Blog Mirror and Commentary: QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024 and the destruction of reality.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism.

Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.

And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.

Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944.  This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions.  Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine.  The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture.  This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.

This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text.  And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.  

If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.

This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time.  Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.

This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.

At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.

That's a phenomenal observation.

And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it.  That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't.  It's been wholly destructive.

We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe.  Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.

Lauren Bacall, 1943.

The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did.  La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s.  But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.

Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s.  Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage.   Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm.  Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.

Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology.  That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.

Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell.  Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex.  It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was.  That really started to break down during the 1940s.  I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.

From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions.  This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is.   The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.

Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong.  Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it.  Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.

By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile.  There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.

Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution.  I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.

And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.

We've lost a lot here. A massive amount.  And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality.   And we're still slippping.

QC: Human Sexuality | January 17, 2024.

Related threads:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Labels: Agrarianism, Agriculture, An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, Commentary, Daily Living, Food, Friday Farming, Medicine, Men, nature, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, trends, Women

Friday, June 13, 1924. Macready jumps into the dark.

Lt. John A Macready, already famous for this; 

The Aerodrome: First "Crop Dusting". August 3, 1921.:

First "Crop Dusting". August 3, 1921.

On this day in 1921, crop dusting, spraying pesticides by air, was performed for the first time in an experiment involving the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

First crop dusting being conducted.

The first flight featured Army Air Corps pilot John A. Macready and aircraft engineer Etienne Dormoy who performed the test with a Curtiss JN4 over a field outside of Troy, Ohio.  Lead arsenate was sprayed to attack caterpillars.

Dormay left, Macready right.

Macready would complete an Army career prior to World War Two, leaving the service in 1926, but was recalled to serve in the Second World War.  He retired from the Army Air Force in 1948.  He was a legendary pilot at the time and had many firsts while in the service, including being the first Air Corps pilot to parachute from a stricken aircraft at night.

made his aforementioned night jump.

He landed in a tree, which saved his life.

Which, in an odd way, brings up this item:

Mosquito Control Notification: Aerial Granular Larvicide Scheduled for June 13

Laramie, Wyoming – City of Laramie Mosquito Control has scheduled the application of granular larvicide to control larval mosquitoes in rural areas adjacent to the city.  The application is scheduled for Thursday, June 13th beginning at daylight.   The product is a granular form of Bacillus thuringensis israelensis (Bti) that is designed to penetrate heavy grasses and brushy foliage to reach water sources, especially in maturing hay fields, where larvae are present. The application is targeting both nuisance and vector mosquito larva. The product is environmentally friendly and will not harm fish, amphibians, livestock, or other aquatic invertebrates. If weather conditions are not favorable for the application, it will be postponed until weather conditions allow for the application. 

Treatment areas include irrigated acreages along the Big Laramie River southwest of the city, flooded riparian zones in the Big Laramie flood plain southwest and north of the city, and acreages north and west of the city that are irrigated by the North Canal and the Pioneer Canal.  

Schedules regarding Mosquito Control, Parks, and Cemetery chemical applications for control of weeds and insect pests are available daily through the Mosquito Control and Integrated Pest Management Hotline at 721-5056. The schedule is updated at approximately 4pm daily. Spraying information is also available on the city website. Look for the daily mosquito and chemical application hotline tab on the home page at www.cityoflaramie.org.   For further information contact Hunter Deerman, Mosquito/IPM Supervisor at 721-5258; hdeerman@cityoflaramie.org or Scott Hunter, Parks Manager at 721-5257 SHunter@cityoflaramie.org.

Silent Cal had a brief statement for the Press:

Gaston Doumerque was sworn in as the President of France.

Hermann Suter's Le Laudi was preformed for the first time.

Bene Berak, Palestine, founded, named for a Biblical place name.  It was then a Jewish settlement.   Ibn Ibraq's Arab villagers subsequently renamed it al-Khayriyya. It was depopulated during a military assault as part of Operation Hametz during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

A large waste transfer station, known as Hiriya, was built at the ancient/modern site, now converted into the Ariel Sharon Park.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, June 12, 1924. Coolidge nominated, train robbed, disaster on USS Mississippi

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1950s, 1957, 1980s, boats and ships, Calvin Coolidge, Crime, Disaster, Election of 1924, George H.W. Bush, Railroads, U.S. Navy

An uncomfortable truth.*

The US has been rocked in recent weeks by student protests over the war between Hamas and Israel.  The striking thing about it for me is how much this has turned, in terms of public opinion.

Even my own opinion has changed, but in the other direction. When I was young, I had quite a bit of sympathy with the Palestinian cause.  My views on it developed when I was old enough to not have any really good recollection of the Palestinian terrorist activities of the 1970s.  The problem to me seemed clear enough.  Israel had been established on British occupied territory without the clear input of all of the residents of that territory, and since then war had precluded the Arab residents from having a voice.

I don't really hold that view anymore.

Unfortunately, much of the world seems to.

"Palestine", as a political entity, has not been free, in a self-governing sense, since sometime . . . well It's hard to say if it ever was.  The word itself refers to the Roman administrative province that was imposed on the Kingdom of Israel.  Romes grip weakened in the 600s, with a Persian invasion taking Jerusalem in 614 and the Muslims invading and conquering all of the Levant in 634-638.

Note those words. . .Levant and conquering.

That's what the Islamic invaders did, they invaded and conquered.  Islam was spread by the sword.

We'll also note that this was a long time ago.

In the Levant, which is what we're dealing with, there were multiple religious groups and Christianity and Judaism remained strong.  Much of what Islam conquered were Christian lands.  Islam did not spring up there from fertile soil, it was imposed, but the other religions remained.

By the 1090s the Muslim principalities of the Levant were themselves coming under attack from other Islamic forces, the net result, without getting into all of the details, were the Crusades.  In 1260, in an odd event, the Mongols briefly conquered the entire region before they retreated due to a succession crisis at home.  The Ottoman's conquered the entire region in 1516-1517 and ruled it, in an increasingly weak manner, until the British Mandate was imposed at the end of World War One.

At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, the Zionist movement sought to reclaim the region that had been Israel up until AD 70.  The Ottomans both facilitated and opposed the movement.  It was gaining strength by World War One and took on a life of its own.  By World War Two (this is the 80th anniversary of the Biltmore Conference) it was becoming a mass Jewish movement of sorts, as Jews around the world reacted to the horror of the Holocaust.  

At the same time, Levantines in the region became increasingly hostile to Jewish settlers, fearing what was to become.  This turned violent on at least one major occasion before World War Two, causing the British to have to put a Palestinian Revolution that lasted from 1936 to 1939.  That movement sought independence, but it did so in part as Levantines feared that the growing strength of Jewish settlement movements meant that they'd be displaced on their own territory.

When the British ducked out in 1948 the Arabs and Israelis went right to war with each other, resulting in the fleeing of 700,000 Levantine's from the region, half of pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine's Levantine population.  That population, now enormously increased, sets up the current situation. Some fled because fleeing fighting armies is the rational thing to do. Some fled as they feared being killed by Jewish militias.  Some fled as, after Israel established themselves, they were expelled.  

The overall problem is that 70 to 80 years ago is a long time.

In the past 70+ years, those tragically expelled should have been productively resettled.  Some were, of course, but many were not.  Instead, the results of the 1948 war were rejected across the Middle East, which in turn made it worse by repeated incompetent efforts to militarily reverse the situation. The West Bank, for example, was lost in the 1968 war.  Movements supporting the Levantine cause, moreover, have been attracted not only to violence, but to extremism.

At the present time, Hamas wants to expel Jews from the borders of what had been Mandatory Palestine, a region that has existed as a politically independent area for, well, ever.  Hamas would impose radical Islam on the region to the detriment of not only the Jews, but to Christians, who remain in the region, and even to other Muslims.

There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that there's any Levantine entity any less radical than Hamas.

A two-state solution for the problem is absurd.  Part of the ongoing problem is that the Levantines have been kept in postage stamp sized settlements not only by the Israelis, but by the non-Levantine Arabs, who don't want to take them in.  An independent Levantine state based on the West Bank would be dirt poor, radical, and a menace to the region's political stability.

And that's not what so many of them want. They want the borders of Mandatory Palestine, with its current Jewish residents expelled from the region for from life.

And that's what student protesters are actually advocating in some circumstances.  Both the Atlantic and the Guardian have interviews with a narrow selection of them who are basically comfortable advocating that murderous solution.   Levantine protesters in the US seem pretty comfortable with it as well, or at least not uncomfortable with noting that those they are supporting by implication are murderous rapists.

One of the uncomfortable truths of history is that wrongs of the past can't be righted, really.  Nobody can go back to 70 and keep the Romans from expelling the Jews.  Nobody can go to all the numerous localities where they were thereafter oppressed and murdered and keep that from happening.  Germans today seem remorseful for what they did from 1932 to 1945, but that can't keep the horror from happening.  The British today would not take Palestine as a mandate, but they did, and that's done.  And the expulsions and fleeing of the Levantines in the late 40s has already occured.

Like so many other things that humans imagine, trying to restore a status quo ante, long after that status quo has fled, only results in new horrors.  The Jewish desire for a homeland was rational.  That they'd desire a portion of what had been Israel (modern Israel is smaller than Biblical Israel) was also rational,  It's already happened.   A solution for the plight of the Palestinian Levantines needs to be found, and frankly isn't all that difficult to work, but neither a two-state solution nor setting an army of rapist and murderous lose in Israel is a solution that's either workable or tolerable.

Nor is it rational or tolerable to put up with people protesting for it.**  Students form the protesting base in any country in part, quite frankly, as a large percentage of them are essentially idle while not knowing it.  As a student, I imagined what I'd do once I was out of school, with a job, and finally "free". It turned out that what I did was worked and took on the responsibilities of adult life.  Freedom, in a certain sense, isn't what Janis Joplin claimed it to be, that being "nothing else to lose", but it is, in another sense, "nothing else to do".

In the 1930s, when Spain was in a violent crisis, a tiny number of people went there and fought in its civil war.  I don't admire the foreign volunteers to Republican Spain, who misjudged their cause and blinded themselves to what it was really for, but at least they did more than gum up classes.  Students yelling bear, ultimately, no real burden for their efforts. They're not Freedom Riders or the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

And here, ironically, should they really have an impact, it'll be to bring to power in "Palestine" a group of murderous perverts, and to help bring to power in the US somebody whom they don't agree with on anything.

Footnotes

*Because I'm not a professional blogger, nor retired, I have a lot of posts, well over 100 in fact, that are in the hopper, some of which related to this.  I note that, as there's more coming, maybe, if I ever get around to it, on the crisis in the Middle East.

**Protesting against Israeli military overreach is something else entirely.  Israeli's are doing that.

This is a common feature, oddly, of protests.  It's perfectly rational, for example, to have been against bombing Hanoi during the Vietnam War, but that doesn't mean you need to appear on an anti-aircraft gun belonging to a communist army.  Here being opposed to Israel leveling Gaza is rational, pretending that Hamas is on the side of virtue is not.

Related threads:

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Arabs, British League of Nations Mandates, Israel, Israeli Hamas War, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Kuwait, MIddle East, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

Wednesday, May 4, 1944. Japanese Command Changes.

 

Soemu Toyoda (豊田 副武) was made Commander in Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy Combined Fleet.

Toyada became a full Admiral only shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and was opposed to it from the onset, believing that a war with the United States was unwinnable.  He figured in late war Imperial Conferences on finding an end to the war, which he was in favor of ending but he wished for better terms for Japan, even after the atomic strikes on the country.  He was in favor of defending the home islands to the last man.

Arrested and charged with war crimes in 1948, he was acquitted in 1949, the only member of the Japanese armed forces to prevail in a war crimes trial.  He died in 1957 at age 72.

The British 14th Army captured the heights above the Maungdaw-Buthindaung road in the Arakan.

The USS Donnell was heavily damaged by a strike by the U-473. Towed to Scotland, she became a total loss.

The U-852 was scuttled on the Somali coast.

Harvard scientists announce the ability to produce synthetic quinine.

The French Resistance burned 100,000 liters of acetone at the Lambiotte plant.

2nd Lt. John W. Garrett, age 19, was killed making an emergency landing of a B-24 at Rentschler Field, East Hartford, Connecticut. 

Sarah Sundin has some interesting entries on her blog, Today in World War II History—May 3, 1944.

She reports, for instance, that Going My Way was released.

I've never seen the film, but according to some its the best in Bing Crosby's career.  I probably should catch it.

The movie is really from the golden age of the portrayal of Catholic clerics in American films.  It interestingly came before the point at which Catholics had crossed over into the American cultural mainstream, and remained their own ethnicity to a strong degree.  The era, which started in the 1930s and continued into the 1950s, basically ended after the American Catholic integration occured following John F. Kennedy's election to the White House.

It's interesting, in that there are an entire series of really sympathetic portrayals of Catholic priests and Catholicism in general from this era, including Boys Town (1938), The Song of Bernadette (1943), The Bells of Saint Mary's (1945), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), The Quiet Man (1952) On The Waterfront (1954), and The Left Hand of God (1955).  These were all major motion pictures, not niche pictures such as For Greater Glory (2012).  They came on pretty strongly in the late 1930s and continued on into the mid 50s, but really disappeared after that.  By the 1970's M*A*S*H the portrayal of priests had declined to the point where the portrayal was entirely satyric.

Sundin reports that meat rationing was temporarily relaxed, which brings up this post that we pondered the topic in from a few years back:

Hunting (and fishing), Stateside, during World War Two.

Owning a packing house, as they did, I wonder what was table fare for my father and his family during the war?

Last prior edition:

Tuesday, May 2, 1944. Sensing a change.

1940s, 1944, boats and ships, French Resistance Movements, Red Army, Romania, Second Battle of Târgu Frumos, Spain, U.S. Navy, Vichy France

Wednesday, January 2, 1924. Kings in Exile.

Bulgaria gave former King Ferdinand, who had been in exile since 1918, permission to return to Sofia.

He had been living in Coburg, Germany, oddly enough, given that the German monarch was also in exile.  He noted, while there:

Kings in exile are more philosophic under reverses than ordinary individuals; but our philosophy is primarily the result of tradition and breeding, and do not forget that pride is an important item in the making of a monarch. We are disciplined from the day of our birth and taught the avoidance of all outward signs of emotion. The skeleton sits forever with us at the feast. It may mean murder, it may mean abdication, but it serves always to remind us of the unexpected. Therefore we are prepared and nothing comes in the nature of a catastrophe. The main thing in life is to support any condition of bodily or spiritual exile with dignity. If one sups with sorrow, one need not invite the world to see you eat.

Yugoslavia issued an ultimatum objecting to his return.

He in fact did not return, and having taken steps to secure his fortune, lived a quasi bucolic life, marked by family tragedy, and carried on in Germany, dying in 1948.  The prior year, he married a third time, to his secretary, age 26.  

Simon & Schuster, the legendary publishing house, was formed.

The U.S. Winter Olympic team left for the first Winter Olympics.

1924 Winter Olympics including Beatrix Loughran, Joe Moore, Valentine Bialis, Richard Donovan, Harry Kaskey, Charles Jewtraw, and William Steinmetz aboard the ship SS President Monroe on January 2, 1924. 

The Constitutionalist government of Mexico reported that is forces had achieved a victory over the rebels of Adolfo de la Huerta at Zacualpan.

The war in Mexico, and other age-old lethal vices, were making headlines far away:

Flooding in Paris closed the railroads.

Sabine Baring-Gould, composer of "Onward, Christian Soldiers", died at age 89.  Clara Abbott, American businesswoman who had been the first woman to serve on the board of a major American corporation, Abbott Laboratories, died at age 66.

United States Senators Frazier and Johnson were photographed working.

A new flag for Iowa was unveiled.

It is, frankly, ugly.

It had been adopted in 1921. Iowa had lacked one before that.

More observations on the Hamas Israeli War. A sort of primer, war aims, and campaign aims. Part I.

War Aims.

A lot of reporting on the Hamas Israeli War, indeed nearly all of it, is devoid of discussion on war aims.  Some of it vaguely discusses Israeli campaign aims.  None of it so far that I've seen has discussed Hamas campaign aims.  Given that, a lot of the reporting is sort of naive.

Hamas, having started the campaign, will be discussed first.

Hamas was formed in 1987 (probably considerably more recently than many suppose.  Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah, the political arm of what had been the Palestinian Liberation Organization, controls the West Bank.  The two entities have actually fought each other.  Hamas started off with the goal of pushing Jews out of the boundaries of what had been the 1948 Palestinian borders, but earlier in the 2000s seemed to lessen its demands.

It seems to have returned to them.  As far as can be told, its war aims are to remove the Jews from Israel, dead or alive, and of any age, and create an Arab Palestinian, and seemingly Islamic (not all Palestinians are Muslims) state in its wake.  That's what's summed up in the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", which like a lot of slogans is catchy but doesn't really convey the full meaning of what it seeks.

Those are the war aims.

Without abandoning them, Hamas cannot back down, and Israel cannot unilaterally realistically convert the current war into a large scale punitive action at this point.  War aims can change, but Hamas shows no desire at all to do so.  A limited raid that was not aimed at civilians could have been undertaken if it has some other goal, but it didn't.

The campaign aims are much more difficult to discern.  Perhaps it was to spark a wider war in the belief that it could be won, or perhaps it was just a gross act of terrorism in furtherance of its remote, unobtainable goal.

Of course, discerning campaign aims, is often tricky in regard to an entity like Hamas, or even large entities.  In spite of long knowledge to the contrary, they may have thought that their raid, if that is what it was intended to be, would scare Israel into submission.  Hitting civilians never does that.  The British didn't surrender after the Blitz, and the air raids on civilian populations in Germany and Japan, perhaps if we exclude the atomic bomb, didn't cause them to surrender either.  Air raids on military targets in North Vietnam which inflicted civilian deaths didn't cause North Vietnam to give up.  9/11 only made Americans mad, it didn't achieve whatever it was that Al Queda thought it would, which seems to have been a hoped for general economic collapse.

Israel's war aims are also simple.  Its goal is to destroy Hamas as it views it, correctly, as irreconcilably opposed to its existence and genocidal in nature.  Its campaign aims seem to be to occupy Gaza, or perhaps the northern portion of the Gaza Strip, trap Hamas, and destroy it and its infrastructure.

Outright destroying an underground organization, however, is very difficult to do. The US basically did it in Afghanistan, however, so it can be done.

Nobody is talking at all about what's going to become of the Palestinians.  Israel isn't addressing it. The Arabs aren't either.  Hamas is simply using their own people as human shields and for propoganda.

A cultural existential difference, or Why can't everyone get along?

Cultures play a part in wars, which people in the West are oddly inclined to forget.  Jimmy Carter famously absent-mindedly quipped that the problems between the Israeli's and Palestinians would go away if they all started acting "like good Christians", but of course neither group is predominantly Christian.

I've taken some criticism on a more stretched observation in this area recently, so I'll explain a bit what I mean.

This question posed above is really a Western one, filtered through our eyes, which are the eyes of heavy Christian influence.  As a South American atheist friend of mine once stated, culturally, "we're all Catholics", even if we often don't behave like it.  That's why we're shocked when people don't behave accordingly.  

Historically and culturally, that's not necessarily the default human norm at all, which doesn't mean that every non-Christian culture (including the two in question) default to bad behavior.   But, as Genghis Khan supposedly noted (often filtered in our culture through Conan the Barbarian in a modified form):

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

We don't think that way, and we don't want others thinking that way.

Back to this war, the fact of the matter is that these two groups of people aren't going to get along.  The Western concept that somehow they can be made to is simply in error at this point.

It might have been true a couple of times.  One was in 1948, just before the first Arab Israeli War broke out, although that's pretty debatable. The second time was when the 1993 and 1995 Palestinian Accords were reached. The big problem is that both times, large numbers of Palestinians simply rejected a future which included Jews within the 1948 Palestinian boundaries.

The 1948 rejection was accompanied by voting with their feet by the Palestinians, a logical choice but one that was taken advantage of by Israel in that it offered the opportunity to truly make the country principally Jewish.  Nobody can fault somebody for fleeing fighting, but the fact that it occured meant that a large Arab population removed itself.  If it had not, demographics alone would have repeated what in fact occured in Lebanon, where a majority Christian population at that time is now 32% of the population.

Instead of taking that route, the Palestinians first relied on Arab hostility to take the country back for them, and then for the PLO, which ultimately compromised on that, to do so.  Now, a certain percentage are relying on Hamas.

Regarding that calculation, relying on it in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, wasn't irrational.  After that, it really started to be. At some point, the land belongs to those who live there.  It was Zapata who stated; “The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands”, which is how it should be (and how it's increasingly ceasing to be in the United States)  That same analogy pertains to revolutions.  It instinctively makes sense for the people ruled by another people to rebel, but not so much a people that had once lived in a land where the majority of the population isn't yours, and the majority of your population wasn't born in that land.  Indeed, the fact that the initial Jewish war for independence sort of violated that tenant is part of the reason that many nations around the globe were quite hesitant about supporting Israel early on, combined with the fact that it appeared they'd lose.

Beyond that, as an essay in Minding The Campus has related:

(Professor Mordechai) Kedar, a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, has spent his academic life studying Islamic and Arab history and society. He explains that the animus of Palestinians, Arabs, and Islamists against the Jewish state is based on the consensus of Islamic religious thought that believes that Jews as a religion, people, or nation are never to be the equals of Muslims, and so their independent state, Israel, must be “struck down.”

While that can be debated, there's at least something to it, or there has come to be.   For the most part, since World War Two, Middle Eastern Islam, which is its cradle, has become increasingly more "conservative", if that is the correct term, and militant over the decades.  That was always there, and indeed Saudi Arabia was founded due to the Saud family's alliance with a group so conservative it was regarded as heretical.  Islam does not have a real coexistence ethos as we'd understand it towards other religions.  It's often noted that it has allowances for "People of the Book", meaning both Jews and Christians, but that tolerance is limited and provides that they are to be second class citizens.

Neither Christianity nor Judaism have something similar towards other religions, which doesn't mean that individual Christian or Jewish societies are de facto tolerant.  People tend to generally be intolerant of any group that's different from themselves.

Interestingly, early Middle Eastern governments didn't have this feature to them, or at least not to the same extent.  Turkey just celebrated its 100th founding as a modern state, and that state was founded as a secular one.  Atatürk suppressed Islam in his country.  Jordan has always been a Muslim state, but the Hashemite family that rules it, and once controlled Mecca, has tended towards moderation consistently.  The Baath movement that controls most of Syria and once controlled Iraq was a fascist movement early on that included Muslim and Christian Arabs and which sought a secular state in the Middle East.  The PLO was a secular organization that leaned heavily on Communist thought.  There was at one time a strong sense amongst Arab nationalist that Islam had to be suppressed or, if not outright suppressed, the state's had to be secular. That really began to fall way with the Iranian revolution, and there's been a good deal of retreat from it since that time.

Which takes us to the current highly conservative (again, if that is the right word) Israeli government.

The current Israeli government is the most conservative, again if that's the word, one ever.  It follows part of the global drift towards far right populism.  Prior to the Hamas attack, it was receiving a good deal of pushback from Western nations and internally, in no small part due to an effort to subordinate the Israeli supreme court to the Knesset.  In the irony that all such conflicts create, that's all been forgotten now.  At any rate, a sharp turn to the right by Israel made it pretty clear that any current Israeli desires to really find a mutual solution to the problems now being fought over just weren't there.

All of which leaves us with this.

Hamas has attacked and made it clear that it thinks it can murder its way towards achieving its goals, a sort of accelerated variant of the 1939-1945 lebensraum at this point.  Israel can't allow that to happen.

There are paths to a lasting peace here, but nobody involved, or even with influence, is going to try to bring them about, so the question is whether the warring parties, or more precisely Israel, can bring it about by force.

And a further note.

 It's through actions like these:

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Palestinian terrorists recording a video with a kidnapped Israeli boy they are holding hostage in Gaza, letting young local Palestinian kids abuse him. To keep the conflicting going, they wan't spread the hatred to the next generation.

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6:16 PM · Oct 7, 2023

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that the Palestinians have made it almost impossible to sympathize with them.

Yes, they lost their land in 1948, but then they also threw in with an effort that promised to conduct mass expulsion if not genocide in part.  And by electing Hamas, they've elected a group that is genocidal and brutal in its ideology.  It'd be childish if not so murderous.  

This is why, although we'll deal with it in another post, that this war promises to probably result in the ultimate tragedy for the Palestinians, or at least the greatest one since 1948.  Israeli occupation of Gaza, which is coming, is likely to be transformational, and probably put to an end Palestinian aspirations in that quarter. That may be lacking in justice itself, but in an age of easy video access, the well will be dry for sympathy with the Palestinians, and frankly the other Arab nations are not going to shed any but crocodile tears for them.