Israel-Hamas war in Gaza

We are truly a people who love death as much as our enemies love life.

-Ismail Haniyeh

There's a war in Gaza. It's terrible. There's really not much more to say about that aspect, the violence. Poo-tee-weet? If you've read that book, that says it all. The wrong kind of reader wants more. They want descriptive, loaded language to match their emotions. I don't have anything for you if you're that kind of reader. I don't want to appeal to your emotions. I want to stand on reason and appeal to your higher nature. With that in mind, here's where I stand right now, using a simple razor:

Intentions

I think you can tell a lot more about the intentions of a society by its infrastructure than by the words of its political class. In America, buildings of a certain size or capacity are required to have fire escapes. If you've ever seen one in the middle of construction, those towers of concrete early on in the process are the fire escape stairwells, built to a stringent code. To a certain point, even our government cares about us not dying in fires. In Israel, they're mandated to have bomb shelters, individual apartments or office floors must have spaces protected by reinforced concrete, and even open fields have public shelters. Israel does not want its people to die, either. In Gaza, Hamas has dug hundred of miles of tunnels to shelter from bombs and conduct war. Civilians are not allowed in it. Palestine wants its civilians to die. If you want to understand the behavior of these polities and their people, you have to be sober about this distinction.

I find that most people aren't. Something about that last one is too counterintuitive for people in largely reasonable societies to countenance. Neither statement nor reasoning above works on them. It short circuits the brain, or more precisely the part governing theory of mind, because it's so alien to their own value system. They just can't imagine it, but it's true. The political goals of the terrorists ruling millions of Palestinians are sought at the expense of their own people. It is possible for a critical mass of people to have that little regard for their own life, and that much hate for others, and it's important in this case to be clear about both.

War vs war crime, apartheid, genocide

Too many are only able to do one. They're only able to see the conflict through the lens of how much one must hate the other to do X. I think that tunnel vision is what makes people susceptible to the kind of propaganda we've been seeing. In particular, the use of terminology like genocide. I don't have much to say about that, other than the fact that many treat it as a fact that the word applies here even as the legal accusation remains stalled. All I will say is that, to my eye, it requires an intent that doesn't exist according to the above razor. I don't see extermination camps, or gas being dropped, or the gunshot execution of rounded up military age men in Bosnia. I don't even see the kidnapping of thousands of children, like in Ukraine. I see a war.

Now, apartheid? Maybe. That seems like an easier case to make. War crime? Even easier. Extremely common in war. Frankly, day to day operations of Hamas are war crimes. The child soldiering alone is horrific, to say nothing of atrocities, but even things like fighting out of uniform are sufficient. The poor discipline on the Israeli side is undoubtedly leading to war crimes, too, on a more individual basis. I don't see many people using this term with care, though.

Anti-semitism vs anti-Zionism

Here are some more words that people definitely aren't careful with. There's a lot of misunderstanding about what these mean, and about how the other side of the argument is using them. Mostly I see this in the form of the strawman that "any criticism of Israel is antisemitism." Pretty much no one believes this, even Israeli hardliners. No one argues it. What happens is that they use the attack of antisemitism loosely, about as loose progressives have been with "racist" over the past decade.

I don't think that's helpful, but it's important to understand what they actually do mean by that, which is that they've common to antisemitism as a diagnosis by exclusion. They've had these many arguments and noticed the double standards. They see that you care about this one war, not the other more deadly one. They see that you claim to be against ethnic nationalism, but it's never a criticism of Sweden or any other literal nation-state (the intended end point of ethnic nationalism), just this one country. I'm not going to make that argument in detail now, that will be left as an exercise to the reader. Suffice to say, there's a lot of these double standards in criticism of Israel.

One thing I would like to mention is that the divide between the religion and the national idea (Zionism) here is not as clear as a lot of people would find convenient. Israel is actually pretty central to Jewish identity. It is the second word in arguably the most prominent Jewish prayer of all, Shema Yisrael, which puts the idea of Israel right up there with monotheism and allegiance to Yahweh. Consider the Lord's Prayer in Christianity, imagine trying to get Christians to abandon the concept of heaven, and you have something similar.

Other arguments

There are a lot of other common arguments we could cover here, and maybe I will someday, but right now I don't see the point. After reading the above, you probably think you know which side of this issue I'm on. That binary is not really the way I think about it and I can say all the above without any issues while not supporting the Israeli government and particularly not Netanyahu. Hamas is worse and Palestinians are less effective in using civil government to abrogate hateful violence, but Israel's actions of late still suck. It's not fair, Israel is held to insane standards, they're surrounded by those who hate and try to annihilate them, but none of that changes the fact that Israel's recent leadership and strategy are awful as well. Israel is awful in the way I would expect the Orban regime to act awfully if Hungary were in a prolonged war, not in the way I would expect ISIS to. I believe that is significant.