So Will The Sky Fall If The UN Declare Palestine a State?

Great Debates
501

What makes you say that. Ariel Sharon probably would have supported it had Hamas behaved differently following the removal of settlers from the area.

BTW, I’m curious about your earlier propasal to have the Palestinians forced into a stated based on(your words) “the Israeli model” where they’d be forced to salute a flag with a Star of David, put up with their newspapers being forced to be approved by a censor, prevented from having a party they’d approve of to vote for, forced to send their children to seperate schools, forced to endure a racist immigration law in which any Jew anywhere in the world could become a citizen, but that wouldn’t be true for Palestinians, and where they’d be reminded in a thousand small ways they were second-class citizens?

What pray tell made you think for two seconds any self-respecting Palestinian would agree to that?

What made you argue for “the Israeli model” for a one-state solution as opposed to a Canadian or American model?

Thanks in advance for your answer.

502

What? Hamas would be in the Knessit and so would Hezbollah.

503

Er… how would either of them be in the Knesset?

Please don’t tell me you think Israel lets any political party put up candidates for election to the Knesset that wants to. I assume you’re familiar with the Kach party and don’t have to run to wikipedia or google to find out what I’m talking about.

You do realize what you were advocating when you said your “one-state solution” would follow “the Israeli model” rather than “the American model”?

504

OK. I think it’s rational to conclude that not all (as both of you show) Israelis are extreme nationalists. But again, are you not part of a minority? Because if you weren’t, Israel wouldn’t keep electing one extreme right-wing nationalist Gov after another. Therefore making a two-state solution more and more implausible.

Fine, I’ll take your word for it. So what do you think happens with Gaza? They aren’t Egyptians in so far as I know.

505

Once more I’d like someone to address the question of what happens to Palestinians should there be no definition on their statehood? ‘Banning’ any response from Brazil of course.

506

As long as Palestinians want to kill Jews more than they want to have a state, they will live in misery and poverty.

507

Just for clarity, I’m a U.S. citizen (Californian.) Not even Jewish.

508

I read the link posted above, but didn’t follow on the bibliography. While I’d be glad to get a more reliable source, I’ll take that as true for now.
One thing to remember is that past trends don’t necessarily continue into the future.

OK, under the above assumptions, the math works fine.
But, it also tells you that the math simply cannot tell the whole story. I’m sure you realize that the WB simply can’t support 50 million people.

I already realized that you’re completely certain about it. While I worry it may be true, I still think it’s possible to try to get to an agreement that will minimize the risk.

What’s with the hyperboles? I weight the factors, and if I think that the immoral outcome is worse than the risk, and that the risk is containable, I will follow the moral path.

Well, you misunderstood.

Because, there are two sides to the story. And because, immorality doesn’t “trumps any other principle”.
I think the two sides should make concessions. And then there may be peace. Until such time as the Palestinians don’t agree to (what I see as) elementary demands from Israel, we don’t have any obligations to withdraw.

Oversimplifying things.

509

And yet, many Israeli Arabs would never dream of forgoing their Israeli nationality for a Palestinian one. Guess Israel may be not so bad after all.

510

True, just as during Apartheid, South Africa was surrounded by black nations and few, if any black South Africans sought refuge within one of them while black Zimbabweans flooded South Africa.

I guess Apartheid wasn’t too bad.

511

South African Apartheid wasn’t as bad as, say, living in the Central African Empire. Living is Israel isn’t as bad as living in Gaza. What’s your point?

512

Ok, I’ll bring you up to speed.

Puzzler very strongly implied that life couldn’t be that bad for Israeli Arabs because few chose to give up “their Israeli nationality” for “a Palestinian one”.

Now, in making such a statement he appears to ignore that according to the Israelis themselves being an Israeli is not a matter of “nationality” but of “citizenship”. In fact, until recently all Israelis had to carry IDs specifically declaring their “nationality”.

He didn’t apparently realize that Israeli Arabs are already Palestinians.

Now, presumably what he was trying, rather clumsily was to suggest that since they didn’t want to give up their second class citizenship in Israel to become part of an occupied territory with little power and few rights that testified to Israel being somehow or other a country with a proud record regarding the treatment of minorities rather than a racist country based on an archaic form of blood and soil nationalism in which belonging to the wrong nationality makes you legally inferior to the main nationality within.

I sarcastically pointed out that using Puzzler’s logic, life couldn’t be so bad for South African Blacks under Apartheid because few fled to Zimbabwe or Namibia.

Incidentally, your choice of Bokassa’s piece of shit little kingdom which lasted two years makes no sense because it wasn’t remotely close to South African and the Blacks of the Central African Republic are about as culturally like South African blacks as Canadians are like Jordanians.

I hope I’ve answered your question and caught you up on the discussion between myself and Puzzler.

513

Well, no thank you at all for the snark, and I don’t think you’ve actually answered my question. As far as I can tell, you’re playing this for victory points, not for meeting-of-minds discussion. Not helpful in the slightest.

I’ll get useful answers from Finn Again, I guess.

514

I agree that the math doesn’t tell the whole story, but it does show that the underlying argument is essentially correct. The Arab population is trending towards leveling off like most other populations in the world. The Jewish population is exploding and there is every reason to think it will continue to do so. Thus, it’s reasonable to expect (even if it is still uncertain) that in 50 to 100 years there will be a Jewish majority on the West Bank.

It’s also worth noting that with 50 million people, the West Bank would have a population density far lower than that of Macau or Singapore. And about equal to that of the Gaza Strip right now.

You might also ask yourself this question: If people start leaving the West Bank because it’s getting to crowded, who is more likely to leave. Seems to me that the least likely to leave are the religious settler types.

Are you aware that kust last year, one of the Senior Palestinian Authority leaders stated in effect in an Arabic interview that the ultimate goal is to put an end to Israel? How do you propose to make this attitude go away?

I’m just trying to figure out your position. Earlier, I said this:

Here was part of your response:

Apparently so.

Well there you go. In a more ideal world, Israel would pull out of the West Bank; the Palestinian Arabs would get their own state there. They would offer citizenship to any Jews who happened to be living there, as well as to the so-called “refugees.” The new country would live in peace with Israel. That is the most moral solution.

Unfortunately, the world is far less ideal. Most importantly, the Palestinian Arabs have demonstrated time and time again the consensus in their thinking, which is that putting an end to Jewish Israel is far more important than having their own state or doing anything constructive.

So one needs to ask what is the best solution in the far less ideal world we live in. And that is to annex. And by your reasoning, one cannot dismiss this solution as immoral unless one is reasonably confident that there is a better solution.

Let me ask you this: Given the statements I quoted from just last year indicating that the goal is to put an end to Israel; given the announcement that a Palestinian state would NOT offer citizenship to “refugees,” even those living on the West Bank itself; given Abbas’ announcement that a Palestinian State would be used to pursue lawfare against Israel; and given all the misconduct of the Arabs over the last 50 years which continues to this day, what is your evidence that a Palestinian State would not be used for destructive purposes? Do you have anything besides your own wishes?

What exactly am I missing? The world hates Israel and always has. The sky did not fall when Israel annexed the Golan Heights or Eastern Jerusalem.

515

Ok, I’m sorry if I pissed you off and apologize for going a little too far.

The point was that Puzzler argued that Israel couldn’t be “too bad” for the Israeli Arabs to live since they weren’t moving to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

I pointed out that using similar logic then life couldn’t have been all that bad for blacks in South Africa under Apartheid because they didn’t flee to Zimbabwe.

For that matter, based on Puzzler’s logic life as a black person in 19th Century America couldn’t have been that bad since most didn’t go to either Haiti or Liberia, despite being intensively encouraged to.

In short, his logic didn’t hold.

Now, does that mean that being an Israeli Arab is a bad as being a Palestinian on the West Bank or a black person in Apartheid South Africa?

No. But it does mean that Israel has a miserable track record when it comes to the treatment of it’s Arab minority.

516

For my part, I apologize also, as my challenge was, itself, too snarky. I realized this some time during the night, sleeplessly recounting the discussion.

My problem is that this appears to be used as an rhetorical equivalence. But it really isn’t. Israeli Arabs have far more rights than black South Africans have. Bloody hell: they have the vote! They’re actual true citizens. Black South Africans didn’t and weren’t.

So, to me, it appeared to be a thrust in the debate that was fallacious.

I do have a question, to which I have no notion of the answer: what would happen if a group of Israeli Arabs emigrated to, say, Jordan or Egypt, and made a big public case of how bad Israel was to them? Would they be celebrated, feted, rewarded, and a big publicity campaign made around them? If so…why doesn’t this happen, and often? Because, under apartheid, many black South Africans did this, and it had a huge effect on public opinion.

My error, then, is thinking you were constructing an equivalence.

Personally, I would say that Israel treats its Arab minority better than the U.S. treated its Japanese minority in 1942, and perhaps better than the U.S. treats its Navajo and Hopi minorities today. The proportion of Arabs in the Knesset is surely higher than the proportion of Navajo and Hopis in Congress.

(13 of 120, vs., as far as I can find, none…)

517

The Arab Israelis make up 20% of the Israeli population. That certainly isn’t true of the Hopi or the Navajo so I don’t think that a remotely useful statistic for comparison.

Also, while most of what I know of the Hopi and the Navajo comes from Tony Hillerman books, I can say that Native American reservations and their residents have vastly more autonomy than do the Arab Israelis.

Also, having spent four years in Minnesota I can assure you that Native American children go to school with white children. That certainly isn’t true of Arab Israelis. Aside from college they have to send their children to separate schools and the Israelis don’t even pretend that the schools are remotely equal.

Similarly, I knew the author of a Native American newspaper from the reservation and he did not have to submit any article in his newspaper before a military censor the way Arab language newspapers have to submit their articles to an Israeli newspaper censor. Amongst other things, there was always controversy over which maps could and couldn’t be shown.

Admittedly, foreign newspapers also had to submit their articles before a military censor. In one of the most notorious cases, the Hebrew language version of The New York Times wasn’t allowed to print an interview with the then former PM Yitzhak Rabin in which Rabin discussed the ethnic cleansing campaign he’d been involved with during the 1948 War.

Whether this is still true or not, I’m not sure.

I’m certainly not going to defend the way minorities are treated in the US(and think I have some authority to discuss it) but no, it’s in no way as bad as Arab Israelis are treated.

518

I did say “proportion.” The proportion of Hopis and Navajos in Congress – properly calculated on the basis of population – is less than the proportion of Arab Israelis in the Knesset.

Anyway…have Israeli Arabs made a point of leaving and protesting conditions?

I’ve been trying to find useful facts via Google, but it is difficult, as too many of the sites I find are uncomfortably strident and extremist. I don’t like to be in the position of rejecting a site as biased…but biased sites certainly do exist.

519

Ibn Warraq,
I don’t mind you trying to speculate about what I do or do not realize. I would appreciate, though, if you’d refrain from grading my skills (“rather clumsily”). Thank you.

To get things straight – I was not talking about Israeli Arabs leaving for the WB or the GS. I was talking just about citizenship.

You may have heard that one of the suggestions that were raised as a possible solution to the IP situation in general and to the settlements issue in particular, was land swaps. That is, the future, agreed upon borders of Israel would deviate from the 1967 borders to include the major settlements blocks, and in compensation, the future, agreed upon Palestine border would be modified to include the same amount of land from territories that were part of Israel before '67.

Now, for those who were trying to follow that route, one of the key questions was what bit of land the Palestinians would get. One suggestion discussed the Um El Fahm region, which has multiple Arab cities and villages, and a large majority of Arab population. When asked in polls, the population there declined the suggestion.

So, once more, to be absolutely clear: we’re talking about Israeli Arabs, who are, by their own admission, of Palestinian nationality; who would remain in their current homes, cities, and communities, on the very patch of land they now reside in; and who would have to endure very little change to their day-to-day life, with one exception –they would forgo the citizenship of the racist, evil Israel, to gain in return a citizenship of an independent Palestine, where they’ll be equal citizens, not second class ones.
And they declined the offer.

I will leave it to you to speculate about the reasons for that.

Now, that doesn’t mean that everything is all nice and dandy for the Arab minority. There are multiple reasons for that. To a certain degree, it is almost unavoidable, as we’re talking about a large minority, who aligns themselves with the declared enemies of the country they live in; to a large extent, It’s the fault of the Israeli governments who failed to assimilate them (though some have tried); and to some degree it is their own fault (the Arab places usually have lower standard of living – but that is largely because they pay very little taxes (including local municipal ones), they disregard city planning laws, and built wherever and however they want, etc.). But the point I was trying to make is that while things are far from ideal, they still prefer this to the alternative.

520

Well, the assumption that the behavioral of 30+ million people may be extrapolated from a few dozens or so of ultra-motivated people seems somewhat far-fetched. So, IMO, the whole point is irrelevant.

I’m quite aware of extremist views, opinions and statements from both sides of the conflict. But instead of just giving up, and except the unavoidable war forever, I prefer to make an effort. And to make efforts to reach an agreement that, while not being perfect, is good enough to answer the basic concerns and needs of both sides. For Israel, that would include a rock-steady foundation (as much as possible) ensuring our security in the presence of a Palestinian state next door.

In addition to what I wrote above about the necessity from the Israeli side to ensure our security, and of making as sure as possible that no hostilities would come from P (and allowance of necessary means to neutralize those in case is does), I will say that I do not believe the world at large would except 50-100 more years of the current situation without interfering.

“The World” doesn’t do or hate anybody… The various states have interests and cultural biases that influence their attitude toward Israel. And while most of the time, there certainly is a feeling here that no matter what we do, we always end on the wrong side, it wasn’t always like that. And in fact, it isn’t now.
The international organizations are certainly biased, as may be expected from the vast amount of Arab and other states that are automatically against Israel, no matter what we do. But on the practical level, and in the state by state attitude (at least in the west), it is a different situation.