Lots of news about Israel today. Amnesty International just released a new report condemning Israel as an apartheid state.[1]
1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
By the way, you could have shown Israel's response to this report as well:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lapid-attacks-delusional-amnes...
_"Do you also post Russian or North Korean responses when discussions involving these countries occur?"_
I'd extend that to America or basically any country. I can't imagine it being considered the start to a flame war if some one presents a report by a large organization with some level of reputation without providing the state's response.
If there is a report by Amnesty condemning a major issue like the amount of cronyism in all higher levels of the West and America. Or of how lobbying in the US is effectively legalized corruption. Or how [Super] PACs hurt the sanctity of democracy...for any of these things, the official US response or response from any high level of the US government is not that important.
I have a hard time imagining being told not including the official western state response is a great way to start a flame war.
Israel is currently governed by a bunch of corrupt jerks motivated by a racist ideology, their officials response don't deserve more credit than Kim Jong-Un's.
It's not a problem with Israel or the Israeli people (most of whom just wish they could live their life in peace in the country they are born in, bearing no responsibility for the troubled times during and following the creation of Israel), but there is a big problem with those politicians benefiting the state of permanent war they are themselves creating to push a colonialist agenda.
All that remains is a colonial war against Palestinian people to put hold on the entire region, based on a supremacist vision of what Zionism should be (and it's not what the founders of Israel had in mind when the country was formed). The Palestinians from the West bank are completely unable to defend themselves from the rampant colonization and Gaza is conveniently left unchecked in the hands of a terror group, who albeit causing little practical damage[1] exert enough terror[2] to keep the Israeli population in a mind-state of perpetual war. This is 1984 taken as an instruction manual.
Honestly, it deeply saddens me that the Jewish people, after suffering two crimes against humanity in the twentieth century (the holocaust, then the mass deportation of Jewish people living in the Arab world, after the creation of Israel) are now involved a third time, now as the tormentor.
[1]: a war in which you lose no military, nor infrastructure and only a handful of civilians isn't a war.
[2]: hundreds of flying rockets that can blow up your house and will kill a dozen of your citizen is a powerful terror attack.
Frame it as colonial as you wish, the fact is a systematic prosecution of Jews in almost all surrounding countries. That was never caught up upon. Maybe start now. It would have been better to start yesterday, but it is never too late.
Its not a war, there is no state involved, just a terror group in Gaza, conveniently left in charge there, while curiously Tsahal is perfectly capable of shutting down any uprising in the territory they want to annex (the West bank), intriguing isn't it? Gaza isn't any harder to occupy than the West bank, but having Hamas as an enemy is just too convenient. (So convenient it would be too bad if Hamas collapsed [1]).
> Frame it as colonial as you wish, the fact is a systematic prosecution of Jews in almost all surrounding countries.
There's two different things:
- The currently Israeli government is currently pushing a colonization project in the west bank (and it's not even hidden).
- Jews living in the Arab world for centuries have been persecuted by Arabs in (in “retaliation to Israel's activity” as if those people had anything to do with any of it…). Sadly enough since those Mizrahi Jews fled to Israel, they have been discriminated against and are still somewhat treated as second-class citizens[2].
[1]: https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-netanyahu-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel#Sephardim_and...
Yet the current Israeli government wants his population to believe that they are still at war, still threatened but an outnumbering army of Arab people on the verge of slaughtering them all. It was the case for a good 40 years after the creation of Israel, but now it isn't.
But the military-industrial complex and the far-right extremists won too much from the situation to let it go. No wonder Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated…
The war is no more, but they want the citizens to feel as if it was still ongoing, as it is a great way to keep people under control, and to push their supremacist agenda. And leaving Hamas doing a bit of terror from time to time is a really efficient way to do so.
This illogical pattern of assuming a word or concept does not evolve is far too common. The world and people learn from history. Apartheids now and in the future will usually not be the way America was 70 years ago or South Africa 35 years ago. Apartheid may be too serious and specific of a word. We don't have another word to go to besides apartheid. Were the Jim Crow laws and behavior of America from Reconstruction through 1960s not apartheid? Technically not. They didn't go far enough. However, it's reductionist to say it's not apartheid but then not provide a label to practices that are cruel and inhumane and overlap with a majority of apartheid.
If Amnesty International or another organization referred to it as analogous or incredibly similar to Jim Crow Law days. That's hard to do. I don't know expect any one outside the US to know what that is. "apartheid" on the other hand is a world wide known term. So, yeah, this all feels reductionist.
Similarly, tech companies learned from IBM and Microsoft's bullying and monopolistic practices of the 80s and 90s. All the same underlying principles of bullying, EEE, and so much more have been able to evolve and become more subtle with the new current tech giants (including Microsoft ).