The State of Israel was created via massive ethnic cleansing, and continues to exist only by depriving the vote from the majority of its citizens (the Arab majority that it refuses to grant citizenship papers to, instead calling them “Palestinians” or just “Arabs”). The State of Israel deprives all non-Jews of civil rights in Israel — just as Iran forces Islamic law upon all, the state of Israel forces Judaic law upon all. In the state of Israel, as with the state of Iran, all laws must comply with their religion as defined by the most radically conservative of their clergy or else are held to be invalid. In other words, Iran and Israel are mirror images, one Islamic, one Judaic.
So what to do, what to do… well, there’s one problem here. The Jews of Europe fled to Palestine because, well, they had no other place to go, what with two years after WWII ended they were still stuck in Hitler’s concentration camps (except with the machine guns turned around to protect them from the Europeans, and re-labeled as “refugee camps”). So while the Arabs may be angry about the illegal immigrants who came and took their land, there’s a problem with just saying “destroy Israel!”. Where do the Jews go?
The Jews aren’t going to go back to their European concentration camps even if the concentration camps hadn’t been largely bulldozed out of a sense of shame, and the Palestinians, who’ve been living in concentration camps for the past sixty years, are pretty goddamned tired of concentration camps too. But there’s already a fait accompli here — the Jews, tired of waiting for someone to rescue them from Europe’s concentration camps, already found themselves a nation to be a citizen of, even if they had to deprive a buncha Arabs of fundamental human rights in order to do so. So the only realistic way to solve the problem of Palestinians living in concentration camps for sixty years is, well, give them citizenship. Somewhere. Anywhere. Pay Egypt to give them all Egyptian citizenship. I'm sure if you paid Egypt another $10B a year they'd be happy to have the Palestinians as new Egyptians. Or fuck, just give’em all U.S. citizenship and give’em all of northeastern Nevada as their new homeland. Or maybe part of southwestern Nevada north of Las Vegas and east of Beatty and Pahrump, so they can learn how to glow in the dark. Whatever. Because as long as the poor bastards are interned in concentration camps all over the Middle East (Gaza being the biggest one of course), they’re always going to be trouble. Because folks just don’t like being kept in concentration camps for generations, and if you do it, well, they figure that dying is better than living life in a concentration camp and tend to strap on explosive vests and shit. Human nature, podner.
You wanna end Palestinian suicide bombings? Simple way to do it — end the concentration camps for Palestinians. Give the poor bastards citizenship somewhere — anywhere — where they’re first class citizens of a real nation (not some bogus Bantu-stan “Palestinian Authority” that doesn’t even control its own borders). I guarantee you that you’ll see an end to the suicide bombings then, because citizens don’t strap on bombs and kill themselves — only concentration camp inmates do, because they got nothing left to lose except their chains.
Will it happen? Of course not. Nobody wants to admit reality. So it goes. So it goes.
- Badtux the Practical Penguin
Badtux, you've got it around backwards. It's not the Palestinians who should be given citizenship in another country, it's the Israelis.
ReplyDeleteLet me preface what I'm going to say by saying that my blood and sweat is literally in the soil of Israel. I spent the summer of 1980 working on a kibbutz south of the Sea of Galilee, and on my first job of getting up at dawn and chopping back the dead leaves in the banana fields, I'd nick my hand with the machete at times, thus the blood. I'm not Jewish, but my daughter is (ex-wife was Jewish, and it goes through the maternal line.) I used to consider myself a goy Zionist, but the way Israel's government has behaved over the past 30 years has rid me of that notion.
You've a history penguin side, right Tux? Think of the Crusades. That was a 200-year span in which the might of the Western World was devoted to establishing a religious colony in the Middle ast. But over the span of centuries, the Westerners were gradually worn down until they were thrown out. It was a catastrophe back then, but civilisation survived.
Time, economics and demographics are against Israel as it's currently constituted. Israel has a military advantage now, due in large part to U.S. weapons. (Israel builds a lot of its own, but they would not be able to keep ahead without U.S. design support.) As the American Empire implodes, and Muslim petro-states gain more economic power, the U.S. won't be able to afford holding back the population tide of Arabs. Do you think the Christian Dominionists running the U.S. would hesitate for a minute to cut Israel loose if faced wth a choice of "Oil or Israel"? Again, look at the Crusades. You can't hold back the tide of history.
I don't want to be pegged as an anti-Semite like you see so much of on teh Internets tubez. It's a sad thing indeed that Israelis and Palestinians can't recognise their similarities, get past the shit with competing versions of mythical sky beings, and do the Rodney King thing. Just too much ingrained hatred.
I propose that the citizens of Israel be given a homeland HERE! They're industrious as all get-out, and made the desert bloom where I was. Lotsa vacant space in Oz. They'd be a great addition. I hope I live long enough to see it.
Jews are intelligent and very successful in business. Ok, so I'm biased, but it is a bias based on their history. Jews are an easy target of blame, it is always their fault.
ReplyDeleteI do have a solution, but one side must let go of their physical attributes of their spiritual beliefs. Lets give that land over there in the Middle East to the Arab side, because it is surrounded by Arabs anyway. Lets create a new bigger land, a new Israel state. We could recreate all the shrines and temples and false idols and have their religious scam leaders bless these places and make them just as important as the physical places they represent.
And where could we put this New Israel. The southwest U.S. along the New Mexico, Arizona, California Border with Mexico. Let the U.S. give a 20 mile wide strip along these states, they would have plenty of land, in the desert land they love and even a coast line in California, San Diego could become the New Tel Aviv. They would have a smaller coastline, but look at all they are gaining, land and peace, you can't get any better than that. I sure we could even negotiate with Mexico to give them some of their land along the same border, and give them access to the Gulf Of California. Current residents could stay or move, the U.S. would pay for those that wished to move, and give incentives to those who want to settle the new country. We could give the new country millions or billions to keep out all those immigrants that scare the U.S. conservatives (they don't speak english, they must be evil).
The U.S. would have a new convenient target of their never-ending bigotry.
Then there would be World Peace. The end of the world as we know it.
Its just a fantasy. Y'know, like the bible stories.
-- Another Grumpy Old Dude (aka A G.O.D)
give 'em mississippi.
ReplyDeleteThere are some gross inaccuracies here. About 20% of Israelis are not Jews, and all have Israeli citizenship. Granted, Israel is somewhat theocratic and you can't marry outside your Millet, or ethnic-religious group, but other millets (e.g., Muslim, Druze, various Christian sects) have their own religious courts. But ti's simply not true you have to be Jewish to be an Israeli citizen. It is true, however, that the Law of Return makes it fantastically easy for Jews living abroad to become Israeli citizens - they just have to land here and file some paperwork, which'll generaly takr five minutes.
ReplyDelete(And if you happen to be a Jewish American who spied for Israel, our government will skip this inconvenient part about landing here, and will ship you an Israeli ID to your maximum-security prison!)
The residents of the West Bank (who enjoyed Jordanian citizenship prior to 1967) and the residents of the Gaza Strip (who did not enjoy Egyptian citizenship) are not Israeli citizens, nor do they wish to be. It's a problem, and it should be solved by ending the occupation, but making them Israeli citizens will merely make this war a civil war.
Yossi, I am quite aware of the following facts:
ReplyDeletea) The West Bank was officially ceded to Israel by Jordan under the terms of its peace treaty with Israel.
b) The Gaza Strip was ceded to Israel by Egypt under the terms of its peace treaty with Israel.
c) Israel maintains effective control of the borders and economic activities within those areas, meaning that they are effectively still under Israeli sovereignty just as the South African "Bantustans" were still under South African sovereignty during the Apartheid era there.
d) Israel will *always* maintain effective control over these areas, because it's necessary for the security of Israel.
Now, every other time on this planet that territories came to a nation, the people came with it or were ethnically cleansed off of it. When the United States seized the American Southwest at gunpoint then paid Mexico a token payment at the peace settlement for them, the former Mexicans who lived there became U.S. citizens, for example. When the Soviet Union expanded its borders westward after WWII and added parts of Poland to its empire, the Poles living on that land either became Soviet citizens or moved westward to stay Poles. This is pretty much international law -- if your country gains lands permanently, those people either become your citizens or gone to be citizens of another country, people can't just be made "stateless". In other words, as far as international law is concerned, the "Palestinians" on the West Bank and Gaza Strip are *ISRAELIS*, no matter how much the corrupt Yassir Arafat wanted to set up his own little feifdom there so he could continue keeping the Palestinians ignorant and impoverished and in thrall to his corrupt PLO.
But also as you point out, there are some slight problems with acknowledging the fact that Israel got a lot of new citizens as an outcome of the 1967 war, mostly dealing with the unpleasant facts that a) Israel was formed in the first place by shoving these folks off their land (an unpleasant affair but given the circumstances at the time seemingly necessary), and b) Israel has spent the last 40 years depriving these folks of some basic fundamental civil rights, so as you point out it's not likely they'd be good citizens of Israel.
Which brings us back to the part b) of international law, which sez if you don't want the folks on your new patches of land, the thing to do with them is to make them be *gone*. If they can't be Israeli citizens, they need to be citizens of some other real country (not a fake Bantu-stan country that will never be allowed to control its own borders because of the security requirements of Israel). Preferably make them be gone somewhere far, far away rather than applying Hitler's "final solution" to them (strange, that Israel today and Germany in 1938 had the same problem -- a large ethnic group they want to be rid of, that nobody else in the world wants either). Because as long as the poor bastards are sitting there deprived of some fundamental human rights (first of which being citizenship in some country), they're always going to be trouble. That's just how it works. That's reality, as unpleasant as it may be. You deprive fundamental human rights of any population for decade after decade after decade, well, they tend to get a bit, how shall I put it... touchy about it. Which, in the Middle East, tends to involve suicide vests and such, as you well know.
Finally, regarding the Arabs, Druze, etc. who currently hold Israeli citizenship, I am aware of the legal fiction that they have full legal rights . The situation is more akin to the state of Utah here in the United States, where Mormon law is the real law. Non-Mormons swiftly find out that in Utah, regardless of the legal fiction that Utah is part of the United States, if they are non-Mormon they are not first-class citizens of the state. Mormons will not sell land to non-Mormons, Mormons will not purchase goods from non-Mormons, Mormons will not give jobs to non-Mormons, Mormons enforce their own sabbath and will not allow members of religions with their sabbath on other days to operate businesses on the day that is Mormon sabbath, and so forth, though it's not as bad as it once was because of the demands of maintaining a modern economy (sometimes they have to hire non-Mormons, for example -- but then at downsizing size, you can bet that the non-Mormons will be the first to be laid off). But of course compared to the folks in surrounding areas, the Druze and Arabs and etc. who are Israeli citizens have it a lot better, so while you might hear them complain in private, they're not going to be strapping on suicide bombs and blowing themselves up at a bus stop. Even second class citizenship is better than no citizenship at all, it seems. Funny how that works...
In any event, as I pointed out, there are simple and practical solutions to the "Palestinian Problem", but nobody wants to do any of them because they all want it to be someone else's problem, so ... (shrug). We are ruled by idiots who think with their testicles rather than with their heads. So it goes. Guess it's just how the human monkey is set up, in the end.
- Badtux the Cynical Penguin