There is, of course, no contradiction between the “average” Palestinian having zero confidence in corrupt PA or Islamist “leaders”, and not feeling that the Israeli government and public are consequently their bros.
There’s also a strong element of “the world is against, always has been, always will be, so what do we care what the world thinks?” among the far-right and Ultra-Orthodox in Israel.
Agreed - they’ve been regarded as an American hand puppet.
I think the misjudging of the Israeli right is part and parcel of what is frankly the narrow and unrealistic view of the international foreign policy “establishment”, everyone understands Israel/Palestine to largely be a conflict waiting for some sort of day where you will have a negotiated settlement between two states. If you think Israel wants that, it causes you to presume a lot of things about how they assess good and bad. When a significant segment of Israeli society has “moved on” from the two state solution, it’s worth recognizing that fact.
That’s not entirely accurate. All Israelis think the whole world is against us; the Left’s response is “We can change that!”, while the Right is all, “Why bother?”.
Mmm, would you say Hamas is fighting against colonial domination, alien occupation or a racist regime?
I don’t think it follows that from Israel having an apartheid regime (or any other way you want to characterize it) that any form of violent resistance no matter what should be viewed as legitimate.
I didn’t say all the Palestinian actions are automatically legitimate. In fact, if a case under Protocol I is successfully applied, some definitively would not be.
That observation doesn’t actually answer the question I actually asked, though.
A major difference from South African apartheid is their histories, South African apartheid was a desire by the white minority to entrench its power regardless of its size of the population. Israel’s occupation of Palestine started out as the result of multiple very serious wars in which Israel’s very existence was in peril. Most people didn’t seriously question the occupation for the first couple of decades because Israel faced so many genuine threats in the region that the legitimacy of occupying a “defensive buffer” around Israel wasn’t seriously questioned as a necessity–with Palestinian independence only being a long term esoteric goal.
In an odd way it’s been a product of the last 25-30 years of relative peace and normalization of relationships between Israel and its neighbors that have changed the international view of it–that the occupation morphed from a relatively justifiable outcome of the first 30 years of war after WWII to widely been seen as no longer justified and in fact that it’s being used as a pretext to establish illegal settlements and illegal land annexations.
I don’t actually think the Palestinians ramping up the violence is wise for them and suspect they won’t do so. If you make it look like Israel has serious security concerns from the West Bank and Gaza it likely builds, not diminishes, support for the occupation internationally and among regional actors.
I am not egotistical enough to think I can solve the conflict, but frankly given the realities on the ground the Palestinians actual best outcome is almost certainly adopting a position of surrender, not opposition. Like I don’t actually think resistance is viable long term. I also don’t think anyone is really ever coming to help the Palestinians, all signs are most of its regional allies other than Iran have moved on from them.
And America has been seen as theirs at times. It’s an Ouroboros of hands up backsides!
I wanted to link this article I just read in the Atlantic, “Israel’s Problems Are Not Like America’s”, by Matti Friedman. Friedman is a Jewish writer based in Israel, I mention to put any context to biases that might be in the article. I don’t think the article comes off as one-sided pro-Israeli, and I think it adds important context to the discussion that is often not really understood in America.
The Americanization of the Israeli-Palestinian Debate - The Atlantic
One of the big things that Friedman mentions is that Americans are always desperate to understand other countries as a reflection of America. So we try to understand Israel’s issues with Palestine as being similar to the era of Jim Crow in America, or associated with the sort of police systemic racism that BLM movement targets. Or how we try to crown a number of populist foreign autocrats from Orban to Modi as “India’s Trump” or “Hungary’s Trump.” I kind of agree with Friedman’s core argument–it’s actually sloppy thinking, and probably not the best practice. We shouldn’t start with the presumption that the lessons of our country are the starting point for analyzing another country’s issues. India for example has a history dating back to the beginning of human civilization, with a huge number of Empires and Kingdoms rising and falling, complex religious and ethnic interactions etc. India has roughly twice the population of Europe and probably as much if not more ethnic, religious and historical diversity, yet our western, American-centric way of thinking tries to glaze over all that, look at someone like Modi and say “he’s just India’s Trump.”
Actually understanding the conflict means actually understanding the conflict, not understanding a bare minimum required to simplify the conflict down to its nearest American approximate.
I also frankly think there’s an important thing Friedman talks about somewhat, but doesn’t delve deeply into–is the matter of race. I’ve been to Israel once, many years ago. I don’t know a way to say it without sounding a little racially insensitive myself but for the purposes of discussion I’m going to say it–by my White American eyes, most Israeli Jews would not be seen as whites in the United States. I think the quintessential Jews in America’s eyes are guys like Jerry Seinfeld, Bernie Sanders, Larry David, Joe Lieberman, Michael Bloomberg–the list of Jewish entertainers and actors is innumerable. But the thing almost all of those people have in common is they are physically white, ancestrally tied to European Jewish populations that had for 500-1000 years off and on intermarried with “white” people. A lot of Israel’s Jewish population does not have this history (but certainly some do), the frank reality is to my somewhat untrained white American eyes, a significant portion of Jewish police officers and such that I saw in Israel and Jews in general were difficult to distinguish from Arabs. Another thing the long list of American Jews who have reached prominence have in common is they overwhelmingly are secular, with very few being anything close to a religiously observant Jew, some are religious atheist who adhere to a “cultural Judaism.” That is also less common in Israel.
I do think there is some value in understanding/processing that, because I think part of what causes many Americans to try and link Israel’s actions to fairly dissimilar ones from other countries is this understanding of what Israel and its Jewish population is versus reality. I think there is a fantasy world where Israel is ran by a bunch of lily white European colonizers. There is a reality where a significant portion of Israel’s founders (more than 50%) were natives of the Middle East with long histories in the region, who would not easily match Western conceptions of “whiteness”, nor would their cultural or religious upbringing be typical of much of the West. I think we sloppily consider Israel a Western country because it is Democratic and some of its prominent politicians have a European background so they in our minds are no different from the fairly secular atheist Jews common in the United States. But the reality is Israel is a Middle Eastern country and so are most of its people, with the cultural and religious baggage that comes from being from that region, as well as the ethnic reality.
Israel has all kinds of problems, including racism, but the difference between the hypothetical Palestinian guy who speaks Arabic, lives in Tel Aviv, and has Israeli citizenship, and the guy who lives in Gaza and does not have the right passport to travel is not that they look different.
The term you’re looking for is Ashkenazi Jews. They were originally Yiddish speaking, and from Northern and Eastern Europe.
The others are Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews – originally from Spain, North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Middle East.
Which is, I suspect, not well understood in America or in the West. I think Friedman is probably digging a bit too far back in history by referencing the 1950s movie Exodus in which an Israeli Jew is played by the ruggedly handsome, blonde haired and blue eyed Paul Newman (who “self-identified” as a Jew due to his father’s Eastern European Jewish heritage, but was never a religious Jew, and his mother was Polish Catholic) but I do think there’s good evidence a lot of Americans are sloppily conflating the Israel/Palestine conflict with “white vs black/brown” issues endemic in the United States.
I think what’s just been pointed out is not that, but that the difference between either of those people and an Israeli Jew is also not that they look different.
It may be worth noting that there’s a hierarchy of different groups of Jews in Israel (with Ashkenazi at the top), and allegations of prejudice and discrimination.
So it turns out that even if “we are all Jews,” it’s still impossible to erase the very significant disparities and powerful tensions between Jews of European background and Jews whose origins are in Arab and Muslim countries. From the establishment of the state through our own day, the two groups, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, have lived under what amounts to a regime of separation: whether in terms of real estate, education, employment or culture, there is still a clear hierarchy, wherein Ashkenazi Jews are advantaged in every sphere.
There is a really good article in The Atlantic saying Americans tend to see world issues, and the Middle East in particular, as a mirror of their own issues. I don’t know if I fully agree with that, but it seems partly true.
Hmm, I see you have linked the article. I do not agree with everything there, but am Canadian and not American nor Israeli. Although there has always been some degree of distaste for semitism in many places - and this seems to have much increased over the last five years - I do not fully agree with your bolded characterization, even though it is clear views are often distorted through a local lens. I suppose the answer one gets may depend on whom one asks, as always.
I thought this article from the AP today was very interesting:
OK, since that’s coming from you, an Israeli, I’ll go with that.
On the other hand, as an American Jew I have not had that feeling. I have long known that some people are against me (everyone has that), but not everyone.