# FinnAgain is kind of a shitty person. **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [February 27, 2011, 8:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787 "2011-02-27T08:42:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 38
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2011, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787/741 "2011-04-08T16:25:17Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > And that is not even counting land laws or water Can you clarify this? The Israeli supreme court has, IIRC, ruled that state owned land has to be able to be rented by Jews, Muslims, Christians, etc… equally. Disputes over water rights seem to generally be in the context of Israeli and Palestinian claims to water, not Jewish and Arab Israelis in conflict. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel don’t go to the same schools While differential funding is troubling, the existence of separate districts isn’t as much of a problem, as Arabs are allowed into the Hebrew schools and the existence of the Arabic schools as a separate track was due to the historical demands of the Arab population and is largely based on the distinctions in terms of what language classes are conducted with and what emphasis/point of view is placed on history. Even in neighborhoods where Jews and Arabs both live, very few Arab parents seem to want to send their children to the Hebrew-language schools. There are of course other issues, such as the fact that enrollment is often predicated on the residential district that students are in, thereby limiting the ability of Arabs students to go to Hebrew-language schools unless they live in certain neighborhoods, but not all Arab and Jewish citizens go to different schools. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > the way Israel blatantly discriminates against it’s Arab citizens when it comes to joining the military […] Israel’s Arab citizens are almost automatically rejected This is something I haven’t heard of either. There has always been a decidedly small portion of Arabs who volunteer for Israeli service, but I’m not aware of how Arab volunteers face near automatic rejection. Indeed,[it’s not impossible for an Arab village to have a substantial portion of its population in the IDF and for its population to appreciate the advantages that serving in the military brings.](http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1119/p06s01-wome.html) ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2011, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787/742 "2011-04-08T17:12:06Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > That is at best grossly misleading. Israel’s immigration laws are certainly quite discriminatory. Beyond that, Israel doesn’t even pretend to give equal funding to the schools it’s Arab citizens go to as it does it’s Jewish citizens(for those not in the know Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel don’t go to the same schools). When it comes to the religious schools, the discrimination is even more blatant. Yeshivas get all sorts of benefits while Christian and Muslim ones get none. > > And that is not even counting land laws or water rights much less the way Israel blatantly discriminates against it’s Arab citizens when it comes to joining the military. The Druze face no discrimination and the Bedouins face some, but not as much, but the rest of Israel’s Arab citizens are almost automatically rejected and then have the fact that they’re not veterans used to justify countless other instances of discrimination throughout their lives. While I’m happy to have my ignorance fought, the cites I can find (mostly linked as sources on Wikipedia articles) match what Finn and Malthus have said above. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2011, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787/743 "2011-04-09T00:06:37Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > This is something I haven’t heard of either. There has always been a decidedly small portion of Arabs who volunteer for Israeli service, but I’m not aware of how Arab volunteers face near automatic rejection. Indeed,[it’s not impossible for an Arab village to have a substantial portion of its population in the IDF and for its population to appreciate the advantages that serving in the military brings.](http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1119/p06s01-wome.html) [This](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=13665235) was a pretty big deal when the court determined that the military service criterion used by Haifa University to allocate dorm assignments was discriminatory. > [@](#): > > The court accepted the claims made by Adalah and the students, who said that the military service requirement creates a discrimination against the Arab students, and ordered the university to abolish it. > > “The inclusion of the military service requirement results in discrimination against a variety of sectors [especially the Arab sector]” Sokol wrote. > > He said that even though there are Israeli Arabs who do serve in the IDF, “Military service is not open to the general Arab public of the State of Israel” and noted that Israeli Arabs are legally exempt from service in the IDF. and > [@](#): > > Adalah lawyer Susan Zohar said Sunday this marked the first time that the courts have disqualified the use of military service as a criterion for granting benefits, a common practice among institutions of higher learning, employers and housing managers. > > “The ruling is likely to have ramifications on other universities who make use of military criterion,” Zohar said. She noted that Adalah will made use of the court’s ruling in its current battle in the High Court of Justice against the Israel Lands Administration’s practice of using military service criterion when distributing plots of land. > > **This is also the first time a court ruled Haifa University discriminates against Israeli Arab students following years in which discrimination claims had been leveled at the institution.** My emphasis. I can’t guess exactly how widespread of a problem the military service criterion is, but evidently it is problem enough that the court intervened. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2011, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787/744 "2011-04-09T02:17:23Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > While I’m happy to have my ignorance fought, the cites I can find (mostly linked as sources on Wikipedia articles) match what Finn and Malthus have said above. David Shipler in his Pulitzer Prize Winning\* Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land\*, noted that the overwhelming majority of Arabs who apply for military service are rejected out of hand. He was The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief in the late 70s and early 80s before being relieved by Tom Friedman. Similarly, David Grossman, who is one of Israel’s most prominent journalists in\* Sleeping on a Wire\*, noted that the Arab citizens of Israel who apply for the IDF are almost always rejected as are those who apply to be members of the police forces in in Israel. Obviously there is not any official policy excluding Israeli Arabs from military service, but that hardly means it doesn’t exist. You might as well try and argue that Christians in Egypt don’t face discrimination because there is little, if any, official discrimination against them. Admittedly that’s not the best example since Arab Christians in Egypt are far better integrated into Egyptian society than Israel’s Christian Arab population and are hardly leaving in the droves that Israel’s Christian Arabs are. In fairness to the Israelis, it should be noted that the Muslim rulers of the West Bank have hardly been terribly supportive of their Christian counterparts and Gaza’s rulers have been far worse than either. Also, while I’d love it if Israeli Supreme Court ruling against discrimination meant it didn’t exist, let’s remember that Jim Crow and segregated schooling continued in the US for years after Brown V. Board of Education. The same is going to be true in Israel. That said, I wouldn’t compare Israel’s treatment of it’s Palestinian citizens to Jim Crow, but to the way blacks were treated in the North of the 1950s and early 1960s. As it is, things will probably get a bit worse for them for awhile since Israel has been turning quite right-wing for awhile, especially among younger Israeli Jews. As for the schooling issue, I don’t see what’s subject to debate there. Israel has Arab-language schools for Arabs and Hebrew-language schools for Jews and the former don’t receive remotely the funding that the latter does. None of this should be terribly surprising. The original Zionist settlers tried to pretend the Arabs of Palestine didn’t exist(everybody remembers the famous claim “a land without a people for a people without a land”) and modern-day Israelis generally try and pretend Israel’s Arab citizens don’t exist either and the idea that Israeli Arabs can be anything but second-class citizens in country which is officially “the Sovereign State of the Jewish People” is a fantasy. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2011, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787/745 "2011-04-09T02:20:09Z")
Incidentally, since Damuri insists that he sees no difference between my views and those of Finn and has regularly labeled Finn an Israeli apologist, it’ll be amusing to watch him attempt to spin the above to be an example of Zionist propaganda. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2011, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787/746 "2011-04-09T04:10:58Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > [This](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=13665235) was a pretty big deal when the court determined that the military service criterion used by Haifa University to allocate dorm assignments was discriminatory. Well, a few things. 1. Your link doesn’t work for me and seems to go back to the Dope itself, but I know the case you’re talking about. 2. However, it was a pretty bad ruling. There was discrimination going on, but it was against all non-veterans, who are not a protected class, and not Arabs. In point of fact, ultra-Orthodox Jews are also exempt from conscription and not many serve in the IDF, so they too would run afoul of preferential treatment for veterans. 3. In point of fact, service is open to Arabs and exemption from service is not the same thing as a prohibition against volunteering. As cited, it’s quite possible for an entire Arab village to have its standard of living significantly boosted and their social fabric significantly effected by the number of their members who serve in the IDF. 4. The verdict wasn’t that simple, nor was the legal history of the situation.. [ > [@](#): > > The High Court of Justice ruled Tuesday that Haifa University would be allowed to continue its policy of giving preference to Israel Defense Forces veterans in its dormitory application process ]([Court Allows Haifa University to Continue Contentious Dorm Policy - Haaretz Com](http://www.haaretz.com/news/court-allows-haifa-university-to-continue-contentious-dorm-policy-1.217810)) IIRC legislation later changed the legal facts and Haifa U is still permitted to use veteran status as a valid metric. I could be wrong though. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > - Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land\*, […]\* Sleeping on a Wire\* The problem there is that, even if the books used valid statistical methodology and had accurate data sets, the books are decades out of date. It’s also not clear exactly what basis their claims would have, since the numbers of Arab volunteers to the IDF is measured in dozens for most years. And for the last several years, the reports have been that[the number of Arab volunteers to the IDF](http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/number-of-israeli-arab-national-service-volunteers-doubles-1.235585)has been [steadily increasing.](http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3768323,00.html) It’s still counted in the hundreds rather than thousands or tens of thousands, and looking back at the 80’s or 90’s, without more detailed information (I can’t find the books online at the moment to comb through them), the percent of volunteers who were rejected, and why, may not be as telling as you are suggesting. I’d also be interested to see current statistics on the number of Arabs who apply for and are turned down for jobs on the police force. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > As for the schooling issue, I don’t see what’s subject to debate there. Israel has Arab-language schools for Arabs and Hebrew-language schools for Jews and the former don’t receive remotely the funding that the latter does. Well, there are numerous subjects for debate. For instance, the existence of the two separate school systems is largely due to historical precedent and the fact that many Arab Israelis do not want their children sent to Hebrew-language schools. There’s also the fact that there appear to be willful distinctions in the curriculum between the two, as polls have shown that upwards of 40% of Arab students believe that the Holocaust simply never happened. So while a difference in funding is certainly not a good thing, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Nor does simply providing more funding for ‘separate but equal’ systems seem like the ideal answer. But many Arab parents do not want their children to go to integrated schools, even if that was floated as a solution. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > The original Zionist settlers tried to pretend the Arabs of Palestine didn’t exist(everybody remembers the famous claim “a land without a people for a people without a land”) They didn’t try to pretend that the Arabs didn’t exist. There was extensive discussion on how to deal with the Arab population, including but not limited to heated debates on a policy of transfer. Also, while everybody may remember “a land without a people for a people without a land”, it’s nowhere near that simple. In fact, it wasn’t even coined by Zionists. [ > [@](#): > > “A land without a people for a people without a land” is one of the most oft-cited phrases in the literature of Zionism—and perhaps also the most problematic. Anti-Zionists cite the phrase as a perfect encapsulation of the fundamental injustice of Zionism: that early Zionists believed Palestine was uninhabited,[1] that they denied—and continue to reject—the existence of a distinct Palestinian culture,[2] and even as evidence that Zionists always planned on an ethnic cleansing of the Arab population.[3] Such assertions are without basis in fact: They both deny awareness on the part of early Zionists of the presence of Arabs in Palestine and exaggerate the coalescence of a Palestinian national identity, which in reality only developed in reaction to Zionist immigration.[4] Nor is it true, as many anti-Zionists still assert, that early Zionists widely employed the phrase. > > Origins of the Phrase > > Many commentators, such as the late Arab literary theorist Edward Said, erroneously attribute the first use of the phrase to Israel Zangwill, a British author, playwright, and poet.[5] In fact, the phrase was coined and propagated by nineteenth-century Christian writers. > > […] > > By the late nineteenth century, the phrase was in common use in both Great Britain and the United States among Christians interested in returning a Jewish population to Palestine.[17] Christian use of the phrase continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1901, American missionary and, later, Yale professor, Harlan Page Beach wrote approvingly of the idea that the Jews will one day, “In God’s good time, inhabit the land of their forefathers; otherwise we can offer no valid explanation of a people without a land and a land without a people.”[18] In her 1902 novel, The Zionist, English writer Winifred Graham (1873-1950) has her Jewish hero stand before the Zionist congress and advocate for the return of “the people without a country to the country without a people.”[19] Augustus Hopkins Strong, a prominent American Baptist theologian, used the phrase in 1912[20] and, on December 12, 1917, the lead article in The Washington Post, written by a Christian journalist, used the phrase. > > The first use of the phrase by a Zionist did not come until 1901 > > […] > > Herzl mentions the resident population of Palestine, albeit in the context of discussing possible locations for his projected Jewish state. He was prescient in his analysis of the political impact that the inhabitants were likely to have on the Zionist project. Immigration, he explained, “continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened and forces the government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration.”[38] To say that Herzl at the time he wrote Der Judenstaat had little interest in the existing population beyond assessing their probable impact on Zionism is fair. To state that he “never even mentioned” the Arabs of Palestine is untrue. Nor did the phrase “land without a people” ever appear in Herzl’s books, letters, or diary. > > […] > > In the minds of many of Zionism’s detractors, the “land without a people” formulation has become a defining element of Zionism’s original sin. But to what extent was that slogan actually employed by the early Zionists? The official Zionist mantra of the era stated that “The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Zionist groups used a range of other slogans, including “Torah and Labor,” “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel,” and “Zionism, Socialism, and Diaspora Emancipation.” These, along with “Jewish State,” “Back to the soil,” “Return to Zion,” “Jewish homeland,” “A Palestine open to all Jews,” and, by far most frequently, “Jewish national home,” were widely-propagated Zionist slogans. In a search of seven major American newspapers—the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post[51]—there were more than 3,000 mentions of the phrase “Jewish national home” through 1948. No other Zionist phrase or slogan comes close. In contrast, there are only four mentions of Zangwill’s phrasing, “country without a people,”[52] all before 1906. There is no mention of its variants: “land without a people” or “country without a nation.” ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers database shows one additional use of the phrase before 1972: the 1947 “Text of the Statement before U.N. by Jamal el Husseini on the Arabs’ Position on Palestine: Arab Statement Denounces U.N. Proposal for Partitioning Palestine,”[53] in which Husseini charges that “the Zionist organization propagated the slogan ‘Give the country without a people to the people without a country.'” > > Despite the claims of Husseini, Said, and Khalidi, it is not evident that this was ever the slogan of any Zionist organization or that it was employed by any of the movement’s leading figures. A mere handful of the outpouring of pre-state Zionist articles and books use it.[54] For a phrase that is so widely ascribed to Zionist leaders, it is remarkably hard to find in the historical record ](["A Land without a People for a People without a Land" - Middle East Forum](http://www.meforum.org/1877/a-land-without-a-people-for-a-people-without)) > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > and modern-day Israelis generally try and pretend Israel’s Arab citizens don’t exist either Come on, this is just silly. While there are certain tensions between the Jewish and Arab populations, they certainly don’t try to pretend they don’t exist. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > the idea that Israeli Arabs can be anything but second-class citizens in country which is officially “the Sovereign State of the Jewish People” is a fantasy. It’s not. I’ve argued, and still maintain, that the only thing that’s required for Israel to remain the Jewish state is the Law of Return. I’ve supported, and continue to support, ARZA and their efforts to make sure that Israel is a pluralistic society. Israel can be a democratic state with equal protection for everybody under the law and a safe haven for Jews with the Law of Return guaranteeing that Israel will remain the only Jewish state on the planet. The concepts of democracy and a Jewish state are not mutually exclusive. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finnagain-is-kind-of-a-shitty-person/572787.md?page=37)