Category: Israel and/or Palestine Page 9 of 10

Look, enough. Let me lay it out really simply for the dense.

The Palestinians did not deserve to be colonized, displaced and turned into 2nd class citizens in their own land because Europeans tried to kill off the Jewish people.

The morality here is the same as the morality of Iraq and 9/11.  “Well, some folks attacked us, so we’re going to use it as an excuse to beat the shit out of someone who was completely uninvolved.”

So, enough with the sanctimony about Helen Thomas’s statement about Israeli Jews from the usual suspects on the left.

Telling the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to “go back to Poland” is outrageous. I received a “defense” of Thomas’s remark from a leftwing blogger who suggested that if HE were a refugee in World War II he would not have wanted to live in Israel. Not helpful. Going back to 1948 — let alone suggesting the repatriation of the descendants of European Jews to the countries that annihilated them — is as absurd as it is hideous.

Oh really, is Germany or Poland as bad a place to be a Jew as Gaza or the West Bank are to be a Palestinian?  Why, exactly, did Western nations pay for their sins by giving Jews a nation in the Middle East instead of, say, a chunk of Germany and Poland?  Why take from, why punish, those who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Is it really as bad to be told to go back to a first world nation where you would have full citizenship, as it is to be forced to live in a slum where you have no rights, can be starved at will, can’t travel as you choose, can have your house bulldozed and your farm destroyed?  Is it really so “hideous”?

Of course it isn’t.

The fundamental truth of Israel’s existence is that it is a settler nation in the modern world.  Yes, there have been plenty of them, including Canada, the US and virtually every nation in the Americas, but is that an excuse to do it again?  To not learn from the past?  To turn our heads and say “well, too bad for the Palestinians, because we Western nations need to expiate our sins, and we intend to make them pay for what we did wrong?  And hey, whatever, it’s not as bad as what we did to the American Indians, so the Palestinians should just suck it up?”

Obama wanted Helen Thomas gone because she had a habit of asking questions he hated.  She was a fool to walk right into it, but hey, someone who was the soul of discretion wouldn’t have asked the questions over the years Helen asked.

You want eunuchs in the White House press corp?  This is how you get them.

As with Helen Thomas when asked what she thought about Israel.  “I think they should get the hell out of Palestine.”

Israel is a colonial power occupying a land whose population was, prior to their getting rid of many of them, majority non-Jewish.  This is why “right of return” is a non-starter, because if all the people pushed out of Israel were allowed to return…

As news comes in that Israeli commandos, boarding a relief flotilla for Gaza, have killed 10 to 16 peace activists, it’s worth reviewing the situation Israel finds itself in.

First, Israel is a state about half of whose population, the Palestinians, have restricted economic and political rights.  This is true both of muslim citizens and those Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza.  I count them as under Israeli rule because when Israel controls their ability to exit or enter the country, bulldozes their houses at will, decides if they can import food and medicine, arrests “cabinet members” at will, determines where and when Palestinians can go, what the curfews are, and so on, it is clear that Israel rules them.

This makes West Bank communities (which are divided from themselves) and Gaza effectively South African bantustans, where non-citizen residents are forced to reside.  And that means that Israel, is, yes, effectively an apartheid state, different from South Africa in the eighties only in that a smaller proportion of the population are second class citizens confined to ghettos.

Population is, of course, the key to understanding the Israeli situation.  Not only are Palestinians outbreeding Israelis, so that they will soon be the majority of the population, but within the Israeli population proper, right wing religious Jews are outbreeding their more secular brethren.  This is leading to a hardening within the voting population, and a higher tolerance for violence and crackdowns, at the same time as the Jewish population feels itself more and more beleagured.

Population is also at the core of the resource problem, or, to be more specific, the water problem.  There is a limited amount of water in Palestine, and as the population increases, there are fears that there isn’t enough. A viable Palestinian state would require more water than Israel wants to give up, for very good reasons.

Another important demographic issue is that given how young their population is  almost every living Palestinian has never known anything but Israeli occupation.  This is less true of Israelis, but still, any Israeli who isn’t closing in on 50 probably doesn’t remember a time when Israel wasn’t occupying a hostile population.

Demographic realities lead to one conclusion: if things keep going on as they are now, in two generations Israel will e so clearly an apartheid state, with the vast majority of the population powerless Palestinians without a vote, that no one will be able to pretend otherwise, either inside or outside the country.

Since Israel’s identity is as a specifically Jewish state, that is, one based on religious and ethnic identity (many Jews don’t recognize converts) that will mean that Jews will rule over a population mainly made up of non Jews.

This is, in a sense, a modern Sparta, an outnumbered ethnicity ruling over numerous Helots.  It is unlikely the rest of the world will tolerate it, and it is an unstable state for a nation with democratic aspirations.

The status quo thus ends, most likely, in a single state solution.  The Palestinians are given the vote, as the blacks were in South Africa, and the state of Israel as a Jewish state, ends.  Those who find the idea of one ethnicity or religion ruling over others may not find this end particularly tragic.

However this end-state is anathema to most Israelis, who believe that Israel should be a state based on religious ethnicity.  If they are unwilling to accept it, then there are two options available to them to avoid that fate.

First, they can try and come to a two-state solution.  This has been the status quo preferred solution for a couple decades now, but it seems more and more unlikey.  The number of settlers in the West Bank goes up every year, as does the continued ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem of undesirable Muslims.  The facts on the ground say very clearly that the Israeli government does not want a two-state solution, and is not acting to achieve one.  However, as the situation becomes more intolerable, they may come to see the situation otherwise.

Any Israeli Prime Minister who acts on this will take his life in his hands.  Right wing settlers have already assassinated one Prime Minister, and there is no reason to believe they would hesitate to do it again.  Furthermore the Israeli military has become infected by right wing religious Judaism, with right wing Rabbis, in the last incursion into Israel, telling soldiers that killing Palestinians was their religious duty.  This influence is likely to only grow stronger the more time goes on, and by the time a Prime Minister feels he must make a deal, or else, the military may no longer be willing to obey orders.

The ability to make a two-state deal is thus likely to decline over time, even as the necessity to do so increases.

The third solution set is to simply remove all Palestinians from the occupied territories.  This doesn’t mean genocide, this just means shoving them out into neighbouring nations, and letting them worry about the Palestinians. This will turn Israel into a pariah state, but it will give them control of a good portion of Greater Israel without having to worry about pesky Palestinians, and while the neighbouring nations won’t like it, Israel has nukes, so who cares what they think?

These seem to me to be the three most likely endgames for Israel – the end of the Jewish ethnic state in a one state solution, a two-state compromise, or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine and the creation of a Greater Israel which is Jewish, and a pariah state.

It’s hard to anticipate which solution will be chosen, but I think the single state or the cleansing of Palestinians are the most likely end-games at this point.  The two-state solution is unlikely to occur, since making it occur would cost an Israeli PM his life and might not be allowed by the army.

One might object that a single-state is unlikely for the same reasons, but single-state is the long term solution.  When population numbers become 80/20 Palestinian/Jewish you either have to ethnic cleanse or give up, the status quo will be intoldrable.  The two-state solution is what occurs before then.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope for a pretty solution in Israel/Palestine, or a solution in the near term.  Could be I’m wrong, and I hope I am, but it seems unlikely.