Senate Israel/Palestine

Israel does not exclude Arab MKs from government because they are Arabs. There have in fact been Arab MKs and ministers in past Labour Party governments. They are self-excluded at present, because the majority of Arab voters choose to elect communists (Hadash), Arab nationalists (Balad) or Islamists (Ta’al), all of which reject participation in Israeli governments. If Arab voters elected Labour MKs as they did in the past, those MKs would be in a Labour government (and also a Labour government would be much more likely).

 

How is this related to anything I wrote?

 

It's the Hasbarabot!

 

I'm just pointing out that the myth of Israeli apartheid that too many people swallow is just that. If the Israeli Arabs still supported the Labour Party, we'd likely have a party in power that was both for peace and domestically for progressive politics. The Israel Arabs choose to exclude themselves at the moment.

 

Fairly sure the 'apartheid' scenario applies beyond the election of Arab MK's.

 

The Arabs are living in a state of denial that they can defeat Israel. They've convinced most of the people on this thread that the security wall is some sort of crime when it was built to stop the Arabs sending suicide bombers and knife murderers. As long as the Arabs keep trying to do that....

 

Alternatively Israel could GTFO of the occupied territories. Do you really think they would be as angry with Israel if they weren't occupying their land.... and even if they were at least Israel would have the moral high ground not flouting international law.

 

Do you really think many Arabs would be satisfied with just the 1949 ceasefire lines?
I think Jerusalem should not be part of an Arab-Islamic state or Jewish state - it should be an international city as the UN originally planned.

 

Why do you call Palestinians "the Arabs"?

 

I don't care if the Palestinians want more than what they rightfully should get. I want some social justice for the Arabs of Palestine and if they don't like it once it's been applied then tuff luck. At least then Israel would be in the right, which it currently is not. At the moment Israel can't pretend that it's the one thats oppressed - they are secure for the most part and have all the cards.

 

Palestinian is not actually an ethnicity, they are ethnically Arabs. There is no sovereign state called Palestine so the purported self-proclaimed "President of Palestine" is not actually a head of state, only President of the Palestinian Authority.

 

What's an 'actual' ethnicity? If you want to go down that route technically Jews are Arabs.

It's only not sovereign because Israel is blocking it being sovereign. Which I would argue undermines Israel's self-legitimacy since the 1948 agreement specifically mentioned two states - therefore if Israel is to be legitimate, by implication so is Palestine.

 

If Israel has deferred authority in the West Bank to an entity called the Palestinian Authority, has it not de facto recognised the legitimacy of a future state called Palestine and a people called Palestinians?

 

There are fanatics on both sides. Remember Michael Collins' famous reply to Lord Birkenhead's "I may have just signed my political death warrant" with "I have signed my actual death warrant". Look what happened to Rabin because he signed the Oslo Accords.

 

No one disagrees that there are fanatics on both sides. There is one party however that is secure in their democratic sovereign state and that is Israel. Israel, the wielder of nuclear weapons, owner of the Iron Dome and protected by the Allies is not going to be destroyed no matter how much fanatical Islamists want them to be. The only problem 'the left' and Europe has with Israel is that it is flouting international law by occupying the territory of another state and building upon said land. This must end, not just because it is fundamentally unfair towards the Palestinians (imagine if we just decided to impede German sovereignty and build settlements in the Rhineland), but it is also dangerous for all Jews because it increases anti-semitism within the world. Just give them a state and go behind your borders - the left doesn't hate the Jews, they don't like the nationalistic Israeli government.

 

The Far left at times does seem to support groups like Hamas and Hezbollah which not only call for Israels Destruction, but all Jews to be killed around the world.

 

What

 

Seems.

 

It's like he's never heard of a Palestinian political party outside of Hamas. "The Far Left" has other parties and groups they can support, like the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. You know, actual Marxist political party instead of a right wing religious party like Hamas.

 

//wonders if Ender Sai saw that Black Lives Matter added genocide in Palestine to their official charter... waits for his head to explode...

 

he's always been a bit spesh, though, has black_saber.

 

Oh, I thought this was like his first post and in this thread, which would have told me plenty...

 

By the Jewish calendar, this is the year 5776. The Exodus from Egypt took place around 1313 BCE. Both Pharaoh's Merneptah (~1213-1203 BCE) and Shoshenk (924-945 BCE) mention Israel by name. Palaestinia was a name given to a Roman province in the region around 390 BCE. The fact is the name "Israel" has been associated with the region for far longer than "Palestine" ever has and was a name given to it by conquerors.

There are a lot of myths and facts surrounding the issue, and this does a really good job of breaking everything down. You also need to look at the news stories coming out of both sides of the conflict. There certainly is a lot that Israel is wrong on, you do never see PM Netanyahu boasting about how many Palestinians he's killed. But President Abbas does. The Palestinian leadership makes a practice of inspiring their people to violence. How is it right at all that a government's leaders inspire their people to bludgeon, stab, injure and kill (even run them over with cars)? This started up in the autumn last year.

Before last autumn, I had a lot more sympathy for the Palestinian people. I just can't fathom how one person can decide they're justified to go and stab someone else. There was one incident where a Palestinian boy stabbed an Israeli boy. Thankfully, both survived. Palestinian media stated falsely that Israeli police had killed the boy, when in fact he was treated at an Israeli hospital (which released a photo of the child in his hospital bed). I hope there must be some Palestinians who don't agree with the policies of their leadership, which is part of why I still have some sympathy for them. I even feel sorry for those who agree, but haven't yet done anything, because they've been brought up with such toxic hate.

The reality is that all the Palestinian leadership has to do is acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist and agree to live in peaceful coexistence with Jew and non-Jew alike. They'd be free to live and worship as they choose and enjoy all the benefits of being an Israeli citizen. But it just seems to be slipping further and further away, and Israel is responding the only way they can when they're surrounded on all sides by countries that would destroy them if they could. I wish so incredibly badly that Jew and Palestinian alike could live together in a unified Israel with Jerusalem as its capital, but I just don't see how that can be. Every Jewish child is taught compassion and empathy from birth, while it seems like most Palestinian children learn hatred and violence. Just breaks my heart there's no way to fix this.

No Jew I know would commit genocide, and every Jew I know is so incredibly tired of this all. The problem is that the Palestinian leadership has shown who they are. You treat all people with compassion and the benefit of the doubt. You give them several chances to change. But if they show you they're out to destroy you, you have to do what's necessary to protect yourself. The scars of genocide are written indelibly on every Jew, even those born after the Holocaust. Never forget.

 

Yeah, so I think you need to understand what it's like to be treated as a second class citizen with no hope of basic rights being conferred. That should help you sympathise then.

Given the historic treatment of Jews, it's a wonder that Israel is such a vacuum of empathy and compassion.