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Originally posted by Ned
Agathon, you might want to do some soul searching about why you are so anti-Israel.
Agathon, you might want to do some soul searching about why you are so anti-Israel.
Have you no sense of history? Don't you have a clue as to why the Jews need a homeland, a refuge on this planet where no nation has for long allowed them to live in peace.
The notion of a state based on race is no longer feasible. There is no reason that Jewish people cannot be at home in any number of liberal democratic multiethnic states. We have lots of Jews here in Toronto, where they are a vibrant part of the community. And if they are a minority, they have lots of other minorities to keep them company. That's what North America is like, a melting pot, where people can live relatively free of effective ethnic chauvinism.
Race based states are an anachronism and are in direct conflict with modern political values. In the present day political climate it is hard to see how Zionism is not a kind of racism. It's even clearer when the acknowledged reason for the beginning of the peace progress and partition was to keep Israel as a specifically Jewish state.
They were permitted to settle in their former homeland by the Turkish Empire and then by the British Mandate.
The people who were there in 1948, were there legally.
They were permitted to form their own state by the UN because the Arabs had grown increasingly beligerent during the Mandate, and the Brits no longer wanted to protect them.
That makes them sound eminently reasonable to me.
And here's the crux of the matter. The UN decided to create a Jewish state against the will of the long term inhabitants of the country. It's much as if Indian immigrants to Great Britain were awarded Kent as a new country without any consultation of the people living in Kent. The formation of Israel was an act perpetrated against the Arabs by other people. Is it any wonder they are pissed off. It would have been better to have created a multiethnic democracy there rather than partitioning which ended up throwing hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of their homes.
The Arabs have a good case. It wasn't Arabs that persecuted and murdered Jews or stood by and watched Hitler do so, or prevented Jewish refugees from immigrating. It was countries like the UK and Canada. Why should the Arabs be disadvantaged because a bunch of Westerners indulged in racist persecution and murder? Europeans have a historical record of being far more intolerant of Jews than Muslims ever were. In fact for most of its history Islam has been a pretty tolerant religion. In fact up until the recent troubles there was a Jewish community in Teheran which had been there forever and were respected as what the Muslims called "People of the Book".
Moreover, the Arabs had already been shafted by the British after the end of WWI as well, despite the fact that they fought hard against the Ottomans.
It is that simple.
Nothing I have said has not been said by eminent Israelis and non-Israeli Jews. Judith Butler wrote a great article about it in the London Review of Books not long ago.
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