But this is much harder to achieve than Bukele’s task because he has local public opinion on his side. Most citizens hate MS13 and want it gone.
Do most Palestinians hate Hamas and want it gone? Hamas did after all win the only democratic election in gaza history. And with half the population below age 18, propagandized and suffering there whole lives, I shudder to think of what the “values” of even the admittedly-innocent median citizen of gaza are. They certainly hate the Jews more than Hamas. The “more moderate” government in the West Bank still has the Martyr’s fund!
If, similar to Bukele, the regular gazan was cheering on a Hamas crackdown, as reasonable people like us agree they SHOULD, things would be easier.
Sanctions are based on similar logic - Sanctions make life of citizens of a sanctioned country hard, it makes their quality of life worse and that would lead to loss of support for the government and a new regime can take its place which is favorable to our interests and sanctions can be lifted. However, in almost all cases opposite thing happens. The normal people suffering from sanctions rally behind their government as a mark of solidarity like how it happened in Russia. Nationalism is irrational, people might accept worse quality of life and suffering for the nation and their leader. Prolonged siege of Gaza might do the same, Israel will risk having an extremely hostile population with larger proportion of them turning into militants. Israel should just launch a ground invasion and cripple Hamas instead of adopting a sanctions like approach -aka siege.
The idea that utilitarianism would support the siege is laughable. Hundreds of thousands will become homeless, thousands will die, tens of thousands will be injured. The siege is unlikely to meaningful improve government in the future such that future generations will counter these effects. Suppose 3000 people died in Israel in this attack. 3000 deaths every few decades plus the fear of the entire population does not outweigh what will happen to the Gazans. That’s not to say Israel should do nothing, but nobody should pretend this is about maximizing utility or anything like that. This is politics and revenge.
This seems nuts to me. For one, Israel is currently blocking checkpoints so Gazans can't escape. For another, the harms to Israel of Hamas attacks are a vanishing scintilla compared to the harms of forcefully displacing literally millions of people. Fewer Israelis die of terrorism per-capita than Americans die of gun violence, yet we wouldn't displace many millions of people to stop gun control.
Using your purely utilitarian calculus, couldn't Hamas's recent tactics also be justified -perhaps even more justified than a siege of Gaza.
One way the conflict to end is for Palestinians to leave, but the other is for Israelis to go. Which group is titled more towards max exodus depends on quality of life (the push factor) but also willingness of other countries to admit émigrés (the pull factor). You seem to claim that currently it is more feasible to bring about Palestinian mass exodus, and this should be achieved through increasing the push and pull factors via a harsh siege along with pressuring the world to take Palestinians.
But there are very few countries that want to accept Palestinians. And for obvious reasons - low human capital, mostly fanatics. Given the terrorism concerns, many of these countries especially in the (increasingly anti-Muslim immigration) West are unlikely to yield to the pressure.
Conversely there are many countries that would be willing to take Israelis, because of their high human capital, cultural and family ties to most of the West, and out of a sense of moral obligation linked to the history of Jewish persecution. So the pull factor for Israeli exodus is much stronger than for Palestinian exodus, and it seems unlikely even with diplomatic pressure that this difference can be made up
As you note, the Palestinian offensive capabilities are only getting stronger. To create a mass exodus they don't need to cause mass death. They only need cause enough terror to prompt a few to leave for the safety of the West. Which in turn could cause a feedback loop amidst a climate of sustained fear, whereby more leave partly anticipating others leaving, and so not wanting to one of the last left. The barbarians of Hamas have shown themselves willing to offset their limited military skill with heightened cruelty to create maximal terror. So they are capable of creating a considerable push factor for Israeli exodus, which will only grow considerably in the next few years as their capabilities increase.
Therefore, given the Palestinians' already considerable and growing ability to create a strong push factor, combined with the far stronger pull factor for Israeli exodus - a pull factor that will remain far stronger than for Palestinians regardless of diplomatic pressure - the purely utilitarian case for Hamas amping up their tactics seems just as strong, if not stronger, as the case for a siege.
Now, given I am not a pure utilitarian, I do not think there is an ethical case for Hamas's sadistic targeting of civilians. But curious whether you think the logic of pure utilitarianism would rule it out?
Israel has effectively already won, given the power differential but can't engage in population expulsions because of human rights concerns and looking like a complete rogue state. This perpetual conflict is never going to end with a two-state solution or anything resembling meaningful peace so long as Gaza remains unoccupied by the Israelis. Western liberals have been the biggest obstacle to peace by preventing Israel from concluding the conflict and fooling themselves and the world into thinking it can be resolved by diplomacy like N Ireland.
Needless to say, all the Arab and Muslim countries that pay lip service to the Palestinian cause won't be letting in any more Palestinians. Egypt will eventually let them into the Sinai after striking a deal with the West that states that the refugees won't be staying, and will instead be going to Europe and North America which was essentially the Hazony/Likud fantasy plan for years.
Hi Richard, I recently learned that you are Palestinian. Do you have any connection to Palestinians living in the region (family, etc)? And does your background have any impact on how you think about this conflict?
Most professional commentators would be saying "AS AN ACTUAL PALESTINIAN...." at every opportunity, but I've noticed that you don't do this. So I was just curious. (No pressure to answer if you don't want to get too personal.)
Fuck off Hanania. Europe is not your dump for latest brown horde that got itself into some military conflict. We will not take 2 million orcs from Gaza and support them, there's zero utility to it. We still struggle with all the trouble 1,5 million of Syrians caused after arriving in 2015. Those people are not our problem, we wash our hands of what happens to them.
“Israel has tried the path of seeking to ensure that Gazans suffer as little as possible for the actions of their government.”
Lol now you’re just trolling.
Anyway, the Israeli government is not, at least last I checked, allowing Gazans to leave, but forcing them to stay, so that belies the notion of them being motivated by utilitarianism rather than collective punishment. I happen to agree that allowing/encouraging Palestinians to self-ethnically cleanse themselves from the region is probably the least bad outcome, but more because I don’t think Israel will ever assent to an (or two) independent Palestinian state(s), even if the Palestinians all embraced Gandhiesque pacifism. A growing plurality are committed to preventing such a thing by their religious beliefs. The humanitarian way of dealing with it would be to bribe them to leave (should be cheap since they’re dirt poor; many would probably jump at the offer of citizenship abroad) rather than your preferred method of bombing/starving them until the remainder leave. But it’s worth noting it’ll ultimately probably have to be most/all of the population. The ones who stay behind will be the most radical, so partial depopulation won’t lead to better government in Gaza. Same will ultimately have to happen in the West Bank too of course, since the settlers aren’t going anywhere and no contiguous West Bank state could be formed anymore.
The double standard seen in regards to how Israel is expected to act has been frankly absurd. If any other western country were bombed tomorrow we’d all understand in a heartbeat that the government will do whatever it takes to prevent future threats and that tragic civilian casualties are a result of the aggressors who attacked us. Here it’s framed as “collective punishment,” which no one seemed to have a problem with when Russian citizens had half their services pull out of the country + crippling sanctions in an effort to convince them to overthrow their government. In that scenario we at least saw Russian civilians who were protesting the actions of Putin, but after a deadly terror attack on Israel? Huge swaths of the western left feel the need to condemn Israel but not Hamas, and no real resistance towards Hamas has been noted in Gaza. The elephant in the room is that a large portion of Palestinian people are probably radicalized more than anyone is willing to admit, and that’s probably why Egypt is so unwilling to take in refugees. Just an awful case all around but the amount of false moral equivalence and “both sides need to de-escalate” rhetoric is just puzzling.
The kindest thing to do to Palestinians would not be to expel them, but to impose civilized modernity on them for their own good. This is what the Spanish did to the Aztecs, what the English did to the Scottish during the Highland Clearances / Scottish Industrial Revolution, what America did to post-war Japan, and what China is doing in Xinjiang. Fundamentally, the problem with Palestinian society is that they've had no real productive economy, and have lived off Western handouts. This inevitably leads to feralization, in which a society is oriented around dominance hierarchies instead of competence hierarchies. If Gazans are expelled, they'll just become radicalized economic dependents somewhere else. If they are reeducated and assigned productive work, everyone will be better off. "The peace of all things is in the tranquility of order."
Why not move to Gaza for a month or do (of course not now), experience living in apartheid first hand and then writing something more than a spherical horse in a vacuum navel gazing 1000 word essay?
The knock against utilitarianism is not just interpersonal comparisons, but also its utter inability to actually compute the consequences.
You have absolutely zero ability to predict the entrance of, say, Iran into a conflict, which can lead to WWIII--in case of Israel continuing to behave in a morally vile manner towards Gaza.
This situation is much worse now precisely because Israel made “utilitarian” computations in ethnically cleansing Palestinians in 1947-1948 (which is full of Jews shooting Palestinian villagers after immobilization, bombing random houses which killed women and children, randomly spraying with bullets boys and so on. Israel couldn’t have gotten away with its ethnic cleansing with today’s social media)
There is actually a good reason why only weird academics are attempting to be consistent utilitarians -- it just doesn’t work.
I think Israel should gracefully shutdown. They should pack up and leave. It's a country founded through conquest, but in the 20th century, when we were supposed to have moved past such things. Really, just reading about the Nakba makes me think the state of Israel is illegitimate. It's just completely fucked that they realized they would have to do that, and then went and did it, instead of reconsidering.
You can kinda cut some slack for countries founded in this way but longer ago, as fact is, back then, there wasn't a widespread realization that doing this is wrong, but this happened right after WW II.
Possibly one of the more depressing facts about humanity is that the primary victims of the Holocaust pretty much learned nothing from it, looking at the rhetoric coming from top officials:
> Gallant said that he had ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
> Netanyahu: The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
This is genuinely close to Nazi rhetoric, no exaggeration. Israel is not a civilization. Shut it down!
I just read a Public article that stated Netanyahu supported Hamas to create political divisions between Hamas and the PA in order to sabotage any momentum for a two-state solution.
Agree with this and thank you for saying it.
But this is much harder to achieve than Bukele’s task because he has local public opinion on his side. Most citizens hate MS13 and want it gone.
Do most Palestinians hate Hamas and want it gone? Hamas did after all win the only democratic election in gaza history. And with half the population below age 18, propagandized and suffering there whole lives, I shudder to think of what the “values” of even the admittedly-innocent median citizen of gaza are. They certainly hate the Jews more than Hamas. The “more moderate” government in the West Bank still has the Martyr’s fund!
If, similar to Bukele, the regular gazan was cheering on a Hamas crackdown, as reasonable people like us agree they SHOULD, things would be easier.
Sanctions are based on similar logic - Sanctions make life of citizens of a sanctioned country hard, it makes their quality of life worse and that would lead to loss of support for the government and a new regime can take its place which is favorable to our interests and sanctions can be lifted. However, in almost all cases opposite thing happens. The normal people suffering from sanctions rally behind their government as a mark of solidarity like how it happened in Russia. Nationalism is irrational, people might accept worse quality of life and suffering for the nation and their leader. Prolonged siege of Gaza might do the same, Israel will risk having an extremely hostile population with larger proportion of them turning into militants. Israel should just launch a ground invasion and cripple Hamas instead of adopting a sanctions like approach -aka siege.
The idea that utilitarianism would support the siege is laughable. Hundreds of thousands will become homeless, thousands will die, tens of thousands will be injured. The siege is unlikely to meaningful improve government in the future such that future generations will counter these effects. Suppose 3000 people died in Israel in this attack. 3000 deaths every few decades plus the fear of the entire population does not outweigh what will happen to the Gazans. That’s not to say Israel should do nothing, but nobody should pretend this is about maximizing utility or anything like that. This is politics and revenge.
This seems nuts to me. For one, Israel is currently blocking checkpoints so Gazans can't escape. For another, the harms to Israel of Hamas attacks are a vanishing scintilla compared to the harms of forcefully displacing literally millions of people. Fewer Israelis die of terrorism per-capita than Americans die of gun violence, yet we wouldn't displace many millions of people to stop gun control.
Using your purely utilitarian calculus, couldn't Hamas's recent tactics also be justified -perhaps even more justified than a siege of Gaza.
One way the conflict to end is for Palestinians to leave, but the other is for Israelis to go. Which group is titled more towards max exodus depends on quality of life (the push factor) but also willingness of other countries to admit émigrés (the pull factor). You seem to claim that currently it is more feasible to bring about Palestinian mass exodus, and this should be achieved through increasing the push and pull factors via a harsh siege along with pressuring the world to take Palestinians.
But there are very few countries that want to accept Palestinians. And for obvious reasons - low human capital, mostly fanatics. Given the terrorism concerns, many of these countries especially in the (increasingly anti-Muslim immigration) West are unlikely to yield to the pressure.
Conversely there are many countries that would be willing to take Israelis, because of their high human capital, cultural and family ties to most of the West, and out of a sense of moral obligation linked to the history of Jewish persecution. So the pull factor for Israeli exodus is much stronger than for Palestinian exodus, and it seems unlikely even with diplomatic pressure that this difference can be made up
As you note, the Palestinian offensive capabilities are only getting stronger. To create a mass exodus they don't need to cause mass death. They only need cause enough terror to prompt a few to leave for the safety of the West. Which in turn could cause a feedback loop amidst a climate of sustained fear, whereby more leave partly anticipating others leaving, and so not wanting to one of the last left. The barbarians of Hamas have shown themselves willing to offset their limited military skill with heightened cruelty to create maximal terror. So they are capable of creating a considerable push factor for Israeli exodus, which will only grow considerably in the next few years as their capabilities increase.
Therefore, given the Palestinians' already considerable and growing ability to create a strong push factor, combined with the far stronger pull factor for Israeli exodus - a pull factor that will remain far stronger than for Palestinians regardless of diplomatic pressure - the purely utilitarian case for Hamas amping up their tactics seems just as strong, if not stronger, as the case for a siege.
Now, given I am not a pure utilitarian, I do not think there is an ethical case for Hamas's sadistic targeting of civilians. But curious whether you think the logic of pure utilitarianism would rule it out?
Israel has effectively already won, given the power differential but can't engage in population expulsions because of human rights concerns and looking like a complete rogue state. This perpetual conflict is never going to end with a two-state solution or anything resembling meaningful peace so long as Gaza remains unoccupied by the Israelis. Western liberals have been the biggest obstacle to peace by preventing Israel from concluding the conflict and fooling themselves and the world into thinking it can be resolved by diplomacy like N Ireland.
Needless to say, all the Arab and Muslim countries that pay lip service to the Palestinian cause won't be letting in any more Palestinians. Egypt will eventually let them into the Sinai after striking a deal with the West that states that the refugees won't be staying, and will instead be going to Europe and North America which was essentially the Hazony/Likud fantasy plan for years.
Hi Richard, I recently learned that you are Palestinian. Do you have any connection to Palestinians living in the region (family, etc)? And does your background have any impact on how you think about this conflict?
Most professional commentators would be saying "AS AN ACTUAL PALESTINIAN...." at every opportunity, but I've noticed that you don't do this. So I was just curious. (No pressure to answer if you don't want to get too personal.)
Fuck off Hanania. Europe is not your dump for latest brown horde that got itself into some military conflict. We will not take 2 million orcs from Gaza and support them, there's zero utility to it. We still struggle with all the trouble 1,5 million of Syrians caused after arriving in 2015. Those people are not our problem, we wash our hands of what happens to them.
“Israel has tried the path of seeking to ensure that Gazans suffer as little as possible for the actions of their government.”
Lol now you’re just trolling.
Anyway, the Israeli government is not, at least last I checked, allowing Gazans to leave, but forcing them to stay, so that belies the notion of them being motivated by utilitarianism rather than collective punishment. I happen to agree that allowing/encouraging Palestinians to self-ethnically cleanse themselves from the region is probably the least bad outcome, but more because I don’t think Israel will ever assent to an (or two) independent Palestinian state(s), even if the Palestinians all embraced Gandhiesque pacifism. A growing plurality are committed to preventing such a thing by their religious beliefs. The humanitarian way of dealing with it would be to bribe them to leave (should be cheap since they’re dirt poor; many would probably jump at the offer of citizenship abroad) rather than your preferred method of bombing/starving them until the remainder leave. But it’s worth noting it’ll ultimately probably have to be most/all of the population. The ones who stay behind will be the most radical, so partial depopulation won’t lead to better government in Gaza. Same will ultimately have to happen in the West Bank too of course, since the settlers aren’t going anywhere and no contiguous West Bank state could be formed anymore.
The double standard seen in regards to how Israel is expected to act has been frankly absurd. If any other western country were bombed tomorrow we’d all understand in a heartbeat that the government will do whatever it takes to prevent future threats and that tragic civilian casualties are a result of the aggressors who attacked us. Here it’s framed as “collective punishment,” which no one seemed to have a problem with when Russian citizens had half their services pull out of the country + crippling sanctions in an effort to convince them to overthrow their government. In that scenario we at least saw Russian civilians who were protesting the actions of Putin, but after a deadly terror attack on Israel? Huge swaths of the western left feel the need to condemn Israel but not Hamas, and no real resistance towards Hamas has been noted in Gaza. The elephant in the room is that a large portion of Palestinian people are probably radicalized more than anyone is willing to admit, and that’s probably why Egypt is so unwilling to take in refugees. Just an awful case all around but the amount of false moral equivalence and “both sides need to de-escalate” rhetoric is just puzzling.
The kindest thing to do to Palestinians would not be to expel them, but to impose civilized modernity on them for their own good. This is what the Spanish did to the Aztecs, what the English did to the Scottish during the Highland Clearances / Scottish Industrial Revolution, what America did to post-war Japan, and what China is doing in Xinjiang. Fundamentally, the problem with Palestinian society is that they've had no real productive economy, and have lived off Western handouts. This inevitably leads to feralization, in which a society is oriented around dominance hierarchies instead of competence hierarchies. If Gazans are expelled, they'll just become radicalized economic dependents somewhere else. If they are reeducated and assigned productive work, everyone will be better off. "The peace of all things is in the tranquility of order."
Why not move to Gaza for a month or do (of course not now), experience living in apartheid first hand and then writing something more than a spherical horse in a vacuum navel gazing 1000 word essay?
Go live in gaza for a day and tell us what you think
The knock against utilitarianism is not just interpersonal comparisons, but also its utter inability to actually compute the consequences.
You have absolutely zero ability to predict the entrance of, say, Iran into a conflict, which can lead to WWIII--in case of Israel continuing to behave in a morally vile manner towards Gaza.
This situation is much worse now precisely because Israel made “utilitarian” computations in ethnically cleansing Palestinians in 1947-1948 (which is full of Jews shooting Palestinian villagers after immobilization, bombing random houses which killed women and children, randomly spraying with bullets boys and so on. Israel couldn’t have gotten away with its ethnic cleansing with today’s social media)
There is actually a good reason why only weird academics are attempting to be consistent utilitarians -- it just doesn’t work.
I think Israel should gracefully shutdown. They should pack up and leave. It's a country founded through conquest, but in the 20th century, when we were supposed to have moved past such things. Really, just reading about the Nakba makes me think the state of Israel is illegitimate. It's just completely fucked that they realized they would have to do that, and then went and did it, instead of reconsidering.
You can kinda cut some slack for countries founded in this way but longer ago, as fact is, back then, there wasn't a widespread realization that doing this is wrong, but this happened right after WW II.
Possibly one of the more depressing facts about humanity is that the primary victims of the Holocaust pretty much learned nothing from it, looking at the rhetoric coming from top officials:
> Gallant said that he had ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
> Netanyahu: The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
This is genuinely close to Nazi rhetoric, no exaggeration. Israel is not a civilization. Shut it down!
I just read a Public article that stated Netanyahu supported Hamas to create political divisions between Hamas and the PA in order to sabotage any momentum for a two-state solution.