Comment by aprilthird2021 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aprilthird2021 | Hacker News Reader

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> If by "current state of things" you mean the Palestinians having no state, I don't think anything justifies that.

So we're all on the same page then. I never said Israel shouldn't exist, and your whole history lesson before (as much as you're leaving out) doesn't really matter. The ethnostate nature of Israel now is what matters, and that it requires Palestinian statelessness is key. At least this is the approach of the current Israeli government.

> multiple attempts have been made at a peace process that gets the Palestinians a sate, which the Palestinians have refused each time

Leaving out that the PA renounced violence against Israel as part of the Oslo Peace Process, which only led to more land theft, that Israelis so badly did not want Palestine to have a state that they murdered Rabin to stop it, that multiple Israeli PMs constantly sabotaged the process to Palestinian statehood thru the PA (most notably Netanyahu preferring to allow Hamas to threaten their rule and ultimately expel them from Gaza). Let's be honest about failures on both sides, not prop up one story or the other solely.

> By most surveys or interviews I've seen, most Palestinians do not want

Doesn't really matter what people want though. Like I replied to you earlier: "You're talking about what Palestinians inherently "want", but that's not really related to peace. Peace exists when nations can deter each other"

Unfortunately, giving Palestine the one thing that can actually enable peace (deterrence) is also a huge risk for Israel. One day Israelis will have to decide if that risk is worth it to have a nation not constantly at war, not constantly on edge, not constantly bowing to the "strong" far-right, and not constantly sending its children to do all the things they are doing in Gaza, some necessary in war, and some absolutely beyond normalization. Palestinians could change entirely tomorrow and it won't make any difference, the way the power lies right now. That is largely borne out by seeing what happened to the PLO/PA after they changed themselves substantially to aid the peace process.

> So we're all on the same page then. I never said Israel shouldn't exist, and your whole history lesson before (as much as you're leaving out) doesn't really matter.

Yes, I believe we are. I kind of have to be pro-actively defensive about the history, because lots of other people (even in this very thread) express exactly that - that Israel shouldn't exist, or that Israelis are uniquely evil, or something.

> The ethnostate nature of Israel now is what matters, and that it requires Palestinian statelessness is key. At least this is the approach of the current Israeli government.

I don't think this is fair, though. First, calling the "nature of Israel" an ethnostate is misleading - it's not any more an ethnostate than France is an "ethnostate" for the French. Indeed, Israel has a sizeable Arab/Palestinian minority (~20%) that have full rights and full voting rights.

And I certainly don't think anything about Israel requires Palestinian statelesness.

But yes, the current government is certainly of the approach that the Palestinians should never have a state - they literally voted on disallowing them ever having a state. The current government is awful, and not just for the Palestinians - dragging Israel towards dictatorship is (IMO, of course) a terrible thing for Israelis too!

> Leaving out that the PA renounced violence against Israel as part of the Oslo Peace Process, which only led to more land theft, that Israelis so badly did not want Palestine to have a state that they murdered Rabin to stop it, that multiple Israeli PMs constantly sabotaged the process to Palestinian statehood thru the PA (most notably Netanyahu preferring to allow Hamas to threaten their rule and ultimately expel them from Gaza). Let's be honest about failures on both sides, not prop up one story or the other solely.

I believe I am honest about the history, certainly honest about the experience of the Israeli left.

There was a genuine push for peace, sustained over many years and multiple PMs, and the experience of the country is that every push for peace ended up with more violence and less security, which just doesn't make any sense - why did the Palestinians ramp up the violence when on the way to getting what they ostensibly want? It makes sense from the POV of Palestinian extremists like Hamas, because they were explicitly against the peace process, and explictly refused to accept anything except getting rid of Israel. So for them, any concessions on the Israeli side were "proof" that Israel would eventually be able to be pushed out, which is what they really want, and represents (afaict) a majority view.

> Unfortunately, giving Palestine the one thing that can actually enable peace (deterrence) is also a huge risk for Israel.

I really, really disagree with this. Again, Mexico and the US have peace, but it's not because Mexico deters the US in any meaningful way. They just aren't fighting because they aren't competing over anything.

If Mexico tomorrow decided that it has a claim on (say) Texas, and were determined to conquer it - and started shooting rockets at the US and invading the US - would your reaction really be "well the only thing that can solve this is the US giving Mexico enough weapons so there was mutual deterrence"?

What brings peace is agreeing to live next to each other without killing each other.

> it's not any more an ethnostate than France is an "ethnostate" for the French.

It is moreso one because there are French citizenship standards for people currently wanting to become citizens not based on ethnicity. And people indigenous to France not of the preferred ethnicity are not forced to live outside the country with no right to citizenship. The need for Israel to be majority Jewish requires that Palestinians cannot become citizens of Israel, even though their lives are completely controlled by the polity of Israel, by necessity, according to the Israeli government, for security reasons.

> why did the Palestinians ramp up the violence when on the way to getting what they ostensibly want?

Why did the Israelis do the same? Even after Oslo, why expand settlements when they got so many concessions from the PA and eliminated essentially their greatest foe of decades, the PLO, through diplomacy? Again, the conflict is not solved by painting one side as a bad faith actor and the other as a good faith actor. There are bad faith actors on both sides increasingly in power. It is not Russia/Ukraine where one clearly invaded a sovereign nation. In this case one does not recognize the other nation while simultaneously blockading all the people in that unrecognized nation, who are all stateless. No matter how we got to this point, it isn't justifiable long term and it is not going to last as a solution. As I said before, let's be honest about both sides' shortcomings.

> They just aren't fighting because they aren't competing over anything.

That's what I said also in reference to Zimbabwe, it applies also to Mexico.

> If Mexico tomorrow...started shooting rockets at the US and invading the US

Did you read my other comment? I will repost my response when I predicted you would say this and preemptively answered:

"You would balk at that saying "But the Palestinians are a security threat. Israel cannot be expected to allow that on its border. The US would never allow Mexico... Etc." and that is of course the same logic Palestine uses to justify its attacks on Israel."

> What brings peace is agreeing to live next to each other without killing each other.

Both sides have rejected to do that when the other has opted for peace. Again the West Bank and PA is very illustrative of this, and you know the analogous situations for your side also

Look, the question of how Israel can remain both Jewish and a democracy is a complicated one that no one has a good answer to. I won't pretend otherwise. I do think people think about this as if it's unique to Israel though.

It's better, IMO, to just think of Israel as a country that, like any other country, defined its citizens in some way when it was founded, as France defines its citizens as French. And that's pretty much it, nowadays it is largely similar to other countries. Just as France wouldn't want agree to an influx of a 10 million immigrants gaining French citizenship, neither would Israel agree to accepting many non-citizens and turning them into citizens. That is true of almost every country on Earth - very few have completely open paths to citizenship.

> It is moreso one because there are French citizenship standards for people currently wanting to become citizens not based on ethnicity.

As there are in Israel. Firstly, 20% of Israel is not ethnically Jewish. Secondly, there are paths to citizenship for non-Jews. The only unique thing in Israel is that if you are Jewish, you have an easy path to citizenship - but that is literally the same as Israel just having defined that all Jews are effectively Israeli citizens, when it was founded. Nothing special about that.

> And people indigenous to France not of the preferred ethnicity are not forced to live outside the country with no right to citizenship.

Umm, I'm not sure there's quite an analagous situation here. But if a group that had lived in France a hundred years ago but had moved somewhere else now wanted French citizenship, they wouldn't just get it.

> The need for Israel to be majority Jewish requires that Palestinians cannot become citizens of Israel, even though their lives are completely controlled by the polity of Israel, by necessity, according to the Israeli government, for security reasons.

Well we've talked about this "complete control" elsewhere, but to focus on the citizenship question - yes, Israel would not agree to double its voting population with people who are not part of the country and have very different values/etc, just as no other country would.

And btw, Palestinians who stayed in the land during the war did become Israeli citizens, hence Israel having a 20% minority Palestinians population. And IIRC, Palestinians living in Jerusalem are able to become Israeli citizens, though few choose to do so.

Again, take out the historical back and forth aside - this is the same as any other country. Dozens of countries came into being in the last 70 years, all of them defined their citizens in some way, often some combination of culture/ethnicity, and none of them would agree to just double their size with new citizens.

I think the rest of your comment I answered in great detail in my other comments.

And I certainly don't think anything about Israel requires Palestinian statelesness.

But it is the explicit policy of its current government, and the overwhelming (probably safe to say >90 percent) sentiment of Jewish Israeli population, nonetheless.

Indeed, Israel has a sizeable Arab/Palestinian minority (~20%) that have full rights and full voting rights.

Perhaps you'd like to tell us about the JNF, and what happens when non-Jewish citizens attempt to purchase or lease land from it.

After that, you can tell us what happens when a non-Jewish citizen seeks to marry and obtain citizenship and residency rights for their spouse, and how this differs when a Jewish citizen makes the same application.

And after that you can tell us about the 14,000 Palestinians annexed into Israel after the latter's illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, who were then forcibly expelled according to criteria determined by the occupying regime -- despite their having "full rights", in your view.

And then you can tell us about the Nation State Law, and the not-so symbolic language it contains.

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