meanfreepath | (no subject)

Hmmm...yeah, you're right--that is importantly different from telling the ship to turn around.

Of course, the people on the ship might say that they don't trust that the supplies would get there through Israel (although apparently Israel did offer to allow them to observe the transit, so I don't know how much weight that holds).

More importantly, as I understand it, it seems like the goal was actually to challenge the blockade (which the people on the ship considered unjust in itself, I think?), rather than just to deliver one ship's worth of aid. But then, I guess that might lead to a negotiating position that's just about as inflexible as the Israelis'.

I don't know--as with most things involving Israel, it's hard to really know which side is more right, without much more knowledge than is easily obtainable...but yet, people (e.g., on my Facebook news feed) tend to want to take a black-and-white position anyway...

Now posted on my lj: Do I want to go to a pro-Israel infosession?

The metaphor I encountered online a few days ago which I find apt is: Israel is an abused child who has now grown up and is abusing others. Only a heartless bastard wouldn't feel some sympathy, and it may be unclear what would be the just thing to do, but when his kids start coming to school with bruises you absolutely must start moving heaven and earth to stop it.

Heh, what is North Korea? Ameria?

America is more like the spoiled, privileged child who grew up to be a bully because it never really got used to having to play nice with others and treat them like equals, rather than having the truly embittered, hysterical tang of the cycle-of-abuse kind of bullying. It is possible to get America to get bored and give up; this is far less true of other aggressive nations.

Curious... what would you have done if you were in charge of Israel?

I would never take charge of Israel for the same reason I don't want to be in charge of America's withdrawal from Iraq. It is a huge, intractable mess that can never be resolved without hurting a whole lot of people. The only way to cleanly fix things would be to have a magic time machine that would allow you to reverse history so that it never happened in the first place -- but it's impossible now to actually return to that status quo ever, not without a ton of death and destruction.

(Seen from this perspective the common Palestinian opinion -- "We wish Israel didn't exist" -- isn't genocidal, it's a wish for a return to that status quo that unfortunately cannot now happen without something approaching ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I don't think that makes the wish unreasonable.

This is partly because I now look at the basic and foundational argument of Israel's existence -- wishing Israel didn't exist equals wishing that the Holocaust would recur, because Israel is the only possible insurance policy against another Holocaust -- and I think it's crap.

It's crap for numerous reasons, but one of the primary reasons I dislike it is that it's only a tenable position if applied evenhandedly and NO ONE actually proposes applying it evenhandedly. Not even for ACTUAL VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST -- who is out there campaigning for the creation of a Romany homeland?)

If Israel didn't exist, would the modern plight of the Jews be any better than the modern plight of the Romany, who, to this day, continue to suffer pogroms, and for the most part live in abject poverty?

But do you really think that would be happening to Jews if Israel didn't exist? I mean, I guess the question is where all of those Jews would have gone after the war if not to Israel. I don't know the history well enough to know, but could they all have come to America if they had wanted to? Or would they have had to go back to Eastern Europe and/or stayed in the various Middle Eastern countries where Sephardic Jews lived? I mean, I disagree with Arthur in that I do still think it's nice that Israel exists, and I don't think going back and un-creating it would be an ideal outcome (although I also don't have any ideas for what WOULD be a realistic, ideal outcome)...but I also don't think Israel's existence really has that much of an impact on the lives of American Jews, even if it is nice to have it as a refuge in case Sarah Palin ever becomes president or something...

They could not have all gone to America. Only the ones with close relatives who could sponsor them could have gone to America (and a lot of them did), but it took a long time to get the paperwork through, and the Iron Curtain was rapidly falling.

My grandfather, from Budapest, was faced with the choice of settling in Palestine, or being disappeared by the Soviets (this is what happened to all of his high school friends--one of them had a British uncle, so the whole social group got implicated as spies). So he couldn't stay in Eastern Europe at all. He had no family in America, and so couldn't go there. And his home in suburban Budapest had been demolished anyway, so his whole family was homeless, even the ones not being hunted by the Soviets.

My grandmother was liberated from Auschwitz. (Well, not literally, since most people were marched out of Auschwitz a couple months before the camp was liberated; she was liberated from whichever camp it was she was marched to.) Other people had taken her family's house in the meantime. She and her surviving siblings tried to go to Vienna but there were no jobs there, especially not for foreign, homeless, Jewish teenagers, so they went to Prague, where a Jewish Soviet officer warned them that the borders were about to close and they had better not be in Eastern Europe when that happened. Their one American aunt had come back to support the family when the war started, and so was herself stuck in a liberation camp, not in America where she could fill out paperwork so the extended family could immigrate. So... they had two choices: 1) being homeless in France or Italy for a few years until their aunt was set free, sailed back to America, filled out the paperwork, and the US government processed it (one aunt did choose this route; it ended up taking about five years, during which time she and her family lived in a tent in a refugee camp in France, because they weren't allowed to actually settle in Western Europe), or 2) smuggling themselves into Palestine where there was a network in place to help people like them find housing and jobs. That was the Sephardic community that was taking people in.

Anyway, if these things are happening to the Romany, is there any reason to think the Jews would have fared better if they'd stayed in Europe?

Also, keep in mind that it wasn't just the Nazis who shipped the Jews off to concentration camps. There were some countries who tried very hard to protect their Jews. Some countries stood passively by, or made only token protests, when the Nazis demanded that the Jews be shipped to concentration camps or killed. But there were some countries who volunteered to ship their Jews to concentration camps before the Nazis even asked, or even orchestrated their own local Holocausts based on the Nazi model. Unlike Germany, who've had their noses rubbed in it, these countries have never really been forced to face what they did, or the underlying hatred that caused them to do it.

In those countries, I find it hard to imagine that Jews in modern times would be treated any better than the Romany currently are, if they had remained there.

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indecisionwins.livejournal.com - 2010-06-01 08:39 (UTC) - Expand

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sildra.livejournal.com - 2010-06-01 23:59 (UTC) - Expand

The Jews and the Romany didn't start in the same place and therefore comparing their endpoints seems like a bit of an unfair argument.

Is it your contention that if a homeland was cleared for the Romany people to live in and have their own nation-state that this would substantially reduce their problems to the point where the average Romany would now enjoy a standard of living comparable to the average Israeli? Because frankly I have a very hard time seeing how that happens.

*Especially* if the creation of the State of Rom in some historically appropriate location -- say, in their most likely area of origin, what is now modern-day Northern India and Pakistan -- involved forcibly displacing the many existing ethnic Indians living in the region, establishing the State of Rom as a "Western invader" within the Indian subcontinent and surrounding the State of Rom with hostility and violence for much of its history, requiring the Romany settlers to spend a tremendous percentage of their resources securing their position and making them a flashpoint of international controversy.

Seriously, I haven't crunched the numbers on this but I'd be very surprised if in pure economic terms Israel gives back more total to Jews outside Israel than Jews have put into it. The Romany, starting with far fewer resources, wouldn't have been able to even start making a go of it -- colonizing a hostile territory is a high-capital-barrier-to-entry enterprise.

And frankly I think the idea of "nationalism" as a shield in and of itself is kind of a fetishized idea within Western political discourse that isn't really true. There is a certain psychological safety that comes with thinking "We have our own country which is ours where we make the laws and we raise the taxes and we command the military", but does that actually make Jews safer? If the paranoid fantasy came true and the Holocaust reignited tomorrow and, as the angriest Zionists claim is always on the brink of happening, the Christian West and the Muslim Mideast united to stomp out Judaism forever, would Israel really be an impregnable fortress of protection or just a convenient target for a first strike? (Remember that we're talking a fantasy where the United States jumps on the anti-Semitic bandwagon -- the possibility of this is the primary justification for why a specifically Jewish state was necessary and just going to America was not a solution. How long does Israel hold out against the *entire world* if the USA isn't at its back?)

And, see, if we're not talking about that specific counterfactual -- the *entire world* turning against Israel -- then what we're talking about Israel protecting people from is largely protecting them from problems created by Israel's presence and geographical location in the first place. If we're not talking about the EU becoming a new Third Reich, then the threats against Jews we're talking about come from Muslim suicide bombers and whatnot -- Muslims suicide bombers who are only there to bomb Jewish people because the Jewish people are in the Middle East, and whose primary motivation for doing so is the existence of the state of Israel in the Middle East. (Yes, a convenient motivation often stirred up by politicians to distract people from their own internal problems -- so?)

If we're not talking about the EU becoming a new Third Reich, then the threats against Jews we're talking about come from Muslim suicide bombers and whatnot

I thought the Big Scary Threat (tm) these days was Iran nuking Israel.

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sildra.livejournal.com - 2010-06-01 23:15 (UTC) - Expand

You start talking about a fantasy where there's a second Holocaust; people of my grandparents' generation were afraid of that and saw Israel as the solution, but I certainly don't. I will point out, for the millionth time, that I am, in a sense, in hiding from the Israeli government because I don't want citizenship--it has no upsides and many downsides for me. If a second Holocaust looked like it was about to happen, the safest thing I've ever been able to think of to do would be to hide in the jungles of Central America. Which isn't a great option, either.

What Israel provided was place for a whole generation of orphan teenagers and 20-somethings with no education to get back on their feet. The Romany didn't have that, and still continue to live in shanty towns and refugee camps. It doesn't matter much that the starting point was different--that the Jewish homeless, uneducated teenagers' now-deceased parents were largely middle class, while the Romany homeless, uneducated teenagers' now-deceased parents were mostly poor.

Have you read The Yiddish Policemen's Union? I'm curious what your thoughts are on the society it envisions.

Well, first off, if I were in charge of Israel, I would not be blockading Gaza. It's a ridiculous, stupid, self-defeating, and dishonorable policy. But if I were in a position where I had no choice and really, really, needed to enforce the blockade? Well... There are plenty of options to get an unarmed merchant vessel to stop. I might actually have authorized boarding by helicopter, but in daylight and after due warning had been issued, including through naval gunnery across the bow. Mostly, I would have refrained from storming the ship until it was at or imminently about to cross the 12-mile limit, or any alternative announced and posted blockade line.

Various corners of the internet also point out that it ought to be easy for a modern navy with precision gunnery and/or frogmen to simply disable a merchant ship and then tow it into port at leisure. They say this assuming that the IDF had this option and deliberately chose not to take it; given how many stories I hear about the IDF involve rank incompetence at the institutional level, I wouldn't even assume that much.

Not necessarily. Operations with frogmen, to say blow off a propeller, are fraught with risk for the attacking side. Modern naval gunnery is precise, but there's an even greater risk of a shell/missile missing its intended target and causing more loss of life than a boarding party, or rendering the entire ship unseaworthy.

Like I said, I don't necessarily trust the IDF to know how to pull off basic tasks.

it seems like the goal was actually to challenge the blockade

OK, this raises an interesting question: Suppose you want to challenge the blockade. What is the best way to do it?

Well, the blockade's official purpose is to keep weapons out of Gaza, because such weapons will surely be used to attack Israel. The blockade's purpose isn't to keep the Gazan people in poverty -- that would be evil and counterproductive of Israel. It just happens to have that effect.

So the number one goal would be to challenge the blockade with materials that are purely humanitarian. This is complicated by the fact that Israel bars certain ambiguous materials from reaching Gaza, like cement and other building materials.

If I were going to challenge the blockade, I would want to carry items that were indisputably humanitarian.

But maybe it's a better challenge to the blockade if the IDF shoots and kills some of the people on the aid flotilla. But something tells me that there won't be any real changes as a result of this event.

I'm not actually certain of the purpose of the blockade--is it just to keep weapons out? Or is it to keep the Gazan people in poverty to punish them for electing Hamas leaders, and maybe persuade them to elect somebody other than Hamas? If it's the latter, that seems stupid and counterproductive to me, but that doesn't mean it's not part of the thinking.

Otherwise... Well, i think you're right that what this ship did is the most effective way to challenge the blockade. Also, though, I think the IDF shooting some people on the ship is probably better for the political goals of the people on the ship than it is for Israel. After all, what happened is bringing a lot of attention to the issue, and there does seem to be pressure on the Israeli government as a result of this to stop being so hard-line. That doesn't mean that they'll listen, of course, but I think they'll have to consider it more seriously than they would have before this. (That might also mean that Israel would have been better-served letting this ship land in Gaza, even if they did want to keep the general blockade up. But then that would have made them look weak, and there clearly would have had to be a breaking point somewhere--but that breaking point could have been in a situation that didn't make Israel look as bad as it does now. So then the question is whether a loosening of the blockade to avoid conflict here would have actually been a problem for Israel's interests, or whether it's just that Netanyahu and/or others who were responsible just didn't want to look weak.)

That might also mean that Israel would have been better-served letting this ship land in Gaza, even if they did want to keep the general blockade up.

But why should they assume that this ship is what it claims to be? There really are weapons being transported into Gaza. A ship could very well be carrying weapons to furnish Hamas with more means to shoot missiles at Sderot.

The thing is that when Israel proposes the conspiracy theory that the ship was actually loaded with actual weapons, they are imputing conspiracy to a *huge* spectrum of people -- all of the activist groups involved in the flotilla, some of the members of whom are quite high-profile and respected citizens of their own nations, as well as the *Turkish freaking government* and the officials responsible for inspecting the ship to ensure it was carrying nothing inherently hazardous/illicit before it embarked.

Now, if you actually take the position that Israel is a tiny island of Jewish identity swamped by an enormous sea of barely-restrained European and Muslim anti-Semitic rage, then this is a plausible and sensible corollary to take -- of course any "peace activist" ship inspected by a non-Israeli, non-USA, nominally Muslim government is going to be suspect.

If you do *not* share this view of the world, then this seems like out-of-control paranoia that only further cements Israel's reputation as dangerous and impossible to deal with.

These days it's getting harder and harder to take any middle ground between these two views.

Even if only humanitarian supplies are being carried, Israel has every right, and even the responsibility, to maintain the blockade and isolate Hamas. I think an apt metaphor here is Sherman's march to the sea, which broke the back of the Confederacy, or the American submarine blockade of Japan which so drastically reduced the amount of shipping going into Japan that the Japanese war machine might well have been starved into submission in a few more months, even without the atomic bombings.

Until Hamas is ready to renounce violence and recognize Israel, such that the people of Israel can live without the threat of violence hanging over them, maintain the blockade. And don't forget that Israel does allow some humanitarian aid in by land. Frankly, few militaries in the history of warfare have ever been as humane as the IDF.

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arctangent.livejournal.com - 2010-06-01 22:54 (UTC) - Expand

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sildra.livejournal.com - 2010-06-01 23:12 (UTC) - Expand

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/06/gaza_flotilla

"[E]mploying a bit of violence in your protest, enough to provoke a murderous reaction, is more effective than eschewing violence altogether. Five of the six ships taken over by Israeli commandos put up no resistance. They didn't make the news. The sixth, the Mavi Marmara, had about 600 passengers on board, and of those, 570 or so appear to have stayed below deck as the commandos arrived. They didn't make the news either. The other 30 went up on deck."