I have found the series of comments on the Israeli situation interesting and helpful. I have not responded to them because I am so upset by what is happening that I can barely watch the news reports of it anymore. Let me make one small observation. There has been talk by Israeli officials and others about how this is an existential threat to the state of Israel. Let us just keep in mind that Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons and more generally is far and away the most powerful militarily. The attack on October 7, horrific and ugly and sadistic as it was, was no more a threat to Israel's existence then was the attack on the twin towers on September 11 a threat to the existence of the United States.
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Sorry, but that's manifestly untrue. Nukes can deter a hostile nation. Not Hamas.
No nation can survive having its citizens murdered and kidnapped without eliminating the threat. People will leave, until there is no citizenry left.
Disagree with Israel's current policies all you like. I do. But it will do what is necessary to survive.
Thanks for adding some perspective, RPW.
As to your cousin's remarks, I can't refrain from asking whether he would agree that Palestinians might also feel justified in saying, "No nation can survive having its citizens murdered and kidnapped without eliminating the threat." And in their case it's been going on for a long long time.
Dear anon
Does Hamas then speak for the Palestinian street?
Hamas is the Vox Populi for the Palestinians?
The Palestinians missed millions and millions of chances for Peace.
The ravers in the desert on 10/6 got their just desserts then?
The Palestinians of their free will chose the House of War- they chose death- they will get what they ordered and pay for it.
The desert might be sick of Jewish blood- you eat it all up.
You are disgusting
The only people facing an existential threat in this horrid mess are the residents of Gaza, who have been driven from their homes, who have had their homes destroyed by Israeli bombing, who are still being bombed by Israel even in the so-called "safe zone" of southern Gaza and who are, in fact, being driven into Sinai in what can only be called "ethnic cleansing". All this, with insufficient food, without water, without medicine, thanks to Israel.
Many have suggested that Israel take a deep breath, wait a while, negotiate to save the hostages and then one by one assassinate the Hamas terrorists who since they filmed their murderous attack on Israeli civilians are easy to identify. Mossad did that with the Palestinian terrorists after the Munich attack on Israel's Olympic team.
Dear Anonymous @ 1:22, is it really "disgusting" to try to suggest that two sets of people might view each other in the same terribly invidious way and that that may then drive them to brutally injure each other?
As I'm sure many of this blog's readers are aware, Brian Leiter has been regularly posting on his blog clusters of links to articles on Gaza. I've only read a few, but this recent one seems to me something that combines a sense of political realism and a sense of international law with an avoidance of moral depravity: https://forward.com/opinion/566525/kenneth-roth-israel-apartheid-gaza-war-human-rights-watch/
There is one school of thought holding that if a group lacks the immediate means to carry out a threat, then there is no “existential” threat. I never found this argument convincing, and I’ll submit that the 10/07 attack supports my position. Courts routinely issue restraining orders based on nothing more than verbal threats (which orders unfortunately do not always prevent the women who obtain them from being beaten and/or murdered).
Looking to history, today’s means-lacking nationalist was yesterday’s hapless victim … and if given the chance, he will be tomorrow’s armed fascist, who (finally!) can carry out his advertised programme. But who reads history? It always seemed to me that another Black September-like outrage was bound to happen sooner or later. Moreover, for it to be effective as an example of “propaganda by the deed” it would have to make the earlier action seem like a Sunday school picnic by comparison. And here we are. Aligning yourself with the "Palestinian Cause” means aligning yourself with this, whether you like it or not … but to my utter horror, a lot of people seem to like it.
In all of this, I’m surprised to realize that what almost disturbs me the most are the women and young people tearing down the “missing” posters …
One area that always struck me as worth investigation is an inquiry into the rhetorical strategies employed by the various Arab and Islamic nationalisms from about 1920 onwards. Even if we discount for what I’d call a floridly oriental style of invective, how are we to accurately interpret this language as a whole? It is undeniably *threatening*, but is it *existentially threatening*?
There is one school of thought holding that if a group lacks the immediate means to carry out a threat, then there is no “existential” threat. I never found this argument convincing, and I’ll submit that the 10/07 attack supports my position. Courts routinely issue restraining orders based on nothing more than verbal threats (which orders unfortunately do not always prevent the women who obtain them from being beaten and/or murdered).
Looking to history, today’s means-lacking nationalist was yesterday’s hapless victim … and if given the chance, he will be tomorrow’s armed fascist. But who reads history? It always seemed to me that another Black September-like outrage was bound to happen sooner or later. Moreover, for it to be effective as an example of “propaganda by the deed” it would have to make the earlier action seem like a Sunday school picnic by comparison. And here we are. Aligning yourself with the "Palestinian Cause” means aligning yourself with this, whether you like it or not … but to my utter horror, a lot of people seem to like it.
In all of this, I’m surprised to realize that what almost disturbs me the most are the women and young people tearing down the “missing” posters …
Re: "(1) a two-state solution that would probably require an Israeli govt to forcibly remove/transfer some settlers...."
Israel already did this when they withdrew from Gaza. Granted, doing this is the West bank would be a larger and much more difficult operation.
@ DZ
Yes, doubtless much more difficult.
Flashback. 28-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu arguing against a two-state solution, on PBS-WGBH Boston's The Advocates.
@09:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1c-DSZ_l9Q&t=540s
Mehdi Hasan, in a roundabout way while debating whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, rebuts the argument that it is antisemitic to challeng the premise that Israel has a right to exist as a state while Palestinians have no state.
I often find myself disagreeing with Hasan on other topics, but there is no doubting his formidability as a debater.
@40:54-43:58
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1VTt_THL4A&t=2454s
(btw Ilan Pappé is another participant in the debate, although not in this segment)
I myself have noticed the "existential threat" baloney popping up all over the place every time filthy apologists for genocide show their repulsive faces on the telly.
I agree wholeheartedly with Prof. Wolff.
You can legitimately call the murder of the 1,400 Israeli civilians many things. An existential threat to the State of Israel is not one of them.
Eric,
The history of the Zionist movement, or movements (plural), shows that a fairly large number of Jews before 1948, including a good many Orthodox Jews, were anti-Zionist. Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the number of Jews who self-identify as anti-Zionist has doubtless decreased, but it's the case today that a non-trivial, and probably growing, number of Jews would identify themselves that way. So it's clear, I think, that one can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic, and that applies not only to anti-Zionists who are Jewish but to some other anti-Zionists as well.
If you were to write on this blog "I don't think Israel should exist as a state because the Palestinians don't have a state," I for one would not level a charge of anti-Semitism at you for saying that (though I would question the statement on some other grounds). On the other hand, if you were to claim for instance that George Soros and an international Jewish conspiracy are running the world, then that would warrant a charge of anti-Semitism, imo.
@ anon 214
Your ignorance is "disgusting"
Remember Rabin's murder- he provoked the settlers for peace.
Which Palestinians sacrificed their power, let alone lives, for an higher ideal than pogroms and Holocausts?
Explain to me, educate me son, why Hamas hides military headquarters under hospitals?
You're just part of a vile and stupid and ineffective wave of antisemitism
It would surprise me not one iota if you secretly take pleasure at the vile and disgusting pogroms
Why do you side with Nazis?
Your idealism is a show that hides quite vilely your violence toward Jews
Why don't you hop on the next flight to Tel Aviv or Dagestan?
Anonymous @ 6:59
I fail to see how anything I actually wrote here could provide any legitimate foundation for your tirade. Anyway, you are very wide of the mark in the things you accuse me of. You do, however, or so it seems to me, provide evidence, albeit unconsciously, as to why part of the Middle East is in such a mess.
I will not reply again since it's so obviously hopeless.
Sober minded people might find this interesting:
https://publicseminar.org/2023/10/the-war-between-israel-and-hamas-isnt-a-zero-sum-game/
a side note: the author is at Durham University; Fiona Hill of impeachment hearing fame was recently made chancellor of that university.
Anonymous @6:59 p.m.
You're making charges that have no basis. I've had some disagreements of my own with the commenter you're attacking, but nothing that commenter has written warrants this vitriolic attack.
Thank you, LFC
There is a story I read about the First World War in which whenever artillery shells were flying over the trenches that soldiers would get gravely depressed if there was no return fire by their own artillery batteries within the hour. And it didn't matter how accurate their artillery was compared to the enemy's barrage.
As an Israeli politician you must send out the military in response to Hamas rockets fired into Israel or you won't be reelected.
LFC, Thanks for that very thoughtful and interesting response and comment from much earlier today. Perhaps there's a wisp of 'realism' in the one-state proposal if one thinks with Roth that the apartheid-afflicted West Bank cannot be rigged in such a way as to provide contiguous territory for a viable state of Palestine.--I just now saw your response, as I spent long day driving south to see soon the William Blake show at the Getty in L.A. The good news in these troubled times is that the car was a news- and Taylor Swift-free zone filled with Hank Williams and Miriam Makeba.--I was also heartened to see that one Israeli hostage was rescued, and that there seems to be growing pressure for a straight-up swap of the Israeli hostages for all Palestinian prisoners. Perhaps there is near-consensus that such a swap would be (some) first-things-first.
JR - enjoy the Blake show. I'll have to look it up.
here's an old piece that unpacks what "right to exist" might mean in this context
- Looks like I am driving from Albuquerque to LA very soon. I saw a display of Blake's manuscripts at the Library of Congress back about '72. Remember, "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
- A death cult that engages in elaborate military planning and execution to accomplish nothing other than the barbaric slaughter of Israeli citizens is an existential threat. Hamas has no chance of political or military gains from its action and undertakes those actions with no regard to the non-combatants in Gaza. Hamas has essentially done the 21st century version of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand: no Arab state can act to tamp down the rage because none of them are politically secure enough push for peace or containment of the conflict. The odds are very high that a second front will open in Lebanon, all other terrorist organizations will mobilize to hit Western targets, and we are off and running.
If Iran does have nuclear weapons then all bets are off.
DDA,
Thanks for sharing that peace from Joseph Levine (professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst).
A variation of the essential point he makes is frequently made by critics of Israel: Israel can be either a Jewish state or a democracy, but it cannot be both.
*piece
A query no doubt very much out of season given recent events, but still I’ll ask it anyway.
s.w., as I recall, supports the assassination of Hamas personnel, and now C. J. M. sees Hamas as nothing other than a “death cult.”
But hasn’t assassination of Hamas personnel been tried before? Here’s from the wikipedia entry on the founder of the organization:
"Yassin, a quadriplegic who was nearly blind, had been reliant on a wheelchair due to a sporting accident at the age of 12. In 2004, he was killed when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile at him as he was being wheeled from Fajr prayer in Gaza City. The attack, which also killed both of his bodyguards and nine bystanders, was internationally condemned."
I guess he was not the only one.
The point of my question is, was there ever any attempt to deal with Hamas as a political organization, albeit a revolutionary one, or was it viewed as and treated as a death cult to be exterminated from the outset? Does any knowledgeable person know?
James Wilson,
No. Israel has never attempted in good faith to deal with Hamas as a political organization.
I quoted in the comments to the last blog post Helena Cobban's allegation that Israel and the United States immediately set out to undermine Hamas after Hamas' unexpected defeat* of Fatah in the 2006 election, threatening to kill any Palestinian legislator who would join a unity government with Hamas.
(*Hillary Clinton, running for re-election to a US Senate seat representing New York, expressed what was undoubtedly a widely-held view in Washington and in Tel Aviv when she told The Jewish Press in Brooklyn that it had been a mistake for the US to seek for the Palestinians to hold an election earlier that year and that "if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.")
Read Norman Finkelstein's 2018 book "Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom." He shows that Israel has generally rebuffed each attempt by Hamas to seek a lasting truce in return for lifting the siege and return of prisoners. Finkelstein writes that when Hamas proposed a cease-fire and acceptance of a two-state solution in 2008, "[Israel] could no longer justify shunning Hamas" and that "Israel needed to provoke Hamas into resuming its attacks. If Hamas rose to the bait and armed hostilities ensued, it would be disqualified as a legitimate negotiating partner, ... or it would be physically wiped out so as to make way for a settlement on Israel’s terms."
To take another example from Finkelstein:
"At the end of April 2014, the Islamic movement and its secular Palestinian rival Fatah formed a 'consensus government.' ... If only through a back door, Hamas had won unprecedented legitimacy, but it also made an unprecedented concession. The United States and the European Union had long predicated diplomatic engagement with Palestinian leaders on a trio of preconditions: recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence, and recognition of past agreements. Hamas did not object when Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, speaking on behalf of the new unity government, reiterated his support for the preconditions. As these developments unfolded, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu erupted in a rage. The prospect of 'Palestinian unity' was a 'red line' for Netanyahu (and Israeli leaders in general), so he reflexively sought to sabotage it....
In June 2014, a gift dropped into Netanyahu’s lap. A rogue Hamas cell abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Netanyahu was aware early on that the teenagers had been killed (not captured for a future prisoner swap) and that Hamas’s leadership wasn’t responsible.... But never one to pass up an exploitable moment, Netanyahu parlayed this macabre 'boon' to break up the Palestinian unity government. Feigning a rescue mission, Israel launched Operation Brother’s Keeper in mid-June.... The rampage was patently tailored to elicit a violent response from Hamas, so as to 'prove' it was a terrorist organization."
Eric,
Hamas was founded in 1987, but your first example comes from 2006. How did Israel deal with Hamas between 1987 and 2006?
Netanyahu has never been interested, afaict, in serious negotiations w any Palestinian group, but other Israeli leaders have been, like Rabin, Barak, and Olmert.
Why not investigate what happened in c. 2000 and why the deal that was almost reached didn't materialize?
Btw here's what Wikipedia says at the outset of the entry on Hamas:
"Hamas became increasingly involved in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by the late 1990s;[62] it opposed the Israel–PLO Letters of Mutual Recognition as well as the Oslo Accords, which saw Fatah renounce "the use of terrorism and other acts of violence" and recognize Israel in pursuit of a two-state solution. Hamas continued to advocate Palestinian armed resistance, won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election,[63] gaining a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council,[64] and took control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah following a civil war in 2007.[65][66] Since then, it has run Gaza as a de facto autocratic and one-party state.[67][68][69]
"While historically seeking an Islamic Palestinian state over the combined territory of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (rejecting the two-state solution),[70][71] Hamas began negotiating with Israel and the 1967 borders in the agreements it signed with Fatah in 2005, 2006 and 2007.[72] In 2017, Hamas released a new charter that supported a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders without recognizing Israel.[73][74][75][76] Hamas's repeated offers of a truce (for a period of 10–100 years[77]) based on the 1967 borders are seen by many as being consistent with a two-state solution,[78][79][80][81] while others state that Hamas retains the long-term objective of establishing one state in former Mandatory Palestine.[82][83] Under the ideological principles of Islamism, Hamas promotes Palestinian nationalism in an Islamic context; it has pursued a policy of jihad (armed struggle) against Israel.[c]"
P.s. and as comments in the other thread by DM suggest, Hamas does not seem to have used its time in charge in Gaza to do much other than enrich certain of its leaders, create an extensive network of tunnels, and prepare for the (unfortunately) long war that now seems to be in prospect.
One last thing: offering a truce based on the 1967 borders is not the same as actually negotiating an agreement. And probably by the time Hamas made that offer it was politically almost impossible for any Israeli politician to take it up as a basis for negotiations because of the way Hamas had acted in the past. None of this is to excuse Netanyahu, who is obvs. a complete jerk.
I know why the Biden administration is trying to link Ukraine with Israel politically. They need to send funds to both nations, and Republicans don't care much about funding Ukraine's war effort. I get it. But linking Ukraine with Israel may prove politically liable in the future. It has the same sent as the Domino Effect of Southeast Asia & the Weapons of Mass Destruction inside Iraq. Viable for the U.S. for the short run, but perhaps not so much politically for the long run.
And what happens if things take a major turn for the worse for the U.S. supporting one or the other Theater of War? An opposing faction to Biden can just group both Theaters of War and dismiss them both at the same time as political nuisances & say we must vote for their candidate who will move us towards a supposed better path.
I believe the U.S. should support Israel. But this bombing accident of the Jabalya Refugee Camp is going to greatly restrict IDF military action in Gaza. If the IDF continues to bomb as they've done, they will be seen as callous by those who are neutral to the previous events. And if they tighten the reigns they will be seen as acknowledging that they were culpable in the bombing.
Like Kierkegaard said: Do this & you'll regret it, but don't do that and you'll regret that too.
May God bless Jacob and Israel. But the recent World Events looks like we're all standing at the precipice of falling into WW3.
"Bombing accident"?
No, it was intentional. The IDF was willing to kill hundreds of innocent civilians in order to kill one Hamas leader. They said so explicitly.
Wrong, Michael Lienos. Right, DZ, it was no accident, just as most of what's being done to the Gazan Palestinians--indeed, to the Palestinians generally--is no accident. A resigning UN Human Rights official makes that clear:
https://skwawkbox.org/2023/11/01/uns-new-york-human-rights-director-quits-citing-us-uk-collusion-in-gaza-genocide/
And this:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/ethnic-cleansing-in-the-west-bank
"No, it was intentional."
But what the IDF has been trying to do since before the invasion is curry favor with the outside world. They know the more civilians they kill the less favor they will have. Therefore they do not intentionally bomb civilians.
I believe they had faulty intelligence. Therefore it was an accident no matter how deadly & unfortunate that accident was. And just because something is unforgivable to many it doesn't mean it had an intentional cause.
I did not say that the IDF had intentionally bombed civilians in the refugee camp. I said that they had intentionally bombed the refugee camp.... it can be added that the did this foreseeing that innocent civilians would be killed and wounded.
Question: Is it morally worse intentionally to kill civilians than to perform an act that one foresees will kill civilians? If one says "yes," one endorses the traditional "doctrine of double effect," which is VERY controversial. Much ink has been spilled over this issue.... a long story indeed.
"They know the more civilians they kill the less favor they will have. Therefore they do not intentionally bomb civilians."
I don't believe it works that way.
@ Micheal Llenos
You are confused about some things. There's a difference between intentionally targeting civilians (which the IDF does not do) and taking actions that cause, foreseeably or otherwise, civilians to die and/or be wounded and/or be displaced (which the IDF has been doing).
The IDF acknowledged that it struck the refugee camp yesterday. Therefore the strike itself almost certainly cannot be an accident because the IDF did not say it was an accident, or a mistargeting, or a mistake, or anything like that.
Where did you get the idea that the IDF is "trying to curry favor with the outside world"? Though they're doubtless aware of outside opinion and, presumably like all militaries in "kinetic" or active mode, are no doubt trying to present a certain face to the world, I'd say all that is probably quite low on their priority list right now.
"The IDF acknowledged that it struck the refugee camp yesterday. Therefore the strike itself almost certainly cannot be an accident because the IDF did not say it was an accident, or a mistargeting, or a mistake, or anything like that."
I meant in the context of faulty intelligence. Do you think the Israeli's are going to admit that their intelligence was mistaken? In a war that would prove imprudent.
"There's a difference between intentionally targeting civilians (which the IDF does not do)..."
...but which Palestinians who are in the ranks of Hamas did and still do by continually firing rockets into Israel.
LFC: Hamas was founded in 1987, but your first example comes from 2006. How did Israel deal with Hamas between 1987 and 2006?.... Why not investigate what happened in c. 2000 and why the deal that was almost reached didn't materialize?
Please scroll up and review what James Wilson asked: "Was there ever any attempt to deal with Hamas as a political organization, albeit a revolutionary one, or was it viewed as and treated as a death cult to be exterminated from the outset?"
My comments were directly addressing his question.
The two examples I gave Finkelstein's book were both after 2005 because it was not until 2006 that Hamas had earned some degree of formal legitimacy as a representative body among Palestinians by winning the 2006 election. Prior to that time there was no reason to expect Israel to try to negotiate with Hamas, as Israel deemed Hamas to be nothing more than a terrorist group, at least officially. (There was speculation that Israel was supporting, or at least tolerating, Hamas from the very beginning as a means to undercut the authority of Fatah/the PLO and to divide and conquer the various Palestinian leadership groups. The US consul in Jerusalem said as much in a secret State Dept cable sent in 1988.)
The director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has resigned in protest over the UN's failure to act to stop military operations in Gaza. In his resignation letter to the high commissioner, he writes: "This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What's more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit.... Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations to 'ensure respect' for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault...."
Israel has done perhaps the best branding operation in world history. They even beat Coca Cola and Marlboro cigarettes. They've convinced so many that they represent Jews everywhere.
I guess I'm still a Jew although Marc Susselman sends me abusive emails saying that I no loner am one and Howard Berman (who comes as so polite in this blog unlike Marc who is abusive everywhere, let's give credit where credit is due) sends me equally abusive emails saying that I hate the Jews.
The Jews excommunicated Spinoza. I've read a bit of Spinoza and a bit about him, so I have some sense of what he might have thought and I don't think he cared much. Maybe they did him a favor because that liberated him to think freely. Still, society still treated Spinoza as a Jew. Was he still a Jew? Did he care? Should he have cared?
I don't vote in Israel, they won't issue me a passport and Israeli policies represent me a whole lot less than those of current Chilean president Gabriel Boric. In fact, there is no reason for me to support Israeli policies right or wrong than there is for me to support those of Mozambique right or wrong.
But Israel did a very good branding job and I do give credit where credit is due. However, as the song says, the thrill is gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fk2prKnYnI
If anyone wishes to read Marc Susselman's opinions then please go to my website here:
Marc Susselman's Opinion web link
Okay. That link didn't work, so try this one:
Marc's Opinion
SW, you’re a self-hating Jew! That sounds bad, but you’re in good—nay, EXCELLENT—company: Philip Roth, Noam Chomsky, Saul Bellow, Bernie Sanders … you name them and they’ve probably been tarred with this epithet. I assume that AIPAC keeps a master list, just like Richard M. Nixon did, but you can’t access it on their website.
As for a key component of the “branding job”, AIPAC and others have been crying wolf so loudly and for so long that I for one stopped listening to them long ago. But now it seems like the wolf—actually existing antisemitism, live and in color—is finally slavering at the door, and not just in benighted places like Dagestan, but HERE IN AMERICA … it’s beyond shocking.
John Pillette,
Thanks, but Saul Bellow is not on the list of self-hating Jews. I'm not sure about Philip Roth, maybe and Chomsky certainly heads it.
Bellow wrote a book about Israel which AIPAC must have financed.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52785
s.w.
Actually, Howard B. is not *always* polite on this site. (His signature style, so to speak, is not v. hard to discern in certain anonymous comments, at least in my judgment. But anonymous commenters should, I suppose, generally be allowed their anonymity.)
If I remember correctly, that was the later chastened Bellow who was on the "Committee for Social Thought" and so on. I think the earlier, more interesting Bellow got a fair amount of stick for bringing the tribe into disrepute ... you know, back when he was a pinko, before he became a neocon. But I could be confusing him with Roth himself. In any event, I shouldn't make fun, it could happen to me. I keep waiting for the day I'm seized with a sudden desire to start watching Fox News and move to Arizona ...
I have found the daily blog by Juan Cole, Informed Comment, to be really helpful to understand the current Israel-Palestine conflicts.
One of my favorite self-hating Jews is Hannah Arendt.
Criticized by Gerhom Scholem for her lack of ahavath Israel (love of the Jewish people), she replies:
"I'll begin with ahavath Israel...How right you are that I have no such love and for two reasons: first I have never in my life "loved" some nation or collective--not the German, French or American nation or the working class or whatever else there might be in this price range of loyalties. The fact is that I love only friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love".
Some of my best friends are self-hating Jews.
s. wallerstein: I guess I'm still a Jew
Being "self-hating" wouldn't have saved someone from the Nazis. The Association of German Jews actively supported Hitler in the early 1930s, and claimed that the reports of antisemitic acts by Nazis were lies. By 1935 the group had been outlawed and its leader arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
Ilan Pappe jokes that when he found out that he was a self-hating Jew, he went to doctors for help with his affliction but was told that there was no cure and he would have to live with it for the rest of his life.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/a-dangerous-conflation/
This does not end well:
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-11-02/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-beware-nationalist-haredis-are-in-a-state-of-ecstasy/0000018b-8c23-d7a8-afcf-aea34fd90000?lts=1698977473992
The philosopher Justin Smith-Ruiu (hitherto known to me as Justin E. H. Smith) has an interesting recent Substack piece wherein he discusses the social-media-type reactions of pseudo-public pseudo-intellectuals to Gaza. He diagnoses the relevant aspect of the present as afflicted with 'universal takesmanship' with everyone feeling pressure to offer their own 'take' on recent events. It's quite scattershot, but I at least found most of it worth reading, although I don't know or care anything about the dingbats he discusses in the first sections. The part on Gaza is section 4: https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/our-dumb-century?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Had a look at the reference you gave, John. I finally must admit I'm getting old when I find myself left quite at sea by the references and the style--especially the style--of one of today's bright younger things.
JR: Ha ha ha! “universal takesmanship” is pretty good. Emily Witt wrote about a prominent aspect of this problem in the LRB three years ago. The context was a review of Maggie Nelson’s “On Freedom” (behind a paywall, sorry):
“Nelson isn’t active on social media but, perhaps without realising it, she is writing about the social media economy. She doesn’t acknowledge the pseudo-reality of ‘our times’, the way the web is structurally engineered to shove a bouquet of the dumbest arguments in human history in our faces several times a day. She treats the sum of these arguments as an inflection point, not pausing to wonder if the political strife that worries her is ersatz.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n24/emily-witt/perseverate-my-doxa
THE DUMBEST ARGUMENTS IN HUMAN HISTORY! It’s pretty hard to argue with that assessment.
Marc's tribe is the Jewish people. Marc is standing up for the Jewish people. Marc is doing what is reasonable and rational. Nothing surprising nor blameworthy in that. In his On Rhetoric, Aristotle says it's wrong to assault someone unless you've been assaulted first. The nation of Israel was assaulted first on October 7th by Palestinians working for Hamas.
I believe I've finally figured out Dr. Wolff's riddle on Kantian Ethics:
Say your a Highschool student growing up in a Confucian household. Your dad tells you to wash the car for twenty bucks. Before you begin to wash the car, your dad says he won't pay you for washing the car so forget about washing it. You decide to wash the car out of a sense of DUTY not because you want to gain your dad's approval or change his mind about the twenty bucks etc. So the young high schooler is washing the car as an END only and not as a MEANS to an end.
M.L.
Didn't Kant's maxim on this pt have to do with treating persons as ends, not tasks or activities or inanimate objects? (That said, I'm very very far from an expert on Kant.) I get that Confucianism is big on honoring one's parents, but I'm not too sure what that has to do w Kant.
LFC
You're right. It just requires a little bit of tweaking.
A High Schooler's mom says to her daughter to go out and buy Chinese food for her grandmother. She says she'll give her a one hundred dollar bill and that she can keep the change if she gets the Chinese food. Before she leaves the house the mother tells the daughter she won't give her the money so forget about getting the Chinese food. The daughter, however, goes out and gets the food anyway because of a sense of DUTY to do so. Not because she wants to impress her parents or grandma because she is being so filial. And not because she has a taste for Chinese food.
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