And trying to destroy Israel (cos it's just like South Africa!1) is completely rational? Plenty of lunatics on both sides of the fence here. I don't like the woke religion more than the evangelical religion.
How would a boycott destroy one of the most powerful military forces on earth?
BDS isn't trying to destroy Israel. It's only attempting to bring attention to the government's inhuman treatment of Palestinians.
Human Rights watch calls the situation in the OT "apartheid" (note the little ' A'). https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
B'Tselem Israeli Human RIghts group: https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid
Not all criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitism.
for the record though, I don't care much about neither the US's culture wars nor for the attempts of Israel to travel two thousand years in the past. Both look like extremely dumb ideas but taking sides means only increasing the idiocy at hand.
It was also determined long ago that all ethnostates are stupid and dangerous and should not exist.
Fpr that matter, it was determined long ago that I should be king of the world.
It's just a question of whose determinations you happen to decide to accept...
> Considering Jews' unique history of persecution it would be pretty crazy to argue they are not a people, so they are not like white South Africans.
Wait, Jews are "a people" and Boers aren't? How did that happen?
The Boers are "a people" by any reasonably principled definition, and nonetheless South African apartheid was unacceptable. Representing "a people" does not give you a license to treat other people like shit.
... and you say "a people" like that's a good thing. In fact, the concept of "peoples" (nations, whatever you want to call them) is dangerous and destructive, and the (unfortunately natural and built in) human tendency to form attachments to arbitrary abstract groups is one of the top contenders for what's going to destroy the whole goddamned species.
> Creating "one democratic state" will rob both the Jews and the Palestinians of their right for self determination.
Only individual human beings have rights, not "peoples". Especially self determination.
The idea of group "self determination" is self-evidently moronic. To have self determination, you have to have a reasonably unified will and probably a reasonably unified mind. "Peoples" have neither.
> It will also in all likelihood create chaos,
Probably true. There is no good answer at this point. Things were already bad, and the foolish decision to create Israel really locked in the doom.
It would have spared millions of innocent deaths if Jews had a country during WW2. So maybe it's not always that stupid. And in fact, taking a whiff at the current state of things for Jews in the diaspora, I still think Jews should have a place of their own. I am not forecasting another holocaust, hell no, but it sure becomes harder to be openly Jewish in the West.
The whole Nazi project was precisely to create an ethnostate. The enthnicity they had in mind didn't have much of a historical existence, true, and neither did the genetic group they imagined to make it up. But what defines an ethnicity? They had a founding myth, and they definitely managed to generate some real "Aryan" self-identification in people's minds. What does any ethnicity, including Jews, have besides founding myths and shared self-identification? It seems to me that the Nazis either had as valid a "people" to work with as any other, or at least were well on the way to creating one.
And yet somehow I really can't work up any sympathy at all for the Nazi's "purification" project, or for the "Aryan people".
Speaking of "states for peoples", a whole lot of those innocent deaths were aided by other states' unwillingness to admit Jews who were trying to get away from the Nazis. It seems they also wanted to keep their countries pure for their own "peoples". Maybe if they'd been less concerned about having states "for their peoples", they'd have been more willing to take in the actual individual human beings who were about to be slaughtered.
For that matter, even after the war, creating Israel let the winners feel a bit better about themselves while still not, you know, letting too many Jews in. I don't know if not having to "take" Jews was a major motivation, but I've heard that some of their leaders at least thought about that.
Oh, and by the way, while the Nazis definitely had a special hardon for Jews, they killed a shit-ton of non-Jews, too. If making sure people have their own country is the method we're using to save people when a genocidal psychotic system takes over the place they're living, then it seems like maybe we have to create some more countries.
Should the Roma get a country? They're definitely a "people", and they were targeted on the basis of it. Should there be a gay country? OK, not a "people", but still a targeted group that's at very serious risk in a bunch of countries today, if that's the criterion you're using.
Or, better yet, why not just take the view that Nazis, or equivalent, don't get to run any countries? And why not put a big fence around that possibility by saying that countries shouldn't be built on ethnicity at all? Would it be so awful to have a system of administrative districts without "national identity"?
Maybe there's no way to get there. I fully understand that that's now how people work.
But I don't like the idea that the way to protect against ethnic violence is to feed and further legitimize the "this for our people only" tendency, to do things that generate stronger ethnic divisions, or to make your personal safety contingent on you being able to find a state that happens to consider you one of "its people".
Israel is in some important ways analogous to what the Nazis were trying to create. It is amazingly clueless for you to offer the Nazis as an example of why Israel should be around, when in fact they are an example of exactly why Israel should not be around.
The creation of Israel fed into and sustains exactly the phenomenon that you claim it's there to protect against. Having states for "peoples" is part of the problem. People identifying with either real or imaginary "heritages" or "cultures" or "races" or "tribes" or whatever is a bad thing. Building governments around it is a worse thing. That includes Israel. And you compound that when you suggest that the way to protect somebody from violence is to have a state that's in the business of protecting that individual's "people".
And, no, for the slower-minded readers, I am not claiming that anything Israel has actually done is the same as what the Nazis did.
You sound borderline anti semitic saying stuff like that. You have no idea how obtuse that is.
In fact, I would have a hard time finding one Jewish friend who was even mildly Zionist.
Finally and most importantly Jews aren't responsible for your personal shortcomings.
--Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, (We and the Arabs) (1923)
While some aspects of Zionism were indeed troubling in today's standards, when push came to shove the Zionist leadership accepted partition to two states (in 1947).
How does quoting Jabotinsky from a century ago help us in solving this conflict? Unless your only point is that current Israel should be dismanteld.
"I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it." --David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938
''The cultivated land is probably 1 million dunam. According to international law, we cannot sell anything, so maybe we should buy from those Arabs who do not want to come back.... All we need is 400 tractors, each tractor can cultivate 3000 dunam - cultivating not just for the purpose of procuring food but in order to prevent anyone from returning to their lands. Land of lesser quality should be sold to private or public sectors....At least, let us say that this confiscation is an exchange for the property the Jews from the Arab world lost when they immigrated to Palestine." --Bechor Shitrit, head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund, Ben-Gurion's Diary, 18 August 1948.