An anonymous question has arrived to distract me from my unbearable heartache over the daily bombing of my native city of Kharkiv:
I’m grateful for the question but I highly recommend looking at every word in it in terms of how non-vague and specific it is.
Pretty much every word in this question lacks definition, which is why the question itself has no meaning.
Who are Palestinians, for instance? Do you have a definition? Where exactly are “Palestinians” defending “themselves”? Was the October 7 incursion into Israel by HAMAS an instance of Palestinians defending themselves? What were they defending themselves from by murdering kids at a music festival?
And let’s not even get started on “rights”. For rights to exist, somebody needs to provide and guarantee them. Who would that be in the instance of the vaguely defined selves that vaguely defined Palestinians are vaguely defending? Who will guarantee the right to conduct another October 7 again and again? I mean, the way things are going, this sacrosanct right of “self-defending Palestinians” to unpunished Jew-slaughter will be guaranteed by President Biden in no time. But that’s his personal whim, not an actual right.
This question is an ideological manipulation similar to when one says, “online learning doesn’t work in languages” and gets accused of wanting to murder thousands of students (this is a true story that happened to me). Or when one says, “I don’t support removing admission requirements” and gets accused of denying the humanity of “students of color” (this is also a true story that happened to me).
“You don’t want Palestinians to defend themselves! Shame on you, you evildoer!” I want Palestinians and everybody else to live normal, good lives. I even want that for Russians. I want everybody to stop being a gigantic victim and defending themselves from non-existent dangers by murdering people. Is that too much to ask? If only both Russians and Palestinians stopped pouting and started building, that would be great for everybody, themselves included.
Please observe how easily Ukraine could have organized a dozen October 7ths for Russia in return for Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, Bakhmut, etc. Three hundred and sixty years of oppression and genocide. The Palestinians’ whining about 1948 is nothing compared to this. But do you see a difference? We don’t rape the enemy’s women, kidnap its babies and slice up its old folks. Because that’s not “defending yourself.” It’s being a genocidal piece of trash maniac who has forever forfeited the right to bleat about self-defense.
I hear that “self-defending Palestinians” are still keeping a baby hostage. Ukraine holds zero Russian hostages. No babies have been kept away from Mommy (and no Mommy was raped and murdered) to defend Ukrainian selves. It’s strange how different selves need a very different kind of defense. I wonder what causes that difference.
And one last thing. The concept of rights that just kind of exist in the ether is a completely Christian concept. It’s a culmination of our Judeo-Christian civilization. It’s our great achievement and our gift to the world together with the nation-state and the concept of “self”. You are trying to squeeze Palestinians into a framework that is alien to them, and that’s why even the question you ask sounds strange.
Clarissa's Blog 
“trying to squeeze Palestinians into a framework that is alien to them”
This is one of the fatal flaws of American foreign policy… the failure to really understand differences….. and since the American model has been so widely exported the same problem is found all across the EU (which should know better).
failures in the middle east and russia start and end with an insistent failure to recognize that different societies have different goals and preferences (different values which are often very alien).
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And it’s not only on the level of policy. Individual people speak about Palestinian “rights”, even though it’s a complete projection. The idea that Palestinians want a nation-state or rights is a baseless assumption. And we’ve already seen that running after people to endow them with rights they never asked for is a story that ends badly.
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The apartheid government tried to rebrand old colonial tribal reservations as “homelands” without bothering to consult their “citizens” on whether they wanted a homeland.
These homelands were fragmented and economicaly unviable leaving the majority dependent on remittances from family members working in SA and the elite as easy marks for hostile foreign powers.
https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv00017/04lv01495/05lv01506.htm
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Precisely. And this mistake keeps getting made. We are two steps away from Biden saddling Palestinians with “a country of their own” that they don’t remotely want. Then we’ll stare in amazement at the terrible problems that will create.
What’s curious is that the US on the one hand tries to give nation-states to people who never wanted them and don’t comprehend the concept but on the other hand does everything to undermine or prevent actual nation-state. The first Bush begged Ukraine to remain in the USSR. Clinton destroyed the Ukrainian capacity to defend its real, existing nationhood.
I’m starting to see a theme here. Massage the people who don’t want a nation into one and destroy actual, existing nation-states. Hmmm.
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A two-state solution is dangerous as some organisation like Hamas can easily take over and cause mischief. Here in France we have probably about 10 million Muslims and nobody is clamouring for a two-state solution.
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@cliff arroyo
You are, of course, right, but so-called “American values” are posited – and actively predicated – as universal values. So are “Western values”, even though, over the past twenty years, at least in Europe, even Westerners themselves no longer believe in them, which makes it quite difficult to export them…
Personally, from what I can understand, American mentality sees itself as logic, rational and genuinely universal, in the sense of “everybody would act like Americans if only they had the chance”, and this way of thinking is shared, fundamentally, even by the most rabidly Woke of the Wokest activists.
I suppose this is due to a mixture of cultural parochialism, a long tradition of historical isolation – the US is a huge country, most Americans tend to live in houses, not in flats on top of one another – as well as to the cultural homogenousness of the US, all of which are characteristics that we, as Europeans, do not share with the Yanks.
I understand that mine are sweeping generalisations but, broadly speaking, I think they are true. My views are vindicated when I see US activists at pro-Pal demonstrations, who would not be able to survive a couple of days in Gaza or the West Bank – what am I saying? – in Lebanon or Jordan even.
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“American mentality sees itself as logic, rational and… genuinely universal, in the sense of “everybody would act like Americans”
The way I put it is — many Americans think that the United States has freed itself from the bonds of history and culture and therefore is built on a set of universal values and those in other countries only reject those to the extent they are unfamiliar with them and with time and familiarity they too will freely adopt universal human values that the US is founded upon.
Complete nonsense but many believe it (whether or not they can articulate it). I remember some years ago really offending an English speaking Canadian guy in Poland by suggesting his behavior in a certain situation was culturally motivated…. the idea that he and his values were shaped by a culture was genuinely offensive to him….
The weaker form in the EU is the implicit assumption that all peoples in the world are ultimately rational actors and if given the chance would pursue peace and prosperity.
Germany built its entire future on the idea that russian leaders (and ‘the russian people’) want peace and prosperity too and when it turned out that neither peace nor societal prosperity motivates russians to any significant degree they were completely disoriented and are still in a state of denial.
Similarly flogging the ‘two state’ idea when Palestinians have never, as far as I know, agitated for a ‘state’…. they want the Jews gone and that’s all. In general Arabs don’t do countries very well, they have forms of organization that are smaller and larger than states but they mostly flounder at the level of country.
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Noise. Oct 7th has nothing to do with “defend themselves”. Xtian mythology and revisionist history sucks eggs like a snake.
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But if we remove October 7, which was a terrible atrocity, do Palestinian people have a right to defend themselves against actions by their neighbour that threaten their existence? Nobody has addressed this.
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But if we remove my head, will I still be able to speak?
Once again, you are operating on a set of assumptions that are not grounded in reality. There are mountains of evidence that “Palestinian people” (who probably would be stunned to have the mentality of “we, the People” attributed to them) do not want the Western fru-frus you are ascribing to them. They simply want to murder the stinky Jews.
The real question here is why here is such a need to edit the situation by removing facts, ascribing motives and inventing categories.
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And now it’s my turn to ask a question.
Why are all the protesters against the “Palestinian genocide” not protesting against this:
Why have they held not a single demonstration, sit-in, protest, anything? Why are they so active on behalf of the savages who organized October 7, and completely indifferent to the daily martyrdom of people who didn’t?
I know the answer but I’m open to hearing an alternative one.
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Liked the pic:
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*lTM6HNbW31V4aAqSJotBsA.jpeg
Just two days ago “Hamas rejects Israel’s latest hostage release proposal … The latest Israeli proposal fell short of meeting Hamas’s key demands, including the unrestricted return of Palestinians to northern Gaza and a complete withdrawal of IDF troops from the Strip. The diplomat further revealed that Israel insisted on inspections for those returning to the north and refused to withdraw from central Gaza.”
Meanwhile, this Monday “Security Council to discuss Palestinian request for full UN membership. Palestinians’ 2011 bid for full UN membership failed, resulting in observer state status; renewing their efforts, they now seek Security Council approval but face likely US veto if they secure the required majority”
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The UN is a total joke. I recommend filtering out all news related to it because it’s a waste of time.
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There’s something quite absurd in your continued insistence that a right to defend oneself is something reserved only for Western people. Ukraine undoubtedly has a right to defend itself. So do Palestinians. Agreeing to only one half of that statement is what’s bewildering.
Do they stop being humans (who deserve every right to not be eliminated from the surface of the earth) just because they’re Palestinians? The Jewish people have that right — deservedly so. Why don’t the Palestinians? Are rights things that come only to people of certain faiths/looks/race/orientation etc or is it something they inherently have?
I’ve chosen specifically not to mention October 7, because the conflict didn’t start last year. So, in general, are we to accept that only one party to the conflict has a right to self defence? And if so, without mentioning religion, what justifies this absurdity?
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No, nobody “inherently” has rights. Rights, once again, have to be granted and then guaranteed by somebody.
For example, do gay people have the right to get married? The question is unanswerable until you take into consideration many other factors. One such factor is geography. Gay people have such right in the US but do not in Saudi Arabia. They do not “inherently” have the right to marry until there is a polity willing to imagine such right and a government willing to defend it.
This has nothing to do with “looks and races” (and by the way, tell me that you are an Anglo leftie without saying it, eh?). It has to do with the polity and the government.
None of this has to do with Palestinians whom nobody is trying to “eliminate from the surface of the Earth.”
But it’s cute how you try to racialize the issue and make it about “looks.” I’d do a lot of soul searching, if I were you, as to why “looks” are so central to your worldview.
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I’m actually neither Anglo nor leftie but thanks for trying.
So, to your argument about rights, let’s talk about it. You chose gay rights because it’s one of the ones that have to be granted in parts of the world — which is not to say that it doesn’t exist but that some backward places have curtailed them.
What about the right to life? Is this guaranteed to all humans no matter where they live? What about the right to self defence (which appears to be one of the oldest that is defended in every culture). So tell me, please who has to grant the right of self defence before Palestinians can exercise it? Israel? Saudi? Iran? Britain? The US? Or they already have that right from birth and all everyone is doing is trying to curtail it one way or another.
Put another way, if a Palestinian were to work in New York city, would he have a right to defend his life if threatened? If so, why should he not have it in Gaza or Jerusalem? What I’m asking for is an explanation for the exceptionalism in basic human rights.
And if you don’t think that there’s such a thing as human rights, then please say so.
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Passive voice always obscures the agent of the action. You ask if the “right to life is guaranteed to all humans.” But your very question obscures the active agent. Guaranteed by whom? Who is the guarantor?
You seem to suggest that “gay rights” exist in a way that planets exist or physical objects do but some “backwards places” haven’t yet stumbled on these rights that seemingly exist independent of human will or design, like volcanoes or sand.
How do we then explain that in its entire history, which has been going on for millions of years, humans never noticed these “gay rights” until about a few years ago and when they did it only happened in very few places in the world? Is one of the goals of human progress, in your view, to discover these self-generating rights and codify them in human law?
As for your question about a Palestinian in NYC, this is an excellent example of how “rights” work. This Palestinian would have every right guaranteed by the US Constitution while he’s on the territory of the US. Once he leaves the US, he will not be protected by the US Constitution any longer and will not have those rights. Which rights he will have then will depend on where he finds himself geographically and what his status in that place will be. It would be bizarre, wouldn’t it?, for him to demand the US freedom of speech, due process and 2nd Amendment in, say, Germany or China.
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And so we’re back to the beginning.
If such a Palestinian man were to live in his homeland, where his ancestors were born and continue to live, will he have the right to defend his life if threatened?
Let’s say his life is threatened by a fellow Palestinian, will he have a right to defend himself? What if the person that threatens him is an Israeli? If those two scenarios lead you to separate answers, I’ll genuinely interested in how you arrived at such a point.
(Remember he’s living in the exact same place in the two scenarios, so your hypothetical with the US constitution doesn’t apply.)
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It’s impossible to have a dialogue when one of the participants refuses to answer the questions posed to her. Please go back to the preceding exchanges and have the maturity and honesty to answer the questions I asked.
The reason why you keep going in circles and not progressing is because you aren’t trying to answer what I ask. All of the answers are right there in the discussion.
A hint: to find out the rights of an American, you should consult the US laws. To find out the rights of a German, you should consult…. Go for it. I know you can do it.
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And to find out a Palestinian’s right, ask the US or Israel? Got it.
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How does “ask the US” remotely follow from what I said?
Rights are a legal concept. They are determined by the legislation that exists in the country where people reside. “Does X have the right to Y?” can only be answered by consulting the laws of the jurisdiction where X resides. You are trying to invest the word “rights” with magical properties, and that is what’s causing this confusion. This is why you have not been able to answer a single one of my questions.
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Oh you stopped approving my comments? You ran away when you could no longer defend the absurdity that was your position? That tends to happen when one takes indefensible positions publicly. Please do better.
PS: To answer your question, the right that a Palestinian has to defend himself comes from the same source as the one David had to kill Goliath with a sling shot for terrorising his family/community, without America’s intervention — whether or not that was a real story.
Selah.
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I went to sleep. People do that sometimes. There’s no need to get so emotional about this.
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Well, thanks for approving them. It has been an enlightening conversation for illustrating the flaws in the prevailing Israeli/American position on the conflict in the Holy Land. As long as one side is seen as not inherently deserving of human rights, for whatever reason, we’ll keep coming back here
And until the right to self defence guaranteed to Israel (by the US and others) is extended to Palestinians, the cycle of violence will continue to pervade our public discourse. And we all lose as a result.
Bye for now.
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This is all empty verbiage because you have made the choice not to think about the definitions I suggested. This is intellectual laziness but I hope that you can overcome it with time.
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On the Anonymous-Clarissa debate
I find it exhausting to engage with people who do not seem to share basic terminology, concepts, logic, but for what is worth it, I’ll try to untangle some of the knots in the discussion which seem to obscure the debate.
“There’s something quite absurd in your continued insistence that a right to defend oneself is something reserved only for Western people.” I do not really see where Clarissa ever said something like that, but the question remains: in what way was the Hamas attack on October 7 a form of self-defence? Had the people at the music festival attacked Gaza in any way? The people who were killed in their sleep, the women who were dragged out of their homes to be viciously raped, the children executed on the spot before or after their parents, the bystanders murdered while in line at a bus stop? Or were such actions in retaliation for attacks by the Israeli army? When? Gaza has been Judenrein since 2005, there were no Israeli “settlers”, no Israeli soldiers, its electricity and water were being provided by Israel – something of which I was unaware until now, and like me billions of people everywhere in the world, I am sure. Many of the Hamas militants killing and raping knew very well the lie of the land and where to look for their victims since they had until the previous day been employed by Israelis in the selfsame kibbutz where they went looking for their human prey.
“I’ve chosen specifically not to mention October 7, because the conflict didn’t start last year.” Well, that’s very disingenuous of you, since the pro-Pal demonstrations that have been strangling civilian life in London for the past six months, suffocating life on campuses in North America and in a few other places like my own country, did not start until October 15, once the Israeli government decided to respond to the vicious attack that left over 1000 people – people, not Jews: many of those killed were Israeli Arabs and some were not even Israelis, Filipinos and Thai, for example – brutally assassinated WITHIN its own borders and over 240 hostages taken like lambs to a slaughter to be used as pawns in a cynical game. October 7 is something that cannot be ignores, since it is the reason for the current Israeli action in Gaza against Hamas.
“You chose gay rights because it’s one of the ones that have to be granted in parts of the world — which is not to say that it doesn’t exist but that some backward places have curtailed them.” I think Clarissa articulated the concept of rights very clearly. No country can curtail gay rights, since until they have been granted – as you put it – they do not exist at all. Rights may be either natural or positive, if you are familiar with such jurisprudential concepts, but even in those countries which recognise natural rights, and not all countries do, you need not only a valid jurisdiction for them to exist but also a system in place that effectively guarantees them, ie, rights do not exist in a vacuum.
“if a Palestinian were to work in New York city, would he have a right to defend his life if threatened? If so, why should he not have it in Gaza or Jerusalem?” I do not understand the pertinence of your example: in what way were the rights of Palestinians in Gaza under attack? Do you call the vicious acts of repellent violence by Hamas militants “a right to defend their life” ? Self-defence, in New York as in any Western country in fact, is a tightly regulated right and comes with severe limitations, including the use of proportionate force, the balance of probabilities (ie you must prove that your life was actually at risk), and the obligation to retreat to a place of surety if available. It certainly may not be invoked to justify killing innocent people, whether they be revellers at a music festival, families in their homes, bystanders in the streets.
“I’m actually neither Anglo nor leftie but thanks for trying.” Obviously there is no way to prove your disclaimer. Still, whether you are a Swede in Canada or a Zulu in South Africa, the drift of your argument – if it is indeed an argument, which I doubt – reflects precisely Left-wing opinions current in the English-speaking world. Ergo, Clarissa was right to identify you as an Anglo leftie.
“until the right to self defence guaranteed to Israel (by the US and others) is extended to Palestinians, the cycle of violence will continue to pervade our public discourse.” Again, I do not understand your point. The right to self-defence that you mention pertains to states. At the moment there is no state of Palestine as such, though there is a quasi-statal Palestinian Authority whose status is rather sui generis and not terribly clear in terms of legal powers since it does not enjoy sovereignty. Still, even if one were to extend such a right to a non-state actor like Hamas – a group that is internationally recognised as terrorist – the right of self-defence would still require the elements of necessity and proportionality mentioned above. Where is the necessity and proportionality in the killing of innocent civilians carried out by Hamas terrorists on October 7?
The cycle of violence does not pervade our public discourse, it is instead the very real violence perpetrated on very real people in Israel by a Terrorist group which enjoys the support of a large majority of so-called Palestinians both in Gaza and in the West Bank who have made very clear (“From the river to the sea”) that they are not interested in a two-state solution, they do not want to see any Jews living there, and have explicitly said that once they win the “war against the Zionist oppressor”, only those Jews who can prove that their ancestors lived in Ottoman Palestine before the establishment of Israel in 1948 will be allowed to stay in the future state of Palestine, as second-class citizens of course, like the dhimmis that are present in all Muslim-majority countries.
So, what are you talking about? There are no pro-Pal demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, in the United Arab Emirates, in Kuwait, in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Morocco, I could go on. Why? This is a war on the West, in the same way that Russia invading Ukraine is a war on the West, but Anglo lefties, in fact lefties and neocons all over the world, do not seem to realise it. But I am not blind and I can see it, and so can Clarissa, and that is why she called you out on your verbiage and on your refusal to engage with the questions at issue.
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This dialogue has been a perfect illustration of the central fallacy undergirding leftism. I could have wasted a lot of words and Christopher Caldwell wrote a whole book (The Age of Entitlement) about it but instead we saw it live right here.
The idea that “rights” exist outside of human will, design or institutions and we should all work to uncover these rights and match them with groups (fabricating such groups, if need be) seems completely normal to leftists and it strikes everybody else as extremely bizarre. This is why everything that the Left does sounds so incomprehensible to everybody else. The right to chop off your penis, the right to be a neurosurgeon without having the intellect or the temperament for it, the right to have your debts forgiven, the right to destroy people who hurt your feelings, the right to rape and murder a thousand Israelis, the right to occupy somebody else’s house – they can’t defend these “rights” legally or logically. And they don’t comprehend the need to defend them. “Rights” are just there. All you need to do is match them to an identity, a “look.”
I’m deeply grateful to the commenter for illustrating this so vividly because people think I’m exaggerating when I explain how it works for the left-wing folks.
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Dear Avi, I think I can answer this one in a few words. What has been clear in all of your paragraph excerpts is that when you’re speaking about Israel, you speak of them as a nation of people. But when you speak of Palestinians, you somehow always quickly substitute them for “Hamas”, which is just an elected government, if that (since most of the current victims weren’t even born in 2005 when Hamas last won in an election). This is a rhetorical trick that seems to work elsewhere. That’s like judging every Israeli with the craven corruption of Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition. That would be absurd.
So here’s a framing that would have helped:
Question 1: “Is it self-defence for Hamas to kill and maim all those women and children and other innocent partygoers they killed on October 7?”
Question 2: “Is it self-defence for Israel to kill and maim all those 30,000 women and children and other innocent journalists they have killed since October 7?”
The answer I’ll give to both is a big NO (though, from your response, I’ll guess that you will not give the same answer to both).
But that was not the question we were addressing YET.
Anonymous asked: Do PALESTINIANS have a right to defend themselves? This is a question that should be easy to answer in isolation.
If you ask me about ANY country of the world, from the US to Yemen to India to South Africa, and I ask you, do [citizens of that country/space/area] have a right to defend themselves, my answer will be YES. I won’t immediately first go to look for something that an organisation that purports to represent them has done wrong before I can answer in the affirmative. Americans have a right to defend themselves. Asians have a right to defend themselves. Israelis have a right to defend themselves. Ghanaians have a right to defend themselves etc. The rule applies, without question. Do Iraqis have a right to defend themselves? Yes. In spite of what Saddam did. Do Afghanis? Yes, in spite of the Taliban. That’s the right answer. Do Palestinians have a right to defend themselves? Of course, yes.
The question of HOW they choose to defend themselves is one that comes AFTER we agree that this right is a human right. The fact that it is in contention is the issue here.
Any other equivocation only shows the absurdity of your position.
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I am not the original Anonymous, but I must admit that these legalese arguments a la “rights only exist if they are enshrined into some law and somebody is guaranteeing them” are not intellectually or morally satisfying to me and potentially leading to absurd conclusions. If these “legal” arguments were totally foolproof, then the following would not be a problem:
Suppose in some country the ethnic majority perfectly democratically decides that some ethnic or religious minority is “undesirable” and, following some formally-legal procedures, strips them of any number of “rights” that people of civilized countries are taking for granted. In the extreme cases – including the right to life and physical safety… But it is OK since “rights just do not exist as long as nobody is guaranteeing them”.
Oh, something like that actually did happen in the past… and we actually do consider things like that a problem…
No, I am not implying that Israel is conducting genocide – if it did, the numbers of dead Palestinians would be much much higher. But “not conducting genocide” should not really be the bar we are aspiring to, or a synonym for “everything is fine”.
If anything, I find your arguments about Palestinians not (yet?) perceiving themselves as a unified nation and Western left trying to squeeze them into that role unbeknownst to them much more compelling than this quasi-legal stuff… Because it has some chance of being true and reasonable. That said, how can we be sure that “right” / pro-Israeli side is free of similar level of wishful thinking and is not trying to bend the reality to match their ideas of what kind of reality would be beneficial for them?..
v07
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OK or not OK is a moral judgment. I’d be happy to discuss whether what Israel does in response to the terror attack of October 7 is OK or not OK. We could have described our moral frameworks, and it would have been an interesting discussion. But the choice was made to make it about rights. And you are making the same choice by equating “it’s OK” with “no legal right.”
The ease with which we slip into the rhetoric of rights and confuse rights with things that aren’t OK already leads to serious problems.
Here’s an example. Every day we see a leap from “black people are severely underrepresented among cardio thoracic surgeons, college professors, and CEOs and that’s not OK” to “black people have the right to proportional representation among these professions.”
The result is that we begin to enforce this right to proportional representation legally. And a lot of ugliness ensues. Why did the ugliness ensue? Precisely because we tried to frame our “I don’t like this” as a right.
Another example. We’ve all heard about the Scottish “anti-hate speech law.” It’s based entirely on the idea that certain groups of people have the right not to read upsetting things online. Scotland now promises to send police to your house if you posted something somebody can deem upsetting. This is yet another instance where a group of people turned their “I don’t like this” into a legally imposed right.
This is not a trivial issue. And it has nothing to do with Palestinians. It has to do with us. Our reality is degraded by this mushrooming horror of rights that people use as cudgels to beat each other over the head.
It’s not OK that people are homeless. But that doesn’t mean they have the right to move into your home while you are on vacation. It’s not OK that people are poor but it doesn’t mean they have the right to steal from Pharmaprix. It’s not OK that my colleague is a jerk but it doesn’t mean I have the right to hit her over the head. We keep trying to remedy the annoyances of life with legislation, and it’s not going great.
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OK, let’s run with it. Suppose the term “right of self-defense” is meaningless… I can write in legalese too. What terminology would be appropriate in the situation from the original question, which is neither about gay rights nor about the rights of Scottish people to not be offended? We are talking about something more life and death here… “Lets debate the appropriateness of the use of violence by people perceiving themselves as a liberation movement, in general, as well as appropriateness of use of violence against those whom said liberation movement perceives as civilian settlers, in particular”? .. One advantage of this approach is that national-liberation movements, by definition, are unlawful in the eyes of those from whom they want to “liberate” the territory in question. Their “nations” also are, by definition, unreal. They “did not exist before”… So we bypass both the topic of rights in the legal sense and the question of if the Palestinians are a real nation.
And let me ask you and everybody else the following questions.
Suppose everything that has been done by the Jewish people and Israel since 1945 (whatever you believe has been done, and whether you think it was”good” or “bad”) was done by the… Chinese, for example… Do you think the Palestinians would respond to that significantly differently and not engage in violence? If you believe they would do more or less the same – would your perception of the conflict be different from how you see it now?
In the scenario above, replace Chinese with some Christian nation (so there would be some realistic historic /religious connection), Portuguese, for example… Same questions…
Also, I would like to point out that if you believe in the concept of God-given rights, then the existence if these rights does not depend on people inventing some other (lets say – “wrong”) origins of these rights that are God-independent. These rights either exist or not, they are either God-given or not… Or do you want to say that these God-given rights are given only to the believers in the correct God?
v07
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I have no idea what it is that the Jewish people are supposed to have done to the Palestinians since 1945 that justifies mass murder and rape of civilians. From what I’m seeing, Palestinians massively lucked out when Jews showed up. Their numbers have grown, they have actual cities instead of dusty low-inhabited villages.
I know nothing about China, so I won’t attempt to guess. But I know about Ukraine. After everything that Russians have done to us for centuries and are doing today – the real horror, completely unprovoked, daily, daily murder, rape, torture – after all this, I do not believe that it would be normal, acceptable or justified for Ukrainians to steal a bunch of babies from Belgorod, chop up their moms and run into with these miserable babies as punishment to Russians. And guess what? Ukrainians are not, in fact, doing any of this.
Last year, a few people posted memes mocking a Russian tourist eaten by a shark. Mind you, Ukrainians didn’t make the shark eat that poor dude. It just happened. We ended up having a many-month-long soul-searching about our lack of humanity in making fun of that dead Russian.
So no, not everybody would torture babies and parade around raped women. I know for a fact that you wouldn’t, no matter how big the outrage done to you. Neither would I. Only savages would. And only savages did.
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Every night the city where I grew up is being leveled. The village where my grandparents are buried is wiped off the map. Mariupol, a large thriving city is no more. And nobody expects us to torture babies in response. But we do expect it from Palestinians and happily excuse it. This is a double standard we don’t even notice any more.
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“It’s not okay that the Jewish people experienced the holocaust, but that doesn’t mean they have the right to expel Palestinians from their homes in ’48, prevent them from coming back, and continue to settle their lands in contravention of international laws, and let new people born in other parts of the world return there just because one of their ancestors is Jewish…”
You see where your argument leads???
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It leads to a much more grown up discussion. Already this sounds much less infantile than the preceding screeds about “backwards places” not stumbling on the free-floating “gay rights” that have existed as long as the planet.
We could make the discussion even better by injecting an even higher level of abstraction into it by saying, “suffering does not and should not translate into rights.” Most importantly, moral or emotional suffering should not entitle anybody to anything.
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I remember you posting a long time ago that Palestinian is a made-up identity, and so is Israeli. This was when you were writing about nation states as part of your research. It’s useless at this point to nitpick about who the Palestinians are, and whether that identity is legitimate. They’re different enough from the Israelis that Israelis don’t want anything to do with them, and vice versa. I mean, the Israelis have a pretty clear idea of who the Palestinians are: “Palestinians are people who we bomb” lol.
As an american, I only care that my country doesn’t suffer negative consequences over the actions of my allies. Israel is a liability. Even american politicians are beginning to say this, which would be unthinkable even 10 years ago. I’ve got to say that Israel has really lost a lot of goodwill around the globe after Oct 7 (not too different from america after 9/11). The IDF has no message discipline anymore. Who thought it would be a good idea for Israeli soldiers to post psychopathic shit on tiktok? How is it helping?
Palestinians are fucking annoying. Israel is fucking annoying. I used to get emotional about this conflict in my leftist phase but at this point I’m just annoyed. Just leave me and my country alone.
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I agree completely that the most important thing here is not what happened in the Middle East in 1948 but what’s happening to us. This idea of certain groups having the right to be spared every annoyance is killing us. The word “rights” has been as emptied of content as the word “racism”. We should abandon both for the time being and try to express ourselves without them.
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