It’s been a democracy for all of its existence. With peaceful and orderly transfers of power from one political block to another, several times.
It’s a democracy in the way that Apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South were: kinda-sorta.
I do not believe that you can accurately state what “the Palestinians show an interest” in until they are allowed to have a functioning state and a representative government.
Palestine has few resources, and Israel has the most powerful military in the region. A Palestinian state would not be an existential threat to Israel.
Regardless of where the border is – and surely it will be disputed – Israel has no claim to the overall territory of Palestine. They have not attempted to make any such claim, nor have they ever shown any interest in incorporating the territory into Israel. Therefore, absent some other power taking control, Palestine should have a state of its own.
I didn’t argue they weren’t a democracy, I argued that they weren’t liberal, or western, or “share [American] values”. I’m not liberal or particularly enthused with American values myself, so I don’t personally care, but one shouldn’t have a mistaken view about what Israel is like. The median Jewish Israeli has a very different set of views than the median Jewish American, and to a large extent the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the two groups are very different, to an extent that was much less true in 1948.
This was in response to your “It’s a democracy for the time being, but we’ll see how long that lasts.”
As for it being “liberal” or “Western” - first you would have to define what those words mean in respect to a democracy.
Israel can’t be Greater Israel, a Jewish State, and a liberal democracy all at the same time.
If they incorporate the West Bank, what happens to the Palestinians? If they’re excluded apartheid-style, then Israel remains a jewish state but at the cost of abandoning liberal democracy. If they give the Palestinians political rights, then Greater Israel isn’t a Jewish state anymore, just a state with a Jewish majority.
Israel shows every intention of continuing and deepening their control over the West Bank. They also show no intention of giving Palestinians any political freedom. And this means that they’ll eventually have to abandon their pretense of liberal democracy.
Sure, it’s certainly true that no other Middle Eastern states are liberal democracies either. Palestinian “refugees” are marginalized in the various authoritarian countries, but so is everyone else.
But pointing out that Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt and Syria and Saudi Arabia aren’t liberal democracies doesn’t magically let Israel off the hook. We can ally with authoritarian regimes when our interests coincide. We can protect people against genocide, even if they aren’t liberal democracies. But if the point of allying with Israel is that they’re a liberal democracy then they have to act like it.
[quote=“TonySinclair, post:118, topic:795822”]
You’ve made it pretty clear that you think any post that agrees with you is a great post.
[/quote}I am perfectly willing to say that a post is well-reasoned even if I fully disagree with it.
The problem is that many of the people who oppose the Israel government’s policies turn a blind eye towards:
[ol]
[li]Turkey’s occupation of large chunks of Greek Cyrus;[/li][li]The brutal oppression in Myanmar/Burma of the Rohingas (also Muslims but who seem to not benefit from Muslim solidarity);[/li][li]Sudan’s continuing interference in South Sudan;[/li][li]The Nigerian Muslim’s snuffing out of Biafran self-determination;[/li][li]Iraq’s ongoing and even mounting oppression of the Kurds and rejection of their right to self-determination.[/li][/ol]
The reason I and many others equate anti-Israel sentiments with anti-Judaism is that the ire of the pro-Palestinians is very selective. The Jews seem to be the only people not allowed to establish a nation-state and not allowed to indulge in the necessary protective measures to validate its Jewish nature.
The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls was very upsetting to Arab interests since it indeed validated the historical claim of the Hebrews to a lot of the territory. The connection of the Hebrews to the Holy Land is indeed well-known. What attracted many of the Arabs (now conveniently called Palestinians) to modern-day Israel and the disputed territories was the massive infusion of capital and know-how to turn a barren stretch of deserts and swamps into a miraculous, productive nation-state rather than a killing field such as nearby Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
As I said above, the Jews seem to be the only people not allowed to establish a nation-state and not allowed to indulge in the necessary protective measures to validate its Jewish nature.
[QUOTE=JBGUSA;20511718The problem is that many of the people who oppose the Israel government’s policies turn a blind eye towards:
[ol]
[li]Turkey’s occupation of large chunks of Greek Cyrus;[/li][li]The brutal oppression in Myanmar/Burma of the Rohingas (also Muslims but who seem to not benefit from Muslim solidarity);[/li][li]Sudan’s continuing interference in South Sudan;[/li][li]The Nigerian Muslim’s snuffing out of Biafran self-determination;[/li][li]Iraq’s ongoing and even mounting oppression of the Kurds and rejection of their right to self-determination.[/li][/ol]
[/QUOTE]
Practically nobody actually supports Sudan, even if most people ignore the situation. Israel gets support, and that support, in light of their actions, is what garners a stronger reaction than if they were just things that were happening in the world.
Also, putting Israel in the same category as those isn’t exactly a good defense of Israel.
My problem is the assumption that Israel or for that matter the U.S. has to be perfect to merit support. In most cases, especially with enemies such as the ones bedeviling Israel, being perfect is a death warrant.
All of those causes have vocal support in the US, and yet the US gives far, far more taxpayer dollars to Israel than the rest combined. As for the Iraqi Kurds, I already noted in a previous post that the US spent billions of dollars and risked the lives of American pilots protecting them with a no-fly zone for over ten years, and then a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives deposing their oppressor (and Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds was touted almost as much as WMDs as a reason to invade). That is hardly turning a blind eye.
Then it’s a stupid reason. The mass illegal immigration of foreign aliens onto Arab land – not even from a neighboring country but from all over the world — and the eviction of the former residents, is unprecedented in modern times, and deserves a unique reaction. I would say the same thing if the Irish tried to take over an African country. And you would say the same thing if the UN voted to give your state to Vietnam as compensation for US war crimes. Do you deny this?
There is a huge difference between indigenous people fighting for independence on their own land, and illegal (according to the same authority you cite for the Balfour Declaration) immigrants taking over someone else’s land. How supportive would you be of immigrant Mexicans establishing a nation-state in the SW US, and taking “protective measures,” including stockpiling nuclear weapons, to validate its Latino nature?
There is also the little matter of our support for Israel having hugely adverse consequences for the US. Bin Laden himself said our support for Israel was a major reason for the 9-11 attacks. If you can show such a direct link between our support of Cyprus and the deaths of thousands of Americans, I’ll treat that as a special case, too.
Allow me to fight your ignorance.
You seem unaware that the Dead Sea Scrolls are of historical interest to Biblical scholars because they doubled the age of the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible from about 1000 years to about 2000 years, but that’s it. Other than minor textual variants, the fragments of the Hebrew Bible they contain are essentially the same as what we already had from copies of other Hebrew and Greek (Septuagint) manuscripts, so the great value of the DSS is to show that the copying process did not cause important distortions in the text during the thousand years that intervened between the period of the DSS and our previous oldest manuscripts. It would be like finding a copy of the Iliad that was centuries older than surviving manuscripts, but which said exactly the same thing. But even 2nd century BCE manuscripts are still about a thousand years later than the mythical date of the Exodus and conquest of Canaan, so they added zero to secular historical knowledge of that period.
You also seem unaware that Islam is an Abrahamic religion, and that Muslims accept the broad outlines of the Hebrew Bible as true (which is why I say the Quran is as ridiculous as the Bible), so they wouldn’t be upset even if the DSS had added to that knowledge. You seem unaware that the Torah is considered scripture to Muslims. You seem unaware that the person most frequently named in the Quran is Moses, and that they fully accept Israel as the “Promised Land” to Jews.
Unlike most modern historians, Muslims even believe that Solomon ruled over Greater Palestine. They simply take the very common-sense view that the Jews lost title to the region when they were expelled by the Romans 2000 years ago (or, less secularly, when God punished them for violating his commandments). If everyone alive today had a claim to the land his ancestors lived on 3000 years ago, we would never sort things out. It would be even worse if we accepted claims that are almost certainly mythical.
If anyone, it is Christians who should have been upset, since the other major finding of the DSS concerned first-century Jewish splinter groups, and showed that some teachings previously thought to have been original with Jesus were more likely derived from the Essenes. Luckily, most Christians know next to nothing about the Bible, so there wasn’t much reaction.
Blindingly obvious, but it’s “known” only in the same sense that we know that Muhammad flew to heaven on the back of a horse. It’s a religious belief that Israel is the Promised Land. The secular connection is that the Jews ruled a small part of Palestine for less than a hundred of the 3000-plus years it was referred to as Palestine. And even their own sacred scriptures add only another century, 800 years earlier, to their total time of independence in the region. The rest of the time, they were just vassals of one empire or another, a condition which Israeli apologists say invalidates the claims of Palestinians.
Again obvious. People go where the money is, even if it’s billions of US taxpayer money.
I guess we’ll never know what the Palestinians could have done if we had given them 3 billion a year, and who knows how much more off the books, and let them develop peacefully, instead of having to spend their lives fighting for their homes, or not being able to plant an orchard without the Israelis bulldozing it.
And would you say the same thing if the UN voted to let them establish a nation-state where you live, and you were driven out?
The fact that they’re not perfect means it’s valid to criticize them. People should stop putting Israel on a pedestal.
Is that so? Where’s the Kurdish nation state? Tamil? Basque? Hell, Palestinian? You don’t seem keen to allow them to establish a nation-state…
I’m sure plenty of people in the Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa felt that the oppression they engaged in was necessary to protect the character of their nations/states. That’s not a reasonable defense of that oppression, however. A state’s “protective measures” must end where the human rights of others begin.
The argument that Israel can only exist as a Jewish state through endless military occupation and oppression of a stateless people is profoundly insulting to all parties to the conflict, and I don’t find it to be based in reality.
What does “support” mean here, exactly? I support Israel’s right to exist. I also support a state for the Palestinian people, and an end to the occupation. Are these positions incompatible? I certainly don’t think so.
So which is it? Should we support Israel because God gave the land to the Jewish people 3000 years ago? Or because we need them as a base to invade other Middle Eastern countries?
Both reasons personally but as a U.S. citizen primarily the latter.
[quote=“JBGUSA, post:127, topic:795822”]
LOL no. The Biafra War wasn’t about ‘islam’ and it wasn’t really even about North vs South, it was a war that pitted the Igbo against everyone else, including against other Southern Christianized people’s.
I’m not super knowledge about Nigeria, but I believe that between the 19th century Fulani Wars and the rise of Boko Haram etc in the 2000s, religion wasn’t the major factor in social conflicts. Ethnicity, economic differences between ethnic groups, quarrels over access to government jobs and offices etc were more important.
[quote=“Hector_St_Clare, post:135, topic:795822”]
Other than the first few words, that was not my post.
[quote=“TonySinclair, post:136, topic:795822”]
Ask Hector_St_Clare.
Hmmmm. Now we see where you’re coming from.
