They’re not terrified of democracy, they’re terrified of Islamists manipulating democracy to their own ends, and then bringing another round of dictatorships which are religious in bent and uncompromising in conviction.
Israel is not an apartheid state or racist. Arabs live within its borders and enjoy political status. Easy how I destroyed your argument in one sentence eh?
Sorry to digress but I must ask. In your world view, if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow do you think the ME would become a free and democratic region or do you think the strongmen and dictators would continue to rule?
Mubarak just ordered the country’s train system shut down indefinitely, CNN says.
A reporter says the military in the streets are acting a lot more confident.
There are widespread food shortages.
Moses had no imagination.
They’re terrified of any actual democratic country in the region. Right now they can claim to be an oasis of democracy in a region of tyranny but if all their neighbours turn democratic then they can’t write them off as a bunch of hypocrites when they call for international law to be respected in the Palestinian territories and sanctions on Israel. They’d be facing countries that couldn’t be bought off with US military aid and similar bribes.
And Israel is both racist and apartheid :
Four decades later, the increasingly complex world of Israel’s system of classification deems Said Rhateb to be a resident of the West Bank - somewhere he has never lived - and an illegal alien for living in the home in which he was born, inside the Jerusalem boundary. Jerusalem’s council forces Rhateb to pay substantial property taxes on his house but that does not give him the right to live in it, and he is periodically arrested for doing so. Rhateb’s children have been thrown out of their Jerusalem school, he cannot register a car in his name - or rather he can, but only one with Palestinian number plates, which means he cannot drive it to his home because only Israeli-registered cars are allowed within Jerusalem - and he needs a pass to visit the centre of the city. The army grants him about four a year.
There is more. If Rhateb is not legally resident in his own home, then he is defined as an “absentee” who has abandoned his property. Under Israeli law, it now belongs to the state or, more particularly, its Jewish citizens. “They sent papers that said we cannot sell the land or develop it because we do not own the land. It belongs to the state,” he says. “Any time they want to confiscate it, they can, because they say we are absentees even though we are living in the house. That’s what forced my older brother and three sisters to live in the US. They couldn’t bear the harassment.”*
From rabbinical prohibitions against renting homes to “non-Jews” to government crackdowns on left-wing activists, Israelis are grappling with their nation’s identity and character.
Across the political spectrum, some see the struggle as a threat to Israel’s democratic ideals. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni, of the centrist Kadima party, warned that “an evil spirit has been sweeping over the country.” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said a “wave of racism is threatening to pull Israeli society into dark and dangerous places.”
Faced with a Cabinet move to force non-Jewish prospective citizens to declare loyalty to a “Jewish state,” government minister Dan Meridor parted with fellow members of the conservative Likud Party in opposing the motion. After the motion won Cabinet approval, he said, “This is not the Israel we know.”*
Racism against Israel’s Arab citizens has dramatically increased in the past year, including a 26 percent rise in anti-Arab incidents, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s annual report.
Author Sami Michael, the association’s president, said upon the release of the report that racism was so rife it was damaging civil liberty in Israel.
“Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom ofexpression and privacy,” Michael said…
According to the June 2007 Democracy Index of the Israel Democracy Institute, for example, only half the public believes that Jews and Arabs must have full equal rights.
Among Jewish respondents, 55 percent support the idea that the state should encourage Arab emigration from Israel and 78 percent oppose the inclusion of Arab political parties in the government. According to a Haifa University study, 74 percent of Jewish youths in Israel think that Arabs are “unclean.”*
Why do you want to know?
What peace process?
The Egyptian army say they’re not going to use force against the protestors. That’s incredible. That’s bad news for Mubarak. The protestors aren’t going to go away now till he goes. The question is how will the army deal with any kind of transitional council/government?
Apartheid regime? How so?
In 2002 Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu wrote a series of articles in major newspapers,[202] comparing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to apartheid South Africa, and calling for the international community to divest support from Israel until the territories were no longer occupied.[202] In an April 2010 open letter to the University of Berkeley, Tutu wrote “I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.”[203]
Other prominent South African anti-apartheid activists have used apartheid comparisons to criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and particularly the construction of the separation barrier. These include Farid Esack, a writer who is currently William Henry Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School,[142] Ronnie Kasrils,[143] Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,[144] Dennis Goldberg,[145] and Arun Ghandhi,[204]
In a letter to the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Ontario, Willie Madisha, the President of COSATU wrote, “As someone who lived in apartheid South Africa and who has visited Palestine I say with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state. In fact, I believe that some of the atrocities committed against the South Africans by the erstwhile apartheid regime in South Africa pale in comparison to those committed against the Palestinians.”[205]
On 15 May 2008, 34 leading South African activists published an open letter in The Citizen, under the heading “We fought apartheid; we see no reason to celebrate it in Israel now!”. The signatories, who included Kasrils and several other government ministers, COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, Ahmed Kathrada, Sam Ramsamy and Blade Nzimande, wrote “Apartheid is a crime against humanity. It was when it was done against South Africans; it is so when it is done against Palestinians!”[206]
On 6 June 2008, Mr. Kgalema Motlanthe, the Deputy President of the African National Congress, who had recently visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, told a delegation of Arab Knesset members visiting South Africa to study its democratic constitution that conditions for Palestinians under occupation were “worse than conditions were for Blacks under the Apartheid regime.”[207]
In 2008 a delegation of ANC veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories, and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid.…
You know, it would be nice to have a thread about events in the Middle East that was NOT about Israel.
That is difficult because Israel is at the center of nearly all the problems in the region… not that it is Israel’s fault in all cases (though it certainly is in some) but Israel is deeply involved in almost every issue.
All right, Dick Dastardly, you have taken your shot and gotten the opportunity to explain it.
However, there is nothing in your statement that is really relevant to the current thread, so if you need to make a case for Israeli “apartheid,” open a new thread to do it. Do not continue to hijack this thread.
This also goes for anyone with a burning need to respond to his claims. Open a new thread; do not respond here.
[ /Moderating ]
Agreed, Agreed. But seems like Israel is to Middle East as Race is to Africa convos. Some bothersome obsessives always have to charge in.
Come on, Israel has fuck all to do with Tunisia, Algeria and those lot, and it was Tunisia that set this off. I’m no expert in this, but doesn’t seem to me that Israel is the Cause of the Mubarek regime and Egypt’s ills since you see the same problems in other places that don’t really have any direct connexion with Israel.
Sure there’s got to be an angle re Egypt since they’re neighbours, and I am in favour of a rather more critical analysis than most Americans seem to have re Israel, but making Israel the centre of all this (or making it entirely the evil actor) is just as stupid as making it all about the Americans.
I’m sorry, but that’s quite incorrect.
Israel has absolutely nothing to do with the problems between Lebanon and Syria. For those not in the know, Syria refuses to allow the Lebanon to appear on it’s map, instead having the words “Southern Syria” appear.
Moreover, Israel has nothing to do with the problems within Iraq between the Khurds, the Shia and the Sunnis nor does Israel have anything to do with the historic problems between Iraq and Iran, which long predate the Islamic regime.
Additionally, Israel has nothing to do with any of the problems within Turkey between the Islamists and and the Kemalists and between ethnic Turks and the Khurds.
Also, if you choose to classify North African countries as part of the Middle East, the idea that Israel is the center of all of the Middle East’s troubles collapses even further.
I don’t know what you’ve been watching, but that isn’t the impression I’ve gotten at all.
We don’t see any clashes between the Egyptian military and the protestors. This isn’t at all like Iran’s green revolution in terms of the way the military is reacting.
Claiming that Israel has a “racist apartheid regime” makes very little sense.
You do realize that Israel has not only large elements of the IDF made up of non-Jews, but generals who are Arabs as well?
You’re also aware that Israel has Arabs serving in the Israeli Knesset and on the Israeli Supreme Court.
In fact, recently the former Israeli President was just sentenced to jail by and Israeli Arab judge.
Can you please tell me under Apartheid South Africa how many black Generals, MPs and judges there were and how many members of South Africa’s Supreme Court were black?
Does Israel discriminate against the Israeli Arabs? Yes, absolutely. In fact the situation is getting worse, but I can assure everyone reading this that being an Israeli Arab is far, far better than being a Shia in Saudi Arabia and better than being a Christian in Iran, Syria or Egypt, much less a Jew in Iran. And that is ignoring the treatment of the Ahmadis, the Khurds, or to bring up the people who wish they had it as good as blacks in Apartheid South Africa, the Bahai.
Jordan is no democracy but you’d have to really, really stretch the definition of dictator to classify King Abdullah as a dictator.
He has an elected parliament that can and has overruled him, though they do need a two thirds majority to do so.
I wish they became a true democracy and he became more of a figurehead like most European monarchs, but he’s hardly unpopular and I’ve yet to hear any respectable commentators think he has to fear being overthrown.
He’s far less of a dictator than any of Israel’s “enemies” in the region.
Moreover, since you’re classifying all the countries in the region Israel has diplomatic relations and treaty agreements with as friends, your claim that all her friends are “dictators and despots” is especially inaccurate because Turkey is a democracy.
Sorry, of Israel’s three “friends” in the region, Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt, I only count one dictator.
King Abdullah of Jordan just dismissed his government and has tasked someone to form another with a view to political reform. (BBC Radio)
Al Jazeera reports up to two million people in and around Tahrir square in Cairo. Don’t see any portable toilets.
Interestingly, it seems that the Jordanian protestors were shouting slogans and waving placards against the prime minister and government, but not against the king.
I’m starting to wonder about Mubarak’s mental state. Is dude just too senile to realize what’s going on here?! Is that why he still hasn’t resigned?!
It is getting to the point where he is not much more than a squatter.
Does Egypt really need to wait for him to resign? If the military is on their side can they not ignore and isolate Mubarak and simply move forward on the assumed consensus that there will be elections? If authority comes from the consent of the governed then he is already gone.