General lack of countries with something even vaguely resembling representative government in the Middle East.
Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
Good for them. But if you're Arab Israeli, you don't have the same slate of rights and representation that Jewish Israelis have. See: freedom of movement to and from the Gaza Strip prior to October 7th.
Arabs has 100% the same rights as Israelis.
The freedom of movements to Gaza was not allowed to Jews as well (or every Israeli), since this is an enemy territory.
So I challenge you to find 1 law that treats Jews and Arab citizens differently in Israel
The only Arab-Israeli that ever thought it would be a good idea to wander into Gaza was a mentally ill young man named Hisham al-Sayed a decade ago, and he has been a hostage there ever since.
It's the same as the US's treatment of African Americans for decades; legally they have the same rights but the reality of how they get treated by their government is much different. Just pointing out "Aha! They are equal under law!" is misleading and tries to shut the issue down
> But if you're Arab Israeli, you don't have the same slate of rights and representation that Jewish Israelis have.
You're mixing up two different things. Arab Israelis (as Israel calls them) are Israeli citizens. They have the same rights as any Israeli citizen.
Freedom of movement to and from the Gaza strip is of Gazans, who are not Israeli citizens, and they indeed don't have the same rights in Israel as Israeli citizens.
David Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish History: "Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth."
Iraq and Lebanon both more closely "vaguely resemble" representative government than Israel does. For all their problems, at least all the people they rule over are allowed to be citizens and vote.
Freedom house, which I think is a credible source here, says Israel is free and democratic, and Lebanon and Iraq are not. How does that not contradict your point? The claim was that Israel is the only free and democratic country in the middle east, do you have any credible source that disproves that?
Israel administers the West Bank as a bantustan for the majority of their (technically non-citizen) Arab population, but does not officially count it as part of their territory, so they don’t have to grant the people there citizenship or allow them voting rights. But it’s worth repeating: Israel entirely controls this territory. That is clearly undemocratic.
What is worth repeating this is no different than any other occupied territory in the world or in history. When the US occupied Germany it didn't allow Germans voting rights. When it occupied Japan it didn't give Japanese voting rights. When it occupied Afghanistan or Iraq it didn't give those voting rights either. Puerto Ricans are administered by the US but don't have voting rights.
There is nothing undemocratic about this at all. This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
You can ask why these territories are in this status for this length of time. Part of the reason is that the country it was occupied from, Jordan, does not want it back. Another part is that the Palestinians that live there don't really want this resolved either (at least some really large portion of them). Another part are other external interests that don't want to see this resolved.
What are you talking about? Germany held federal elections less than 4 years after the end of the war. The US didn't occupy germany against their will for 50 years. Japan had elections ONE year after the war. Stop lying.
I'm saying they could not vote in the US which is what the discussion is about. The Palestinians also had elections. I don't think what people are asking Israel to do here is to let the Palestinians have elections while being occupied?
The total physical occupation of Germany lasted 11 years. The final status of Germany was only determined in 1990 in the 2+4 agreement. That's a 45 year period. The US still has bases in Germany.
> I don't think what people are asking Israel to do here is to let the Palestinians have elections while being occupied?
It's incredible how persistently you miss the point.
What people are asking Israel to do is let Palestinians have a say in their own affairs. That can be done _either_ by letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine (as the West German government did relatively soon after the war ended), _or_ by letting Palestinians have a say in the Israeli government that rules over them (one state solution).
I'm being called a liar for pointing out that in general people living in occupied territories do not have the rights of the citizens of the occupier, which is the exact situation here, and for which Israel is labelled as an "Apartheid State", since there's no Apartheid in Israel proper, only supposedly in said occupied territories.
I think you're factually wrong on your "What people are asking" statement. Different people are asking different things. However, you can totally ask that question as an individual and we can discuss it.
Palestinians do have a say in their own affairs. But you're saying "letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine". When you say Palestine do you mean the west bank? Would you agree that in Gaza Israeli did let the Palestinians "meaningfully control Gaza"? What was the outcome of that? What do you propose can be done differently in the west bank for example? What level of say/control do you feel would balance Israel's security needs with the Palestinian's need to have a say/meaningful control? Let's talk specifics.
There was West Germany and East Germany. There was "denazification" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification (e.g. promoting of Nazi ideas had a death penalty under the occupation, do you think that'll fly with Israel vs. Palestinians vs. the world?). There were war crime trials for top level Nazis.
EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that when the west bank was occupied by Israel in 1967 it was considered to be part of Jordan and Jordan didn't give up that claim until their peace agreement with Israel. But if your point is that Israel should have at that point given the people living in this area a measure of autonomy to run most aspects of their lives I think I can agree. There was definitely some self governing, e.g. at the city level. I think the demand was of Israel to return this to Jordan at that point in time and Israel refused since it meant there would be large Arab armies 10 minute tank drive from Tel-Aviv. (e.g.). I wasn't around in 1967 and I haven't studied that period in detail.
> What is worth repeating this is no different than any other occupied territory in the world or in history. When the US occupied Germany it didn't allow Germans voting rights. When it occupied Japan it didn't give Japanese voting rights. When it occupied Afghanistan or Iraq it didn't give those voting rights either.
It is a lot different from any of those examples, mainly because the U.S. didn’t annex the parts of those countries it cared about (see East Jerusalem), didn’t start moving its own people to the rest of the territory carving it up like Swiss cheese, didn’t prevent people from going and coming, didn’t heavily restrict trade between those countries and their neighbors, etc.
So while indeed they were militarily occupied, the degree of functional civilian control by the democratically elected governments were far greater than that enjoyed in Palestine by the PA or by Hamas.
I agree that the situation in Puerto Rico is undemocratic but again, it’s not nearly as egregious for lots of reasons.
> This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
It is laughable to claim the reason for anything Israel does is “international law” when they flaunt it so cavalierly. Really, they didn’t mind the international legal implications of annexing East Jerusalem or building settlements in the West Bank, but the reason they refuse to annex the rest of it and give people citizenship is because of international law?
That’s clearly not the case. They have taken the parts they care about either by annexation or pseudo-annexation (settlements). The reason they don’t want to annex the rest is because they don’t want Arabs to be nearly half their citizens (annexing it without granting citizenship would be too egregious to ignore in the eyes of the rest of the world) and because there’s nothing there that they want. Expect this to change if the trend of Israel becoming more and more right wing continues.
I agree there are a lot of differences. My point though still stands I think. The reason Palestinians don't enjoy equal rights to Israelis is that they live in an occupied territory of still to be determined status. Whatever process happened in Germany after WW-II failed to happen in the west bank after 1967. Israel would love to resolve this problem, ofcourse on terms it can live with. Israel and the Palestinians have not been able to get to terms they can both live with (understatement of the day) and so the situation persists.
I also think my other point stands that if Israel did annex the West Bank and/or Gaza and give Palestinians equal rights, as it did in Jerusalem or the Golan Heights that would not be viewed as an acceptable solution. The reason I raise this is because criticism is levelled at Israel for not doing that. The Palestinians would not consider this to resolve the conflict and neither would anyone else, they say exactly what you're saying here. I'm not saying the reason Israel isn't doing it is international law but surely the lack of acceptance from anyone to this solution is part of that thought process (and also the question of maintaining Jewish majority in Israel).
Palestinians did get some control, they got total control of Gaza in 2005, partial control earlier of Gaza and the West Bank as part of the Oslo accords.
I also want to be clear that I'm opposed to Israeli settlement in the west bank. I don't think that's helpful. I also don't think it's the real problem here. The legal status of the west bank in Israeli law is still occupied territory, there hasn't been any formal annexation.
One thing I can say as to the annexation/reunification of Jerusalem is that Israel is doing a much better job than Jordan did in maintaining and protecting the rights of all religions to have access to their holy sites. When Jerusalem was under Jordanian control Jews could not access it at all and I think Christians also less than today. So I think Israel is a reasonable guardian of this place and all its citizens and visitors are treated fairly. The final status of Jerusalem would presumably be something agreed to as part of the (maybe never) peace agreement. I think between leaving it "occupied" and the current status the current status is/was the better option for everyone.
There are voices by the way in the right wing of Israel calling for annexation and granting of citizenship.
I don't think Israel is "flaunting" international law more so than most of the rest of the world. It just happens to be in an unsolvable mess of a situation. Israel and Israelis really wanted this resolved in the peace process of the early 90's and were willing to go a long way towards what Palestinians were asking for, but didn't really meet a partner. So to blame this solely on Israel, which is admittedly to some degree in a position of power, but is also very vulnerable, is not fair. I would say at least half the blame is on the Palestinians.
500k Palestinians in Lebanon, 2nd-3rd generation "refugees", are not allowed to be citizens and do not have a vote.
(Palestinians are the only people in the world who the UN allow to inherit this status)
> Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
According to the wisdom of US foreign policy, yes.
For what it's worth, the US has also tried to work a two-state solution over the last 30 years with various degrees of vigor. That became much harder to accomplish when the Gaza Strip decided to elect Hamas to lead its government in 2006-07.
> For what it's worth, the US has also tried to work a two-state solution over the last 30 years with various degrees of vigor. That became much harder to accomplish when the Gaza Strip decided to elect Hamas to lead its government in 2006-07.
It became much harder when the Israeli hard Right murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and then took over the Israeli government with Netanyahu's election in 1996.
Both fairly explicitly in reaction against the idea of ever accepting a Palestinian State.
It's worth mentioning that Rabin's murder was almost certainly related/triggered to the wave of suicide bombing attacks by Hamas that came as a response to the peace process. The Israeli right was up in arms about how the peace process was leading to terrorism. I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
> the wave of suicide bombing attacks by Hamas that came as a response to the peace process
The Hamas suicide bombings in 1994 were in response to the massacre committed by Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein in February. The first bombing of the "wave" happened in April.
[1]
> This was the first suicide bombing attack to be carried out by Palestinian militants against Israeli civilians in Israel, and was carried out in retaliation for the killing by a settler of 29 Muslims while they were at prayer in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on 25 February.
> I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
Honestly it's a bit of a blur to me but I do agree that Baruch Goldstein's attack was likely another destabilizing factor. It stood out at the time as something completely insane. For the sake of historical accuracy though Hamas' suicide attacks predate that event, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehola_Junction_bombing
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack, describing Goldstein as a "degenerate murderer" and "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism" - which is important.
>Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack, describing Goldstein as a "degenerate murderer" and "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism" - which is important.
Agree that it is important. What is even more strange is that Yitzhak Rabin himself was assassinated by a Zionist Terrorist.
There were many deals and processes and talks, Almost all of them put Israel front and centre, even Oslo accords for instance. But as claimed by Bibi, Zionist Terrorists tried everything to thwart it. And conveniently placed the blame on Palestinians. It was Zionist Terrorists who brought terrorism as we know today to the middle east. It was them who killed in cold blood, the mediator who presented the plan, Count Folke Bernadotte. But all the blame is on Palestinians, while the Terrorists derailed any hope for peaceful coexistence, and continue to do so.
I'm not sure what "Zionist Terrorist" is getting us here in relation to Yigal Amir. There is very little relationship between that dude, who is a religious extremist, and the secular zionists that founded Israel.
I can't really debate your other statements because it's pretty short of facts. I seriously doubt the truth of "zionism brought terrorism to the middle east" as there were e.g. massacres of Jews in the region (Hebron, or Tsfat) that predate zionism.
And sure, Lehi were terrorists, I'm not super familiar with the Bernadotte story but that's well into the conflict, not by any means that start of it.
From my perspective it was the Palestinians, through Hamas, that derailed the Oslo accords. By any measure you can choose, the Palestinian violent opposition to peace eclipsed the Israeli one. Also while Israel has a government with the ability to enforce policy, the Palestinians never had any centralized authority that talks for all of them. While Israel was putting extreme right activists in detention with no trial, the Palestinians were letting Hamas out of their jails with a "revolving door".
Did you know Israelis ran a covert bombing campaign in Lebanon wherein they blew up hundreds of civilians, blamed it on Palestinians, and then used this to justify the 1982 invasion?
> [Rise and Kill First] contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly ‘terrorist’ campaign.
> As Rise and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister immediately decided to “activate” the FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.
> On September 17, 1981, a car bomb exploded outside of the command center shared by the PLO and its Lebanese leftist allies in the port city of Sidon, killing over 20, most of them women and children who lived in nearby apartment buildings, John Kifner reported in the New York Times.
> Two days later, another “terrorist bomb” killed four in a crowded movie theater in West Beirut, Kifner reported. The FLLF claimed responsibility, but Palestinian officials immediately insisted that the group is “fictitious,” a ploy used by Israel to hide its hand in these attacks.
> On October 1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing 90, as Kifner and the UPI reported. Several other vehicles loaded with explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”
> A RAND report on ‘recent trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its totality claimed 308 lives.
> The censor’s decision made it possible for Israeli leaders to insist, in June 1982, that the invasion of Lebanon was justified in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Remarkably, it made it possible for Ariel Sharon to take to the pages of the New York Times in August 1982 and insist that Israeli troops “were greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered” the country. They had followed the Jewish doctrine of tohar haneshek, “the moral conduct of war,” Sharon added, a policy that stood “in vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.”
Did Israel also fire rockets on its north from Lebanon? Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Anyways, in this conflict cherry-picking is a big problem. Pro-Palestinians are very good at cherry picking some questionable Israeli action while totally ignoring the rest of the story. You can't understand reality by cherry picking certain things and spinning a theory to accommodate them. That's how conspiracy theorists think. The scientific method is to try and falsify your theory and really test whether it stands the test of the other events, not the ones' your cherry picking. And naturally for every story check multiple sources to try and get a sense of what really happened. If you're ignoring the rocket attacks on Israel, and other PLO attacks on Israel, and the attempt to assassinate the UK ambassador, as factors in your theory, then maybe your theory is wrong.
> Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
See below quotes. It also did try to assassinate US diplomat John Gunther Dean.
> Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Not the sole reason in itself, rather a critical part of whipping political support.
[1]
> From his first day at the Defense Ministry, Sharon started planning the invasion of Lebanon. He developed what came to be known as the "big plan" for using Israel's military power to establish political hegemony in the Middle East. The first aim of Sharon's plan was to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure in Lebanon and to undermine it as a political organization. The second aim was to establish a new political order in Lebanon by helping Israel's Maronite friends, headed by Bashir Gemayel, to form a government that would proceed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. For this to be possible, it was necessary, third, to expel the Syrian forces fro Lebanon or at least seriously weaken their presence there. The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan's conversion into a Palestinian state would end international pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
> Sharon and Eytan, realizing there was no chance of persuading the cabinet to approve a large-scale operation in Lebanon, adopted a different tactic. They started presenting to the cabinet limited proposals for bombing PLO targets in Lebanon, expecting that the guerillas would retaliate by firing Katyusha rockets on Israel's northern settlements and that this would force the cabinet to approve more drastic measures. The idea was to implement Operation Big Pines in stages by manipulating enemy provocation and Israel's response. A number of confrontations took place in the cabinet as a result of these tactics. Ministers opposed to a war in Lebanon because they recognized where these proposals were intended to lead.
> Sharon himself displayed the same deviousness in his relations with the Reagan administration as he did in his relations with his cabinet colleagues. He fed the Americans selective information intended to prove that the PLO was making a mockery of the cease-fire agreement and to establish Israel's right to retaliate.
This coincides exactly with the FLLF terror campaign.
> On 3 June the casus belli that the hard-liners had been waiting for materialized. A group of Palestinian gunmen shot and greviously wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to London, outside the Dorchester Hotel.
> Mossad sources had intelligence to suggest that the attempt of Argov's life was intended to provoke an Israeli assault on Arafat's stronghold in Lebanon in order to break his power.
> Avraham Shalom, the head of the General Security Service, reported that the attack was most probably the work of the faction headed by Abu Nidal and suggested that Gideon Machanaimi, the prime minister's adviser on terrorism, elaborate on the nature of that organization. Machanaimi had hardly opened his mouth when Begin cut him off by saying, "They are all PLO."
[1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall, chapter "The Lebanese Quagmire"
What do you mean at least work with Israel? The US is propping up Israel and without that ally Israel would probably implode. What’s messed up is how disrespectful Israel and some of their politicians are to US and their citizens. One thing I like about Israel is that they have a variety of oppinions and schools of thought. What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
Israel is a postindustrial economy with a 600,000-man military reserve and (unofficially) a nuclear arsenal of the size and capability needed to destroy the society of any industrialized nation on Earth.
Almost all of the support and protection they've received from the US since October has been mainly to keep leverage on Netanyahu and to keep the war from spreading across the Middle East. For example, if Iran's missiles had bombarded Tel Aviv, you're probably going to see Israel bombarding Tehran, which could pull in Iraq, etc., and Israel has yet to lose a fight against its regional neighbors.
They don't need the US to prop them up economically or militarily, which should bring about a conversation about support come next budget, but I doubt it.
I too would like to see a more moderate group in charge.
Which Israeli defense contractors build airplanes and tanks? Without aircraft and spares you cannot have a modern military. The US absolutely props up Israeli with weapons and military technology that they do not produce in country. Waving around nuclear weapons and a massive number of troops are the actions of states that are weaker then project as (Russia DPRK).
> Which Israeli defense contractors build airplanes and tanks?
Neither do the North Koreans [1][2]? (Caveats [3][4].)
America dropping Israel simply means it finds a new supplier. Russia is out of the picture, given its dependence on Iran, but China and India would be more than willing to supply.
Israel did use to build fighter jets. It built the Kfir. It planned to build a next gen airplane (The Lavi) but was pressured by the US to cancel that plan and instead buy F16s. The US also affects control of what Israeli weapons systems can be sold to who. Presumably part of the agreement to cancel the Lavi project was some sort of US commitment to supply Israel instead.
> What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
Wishful thinking, regardless of which elections your talking about. In the US, both sides are working hard to prop up Israel. In Israel before October, Netanyahu was on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Who's even talking about that anymore? Now he gets to be a war Prime Minister.
Most Americans have no idea how Israel is governed. Even grasping the basics of how the United States government works is sadly not guaranteed.
All most people know is the spin they've gotten from the media and politicians. Both tend to be very pro Israel in the US. That's changed a little recently, but not much.
Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.