It seems to me that Israel today is but a racist aphartied state like South Africa was before the end of Aphartied. Although Palestinians account for about 50% of the population between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, they occupy less than 2% of the seats in the Zionist parliament (knesset), the rest are 3rd class citizens confined to Bantustans. There are no civil-rights in that country to speak of like the kind we have in America because Israel is a ‘Jewish State’, a state for Jews only and other human beings are considered inferior; And then another 4 million Palestinians are in refugee camps in neighboring countries; and they are there because Israel expelled them from their villages and then destroyed the villages. But where S Africa was hit with stiff economic sanctions and forced to end it’s racist practices, Israel receives blind support and billions of dollars in aid, and isn’t this double-standard the fundamental reason Arabs hate Americans? Why is it OK to subject Arabs to such humiliation but it’s not OK to do it to blacks or anyone else for that matter?
A lot of people obviously do not realize the double-standard for human and political rights that Israel deploys is what garners so much hatred for it. Ariel Sharon is war criminal in the class of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic IMO, but he’s best friends with our nation that claims to be the champion of human rights. There is definitely something amiss here.
The state of the Palestinians is a product of Palestinian behavior. They chose barbaric means of dialogue (terror) and thus they shouldn’t be surprised if they are treated as barbarians, (even though usually aren’t). If they had chosen a peaceful path of resistance, such as imitating Ghandi, then they would have the world’s sympathy. So, instead of non-violent resistance, they chose murdering pregnant jewish women and children. They forfeited any sympathy long ago.
I’m not a big fan of Israel, but I think the OP has got some facts wrong.
“Palestinians” are generally not Israeli citizens, so it should be no surprise that most of them are unrepresented in the Israeli goverenment. There certainly are Israeli Arabs who make up something like 20% of the population. But lumping them in with “Palestinians” makes no sense.
AFAIK, the only limitation on Arab Israelis relates to military service. If you can outline other limitations and show that they’re the same as those experienced by Blacks in S.A., let’s see them laid out with cites to back them up.
You do realize that Palestinians don’t vote in Israeli elections because they aren’t citizens of Israel, right? And they aren’t citizens of Israel because, well, they don’t want to be, they’d rather be citizens of Palestine? And to call the occupied territories “Bantustans” is ridiculous?
And that to say: “There are no civil-rights in that country to speak of like the kind we have in America because Israel is a ‘Jewish State’, a state for Jews only and other human beings are considered inferior” is simply and clearly a lie, right? You do know that many European countries (for example) have a state religion, right? You do know that there are Arab citizens of Israel, right?
You do know that President Carter promised economic aid to both Israel and Egypt if they signed a peace treaty, which is why we now send economic aid to both Israel and Egypt, right?
You do know that when people like yourself harp on how terrible the state of Israel is, and how racist it is, and how the Jews consider other human beings inferior, that people can question your motives for believing this, right? And wonder why, out of all the fucked-up countries in the world, you chose Israel to get upset about? Why is that, do you think?
While I disagree with the OP’s comparison of the levels of discrimination between the two, if you (and John Mace) are truly making the claim that Arab Israeli citizens are treated completely equally to their non-Arab brethren, with the exception of military duty, I’ve got all kinds of arguments to make. The standard argument that is bandied around by the powers that be is that at least the Arab citizens of Israel have it better than many Arabs in their native countries. They find it difficult to claim that Arab citizens enjoy equality with non-Arabs without getting laughed at, though.
While I’ll happily concede that many of these citizens are indeed better off than many Arabs in other countries, discrimination is still very much a fact of life. If you really wish to continue to pursue this, let me know. I can find plenty of cites to back me up, and I can even doing so by going to purely pro-Jewish cites, who are going to sugarcoat the situation as much as possible, but still not deny it.
I notice you didn’t make the claim that there was no discrimination, simply that you wanted evidence to show it. Because of that, I’ll start with a single quote, which is overall a VERY pro-Israeli message:
I think you need to learn and understand mid to late 20th century history.
Without getting into the debate about exactly how many Palestinians fled because they were urged to by their leaders, and how many were forced to leave - it is historical fact that Palestinians and numerous Arab allies attacked the fledging state of Israel with the intent to destroy it. Continued aggression (you may wish to research the 1967 and 1973 wars, for example) has influenced Israeli policies to this day.
The refugee camps have continued to exist in large part because it serves the political interests of Arab nations. The occupants of these camps could have been integrated into Arab societies decades ago. But leaders of these countries have chosen to isolate Palestinians in refugee camps, largely for symbolic value and to avoid possibly upsetting the balance of power in their nations.
My other thoughts are that constructive and necessary criticism of current-day Israeli policies are hampered by completely one-sided and inaccurate diatribes such as yours.
Israel should have never come into existence in the first place, before the 1948 War the Arabs had proposed that Palestine become a parliamentary democracy, which would have been about 75% Palestinian and 25% Jewish, a single state of it’s citizens like it was under the British Mandate. Instead the west pushed for this 2 state solution which was completly unrealistic because the ‘Jewish State’ would have been demographically 40% Palestinian and Palestinians owned most of the land in that area; those people would have been expelled and their land stolen to make way for this ‘Jewish State’… so of cource a war insued… The west should have accepted the Arab proposal and enforced it with peacekeepers, and when the Jewish terrorists started their campaign to drive the British out, the west should have had their ‘war on terror’ then and told the Jews that if they want a ‘Jewish State’ find some land where there are no people so you don’t have to oppress another race to have it.
Can you imagine if Arabs immigrated by force to the Netherlands and established a muslim state there by expelling 1/2 the Dutch population into Belgium and pinning the rest of them into refugee camps and Bantustans? No you can’t, but you expect them to accept such a ludicrous agenda after jewish people from Europe and America went over there to do this, and this supremist American attitude is the fundamental reason Arabs hate the west, especially America and the reason we have endless war that can’t be won.
Lebanon is 1/3 Christian, why should they accept Palestinian refugees and then that would lower the Christians profile further in their government, why are their ‘political interests’ inferior to the Israeli…
Having said all this, the past is the past, the Arabs had proposed the Saudi initiative to end the conflict which would have simply called for a total end to the occupation and the refugee problem address later, and a comprehensive peace aggreement with Israel, most likly refugees returned to the west bank, also Israeli opposition polititians and Palestinian leaders signed the Geneva Initiative which was based on the Saudi Initiative, and Yasser Arafat has said that he would sign such an aggreement if it were presented to him by the Americans and Israelis, but instead the Israeli/Americans keep trying a impose a racist-aphartied sheme on the Palestinians, like Barak and Clinton proposed at Camp David in 2000.
Israel is why Muslim terrorists blew up a nightclub in Bali. Israel is why Arab Muslims are slaugtering blacks in Chad, and Israel is why Muslim blacks are slaughtering innocent Christian and Animist blacks in the Sudan. And Israel, of course is why thousands of Sunni Muslims are killed by Shiite Muslims, and thousands of Shiite Muslims are killed by Sunni Muslims.
It’s all ISRAEL! If America would just stop supporting Israel, all the Arab/Muslim terrorist problem would go away!!
Standard foolish, uninformed, anti-Semitic argument.
It is entirely possible to think that the existence of the state of Israel is unsupportable, or that the current policies of that state are reprehensible, without possessing even a trace of anti-Semitism. Please don’t conflate the two.
Of course it’s possible to be against the policies of Israel without being anti-Jewish. I myself am against most of Israel’s current policies.
However, being opposed to the existence of Israel is anti-Semitism because the Jewish religion is founded upon the return of the Jewish people to the homeland of Israel (in effect, it’s impossible to be anti-Zionist but not anti-Jewish because Judaism IS Zionism. A Jew who doesn’t believe that the Jewish state of Israel should exist is like a Christian who does not believe in Christ.)
A little additional info is available here. As you can see, the notion that being Zionist = being Jewish is an oversimplification, to say the least. For starters, check out the statement that many of the Jews who oppose Zionism are, in fact, Orthodox. I condemn all those horrible, anti-Semitic Orthodox Jews.
Not really. When Wilhelm Marr coined the term anti-Semitism, he did it so that Jews could be attacked on a racial basis (since the Enlightenment made religious attacks much less valid). Of course anti-Semitism today typically applies to both the religion and the ethnicity, but it started out as more racial than religious and you’ll note that, today, anti-Semitism has more to do with ethnicity than religion, although the two are often conflated.
Similarly, Zionism began and always has been (mostly) a secular movement. Some religious Jews support the existence of Israel from a religious perspective while others (e.g., the Hassidim) are against it because they feel there should not be a Jewish state until the arrival of the messiah. To the extent that some attacks on Israel are motivated by anti-Semitism, it’s more likely that they are racial rather than religious in nature. Jews deserve a state of their own just like any other people, but this does not mean that they should not allow the Palestinians to govern themselves. Certainly, the blame falls on both sides and the other Arab states are using the Palestinians as a tool, but Israel should still withdraw to the 1967 borders.
I don’t want a state that is solely for Jews, I’m just saying that there should be a Jewish (by which I mean that the majority of the population is Jewish) democratic state.
No, but what makes a group of people “deserving of their own” state? Clearly, this is a policy that can not be realized in most places, and for most people would be considered borderline racist and segregationist. What makes the Jews special and deserving of a state?