Deep Zionism (opens in new tab)

False Dichotomy. A plurality of Israeli voters dislike Netanyahu and what is going on in Gaza. I applaud Aaronson at least for being clear where he stands but his lines of reasoning are (to me at least) over stating what opposition to the war in Gaza means.

The railway track dilemma is a poor analogue to a more complex world.

Woit has a response: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15191

When you commit an act of aggression what follows is on you. That is, at least, what was established at Nuremberg. The original act of aggression was the unwarranted dispossession of the Palestinian people by the Zionists and their Western allies, who were in a position to assist them solely because of their own colonialist sins. There is no need for convoluted trolley dilemmas here. Every evil followed from that original crime against humanity.

So many fallacies in Scott's argument.

The trolley problem presents an either/or scenario. Pull the lever or don't. This is a false dilemma because there arew other options like negotiation, compromise, peace processes, international mediation, addressing grievances.

Scott assumes the "murderer" is irredeemably committed to killing your child, that the threat is existential and immediate, and that defensive actions are the only possible response, then uses these assumptions to conclude you must take defensive action. The conclusion is baked into the circular setup of the thought experiment itself.

A straw man is constructed by characterizing critics only as people who cheer for the murder of Jews, want Israel "decolonized" in a way that implies genocide, or are equivalent to Nazi collaborators. This misrepresents the majority of the criticism of Israeli policies, which usually focuses on specific military actions or settlement policies over questioning Israel's right to exist.

False equivalence applying "Deep Zionism" moral framework across wildly differing scenarios like defending against existential threats, leaving school early, pursuing quantum computing research, and asking women out.

ad hominem attacks, calling critics "snarling nobodies," "self-hating Jews," and "obsessive haters"

Appeal to emotion, false attribution of collective guilt (all Palestinians = murderers, the crowd = the entire international community as if there werent differing opinions.)

By closing comments and declaring there's nothing here to debate, Scott is trying to tie his readers to those same tracks, forced to accept his moral framework or be branded as part of the hateful mob.

EVERYBODY should always chose one's own children, no matter how many other people would die instead. This is the essence of human nature and it would be absurd to ask anything else to someone.

However, I don't believe this has nothing to do with zionism and/or israel.

In general most people I know generally agree on the sentiment that Jewish people should have some form of safe state.

Most disagreement actually arise from differences in the situation presented in the blog post :

- What are exactly "people like you" ? Trying to define a "people" is very different from "my children". Many consider the distinction is wildly arbitrary if you remove religious definitions..

- What should be the actual boundaries of the land an why is it not possible to live together ? In particular when settlers are killing people in the west bank, destroying their homes and displacing them, how is this not exactly the same situation in reverse (the argument of the blog is that israel is the ONLY land, and it is literally the argument of the film "no other land" about Palestine last year) ?

- For the most cynical, is the conflict and the security issues are being weaponized by right wing religious dudes, who don't really want peace but expand the land.

At the end of the day I don't think the Israel / Palestine conflict is really "special". Many groups have been fighting over land for reasons that didn't make sense at all some times (skin color / language spoken / size of skulls between african tribes ?!). This one lasts longer because of religion and that religion tend to last in time because they stick to the intemporal idea of god. Everybody want its own case to be special, but this type fighting is sadly 'classic' human nature.