Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 18, and yes, it’s shabbos for Jewish cats, though the High Holy Days are over. If you eat pork, however, it’s National Whole Hog Barbecue Day, particularly celebrated in North Carolina. Here’s a friend of mine in Pittsburgh barbecuing a hog in his backyard:
And a visit to the best pulled-pork BBQ I know: Allen and Son, a few miles from Chapel Hill, NC. Sadly, this wonderful place is now gone. There’s a new iteration nearby, but it’s not run by the original owners, and I haven’t been there.
A geneticist named Corbin chowing down on pulled pork:
And on Fridays they featured banana pudding, the classic dessert after BBQ in the South (note the vanilla wafers, an essential ingredient). There’s also meringue.
Russia has launched a new and dangerous campaign of provocation against NATO. Over the past six weeks, it has sent drones over Poland and Romania and flown fighter jets into Estonia. Russia was also very likely behind drone flights that disrupted activity at airports in Denmark, Belgium and Germany. President Vladimir Putin has unconvincingly denied responsibility for all these acts and in fact seems happy for the world to believe Russia is behind them.
His goals are to scare, exhaust and divide Europeans, causing them to question their support for Ukraine and undermine its efforts to repel Russia’s invasion. Ultimately, he also wants to make the United States look weak and fragment the NATO alliance. Responding wisely to him is vital for Washington and Europe. It is not easy. Striking back hard risks escalating conflict, while doing nothing conveys a weakness that invites future aggression.
NATO allies are aware that Russia is testing them and so far have done a good job of responding. They have denounced the incursions, forthrightly blamed Russia for them and met this month in Copenhagen in a show of unity. “We are not at war,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany said recently, “but we are no longer at peace either.”
There is more to do. European leaders should make clear that Russian aggression against NATO countries risks a forceful response, including the shooting down of drones — as the West has already done — and potentially of Russian fighter planes that enter NATO airspace.
The United States and its NATO allies should also use the new Russian aggression as a reason to increase their support for Ukraine, sending the message that Mr. Putin’s attempt to weaken Western resolve has backfired. The visit this Friday of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to the White House is an opportunity for President Trump to commit to new military and economic aid for Kyiv.
Trump has also said that NATO should shoot down any Russian planes that violate its airspace. That, of course, could launch WWIII, but unless Putin is suicidal, he won’t break out the nukes. Still, this is a delicate dance. But I do feel strongly that Putin should not be allowed to keep any part of Ukraine.
The op-ed of course notes the danger of retaliation, and the instability of Putin,
*Nellie Bowles is back with her weekly news-and-snark column at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Trump treaty summit”. As always, I’ll steal a few juicy items.
→ Ceasefire-measefire: No one cares about your silly ceasefire. Ceasefire? Now? Sorry—never said that, you have us mixed up. The war is and always has been against Israel existing, and so now it will simply morph. Here’s the National Students for Justice in Palestine, mourning the death of pro-Hamas social media influencer Saleh al-Jafarawi, known as Mr. FAFO, killed by Hamas’s rivals in Gaza: “Saleh’s martyrdom is a testament to the fact that the fight against Zionism in all its manifestations—from the IOF to its collaborators—must continue.” Fascinating. [JAC: Whaaaaat?]
To mourn the end of the war, a huge pro-Palestine march moved through London. British MP Zarah Sultana wrote up the next set of demands we’ll see from the movement: “We must sever all diplomatic ties with the genocidal apartheid state of Israel immediately. Expel the ambassador. Close the embassy. As apartheid South Africa was isolated, so too must Israel be—a pariah state. We’ll march until Palestine is free, from the river to the sea.” Here’s the Democratic Socialists of America, announcing that they remain unhappy upon hearing that they’d gotten exactly what they campaigned for: “DSA stands for the full freedoms and self-determination of the Palestinian people including the end of Israel’s colonization and occupation of all Arab lands.” Of all Arab lands, which some might say is all land across the Middle East, taken by one of the most accomplished colonizing forces of all time (the Arabs! Who came roaring out of Saudi Arabia). Well, they’re all taken except for that one little speck in the eye called Israel.
To mark the end of the bloodshed, Christiane Amanpour, for her part, announced on CNN that the Israeli hostages were “treated better” than average Gazans (I think of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, apparently treated so very well, right Ms. Amanpour?). She later apologized. Greta Thunberg’s Global Sumud Flotilla group posted a terrifying image of a booby-trapped children’s toy, saying it was just discovered in Gaza. This is odd because the image the group posted is from Yemen in 2018. Oh, well. Nevertheless. I’m sure the flotilla will issue a prompt correction.
I found Amanpour’s apology She’s about as woke as they come, and any decent journalist would have been able to find out how the captives were treated:
Earlier live on air, I spoke about what a day of real joy this is, for Israeli families whose loved ones are finally being returned from two years of horrific Hamas captivity, and for civilians in Gaza, who have finally had a reprieve from two years of brutal, deadly war.
→ Never change, NPR: When Venezuela’s opposition leader won a Nobel Prize, NPR was aghast. Sure, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro rigs the elections. Sure, under his socialist-authoritarian regime, Venezuela has suffered economic catastrophe and famine. But we must stand with all the world’s leftist regimes and stand against so-called opposition parties (traitors). Here’s how NPR frames María Corina Machado, who lives in hiding and is barred from running for election, on winning the Nobel:
They chose a good scary pic of her too. Nice and screamy, a cross around her neck (is that the fascism?!). Her hand is curled into a fist, like she’s going to punch a baby or something! NPR calling Machado far-right is perfection. Remember how, for decades, NPR was funded by taxpayers and we were told it was so fair? No bias? I recite it in my head every night.
→ Nonbinary identification is collapsing: The number of young people identifying as neither male nor female has fallen through the floor, which is crazy because I thought they were all born that way. An analysis of data from surveys by Brown University, Andover, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) shows a massive drop-off among nonbinary students from the 2022–2023 peak. Maybe nonbinary was just another boarding school fad that has started to fade—pronouns are out, trust funds are back in (good thing polo shirts work for both vibes). I always have struggled with conjugating verbs with the singular they/them and got in trouble for encouraging a friend or two to just pick one, either one, it’s fine! But I’ve made peace with they. I’m good at it now. I’m cool, I say, just as the youth move on to some new test. Let’s pray that by the time my kids get old enough for this type of thing, it’s swung back to sneaking out and begging for makeup.
*Bret Stephens has been the most reliable NYT op-ed writer on the war in Gaza, and his latest column gives us his take on “Why Israel won the war”. But did it? It seems so for the time being, but the threat of future terrorism has yet to be dealt with in the second phase of the cease-fire agreement. But one thing is for sure, as embodied in the Hebrew slogan “Am Yisrael chai”: “The people of Israel live”)=. And that’s what his column is about. The answer is simple: patriotism—Israelis love their country even though many don’t like the government. Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the October 7 attacks, apparently didn’t realize that.
We’ll probably never know whether Sinwar, who was killed by Israeli troops a year ago this week, ever came to grips with the scale of his misjudgment. Israelis did not crumble in the face of his butchery, which he appears to have specifically ordered against soldiers and civilian communities alike “so as to evoke fear in Israelis and destabilize the country,” according to a recent report in The Times. They did not limit themselves to several weeks of fighting, as they had in previous wars, or buckle to unceasing international pressure, or surrender most of their war aims for the sake of releasing the hostages.
Instead, Israelis rallied and won — at least inasmuch as a lasting victory is ever possible in the Middle East.
They have changed the game with Lebanon and Syria. They have humiliated and defanged Iran, whose regime, as Karim Sadjadpour notes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, is tottering. They have gotten back their remaining living hostages without giving up their most important leverage in Gaza, which is the control of its inner perimeter. They have secured the commitment of Muslim countries to a Gaza free from Hamas’s governance: If that fails, they have some assurance that Gazans will resist future attempts by Hamas to drag them into another calamitous war. They have maintained diplomatic relations with friendly Arab states. And, for all the global street protests, hostile op-eds and meaningless arms embargoes, they have the full-throated backing of the only foreign government that matters: America’s.
He notes the damage that Gaza has sustained, and how that (and other factors) have led to worldwide opprobrium against Israel, but thinks that the latter, at least, could not have been avoided. And here’s his answer:
But the how questions are ultimately less revealing than the whys. Why, contrary to what Sinwar believed, did Israel not collapse on Oct. 7? Why did Israelis persevere through mass murder, forced internal displacement, ballistic-missile attacks and international isolation? Why was Israel determined to win rather than settle for a premature end to the war that would have left Israel’s major enemies mostly unscathed?
The answer came to me on an Israeli military base near Gaza, where I met a sergeant who went by the nickname Cholo. Cholo had been D.J.’ing raves in Brazil but returned to Israel immediately after Oct. 7 to serve. “I am not supporting this government,” he told me. “But I will go to the army.”
The word for this is patriotism, or what Mark Twain called “supporting your country all the time, but your government only when it deserves it.” Many of the Israeli soldiers who fought and fell in Gaza and other fronts were surely marching against Netanyahu during the protests over the judicial reform.
But they came from nearly every political quarter to fight not out of ideological or partisan conviction, but because Sinwar’s aims and methods on Oct. 7 made clear that the stakes were existential. What’s more, the gleeful support those aims and methods instantly engendered worldwide made clear that, even now, there’s still no safe harbor for Jews. Not Australia. Not Canada. Not Britain. Not France. Not Germany. And perhaps not America.
. . . Nor did Israelis fight only because they were faced by an existential threat. They also faced an existential lie: the lie that Israel is a settler-colonialist state, a nonnative invasive species that has no place in that land. It’s a lie that’s taken hold everywhere, even if a 3,000-year historical record disproves it. And it’s a lie that, as it’s grown bolder, attacks the very roots of Jewish identity. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem …” wasn’t simply meant as literary metaphor. To prove the point, Israelis had to fight and win the war.
Well, that last bit sounds somewhat hyperbolic. How many IDF soldiers went to war to disprove the lie that Israel was a “settler-colonialist state”. It isn’t, but the fighting was really to preserve the one place in the world Jews are allowed to go.
The U.S. military killed an unspecified number of suspected drug traffickers transiting the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela on Thursday, an attack that left some survivors, according to people familiar with the matter.
U.S. forces took multiple people into custody and have detained them aboard a Navy vessel in the region, people familiar with the matter said. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an operation that has not been announced publicly.
It was not immediately clear how many people were killed in the strike or how many survived — a first since the Trump administration dramatically escalated its counternarcotics activities in the Caribbean last month.
Spokespeople for the Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment.
The operation, including the capture of survivors, was first reported by Reuters.
To date, the Trump administration has disclosed the deaths of 27 people it has accused of being drug smugglers. Thursday’s strike marks the sixth known attack on suspected drug boats near Venezuela since September.
The operation raises significant new questions about the legality of President Donald Trump’s campaign of violence in the Caribbean, which Democrats — and at least one Republican — in Congress have said is an indefensible use of deadly force.
The Trump administration has said it is in “armed conflict” with drug traffickers, whom the president and others have describes as terrorists. International law requires the protection of wounded combatants when military forces are able.
. . . . The strikes come as the U.S. military continues to build up a significant presence in the Caribbean, including sending fighter jets to Puerto Rico and sending at least eight warships to the region, which in years past has seen very little U.S. military presence.
I have doubts not only whether these strikes are legal (could we be going to war with Venezuela?), but whether the boats are indeed carrying drugs, I’ve seen nothing in the news to demonstrate that, though presumably the U.S. has information about it. Still, I want evidence rather than assertions!
*Our University has cut way back on funding the humanities and accepting grad students in those areas (“pausing admission”). The Nation has questioned this in a new piece, “Why did UChicago destroy the humanities?” (archived here, h/t Thomas). The article is a bit unhinged, but does point out a real problem: our increasing debt and the decline of the humanities, something I mourn:
n August, the University of Chicago shocked the academic world by announcing that it would be pausing PhD admissions in nearly all of its world-famous humanities programs. While the ongoing crisis in the humanities—that is, the deliberate marginalization and even elimination of humanities programs by neoliberal administrations in order to reorient schools toward more lucrative business, engineering, and tech programs—is not unique to UChicago, the extent of the damage is especially jarring. What is distinct about the university is its staggering indebtedness. According to Clifford Ando, a professor of classics who has been reporting on the crisis for years, the university’s debt ballooned from $2.2 billion to $5.8 billion between 2006 and 2022—an increase of more than 250 percent, and the equivalent of 68 percent of the university’s total assets. Tuition from 85 percent of the student body is needed just to service this debt. It’s not surprising, then, that UChicago has hollowed itself out by repeatedly robbing Peter to pay Paul. (It is somewhat more surprising, however, that it also gambled—and lost—$20 million on cryptocurrency.)
Auithor Kate Wagner then points to the building spree our university has had, spending millions and millions of dollars on buildings that she thinks are overpriced and architecturally dire.
But now the fun is over and it’s time to pay up. According to Ando, $900 million of the university’s debt will come due over the next five years, forcing it to refinance at much higher interest rates. One must ask: If the university was in such dire financial straits, which only worsened as the years went by, why did it continue to undertake such construction follies? Especially given the fact that the quadrangle—the collection of Collegiate Gothic buildings that house most of the humanities programs—needs $1 billion in deferred maintenance? The answer lies in rank elitism.
. . . .For most of its history, the university as an institution was a public good. But thanks in part to the good old boys in the UChicago economics department, it is now little more than a generator of real and human capital alike. An education is no longer primarily about the perpetuation of human knowledge, but rather an investment one makes (with increasingly diminishing returns) in order to secure higher wages. Meanwhile, university administrators continue to make things worse for students and researchers by cutting majors, recklessly expanding the student population, threatening to teach languages via ChatGPT, and immiserating an army of underpaid adjuncts.
Architecture, like the university, has historically been a public good, something to be evaluated based on whether it contributes to human flourishing. Now it most often seems like part of a marketing ploy. It’s not the fault of the architects that these buildings have been used to starve what little humanity remains of a once-illustrious institution, but it’s a travesty all the same. The University of Chicago’s architecture once paid homage to the medieval trivium and quadrivium—the bedrock of the liberal arts. Now it pays homage only to money.
This is more or less a rant, and though it may be true (I am not party to the University’s finances), they could have at least mention the areas that will be paused. You can get more information in the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon:
The University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts & Humanities is preparing for a significant reorganization to cut administrative costs, with proposed changes expected to be presented to Provost Katherine Baicker by late August.
Citing new federal policies and shifts in the “underlying financial models” for higher education, the division is considering consolidating its 15 departments into eight, reducing language instruction, and establishing minimum class and program sizes.
You can see the departments at the link, but I can’t find which ones are supposed to be consolidated. It’s a shame, and it’s a shame that they’re reducing languge instruction. This is what happens when a university is regarded as a brick-and-mortar education store.
*Oh, and Ghost, the Giant Pacific Octopus senescing towards death as she cares for a brood of infertile eggs in a California aqauarium, is apparently still alive. Every day I follow her, but there has been no news as the dying cephalopod has been taken off public view to permit her to starve to death in private.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili invites us to rub her tummy, but she is not up for pleasure:
Hili: It’s strange, but even hedonism gets boring sometimes.
Me: Unfortunately.
In Polish:
Hili: To dziwne, ale nawet hedonizm czasem robi się nudny.
Ja: Niestety.
For some reason Twitter has prohibited us from embedding many tweets from Masih, so here’s a screenshot (original is here). More morality police: 80,000 of them!
A tweet relevant to the one above, but retweeted by Masih’s stand-in, J. K. Rowling:
This is the Taliban celebrating the closure of girls schools by dancing in their empty classrooms.
Please stand up for Afghan women rights and give cry to taliban and support Afghan women by every way you can 🌿🙏
And be Afghan women boices🙏🌿💔@AjaTheEmpress@AllisonPearson… pic.twitter.com/aoRPkN5vw3
Yet another pro-feminist tweet showing a brave woman. An abaya is a full-body-covering dress, but not a burqa. This took place about 8 years ago, but it’s cropped up on my feed. (h/t Greg)
Chess Grandmaster Anna Muzychuk refuses to play in Saudi Arabia and says: “In a few days, I will lose two world titles, back to back.” Because I decided not to go to Saudi Arabia. I refuse to play by special rules, to wear abaya, to be accompanied by a man so I can leave the… pic.twitter.com/AsQglh9XB8
From Luana. Like the University of Chicago, Brown has also “paused” admission to the humanities:
More budget cuts for the humanities:
Brown University has paused PhD admissions in “Egyptology and Assyriology, Classics, Anthropology, French and Francophone Studies, German Studies and Italian Studies.”
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death (probably with her mother) as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was three, and would have been 85 today had she live.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
There are two things to aim at in life; first to get what you want, and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second. -Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (18 Oct 1865-1946)
The zeroth thing is to work out how to decide what you really want, and then decide.
That is the first time I have seen the word zeroth used other than in
Azimov”s robot stories.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=zeroth gives an 1896 origin, by physicists (not biochemists 🙂). The Wikipedia page for it gives lots of usages, including 3 different ones for “zeroth law” (including of course Dr A’s).
Nellie and Bret Stephans make a couple of nice points that I generally do not see in articles on Israel. Nellie points out the “speck” of middle east land that is Israel. Yes indeed. In the Routledge atlas of the Arab-Israel conflict, Martin Gilbert points out that the settlement ended up with about 1.2 million square miles of Arab land to about 10,000 square miles of Jewish national homeland. Stephans rejects the “settler-colonialist state” narrative and explicitly points out the more than 3,000 year history of the Jewish people in the land called Israel today. (They ain’t settlers). And I might even take the viewpoint that rather than acting as colonizers in the 20th century, that post WW1, with partitioning, the British and French actually liberated the Arab counties from under the thumb of the Germany-sided Turkish Ottoman (colonial) rule and the partitioning began a process which led over the following decades to independent kingdoms and states. And of course let us not ignore possibly the greatest colonizer of them all: the 700 CE expansion of the Moslem world.
Yes, you have to pay close attention to when disputants begin their historical timelines. The Christian-Arab conflict didn’t begin with the Crusades.
To me, the historical claim of Jews to any part of the Holy Land is the weakest reason to support Israel’s continuing existence and territorial integrity. I suspect the rest of the world knows this and rejects it. Only some</> “first peoples” get to have a claim of indigeneous sacredness heard, and Jews aren’t on that list. The flip side is that decolonization and indigenization works against the interests of the hundreds of millions of us “settlers” in North and South America who won’t be able to escape to Israel if we are ever pushed into the sea, as the “Landback1492” movement says it wants to do to us. We must shut our ears to all arguments for mythical indigenization, including those made by Jewish friends and allies, even if those made by Jews are somewhat tongue-in-cheek to annoy the Left. (I can’t help but think that Canadian aboriginal chiefs who participate every year in Toronto’s Walk with Israel have an ulterior motive. They always do.)
The best reasons are that:
1) Jews are there now. What they have they should hold, with as much military force and bloodshed as necessary. Whatever anyone has, anywhere, he has only as long as he can keep someone else from taking it. This interest aligns with our own interests here. If Israel needs a founding legend to ensure diplomatic support from America, go for it.
2) Israel and the Zionist Judaism that gives it its reason for being is an outpost of Western civilization in an uncivilized part of the world. Jews are the good guys. The civilization they created — ours — deserves to be assisted because it is better for everyone. That Israel stands on its own two feet and is successful is a big help, much as it makes its enemies resent it.
3) Related to 2), Jews can develop the land more productively than Muslims can and should, as John Locke, displace the less productive.
“To me, the historical claim of Jews to any part of the Holy Land is the weakest reason to support Israel’s continuing existence and territorial integrity.”
And yet, this historical claim is part and parcel of valid International law. Several treaties, and the Mandate for Palestine itself (which passed on unanimous vote by the League of Nations) reference this connection.
The San Remo Declaration explicitly recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” as a pre-existing right and called for reconstituting (not creating anew) their national home in that land. This international agreement gave the Jewish people exclusive legal and political rights to establish their national home in Palestine.
The language used at San Remo was stronger than the original Balfour Declaration, transforming it from a political promise into an operative obligation for Britain, as Mandator, to facilitate the Jewish national home via the Mandate system of the L.O.N..
For me, International law is the strongest reason to support the integrity of Israel, and the weakest reason is the claim by some that the Old Testament ordains it.
I would agree with Leslie that the claim based on history from 2000 years ago is weak. It’s too far into the past. Also, over the lengthy span from about AD 650 to about AD 1917, the region was ruled by Muslims. There’s been so much migration, the modern world would be unworkable if we accepted claims going that far back (do we regard the English [“Angles”] as having a claim on Denmark? Do Native Americans have a claim on East Asia?) We should have a de facto “statute of limitations” at about 4 or 5 generations back. (Note: I’m happy to support the state of Israel based on post-1917 history.)
Leslie, ref to your 3), “They made the desert bloom,” used to be a common phrase, but I haven’t heard it in decades. Of course, people forget.
Speaking of such, if you’ve ever been to White Sands National Park, you’ve seen that the natural desert blooms are spectacular.
MAD Magazine’s David Berg was my first source many years ago for “made the desert bloom”. He avoided the topic of Israel and made only oblique references to Judaism in his “The Lighter Side of . . . “ strips (which were set mostly in Brooklyn to my tender eye) but he wrote several paperbacks on his own time making the case for Israel and Zionism around the time of the 1967 war. Heady stuff for an adolescent. I read years later that the other Jewish staffers at MAD found him a bit much, prone to lecturing, but he made an impression on me, opened my mind.
@Gingerbaker
Thanks. Yes, modern international law is a robust defence. It still has to be enforced by looking to be unchewable and being known ahead of time to be indigestible.
I agree 100 pc (as an atheist). The biblical “chain of title” is a good argument, but the Enlightenment values trump them all.
And miliary reasons. After so many wars of annihilation against Israel, all lost, Israel has MORE than “earned” the land they have. Which is why the term “Occupied” pisses me off so much, as does “West Bank”.
D.A.
NYC
Would you support your home being turned over to the Lenape?
By my 1), 2), and 3), the Lenape can’t have David’s home. No one is going to turn it over to them. David is a citizen of a state, sovereign to The People. It owes him the duty of helping him drive off the Lenape, with guns, if they try to take it. States make a claim of sovereignty within their borders, and that’s what that claim looks like. Any claim by the Lenape that they should have his land back must be answered, “No”, by David and by the U.S. Government.
It gets into the weeds as to whether the Lenape hypothetically want David’s land fee simple — just the deed — which leaves it still American soil where U.S. law applies, or do they want it as their sovereign “decolonized” territory, where Lenape law would apply and U.S. law wouldn’t. But in either the event the only acceptable answer is still “No.”
If you think this has any relevance to Palestine, please specify.
Leslie, I didn’t say would you turn it over, I said would you support it being turned over by the same processes that had Palestinian homes and businesses taken when Israel was established. Of course this will never happen, but it’s something I think about when considering what happened to the first peoples on this continent.
Maybe I’m not the right person to ask because I’m not on your wavelength: I don’t think much at all about “what happened to” the people our European ancestors encountered here. (We don’t know that they were the “first” peoples, as if that gives them any special cosmological rights.) They fought with and drove off their pre-Contact competitors for food and sex, else what was warpaint for? We did the same when our patterns of land use became incompatible with theirs. Ranchers and pastoralists can’t share land with hunters, nor can farmers and orchardmen share land with gatherers. They must build fences and punish thieves. If the hunters and gatherers want to become ranchers and farmers on their own land, as some did, and obey our law to stop trying to drive us off ours, then we can get along.
The reason I don’t dwell on this emotionally is that there is a line of thought in academe and in some corners of the federal civil service that the Canadian State is illegitimate and has never existed, that this is all “native land.” I don’t want to foster that view by wringing my hands about treaties and UNDRIP and reconciliation and cultural genocide (no such thing) in residential schools. Especially not “decolonization”. That’s as destructive as land reform in South Africa. Land acknowledgements in Canada aren’t just the empty virtue-signalling they are in the States. Here the (white) speakers intend them to undermine Canadian sovereignty as they encourage indigenous self-determination.
“What we have we hold” has to apply here in Canada (and in the U.S.) I must accept it as the modus operandi for sovereign Israeli territory in Judaea and Samaria, too. (I recognize that Israel has diplomatic reasons to refer to the provinces as “disputed” territory.) Within those territories, Israeli law holds, including whatever law Israel applies to former landholdings from when Jordan, Britain, or the Ottomans occupied them. Israel will have to decide how to settle that land, and what to do about people who have old deeds granted by a now-defunct sovereign. It’s hers. The settlements aren’t my business any more than Canada’s indigenous policy is Israel’s.
” the same processes that had Palestinian homes and businesses taken when Israel was established”
That certainly is the Palestinian narrative, but I see no evidence for the claim. Israel was delineated under International law in 1922, and assumed sovereignty when it declared its independence on the afternoon of May 14th, 1948.
There was no taking of property or businesses up through that time, although many Arabs were abandoning their property for months prior, either from fear of war or to follow the advice of Arab generals in order to expedite the genocide of Jews.
Even Mahmoud Abbas. the head of the PA. in March 1976, (published in the official PLO journal Falastin al‑Thawra) acknowledged this:
“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate, and subjected them to political and ideological slavery.”
So, yeah, the Arabs who abandoned their properties forfeited them. But there was no program or process to seize Arab properties or businesses. The Arabs who stayed now make up more than 20% of Israeli citizenry.
Leslie, you are right that you are the wrong person to discuss this with, at least in this forum rather than over a beer.
GB, all technically correct but denies that people lost their homes and businesses back then and now as well. And there certainly is no use for the Palestinian narrative on this forum.
Yesterday Mamdani claimed that the terms of the cease-fire require both Israel and Hamas to disarm.
One of the things that sticks out in my mind from my First Year at Chicago was that there were signs all over the place saying “Don’t Walk on the Grass” in the Quads. Of course, being Chicago, they were all written in foreign languages, and not just European ones. I remember signs in Urdu (someone had to identify it for me) and Sanskrit. Over my four years this practice petered out.
A year ago I wrote the following, unusually lyrical for me, article in my column about the death of Sinwar.
You actually made me feel a bit sorry for Sinwar, which was probably not your intent
HAHAHHA!
Keep well Frank,
D.A.
NYC
For some reason, teenage girls are fad-prone. I don’t know why. We have had Bobby-soxers, Bulimia, Anorexia, Cutting, etc. Now (maybe wrong tense) we have trans. The other fads were not taken too seriously (for society). They may have been quite deadly for the girls involved.
I’ve thought about this a lot, Frank.
There are certain female skewed personality traits (to get along, consensus, etc). Add that to high anxiety and you’ve got a “craze”.
Also.. the witch panics, and pretty much all social manias and moral panics develop from young women. Females also are in charge of enforcing social rules.
Also… young women are precious – they are the bottleneck in human reproduction ’cause they got the WOMBS!
NOTE—–
I mean no disrespect to our wonderful broads, of course. Without you ladies we’d still be living in caves beating each other over the head for kicks! I don’t want to be the James Damore of WEIT! 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Any idea how much dosh Damore got out of Google in the settlement of his lawsuit? It might be a good career move….
Wow! Sloths (‘slowths’?) AND sea cucumbers both taking a poop! Is this going to be a new series?
Ahem, that’s ‘slowths!’ (also the derived unit of inverse speed — time per distance).
Good piece from Bret Stephens, judging from the excerpts. Yes, Israelis love their country and are proud to be Israelis. Just as important is that Israel may be the only country in the world where Jews are welcome without condition. Israel is Plan B for Jews all around the world, so a strong Israel is not negotiable.
Putin’s testing of NATO is a difficult problem. If NATO acts timidly in response, Putin succeeds in moving the boundary in his favor. If they act too robustly, we don’t really know what will happen. The challenge is that what it means to be too robust depends entirely on Putin’s appetite for risk. He’s probably a rational actor, but we can’t be sure of his limits.
Re Russia’s new and dangerous campaign — dangerous for whom? Certainly not for Russia or Putin. So far, NATO’s “good job of responding” is that they “denounced”, “forthrightly blamed”, and “met this month”. [Any attempted sarcasm here would be superfluous.]
At worst Russia faces losing a few drones and some oil exports. NATO without the US is outmatched and knows it; and iDJT is even worse outmatched by Putin and apparently does not know it.
Short of a second Russian revolution, NATO is warm bread on the way to toast. I expect I’ll miss it.
I guess Amanpour didn’t seem to notice only some of the starved hostages came back. No women returned. Most likely raped and tortured in dark tunnels. But at least they didn’t have it as bad as the Gazan’s? News to me.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
There are two things to aim at in life; first to get what you want, and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second. -Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (18 Oct 1865-1946)
The zeroth thing is to work out how to decide what you really want, and then decide.
That is the first time I have seen the word zeroth used other than in
Azimov”s robot stories.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=zeroth gives an 1896 origin, by physicists (not biochemists 🙂). The Wikipedia page for it gives lots of usages, including 3 different ones for “zeroth law” (including of course Dr A’s).
Nellie and Bret Stephans make a couple of nice points that I generally do not see in articles on Israel. Nellie points out the “speck” of middle east land that is Israel. Yes indeed. In the Routledge atlas of the Arab-Israel conflict, Martin Gilbert points out that the settlement ended up with about 1.2 million square miles of Arab land to about 10,000 square miles of Jewish national homeland. Stephans rejects the “settler-colonialist state” narrative and explicitly points out the more than 3,000 year history of the Jewish people in the land called Israel today. (They ain’t settlers). And I might even take the viewpoint that rather than acting as colonizers in the 20th century, that post WW1, with partitioning, the British and French actually liberated the Arab counties from under the thumb of the Germany-sided Turkish Ottoman (colonial) rule and the partitioning began a process which led over the following decades to independent kingdoms and states. And of course let us not ignore possibly the greatest colonizer of them all: the 700 CE expansion of the Moslem world.
Yes, you have to pay close attention to when disputants begin their historical timelines. The Christian-Arab conflict didn’t begin with the Crusades.
To me, the historical claim of Jews to any part of the Holy Land is the weakest reason to support Israel’s continuing existence and territorial integrity. I suspect the rest of the world knows this and rejects it. Only some</> “first peoples” get to have a claim of indigeneous sacredness heard, and Jews aren’t on that list. The flip side is that decolonization and indigenization works against the interests of the hundreds of millions of us “settlers” in North and South America who won’t be able to escape to Israel if we are ever pushed into the sea, as the “Landback1492” movement says it wants to do to us. We must shut our ears to all arguments for mythical indigenization, including those made by Jewish friends and allies, even if those made by Jews are somewhat tongue-in-cheek to annoy the Left. (I can’t help but think that Canadian aboriginal chiefs who participate every year in Toronto’s Walk with Israel have an ulterior motive. They always do.)
The best reasons are that:
1) Jews are there now. What they have they should hold, with as much military force and bloodshed as necessary. Whatever anyone has, anywhere, he has only as long as he can keep someone else from taking it. This interest aligns with our own interests here. If Israel needs a founding legend to ensure diplomatic support from America, go for it.
2) Israel and the Zionist Judaism that gives it its reason for being is an outpost of Western civilization in an uncivilized part of the world. Jews are the good guys. The civilization they created — ours — deserves to be assisted because it is better for everyone. That Israel stands on its own two feet and is successful is a big help, much as it makes its enemies resent it.
3) Related to 2), Jews can develop the land more productively than Muslims can and should, as John Locke, displace the less productive.
“To me, the historical claim of Jews to any part of the Holy Land is the weakest reason to support Israel’s continuing existence and territorial integrity.”
And yet, this historical claim is part and parcel of valid International law. Several treaties, and the Mandate for Palestine itself (which passed on unanimous vote by the League of Nations) reference this connection.
The San Remo Declaration explicitly recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” as a pre-existing right and called for reconstituting (not creating anew) their national home in that land. This international agreement gave the Jewish people exclusive legal and political rights to establish their national home in Palestine.
The language used at San Remo was stronger than the original Balfour Declaration, transforming it from a political promise into an operative obligation for Britain, as Mandator, to facilitate the Jewish national home via the Mandate system of the L.O.N..
For me, International law is the strongest reason to support the integrity of Israel, and the weakest reason is the claim by some that the Old Testament ordains it.
I would agree with Leslie that the claim based on history from 2000 years ago is weak. It’s too far into the past. Also, over the lengthy span from about AD 650 to about AD 1917, the region was ruled by Muslims. There’s been so much migration, the modern world would be unworkable if we accepted claims going that far back (do we regard the English [“Angles”] as having a claim on Denmark? Do Native Americans have a claim on East Asia?) We should have a de facto “statute of limitations” at about 4 or 5 generations back. (Note: I’m happy to support the state of Israel based on post-1917 history.)
Leslie, ref to your 3), “They made the desert bloom,” used to be a common phrase, but I haven’t heard it in decades. Of course, people forget.
Speaking of such, if you’ve ever been to White Sands National Park, you’ve seen that the natural desert blooms are spectacular.
MAD Magazine’s David Berg was my first source many years ago for “made the desert bloom”. He avoided the topic of Israel and made only oblique references to Judaism in his “The Lighter Side of . . . “ strips (which were set mostly in Brooklyn to my tender eye) but he wrote several paperbacks on his own time making the case for Israel and Zionism around the time of the 1967 war. Heady stuff for an adolescent. I read years later that the other Jewish staffers at MAD found him a bit much, prone to lecturing, but he made an impression on me, opened my mind.
@Gingerbaker
Thanks. Yes, modern international law is a robust defence. It still has to be enforced by looking to be unchewable and being known ahead of time to be indigestible.
I agree 100 pc (as an atheist). The biblical “chain of title” is a good argument, but the Enlightenment values trump them all.
And miliary reasons. After so many wars of annihilation against Israel, all lost, Israel has MORE than “earned” the land they have. Which is why the term “Occupied” pisses me off so much, as does “West Bank”.
D.A.
NYC
Would you support your home being turned over to the Lenape?
By my 1), 2), and 3), the Lenape can’t have David’s home. No one is going to turn it over to them. David is a citizen of a state, sovereign to The People. It owes him the duty of helping him drive off the Lenape, with guns, if they try to take it. States make a claim of sovereignty within their borders, and that’s what that claim looks like. Any claim by the Lenape that they should have his land back must be answered, “No”, by David and by the U.S. Government.
It gets into the weeds as to whether the Lenape hypothetically want David’s land fee simple — just the deed — which leaves it still American soil where U.S. law applies, or do they want it as their sovereign “decolonized” territory, where Lenape law would apply and U.S. law wouldn’t. But in either the event the only acceptable answer is still “No.”
If you think this has any relevance to Palestine, please specify.
Leslie, I didn’t say would you turn it over, I said would you support it being turned over by the same processes that had Palestinian homes and businesses taken when Israel was established. Of course this will never happen, but it’s something I think about when considering what happened to the first peoples on this continent.
Maybe I’m not the right person to ask because I’m not on your wavelength: I don’t think much at all about “what happened to” the people our European ancestors encountered here. (We don’t know that they were the “first” peoples, as if that gives them any special cosmological rights.) They fought with and drove off their pre-Contact competitors for food and sex, else what was warpaint for? We did the same when our patterns of land use became incompatible with theirs. Ranchers and pastoralists can’t share land with hunters, nor can farmers and orchardmen share land with gatherers. They must build fences and punish thieves. If the hunters and gatherers want to become ranchers and farmers on their own land, as some did, and obey our law to stop trying to drive us off ours, then we can get along.
The reason I don’t dwell on this emotionally is that there is a line of thought in academe and in some corners of the federal civil service that the Canadian State is illegitimate and has never existed, that this is all “native land.” I don’t want to foster that view by wringing my hands about treaties and UNDRIP and reconciliation and cultural genocide (no such thing) in residential schools. Especially not “decolonization”. That’s as destructive as land reform in South Africa. Land acknowledgements in Canada aren’t just the empty virtue-signalling they are in the States. Here the (white) speakers intend them to undermine Canadian sovereignty as they encourage indigenous self-determination.
“What we have we hold” has to apply here in Canada (and in the U.S.) I must accept it as the modus operandi for sovereign Israeli territory in Judaea and Samaria, too. (I recognize that Israel has diplomatic reasons to refer to the provinces as “disputed” territory.) Within those territories, Israeli law holds, including whatever law Israel applies to former landholdings from when Jordan, Britain, or the Ottomans occupied them. Israel will have to decide how to settle that land, and what to do about people who have old deeds granted by a now-defunct sovereign. It’s hers. The settlements aren’t my business any more than Canada’s indigenous policy is Israel’s.
” the same processes that had Palestinian homes and businesses taken when Israel was established”
That certainly is the Palestinian narrative, but I see no evidence for the claim. Israel was delineated under International law in 1922, and assumed sovereignty when it declared its independence on the afternoon of May 14th, 1948.
There was no taking of property or businesses up through that time, although many Arabs were abandoning their property for months prior, either from fear of war or to follow the advice of Arab generals in order to expedite the genocide of Jews.
Even Mahmoud Abbas. the head of the PA. in March 1976, (published in the official PLO journal Falastin al‑Thawra) acknowledged this:
“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate, and subjected them to political and ideological slavery.”
So, yeah, the Arabs who abandoned their properties forfeited them. But there was no program or process to seize Arab properties or businesses. The Arabs who stayed now make up more than 20% of Israeli citizenry.
Leslie, you are right that you are the wrong person to discuss this with, at least in this forum rather than over a beer.
GB, all technically correct but denies that people lost their homes and businesses back then and now as well. And there certainly is no use for the Palestinian narrative on this forum.
Yesterday Mamdani claimed that the terms of the cease-fire require both Israel and Hamas to disarm.
One of the things that sticks out in my mind from my First Year at Chicago was that there were signs all over the place saying “Don’t Walk on the Grass” in the Quads. Of course, being Chicago, they were all written in foreign languages, and not just European ones. I remember signs in Urdu (someone had to identify it for me) and Sanskrit. Over my four years this practice petered out.
A year ago I wrote the following, unusually lyrical for me, article in my column about the death of Sinwar.
https://themoderatevoice.com/the-last-moments-of-sinwar/
D.A.
NYC
@DavidandersonJd
You actually made me feel a bit sorry for Sinwar, which was probably not your intent
HAHAHHA!
Keep well Frank,
D.A.
NYC
For some reason, teenage girls are fad-prone. I don’t know why. We have had Bobby-soxers, Bulimia, Anorexia, Cutting, etc. Now (maybe wrong tense) we have trans. The other fads were not taken too seriously (for society). They may have been quite deadly for the girls involved.
I’ve thought about this a lot, Frank.
There are certain female skewed personality traits (to get along, consensus, etc). Add that to high anxiety and you’ve got a “craze”.
Also.. the witch panics, and pretty much all social manias and moral panics develop from young women. Females also are in charge of enforcing social rules.
Also… young women are precious – they are the bottleneck in human reproduction ’cause they got the WOMBS!
NOTE—–
I mean no disrespect to our wonderful broads, of course. Without you ladies we’d still be living in caves beating each other over the head for kicks! I don’t want to be the James Damore of WEIT! 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Any idea how much dosh Damore got out of Google in the settlement of his lawsuit? It might be a good career move….
Wow! Sloths (‘slowths’?) AND sea cucumbers both taking a poop! Is this going to be a new series?
Ahem, that’s ‘slowths!’ (also the derived unit of inverse speed — time per distance).
Good piece from Bret Stephens, judging from the excerpts. Yes, Israelis love their country and are proud to be Israelis. Just as important is that Israel may be the only country in the world where Jews are welcome without condition. Israel is Plan B for Jews all around the world, so a strong Israel is not negotiable.
Putin’s testing of NATO is a difficult problem. If NATO acts timidly in response, Putin succeeds in moving the boundary in his favor. If they act too robustly, we don’t really know what will happen. The challenge is that what it means to be too robust depends entirely on Putin’s appetite for risk. He’s probably a rational actor, but we can’t be sure of his limits.
Re Russia’s new and dangerous campaign — dangerous for whom? Certainly not for Russia or Putin. So far, NATO’s “good job of responding” is that they “denounced”, “forthrightly blamed”, and “met this month”. [Any attempted sarcasm here would be superfluous.]
At worst Russia faces losing a few drones and some oil exports. NATO without the US is outmatched and knows it; and iDJT is even worse outmatched by Putin and apparently does not know it.
Short of a second Russian revolution, NATO is warm bread on the way to toast. I expect I’ll miss it.
I guess Amanpour didn’t seem to notice only some of the starved hostages came back. No women returned. Most likely raped and tortured in dark tunnels. But at least they didn’t have it as bad as the Gazan’s? News to me.