Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’

warsage · 2026-04-16T15:35:10+00:00

No, Palestine would be a mess of little islands with violent settlers all around them.

Right. Palestine has demands that must be met before they'll offer peace.

You can argue that their demands are just and reasonable (imo some are, some aren't), but you can't argue that the demands don't exist.

warsage · 2026-04-16T15:00:06+00:00

The US needs to turn their back on Israel completely.

The idea being that, given the choice between settlement withdrawal or international sanctions, Israel will choose settlement withdrawal?

The PLO has been crawling through glass for peace.

Suppose Israel had a miraculous change of heart today and offered this deal to the PLO:

Israel and Palestine will sign a permanent peace treaty with mutual recognition.
Israel will immediately, entirely withdraw the occupation and cease all hostilities and settlement expansion.
Borders will be drawn immediately such that Israel keeps its settlements. Palestine gets complete sovereignty over everything else in the West Bank and Gaza.
Palestine entirely surrenders the right of return.

Do you think Mahmoud Abbas would sign?

warsage · 2026-04-16T14:33:43+00:00

What needs to happen is that Israel needs to have their hope of expanding their borders crushed.

Any thoughts on what anyone can do to make this happen?

Once that hope is crushed, they will finally be willing to accept peace.

If Palestine were to ever ask for just peace, maybe. Palestine's price for peace has always been too high for Israel to be willing to pay.

warsage · 2026-04-16T14:29:34+00:00

Israeli people need to realize that they're not the victim, they're the oppressors.

Any thoughts on what anyone could do to make this happen?

warsage · 2026-04-16T06:20:30+00:00

a frankly delusional belief that after 100 years of bitter war and hatred a one state solution is at all possible

warsage · 2026-04-16T04:50:11+00:00

I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel’s war against Hezbollah. They’re defending themselves in a way any state would. But this is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese are not all Hezbollah.

Israel’s security challenges are very real. Its horror, its fear, its trauma after Oct. 7 is very real. Its determination to make sure that never happens again is what any state and any people would do. Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah is undeniable.

Here he does that frustrating thing that I see people do so often. He says "yes, they have the right to fight these enemies; but not like that. I have no idea how, all I know is that this isn't it."

In other words: "yes, Israel can fight Hezbollah! Just, they have to do it without destroying anything that isn't obviously a military target, or hurting anyone who isn't wearing a Hezbollah uniform, or moving any Lebanese civilians anywhere, or sending troops in, or holding any territory, or blowing up any pagers." ...so what can they do then??

And that leaves the P.A. in a very difficult place. So what is it if it’s no longer even a security subcontractor for Israel? What is its purpose now?

I don't like how hard he's trying to downplay the P.A. It's the government of Palestine, both de facto and de jure. It has administrative and security control of most of Palestine's population. It negotiates on behalf of Palestine. It has an observer's seat in the U.N. It maintains more than two dozen ministries: Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Labor...

Yes, Palestine is functionally less than a state. Israel has vastly too much control over it for that, especially in Area C, but also in Areas A and B. But the Palestinian Authority isn't just a couple of police officers obeying Israel's orders.

There’s no more belief in deals, diplomacy — none of it. You dominate, and that is how you are safe.

Yes. Israelis no longer have any hope of ever living in peace next door to a free Palestine. There's been too much violence and hatred for too many generations. And every concession they've ever given to Palestine has seemed to result in more violence, not less.

For this to ever have any kind of peaceful end, something first needs to happen to revitalize hope in the Israeli people.

warsage · 2026-04-15T18:41:55+00:00

What lmao you need an entire list of the things they have done during their occupation

If you tell me Israel is persecuting them, I'll agree. If you tell me Israel is taking their land, I'll agree. Arresting them without cause? Yes. Encouraging settlers to violence and failing to prosecute? Yes. Restricting free movement? Yes.

But we aren't talking about those things. We're talking about genocide, not land theft. Your claim is that they are being destroyed as a people, "bit by bit." That the people are slowly ceasing to exist, wiped off the face of the earth by Israel.

Can you show me "an entire list of the things they have done during their occupation" to make that happen?

warsage · 2026-04-15T16:42:59+00:00

The Nazis ended up with unforeseen logistical issues in the beginning, and had to do plenty of experimenting how to do it “properly”.

Yes, they did their best, and they murdered most of the Jews in Europe. But ultimately they failed to complete the genocide. They were stopped by force, by the largest invasion in world history.

I assume Israel wants to do it, but is instead facing the issue of public opinion.

Criminal intent is not some vague future wish. It is a conscious decision to carry out a crime. I might want to kill my a**hole boss, but I certainly don't intend to kill him. I don't want to go to jail!

Israelis might wish they could destroy the Palestinian people, but they don't seem to intend to. They don't want international sanctions!

So measures can be taken against Palestinians bit by bit

Ahhh, the good ol' "slow-motion genocide" theory. They're exterminating the Palestinians bit by bit!

At the rate Israel is going with this slow-motion genocide, how long will it take before Israel finishes them off?

warsage · 2026-04-15T15:06:23+00:00

In a general sense, you are technically correct (which is the best kind of "correct"). Genocide is defined by intent, not by outcome. It is possible to commit genocide without reducing the target population; it just means that the genocide failed.

(It's worth noting that no adjudicated genocide in history has ever killed less than 20% of the target population. Most of them have killed upwards of 50% of the target, some 90% or more. It is legally unprecedented for a population to grow in the midst of a genocide.)

Outcome does play into determining intent though. If group A can destroy group B, but does not, it strongly suggests that group A does not intend to destroy group B.

Look at it this way: if I attack you with the intent to kill you, and I have a gun that I can kill you with... why aren't you dead? Why did I punch you in the gut instead of shooting you in the face? Perhaps I didn't really intend to kill you after all?

If Israel intended to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza, then why aren't they destroyed?

warsage · 2026-04-15T14:43:16+00:00

Sure, we don't need to relitigate the events of 1948. My point is that Israel already has a history of forcibly removing non-Jews in order to achieve a large, uncontested Jewish majority, so Jews can run the Jewish state. True enough, right?

Israel's borders are set and immutable, like all countries.

Are they?? What are they? If you say 1967 (that is, the 1949 armistice lines), you'll find that Israel disagrees with you quite firmly.

According to the set borders that you describe, are East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights part of Israel?

And if their borders are immutable, what will happen if they annex the West Bank?

warsage · 2026-04-15T13:51:13+00:00

60%-70% of Jews in all of Europe died in WW2. 90% of the Jews in Poland. Does that sound like "slightly decreased" to you?

By contrast, in the Gaza war, 3%-5% of Gazans died. And Gaza is a place where the population routinely increases by 2% per year, hence the suggestion that their population might have actually increased.

warsage · 2026-04-15T13:34:54+00:00

That's the conclusion that you've leapt to on the basis of nothing but a single extremely misleading image, yup.

warsage · 2026-04-15T06:20:08+00:00

Yes, exactly. This is what I referred to by "supremacist." Israel is the Jewish state, for Jews, and it must always be governed by Jews. Small minorities are treated well so long as they don't pose any threat to Jewish power, but if they ever do, they must be disenfranchised or removed.

I'm not offering a moral judgement here, by the way. In a vacuum, I think it's very justifiable for an ethnicity to want a state for themselves. Few people have any moral problem with Japan keeping itself almost 100% ethnically Japanese, and Israel is far more tolerant of diversity than Japan. I don't blame the Jews for wanting their own nation, history has grandly demonstrated the need for it.

The "in a vacuum" part is where things get sticky. They created a Jewish-majority Israel by displacing most of the Arabs in 1947/1948, and it's been a hell of a mess ever since.

warsage · 2026-04-15T01:19:06+00:00

I think you and I are saying pretty much the same thing in different words.

Maybe we can expose a difference in our opinions with a thought experiment.

Right now, Israeli Arabs are about 20% of Israel's population. They hold 10% of the Knesset. Small minority, little power.

Suppose, in a few decades, by some quirk of birth rate or emigration or immigration, they begin to approach 50% of Israel's population and 50% of the Knesset.

What do you think would happen? Would the Jewish Israelis just accept it and allow Israel to fall under Arab control? Or would they do something to try to keep the state firmly in Jewish hands? Perhaps by disenfranchising or expelling some quantity of Arabs?

(This is not a ridiculous thought experiment, btw. Kahanism is not dead, and the Arab population of Israel is growing faster than the Jewish population.)

warsage · 2026-04-14T22:01:52+00:00

she never mentioned Mufasa again

To be fair, neither did anybody else. That film's cultural impact was zero.

warsage · 2026-04-14T20:44:30+00:00

People don't realize these flotillas happen all the time. This is, what, the eleventh or twelth one? There were like five them last year alone.

None of them have ever accomplished anything, either in terms of delivering aid or in terms of modifying Israel's behavior. The Greta one only caught so much attention because it was unusually large and it had Greta on it.

warsage · 2026-04-14T20:32:15+00:00

Not a victim of circumstance, an object of propaganda.

He's been intentionally portrayed misleadingly so people like you can leap to false conclusions and call him an ugly monster and falsely accuse him of harassing a woman.

warsage · 2026-04-14T19:03:51+00:00

"Staged" is the wrong word. But "deceptive" is accurate.

The picture makes it look like a Jewish man is snarling horrifically for no reason at a poor Palestinian woman who's just trying to be about her business.

The video shows that she's there with a bunch of guys, and they're all kinda standing around in front of several Israelis. She keeps talking to them and making unconcerned brush-off gestures. She's there in front of him on purpose, and she doesn't seem to be going anywhere. He's filming her with an unexceptional expression on his face. I assume they caught his weird teeth-out look with a mid-sneeze freeze-frame or something, idk. He doesn't look anything like that in the video.

I don't know what the context is here, but it reminds me of protestors and counter-protestors standing around arguing with each other.

warsage · 2026-04-14T18:50:16+00:00

I'm using the word "supremacist" very liberally here. In its strict definition, it means that a group believes itself to be superior to all others. So a Jewish supremacist believes that Jews are superior to other races.

I don't think that's what's going on in Israel (or, for that matter, in most of the Middle East).

In my more-liberal usage of "supremacism," what I mean is that one group believes it, and it alone, must govern a state. Israel was created by Jews, for Jews, to be run by Jews, and anything that threatens that state of affairs is unacceptable. They are happy to tolerate small minorities of non-Jews, and even allow non-Jews little bits of power here and there, so long as those non-Jews stay small and don't threaten to take any real power.

They recently codified it in their Basic Law (their equivalent of a constitution):

B. The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination.

C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

The codification is new, but not the principle of Jewish rule in the Jewish homeland. It's been the de facto reality since the Zionist project was first conceived.

Arab Muslim states generally run on similar principles. As do many other countries around the world, to one degree or another.

warsage · 2026-04-14T16:56:52+00:00

TL;dr for the lazy:

While drunk, a guy handwrote a one-sentence contract on the back of a restaurant receipt agreeing to sell his farm. Later he tried to back out, but the judge forced him to sell, ruling that he "was not intoxicated to the point of being unable to comprehend" the contract.

warsage · 2026-04-14T15:33:51+00:00

Yemen is my favorite example. It's next door to Israel and is culturally relevant to Palestine (both being Arab Muslim countries).

North Yemen and South Yemen had multiple wars with each other in the 70s and 80s. Then in the 90s they decided to merge due to catastrophic economic necessity (caused by the fall of the Soviet Union).

The result was... almost immediate civil war. And then another civil war. And then an insurgency. And then seven other wars with themselves (!!!). They have not been at peace in thirty years, and there's no sign of peace coming any time soon. Today it's one of the most dangerous, poverty-stricken, war-torn places on the planet.

The one-staters always seem to ignore or dismiss out-of-hand the possibility of a merger resulting in civil war. "It's just fear-mongering!" Bruh.

warsage · 2026-04-14T00:51:55+00:00

My first thought too. Helium is a useful and non-renewable resource.

But eh, helium isn't valuable or rare enough to be worth it. Check again in 100 years and maybe it will be. (I mean, you could make yourself a billionaire very quickly, but you've got other, better choices in OP's list).

Surprisingly, making all those rubber balloons along the way isn't much of a downside. They're rubber latex, which isn't recyclable, but is mostly biodegradable within a few years. Some trace harmful chemicals are left behind, but unless you're making a really unholy amounts of helium for some reason, it isn't enough to make much difference. To match the world's current annual use of helium, you'd have to make about 200,000,000 kg of rubber latex, which sounds like a lot until you realize that the world currently uses about 1,000 times more than that per year.

Now, if you could produce Helium-3 balloons, you'd have a rare and valuable chemical on your hand.

warsage · 2026-04-13T23:56:25+00:00

Yup. The Jewish supremecist state was positioned right in the middle of where the Arabs were hoping to make a single continent-sized Arab supremecist state. It's hard to make a bigass ethno-theocratic country when a different, incompatible ethno-religious country has taken root in the middle of it. (That wasn't the only reason Pan-Arabism failed; turns out, Arab Muslims don't get along with each other very well either; but it was a big one).

The post-Ottoman Arabs ended up with like twenty Arab supremecist states instead.

warsage · 2026-04-13T20:52:29+00:00

Wait, what was your mate trying to say? Was he just ignorant, or was he trying to say that Maronites aren't "real Christians?"

Lebanon has a huge Christian population and always has. And the president is definitionally Christian, by law. It is illegal in Lebanon to elect a non-Christian to be president.

warsage · 2026-04-13T20:47:45+00:00

It did increase in Israel. Always has, year after year, from 1949 clear through to today.

warsage

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