Switching Sides in Israel Palestinian Conflicts
I used to think that the Jews were the good guys. Their fate is like the Chinese in Indonesia. In my image, they were nice productive businessmen that are victims of envy bigots around them.
That image gets carried into the conflicts. In my images, the Arabs, the Palestinians, and the Jews enemies, must have been either religious bigots or demonic commies.
So when Israel bombs Lebanon, my first impression is that Lebanon must be some bad countries, something like North Korea or Taliban.
I was surprised when I checked wikipedia.
Lebanon is a pro market country.
They’re more like Swiss rather than North Korea. They’re even better than US. In fact, they’re so pro market that their percapita income rose 393% within 1990s.
In war with Israel, Lebanon lost billions of dollars while Israel only lost $20 million.
Quite obviously, Lebanon is not the kind of country that “Ask for it.” This seems to be a peaceful country with reasonable intensives to be peaceful. In those countries, Muslims, and Christians live side by side in harmony.
The country also accepts a lot of Palestinians refuges causing quite some problems. Did US accept Palestinians refuges? Did the Chinese accept Jewish refuges in Second World War?
And that forces me to rethink the whole issue.
Yes the Palestinians kidnap Israelites soldiers. But before that 8 Palestinians are death due to Israelites rockets.
There is no mechanism whatsoever to neither compensate those 8 Palestinians with money nor can the Palestinians sue Israel governments for the wrongful death to get justice. Without such court like figure, the only way to prevent a party from going all the way committing Nazi like genocide is to strike back.
So the whole retaliation and self defense doctrines can actually work on both sides. It’s hard to figure out which one really strikes first. If 2 societies live side by side, surely shits happen once in a while.
Unless we’re dealing with really big shits, I don’t see why standard libertarian policies of putting the guilty into a fair trial and fair punishment don’t work.
If the issue is bigger, we can set an international court where any country causing wrongful death will be fined to compensate the victim. At least that way the other side knows that without striking back, the party has intensive not to keep killing.
Pro Israelites group may argue that their act is self defense. It’s more of retaliation. Speaking of retaliation, I kind of believe in an eye for an eye doctrine, or more preferably, a million bucks for an eye.
Bombing Lebanon and causing billions of dollars of damage is a highly disproportional retaliation that damages so many other innocent third parties.
I am a pro market individual. I can no longer support any people that use that size of violent against so many innocent civilians and productive businessmen.
I’ll be glad to support a mechanism where the Jews can buy lands from the Palestinians at fair price. However, if they want to kill all Palestinians for some land by poking and provocation by some sort of “Final Solution”, they’ll have better chance finding allies with more similar preferences. Try the Nazi.