This is a linkpost for https://messyprogress.substack.com/p/genocide-isnt-decolonization
This feels like you're engaging with the weakest argument against Israel's recent aggression to make your point. You are not going to find many people who disagree with "violence against civilians is bad" on LessWrong.
It also strikes me as bizarre that this post mentions only the civilian casualties on one side and not the far greater (and rapidly growing) number of Palestinians who have been killed.
Hamas plan was exactly this:
1.Kill many civilians in Israel in awful ways to ensure quick retaliation
2.Ensure that many Palestianian are perceived to be killed during retaliation (by locating own military infrastructure near civilian cites, preventing evacuation, overestimating number of killed)
3. Manipulate those who are using utilitarian calculation in the West into supporting them
4. Manipulate Muslim countries into declaring war with Israel
5.Destroy Israel
Ensure that many Palestianian are perceived to be killed
Wait, are they merely perceived to be killed, or are they actually killed?
(If it is the latter, what made you write the former?)
I thinks that many was killed, but less then was reported. However, only reports about killing matter in this plan, as such reports create anger and affect utility calculations.
Does it matter for Villiam's point whether 10x more Palestinian civilians are killed then Israeli, or 20x, or 30x?
For example, even if it's perceived by inflated reports to be 30x, and the real figure is 10x, that's still 10x more civilians in body bags.
It seems unlikely to me that anyone who thought through the current power dynamics would expect the other Muslim countries to be able to declare war on Israel and win it.
It seems to me more likely that derailing the peace process between countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel was the goal.
To not play into that plan and not make Hamas have success Israel would have had to mediate their response and there would have been nothing stopping them from doing so.
Hamas’s massacre of jewish civilians was praised by multiple campus student groups, DSA chapters, BLM chapters, and Democrat Groups.
That claim to me false, at least for the first claim that's not really supported by the link. The position of the student groups seems to be that Israel is the one responsible for the people that Hamas killed but not that it's good that they died.
By making borders sovereign and banning ethnic cleansing, they effectively froze people’s territories in the state they were around the end of WW2. For the Palestinians, this was just after they had lost a large amount of territory they considered to be rightfully theirs.
Israel does not seem to accept post-WW2 boundaries and Israel's treatment of Gaza is not compatible with those borders.
If you want to advocate for genocidal blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism rooted in intolerant islamic fundamentalism (which is what Hamas is) you don’t use any of those words to describe your ideology, because they all have negative connotations.
While Hamas might does have that ideology, that's not the ideology that was driving the the student organizations, and I don't think the student organizations hold their positions because Hamas speaks about decolonization.
not that it's good that they died.
At the University of Virginia, the chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine declared that it “unequivocally supports Palestinian liberation and the right of colonized people everywhere to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary.”
We unequivocally support the right to kill the civilians... but it's not good that they died?
I unequivocally support the right of police to shoot a person who points a gun at them but I still don't think it's good when people with guns in their hand get shoot by police.
It's classic for cases of self-defense to see the act of self-defense as rightful but still see it as unfortunate.
So, does killing any Israeli under any circumstances classify as self-defense? Or was there something especially wrong about the psychedelic trance music festival so that it had to be stopped immediately?
It seems like political topics have a habit of being mind-killing. This is not complicated.
The position of the student groups is that acts by groups that are oppressed against their oppressor (and that includes citizens of the country) are self-defense. While it's easy to disagree with that position, pretending that it isn't their position, seems strange to me.
So, although you and me might disagree about it, it is the position of the students at University of Virginia that killing people at psychedelic trance music festival is legitimate self-defense. It might be a strange position, but it is their honest position. Is this correct?
Now I would like someone to experimentally verify this. Like, visit the University of Virginia and collect signatures under statement literally saying "killing people at psychedelic trance music festival is legitimate self-defense if Palestinians do it".
That is, I am curious how many students actually say "whatever" and mean literally whatever, and how many say "whatever" but only imagine a few examples that many people would agree with. I might be surprised, of course; but that's the point of doing experiments.
It's the position of one student group at the University of Virginia and a student group founded for the Palestinian cause. I would not expect that the student group is representative of all students of the University of Virginia.
Most students at the University are likely going to have positions that are less extreme than those of the "Students for Justice in Palestine" group.
I would expect that you could find some extreme student that are willing to sign "killing people at psychedelic trance music festival is legitimate self-defense if Palestinians do it" but nobody that's willing to sign "it was good the people at the psychedelic trance music festival got killed".
(of course, it would likely be helpful if the person who's asking isn't a white man but checks a few diversity boxes)
You make a lot of true points, though we can disagree on how to interpret or how best to express some of them. But I think it's worth noting that at the moment when we tried to freeze national borders, the "we" was the former colonial powers. It wasn't (maybe partially, but not entirely) out of an upwelling of virtue, it was because they were no longer strong enough to impose their will. And it was accompanied by "Hey, even though we totally upended your borders and governance structures many times over the centuries, we've now decided to change the definition of what a state is so you no longer have sovereignty anyway. That means if you go to war without our permission, the US will come in and mess things up again instead of letting you figure it out for yourselves. But in many cases they'll do it halfheartedly, dragging things out and making Faustian bargains for fear of being seen as a colonizer themselves. Kthxbai!"
The UN declaration(s) came later, and were a good idea but also a bit of a veneer on the prior underlying events. Like many concepts we rely on in life and law, they're sometimes incoherent or implausible if you try to make them foundational to your worldview.
I'm so utterly tired of posts on this conflict which lopsidedly criticize only or mostly one side of it, regardless of which one. Arguments are soldiers, and this is doubly so when the arguments are about a longstanding violent conflict.
To give a positive counterexample, I found this Matt Yglesias article on the history of the conflict pretty educational, because it manages to explain why the conflict is so intractable, without assigning all the blame to any one faction.
Hamas’s massacre of jewish civilians was praised by multiple campus student groups, DSA chapters, BLM chapters, and Democrat Groups.
While I agree with your broad point, I gave you a downvote for writing this.
There is an important difference between praising and not being maximally outraged. And if your stance is of recognising the nuance between opposing United Ireland and opposing violent means to achieve it you should be twice as careful not to get mindkilled in this regard.
It is a mixed bag, quite close to "scissor statements".
Mostly, one side is yelling "why can't you simply condemn X, without making excuses or adding context?".
The other side is a mixed bag of people saying "nothing wrong about X" (which I disagree with) and "we are fine with condemning X, but the context is also important, otherwise the condemnation of X will sound like a support of Y that we also oppose" (which makes sense to me).
Specifically, the apologists:
At the University of Virginia, the chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine declared that it “unequivocally supports Palestinian liberation and the right of colonized people everywhere to resist the occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary.”
Their resistance must not be condemned but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.
The context-adders:
If we want to talk about justice, [if] we want to talk about human rights, [if] we want to talk about protecting civilians, then we must include the conversation around the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip, who for decades have endured mistreatment
And the punishers of lack of outrage:
In Michigan, Rep. Shri Thanedar officially renounced his DSA membership, saying in a statement Wednesday that he won’t “associate with an organization unwilling to call out terrorism in all its forms.”
Indeed. There is a whole spectrum between being maximally outraged about X and praise of X, represented in the links. And claiming that any point on it equals praise is literally false.
Even apologists of group who did X are not necessarily praisers of this group doing X. Otherwise we will have to classify everyone who accepts the fact that Israel military is killing Palestinian civilians as a necessary evil, to be praisers of killing civilians.
Now, there definitely are some people who are praising the death of civilians. But there are a lot less of them than the author of the post states.
I don't fully understand the obsession with exploring the moral dimensions of the conflict, many from multiple sides, fronts, factions etc. have committed atrocities and I condemn them all regardless of affiliation. I've yet to find anyone on LW willing to seriously engage on solutions. It's like we've collectively given up on the possibility of peace and all that's left is to hash out the specific wording for the history books.
In 1987, Bono, the lead singer of U2, interrupted his performance of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” to give a speech about The Troubles, prompted by the Enniskillen bombing that had taken place that day:
And let me tell you something,
I've had enough of Irish Americans,
Who haven't been back to their country in 20 or 30 years.
Come up to me, and talk about the resistance
The revolution back home
And the glory of the revolution
And the glory of dying for the revolution
Fuck the revolution!
They don't talk about the glory of killing for the revolution
What's the glory in taking a man from his bed
And gunning him down in front of his wife and children
Where's the glory in that?
Where's the glory in bombing a remembrance day parade
Of old age pensioners their medals taken out and polished up for the day
Where's the glory in that?
To leave them dying, or crippled for life, or dead
Under the rubble of a revolution
That the majority of the people in my country
Do not want
The Enniskillen bombing killed eleven people, a drop in the ocean compared to the 1400 Israeli civilians brutally murdered (at last count) by Hamas on October 7th. But I feel this speech captures something important that is relevant to this current moment.
I was shocked by what Hamas did, but what shocked me more was how many people in the west were eager to cheer for what Hamas had done, or were unwilling to condemn it. Hamas’s massacre of jewish civilians was praised by multiple campus student groups, DSA chapters, BLM chapters, and Democrat Groups. Lest you think this was just a fringe opinion, notoriously censorious Harvard University decided this was the one topic they were going to take a free speech stance on.
These groups justified their support for Hamas killing innocent civilians by claiming it was justified by “decolonization” - that the Jewish people are “colonizers” in ancestral Muslim land and “resistance is justified when people are occupied.”
But this is a very new meaning of the word “decolonization”.
Decolonization, as defined by the UN’s 1960 declaration is the “right of all people to self determination” - a rejection of the colonial model where a few central powers conquered distant lands and governed them without regard for the interests of their citizens. It is part of a broader set of principles like sovereign borders, human rights, rejection of ethnic cleansing, and a taboo against harming civilians, that emerged in the aftermath of WW2 in the hope that, by adopting such principles, a war like WW2 would never happen again.
The new meaning of decolonization seems to be almost the opposite - the right of any group of people to use unrestrained violence against any other ethnic group living in land that they claim is their ancestral homeland.
Multiple members of my family fought hard for decolonization. My grandfather David Ennals and great uncle Martin Ennals were key figures in the original decolonization movement, having key roles in the Anti Apartheid Movement, Amnesty International (which won the the Nobel Peace Prize under Martin’s leadership), The Commission for Racial Equality, The Gandhi Foundation, The Free Tibet Movement, The United Nations Association, and other groups. My father wrote a book, “From Slavery To Citizenship” about decolonization. Nobody in their movement supported violence against civilians and nor has any recipient of the Martin Ennals Award.
The “decolonization” used to justify Hamas has almost nothing in common with the “decolonization” we have been told to think of as good.
It’s easy to understand why some might want to overturn the post WW2 peace consensus.
For many groups, the post WW2 peace principles were pretty unfair. By making borders sovereign and banning ethnic cleansing, they effectively froze people’s territories in the state they were around the end of WW2. For the Palestinians, this was just after they had lost a large amount of territory they considered to be rightfully theirs. For the Israelis, who had just arrived in new land after fleeing the Holocaust, they found their borders frozen in an awkward shape that made their major cities near impossible to defend from attacks by neighboring hostile power.
But the alternative of undoing the post WW2 peace consensus is almost certainly worse. If it is “decolonization” to use unrestrained violence against anyone you consider to be living in your homeland then almost nobody is safe, since we all live in land previously occupied by someone else. Was the holocaust decolonization? Would it be “decolonization” for Europeans to ethnically cleanse their recent Muslim immigrants? Would terror attacks by Native Americans on US Civilians be “decolonization”? Is there anywhere a Jew can live and not be a colonizer?
We should reject this new definition of decolonization. The current status quo has very real issues, but the alternative is worse.
So how did we get from there to here?
The problem is that words change their meanings, and sometimes they do this while keeping the moral associations attached to the old meaning.
If you want to advocate for genocidal blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism rooted in intolerant islamic fundamentalism (which is what Hamas is) you don’t use any of those words to describe your ideology, because they all have negative connotations. Instead you find whatever seems to be the closest concept that has strong positive associations, and use the kind of rhetorical devices that academics are brilliant at to argue that the positive thing everyone is supposed to like is the same as the dark ideology you want to advocate for.
If you do this well, then the pre-existing positive brand you have hijacked is so strong that it becomes taboo to criticize your utterly different idea.
You can also use the same trick to redefine a morally-repugnant word like “genocide” to mean to whatever your enemies are doing, even if their behavior has little in common with the meaning the word had when society decided it was repugnant.
People keep expecting the Nazis of the future to come usefully labeled as Nazis, or with other negative badges that everyone has been trained to recognize, but that’s not how the world actually works. Don’t forget that the Nazi’s called themselves National Socialists - two concepts that had positive brands at the time.
It’s hard to avoid the gravitational pull of genocidal ethno-nationalism, because it is the default ideology of humanity. History is basically a long list of genocides. Not just in one part of the world, but in all parts of the world.
You are descended from people who were able to exterminate other races before they were able to exterminate yours. You live on land that was stolen from other people your ancestors oppressed and killed. This isn’t just true of some people in some places. It is true of all people, in all places. The fact that it was universal doesn’t mean it was okay. It was terrible, and many communities today suffer from the results of events like these that happened in the recent past.
It is a miracle that we live in a precious moment where this way of living isn’t the default. It still exists in some places, at some times, but it’s rare enough that it’s notable when it happens.
And the reason it is rare is because we have collectively chosen to enforce a set of sacred principles that prevent it. Principles like a taboo against empires (decolonization), a taboo against genocide, a taboo against invading other countries, and a taboo against using violence against civilians.
These taboos matter, and it is important that we do not let their meanings drift until they become yet another synonym for the default human ideology.
I started this essay with Bono’s speech, and now I’m going to return to it.
You will note that Bono never said whether he was in favor of a United Ireland. His objection wasn’t to the IRA’s aims (a United Ireland) but to their methods (senseless violence).
If you tell me that you think Israel should be doing more to prevent civilian casualties when they strike Hamas then I might agree with you. If you tell me that Palestinians should be treated better than they are today, then I might agree with you. If you criticize the behavior of Netanyahu then I might agree with you. If you argue that the post-holocaust refuge for the Jews should have been placed somewhere in the West rather than in Israel, then I might agree with you. These are all important questions, but they are messy questions, and I don’t feel confident I know what the answers are.
But if you advocate for pursuing your aims with depraved violence against innocent civilians then I will never agree with you.