Paging Jeff Goldstein Foxworthy! 
@Tagos
That was interesting stuff.
It does raise the problem of ‘ownership’ in a militarily defeated state. For example there are plenty of Germans who lost property in Eastern Europe after WWII.
I know that if my ancestors lost property, I would be very keen on getting it back, but I also know it could create real problems. Britain has a historical claim on a large part of France, not through conquest but through original ownership/inheritance.
For the record I think that the Settlements were a stupid idea and that they should be handed over intact as soon as possible.
Jerusalem is a different matter, Israel has done a pretty good job there and they are not going to pull out. The emotional attachment is too strong.
I think that in 1967 the Israelis rather expected the population would scarper as it did in 1948 - also that they conquered rather more than they expected - with hindsight they would probably have been wiser handing back the West Bank to Jordan and Ghaza to Egypt - and very quickly.
Dual legal systems based on race are the meat of apartheid and that appears to be what is gonig on regarding the occupied territories. It is indisputable that Palestinian’s are second class citizens next to the settlers in the West Bank in terms of freedom of movement, access to services and where they are allowed to live. And their land is being systematically stolen. Apartheid seems a perfectly good word for that.
It is a matter of international law. Conquest does not bestow property rights. There is nothing to debate.
Tagos was equivocal, writing:
The status of private land rights is not where the apartheid likeness comes from.
Why poison the well in this way? The question is whether ‘apartheid’ is an appropriate analogy. Likewise, ‘ethnic cleansing’ is appropriate to describe the land seizures in the OTs. We are looking at the same facts and affording them differring descriptions. Agreed, ‘ethnic cleansing’ does carry come genocide baggage, but alternatively it is a perfectly adequate description for the policy of indigenous depopulation and Jewish colonisation adopted by Israel.
‘Ethnic cleansing’ probably isn’t the right term but illegal colonisation of other’s land, coupled with systematic theft deserves some appropriate term. Apatheid, as used by Carter to refer to Israeli policies in the occupied territories seems apt.
But people can feel free to come up with another term for Israel’s illegal colonies, land theft, unequal treatment of palestinians, collective punishment etc.
IMHO it’s long past time the Palestinians recognised they are history’s losers. HAMAS should abandon the right of return and recognise Israel’s right to exist behind it’s pre 1967 borders.
And they should stop with the bombings and pissant rockets. And Israel should stop with the assasinations, the colonisation and the collective punishments and accept UN resolutions.
I’m not convinced that ‘International Law’ exists, some states like the UK have signed up to some rather odd conventions, like European Rights which are making a mess of our legal system.
I certainly agree that Hamas should stop being idiots and that Israel and ‘Palestine’ should get on with their lives peacefully - posturing and retalliation for somebody elses retalliation ad nauseum is pretty unproductive.
It is a pity that your ancestral land was not within the pre-1967 borders, and that your ancestors had stayed put in 1948 - you would have an Israeli passport and some rather valuable real estate.
I think that Apartheid can be ruled out as the Israeli courts would take a pretty dim view of non Jewish Israelis being treated differently.
I would like to see a lot more settlements in the West Bank, high standard developments populated by people without Israeli passports.
“Palestinian” isn’t a race.
It’s a very sloppy, very loaded word for that. Why not simply “They are under military occupation and have had some of their land taken from them?”
But I guess that the system of civilian targeted killings, attempts at driving the Jews into the sea, racial propaganda distributed by many Arab and Palestinian regimes, etc… well, we can just call all that Nazism, right? Israel is an Apartheid State, and the Palestinians are Nazis? I mean, sure, it doesn’t really mean the same thing, and is emotionally charged and loaded, but it adds punch to the claims. Or are we going to play straight here?
“Cat” may be a ‘perfectly good’ word for a lion, but you can also try harder and use more than one single word or phrase.
Of course there is, if you’re going to actually discuss the prime resolution here: UNSC 242. Your gloss is, frankly, overly simplistic and ignores what the resolution actually calls for. Those who drafted the resolution were quite specific in not calling on Israel to return all of the territories.
In addition, while returning some of the OT’s was the first principle of the resolution, the second was the “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force;”
It’s hard to argue that only one of the two principles has to be enforced, or that the context represented by the second principle can be ignored in order to demand that the first be unilaterally enforced.
That is exactly what is not going on in the OT. There are dual legal systems based on citizenship and citizenship has nothing to do with race. Heck, this isn’t a duality based on religion or ethnicity even if it plays out that way. Finn states the obvious: Arab refugee and Israeli citizen are not races. An Arab refugee is not a second-class citizen, (s)he is a non-citizen of Israel. They do not have rights of citizenship. Once settlements were allowed, then security for Israeli citizens was required. Since they were targets of attacks by non-Israelis in the area, then restricting access to settlers by non-Israelis followed as a security consideration. The big problem was in allowing the settlements in the first place. That was various Israeli administrations stupidly trying to play both fish and fowl (or fleishig and milchig if you prefer :)) … and saying that this is not annexed land and hoping for Arabs to come around and negotiate in good faith, while handling it as open for colonization in the meantime to satisfy political groups needed to have for coalition building. Stupid and wrong. It compromised Israel’s security and restricted the welfare of the occuppied for no good end. But that stupidity does not equal apartheid in any way or even close.
Sev talks about poisoning the well? Wow.
I can’t agree with that. Pre-emptively accusing others of dishonesty does not have the effect of ensuring honesty, any more than pre-emptively accusing others of bigotry.
International Law exist independently of your whims. And Palestine is no one’s ancestral land but the Palestinians. Not that ‘ancestral land’ is any sort of meaningful term. But when the USA is given back to the Indians etc etc, you be sure to get back to me.
UN Resolution 242 is subject to semantic dispute but no reasonable interpretation supports illegal colonisation.
Apartheid does not necessaily refer to race but the palestinians as a people are subject to israeli law without having representation, they have a different set of israeli laws for planning and their day to day existence including movement is subject to israeli control including passes issued by the military. Israel embarked on a deliberate seperation program in 2002 to seperate israeli’s and palestinians in the West Bank. Land annexation in the form of the great wall land grab continues apace.
As far as i’m concerned the situation of palestinians in the west bank fully justifies the use of the term apartheid. Sure it’s a bad word. So is the situation. If it gets the Israeli Govts knickers in a twist they can change their policies or suggest another word carrying equal pejorative weight.
Israeli law and practice discriminates. Marriage law example
OK, how about “Ay-Rab”?
The important thing isn’t racial nomenclature, it’s the reality that they’re regarded as different by the Israelis. That suffices.
How about, “they’re under military occupation, have had much of their land stolen, are under a completely different legal system, have to carry passes and pass through checkpoints, frequently having to wait in line for hours, to get from one part of the land not yet stolen from them to other parts of the land not yet stolen from them, and the occupying power enforces laws by bombing and bulldozing the innocent along with the presumed guilty.”
I’m sure I’ve left out a few things, too.
The thing is, when the list gets that long, an encapsulating term aids rather than detracts from the discussion. This system has many of the attributes of South African apartheid; using that word, IMHO, illuminates more than it muddies the waters. YMMV, and clearly does.
Plenty of those on both sides. And Israel’s killed, what, three times as many Palestinians as Palestinians have killed Israelis, in this decade?
And I attempted to impeach Bush last week, too.
Racial propaganda versus racist actions as occupiers. Gee, which is a bigger deal? Have to think about that one awhile.
Seriously, racial propaganda by Arab regimes is wrong, and I’m against it. But the U.S. doesn’t exactly have the sort of moral authority right now to condemn that sort of thing, when we’re up to our armpits in blood in Iraq. I wish we did. (Just one more unintended consequence of the Iraq Abomination.)
And even more so, apparently, are the Israelis, by those very same standards. So sure, let’s call the Palestinians Nazis, if you can deal with the irony of the resulting implication.
This makes no sense whatsoever to me. An Iraqi is “different” from an American, under American law - unless of course that Iraqi happens to be an American citizen. This does not thereby make America “racist”, merely because it militarily occupies a different country and treats the citizens thereof as legally distinct.
Nope, as should be obvious. It is obvious to you, isn’t it?
Humpty Dumpty would be proud.
I guess you call the Palestinians Nazis then, right?
I mean, if you’re intellectually honest, you must’ve been doing it all the time. I’m sure I can find at least one post where you’ve done it, right?
Well, on one hand, you can be commended for actually trying to state the situation rather than use silly buzzwords for shock value. On the other hand, the fact that you’ve included a few deliberate absurdities kind of weakens your claims.
For instance, of course they’re under a completely different legal system. That’s what happens when people aren’t your citizens. :rolleyes: Of course they have their freedom of movement restricted, that’s what happens when you’re under military occupation.
Of course you’re being as absurd as humanly possible when you refer to “land not yet stolen”. You know full well that Israel has no intention of annexing the entirety of mandate territory, and yet you need to throw in ridiculous hyperbole rather than discussing honestly.
Of course you know full well that Israel does not “bomb and bulldoze” in order to “enforce laws”, and that’s such an obvious falsehood that I wonder why on earth you thought you’d fool anybody.
No, sorry. A long list doesn’t mean that you can use a different word that means something different. Or have you said in the past that the Palestinians are Nazis, RTF? If not, why, exactly, have you not? Does a double standard like that not bother you?
And the Arab regimes and Palestinians have had many elements among them, both in power and not, who share many attributes of the Nazis. Does calling them Nazis illuminate anything, RTF? If not, why are you comfortable with that level of intellectual dishonesty?
Why, rather than stating the actual situation, do you feel that calling it a different situation, that you yourself admit is a different situation somehow “illuminates” anything? You can’t obfuscate and then claim it’s illumination, that’s not a matter for a “YMMV”, it’s a matter of fact.
If you use a word that doesn’t mean what you’re using it to mean, you’ve used the wrong word. If you’re using that wrong word because using an extra few dozen words which would more fully inform the situation is just too much hassle, then you’re being intellectually lazy in addition to obfuscatory.
Again, either you are totally ignorant of what actually goes on, or you are making things up. Or, as many folks do, you are trying to invent a totally different definition of “targeted” to apply to Israel.
Moreoever, the fact that more Palestinians were killed than Israelis means nothing other than that there are more deaths on one side than the other. More German civilians lost their lives than American civilians during WWII, for example. Does that mean that the Nazis were the good guys?
Again, if your rhetoric logically consistent? Is it intellectually honest? Or does it work on a sliding scale based on double standards?
:rolleyes: Yes RTF, brilliant. Your impotent attempts to oust Bush are exactly equal to an actual campaign of genocide. I’m glad you’re so set on “illuminating” issues here.
Ignoring, willfully as you’ve just done, that the racial propaganda is in many ways part of an ongoing campaign of extermination, doesn’t make it go away. And, of course, you have totally ignored the actual point of that, which was that many Arab and Palestinian groups share similarities with the Nazis.
Are you intellectually honest in your beliefs? Will you claim that calling them Nazis is “illuminating” the situation? Or are you intellectually dishonest and have mutable beliefs built on a double standard?
So… a tu quoque fallacy based upon the non sequitor of bringing up the US. Maybe even a compositional fallacy thrown in the mix to boot?
Nope, sorry. Saying it doesn’t make it so.
I eagerly await the rest of your posting history on the Dope, when, surely, you will not refrain from pointing out that you consider the Palestinians to be Nazis. And no, much like you cannot invent definitions for other words, irony already has a definition before you came along.
RTF they ARE different! They are non-citizens and include those who act upon desires to destroy Israel and to kill Israeli citizens. If the PA becomes a state, and settllers are allowed to stay as noncitizens in the area (one idea that has been floated by Gush Shalom), then I would not expect them to have full rights of Palestinian citizenship (although protection would be expected), and if members of the group habitually instigated terror attacks on Palestinians, then i would expect restrictions to be placed on them, or even forced removal. Wouldn’t you? If they were allowed to stay in a Palestinian state but became citizens of that state (another idea that has been floated), then I would expect full rights of citizenship. Wouldn’t you? States discriminate on the basis of citizenship. Duh. That does not apartheid make.
Yes. Settlements were allowing colonization. Bad. Yes, Israeli policy has embraced punishment unnecessarily indiscriminate and without due process. Bad. Agreed there. Still not apartheid.
First, that’s certainly not true. As it was not stipulated that Israel had to give up all the land it gained, you can’t make such a sweeping claim. A reasonable reading of 242, for example, might allow Israel to control and populate those areas needed to insure its security. Nor can you call it “illegal”, if 242 made it legal.
Nor, by the way, as has been pointed out, can you ignore the impact of The Three Noes on the present day situation. Especially not if you want to manhandle facts to “fit” a deliberately inflammatory word. If you conquer territory in a defensive war, and then offer to return it in exchange for peace… that’s hardly apartheid.
Yes, the policy of building settlements is, and was, wrong. But it was also started, to a large degree, to serve as a bargaining chip. Annexation was never a real possibility, not the least of which because the Egyptians and Jordanians who would later become known as Palestinians did not particularly want to be Israelis.
When looking at the causes and dynamics of the occupation, nuance and context are both required. If you ignore them both, and don’t care much about accuracy, we get to a point where we’re calling military occupation and the theft of land “apartheid”.
Second, you’ve shifted the goalposts. The claim that you made, which I responded to directly, was:
Property rights, not the subcategory of colonization.
UNSC 242 makes it quiet clear that there are certain property rights that Israel gained. What, exactly, they are is a subject both for debate and, more importantly, negotiation within the framework of the two principles taken together, at a whole. Handwaving away that UNSC 242 does, indeed, grant Israel certain property rights does not further the debate.
Interesting article in Salon today on a possible new lobbying group to counter AIPAC, backed by financier George Soros and former Bill Clinton advisor Jeremy Ben-Ami.
/hijack
Well, duh. Your land’s occupied by furriners who make you a non-citizen in your own land. Of course you want to kill them, and some of your kinsmen actually do manage to kill some of them. Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Well, yeah. Doesn’t that just show what a dumb idea the settlements were in the first place?
Lacking the Nazi-like viciousness to actually ethnically cleanse Palestine, Israel should have had the sense to stay on its own side of the Green Line. (I still support a wall that follows the Green Line, btw. Good fences don’t necessarily make good neighbors, but they can’t hurt.)
???
Since you’re big on bringing the Nazis into this, you may have noticed that racism doesn’t actually have to be based on actual, y’know, racial distinctions, right??
I mean, what did ‘Aryan’ mean, anyway, when the Nazis used it? It was a pretty damned elastic term. In a pinch, even the Japanese could be Aryans. Seventy years later, that’s still a big WTF, isn’t it?
IOW, this is very much Humpty Dumpty territory, if you want to define things strictly in terms of racial groupings. It’s all in how one group sees another. Like here in America, where the offspring of a black person and a white person is almost always perceived as black.
Here’s what I don’t get.
In post 108, you raised this very point in responding to tagos. So when I responded to post 108, one would think you might be curious enough to see whether I responded to that point - which I did - rather than asking it a second time before seeing if I answered it the first time.
Like I said. Boy howdy, you’re so impatient to reply that you can’t even read further down.
The reason freedom of movement has been restricted isn’t usually due to the simple fact of military occupation. It’s because there are settlements in the West Bank, connected by a network of roads which Palestinians can’t use, and that network chops the West Bank up into pieces.
And in the absence of the settlements, there would not be two ‘completely different legal systems’ in the West Bank. There’d be one that the Palestinians would be subject to, and that would be it; there wouldn’t be a need for another. The settlements and roads necessitate the restrictions and passes and dual legal systems, not the occupation itself.
I refer to “land not yet stolen” for the best of reasons: the taking of West Bank land by Israelis has been more or less ongoing for a generation or more now. Can you give me a date and say, “after this date, the Israelis acquired no more West Bank land”? (Within the past week doesn’t count.)
If they don’t do it to enforce the laws, then why do they do it? For the sheer hell of it?? I’m open to alternative explanations. I was trying to put the best face on it, but have it your way.
Saying it means something different doesn’t make it so. You’ve got to make a case for it.
Impatient, aren’t we? Geez.
[quote]
And the Arab regimes and Palestinians have had many elements among them, both in power and not, who share many attributes of the Nazis. Does calling them Nazis illuminate anything, RTF? If not, why are you comfortable with that level of intellectual dishonesty?
[quote]
Just because using ‘apartheid’ illuminates, doesn’t mean ‘Nazi’ does. You’re just saying there’s an inherent double standard, without saying why.
Whether a term makes things clearer or not very much depends on the reader, doesn’t it? There’s no Platonic truth there; there’s only ‘does this help people see the situation more clearly, or not?’ Chances are most people really weren’t that aware of how much circumstances on the West Bank had in common with S.A. apartheid. I didn’t, and I think I’m paying more attention than about 80% of Americans. So my WAG would be it helps illuminate. It seems to enrage you, so it doesn’t help you see much of anything except red, I’d guess. Hence YMMV.
If in accurately describing a situation, one must use so many words that one loses one’s audience, then one has illuminated nothing to anyone. Like it or not, ‘apartheid’ gets people’s attention, and highlights the clear similarities. That works. We can and should certainly talk about the differences between S.A. apartheid and West Bank apartheid, but the differences seem to be of the degree that you’d expect in moving from place to place. It’s as if one said what happened in the U.S. between 1775 and 1781 wasn’t a revolution because it wasn’t like the English, French, or Russian Revolutions in a lot of ways - and it was in fact quite different from all of those. Yet we still use the word.
Is it just my imagination, or have you switched sides on this question since summertime? IIRC, you’d been arguing that the Israelis had in fact been targeting people with their bombs, so the collateral damage, i.e. other people killed, were justified. Correct me if I’m wrong.
No, but if you’re using deaths as a justification, which you are, then you’ve got to admit that the justification cuts both ways.
That’s for you to show it’s not, isn’t it? Just asking the question rhetorically is easy. Building an argument is tougher.
An actual campaign of genocide? By whom, against whom, when?
An “ongoing campaign of extermination”?! Who’s being exterminated? Seriously.
Oh, I’m as intellectually dishonest as the day is long. But it’s your job to prove when, where, and how. If you can’t, that’s your problem, and not mine.
No, an honest expression of regret. I genuinely wish the U.S. had stayed out of Iraq, and retained its moral standing to speak to this issue. But who’s going to listen to America now, in that part of the world, when we criticize them about anti-Semitic propaganda? They’re just going to bitterly laugh at us after what we’ve done in Iraq.
I’d have thought the point-by-point comparison might have made it so, or at least have pointed out to you the lack of demonstrated basis for your crying ‘Nazi’.
Since you’ve failed to demonstrate, despite much handwaving, why I should call Palestinians Nazis, you will be disappointed, I’m afraid. Better luck next time.
No, I was using it correctly. What could be more ironic than an overzealous defender of Israel having his own argument used to demonstrate that the Israelis are no better than Nazis?
Before you get too irate, no, I don’t believe the Israelis are equivalent to Nazis. But it’s where your argument and your evidence lead.
Sorry, but I won’t take your bait.