"A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed"

(UPDATE 2024: well, that went to hell. Obviously the only morally sane thing to do is to stop.)

 

With us posting more at Twitter and much less here, there's been very little posted here unrelated to climate. Still, given my semi-informed opinion that the readership/commentariat trends pretty left, and it seems worthwhile to bring up the small fraction (I hope?) of the left that sees nothing wrong with the atrocities in Israel, exclusively focusing instead on the tragedies past and future in Gaza.

So the post by Eric Levitz at NY Mag applies, maybe. Read the whole thing etc., and some relevant parts:

More broadly, the notion that an ethnic group can boast the exclusive right to occupy any stretch of land is not a left-wing one. Virtually all land is “stolen land” if one rolls the tape back far enough. Individuals who were dispossessed of property as a result of their ethnicity have a right of return and reparation. But ethnic groups do not have a right to cleanse any geographic area of outgroup members, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.

Pretty good for a broad statement. All in life is qualified though. Ukraine IMO has the right to kick out Russian immigrants that have arrived in Crimea since 2014, even the innocent children, given the options of living a few miles away in Russia proper. (I hope that if Ukraine gets Crimea back that it becomes flexible on this.) Palestinians have the right to get settlement land back in the West Bank given that Israel proper is right next door, although for utilitarian reasons they should negotiate on this. But Jewish Israelis, most of whose ancestors fled from the Holocaust or were expelled from other countries, shouldn't be forced to become international refugees, let alone killed in the process of forcing out the rest. That's Holocaust-level antisemitism. It's not going to happen anyway, but it's still a really stupid idea. 

For these reasons, it is a moral imperative for progressives to condemn Hamas’s atrocities, affirm the human rights of Jewish Israelis, and reject the ethno-nationalist claim that Palestinians have a unique right to reside in the region. And it is also a political imperative for them to do so....Yet since algorithmic social media favors incendiary speech, from the vantage of many X and Instagram users, the left’s response to last weekend’s events is characterized by bloodlust. In the face of that response, multiple progressive-leaning people in my life have expressed a sense of estrangement from leftists and newfound doubts about their worldview. Seeing an ideological group embrace a position that one knows to be intellectually bankrupt and morally odious will naturally lead one to view that group’s other claims — especially those concerning matters one knows little about, such as the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine conflict — with greater skepticism. It’s important, therefore, to ensure that the majority of progressives who abhor all war crimes makes itself as visible as possible. 

 ....The political necessity of criticizing Israel on universalist grounds, rather than ethno-nationalist ones, is similarly urgent. In defending their apologias for war crimes, leftists tend to cite the gross power imbalance between the Palestinians and Israelis as somehow exculpatory. But precisely because Palestinians cannot hope to prevail in a contest of brute force, it is incumbent on their champions to make the case for their liberation in terms that honor the basic rights of Israelis. If we posit that some ethnic groups have a unique claim to specific stretches of land, and that they also have the right to commit war crimes so as to secure this heritage, then we will do the Israeli far-right’s ideological work for it.

Not much to add to that. I fear that the level of death and destruction coming to innocent civilians in Gaza will soon far exceed what happened in Israel. And still I think Israel has to invade, despite being led by a goon that might even be worse than Trump. What Israel will do after it invades is a huge question mark - I doubt it will handle things better than we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. And West Bank's future is also up for grabs, something that I wonder may have been Hamas' motivation in committing such a huge gamble with certain death for most of its leadership.

Makes climate change seem like a pleasant subject. Guess I'll get back to that.