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The World Is a Simple Place to Leftists
Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff quotes a Washington Post story, which explains that Democrats are less supportive of Israel than they once were (emphasis mine):
A Gallup poll in March found that the majority of Democrats now take the position that the United States should be applying more pressure to Israel to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The 53 percent opting for more pressure on the Israelis is up from 43 percent in 2018 and no more than 38 percent in the decade before that, marking a substantive change in Democrats’ perspective on U.S. policy,” the report found.
I wonder what their stats would have looked like if they had asked that question differently. Say for example:
A Gallup poll in March found that ______ percentage of Democrats now take the position that the United States should be applying more pressure to Palestinians to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After all, it seems to me that it might be easier to achieve peace if the Palestinians would stop lofting missiles into residential areas of Israel. It would be easier for Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians if they could see some evidence of goodwill from their neighbors, and less evidence of hatred. It takes two to tango, right? On the other hand, I know the situation over there is complex, and I don’t understand the details. So what do I know? It’s a difficult situation.
But to Democrats, the situation is simple. When Israel gets bombed, it’s Israel’s fault. When anything else goes wrong in that area, it’s Israel’s fault. The solution is obvious: America should put more pressure on Israel. Simple.
The world is a simple place to leftists. Bad weather is caused by SUV’s. You can cure poverty by giving money to poor people. Lower-class blacks are poor because of racism. Lower-class whites are poor because they’re lazy stupid redneck deplorable Neanderthals. Corporations are evil. Government is good. Businessmen are greedy. Politicians are selfless public servants. And on and on. And on and on and on and on.
Everything is simple.
Republicans are redneck Neanderthals, and Democrats are deep thinkers.
Right.
Published in General
I so agree with your post, Dr! What everyone seems to forget is that the Palestinians don’t want to come to the table without the Israelis agreeing to ridiculous pre-conditions. But we don’t want to muddy the Democrats tidy perception of who is to blame.
“Using a term like nonlinear science is like referring to the bulk of zoology as the study of non-elephant animals.” —Stanislaw Ulam
Managing complexity is hard. Most things that involve lots of people are complex.
As if Israel wasn’t already motivated. Clearly, the people with incentive to foment disorder are on the other side.
It feels like Leftists hate any country with a middle class.
Is the Right really more nuanced or balanced in its view of who is to blame for the Israel-Palestine conflict continuing? ( Or indeed starting?)
Mote. Beam.
It’s easy being a leftist, you only have to think one thing.
More nuanced or balanced? Probably not.
More correct? Yes, I think so.
Heh™
Actually, it seems to me that they generally hold many contradictory beliefs at the same time. You know, “if they didn’t have double standards they’d have no standards at all.”
Yes. Yes we are.
I take a different view.
The reason that I think that the Right is more nuanced in their view of the Israel conflict, is that they acknowledge that the Palestinians must be involved in, and interested in, the peace process, as well as the Israelis. Israel has work to do. But so do the Palestinians. Any peace plan which expects no change in behavior from the Palestinians is simplistic. And doomed to fail.
You may be right. It may simply be that I am not more nuanced and subtle. Because I thought the last administration’s approach of ignoring the Palestinians and focusing on the larger region relative to Israel made a lot of sense.
In general I think that people tend not to be too nuanced, but that folks on the right have the advantage of being simple-minded about tested things, whereas the left is simple-minded about new things. So we on the right more often get it correct.
I like Caroline Glick’s approach. That we continue settling the land which has always been ours, and gradually the Palestinian enclaves will come under Israel’s governance. As they begin to realize that living under Israeli law offers many benefits, including better education for their kids, they’ll come around.
I am very not nuanced on the issue at all. There is a very simple way to manage the problem, the same one that worked with the Tories after the American Revolution. This would work, and it would not be genocide.
The left’s solution is genocide.
It is not about thinking–it is about emoting to establish superiority over others. The only trick is staying aligned with the emoting mob. The most ardent Leftists will continually change language and stances to separate themselves from the lesser Leftists.
That’s the calm steady analysis that we know and love from Bryan.
Of course what most people want is the status quo. It suits their needs. I think the status quo sucks. Had the Tory option taken place back in the 70s, it would all be over.
And by the way, if anyone here does not like the Tory solution, I’d like you explain to me why it was also not OK when it happened in the 1780s.
People win wars and losers lose land. That is how the world has always worked and always will work. The Palestinians have as their stated goal, genocide. They are as open as Hitler was. There can be no peace with them, ever, because they refuse it. There are two realistic options only: Maintain status quo, the Tory Option. That is it. All other options result in genocide.
The views of both the Left and the Right on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem incorrect to me.
The Right tends to view the Israelis as the good guys. They want peace. Well, sure, they want peace now because they have conquered all of the land that they want. They are a substantial majority in Israel itself, and they semi-occupy the Palestinian territories while denying the people of those territories either citizenship within Israel or independent statehood.
I don’t blame the Israelis for taking these positions. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to recognize a Palestinian state that would be dedicated to conquering Israel. It also doesn’t seem like a good idea for a nation with a representative government, like Israel, to grant citizenship to a group of people who would want to destroy or undermine the state.
Some people on the Left tend to view the Palestinians as the good guys. The territory in question, including the modern state of Israel, was a mostly Arab Muslim region for about 1,200-odd years, with some Crusader interruptions. Starting in the late 19th Century and accelerating after WWI, a sizeable number of Jews immigrated to the territory. In the aftermath of WWII, they took over and established Israel. A series of wars ensued, in which the Israelis prevailed.
From the Leftist view, why should one accept the existence of Israel? The Israelis were, for the most part, European colonists who conquered Muslim Arab lands. There’s some logic to the argument that just as the British had to get out of India, the Israelis out to get out of Palestine. There is an important difference, of course, as the British had a homeland to which they could return.
For some reason, many people on the Right take the Israeli side, and essentially claim that the Palestinians must accept the Israeli conquest. For those who take that view — do you take the same view of the Spanish Reconquista? It took the Spanish about 700 years to kick the Muslims/Moors out of Spain. Do you take the same view of the various partitions of Poland?
The situation is made more complex by the fact that there really hasn’t been a Palestinian state, as a historic matter. It was typically a region of a much larger empire — Alexander’s empire, the Hellenistic empires (Seleucid and Ptolemaic), the Romans, Byzantines, and a series of Muslim empires (Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, then Ottoman). This, however, does not mean that the Palestinians lack any meaningful connection to their historic home territory.
[Cont’d]
I used to be strongly on the Israeli side. My view has changed, but I haven’t shifted to the anti-Israeli side. I’ve become more of a neutral observer.
I’ve come around to a historic view. The ebb and flow of nations and empires is the normal operation of human history. It’s messy, certainly. But why would one expect nations or empires to last forever? Why would one expect a territorial settlement to last for all time?
Which brings me to the issue presented by the OP. I’m not inclined to blame the Palestinians for wanting to conquer and drive out the Israelis. I’m not inclined to blame the Israelis for retaliating when attacked.
What is the solution?
The only stable solution that I see would be for the Israelis to take all of the disputed or occupied territories, and eject the Palestinians. The Palestinians would need to find another home, probably by moving to other Muslim Arab states. People have a horror of population relocation, and with some reason, though I’m not convinced that it could not be done in a humane way.
For some reason, population relocation is considered “genocide.” This seems like a category error, to me. Disentangling populations can certainly be messy, but leaving them entangled is also messy, in many circumstances.
In any event, population relocation does not appear to be a plausible solution as a political matter. So the conflict will continue.
For a while, it looked like the Palestinians and Arabs were going to win the demographic race. Remarkably, the Israelis seem to have done an effective job in closing the birth rate gap. Per Wikipedia, which may or may not be accurate but seems generally reliable for demographic information, Israelis Muslims had a total fertility rate of 4.74 in 2000, while Israelis Jews had a much lower TFR of 2.66. The latest figure is 3.16 for the Muslims and 3.09 for the Jews, which is virtually the same, and should stabilize the population at about 74% Jewish and 21% Muslim.
It was done in 1948 in Israel. The Palestinians are still insisting on the right of return.
The real difference is the relative numbers in the two cases and culture. There were/are many more Americans than Tories/Canadians. And both Americans and Tories/Canadians have common cultural roots. Even then it took almost 100 years for Americans and Tories/Canadians to bury the hatchet. The most important element was the British had granted Canada dominion status.
Funny that Gallup never asks Do you agree that the state of Israel and all of its non-Arab inhabitants should be wiped off the face of the earth? which is kinda the main demand of Palestinians to achieve “peace.”
The main problem in the Peace Process Industry in diplomatic circles and the media. A half-century of pointless kabuki but big bullet points on the old résumé. How many career diplomats and foreign correspondents got to be part of the drama of Yassir Arafat at a big table in a great hotel in Paris or Switzerland signing some document he had absolutely no intention of honoring while everybody tried to push their way into the group photo (suitable for framing). Then when the violence erupted shortly after the signing, Arafat could say “What am I, a government? Be serious. Clearly, you did not make enough concessions to make the people happy. Can I have a bigger suite next time and let’s try Zurich or Geneva so I can be close to the PLO treasury and can deposit the check from the Americans faster.”
And so the farce would resume with succeeding US and Israeli governments and the US and European powers would continue to write big checks. When Arafat died, his successors in the Palestinian leadership had to fly to Paris to negotiate with Mrs. Afafat because the entire PLO treasury was in personal Swiss accounts that she inherited. She got to keep enough to stay in her Paris condo and maintain her lifestyle and the next generation of Palestinian crooks and thugs (“leaders”) got the rest of the dough that had been coughed up in the Peace Process. Meanwhile, two generations of State Dept careerists continued to get gold stars for their CVs, a shot at the Harvard’s Kennedy School or maybe Georgetown’s Foreign Service school or a think tank Or maybe a book and a post in some future administration just for promoting the same pablum.
Trump messed up the game by just leaving the intrnsigent Palestinians out and actually reconciling the Jews and Arab states. This was better for Peace but bad for the (career-enhancing) Process. That is why the biggest priority of the Biden foreign policy team was to undo all positive developments and resume activities that won’t work but more importantly, can never end, (AKA the Peace Process).
I’ve heard it stated much more simply. If the Palestinians disarm, there will be peace. If the Israelis disarm, there will be no Israel.
EDIT:
I’ll bite:
Fact on the ground are facts on the ground. People who win wars take the land and resources. It has ever been thus.
I also take the same view of the Spanish Reconquista. The moors lost.
The Poles lost.
The American Indians Lost.
The Romans Lost.
The English lost to the Saxons.
It is the way of the world and something that conservatives ought to understand.
This is my solution and it is not “genocide” it is relocation. Like the Tories.
Yes, and I do understand. But the Moors lost because the Spanish kept fighting, for 700 years. They refused to concede defeat. The Palestinians are in a similar position to the Spanish. The Spanish lost, until they won.
So I don’t see any particular reason to condemn the Palestinians for wishing to continue to fight for their homeland.
I also don’t see any particular reason to condemn the Israelis for continuing to fight for their homeland. The problem is that both groups view the same land as their homeland. That seems unlikely to change, absent extraordinary measures like relocation of the Palestinians.
I might not have been clear, Bryan. I basically agree with you.
I may be wrong in stating that this is considered “genocide” as a legal matter, though I have heard the term used rhetorically. I find this to be a category error.
The relocation that both of us contemplate does violate international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (here) states:
“[D]eportation” was considered both a war crime and a crime against humanity in the charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal (here — see page 6 of the pdf).
One bit of information you might be missing is that the Jews never completely left Israel; there were always enclaves maintained there. One could debate how many people would have had to remain there to maintain possession of it (although I know of no such law), but those are the facts. And there never was a “Palestine” state governed by the Arabs. And many Jews who returned in the 20th century weren’t colonists, but refugees out of the war. It is, and has always been, our land. The Palestinians have never had a homeland.
It is more like the Jews are the Spanish in this case.
I don’t care. “War crimes” is a joke of a concept. You fight wars to win. Period. I do not believe the Americans were engaged in a crime against humanity with the Tories.
This is such an interesting response.
First, you refer to it as “our land,” explicitly identifying with a nation that is not your own. At least, I don’t think that you are Israeli. It’s my understanding that you are one of my fellow Americans. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Second, the land of Israel or Caanan has not always been Israelite land. It certainly was not Israelite land before the conquest led by Joshua. I don’t recall all of the other nations that were to be either slaughtered or driven out — I think that there were Canaanites, Jebusites, Perizzites, Hivites, and others. They were not all killed or driven out, however.
Third, if the idea is that as long as one single Jew remained in the land, their possession continued — then why wouldn’t that apply to the descendants of the Canaanites and others? Who are probably the Palestinians, though doubtless the ancestry of both Palestinians and modern Jews is complicated.
I simply find the situation to be much more complicated than the view that the modern Israelis are obviously right, and the modern Palestinians are obviously wrong. I do not blame either side for viewing this territory as their historic homeland.
Generally, such disputes are settled by force, as a historic matter. This is the reason that I do not object to Israel’s actions in self-defense.