Israel-Palestine - a modest proposal

and yes, there are a lot of Israeli Arabs... c. 20% of the population. Their situation triggered my proposal about full de jure and de facto equality for all Israeli citizens.

you make some interesting assumptions... firstly that Palestinians will vote as an undifferentiated bloc in any election, secondly that any constitutional bill of rights will only protect the rights of Palestinians and not of Jews.

And thirdly, and perhaps most tellingly, that it's alright for Palestinians to live as a minority in a state with a Jewish majority, but not for Jews to live in a state with a non-Jewish majority.

DV, when did I ever state that? It was hypothetical, not my actual opinion on the matter. If you want that, I'd be happy to share it with you.

Is this because, since the US chooses to dominate the world stage and act as if it is the global government, it would be correct for all citizens of the Earth to be considered US citizens? If so, I agree a 1,000,000%.

The parallel are obvious and it is clear that the best thing for all concerned would be a secular state where jews and arabs can live together. The fact is the Jews are in the main colonisers who have become intactably linked with the land (some even claim a devine right to that land), much like the Afrikaners in South Africa. The Jew have decided to herd all of the arabs into areas which are like the Bantustans of the 70s and 80s, allowed out only to work in serfdom.

The differences are also manifest. South Africa never had to deal with suicide bombers but mass protest in Palestine is pretty much impossible. There are no palestinian leaders like Nelson Mandela or Oliver Tambo. There are no jews to take a Walter Sislu role. There is no Jewish left standing up to Likud and advocating a single state.

Israel as a Jewish state is not a viable proposition, neither is evicting the israelis or the palestinians and a Palestine consisting of the west bank and gaza strip evn on the 1948 UN partition lines isn't viable either. A secular state in the Levant where jews and palestinians can live side by side is the only solution that works.

So tactically this isn't a useful proposition right now -- although it's important that we never let go of this vision.

to everyone else - for all that I've put forward the one secular state solution above, I don't think it's actually very feasible in the short term, mainly because there is such a bloc of support withing Israel for the idea of a zionist Jewish state, and because Israeli power & US support means that they can veto outcomes they don't like. I think a more likely outcome, and a not awful one, is the constitution of a Palestinian state in the bits of mandate Palestine that weren't incorporated into Israel at the end of the '48 war, and the return of Israel's settlers behind the Green Line. In time sheer geography will force the two states to integrate, but I don't think they're ready for that now.

there was quite an interesting article in Ha'aretz a while ago by some Israeli academic about likely developments within Israel in such a scenario. One thing they predicted was an increasingly vocal and determined civil rights movement demanding full equality by Israel's non-Jewish population (Israeli Palestinians and Russian Christians, mainly). The academics did not forsee that these people would be pushing an open door.

(Sorry, off-topic, but: you mean relative to Kuwait, or something?)

yeah, i meant to coment on that too - getting visas to US is tuff enuf

Not true. Peace Now, anyone?

It would be foolish, of course, to draw too many parallels between the Israelis and the afrikaners but I think the analogy holds true in many respects.

As for Bantustans that's what the occupied territories ammount to. Even before the current initifada the restrictions placed on palestinians are very much the same as those placed on blacks under the aparteid system.

As for Lumping the jews and Arabs together, they are lumped together, they share a strip of land barely a hundred miles wide.

(Crossposting: you can add to Ed's response that the UN mandate for Israel doesn't exactly cover the occupation and settlement of additional land -- in fact, the UN's forbidden it.)

Anyway, the point of all these parallels, I think, wasn't to beat up Israel as the new apartheid state, but rather to point to one model for resolving this sort of conflict -- a model that, problems aside, has worked out a billion times better and faster than I would have ever guessed twenty years ago. Okay, I was only five twenty years ago, but you know what I mean.

The South African thing - there are some obvious similarities, and some obvious difference. The comparison does get people thinking and it has explanatory power.

Anyway, what's more offensive, saying Israel is like White South Africa or sending a maniac in a bulldozer to demolish a refugee camp (a cheap argument, I know, and one easily turned on its head; but still)?

compare contrast sorta spanish:native americans vs. americans:native americans. (of course the whole mestizo thing doesn't hold much water in south africa *or* israel so the analogy is supah-rough)

'The greater good shouldn't ever be achieved with a great loss of innocence.' --Arab

Talking with an activist friend in Jerusalem, they said they had never seen, in their years of activism, such numbers of far-right youth, some of them armed, storming the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah tonight. 1/

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