Israel

[ajax18]

Have some children killed and wounded some illegal [Mexican] immigrants/land squatters?

Isn't it racist to call an immigrant illegal or a land squatter? What happened to the "no human being is illegal" garbage that you preach?

I don’t preach that you facile turd bird. Example #345,876 of Ajax not reading. It’s all just skimming for Big Baby Boomer.

This is what it’s like to interact with the board’s ‘totally not a white supremacist’. He never answers questions, and he thinks he’s clever for doing so. And he then uses the ‘dialogue’ as a chance to move the goal posts around. Like, all over the place. It’s rhetoric and larping.

- Doc

Maybe you specically didn't say this but it's the line of the party you vote for and something you tacitly support.

[Morley]

All the confederates ever asked for was a two state solution. Hamas will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel and death to all Jews. And they'll never stop attacking Israel until they acheive it. Whereas the Confederates abided by the terms of the peace treaty and General Lee said that guerilla/terrorist campaigns were dishonorable.

And so you pretend.

All Confederates ever asked for was to be able to maintain the conditions necessary to enslave fellow human beings. In order to keep the right to literally own another person, they were even willing to form a break-off state and fight a war over it.

[Vēritās]

Informative...

Whenever Israel is accused of being undemocratic or being an Apartheid state, one of the main counter-arguments used by its advocates is that everyone in Israel is politically equal. They’ll often cite examples of “Arab” judges or members of Knesset to reinforce their point. I have specifically discussed the issue of Apartheid more thoroughly in the answer below, and while they are connected, the goal of this answer is to inspect the narrower claim that every Israeli citizen is equal.

While such a claim is very attractive to defenders of Israel, how realistic is it?

At first glance it does seem that all citizens in Israel enjoy the same rights, they can all vote, for example, among many other rights granted by citizenship. However, after a more thorough look it becomes clear that this talking point is only held together by the omission of one very important fact:

Israel distinguishes between citizenship and nationality.

What does this mean?

For example, you can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. But how is this relevant to the original question being discussed?

It is relevant because many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality”. Seeing how Israel is an ethnocracy it is not a mystery who this system privileges and who it discriminates against.

This is not merely discrimination in practice, but discrimination by law. Adalah have composed a database of discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system.

This is not some old, odd oversight, but a very deliberate part of the design of Israeli society. This is periodically reinforced whenever some Israelis petition the Supreme Court to recognize an Israeli nationality that does not discriminate based on ethnicity. A recent example of these petitions was in 2013, where the Supreme Court rejected such an idea on the grounds that it would “undermine Israel’s Jewishness“.

It says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people“, as the court ruled. The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.

But this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality among Israelis. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.

Almost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues facing Palestinians within the green line. Another report shining the light on Israel’s discrimination is “Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences” by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.

Additionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.

Furthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has a:

“specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use…”.

The JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also the so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit” for the community there. For example, a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

No matter how you look at it, Israeli society is a heavily segregated and hierarchical one. Whether through the legal system or just the attitudes of average Jewish Israelis, the ethnocratic nature of Israel and its obsession with ethnic gerrymandering always rises to the surface. Some would deny it, citing standards of living or some random “Arab” judge as a refutation of this point, but again as discussed in the answer below, none of these claims dispute the extreme inequality -by design- of Israeli society. This denial is not unique to Israelis, we saw similar sentiments among white Americans who denied the existence of white supremacy, even though they reaped its benefits either directly or indirectly.

Ultimately, the goal of this answer is not to advocate for a “more just” or equal settler-colonial state. As Audre Lorde observed, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. A just society is the complete antithesis to an ethnocracy, which elevates one group of people over the rest by virtue of their blood. It falls on us, however, to advocate for decolonization and a new polity for everyone between the river and the sea, where justice is its cornerstone rather than ethnic supremacy.

Sound utopian?

Perhaps, but to quote Pliny the elder, how many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible, until they have been actually effected?

[Physics Guy]

As long as in the heart, within,
The Jewish soul yearns,
And towards the ends of the east,
[The Jewish] eye gazes toward Zion,

Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our own land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

I have (secular Jewish) Israeli friends and colleagues, whom I have visited in Israel. I once happened to mention that the Canadian national anthem has two completely different but equally official sets of lyrics, in French and English. My friends kind of slapped their foreheads and wished that Israel could do something similar, with an Arabic version. They were talking about the ultra-religious Jewish voting bloc in Israel as something like today's American MAGA people, before Trump.

I lived in Israel for the year in which I turned three. My father was a UN observer on the Golan heights. I still feel an attachment to Israel, more than fifty years later, but rationally I can't escape the conclusion that the whole state is Europe atoning for its crimes with Palestinian homes. I don't know what is the best thing to do now. Germany has taken in nearly a million Syrians, which has been difficult, decent, and shrewd; maybe Germany should offer places to a lot of Palestinians. It still wouldn't be an obviously attractive deal, to come from a Mediterranean Muslim land to a Northern European land of pork.

(Both versions of the Canadian national anthem express sentiments that few modern Canadians feel. Anthems don't seem to age well.)

[Res Ipsa]

Hamas literally pays its citizens a monthly stipend for each Jew they kill.

No, they literally do not. I suspect you've mangled this program of the Palestinian Authority. https://www.cjpme.org/fs_233

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I don’t preach that you facile turd bird. Example #345,876 of Ajax not reading. It’s all just skimming for Big Baby Boomer.

This is what it’s like to interact with the board’s ‘totally not a white supremacist’. He never answers questions, and he thinks he’s clever for doing so. And he then uses the ‘dialogue’ as a chance to move the goal posts around. Like, all over the place. It’s rhetoric and larping.

- Doc

Maybe you specically didn't say this but it's the line of the party you vote for and something you tacitly support.

I do not “tacitly support” it.

[Res Ipsa]

Veritas, the post you quoted from Quora (you should add quote tags) is not an accurate description of legal rights of Israeli citizens.

Israel has no constitution, but it has a number of Basic Laws passed by the Knesset. In 2018, the Knesset passed a Basic Law titled Israel -- the Nation State of the Jewish People. Fifteen petitions were filed with the Supreme Court against the law. The Supreme Court left the law intact, but interpreted it as being consistent with being both a Jewish and a democratic state. In a summary on the Library of Congress's web page:

At this stage of the Israeli constitutional enterprise, Hayut held, the Knesset could not by a basic law eliminate the core principle of Israel being a Jewish and democratic state. This principle, she determined, derived from constitutional texts and a framework that had developed since the creation of the state. Determining that the basic law in question did not violate the character of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, Hayut refrained from making a determination regarding the court’s authority to exercise judicial review of the constitutionality of basic laws.

The Principle of Equality

Hayut rejected the petitioners’ claim that the Basic Law’s omission of a commitment to equal treatment of all citizens inflicted severe harm to the democratic character of the state. She noted that the Basic Law constitutes only “one chapter of the future constitution.” The principle of maintaining equal social and political rights for all citizens, regardless of religion, race, or gender, was expressed in the state’s Proclamation of Independence, and recognized by the Supreme Court as a fundamental constitutional principle that is intertwined with Israel’s basic legal concepts.

Practical Impact on Personal Rights

Rejecting the claim that the Basic Law led to a drastic change of the constitutional regime in Israel, Hayut held that the Basic Law did not include operative provisions that confer personal rights on individuals on the basis of their national affiliation. This conclusion derives from the wording, legislative history, and objectives of the Basic Law. She further maintained that, in cases where a conflict arises between competing components of the state’s identity, the balancing of the Jewish and democratic values will be accomplished through respect for both values and through “synthesis and harmony.”

https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-m ... %20in%20it. [Emphasis added.]

Nationality does play a role in immigration and the granting of citizenship. The right of return under Israeli law designates all practicing Jews as members of the Nation of Israel. If they move to Israel, they are automatically granted citizenship. Others must naturalize.

I reviewed the website the post referred to, but didn't find two classes of citizens based on nationality.

As far as land goes, the government owns 93% of the land in Israel. No one, regardless of nationality can buy that land. It can only be leased. About 13% is under the control of the JNF. However, the government administers those lands. Under a new policy announced in 2017, JNF lands can be leased by Arabs without discrimination. However, when that happens, the government "compensates" the JDF by transferring an equal amount of land to JNF control. https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/8777

[ajax18]

Hamas literally pays its citizens a monthly stipend for each Jew they kill.

No, they literally do not. I suspect you've mangled this program of the Palestinian Authority. https://www.cjpme.org/fs_233

It's a difference in my definition of terrorism. I don't view beheading infants and baking them in ovens while forcing the parents to watch as military service worthy of monthly stipends. To me that's terrorism and it's very different than collateral damage of killing Palestinians who either cannot or will not eradicate Hamas on their own.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

No, they literally do not. I suspect you've mangled this program of the Palestinian Authority. https://www.cjpme.org/fs_233

It's a difference in my definition of terrorism. I don't view beheading infants and baking them in ovens while forcing the parents to watch as military service worthy of monthly stipends. To me that's terrorism and it's very different than collateral damage of killing Palestinians who either cannot or will not eradicate Hamas on their own.

https://Twitter.com/GwansunRyu/status/1 ... 6594431468

-_-

[Vēritās]

It's a difference in my definition of terrorism. I don't view beheading infants and baking them in ovens while forcing the parents to watch as military service worthy of monthly stipends. To me that's terrorism and it's very different than collateral damage of killing Palestinians who either cannot or will not eradicate Hamas on their own.

https://Twitter.com/GwansunRyu/status/1 ... 6594431468

-_-

From that thread...

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