Without commenting on how much influence Jews in particular have, you certainly can’t dismiss a group’s influence simply because it is small. NRA members make up about 2% of US citizens, and pretty much always get their way, even when 80% of the public opposes them.
ETA: And the NRA leadership almost always gets its way, even when over half the NRA members oppose them.
That’s not all there is to it, the US committed to send aid to both Egypt and Israel as part of the Camp David Accords, and this has continued ever since.
Also, don’t confuse the Israeli lobby and the Jewish lobby, they are not the same thing.
Not really, whatever one might say about the theft of Native American and/or Mexican land, today both Natives and Latinos of Mexican descent enjoy US citizenship and the same rights as any other citizens. They were not kept in a state of permanent occupation with no legal rights.
You forgot to explain why the settlements, or the indefinite occupation, are ok.
I don’t think they are “OK.”
But what is your end game? Here is what I would have handled things.
Keep settlements off contested territory but maintain some buffer zone for security reasons. Keeping settlements off the contested territory (now to some the “contested” territory applies to anything beyond 1948 borders which is a non starter) would be the act of good faith on the Israeli side, where it would be allowed to be filled in and a state formed once the Palestinian side and parties like Hamas dropped their stated goal to destroy the Israeli state.
I have ZERO confidence or expectation they would ever drop that goal of destruction, as they have been reported saying, we love death more than you love life, but the offer of cooperation would forever be there as a carrot for a willingness to compromise and have a deal for peace.
What Israel seems to be doing is a slow rolling population of contested territories in order to make it less politically viable to ever offer those areas up in a land swap. The Jewish right strikes me as wanting to push the Palestinians out and have it all for the Jews.
I don’t even like the concept of an ethno state, it strikes me as an inherently inferior construct and basis for a state, but in that region that is probably the only way to survive amidst the supremacist Islamic religion influencing people on all sides.
Well, we still have the reservations, which are kinda weird. I think it’s wrong to try to draw parallels to other situations, because no two are really alike. Yes, the Palestinians in the West Bank don’t have citizenship rights…but they aren’t citizens. The West Bank is not Israel. The comparisons to apartheid are wrong, largely for this reason. Again, you can’t make comparisons, because no situation in history has ever exactly resembled this one.
The fact that no nation claims the West Bank as sovereign territory is all but unprecedented.
This is the worst kind of tu quoque. That would mean that the only countries that haven’t at some point in recent or ancient history conquered land, occupied it, and tried to settle it resulting in a displacement of the original inhabitants are allowed to criticize Israel. So, just East Timor then? Maybe the Seychelles?
If a country out there was determined to exterminate all the Jews that live there and in all surrounding countries, Germany of all countries would probably be a good authority to say “hey, maybe you shouldn’t do that.”
You came into a thread about settlements and wrote about how terrible Arabs are, without mentioning the settlements. Forgive my confusion.
A stable Jewish-majority state, and a stable Palestinian Arab-majority state, coexisting. No stateless people, no oppression.
As long as people are poor, desperate, and oppressed, you’ll have groups like Hamas. They’re of a kind with groups like the IRA, MK, or Yugoslav Partisans - when people are oppressed, with no legal recourse, they turn to violence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most violent occupied territory, Gaza, is also the poorest and most densely populated one.
To that end, I’d have handled things by building a free and prosperous Palestinian state. Give people political freedom and something to lose, and watch the conflict peter out.
That’s exactly what they want.
I don’t like ethno-states either, but there are plenty of religious minorities in the Middle East. It’s heavily Muslim, of course, but no exclusively so.
I guess, but the people on them are citizens, and aren’t confined to the reservation. It’s not at all like the occupied territories.
They are subject to Israeli military law, displaced by Israeli settlements, and depend on checkpoint passes issued by the Israelis, yet have no say in any of this. How is that not apartheid?
You don’t think the existence of the Bantustans argues against it being such a wrong comparison for that reason?
Others on the Left? I am not on the Left. It is also not the case that I am hostile to Israel. It is interesting that a mere slight critical comment is read this way.
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Funny no you set up the Them too strawman. Odd the Palestina Christian is erased in this.
amusing the presumptions…
It seems to me that you have a double standard in the opposite direction. You blame the Arabs for continuing to oppose Israel; how cheerfully do you think the rest of the US would take it if the UN (in a fantasy world where the US couldn’t veto everything) decided to award everything west of the Rockies to Native Americans, so they could have their own homeland in return for all they had suffered, and China and Russia and Europe quickly moved in to enforce that decision, overwhelming the local authorities, and making it impossible to dislodge the new mandate without a nuclear war on American soil?
Note that that would be much more fair than what happened to the Arabs, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but had to see a chunk of their land, rather than a chunk of Germany, given for reparations.
What if, after some years of fighting, Native Americans graciously offered to keep only California, Washington, and Oregon, and give Nevada and Arizona and Idaho back to the US (subject to Native American checkpoints on all highways and borders, including the eastern borders of the returned states, of course), and the US said that wasn’t good enough? Would you condemn the US as being too unreasonable to even deal with, and say they had their chance, now they get nothing?
If your family had to abandon your house and business in California because of all this, how many years would it take for you to say, “Meh, I guess that’s that, no use crying over spilled milk?”
And you condemn the “supremacist Muslim religion.” Are you aware that 60% of Israeli Jews say that Israel is theirs because God gave it to them (Source PDF)? And by “Israeli Jews,” I mean ethnic Jews, including those who describe themselves as secular or even atheist; not just religious Jews, for whom the figure is over 99%.
I’m sure you know that they get that idea from the Bible, but have you read enough of the Bible to know that that promise included the land from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates? And that the Israelites had explicit orders to exterminate every man, woman, and child who was already living on that land? I assure you, most Muslims are aware of it.
As long as the majority of Israeli Jews believe it is their God-given right to take the land, regardless of who has the better claim, what chance is there for a long-lasting peace?
Yes he has his fun house mirror view that he thinks is “balanced” but nothing more is expected really, although I am always amused at home the Palestinian reaction is 100 per cent put on the Muslims in total ignorance of the historical rôle of the Palestinian and Levantine Christians (other than the Maronites) in the creation and leadership of the most extreme and violence oriented resistance groups to the Israel. It is a funny American blindness as it seems to disturb their Cowboys and Indians type narrative
In any case, if you wish to locate the wider Arab reaction properly (not to defend at all the idiocy of the expulsions and the treatment of the Mizrahi, only to understand the soutces), it can not be ignored that this occurred at the same time as the décolonisation and the leading rôle of the European Jewish groups was naturally fitted into this anti colonial reaction. For the leaderships that already were revolting against the colonial record of seizures of the land and the assets for the service of the European objectives, it was natural to see a repitition.
A similar settlement program under the rule of the Ottomans, in a alternative history without the British colonial rule, and by their invitations following the pattern they had when the European powers, the Iberians particularly, expelled the Sephardin (as well as the Muslims, no tolerance… funny to talk of Islamic supremacist policy in a world where not one pre Christian religion survived in the European space), it is not hard to imagine a very different history based on the real historical patterns.
The foundation of the Israel was contaminated by the historical moment of its occurence.
I don’t get why those supremacist Jews don’t just listen to everyone who thinks they have too much agency. What shall we do to them?