The problem with peaceful protest is that it can only work if there is very strong international pressure to stop Israel, because they most definitely won't stop by themselves.
The problem with expecting any international pressure, is that America vetos any such event, and Israel work really hard to make sure they always have the backing of all the countries that matter.
In any case, Hamas's existence is completely orthogonal to the reason for Israel's aggression. They want more land and less Palestinians on it.
All Palestinian violence, especially by Hamas, is used very effectively to gain international sympathy for Israel and to excuse violent & unjust policies.
A much greater level of non-violence from the Palestinian side would result in far stronger international pressure, and also domestic American pressure.
> A much greater level of non-violence from the Palestinian side would result in far stronger international pressure, and also domestic American pressure.
The 2018-2019 Gaza border protests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...) began with extended peaceful demonstrations and dancing by Palestinians. This was met with live fire from Israel, maiming tens of thousands and killing well over 200 people.
There was no meaningful international response, with America only voicing support for Israel's "right to defend itself."
Of course that was gross criminality & basically mass murder from the IDF side, but they still used the excuse of Hamas using the protests as cover to attack, to breach the border, to fire flaming kites, etc. Nevertheless there was quite a significant international response and loads of reputational damage to the IDF. The difficulty is that the non-violence has to be deep and prolonged.. The current leadership of Hamas controlling Gaza makes things extremely sad/difficult & is a great gift to the Israeli militarists..
Israel currently will use that as a public excuse, but Israel will clamp down on non-violent protect and violent protest fairly equally. There is always an excuse for why Israel has to take land and also why it has to have racist laws.
The problem is that if you look into it, it is a demographic battle to ensure that Israel keeps the West Bank and also that there is a Jewish majority in that region at whatever cost.
And here is an Israeli ambassador making the case that Jews are reproducing more than Arabs and that is a great thing (although he excludes Gaza, which Israel hopes that Egypt takes over): https://www.jns.org/opinion/blinken-is-wrong-on-israels-demo...
Israel is a really strange nation these days. It is very racist and openly so.
I don't agree at all, and I don't think others agree either. Hamas is the government of the area in question. Why are they not allowed to fire into Israel but Israel is allowed to do all manner of crimes in Hamas' territory?
Shooting innocents, storming innocent gatherings, espionage, wounding and killing innocent people is always done by Israel especially in land it internationally has no right to (think East Jerusalem).
No government in the world would allow such unchecked aggression and militarism within their borders. Hamas does not allow it either.
Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by most of the western world. Hamas now runs the government in Palestine. Sounds like check mate by the israeli's to me. Palestine fucked up by letting a terrorist organization take over their country.
Because this is the first time murdering a bunch of hamas members wasn't par for the course historically. Now it's Palestinians not 'Hamas' for the Palestinians, but one-in-the same for the US and Israeli governments. The other side of this is that they are a terrorist organization and need to be exterminated. Hamas says the same thing about the israeli's.
Also, war crimes as a subject is always brought on by the winners, just like the telling of history.
The world is a brutal place. Hamas has proved they are not a military match for israel and the war will continue until israel has complete control of the region. That's how one sided conflicts have happened historically.
In that case Israel should follow New Zealand's example and allow all Palestinians to become citizens, with full rights, stop being an ethnostate for Jews, stop with the racism and start behaving like the progressive country they pretend to be.
> allow all Palestinians to become citizens, with full rights, stop being an ethnostate for Jews
If that happened, then Palestinians would outnumber Jews and could dominate the country democratically. I can understand the potential for discrimination.
That's why the two state solution is often considered the only just solution: Both groups each have a country in which they are the majority.
The Israeli right rejects the two state solution, and clearly they reject being a minority, so that only leaves oppression of Palestinians (which is awful and unjust, to avoid any doubt).
> the progressive country they pretend to be
Israel hasn't pretended to be progressive in awhile. Netanyahu and some of his predecessors made no pretenses about it.
> The Israeli right rejects the two state solution, and clearly they reject being a minority, so that only leaves oppression of Palestinians (which is awful and unjust, to avoid any doubt).
Actually I'm fairly sure it could have happened at some point if it hadn't been loudly rejected by Arabs.
> In that case Israel should follow New Zealand's example and allow all Palestinians to become citizens, with full rights, stop being an ethnostate for Jews,
This would have been somewhat reasonable if it hadn't been for the fact that Jews have been driven out from neighboring countries in larger number than Arabs from Israel.
I'm not sure this is the mic drop you think it is, since what you're pushing back on here is the idea that Palestinians living in Israel should be allowed to simultaneously remain in their homes and have full political rights and agency. Which of those two things do you disagree with?
You're excluding the middle a lot in these comments, suggesting that the only two valid perspectives on this conflict are "Israel must be an exclusionary ethnostate" and "Hamas is a legitimate actor". It's possible to disagree with both of those statements. People who stick up for Hamas are dumb. Ethnostates are immoral.
There’s nothing immoral about ethnostates. Not every country needs to be a multiethnic democracy like the US. I agree certain human rights must be respected, but there’s nothing wrong with Israel being structured as a homeland for Jews. To assert otherwise is to elevate notions of non-discrimination above the right to self-determination. My parents’ generation fought a war with Pakistan to have a home for Bangladeshis. (The ethnic group is in the name of the country!) If there was any risk of Bangladeshis losing political control of the country, they’d be entirely within their rights to prevent that.
Perhaps they ought to set up their constitution to have a military pledged to the maintenance of a purely secular state that will overthrow any overtly religious government, no matter the electoral margins they earned when getting installed.
Or they could do what Lebanon does and have some mandatory representation from all ethnic groups in all important public institutions.
There are definitely ways to make this work, if there is a true willingness to live in peace.
> a military pledged to the maintenance of a purely secular state that will overthrow any overtly religious government
That's an idea with a very bad history and no political legitimacy: What grounds does a general have to tell their neighbors what to do? Nobody voted for them. What stops the general from arbitrarily wielding that power?
Why vest that power in the military? A civilian institution could make the decision, such as a court interpreting a constitution.
I think you're being naive because the military always has that power, regardless of what people want to pretend. What would make it legitmate is that the people agreed to it ahead of time.
> the military always has that power, regardless of what people want to pretend
Maybe in your fantasies, but not in advanced democracies. Nobody would follow those orders; there's no evidence of it ever happening, in centuries. Technically, the people of Washington DC have the power to overthrow the government if they all rush the seats of power at the same time, but really they don't.
There have been hundreds of coup d'etat and attempts at such in "advanced democracies." And if you're trying to claim they aren't advanced if they haven't had a coup d'etat then there's just no true Scotsman, is there?
When? Where? I suppose it could depend on definitions of 'advanced' democracies, but it ain't happening in the modern US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, S. Korea, Canada, Australia, etc. etc.
> In Judaism, "chosenness" is the belief that the Jews, via descent from the ancient Israelites, are the chosen people, i.e. selected to be in a covenant with God.
> This view, however, does not always preclude a belief that God has a relationship with other peoples—rather, Judaism held that God had entered into a covenant with all humankind, and that Jews and non-Jews alike have a relationship with God. Biblical references as well as rabbinic literature support this view: Moses refers to the "God of the spirits of all flesh",[4] and the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) also identifies prophets outside the community of Israel. Based on these statements, some rabbis theorized that, in the words of Nethanel ibn Fayyumi, a Yemenite Jewish theologian of the 12th century, "God permitted to every people something he forbade to others...[and] God sends a prophet to every people according to their own language."(Levine, 1907/1966)
> The Mishnah continues, and states that anyone who kills or saves a single human, not Jewish, life, has done the same (save or kill) to an entire world. The Tosefta, an important supplement to the Mishnah,[5] also states: "Righteous people of all nations have a share in the world to come" (Sanhedrin 105a).
I just want to point out that this nonsense is Islamophobia and should not be tolerated.
Muslims are no less people than anyone else. They are not the cartoonish evil character that you believe them to be.
>I just want to point out that this nonsense is Islamophobia and should not be tolerated. Muslims are no less people than anyone else. They are not the cartoonish evil character that you believe them to be.
He said progressive. Progressive doesn't mean "not evil", it means progressive. Can you name a single Muslim-majority country that allows gay marriage?
>Can you name a single Muslim-majority country that allows gay marriage?
I think that's a false dichotomy. The question is not if a country is a Muslim-majority country or a Christian-majority country, but if it's secular enough or not.
You never answer my question - why would Israel give full citizenship to people in Gaza and let’s add on top parts (Area C) of the West Bank entirely controlled by the Palestinian Authority?
And the funny part is, the reason Israel control parts of the West Bank is because they were attacked in 3 wars (1948, 1967, 1972) and won.
Some misanthropes get inspired by his general lack of giving a fuck, but I personally do not think we should look up to the man.
He did no good and possibly quite a bit of evil.
If you are an employer in a jurisdiction with pay transparency, and you need to get a superstar employee, you just create a titled position for them. Then you can justify paying them 350% the average wage.
The paper claims that there will be a wage equilibrium. Yes, for average employees there will be a wage equilibrium, and average employees will see their wages increase because of this.
The paper tries to claim that this wage equilibrium will negatively affect superstar employees. This is complete nonsense. It bases this on the assumption that employers cannot justify discriminating between normal employees and superstar employees. But this is an unwarranted assumption. Literally just give the guy a title. Secondly it assumes that even for these superstar employees their wage would reach an equilibrium. This is another misguided assumption, because these superstar employees are not a fungible resource like the rest of the employees in the same occupation. They very likely possess unique experience and skillsets. So the pay of other superstar employees should not have any bearing on how much they themselves get paid.
Basically the model seems to think that somehow all the employees are equal and entirely fungible, but at the same time some employees somehow manage to negotiate much higher salaries.
Now of course I am not an economist so it is ridiculous to believe that I have found the fatal flaw in a published paper, but because of the political nature of such articles I find it hard to trust the "hard numbers". I remain skeptical.
>Now of course I am not an economist so it is ridiculous to believe that I have found the fatal flaw in a published paper, but because of the political nature of such articles I find it hard to trust the "hard numbers". I remain skeptical.
I admittedly haven't read the paper properly, but did study economics at undergrad and read many similar papers. This is how a lot of economics works, you end up with published papers claiming completely different results because of small differences model assumptions. Multiple models can be consistent with observed data while providing vastly different policy implications. If you want to look at a well publicized example (though I think it might have to do more with different econometric assumptions) look at the research published on the Mariel boatlift and its impact on labor markets. See here - https://www.bruegel.org/2017/06/the-mariel-boatlift-controve...
If you are hiring someone to do a specific job which is different to other roles then sure you can create such titled positions. But if they are basically doing similar work to others (Just 10X better or whatever), then a fancy title isn't really going to fool anyone.
Coworkers can actually see how productive someone is, assuming they are actually 10X that’s not a problem. I have worked with people that I thought should be making bank.
The only issue is people outside your organization, but they have no idea what a given title means. Scrum Lord’s make 500k, wonder what they do?
Some types of high productivity are easily visible, some aren't.
The dev who can whip out tons of stable code is easily measured. The dev who fights to stop an unneeded re-architecure or veto feature requests that would have maintenance overhead unjustified by their value is harder to judge. And yet that veto may be the equivalent of 2-3 FTEs savings.
Haha, when I had been a software dev for a year, I interviewed at MS and they asked what my biggest success was. I said it was convincing an architect and 3 FTEs that they didn't need to spend 2 months on a 100% solution, given that we had all the pieces of an 90% solution ready at hand.
They did not seem impressed. I did get hired though...
More seriously, I've met several people who really struggled to get recognized officially for their work. One was someone who was just amazing at cross team collaboration. Specifically, we were a small group, doing an important strategic project, but we needed some work from other teams that were serving the companies larger, single product. It was hard to get them to free up a couple of dev-days, even when we had the explicit support up and down the management chain. She was amazing at getting the ICs on the team to get on board. But really struggled during review cycles because a fair amount of her work wasn't traditional lines-of-code/jiras.
Another example was a developer who was a king at driving customer solutions through the dev team. He was a developer, and even though he's probably responsible for millions in not-lost-sales, he struggled to get the recognition he deserved.
Anyway, just agreeing with some examples from my professional life.
Some coworkers can see high performance. If the quantitative performance is only 30% higher, it may not be apparent. If there is a qualitative outperformance, the dullard coworkers may not realize the impact.
Right, what is the spread of salaries among star and journeymen players in professional sports leagues?
The Indian cricket league IPL has a public auction every year. Salaries range from 2 million at the top to 20/30K at the bottom. And most players are towards the bottom.
In any case, Hamas's existence is completely orthogonal to the reason for Israel's aggression. They want more land and less Palestinians on it.