Is supporting Israel versus Palestine conservative?
From the news it sounds like many conservative outlets are very supportive of Israel and very against anyone that supports Palestinians. I don't typically expect to see conservatives support Jewish people considering their concern that the Jews might control entertainment and maybe even the media. Lol. But other than the relative stability of having Israel as a United States allie, there isn't anything conservative to the cause?
Keep seeing Jonathan Greenblatt on MSNBC and he seems a bit extreme and unsympathetic towards the Palestinians wanting their land back. Other than him the left seems a bit more even on this topic.
Keep seeing Jonathan Greenblatt on MSNBC and he seems a bit extreme and unsympathetic towards the Palestinians wanting their land back. Other than him the left seems a bit more even on this topic.
Comments (38)
What better way to draw simple lines without thinking things with reason and objectivity.
America is one of the few places where you can get away with being simultaneously anti-semitic (damn liberal Jews and their evil Hollywood, media, banks etc) and rabidly pro-Israel (the holy land is under threat! God save Jerusalem!). If you are such, you are almost certainly both conservative and Christian (the Evangelicals in particular seem to suffer from this prejudicial paradox). So what's conservative about the cause, it seems to me is at least to an extent what's religious about it. The religious right has set itself up in contradistinction to Islam primarily and the enemy of that enemy must be a friend (even if it's them Jews...)
And as you said, what is conservative is that the religious conservatives do have in their heart a special place for Israel. This isn't something limited to American religious right, but something quite universal. Perhaps it's similar as present day Germany supporting Israel while having earlier being the culprits of the Holocaust. Yet one cannot deny that one of the most influential books for anti-semitism is the New Testament with Matthew 27:2425 and the blood curse. Especially when the other Gospels talk nothing about this (at least I'm not aware of), it should be evident the salesmanship here for the new Religion doing for the Romans.
Just like the Crusades aren't embraced and honored by modern Christianity, same thing with age-old accusations of the Jews being the 'Christkillers'. And then of course you have the Evangelists who think next time Jesus comes around, many of the Jews who accept him will become Christians! :smile:
Anti-semitism isn't limited to one side of the political spectrum.
In modern US culture, supporting Israel would be considered "conservative" although many liberals and even those on the left also support Israel. There's a definite ethnic component to it with even left-wing Jews largely siding with Israel and minorities being sympathetic to palestine. The conflict has strangely been manufactured into "white" Israel versus "non-white Palestine" with "white" Israel as the oppressor. Assad murders 500,000 Arabs no one says anything, but Israel retaliates against Hamas and the world is aflame with protest. Israel is under a microscope compared to other middle eastern countries.
I likened this in the other thread to a sort of Madonna-whore complex. Some of the people here hold Israel to an impossibly high standard, whereby Israel is supposed to absorb the Oct. 7th attacks without retaliation and head to the bargaining table, hat in hand, to see what concessions she can make to the animals that just attacked her. When Israel doesn't do this, and responds like any nation would, she's then treated like a whore.
Do you believe Israel has a right to retaliate from the attack?
I recognise an individual right for Israeli citizens to defend themselves against terrorist attacks, since I don't believe in guilt by association, but as far as I'm concerned every illegal settler, every idf soldier in the occupied territories is explicitly involved in the oppression and is therefore fair game. Shoot them all until the oppression stops. The state of Israel doesn't have a right to do anything until it stops committing crimes itself. Only once it has done that and if they are still confronted with an attack, then do they have any rights.
Edit: actually no rights is an exaggeration but you get the drift.
I reject analogies that liken countries to individuals. Countries are not individual moral agents that bear individual moral responsibility. One does not "get back" at this "person" by killing its civilians.
Quoting Benkei
A Jewish baby born in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv is an "illegal settler" according to Hamas (and unfortunately a significant portion of the Palestinian population). I recommend the Ami Horowitz interview where he interviews a Hamas leader and asks this question directly.
Quoting Benkei
I think the problem is to think here that retaliation and retaliatory strikes is the answer. Going after the perpetrators to prevent further attacks isn't retaliation. But it is hard not to see the retaliatory nature of the mission with the talk of human animals, the evil city, Biblical references and other dehumanization of the Palestinians. And then, even with the ground troops inside the city, using still a lot of air power. Using bombing to level the city is so different from how for example the US fought against insurgents in Iraq. It comes to mind that the unannounced objective could to make Gaza unlivable and then try to push the 2,2 million or so to Sinai. Perhaps for a 'temporary time', so it wouldn't be an act of genocide / ethnic cleansing.
Comparing how the US dealt with insurgents in Iraqi cities is here valid. The US went to great lengths to avoid using air power and the ground troops understood it well. The ironic thing is that the US armed forces actually won the Sunni insurgency only to then withdraw, have the Shia lead government take over and mess up all the work the Americans had done and the end result was ISIS taking over.
Showing restraint isn't a sign of weakness, it's usually a sign of intelligence. But if one wants just to retaliate and thus give those who call for retaliation what they want, that's something else.
I never said that. Are you really going back to 1948? Jews have been forced from their homes across the nearly the entirety of the Arab world yet you don't see revenge attacks.
Vaskane, what about when the Babylonians sacked Judea in 586 BC? When are the Jews gonna stick it back to the people of Iraq?
In 1948 the Arab states did not accept Israel as a state. Thankfully, in 2023 quite a few have come to accept it and therefore we have peace. Once the Palestinian governing authorities/society accepts Israel's acceptance that'll be a huge step forward. Look forward, not back. Societies that are caught up with historical grievances look back, not forward.
edit: not wasting my time with this one.
You need to leave 1948 and enter 2023. Orde Wingate is no longer with us and hasn't been for quite some time. Once this war is over, Palestinian children will need to be raised and educated in a way that encourages peaceful coexistence and cooperation with their neighbor, Israel. It is their only hope.
Or we could teach the new generation of palestinians how Israel is illegitimate and a criminal state and how Orde Wingate killed Arabs in the 40s and how everything is suffering and oppression.
I think it's a sure bet that this will happen, and it doesn't appear that the US is going to tolerate Israeli occupation of Gaza. I don't believe Israel's position is as strong as you seem to think.
What kind of sick joke makes restraint from massacring helpless and innocent civilians, leveling their city, while talking like genocidal maniacs, an "impossibly high standard"?
Even by the crudest biblical eye for an eye standard, Israel has taken seven or eight.
Quoting ssu
:up:
This seems clear to me.
from 2021
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/650650
from 2021
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/650398
7 days ago
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/856307
addendum:
Neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Israel, like (e.g.) R. Luxemburg, S. Freud, A. Einstein, E. Fromm, P. Levi Marek Edelman, I. Asimov, H. Arendt, I.F. Stone, N. Chomsky, H. Siegman, M. Lerner, R. Falk, T. Judt et al, I am also anti-zionist (i.e. anti-ethnonationalist).
That pertains to individuals within a society; the punishment must fit the crime. When it comes to a different people, e.g. Amalek, large scale destruction is on the table.
Yoni Saadon, one of the witnesses, recounts in the Times: "I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, 'Stop it - already I'm going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!' When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head. I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying 'I'm sorry.'"
The girl was Shani Louk.
AQuoting BitconnectCarlos
As sanctioned by whom? God? Or have you given yourselves license to do the sanctioning as well?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
How many such tragedies has Israel perpetrated in turn?
What a monumentally inept analogy, it doesn't begin to make any sense.
Israel's special and exclusive history of grievance gives it special and exclusive license to behave as it likes. And how dare you suggest they should behave in a more civilized manner. Yes yes, we're heard it before.
In the case of Amalek I could not tell you whether it is God or Samuel, but from memory in I or II Kings members of the tribe of Benjamin gang rape and murder a woman and when the other tribes demand justice the tribe of Benjamin refuses setting off a bloody civil war. Sometimes you just gotta root out the rottenness.
edit: book of judges, not kings.
:up:
....whatt????
World war perhap
Sure. Then Israel also has no right to self-defence. We "liken" countries to individuals all the time as we conceptualise that they have rights. And this makes perfect sense. If a person has a right then obviously a party who represents that person also has such right. So the State has rights because it is an agent of its citizens (ideally). And if actual people oppress another people, and the State as an agent supports such oppressions, its rights and duties are derived from the rights and duties of the individuals it represents. And since those illegal settlers and IDF soldiers are perpetrating a continuous war crime, they do not get to enjoy any protection.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Except I never said that, I said in "occupied territories" which is well established under international law and since I'm not a Hamas spokesperson or affiliated with them, I don't see how whatever they say has anything to do with what I'm saying.
If you're suggesting Palestinians aren't allowed to kill illegal settlers in the occupied territories of the West Bank or to kill IDF soldiers who protect those illegal settlers, then really what you have is human shields to pursue immoral State sanctioned policies. In which case I think indiscrimate bombing of illegal settler villages and IDF posts, killing as much as possible and levelling it to the ground by the international community makes perfect sense, just to get to the adults. Because that's the calculus the Israeli government is making. We'll even be nice about it and warn them beforehand!
Or, maybe a weird idea, Israel stops pursuing the war crime of annexing land and reverses the crimes it has already commited (and we all know that in a negotiated peace they still get to retain what they have no right to) and then when an attack does happen, they can at least claim a moral right to do something against it and I'd be the first to support discriminate police action and, depending on circumstances, escalate to military action.
"Retaliation" implies "revenge", so already an interesting choice of words but not my words.
And the cynic would say the retaliatory bombing of Gaza is done for to keep Hezbollah not to engage. Or at least, that's how the hawks see it. Of course, this strategy doesn't help to solve the conflict, because the end state is perpetual war state, just safe enough that Israeli voters are fine and don't want peace/two state solution. And since I'm accused of not thinking this from the Palestinians as the culprits here too, well, an islamic movement that see all the killed Palestinians as martyrs is perfect for this perpetual war. They will happily look at the timeline being similar as to pushing out the Crusader states.
Hence the right-wing government and an islamic resistance movement just embrace each other. Bibi supported Hamas and I'm sure that if Israel would have a government wanting to find a two-state solution, Hamas wouldn't like it either as the compromise would de facto be not so glorious to Palestinians.
But coming back to the thread's topic, to 'support Israel' being conservative makes itself then the assumption that supporting the other side, the Palestinians, as being leftist is the way how to simplify and basically dumb down the whole problem. Such divisions don't help to actually at all in reaching some kind of solution to problem in the Middle East when both the interests of Israel and the Palestinians (and the regional nations) should be taken into account.
In a similar way you can dumb down the discussion not only in foreign policy, but for example energy policy and thus environmental policy. It's seems like making everything about the 'culture war' doesn't help at all, just shuts down discussion.
The oppressor always desires peace in the form of a completely pacified, oppressed population perpetual status quo. E.g. Nazi Wehrmacht & Paris, France in 1940, respectively; PRC & Tibet since 1951, respectively; US-client state of Israel & Palestinian territories since 1967, respectively; ... Russia & Crimea/Donbas, Ukraine since 2014-22, respectively; etcetera.
In other words there are similarities to debates about punishment for crimes and who is responsible.
For myself I find the whole thing painful. Which is a wussy response given the extreme pain and worse for those actually invovled. But it seems like if you talk to anyone and you do not see the issue as simple and there is the one team to be extremely critical of period, you are in for being called a Nazi or some kind of colonialist. .
And this trickles down into practical matters. For example, for those on Israel's side, there is only one possible response to the Hamas attack and any suggestion, even exploratory that anything else could be done is anti-semitic. There are equivalents on the other team.
So you think there is just ONE way to fight a war? One way to use military power?
Just to give an example why this isn't so, just look at the statistics how the US and the Soviet Union fought an insurgency in Afghanistan:
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:
Length: 9+ years
Soviet losses: 14 400 killed
Afghan mujahideen losses: 75 000 - 90 000 killed
Civilian casualties: 560 000 - 200 000 deaths, 5+ million civilians externally displaced (refugees outside of Afghanistan)
US invasion of Afghanistan:
Length: 19+ years
US losses: 2 420 killed
Taleban losses: 53 000 killed
Civilian casualties: 46 000 deaths
Even if the killed enemy combatants are at the same scale, do notice the difference between civilian losses. And compared to the 5 million refugees who mainly live in Pakistan and Iran, the US air lift evacuated 122 000 people out of Afghanistan. So yes, there are differences in how you fight a war.
I think if you read that sentence in context, you'll see that I meant precisely the opposite. That I encounter that kind of oversimplification, from those on Israel's side, and similar versions for those on the other side.
Yes, and it's easy. You have one main reaction and you aim it at anything, those who agree, those who don't, those who see it as more complex. No nagging doubts, nothing of importance to work out. And then in today's climate, you divide the world into Team A and Team B, with me or against me, evil or good, sane or insane, smart or a moron. Of course there have always been these tendencies and certainly for many who are directly involved in an issue or conflict. But now all the armchair generals and couch potatoes have the same utterly clear binary choice well and good made. And there is no possible Team C or D in the schema.