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Comment by docdeek | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn’t really provide much in the way of explanation for why this law is being enacted. Here [0] is a better article that quotes supporters and objectors to the law.

It includes the (IMHO not very convincing) figures that "Between 1993 and 2003, around 130,000 Palestinians were given Israeli citizenship or residency through family unification, including children, according to court filings. The Shin Bet security service told the Knesset on Monday that between 2001 and 2021, about 48 were involved in terror activities.”

48 of 130,000 amounts to 0.037% being involved in terrorist activities which seems very low to be used as justification for a law around security.

[0]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-coalition-battle-knesset...

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From your source: "Israeli politicians say the law is both an essential security measure to prevent Palestinian terror attacks and a means of preserving a Jewish majority in Israel."

Maybe it's more of an immigration policy than a security policy?

It's a policy of apartheid, which is motivated by both immigration and security.

Fortunately, as we have learned over the past few weeks, sanctions are an effective means of pushback against archaic 20-th century statesmanship.

Unfortunately, geopolitics all but guarantee this will never happen so long as Israel is a strong western ally

Does it have to be? Does it operate a gas pipeline that heats Germany, or something? Is it an irreplaceable source of titanium? A major wheat exporter? Is the West planning to use it as a launchpad for a war of aggression in the region?

> Is the West planning to use it as a launchpad for a war of aggression in the region?

Pretty sure this was the reason. It’s a tactical piece that they want to keep control over. Everyone else in the region hates them (and rightfully so).

Considering Israel does not, and never has allowed American forces to be stationed inside Israel, this seems pretty unlikely.

You do know you don't have to have your own troops in a specific area for it to be a tactical asset, right?

They will do what we want when it matters. Even better that their people die in our service than ours.

I'm not sure quite what you mean by "rightfully hates them" but it sounds pretty scary to me.

they mean the west has systematically overthrown governments, strip-mined the natural resources, drawn arbitrary country borders, funded extremist groups, bombed civilian populations, gone to war because the extremists they originally backed got too strong, etc etc in the Middle East for generations

then if all else fails, they do sanctions, which of course NEVER affect the ruling class, they merely provide the rulers a tool to point more hatred at the west - you think it's the ruling class that can't get diabetes medication due to sanctions? No of course not, it's the average person.

In the comment to which I replied, "them" refers to Jewish Israelis ("Everyone else in the region hates them"). Jewish Israelis are Middle Eastern, not part of the West.

My "them" was actually a reference to the west. Jewish Israelis is a fair argument too. Both are true.

It will not happen as long as there exists a strong pro-Israel lobby in the US.

Israel passed on confidential US military technology to China and abstained in the Security Council resolution against Russia. That's not the behaviour of a strong ally.

Israel did not abstain, they voted for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assem...

Im also interested in what you construe as evidence that Israel passed US confidential anything to China.

's/so long as Israel is a strong western ally/so long as being "insufficiently pro-Israel" makes it difficult to gain or retain elective office in most Western democracies/g'

> as we have learned over the past few weeks, sanctions are an effective means of pushback

Not really. The war in Ukraine is intensifying. Russia sees the sanctions regime as an act of war. I'm not sure what the off ramp would be, and I generally support the sanctions. But I don't think your conclusions are sound. Pushback? Yes. Effective? Not so far.

As someone born and raised in South Africa that lived there until the end of 2019 I really wish people would stop comparing Israel to the old government in ZA.

The Israeli government definitely does a ton of problematic stuff that is objectively awful but it's just not quite the same as what the old government in my country used to do.

I am sure I will get downvoted for this, but the situation with Israel/Palestine is not quite the same as what existed in South Africa for a significant chunk of the 20th century. That doesn't mean it's a nice situation but really, I just would prefer it if people would stop trying to weld one shitty piece of history to another one to try and create this weird equivalency between the two.

Is there a better analogy to compare the situation to? Language is about communicating ideas efficiently. Apartheid is a good word for what is happening, and our response should be the same as it was in South Africa.

My understanding is that, once you're a citizen of Israel, you have the same rights as other Israeli citizens, regardless of race or religion. Under apartheid, rights were infringed based on race.

I see the distinction here.

In South Africa you could be a citizen regardless of your race, but how you were treated depended on your race; citizens were not equal.

In Israel, they are trying to prevent people of a certain race from becoming citizens, but once you are a citizen, there are fewer 'official' racist policies even if a lot of the people you have to deal with are outwardly racist anyway. On paper, citizens are (largely) equal.

In other words, it doesn't meet the definition of apartheid.

You can make an analogy to apartheid. It's up to others to determine if the analogy fits the point you are making though.

There is an entire Wikipedia article going over this exact issue. It looks like people have been arguing about this analogy for awhile now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_ana...

> Under apartheid, rights were infringed based on race.

This is a good point. Israel totally doesn't deny entry, immigration, work visa status, citizenship, and even recognition as Jewish to black Jews:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Jews_in_Israel#Absor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Hebrew_Israelites_in_I...

Immigration is not generally regarded as a right, nor is recognition of membership by a particular religious structure.

And racism by itself doesn't appear to constitute apartheid.

You don’t have the same right to marry who you want thou (where the other person agrees to be explicit)

But is it really so different if we replace race with religion? Israel doesn't recognize people who join the religion- it's effectively based on birth just as much as race.

We have a government over a people that determines the rights of each person based on who their parents were. That's the core concept that I, for one, am opposed to.

>But is it really so different if we replace race with religion?

They aren't completely replacing race with religion, many Palestinians are black and my understanding is Israel is quite racist towards its black Jewish population as well. European Settler colonialism has historically been quite racist.

How many and what % of Palestinians are black? How many and what % of Israelis are black?

By black do you mean having darker skin tones?

If so, many Jewish Israelis are black - as are many Palestinians - and not just those that came to Israel from Ethiopia. Also, many Israelis are white (as in light skinned) as are many Palestinians.

The average Israeli is Mizrahi (of North African / Middle Eastern origin).

I'm not sure why you think any of this is relevant to the point being made, but since you seem to be actually ignorant of the matter: blackness is a racial identifier, not a matter of skin tone. Skin tone is certainly part of racialization, but regardless of how dark or light someone's skin is, they may or may not be racialized as black, and therefore may or may not be subject to anti-black racism.

Apartheid doesn't mean "Identical to South Africa". Apartheid is a crime against human rights defined as such:

Apartheid refers to the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalized racial segregation in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights. Apartheid is a crime against humanity punishable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. ACADEMIC TOPICS. legal history.

How would you explain affirmative action on the basis of race today, in this context?

There are a couple of arguments that might be presented to explain how affirmative action is different to apartheid.

1) affirmative action does not remove any rights of those groups not targeted by affirmative action. It is possible to argue that by supporting one group, you are implicitly disadvantaging the out-group, but usually this distinction is important. E.g. having a "ladies night" at a bar is generally more acceptable than a "men pay double price" night.

2) affirmative action policies tend to target education and employment. The right to vote is typically is given higher priority when it comes to balancing different rights.

3) Affirmative action can be seen as targeting equal outcomes, not equal treatment[1]. My country offers free breast cancer screening to all women above a certain age. Men can certainly catch breast cancer, but it's far more dangerous to women, so a gender-blind outcome of "we want less people to die of breast cancer" has a gender-aware policy implementation. Most people wouldn't say that this policy is "medical apartheid" on the basis of gender. Similarly, you could say that affirmative action is about getting disparate groups to have equal outcomes in terms of whatever metric you care you measure (educational attainment, income, etc)

[1] not everyone agrees with this. Some people argue that preferential treatment should be given to groups that were historically persecuted (e.g. land confiscation), as remediation.

I feel this is a reaction to various PA policies. In PA, there is a law that selling land to Israelis is punished by death. In Gaza, Hamas declaration of principles states that the goal of Hamas is to destroy the state of Israel.

If you're referring to the Russia Ukraine conflict with note about sanctions I don't think we've seen indication that sanctions are an "effective means" of pushback considering the fact that the Russia continues to wage war against Ukraine.

Emigrating into your own country. That's a new one. Opinions here are laughable.

That's a disingenuous way of putting it.

The Palestinians who stayed in Israel during the Israeli war of independence became citizens. The ones who left, did not. They were also not part of Israel for almost 30 years, they were refugees of other countries, who then attacked Israel.

They have never been Israeli citizens, and were not even in Israel for many years before they became Israeli refugees.

(Whether they should have been granted citizenship when the lands were annexed as part of the war, or not, is a different question)

Honestly I'm really confused every time I try to understand Israel. Ordinary terms like citizenship, borders, immigration, and statehood are all in dispute. Then that makes it hard to define "democracy".

I tried reading about the history of Palestinian nationality on wikipedia, and I have as many questions as answers. Are they Jordanian, Egyptian, Palestinian, or Israeli? Are some Palestinians stateless?

What does "territory" really mean?

I'm no expert, but I can give you my perspective (Background: I'm Israeli, and consider myself fairly liberal politically).

> Honestly I'm really confused every time I try to understand Israel. Ordinary terms like citizenship, borders, immigration, and statehood are all in dispute

I'm not sure what you mean by in dispute here. Most of these are fairly well-defined when it comes to Israel. They're not even unique definitions - Sweden is the state of the Swedish ethnic group, Germany of Germans, Japan of the Japanese, etc. Israel in its conception is the land of the Jews.

There are complicating factors, which is that history you alluded to. While it certainly seems from the wiki article that the "historical Palestinian national identity" is something that is still argued about, I think the relevant part isn't so controversial.

Around the mid-19th century, the land that is now Israel (and was back then referred to as Palestine) had mostly Arab inhabitants, with a small Jewish population. Jews around the mid-19th century started a plan to go back to the lands they were removed from two thousand years prior - and many Jews started (legally) immigrating to Palestine and buying Palestinian lands. This caused there to be a fairly large Jewish population by the time 1948 came around.

Between 1900-1948, that land changed hands several times, eventually ending up under the rule of the UN, which made a plan to divide the land into a Jewish country and a Palestinian country. The Palestinians refused, and fled the land, as several Arab countries decided to attack Israel. Here there is some disagreement - were the Palestinians encouraged to flee by their leaders? Were they pushed out of Israel? Those are more disputed facts (I think for sure, some of both things happened.)

Israel won that war, effectively cementing most of modern day Israel, minus some (fairly large) territories. The Palestinians that stayed in Israel and didn't flee, became Israeli citizens. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that did flee became refugees in other countries.

Then the Six Day war happened. (Israelis generally consider the war to be started by others, though this is certainly disputed.) During this war, Israel took a bunch of extra territories, and with it, the Palestinian refugees. However, Israel didn't officially annex the regions or give the refugees citizenship, rather, kept them (and still to some extent keeps them) as refugees.

I think that's the majority of the story, from a (definitionally) Israeli perspectiev.

> 48 of 130,000 amounts to 0.037% being involved in terrorist activities which seems very low to be used as justification for a law around security.

... and yet, we have laws that cut basic human rights because of the similar percentage of people dying from it.

.037% terrorism sounds high to me

That a 0.37% (or more) slice of some population that feels it's been oppressed and impoverished might engage in /(freedom fighter|terrorist)/ activities doesn't seem surprising to me.

That would mean 100,000 terrorists in the scale of the USA

Not sure what you mean by this. There's not a current, similar situation in the US where the average US citizen feels like they were recently displaced/oppressed/etc by occupiers. That's been the situation in the past with Native Americans, slave populations, the American revolution, etc. I suspect the numbers met that threshold then.

I don’t think this is a good faith answer. .037% of the USA pop is roughly 100,000 people.

It's not a good faith premise since the whole of the USA population isn't in a similar situation currently. If it were, then I would expect at least 100k, yes.

"being involved in terrorist activities" is pretty poorly defined. In the US at least that could amount to charitable giving that accidentally finds its way to the orphans of suicide bombers.

1. Are Israeli figures to be trusted? There are countless - literally countless - of examples of abuses and arbitrary detention from the state. Including detention for “terrorism”.

2. What qualifies as “terrorism” in their book? Does throwing a rock at the IDF qualify as terrorism?

3. Why is Israel providing citizenship in the first place? What brought them to such an authoritative position? Who are the people they are giving citizenship to, where are they coming from, what were they subjugated to, why are they seeking citizenship in this place? The answers to these questions lie somewhere between Israeli far-right governance, oppression, human rights abuse and land imprisonment of a population who were kicked out of their homes and left stateless, passportless, and immobile, unable to cross their borders and travel, left to take long treks through abusive barriers and routes just to make it 5 miles from one place to another. Whose water is shut off, food supplies are limited, and have no economic prosperity. So why are these people the way they are, and seeking citizenship in such a place?

How is it that you and user adielsa paste this same reply here multiple times?

Other user is an almost empty account that doesn't seem like an alt-account, they probably copy and pasted it.

I suspect they copied and pasted my original comment for some reason.

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