@ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @Alon @djc absolutely, tarring Americans with Trump’s pathologies while he was President is a form of unjust collective responsibility akin to racism. even Americans who for whatever reason elect not to disavow their President when some third party demands it. Netanyahu is a grifter and war criminal, but Israelis don’t inherit that status, though he is their leader, even if they won’t disavow on demand.

@BenRossTransit @ikentcpel @Alon @djc (oh and leaders are often nuts. they are almost always weirdoes, the opposite of representative. it’s one of the paradoxes of “representative democracy” that the elected class may be called upon to represent, but they can never be representative.)

@BenRossTransit @ikentcpel @Alon @djc absent the epithets, they should be welcome to. and the controversy surrounding this particular thread is over the prevalence of the epithets. do they exist? yes. with any meaningful frequency? maybe not, unless simple expression of the view that Robert E Lee was a great and noble man and the South’s cause was largely virtuous counts as epithet. to me, it would count only as error.

@ikentcpel @Alon @BenRossTransit @djc no, it doesn’t. some fool says outrageous things. it’s not incumbent on everyone in the drum circle to take a break + publicly denounce it. all this started with a real, less dumb, question—do Jewish kids just going about their lives, dressing and acting like they did before all this—face pervasive harrassment. i think the answer is no, but it’s an empirical question we can’t definitively answer.

@mike_kraft we certainly don’t need to abet them! we need to restrain them against the Palestinians, but also prevent adventurism by Iran and its cancerous proxies. not because contemporary Israel is a good actor — it’s a terrible actor — but because a regional interstate war that likely would not stay regional would be an absolute catastrophe. Israel is the new Saudi, an “ally” we dislike, against whose human rights violations we push back to some degree but not enough.

@mike_kraft i agree. the cold war “justified” lots of foolish interference in internal politics. but Vietnam, for example, was not that. it was about preventing a distinct, self-governing territory from being taken by force. it was a “war lost” — with lots of absolutely unjustifiable US atrocity — but it was not absurdly founded, and perhaps not without deterrent effect. Korea was similar. the line between shambolic withdrawal of Afghanistan and Ukraine is pretty straight.

@Alon @BenRossTransit @djc it is absolutely nutpicking.

@mike_kraft Iraq I, Vietnam, and Korea were very directly policing. Many of the Cold War conflicts were indefensible in my view, interferences in domestic politics, analogous to the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, for all the error and horror, territorial war, the great scourge of history, outside of Africa (which the US mostly writes off as too troubled to bother which) has been deterred since WWII. Which is why Ukraine matters so much.

@mike_kraft I think that’s just untrue. It’s like police abolitionism. Police are the source of a great deal of the violence we see, sure. Abolitionists assume no police and that violence disappears. It fails to account for the violence of others deterred by policing. For all the very real horrors you can blame the US for, overall “pax americana” has been very real. The great threat to world peace is its undoing.

try as you might, you can’t quite not see that you are the villain. but you are addicted to your villainy.

democracy. whiskey. sexy. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/world/middleeast/tiktok-iraq-killing.html

@mike_kraft the world is not so clean. no one thanks the US for the status quo. no one will thank the US for the civil wars and territorial wars that would result from simply withdrawing support. the Biden admin has in many respects been terrible on Israel. but it's been remarkable in preventing a broader regional war that, as you say, several of Israel's asshole leaders are hellbent to provoke. even worse than states that don't deserve to continue are no states at all, war of all against all.

@mike_kraft what, all of them? let Saudi and Egypt collapse or lose a war to Iran and its proxies and just hope that whatever emerges is okay with us? watch a cornered Israel nuke Tehran, and then maybe vice versa?

i think that would be a bad mistake. we need to learn how to support the stability of states without being seen either to provoke or repress domestic political change. a world on fire is worth preventing in the meantime. the ashes rarely bring anything good.

@mike_kraft i agree that a multiconfessional secular state is by far best way forward. unfortunately, neither of the two communities that lives there seems to agree. i think in practice, for the forseeable future the name of the game must be external constraint. israel has forfeited in my view any right to autonomy or independence, and the palestinians don't have any pretense of it. the US + arab autocracies must be all up in Israel/Palestine affairs, even though no one wants the heartache.

@mike_kraft today, sure. but 20 years ago Palestinian kids were blowing up buses+cafes after a land for peace proposal that wasn't good enough.

there was history before 7-oct, sure. it didn't come from nowhere. there was history before Israeli apartheid too. it didn't come from nowhere.

"both sides" is in fact the only sane take on Israel/Palestine. one abuser—Israel—currently holds the knife, and is the one that needs to be restrained now. when the other side has the knife it's also no good.

@Alon @BenRossTransit @djc obviously people targeting epithets directly at people walking by is more visceral than a Charles Murray talk.

but (referring back to the #TimothyBurke piece that inspired the thread), the vast majority of the protest is not that at all, but might still be uncomfortable, disturbing, hurtful to people simply by virtue of its content. and that should be tolerated, even though i agree in practice there have been less-than-uniform standards of that sort of toleration.

@BenRossTransit @djc That's the kind of thing I thought you were talking about! And that's where we have a dispute about prevalence.

Media and social media pluck conflict from the tails of social phenomena, because that's where the engaging stories are. Ridiculously horrible slogans definitely are shouted, and sometimes in harassing ways at Jewish students. There are also purposeful provocateurs on the pro-Israel side.

But I think these both are a very small part of the overall activity.

@djc @BenRossTransit i can assure you both can make Jewish kids with strong identification and attachment to Israel feel pretty horrible! and also that Jewish kids (and adults) do not universally agree on either question. (a difficult thing in the US Jewish community now is that a large group who previously had squish mixed feelings about zionism are becoming polarized towards outright antizionism, which might make this passover worse than any proverbial thanksgiving.)

@djc @BenRossTransit directions in which harassment / hostile environment should be more or less expansively defined have become battlegrounds of social contestation, as matters of mere status and prestige, and more cynically in office politics and career competition. i think this is a mistake we should try to reverse by narrowing application of these ideas.