THe “axis” model is insane. It is reductive in a way that renders as simplistic nonsense everything that comes out of the mouths (pens) of any but “conservatives.” As such, it does it’s job, that of rendering public opinion incomprehensible.
Do Kling's "absurd standards of non-barbarity" include basics like don't engage in mass killing of civilians? Don't carpet bomb Gaza? Don't hand wave large numbers of civilian killings as unavoidable collateral damage?
The absurd standard is to tell Israel not to bomb civilians and to also condemn offering them safe passage to a zone that they won't bomb as a "war crime." Technically, it probably is a war crime to displace civilians in that way, but the war crimes were not drawn up under the assumption that fighters would use their own civilians as human shields.
I found the footnote in this essay to be worthy of more than a footnote. (Copied here for emphasis.)
"...some libertarians [are] vehemently opposed to Israel and sounding like Progressives, while others view Israel much more favorably, in the process sounding like conservatives. One famous libertarian catch-phrase is “anything peaceful,” and that makes it uncomfortable to take sides in a war. If I had to guess, I would say that should American involvement in the war in the Middle East deepen, libertarians will be opposed to such involvement, just as they tend to be on the side of non-involvement in the Ukraine war."
The problem with the libertarian "anything peaceful" approach to geopolitics is that it ignores the fact that megalomaniacs are evil, and their malevolence doesn't stop at the ocean or national borders. A peaceful approach to Nazi German, Putin's Russia, the Iranian regime and its satellites, now especially Hamas, Chavista Venezuela and others simply doesn't work. We'd eventually pay the heavy price for the benign neglect of "anything peaceful."
Israel has declared war. They should keep fighting Hamas, and killing Hamas fighters and leaders, until there is Unconditional Surrender. Like WW II ended. And the US Civil War.
I agree with your model of interpretation but there is a fourth axis we’ve forgotten in the West. It is reciprocal violence between equal honor based tribes rooted in ancestral land claims. This is the real symbol I logic at play. The problem with reciprocal violence is that it is based on a tribal logic rooted in protecting family honor...this is ancient human behavior. It is the darkest side of otherwise highly functional, protective human community. Ultimately, both Israel and Palestine are out-dated, broken concepts from two thousand years ago. They are concepts rooted in near constant boundary violence. Both sides are living in the past. We need to stop apologizing for tribal sentiment on both sides.
It seems to me that the progressive language axis is sincere and authentic - they really mean oppressor vs oppressed in the ordinary meaning of those terms - but that the conservative axis is, maybe not 'fake', but still, more of a kind of euphemism, vague idealized abstraction, and code. The fact that conservative commentators and public figures feel it necessary to speak in such code to maintain respectability is itself a kind of consequence of an earlier ideological surrender to progressive values.
The question is how is one socially allowed to explain how they picked sides in a fight. The progressives get to judge what's respectable, and that must be ideological instead of natural or traditional (or tribal, if you must, consisting of concentric circles of diminishing loyalties), so allow themselves to honestly side with "the oppressed". Conservative instinct is to want to choose "the side more like us." The side with more commonality and with which it is easier to identify, thus in a way, siding with themselves.
But if you must come out and explicitly say it in that brazenly chauvinistic way, most conservative voters might like it just fine and have no issue with barbaric responses from their team, but conservative elites straying from the "Progressive-approved euphemisms lexicon" would get The Treatment and find their careers prematurely ended.
Frankly its tribal. My tribe hates your tribe. But your tribe is too steong to loose. So we will martyr our tribe to humiliate yours and feel that we have done something. Exhaustion may be the only solution. Eventually. But probably not.
I mostly or completely agree with what you say. I have major problems with what you don't say.
Not all Palestinians without a country to call home are Hamas or even sympathizers with violence against Israel. Yet they suffer, maybe from Palestinian leaders, maybe from Israeli actions, and more likely both. These people are just as innocent as the kidnapped and killed Israeli citizens.
Note: I recognize that maybe Israel does as well as possible to limit collateral damage. Even if completely true, I think it is a huge oversight not to at least recognize the sometimes innocent people on the other side who also suffer.
Whatever weight of concern you put on whoever's suffering, it's completely obvious that the consequence of the Hamas attack is that the expected value of that index just went way up, with plenty of extra suffering for everybody. Recognizing all that new extra suffering does not weaken the case to annihilate Hamas, it strengthens it.
All well and good, but isn't it the case that Israel factually HAS more agency? Even if we irrationally round-up and down (they who have less agency have none; they more, all), the direction is right. More powerful military, more human capital, etc.? And when there is a disparity in agency there follows a disparity in responsibility and blame.
I disagree. The Palestinians always have had the choice to recognize Israel's right to exist and agree to a lasting peace. That is more than sufficient agency. They can have peace any time they wish it, and Israel cannot. In that sense, Israel has less agency.
A major limitation of all these axes is that they too easily lead people to think of them as binaries rather than spectra. It is tempting, because it feels satisfying, to believe there is a Side of Civilization and a Side of Barbarism, or a Side of The Oppressed vs a Side of the Oppressors. Propagandists certainly want you to believe that, and will work as hard as they can to get you to surrender to temptation. But in real life there are always degrees of these things, and most important real-world moral choices involve holding one's nose in some way to pick the lesser evil.
This is certainly true of WWII: the Allies committed monstrous and indefensible war crimes-- even if you don't think e.g. Hiroshima or Dresden fall in this category, consider the Red Army's mass rape campaign-- and yet were still clearly the lesser evil, in both ends (jus ad bellum) and means (jus in bello). Recognizing this doesn't require you to support or excuse Allied war crimes, nor free you from the moral responsibility to advocate reforms that make such crimes less likely in the future. But it does require you to cast aside simplistic good-vs-evil binaries, make your peace with the reality of a second-best world, and commit to supporting such lesser evils as one must in that world. Similarly, you can take a very dim view indeed of the Israeli regime and its ideology and conduct, and even the whole Zionist project, and still recognize that it is, at least for the foreseeable future, the obvious lesser evil compared with Hamas.
Doing so requires some level of emotional and intellectual maturity, and I think the maturity/immaturity axis is an underappreciated fourth dimension here. It is also a mature contemplation of a second-best world, for example, that permits one to utter such a phrase as "Markets fail; use markets". Maturity has often been associated with conservatism-- think of Churchill's famous remarks, or more recently Yuval Levin's work on formative institutions as builders of maturity-- but this is not a necessary association: in the Trump era there is no lack of immaturity on the Right. Indeed a general diminution of maturity across the political spectrum (maybe connected to "17 is the new 15" somehow?) is one of the persistent problems with the present discourse and with presently available political choices in much of the world.
I find Arnold Kling's book good as far as it goes, but naive in that it assumes that negotiating a settlement is always possible and desirable. On some topics and against some opponents, fighting is truly the only constructive reaction.
I see the "three languages" as really the way people on each side organize their feelings. The choice of one is more than a communication preference, but is not an "analytical approach" because nobody really uses analysis to decide his feelings. Man is not a rational animal but a rationalizing animal.
That being said, the "oppressor/oppressed" model is not just wrong on this topic -- it is always wrong. Show me an oppressed group and I'll show you someone who is trying to assert entitlement to preferential treatment by labeling himself as belonging to that group. Intersectionality is worthless as a measure of virtue by any rational standard, and is simply never credible.
Not commenting on the Current Thing unless you are confident in your analytical framing is wise. For other reasons I had already a mostly written piece on Christianity as sanctifying the Roman (farming) synthesis and Islam as sanctifying the pastoralist synthesis that suddenly had horrifying relevance.
The Israelis are walking into an obvious trap here. The Palestinian plan (note my ascription of agency to Hamas) is clearly to provoke them into committing atrocities that will torpedo their relations with Arab nations and isolate them among enemies again. If retaliatory atrocities from Israel stood any real chance of accomplishing their goals, then I'd see merit in a conversation about whether the rules of warfare should be bent in this case. But that is not the reality, as anyone outside the Likud echo chamber can clearly see.
As far as standards of non-barbarity, I would say we should hold Israel to the same standards that were pretty carefully followed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan (at least on the battlefield).
On the WW2 analogy, some people seem to think it was obviously OK for the Allies to torch Tokyo, Nagasaki and Dresden. Even Churchill's own "supreme emergency" argument could not justify these atrocities, which happened long after the Axis powers had ceased to pose any offensive threat. If you think Iraq was a just war, that doesn't mean you have to defend Abu Ghraib. Same goes for the strategic bombing campaigns of late WW2. The US should have blockaded Japan, dropped a single atomic bomb and waited much longer than three days before following up with a second one.
"I would say we should hold Israel to the same standards that were pretty carefully followed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan (at least on the battlefield)."
And with how well those turned out, how could anyone think otherwise?
The backgrounds and easily-inferred IQs of the two most notorious Abu Ghraib offenders suggest a problem the military is presumably going to have going forward as long as America should last. The Fort Cavazos (formerly Hood) soldier who went AWOL a year or so back and whose return was apparently so little desired by the Army that they didn't look for him, and the story was only kept alive by his trans wife and drug use partner, who was found dead one day before he resurfaced - comes to mind. This was not a story of national interest and for Fort Hood was utterly of a pattern.
It is hard to say these things; we all know we must support our military. So the judgment should be turned on the class that chose to downgrade a military career, for their children.
These seem like isolated cases to me. My sense is that the US military remains a pretty elite force overall. But ideally I would like to see enlisted troops paid better.
I think it has an elite, and I think they probably are the best of our young people. But my impression is otherwise than yours overall. It may be from the proximity of a major military base and military town, that my entire adult life has been associated with serious dysfunction, far from bright, shiny military discipline.
I have long believed that this all ends with Tel Aviv a smoking nuclear ruin quickly followed by every Arab/Islamic city becoming a smoking nuclear ruin. There is no middle ground of compromise between the Jews of Israel and the various Islamic governments, no matter how much we or they want to pretend otherwise. Saturday proved this once again. A real and stable solution had to be implemented starting 80 years ago, not yesterday.
If I were in Netanyahu's shoes, the Gazans would be pushed into the sea and the entire region emptied of Arabs. This doesn't mean they have to be killed, but they must be relocated to other countries- same for all remaining Arabs in the West Bank. Of course, this doesn't change the outcome I foresee one iota, but that is the political reality as it stands today.
There is no "this all ends". What do you think this is, Ireland? That was nothing. If there is one lesson to draw from history there, it is, "It never ends."
Yeah, ethnic cleansing is a nasty business, but pair it with a check for a few grand as a "relocation fee" and free plane ticket on Emirates Airlines, and we're firmly in "eh, coulda been worse" territory.
Thinking of that business the other week, the Bari Weiss debate about "whether the sexual revolution failed" or something: a place like Gaza represents to me the failure of that debate to confront the most salient point, the disparate takeup of the sexual revolution around the world.
THe “axis” model is insane. It is reductive in a way that renders as simplistic nonsense everything that comes out of the mouths (pens) of any but “conservatives.” As such, it does it’s job, that of rendering public opinion incomprehensible.
Do Kling's "absurd standards of non-barbarity" include basics like don't engage in mass killing of civilians? Don't carpet bomb Gaza? Don't hand wave large numbers of civilian killings as unavoidable collateral damage?
The absurd standard is to tell Israel not to bomb civilians and to also condemn offering them safe passage to a zone that they won't bomb as a "war crime." Technically, it probably is a war crime to displace civilians in that way, but the war crimes were not drawn up under the assumption that fighters would use their own civilians as human shields.
I found the footnote in this essay to be worthy of more than a footnote. (Copied here for emphasis.)
"...some libertarians [are] vehemently opposed to Israel and sounding like Progressives, while others view Israel much more favorably, in the process sounding like conservatives. One famous libertarian catch-phrase is “anything peaceful,” and that makes it uncomfortable to take sides in a war. If I had to guess, I would say that should American involvement in the war in the Middle East deepen, libertarians will be opposed to such involvement, just as they tend to be on the side of non-involvement in the Ukraine war."
The problem with the libertarian "anything peaceful" approach to geopolitics is that it ignores the fact that megalomaniacs are evil, and their malevolence doesn't stop at the ocean or national borders. A peaceful approach to Nazi German, Putin's Russia, the Iranian regime and its satellites, now especially Hamas, Chavista Venezuela and others simply doesn't work. We'd eventually pay the heavy price for the benign neglect of "anything peaceful."
Israel has declared war. They should keep fighting Hamas, and killing Hamas fighters and leaders, until there is Unconditional Surrender. Like WW II ended. And the US Civil War.
"Conservatives like to use the civilization-barbarism axis."
That depends on what kind of "conservatives" are being considered: https://jclester.substack.com/p/conservatism
Libertarians have a better claim to that axis: https://jclester.substack.com/p/civilisation-and-libertarianism
It's a shame you choose to eschew the Libertarian axis, as it would be a much better way to explain the violence in Canaan...
I agree with your model of interpretation but there is a fourth axis we’ve forgotten in the West. It is reciprocal violence between equal honor based tribes rooted in ancestral land claims. This is the real symbol I logic at play. The problem with reciprocal violence is that it is based on a tribal logic rooted in protecting family honor...this is ancient human behavior. It is the darkest side of otherwise highly functional, protective human community. Ultimately, both Israel and Palestine are out-dated, broken concepts from two thousand years ago. They are concepts rooted in near constant boundary violence. Both sides are living in the past. We need to stop apologizing for tribal sentiment on both sides.
It seems to me that the progressive language axis is sincere and authentic - they really mean oppressor vs oppressed in the ordinary meaning of those terms - but that the conservative axis is, maybe not 'fake', but still, more of a kind of euphemism, vague idealized abstraction, and code. The fact that conservative commentators and public figures feel it necessary to speak in such code to maintain respectability is itself a kind of consequence of an earlier ideological surrender to progressive values.
The question is how is one socially allowed to explain how they picked sides in a fight. The progressives get to judge what's respectable, and that must be ideological instead of natural or traditional (or tribal, if you must, consisting of concentric circles of diminishing loyalties), so allow themselves to honestly side with "the oppressed". Conservative instinct is to want to choose "the side more like us." The side with more commonality and with which it is easier to identify, thus in a way, siding with themselves.
But if you must come out and explicitly say it in that brazenly chauvinistic way, most conservative voters might like it just fine and have no issue with barbaric responses from their team, but conservative elites straying from the "Progressive-approved euphemisms lexicon" would get The Treatment and find their careers prematurely ended.
Frankly its tribal. My tribe hates your tribe. But your tribe is too steong to loose. So we will martyr our tribe to humiliate yours and feel that we have done something. Exhaustion may be the only solution. Eventually. But probably not.
I mostly or completely agree with what you say. I have major problems with what you don't say.
Not all Palestinians without a country to call home are Hamas or even sympathizers with violence against Israel. Yet they suffer, maybe from Palestinian leaders, maybe from Israeli actions, and more likely both. These people are just as innocent as the kidnapped and killed Israeli citizens.
Note: I recognize that maybe Israel does as well as possible to limit collateral damage. Even if completely true, I think it is a huge oversight not to at least recognize the sometimes innocent people on the other side who also suffer.
Whatever weight of concern you put on whoever's suffering, it's completely obvious that the consequence of the Hamas attack is that the expected value of that index just went way up, with plenty of extra suffering for everybody. Recognizing all that new extra suffering does not weaken the case to annihilate Hamas, it strengthens it.
I don't see how getting rid of Hamas changes anything. The problems all existed before Hamas and won't go away if Hamas does.
For any problem, there is a level of action that will make it go away. The only questions are capability and will.
I don't belong even that is true. Not with any certainty and not without risk of new issues that may be worse
All well and good, but isn't it the case that Israel factually HAS more agency? Even if we irrationally round-up and down (they who have less agency have none; they more, all), the direction is right. More powerful military, more human capital, etc.? And when there is a disparity in agency there follows a disparity in responsibility and blame.
I disagree. The Palestinians always have had the choice to recognize Israel's right to exist and agree to a lasting peace. That is more than sufficient agency. They can have peace any time they wish it, and Israel cannot. In that sense, Israel has less agency.
A major limitation of all these axes is that they too easily lead people to think of them as binaries rather than spectra. It is tempting, because it feels satisfying, to believe there is a Side of Civilization and a Side of Barbarism, or a Side of The Oppressed vs a Side of the Oppressors. Propagandists certainly want you to believe that, and will work as hard as they can to get you to surrender to temptation. But in real life there are always degrees of these things, and most important real-world moral choices involve holding one's nose in some way to pick the lesser evil.
This is certainly true of WWII: the Allies committed monstrous and indefensible war crimes-- even if you don't think e.g. Hiroshima or Dresden fall in this category, consider the Red Army's mass rape campaign-- and yet were still clearly the lesser evil, in both ends (jus ad bellum) and means (jus in bello). Recognizing this doesn't require you to support or excuse Allied war crimes, nor free you from the moral responsibility to advocate reforms that make such crimes less likely in the future. But it does require you to cast aside simplistic good-vs-evil binaries, make your peace with the reality of a second-best world, and commit to supporting such lesser evils as one must in that world. Similarly, you can take a very dim view indeed of the Israeli regime and its ideology and conduct, and even the whole Zionist project, and still recognize that it is, at least for the foreseeable future, the obvious lesser evil compared with Hamas.
Doing so requires some level of emotional and intellectual maturity, and I think the maturity/immaturity axis is an underappreciated fourth dimension here. It is also a mature contemplation of a second-best world, for example, that permits one to utter such a phrase as "Markets fail; use markets". Maturity has often been associated with conservatism-- think of Churchill's famous remarks, or more recently Yuval Levin's work on formative institutions as builders of maturity-- but this is not a necessary association: in the Trump era there is no lack of immaturity on the Right. Indeed a general diminution of maturity across the political spectrum (maybe connected to "17 is the new 15" somehow?) is one of the persistent problems with the present discourse and with presently available political choices in much of the world.
I find Arnold Kling's book good as far as it goes, but naive in that it assumes that negotiating a settlement is always possible and desirable. On some topics and against some opponents, fighting is truly the only constructive reaction.
I see the "three languages" as really the way people on each side organize their feelings. The choice of one is more than a communication preference, but is not an "analytical approach" because nobody really uses analysis to decide his feelings. Man is not a rational animal but a rationalizing animal.
That being said, the "oppressor/oppressed" model is not just wrong on this topic -- it is always wrong. Show me an oppressed group and I'll show you someone who is trying to assert entitlement to preferential treatment by labeling himself as belonging to that group. Intersectionality is worthless as a measure of virtue by any rational standard, and is simply never credible.
Not commenting on the Current Thing unless you are confident in your analytical framing is wise. For other reasons I had already a mostly written piece on Christianity as sanctifying the Roman (farming) synthesis and Islam as sanctifying the pastoralist synthesis that suddenly had horrifying relevance.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/hamas-displays-a-muslim-way-of-war
The Israelis are walking into an obvious trap here. The Palestinian plan (note my ascription of agency to Hamas) is clearly to provoke them into committing atrocities that will torpedo their relations with Arab nations and isolate them among enemies again. If retaliatory atrocities from Israel stood any real chance of accomplishing their goals, then I'd see merit in a conversation about whether the rules of warfare should be bent in this case. But that is not the reality, as anyone outside the Likud echo chamber can clearly see.
As far as standards of non-barbarity, I would say we should hold Israel to the same standards that were pretty carefully followed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan (at least on the battlefield).
On the WW2 analogy, some people seem to think it was obviously OK for the Allies to torch Tokyo, Nagasaki and Dresden. Even Churchill's own "supreme emergency" argument could not justify these atrocities, which happened long after the Axis powers had ceased to pose any offensive threat. If you think Iraq was a just war, that doesn't mean you have to defend Abu Ghraib. Same goes for the strategic bombing campaigns of late WW2. The US should have blockaded Japan, dropped a single atomic bomb and waited much longer than three days before following up with a second one.
"I would say we should hold Israel to the same standards that were pretty carefully followed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan (at least on the battlefield)."
And with how well those turned out, how could anyone think otherwise?
The backgrounds and easily-inferred IQs of the two most notorious Abu Ghraib offenders suggest a problem the military is presumably going to have going forward as long as America should last. The Fort Cavazos (formerly Hood) soldier who went AWOL a year or so back and whose return was apparently so little desired by the Army that they didn't look for him, and the story was only kept alive by his trans wife and drug use partner, who was found dead one day before he resurfaced - comes to mind. This was not a story of national interest and for Fort Hood was utterly of a pattern.
It is hard to say these things; we all know we must support our military. So the judgment should be turned on the class that chose to downgrade a military career, for their children.
These seem like isolated cases to me. My sense is that the US military remains a pretty elite force overall. But ideally I would like to see enlisted troops paid better.
I think it has an elite, and I think they probably are the best of our young people. But my impression is otherwise than yours overall. It may be from the proximity of a major military base and military town, that my entire adult life has been associated with serious dysfunction, far from bright, shiny military discipline.
I have long believed that this all ends with Tel Aviv a smoking nuclear ruin quickly followed by every Arab/Islamic city becoming a smoking nuclear ruin. There is no middle ground of compromise between the Jews of Israel and the various Islamic governments, no matter how much we or they want to pretend otherwise. Saturday proved this once again. A real and stable solution had to be implemented starting 80 years ago, not yesterday.
If I were in Netanyahu's shoes, the Gazans would be pushed into the sea and the entire region emptied of Arabs. This doesn't mean they have to be killed, but they must be relocated to other countries- same for all remaining Arabs in the West Bank. Of course, this doesn't change the outcome I foresee one iota, but that is the political reality as it stands today.
There is no "this all ends". What do you think this is, Ireland? That was nothing. If there is one lesson to draw from history there, it is, "It never ends."
Fair enough. This cycle of it ends.
Yeah, ethnic cleansing is a nasty business, but pair it with a check for a few grand as a "relocation fee" and free plane ticket on Emirates Airlines, and we're firmly in "eh, coulda been worse" territory.
Thinking of that business the other week, the Bari Weiss debate about "whether the sexual revolution failed" or something: a place like Gaza represents to me the failure of that debate to confront the most salient point, the disparate takeup of the sexual revolution around the world.