what #RonDeSantis never understood is he was popular not because he's "conservative", but because he was perceived as chill, as letting people live and do their thing, during the pandemic when media portrayed other places as under the jackboots of some COVID gestapo.
anti-abortion, anti-pot, don't-say-anything-in-front-of-the-children Ron is not chill. and not, i think, broadly that popular anymore.
i’ve got to admit, Elise Stefanik performed an unintentionally brilliant act of partisan politics when she got the Presidents of Penn and Harvard fired, encouraging their colleagues to jump straight to the kind of repressive overreaction that is a match to the kerosene mix of student idealism and narcissism.
now the Democratic coalition is bitterly divided, and the most salient issues are public disorder and student entitlement, both of which strongly favor Republicans.
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.
@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.
@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.)
@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.)
@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.
@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
@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
@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
“To even admit you are acting out of a perception of potential liability is thought in some circles to create a risk of liability. But this thinking in some cases creates enormous risk because the people who are articulating risk only think along one line of vulnerability, the one they understand—or because their logic is easily bent towards a pre-determined conclusion by ideologues prepared to manipulate it.” #TimothyBurkehttps://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-on-the-inside
the basic antizionist position to which many not-right-wing Americans, including many American Jews, are gravitating towards concedes that "Jewish and democratic" is too great a contradiction, and so advocates a secular liberal state without religious or national favoritism.
that position may or may not be practical, but it is not advocacy of anything ethically horrid.
