Why? What are the criteria for determining whether a group of people deserves a state?
Why is “apartheid” as you have defined it national suicide? And just so we are clear, is it your position that the current situation counts as “apartheid”?
Again, why?
Of course it’s acceptable. There isn’t a country on the Earth that doesn’t shoot within its borders now and then.
Brazil, please stop helping.
Lol, I am not here to help other posters. But if my goal were to help other posters, I would note that anyone who suddenly shows up from out of nowhere, claiming to be Israeli while at the same time accusing Israel of “apartheid” needs to have his posts looked at carefully.
At the risk of getting pulled into the vortex, I’ll just note that doubleminus pings my radar (as an Israeli) as being an Israeli themselves.
Hard to put my finger on what it is… and I suppose I could be fooled (won’t be the first or the last time :o) – but something about their writing style, “notional* vocabulary”, and overall context rings true to me.
I’m not going to enter the fray of the discussion proper. BTDT too many times and I’m jaded.
Perhaps, but don’t you think there’s something a bit odd about a self-described Israeli “patriot” who nevertheless accuses his own country of “apartheid”?
Anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter much. His arguments deserve whatever weight they deserve whether they come from an Israeli patriot or anyone else.
Ever read the comments on this board from Yanks regarding the U.S.?
Also, he didn’t say that Israel is practicing apartheid, he said that he was afraid Israel would become an apartheid state - which is very much the kind of thing Israelis worry about.
In effect he did. I explicitly asked him what was untenable about the status quo and his response, in part, was that there are 3 choices: “2 states, or one state with one man/one vote, or apartheid”
Since the status quo is neither of the first two, the implication is that the status quo amounts to apartheid.
Wow.
Ok, first to Jackmannii and Terr.
Before I posted, I reread the “deeply unpopular” part and I was for a few seconds skeptical by myself. But in the end the phrasing stood:
It is surely strange how a small minority manages to define a situation, but looking at many historical precedents this is very common.
Terr is perfectly right about this:
(explanation) In 1948, Ben-Gurion was adamant there could not exist sectarian militias, but a single military force controlled by the elected government. He dissolved militias belonging to the political left, but, seemingly the rightist IZL militia refused, and brought a ship loaded with weapons for themselves, called Altalena. It was duly sunk near the coast, and there were casualties. This episode of internal armed conflict is traumatic.
Moreover, regarding a determined minority controlling a majority, please consider this: How did a small country, wholly dependent on commerce, oil and weapons on the western world, extremely unpopular in the non-western world and much of Europe, managed to prevent the imposition of a solution on the parties. That solution could have been non-adversarial to either party, and close to what was already agreed in 2000 (the Clinton framework) and 2007 (Olmert-Abbas). The points of disagreement were very minor both times.
OK, that was the first batch.
To Alessan,
Naphtali Bennett is projected to win 13-14 seats, because he seems a bright, rational and very likable person on all issues apart of the future status of the occupied territories, and even on those he proposes an unacceptable plan, but at least does not invoke trusting God as the only policy. He manages to attract right wing voters that are not only from the ideological settler hard core (they count 2-3 seats out of 120). However, he is (in my view) either a trojan horse with the nutties inside, or a disposable person to be thrown out after use. I, for one can’t say.
Regarding the international force. Here you started to get mad at me. First of all, I am not for the evacuation of the settlers who will remain the the west bank after the slight border adjustments, if this at all possible. We’re talking about 100-150 thousand people. THis is less than 5% of the Arab population of the West Bank. Evacuating a person from his home, especially with the historic link they feel, seems to me more horrible and traumatic than living in a foreign country. Hey, why we can accept 20-25% of Arabs in Israel proper and the Palestinians cannot accept a fifth of that ? This may prevent a violent clash with them.
Now, this is not my own idea, please read these articles by Yair Sheleg. He is a religious person, a columnist for the weekly Makor Rishon.
black feet in judea and samaria the algerian evacuation model and its relevance for israel
appropriate and inappropriate evacuation
Yitong is the lightest possible construction block, 80% air and very fragile.
The goyim should be there to enforce de-militarization and protect both parties. Believe me, Israel will not shoot at American or European forces. Palestinians, maybe.
Why do you see Western foreign help as detrimental to Israel ? This is not rational.
So if I understand you correctly, it’s entirely understandable that Israel is helpless to withstand a deeply unpopular, lawless element within its own borders which threatens its security, because hostile countries outside Israel have been unable to impose an unfavorable political settlement on it.
Sounds like both a flawed analogy and a cop-out to me.
Jackmannii, you got me wrong. I meant that **friendly **countries have been unable to impose, or at least to coax an agreement, even though it would have been highly beneficial for them and for the involved countries. Look, both US and the EU claim they support the creation of a Palestinian state for decades. A year ago there was a vote in the Sec. Council in which such a proposal was rejected - A US veto, but also a negative vote of other western countries.
Now, I can try to find reasons for what happened. Maybe the Palestinians themselves were (and still are) so divided - Hamas and Fatach that they wouldn’t be able to execute their part. Maybe Netaniahu promised something. Maybe Obama was afraid of AIPAC. Maybe the world just got tired.
In any case you may find lots of examples in which a small minority has a disproportionate high influence. Look at powerful lobbies in the US - health care for instance. It doesn’t make sense to me that Israel would have a universal health system, that is thought to be quite good, with 2/3 of the GNP/capita and less then half the GNP percentage in health services.
So, Jackmanii, I don’t know why we have been so unsuccessful to take on the settlers. I really don’t know. I can only provide psychological and historical pseudo explanations.
I would like to remind you of the end of the second Temple in the first century. A small band of messianic Jews decide to liberate the country from the Romans - that were by far the most powerful empire at that time. They also terrorized the rest of the Jews that thought otherwise, probably calling them unpatriotic enough.
The end was clear and expected and you can see it pictured on the Titus arch in Rome.
I’ll ask that one then. Let’s see how many replies there are.
However. It does look like an annexationist party is going to win a bunch of seats in the election and along with Lieberman’s party, which a lot of people have described as neo-fascist, and other right wing parties then it’s fair to describe Israel as heading further and further right. You’ve got a majority of Israelis who believe Israel already practices apartheid. You’ve got the government ignoring Supreme Court rulings and doing what they want so it isn’t really an assumption that Israel is heading towards apartheid and lawlessness, it’s an accurate description.
I know, how odd is it that more people aren’t responding to an off-topic question, which has zero relevance to the thread, posted by someone whose arguments are so fanatically anti-Israel that even the mention of actual facts causes a default flee-in-defeat-mode where little pellets of “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinions, maaaaaaaaaaan, so let’s have people vote on what reality is!” are deployed like so much chaff? Truly, it is so odd it deserves to be mentioned by you yet again in this thread. “When will your slavish devotion to Apartheid Israel end, do you know no decency!?!? Will you follow your Master’s bidding in everything, or can you finally state that would be over the line, Zionist patsies?”
Yeah, let me queue up to answer that question asap.
Cite?
Chances are you simply invented that in a dream, and it’s as untrue as it gets.
As always happens when you are caught in logical or factual errors, I believe it is time for you to retreat to your claim that there’s reality, which the Zionists nefariously gather cites from, and there’s your loathing of Israel, so let’s just stack reality up against whatever sounds good to you, and we can just like put it to a vote. Like any proper research methodology, which all end with a popularity contest. Of course, predictably, if you have the basic facts wrong other than your hatred of Israel, you might be referring to the poll which the anti-Israel blogosphere has been trumpeting for a while now. Your lack of any actual cites for this claim (I wonder why…) leaves one in doubt. Might you referring to a different poll that was was flawed beyond use? No one knows, as you cited… nothing.
But assuming that’s the cite you’re using as rant-fuel, let’s look some more at it, shall we?
[
](http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=55&x_article=2311)
Here’s a cite:
This effin BS of spuriously looking for easily Googled facts is getting really boring. There should be a rule that would classify this kind of sh!tty cite requests as a hijack and deal with repeated offenders accordingly. It’s just pages after pages of the same BS that is for some reason considered a contribution to a debate. Well, there’s no effin debate if you keep spinning wheel all the time by making easily Googled facts look suspicious.
That I dealt with and refuted, with a quote, directly above your post.
Yeah, asking y’all to provide proof for your claims, and then analyzing your logic?
The mods should totally step in and stop that.
You obviously could use their help.
LOL, you “refuted” it by citing an opinion piece, and the scrupulously objective CAMERA, saying the poll is worthless, because (CAMERA claims), Israelis are too fucking stupid to know what apartheid means.
I mean, EVERYBODY knows about the 2002 Rome Statute of the ICC, so what were those dumb poll respondents smoking?
I cited and quoted the statistics, methodology and questions in that piece.
You’re welcome to find the same information in a different web page if you’d like.
As for the idea that everybody just knows what the actual definition of apartheid is? Evidently the folks writing the poll didn’t since, as pointed out, you cannot have “apartheid in some places.”
Try again.
No need.
In other news, when asked whether the sky was blue, 85% of Israelis said it was. They are obviously all idiots, because according to a 1997 paper of the NIST, blue light has a wavelength of 475nm, which is several nm shorter than the predominant light of the Israeli sky.
I accept your admission that the poll’s methodology, question construction and phrasing renders it useless as a poll, and you have no actual argument to the contrary.