Lorde Cancels Israel Concert Date Amid Protests • Page 3

And maybe this is just because I'm an atheist, but I don't think religious states should exist. Isreal really is a prime example of why. Religious states will always subjugate people who don't follow that religion.

 

Imagine saying "well if the US hadn't 'removed' all those Native Americans they'd lose the European character of the state."


You are literally openly advocating a 'pure' ethnostate.

 

That the Jewish state needs a Jewish majority in order to be a Jewish state? Seems pretty straightforward logic to me.

Those people were displaced in a war (1948 Independence War) in which Israel was attacked by all of its surrounding neighbours at once. It’s very existence was threatened and needed to defend itself, as any other country would in that situation. One of the unfortunate and in some cases unavoidable consequences of this was innocent people being forced to leave their homes. It’s a shitty situation and Israel is definitely not completely blameless, but to position Israel as purely the aggressors, as well as ignoring the fact that both Israel and Palestine were offered to split the land a few months prior with Israel accepting and Palestine rejecting, is painting a completely false narrative and ignoring the complexities.

To label Palestinians as the indigenous people of the land without acknowledging the thousands of years of history and connection that the Jewish people have to this land is to create a false narrative and ignore the complexities. They’re not not indigenous but they aren’t the only ones with a legitimate claim to the land.

Again, the border expansion you talk about happened by capturing land in a war (1967 Six Day War) in which Israel’s existence was threatened. We ended up with a lot more land than we started with and millions of displaced Palestinians under our control as a result. What the government has chosen to do is increase the Jewish population in the occupied territories and strategically place Jewish settlements in a way that makes creating an autonomous Palestinian state very difficult. For this I am very critical.

As for purposely bombing schools to kill children? Completely unfounded and inaccurate. The only times Israel bombs Palestinian Territories is during wars with Hamas in Gaza, who use children as human shields and fire rockets from schools and hospitals to force Israel to bomb those places to make them look bad, rather than taking care of its citizens.

I am also an athiest and there are plenty of other Jews who are. Most Israelis are not religious but rather identify as part of the Jewish nation. The Jews were originally a nation long before there was a Jewish religion. For two thousand years the Jews lived outside of their native homeland going from place to place, encountering antisemitism, pogroms and persecution almost everywhere we went, with the Holocaust being the culmination of all of it, not to say that Antisemitism doesn’t exist in a serious way still today. The answer to this is for Jews to return to their native home land and build a secular Jewish democracy there. It comes with a lot of complexities and serious tensions and dilemmas, but it’s clear from history that for the Jews to be able to continue to exist we needed a state of our own.

No, read what I said. I said the Jewish state needs a Jewish majority in order to actually be a Jewish state. That doesn’t mean all citizens have to be Jewish.

That’s also a completely different example. Europeans had no historical, ethnic or other type of connection to the land, they just came and killed the natives.

 

Your example of Israel would exist, and does exist, due to ethnic nationalism more than religion. I don't think religious states or nations are a good idea, but like the old religion is the cause of all wars claim, this is taking an element and making it the cause.

I mean the post right above this one shamefully attempts to justify, and even deny, the oppression and apartheid of the Palestinian people by Israel using typical ethnic nationalist rhetoric ("Israel's existence was threatened" "Jewish state needs a Jewish majority") rather than religious.

 

The reason Israel was attacked at its foundation was because it was established unilaterally by the UK and the United Nations, without the agreement of Palestinians (who were living in what would be Israel) or its neighbors, themselves recently out from under the foot of the colonizers who were supporting Israel's establishment. The decades of colonization under the mandate system were aggression, nothing changes when they hand over the reigns to an 'independent' government. I'm not sure what your point about Palestine rejecting the partition is. Rejecting a partition agreement is a perfectly reasonable action when you don't want your country partitioned. Or do you not think they should have any say?

There are Palestinian Jews, and Arab Jews. If you're Israeli (I can't tell) you know this but you'd be surprised how many people don't. The ruling class of Israel, to this day, is mostly made up of European/European-descended Ashkenazim, who you would be very hard pressed to argue are "more" indigenous than Palestinians of any ethnicity. Many Palestinian Arabs are descended from indigenous Jews who converted or intermarried with Muslim Arabs. (The idea that there are levels of indigenousness is nonsense used only to justify things like this, but whatever.) Certainly they have more of a claim to decide the fate of Palestine than its colonizer?

Ah right, the occupation just "happened." They just "ended up" occupying Sinai and the West Bank.

Like last week, the IDF shot an unarmed double amputee in a wheelchair. Even Human Rights Watch says that "1,462 Palestinian civilians, including 551 children, and 6 civilians in Israel, including a child, were killed during the fighting." Seems like real tit-for-tat fighting there, a real balanced "war" - oh but this was during January-October 2016, there was no war. Even if they had officially declared one, Israel is killing 500 times more children.

No it is not clear that Jews need a state to continue to exist as a people. In fact, history should prove that we decidedly do not need to have a state to survive as a people - we were doing it for, like you said, a couple thousand years before we had a state. I take pride in diaspora and the strongly reject any idea of my being in diaspora as something that needs to be corrected or fixed. This view is shared by apocalyptic evangelicals who think the uniting of the Jews in the holy land is necessary for the rapture, after which all the unconverted Jews will die in hell, by the way.

This view also is in line with antisemitic beliefs about how Jews do not really "belong" in the country they are in, and that is why they are victimized. German, Russian, Ukrainian Jews are not really German, Russian, or Ukrainian and fundamentally should not be in those countries, but in Israel, in a Jewish state. Is this what you believe?

Do you also really believe that simply being Jewish constitutes enough of a uniting identity to build a state around? Can you describe what would be the "Jewish character" of a state which purports to unite Spanish Sephardim; German, Eastern European, and American Ashkenazim; Ethiopian Beta Israelis and Arab Jews? What do all of these groups have in common culturally, besides the religion - which can look very different in different areas and which would not actually influence the policies of a 'secular' state - that can be used to support their constitution together as a 'nation?'

One of the biggest right wing canards of the decade is the idea that Europe is going to be flooded with Muslim refugees who will overtake the Europeans as a majority in their own country. In a hypothetical world where Arab Muslim immigrants (proper citizens though) eventually became the majority in, say, France, would that still be a "French" nation? If so, why is the same not true for Israel? If not, would you expel those immigrants to refugee camps to make sure France retained its "French character?"

 

I went full posting mode. It's been while since I did the "quote each paragraph of your post and respond with a paragraph or three of my own" move, we've kind of settled on one paragraph in the politics thread recently. Sometimes other people still do that one but I haven't in a long time.

 

Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. I don't actually know if that saying is true, but I enjoyed your post.