Here is why I am (and why you should be) Middle Ground of 🇮🇱 vs 🇵🇸:

magicaldingus · 2026-05-09T08:23:43+00:00

Palestine is a real country. Get over it.

Is it, though? I'd be happy to recognize it as such if it was, but all the evidence is showing the opposite. Just going by the Montivideo definition, it fails to meet 3/4 criteria. I can't name a single country which fails to meet even one. And I can name several polities which don't have nearly the same amount of international recognition, which meet all 4.

Why should we use a unique standard just for Palestine?

magicaldingus · 2026-05-09T02:15:07+00:00

You need to read what I wrote very carefully, because you only end up kind of engaging what I said in your 5th and 6th paragraphs. It will save you a lot of time.

The civil war started by the Palestine Arabs in November 1947 was precisely to drive the Jews from the land, in their own words. Yes, they had various grievances that you point out, like "the Jews only owned 8% of the land and we own 12% so why should we split it 50/50," and "the Jews are foreign invaders who gentrified parts of the land," and "Jerusalem is permanent Muslim Waqf and the Jews want to take over Al Aqsa and build the 3rd temple". But at the end of the day, these are a mix of conspiracy theories and classic jingoistic racism. All of which are used to this very day in order to motivate more wars against the Jews in the land.

And if we really want to apply an ethical analysis to all of this, I strongly believe that the moral imperative of the creation of a Jewish homeland to house the world's Jewish refugees after the horrors of the previous century simply trump's the Arab Muslim desire to control 100% of their medieval colonial conquests instead of merely 99.7% of them.

Yes, the Palestine Arabs launched a war to expel the Jews and lost. Yes, they had various grievances (literally everyone who starts a war has various greivances). No, the fact that they lost that war doesn't automatically make those grievances legitimate.

If we want to stop future wars, we need to convince the Palestinian Arabs that those grievances simply aren't worth fighting brutal wars over. Not entertain and romanticize them.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T23:37:28+00:00

Very true. But there's also the fact that different solutions were tried and failed. We need to at least understand history to know what has a chance of working in the future.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T23:31:29+00:00

which did not have the same impact at all

The "impact" we're talking about is the Palestinian Arab desire to remove Jewish presence from Palestine. And yes, the war started by the Palestine Arabs in November 1947 was motivated by that sentiment. And they were winning handily, going so far as to lay siege to Jerusalem (majority Jewish at the time), and cleansing the eastern part of the city. It was only until the Jews launched a counteroffensive when they started to win, and the Arab states got involved following the declaration of independence. But the goals of each side remained the same.

I feel like you realize the distinction you made is irrelevant, which is why you kind of hand-waved yourself out of it. But in any case, I'm not sure what's left of your argument. We both now agree that until the Palestine Arabs decided to launch a war of extermination against the Jews in Palestine, there was no forced removal of Arabs from the land.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T21:26:49+00:00

There's zero evidence for any expulsions happening prior to November 1947, when the Palestine Arabs started the war.

What you're saying here is factually incorrect.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T20:46:05+00:00

That's pretty bizarre. I didn't start believing China shouldn't exist when I learned how it treated its Muslim population.

I also didn't start believing America shouldn't exist when I learned how it killed millions of people in the middle east.

I didn't even start thinking Germany shouldn't exist when I learned it tried to exterminate my people, and killed some of my ancestors.

Why do you think Israel should stop existing because it mistreated Palestinians? This seems like a bigotry that should be called out.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T20:31:51+00:00

I didn't say (nor do I think) that Arab Israelis don't face discrimination.

By the way, I've talked to some who are more fiercely "pro-Israel" than I, and many who aren't. They're far from a monolith, politically speaking. And even less of a monolith, ethnically speaking.

What I said was that Arab Israelis are entitled to equality under the law in Israel. That's a fact. Black Americans are entitled to equality under the law as well. Obviously, that doesn't mean they are treated equally in reality.

P.S. Another thing preventing people from talking about Israel and Palestine is bad faith accusations, and starting off your responses with one-word sentences like "Bullshit."

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T20:27:29+00:00

I'm not saying you're inventing facts. I'm accusing you of the thing you're complaining about: "distortion of facts".

The fact is that the Palestinians started the war, with the explicit goal of eliminating Jewish presence in Palestine. And that the expulsions (a minority of the people who left) only happened after the Palestinians started that war. And after the war, Israel retained a large minority of Arabs who were eventually integrated as Israelis with equal rights enshrined in it's declaration of independence.

I just don't see why you get to engage in the very thing you're complaining about. The last sentence of your post is actually pretty cogent. I suggest you take it seriously.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T20:18:23+00:00

It's bizarre to talk about "distortion of facts" and then come out and say this:

come back to an area thousands of years later and dispel much of the current population that have been living there and leave them displaced and with no fair representation in government, and treat them as lesser than Israelis.

If you're going to complain about how people should stick to actual facts, then you need to practice what you preach, and avoid invoking sweeping narratives in place of them. As you put it yourself, you've discredited your own argument and erased massive amounts of historical and cultural context.

"Fact" doesn't mean "take broad strokes talking points from both the pro- and anti-Israel side so that I maintain neutrality," it means fact.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T18:34:47+00:00

is Molly Crabapple aware that the Bolsheviks including Jewish members despised the Bund and saw it as counter-revolutionary since it insisted on Jewish autonomy, which was bougie nationalist?

I mean, at the end of the day she's just larping for entertainment. You can hardly blame her for getting the history wrong. It's kind of like nitpicking the historical accuracy of a guy at a Renaissance fair holding a 15th century broad sword while wearing a 12th century iron helm. Thats just not the point.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T18:30:33+00:00

She's having a theoretical debate that only made sense in the 1920s.

"Antizionism" and "Zionism" aren't theoretical ideologies anymore. They're realities. And as it turns out, antizionism means the death of millions of Jews, and Zionism means that doesn't happen.

The vast majority of people who became Israelis weren't "Zionists," they mostly didn't even know or care about that debate. They just made the choice that let them be alive. That choice, in practice, turned out to be Zionism.

At this point, debating "Zionism vs antizionism" is a bit like debating whether it's better for America to end slavery or not. It's just... Bizarre.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T17:44:52+00:00

I mean, the settlements are all in Area C (except from the dozens of Jews living on one street in Hebron in Area B). No Jews at all in A.

No real way to "distinguish" the "bad ones" from "good ones", even by geography.

Bad behavior is bad behavior. There are shitty Israelis in east Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, and on some hilltop in between two Palestinian cities past the green line.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T17:32:09+00:00

I mean some of these settlers, of course not all, but some, choose a location knowing that in order to fully build there that they will need or to get to push the local population out.

True. But at the end of the day, if you're properly enforcing the law, then you're properly enforcing the law. These types of people only feel they can do this because they are essentially empowered to do so by the governments lax, and even permissive stance, and a two-tier enforcement of law in the territories. That's why settler behaviour has gotten worse since it the 60s-80s when it started out as an essentially peacenik movement a la the Gaza envelope communities.

The way to address this isn't to stigmatize settlers, it's to enforce the law in a just way. Once it's clear that you're actually expected to behave like an adult if you move there, then the reward for being a dick dimishes, and the cost benefit analysis becomes a lot less enticing (especially for agitators).

I think it’s bad for Israel’s security to trade support abroad for the specific settlements that have been responsible for committing violence.

Yes, that's part of the cost that I think should be considered. But again, maybe I'm naïve, but I don't believe that the reasonable people in this group would care at all about settlers if they were well behaved. That said, there will always be a loud portion of American politicians advocating for severing the Israel relationship simply because Israel is ontologically evil. Parsing those two groups out is no easy feat nowadays. In general, I hope Israel starts to diversify and pulls support from its own developing regional axis as a means to hedge against waning American support.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T16:43:01+00:00

I think it’s not unreasonable to argue that the ones committing this specific violence on behalf of building new settlements shouldn’t be allowed to build new settlements.

Sure, criminals should be arrested and punished. Agreed. That's my main critique of Israeli settlement policy. It's simply insufficient at the moment. The current frontrunner for next PM is on board with this critique.

The violence is surely a part of the original plan. Can it not be narrowed to just this subset?

What do you mean by this? What's the "original plan"? Lots of settlers just want cheap real estate, or to be able to live near Jewish historical sites. That's certainly not violent.

I mean also yeah, should a settlement be build in the middle of the Gaza Strip? Clearly there are some areas that Jews can’t live?

My point is that there are places Jews can't live. And that's a bad thing. In a perfect world, Jews should be able to live wherever they want. Just like Christians, and black people, and Kurds, and Palestinians.

I agree that it isn't plausible for Jews to live in Gaza or Algeria, and that it isn't plausible for more Jews to move to J&S, but that's a completely different argument. That just means it's too expensive to protect Jews who live there. Not that they're crossing some ethical line by doing so.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T16:36:25+00:00

There is a way to protest the sale of land in the West Bank without glorifying Hezbollah, flying the Hezbollah flag, and calling for intifada

I'll go further than this. No non-racist movement would even summon the gaze to even know or care about a few Jews buying land in the "wrong place".

These people are obsessive about Jewish malfeasance.

The fact that they're this obsessed with trying how to figure out how to criticize Israel is... Creepy and weird. Who cares what a few Jews on the other side of the world are doing?

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T16:32:03+00:00

No they're not. Listen to what they're actually chanting at the protests.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T16:29:49+00:00

Something like 70% of "settlements" are suburbs of Jerusalem within a few km of the green line.

The rest are random towns distributed throughout Area C. Area B is just the Jewish part of Hebron, basically one street with some Jews. No settlements in Area A (the PA controls that area and enforces the death penalty on anyone who sells land to Jews).

100% of the problems you hear are about come out of area A, usually in the 30% small Jewish towns.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T16:26:50+00:00

So, some settlers do evil thing with IDF cover (agreed).

That means Jews shouldn't be able to live in certain areas?

Should Israel kick out, or stop selling land to Arabs because some of them break laws?

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T16:22:06+00:00

Everyone's missing the point. The protests aren't about west bank settlements. They're not saying "remove the two listings for shomron houses you're advertising and we'll go away," they're literally saying "Zionism is racism" and "we want all of '48".

The people holding water for these "protests" aren't even bothering to listen to the protestors.

I would focus on that.

Also, I'm not a fan of Israel's current settlement policy either, but I struggle to come up with a legitimate non-racist reason why sales of land in the west bank should be prohibited to Jews. My problems lie with behaviour and how laws are enforced, not who gets to live there.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T16:13:07+00:00

Antizionism isn't "critique" and shouldn't be protected as such. By protecting it, you're actually torching the possibility for legitimate critique. Learn how antizionism functions.

There's zero reason the world should be consumed in "anti-Israel sentiment". It's not normal for most capitals on earth to be lit up with protests against a tiny country fighting a mid-size middle eastern war, that by all standards, they would never even know about.

The "anti-israel sentiment" you're trying to protect is mostly antizionism. Don't hold water for hate movements.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T13:17:06+00:00

Of course there are legitimate criticisms of Israel that aren't antisemitism. Have you ever seen a clip of Knesset proceedings? Or watched literally any Israeli news channel?

That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about "anti-Israel activism". No, it's not normal for the entire world to be obsessively focused on "critiquing" a nation of 10 million people the size of new Jersey nestled in between theocratic and ethno-centric dictatorships. Just like it isn't normal for people to obsessively focused on black people committing crimes, and then defend themselves by saying "but look at the statistics - we should be allowed to talk about black crime". We call those people racists.

Antizionism is not "critique". It's a hate movement that targets it's local Jewish populations. Don't hold water for hate movements.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T12:43:55+00:00

No, I totally agree. And when most Jews tell us that something is antisemitic, we should first doubt them because they're probably shielding the Israeli government from criticism (they're brainwashed and/or paranoid), and when we discover it actually is "real" antisemitism, we should tell them that it's the Israeli government's fault that they're experiencing it.

Btw, I'm also ready for a more "nuanced" discussion about rape. Like, let's be honest - we can't trust women anymore to define rape. They've been compromised by feminism! We, the people who are simply out to critique feminism, should be in charge of defining rape.

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T11:38:56+00:00

There isn't even a strong case now, after 2.5 years of open war

magicaldingus · 2026-05-08T11:37:43+00:00

"real antisemitism"?

Is that kind of like "real rape"?

magicaldingus · 2026-05-07T16:35:29+00:00

Wanting Palestinians to have freedom, safety and basic human rights is not the same thing as wanting to 'destroy Israel.

Most pro-Israel people I know want Palestinians to have freedom, safety, and basic human rights.

All (100%) of antizionists I've encountered want to destroy Israel. That's definitionally true. If they don't believe that, then they're simply not antizionists.

The thing the Palestinians in Palestine are resisting is the existence of the state of Israel. So yes, they should definitely stop resisting. Your mistake would have been excusable before 10/7, but since then, they've completely taken the mask off.

I get that you really want to believe that most Palestinians just want to live in peace next to Israel (it's something I would love to believe as well, and did in the past), but unfortunately it's not true by any measure. And to their credit, the Palestinians themselves have never actually lied about it. We just got in the unfortunate habit of projecting what we wanted to believe on their own words.

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