What's the matter with Israel?

73% of Israelis basically endorse genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, or at least a state-sanctioned apartheid that basically keeps Palestinians dependent upon what meager rations that Israel deems to dole out to them. Gaza, apparently, is going to be treated like a late 1890's U.S. Indian reservation, where the natives are exiled and systematically starved to death.

Israel is clearly a nation that has gone off of its moral tethers. Even in the United States, one of the most violent nations on the planet, support for genocide has declined since the 1890's to the point where it never cracks the crazification factor of around 27%. What in the world has happened to Israel, to have such a blithe disregard for other people's fundamental human rights?

The Stormfront crowd, of course, would claim that this is because the Jewish faith is inherently racist and Jews are inherently greedy people who just want to steal everybody else's land and money. But this is clearly contraindicated by, well, facts. Jewish intellectuals and philanthropists were prime movers of the American Civil Rights movement that freed America's minority populations from state-sanctioned apartheid, and provided much of the funding that allowed the NAACP to challenge apartheid before the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1950's.

So clearly the notion that Jews are inherently greedy racists doesn't pass the laugh and giggle test. Furthermore, while Israel's founders were, by the accounts of their own historians, not at all loathe to engage in massive acts of ethnic cleansing in order to free up space for Jews in Palestine, there is no indication that they were actively hostile to the Arabs they were pushing off the land... rather, they needed a place to go from Hitler's concentration camps where they were still interned in 1947 (except relabeled "relocation camps" and with the guns turned outwards to protect them from the Europeans who wanted to finish the job Hitler started), they had nowhere else to go, so they were going to make a place for themselves, period. Too bad about the Arabs pushed off the land, but there just wasn't any good alternative for them, given widespread discrimination against Jews at the time such that no other nation would take them. But racism? Not really, indeed many of those first Israelis spoke Arabic, and there was serious talk about making Arabic the second official language of Israel.

So what happened? I have no way of knowing, but I can speculate. First, that generation of Israelis is now either dead or so elderly as to be close to death. For someone who survived Buchenwald, some Arab asshole blowing himself up in the middle of a bus is, like, "eh, so what." When you've seen your fellow Jews piled up like cordwood in piles of the dead, a spot of terrorism doesn't cause fear... you've seen the real thing, and it just makes the asshole look like an asshole, not like someone you should be afraid of. But today's generation of Israelis were raised in a time of peace and prosperity -- the last time anybody ever threatened the existence of Israel was 1973, almost 40 years ago, and the younger generation of Israelis have never known any war that Israel itself did not start -- and, lacking that personal first-hand knowledge of real existential threats, they freak out when some asshole fires an unguided overgrown bottle rocket out of Gaza City at an empty field somewhere, especially if the overgrown unguided bottle rocket misses the empty field and manages to hit a school or something. In other words, the younger generation of Israel is a generation of pussies -- not much different from the Baby Boomers here in the U.S., now that I think about it.

Second... the Russian influence. Russia has never been a warm and welcoming place. Death is always around the corner in Russia, either from the bitter climate, or from the series of incompetent and/or brutal governments that have run the place over the years. Russians are xenophobic to a fault, the "Putin Youth" in Moscow today make the Hitler Youth look downright multicultural, if you're a black man be prepared for the fact that many restaurants in Moscow simply will not serve you or, indeed, even allow you through the door. Russians also, because of their history, don't attach much value to human life. Human life is cheap in Russia... if the government doesn't get you, the weather or the vodka will.

Some estimates I've seen is that 40% of today's Israeli "Jewish" population is ethnically Russian. The exact percentage is unknown, since the demographics of Israel are classified as a state secret. These people fled the former Soviet Union largely by finding an official to bribe to produce a fake birth certificate for a parent claiming a Yid granny, and Israel turned a blind eye to the widespread document forgery because of the fear of being demographically overwhelmed by the birthrate of their own (non-ethnically-cleansed) Arab population. The Russians, they felt, were at least white Europeans, and maybe if they pretended hard enough to be Jewish, they'd be close enough to the real thing to outweigh the Arab influences. Thing is, these Russians by and large were neither culturally nor ethnically Jewish, and brought their own cultural values with them, amongst which are xenophobia and brutality. Thus the hilarious stories of "Jewish" neo-Nazis in Israel. That's what happens when you try to pretend that Russian thugs are actually Jews... eventually the thug comes out. Anyhow, nobody gets elected to higher office in Israel today without the support of the Russians -- which invariably requires promising to be evenb more brutal and xenophobic than the opposition.

So what now? I have no idea. Clearly the majority of people in today's modern State of Israel are, to put it blankly, racist thugs. But what to do about it? Well... I suppose for a start, quit enabling them. Israel gets over $4B/year in aid from the US, granted, mostly in the form of assistance for buying U.S. military gear, but that's money they don't have to spend out of their own defense budget for bombs and bullets to kill women and children at the beach with. Beyond that, I don't think it's anything for America and Americans to get involved with. Israel has no -- zero -- strategic value to the United States, and if Israel disappeared tomorrow -- or if Israel successfully managed to finish their ethnic cleansing against their Arab population by exterminating the Palestinians -- it would make no -- zero -- difference to America's strategic interests. That's blunt, but true. The United States is not the world's policeman, indeed is well on the way to being a third-world nation itself, and the world will just have to make do without the U.S. around as their mercenaries for hire.

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin