Specter of Reason

Anti-Zionist protesters have a lot to complain about. In the seven months since the October 7 massacre, over 35,000 Gazans have been killed, compared to less than 2,000 Israelis. Population centers in Gaza have been decimated, while Israel has been able to fend off most of the missiles fired into the Jewish state.  Around two million Gazans have been displaced, compared to perhaps 250,000 Israelis.   These numbers are impossible to ignore, but they do not tell the whole story. For critics of Zionism, the current Israel-Gaza war is just the latest chapter in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the state of Israel. This struggle, which they call  the Nakba ( "the Catastrophe"), began in the late 19th century, when Zionists staked a claim to the land in Palestine as their national home, and crystallised during the first Arab-Israel war (1947-1949), when Israel ascended to statehood and over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees, mostly in Gaza and the West Bank....

My wife and I were talking about it this evening, how her paternal ancestry was rooted in a part of Poland that doesn't exist anymore. The land exists, and many of the villages exist, but it stopped being Poland in 1945. Today it is part of Ukraine. We discussed how this might be similar to what happened around the same time with Palestine in the Middle East. After WWII, Britain and the Soviet Union negotiated new Polish borders. On the one hand, northeastern Germany was absorbed by Poland. (That's why the city we live in now is called Szczecin, and not Stettin, and why Danzig is now Gdańsk.) On the other hand, eastern Poland went to the Soviet Union. Over one million Poles were forced to relocate. Looking at the map below (Poland gained the brightly coloured areas and lost the grey area), it's easy to see that Poland also got smaller in the process. Poland's borders before and after WWII This was only about two years before Britain abandoned its Palestine Mandate, leav...

South Africa's strongest case seems to be that Israel has not done enough to crack down on hate speech and possible incitements to genocide within the country. While Israel has taken some steps in this direction, the ICJ may decide that they have not done enough. A plausible outcome would be a provision recommending that they do more. As for South Africa's argument that Israel's military activities should be suspended until a verdict is reached: I think the case is extremely weak, and the ICJ is almost certain to reject it. On the one hand, South Africa ignores the many efforts Israel has made to protect innocent Palestinian lives and comply with the Genocide Convention. Second, South Africa fails to take into account the fact that Hamas continues to be an active participant in hostilities, and that hostages and other Israeli civilians are still in danger--hundreds of thousands of whom have already been displaced. South Africa's argument is ideologically driven, which t...

Does Hamas = ISIS? What does that slogan even mean? Certainly ISIS and Hamas are distinguishable. I don't think anyone is saying that Hamas and ISIS are the same organization, with the same leaders, the same members, or even the exact same ideas. It seems obvious that "Hamas=ISIS" only means that their goals and practices are *similar enough* so that we should treat them the same. On that topic, I encourage you to read this analysis from The Conversation . It provides a good overview of similarities and differences between the two terrorist organisations, if you want to make up your own mind on the topic. It is certainly much more useful than  this opinion piece by Monica Marks , which I believe is representative of the pro-Palestinian movement. My suspicion is that its publication in Time was not based on the merits of its argument, but rather because of the anti-Israel rhetoric it propagates. The inadequacy of Marks' argument is plain as day. While she admits that ...

Professor Jason Stanley. Photo taken from   https://campuspress.yale.edu/jasonstanley/ Approximately a month after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, instigating the ongoing Israel-Gaza war, the Guardian published an opinion piece by Jason Stanley , the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, entitled, "My Life Has Been Defined By Genocide of Jewish People. I Look On Gaza With Concern." Though I had not had any interaction with Professor Stanley in a number of years, I felt inclined to share my immediate reaction with him. After all, we had enjoyed some acquaintance in the past, primarily spawned by my criticisms of his philosophical approach to know-how and his take on Gilbert Ryle. Unfortunately, our heated exchanges over the 2016 Democratic primary led us to lose contact. (Incidentally, I decided to break off contact first, though he might have been considering doing the same.) Unsurprisingly, he did not respond to my initial thoughts on his recent Gu...