It's a democracy of the first-class citizens only. Don't forget it's an apartheid state!
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ndik83/south_afr...
"Israel is the nation state of Jews alone" Netanyahu responds to TV star saying Arabs are equal citizens (2019):
source: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-is-the-n...
It can be argued, therefore, that Israel is de facto the state.
Wikipedia is hopelessly unreliable on anything to do with the Middle East. -> Didn't read.
That's what the far right in Israel also says! Horseshoe theory at its finest.
Does Aljazeera disagree with this account? All the contemporary accounts in the Western media at the time agreed on this. Even Wikipedia seems to agree, in its weasely way.
I'm not responding here to get into an hopeless post-truth argument and I'm not going to reply any further.
The reason I'm posting is to ask the readers to go search themselves and be very very skeptic about what they read hear. There are quite a few news stories and videos from that period.
This point is scarcely more than a deflection; the fulcrum of Israel's apartheid regime consists primarily in which Arabs are permitted to be citizens, and in particular those whose parents and grandparents were violently driven from Israel's current territory in what Palestinian Arabs call the Nakba [1]. The Israeli government blatantly wants to both claim the right to authorize violence in the occupied territories and blame the nominal governments of those territories for that violence. And however you want to frame the conflict philosophically, the practical reality is that the IDF has vastly more capacity to enact violence than do Hezbollah or Hamas. When was the last time either of them leveled a 10+-story apartment building in Israel [2]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
[2] https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/05/12/gaza-al-shorouk-...
It's not fully fair to describe Israel as apartheid either. Its actual citizens largely have the same rights on paper no matter ethnicity or religion (though the religious marriage laws are an oddity, and the inability to intermarry does make it comparable to those prohibiting interracial marriage in South Africa).
But it is actually somewhat fair to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa. They have an active, ongoing separation of populations into segregated areas and even nominally independent states, that have no effective autonomy due to the overwhelming power and actual physical control of Israel. The Gaza strip and the West Bank are nearly direct equivalents of South Africa's bantustans. If you accept that Israel does have real sovereignty over all the territory it occupies, the differences in how it treats different people really don't seem just.
So that's what Israel should have done (one time expulsion of Arabs) to avoid being called Apartheid?
The unfortunate matter is that the Arab states were not criticized harshly enough. And that is almost certainly due to a combination of antisemitism and realpolitik over their oil resources. And this relative lack of criticism continues to this day.
Nonetheless, it's still not a responsive defense to bad behavior to point out other bad behavior that is less criticized. By all means do what you can criticize these states and surface their bad behavior (and do so individually; they're not a monolith). But a thread talking about Israel isn't the place to do it. First of all, it's ineffective, second of all it's derailing to the thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaz...
https://www.reddit.com/r/list_palestine/comments/l43xgk/mega...
[1] "... A February 2008 suicide bombing that killed one Israeli woman in Dimona was supported by 77% and opposed by 19%"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_political_violence...
I will not even go into the difference between lone gunmen and state-sanctioned killings. Let's accept that any Palestinian killing an Isareli should be treated the same as an officer of the Israeli military or police, acting in their official capacity, killing a Palestinian. Even so, which way has the balance turned in the last 10-20 years?
I will acknowledge Israel is stronger. But I also acknowledge what happens in Gaza is 85% due to the Hamas terroristic organization being terroristic. How the hell does that even imply Israel as an apartheid. Who knows.
Is the fact the Egypt also closes the border with Gaza, Make them also an apartheid state? I guess the problem here is not Israel.
And, how is the fact that for every Palestinian terrorist Israel killed 10 civilians Palestine's fault?
Also, Israel didn't "give Gaza control to the Palestinians" in 2005, they only gave them limited self-government power. They still couldn't control their own border, didn't have access to a source of water etc. And none of the people who fled their homes in Israel during the previous wars was allowed to return home, unless they were of Jewish descent.
Unironically Yes!!!! Egypt do! Happy you see how mind boggling it is that there are others who deny access to the Gaza strip. (Again, because of their gov - Hamas)
> x10 Palestine's fault?
Who said that? It was during a war. It is because Israel has stronger weapons. A war that shouldn't ever started. Why did Hamas start it? You are really dodging the question here...
> Also, Israel didn't "give Gaza control to the Palestinians" in 2005,
They gave them military control and government control. So you are wrong, read Wikipedia again. Otherwise how do they get rockets if the are so limited? Looks like they could get anything but choses to get terror related assets... which again. Is their fault.
No, Egypt has closed its own border with Gaza, but it is not enforcing a naval or airspace blockade, which Israel is.
> Who said that? It was during a war. It is because Israel has stronger weapons. A war that shouldn't ever started. Why did Hamas start it? You are really dodging the question here...
Israel occupied Egyptian/Jordanian territories. Hamas is a resistance movement of the people living in these territories under Israeli military occupation. The war was between Israel and Egypt, and it has long since ended. Hamas didn't start anything - they were being oppressed by Israel occupation forces and they fought back.
Saying Hamas started a war is like saying that, should Ukrainian citizens of Crimea started attacking Russia, they are "starting a war" against Russia. People who live under military occupation have a right to defend themselves from their occupiers. The occupiers need only leave if they want this resistance to stop.
> They gave them military control and government control. So you are wrong, read Wikipedia again. Otherwise how do they get rockets if the are so limited? Looks like they could get anything but choses to get terror related assets... which again. Is their fault.
Palestine is still under embargo. That resistance fighters need weapons as well as other supplies is normal. The fact that the embargo is not perfect doesn't prove that it doesn't exist. And rockets aren't the only goods being smuggled past the embargo - there is also medicine, food, construction materials etc.
But make no mistake - had there not been an armed resistance movement defending the rights of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, the current limited independence would never have been reached.
Sorry to say pal, you lost the plot. Look at a map please.
Sorry to burst our bubble. But the main reason Gaza is not going forwared is Hamas. Not Israel.
"The blockade of the Gaza Strip is the ongoing land, air, and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed by Israel and Egypt in 2007"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip
What is even the point? Can't you just admit you are wrong and Hamas has a HUGE NEGATIVE effect on Gaza? And peace process in general?
> The Israeli Navy enforces a maritime blockade of the Port of Gaza and the coastline.
and the "Control of Gazan airspace" section:
> The Oslo Accords interim peace agreements expressly give Israel security control over Gazan airspace and coastal waters.
Also, Egypt being complicit in depriving Gaza of resources (to a MUCH lesser extent than Israel, to be fair) does in no way prove that Hamas is the problem, or has a "HUGE NEGATIVE" effect on Gaza. I will let the people of Gaza who keep electing Hamas in free elections (despite brutal Israeli reprisals for their wrong vote) decide how bad Hamas is for them.
Yeah it does... Oh, how much it does...
you are protecting a terrorist group. they harm palestine future the most. stooop.
You are consistently wrong on every fact of this conflict.
It will only be proportional if Israel agrees to let Hamas and the PLO be armed with as good weapons as it has. Or in other words if Israel commits suicide. It's unclear to me what you're actually arguing for.
What we see instead is that Hammas has less and less ability to harm Israel, but Israel is still systematically killing Palestinian civilians - an almost 20:1 ratio is not a sign of a democratic state defending itself from terrorism, by any reasonable measure.
Well yes, that's why the proportion is like it is. Once/if it gets the ability to harm Israel, many more Israelis will die. This has nothing much to do with "systematically killing Palestinians" or Hamas being merciful. It's just a possibly temporary balance of power. Interesting that Hamas fired the first shots in the last conflict, that's not really the behavior of a regime trying to save lives.
The only reasonable conclusion is that Israel's attacks on Palestinian people are not related to Hamas attacks on Israeli people, they are coming from a desire to harm the people or state of Palestine.
This desire is of course corroborated by other actions - most notably, the illegal colonization of Palestinian territories with Israeli citizens of Jewish descent.
Hamas can't get a lot of kills because Israelis run to shelters, they have a very advanced bomb sirens and radars. Without this I'm sure Hamas' kills would have skyrocketed. So it's not that Hamas isn't trying. BTW a lot of Israeli cities live under unbearable conditions, it has been shown the psychological trauma running for shelters (for years on years) is doing to young kids. I'm not denying Palestinian kids live under an even greater trauma, I'm only saying this is affecting both sides. I wonder what the UK or US would do if the kids in London and NY would need to run to shelters a few times a week because of missile attacks. I'm sure they would seek to proportionally kill just as many terrorists right? It's not as if Israel can just decide to absorb this and do nothing, what country would do nothing in such a state? You seem to have no words of criticism towards Hamas for some reason - because yes colonialism and white privilege, gotcha.
If you think all of these things, then you should look at the history of occupied territories much more closely.
> I wonder what the UK or US would do if the kids in London and NY would need to run to shelters a few times a week because of missile attacks. I'm sure they would seek to proportionally kill just as many terrorists right?
The US and UK are farthest from my mind in terms of potential models of good behavior in such situations. They have been some of the worse offenders in history in terms of unequal retaliation - the US's ongoing twenty-year plus war in the Middle East as punishment for 9/11 being one of the prime examples of unacceptable behavior in recent memory.
> It's not as if Israel can just decide to absorb this and do nothing, what country would do nothing in such a state?
Again, Israel is the original aggressor here. This fact is of utmost importance - Hamas was born in response to Israeli aggression, not the other way around. Israel could have chosen not to occupy the Gaza strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem in 1967. Even once they chose to occupy these territories, they could have chosen to integrate them as parts of Israel, and offer citizenship to their occupants - but of course, this would have meant that Israel was no longer a Jewish state, having a majority Arab population, which was deemed (and is still deemed) unacceptable.
Would the world be a better place had the Palestinians chosen to sacrifice their own interests and accepted to live as sub-humans under Israeli military rule, without retaliating against Israelis (remember, this was the state of Gaza and the other Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1994)? Yes, undoubtedly. Is it fair and reasonable to ask such a thing of an entire people? I certainly don't believe so.
Yes, absolutely. Conditions have been much much better before Hamas came to power. In fact Israelis and Gazans used to visit each other freely in the 80s and lots of Gazans worked in Israel.
> Do you think Israel would accept mass Palestinian (Arab) immigration?
No, I don't. That's the crux of the matter and also deals with your comment about who the "main aggressor" is. Israel wants to remain a Jewish country, that means settle the descendants of Palestinian refugees in their current countries. Given what Jews have been through it should be clear why Jews feel like they need a country of their own. Given the fact that Palestinians don't really want to live in a binational state with Jews, or in a democracy, and all the bad blood between the two peoples, it should be clear why allowing uncontrolled immigration to Israel is not a solution but a creation of a new problem (probably a new wave of jewish refugees)
Those are some spectacular rose tinted goggles. Gaza was a refugee camp entirely under Israeli control, and Palestinians were almost entirely doing unskilled labor in Israel. Israel decided where and if new housing could be built in Gaza, new farms, anything. They instituted a police state in Gaza, with curfews, collective punishment and other methods. People in Gaza were kept poor to work unwanted jobs for Israel. The current situation of people in Gaza is significantly better than it was then. Hamas and the PLO appeared because of the poor situation in Gaza, and Israel's iron fist, not out of the evilness of Palestinians.
> That's the crux of the matter and also deals with your comment about who the "main aggressor" is. Israel wants to remain a Jewish country, that means settle the descendants of Palestinian refugees in their current countries.
There are two problems with this line of thinking. One is, the land of Palestine is simply not a majority Jewish area. It had been a majority Arab area for hundreds of years before 1949. It is today a 50/50 Arab/Jewish area (approximately). But Israel wants to be a Jewish ethno-state, Arab Palestinians be damned. The two-state (or three-state) solution would already be a massive compromise for the Arab population, given the relative land-mass and resources vs population of the potential Palestine (or Gaza and West Bank) compared to Israel. But, Israel is not even content with that.
Your assertion that Palestinians don't want to live in a democracy is bizarre, given that they already live in one. Whether they want to live in a 50/50 Jewish/Arab Israel is irrelevant, as that is not an option Israel will ever contemplate, at least in the current framework.
The only option that remains, and what seems most likely to happen, is that Israel will continue to demoralize, kill, and harass the people of Gaza and the West Bank until such a time as the remaining Arab population will be small enough compared to the Jewish population of Israel, and then it will annex these territories into a single Israeli state with a minority (<20% ?) Arab population enjoying full rights. I don't honestly see any other end to this conflict that Israel would accept.
> Given what Jews have been through it should be clear why Jews feel like they need a country of their own.
This is partly understandable, partly disingenuous. While there are obvious reasons after the horrors of the Holocaust that the Jewish survivors would want to have a country of their own, there is no non-religious reason this country should have been in Palestine. A chunk of the defeated Germany, for example, would have been a much more natural and easier to create space. The region of Palestine was already inhabited in the 1940s, and the people living there had no fault or implication in the horrors of the Holocaust. But, it was impossible to create a Jewish majority state there without displacing hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
Nevertheless, history is what it is. Dissolving the state of Israel today would be at least as unjust as creating it was in the first place, and would lead to even more misery - I would not advocate for that in the slightest. Dismantling the idea of a Jewish ethno-state would be much more just, but that is a complete fantasy at this point, akin to saying that North Korea should just become a democracy. Still, Israel can't claim it's not an apartheid state while stoking a conflict on the sole reason of not wanting a significant amount of Arabs to live on its territory with full rights.
Actually Zionism started about 50 years before the holocaust because of massacres of Jews in East Europe in the Dreyfus trial which was the last straw. Turns out Zionism was right, couldn't be more right.
> A chunk of the defeated Germany, for example, would have been a much more natural and easier to create space
No one offered, and as I say above Jews needed a place well before the holocaust. Also you're talking as if there's some just policeman who runs the world and thinks of "just" and practical solutions for everyone. There isn't any. Jews found out the hard way what could happen to them, no one offered them jack s**. Almost all countries restricted Jewish immigration before and during the holocaust.
The Palestinian predicament can be solved with fair compensation to the refugees and resettlement, a Palestinian state beside Israel in the 67 border and an end to hostilities. But they have to give up the will to destroy Israel and they can't do that it seems to me.
The partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state was designed by the UN and the British Empire, which retreated from the territory and let the dice fall where they may. Just another in the long series of insane borders the British Empire traced all over the Middle East, the cause of so much bloodshed over the years.
Of course, this wouldn't have happened if the Zionist movement hadn't lobbied for it, so I do agree with you that it was ultimately every man for himself. But had they petitioned for a piece of Germany, and had the European and American and Russian powers who re-drew the world been more wise, this entire situation could have been avoided. Alas, history can't be re-written, and who knows what other problems would have occurred.
Many options remain: peace, Palestinian refugees settled where they're living in now, an Iranian nuclear attack on TLV and flight of all the Jews from there, who knows. The area is unpredictable, I'm not gonna try to predict anything.
These two are dependent on one another, and every evidence so far suggests that the Gaza strip and West Bank simply aren't big enough and don't have enough resources (water and arable land especially) to sustain their population. This could work with massive resource commitments from Israel, Jordan and Egypt, but that doesn't seem to me like a realistic stable possibility for the long term.
>(32) 5 Israelis working for an Israeli Company "Urban Moving" were arrested on 9/11 after being seen "documenting" (their own words during an Israeli interview) and celebrating the attack on the WTC. Owner of the company, Dominik Suter, fled to Israel after the incident. His name appeared on the May 2002 FBI Suspect List, along with the 9/11 hijackers and other suspected extremists. Israel has yet to extradiate him (2001):
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020802194310/https://abcnews.g...
and also
[2] "Unraveling Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories"
Page 7 :
https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf...
"...despite the FBI's statement that it had found no connection between the five men and the attacks."
One of the legal principles of Israel is:
> The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people. [0]
There's also a legal path from citizenship to legal-residency, which I would surmise is used almost exclusively on non-Jewish citizens, as well as the blanket permission for all Jewish people (and no one else) to become citizens of Israel.
[0]https://www.timesofisrael.com/final-text-of-jewish-nation-st...
While we are on the subject, did you know that it's illegal for an Arab in the self-governed parts of West Bank to sell land to a Jew? And that the official penalty for doing so is death?
Also, take a look at the awful governments in West Bank and Gaza and how they abuse their citizens. You don't see hordes of opressed Israeli Arabs fleeing to the Gaza Strip do you?
That's a very bold claim.
The "United Arab List" is part of the current government (!) not of the parliament, but the government itself that is formed. Representing many Arabs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_List
Anyone who repeats the lie of "apartheid" is either malinformed, or has some antisemitic agenda to pro
Double standards or ignorance.