism is on the rise due to Israel decapitating the Shia axis but you'll be met with blank stares.
Israel is hawkishly militant for a reason, you and I may disagree with the strategy but on a geopolitical level this hawkish militancy is the reason it still exists and really the only reason Israel is respected in the region.
I think Israelis have tried to win over Arab elites one way or another but hit a brick wall, realizing that it's really tribal leaders and tinpot dictators that they need to "win over", and that can be done most efficiently with force.
My understanding is that religious ardour is on the decline across a large chunk of the MENA region, especially among the young, roughly coincident with collapsing TFR. So I'd be a little surprised if Jihadist Islamism went on the upswing over the coming decades, although maybe a more detailed demographic breakdown would suggest patterns I'm not aware of?
I guess liberal-progressive arguments against Zionism can always be trotted out to replace quotations from the Hadith.
I'd like to see a source for that because anecdotally Islamic conservatism is on the rise even here in Israel.
Sunni Salafist Jihadism will likely morph into Sunni chauvinism or supremacy rather than die off completely. The point of Jihadism was to fight the infidel invadors and now that they've fucked off from say, Afghanistan, what did we get? An Islamist, predominantly Sunni, Salafist government.
It's the same in Syria, after defeating the "infidel" Alawite regime the STG, despite marketing themselves as "pragmatic", are still a de facto Sunni supremacist organization and government.
Jihadism is but one face of Islamism, a means to an end with the end being the establishment of an Islamist state, one where the lack of education combined with religious fervor and fanaticism lead to oppression, poverty and frequent pogroms against perceived infidels or saboteurs.
A huge oversimplification. Aside from the fact that as others have pointed out about Taliban being anti salafism, the Afghan regime today is much more pragmatic about non Muslims than their predecessors or even democratic Islamic states in Turkey (this is in fact a problem of democracies in general; appealing to the people invariably means appealing to sectarianism, racism, and whatever garden variety bigotry that is popular with the masses)
It looks like the overall trend is downward, but there's increased polarisation as well, so both the secular and fundamentalist bloc may be growing simultaneously. The secular trend is most pronounced among young men, interestingly.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00207152251319750
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-48703377
https://www.arabbarometer.org/2020/04/is-the-mena-region-becoming-less-religious-an-interview-with-michael-robbins/
This is mostly true in North Africa and far away from Israel, you can see how in Jordan and the Palestinian territories the chart barely budges in that BBC article.
Interesting, I didn't know that Deobandism was not also based in the literal interpertations of the hadith and Quran that Salafism espouses. Thanks for clarifying!
Very, very hard, even for the true renaissance man to summon up the interest to become informed about Pakistan.
Pakistan? Fuck no
Afghanistan however..... Fuck no as well
The David wood video is amazing pull; bravo 🤣
You’re obviously correct that the conflict is not, fundamentally, about Islam. (However, Israel is right to push this false narrative - here in Britain, where most people used to be pretty indifferent to the conflict, expressing support for Israel has recently become a way of expressing your hostility to Muslim migration so the propaganda is working.)
However, I’m baffled by your assertion that Israeli and Arab views of the conflict are equally false and I don’t understand why you say the Arab view is “completely ridiculous”. The Arab view, as you say, is that Zionists got together with imperialists to facilitate Jewish settlement in Palestine and then later on the Arabs attacked the Jews and kicked them out. This is, more or less, what happened. Every attempt by Israel defenders to claim that this is not what happened comes down to a refusal to see the wood for the trees.
As ever, your main argument suffers from a glaring foundational weakness: You implicitly pretend that an alternative to Zionism ever existed or that an alternative to Zionism exists now. It's unbelievable to me that you can remain intellectually satisfied with this state of affairs.
For instance, you write that anyone today can see that "Zionism was a bad idea." But it's simply too intellectually dishonest to stop at that. You must ask: What were the other options? What was the better, less bad option? The reason why you don't ask, of course, is that the answer is obvious.
Similarly, it's simply too easy to state that you wouldn't mind to see the state dismantled, it's just not feasible right now. Yeah, no shit. And it never will be, so there you have it. That's Zionism. It's as banal as Churchill's defense of democracy, really.
And this is also to say: Of course you're a Zionist. You know way too much not to be one. Nothing you have written suggests that, when pushed, you are actually a "NonZionist." Because in all honesty you know what it would entail to be one.
What would it entail?
You tell me: What would have been the consequence for Europe's Jews if they had not had the chance to move to Israel after the rest of the world either started killing them or shut its doors to them and left them to their own devices? And what would happen to Israel's Jews today if Israel ceased to exist?
I'm genuinely interested in your answers.
In real-world material reality Zionism is not about creating some kind of model state that is a light unto the nations. It's merely about Jews never again being left to their own devices in a hostile foreign state. It's really that simple, everything else is just ideological varnish (similar to the ideological varnish of all similar concepts). The State of Israel was not a "good" or "bad" idea. It was the only viable option for the world's Jews. If it had not been the only viable option, it would never have come to exist.
"What would have been the consequence for Europe's Jews if they had not had the chance to move to Israel after the rest of the world either started killing them or shut its doors to them and left them to their own devices?"
Well, they couldn't move to Eretz Yisrael either because the Zionist project totally failed by 1936, so it would be exactly the same. https://nonzionism.com/p/the-holocaust-does-not-vindicate
I can't correct all of the thousands of misapprehensions you have as result of your Zionist conditioning all at once, you have to work with me. Instead of asking rhetorical questions, ask actual questions starting with the premise that everything you think you know is probably wrong, because that's the situation.
When you address me, please do me the courtesy of pretending that you're not on the internet. However difficult that may be for you. I'd appreciate at least the attempt.
The fact that Jews at some point also couldn't move to Palestine does not mean that many thousands did not move to Palestine before Jews were not allowed to do so. As did the Holocaust survivors after 1945 who no European country wanted even then. As did Jews from Arab countries etc. My point is that I would like you to account for the many Jews who did manage to move to Israel. What would have happened to them if they had not had that option? We can also just go with your 1936 cut-off. At that point they indeed could not move to Palestine. How does that in any way refute the Zionist project? Also, when you say that the Zionist project totally failed by 1936, what, then, made it not fail subsequently?
You don't know anything about my misapprehensions. Again: Pretend you're not online. The questions I ask you are extremely simple: For many decades only a small number of ideologically lunatic Jews wanted to be Zionists and make aaliyah. Because very few Jews saw the point of living in a poverty and disease stricken swamp just based on ideological fervor. But eventually, millions moved to Israel. Why is that? Is it simply due to misguided apprehensions of a "bad idea"? Obviously not. People don't do something that insane at scale without a life or death impetus.
So: What do you propose - in the actual material reality of the 20th and the 21st centuries - as an alternative to the state of Israel for Israeli Jews?
The Jews who moved to Israel could have moved to other countries where land was cheaper and there weren't hostile natives. As I have written, for the cost of settling a single family in Israel, dozens could have been settled in Argentina. The Zionist movement was a big money sink that ended in failure, and the failure was 'fixed' through the Nakba, and so here we are today.
What I propose is actually very simple: we stop acting like fools and try to make the best of the mess we made instead of making it worse.
"What I propose is actually very simple: we stop acting like fools and try to make the best of the mess we made instead of making it worse."
That sounds a whole lot like Zionism.
Not convinced, and you argue against yourself.
“Islam stiffens the Palestinian cause; it adds transcendence, after a fashion, intransigence, fanaticism, courage in the face of death, persistence in the face of hardship, that kind of stuff, plus, best of all, it gives a lot of excuses for teleological suspension of the ethical, which come in handy when there’s a granny to stab, a child’s throat to be slit. Islam isn’t necessarily better per se at winding up numnutses to do crazy nonsense than Arab nationalism, but it’s more timeless, less vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of ideological fashion. Islamicizing the conflict also gets you support from countries like Indonesia and Pakistan, that don’t objectively have anything to do with the dispute, but do share your religion.”
This is precisely why it is mostly about Islam. Sans the ‘slam, it would just be an ordinary territorial conflict adjudicated similarly to the thousands that came before it. Israel whooped that trick and that would have been the end of it. Instead, Islam injects an irrationality into it that perpetuates things past their logical conclusion.
When, in the absence of Islam, do you think the Palestinians would have stopped?
Without Islam, they wouldn't have the support of a 2 billion Ummah that controls 70% of the world's oil reserves. So they would have stopped around the time others fighting for territorial claims, i.e, Jordan and Egypt, stopped.
That's silly. There's no way for the Palestinians to 'stop' - they're under occupation by the Israelis and terrorism amounts, in fine, to them lashing out.
Palestinians in Jordan - roughly half of that state's citizenry - aren't attacking Israel. Can you guess what primarily distinguishes them from their brethren in the occupied territories?
The Hashemite dynasty and Black October.
Today, Palestinian terrorism is, as you say, basically lashing out, but the 1st and 2nd intifadas were planned with specific goals in mind, none of which have been achieved. The basic reason for this is that Palestinian intellectuals decided that their model was the Algerian nationalist, and this was just completely wrong.
My sense is that the 1st Intifada was largely a bottom-up event that was only co-opted by the PLO after it broke out.
Meanwhile, the 2nd Intifada was planned. I agree that the assumptions of the PLO/Fatah leadership were faulty, albeit I don't know how much the Algerian model played a role here - in 2000 the PLO had abandoned its initial goal of reversing '48.
If anything, it appears to me that the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon had a bigger impact on Palestinian leadership assumptions than Algeria at the time.
They don’t have to live with Jews.
That's one way to put it.
Another would be that they're not under Jewish occupation.
Cool, but you’ll have to explain Gaza that was neither occupied nor shared with Jews, but does have an insanely high level of Islamic fanaticism.
And Jordanian Palestinians just arm West Bank Palestinians anyway. Again, because of Ummah.
I guess weakly corroborating this thesis is that although you do have non-Arab Muslim countries like Iran and Pakistan, which are very hostile to Zionism, historically Israel has had much more success with the non-Arab Muslim states than the Arab ones. E.g. Azerbaijan, Turkey (historically), Iran (historically), Somaliland, Turkmenistan, etc.
The only Arab party in this country that is not explicitly in favour of ending the state of Israel is Islamic. It's pretty obvious when you take a step back.
Rabbi Kook was unfortunately named.
Somewhat related, I thought you might like this https://mijal.substack.com/p/purim-is-the-holiday-of-october-8th
I thought this would be really bad from the title, but it’s a nice message.
I agree with your basic premise that Islam is not really the most important factor here, more of an accelerator or intensifier, a way to shape a people into cannon fodder.
I don't agree, though, that the hatred of the Arabs towards Israel is especially relevant, at least until Israel fully loses U.S. sponsorship, which who knows if and when that will ever happen. Until that day comes there is no Arab state will actually go to war with Israel.
The only actual security concern is the Palestinians, and the hate Palestinians have for Israel is not a solvable problem. But that hate is not the reason they fight, they fight because they think they can and will eventually win. That's it. There is no other reason. The second they come to believe that they cannot win, fighting will stop.
How to solve that problem, how to convince the Palestinians that they can't win, is a good question. I think the war in Gaza was a positive step in that direction, as horrible as it was. It reinforced the idea that Israel can and will go to extreme measures to protect itself when actually threatened, which I think people have not seen in a while. That was probably a good reminder for the Palestinians.
It's possible that it will only end if there's a similar October 7th-style attempt in the West Bank that is then successfully repulsed and forces the IDF to launch massive retaliatory and strategic operations that kill many, many, West Bank Palestinians and force many, many of them of the land, and again reinforce Israel's willingness to be brutal in order to survive.
I don't know how serious the small arms and machine guns and bombs being moved around by heavy drone through the Negev and into the West Bank actually is. The alarmist settler types are being very alarmist about it, but that kind of thing may be a precursor and a trigger for this kind of attack. If it plays out the way Gaza post 10/7 did, it might be the thing that actually breaks the Palestinian spirit for good.
What will they do when their spirit is broken? WIll they dissolve?
In a sense, yes. The vast majority of their elites would likely emigrate, and for those that remain, many would suddenly become amenable to less violent ways of resolving the issue, such as becoming Israeli Arabs or seeking Jordanian annexation of geographic chunks or accepting a less-than-sovereign polity within Israel proper, maybe following Native American Rez style.
Over time, Palestinian identity itself would fade. A nation that defines itself by its eternal war with an existential enemy ceases to exist when it decisively loses that eternal war.
they'd become an ethnoreligious group like Jews whose nationalist desire for sovereignty over the land could be reactivated at any time
Israel won't let them become Israeli Arabs - even though current demographic trends wouldn't threaten to end the Jewish majority, to give them citizenship and the vote would completely upend Israeli politics.
Besides, Israel's future is Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. The country is closer to genocide - actual, eliminationist genocide, not what's been done to Gaza - than to absorbing millions of Palestinians as equal citizens.
20 years ago the Israeli polity looked very different than it does today, and 20 years from now it can look very different again. Smotrich and Ben Gvir exist because the "negotiate" faction conclusively lost their war with reality and delegitimized their position for a generation.
If facts on the ground change, and the threat Israel faces from local Arabs recedes, there will almost certainly be a new appetite for negotiation and integration.
Too late for that. Not to excuse how the Arabs have behaved historically, but it's out of their hands now. Go down to Kfar Chabad and talk to your guys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NDJq_bTgnU.
I must confess I don't have your ability to mine deep wisdom from 20 second clips of young men dancing with a controversial celebrity. Maybe use more words to make your point.
Great article. I always look forward to them and rarely do they disappoint. It would be nice if, for some (or even one) of your articles, you could have the target audience be Jewish normies, or at least not include stuff that would completely shut them off. I often want to send your articles to my Zio friends and family but your stuff is either too “R rated”/offensive/radical to send (for example it’s hard to send this to a hasbaratard lite). It’s not your style which I understand but unfortunately there is no PG version of you
My vision is that readers set up their own blogs and translate this stuff for normies.
Fair enough. Do you know of anyone who has done that yet?
Well, I don't think they'd appreciate me saying. I see things here and there that suggest the message is getting out.
I think you do a bit of a bait and switch here: "the problem is that the only weapon you have to do so is truth and then, uh-oh, poof that’s your Zionism gone too"
What I think you mean is that zionism was a flawed idea, and that it's not clear that Jews are better off with Israel than in the counterfactual. But that's not the currently relevant question. Zionism now means should the current Jews have a current state.
Yes, I don't care at all if Jews have a state. If there's a way of dissolving this state that improves the situation, that's fine. For the time being, keeping the state of Israel seems preferable to any other option. That's where I think anyone ends up once they take the red pill, and that's not Zionism.
If there was an option for the population to live in US style security without having to uproot their families, and it was a stable enough political situation that everyone was confident it would last a very long time, but it required a totally different political arrangement, then I'm sure that would split the zionist coalition and many would agree with you. But that possibility is total fantasy, so we are where we are.
The first step to peace is to debunk anti-Zionist narratives. On this much I agree with the Zionists. The problem is that if they actually want to do it, they will have to debunk Zionist narratives. The nemesis can only be destroyed by also destroying what produced it.
Appreciate your articles.
I see myself circling round back to a basic imperialist interpretation. Meaning that political Islamism is simply some regions‘ formula for generic anti-imperialism? Pakistan and Ireland may share their reasons for opposing Zionism. In this sense, Islamism is a modern phenomenon that mainly increases in aggression during military threat/struggle.
The fact that the outward appearance of Zionism has been entangled (or even dominated) in the West by American WASPs alongside the US military relationship make Israel look like a pawn of the Empire.
https://youtu.be/osgrd1MPb7I?si=GmcDNGwpDt9PQVKz
To ruin the obvious mashul: Islam is the ideological baby skull seaker. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for violence, but is quite optimized and uniquely useful to maximize it.
Agree.
Also, שקר may have no legs to stand on, but كذب looks quite stable
Surveys of Lebanese public opinion might give us insight into how a conflict between Israel and a 95% Christian Palestine might have evolved differently:
"One poll conducted immediately after October 7 by Hezbollah’s Consultative Centre for Studies and Documentation (CCSD) found that 80% of Lebanese supported the attacks, including 98% of Shi’ites, 86% of Sunnis and Druze and 60% of Christians."
https://aijac.org.au/australia-israel-review/what-do-the-lebanese-think/
On the other hand,
"In contrast to the majority perception in other Arab countries, Lebanese are split as to whether there will have to be eventual “political negotiations for a Palestinian-Israeli agreement” as opposed to a “military solution.” 53% of Lebanese agreed with this proposal overall, with drastically different attitudes depending on sect. Only 25% of Shia agree with such a statement, as compared to 56% of Sunni and 75% of Christians."
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/shadow-hezbollah-israel-escalation-poll-shows-slim-majority-lebanese-still-want
The framing of a 1-10 historic perception is still firmly rooted in the dumb Zio/Arab kvetch matrix.
The actual matter at hand is violence, how much is necessary, and how much is advisable.
For the Arabs, the best they could hope for is a clever combo of emphasizing industry, and building up an unmanagable enclave of defensive capacity. They actually achieved this in Gaza, but then ofc "the cause" and Islam had to have their deformed baby on October 7th.
For Jews the equation is a little simpler. We have to deal with the guys who occasionally want to lap blood and stab you or whatever. The Zionist narrative world-building is secondary cope (the religious stuff is reliable and load bearing).
Whatever your opinion on how "Evil" or short sighted the militant chimp outs are, the real problem is that they at least temporarily work way better at reducing the blood juice box behavior than whatever enlightened gnosis you prefer.
The response to "muh middle east" can't be "the cost of doing business(in the middle east)".
I think this is mostly not true. The IDF has been going into Jenin and dealing with terrorist cells, and in general there has been a massive crackdown, much stricter checks at checkpoints, huge proportions of the West Bank essentially under quasi house arrest.
The Breslev guys are mostly dealing with bedouins who are non-political and just random people who get in their way. This makes *them* safer because the bedouins are willing to scrap with them over their hilltops, but it really makes no difference for the mass of the Israeli population. This has massive negative medium-term consequences for Israel for concentrated benefits for them and their heretic religion.
In theory, if Breslev militias would go in and have a shootout with the Al Quds brigade in Nablus, then that would be a win-win, but that's not what's happening.