I feel it would be even better if you put data from how more illiberal countries fight these kind of wars. For instance, the Russian actions in Chechenya, or Chinese actions in Xinjiang (no war there). Separatist insurgencies in Pakistan. Examples from Africa, like the fight against the jihadists in Mali. Egyptians fighting ISIS/AQ in Sinai (with the help of Israel). And so on. I would guess you are right and that countries like the US and Israel are far more benevolent than those countries. Also, it would be better if you put more data on the success rate of countries like the US and Israel compared to the success rate of more illiberal countries.
Also "this is primarily due to Israel facing a lot more scrutiny than most other nations would under similar circumstances" - that is definitely a factor, but I wonder if there are other causes. Israel is generally liberal, and there are Jewish tendencies or at least Ashkenazi tendencies toward liberalism, whether because of high IQ, verbal tilt, the Holocaust, historic persecution by Christians, secularism, the theological value of life in the Jewish religion, and so on. Or maybe it's that Zionism was founded as a liberal movement, or something else. I wonder how you would measure that. Obviously the McDonald point that "liberalism is a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Western civilization" is false and has never been disproved more conclusively than now with woke leftists and BLM cheering for Hamas. Israel has no death penalty (they executed 2 people ever, and haven't in decades), which is also a bit surprising a priori. Jewish bioethics are very pro-IVF and pro embryo selection (pre-implanted embryo is like water, and "playing god" is good because man is in god's image) but anti death-penalty and anti-euthanasia, so they are "pro-life" in some sense. See also Israel's pro-natalism.
It does seem to be true that Israel is generally pretty restrained. Exactly how much and why would be interesting things to study. Is it more restrained that other liberal democracies? How would one go about distinguishing between the various hypotheses and establishing the cause? I guess a good place to start be that you could look at various demographics in Israel and their support for restraint, and what causes this. And which political leaders support it, and how they are receptive to public opinion.
In the specific case of the threat Israel faces from Gaza, it seems like they could have prevented the vast majority of casualties from this kind of attack by better securing the border with Gaza. The military outposts in the area were caught flat-footed, which presumably won't happen again. The rocket attacks by themselves are a small threat to Israel--even before the Iron Dome, they caused few casualties. The scale of the casualties Israel faced in the most recent attacks were caused by Netanyahu's catastrophic incompetence more than Hamas being a true existential threat. If the IDF had invested more resources in defending the area near Gaza and less defending settlers in the West Bank, Hamas' attack couldn't have been nearly as disastrous.
The true existential threat to Israel is its increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the world, particularly the younger generations in the West. Western countries treating Israel more like South Africa once the boomers die off and are replaced by a younger generation much less sympathetic to Israel is a much greater threat than Islamic militants.
For the first paragraph, definitely. https://reason.com/2023/10/13/israel-eases-guns-restrictions-amidst-security-failures/ . Those kibbutzim in the Gaza Envelope are full of IDF veterans (of course, there is conscription). They will all have guns now. Kibbutzim are small towns, so as Jason Aldean says, "got a gun that my granddad gave me..." ;)
The last paragraph is something that I used to be worried about. But I am pretty sure people who had their formative years after October 7, 2023 will be much more like the boomers than like the millenials in their attitude toward this. Millenials/Gen Z will be the most anti-Israel generation ever and they are still pro-Israel. This event itself definitely shifted public opinion (which was already pro-Israel) toward Israel even more. In any case, within a generation or two differential fertility by political orientation will be pushing the US public to the right. The BDS movement in the West is totally and completely dead, except among the kinds of tankies and commies (and "frog Nazis") who support Putin in Ukraine (I don't mean the ones who want the US to stay out, I mean the ones actively rooting for Putin).
I also used to be worried about the Haredi demographic threat. But after October 7, I don't think people will tolerate the Haredim taking welfare, having tons of kids, and not serving anymore. They ran the trains on Shabbat, they might not do it again, but it's a hell of a precedent. Secular anger was already high over the judicial reform.
I think that paradoxically I became much more optimistic about the future of Israel in the last 1-2 weeks. I was optimistic before but now I'm very optimistic. Am Yisrael Chai!
It's hard to see how US support for Israel will continue to remain so far ahead of other Western countries. The main influences behind America's superlative and peculiar support for Israel, above and beyond the Western norm, are Dispy theology and Jews, both of which are rapidly diminishing. Meanwhile, the Hispanic world is much cooler towards Israel than the US is, and therefore it's hard to see how the Hispanicization of the US will be anything but negative for its support of Israel.
However, while I wouldn't 100% count on it, it's a fair bet that post-Zoomer generations will also revert to some sort of mean in terms of patriotism vs. oikophobia. And the natural position of any Westerner who is more patriotic than oikophobic, who has more concentric than leapfrogging loyalties, is to sympathize with the more Westernized group, i.e. the Israelis. Just as it's natural that patriotic Arabs will do the opposite.
Yeah, I think and hope Vivek Ramaswamy will represent the new American consensus. It's not like giving Israel more fictitious aid earmarked to buy overpriced US weapons would have prevented the Gaza envelope pogroms.
On the other hand, I expect that now maybe Western countries (including the US and maybe some others) will finally say no to UNRWA, an evil evil organization that needs to be abolished. End US aid to UNRWA!
Young and non-white people are less likely to support Israel than older and white people, but even in the first two groups, many more people say the US government should publicly support Israel than people who say the US government should publicly criticize Israel:
Israel also has very good numbers with Democrats, which some may find surprising considering where Democrats were going before. This poll seems to support the idea that sympathy for Israel has increased, however, I wouldn't take this as carte blanche forever. I think support for Israel will become less unanimous, and the Israeli government can always do things to make this worse. Also, take note of how support for NATO/Europe has become a partisan issue in the US, and how parts of the GOP has flirted with isolationism. Counting on US politics to be stable is a dangerous thing, because the US is always one presidential election away from some charismatic figure getting elected and convincing at least his party to do this or that or not to do this or that.
How is the Israeli government going to stop the ultra-Orthodox types from having so many kids? There's no reason whatsoever this will change the demographic trajectory of Israel. I also doubt the attack will have a long-term effect on people's attitude toward Israel. The effects of 9/11 petered out after a few years, and when the consensus became that the response wasn't worth it or was excessive, they probably actually reversed. At the time, it was the best thing that could've happened for foreign policy conservatism, but ultimately it nearly killed foreign policy conservatism.
Cutting welfare reduces TFR (see 2003), but importantly the attrition rate will go way up, I think at some point the attrition rate will go up to 50% like it currently is for Modern Orthodox in Israel. With a TFR of 5 (instead of 6.5) and an attrition of 50%, their proportion of the population will decline (Israeli Jewish TFR is about 3). Haredi TFR was like 3 in the 1950s, it went up with a lot of subsidies. Israel has tons of levers, cutting welfare and introducing secular subjects into the schools will do a lot. The goal will be to get to a place where a few smart people become rabbis have 10+ kids but if you are not a great scholar you cannot have the Haredi lifestyle. Some Haredi groups have expressed openness to this. The Haredi lifestyle depends on them being in the coalition and taking welfare money. Haredi demography is a political choice. Cut the government support and the problem will be solved.
I do think that the attack will have a long-term effect. With 9/11 you didn't have student activists cheering it on... and you didn't have people with Nazi-style genocidal hatred towards Jews.
Good post, but outposts will always be caught flat-footed sometimes. The enemy gets a vote. And Netanyahu may be staggeringly incompetent- lots of Ashkenazi think so, and it's their country- but he's a traitor to his class of Ashkenazi by leading the Mizrahi, and lots of Ashkenazi want to hate him about something. Netanyahu being an idiot is a best case. Netanyahu being broadly right that Hamas was the least bad enemy to run Gaza is a worst case. It's the Mideast- bet on the worst case.
Or maybe you know the area better than I do. Probably not hard.
Was it Netanyahu's incompetency? I was under the impression that he is the option that is focused more on security, and he was weaker than he has been in the past in part because he was losing ground to politicians, judges, and voters that are more inclined to want Israel to back off on some of its more stringent security measures. I definitely don't pay a lot of attention to their politics, so that could be backwards, but that's the impression I have from reading casually from time to time about Israel politics.
Netanyahu's fights with the judiciary and national security establishment were about him trying to reform the judiciary to protect himself from charges of corruption, not because he wanted more stringent security measures.
As I understand the whole Judicial reform controversy in Israel it boiled down to the fact that the "supreme" court can inject it self into the legislative/executive process and proactively veto a law based on a standard of "unreasonableness" . Secondly that the court reserves to itself the right to appoint it's own replacements. If this is not the central issue, what is ?
Bibi is like Trump in the US. The never Trumpers have their equivalents in Israel and many of those seem to be senior leaders in the IDF, intelligence services and foreign ministry.
It seems that Israel has imported a lot of wokeness from the US. Much of the opposition to judicial reform claim they are "saving democracy", just as those in the US who seek to criminalize Trump and his supporters claim to be "saving democracy"
Regardless of how the Gaza war turns out, I suspect Bibi's political career is over as well as the careers of the opposition. If the people of Israel are smart, they will throw everyone out and look for a fresh start.
The supreme court in Israel is the only counterbalance to the power of the government / ruling coalition in the Knesset (which are the same: ministers are almost always also MKs). The judicial reform aimed at eliminating the restraining power of the court and enable the gov't to enact any decision and pass any law they want. Including, for example, outlawing some political parties or preventing the vote to some population groups, in the more extreme cases. Or appointing patently incompetent, but loyal, individuals and shifting massive resources to loyal populations in the more common cases, as has been happening over the last year. And here we are.
The role of the supreme court as final arbitrator is clear. But what standard do they refer to. Is it true that the only standard they have to test against is "reasonableness' or "unreasonableness". And who or what standard defines those terms. Isn't that the crux of the issue ? And also, is it true that the members of the supreme court effectively nominate and chose their own successors - it not as individuals, then as a court ?
If sounds perfectly reasonable that there should be a check on the authority of parliament or government. But what is the check on the court. Without an objective standard, they just become another kind of tyranny.
It's already bad enough in the US, where we, in theory, have such a document in the constitution and the bill of rights which is simply redefined out of existence. If the Israeli system lacks even that then that is a sad story.
To your questions: regarding the "reasonableness" argument, I'm no lawyer, but law experts claim that this is a standard almost universally used in one form or another in higher courts worldwide. If it sounds subjective, it is because it is, but so are all judicial decisions. According to this doctrine, to be overturned, an administrative decision must be "obviously unreasonable" (my translation of the Hebrew term), i.e. beyond the pale of reasonable decisions by competent people. So this doctrine is used sparingly, in glaring cases only.
Regarding the mechanism of nominating supreme court judges: Currently the Judges Appointment Committee includes 3 supreme court judges, two ministers (incl. the justice minister), two MKs (one from the coalition, one from the opposition) and two representatives of the bar, 9 in total (https://www.gov.il/he/Departments/Guides/judges_nomination_committee?chapterIndex=2). Crucially, appointments of supreme court judges requires 7 votes. This system, the brainchild of former Likud minister of Justice Guideon Saar, has been in place since 2008 (http://fs.knesset.gov.il/17/law/17_ls1_566565.pdf). Thus, on the one hand no single constituency can appoint a judge on its own, but both the 3 judges and the 3 coalition members (2 ministers and 1 MK) have veto power to prevent appointments. The former makes sense because a judge is, among others, a professional appointment – and the profession should be able to block unqualified candidates. The latter makes sense because they were voted in power. This system ensures that supreme court judges are either consensual or, based on give and take, alternatively include more ideological and more liberal candidates. The makeup of the court since the last decade reflects this and is more diverse. I think it is fair to say that a large majority of stakeholders think that the current appointment system is well balanced and should not be altered in any way.
Regarding the "tyranny of the court" argument, I don't think it holds water. The power of the court is mainly to block decisions. The court has no power to implement decisions itself, and can do very little if the administration ignores its decisions. So the power of the court is first and foremost a restraining power.
Israel does not have a constitution, therefore the Supreme Court has used the Declaration of Independence, which includes a sort of Bill of Rights (equal rights for all citizens without distinction etc.) as the de facto constitution.
Out of curiosity, is their government as partisan and corrupt as ours? I.e., is he being prosecuted because he is corrupt? Or because he is corrupt and has the wrong political leanings?
Not that being corrupt isn't bad, but it doesn't necessarily answer the question of why he is being prosecuted. That's looking at things through a US lens but I don't think the US is particularly unique among developed countries as far as having a partisan bureaucracy and law enforcement?
Netanyahu has pretty flexible political leanings, he's partnered with various groups to stay in power. It also doesn't really make sense to prosecute a PM for their political views in Israel's parliamentary system--the Likud party would still have the same amount of power without him. It's not like his political party is being persecuted more broadly, it's just him personally.
This is wrong. Bibi has spent the last 20 years securing his power in the Likud by getting rid of anyone even slightly talented. The leaders of most opposition parties used to be his allies and those that are left are absolute dross. With any conceivable leader from within the existing Likud, it would lose half its seats. Now it will lose them anyway.
> The true existential threat to Israel is its increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the world, particularly the younger generations in the West.
I agree. If Israel loses support from the West, particularly the USA, and doesn't get another backer, then it may not survive as a state.
You can't "secure a border" to a country run by a terrorist colonial power, and despite the tainting of those words by the leftoids, I'm not talking about Israel. Hamas gave up anything resembling independence for the sake of aligning with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and expanding their terrorism capabilities. They care nothing for the actual people of Gaza, any more than the KGB cared for the people of the Captive Nations. They're just a material resource, to be extracted and made use of with no more thought to anything but whether they help destroy the enemy than if they were ore or oil.
If there's any means of destroying such an organization, it must be taken. Only then can the border be secure, or you end up in no better shoes than South Korea, which has the most heavily fortified border in the history of human civilization, and yet is still at perpetual risk for an exestential conflict breaking out on their nation, which could kill more people than any war since WWII, kicking off at any time for potentially any reason, or no reason at all. And given the Ingsockian counterintelligence measures of Pyongyang, they very well could have no notice of the conflict breaking out until the moment enemy troops start re-enacting their favorite Hamas videos on the populous.
Wrong. Israel could absolutely have secured its border with Gaza against the attack that ensued, which was by a few thousand light infantry and a few entering on paragliders. Simply having an armed fortified post every 200 meters, with video/IR cameras, machine guns, and manned by about 10-20 soldiers, would slow the Hamas attackers down for a few hours, which is long enough for reinforcements to arrive from the rest of the Israeli army.
There is absolutely no way that a competent and alert defender would have allowed the incursion -- which against I will emphasize was by light infantry -- to quickly advance several km into Israel.
I've got a better idea: how 'bout they just go in, destroy Hamas and the PIJ, kill as many high-ranking terrorists as possible, assassinate the leaders based in Qatar, force those left into signing an unconditional surrender, and do business with whatever's left?
That'd offer a fuck of a lot more security than any amount of border checkpoints can get them. A fortified border certainly can help when there's an enemy behind it, but it can never truly provide security. You can only get that when the enemy is eliminated or defeated. It's not like the problem here is economic migrants looking for a better life in a richer country. The populous of Gaza, unlike the populous of Syria or Iran or even North Korea, is genuinely behind the genocidal project of their overlords. They need to be handed defeats until they learn their lesson, however long that takes.
> force those left into signing an unconditional surrender
You mean everyone as individuals, or setting up some sort of representative government to do so?
> They need to be handed defeats until they learn their lesson
AFAICT the lesson Palestinians have learned is whatever they do, Israel will continue to oppress and kill them while making their lives miserable on a daily basis. As long as they beleive that, it is certain that some of them will conclude that the best they can do is sell their lives as expensively as possible.
If the Palestineans had more of a problem with being killed and oppressed than they had with Jews existing, they wouldn't have voted in terrorists as their leaders every time they have an election, nor would they have collaborated with the IRGC, who have murdered more Palestineans this century than anybody else in the 21st Century via their puppet Assad. They don't.
They must be handed defeat until they accept the right of Jews to nationhood and property as a matter of practicality. Only then, with time, will their practical acceptance morph into personal acceptance. One of the greatest delusions in all of history is that it's possible for this to work the other way around, but it's not. Accepting that others have a right to things which they've earned via lawful conduct, even if they earn said things at a disproportionate rate to you and your people, is a very difficult skill to learn. It's a multi-generational project that must first and foremost be based in practicality, and the world of things is the best way to develop such practice.
For the record, it was also a mistake when the Afrikaners surrendered their political control before a respect for property rights had developed among the black population. They have paid a steep price for this, the nation has been destroyed likely beyond repair, and they may well be properly genocided in the subsequent generation. The same would be even worse were Israel to attempt the same with their own nation.
What if no one in Gaza is afraid of dying, and they positively seek it as route to a blessed afterlife if they die in the act of killing infidels? Even religious westerners find this Muslim idea bizarre beyond belief. perhaps because all our religions preach against totally wanton killing. Even atheists imbibe this cultural prohibition.
The kamikaze attacks on the United States and Royal Navies in the Pacific genuinely stunned and alarmed allied sailors that whole squadrons of attacking aircraft would commit suicide in what were highly destructive strikes if they got through the air defences. Most didn't, but the hit rate was higher than for aircraft attempting to bomb or drop torpedoes and then escape out of harm's way... and get home to re-arm and fight again. Part of the rationale for using the atomic bombs was that the whole population of Japan was similarly believed to be suicidally prepared to make the American invaders "eat stones."
I like the idea of a hit on the leaders in Qatar, though.
It's interesting to see someone else's 9/11 from a different perspective. And soon to see what their version of the Iraq war will look like. Then compare our outsider feelings to what we felt when it was us.
This isn't Israel's 9/11. It's significantly worse. Not only did they take half the caualties of 9/11 in a day despite being an orders-of-magnitude smaller country, but there's no reason to believe the war will be contained to a single front with three Pasdaran colonies at their Northern and Southern borders.
Bibi's amoral approach to governance, and his consistent suckuppery for Putin to a level even Trump never reached, has proven itself a failure on both ethical and practical grounds. Not enough of a failure to where Jerusalem won't emerge victorious even on a three-front war, but he's done the moment there's a fresh election. This was the single greatest failure in the history of the Israeli Republic.
One interesting consequence to the difference between the trivial threat posed by terrorism in America and the much greater threat to Israel is that the electorate in Israel seems to be more rational. The 'rally around the flag' effect Bush got after 9/11 is not happening for Netanyahu in Israel--Israelis are furious with him. I think voters in America are 'rationally irrational', as Caplan says, about national security issues because at some level they know that who the President is doesn't actually matter much for their safety. For Israelis, incompetence in national security policies is a real threat to their lives.
So the Israelis are more rational for being furious with Netanyahu and don't rally round the flag? Why is that more rational? Why would it be irrational to be furious with Hamas and rally round the Israeli flag?
It isn't rational to rally around the flag if it means overlooking the incompetence that led to the terrorist attacks being successful. If your country is under frequent terrorist attacks that creates horrible incentives. It means that leaders can slack off with no consequences, because if they fail to prevent a terrorist attack people will rally behind them anyway.
The 'rally around the flag' effect doesn't mean not hating Hamas and supporting Israel, obviously Israelis do hate Hamas and support the Israeli state. In the US, the 'rallying' was a huge boost in popularity for George W Bush, which isn't happening in Israel, because they blame Netanyahu's incompetence for the attack.
“ Conflict is generally caused by opportunity, not grievance” - as someone who knows a lot less about the history of conflict, is this something you can elaborate on?
Grievance exists in every country at every time. For it to cause civil war, it would mean that every country at every time would always be at civil war.
Why else do you think there hasn't been a civil war in the US in over a century and a half? Because the last time their was, our state was significantly poorer, weaker, and lacking in counterintelligence capabilities as compared to now. Groups like the Third Klan and the Panthers were shot through with informants, hit with hard prison time, and killed at a high enough rate to ensure their boogaloo dreams remained just that. It'd take a level of intentional institutional degredation worthy of the ANC to empower any organization in the US to the level where a civil war could actually be sparked up, and we're at least a generation away from such things even if absolutely everything for us goes wrong.
It strikes me that the ways powerful western countries used to fight, back when we used to win wars, are no longer allowed by international humanitarian conventions. Incendiary bombing of cities, a tactic used chiefly by the British (and Empire) Bomber Command in WW2 against Germany and by the United States against Japan are now war crimes, even in a war for existential survival....as it was for the British. It is now required of belligerents that they not interdict humanitarian supplies of food, water, and medicine to civilians on the enemy side even if the enemy forces militarize those civilians into the war production effort or use them as human shields. You can bomb and shoot them as collateral damage but you can't starve them out or drop napalm on them.
To me, these restrictions seem designed to make it hard or impossible for powerful western countries to defeat insurgencies. I don't think these rules are just part of the natural evolution of beneficence and magnanimity, the moral arc of history if you will. Rather there was a deliberate attempt by the Global South at the United Nations (who brokers all these international agreements) to frustrate the forces of colonialism and capitalism under the guise of protecting civilians. It was tacitly understood that only the western powers would be subject to these rules. The insurgencies themselves could carry on terrorizing the population much as they always have. As Randy Newman sang, "They all hate us anyhow." (I think he was being sarcastic, not prescient.)
Why did the western nations agree to these restrictions? Why did we agree that, yeah, we incinerated Hamburg, Tokyo etc. without serious compunction (except for the terrible cost to our own aircrews) and carried out unrestricted submarine warfare against all of Japan's commerce, starving them, but we would never do it again? Did we think we would never ever again have to fight an existential conflict with an enemy who will do anything to win? Did we think nuclear weapons covered off that possibility?
Maybe we thought all future war would be fought between feuding militias in Africa somewhere, who didn't have napalm, (or even cities to drop it on) and we could virtuously demand that one militia allow a Red Cross truck with food to cross its lines with the other. In that case we would look the other way while the other militia looted the truck of food for its own soldiers and to hell with the villagers. But now when Gaza could be effectively reduced with a tight mediaeval-type siege we find that Israel isn't allowed to shut off the water and has to feed the Gazans from its own resources. Why did we agree to that?
>Why did the western nations agree to these restrictions? Why did we agree that, yeah, we incinerated Hamburg, Tokyo etc. without serious compunction (except for the terrible cost to our own aircrews) and carried out unrestricted submarine warfare against all of Japan's commerce, starving them, but we would never do it again?
Well, we (that is, the US) did not in fact agree to those restrictions after WWII. The use of 'strategic bombing'--bombing civilian populations to force the enemy to submit--continued in Korea and Vietnam. In Korea the US killed 20% of the N Korean population, far more than we did against Germany or Japan. We stopped after Vietnam because we lost anyway, because it wasn't actually an existential war that we had to win, and it wasn't worth continuing indefinitely until they surrendered unconditionally. We didn't use those tactics in Iraq or Afghanistan because it wouldn't have made any sense given the aims of the wars. The goals of those wars were in fact impossible to actually achieve, but that wouldn't have changed if we used WWII tactics.
You did agree to the restrictions I described in 1980s. Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed To Be Excessively Injurious Or To Have Indiscriminate Effects came into effect in 1983. Whether or not you could have firebombed Hanoi without unsustainable losses of aircraft -- Rolling Thunder and Linebacker II suggest you probably couldn't have -- the war aims and risks of drawing in China or USSR made the idea a non-starter. By the time of Iraq and Afghanistan, firebombing was no longer a legal option, aside from whether there would have been any military gain from doing so and probably not, quite right. Getting either country to surrender was not the point, as you say.
I agree with you that all 3 later wars were the "wrong" wars. (The Korean war prevented a communist takeover of S. Korea.) They would have been unwinnable even with WW2 tactics which were geared toward unconditional surrender after destroying the enemy's ability to make war. On the other hand, if Israel could utterly destroy all of Gaza, this could achieve a war aim for her. (Not saying that Israel actually seeks the destruction of Gaza, certainly not, but if she did, she probably could but she would have to work at it.) Whether incendiaries would work well against an urban construction that is mostly cinder-block I don't know. (Unlike German cities, Japanese cities were susceptible to conflagrations of fire even without creating "kindling" with high explosives.)
I'm concentrating on incendiary bombing just because it's an example of a widely used wartime tactic that is now outlawed, not implying that it could or should be used were it legal today.
Do you think race played a role? In those days we had Jim Crow in a part of our country and had harsh limits on Asian immigration. Probably the US was more willing to kill white civilians than non-white/Asian ones.
(Edit: of course I meant more willing to kill non white)
The atomic bomb was being developed for use against Germany, against the fear that the Nazis would get theirs first. Germany collapsed (as did FDR) before it was ready. President Truman had no knowledge of the Bomb as VP and got briefed on it in his first hours as Commander-in-Chief. less than a month before Germany surrendered. Was he willing to use it against Japan because they were Oriental? Hard to say as there was no opportunity for *him* to use it against Germany. Germans also were dehumanized by war propaganda, not just Japanese, although the artists tended to use more racial stereotypes in the cartoons of Japanese. And of course everyone called them "Japs", even years after the war. The Japanese were more inhumane to POWs but I think most of this came out later, after the war as the POWs came home.
As for incendiaries, the American approach to Germany was daylight precision bombing (which wasn't really.) When USAAF and Bomber Command attacked the same target (e.g., Hamburg and Dresden) the Americans bombed by day with high-explosive bombs, less use of incendiaries. Night bombing was so inaccurate that you really had to set fire to wide areas in order to do much damage. As to Japan, the USAAF tried for like 8 months to bomb Japan by daylight with high-explosives aimed at military & industrial targets: factories, aircraft plants, steel mills. It was an abject failure for many reasons. In desperation, given the astronomical cost of the B-29 program, they switched to British-style night incendiary raids and achieved success.
So I think it's simplistic to say the Americans were squeamish about firebombing white people but enthusiastic about firebombing Japanese (and North Koreans and Vietnamese.) Precision bombing was simply failing to achieve the war aim of forcing Japan to surrender. Firebombing was so effective that there is still argument about whether the Japanese would have capitulated with the A-bombs.
How could you actually figure out whether racism was to blame or had any effect? It seems hard to establish especially given it was so long ago. You would need to collect a lot of relevant data.
But I take your point the US was not squeamish about bombing white Christians. We weren’t in the 1990s either but that was a different era. Are we more squeamish about bombing or killing non-whites now? I don’t know. Richard used to say that, and that’s why the left was more anti-Russia. Again probably some truth. But it’s hard to tell a priori. What data would make someone change their position one way or the other?
>Probably the US was more willing to kill white civilians than non-white/Asian ones.
Do you mean the reverse of this? Yes, I do think it played a role. The dehumanizing rhetoric used to train US soldiers fighting in Korea/Vietnam was sickening and led to countless atrocities. Although, we never fought a war against a white country during that time frame, so there's no way of knowing if we would have done the same thing there.
That doesn't make any sense historically. There is a long history of Western nations agreeing to restrictions on warfare against each other. Rules about ships being required to fly their countries flags, the taking of prisoners, later a ban on the use of chemical weapons. We made those agreements precisely because we were fighting against other civilized nations, not because we wanted to bend to the will of poor countries who weren't even at the negotiating table.
Those rules you cite go back to mediaeval times, so fair enough. Prisoner treatment is reciprocity: you don't want to give the other side in a European war an excuse to mistreat your prisoners. Yet native people in the Americas tortured and killed prisoners that they captured. Using flags to distinguish King's ships from privateers and pirates relates to the law of freedom of the seas and what you get to do with a ship you capture. It's not really about limiting the ferocity of warfare. In sea combat under sail you didn't want to slaughter the crew and sink the ship. You wanted to capture it sort-of intact as a prize with enough crew left alive to sail it home for you. So a captain of a king's ship would surrender his ship once he had lost enough men and rigging to make eventual victory unlikely. A pirate would fight to the death because he would be hanged for sure if captured.
Colonial empires absolutely did try to bend the wills of poor countries -- their colonies.
There was a popular bit of doggerel among British toffs during the late 19th century, shortly after early machine guns appeared:
"We shall not fear the Hottentot
For we the Maxim gun have got.
And they have not."
Belgium and France brutally suppressed their African colonies.
Winston Churchill (who was out of the British government at the time) called for the use of poison gas against troublesome colonial rebels during the 1920s, even as the civilized nations were working on the Geneva Convention to ban poison gas against each other.
In the twenties and thirties, as air power began to come into its own -- Col. Billy Mitchell sank a bunch of old battleships in a demonstration using primitive airplanes in 1921 -- the civilized countries began to realize that aerial bombardment was likely to be a serious threat to civilians as airplanes could fly much farther inland than a warship's artillery would carry and they could be built in huge numbers. They were the WMDs of the day.
>To me, these restrictions seem designed to make it hard or impossible for powerful western countries to defeat insurgencies.
That's a side effect, but their primary root is to make it impossible for a smaller/regional powers to mount any kind of effective resistance to major powers (not without violating them, and opening the leadership to execution after getting inevitably defeated).
1)These conventions are brokered through the UN which, numerically, is composed almost entirely of small regional powers and failed states locked (they say) in perpetual struggle against the United States, UK, France, and Israel. Why would they in their many dozens vote to reduce their own freedom to act in asymmetrical warfare against the larger colonial powers as they struggle for ethnic cleansing and self-determination?
2) The methods they want to outlaw are the methods possessed only by large powers: air forces with the ability to drop incendiary bombs and sophisticated cluster munitions, for example.
3) Finally, the countries with the most vicious records of barbarity against civilians (in Africa mostly) have not signed the conventions at all, not wanting to bind themselves if a large power has to intervene to stop the worst of the blood-letting.
4) The movement to restrict weapons like incendiaries is led by NGOs such as Human Rights Watch who are generally hostile to the former colonial powers and friendly to the aspirations of the Global South. If these conventions had the effect of strengthening the hands of the major powers to suppress their former colonies, the NGOs (and their UN audience) would not be pushing them.
The Rwandan genocide was carried out with machetes, not with sophisticated weapons covered under the Convention on Weapons.
It's fascinating how readily you dismiss technology as an explanation in order to reach your preferred conclusion. It is easier today to obtain or build a bomb than it was to get a sword 4 or 500 years ago. And bombs and guns can be effectively used - even non-suicidally - by a few or even one person (whereas melee weapons are basically useless without a whole unit of soldiers). Technology has also greatly empowered combatants working in small numbers (at least in an urban setting, and the technological advantages of powerful countries - artillery, fighter jets, etc. - are pretty useless at taking out the two guys taking pot shots from a window before running away. At the same time, technological advancement has made killing lots of civilians unnecessary. Planes and drones can strike very specific targets (and info on where to aim obtained from highly accurate satellites). The kind of carpet bombing that killed millions of German and Japanese civilians would make much less sense, especially since there are no industrial targets like factories or oil refineries in the context of a middle eastern insurgency.
Generally the only reason for a superpower today to wage as brutal a war as was waged, say, by the allies in WW2 or even the US in Vietnam would be if killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure. Perhaps you're trying to surreptitiously argue for this - that killing lots of people in general should be the goal, in order to fully beat them into submission, but WW2 at least if anything suggests this leads people to fight to the bitter end.
"It is easier today to obtain or build a bomb than it was to get a sword 4 or 500 years ago."
Guns have been around for hundreds of years, and we haven't seen this trend until much more recently.
"Technology has also greatly empowered combatants working in small numbers (at least in an urban setting, and the technological advantages of powerful countries - artillery, fighter jets, etc. - are pretty useless at taking out the two guys taking pot shots from a window before running away. "
You can destroy the building, and the entire neighborhood if you have to, so bombs are pretty useful. How long would residents tolerate insurgents shooting out of windows if that was the result every time it happened? What about cutting off electricity and water to neighborhoods where that happens and leaving the lights on where it doesn't? The US hasn't done anything close to this.
" but WW2 at least if anything suggests this leads people to fight to the bitter end."
It doesn't suggest that at all. Japan was nuked and gave up because they realized it was hopeless, and they would be fried if they kept fighting. You can do that to any other movement or country. Even if you don't want to use nukes, conventional bombs are very now big and can do a lot of damage.
The problem is that it's far from clear whether Israel can indeed do what's sufficient. Short of actively resettling all the Palestinians (weirdly, even though having every resident of Gaza immigrate to western nations would be a massive increase in their welfare envied by many it would also be considered some kind of war crime) it's not clear that Hamas won't simply grow back the moment Israel withdraws.
The problem is that as long as Palestinians stay poor there will be a supply of young men willing to die and they'll stay poor until they can enter into a peaceful trading deal with their Israeli neighbors.
US occupying forces in Japan and Germany weren't met with much resistance from the civilian population. ISIS also hasn't returned from the dead so far (in the Middle East, I mean; Africa is another can of worms). These examples don't guarantee anything, but at least they show that things *can* go well. My guess would be that what distinguishes a successful from an unsuccessful tyrant-toppling operation is the absence/presence of powerful outsiders invested in the old regime (here, of course, Iran and perhaps Qatar).
But wasn't that in large part because the occupied regions knew the victorious powers weren't going to take any shit? They had the Russian occupations to look at and realize they were doing alot better than it might be and given that this was shortly after the US had shown it's willingness to flatten cities I think the threat was clear.
Moreover, there weren't external agitators pushing the narrative that destroying the occupiers was a religious duty.
People often point to how powers like the Byzantines or Ottomans kept peace in these regions but part of how they did it was a willingness to inflict punishment we'd never be ok with today. I sometimes wonder if we aren't making it worse in the long run as a result (tho the costs to accepting this reasoning might be large elsewhere in the world).
I'm not sure how much punishment the Americans were willing to inflict on small-scale civilian resistance in Germany or Japan; I suspect usually not much. Moreover, I suspect that many in the population knew this and feared at least the incoming Americans and Brits less than the retreating Nazis (the threat from the latter being forced recruitment in their last-ditch Volkssturm efforts). With the Soviets it was a different question.
It helped, of course, that the Western allies were seen in Germany as the bulwark against the Soviet Union, which to most was the real enemy.
It is an interesting thought-experiment what would have became of Iraq after the 2003 war if not for Iranian meddling.
In 1945 we still had our own japanese citizens in internment camps. I don't know if we'd have been willing to flatten cities to extinguish resistance but we were still doing things to our own citizens Israel couldn't get away with doing in Gaza today. Also, the difference in public attitude then was huge, the public was stilll under the effect of the dehumanization the enemy recieves in war.
Not to mention the fact that these countries had very recently been brutality occupying others which, even if we weren't willing to do the same, no doubt made that prospect feel very plausible.
I agree the Iraq situation is an interesting case and I'm not sure that a primarily carrot based approach is not possible but I'm not convinced and the WW2 case was different in all the ways that make it hard to know how far you can get mostly using carrots.
Having Gaza residents move to Western countries would be a crime against Western countries.
Germans and Japanese are high IQ and cooperative people, who understood the situation, what needed to be done, and that it was better to look to the future and develop their countries. Also, there was the Cold War and all that. The situation in Palestine is very different in many ways. Palestinians are not high IQ and cooperative people, they are more fanatical religious types. Also, to be fair to the Palestinians, the Americans did not stay in or near Germany and Japan, and the US is an ocean away from them. Different dynamics in Israel and Palestine. But who knows? Perhaps if Israel could find enlightened and smart local collaborators, they could successfully occupy Gaza and develop the place sufficiently. It seems unlikely, though.
Well western countries kinda caused the situation so maybe they deserve the responsibility of fixing it. Be it the UK's division of the area, the Germans's perpetuation of the Holocaust which created the need for a Jewish homeland and the inaction of the US on offering up any other homeland (tho that last one is weaker).
Seems to me the west is largely responsible for the situation and is asking Israel to do what it isn't willing to do itself.
I'm really frustrated by the way some people are conflating forced resettling with the more lethal forms of ethnic cleansing.
Israel forcibly resettling the people of Gaza would be an improvement for those people. It doesn't deserve to share a word with actual genocidal actions.
Yes, it would be far less bad than killing people, but literally anything is less bad than killing people. If the government decides to take your home (along with all the equity in it) and give it to Native Americans and relocate you to England, would you be very happy about that? Would it comfort you if they told you that the other option was to kill you?
Of course that would be bad and I would feel a significant grievance, but the Palestinian people are going to feel a grievance either way. And the other option is either killing them or an even more punishing blockade.
Also, no reason they can't be compensated while being resettled.
The Zionists didn't axe Hitler's Madagascar Plan, it was a throwaway plan in the middle of the war. Nazi Germany is genocidal, Hamas is genocidal, Israel is not. Simple.
Personally, I don't support forced resettling of Gazans; they should be allowed to choose to emigrate to Egypt or not to emigrate. Many will choose emigration, many will choose not to emigrate. Pay Egypt a lot of money per Palestinian.
TBF I agree that in this instance it would be very different but sometimes you need rules to prevent other people from abusing them. I suspect the thinking is that even if that kind of resettling wouldn't be bad, Russia and China are going to insist they are doing the same thing when it's a much much worse situation so you need a bright line.
But it doesn't seem to me like that bright line is really getting respected that much in the cases we do want to prevent so maybe it's not as useful as assumed.
The Palestinians will stay poor so long as they have an average IQ of 85, i.e. forever. This is the real killer argument against a 2 state solution. Assume for a moment that both the Palestinians and Israelis could force such a deal through against internal opposition, you would have a poor basketcase sitting next to a first world economy (Israel would get even richer if it could offload some Arabs onto this new Palestinian state). The Palestinians could either deal with situation (Lol), or just invent reasons it's Israel's fault (the Naqba caused epigenetic trauma!). Palestinians would do various provocations, Israel would have to respond with some kid of blockade or whatever. Immediately, Palestinians would blame all their problems on the blockade since they have no real concept of chronology, and, sooner than you can say, 'cycle of violence', it's war.
The truth is that, from a secular perspective, zionism was probably a mistake. White people and dumb people can't live next to each other. Too late now, but there's a lesson for you guys as regards immigration. Just don't.
The conflict isn't caused by poverty, you fool. There are plenty of poor countries out there which have populations with even lower average IQs that don't dedicate their entire state apparati to terrorizing their neighbors. Nor is it caused by grievance, because grievance exists in every country at every time, and yet every country at every time is not at war. Nor is it caused by IQ, because the people of Gaza don't have any meaningful IQ differences with the people of Jordan, and the Israelis and Jordanians have been at peace for almost thirty years with no serious chance of war breaking out between the two nations in the forseeable future.
This was caused by the work of Men. Specifically, the work of the IRGC. They are a concrete organization that can, and should, be destroyed. Putting this concrete conflict down as an inevitable product of sone historical force or another is bullshit. It was bullshit when lefty academics used such things to explain the October Coup being inevitable, and it is bullshit here.
There aren't really plenty of poor countries right next to rich countries, because as a rule, for obvious reasons, people live next to people who are relatively racially similar to themselves.
As for Jordan, if there was a democratic election there, there would be war with Israel one week later. Luckily, they are ruled over a by a high IQ elite Arab family.
The US lives next to Mexico and even if AMLO destroys the country, which he very well might and is doing a damn good job at it so far, there won't ever be another war between Mexico and the US, because the Mexis know they'd lose. Brazil and Argentina are likewise at no risk of war between eachother. Nor was South Africa at threat for military invasion by an enemy nation during the Apartheid Era. Their threats were local, and they defeated them thoroughly militarily, to the point where they even successfuly projected their force outside their borders fighting against Commie insurgents in Africa. The failure of post-Apartheid South Africa was a political matter, not a military one. The ANC simply should never have been let back into politics. The same is doubly true for Zimbabwe, which we in the West deliberately betrayed to warlord commie terrorist Mugabe at the height of the Cold War AFTER they had already integrated black people who weren't terrorists into their political system and had already elected their first black PM.
The problem is not geographic. It's political and military. There is a specific enemy that needs to be killed in large enough numbers and pressed into unconditional surrender, and if such is not done, there will never be peace.
All the things you said would happen if there was a two-state solution have already happened in the absence of Palestinian statehood. Gaza is not a country right now, but it is already a basket case full of resentment that sponsors terror. How would making it a country make that worse?
This is the main reason I think the two or three state solution is a good idea. The statelessness of the Palestinians is used by them and their supporters as a moral club against Israel. If Gaza was a country then people would no longer be able to talk about "colonialism" or "apartheid." Why not take that club away? All the arguments against doing so revolve around the Gaza government potentially doing horrible stuff, but it already does that without official recognition as a country anyway.
The Gaza withdrawal was a trial run for the 2 state solution. That's how it was explicitly marketed in Israel. The results are in: they stink.
"If Gaza was a country then people would no longer be able to talk about "colonialism" or "apartheid." Why not take that club away"
You really think this? The truth is that the moral club Palestinians and their supporters have is that we shouldn't be here in the first place. Regardless of whether this is true or not, what could we possibly do to take this club away?
The "apartheid" argument comes from the idea that the Gaza strip is kinda-sorta part of Israel, and therefore Israel is restricting travel within its own borders for part of the population , which was what the actual apartheid regime South Africa did. If Gaza was definitively recognized as not part of Israel, that argument would cease to make any sense. Israel restricting travel from Gaza would be no more problematic than it restricting travel from anywhere else in the world.
One of the main reasons that Israel is accused of being colonialist is the settlers moving into the West Bank. If the West Bank was a country it could simply have its border patrol stop the settlers from moving there.
I don't think it would shut down the worst fanatics, but on the margin a lot of more reasonable people would suddenly find their arguments less convincing. The average reasonable person believes Israel has a right to exist, but has concerms that the stateless status of Gaza and the West Bank is causing excessive suffering for its people. If Gaza and and the West Bank were countries, that concern would be alleviated.
Again, we tried this on a limited scale, like a pilot scheme. We had explicit assurances - or at least we were told by our government we had - that if we dragged the settlers in Gaza out by their feet, then we would have total backing if the Palestinians used their new territory to attack. And then when the rockets started flying it was all proportionality this innocent civilians that. You can tell me that if we had only done X or Y more then the international community would have followed through on their end of the bargain, but it's just not plausible.
The fact is that we are white they are brown; we are functional and they are retarded and f**ked up; we are invaders and they are natives. The moral rules of the international order mean that we are wrong. There will always be some reason to justify why they had to resort to violence, some ancestral olive tree or whatever-the-f**k that we didn't give back. And then when we respond, we will be reminded that we have the right to defend ourselves, but not the right to win. And they will never stop this until we get rid of them or they get rid of us.
The fact is that Hamas' strategy makes perfect sense, which is why they are the recognised leaders of the Palestinian struggle. Of course, their strategy entails having total contempt for the welfare and lives of Palestinians, but, looking at them, isn't that a pretty fair assessment?
This seems like an example of (I believe) Saul Alinsky's dictum: use your enemies scruples/morals against them. Of course, if you do this, you are committing state/cultural suicide. It's kind of Darwinian, if you think about it.
It is also a rejection both of Enlightenment principles as well as every major religious doctrine, and almost every western moral philosophy. If you implement your enemies morals then by definition they are now your morals.
Incredibly disconnected from reality, both the analysis and the data… suffice to quote Madelaine Albright “ death of 500 thousand Iraqi children was worth it”
What planet you on Richard, come down to earth and see for yourself
There's a fundamental contradiction in what you write - on the one hand, you claim rebels require an opportunity to revolt, on the other, you claim that modern militaries aren't very good at suppressing rebellions because people aren't willing to do what they must to suppress rebels. Then wouldn't disgruntled Americans have the opportunity to rebel? You claim they don't, but your other arguments contradict that claim. If the US Army can't win in Afghanistan because it won't use sufficiently harsh tactics, then it can win in FL? Where It will use harsher tactics? Where it's willing to kill MORE civilians? Huh? That's just nonsense.
If we believe that our army loses because it lacks the will to be sufficiently brutal, then we'd have to infer that FL, TX etc have a great opportunity to get out.
And wouldn't it be what opportunity they think they have, not what opportunity they really have that matters. That is, if TX & Fl think they can win easily, then they'll rebel even if they can't actually win easily. So isn't the real variable whether or not rednecks w/ guns FEEL threatened by liberals w/ lattes? liberals who just shut down the world in fear over a virus? Yeah, they don't seem intimidating to me, maybe I'm wrong, but wouldn't perception not reality matter in your model?
Anyway, I think you need to do some more thinking here as you appear to be confused & contradicting yourself.
I don’t think this is a contradiction at all. I think the US law enforcement is so strong at home that it doesn’t need to kill massive numbers of people. It can just use surveillance and target threats directly. It’s known in extremist circles for example that they’re crawling with federal agents. Try to organize 5-10 men for a violent political cause and you’ll get shut down very quickly.
'And you being insufficiently literate for "Großdeutsche Reich" or "Israelim" to be acceptable for you isn't my fault.'
No, no. I speak German. I lived there for 5 years and studied it at university. I was simply wondering why you didn't use normal English. I generally don't sprinkle my conversations with random foreign words.
So let me get this straight. Your argument is that this massacre happened because Bibi cosied up to Putin. Do I have that right?
Richard, the fact that you're both a Palestinean and a literal ex-neo-Nazi and yet are significantly more clear-eyed on the nature of Hamas, the Pasdaran, the global jihadi movement, and the nature of war than countless ostensibly more reasonable and moderate figures is both tragic and inspiring.
Palestein will never be free for as long as they are ruled by terrorists, and terrorists can never be appeased by having their grievances addressed, because that only encourages them to commit more terrorism to get what they want. They can only be defeated via force of arms.
No. He was. He admitted it himself. He was Richard Hoste. And even if he hadn't admitted it, it was obvious Richard Hoste was him.
And yet, even though so much of his prior life would lead him otherwise, he still isn't for a second pretending that Hamas is anything other than a rapacious terrorist organization, and an enemy of human flourishing.
Look, the term "Nazi" has always been an insult. It was an insult for decades even before the formation of the Nazionalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, much the same way that "Pajeet" is now an insult for Indians, "Karen" is now an insult for white women, and to a lesser extent "Tyrone" and "Shaniqua" are now insults for black people. The implication was that only stupid yokels* were fool enough to believe in a stupid yokel like Adolf Hitler. No one has ever liked being called one. Including the Literal Nazis, to whom even being referred to as "the Nazis" they would consider a punishment-worthy infraction.
But how on Earth Richard Hoste's beliefs don't constitute national-socialist, I don't know how you can make the case for. Especially given that you can make a very good case that the reason Richard has moved from Hoste to Hanania is because he stopped believing that socialism in any form could be a good thing, and -- contrary to 21st Century socialist being so stereotypically part of the danger-hair rainbow coalition -- a genuine commitment to the free market makes it a lot harder to be a committed racist, or even a committed sexist.
* Indeed, "yokel" started life as a German nickname for "Jacob", which, much like "IgNATZ", was a popular name among hinterlanders, and thus a common target of cityfolk punchlines for use against hicks.
Dunkirk was nowhere near the disaster that the Supernova Massacre was. Humiliating though the defeat was, they salvaged enough vessels and rescued enough troops to both deliver a huge morale boost and secure the integrity of the empire's warfighting capabilities enough to ensure future victory against the Großdeutsche Reich.
There is no way to spin the Supernova Massacre as a victory, no matter how heroic the actions of the first responders nor even the total defeat and unconditional surrender of the IRGC satraps at Israel's border. The worst mass murder of Jews since 1945 happened precisely because of Bibi's amorality and incompetence, and the Israelim still have a strong enough lever over their governence to punish such gross failure from their leaders.
I wasn't suggesting Dunkirk and the massacre were comparable. I only wanted a tactical cockup that everyone was familiar with.
I often watch football matches. It seems what you are advocating is booing your own team if they make a mistake. Surely the whole point of being a supporter is to support your team even when they are losing. Similarly, ditching your loyalty when your government/military makes a mistake suggests one's loyalty was pretty lukewarm in the first place.
Precisely what was Bibi's amorality, which allegedly facilitated the massacre?
'The Israelim'. I have never heard that before. Is it the same as 'the Israelis'? And 'the Großdeutsche Reich' would be what others often call 'Germany'?
Bibi is not the State of Israel. He's the Prime Minister. He works for them, and he fucked up his job. When you are given a job by seone and you fuck it up at the elementary level like this, you deserve to lose your job and be replaced by somebody competent. Bibi's cozying up to Putin is highly likely to be the reason why such a devestating attack was able to be carried out, given that Putin is ideologically and strategically allied to Khameini, who was the man ultimately responsible for this atrocity; and how Putin has been fermenting anti-Semitism worldwide, sponsoring neo-Nazi militias, and has compared the Israelis to the Nazis; and how even this was not enough to break him away from Moscow, or even to allow Zelensky, a grandson of Holocaust survivors and a man actually worthy of respect and alliance, to so much as visit his country after the worst massacre of Jews since 1945.
And you being insufficiently literate for "Großdeutsche Reich" or "Israelim" to be acceptable for you isn't my fault.
This is a good piece.
I feel it would be even better if you put data from how more illiberal countries fight these kind of wars. For instance, the Russian actions in Chechenya, or Chinese actions in Xinjiang (no war there). Separatist insurgencies in Pakistan. Examples from Africa, like the fight against the jihadists in Mali. Egyptians fighting ISIS/AQ in Sinai (with the help of Israel). And so on. I would guess you are right and that countries like the US and Israel are far more benevolent than those countries. Also, it would be better if you put more data on the success rate of countries like the US and Israel compared to the success rate of more illiberal countries.
Also "this is primarily due to Israel facing a lot more scrutiny than most other nations would under similar circumstances" - that is definitely a factor, but I wonder if there are other causes. Israel is generally liberal, and there are Jewish tendencies or at least Ashkenazi tendencies toward liberalism, whether because of high IQ, verbal tilt, the Holocaust, historic persecution by Christians, secularism, the theological value of life in the Jewish religion, and so on. Or maybe it's that Zionism was founded as a liberal movement, or something else. I wonder how you would measure that. Obviously the McDonald point that "liberalism is a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Western civilization" is false and has never been disproved more conclusively than now with woke leftists and BLM cheering for Hamas. Israel has no death penalty (they executed 2 people ever, and haven't in decades), which is also a bit surprising a priori. Jewish bioethics are very pro-IVF and pro embryo selection (pre-implanted embryo is like water, and "playing god" is good because man is in god's image) but anti death-penalty and anti-euthanasia, so they are "pro-life" in some sense. See also Israel's pro-natalism.
It does seem to be true that Israel is generally pretty restrained. Exactly how much and why would be interesting things to study. Is it more restrained that other liberal democracies? How would one go about distinguishing between the various hypotheses and establishing the cause? I guess a good place to start be that you could look at various demographics in Israel and their support for restraint, and what causes this. And which political leaders support it, and how they are receptive to public opinion.
In the specific case of the threat Israel faces from Gaza, it seems like they could have prevented the vast majority of casualties from this kind of attack by better securing the border with Gaza. The military outposts in the area were caught flat-footed, which presumably won't happen again. The rocket attacks by themselves are a small threat to Israel--even before the Iron Dome, they caused few casualties. The scale of the casualties Israel faced in the most recent attacks were caused by Netanyahu's catastrophic incompetence more than Hamas being a true existential threat. If the IDF had invested more resources in defending the area near Gaza and less defending settlers in the West Bank, Hamas' attack couldn't have been nearly as disastrous.
The true existential threat to Israel is its increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the world, particularly the younger generations in the West. Western countries treating Israel more like South Africa once the boomers die off and are replaced by a younger generation much less sympathetic to Israel is a much greater threat than Islamic militants.
For the first paragraph, definitely. https://reason.com/2023/10/13/israel-eases-guns-restrictions-amidst-security-failures/ . Those kibbutzim in the Gaza Envelope are full of IDF veterans (of course, there is conscription). They will all have guns now. Kibbutzim are small towns, so as Jason Aldean says, "got a gun that my granddad gave me..." ;)
The last paragraph is something that I used to be worried about. But I am pretty sure people who had their formative years after October 7, 2023 will be much more like the boomers than like the millenials in their attitude toward this. Millenials/Gen Z will be the most anti-Israel generation ever and they are still pro-Israel. This event itself definitely shifted public opinion (which was already pro-Israel) toward Israel even more. In any case, within a generation or two differential fertility by political orientation will be pushing the US public to the right. The BDS movement in the West is totally and completely dead, except among the kinds of tankies and commies (and "frog Nazis") who support Putin in Ukraine (I don't mean the ones who want the US to stay out, I mean the ones actively rooting for Putin).
I also used to be worried about the Haredi demographic threat. But after October 7, I don't think people will tolerate the Haredim taking welfare, having tons of kids, and not serving anymore. They ran the trains on Shabbat, they might not do it again, but it's a hell of a precedent. Secular anger was already high over the judicial reform.
I think that paradoxically I became much more optimistic about the future of Israel in the last 1-2 weeks. I was optimistic before but now I'm very optimistic. Am Yisrael Chai!
It's hard to see how US support for Israel will continue to remain so far ahead of other Western countries. The main influences behind America's superlative and peculiar support for Israel, above and beyond the Western norm, are Dispy theology and Jews, both of which are rapidly diminishing. Meanwhile, the Hispanic world is much cooler towards Israel than the US is, and therefore it's hard to see how the Hispanicization of the US will be anything but negative for its support of Israel.
However, while I wouldn't 100% count on it, it's a fair bet that post-Zoomer generations will also revert to some sort of mean in terms of patriotism vs. oikophobia. And the natural position of any Westerner who is more patriotic than oikophobic, who has more concentric than leapfrogging loyalties, is to sympathize with the more Westernized group, i.e. the Israelis. Just as it's natural that patriotic Arabs will do the opposite.
Yeah, I think and hope Vivek Ramaswamy will represent the new American consensus. It's not like giving Israel more fictitious aid earmarked to buy overpriced US weapons would have prevented the Gaza envelope pogroms.
On the other hand, I expect that now maybe Western countries (including the US and maybe some others) will finally say no to UNRWA, an evil evil organization that needs to be abolished. End US aid to UNRWA!
Young and non-white people are less likely to support Israel than older and white people, but even in the first two groups, many more people say the US government should publicly support Israel than people who say the US government should publicly criticize Israel:
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/13/1205627092/american-support-israel-biden-middle-east-hamas-poll
Israel also has very good numbers with Democrats, which some may find surprising considering where Democrats were going before. This poll seems to support the idea that sympathy for Israel has increased, however, I wouldn't take this as carte blanche forever. I think support for Israel will become less unanimous, and the Israeli government can always do things to make this worse. Also, take note of how support for NATO/Europe has become a partisan issue in the US, and how parts of the GOP has flirted with isolationism. Counting on US politics to be stable is a dangerous thing, because the US is always one presidential election away from some charismatic figure getting elected and convincing at least his party to do this or that or not to do this or that.
How is the Israeli government going to stop the ultra-Orthodox types from having so many kids? There's no reason whatsoever this will change the demographic trajectory of Israel. I also doubt the attack will have a long-term effect on people's attitude toward Israel. The effects of 9/11 petered out after a few years, and when the consensus became that the response wasn't worth it or was excessive, they probably actually reversed. At the time, it was the best thing that could've happened for foreign policy conservatism, but ultimately it nearly killed foreign policy conservatism.
Cutting welfare reduces TFR (see 2003), but importantly the attrition rate will go way up, I think at some point the attrition rate will go up to 50% like it currently is for Modern Orthodox in Israel. With a TFR of 5 (instead of 6.5) and an attrition of 50%, their proportion of the population will decline (Israeli Jewish TFR is about 3). Haredi TFR was like 3 in the 1950s, it went up with a lot of subsidies. Israel has tons of levers, cutting welfare and introducing secular subjects into the schools will do a lot. The goal will be to get to a place where a few smart people become rabbis have 10+ kids but if you are not a great scholar you cannot have the Haredi lifestyle. Some Haredi groups have expressed openness to this. The Haredi lifestyle depends on them being in the coalition and taking welfare money. Haredi demography is a political choice. Cut the government support and the problem will be solved.
I do think that the attack will have a long-term effect. With 9/11 you didn't have student activists cheering it on... and you didn't have people with Nazi-style genocidal hatred towards Jews.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bjq0hxlgp
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b11dqjmma
Good post, but outposts will always be caught flat-footed sometimes. The enemy gets a vote. And Netanyahu may be staggeringly incompetent- lots of Ashkenazi think so, and it's their country- but he's a traitor to his class of Ashkenazi by leading the Mizrahi, and lots of Ashkenazi want to hate him about something. Netanyahu being an idiot is a best case. Netanyahu being broadly right that Hamas was the least bad enemy to run Gaza is a worst case. It's the Mideast- bet on the worst case.
Or maybe you know the area better than I do. Probably not hard.
Hindsight is interesting
Was it Netanyahu's incompetency? I was under the impression that he is the option that is focused more on security, and he was weaker than he has been in the past in part because he was losing ground to politicians, judges, and voters that are more inclined to want Israel to back off on some of its more stringent security measures. I definitely don't pay a lot of attention to their politics, so that could be backwards, but that's the impression I have from reading casually from time to time about Israel politics.
Netanyahu's fights with the judiciary and national security establishment were about him trying to reform the judiciary to protect himself from charges of corruption, not because he wanted more stringent security measures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Benjamin_Netanyahu
As I understand the whole Judicial reform controversy in Israel it boiled down to the fact that the "supreme" court can inject it self into the legislative/executive process and proactively veto a law based on a standard of "unreasonableness" . Secondly that the court reserves to itself the right to appoint it's own replacements. If this is not the central issue, what is ?
Bibi is like Trump in the US. The never Trumpers have their equivalents in Israel and many of those seem to be senior leaders in the IDF, intelligence services and foreign ministry.
It seems that Israel has imported a lot of wokeness from the US. Much of the opposition to judicial reform claim they are "saving democracy", just as those in the US who seek to criminalize Trump and his supporters claim to be "saving democracy"
Regardless of how the Gaza war turns out, I suspect Bibi's political career is over as well as the careers of the opposition. If the people of Israel are smart, they will throw everyone out and look for a fresh start.
The supreme court in Israel is the only counterbalance to the power of the government / ruling coalition in the Knesset (which are the same: ministers are almost always also MKs). The judicial reform aimed at eliminating the restraining power of the court and enable the gov't to enact any decision and pass any law they want. Including, for example, outlawing some political parties or preventing the vote to some population groups, in the more extreme cases. Or appointing patently incompetent, but loyal, individuals and shifting massive resources to loyal populations in the more common cases, as has been happening over the last year. And here we are.
The role of the supreme court as final arbitrator is clear. But what standard do they refer to. Is it true that the only standard they have to test against is "reasonableness' or "unreasonableness". And who or what standard defines those terms. Isn't that the crux of the issue ? And also, is it true that the members of the supreme court effectively nominate and chose their own successors - it not as individuals, then as a court ?
If sounds perfectly reasonable that there should be a check on the authority of parliament or government. But what is the check on the court. Without an objective standard, they just become another kind of tyranny.
It's already bad enough in the US, where we, in theory, have such a document in the constitution and the bill of rights which is simply redefined out of existence. If the Israeli system lacks even that then that is a sad story.
To your questions: regarding the "reasonableness" argument, I'm no lawyer, but law experts claim that this is a standard almost universally used in one form or another in higher courts worldwide. If it sounds subjective, it is because it is, but so are all judicial decisions. According to this doctrine, to be overturned, an administrative decision must be "obviously unreasonable" (my translation of the Hebrew term), i.e. beyond the pale of reasonable decisions by competent people. So this doctrine is used sparingly, in glaring cases only.
Regarding the mechanism of nominating supreme court judges: Currently the Judges Appointment Committee includes 3 supreme court judges, two ministers (incl. the justice minister), two MKs (one from the coalition, one from the opposition) and two representatives of the bar, 9 in total (https://www.gov.il/he/Departments/Guides/judges_nomination_committee?chapterIndex=2). Crucially, appointments of supreme court judges requires 7 votes. This system, the brainchild of former Likud minister of Justice Guideon Saar, has been in place since 2008 (http://fs.knesset.gov.il/17/law/17_ls1_566565.pdf). Thus, on the one hand no single constituency can appoint a judge on its own, but both the 3 judges and the 3 coalition members (2 ministers and 1 MK) have veto power to prevent appointments. The former makes sense because a judge is, among others, a professional appointment – and the profession should be able to block unqualified candidates. The latter makes sense because they were voted in power. This system ensures that supreme court judges are either consensual or, based on give and take, alternatively include more ideological and more liberal candidates. The makeup of the court since the last decade reflects this and is more diverse. I think it is fair to say that a large majority of stakeholders think that the current appointment system is well balanced and should not be altered in any way.
Regarding the "tyranny of the court" argument, I don't think it holds water. The power of the court is mainly to block decisions. The court has no power to implement decisions itself, and can do very little if the administration ignores its decisions. So the power of the court is first and foremost a restraining power.
Israel does not have a constitution, therefore the Supreme Court has used the Declaration of Independence, which includes a sort of Bill of Rights (equal rights for all citizens without distinction etc.) as the de facto constitution.
Out of curiosity, is their government as partisan and corrupt as ours? I.e., is he being prosecuted because he is corrupt? Or because he is corrupt and has the wrong political leanings?
Not that being corrupt isn't bad, but it doesn't necessarily answer the question of why he is being prosecuted. That's looking at things through a US lens but I don't think the US is particularly unique among developed countries as far as having a partisan bureaucracy and law enforcement?
Netanyahu has pretty flexible political leanings, he's partnered with various groups to stay in power. It also doesn't really make sense to prosecute a PM for their political views in Israel's parliamentary system--the Likud party would still have the same amount of power without him. It's not like his political party is being persecuted more broadly, it's just him personally.
This is wrong. Bibi has spent the last 20 years securing his power in the Likud by getting rid of anyone even slightly talented. The leaders of most opposition parties used to be his allies and those that are left are absolute dross. With any conceivable leader from within the existing Likud, it would lose half its seats. Now it will lose them anyway.
> The true existential threat to Israel is its increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the world, particularly the younger generations in the West.
I agree. If Israel loses support from the West, particularly the USA, and doesn't get another backer, then it may not survive as a state.
You can't "secure a border" to a country run by a terrorist colonial power, and despite the tainting of those words by the leftoids, I'm not talking about Israel. Hamas gave up anything resembling independence for the sake of aligning with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and expanding their terrorism capabilities. They care nothing for the actual people of Gaza, any more than the KGB cared for the people of the Captive Nations. They're just a material resource, to be extracted and made use of with no more thought to anything but whether they help destroy the enemy than if they were ore or oil.
If there's any means of destroying such an organization, it must be taken. Only then can the border be secure, or you end up in no better shoes than South Korea, which has the most heavily fortified border in the history of human civilization, and yet is still at perpetual risk for an exestential conflict breaking out on their nation, which could kill more people than any war since WWII, kicking off at any time for potentially any reason, or no reason at all. And given the Ingsockian counterintelligence measures of Pyongyang, they very well could have no notice of the conflict breaking out until the moment enemy troops start re-enacting their favorite Hamas videos on the populous.
> You can't "secure a border"
Wrong. Israel could absolutely have secured its border with Gaza against the attack that ensued, which was by a few thousand light infantry and a few entering on paragliders. Simply having an armed fortified post every 200 meters, with video/IR cameras, machine guns, and manned by about 10-20 soldiers, would slow the Hamas attackers down for a few hours, which is long enough for reinforcements to arrive from the rest of the Israeli army.
There is absolutely no way that a competent and alert defender would have allowed the incursion -- which against I will emphasize was by light infantry -- to quickly advance several km into Israel.
I've got a better idea: how 'bout they just go in, destroy Hamas and the PIJ, kill as many high-ranking terrorists as possible, assassinate the leaders based in Qatar, force those left into signing an unconditional surrender, and do business with whatever's left?
That'd offer a fuck of a lot more security than any amount of border checkpoints can get them. A fortified border certainly can help when there's an enemy behind it, but it can never truly provide security. You can only get that when the enemy is eliminated or defeated. It's not like the problem here is economic migrants looking for a better life in a richer country. The populous of Gaza, unlike the populous of Syria or Iran or even North Korea, is genuinely behind the genocidal project of their overlords. They need to be handed defeats until they learn their lesson, however long that takes.
> force those left into signing an unconditional surrender
You mean everyone as individuals, or setting up some sort of representative government to do so?
> They need to be handed defeats until they learn their lesson
AFAICT the lesson Palestinians have learned is whatever they do, Israel will continue to oppress and kill them while making their lives miserable on a daily basis. As long as they beleive that, it is certain that some of them will conclude that the best they can do is sell their lives as expensively as possible.
If the Palestineans had more of a problem with being killed and oppressed than they had with Jews existing, they wouldn't have voted in terrorists as their leaders every time they have an election, nor would they have collaborated with the IRGC, who have murdered more Palestineans this century than anybody else in the 21st Century via their puppet Assad. They don't.
They must be handed defeat until they accept the right of Jews to nationhood and property as a matter of practicality. Only then, with time, will their practical acceptance morph into personal acceptance. One of the greatest delusions in all of history is that it's possible for this to work the other way around, but it's not. Accepting that others have a right to things which they've earned via lawful conduct, even if they earn said things at a disproportionate rate to you and your people, is a very difficult skill to learn. It's a multi-generational project that must first and foremost be based in practicality, and the world of things is the best way to develop such practice.
For the record, it was also a mistake when the Afrikaners surrendered their political control before a respect for property rights had developed among the black population. They have paid a steep price for this, the nation has been destroyed likely beyond repair, and they may well be properly genocided in the subsequent generation. The same would be even worse were Israel to attempt the same with their own nation.
> They must be handed defeat until they accept the right of Jews to nationhood and property as a matter of practicality.
That's rhetoric. In practice, how would you implement that? Go into practical detail of what you mean.
What if no one in Gaza is afraid of dying, and they positively seek it as route to a blessed afterlife if they die in the act of killing infidels? Even religious westerners find this Muslim idea bizarre beyond belief. perhaps because all our religions preach against totally wanton killing. Even atheists imbibe this cultural prohibition.
The kamikaze attacks on the United States and Royal Navies in the Pacific genuinely stunned and alarmed allied sailors that whole squadrons of attacking aircraft would commit suicide in what were highly destructive strikes if they got through the air defences. Most didn't, but the hit rate was higher than for aircraft attempting to bomb or drop torpedoes and then escape out of harm's way... and get home to re-arm and fight again. Part of the rationale for using the atomic bombs was that the whole population of Japan was similarly believed to be suicidally prepared to make the American invaders "eat stones."
I like the idea of a hit on the leaders in Qatar, though.
It's interesting to see someone else's 9/11 from a different perspective. And soon to see what their version of the Iraq war will look like. Then compare our outsider feelings to what we felt when it was us.
This isn't Israel's 9/11. It's significantly worse. Not only did they take half the caualties of 9/11 in a day despite being an orders-of-magnitude smaller country, but there's no reason to believe the war will be contained to a single front with three Pasdaran colonies at their Northern and Southern borders.
Bibi's amoral approach to governance, and his consistent suckuppery for Putin to a level even Trump never reached, has proven itself a failure on both ethical and practical grounds. Not enough of a failure to where Jerusalem won't emerge victorious even on a three-front war, but he's done the moment there's a fresh election. This was the single greatest failure in the history of the Israeli Republic.
One interesting consequence to the difference between the trivial threat posed by terrorism in America and the much greater threat to Israel is that the electorate in Israel seems to be more rational. The 'rally around the flag' effect Bush got after 9/11 is not happening for Netanyahu in Israel--Israelis are furious with him. I think voters in America are 'rationally irrational', as Caplan says, about national security issues because at some level they know that who the President is doesn't actually matter much for their safety. For Israelis, incompetence in national security policies is a real threat to their lives.
So the Israelis are more rational for being furious with Netanyahu and don't rally round the flag? Why is that more rational? Why would it be irrational to be furious with Hamas and rally round the Israeli flag?
It isn't rational to rally around the flag if it means overlooking the incompetence that led to the terrorist attacks being successful. If your country is under frequent terrorist attacks that creates horrible incentives. It means that leaders can slack off with no consequences, because if they fail to prevent a terrorist attack people will rally behind them anyway.
The 'rally around the flag' effect doesn't mean not hating Hamas and supporting Israel, obviously Israelis do hate Hamas and support the Israeli state. In the US, the 'rallying' was a huge boost in popularity for George W Bush, which isn't happening in Israel, because they blame Netanyahu's incompetence for the attack.
I see. That makes sense.
“ Conflict is generally caused by opportunity, not grievance” - as someone who knows a lot less about the history of conflict, is this something you can elaborate on?
Grievance exists in every country at every time. For it to cause civil war, it would mean that every country at every time would always be at civil war.
Why else do you think there hasn't been a civil war in the US in over a century and a half? Because the last time their was, our state was significantly poorer, weaker, and lacking in counterintelligence capabilities as compared to now. Groups like the Third Klan and the Panthers were shot through with informants, hit with hard prison time, and killed at a high enough rate to ensure their boogaloo dreams remained just that. It'd take a level of intentional institutional degredation worthy of the ANC to empower any organization in the US to the level where a civil war could actually be sparked up, and we're at least a generation away from such things even if absolutely everything for us goes wrong.
It strikes me that the ways powerful western countries used to fight, back when we used to win wars, are no longer allowed by international humanitarian conventions. Incendiary bombing of cities, a tactic used chiefly by the British (and Empire) Bomber Command in WW2 against Germany and by the United States against Japan are now war crimes, even in a war for existential survival....as it was for the British. It is now required of belligerents that they not interdict humanitarian supplies of food, water, and medicine to civilians on the enemy side even if the enemy forces militarize those civilians into the war production effort or use them as human shields. You can bomb and shoot them as collateral damage but you can't starve them out or drop napalm on them.
To me, these restrictions seem designed to make it hard or impossible for powerful western countries to defeat insurgencies. I don't think these rules are just part of the natural evolution of beneficence and magnanimity, the moral arc of history if you will. Rather there was a deliberate attempt by the Global South at the United Nations (who brokers all these international agreements) to frustrate the forces of colonialism and capitalism under the guise of protecting civilians. It was tacitly understood that only the western powers would be subject to these rules. The insurgencies themselves could carry on terrorizing the population much as they always have. As Randy Newman sang, "They all hate us anyhow." (I think he was being sarcastic, not prescient.)
Why did the western nations agree to these restrictions? Why did we agree that, yeah, we incinerated Hamburg, Tokyo etc. without serious compunction (except for the terrible cost to our own aircrews) and carried out unrestricted submarine warfare against all of Japan's commerce, starving them, but we would never do it again? Did we think we would never ever again have to fight an existential conflict with an enemy who will do anything to win? Did we think nuclear weapons covered off that possibility?
Maybe we thought all future war would be fought between feuding militias in Africa somewhere, who didn't have napalm, (or even cities to drop it on) and we could virtuously demand that one militia allow a Red Cross truck with food to cross its lines with the other. In that case we would look the other way while the other militia looted the truck of food for its own soldiers and to hell with the villagers. But now when Gaza could be effectively reduced with a tight mediaeval-type siege we find that Israel isn't allowed to shut off the water and has to feed the Gazans from its own resources. Why did we agree to that?
>Why did the western nations agree to these restrictions? Why did we agree that, yeah, we incinerated Hamburg, Tokyo etc. without serious compunction (except for the terrible cost to our own aircrews) and carried out unrestricted submarine warfare against all of Japan's commerce, starving them, but we would never do it again?
Well, we (that is, the US) did not in fact agree to those restrictions after WWII. The use of 'strategic bombing'--bombing civilian populations to force the enemy to submit--continued in Korea and Vietnam. In Korea the US killed 20% of the N Korean population, far more than we did against Germany or Japan. We stopped after Vietnam because we lost anyway, because it wasn't actually an existential war that we had to win, and it wasn't worth continuing indefinitely until they surrendered unconditionally. We didn't use those tactics in Iraq or Afghanistan because it wouldn't have made any sense given the aims of the wars. The goals of those wars were in fact impossible to actually achieve, but that wouldn't have changed if we used WWII tactics.
You did agree to the restrictions I described in 1980s. Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed To Be Excessively Injurious Or To Have Indiscriminate Effects came into effect in 1983. Whether or not you could have firebombed Hanoi without unsustainable losses of aircraft -- Rolling Thunder and Linebacker II suggest you probably couldn't have -- the war aims and risks of drawing in China or USSR made the idea a non-starter. By the time of Iraq and Afghanistan, firebombing was no longer a legal option, aside from whether there would have been any military gain from doing so and probably not, quite right. Getting either country to surrender was not the point, as you say.
I agree with you that all 3 later wars were the "wrong" wars. (The Korean war prevented a communist takeover of S. Korea.) They would have been unwinnable even with WW2 tactics which were geared toward unconditional surrender after destroying the enemy's ability to make war. On the other hand, if Israel could utterly destroy all of Gaza, this could achieve a war aim for her. (Not saying that Israel actually seeks the destruction of Gaza, certainly not, but if she did, she probably could but she would have to work at it.) Whether incendiaries would work well against an urban construction that is mostly cinder-block I don't know. (Unlike German cities, Japanese cities were susceptible to conflagrations of fire even without creating "kindling" with high explosives.)
I'm concentrating on incendiary bombing just because it's an example of a widely used wartime tactic that is now outlawed, not implying that it could or should be used were it legal today.
Do you think race played a role? In those days we had Jim Crow in a part of our country and had harsh limits on Asian immigration. Probably the US was more willing to kill white civilians than non-white/Asian ones.
(Edit: of course I meant more willing to kill non white)
I wouldn't rush to blame racism. That's too easy.
The atomic bomb was being developed for use against Germany, against the fear that the Nazis would get theirs first. Germany collapsed (as did FDR) before it was ready. President Truman had no knowledge of the Bomb as VP and got briefed on it in his first hours as Commander-in-Chief. less than a month before Germany surrendered. Was he willing to use it against Japan because they were Oriental? Hard to say as there was no opportunity for *him* to use it against Germany. Germans also were dehumanized by war propaganda, not just Japanese, although the artists tended to use more racial stereotypes in the cartoons of Japanese. And of course everyone called them "Japs", even years after the war. The Japanese were more inhumane to POWs but I think most of this came out later, after the war as the POWs came home.
As for incendiaries, the American approach to Germany was daylight precision bombing (which wasn't really.) When USAAF and Bomber Command attacked the same target (e.g., Hamburg and Dresden) the Americans bombed by day with high-explosive bombs, less use of incendiaries. Night bombing was so inaccurate that you really had to set fire to wide areas in order to do much damage. As to Japan, the USAAF tried for like 8 months to bomb Japan by daylight with high-explosives aimed at military & industrial targets: factories, aircraft plants, steel mills. It was an abject failure for many reasons. In desperation, given the astronomical cost of the B-29 program, they switched to British-style night incendiary raids and achieved success.
So I think it's simplistic to say the Americans were squeamish about firebombing white people but enthusiastic about firebombing Japanese (and North Koreans and Vietnamese.) Precision bombing was simply failing to achieve the war aim of forcing Japan to surrender. Firebombing was so effective that there is still argument about whether the Japanese would have capitulated with the A-bombs.
How could you actually figure out whether racism was to blame or had any effect? It seems hard to establish especially given it was so long ago. You would need to collect a lot of relevant data.
But I take your point the US was not squeamish about bombing white Christians. We weren’t in the 1990s either but that was a different era. Are we more squeamish about bombing or killing non-whites now? I don’t know. Richard used to say that, and that’s why the left was more anti-Russia. Again probably some truth. But it’s hard to tell a priori. What data would make someone change their position one way or the other?
>Probably the US was more willing to kill white civilians than non-white/Asian ones.
Do you mean the reverse of this? Yes, I do think it played a role. The dehumanizing rhetoric used to train US soldiers fighting in Korea/Vietnam was sickening and led to countless atrocities. Although, we never fought a war against a white country during that time frame, so there's no way of knowing if we would have done the same thing there.
Yes I meant the reverse of that of course.
That doesn't make any sense historically. There is a long history of Western nations agreeing to restrictions on warfare against each other. Rules about ships being required to fly their countries flags, the taking of prisoners, later a ban on the use of chemical weapons. We made those agreements precisely because we were fighting against other civilized nations, not because we wanted to bend to the will of poor countries who weren't even at the negotiating table.
Those rules you cite go back to mediaeval times, so fair enough. Prisoner treatment is reciprocity: you don't want to give the other side in a European war an excuse to mistreat your prisoners. Yet native people in the Americas tortured and killed prisoners that they captured. Using flags to distinguish King's ships from privateers and pirates relates to the law of freedom of the seas and what you get to do with a ship you capture. It's not really about limiting the ferocity of warfare. In sea combat under sail you didn't want to slaughter the crew and sink the ship. You wanted to capture it sort-of intact as a prize with enough crew left alive to sail it home for you. So a captain of a king's ship would surrender his ship once he had lost enough men and rigging to make eventual victory unlikely. A pirate would fight to the death because he would be hanged for sure if captured.
Colonial empires absolutely did try to bend the wills of poor countries -- their colonies.
There was a popular bit of doggerel among British toffs during the late 19th century, shortly after early machine guns appeared:
"We shall not fear the Hottentot
For we the Maxim gun have got.
And they have not."
Belgium and France brutally suppressed their African colonies.
Winston Churchill (who was out of the British government at the time) called for the use of poison gas against troublesome colonial rebels during the 1920s, even as the civilized nations were working on the Geneva Convention to ban poison gas against each other.
In the twenties and thirties, as air power began to come into its own -- Col. Billy Mitchell sank a bunch of old battleships in a demonstration using primitive airplanes in 1921 -- the civilized countries began to realize that aerial bombardment was likely to be a serious threat to civilians as airplanes could fly much farther inland than a warship's artillery would carry and they could be built in huge numbers. They were the WMDs of the day.
>To me, these restrictions seem designed to make it hard or impossible for powerful western countries to defeat insurgencies.
That's a side effect, but their primary root is to make it impossible for a smaller/regional powers to mount any kind of effective resistance to major powers (not without violating them, and opening the leadership to execution after getting inevitably defeated).
Empirically, that seems unlikely.
1)These conventions are brokered through the UN which, numerically, is composed almost entirely of small regional powers and failed states locked (they say) in perpetual struggle against the United States, UK, France, and Israel. Why would they in their many dozens vote to reduce their own freedom to act in asymmetrical warfare against the larger colonial powers as they struggle for ethnic cleansing and self-determination?
2) The methods they want to outlaw are the methods possessed only by large powers: air forces with the ability to drop incendiary bombs and sophisticated cluster munitions, for example.
3) Finally, the countries with the most vicious records of barbarity against civilians (in Africa mostly) have not signed the conventions at all, not wanting to bind themselves if a large power has to intervene to stop the worst of the blood-letting.
4) The movement to restrict weapons like incendiaries is led by NGOs such as Human Rights Watch who are generally hostile to the former colonial powers and friendly to the aspirations of the Global South. If these conventions had the effect of strengthening the hands of the major powers to suppress their former colonies, the NGOs (and their UN audience) would not be pushing them.
The Rwandan genocide was carried out with machetes, not with sophisticated weapons covered under the Convention on Weapons.
It's fascinating how readily you dismiss technology as an explanation in order to reach your preferred conclusion. It is easier today to obtain or build a bomb than it was to get a sword 4 or 500 years ago. And bombs and guns can be effectively used - even non-suicidally - by a few or even one person (whereas melee weapons are basically useless without a whole unit of soldiers). Technology has also greatly empowered combatants working in small numbers (at least in an urban setting, and the technological advantages of powerful countries - artillery, fighter jets, etc. - are pretty useless at taking out the two guys taking pot shots from a window before running away. At the same time, technological advancement has made killing lots of civilians unnecessary. Planes and drones can strike very specific targets (and info on where to aim obtained from highly accurate satellites). The kind of carpet bombing that killed millions of German and Japanese civilians would make much less sense, especially since there are no industrial targets like factories or oil refineries in the context of a middle eastern insurgency.
Generally the only reason for a superpower today to wage as brutal a war as was waged, say, by the allies in WW2 or even the US in Vietnam would be if killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure. Perhaps you're trying to surreptitiously argue for this - that killing lots of people in general should be the goal, in order to fully beat them into submission, but WW2 at least if anything suggests this leads people to fight to the bitter end.
"It is easier today to obtain or build a bomb than it was to get a sword 4 or 500 years ago."
Guns have been around for hundreds of years, and we haven't seen this trend until much more recently.
"Technology has also greatly empowered combatants working in small numbers (at least in an urban setting, and the technological advantages of powerful countries - artillery, fighter jets, etc. - are pretty useless at taking out the two guys taking pot shots from a window before running away. "
You can destroy the building, and the entire neighborhood if you have to, so bombs are pretty useful. How long would residents tolerate insurgents shooting out of windows if that was the result every time it happened? What about cutting off electricity and water to neighborhoods where that happens and leaving the lights on where it doesn't? The US hasn't done anything close to this.
" but WW2 at least if anything suggests this leads people to fight to the bitter end."
It doesn't suggest that at all. Japan was nuked and gave up because they realized it was hopeless, and they would be fried if they kept fighting. You can do that to any other movement or country. Even if you don't want to use nukes, conventional bombs are very now big and can do a lot of damage.
The problem is that it's far from clear whether Israel can indeed do what's sufficient. Short of actively resettling all the Palestinians (weirdly, even though having every resident of Gaza immigrate to western nations would be a massive increase in their welfare envied by many it would also be considered some kind of war crime) it's not clear that Hamas won't simply grow back the moment Israel withdraws.
The problem is that as long as Palestinians stay poor there will be a supply of young men willing to die and they'll stay poor until they can enter into a peaceful trading deal with their Israeli neighbors.
US occupying forces in Japan and Germany weren't met with much resistance from the civilian population. ISIS also hasn't returned from the dead so far (in the Middle East, I mean; Africa is another can of worms). These examples don't guarantee anything, but at least they show that things *can* go well. My guess would be that what distinguishes a successful from an unsuccessful tyrant-toppling operation is the absence/presence of powerful outsiders invested in the old regime (here, of course, Iran and perhaps Qatar).
But wasn't that in large part because the occupied regions knew the victorious powers weren't going to take any shit? They had the Russian occupations to look at and realize they were doing alot better than it might be and given that this was shortly after the US had shown it's willingness to flatten cities I think the threat was clear.
Moreover, there weren't external agitators pushing the narrative that destroying the occupiers was a religious duty.
People often point to how powers like the Byzantines or Ottomans kept peace in these regions but part of how they did it was a willingness to inflict punishment we'd never be ok with today. I sometimes wonder if we aren't making it worse in the long run as a result (tho the costs to accepting this reasoning might be large elsewhere in the world).
I'm not sure how much punishment the Americans were willing to inflict on small-scale civilian resistance in Germany or Japan; I suspect usually not much. Moreover, I suspect that many in the population knew this and feared at least the incoming Americans and Brits less than the retreating Nazis (the threat from the latter being forced recruitment in their last-ditch Volkssturm efforts). With the Soviets it was a different question.
It helped, of course, that the Western allies were seen in Germany as the bulwark against the Soviet Union, which to most was the real enemy.
It is an interesting thought-experiment what would have became of Iraq after the 2003 war if not for Iranian meddling.
In 1945 we still had our own japanese citizens in internment camps. I don't know if we'd have been willing to flatten cities to extinguish resistance but we were still doing things to our own citizens Israel couldn't get away with doing in Gaza today. Also, the difference in public attitude then was huge, the public was stilll under the effect of the dehumanization the enemy recieves in war.
Not to mention the fact that these countries had very recently been brutality occupying others which, even if we weren't willing to do the same, no doubt made that prospect feel very plausible.
I agree the Iraq situation is an interesting case and I'm not sure that a primarily carrot based approach is not possible but I'm not convinced and the WW2 case was different in all the ways that make it hard to know how far you can get mostly using carrots.
Having Gaza residents move to Western countries would be a crime against Western countries.
Germans and Japanese are high IQ and cooperative people, who understood the situation, what needed to be done, and that it was better to look to the future and develop their countries. Also, there was the Cold War and all that. The situation in Palestine is very different in many ways. Palestinians are not high IQ and cooperative people, they are more fanatical religious types. Also, to be fair to the Palestinians, the Americans did not stay in or near Germany and Japan, and the US is an ocean away from them. Different dynamics in Israel and Palestine. But who knows? Perhaps if Israel could find enlightened and smart local collaborators, they could successfully occupy Gaza and develop the place sufficiently. It seems unlikely, though.
Well western countries kinda caused the situation so maybe they deserve the responsibility of fixing it. Be it the UK's division of the area, the Germans's perpetuation of the Holocaust which created the need for a Jewish homeland and the inaction of the US on offering up any other homeland (tho that last one is weaker).
Seems to me the west is largely responsible for the situation and is asking Israel to do what it isn't willing to do itself.
You're probably right on the Japanese; they were treated very differently from Germans.
Fair re: Germans...tho I wonder if it's easier to succeed in an occupation peacefully when you have a shared culture.
I'm really frustrated by the way some people are conflating forced resettling with the more lethal forms of ethnic cleansing.
Israel forcibly resettling the people of Gaza would be an improvement for those people. It doesn't deserve to share a word with actual genocidal actions.
Yes, it would be far less bad than killing people, but literally anything is less bad than killing people. If the government decides to take your home (along with all the equity in it) and give it to Native Americans and relocate you to England, would you be very happy about that? Would it comfort you if they told you that the other option was to kill you?
Of course that would be bad and I would feel a significant grievance, but the Palestinian people are going to feel a grievance either way. And the other option is either killing them or an even more punishing blockade.
Also, no reason they can't be compensated while being resettled.
Quite true. It's a shame that Zionists directly led to the genocide of Jews by axing Hitler's not-actually-genocidal Madagascar Plan.
The Zionists didn't axe Hitler's Madagascar Plan, it was a throwaway plan in the middle of the war. Nazi Germany is genocidal, Hamas is genocidal, Israel is not. Simple.
Personally, I don't support forced resettling of Gazans; they should be allowed to choose to emigrate to Egypt or not to emigrate. Many will choose emigration, many will choose not to emigrate. Pay Egypt a lot of money per Palestinian.
Also there is no way Israel will ethnically cleanse Gaza. They are too liberal and moral and care too much about world opinion.
What is the difference between forces resettling and ethnic cleansing?
TBF I agree that in this instance it would be very different but sometimes you need rules to prevent other people from abusing them. I suspect the thinking is that even if that kind of resettling wouldn't be bad, Russia and China are going to insist they are doing the same thing when it's a much much worse situation so you need a bright line.
But it doesn't seem to me like that bright line is really getting respected that much in the cases we do want to prevent so maybe it's not as useful as assumed.
The Palestinians will stay poor so long as they have an average IQ of 85, i.e. forever. This is the real killer argument against a 2 state solution. Assume for a moment that both the Palestinians and Israelis could force such a deal through against internal opposition, you would have a poor basketcase sitting next to a first world economy (Israel would get even richer if it could offload some Arabs onto this new Palestinian state). The Palestinians could either deal with situation (Lol), or just invent reasons it's Israel's fault (the Naqba caused epigenetic trauma!). Palestinians would do various provocations, Israel would have to respond with some kid of blockade or whatever. Immediately, Palestinians would blame all their problems on the blockade since they have no real concept of chronology, and, sooner than you can say, 'cycle of violence', it's war.
The truth is that, from a secular perspective, zionism was probably a mistake. White people and dumb people can't live next to each other. Too late now, but there's a lesson for you guys as regards immigration. Just don't.
The conflict isn't caused by poverty, you fool. There are plenty of poor countries out there which have populations with even lower average IQs that don't dedicate their entire state apparati to terrorizing their neighbors. Nor is it caused by grievance, because grievance exists in every country at every time, and yet every country at every time is not at war. Nor is it caused by IQ, because the people of Gaza don't have any meaningful IQ differences with the people of Jordan, and the Israelis and Jordanians have been at peace for almost thirty years with no serious chance of war breaking out between the two nations in the forseeable future.
This was caused by the work of Men. Specifically, the work of the IRGC. They are a concrete organization that can, and should, be destroyed. Putting this concrete conflict down as an inevitable product of sone historical force or another is bullshit. It was bullshit when lefty academics used such things to explain the October Coup being inevitable, and it is bullshit here.
There aren't really plenty of poor countries right next to rich countries, because as a rule, for obvious reasons, people live next to people who are relatively racially similar to themselves.
As for Jordan, if there was a democratic election there, there would be war with Israel one week later. Luckily, they are ruled over a by a high IQ elite Arab family.
The US lives next to Mexico and even if AMLO destroys the country, which he very well might and is doing a damn good job at it so far, there won't ever be another war between Mexico and the US, because the Mexis know they'd lose. Brazil and Argentina are likewise at no risk of war between eachother. Nor was South Africa at threat for military invasion by an enemy nation during the Apartheid Era. Their threats were local, and they defeated them thoroughly militarily, to the point where they even successfuly projected their force outside their borders fighting against Commie insurgents in Africa. The failure of post-Apartheid South Africa was a political matter, not a military one. The ANC simply should never have been let back into politics. The same is doubly true for Zimbabwe, which we in the West deliberately betrayed to warlord commie terrorist Mugabe at the height of the Cold War AFTER they had already integrated black people who weren't terrorists into their political system and had already elected their first black PM.
The problem is not geographic. It's political and military. There is a specific enemy that needs to be killed in large enough numbers and pressed into unconditional surrender, and if such is not done, there will never be peace.
All the things you said would happen if there was a two-state solution have already happened in the absence of Palestinian statehood. Gaza is not a country right now, but it is already a basket case full of resentment that sponsors terror. How would making it a country make that worse?
This is the main reason I think the two or three state solution is a good idea. The statelessness of the Palestinians is used by them and their supporters as a moral club against Israel. If Gaza was a country then people would no longer be able to talk about "colonialism" or "apartheid." Why not take that club away? All the arguments against doing so revolve around the Gaza government potentially doing horrible stuff, but it already does that without official recognition as a country anyway.
The Gaza withdrawal was a trial run for the 2 state solution. That's how it was explicitly marketed in Israel. The results are in: they stink.
"If Gaza was a country then people would no longer be able to talk about "colonialism" or "apartheid." Why not take that club away"
You really think this? The truth is that the moral club Palestinians and their supporters have is that we shouldn't be here in the first place. Regardless of whether this is true or not, what could we possibly do to take this club away?
The "apartheid" argument comes from the idea that the Gaza strip is kinda-sorta part of Israel, and therefore Israel is restricting travel within its own borders for part of the population , which was what the actual apartheid regime South Africa did. If Gaza was definitively recognized as not part of Israel, that argument would cease to make any sense. Israel restricting travel from Gaza would be no more problematic than it restricting travel from anywhere else in the world.
One of the main reasons that Israel is accused of being colonialist is the settlers moving into the West Bank. If the West Bank was a country it could simply have its border patrol stop the settlers from moving there.
I don't think it would shut down the worst fanatics, but on the margin a lot of more reasonable people would suddenly find their arguments less convincing. The average reasonable person believes Israel has a right to exist, but has concerms that the stateless status of Gaza and the West Bank is causing excessive suffering for its people. If Gaza and and the West Bank were countries, that concern would be alleviated.
Again, we tried this on a limited scale, like a pilot scheme. We had explicit assurances - or at least we were told by our government we had - that if we dragged the settlers in Gaza out by their feet, then we would have total backing if the Palestinians used their new territory to attack. And then when the rockets started flying it was all proportionality this innocent civilians that. You can tell me that if we had only done X or Y more then the international community would have followed through on their end of the bargain, but it's just not plausible.
The fact is that we are white they are brown; we are functional and they are retarded and f**ked up; we are invaders and they are natives. The moral rules of the international order mean that we are wrong. There will always be some reason to justify why they had to resort to violence, some ancestral olive tree or whatever-the-f**k that we didn't give back. And then when we respond, we will be reminded that we have the right to defend ourselves, but not the right to win. And they will never stop this until we get rid of them or they get rid of us.
The fact is that Hamas' strategy makes perfect sense, which is why they are the recognised leaders of the Palestinian struggle. Of course, their strategy entails having total contempt for the welfare and lives of Palestinians, but, looking at them, isn't that a pretty fair assessment?
This seems like an example of (I believe) Saul Alinsky's dictum: use your enemies scruples/morals against them. Of course, if you do this, you are committing state/cultural suicide. It's kind of Darwinian, if you think about it.
It is also a rejection both of Enlightenment principles as well as every major religious doctrine, and almost every western moral philosophy. If you implement your enemies morals then by definition they are now your morals.
Incredibly disconnected from reality, both the analysis and the data… suffice to quote Madelaine Albright “ death of 500 thousand Iraqi children was worth it”
What planet you on Richard, come down to earth and see for yourself
There's a fundamental contradiction in what you write - on the one hand, you claim rebels require an opportunity to revolt, on the other, you claim that modern militaries aren't very good at suppressing rebellions because people aren't willing to do what they must to suppress rebels. Then wouldn't disgruntled Americans have the opportunity to rebel? You claim they don't, but your other arguments contradict that claim. If the US Army can't win in Afghanistan because it won't use sufficiently harsh tactics, then it can win in FL? Where It will use harsher tactics? Where it's willing to kill MORE civilians? Huh? That's just nonsense.
If we believe that our army loses because it lacks the will to be sufficiently brutal, then we'd have to infer that FL, TX etc have a great opportunity to get out.
And wouldn't it be what opportunity they think they have, not what opportunity they really have that matters. That is, if TX & Fl think they can win easily, then they'll rebel even if they can't actually win easily. So isn't the real variable whether or not rednecks w/ guns FEEL threatened by liberals w/ lattes? liberals who just shut down the world in fear over a virus? Yeah, they don't seem intimidating to me, maybe I'm wrong, but wouldn't perception not reality matter in your model?
Anyway, I think you need to do some more thinking here as you appear to be confused & contradicting yourself.
I don’t think this is a contradiction at all. I think the US law enforcement is so strong at home that it doesn’t need to kill massive numbers of people. It can just use surveillance and target threats directly. It’s known in extremist circles for example that they’re crawling with federal agents. Try to organize 5-10 men for a violent political cause and you’ll get shut down very quickly.
Is your message, only fight existential wars, like Israel, and prosecute them, like Israel, with low civilian casualties?
Phenomenal piece. 🙏
> I expect Israel to do whatever it takes to at the very least either dismantle Hamas
This is impossible. Even if you were omnipotent Alien Space Bats and had the power to destroy all records and memories of Hamas, given the living conditions in Gaza under Israeli occupation, something very much like it would re-emerge. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-flesh-and-blood-but-against-powers-and-principalities/
Gaza is not under occupation by Israel.
'And you being insufficiently literate for "Großdeutsche Reich" or "Israelim" to be acceptable for you isn't my fault.'
No, no. I speak German. I lived there for 5 years and studied it at university. I was simply wondering why you didn't use normal English. I generally don't sprinkle my conversations with random foreign words.
So let me get this straight. Your argument is that this massacre happened because Bibi cosied up to Putin. Do I have that right?
Richard, the fact that you're both a Palestinean and a literal ex-neo-Nazi and yet are significantly more clear-eyed on the nature of Hamas, the Pasdaran, the global jihadi movement, and the nature of war than countless ostensibly more reasonable and moderate figures is both tragic and inspiring.
Palestein will never be free for as long as they are ruled by terrorists, and terrorists can never be appeased by having their grievances addressed, because that only encourages them to commit more terrorism to get what they want. They can only be defeated via force of arms.
He is not a literal ex Neo Nazi.
No. He was. He admitted it himself. He was Richard Hoste. And even if he hadn't admitted it, it was obvious Richard Hoste was him.
And yet, even though so much of his prior life would lead him otherwise, he still isn't for a second pretending that Hamas is anything other than a rapacious terrorist organization, and an enemy of human flourishing.
He had views that were abhorrent but that doesn't make him a literal neo-Nazi. He was not trying to revive Nazism.
Look, the term "Nazi" has always been an insult. It was an insult for decades even before the formation of the Nazionalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, much the same way that "Pajeet" is now an insult for Indians, "Karen" is now an insult for white women, and to a lesser extent "Tyrone" and "Shaniqua" are now insults for black people. The implication was that only stupid yokels* were fool enough to believe in a stupid yokel like Adolf Hitler. No one has ever liked being called one. Including the Literal Nazis, to whom even being referred to as "the Nazis" they would consider a punishment-worthy infraction.
But how on Earth Richard Hoste's beliefs don't constitute national-socialist, I don't know how you can make the case for. Especially given that you can make a very good case that the reason Richard has moved from Hoste to Hanania is because he stopped believing that socialism in any form could be a good thing, and -- contrary to 21st Century socialist being so stereotypically part of the danger-hair rainbow coalition -- a genuine commitment to the free market makes it a lot harder to be a committed racist, or even a committed sexist.
* Indeed, "yokel" started life as a German nickname for "Jacob", which, much like "IgNATZ", was a popular name among hinterlanders, and thus a common target of cityfolk punchlines for use against hicks.
At Dunkirk the British army and government messed up. Therefore the British people shouldn't have rallied round Churchill. Is that what you're saying?
Dunkirk was nowhere near the disaster that the Supernova Massacre was. Humiliating though the defeat was, they salvaged enough vessels and rescued enough troops to both deliver a huge morale boost and secure the integrity of the empire's warfighting capabilities enough to ensure future victory against the Großdeutsche Reich.
There is no way to spin the Supernova Massacre as a victory, no matter how heroic the actions of the first responders nor even the total defeat and unconditional surrender of the IRGC satraps at Israel's border. The worst mass murder of Jews since 1945 happened precisely because of Bibi's amorality and incompetence, and the Israelim still have a strong enough lever over their governence to punish such gross failure from their leaders.
I wasn't suggesting Dunkirk and the massacre were comparable. I only wanted a tactical cockup that everyone was familiar with.
I often watch football matches. It seems what you are advocating is booing your own team if they make a mistake. Surely the whole point of being a supporter is to support your team even when they are losing. Similarly, ditching your loyalty when your government/military makes a mistake suggests one's loyalty was pretty lukewarm in the first place.
Precisely what was Bibi's amorality, which allegedly facilitated the massacre?
'The Israelim'. I have never heard that before. Is it the same as 'the Israelis'? And 'the Großdeutsche Reich' would be what others often call 'Germany'?
Bibi is not the State of Israel. He's the Prime Minister. He works for them, and he fucked up his job. When you are given a job by seone and you fuck it up at the elementary level like this, you deserve to lose your job and be replaced by somebody competent. Bibi's cozying up to Putin is highly likely to be the reason why such a devestating attack was able to be carried out, given that Putin is ideologically and strategically allied to Khameini, who was the man ultimately responsible for this atrocity; and how Putin has been fermenting anti-Semitism worldwide, sponsoring neo-Nazi militias, and has compared the Israelis to the Nazis; and how even this was not enough to break him away from Moscow, or even to allow Zelensky, a grandson of Holocaust survivors and a man actually worthy of respect and alliance, to so much as visit his country after the worst massacre of Jews since 1945.
And you being insufficiently literate for "Großdeutsche Reich" or "Israelim" to be acceptable for you isn't my fault.