if you want to make a case that antisemitism plays an unusual role in the US discourse surrounding Israel, your best point of reference is Yemen and US support of Saudi Arabia’s conflict there, which conflict (whomever you blame for it) did lead to mass famine and death, but not to mass protest on US campuses.
@interfluidity Yeah, the part where somehow people blame the mass death in Yemen not on the country that actually did it (KSA) but on tepid allies (US, UK) and an uninvolved ally (Israel) is pretty bad.
Relatedly, this is also why I highlight how ~none of the people calling Israel's killing 0.6% of Palestine genocide call the US's killing 2% of Iraq genocide. A Putin comparison could be campism, but this is Americans who think Israel exploits the US.
@BenRossTransit@interfluidity The part where Egypt won't even send warships against the Houthis, who are blockading the aid ships to Sudan, and is taking hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees, but refuses to open refugee camps for Gazans, is such a meme. It's not anti-Semitism, since the issue is which unwanted population Egypt is likely to get stuck with, but Gazans are way higher-skill and more similar to Egyptians, there's just unwillingness to naturalize Palestinians in particular.
@Alon@BenRossTransit If we can get past this shitty war to a world in which Israel's integration with the Arab Middle East can continue, lifting old taboos on naturalization of Palestinians by Arab states is an obvious thing to pursue. Gulf allies no longer want to foment the instability those taboos were imposed to foment. Unfortunately, though there may be linguistic + cultural fit, the past half century has left all parties nervous about populations like Gaza's on security grounds, I think.
@interfluidity@BenRossTransit Yeah, that's a big difference between Palestinian negotiators and the global Palestine movement. The negotiators know they're not getting right of return, and the UNRWA-refugees are staying in place or moving to Palestine. The Starbucks boycotters, lol.
(Also, it's not security grounds but just racism - note that Jordan did naturalize most UNRWA-refugees despite violence; Lebanon didn't, because its internal ethnic dynamics are a powder keg anyway.)
@Alon@BenRossTransit (i won't comment on whether it's racist or not for them to think so, but my understanding is Egypt's elites in particular genuinely fear Gaza's populations would add to sometimes violent strands of political Islam they already find difficult to manage, even with a willingness to indulge in, um, lapses of liberalism. Sinai itself is perhaps not a fully integrated province of a modern developed state, and though most Gazans aren't habitually Bedouin, they are a complication.)
@interfluidity@BenRossTransit (Gazans aren't any more Islamist than the Egyptian people, who voted Morsi the one time there were free elections. One way Hamas seemed moderate to the world until 7.10 was that although it's Islamist, it never enforced a religious police on e.g. veiling. Egypt just has a long history of oppressing Gazans - in 1948-67 there was no Egypt proper-Gaza free movement, to the point that in the first few years of the Occupation Gaza had double-digit economic growth.)
@Alon@BenRossTransit (i don’t think theocratic strictness is the aspect of polical Islam Egypt fears. rather there’s a strand of political Islam that might be less strict in those ways but that sees life ordered under disjoint contemporary states as illegitimate. it hearkens to a more encompassing Dar al-Islam, which constructs like Egypt and elites who benefit from it undermine. the Saudis, for example, use strictness precisely to substitute for and mollify this more dangerous strand.)
@interfluidity@Alon@BenRossTransit this is getting close to the heart of the matter, the nation-states of the Muslim world actually are artificial colonial constructs that have no natural clientèle outside of narrow elites and are deeply and inherently unstable for this reason
@interfluidity@Alon@BenRossTransit and pan-Islamism as the idea of Muslim political union/Muslim polity does have much bigger natural appeal than Sharia legalism
@interfluidity@Alon@BenRossTransit This has profound implications for Israel's long-term prospects as Israel's very purpose and existence is essentially predicated on the Middle East remaining the domain of nation-states that don't reflect grassroots identities and aspirations.
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit well, don’t reflect grassroots identities of those inclined pan-Islamism. Jewish Israelis live there too, and have their own grassroots. as do other communities that, in a generous view might thrive under a confident caliphate, but might also wonder whether that best, most tolerant, case is most likely or what a transition would look like.
@interfluidity@Alon@BenRossTransit the problem is that even for those groups disinclined to support a pan-Islamic identity, the nation-state boundaries that exist are still a very fraught imposition over the highly interspersed ethnolinguistic, ideological, and confessional reality on the ground
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit i think this is right. but even those for whom states feel most artificial have to ask themselves whether wearing a costume for a while isn’t better than ripping it apart in the name of authentic expression. a pan-Islamism could peacefully emerge from the politics of artificial states. an Arabian EU might quickly thrive in ways the European one has not, as in Europe people’s identities are national. 1/
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit but simply casting off states as colonial impositions, however accurate the characterization may be, means a lot of war, internally against incumbent elites, also externally against all the powers—not just “the West”—for whom militarily assertive emergence of a nonterritorially founded entity vying for allegiance of a globally dispersed umma would seem dangerously destabilizing. 2/
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit i may be wrong, but in actual practice my sense is the claims associated with pan-Islamist identity are narrower than they might be in theory. people in the Arab world view Baghdad and Cairo and Mecca as capitals of a community to which they belong, but do not view Jakarta in the same way. (Tehran is perhaps an intermediate case?) 3/
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit a pan-Islamist superstate that is formed from a voluntary association of territorially circumscribed, internationally recognized Westphalian states could emerge peacefully and compatibly with the existing, currently uncomfortable order, and become something much more consistent with lived identities. 4/
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit oddly, this version of pan-Islamism could eventually be compatible with Israel’s existence. as Thomas Friedman (more boulders of salt) likes to put it, Israel has been aspiring with its Abraham Accords and flirtations with the Saudis to join the contemporary Middle East. 6/
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit if one thinks of the Abbasid caliphate as an Islamic dominion under which diverse other communities who accepted that dominion could also thrive, one might imagine Israel as kind of the superstate analog of a prosperous Jewish quarter of Baghdad.
of course anything like this will remain impossible while millions of Palestinians remain stateless and hopeless under Israeli military occupation. /fin
@interfluidity@Alon@BenRossTransit Whatever it is, IMO it's kind of late for any stable transition. I agree with @shadihamid 's take which is basically that the path to stable democracy in the Muslim world runs through allowing destabilizing and illiberal elements to run their historical course, and the longer this is postponed, the worse the rebound will be. By that light, the Arab Spring was possibly the last opportunity for a manageable shift.
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit@shadihamid i think the US is likely to go for a Taiwan/Korea solution—support illiberal autocracy until it mb someday becomes secure enough to relax into liberalism. that may not succeed, but if you think ugly illiberalism is an unfortunate historical necessity, is it necessarily worse? is it a bad idea to try, given the risks to global (including obviously US/Western) stability of more freeform Islamicized illiberalism?
@interfluidity@Alon@BenRossTransit@shadihamid This is the theory behind the current lionization of the Gulf Arab states particularly UAE as the current paragons of modernity in the Arab world in particular. It depends on some very specific conditions that do not obtain overall, such as a sustainable form of industralization.
@asayeed@interfluidity@BenRossTransit Yeah, but the Gulf states are resource exporters, not industrial exporters (the UAE is a partial exception, but its economy is a combo of oil and professional services to nearby oil exporters). The lionization of such regimes is mostly because they have so much rentier income they spend it on bribing foreign institutions to say nice things about them. Comes from the same place that instead of building their own universities, they do NYU-Abu Dhabi.
@interfluidity@asayeed@BenRossTransit The difference is that South Korea and Taiwan were intensely developmental. These days, an autocrat can look at what happened to the Kim dynasty vs. to Park and know not to accidentally let the economy grow too much.
@Alon@interfluidity@BenRossTransit In fact, the example of Turkey and the Erdoğan phenomenon are the cautionary tale for allowing a well-off industrial elite to form who come from religiously traditional social classes.
@Alon@interfluidity@BenRossTransit (but the point is, you probably cannot expect anything better to form unless you allow the gradual rise of an Erdoğanist elite and then let them run the show illiberally for a few decades)
@Alon@interfluidity@BenRossTransit but bringing this back to Israel/Palestine, I am doubtful that there are scenarios of development in the Muslim world as a whole that aren't very high-risk for Israel, including the current trajectory. Israel's founders did not apparently leave behind a strategy for what happens when the Muslim world eventually returned to being a historical subject rather than an object.
@asayeed@interfluidity@BenRossTransit I think it's the other way around - the risk to Israel doesn't come from armies fighting symmetric wars, but from terrorists taking advantage of state failure (e.g. Hezbollah, Houthis). The upshot is that a Palestinian state that has its own army, contra the Israeli demands for demilitarization, will a) repress Hamas and b) have a Jordanian rather than Iranian relationship with Israel.
@Alon@interfluidity@BenRossTransit The problem is that the long-run trajectory of most of the neighbouring states, probably Jordan also, is eventually crises of legitimacy and state failure in one form or another.
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit "state" is the center of the controversy. Erogan's Turkey is not as liberal (or pliant) as the US might like, but it is an ordered state. to the degree it causes troubles elsewhere, they relate to where its state consolidation is weakest, ie risks of Kurdish national self-determination. i think the US is slowly realizing the form of postcolonial moralism that means every self-perceived ethnicity gets its own state is unaffordable, despite affection towards Kurds.
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit states can fail and reform themselves all they want from a US perspective. the advantage of democracy is that revolution is routinized, but institutions to support that may be hard to get or keep. what the US (+ Israel) can't tolerate are the anti-Westphalian currents. Iran's "axis of resistance" is a catastrophe from the perspective of state-system legibility + management. we can't know what form Sunni pan-Islamism might take, but we'll try to impose constraints.
@asayeed@BenRossTransit i agree with @Alon that for Israel, conversion of "Palestinians" into a Westphalian state (or their naturalization into existing such states) is the only way forward. the Israeli right wants to insist upon the parenthetical by any ugly means necessary. the US and Israeli left-ish prefer the former.
@asayeed@BenRossTransit@Alon But the broader problem is to find ways of reconciling a legible global system made of states with defined borders with the aspirations and identities of the people of that region. recognizing that it is not an easy fit is not a case for abandoning the project. the risks, from the perspective of a status quo power, are far too great.
@asayeed@BenRossTransit@Alon (from the perspective of revisionist powers like China, Russia, and Iran, there's are sorcerer's apprentice problems. on the one hand, playing up the contradictions between ME aspirations & westphalian states troubles the hegemon. on the other hand, China largely does not dissent from the westphalian norm, and faces risks from assertive pan-Islamism unconstrained by them. they want to alliances and perhaps some borders, but cautiously. Russia may be less cautious.)
@interfluidity@BenRossTransit@Alon As I said earlier. I think (pessimistically) that the Arab Spring might have been the last opportunity to reconcile popular legitimacy in the Middle East with the present state system with low friction.
@asayeed@BenRossTransit@Alon (if that's the case, was it any opportunity at all? did Arab publics not do enough? i mean the US, idiotically for a status quo power, abandoned perfectly stable and in the first case very warm relationships with Mubarak and Assad on the theory of a liberatory Arab Spring. Tunisia pulled it off for a while. who has an opportunity to do more? did the US need to turn on Bahrain & Saudi, and then something good might have emerged? what was the opportunity was lost?)
@interfluidity@asayeed@BenRossTransit The US did pressure Mubarak not to massacre protesters, and then provided some logistical help to NATO allies defending the rebels in Libya. But Obama was too cautious to follow through with his red line re Assad, and once ISIS became a thing, the US became negatively helpful.
(Note also that while Morsi was more hostile to Israel than Mubarak or Sisi, the Syrian rebels are the exact opposite.)
Iran is fairly Westphalian itself. Its sense of nationalism is sectarian rather than linguistic (so it represses the Kurds but not the Azeris), but the same is true of Israel's sense of nationalism or India's and is also how Western Islamophobia works.
Naturalization of UNRWA-refugees where they live is not a right-wing Israeli position - the Israeli mainline right has non-solutions, which boil down to status quo forever.
@interfluidity@Alon@BenRossTransit That means that complete Palestinian naturalization in other Arab states is actually a double-edged sword for the party that wants it most (that is, Israel) as it undermines the concept of national identity in these countries that is already fragile.
@asayeed@interfluidity@BenRossTransit On the other hand, among the neighbors of Israel, the one that naturalized most UNRWA-refugees, Jordan, is the most stable.
@Alon@asayeed@BenRossTransit i wonder whether the discriminator here might not be more when rather than how many. Jordan naturalized many Palestinians before the conflict curdled into something quite so bitter and nihilistic and apocalyptic as it has now become. it did the most important work a state does, made that population not stateless, gave people a state which defines enforces certain rights. 1/
@Alon@asayeed@BenRossTransit Jordan’s Palestinian population is obviously pro-Palestinian and in deep, painful sympathy with their stateless brethren. But they have much more to lose, and are less bitter and radical than those who’ve spent 40 years in the desert hoping for Canaan. 2/
@Alon@asayeed@BenRossTransit Over time, naturalization could offer some degree of contemporary normalcy to migrants to, say, Egypt from Gaza or the West Bank. But if you were governing Egypt, and well aware of your precarity doing so, you might wonder how long it might take for bitter, defiant grievances to fade, whether that population would consent to mix and assimilate as much as Jordan’s much earlier wave did. 3/
@Alon@asayeed@BenRossTransit Putting aside questions of justice or the human rights surrounding “ethnic cleansing”, I think naturalization in neighboring states will be a hard-sell due to these very realist concerns. Of course leaders will say, as Sisi does, that they won’t accept them because they must remain steadfast in their noble cause. But that serves both as pretext + to mollify the passions of their publics. On practical grounds, it’s just dangerous./fin
@interfluidity@asayeed@BenRossTransit "If I were governing Egypt" is a weird game, because it's like watching a silver league player. There are a thousand things they're doing wrong; I can go on just about how their urban and transportation policy is extremely bad to the point that it is visible in national descriptive statistics (the air pollution in Cairo was measured ca. 2000 to deduct 4 full IQ points from the city's average).
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit to the degree Palestinian identity is anti-Westphalian pan-Islamist, Israel and Egypt’s elites potentially share a common concern. but Palestinian identity is also has nationalistic strands, hostile both to Israel and to assimilation as Egyptian in ways analogous to—and I think mimetic of—Israeli identity and Judaism’s proud, arguably reactionary, claim to be primary and indissoluble. 1/
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit both strands are bad news for Palestinians who just want to live, as they are both reasons why contemporary states of the region, however legitimate or not, have to fear Palestinians’ potential to affect domestic stability. /fin
@interfluidity@asayeed@BenRossTransit I don't think even Hamas is anti-Westphalian (let alone Fatah). What people were pointing out after the #HamasIsISIS campaign was that unlike ISIS, Hamas has always been a national movement with no claims beyond what it considers the boundaries of Palestine (inc. Israel); its interactions with Arab states, Iran, and Turkey are pretty realistic. The extreme element within Hamas is the wish for genocide of the Jews, but that's thoroughly Westphalian.
@interfluidity It'd be a silly case, especially considering that the Democratic Party made ending US support for the KSA campaign in Yemen an issue, and Biden promised to stop such support once in office. Also the war in Yemen, while terrible, has been far less intense; 15,000 Yemenis were killed in aerial bombardment by Saudi over 7 years; Israel has killed well over 2x as many in 11 months.
@tequila0341@interfluidity 15,000? What? The estimates I'm looking at are 300,000-400,000. The Gaza War has generally better reporting than others, so the rate at which deaths are confirmed is very high, but the overall death toll there is not high.
(Same thing with various Ukraine comparisons - there's not much confirmation of the civilian death toll there because it's in Russian-controlled areas and nobody's counting in detail, but the estimates are really high by Gazan standards.)
@Alon@interfluidity Agreed that the total deaths are much higher (over a much longer period of time), I'm using the estimate of deaths by aerial bombardment alone, which are enabled by Western support. Yemen is a multi-sided conflict that also was preceded by state collapse, so it's very different than Gaza.
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