Reading George Fox

My Current Stance on Israel

By Bruce Steinberg 2023-07-16 Politics

2025-07 My thinking has evolved a lot over the past six years and I don’t think anyone in Israel-Palestine wants a single state solution. Which means the Good Friday Accords is probably the best model. Two states with open borders and everyone is free to identify themselves as Israeli, Palestinian, or both.1 2019-07 One state with full citizenship for all. Right of Return.2 Significant reparations. A Conciliation Committee. A South Africa+ plan basically. Moreover, like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the whole situation started with British Imperialism attempting to use ethnic tensions to remain in power (functionally they used Socialist Zionism the same way they used tensions between Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias in Iraq. Revisionist—aka fascist—Zionism is a whole other ball of wax). And then, after WWII, they just gave up and went home leading to disaster not so different than the Partition. And, thinking along these lines, I believe one way to restart the peace process (after deposing Netanyahu and the other fascists from power) would be to add the UK as a third party who will be responsible for funding reparations and the rebuilding of Palestine. Not only will that make it easier for the Israeli government to…

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American Parties & Foreign Policy

By Bruce Steinberg 2023-07-16 Politics

I’m deliberately avoiding any more arguments in this post to present the most conservative argument that the Republican Party has been a mess on the foreign policy front. I had a conversation today about political polarization in our country. My friend was on the “both sides” spectrum, which I think overstates how much the Democrats have contributed to it. I’m going to leave aside the domestic side of the debate and focus on which party has had a better foreign policy. My friend argued that the Democrats were terrible, listing Kennedy, LBJ, and Carter, while contrasting them to Bush I’s multilateralism (which I think boils down to the Gulf War). Given the immense change that was the end of the Cold War, I don’t know if one can actually make a fair comparison without a lot of background research. Also, there’s the question of: “Does the Gulf War happen if the Reagan administration doesn’t arm Iraq during its war with Iran?” It seems a bit off to credit Bush for positive foreign policy if he helped create the underlying crisis in the first place.1 Of course, the bigger argument is how bad a catastrophe was Iraq Part Duex. I’d argue…

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