Spiritually Israeli Geographically Canadian

We have some previous interactions but the extremely long threads and explicit and implicit demands for hours of my time mean I have previously tended to let interactions wither in my drafts rather than play out to the end but I have some time and energy today. At least she does seem to be trying to interact with me rather than an imagined opponent some of the time. Like, I enjoy doing some politics shouting on tumblr, but I try to draw the line at posters doing pointless meanness without offsetting value and I bristle at strangers demanding I perform significant pointless labor for them.

"Russia poses such a grievous and overwhelming threat to Ukraine that white supremacists and Jews are willing to work together to stop them. This is proof that it is good for Russia to invade them and Russia's only sin is not invading them better."

Edit:

You gonna give that land back????

No. Of course not. You're using it.

I fucking hate this rhetoric so much. Like, in terms of buzzy sound bite horseshit to sound like you care when you just want to show how you're the best at being liberal.

Just shut the fuck up.

If there were, one day, a Palestinian state and it treated its Jewish citizens as second class citizens, legislated against them, forcibly removed them from their homes and robbed them of many rights, then I would call that state an apartheid state too

Luckily, we do not need to wait for this to happen! The Arabs already treated their Jewish citizens as third class people, to the extent that they cant have apartheid in those areas BECAUSE THERE ARE NO JEWS LEFT.

There are NO Jews living in area A, under Palestinian leadership. Jews who mistakenly end up there get murdered, aided by Arab cops. The only Jews in Gaza are the ones who have been kidnapped there and held for ransom.

So yeah, a Palestinian state would not be apartheid, it would just ethnically cleanse and genocide the Jews for daring to exist.

And as an aside, there are COUNTLESS Jewish organizations working to give Gazans/West Bankers more rights and access to health, aid, etc, when 1) these people are NOT our obligation, they are NOT Israeli citizens, and 2) they work incredibly, desperately hard to harm Jews. Jews in Israel are doing 5x the work that you are doing, on issues that we did not create, to people that would love to murder us. And how do I know that? Look at O7. Look at the intifadas.

You understand that discrimination ≠ apartheid? That word has meaning. Presumably being SA you would understand that there is a huge gap between just discrimination and legally having a completely different set of laws you are under.

It would be impossible for someone under apartheid to serve in the government. Thats just....not how apartheid works.

Israel offered citizenship to the Arabs when they won the WB back in 67. As most Arab policy, thousands rejected it, since they refuse anything positive that comes from Jews, willingly creating more suffering for themselves. People who want citizenship are more than welcome to apply, just as in every other country in the world.

Israeli Arabs are free to live wherever they want in Israel, there are zero laws dictating which plots of land they can rent/buy. I have plenty of Arab neighbors. For religious reasons, many communities live in the areas with their common religious folk but that is not legally mandated. Is it apartheid when families choose to live near each other???

The Israeli government provides services to all legally recognized towns/cities etc. If I build a house outside zoning laws then sure, they won't supply the proper infrastructure. But no one is forcing certain sections of the population to live in specific areas and then under-funding them.

Now, does that mean that the Israeli government is perfect? Ofc not. There are plenty of communists that don't have the resources they need or the assistance or whatever. That doesn't mean it is apartheid, just as when there are poorer neighborhoods in *any* country.

At no point were Arabs stripped of Israeli citizenship, nor are Gaza and the West Bank the least valuable land in I/P. There are also major elements to the conflict which don't really have parallels in the history of South Africa, namely the role of other Arab/Muslim countries and the history of Jews in the Arab/Muslim world.

A brief (and, by necessity, incomplete) history

--Islam in founded in the 7th century CE. It begins as a religion of conquest expanding from the Arabian Peninsula, and there are many longstanding Jewish communities in the lands they conquer, some of which are wiped out in horrific ways, with the rest allowed to remain as second class citizens. Thus, from the beginning, this is a relationship of conquest and oppression with the Jews as the conquered and oppressed.

--Eventually, the Arabic Muslim Caliphates fall and are replaced by the non-Arabic but still Muslim Ottoman Empire. Jews are still second-class citizens. The complexities of Arab Nationalism and Islamic Nationalism are one of many elements that I don't have time to get into, but that are crucial to understanding the situation.

(The Crusaders briefly conquer Jerusalem from the Ottomans, but that's not important right now.)

--At no point in the 1300 years of Muslim rule, nor of the 600 prior years of Roman and Byzantine rule, is Palestine a distinct land with a distinct political identity. It is a part of a larger empire, and suffers significantly from colonial neglect and exploitation.

--Meanwhile, the Jewish community, having been forcibly exiled by imperial conquerors, is spread throughout the world, but always maintains a cultural connection to Israel, and there is always a Jewish presence in Israel.

--In the 19th century, the modern Zionist movement is formed. This is far from the first Jewish attempt to return to the homeland or to regain some degree of sovereignty, but it is the first that will actually result in that sovereignty.

--The early Zionists purchase land from absentee landlords. This is almost always the least valuable land, often unfit for human habitation, as the Ottoman Empire blocks other purchases. However, much of this land is only poor because of the millennia of neglect, and proves to be extremely fertile and valuable once it is rehabilitated.

(Ecological repair on the scale is an unprecedented project, and the early Zionists certainly made mistakes, but that's another issue I don't have time to get into.)

--WWI happens. The British make deals with both Arabs and Jews to give them independence if they join the fight against the Ottomans, while plotting with the French to betray them both. When the Allies win, the Ottoman Empire is disbanded. Their imperial holdings were divided into zones of influence which the British and French would take over with the official goal of guiding them towards independence, though of course the reality was more complicated.

--This is the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. The British certainly don't create the tensions between the Arabs and Jews, but they do make everything worse.

--The highest ranking Muslim in Palestine, who the British treat as the leader of the Arabs, is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini. He and Adolf Hitler get along quite well, having similar views on the Jews.

--There is quite a lot of violence in this period. By the end of it, the Zionist consensus is that Jewish safety requires Jewish rule.

--In 1948, the British look at the mess that Palestine has become under their rule and decide they don't want to deal with it anymore. They hand the matter to the newly formed United Nations.

--The UN does a demographic study and then draws up the Partition Plan, which would turn the Arab-majority areas into an Arab state of Palestine and the Jewish-majority areas into the Jewish state of Israel, with Jerusalem and the surrounding land becoming and international city. The plan also gives Israel the Negev desert, because the only people who live there are the Bedouins, and the UN does not give a shit about the Bedouins.

--The Arab League, consisting of several Arab governments but not a Palestinian representative, reject this plan, stating that if the Jews attempt to declare independence over any part of what they consider Arab land, they will attack. They make it clear that this will be a war of extermination.

--Again, this is 1948. Several of these Arab governments were allies of the Nazis.

--The Jews declare Independence. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia declare war.

--Living in a war zone is awful, and many Arabs flee.

--Israel wins the war-that is, it still exists when the Arabs are tired of fighting. The ceasefire line (later called the Green Line) becomes Israel's defacto borders. Gaza and the West Bank are not within these borders, but are controlled by Egypt and Jordan respectively, who annex them. Arabs living within the new borders become Israeli citizens. Arabs who are outside these borders when the war ends become the responsibility of the countries in which they now live or of the newly formed UNRWA. Many of them do face apartheid conditions under the rule of other Arab countries.

--Jews who are inside the Green Line when the war ends become Israeli. Jews who are in the areas Egypt and Jordan now control also become Israeli, as they are expelled form their homes and the newly formed State absorbs them. Over the following decades, Jews will be ethnically cleansed from the entire Arab/Muslim world. Israel absorbs them as refugees.

--The Green Line runs through Jerusalem, making it a divided city.

--In 1967, the Arab countries again try to destroy Israel. Israel wins son conclusively that, six days after the war starts, they control not only Gaza and the West Bank, but some land on the other side of the Jordan river, the Golan Heights, and all of the Sinai desert. Israel annexes East Jerusalem, reuniting the city, and the Golan Heights. The rest of the conquered land is not annexed, leaving open the possibility that it can be returned to Egypt and Jordan in peace treaties.

--It takes a decade for an Egyptian president to agree to a treaty with Israel. Israel returns the Sinai, but Egypt refuses to take back control of the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian president is promptly assassinated for negotiating with Israel.

--Later, Jordan makes a similar deal. They take back the land east of the river and agree to peace with Israel, but they don't want the West Bank, which remains under Israeli military rule and largely in limbo.

--Finally, in the 1990s, the Oslo Accords are signed. These facilitate a Palestinian government with control over certain parts of the West Bank with a plan to transfer control over all of the Palestinian territories (give or take some land swaps) to the control of the Palestinian Authority. This is the most self rule Palestinians have had and the most significant step towards Palestinian self-rule ever.

--The plan stalls for several reasons, including the Israeli Prime Minister being assassinated and the Palestinian president organizing a wave of suicide bombings and other terror attacks.

--Israel withdraws for Gaza. Hamas manages to win the first election, after which they murder all their political opponents and use the land as the world's largest terrorist base.

Prev here tackles the historical approach to partition (that modern colonial horror) far better. Prev, I agree that the histories don’t match up. I’ll also go further: while the Southern African region had seen its own share of war and imperialism before European colonialism and eventual apartheid, we just don’t have a population that experienced the kind of persecution and cyclical displacement that the Jewish population faced. Even pre-WWII, the stakes of a homeland for Jewish people were just always going to be higher than for most other groups of people.

Have the surrounding states not helped? Yes, of course. Is any other nation necessarily obliged to help a territory they don’t administer? Or a region they do administer but one that wants autonomy to the point of conflict?

This I think is where it gets murky. If you look at other times when this happened: the bantustans and apartheid forced removals, the partition of India, you’ll note that that there were swathes (sometimes the majority) of people who got no say. People who supposedly spoke for them and/or opposing interests made a decision, and everyday folk lost something like what statehood is today, something like what citizenship is today, and also had to endure not ever being able to move freely around the land of their birth. (This ignominy: being viewed as a trespasser in your own lands, being stopped and checked, asked for papers, having movement arbitrarily curtailed etc. is one of the reasons why dignity is a constitutional right in South Africa).

It’s not just the original population though: the displacement is an intergenerational scar, children and grandchildren raised in a state of loss and a liminal space politically: the self determination of a people stuck circling in a holding pattern. The displacement also causes impoverishment, and does strange things to people and groups. In South Africa we lump some of these twisted formations under the title “liberation politics.” Again, I am sure much of the issues around displacement are ones Jewish people in particular can understand.

There’s not any room for extreme views: neither that the West Bank should be settled and that Gaza should be annexed, nor that Israel should not exist. I’m not calling for one group to expel another. In South Africa, for example, a lot of black people wondered if all the white people should be forced to leave, if ever we could end apartheid. And if you judged it on rhetoric alone you’d think each side had no view of the humanity of the other. Turns out though, that the heightened state of fear, the burden of poverty and indignity, even the smaller burden of unfair privilege and global ostracism, just aren’t things most people opt into if they have a choice. If they have the chance at a life that’s more than a game of survival odds or ill-gotten gains.

Now, again, the wounds run back further in history in your region than mine. But I do feel like that when the stakes feel existential you’ll be hard-pressed to find people willing to move out of a defensive crouch. I think the apartheid aspects I mentioned (in particular holding people including children in detention, the restrictions on movement, the displacement through the means of Israeli settlers and the stated intent to settle more land that way) only compound the human misery. There’s good reason why the South African government consider the state there apartheid, why organisations like Amnesty International do too. The current situation mirrors many of the same hallmarks.

I was agreeing with OP.

To restate my point: While you can draw parallels between the issues faced by many Palestinians in the West Bank and the issues faced by Black South Africans under Apartheid (at least as long as you ignore any facts that don't fit), the history and legal situation are entirely different, and therefor calling Israel an Apartheid state is wrong.

Which was OP's point, which you came onto their post to be gross about.

As I pointed out, Arabs have never been forced onto the poorest land in the region. Jews were forced onto the poorest land because the government blocked any attempts to purchase better land. It's just that the land was only that poor because of colonial mismanagement, so the Jews were able to rehabilitate it, though quite a lot of people literally died to do so. (Turns out that, when you neglect Mediterranean land so badly that it turns into swamps, you end up with mosquitoes carrying malaria.)

You want to talk about restrictions on movement? There is exactly one place in Israel where movement is restricted by ethnicity: Jews are not allowed to visit the Temple Mount, because Muslim leaders' favorite way to incite violence against Jews is to say that we're going to desecrate the mosque that they built on the site which was the center of our culture for millennia before Islam existed, and they consider Jews entering the site to be desecration.

Meanwhile, there are places all over the Middle East and North Africa, including in the West Bank, where Jews are not allowed to enter, despite literal millennia of Jewish history. And why don't you go ahead a look up Palestinian Authority laws about selling property to Jews.

You say that there's no room for extreme views, but the only reason to push the claim that Israel is an Apartheid state (or to use other terms with specific legal meanings that don't apply to the situation but that South Africa and Amnesty International are nonetheless pushing, to the extent that the later is trying to literally change the definition) is to justify extreme positions.

To call Israel Apartheid is to suggest that, as with South Africa until the 90s, a fundamental element of the government and the country is illegal and invalid, and the only acceptable solution is for the government and the country to change on a fundamental level.

And people who make this claim inevitably connect it to the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, suggesting that it is wrong for the State's culture to be Jewish, rather than equally Jewish and Palestinian Arab, or just Arab.

That is, they think it's wrong for the state to have the culture or the indigenous people, and not the culture that was imposed on it through violent colonialism, and which continues to be the dominant culture in the entire region because of the legacy of that same violent colonialism.

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.

Also, following this, I asked my mom what her thoughts were on the matter, and she said that while she “wouldn’t put it in those terms” she broadly agreed, and thought that anyone expecting any sort of exclusivity when a marriage proposal wasn’t at least on the very immanent horizon was “nuts, honestly.” I hesitantly asked if she was including relationships with premarital sexual activity in that, and her response was “Of course. I mean, gosh, you know your Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week before she finally settled down.”

And this was when I learned, to my shock, that the oft-repeated story of how “Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week” didn’t just mean “Aunt Terri had a full dance card” but rather meant that Aunt Terri had a period of her life where she literally dated exactly seven guys at once, all of whom she was sleeping with (or, my mom was quick to disclaim, “well, fooling around with, I don’t know how far she actually went with any of them, but they were definitely all fooling around behind closed doors”), on a literal weekly rotation. Like, they had a schedule. A schedule that all seven of the guys knew.