What’s up with the modern Nation of Israel?

by DATA-DOG 39 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • Earnest
    Earnest

    LoveUniHateExams : Palestinians living within Israel do have full rights, as far as I'm aware.

    It reminds me of South Africa where, during the apartheid years, the majority black population were assigned areas devoid of industry and cities where they were entitled to live. When I left South Africa in 1987 (during apartheid) my first stop was Israel and the similarity between the two countries in their treatment of the underclass was remarkable. No wonder Israel was one of the few rogue nations that supported South Africa despite UN sanctions to end apartheid.

  • apostatethunder
    apostatethunder

    If the US was being ruled by Christian fundamentalists it wouldn't be the cradle of so many different cults. The US is ruled by Masons, and they have no religious preferences but historically they did oppose Catholicism.

    Now they seem quite happy with the Opus Dei type of Catholicism.

    Israel is the spearhead in the muslim world to destroy the region, not destroying religion but radicalizing it to control it better.

    The theocratic war is to determine who is the Supreme Architect of the Universe and his chosen people.

  • Anony Mous
    Anony Mous

    How is Israel an apartheid state? The West Bank and Gaza is self-ruled by Hamas, a terrorist government supplied by Iran after Israel GAVE them the territories.

    If Palestinians can’t feed themselves but can afford to send toy balloons with bombs to target kids, who is to blame?

    Israel is the only integrated state in the Middle East. There live Jews, Christians and Muslims with equal opportunity. Palestine on the other hand has signs at their border that it will kill Jews on sight and live in squalor while receiving billions from Iran to build tunnels and rockets.

    Read the history, not just what the media tells you. There is no Palestine, never was, Israel was given from a British colony, they defended invasions from Jordan, Egypt, Syria and conquered them, then gave it all back under pressure from left wing Americans.

    Muslim extremists concocted the idea of a land of Palestine, kind of as a stand in for the unified Muslim country (like ISIS). But historically there never was a land of Palestine, there is no Palestine ethnicity or religion or anything until well after the establishment of Israel.

    Before the British you could say the area was part of the Ottoman Empire but that is a very complex history with many concurrent claimants including Turkey, Syria, modern day Jordan.

    It would be akin to giving back the US lands to the Native American tribes - which tribes lived where isn’t documented, what year are we picking to set it back to as nomadic tribes and internal conquering changed these things all the time.

  • Earnest
    Earnest

    Anony Mous : How is Israel an apartheid state? The West Bank and Gaza is self-ruled ... after Israel GAVE them the territories.

    The Apartheid Convention gives us some indications of whether apartheid is being practiced, in other words "acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them".

    I would encourage you to read the report "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?" by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, who surprisingly do know something about apartheid, but I will summarise some of their findings. Article 2 of the Apartheid Convention cites six categories of 'inhuman acts' comprising the 'crime of apartheid'.

    It found that Israel practiced three of these categories, namely (a) the denial of the right to life and liberty of person, (b) denial of basic human rights and freedoms, and (c) division of the population along racial lines.

    Please read the document for the support of these assertions under the heading "E. Findings on Apartheid".

    Israel’s practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories can be defined by three ‘pillars’ of apartheid.

    The first pillar derives from Israeli laws and policies that establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews. The product of this in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is an institutionalised system that privileges Jewish settlers and discriminates against Palestinians on the basis of the inferior status afforded to non-Jews by Israel. At the root of this system are Israel’s citizenship laws, whereby group identity is the primary factor in determining questions involving the acquisition of Israeli citizenship. The 1950 Law of Return defines who is a Jew for purposes of the law and allows every Jew to immigrate to Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The 1952 Citizenship Law then grants automatic citizenship to people who immigrate under the Law of Return, while erecting insurmountable obstacles to citizenship for Palestinian refugees. Israeli law conveying special standing to Jewish identity is then applied extra-territorially to extend preferential legal status and material privileges to Jewish settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and thus discriminate against Palestinians. The review of Israel’s practices under Article 2 of the Apartheid Convention provides abundant evidence of discrimination against Palestinians that flows from that inferior status, in realms such as the right to leave and return to one’s country, freedom of movement and residence, and access to land. The 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law banning Palestinian family unification is a further example of legislation that confers benefits to Jews over Palestinians and illustrates the adverse impact of having the status of Palestinian Arab. The disparity in how the two groups are treated by Israel is highlighted through the application of a harsher set of laws and different courts for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories than for Jewish settlers, as well as through the restrictions imposed by the permit and ID systems.

    The second pillar is reflected in Israel’s grand policy to fragment the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the purposes of segregation and domination. This policy is evidenced by: Israel’s extensive appropriation of Palestinian land, which continues to shrink the territorial space available to Palestinians; the hermetic closure and isolation of the Gaza Strip from the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories; the deliberate severing of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; and the appropriation and construction policies serving to carve up the West Bank into an intricate and well-serviced network of connected settlements for Jewish-Israelis and an archipelago of besieged and non-contiguous enclaves for Palestinians. That these measures are intended to segregate the population along racial lines in violation of Article 2(d) of the Apartheid Convention is clear from the visible web of walls, separate roads, and checkpoints, and the invisible web of permit and ID systems, that combine to ensure that Palestinians remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory.

    The third pillar upon which Israel’s system of apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories rests is its ‘security’ laws and policies. The extrajudicial killing, torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of Palestinians, as described under the rubric of Article 2(a) of the Apartheid Convention, are all justified by Israel on the pretext of security. These policies are State-sanctioned, and often approved by the Israeli judicial system, and supported by an oppressive code of military laws and a system of improperly constituted military courts. Additionally, this study finds that Israel’s invocation of ’security’ to validate sweeping restrictions on Palestinian freedom of opinion, expression, assembly, association and movement also often purports to mask a true underlying intent to suppress dissent to its system of domination, and thereby maintain control over Palestinians as a group

    Anony Mous : Read the history, not just what the media tells you. There is no Palestine, never was ...

    In the first place, I don't need to read what the media tells me. I was there. I could see how Israelis treated Arabs. I had walked from one apartheid state into another. No one needed to tell me that.

    Secondly, history shows that Jews made up 7% of the population of Palestine in 1914. with Moslems comprising the largest segment of the population. To say "there is no Palestine, there never was" displays such ignorance I cannot believe you were ever one of Jehovah's Witnesses. The reason the number of Jews in Palestine increased was the Balfour Declaration during the First World War which allowed for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine in exchange for support from the Zionists.

  • silentbuddha
    silentbuddha

    " The reason the number of Jews in Palestine increased was the Balfour Declaration during the First World War which allowed for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine in exchange for support from the Zionists" <------------THIS.

    Which is why the majority of Jews in Israel today are descendants of Europeans.

  • Earnest
    Earnest

    Yes, silentbuddha. Either the Ashkenazi from France, Germany and Eastern Europe/Russia, or the Sephardi from Spain and Portugal. None of whom had any birthright to live in Palestine except on religious grounds.

  • JoenB75
  • cofty
    cofty

    There was a compelling case to create a homeland for Jews, even more so after WWII. They were persecuted everywhere.

    Palestinians have been intransigent at every turn.

  • Anony Mous
    Anony Mous

    First of all, I don't take in very high regard the extreme-left wing views of the South African state. Their constitution guarantees free health care, but doesn't implement it and has a government that wanton takes property to give it to the 'poor' who subsequently and obviously, because they do not have experience or training cannot manage the land, cannot afford to buy seed, tools and thus the land goes to waste. Apartheid is bad, the solution South Africa implemented (borderline communism) is worse.

    By declaring Israel "Occupied Palestinian Territory" the whole treatise goes out the window. Israel is an established state, not an occupied territory. As I said, Palestine, as a country, never existed. The "State of Palestine" was invented by the UN in 1947 as a response to Arab pressures to finish wiping out the Jews after the holocaust and this state has never been recognized by the US or the UK.

    It was British, before that Ottoman Empire, before that Roman Empire and before that "Israel" (a primarily Jewish territory which was pretty much dominated by empires throughout history).

    To further destroy the first pillar, Palestinians can live free in Israel, Israel does have the right to set its own immigration law. These laws are very similar to the US's, if you are born of a US citizen, even abroad, you can always return because you are a US citizen - but we don't call the US an apartheid state because they accept foreigners born of US Citizens but not Mexicans.

    To destroy your second pillar: The UN in its establishment of the State of Palestine, defined those regions, after the UK had already established Israel. Israel voluntarily gave and has actually given more land to the Palestines since. The Palestines won't be happy though until, as is explicitly stated in the Quran and by Hamas and by the PLO in the past and by Yasser Arafat and every group there is in Palestine to eradicate the Jews from the world. Israel has sufficient firepower to simply invade and take over the areas, and they have in various Israeli wars demonstrated their capability to even take Jordan and go as far as Egypt, but they simply don't.

    As for the third pillar, there is no evidence of state-sanctioned torture of Palestinians within Israel.

    I had walked from one apartheid state into another. No one needed to tell me that. - as Adam Sandler puts it "Earnest, not a Jew" - The fact however that you see a difference does not mean the state of Israel is to blame. Palestine, as I said, has been self-ruled and has the power to make its own elections, its own decisions, its own laws. They haven't had elections in a decade since the first and only election they had established a dictatorship.

    Secondly, history shows that Jews made up 7% of the population of Israel in 1914. with Moslems comprising the largest segment of the population. <- Fixed that for you. And yes, Jews make up a minority in Israel, Palestinians and Christians get to be in their government too.

    The reason the number of Jews in Palestine increased was the Balfour Declaration during the First World War which allowed for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine in exchange for support from the Zionists.

    Yes, to the first part, no to the second part. The British area was given to the Jews during the Balfour Declaration, the primary goal was to return Jews their land which the Romans had taken and dispersed the Jews that live there, the second reason and primary reason for the British was to give control of the "holy sites" at that time under hot contention from all Christians, Jews and Muslims to the League of Nations. This was done to preserve the sites during the war and prevent a holy war. Zionism came later and was a side effect.

  • Earnest
    Earnest

    Anony Mous, I would just make the point that "Occupied Palestinian Territory" (OPT) refers to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, not to the state of Israel.

    There are Jewish settlements within the OPT which would not be the case if the Palestinian Territory was not occupied.

    So, in this context, Israel grants to Jewish residents of the settlements in the OPT the protections of Israeli domestic law and subjects them to the jurisdiction of Israeli civil courts, while Palestinians living in the same territory are ruled under military law and subjected to the jurisdiction of military courts whose procedures violate international standards for the prosecution of justice. As a consequence of this bifurcated system, Jewish residents of the OPT enjoy freedom of movement, civil protections, and services denied to Palestinians. Palestinians are simultaneously denied the protections accorded to protected persons by international humanitarian law. This dual system has gained the imprimatur of Israel’s High Court and constitutes a policy by the State of Israel to sustain two parallel societies in the OPT, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, and discriminate between these two groups by according very different rights, protections, and life chances in the same territory.

    That is apartheid.

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