Random Vosem and eadmund conversation

[jojoju1998]

Don't derail the thread, please.

I'll move the answer elsewhere if you insist (and I won't be very upset if the chain of posts is deleted by mods, really).

Of course you'd reply to the throwaway line. Your commitment to being wrong is admirable. Latin American evangelicalism is completely and utterly irrelevant, while concern about Palestine is hardly the sole realm of (or, for the most part, originating from) NGOs. There's more of a case that the unhesitating support for Israel is unsustainable; there is little love for it in Europe among younger generations. Support for Israel as Staatsräson is a(n absurd) sentiment confined to the middle-aged and elderly not just there but in America as well.

But, like, it isn't: this is generally not what polls show when not hopelessly cherrypicked, many Democratic campaigns in the 2020s hire staffers from pro-Israel campus movements, and the large-scale growth in support for Israel in the United States only began in the 1980s and clearly accelerated during the Second Intifada. (One rather strongly suspects, comparing things like Sunak's policies to Thatcher's, or the emergence of governments like Austria/Czechia whose stances are the thing G-Mac was banned for, that this is also the case in western Europe, with support for Israel having been unusual outside of the West German state apparatus in the 1970s but being broadly common across society today.) There exists a pious fiction that modern Western support for Israel is a holdover from the wars against the Arab states, but that was when it was weakest: modern support for Israel is either religiously motivated or (primarily) motivated by an active distaste for the Palestinian movement, and a desire for it to be destroyed.

Western concern about Palestine held above other global conflict hotspots is broadly what is keeping the conflict going, considering things like UNRWA's budget coming largely from Western sources, and in the absence of funding for such organizations (and the likely evolution of demographic reality in the region) the conflict becomes much likelier to simply end. Western funding for these organizations is a holdover from where public opinion was in the 1990s, and doesn't reflect opinion in the 2020s. It'll go away one way or another.

(Latin American evangelicalism is relevant in the sense that large parts of the world have religious motivations for supporting the state, and this was not true 50 years ago. 'World opinion' is commonly cited as a source of Palestinian strength, but I think this is hopelessly outdated -- if we revisit the question in 20 years, like you suggest, we'll find much more 'world opinion' supporting Israel in a literally religious way.)

I forgot your commitment to arguing the impossible. Know that I appreciate the part about 'cherrypicked polls'.

Support for Israel among Americans of any generation closely correlates with the percentage that claim to be following news closely, which of course rises with age. I don't think there is actually a cohort effect here, substantially because I think support for Israel among American news-watchers is of recent vintage and its causes are still active/strengthening.

There is a distinction between support for Israel and the notion that it constitutes Staatsräson. You're also confusing public attitudes with elite attitudes, and failing to understand the significance of cohorts in opinion changing over time. Those are the main issues.

But I don't think support for Israel depends on the notion of it being a Staatsräson. (And, while it being a Staatsräson is commonly invoked in rhetoric, I'm not sure any country besides Israel has actually behaved in that way, except maybe like 1940s Czechoslovakia.)

Going point by point, I'm not sure what Democrats still hiring staffers from pro-Israel groups is supposed to prove?

It is meant to demonstrate that pro-Israel organizing among young left-wing Americans exists and is relatively active. I may come from a particular campus (Ohio State) where it was unusually common, but the fact that it was very successful makes me suspect that it could be expanded easily.

If anything is to be proved by which staffers are hired, more indicative as to attitudes seems the whole controversy about staffers not being supportive enough of Israel (and accusations that they were racist and/or stupid because they didn't agree) a few months back.

Why would this be more indicative? Your occasional pro-Palestinian statements among staffers are virtually always anonymous, as if those signing don't want to know that they hold an opinion which they know to be unpopular. (In fairness to those staffers, they're probably likelier to be afraid of the opinion being unpopular among the electorate rather than among other staffers. But still.)

Going back and checking news from the time—looking at Jonathan Chait's article, I can understand why you might not want to remember all this—I would assume those staffers hired from pro-Israel groups were the minority opposed to them, conflating their opinions with those of "liberal and progressive Jews" supposedly let down by their allies and saying that their colleagues would applaud swastikas being painted on their cars!

I really don't find your writing or allusions clear at all and I don't understand who "they" are meant to be in the context of this sentence. Is it meant to be pro-Palestine staffers? They definitely don't behave as if they were a majority; nor would it make sense for them to think their opposites would applaud swastikas drawn on their cars? What are you even saying here?

Support for Israel growing over time is completely irrelevant to this. I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make by mentioning it. Do you think that it'll indefinitely continue or something like that?

My point is that the reasons for it continue to be present and are mostly strengthening in Western societies, and I don't think we have very good reasons to think that the continuing shift will peter out. (The shift away from police reform over the last half-decade in the United States happened for basically similar reasons; it is because pro-Palestinian individuals and groups in civil society have adopted a style that repels, such that demagogues like Fetterman can score easy points even among the left by adopting comical pro-Israel stances.) There's no reason to think this is going away in the near-term future.

Support for Israel growing has more to do with cohort replacement and the growth of evangelicalism than anything else. The spikes of support during the Intifadas are just that. Also not sure what "actually there are lot of dog pfp 60-year-olds who cheer Palestinian children dying" has to do with anything? Anyway: things like the difference of Thatcher and Reagan's responses to Sunak's and Biden's have more to do with elite attitudes.

I don't think elite attitudes are as divorced from popular attitudes as you imply; nor do I think that cohort effects are as important as predictable outcomes to news events.

"a holdover from where public opinion was in the 1990s, and doesn't reflect opinion in the 2020s"—I get that this is your whole thing but it could at least be a bit more convincing. I don't for a single second think that you actually, sincerely believe this.

Oh, trust me, I have opinions about the future of public opinion much more exotic than that one. Do I need to find my posts where I argue that it is plausible that in the absence of a World Wars-level calamity that the American public school system and the NHS will eventually be destroyed in a mass popular movement?

Your interesting euphemism for ethnic cleansing: "the likely evolution of demographic reality". It's quite something when you are using such language.

This is a forum about demographics, and those of us that discuss Israel know that the long-term trend is Palestinian emigration and Jewish immigration; that over the long run the Jewish TFR is rising; and that Palestinian emigration tends to spike during periods of conflict. It's no more genocide than the fact that the once-heavily-Russian neighborhood I grew up in in Brooklyn is now heavily-Chinese.

Also if we're looking at religion twenty years from now, Israel is going to be in the process of transforming into a halachic state, which should about finish off any support from secular or mainline/Catholic quarters.

Probably not; unlike in the Anglophone world in Israel there is heavy attrition from ultra-Orthodox Judaism. It'll be more like 80 years. (I also don't see why that would finish off support from secular or mainline/Catholic quarters? Most current support for Israel comes from distaste or opposition to the Palestinian movement in the West, which would probably not fundamentally change in such an event. Some of the support for Israel is undergirded by sympathy for ultra-Orthodox Judaism -- consider the Lubavitcher Rebbe having been a relatively prominent public intellectual in the US in his time, or everything about Javier Milei -- and while most of it isn't, I don't really think this would change much even if it happens in the way you describe.)

Finally and frankly, it is irrelevant if tens of millions of Brazilians join American evangelicals—who, conversely, are relevant and in decline—in placing the interests of Israel before their own state's. It has as much value as Russia appealing to third-worldism and the 'global south'. 'World opinion' is irrelevant. This century is still the West's and China's.

So long as this is true, the West and China will eventually eviscerate the current culture which exists among humanitarian organizations, and my suspicion is that without their propaganda that the left-wing pro-Palestinian movement will wither away, and I indeed expect this to happen over the next few decades. As with all long-term predictions there is substantial uncertainty, but I think this is the path of least resistance.

It's not just the left wingers who are sympethetic to Palestine.....



The Catholic Church has been one of the most vocal pro palestinian religious groups for a while.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/13/pope-benedict-palestinians-gaza#:~:text=Today%20the%20pope%20made%20his,of%20the%20coastal%20strip%20lifted.


"Today the pope made his strongest call yet for a "sovereign Palestinian homeland". He said mass in Bethlehem's Manger Square and offered his "solidarity" to the Palestinians of Gaza, telling them he wanted to see the Israeli blockade of the coastal strip lifted."

This was from Pope Benedict XVI, who I don't think anyone on this planet would consider to be a liberal in anyway shape or form.

Of course you'd reply to the throwaway line. Your commitment to being wrong is admirable. Latin American evangelicalism is completely and utterly irrelevant, while concern about Palestine is hardly the sole realm of (or, for the most part, originating from) NGOs. There's more of a case that the unhesitating support for Israel is unsustainable; there is little love for it in Europe among younger generations. Support for Israel as Staatsräson is a(n absurd) sentiment confined to the middle-aged and elderly not just there but in America as well.

But, like, it isn't: this is generally not what polls show when not hopelessly cherrypicked, many Democratic campaigns in the 2020s hire staffers from pro-Israel campus movements, and the large-scale growth in support for Israel in the United States only began in the 1980s and clearly accelerated during the Second Intifada. (One rather strongly suspects, comparing things like Sunak's policies to Thatcher's, or the emergence of governments like Austria/Czechia whose stances are the thing G-Mac was banned for, that this is also the case in western Europe, with support for Israel having been unusual outside of the West German state apparatus in the 1970s but being broadly common across society today.) There exists a pious fiction that modern Western support for Israel is a holdover from the wars against the Arab states, but that was when it was weakest: modern support for Israel is either religiously motivated or (primarily) motivated by an active distaste for the Palestinian movement, and a desire for it to be destroyed.

Western concern about Palestine held above other global conflict hotspots is broadly what is keeping the conflict going, considering things like UNRWA's budget coming largely from Western sources, and in the absence of funding for such organizations (and the likely evolution of demographic reality in the region) the conflict becomes much likelier to simply end. Western funding for these organizations is a holdover from where public opinion was in the 1990s, and doesn't reflect opinion in the 2020s. It'll go away one way or another.

(Latin American evangelicalism is relevant in the sense that large parts of the world have religious motivations for supporting the state, and this was not true 50 years ago. 'World opinion' is commonly cited as a source of Palestinian strength, but I think this is hopelessly outdated -- if we revisit the question in 20 years, like you suggest, we'll find much more 'world opinion' supporting Israel in a literally religious way.)

I forgot your commitment to arguing the impossible. Know that I appreciate the part about 'cherrypicked polls'.

There is a distinction between support for Israel and the notion that it constitutes Staatsräson. You're also confusing public attitudes with elite attitudes, and failing to understand the significance of cohorts in opinion changing over time. Those are the main issues.

Going point by point, I'm not sure what Democrats still hiring staffers from pro-Israel groups is supposed to prove? If anything is to be proved by which staffers are hired, more indicative as to attitudes seems the whole controversy about staffers not being supportive enough of Israel (and accusations that they were racist and/or stupid because they didn't agree) a few months back.

Going back and checking news from the time—looking at Jonathan Chait's article, I can understand why you might not want to remember all this—I would assume those staffers hired from pro-Israel groups were the minority opposed to them, conflating their opinions with those of "liberal and progressive Jews" supposedly let down by their allies and saying that their colleagues would applaud swastikas being painted on their cars!

Support for Israel growing over time is completely irrelevant to this. I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make by mentioning it. Do you think that it'll indefinitely continue or something like that? Support for Israel growing has more to do with cohort replacement and the growth of evangelicalism than anything else. The spikes of support during the Intifadas are just that. Also not sure what "actually there are lot of dog pfp 60-year-olds who cheer Palestinian children dying" has to do with anything? Anyway: things like the difference of Thatcher and Reagan's responses to Sunak's and Biden's have more to do with elite attitudes.

"a holdover from where public opinion was in the 1990s, and doesn't reflect opinion in the 2020s"—I get that this is your whole thing but it could at least be a bit more convincing. I don't for a single second think that you actually, sincerely believe this. Your interesting euphemism for ethnic cleansing: "the likely evolution of demographic reality". It's quite something when you are using such language. Also if we're looking at religion twenty years from now, Israel is going to be in the process of transforming into a halachic state, which should about finish off any support from secular or mainline/Catholic quarters.

Finally and frankly, it is irrelevant if tens of millions of Brazilians join American evangelicals—who, conversely, are relevant and in decline—in placing the interests of Israel before their own state's. It has as much value as Russia appealing to third-worldism and the 'global south'. 'World opinion' is irrelevant. This century is still the West's and China's.

Ironically, a large percentage albeit declining of Palestinians are Christians ( they have fled however, having more education, and more job skills; fleeing to places like the US.).

They are no fans of Israel, but they fear Hamas as well.


Also, these christians are probably not " Christian " enough for Evangelicals anyway. They're latin rite catholic or maronite; Eastern Orthodox.