Israel Goes Full Apartheid
Israel has been an apartheid state from the beginning, they just made it official.
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has long demanded that the Palestinians acknowledge his country’s existence as the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” On Thursday, his governing coalition stopped waiting around and pushed through a law that made it a fact.
In an incendiary move hailed as historic by Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition but denounced by centrists and leftists as racist and anti-democratic, Israel’s Parliament enacted a law that enshrines the right of national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people” — not all citizens.
The legislation, a “basic law” — giving it the weight of a constitutional amendment — omits any mention of democracy or the principle of equality, in what critics called a betrayal of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, which ensured “complete equality of social and political rights” for “all its inhabitants” no matter their religion, race or sex.
I wonder if Chris Coons is going to continue pretending that Israel is a paragon of virtue and western democracy in the middle east?
No I don’t. He is.
Israel was founded and is recognized as a Jewish state first, a democracy second. The US hard left knows 100% democracy means the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and that is just fine with them.
Theocracy is theocracy. The only thing that prevents civil war in Israel is the existential threat that surrounds it.
Civil war is inevitable in a theocracy, because God doesn’t write anything down.
If you’re anti apartheid are you an antisemite?
If a “Jewish” state can only exist as an apartheid state, than puck is correct. I have zero hesitation arguing it.
They could have tried this with ethnically cleansing the West Bank, but they did it. So, this taboo again calling Israel exactly what it is needs to stop.
Israel is not a theocracy. Perhaps it is at risk of becoming one, but now it is not.
Could’ve fooled me. Ever see the “settlers” terrorize West Bank villagers? They ain’t secular. The entire idea of that being the Holy Land is from the book. Don’t be daft.
Israel is full of right wing religious wackos who have a disproportionate effect on their government, just like the US.
Basis of the idea of the country is purely religious in nature. We’re the opposite.
The fact that we both have religious nuts doing politics is irrelevant.
Israelis lay claim to Palestine solely based on Jewish tradition from the book.
Everybody lives on land that used to belong to somebody else.
Correct. Israel do it for religious reasons. We do it for other reasons. I’m explaining why Israel is a de facto theocracy. I’m not defending America. Don’t change the subject.
Apartheid has an Afrikaans translation.
Separation. Government mandated separation violently enforced.
Israel is a theocratic apartheid state. Financed tip to tail by you & me.
I remember when Reagan vetoed sanctions against de Klerk’s government in South Africa. (Overridden by Congress).
Some are slower on the pick up.
Changing the subject is your only option once you’ve decided that two historical wrongs make a historical right. If you start with the thesis that Israel has a legitimate right to govern the land, the rest of his position follows logically.
I do not accept the legitimacy of a country set up by world powers who found it convenient to “solve” the region’s problems in the post-WW2 world by giving the Jewish people somebody else’s land. It might have seemed like a good idea then, when another war was the last thing anyone wanted, but time has not been kind to this solution.
Is it incongruous for someone so opposed to immigration into this country to support a country founded by selective immigration?
At a certain point, Israelis are responsible for their own government. Just like us.
They have re-elected BiBi and the Likud multiple times.
Here’s something to crew on. Maybe for the open thread…
https://nyti.ms/2O1K4vp
Now I’ve changed the subject.
I heard it summarized well once by a professor specializing in the region. Israel wants to be 1. A Jewish state 2. A democracy 3. controllers of the historic land of Israel.
The problem is, these things are simply mutually exclusive. To be a democracy, they may lose their Jewish character, certainly if they continue to occupy the West Bank and Gaza, where Jews are the minority – assuming you eventually allow the people there a say in their government. To not do so makes you not really a democracy at all. It is an ugly situation, with the Christian right of the US and the Jewish right of Israel allied for often very different reasons.
Not that I’m a fan of his politics, but Peter Beinart wrote a decent book on this.
The Crisis of Zionism
The Israeli law that recently was enacted and galls me is the one that segregates Jewish and Palestinian peoples in the occupied West Bank. Not only is settling occupied land a war crime per the Geneva Convention but now Israelis can evict Palestinians from more of their land by declaring areas as exclusively Jewish domains.