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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

It goes to show the biases of The Economist that Israel is marked as a "flawed democracy" rather than a "hybrid regime". Israel is a hybrid regime if there ever was one.

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The brainwashed majority of this board is amazing. The previous comment here is true and people judge, from their leather sofas, thousands of kilometers away, a culture as well as a country without knowing the least bit of history about them outside of mainstream media.

In a political context, we can't have political discourse that doesn't align with the Western fantasy? How far have you fallen. Freedom, free speech and all those slogans are just a disgusting lie.

For those who downvoted it and reported it are invited to turn off their TVs and read Time Immemorial. A book written about the recent (decades) history of the region. With quotes and sources cited at the end of it. Ranging from UN, public announcements and other documents.

For example, absolutely everyone ignores the fact that the region of Palestine includes Jordan. A country 4 times the size of Israel with much less populace. When they shriek Palestinians, no one thinks of Jordanians. Strange? Nah, brainwashed. In Israel, 20% of the population are Arabs. 20% of parliament members are Arabs. Arabs are exempt from the mandatory 2-3 years military service. Arabs receive a special scholarship to universities, regardless of their SAT score. No wonder the heads of hospital departments and country's top doctors are Arabs. Yet, the west is somehow convinced there's apartheid here. Successful propaganda is successful.

You must understand there are over 7 billion people on this earth and most are different than you. In addition, it isn't a defacto rule that everyone alive in 2022 is civilized, will not lie and let you live. Something that the West assumes like some knee jerk reaction.

A small anecdote - my colleague is Arab, works as a DevOps engineer, makes 150k USD a year, had an onboarding bonus of 40k in stocks and receives a "top up" additional stocks every 6 months after 2 years. How much do you make compared to the "oppressed"?

Anyway, ignore your ego and finish that book.

"Israel is not a state of all its citizens, but rather the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them." - Benjamin Netanyahu, 2019

You are deliberately excluding the passportless, subjugated people who are forced to live in permanent poverty because of Israel's brutal and illegal occupation. Your rich colleague doesn't mean those people don't exist.

I know nothing about the Palestinian conflict but I have to say that a lot of what you are saying is repeated by Europeans about Roma people and about other Europeans who happen to be a sizable minority in another European country. It almost seems like it's better to be a minority than a majority.

I don't know if that's factual or not, but it doesn't seem that way, the simplest answer would be that is just pure tribalism.

Time Immemorial? You must mean the book From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters. While that's perhaps the single most common narrative people believe, it's full of myths that most historians have dispelled back in the 1990s. The author attempted to “prove” the laughable proposition that the land was uninhabited before Zionist immigration created the jobs that attracted Arabs from other regions. Much worse were the claims that the exodus of indigenous Palestinian people was due entirely to the orders of advancing Arab armies, who invaded the new Jewish state of Israel. The sad reality is that almost half of those expelled (300,000) were driven off their land before the war started (my parents included).

One would be much better off reading actual historical accounts the region: The Hundred Years War on Palestine (Rashid Khaldi) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Ilan Pappe).

I don't see anything in your comments that justifies apartheid. You could say many of the same things about South Africa.

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