games like EU4 simulate it pretty well

when you first take a territory, it requires infamy. other countries look at you with sideways. you can’t extract the full value out of the land yet. but after a long period of time (upwards of 50 years) it slowly starts to become legitimized. especially as you import settlers and built population centers. after a long enough time, it’s both de facto and de jure yours and if you hold it long enough people will recognize it as yours.

so look what happened with West Bank. when Israel took control of WB in 1967, it was majority Palestinian.

what did they do? first, you import settlers. you give incentives for people to come and populate the area with Jews. you also tacitly endorse the ideology of the settlers, so they do it even without you actively supporting it (so you have some semblance plausible deniability when people call you out)

then, you take the native peoples and you herd them into smaller and smaller pieces of land. you restrict movement (like through their “jewish only roads” and the many checkpoints through the WB) (edit: sound similar to what Americans did to another native peoples by chance? almost like it was a blueprint)

fast forward to today, and now 63% of the land area of West Bank is majority Jewish. The Palestinian population is still higher, but they are forced into smaller and smaller pieces of low-value land. In about 50 years or so they’ve managed to turn a majority Arab area into a majority Jewish.

this gives them legitimacy. there’s no way some future government, even if they wanted to be more generous, would ever give up majority Jewish land.

I’d say the entire process is gonna take ~75 years or so. we’re almost to its conclusion. they’re gonna replicate their WB strategy in Gaza, but since Gaza is much smaller and they’re being much more brutal about it, it’ll go much faster

I think the best way to become more resistant to propaganda is to read and understand history. If you only pay attention to this conflict since Oct 7th and you are getting your entire media diet from certain dubious sources, you don’t stand a chance.

but if you deep dive and actually look at the history. look at the beginning of the state of Israel, look at the early leaders, what they were saying, what they believed. look at the process of occupation, what the policies have been (ethnic cleansings population transfers, restriction of movement, blockade of gaza, destruction of airports, killing of journalists, etc)

then you will have a more cynical eye when certain people try to twist and bend the truth. and you will be more accurate in predicting where the ball will land.

You are ignoring how people actually think and live. You view voting as a utilitarian choice. Utilitarianism is not the only ethical system in existence. In fact, utilitarianism is exactly how histories worst autocrats justified their atrocities. Hitler himself ran on a platform of doing painful things that, he at least claimed, simply had to be done. The Holocaust itself was justified entirely from a “lesser of two evils” perspective. Hitler just had to convince the broader German populace that killing all the Jews was a necessary evil. Kill all the Jews or have the world taken over by godless Communists. That was Hitler’s central “lesser of two evils” message.

This is the fatal flaw of appeals to the lesser of two evils approaches. Yes, you “achieve more” by picking the lesser evil. But from many ethical perspectives, if both choices are objectively evil, and you can’t stop either, your only ethical choice is to not support either side. You’re still supporting evil, even if it’s the lesser evil.