A large part of the difficulty in understanding comes, I think, from “the war” or “Israeli policy” being composed of many large and small acts by different agents with different agendas, e.g.:
PM Netanyahu
Defense minister Gallant
Cabinet members Gantz & Eisenkot
Police minister (and convicted terrorist) Ben-Gvir
Treasury minister Smotrich
Other extended cabinet members
IDF chief of the general staff Halevi
Various lower IDF commanders
Add to that various wings of Hamas, UN orgs of questionable independence and reliability, wartime media, and 2500 years of historical context, and you get dozens of conflicting narratives.
I don’t really appreciate Ofer’s comments, because they present the war effort as one combined front and do not really tell you how much influence different agents have. This also makes it hard to draw conclusions—is the very existence of Israel to blame for death, injuries, mass displacement, war crimes? Or is it the current administration? Or just parts of it? Or Hamas? Each answer gives different practical conclusions of what could/should be done about it, and in reality it’s going to be some combination of all of them.
I don’t really appreciate Ofer’s comments, because they present the war effort as one combined front and do not really tell you how much influence different agents have.
The OP includes arguments for why people should not support a ceasefire, while not providing ~any info about the incentives of people/factions within Israel or the relevant historical context. I agree that such info is important. Summarizing all the relevant info in a reliable/legible way is hard (and both I and the OP failed to do so here). This problem probably often exists w.r.t. conflicts at that scale. Humanity should nonetheless attempt to coordinate somehow to make the world peaceful and avoid situations in which humans are doing terrible things to each other as they compete over resources and power.
Your comment mentions in passing “UN orgs of questionable independence and reliability”. This is a good place to argue that most people should probably just defer to relevant UN institutions on questions such as whether a certain ceasefire is net-positive. Quoting from the UN website (published 3 days ago):
The Secretary-General went before the Security Council today to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza to avert a humanitarian catastrophe that could have ramifications for peace and security in the region and beyond, two days after he invoked Article 99 of the United Nations Charter.
Is anyone on this forum in a better position than the Secretary-General of the UN to analyze, for example, the impact of Israel’s actions on future, unrelated conflicts? (E.g. imagine that next year some state/org will set out to starve millions of people etc. as part of some total war, while claiming that their actions are at least as justified as the US-supported actions of Israel in the Gaza strip.)
Is anyone on this forum in a better position than the Secretary-General of the UN to analyze, for example, the impact of Israel’s actions on future, unrelated conflicts?
I would guess yes? The Secretary-General of the UN is subject to a lot of political pressures. Many UN members are enemies of Israel—e.g. Iran, which chaired a UN human rights meeting just last month, has pledged to destroy Israel. UN aid workers in Gaza collaborate with Hamas, including allowing Hamas to operate inside UN buildings. And one of the major drivers of the conflict is the UN policy towards palestinian refugees, which has encouraged revanchism over integration for decades, unlike their policy towards other descendants of refugees. Given these political pressures, and the lack of positive incentive for accuracy, I would actually expect him to be unusually bad at analyzing the situation. I think this is verified by the very anomalous way the UN treats Israel, like repeatedly condemning Israel while neglecting far worse offenders, and being strangely reticent to criticize Hamas’ use of rape against civilians.
I don’t see any obvious reason to think enemies of Israel are more influential on the UN Secretary-General than allies. The US is on the security council and is the most powerful country in the world, and Iran is not. Although I guess for UN stuff that depends on majority vote (I am not expert to know what does and doesn’t) it is plausible that most developing countries see the conflict through an anti-colonial, and hence anti-Israel lens. But Israel is certainly not friendless in international institutions: most of the power in the world is either friendly (US, Europe) or probably doesn’t really care much (China, Japan).
Thanks for asking this, it’s an interesting question. I don’t feel confident in my answer, but my best guess is some combination of:
The countries you list as Israel supporters have many issues they care about at the UN. The US cares about North Korea, Taiwan, nuclear proliferation, climate change, refugees, women’s education, polio, piracy, Ukraine… In contrast, the enemies of Israel typically have fewer issues they care as much about, so their attention is more concentrated.
The more pro-Israel countries are not anti-palestine; both the US and Europe are major donors to both the West Bank and Gaza, and they often try to influence Israeli policy to be more considerate of Palestinian welfare. In contrast many of the enemies of Israel range from actively desiring the murder of jews to simple indifference to Israeli welfare.
You’re right that this isn’t a fully convincing argument. I’m significantly more confident in the problem of UN bias, which I think can be observed reasonably directly, than my diagnosis of the causes.
Please explain how a 120-fold difference in population sizes between groups wouldn’t yield any bias in the global influence those groups would tend to have at the United Nations?
I didn’t vote on your post, but I could imagine disagree voting to indicate disagreement with the implication that Muslims are fundamentally ‘enemies of Israel’.
Your first comment claims that the 120 fold difference in population makes Israel’s enemies more influential than its allies at the UN (which I disagree with), which is different to claiming that the disproportionate populations have “some” effect over the UN (which I agree with).
Religions are not represented at the UN, countries are, and the major forces influencing the UN in favour of Israel are the US and the UK, which are mostly not made up of Jews, and the main force influencing the UN against Israel is China, which is largely not made up of Muslims.
In other words, power struggles at the UN on Israel-Palestine are not really a power struggle between Jews and Muslims, and like lots of other geopolitics things are more of a power struggle between the USA and China.
And one of the major drivers of the conflict is the UN policy towards palestinian refugees, which has encouraged revanchism over integration for decades, unlike their policy towards other descendants of refugees.
Many policies that seek to hold states accountable for committing atrocities can be accused of encouraging revanchism. Nonetheless, the international community should probably coordinate to prevent states from doing things like conquering land and then effectively throwing hundreds of thousands of natives outside their new borders (causing them to be stateless), killing those who try to return, destroying/stealing almost all of their property without providing any compensation, etc.
I think this is verified by the very anomalous way the UN treats Israel, like repeatedly condemning Israel while neglecting far worse offenders,
Can you give an example of a state that was clearly a “worse offender” than Israel and yet was clearly treated less severely by the UN?
Can you give an example of a state that was clearly a “worse offender” than Israel and yet was clearly treated less severely by the UN?
I’m not fact-checking anything, but I’d bet both Russia and China are worse offenders who are treated better.
Although to be clear, I think the “UN bias against Israel” argument, while true, is almost always irrelevant to the discussion, maybe even including this instance. The relevant question is whether the UN General Secretary has the necessary information to know better than you or I do. And I’d answer that with a “maybe”.
If Russia and China are worse offenders (which I doubt, if the metric is “atrocities per capita”) and have been treated less severely by the UN, this seems to point at a bias in favor of permanent members of the UN Security Council / superpowers, rather than a bias against Israel in particular.
Just to make clear, I meant UN orgs on the ground in Gaza whose activities are, by necessity, dependent on continued support from Hamas (which comes with a steep price), and many of whose workers are (at least in expectation) Hamas supporters.
Without saying much about the merits of various commenters’ arguments, I wanted to check if this is a rhetorical question:
Is anyone on this forum in a better position than the Secretary-General of the UN to analyze, for example, the impact of Israel’s actions on future, unrelated conflicts?
If so, this is an appeal to authority that isn’t very helpful in advancing this discussion. If it’s an actual question, never mind.
There are few organizations in the Western world that could survive with the allegations of mismanagement, scandal, and corruption that permeate the United Nations. For many delegates, officials, and employees, particularly those from developing nations, the UN is little more than an enormous watering hole.
Concerned about its shabby image, the UN recently developed a multiple-choice “ethics quiz” for its employees. The “correct” answers were obvious to everyone [Is it all right to steal from your employer? (A) Yes, (B) No, (C) Only if you don’t get caught].
The quiz was not designed to determine the ethical sense of UN employees or to weed out the ethically inept but to raise their level of integrity. How taking a transparent test could improve integrity is unclear. There has been no mention of how management and other officials did on the test
~ Snakes in Suits, a study of psychopaths in the workplace
Are there many EAs that consider the UN a serious institution from a “makes the world a better place” perspective? I thought most of us viewed it the same way we view the US medical system: which is to say woefully ineffective, credentialist, in some cases net-negative for public health and something that is ripe for systemic change to make the world better (It would be interesting to see how many “systemic change” criticisms of EA could apply just as well, if not more, to the UN).
That said, you do have a point. I still haven’t heard a pro-Israeli argument that properly parses the whole anti-Israel UN position. The most salient answer to me is still “Israel is actually in the wrong for a lot of things.” Otherwise surely the UN would be a tad bit more split on the issue?
I just wouldn’t place quite as much stock as you do in the UN. Same goes for the US medical system. Get multiple opinions. Always. Including from those from within the system that argue the entire system has systemic flaws (e.g. vegan doctors that face opposition from practically their entire field). The overall UN position is one signal among many, but it isn’t that strong of a signal.
It’s possible that if the UN had not existed, we would have already had a third world war. The UN is obviously not optimal but may be a lot better than nothing (w.r.t. allowing humanity to coordinate on important issues). EDIT: ‘Making the UN better’ may be an important cause area from an EA perspective.
Shrugs, sure it’s possible. It’s also possible that if we employ counterfactual reasoning that had the UN not existed that a better institution would have arisen in its place. It is quite possible that the dynamics of post-WW2 just made it inevitable for some coordination-institution to be built out of sheer geopolitical necessity and that we got one of the worse possible outcomes.
If the US medical system didn’t get created in its current form that doesn’t mean that counterfactually what would have happened otherwise is that the US would just have no medical system whatsoever. Nobody seriously defends the US medical system by saying it is “better than nothing” because a world where something like it doesn’t exist at all is practically impossible—probably much like a world without something resembling the UN. Too many social, economic and political forces demand that both exist in some shape or form.
Of course you could say the exact same thing about Effective Altruism as well. Had EA not been created in its current form something—counterfactually—with a better foundation might have been culturally constructed. I suppose the difference for me is that it is probably orders of magnitude easier for me to picture a better US medical system or better UN that could have been constructed instead than it is for me to picture a better EA. Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part.
Anyway, this game of “if this-thing-I-like-had-not-existed” is a fool’s errand and strongly susceptible to motivated reasoning. And that is true whether we do or do not employ counterfactual reasoning.
A large part of the difficulty in understanding comes, I think, from “the war” or “Israeli policy” being composed of many large and small acts by different agents with different agendas, e.g.:
PM Netanyahu
Defense minister Gallant
Cabinet members Gantz & Eisenkot
Police minister (and convicted terrorist) Ben-Gvir
Treasury minister Smotrich
Other extended cabinet members
IDF chief of the general staff Halevi
Various lower IDF commanders
Add to that various wings of Hamas, UN orgs of questionable independence and reliability, wartime media, and 2500 years of historical context, and you get dozens of conflicting narratives.
I don’t really appreciate Ofer’s comments, because they present the war effort as one combined front and do not really tell you how much influence different agents have. This also makes it hard to draw conclusions—is the very existence of Israel to blame for death, injuries, mass displacement, war crimes? Or is it the current administration? Or just parts of it? Or Hamas? Each answer gives different practical conclusions of what could/should be done about it, and in reality it’s going to be some combination of all of them.
The OP includes arguments for why people should not support a ceasefire, while not providing ~any info about the incentives of people/factions within Israel or the relevant historical context. I agree that such info is important. Summarizing all the relevant info in a reliable/legible way is hard (and both I and the OP failed to do so here). This problem probably often exists w.r.t. conflicts at that scale. Humanity should nonetheless attempt to coordinate somehow to make the world peaceful and avoid situations in which humans are doing terrible things to each other as they compete over resources and power.
Your comment mentions in passing “UN orgs of questionable independence and reliability”. This is a good place to argue that most people should probably just defer to relevant UN institutions on questions such as whether a certain ceasefire is net-positive. Quoting from the UN website (published 3 days ago):
Is anyone on this forum in a better position than the Secretary-General of the UN to analyze, for example, the impact of Israel’s actions on future, unrelated conflicts? (E.g. imagine that next year some state/org will set out to starve millions of people etc. as part of some total war, while claiming that their actions are at least as justified as the US-supported actions of Israel in the Gaza strip.)
I would guess yes? The Secretary-General of the UN is subject to a lot of political pressures. Many UN members are enemies of Israel—e.g. Iran, which chaired a UN human rights meeting just last month, has pledged to destroy Israel. UN aid workers in Gaza collaborate with Hamas, including allowing Hamas to operate inside UN buildings. And one of the major drivers of the conflict is the UN policy towards palestinian refugees, which has encouraged revanchism over integration for decades, unlike their policy towards other descendants of refugees. Given these political pressures, and the lack of positive incentive for accuracy, I would actually expect him to be unusually bad at analyzing the situation. I think this is verified by the very anomalous way the UN treats Israel, like repeatedly condemning Israel while neglecting far worse offenders, and being strangely reticent to criticize Hamas’ use of rape against civilians.
edit: typo
I don’t see any obvious reason to think enemies of Israel are more influential on the UN Secretary-General than allies. The US is on the security council and is the most powerful country in the world, and Iran is not. Although I guess for UN stuff that depends on majority vote (I am not expert to know what does and doesn’t) it is plausible that most developing countries see the conflict through an anti-colonial, and hence anti-Israel lens. But Israel is certainly not friendless in international institutions: most of the power in the world is either friendly (US, Europe) or probably doesn’t really care much (China, Japan).
Thanks for asking this, it’s an interesting question. I don’t feel confident in my answer, but my best guess is some combination of:
The countries you list as Israel supporters have many issues they care about at the UN. The US cares about North Korea, Taiwan, nuclear proliferation, climate change, refugees, women’s education, polio, piracy, Ukraine… In contrast, the enemies of Israel typically have fewer issues they care as much about, so their attention is more concentrated.
The more pro-Israel countries are not anti-palestine; both the US and Europe are major donors to both the West Bank and Gaza, and they often try to influence Israeli policy to be more considerate of Palestinian welfare. In contrast many of the enemies of Israel range from actively desiring the murder of jews to simple indifference to Israeli welfare.
You’re right that this isn’t a fully convincing argument. I’m significantly more confident in the problem of UN bias, which I think can be observed reasonably directly, than my diagnosis of the causes.
David—there are 1.9 billion Muslim people in the world, and only 16 million Jewish people in the world. That’s a 120-fold difference.
Of course the ‘enemies of Israel’ are numerically more influential in the UN. This has been obvious for decades.
People who are disagree-voting with me on this:
Please explain how a 120-fold difference in population sizes between groups wouldn’t yield any bias in the global influence those groups would tend to have at the United Nations?
I didn’t vote on your post, but I could imagine disagree voting to indicate disagreement with the implication that Muslims are fundamentally ‘enemies of Israel’.
Your first comment claims that the 120 fold difference in population makes Israel’s enemies more influential than its allies at the UN (which I disagree with), which is different to claiming that the disproportionate populations have “some” effect over the UN (which I agree with).
Religions are not represented at the UN, countries are, and the major forces influencing the UN in favour of Israel are the US and the UK, which are mostly not made up of Jews, and the main force influencing the UN against Israel is China, which is largely not made up of Muslims.
In other words, power struggles at the UN on Israel-Palestine are not really a power struggle between Jews and Muslims, and like lots of other geopolitics things are more of a power struggle between the USA and China.
Many policies that seek to hold states accountable for committing atrocities can be accused of encouraging revanchism. Nonetheless, the international community should probably coordinate to prevent states from doing things like conquering land and then effectively throwing hundreds of thousands of natives outside their new borders (causing them to be stateless), killing those who try to return, destroying/stealing almost all of their property without providing any compensation, etc.
Can you give an example of a state that was clearly a “worse offender” than Israel and yet was clearly treated less severely by the UN?
I’m not fact-checking anything, but I’d bet both Russia and China are worse offenders who are treated better.
Although to be clear, I think the “UN bias against Israel” argument, while true, is almost always irrelevant to the discussion, maybe even including this instance. The relevant question is whether the UN General Secretary has the necessary information to know better than you or I do. And I’d answer that with a “maybe”.
If Russia and China are worse offenders
(which I doubt, if the metric is “atrocities per capita”)and have been treated less severely by the UN, this seems to point at a bias in favor of permanent members of the UN Security Council / superpowers, rather than a bias against Israel in particular.Just to make clear, I meant UN orgs on the ground in Gaza whose activities are, by necessity, dependent on continued support from Hamas (which comes with a steep price), and many of whose workers are (at least in expectation) Hamas supporters.
Without saying much about the merits of various commenters’ arguments, I wanted to check if this is a rhetorical question:
If so, this is an appeal to authority that isn’t very helpful in advancing this discussion. If it’s an actual question, never mind.
Are there many EAs that consider the UN a serious institution from a “makes the world a better place” perspective? I thought most of us viewed it the same way we view the US medical system: which is to say woefully ineffective, credentialist, in some cases net-negative for public health and something that is ripe for systemic change to make the world better (It would be interesting to see how many “systemic change” criticisms of EA could apply just as well, if not more, to the UN).
That said, you do have a point. I still haven’t heard a pro-Israeli argument that properly parses the whole anti-Israel UN position. The most salient answer to me is still “Israel is actually in the wrong for a lot of things.” Otherwise surely the UN would be a tad bit more split on the issue?
I just wouldn’t place quite as much stock as you do in the UN. Same goes for the US medical system. Get multiple opinions. Always. Including from those from within the system that argue the entire system has systemic flaws (e.g. vegan doctors that face opposition from practically their entire field). The overall UN position is one signal among many, but it isn’t that strong of a signal.
It’s possible that if the UN had not existed, we would have already had a third world war. The UN is obviously not optimal but may be a lot better than nothing (w.r.t. allowing humanity to coordinate on important issues). EDIT: ‘Making the UN better’ may be an important cause area from an EA perspective.
Shrugs, sure it’s possible. It’s also possible that if we employ counterfactual reasoning that had the UN not existed that a better institution would have arisen in its place. It is quite possible that the dynamics of post-WW2 just made it inevitable for some coordination-institution to be built out of sheer geopolitical necessity and that we got one of the worse possible outcomes.
If the US medical system didn’t get created in its current form that doesn’t mean that counterfactually what would have happened otherwise is that the US would just have no medical system whatsoever. Nobody seriously defends the US medical system by saying it is “better than nothing” because a world where something like it doesn’t exist at all is practically impossible—probably much like a world without something resembling the UN. Too many social, economic and political forces demand that both exist in some shape or form.
Of course you could say the exact same thing about Effective Altruism as well. Had EA not been created in its current form something—counterfactually—with a better foundation might have been culturally constructed. I suppose the difference for me is that it is probably orders of magnitude easier for me to picture a better US medical system or better UN that could have been constructed instead than it is for me to picture a better EA. Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part.
Anyway, this game of “if this-thing-I-like-had-not-existed” is a fool’s errand and strongly susceptible to motivated reasoning. And that is true whether we do or do not employ counterfactual reasoning.