#they see gaza as this far away problem and middle easterns as not human

[greencarnation]

Can you imagine if the French invaded Britain and killed a bunch of people displaced a bunch more and then shoved what was left into like. Aberdeen. And then bombed the shit out of Aberdeen for 75 years and didn't let anyone leave. And if you tried to get out they killed your whole family and called you a terrorist. And the whole world was like omg you're barbarians France has a right to defend itself even though that's literally not even France it's Britain, France just invaded and stuck French flags everywhere. And then France killed 20,000 people mostly British kids in like a month but if anyone says hey maybe France should stop killing the kids then they're anti-French and they support terrorism and genocide. That would be crazy right

[utilitymonstermash]

Taleb:

One of the problems of the interventionista — wanting to get involved in other people’s affairs “in order to help” — results in disrupting some of the peace-making mechanisms that are inherent in human affairs, a combination of collaboration and strategic hostility. As we saw in the Prologue 1, the error continues because someone else is paying the price.

I speculate that had IYIs and their friends not gotten involved, problems such as the Israeli-Palestinian one would have been solved, sort of — and both parties, especially the Palestinians, would have been better off. As I am writing these lines the problem has lasted seventy years, with way too many cooks in the same tiny kitchen, most of whom never have to taste the food. I conjecture that when you leave people alone, they tend to settle for practical reasons.

[...]

Imagine [Nero1] the absurdity of Arab states prodding the Palestinians to fight for their principles while their potentates are sitting in carpeted alcohol-free palaces (with well-stocked refrigerators full of nonalcoholic fermented beverages such as yoghurt) while the recipients of their advice live in refugee camps. Had the Palestinians settled in 1947, they would have been better off. But the idea was to throw the Jews and neo-crusaders in the Mediterranean; Arab rhetoric came from Arab parties who were hundreds, thousands of miles away arguing for “principles” when Palestinians were displaced, living in tents. Then came the war of 1948. Had Palestinians settled then, things would have worked out. But, no, there were “principles.” But then came the war of 1967. Now they feel they would be lucky if they recovered the territory lost in 1967. Then in 1992 came the Oslo peace treaty, from the top. No peace proceeds from bureaucratic ink. If you want peace, make people trade, as they have done for millennia. They will be eventually forced to work something out.

Moldbug:

Under the Wilsonian interpretation, this right to judge has been removed from Israel and Gaza, and transferred to Washington, our honest—or, depending on your point of view, dishonest—broker. Our single global sovereign.

Result: Arabs persistently refuse any settlement, always involving concessions in their favor, which Israel will accept. As diplomats put it, they will “not take yes for an answer.” Small wonder, as the conflict is essentially their national industry at this point. War continues for sixty years, on and off, and bids fair to go on for the next sixty.

Note that in none of this analysis have we considered the actual merits of the case Palestine v. Israel. We have simply observed that the old international law, generally perceived as brutal and bellicose, results in peace. And the new international law, generally perceived as civilized and humanitarian, results in war. This would not be the first such inversion.

War is, generally, more evil than peace. So our evil detector is going off. But we have only begun to scratch the surface of the evil in this case.

There is actually an English word which refers to the Palestinian case. The word is irredentism. The fit is perfect: “Irredentism is any position advocating annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession, actual or alleged.” The origin of the term is also worth a look. And irredentism can also be considered a special case of revanchism.

But you seldom see these terms used in relation to the Middle East conflict, because both have acquired a distinct odor of… evil. It’s all too easy to understand how irredentism and revanchism are the polar opposite of peace. Peace means accepting the results of history. Irredentism means the Welsh Liberation Front, demanding the return of London from those notorious human-rights violators, the Saxons.

Moreover, one question too seldom asked is why irredentist violence occurs. After all, changes in borders, even mass population transfers, are ubiquitous throughout history. Focusing on our own era for a moment, we have the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe, the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt, and the expulsion of the pieds-noirs from Algeria. In each of these cases, a population of millions was expelled at gunpoint from land they had lived on for generations, an enterprise blatantly inconsistent with “the rights of humanity.” And resulting in a complete absence of irredentist violence, or even political organization. So far as I know, not a single pipe bomb has been detonated by any victim of any of these expulsions.

Why? Perhaps these particular peoples are just genetically docile. A racial characteristic. Or a cultural one, at least. Can these factors be ruled out? Of course not.

But there’s another troubling factor, which is that none of the docile expellees enjoyed the sympathy of the “international community.”For the Germans, this is obvious. The Jews and pieds-noirs were expelled by Arab nationalists—who, as we’ve just seen, did enjoy that sympathy. (Or see, for example, Suez.)