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?
Maybe it's more of an immigration policy than a security policy?
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)
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?
> 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.
Fortunately, as we have learned over the past few weeks, sanctions are an effective means of pushback against archaic 20-th century statesmanship.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can make an analogy to apartheid. It's up to others to determine if the analogy fits the point you are making though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_ana...
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...
And racism by itself doesn't appear to constitute apartheid.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.