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I'll take one shitty liberal democracy before I take five shitty far-right religious dictatorships.
Israel isn't a "liberal democracy", shitty or not. It's a fascist apartheid state. Please wake the fuck up.
Apartheid. Give me a break.
I remember apartheid. The minority race didn't let the majority race vote, citizens of the same country. That was what turned the world against South Africa, made Apartheid a crime against humanity.
Israel is an apartheid state because they don't let people from terra nullius vote in their elections? Okay buddy.
I think you'll find that actual experts, including the UN and Nobel peace prize laureate and Apartheid survivor Desmond Tutu disagree(d) with whether or not Israel is an Apartheid state and whether voting rights was the main problem in Apartheid South Africa 🤦
Israel is an Apartheid state because it by law gives full rights to Ashkenazi Jews while treating Mizrahim and the Palestinians in the occupied territories (which are effectively under Israeli control) as second class citizens and nonhumans, respectively.
Palestinians in the "occupied" territory aren't citizens of Israel; they don't want to be and the world doesn't want them to be. People would flip their shit at a one state solution, they'd be self imolating all over the place. What you're suggesting is called annexation. I'd support annexation if it would stop all the pointless killing and help democratize the region. If Palestinians wanted to be Israeli, there wouldn't have been 100 years of terrorism on both sides or even now, we'd be talking about lawful occupation and jurisdiction of under terra nullius, or irredentism.
Actual experts at the UN disagree strongly, and have no consensus on this. I went to school with some of them and was a better student. Some others of them, as it turns out, were actually far-right religious terrorists themselves, and were using the UN for decades as a platform to teach generations of Palestinian kids the honor of martyrdom culture and terror culture.
Here's the thing about Desmond Tutu and other legal scholars who wrote comparative-law content on Palestine and apartheid (lower case a): "like" and "as" don't mean the same thing.
There was a lot of legal scholarship for a while around the time that the world turned on South Africa, and for years after, during reconstruction, when it was trendy to draw comparisons to Apartheid (big A). I concede that interested people have taken that comparative work, and misquoted it to suggest that there was any kind of serious scholarship saying that Israel-Palestine was as apartheid, until it became truth for some people. I disagree with them. Racially oppressive government's exist all over the world, yet the world has not turned on them as it turned on South Africa in an such a unanimous and unprecedented way. It was really something to behold. And even afterward, all the help and support the world gave South Africa with reconstruction: so many people were so proud to help launch a new democracy, to write from scratch a constitution for a modern nation that was freeing itself from being oppressors and its people for being oppressed.
Desmond Tutu's work doesn't support that he believed Palestine was literally the same as apartheid (small a), he drew certain comparisons, said certain policies were apartheid-like, and I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong. Certain policies in America are apartheid-like, too. Also, if memory serves, it was only in the last few years of his life that Tutu stopped being offended by such comparisons and started making them himself. Nelson Mandella never said it was equivalent. Correct me if I'm wrong. I agree Palestinians are oppressed people. I disagree with the Lemmy Zeitgeist about who has led them to oppression and who maintains it.
In any event, one thing Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu agreed on, and I agree with wholeheartedly, is that the cure for Apartheid or apartheid, and for systemtic oppression in all forms, is democratic governance enshrined in a written Constitution with clear minoritarian rights--freedom of speech, assembly, and a right to petition, due process of law, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment--the kind of rights that religious law cannot ever provide because religious law doesn't have them to give and claims for itself a right to take rights away by religious proclamation, which is antithetical and mutually exclusive to democracy, a constitution, or minoritarian rights.
That is to say that, if your opinion is that Israel-Palestine is apartheid, you must agree that the cure for it as it was in South Africa is democratic governance. If you're not totally ignorant or brainwashed, you must also agree that the first step to making that happen is to dispose of Hamas and Hezbollah. Can we agree on that?
Shitty liberal democracy isnt a strong enough indictment of what is going on in Israel right now. Theyre well on their way to being another far right dictatorship.
They will have another election soon and can popularly reverse course, right?
I would say that, as people go, as the long arc of history bends slowly toward truth and justice, as human rights are hard won and hard kept, Israel is a diamond in the rough. I'm reminded of the words of Marquis de Lafayette, a rich French kid who joined the military at age 13, on the eve of the American Revolutionary War, which he volunteered to come over and fight, when he said "the good fortune of America is closely tied to the good fortune of all humanity."
At that time, obviously America still had a thriving slave trade; it wasn't about what America was right then, but what the idea of it could be, what the ideals of representative democracy could do for human kind.
Realize how crazy of an idea it is, how astonishing it is that in any place in any time, it came to be that there were no kings and the people chose their leaders? Prior to that, the law was literally "the king can do no wrong."
To even break free of the mental shackles of that kind of dark-ages governing took modern mankind hundreds and hundreds of years, spark to flame, and has been widely regarded as a great idea, having secured real civil and human rights to billions of people. How I see it anyway.
So we should excuse israel because progress is hard? You don't happen to work in sales or marketing do you?
No and no.
They will have another election soon and can popularly reverse course, right?
In this particular war? Hopefully. There's a good chance they'll just get someone more competent to lead it, but I won't deny that there's also a significant possibility they'll call off the whole thing out, which has been disastrous for Israel. But, I don't see any significant social current calling for peace with Palestine in Israel. Israelis have been feeling many things since the start of the war, but remorse towards their treatment of Palestinians before and after the war is not one of them. So... yeah, not getting my hopes up.
Now the law is "Israel can do no wrong"
Such democracy!!!
Much amaze!!
A rabidly racist Appartheid State founded on 19th century white colonialist values which it has preserved and even strengthened ever since isn't a Liberal Democracy, quite the contrary.
This has to be the best description of Israel I've ever seen. Seriously kudos.
Okay take it up with political science. I didn't invent the terms.
A Racism so institutionalized that it's written down on the Constitution isn't Liberalism and denying the vote to the millions who used to live there (and some who still do) by denyng them citizenship isn't Democracy.
What could make a racism so institutionalized it's written into the Constitution liberalism? What about a constitution that would allow such provisions to be amended? I agree they are outmoded in purpose and spirit and should be amended. I won't go so far as to say they existed for no reason or for an offensive reason ab initio. Even if I did believe that, it's irrelevant to reality: Israel is there and it began as an ethnostate.
The logical conclusion to your position is that you believe Israel doesn't have a right to exist / defend itself, unless and until it amends the offensive provisions of its constituon. Is that your belief?
I don't find arguments about who lives there now and who used to live there compelling at all. They fall apart just at face value when the earliest historical record has the land occupied by Hebrew-speaking bronze-age people called Judites. That is to say the land records are a total crapshoot of lands changing hands, peoples changing identities, cultures changing over time, and shifting borders. It's also futile because, again, Israel is there now, is a nuclear power, and any plan forward must realistically account for this (Israel is going to defend itself).
Suppose Israel amends the offensive provisions, annexes all the disputed borderlands, and naturalizes every person therein with full rights and privileges, but then Iran and others in the region don't stop funding terrorism at Israel's borders and don't stop carefully cultivating a culture of martyrdom and anti-western and anti-liberal violent extremism? Are we not right back where we started?
I don't think innocent people deserve to die just because they happen to not live in a liberal democracy. It's not like it's their choice, anyway, but even people who support their country's regime don't deserve to be killed for it.
Nobody thinks innocent people deserve to die, that's what innocent means. Don't have to deserve it to be killed incidentally, which is inevitable in war, and yet war can still be just.
As an aside, these are not distant, national, state-actor regimes. They are hyper-local partisans, non-state actors who are classified by most of the western world as terrorist organizations, doing things that most of the western world, including the ICJ, considers to be criminal: shooting 1,000 rockets a month as Israeli civilians.
Except you literally think that though. You just wrap it around some BS like "war is baaaad" or "hamas is baaaaad".
So I guess if war is bad and everything is allowed, the take your example further and say that killing Israeli civilians is "tragic but war is war".
Don't spit on my cupcake and tell me it's frosting.
Uh... You do realize Israel is an Apartheid state committing genocide right now right? That's like comparing 19th century America to the Ottoman empire, like yeah of course you're going to prefer the former if you're not Black or Native American.