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The Plot Against Einstein (warfarehistorynetwork.com)
88 points by geox 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 105 comments



> Einstein was not the “father of the atomic bomb” as is sometimes still claimed, based on his famous equation, E=mc2, or “Energy equals mass times velocity squared.” His equation itself wasn’t a breakthrough, but it did explain what was going on. Einstein’s theory behind the equation holds that energy and mass are essentially the same thing. In splitting atoms —fission—the energy in their mass is released, producing enormous power.

More than that, the equation is not E= mc^2 except when we are talking about particles with rest mass and are not moving. The equation is really E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2. For example, the second term vanishes for photons without rest mass. I agree that the equation weren't that of a breakthrough in itself until we think about the negative solutions which will lead Dirac to the path of anti-matter.


What Einstein did do for the Atomic Bomb was to co-sign Leo Szilard's letter which got the attention of President Eisenhower and kick-started the Manhattan Project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szilard_lette...


You mean Roosevelt, not Eisenhower.


It raised a flicker of polite interest that died, from your own link:

    The Advisory Committee on Uranium was the beginning of the US government's effort to develop an atomic bomb, but it did not vigorously pursue the development of a weapon.
What did move the needle, again from your link:

    The Frisch–Peierls memorandum and the British Maud Reports eventually prompted Roosevelt to authorize a full-scale development effort in January 1942.
In essence, the letter from Einstein did not start the Manhatten Project, it was instead the direct efforts and in person meetings of Oliphant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oliphant#Manhattan_Projec...


Einstein was, of course, a devout pacifist. It must have turned some heads that he argued for a bomb to be made.


> More than that, the equation is not E= mc^2[...]

Unless 'm' is the relativistic mass. Which, yes, is a perfectly valid and useful concept. See also this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425252


People are usually using E=mc^2 equation because it is simpler. Introducing the concept of relativistic mass and Lorenz transformation to get the rest mass (what most people think of mass) will be less intuitive for the common culture.


I used to think so, but these days, I wonder why I used to think that rest mass is more intuitive. For most things we interact with and develop intuitions about, their speeds are so low that relativistic and rest masses are virtually the same, so that intuition can't come from experience. Photons are the exception to that, but we never encounter them at rest, and there's no particular reason we would have an intuition that photons must be massless until we learn about it in school. And then people have to overcome the confusion that photons do still carry momentum despite being massless.

If we think of mass in terms of inertia, the difference between rest mass and relativistic mass only shows up at relativistic speeds (like in a particle accelerator, or cosmic rays). At that point, relativity and Lorentz transforms needs to be taken into account anyway; the half-lives of unstable particles get affected by time dilation, and so on.

The other way that mass shows up in physics is through gravitation. If we think of mass in terms of its gravitational influence, then relativistic mass is all that matters, and rest mass seems to mess with people's intuitions much more, causing all sorts of conceptual mistakes. Like thinking that photons don't gravitate.

Rest mass does has some theory-simplifying mathematical advantages, but I don't think those benefits will matter to the intuitions of non-experts.



That was the submitted link! Did you mean to include a different URL?


The link that I first tried came to a summary, without any text from the article.


In addition Einstein's theories were denounced by a group of physicists because they were considered "Jewish physics" and not "German physics":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

I think it is remarkable that a racist argument against a description of nature could even gain a foothold in the physics community. Fortunately, people like Planck and Heisenberg could see the insanity of it all.


> I think it is remarkable that a racist argument against a description of nature could even gain a foothold in the physics community.

And, Germany was a cornerstone in physics in the late XIX and early XX centuries.

This shows a bad aspect of humans in the quest for truth. If many scientists are involved in nationalism, antisemitism, etc what can we expect of less rational people? Not saying that we need to be completely rational though but it is interesting when bad emotions beat rationality in smart people as a topic itself.


I suspect many scientists are not especially rational outside their field of study. Probably worse, being scientific authorities can make them overconfident.


Isn't there a study that shows that new theories don't get accepted because people got convinced by evidence but the supporters of the old theory just die of age?


It's a common quip attributed to Max Planck, not really a study.

Developed more thoroughly into a theory e.g. by Thomas Kuhn, see his book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Some broadly similar ideas in the philosophy or science were also explored by Feyerabend in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method


> This shows a bad aspect of humans in the quest for truth. If many scientists are involved in nationalism, antisemitism, etc what can we expect of less rational people? Not saying that we need to be completely rational though but it is interesting when bad emotions beat rationality in smart people as a topic itself.

This framing is interesting considering how HN is such an IQ-worshipping forum: The context is the most pig-headed, blatant racism imaginable—doesn’t even try to rationalize it, just “Jewish Physics”—and then we pivot to how these exalted rational people (translation: physics-smart specifically) must clearly be more rational than “less rational people” (average people?) and in turn how racist they (less rational people) must be. So we went from blatant racism exhibited by physicists to inferring how these scientists must be leagues better than “less rational people” in terms of racial tolerance or rationality with regards to race (if race is even a thing).

Except the only thing we have in front of us is racism expressed by physicists. Not commoner racism.

So what grounds do we have to expect “less rational people” to be more or less racist than these exalted scientists? Absolutely nothing.

Imagine if a gaggle of biologists in Antarctica committed mass murder of another group of scientists and smeared their blood in some Satanic ritual. I bet the conclusion would be to speculate about how less rational people would be even more inhumane and cruel if they had to live through an Antarctic winter or two? Absolutely bonkers.


Scientists are not more rational people than $anyone_else. And being more or less rational does not make one any less capable of emotions, hatred, evil, or all sorts of other bad things.


> Scientists are not more rational people than $anyone_else.

Well, scientists disagree with you [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-think-...


*Some scientists.

And that agrees with what I said?


Most people probably think they are more rational than average.


It’s good to remember that scientists are just as capable of violence (if anything, they can be better at it). It might also be a mistake to think that rational people are inherently less violent towards other people. Finally, I reckon it’s especially dangerous to think the Nazi did what they did just because of “bad emotions”.

The trolley problem adjacent research has shown (if inconclusively) that more rational people are more likely to be OK being a cause of harm to other people to achieve some goal. In those experiments such goal is usually “save more people”, but all you need is to define some terms and “kill some now” might seem imperative to “save more later” to a sufficiently rational, long-term-thinking, “smart” person.

So the Nazi did, and there is much less conjecture here since it’s mostly well-documented. They were specifically inspired by natural sciences, including the then-new Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If anything, their shtick might’ve been to overcome the “bad” (for the Nazi) emotions that one may experience when sending some disabled person or a Jew to death. Which, according to them, had to be done since they were detrimental to survival of humanity (as Nazis defined it, of course) by polluting its genetic pool—so they were taught to train themselves to treat Jews as non-human bedbugs, stripped Jews of citizenship, disciplined fellow Germans who dared to shake hands with a Jew, etc. To Nazis emotions were a hindrance, they included the “irrational” compassion, and we might be better off remembering that when we discuss rationality, which consequentialism tends to go hand in hand with.

Addendum: An obvious argument can be made that Nazis were “not rational enough”, i.e. the problem is not with rationality per se but only with rationality based on premises that we now know are wrong. That, however, shows nothing because if we’ve learned anything it should be not to assume that now we have finally got all of our premises in order and possess absolute truth and complete understanding of reality.


"To Nazis emotions were a hindrance, they included the “irrational” compassion"

Have a look at Rosenbergs influental writings for instance. Or well, "Mein Kampf". It is not a rational, but very emotional work. All of their ideology starts with mysticism around nationalism. Finding greatness while giving yourself up to the higher rightful order. The Volk, connected by blood.*

All "rationality" was applied after that premise.

*The right blood of course. Investigated, determined and mandated by buerocrats with pseudoscientific methods.


You’re right, it’s more nuanced than that and cannot be reduced just to rationality. I’d be the first to agree that neither rationality nor emotion is alone enough. Defeat in WWI has contributed to emotional context a lot.

However, to say it was all just emotion and post-rationalization is to oversimplify even more. The two were intermingled even since 19th century (e.g., Lamarck).


"However, to say it was all just emotion and post-rationalization is to oversimplify"

Sure. I remember from Mein Kampf, where Hitler talks about his Antisemitism. His Intuition always advised against it, but with his rational mind, step by step he came to the logical conclusion, that yes, the jews are basically to blame for everything. (Interesting that he remarks, that his intuition left him for some years, after he made that "rational" decision)

It was twisted all around.


As Kahneman wrote, rationality is logical coherence, a rational person can believe in ghosts if the rest of their beliefs are consistent with ghosts. A rational person can prefer to be hated instead of loved, if it’s consistent.

Most of the book is about economics and rational behavior in terms of utility, but that part seems to apply here as well.

Logical coherence is always internal, it can only be complete within itself and will inevitably conflict with external reality and other internally coherent beliefs. It’s possible for a Nazi to be extremely rational in this way, whereas a reasonable person cannot be entirely rational by definition.


Don't dismiss the cultural ubiquity in the 20th century of eugenics, like phrenology and misapplication of Darwin's works just because we know it to be pseudoscience now and even then, it's origins in American slavery justification and being taken up by Germany, doesn't mean it didn't give a horrible false authority to all kinds of horrors.


There was also a plot to assassinate Heisenberg.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-baseball-player-t...


It’s likely a big part of what helped win the war. A whole swath of science was discounted or thrown out by the Germans because of the race component.


Of course nobody needs convincing of the idea that Hitler was a fucking idiot, but also, designing a philosophy of racial purity so aggressive that it scares away like half of your physicists, including probably the best physicist in generations, was a pretty boneheaded move. I guess he didn’t know that they were on the verge of a wild and completely war-changing discovery, but physicists are always up to something.


The Germans were also disastrously behind with radar, but were way ahead with rocket engines and turbojets. Their faith in Enigma also arguably cost them the war.


Their faith in the Lorenz cipher aka Fish cipher codenamed Tunny also arguably cost them the war.

The Germnans were suspicious of Enigma security given Polish cryptanalysts had an attack in the late(?) 1920s and further attacks in the 1930s.

The German High Command used Lorenz for significant traffic .. this was cracked by the Britsh, by Bill Tutte and others, in house at Bletchley during WWII.


From what I'm reading, it wasn't as decisive as "costing Germany the war".

Instead if would have delayed D-day and other operations by a year or more but the benefit is arguably on the side of Germany because both the Soviet Union (making Germany "pay") and the US (first use of the atomic bomb there?) had more sinister intentions.

https://www.historynet.com/what-if-the-allies-had-not-broken...


Enigma caused the U-boot campaign to fail. Many U-boot commanders were convinced that Enigma was compromised, as the circumstances of the losses were too coincidental. But Admiral Doenitz doggedly refused to believe that. All the Kriegsmarine needed to do was layer on a one-time pad - a simple and effective technique. But nope.

The failure of Enigma also caused Rommel to lose the Afrika campaign. The Allies knew when and where his supply ships were coming, and sank them one after the other. Rommel knew that these losses were only explainable by espionage, but believed the Allied disinformation and misdirection as to the cause.


Interesting points that I wasn't aware of.

Still, in my understanding this doesn't seem to make a German victory more likely in retrospect because it wouldn't have sufficiently impacted the campaign in the East.

At best I see more fuel, stronger Italy, and weaker GB in it.


Is it so hard to imagine?

I can easily see certain theories being denounced today because they are "too white". Maybe not in physics - not yet - but I imagine this is already a debate in the social sciences.


I am guessing this is why Planck coined the phrase "science advances one funeral at a time".


Researchers falling behind on mathematical results? Government can lend a hand:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill


It's very postmodern. Note how science is sometimes called patriarchal or "white" today in some circles. It's not unique to the Nazis.

Of course, it is true that science is a part of culture and society, and that the world is interpreted though the lens of both. Yes, culture can distort, but it is also a medium of truth. And reason is able to make these determinations in principle.


We live in a world where code in the Linux kernel will rot until removal if it was commited by someone who later become a criminal and where research will simply not get done if the one that would do it don't have the right political opinion. "Remarkable" is not the word I'd use. "Banal" seems more true.


while presumably the emotional associations of murdererfs made it harder for it to find new maintainers, i think the bigger issue is that the maintenance had been handled by reiser's employees, and the company sort of organizationally collapsed in the wake of his imprisonment https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/namesys-vanishes-but-rei...

it might have helped if he hadn't named it after himself. though that wasn't without precedent; xiafs was also named after its author, and of course there are lots of other examples that aren't failsystems (linux, the boehm–demers–weiser garbage collector, the stl by stepanov and lee, and of course every software project named something like ZEUS or THOR)

the default is for free software to die if nobody works on it, and though murdererfs did have some users, it evidently didn't have enough enthusiastic users for them to take up the mantle

pretty similar to what's happened with firefox and chromium; the hypothetically less evil forks like palemoon keep dying off from failure to recruit new talent


I don't get the Zeus or Thor bit. Of course our indo-european father of the daylight sky has likely killed a few mortals. But does that really stop people contributing to projects named after him? I've been using the Thunar file manager for years...


the joke is that when walter mitty writes a program and names it 'thor', he is in effect naming it after himself (a wish-fulfillment fantasy version of himself), just like when linus called his versioned blob store 'git', but in a less self-deprecating way


stl get a pass because it also makes a great acronym.


also as far as we know meng lee has never stabbed anyone to death


(or strangled anybody)


This feels like a trollish way of making a point about "PC" culture. Linus Torvalds is hardly a beacon of said culture already and it's going just fine


When has Linus said something politically incorrect? And no, calling someone an idiot because of their incompetence as a programmer does not count.


This would be a much better example since we were talking about physics / code being done by some group of people

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11sv7gc/linux_kernel...


A little bit different don't you think? Unless Einstein murdered any people that I don't know about.

In any case they didn't remove it because of the murder.


This is flat-out wrong. Even Hans Reiser himself (pre-murder) had essentially given up on ReiserFS 3 and had been saying "just wait ReiserFS 4, which will fix all the problems" in response to bug reports and such for ReiserFS 3, which mostly went unfixed.

Some development and maintenance has happened after Hans Reiser's conviction, such as enabling ReiserFS to use more than one core.

However, some problems like y2038-compatibility or 1 second date resolution are not even easy to fix without changing the on-disk format. It's a right pain, y2038 in particular. And ReiserFS doesn't actually have a lot of usage, partly due to this and other problems, so why bother going through a difficult and painful migration?

It's slated for removal now due to the y2038 issue, but even with that the removal of ReiserFS is conditioned on "no one really objects and/or brings a good use case to front", similar to the Itanium removal.

It's more than likely that ReiserFS would have been in the same state if Hans Reiser has died in a sudden accident before he killed his wife.


Oh, now I remember ReiserFS 3 vs 4!

It was like WinFS in Microsoft land. The filesystem would be the database etc.

(By the way never put an image of a reiser filesystem on a mounted reiser disk and then run fsck. Goodbye, all files.)


[flagged]


This sounds like rubbish to me. I've heard Poincare almost discovered special relativity, but insisted on keeping aether in the model or something like that. Apart from that I've never seen anything about Einstein not being fully original in his ideas. Source please.


Poincaré moved knowlage forward but could never let go of the concept of aether.

Einstein’s novel addition were the first and second postulate of SR. This is what allowed him to use the work of Poincaré, Lorentz, Heaviside etc.. and move beyond the falsified concept of aether which absolutely was holding Poincaré back at that point in history.


As I understand it, the Lorenz transform for relativistic velocities was well-known prior to Einstein's publications (1892 initial appearance for Lorenz).

Einstein's work, as I understand it, was to set the transform in a complete and encompassing theory.

"The transformations later became a cornerstone for special relativity."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation


Worth noting he did a ton more than special relativity (his Nobel prize wasn’t for that theory)


Right, the article reminds us that the Nobel was for his work on the photoelectric effect, and implies that relativity was too radical for a substantial number of scientists.


I can't find the original article, I read it long ago.

Here's a short summary why this article may have been written though.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-ei...


Well, you submitted this [1] last April. The piece comes straight from a conspiracy theory website.

[1] https://www.techcounsellor.com/2017/04/albert-einstein-plagi...


Eh, so he built on other people's work like any other scientist. I can't see he would have Zuckerberg'd anything based on reading those discussions.


> But the danger became a reality when on April 30, 1933, Nazi assassins killed Theodor Lessing, a controversial German-Jewish philosopher living as a refugee in Czechoslovakia. He was shot and died the next day. There had been a price on Lessing’s head, and the killers were honored in Germany. Lessing’s photo had also been published with the caption “Not yet hanged.”

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.


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You broke the HN guidelines egregiously here. Please don't do that again.

Turning this thread into a flamewar about Israel, of all things, was beyond vandalism and approaching arson.

I agree with sbilstein that its odor is nasty as well.

(Edit: it turns out you've been breaking the site guidelines a great deal. We have to ban accounts that post like this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, that would be good. Please especially don't use multiple accounts to break HN's rules with.)


[flagged]


I have no idea about your intent, of course—we have to moderate by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Turning this thread into a flamewar about Israel was the effect of what you posted, and you're responsible for that. If it wasn't what you intended, you should either have posted something entirely different or refrained from posting.

I have no memory of previous responses to you, nor do I recognize your username. If I've posted moderation comments in the past, it would be in exactly same way as I do toward any other user. None of this is personal.


This policy means that

A) Nobody can ever even so much as mention Israel.

B) To completely suppress speech about a topic on Hacker News, I only need about 5 accounts. Hacker News is completely vulnerable to a singular group's efforts to suppress topic discussion.

C) The effects of a completely innocuous post can punish the author.

Unless you believe I am a malicious mastermind, it's obvious that this ex post facto methodology of meteing out bans is ridiculousa and ineffective and mostly just a justification for your current emotional state.


HN has had many comments about Israel and related topics in the last few days. Difficult as the discussion is under current circumstances, not all of them were flamebait. Your comment was. Worse, it was a generic flamewar tangent—taking the discussion away from the historical material of the OP and into an ugly slugfest about an obvious flamewar topic.

Re B: if you're going to make a claim like that, you should supply links, so we can look into what happened, and so readers can make up their own minds.

In any case B is irrelevant to whether or not you broke the site guidelines in this thread, which you certainly did—it wasn't a borderline call.


The man lived at the same time my great grandfather did, a ww1 Jewish German veteran.

Everyone’s views on their integration into German / Gentiles society were completely upended throughout those years. Einstein wasn’t always an ardent Zionist, he wasn’t always a pacifist, his lived experiences caused changes. Your question compresses 30 years of life, say 1925-1955, into a simple binary to try and drive some nasty conclusion.


[flagged]


I already responded to you at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169987 but this is so bad that I need to add something: if you post like this again to HN, we will have to ban you.


That is not true, the Arab countries decided to wage war in Israel after the UN proposed the two state solution. Herzl and many other founding figures in Zionism called for peace and integration in the Middle East. Jewish people thought because they had no choice. Meanwhile in Europe Jews were massacred or if they were lucky bullied and harassed.


No group would or should have to tolerate a foreign state being established on their soil at gunpoint by colonial powers.

> the Arab countries decided to wage war in Israel after the UN proposed the two state solution

- That doesn't make sense. Israel didn't exist until it was established.

- The Arabs didn't voluntarily leave their villages.

- And during 1947, the Arabs ejected from the Arab side of the UN partition line did not leave because they wanted to give more land to Israel or because of the Arab League intervention a year later in 1948.....They left because of ethnic cleansing by Jewish religious extremists.

> other founding figures in Zionism called for peace and integration in the Middle East.

To the contrary, Israeli leadership wanted all of Palestine and the UN plan was treated as a stepping stone toward Greater Israel.

The current Prime Minister of Israel Netanyahu also rejects a two state solution, insisting for decades that only Israeli sovereignty should be allowed between the Jordan River and the Sea.


Colonial powers? Like the Ottomans? (The previous rulers)


The countries we're referring to were generally all established colonially, in many cases very close in time to the establishment of Israel.


While Israel does have a present problem with religious extremists I take issue with the characterization of the Irgun, Haganah, Levi and other terrorist groups that conducted the ethnic cleansing as “religious extremists”.

These were terrorist thugs. They had an objective and they naturally used violence to achieve it. Whatever “religious” views they may or may not have had are secondary. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was conducted by violent terrorists who wanted to create a country that they dominated.

We can discuss and debate whether their religious views follows from or causes the Zionist terrorism that has prevailed for the past century separately. It’s a valid discussion point but in the context of the ongoing genocide and ethnics cleansing all it does is muddy the waters for many people.


My understanding is that the Arabs opposed a minority population suddenly and aggressively taking over half of their land.

This itself is a very simplified summary. I strongly recommend "Fear and loathing in New Jerusalem" for a long, nuanced explanation of what happened there. Starting at the UN proposition is ignoring a lot of critical context.


Where do you recommend starting?

I prefer starting at the Ottoman property laws, which were adopted by the British Mandate, by which the Jewish purchase of land was perfectly legal.


I'd start at episode 1, since it covers this with far more nuance than "it's legal therefore it's okay".


Thank you, I'll read episode 1. Episode 1 of what?

In the meantime, I would really appreciate a summary of why "it's legal therefore it's okay" is not a good answer. The Ottomans deliberately enacted liberal property laws to increase immigration, and thus tax collection, from the area. It was literally the stated goal of the government at the time.


Episode one of the aforementioned podcast?

One answer to this point in particular is that this wholesale liquidation of the land was made by rich landowners living far away, and cannot be treated as the Palestinians selling their own land away. The people actually living on the land had no say in this.


Years before that, the Israelis waged war against the British.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_insurgency_in_Mandatory...


Mind you the Jewish helped the British to get to Palestine in the first place. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nili The British, like in many other colonies were bad rulers, and even so the majority of the Jewish population didn’t wage war on the Brits and waited patiently for the Mandate to be over


- The British offered land that didn't belong to them because of colonialism

- They offered land to Zionists to further their imperialist goals

- The British enabled Jewish immigration to Palestine when it was clear that Zionists intended to take over the entire territory of Palestine

- The local Arab population wasn't stupid and they understood that Zionism was an organized political program driven in large part by Jewish religious extremists to take away their home

That only some Zionists resorted to terrorist bombing campaigns against the British is hardly "patiently waiting".

They were only there because of the British and still waged war against them, mirroring Israel's refusal to heed US admonitions against illegal land grabs in the West Bank despite absolute dependence on American protection.

It's a client state that feels it can write the rules, steal what it wants and bites the hand that feeds it.


> The British offered land that didn't belong to them because of colonialism

I’m sorry, but the British mandate didn’t exist because of colonialism. It existed because it was at war with the Ottoman Empire during WWI and won territory. That is very different than colonialism even though it was a colonial power and that’s how it got its strength and military experience and might. The local Arab population hadn’t had sovereignty in many hundreds of years.

> They offered land to Zionists to further their imperialist goals

They offered the same land to both Zionists and local Arabs as a reward for helping overthrow the Ottoman Empire. Of course they kept it through the British Mandate cause the Brits are a crafty folk. As for actually honoring the agreement in 1948, a large part of legitimizing the state of Israel was because of what happened to Jews in WWII - atrocities no other people felt as deeply and the general populace was shocked into action when they learned what had been going on. Today’s Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939 for context. Half of all Jews worldwide are in Israel which I hope explains the emotional reaction of treating critiques and attacks on Israel as anti semitism (and of course that argument is weaponized for political purposes).

> That only some Zionists resorted to terrorist bombing campaigns against the British is hardly "patiently waiting".

By that line of reasoning, that only some Palestinians engage in terrorist attacks means that all Palestinians are guilty? For context, once the state of Israel was established the other groups were labeled terrorist organizations and were ordered to merge into the IDF. One group resisted and the IDF attacked it and defeated it. The same doesn’t seem to be happening with Hamas which despite being in power can barely even control other militant groups in the area. Is your suggestion to hand control over to Hamas? Cause you only have to look at what happened with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to understand what popular democracy looks like in the area (keep in mind Hamas was elected and then immediately abolished democracy).


The land didn't belong to British. Nor did it belong to Ottomans and nor to Arabs. The only rightful option for the defacto controllers of the land was to return it to Jews.


> Mind you the Jewish helped the British to get to Palestine in the first place.

So did the Arabs. Before revolting against the League of Nations mandate for British administration they were revolting against the Ottoman Empire - and fighting alongside the British (/French/Italian) Egyptian Expeditionary Force.


Yeah, it was a complicated relationship. But that example seems to support the original statement that "Israel was never tenable without war." First against the Ottomans, then the British, then the Arabs.


There were wars fought on that region with the intent of exiling the Jews there since at least the 19th century. Neither them nor the Muslims got any saying on the matter.

But all the discussion about who started it only serves to make it less likely that the situation will be resolved. (Or maybe we should punish the Ottoman Empire.)


And why did the UN propose a 2 state solution?


Because there was a formidable Jewish population in Israel before WW II and the horrors of the holocaust made the world understand the Jewish people must have their own country. On the other hand, the UN wanted to give the Palestinians (which were never an independent nation before) their own country.


They were never an independent nation? What does that mean?

I'm taking that to mean that you think their not being officially recognized as a state makes outside decisions about what land was and wasn't there's more valid.

But I would posit that the idea of statehood that this relies on is based on a Westphalian ideal that is in colonial in this case. The people of Palestine were a nation and they had land of their own. The lack of official recognition by western powers doesn't change that.

Did "the world" agree that there was a need for a Jewish state? It seems that many people disagreed both then and now.

Why did it have to be built where it was? Because there was a Jewish population there? What changed for the population of Jews to change from less than 5% to almost half within the preceding century?


I'm on the side of Israel, since to a certain extent I believe in "Might is Right". Don't challenge to a fight you can't win. But to large extent every claim that Israel makes to the land, the Palestinians could make. Hasan Parker kind of changed my opinion on this.

But currently the left sees Jewish people as high status white people, using their status to get away with bloody murder. And you can't be racist agains white people...so the claim. The right is waiting for the rapture....and Israel will bring God back to earth ...or something crazy like that.

I personally think a practical approach needs to be taken.


You cannot give away some thing that doesn't belong to you.

If I accept stolen property which I know to be ill-gotten, then I am as responsible as the thief.

A Jewish state could've been established peacefully somewhere out in Utah instead (or joined the millions of American Jews prospering safely in their communities), but Palestinians had their land taken instead.

Why? Racism, plain and simple. Like the Native Americans, the Palestinians were treated as mere savages who could be dispossessed without consequence.


You also can't expect to receive something that doesn't belong to you. Arabs were not natives on the historical Jewish lands. The offer to give them just anything was more than generous.


What does "historical lands" mean? What's the cut off point on being able to claim the land your ancestors lived on?


This is almost entirely just plain false.


Speaking of the UN, if we are to take them as the international organization with primary legitimacy on these affairs, let's do a quick check in:

https://unwatch.org/un-general-assembly-condemns-israel-14-t....


What the hell does it have to do with the 1947 resolution??? And yeah the UN is full of countries that call for the inhalation of Israel today. They expect Israel to stay silent while its citizens are being slaughtered, kidnapped, raped and bombarded


Einstein was a pacifist whatever his other inclinations were. He certainly didn’t want the natives in Palestine to be harmed or displaced as European Jews also moved there.

“Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.”

Einstein in his letter to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, Nov. 25, 1929, AEA (Albert Einstein Archives) 33-411.

It might have been naive of him to think and hope for European Jews to come to Palestine in peace and without war (that is not how history played out), but I don’t think he had bad intentions.


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From my understanding of history, the Jews that one thinks of as natives had historically converted mostly (which is where the Christian and Muslim population in Palestine came from - not by settling but through an organic change in what people believe, like how we in the west have a population becoming increasingly secular). The European Jews who migrated cannot be called natives.


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Just fyi, the "native" Americans are not native either, but got America by fighting the actual first settlers before them.


> Israel was never tenable without war.

The territory assigned to Israel by the UN partition plan had a population that was 47% Palestinian. I wonder what was the thinking there- how did the UN envision the establishment of a Jewish state with almost 50% of non-Jewish citizens.


Einstein didn't want a Jewish state, he wanted a binational Jewish - Arab state. Basically one state solution without the apartheid.



Many people accuse Isreal in apartheid without realising at all what it means.

Do you for example know why Isreal built fenced borders in Gaza and West Bank?

In period between 2000-2005 over 700 Jewish civilians were killed in terrorist attacks coming from these territories.

Attacks basically stopped after the fences were built.


You do realize you didnt actually argue against it being apartheid? You repeated a victim narrative, a common method in fascist systems to normalize crimes against humanity.

Its really worth reading Einsteins notes on Israel.

"“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations build [sic] up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”" https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/albert-einstein-the-p...

Should echo in the ears of everyone that ignored Trudeau warning

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/israel-s-gaza-campaign-puts-...

Murderous totalitarian regimes do not work. They quickly turn into mafia states. At its not something you end up in accidentally, its very visible by people falling back onto tribalistic narratives they prefer over reality.

Looking back at Einsteins letter from 1948, its worth remembering, that Hannah Arendt co-wrote it while being a Zionist. Anyone actually interested in a future for Israel should think really hard if revisionist Zionism is a way to achieve that.


There’s no apartheid in Israel. 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab. There are Palestinian civilians who chose to live in a separatist area and refused time after time to recognise Israel and have their own state in the West Bank.


Suppose an atheist born in Gaza would like to move to Tel Aviv. What is required, short of conversion to Judaism?




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