There are plausible futures where the answer is <5% or >90%, and the road to them is very different from ones where to answer is 39% or 61%.

Non-Jews: 2.1 + 3 + 2.25 (Gaza, West Bank, non-Jewish Israelis) makes 7.35 million to 7.18 Jewish Israelis. I think this is closer to 50/50, erring slightly towards a Jewish majority giving fertility and lifespan.

The fertility rate in Palestine (3.5) is still higher than in Israel (3.0), but they're converging. Life expectancy is lower in Palestine (74y) than in Israel (82y) but they're slowly converging. Net migration has been negative in Palestine for the past 25 years but positive in Israel over the same period of time. However, migrants to Israel are increasingly not considered Jewish by Israeli law (and the CIA World Factbook seems to currently rely on the official Israeli data): "between the years 1990 to 2020, 36% of the olim were not considered Jewish".

So, we should expect a higher Jewish % in 10 years than today?

@adssx Tfr of Palestinians isn’t really converging with Israel’s but rather dropping quickly whereas Israel stays constant.

I expect more emigration of Palestinians from Gaza after the war.

@adssx Hamas prevents Gazans from leaving, a post-Hamas Gaza will allow more emigration. Who wants to live in Gaza anyway?

@nathanwei "Who wants to live in Gaza anyway?" Many Jewish settlers: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/12-ministers-call-to-resettle-gaza-encourage-gazans-to-leave-at-jubilant-conference/amp/

@adssx Well, Netanyahu came out against resettling Gaza. It's only a fringe minority that supports this nonsense.

Anyway, I'd certainly rather in Tel Aviv.

@nathanwei It's not a fringe minority, polls found that 25 to 40% of Israelis support the resettlement of Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Israeli_resettlement_of_the_Gaza_Strip#Israeli_public_support

@adssx I would assume that there is a difference between saying that "Israel should resettle Gaza" and actually wanting to move there.

@adssx Yeah, it's certainly a minority, but not a fringe minority.

@adssx Issue polling like this is notoriously unreliable (especially in cases like this where it was done by a group that very much wanted a specific result). There's probably a 10-20% minority that would go for this, but 25-40 is implausibly high and suggests someone writing the poll with a result in mind.

@ShakedKoplewitz At least four polls have been conducted on this issue by various organizations with different political orientations, and none of them has ever found a % below 22.5% (I found this one after I wrote my comment above and then added it to the Wikipedia article). So it's unlikely to be below 20%.

@nathanwei @ShakedKoplewitz

I think just like the West Bank, even if 80% of Israelis don't want to settle Gaza, they don't sufficiently mind it to stop the 20% who do from settling there. So there will probably end up being settlements again. It will be some coalitional concession.

In other topics, any Israelis (other than myself) coming to Manifest?

@colorednoise We have questions on that. People think it won’t happen.

@nathanwei can you point me to that question? I can't seem to find it

@colorednoise I search “Gaza settle” in browse and I get 6 questions.

@nathanwei thanks, sometimes the search is sensitive to specific tenses (and you are right, it's lower than I expected, though if it was conditional on Israel occupying Gaza I would definitely buy it higher)

@colorednoise If Gaza has occupation but no setttlements and it’s not a diisaster, perhaps the same can be repeated in the West Bank (of course without the blocs).

@nathanwei There’s only formula that will bring peace: (a) All Israelis all need to become fluent in Arabic (b) or all Palestinians need to become fluent in Hebrew (c) or all Israelis and Palestinians need to become fluent in a third language like English.

we live in our languages.

The the reason for the protracted nature of this conflict is that there are no good borders representing a 2SS contiguous geography (eg like India and Pakistan), and given that, people literally can’t talk with their neighbors. They maybe speak a little of their neighbors language, but ~80% of the time not enough to develop relationships with them, and each side remains alienated from their neighbors.

This is like a heavily militarized version of what happens to ethnic neighborhoods in the US.

@CraigTalbert I don’t believe that at all. Syria and Iraq and Yemen had civil wars. Heck the Palestinians themselves had their own Hamas-Fatah war.

I don’t think the problem with the 2SS is the borders. After all Pakistan and Bangladesh is just like the West Bank and Gaza. As far as Gaza is concerned, Israel withdrew to the Green Line 18 years (!) before October 7.

@nathanwei You’re largely making my point. In each of those countries 80% of people speak Arabic, in Iraq the civil war has resolved. In Yemen and Syria, civil wars won’t last 75 years. It’s true there are ongoing wars in those areas for the last decade or so, I will take 1:99 odds that they’re resolved within the next 65 years.

The language barriers between Bangladesh (Bengali) and Pakistan (Urdu, and multiple others) anre also significant.

If Israelis and Palestinians could frictionlessly talk to each other in the same language, this would be a 10-20 year conflict, not a ~century conflict.

It probably also won’t end without Israelis and Palestinians being mutually intelligible.

@CraigTalbert This is not a language issue. This is fundamentally about culture and religion. Palestine and their Islamic Jihadist beliefs simply do not permit the existence of the Jewish state.

@AlexCao It's not fundamentally about culture and religion, otherwise Jordan and Egypt with a very similar (if not identical in the case of Jordan given their massive Palestinian population) culture and religion would not have signed a peace deal with Israel. (Further away, with the same religion but less similar cultures we have Turkey, Albania, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Kosovo, Bahrain, the UAE and Sudan of course.)

Still, the point about language is moot. Indians and Pakistani speak the same language (Hindustani = Hindi-Urdu continuum) and yet fight each other. While there are many examples of peaceful countries who don't speak the language of their neighbors.

@adssx language probably does have some weight, the different media environments are a problem (seriously check out Arabic language Wikipedia sometime, there is some insane shit on there).

@ShakedKoplewitz Arabic speakers in Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan are exposed to the same media environments and yet they don't attack Israel and even recognize it. No matter the media environment, if I were living in Gaza or the West Bank I'm pretty sure I would hate Israel deeply and would probably be desperate (and stupid) enough at some point to join whatever opposition movement. You give people nothing to live for, they have everything to die for.

@adssx Arabic speakers in those areas do very much hate Israel though! The main difference is their governments (unlike the Gazan government) have more legitimacy to lose than gain by fighting a losing war. The ones who don't (Iran, Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, the houthis in Yemen) still bomb Israel despite having no claim to personal oppression. It's telling that even within Palestinian territories most terrorism comes from Gaza, which pre-war was pretty autonomous, and not the west bank where people face more restrictions.

It's a nice theory that it's all about oppression. It would imply that we could end terrorism by oppression, and it's the easiest way to imagine ourselves doing the same thing. But unfortunately it genuinely doesn't match the evidence.

@ShakedKoplewitz (I should be careful here: clearly "different languages make it hard to communicate" is far from the only factor involved in any of this. But I do think it meaningfully makes reconciliation harder and raises the level of hatred. And worth noting that the countries Israel made peace with generally involved making peace with English speaking elites, often over the sometimes-violent opposition of their own people).

@ShakedKoplewitz People I know in Morocco and the UAE don't hate Israel (at least before Oct 7), but they don't love it either for sure. Still, you make an excellent point with Iran and its proxies that it's not all about oppression.

It's all about incentives. Israel has no incentives to recognize Palestine and to stop territorial expansion. And Palestinians unfortunately have incentives to resort to violence as proven by the increased sympathy for their cause after Oct 7 (so far at least, it might change).

To break that and achieve peace you'd need to change these incentives so that Palestinians have more to lose than gain by using violence. It's the carrot and the stick: either you punish them a lot (but it can backfire as we're seeing now, unless you go even harsher) or you reward their non-violence (diplomatic recognition, economic cooperation, cash transfers, etc.). But, as of today, the Israeli government categorically refuses to agree to a mere "pathway to a future Palestinian state" even in exchange of normalization with Saudi Arabia, the strongest Arab country and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/saudi-ties-in-reach-but-hinge-on-path-to-palestinian-state-sullivan-tells-reluctant-pm/amp

So violence will continue?

@adssx re incentives, it's worse than that - Israeli incentives are to refuse to pull out any settlements because the last time they did that (in Gaza), Hamas took over the strip and spent the next two decades attacking Israel (and Israel did spend a decade or so there trying to reach a negotiatd peace, getting the second intifada instead). So if you're in the Israeli anti-settlement camp you're kinda stuck with "yes it won't bring peace and may actually make terrorism worse but we should do it anyway", which isn't a great vote winner.

But re the language thing - this very much doesn't match things I've heard, especially with closer Arab countries like Egypt (UAE is probably more businesslike and cares less). My (Arabic speaking) brother's stories about talking to Egyptians (while pretending to be Syrian) is that they have a pretty chill level of Israel hatred (not like, intense "kill them all", but definitely "those sure are the bad guys huh").

But where language is really a factor isn't the hatred, it's the information bubble - the problem with Arabic language Wikipedia isn't just about hating Israel, a lot of it is just selling a very skewed image of the conflict with facts omitted or modified at will (their page on the October 7 attacks presents it as a straight up military action against army bases). And that does make the conflict meaningfully harder to resolve, because it means one side is in an information sphere that both plays up their grievances and convinces them they can win by military force any day now, which makes it much harder to compromise.

@ShakedKoplewitz The conclusion of the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza is that withdrawing to the 1967 borders is not enough for Palestinians to shift the balance of incentives toward nonviolence. So if Israel decides to use the "carrot", then Israel should give away more (diplomatic recognition? partial lifting of the embargo? economic cooperation? etc.). As you noted, it's politically inaudible for the Israeli public. So the most likely part is more violence rather than less.

Yes, Arabs mostly think that Israelis are the bad guys. But most of the world thinks the same: "The U.S. remains the only rich country that still had net positive views of Israel." So, it's not only about Arabic media coverage.

I've just checked the Arabic language Wikipedia page (using Google Translate). It's bad, but not that bad. First, the English article also describes the attack as a military action against army bases, but also says it was a massacre of civilians, which the Arabic article totally omits: "2023 military operation into Israel and massacre" (subtitle) and "Hamas fighters breached the Gaza–Israel barrier, attacking military bases and massacring civilians in 21 communities" (lead). Second, the article about the war is a bit more neutral (it uses "Palestinian militants" or "Palestinian armed groups" instead of "Palestinian Resistance fighters", for instance, and it mentions in the lead the 1,400 Israelis killed, including at the Ra'im music festival). Third, the Hebrew article, although nowhere as bad as the Arabic one, is also biased, describing in the lead the attack as a crime against humanity and genocide (it might be, but the jury is still out there, so you don't put this in the lead in WP:WIKIVOICE). Fourth, due to the Arabic diglossia and the prevalence of English and French language education in the Arab World, many Arabs also have access to news in French and English, so the Arabic Wikipedia is more or less as read as the French and English ones combined: English readership, Arabic, and French (unfortunately, the Wikimedia Foundation recently decided to hide even aggregated stats in some dictatorships so we only have data for Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, Qatar, and Lebanon). I'm not sure Arabs are more in an information bubble than all of us.

@adssx > Yes, Arabs mostly think that Israelis are the bad guys. But most of the world thinks the same: "The U.S. remains the only rich country that still had net positive views of Israel." So, it's not only about Arabic media coverage.

Yes, widespread antisemitism is another key problem with this conflict. That's very different from saying the language stuff is a non issue, and the degree of antisemitism in the Arab world really is significantly higher than in Europe.

(Sorry, I'm never going to stop being horrified and angry that the world's reaction to "Israelis are raped to death and have their corpses paraded in the streets and spat on" was to get mad... At Israel)

@ShakedKoplewitz Yes, antisemitism is extremely high in the Middle East, but the reductio ad antisemitismum does not help. Even in Sweden (third-lowest antisemitism score in the world), people side more with Palestine (and this was before the war). And in countries that are allies of the US and Israel, without Muslim populations, such as Japan and South Korea, Israel is deeply hated: "Net favorability in Japan went from -39.9 to -62.0; in South Korea from-5.5 to -47.8".

@adssx yeah, I'm lumping that it with antisemitism/second degree antisemitic propaganda. I don't think Sweden ever had "low antisemitism" except under very gerrymandered metrics. I don't think you end up coming to hate people for being invaded by brutal terrorists without either being biased yourself or having a distorted information source, and both of these are common in this case.

I don't think Japan or Korea think that much about Israel. When they do, it's mostly because they hear about them on media sources with a weird obsession with Israel, which are mostly that way because of antisemitism. So it does come down to that, in the end. America is the main exception here because it's the one country that sometimes has other reasons to hear about Israel, so it's not as subject to this.

@ShakedKoplewitz I think that's where you're mistaken. I consider myself pro-Israel and Zionist (meaning that I admire the founding of Israel and that I support its existence as a Jewish nation-state), and I'm trying to access various sources of information, and yet my level of support for Israel has significantly decreased since Oct 7th. And I don't think that this shift in opinion is the result of antisemitism or second-degree antisemitic propaganda on me. (Not to mention that I'm partially ethnically Jewish, but there are self-hating Jews...)

@adssx well, that's pretty heartbreaking and hard to understand TBH.

@adssx but your own opinions aside, most people internationally don't know much about Israel - they'll see one or two messages on TikTok or an international news channel (often something like al Jazeera or the BBC), which tells them who the bad guys are, and they'll shrug and take it as stated without overthinking it (after all, those usually are fairly reliable).

@ShakedKoplewitz I agree. But the same goes for the pro-Israeli side. Or for any conflict actually, most people have an opinion without doing "the work required to have an opinion".

@adssx right, I think discounting what international mostly-uninvolved people think about a conflict is usually correct.

Which is why, going back to the start, I think the language thing (and just cultural influence) is such a problem here. Palestinians get most of their image from Arabic propaganda, mostly written by people who are far away and just enjoy bashing Israel. Probably more importantly, Hamas leadership lives it up in Qatar, so they also have no real skin in the game. There's a real information barrier to Palestinians getting a hard truth "you're not winning this war. Try to make peace and some kind of two state solution" message.

(Again, this isn't the only factor or a real cause, just one more thing on a list of things that make reconciliation harder).

It is worth noting that Israeli Arabs - who generally speak Hebrew and often work alongside Jews - have become much more peaceful and integrated over time (there's still problems there, but those I actually do mostly blame on the Israeli government).

(Does this also apply on the Israeli side? Maybe partly - I do know some people who try to advocate for Israelis to learn Arabic to develop empathy - but I think there's enough left-wing Hebrew media that Israelis who don't listen to it are mostly choosing to ignore it rather than unaware).

@adssx They speak the same language and they largely cooperate. The partition was successful, as opposed to similar attempts in Israel-Palestine.

@CraigTalbert They largely cooperate?! Check the Kashmir conflict. Speaking the other's language (identical languages, or high mutual intelligibility, or just learning it from a young age) didn't prevent conflicts in the UK vs Ireland, the US civil war, Russia vs Ukraine, the Koreas, Tutsi vs Hutus, the various Balkan Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cyprus conflict, Biafra, etc.

@adssx None of these were intractable conflicts for 75+ years. Not discounting the The Kashmir conflict, but you can’t draw any real comparison there to Israel-Palestine. Militant groups in Kashmir have used similar tactics, but the suicide bombing in 2019 was a massive deal, whereas during the second intifada, those were weekly occurrences. Reading the prospects for improvement here (where, for example, real negotiations occur) is much more promising scenarios than Israel-Palestine. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/india-pakistan-two-decades-after-the-cease-fire-agreement

@AlexCao Religious and religious beliefs change, but they need exposure to the rest of the world. This is why cults and other groups try to discourage this. In Israel-Palestine’s case, the mutual unintelligibly does it for them naturally.

@CraigTalbert The Kashmir conflict is as long as the Israeli one with a similar death toll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll. And 75 years is fairly short in the grand scheme of things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_by_duration Look at the longest conflicts, many belligerents spoke the same languages (Anglo–French: the English court was speaking more French than English for a very long time, Danish and Swedish, English and Scottish, etc.)

List of conflicts by duration - Wikipedia

@colorednoise @nathanwei FYI I've just created a new question, with a longer timeframe, about resettling Gaza: https://manifold.markets/adssx/will-there-be-israeli-settlements-i

@ShakedKoplewitz Well, Israel should have pulled the settlements from Gaza but kept the army. One problem with that is that then there would be even more pressure to pull the army.

@adssx You’re correct about the duration and death tolls here.

But you’re trying to say everyone in the Kashmir region is mutually intelligible to other people in the region? Because it looks like that’s not true.

India in general seems to work well because everyone knows Hindi and or English in addition to one or more of another 20 languages, it doesn’t quite seem to be the case in this specific area.

@CraigTalbert People have various mother tongues, but English and Hindi–Urdu serve as lingua franca understood by the vast majority of the population in the region.

@adssx I would disagree here. The people of Egypt and Jordan still has extremely hostile opinions on Israel - it's just that their government realized that they could not beat Israel in a war and that they should compromise and seek peace. If Israel's military prowess proves to be deficient, I am inclined to believe that they will launch yet another war against Israel with the goal of total annihilation.