I’m sorry, that’s not true, at all. Israel can and would crush them if they really devoted themselves to the job. Political pressure from the USA and elsewhere keeps them in (relative) check so far.
I cannot believe that anyone that has any knowledge of Israel and its military would actually believe that. That’s what Hamas (and Hizbullah) tells its followers. It simply ain’t true.
Pound for pound, the IDF is the best fighting force on the face of the planet. Pan-Arab sub groups and terrorist organizations like Hamas stand zero chance of defeating Israel if Israel really took the gloves off.
This has happened ‘fairly’ successfully in South Africa. Unfortunately many of the ‘hated minority’ in South Africa were either attacked or immigrated, but it is certainly better now than under apartheid.
A similar solution for Palestine would be the creation of a single state and removal of Israels discriminatory immigration policy. In the same way as South Africa, the ethnic majority would be given back control of the country.
How could this be done whilst protecting the safety of all religious groups?
Except, no, the analogy falls apart at every level. There was never a country of Palestine, and the area that was partitioned to become Israel was partitioned along ethnic majority lines. Nor did the Palestinians ever have control over the country. For roughly 400 years it was an Ottoman possession and ruled from Damascus. Even then, the majority of the land in question was never privately owned and most Palestinians have no claim to the land in any sense of ownership. And even all that being true, most of the Palestinian populace are made up of people, and their descendants, who immigrated to the region during the same time as the Zionists. To claim that because they immigrated more heavily (due to racist British restrictions) they should be allowed to eliminate Israel as a sovereign nation and rule the entire area is… odd. And so on.
Likewise, Israel’s immigration policy is only “discriminatory” in that it’s set up to be a safe haven for Jews. Non-Jews are able to immigrate as well. Attacking the Law of Return is a backdoor method of claiming that Jews have no right to safe haven on the entire planet. ’
You are conflating the Palestinians, who are not Israeli citizens and never will be, with Israel’s Arab populace, who have full citizenship rights and are protected under the law although discrimination does still occur. Your analogy is also, shall we say, cherrpicked?
It’s telling that it’s always “South Africa worked out just fine” and not “Well… Zimbabwe…”
The problem with analogies is that they’re very often divergent from the original fact they’re supposed to be compared too. That is, when they’re not actively obfuscatory (if Zimbabwe’s troubles had come before South Africa, would you have been arguing that Apartheid should remain in force?).
It is eludicative that rather than dealing with the specific problems, circumstances, context, history and grievances in I/P, some would prefer to act as if it’s just South Africa transplanted to a different place, and leave it at that. The situations are totally different unless you wipe out enough essential, defining distinctions as to render a comparison meaningless.
The important consideration is the people who have lived there, and who live there now, rather than which power historically controlled the area. You will find that South Africa has been controlled by various powers over time as well. The Australian aborigines, like the South African aborigines, never had control of a country - they just lived there.
Does it matter where the current populace came from? Europe, Russia or Egypt - they are there now.
Like all countries, Palestine/Israel should be a safe haven for all creeds to live together in peace.
First, you are the one phrased things in terms of an ‘ethnic majority’ ‘regaining control’. You have now retreated to simply saying that those who lived there should gain control. You are also ignoring that the partition was drawn along ethnic majority lines, so there is no reason for you to say that Israel should be obliterated as a sovereign nation because the people next door are of a different ethnicity. Your argument seeks to conflate Palestinians gaining control of their own country with them gaining control over and eliminating an entirely separate sovereign nation. Nor can you, validly, try to equate 400 years of the Ottoman land codes with colonial rule over South Africa. You’re obfuscating the issue when you claim that the situation of land ownership was in any way analogous between Ottoman citizens and Australian Aborigines. It’s roughly the same bit of misdirection as if you’d claimed that an American who rented an apartment but didn’t own it was just like the Aborigines.
(And yet again, why SA for your analogy rather than Zimbabwe?)
And yes, it matters when the people arrived. Since the population of the region was swelled by immigration brought about by the Zionists improving the area, it’s especially nonsensical to claim that the Arab populace that moved in should get their own state, but the Jews shouldn’t get theirs and the Arabs should get to remove the Jewish one that was created and rule over the Jewish ethnic majority, too.
Of course, you final comment sidesteps the issue The Law of Return guarantees that Israel will always be a safe haven for Jews, unlike literally every other nation on the planet. No matter what happens, there is only one nation on the world that will accept any Jews and every Jew fleeing other nations. Only one.
so i just read through all 3 pages and i have 3 thoughts:
1- Krauthammer, what a name.
2- threads get derailed SO easily
3- ideologies, semantics, and historical factoids aside, i’m interested in thoughts on the OP. What would happen if the US withdrew troops from Israel.
i’m on the side that other superpowers would take up the gauntlet. while it’s true that the saudis have oil, but egypt, palestine, and jordan do not. Plus the israelis are some of the biggest arms sluts in the market today, supplying both India and China with high tech weaponry. Plus china gets its oil from the Sudan (darfur controversy, anyone?).
i also don’t buy the “uncage the israeli beast” idea. is israel just going to conquer the middle east if the US isn’t there to keep Israel in check? of course not. they’re technologically advanced but they’re not capable of inciting WWIII and going apeshit on the ME. plus the US should know as well as anyone that you can’t declare a traditional war on terrorists.
i think friedman’s article was pretty spot on. peace is nothing more than a piece of paper for the israelis. they’re conducting business as usual over there without a formal peace agreement. the US pulling out wouldn’t do much to stop the terror or the animosity in the region, nor escalate it. the symbolic move though, is one that the pro-israeli lobbyists in this nation would never allow. this should incite a rant about lobbyists but i’ll restrain myself.
i think jewish americans, traumatized by stories of the holocaust, need the US to back Israel. the only reason we’re over there, i’m convinced, is because of the lobby. a marginal troop presence and a diplomatic smile keeps the approval ratings buoyant. pulling out would have drastic political consequences but to israel itself? not much.
We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; and the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day…
The Six-Day War’s seventh day has transformed us from a just society into an unjust one, prepared to expand its control atop another nation’s ruins. The discarding of our moral foundation has hurt us as a society, reinforcing the arguments of the world’s hostile elements and sowers of evil and intensifying their influence…
No need to repeat the details of the painful phenomena entailed in the occupation regime and in our battle to prolong it. Suffice it to recall the killing of little children fleeing for safety; the executions, without trial, of wanted persons who were not on their way to launch a terrorist act; and the encirclements, closures and roadblocks that have turned the lives of millions into a nightmare. Even if all these actions stem from our need to defend ourselves under an occupation’s conditions, the occupation’s non-existence would render them unnecessary. Thus, a black flag hovers over these actions…
So, Dick, you’d also uncritically cite and support any Israeli opinion that disagreed with your position too? And in the future, if anybody provided a cite from any Israeli politician saying something, you’d support that, too, right? Or is there a special reason why you’re offering Israeli politicians’ opinions and tacitly asking that people hold them as gospel?
Here’s a thought, provide your own arguments. While ad hom support of a person is nice and all, it’s rather clear that Yair has let his personal feelings run away with him. Like his claim that the Intifada is the Palestinian people’s war of ‘national liberation’, and yet not only was there no such movement when they were Jordanian and Egyptian possessions (although there was an attempt to take over all of Jordan). The Second Intifada was in response to a peace deal that would have given them 97% of their territorial ambitions and a sovereign state whose borders they controlled, not ‘oppression’. Nor is there international support for the ‘right to violence’ of Palestinians who are in refugee camps in other nations, such as when they had a camp in Lebanon shelled continuously by the Lebanese military and the world stood silent. Yair’s claims that the occupation’s non-existence would make security measures unnecessary are, likewise, a strange opinion not grounded in fact. He’s only able to voice such an opinion by ignoring that the PLO was founded to destroy Israel before the Six Day War and that Hamas has pledged eternal hostility and genocidal ambitions regardless of Israel’s occupation or not. As pointed out numerous times, the only effect of dropping all checkpoints and border controls tomorrow would be that Hamas would be able to launch rockets at every Israeli village, town and city the day after that. As I would hope is obvious, this is not a path to “peace”, but all out war.
And so on.
The point is that you need to actually support an argument in your own words, rather than simply playing a game of “Ah-hah! An Israeli politician said it, it must be true!” Especially since, in such a vibrant democracy with a tradition of robust debate, finding someone to support some position isn’t all that difficult, and cherrypicking statements to support your own ideas is not a valid route to actually proving those ideas. Any more than someone who wanted to ‘prove’ that America was a socialist nation could do so by citing Republicans who’ve made that charge. And most people would question such a tactic anyways, just as they should when you use it to support your position. Besides, sooner or later someone might cite another Israeli politician with another point of view, and then who knows what to think! Ayieieieieie!!!
Hang on! In all the other threads where you are arguing about Israel, you insist on rejecting personal opinions and relying instead upon “official” cites, yet now someone is providing a cite, you want them to back it up “in their own words”?
What I’m saying is that the apartheid analogy is so compellling that even some prominent Israelis are making it. That it’s not just a bunch of crazed antisemitic people making it but also prominent mainstream Israelis too. That doesn’t mean that I have to accept anything any Israeli says as accurate. For instance, there are prominent Israelis who condemn the apartheid analogy and call anybody making it antisemitic; I don’t agree with them.
And the Palestinian people didn’t move to Palestine at the same time as the Zionists, they were already there. For centuries before the start of Zionist resettlement in the late 1880s the Jewish population of Palestine was in the low single digits, as we can see from the census numbers linked below. I know somehow that this fact won’t be factual and I’ll have made a bunch of factual errors and personal attacks, so let’s not bother debating it or the apartheid analogy or any other wild tangents we may end up going on. Let’s just both put up our own version of the facts and let people decide for themselves which ones they like best.
Dick, all you’re demonstrating is that you are ignorant of Israeli culture and politics. Israeli political viewpoints include everything from capitalism to hardcore communism, from expelling all the Arab residents to immediately withdrawing from the territories unilaterally. That you can cherrypick one viewpoint and declare that its mere existence makes it “compelling” is a farce.
And it seems that you didn’t even realize the irony of your hypocritical argument. An Israeli politician saying that there is an apartheid situation means that it’s compelling, but an Israel politician saying that there’s not is just to be handwaved away.
A no, sorry, there are no “different versions of facts”. Not, of course, that “farm3.static.flickr.com” isn’t a reliable source of census data for an uncited chart, but it would be very interesting to see where they got their data from and how they “corrected” it, especially since it doesn’t seem to match any of the actual census numbers. Not to mention that you’ve moved the start of Zionist settlement from the 1850’s to the 1880’s. The fact is that we don’t have firm data from the period you’re referencing, and the Mandatory period is spotty as well. We do, however, have some facts.
The British authorities stated that there was an unknown amount of Arab immigration, but that it was most likely substantial. The Jewish communities significantly raised the standard of living in the areas surround them, and economic factors of that sort have always helped spur immigration, especially in a situation like that which the populace of the Ottoman Empire faced. Britain’s 1935 report confirmed more than 100,000 Arab immigrants alone, and that was only the ones they’d caught.
There may be a quibble as to whether or not “much” or “most” of the population in the region arrived illegally and migrated internally to sites where the economy and standard of living was surging, but dodging the question by pointing out that there were Arabs there before 1850 is spectacularly unimpressive.
Here’s the book those numbers came from. Here’s another set of numbers from 1890 :
that show the Jewish population at about 8%.
Here’s another set of numbers which show the Jewish population of Palestine in the low single digits for centuries before the Zionists started organised settling :
When you talk about “the actual census numbers”, which numbers are you talking about? Zionist settling started in earnest around 1880 and by the time the Brits took their first census in 1922 Jews made up 11% of the total population. So what numbers don’t mine fit in with?
Here’s the Brit census stuff
So whichever set of numbers you pick then it takes well after we both acknowledge that organised Zionist settling increased the Jewish population percentage before the Jewish population of Palestine breaks 10%, and the numbers from another poster show low single digits from 1600ish to 1800 and after.
Anyway, you put your census numbers down and people can pick which ones they like. Have a nice weekend.
I will note that you’re trying to change the subject from when Arab immigrants arrived to when Jewish immigrants arrived.
As for your ignorance of what census I’m referring to, please check your facts before you make claims. Rather obviously, when you linked to numbers from a specific time period, the specific time period was the one in which I was discussing census figures. Also glaringly obviously, it doesn’t match the Ottoman numbers because your own source modified them as he indicates with the claim that he has “corrected” the figures. McCarthy is well known for his argument that women and children were under-counted, even though the prime reason to avoid the Ottoman census would have been for men to get out of military service obligations and tzxes, something that wage-earning men of military age would have had special reason to avoid. The Turkish census of 1893, for example, found roughly 400,000 Arabs in the region. McCarthy “corrects” the figure and claims roughly 550,000, a massive increase. He also claims that there were roughly the same number of Arabs in 1883 as the 1893 Turkish census found.
In fact, the only fully reliable census data that exists was from 1931. And as already pointed out, by the 30’s the standard of living for the Arabs surrounding the Jewish areas was already double that of Arabs in the surrounding countries. The region had also gained a major infrastructure upgrade when the port of Haifa was built in the 20’s. That the 100,000+ who happened to be caught attempting to immigrate represented the sum total of those seeking to improve their lives is nonsensical.
Dubious assessment. The IDF is superbly equipped and trained, but it’s not a professional military. Conscript armies have historically simply not been as effective.
This thread seems to have veered a bit, as these threads tend to do, but I will throw an answer into the mix.
The Obama administration risks losing the approval of some of its political base but in terms of geopolitical realpolitik it has little to lose and much to gain; in fact Israel has much to gain as well. In fact, I think that the Obama administration was secretly grateful that Bibi’s underling gave them the chance to express some condemnation.
Israel needs a friend that will not do the equivalent of letting her drive drunk, a friend who will take the keys away and keep them away even if she yells at him and has the other friends yell at him too. Being willing to politically distance, to not only threaten but to follow through on removal of funding, is that equivalent.
Meanwhile Obama needs to show the Arab actors that this American President can actually be an honest broker and that he has some meaning behind the words he has said to them. This episode and his willingness to stand up to his House’s disapproval earns him some of that cred. That cred will end up helping Israel in the long run too.
As far as the domestic political fall-out - the bet is that being willing to actually pressure Israel will end up delivering results both because Israel will end up moving and because the Arab side will be more willing to move if they trust Obama as an honest broker. If it results in a deal before re-election the bet pays off big. And the down side is not so big, really. A reasonable bet that I think might actually pay off. OTOH, blind support of all Israeli actions, having Israel know they risk nothing by ignoring American wishes and interests, is a bad bet to place, for all involved.
Consider the US Army in WWII, for example.