6 Answers sorted by
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I wonder if anyone has a sufficiently good model of how societies work, to predict how would Palestinians (or Israelis) react to different things. I certainly don't. But I believe it is necessary to perceive the situation game-theoretically not as a conflict of two players, but rather as millions of independent players on each side, suffering from lack of coordination, each side tormented by their own local incarnation of Moloch.
For example, no matter what we conclude that "Israel should do" or "Palestine should do", in real life those decisions would need to be made by specific leaders, who have their own interests, not necessary well aligned with the interests of the side they formally represent, and above all, they probably want to avoid assassination or losing the next election. That may drastically limit the choices available to them.
On the bottom of the pyramid, the same applies to e.g. an average Palestinian. In their place, would you rather do something that risks strong retaliation from the side of Israel, and let's say 5% chance of your family getting killed by IDF? Or make an opposite choice, and face a 90% chance of your family getting killed by Hamas for "treason"? To understand the motivation, we need to notice all the predictable consequences. Then, seemingly stupid behavior may start making sense in a very sad way.
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Not sure if I can make an analogy with Europe, but I am thinking about the aftermath of WW2. The natural thing to do would be to punish the losing side in various creative ways (killing their high status people, looting and raping the average ones, burning their cities, taking parts of their territory, imposing heavy fines), and then mostly get bored and leave them alone.
But when you think about it, "taking parts of their territory, imposing heavy fines, and later leaving them alone" was the exactly the aftermath of WW1, and now in hindsight we see how that strongly contributed to WW2. One might conclude that pissing people off and then turning your back to them is actually not a smart strategy, no matter how much they may deserve it.
Seems like there are basically two ways to lasting peace: be nice to your neighbors (and hope that they understand and reciprocate), or crush them so completely that they will never pose a danger again (and hope than you did not underestimate their resilience). Or maybe, first crush the resistance and show them who is the boss... and only after they fully accept that they lost (but not sooner!), give them a second chance and perhaps a helping hand. (The important thing is to get the timing right; to make it perfectly clear that the second chance is mercy, not a combination of their successful resistance and your weakness.) This worked unbelievably well in both Germany and Japan.
(Note that Soviet Union chose the "loot and rape, take territory, and impose fines" option regardless. Today, Germany reciprocates by supplying weapons to Russia's enemy. Probably not a coincidence.)
Note that I am not speculating on who "deserves" what. All justice in this world is at best a very crude approximation anyway. I think the lesson is to perceive the aftermath of a conflict not as an end of the old era (which would, for literary reasons, require a dramatic punishment), but rather as a beginning of the new one. The winner gets to choose what kind of neighbor will he have in future. He needs to choose wisely.
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I don't have a good model of how fragile civilization actually is; what kind of disasters we can overcome, and what kind leaves permanent damage. We had a pandemic recently, it changed our lives in many ways, and now it's mostly over, and it seems like there will be few permanent consequences. (The companies are now trying to eliminate work from home, which suggests that even the positive consequences will disappear.) On the other hand, seemingly positive inventions like television or social networks can do irreparable damage to social fabric. (Deepfakes, surprisingly, did not. Yet. It seems like most people actually do not care about technical realism of evidence, only whether it supports their preexisting opinions or not. The ones you can convince by a deepfake, you could already convince by a blog post or a video game footage.)
Dictatorships seems quite resistant. Not the specific dictators, although some of them live quite long. But rather the fact that the person most likely to defeat a dictator is the future dictator. The system is more "antifragile" than the people who represent it. It is difficult to organize a democratic opposition in a dictatorship, and murdering the potential opposition leaders is easy. I don't remember an example when a dictator was overthrown without foreign help; and all currently existing dictators are probably a proof that often even the foreign help is not enough.
Regardless how Hamas got to power, it is naive to expect that it will just go away peacefully. Not even if 90% of Palestinians started secretly hating it. (Secretly, because they do not want their entire families to get murdered.) If a few years later someone replaces Hamas, it will probably be another organization bloodthirsty enough to be a serious competitor.
(Analogically, once you elect Hitler, you cannot simply "unelect" him later. It does not work that way anymore. The rules have changed. SA can still be replaced by SS, but that is not really what you wanted.)
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It seems to me that Israel has successfully defeated the native population of Palestine, but handled the aftermath poorly. I have no idea what their options were at the moment, and how much this choice was conscious. (Remember that "Israel" is not one player, but millions of individual players following their own goals. Perhaps most of them would prefer to live in peace, but those are not necessarily the ones who make the decisions. An occasional conflict is a pretext to expand the territory. I certainly cannot be the only person who has noticed that.) From the perspective of peaceful future, this was a bad outcome.
Individual Palestinians are probably stuck in their situation, and cannot solve it without outside intervention. No matter how big threat IDF may be, Hamas is clearly worse. (Also, it's not like opposing Hamas individually would somehow make you or your family safer from IDF. The chance to become a collateral damage remains the same. Except now you also have a more urgent problem to worry about.)
The WW2-style solution for Israel would be to own the fact that they are already deciding the future of the region anyway, conquer the entire territory of Palestine (without annexing it), remove the current leaders and put them in prisons, establish a puppet government, keep a military presence there (to stop anyone from interfering with this process), and do a massive reeducation of the Palestinian population. Keep rewarding the people who do the right things, and punishing the people who do the wrong things. Build a new police force from local people, and train them so that one day they would be able to defeat former Hamas members if they try to get their power back. Very slowly teach local people self-government. Like, first let them peacefully choose their representatives on local levels, and only allow them to choose among the "safe" options (like: here is a budget for your village, how much would you like to spend on schools, how much on playgrounds?); if they act responsibly, expand their competence.
The question is whether Israel actually has enough military power to do this. In some sense, peace is more difficult than war, because in war you just need to eliminate a few enemy centers, but in peace you need to protect every village (otherwise your enemies can establish a base there). To be a good policeman is more difficult than to be a soldier.
(Notice how USA has a great army, but their police sucks. Also, how defeating Nazi Germany and Soviet Union turned out to be an easier task than defeating Taliban.)
An important part is not to do a half-assed job. Remember, if you leave too soon, all people who joined your side will be murdered the next day. So it might be better to do this all in a part of Palestine, rather than in the entire Palestine partially. (Choose a part that would be able to defend itself from the remaining part, if necessary.)
(Maybe the word I am looking for is "protectorate"? Not sure.)
This response is not unreasonable, but the description of "WW2-style solution" seems ignorant of the fact that Israel did occupy Gaza for decades, and had something very similar to a "puppet government" there, in the form of the Fatah party in control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005, and Hamas violently took over in 2007.
The rest of it operates under the hypothesis that Hamas is opposed to the objective interests of the Palestinians of Gaza. This ends up being tautological if objective self-interest is de...
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I can think of no good solution. Here's a mediocre solution, laden with violations of human rights and prone to failure and going back to square one:
1. Israel retakes Gaza, eliminates Hamas and installs a puppet regime of Israeli Arabs. With cues from China, Orwell and post-WW2 Germany, Gaza is made into a complete panopticon - cameras, internet monitoring, a network of spies, you name it. This is very problematic, but it's preferable to collective punishment. This is meant to be temporary.
2. Using American and European money, The homes, schools, hospitals and stores are rebuilt. Massive famine relief is performed. A UBI plan is initiated to allow the Gazan economy to get back on its feet. It is important that Gazans will feel that the post-defeat period has been a big step upwards in terms of life quality.
3. Using Saudi/Emirati money, the mosques are rebuilt. They are made to be the fanciest, most beautiful mosques in the region. Streets and institutions are named after Palestinian poets and artists (not terrorists). It is important that Gazans won't feel like their culture is being erased.
3. A new education curriculum is developed which fuses western education, progressive values and Muslim tradition while discouraging political violence. There are lots of art, music and sports scholarships.
4. Safe spaces for LGBTQ people are established. These will cultivate a local progressive movement that will be in touch with Israeli leftist organizations, and will serve as an additional front against Islamic fundamentalist violence.
5. Using Saudi/Emirati investments, an artificial island is built in front of Gaza, and on it - hotels and gaudy tourist attractions. This is for developing the economy.
6. Gaza's tax system is made to attract international companies and billionaires. They will have an interest in a peaceful Gaza and will pull the strings to keep it so.
7. As Gazans become deradicalized, they get more and more permits to enter Israel and visit the West Bank. This improves their economic prospects.
8. Once Gaza is no longer a threat to Israel, pressure is enacted on Israel to give Gaza independence.
Sun Tzu says that the keys to victory lie in knowing yourself and your enemy. When I got to #4, it became obvious that you know very little about Islam. There are no LGBTQ+ safe spaces in Islam. A relevant wikipedia page says "Homosexual acts were forbidden (haram) in traditional Islamic jurisprudence and therefore were subject to punishment. The types of punishment prescribed for non-heterosexual activities include flogging, stoning, and the death penalty, depending on the particular situation and the school of thought." The major ...
I think these ideas are well meaning, and parts are good, but it is maybe a little bit paternalistic towards the palestinians, none of your steps seem to involve asking (although part of that is in the nature of 'suggest a solution' type questions). Maybe they can vote on the tax haven and gaudy tourist attractions.
I think you have pattern matched Hamas to religious fundamentalism, and are imagining them a bit like the Taliban. I dont know if this characterisation is correct. I feel like they are primarily a nationalist thing, not a religious one. Like, most people fighting for american independence were presumably christian, but that wasnt the point. And my guess is that is how Hamas see and bill themselves.
And my guess is that is how Hamas see and bill themselves.
And your guess would be completely, hopelessly wrong. There is an actual document called "The Covenant of Hamas" written in 1988 and updated in 2017, which you can read here, it starts with
Praise be to Allah, the Lord of all worlds. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon Muhammad, the Master of Messengers and the Leader of the mujahidin, and upon his household and all his companions.
... so, uh, not a good start for the "not religious" thing. It continues:
1. The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means.
In the document they really seem to want to clarify at every opportunity that yes, indeed they are religious at the most basic level, and that religion impacts every single aspect of their decision-making. I strongly recommend that everyone here read the whole thing, just to see what it really means to take your religion seriously.
The 2017 version has been cleaned up, but in the 1988 covenant you als...
It is important that Gazans won't feel like their culture is being erased.
A new education curriculum is developed which fuses western education, progressive values and Muslim tradition while discouraging political violence.
These two things are incompatible. Their culture is the entire problem. To get a sense of the sheer vastness of the gap, consider the fact that Arabs read on average 6 pages per year. It would take a superintelligence to somehow convince the palestinians to embrace western thought and values while not feeling like their culture is ...
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3Which peaceful(-ish) branch of Islam would be most compatible with the current beliefs of the majority of Palestinians? Perhaps it would make sense to ask them to send their priests to convert people and to explain why Hamas were a bunch of heretics that are now rightfully punished by Allah. (The idea is to find priests who genuinely believe that.)
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Egypt was controlling the territory before 1967.
A good solution would be to get Egypt to annex Gaza and rule it while forbidding Hamas.
Given that Egypt would get a lot of trouble out of doing this, we might pay them off by foreign investment to build up Gaza and the nearby other Egyptian territory.
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Realistically, Israel and the west already have their plans laid and aren't going to change them. In that sense, there are no options.
Unrealistically, Israel should relocate. To Moldova, specifically. As for the Moldovans, buy them out. Offer up enough money and choices for new citizenship that the vast majority accept and leave and Israel can accept the remainder as full citizens without having to worry about cultural dilution/losing democratic elections/etc.
In a even more unrealistically reasonable world, middle eastern countries would be willing to fund this, as they're the main beneficiaries.
On that note, Taiwan should relocate next.
In a world where Jews have so little cultural identity that they're happy to relocate Israel to Moldova, Palestinians and Israelis might as well have so little national identity that they're happy to live together in a one state solution.
I don't know about Moldova, but it seems obvious that the creation of modern Israel depended on the idea that the Palestinians could be managed and equally obvious that it hasn't worked out that way. The only real endgames are genocide or leaving and personally I'd vote for leaving.
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One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the food supply in the Middle East and North Africa used to come from Russia and Ukraine (link). Actions targeted at increasing food security in the region won't solve the political issues, but probably would turn down the temperature of the region. It would also help with the immigration crisis in Europe. It's not an easy or quick solution (growing food takes time, and the scale of the problem is staggering), but it's hard to see how peace would come without food.
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I don't think taking sides or assuming one side is more justified than the other, is constructive. Both sides are doing horrible things to each other: It's the collective insanity of war.
Of course people have to protect themselves, and something has to be done to resolve the situation. But I don't think the current methods are the best solution.
What can other countries do?
Many are sending weapons to the side they support - this doesn't sound like a good way of reducing bloodshed.
Turkey is offering a neural place to hold negotiations - that seems like a good start.
Lebanon is joining in with some of the fighting - this is bizarre, as they've previously enjoyed 20+ years of peace, and were busy promoting tourism as central to their economy.
The Israeli state is encouraging Palestinian civilians to leave before their bombardment commences - that's a helpful concession, but it's mixed as they still intend violence.
It seems likely there will be a refugee crisis, both before and after the bombardment. So other countries preparing refugee camps, and the Red Crescent, UN, etc helping distribute aid, seems likely.
The root causes are a refusal to share the land, and violent actions promoting retaliation. I've heard it said that this is also a war for fresh water. Even without further conflict, Palestinian civilians are dependent upon foreign aid for food, water, fuel, and electricity. They must also be dependent upon outside services for communications, as the Israeli state managed to cut that off.
The logical conclusion would be to share the land, to stop killing each other, and to set up desalination plants, to supply arid inland areas from coastal regions.
But people there don't want to behave rationally at this time - for whatever reason, so they have to get in a peaceful & cooperative frame of mind first, ie they have to rebuild trust.
I think it would help to compare to a similar impasse in Northern Ireland. While I don't think it would be representative to say the NI conflict is over, it's certainly calmer.
Two main things changed in NI: Negotiation leading to powersharing, and an amnesty ie forgiveness for past incursions.
Powersharing, in the form of collective decision-making, would take power away from the advocates of violence. So it would effectively be a combined government for both states, effectively turning it into one state. The first consequence would be allowing civilians from either side to settle where they chose. This would also defeat the point of violence, because either side would be shooting their own people in an exchange of fire. The second consequence would be land-sharing without moving any borders.
In NI, the British government removed its towers and fortifications along the border, so that sort of thing could be a third consequence. They didn't wait until things had completely calmed down: They did it early, as a visible gesture of trust, and of change. It was, and is, of course reversible, so it wasn't entirely magnanimous.
Negotiations started in NI as a series of small concessions by both sides. Things moved slowly at first, but eventually small steps turned into big ones, and then visible changes started happening. Once civilians saw changes happening, attitudes changed as well. It's not perfect; I would say peace has been fumbled rather than planned. But it is constructive change, which is what we all want, right?
The alternative is further bloodshed, probably eventually resulting in the wiping out and occupation of the Gaza Strip, a diaspora of Palestinian civilians in neighbouring countries, and retaliations continuing along the new border, probably with support from some neighbouring countries.
I'm interested in opinions about these points, and corrections to anything I've got wrong, as some of the history is from my own memory, which is turn is based upon news sources which are undoubtedly biased.
This is not really helpful now, but I wonder what the hell was the original plan that the funders of Israel had. I mean, if we interpret the current situation as "the plan, but gone wrong in some parts", what was the "all according to the plan" version supposed to look like?
- Were they completely unaware that someone else has already settled in Palestine during the last thousand years?
- Did they expect those people to go away, if asked politely? Was there a specific plan where they should go, or just a vague idea like: "all brown people look the same to me, I am sure they would fit nicely in any other brown people's country; it's not like they have any cultural or religious differences, right?"
- Or was the original plan genocide, and then they chickened out, or found out that it can actually be quite difficult when the people you are trying to eliminate fight back?
- Or was it something like: "hello, we are your new neighbors, now we will make the rules, but you are still allowed to live among us, of course, as long as you obey the new rules"? And the people were supposed to say: "hi new neighbor, what a lucky coincidence, we have no culture of our own, and we were just desperately looking for someone to tell us how to live"?
To put is shortly, if your plan is to establish a new country on the top of someone else's house, and you do not include that person's reaction in your plans, that seems to me incredibly short-sighted. So if there was a plan that included this (better than "surely God will solve all the problems"), I am curious to hear it.
EDIT:
So it seems that the genius plan was: "Palestinians will be told to give up a large part of their territory, they will grumble for a moment, but they will quickly get used to it", i.e. people living in the part which becomes Israel will move to the remaining parts of the Palestine.
Seems to me like an instance of a more general pattern: Someone makes a plan based on wishful thinking that other people will react in a certain way; and when they quite predictably don't, he blames them for being "irrational", instead of admitting that perhaps the plan was not the smartest one.
On the other hand, the genius plan was approved by both USA and Soviet Union, so perhaps it seemed reasonable at that moment that Palestinians would give up facing an overwhelming opposition.
Trying to find an analogical situation in Europe: Hungarians are more than 100 years later still complaining about Trianon; but they usually don't attack, unless a war is already going on anyway. So perhaps without the benefit of hindsight the plan actually made sense.
It would also be difficult to predict that in a few decades our moral intuitions about colonies will change so dramatically. What seemed acceptable when Israel was founded, would be considered a horrible crime today. It's not fun to inherit a moral problem from people who worked on moral principles so different from yours.
You've already noted that it doesn't really matter, but I thought I'd help fill in the blanks.
The current global regime of sovereign nation-states that we take for granted is the product of the 20th century. It's not like an existing sovereign nation-state belonging to the Palestinians was carved up by external powers and arbitrarily handed to Jews. Rather, the disintegration of empires created opportunities for local nationalist movements to arise, creating new countries based on varying and competing unifying or dividing factors such as language, tribal associations, and sect. Palestinians and Zionist Jews both had nationalist aspirations during this period, and for various reasons the Zionists came out on top.
The idea that "the Palestinians were there first" is not particularly meaningful or accurate, especially given the historical fact of Judea and Israel as the birthplace of Judaism and the continuous presence of Jewish communities in the region, despite the many events contributing to the creation of a Jewish diaspora.
I think you are working under a wrong assumption that there was something as Palestine where Palestinians lived.
The reality was that there was an Ottoman Empire, they lost in a WW1, and thus they lost this region to British. There lived Jews and Muslims there, though there were more Muslims than Jews. It happened to go under the name of “Palestine region”, but thats similar like saying “What did those Czechs and Slovaks thought settling in the Hungary and carving out a portion of the country? Didn’t they notice that there were Hungarians living for like a thousand of years already?
The problem with this analogy is that Czechoslovakia didn't start by expelling 700 000 Hungarians from its territory. My great-grandmother was a proud Hungarian and refused to learn a single Slovak word, justifying her ignorance by saying: "I was born in Hungary, and I have never moved". So she spent most of the century living in Czechoslovakia, trying to ignore this fact as much as possible. And it worked for her.
Taking a territory from another country is one thing, taking homes from people living there is another.
A more fitting analogy would be Beneš Decrees, but that's not how the country was founded, it happened a few decades and a world war later, and as far as I know there was no attempt to deny it.
Wow. I didn’t know about these details honestly. I guess we can agree that Israel did many things that were wrong, and we can even call those war crimes.
I just don’t agree with your original claim that the very creation of Israel was wrong.
There is nothing wrong per se with wanting to have your own country. Unfortunately, all places on land are already taken, so your options are: seasteading, colonizing Mars, or killing someone else and taking their country. The first two options are currently technically impossible. The third option was considered perfectly okay a few centuries ago... and kinda okay a century ago, as long as you didn't do it to white people... but is generally frowned upon these days.
(In theory you could buy a piece of land, but in practice, countries are unwilling to sell.)
I don't buy the argument "the land is ours, because our ancestors lived there more than thousand years ago". I mean, imagine what would it look like if everyone started following this rule. Would you support my crusade to conquer the place in Asia (I don't even know where exactly, but perhaps we could figure it out) where our Slavic ancestors came from more than thousand years ago? Or would you call me insane if I proposed it seriously?
The usual argument "but Jews were killed by Nazis, and therefore they deserve their own country to finally have a place where they are safe" fails to explain why Palestinians should be the ones to pay for the crimes of the Nazi Germany. Why don't we take a part of Germany instead, and make it a new country for Jews? That would be fair... and also more convenient; placed in Europe, it could be a part of EU and/or NATO today, away from the conflicts. (Yeah, but it is not their homeland. Yeah, but I don't buy that argument.) This version of justice sounds like: someone punched you, therefore you are now allowed to punch a completely unrelated person, and call it self-defense.
What other arguments are there? "It was okay, because the British said it was okay." Uh, why was it okay for the British to say that it is okay to displace almost million people? And how is it okay to do something just because the British said it would be okay? (Hypothetically speaking, if British gave a permission to murder everyone in Palestine instead, would you say that the people who actually did it did nothing wrong, because they had someone else's permission? People in Nuremberg were hanged for smaller leaps of logic.)
So please explain to me in what sense the actions that created Israel were right. (Not why it would be okay to create Israel in a hypothetical uninhabited land; because I agree that yes that would be okay.)
How would you see the situation if instead Israel was created today? Like, you would turn on the TV and hear that somewhere far away, half million people were forcefully driven away from their homes, to make place for a new country of white people. Would you honestly say "nothing wrong with that"?
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The only reason why I don't say that the fair thing would indeed be to cancel the project of Israel and send everyone home is... that it happened a few decades ago. [EDIT: Oops, I forgot about the Jews who already lived there before Israel. I guess that would mean yes to Israel, but probably a smaller one? Not sure, would need to check the population numbers before Israel.] The new generation of Israelis are at home there, in the literal sense of "they have never actually lived anywhere else". So I don't think that displacing people should be solved by... displacing other people.
There must be an expiration date on crimes, otherwise we would have endless vendettas and complete legal chaos, because practically everything that can't be produced (such as land) was taken by force at some moment of history. But at the same time, the victims of those crimes deserve, at least, a public admission that it happened, and perhaps an apology -- even if it comes with a firm statement that although we genuinely feel bad about that, no recompensation is going to happen, ever. As far as I know, this didn't happen. Instead, Israel has a law against commemorating the event. (At the same time, they complain that Palestinian schools don't teach their kids about the holocaust.)
So the first step would be to stop the bullshit about how all those Palestinians left their homes voluntarily. Yeah, I get it, it is so convenient when other people start voluntarily doing what you want, as soon as you aim a gun at them. But seriously, if this is what you teach your kids at schools, of course you will raise a generation of nationalistic morons who believe that their ancestors never did anything wrong, and therefore they are morally superior to the rest of humanity. Which, of course, also makes all their actions today perfectly okay, because the world deserves a payback. -- As opposed to living in a world full of flawed people, where we need to find a way to be nice to each other anyway.
Of course, none of this means that Israel should not address the terrorist attacks by force today. This is more about what to do after that.
I am not saying that displacing 700,000 people was okay. I am saying is that splitting the region between two people who were already living there was right. Especially given that these two people could not be realistically capable co-governing together given their not-so-great relationship.
But you are changing argument on the go. First, you start by saying it's not ok to come to someone else's land and steal it (100% agreement on that). Then you pretend that somehow there were not living Jews in Palestine (they were already). They had as much right for the land as all the muslims that lived there.
1I agree with that, thanks for correcting me! (Made an edit in my comment.)
Splitting the region between two people who live there -- ok (with some more details)
Displacing 700 000 people, and inviting strangers to replace them -- not ok
The details on splitting the region are that it should approximately follow the locations where those people previously lived (i.e. not something like "the people who previously mostly lived in the south will get the northern part, and vice versa" or "the people who were previously 5% of the population will get 95% of the territory, and vice versa"). Of course, this cannot be done perfectly, a square mile at some place is not equal to a square mile at a different place, and it might be better if the new borders go along some river or mountain, to make them naturally defensible. Also, the people who were e.g. 20% of the population should intuitively get 20% of the territory, even if they were a majority in 0% of cities, I suppose? (Mathematically equivalent to drawing borders and resettling people 1:1, until everyone is on the "correct" side.)
And, after this is done, the people living in one part are free to invite strangers to their homes, keeping the borders unchanged.
My understanding is that Jews were 1/3 of the total population, not 20%.
I agree though that the UN plan for Palestine was too generous to Israel, but that might have also be caused by Arab side essentially sabotaging it and not engaging in negotiations?
And the actual outcome for Israel turned out to be even more than the original UN plan was suggesting. Still, I don't know how a good solution would look like here. Jews were the underdog here and if they wouldn't secure the territory they secured, it would probably get pretty bloody bad for them. Simply, them having some smaller territory that wouldn't really be defensible doesn't seem like a stable equilibrium to me. Also, it's not like they are discriminating against their Arab citizens (20% of today's population). I don't think there would be any Jews alive today would the roles be reversed.
Don't get me wrong, this is not me trying to absolve them of the war crimes they did, nor me trying to say that it's fair that they pretty much got most of the land while Arab's live an an Apartheid state occupied by Israel.
I am just saying that I don't think that there was some magic easy solution back in 1948 that would lead to magically better situation than there is today.
FYI: This is the proposal from 1937 rejected by Arabs that would have been IMO fair according to population criteria. I have no idea whether that kind of land would be viable from the military point of view. The long thin stretch of blue seems like really hard to defend.
Not sure how much I can trust ChatGPT, but frankly I don't have energy left for a more serious research, so I asked:
You are a historian. What was the demographics of Palestine before 1948?
I got a list of groups, but no numbers, so I asked again:
Can you estimate the fractions of total population these groups made somewhen around 1920?
Now the same, for 1940.
Now the same for 1900.
I mean, I was interested in what happened before Nakba, but didn't know how far to go in the past. Too much in the past is less relevant. Too little, on the other hand, includes the Zionist immigrants, and I was interested in the people who lived there traditionally.
ChatGPT said that Arab population was roughly 80-95% of population in 1900 and 1920, and 70-80% in 1940. Jewish population was around 5-10% in 1900, 10-15% in 1920, and 20-30% in 1940. Other minorities, such as Druze, Circassians, and Samaritans, were likely less than 1%.
So, if this is correct, the number "1/3 of the total population" already includes the Zionists that immigrated before 1948. The fraction of Jews traditionally living in Palestine is much smaller.
EDIT:
When I asked about today, ChatGPT gave separate statistics for Israel and Palestinian Territories, so I asked again:
Please express this as a fraction these groups have in the territory of Israel and Palestinian Territories together.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT sucks at math (yes, that also makes the previous numbers suspicious), it just couldn't do the addition properly, so I asked for absolute numbers instead, and got this: in Israel 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs, in Palestinian Territories 0 Jews and 7 million Arabs (5 million in the West Bank, 2 million in Gaza). So, assuming I am better at math than ChatGPT, it makes 40-45% Jewish population, and 55-60% Arab population in September 2021.
Sorry, I guess I expressed myself confusingly, the parts about "people who lived in south vs north", "5% and 95%", and "20% of population, but a majority in 0% of cities" were all meant only as illustrative examples of what I meant by fair vs unfair division of a territory, not statements on the specific number of people in actual Palestine and their historical locations.
Also, it's not like they are discriminating against their Arab citizens (20% of today's population).
Some people disagree with this statement, but unfortunately I don't the time to figure out who is wrong here. Seemingly no one can agree even on the basic facts, so every single sentence anyone says on this topic needs to be verified. The weekend is over, I am out of time. :(
I have no idea whether that kind of land would be viable from the military point of view. The long thin stretch of blue seems like really hard to defend.
I agree. I am not good at geography, but there seem to be no natural borders in that area, except for the river Jordan.
On the other hand, compared to some fractal-like proposals I have seen, that one seems unbelievably simple.
Another problem seems to be that the areas where both sides live are economically interconnected, so you can't simply "build a wall" between them. (I think so. Maybe I am wrong here.) My reasoning is that if you build a wall and stop interacting across it, at some point it becomes boring to keep yelling at the wall. But if thousands of people cross the border every day, that is thousand opportunities for some petty aggression to escalate, and a daily reminder how much your enemies suck. ("Good fences make good neighbors.") Again, I know too little about the commerce in the area to propose a natural place where a wall could be built. Maybe there is no such place.
(In theory you could buy a piece of land, but in practice, countries are unwilling to sell.)
Buying land from governments really hasn't been a very legitimate concept from the beginning. Even if they are willing to sell, the people living there probably don't want you ruling them, and where they don't want to sell, I fail to see the crime against humanity in paying people to move to another country until there are few enough left that you can walk in, become the super majority, and declare yourself the new government.
Of course, that doesn't mean men with guns won't try to stop you. I can very much see how elites with guns like this environment where no one ever has the option of forming a new country, or buying out their own country from under them. The problem here is that people who are not powerful elites tolerate this, and don't consider that we could cut governments out of this equation entirely.
I don't have a solution to this, but I have a question that might rule in or out an important class of solutions.
The US spent about $75 billion in assistance to the Ukraine. If both the US and EU pitched in an amount of similar size, that's $150 billion. There are about 2 million people in Gaza.
If you split the money evenly between each person and the country that was taking them in, how much of the population could you relocate? That is, Egypt gets $37,500 for allowing Yusuf in and Yusuf gets $37,500 for emigrating, Morocco gets $37,000 for allowing Fatima in and Fatima receives $37,000 for emigrating, etc... How many such pairings would that facilitate?
Supposedly Israel has begged Qatar (and others?) to fund Hamas. If true, presumably Hamas is dependent on Israel's diplomacy to get funding as otherwise Israel would not be asking others to fund it because it wouldn't make a difference. So presumably Hamas would recede without Israel's support.Some people put a manipulation angle to it[1], but the linked article puts a humanitarian angle to it (building infrastructure and keeping the government running).
If we do buy the humanitarian angle, then the question seems not so much "how can we stop Hamas?" but instead "how can we sufficiently quickly build something else in Hamas' place that it doesn't lead to mass starvation?". I don't know what the answer to this is.
If we don't buy the humanitarian angle and instead buy the manipulation angle, then it seems like a solution to "how to stop Hamas?" is "Israel should stop ensuring Hamas gets funding".
Might also be that this is misleading for some reason. I've been trying to catch up on the conflict and have changed my mind about lots of stuff in the past few days. Some argue this isn't really Likud making Qatar fund Hamas, but instead Likud making Qatar fund various autonomously-run institutions in Gaza.
- ^
that Likud wants to support Hamas so they have an excuse to agress against Gaza - "anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas"
Epistemic status: Weakly held opinions, and not super well informed. Sometimes the best way to learn is to be confidently wrong online so those in the know will correct you.
Hamas is a genocidal enemy and having them as neighbors has gone from bad to intolerable for Israel. Seems like Hamas is breaking all the rules, literally committing crimes against humanity, deliberately targeting civilians, taking hostages, using their own civilians as human shields. They're acting just like ISIS. It's all very illegal, even in war. But who is going to hold them to account for that? They're already under a crushing blockade.
The obvious options Israel seems to be considering seem like war crimes themselves. The "total blockade" is an illegal collective punishment that will hurt civilians most of all. Unlike Gaza, Israel has a lot more to lose if the world decides to hold them to account. Seems like an impossible situation.
But the Gazans are not some alien species. They're human beings, same as the Israelis. What makes them different is their radical indoctrination and probably ignorance about how things could be any different. It's a war of memes, and until those are defeated, nothing will change.
So attack that problem directly. Spread the good memes and shame the bad ones. Destroy their mass media stations and broadcast your own propaganda PR from outside the borders. Institute compulsory education, including the women. That one might take an occupation to fully pull off. This is so threatening that one of the Islamic terrorist organizations chose to call themselves Boko Haram, "education is forbidden". Teach them about all the other world religions. Teach them that terrorism is evil, and that Hamas committed crimes against humanity. Teach them that Hamas is responsible for their state of poverty. Give the children educated this way a path to citizenship in Israel. Make the men pass a test proving they know the good memes before they're allowed to cross the border to work in Israel.
In the meantime, there's a war going on. Israel will at least have to mow the grass. Assassinate the Hamas leadership. Use American drones if that helps.
1I'm surprised by the lack of follow-up to this post and the accompanying thread, which took place in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th massacre. A lot has happened since then -- new data against which the original thinking could be evaluated. Also time has provided opportunity to self-educate about the conflict, which a few people admitted to not knowing a lot about. Given the human misery that has only worsened since the OP started asking questions, I would think that a follow-up would be a worthy exercise. @Annapurna ?
Urge them to swallow their pride and surrender.
Whether or not they do, expect that after the fighting, there will be an international peacekeeping force in Gaza, as in Lebanon.
1From what I know, the international peacekeeping force in Lebanon does precisely nothing. They leave whenever there's fighting, and have no interest stopping Hezbollah from rearming. I literally do not know if it would make any difference if they didn't exist at all.
This is to be expected. UNIFIL has no skin in the game, and would take significant risk if they attempted to stop Hezbollah operations.
We are a few hours away from a likely ground incursion / invasion of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) into Northern Gaza. For the past week I've been trying to figure out a more reasonable way that the world can deal with Hamas, as an alternative to what the Israeli government is considering doing. I am having trouble coming up with a rational option aside from status quo (leave the group as is) or Israel's option (eliminate no matter the cost).
What other option exists to deal with a group with the following fact sheet (and please correct anything that is factually wrong in the statements below):
Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
The leaders of Hamas and their families live in relative luxury while the average Gazan lives near the poverty line.
They promote radicalized education in Gaza, half of which are under the age of 19.
They use humanitarian aid for war (for example, digging up water pipes and turning them into missiles).
They strategically place their military operations near school, hospitals, residences, and commercial areas.
They convince Gazans to stay in urban areas and not to head to places IDF is advising them to go to in order not to get bombed.
They recruit minors to their cause and send them in paragliders to murder people (and be murdered by IDF)
They have the sympathy of many, EVEN IN ISRAEL, because of the civilian death toll every time there is an IDF operation.
I really don't know what can be done that is better than either option presented above.