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If America gave special rights to Christians, who wold be the first to complain?
Israel is not a democracy, to think otherwise is complete rediculessness. Zionism is racism. Nazism gave German specials rights, and for the formerly oppressed to now oppress another, has made the world see that Israel (a.k.a. Judenreich) is a racism hyprocritical democracy, similar to America before the civil rights era in the 1960's. Israel won't practice 'real democracy', because with a one person one vote democracy anywhere in the Middle East, Israel would have to use its WMD's (a.k.a. nuclear bombs) or lose its 'jewish identity' and become a true democracy like France, Germany, Brazil, and South Africa.
Barely a week after President Bush attempted to kick-start the latest Middle East peace process with the Red Sea Summit in Jordan, the bloodletting in the Holy Land has resumed with its usual vengeance. Keeping a tally of how many Israelis and Palestinians kill each other requires daily vigilance because it's a daily occurrence. The road map might more aptly have been named road kill.
President Bush is to be commended for taking the Middle East bull by its horns and committing to ride herd. Time will show that the map of the ranch will have to be redrawn if the bucking broncos are ever to be tamed.
One of the roadmap's failings is that, like the Oslo peace process that preceded it to such disastrous effect, it avoids discussion of the most contentious (read intractable) issues--borders, settlements, Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees--until the end-stage 'final status' negotiations, so they can cause the process to unravel later rather than sooner. Another failing is in the unequal demands the roadmap places on the two warring parties, an example being the onus on the Palestinians to draft and adopt a constitution, while Israel is allowed to remain without one.
A more logical approach is to address all the issues--the tough ones at the head of the list--up front, and to frame everything strictly in the context of American values of governance. There is only one solution that is consistent with American-style democracy, and it resolves all the issues to the satisfaction of all but those on both sides who preach exclusionist segregation. It involves defeating those on the Palestinian side whose avowed aim is to create an Islamic nation in all of historic Palestine, an unacceptable recipe because it means the destruction of Israel and the disenfranchisement of the Holy Land's Jews and Christians. It also involves defeating those on the Israeli side who espouse Jewish domination of the land, because that leaves the Muslims and Christians with not just the short straw, but no straw at all.
The two-state solution in the Holy Land is objectionable for the same reason the international community rejected it in South Africa, where it would have meant a state for blacks alongside a white state still built on--and practicing--Apartheid principles. Two infrastructures must be dismantled for peace in the Holy Land: The infrastructure of terror--the targeting of innocent civilians by whichever group or government--and the infrastructure of racism--the state-sanctioned laws that assign rights, privileges and obligations to people based solely on their religion.
Jews have a right to live in peace and security anywhere in the world, including in the Middle East, and nowhere more so than in the Holy Land. Equally so Christians and Muslims. This is disputed only by those who give precedence to religion over human rights, those who, in America, we regard as religious fanatics.
There's only one solution, with the emphasis on 'one', and it is the American way. One state. One set of borders. One constitution. One set of laws that treat all citizens--regardless of race, color, religion or sex, as one. No need to dismantle a single Jewish settlement. The Palestinian refugees can all return to their ancestral homeland or be adequately compensated if they choose not to. Ditto for the Jews who left other countries--including Arab ones--to go to Israel. Jerusalem the eternal capital of the Holy Land, home to Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Idealistic? Of course. But not more so than the values America's founding fathers espoused when they charted the future of our nation, and drafted the document that has so stalwartly endured as the cornerstone of our democracy. We don't need to draft a new constitution for Iraq. We've already got one as hale as any has ever been hailed to be. We just change a few names and addresses and we're done. And it's the same one we should impose on all the other autocracies and dictatorships in the Middle East as we promote the democratization of that region.
More than any other territory in the world, the Holy Land deserves nothing less. The only rejectionists who must be allowed to flourish are those who reject terrorism, violence, segregation, and racism. All others are obstacles to peace. America should use its power, and wielding its Constitution, its moral authority, to defeat them.
President Bush is to be commended for taking the Middle East bull by its horns and committing to ride herd. Time will show that the map of the ranch will have to be redrawn if the bucking broncos are ever to be tamed.
One of the roadmap's failings is that, like the Oslo peace process that preceded it to such disastrous effect, it avoids discussion of the most contentious (read intractable) issues--borders, settlements, Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees--until the end-stage 'final status' negotiations, so they can cause the process to unravel later rather than sooner. Another failing is in the unequal demands the roadmap places on the two warring parties, an example being the onus on the Palestinians to draft and adopt a constitution, while Israel is allowed to remain without one.
A more logical approach is to address all the issues--the tough ones at the head of the list--up front, and to frame everything strictly in the context of American values of governance. There is only one solution that is consistent with American-style democracy, and it resolves all the issues to the satisfaction of all but those on both sides who preach exclusionist segregation. It involves defeating those on the Palestinian side whose avowed aim is to create an Islamic nation in all of historic Palestine, an unacceptable recipe because it means the destruction of Israel and the disenfranchisement of the Holy Land's Jews and Christians. It also involves defeating those on the Israeli side who espouse Jewish domination of the land, because that leaves the Muslims and Christians with not just the short straw, but no straw at all.
The two-state solution in the Holy Land is objectionable for the same reason the international community rejected it in South Africa, where it would have meant a state for blacks alongside a white state still built on--and practicing--Apartheid principles. Two infrastructures must be dismantled for peace in the Holy Land: The infrastructure of terror--the targeting of innocent civilians by whichever group or government--and the infrastructure of racism--the state-sanctioned laws that assign rights, privileges and obligations to people based solely on their religion.
Jews have a right to live in peace and security anywhere in the world, including in the Middle East, and nowhere more so than in the Holy Land. Equally so Christians and Muslims. This is disputed only by those who give precedence to religion over human rights, those who, in America, we regard as religious fanatics.
There's only one solution, with the emphasis on 'one', and it is the American way. One state. One set of borders. One constitution. One set of laws that treat all citizens--regardless of race, color, religion or sex, as one. No need to dismantle a single Jewish settlement. The Palestinian refugees can all return to their ancestral homeland or be adequately compensated if they choose not to. Ditto for the Jews who left other countries--including Arab ones--to go to Israel. Jerusalem the eternal capital of the Holy Land, home to Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Idealistic? Of course. But not more so than the values America's founding fathers espoused when they charted the future of our nation, and drafted the document that has so stalwartly endured as the cornerstone of our democracy. We don't need to draft a new constitution for Iraq. We've already got one as hale as any has ever been hailed to be. We just change a few names and addresses and we're done. And it's the same one we should impose on all the other autocracies and dictatorships in the Middle East as we promote the democratization of that region.
More than any other territory in the world, the Holy Land deserves nothing less. The only rejectionists who must be allowed to flourish are those who reject terrorism, violence, segregation, and racism. All others are obstacles to peace. America should use its power, and wielding its Constitution, its moral authority, to defeat them.
For more information:
http://www.counterpunch.org/abboushi061620...
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There are two very different views that are being promoted about the state of Israel. Those who support Israel's actions, like Jewish and right-wing Christian groups in the United States, say that it's a shining beacon of democracy, while critics, like Palestinian solidarity groups and the anti-apartheid South African Desmond Tutu, say it's a racist apartheid state. The issue is an important one for Americans in general and the UMass community in particular.
It's important for Americans because of the centrality of the Middle East and Israel to American foreign policy. Israel gets far more aid from the U.S. than any other country does - about $5 billion a year, by conservative estimates - more than all of black Africa combined. The U.S. also provides diplomatic support for Israel. For instance, America goes against the rest of the world and vetoes United Nations Security Council resolutions that Israel disapproves of, like those supporting the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The issue of whether Israel is a democracy or an apartheid state is particularly important for the UMass community because the University has set a precedent for institutional political involvement in questions of apartheid, when it agreed in 1977 to sell off its investments in businesses that supported apartheid South Africa. At the time, the Board of Trustees inserted a clause in the university's investment guidelines stipulating that the University should not use its investments to support apartheid regimes. Currently, the University invests in businesses that support Israel, and it holds State of Israel bonds. So the issue of whether Israel is or is not an apartheid state is one that should concern us all.
I believe, and will try to persuade you, that although Israel has certain democratic features, it is essentially an apartheid state. This is not a contradiction: the United States had features of a democracy when millions of blacks were slaves and the Indians were being exterminated. Israeli society is deeply committed to certain democratic values like individual rights, elections in which all adult citizens can vote, and an independent court system. On the basis of these values, certain supporters of Israel have managed to persuade the world that Israel is deep down a democracy. But Israeli society is also extremely racist, and its racist laws and practices determine the character of the state to a greater extent than its democratic values do. Because of this racism, the democratic features that I've named are constantly being undermined.
Here's one way to think about it: the supporters of Israel that I've mentioned don't deny that Israel has a Jewish character. They say that it's both Jewish and democratic. In my mind, these two characterizations are contradictory. A state can either be democratic, or it can be Jewish, but not both. The contradiction can lay low and avoid being noticed, as long as there's an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel. Right now, that's the case: because the majority of Palestinians living in Israel in 1948 were expelled and not allowed to return, and because of large-scale Jewish immigration, about 80-percent of Israeli citizens are Jewish. It's impossible for the 20-percent of citizens who are Palestinian to democratically form a government and to replace the racial regime with a true democracy, where all citizens are equal before the law.
In fact, the Palestinian minority has had a hard time using its votes to gain any real concessions, because the Jewish political parties have an informal agreement among themselves that no coalition government should be formed in which the Arab political parties hold the balance of power. That means that the Arab parties never have the power to cause the government to collapse, something that the small Jewish political parties often threaten to do in order to win concessions from the ruling coalition. Another strike against Arab parties is the law that empowers the government to disqualify the candidates of any party that opposes the Jewish character of the state. This law has been used to disqualify candidates for calling for a democratic state, in which all citizens have equal rights.
The true test of which set of values determine the character of the state of Israel is what would happen if Arabs were no longer a small minority, but became a majority. Considering the fact that Palestinians in Israel have a far higher birth rate than Jews, this is a real possibility. Anyone who is familiar with the Israeli political scene knows exactly which set of values would come to the fore: the apartheid ones, not the democratic ones. The leadership would come up with some way of disenfranchising Palestinians in order to prevent the emergence of a democratic majority.
Presently, Israel has no constitution that guarantees the rights of individuals. As a result, there are a number of laws that discriminate against Palestinians on the basis of race. For example, 93% of the land in Israel is, by law, under the trusteeship of the Jewish National Fund. By the JNF's constitution, this land is for the exclusive use of Jews - it may not be rented or leased by Palestinians. Probably the most revealing laws were the ones that were passed in Israel's early days in order to create its "Jewish character". One such law, passed after three quarters of the Palestinian population was expelled in 1948, stripped the refugees of the citizenship that they were entitled to (by international law) as rightful residents of the area that came under Israeli control, and facilitated the theft of their land. These laws and others are discussed in detail in Uri Davis's book "Israel: An Apartheid State".
All of this concerns just the situation within Israel. The racist character of the regime is actually far more obvious in the occupied Palestinian territories, where Arabs cannot vote in state elections at all and are subjected to arbitrary and brutal collective punishment, while Jews, who live in fortified Jewish-only towns connected by Jewish-only roads, have maximal rights and freedoms as they use resources stolen from Palestinians. It's basically a situation of liberal democracy for the Jews, military dictatorship for the Arabs.
I encourage everybody to find out about the occupation that they're funding by reading the reports of human rights groups, and then to act on it.
Oct. 30, 2002
[This article was originally published as an editorial in the Daily Collegian, the student-run newspaper for the University of Massachusetts Amherst]
It's important for Americans because of the centrality of the Middle East and Israel to American foreign policy. Israel gets far more aid from the U.S. than any other country does - about $5 billion a year, by conservative estimates - more than all of black Africa combined. The U.S. also provides diplomatic support for Israel. For instance, America goes against the rest of the world and vetoes United Nations Security Council resolutions that Israel disapproves of, like those supporting the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The issue of whether Israel is a democracy or an apartheid state is particularly important for the UMass community because the University has set a precedent for institutional political involvement in questions of apartheid, when it agreed in 1977 to sell off its investments in businesses that supported apartheid South Africa. At the time, the Board of Trustees inserted a clause in the university's investment guidelines stipulating that the University should not use its investments to support apartheid regimes. Currently, the University invests in businesses that support Israel, and it holds State of Israel bonds. So the issue of whether Israel is or is not an apartheid state is one that should concern us all.
I believe, and will try to persuade you, that although Israel has certain democratic features, it is essentially an apartheid state. This is not a contradiction: the United States had features of a democracy when millions of blacks were slaves and the Indians were being exterminated. Israeli society is deeply committed to certain democratic values like individual rights, elections in which all adult citizens can vote, and an independent court system. On the basis of these values, certain supporters of Israel have managed to persuade the world that Israel is deep down a democracy. But Israeli society is also extremely racist, and its racist laws and practices determine the character of the state to a greater extent than its democratic values do. Because of this racism, the democratic features that I've named are constantly being undermined.
Here's one way to think about it: the supporters of Israel that I've mentioned don't deny that Israel has a Jewish character. They say that it's both Jewish and democratic. In my mind, these two characterizations are contradictory. A state can either be democratic, or it can be Jewish, but not both. The contradiction can lay low and avoid being noticed, as long as there's an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel. Right now, that's the case: because the majority of Palestinians living in Israel in 1948 were expelled and not allowed to return, and because of large-scale Jewish immigration, about 80-percent of Israeli citizens are Jewish. It's impossible for the 20-percent of citizens who are Palestinian to democratically form a government and to replace the racial regime with a true democracy, where all citizens are equal before the law.
In fact, the Palestinian minority has had a hard time using its votes to gain any real concessions, because the Jewish political parties have an informal agreement among themselves that no coalition government should be formed in which the Arab political parties hold the balance of power. That means that the Arab parties never have the power to cause the government to collapse, something that the small Jewish political parties often threaten to do in order to win concessions from the ruling coalition. Another strike against Arab parties is the law that empowers the government to disqualify the candidates of any party that opposes the Jewish character of the state. This law has been used to disqualify candidates for calling for a democratic state, in which all citizens have equal rights.
The true test of which set of values determine the character of the state of Israel is what would happen if Arabs were no longer a small minority, but became a majority. Considering the fact that Palestinians in Israel have a far higher birth rate than Jews, this is a real possibility. Anyone who is familiar with the Israeli political scene knows exactly which set of values would come to the fore: the apartheid ones, not the democratic ones. The leadership would come up with some way of disenfranchising Palestinians in order to prevent the emergence of a democratic majority.
Presently, Israel has no constitution that guarantees the rights of individuals. As a result, there are a number of laws that discriminate against Palestinians on the basis of race. For example, 93% of the land in Israel is, by law, under the trusteeship of the Jewish National Fund. By the JNF's constitution, this land is for the exclusive use of Jews - it may not be rented or leased by Palestinians. Probably the most revealing laws were the ones that were passed in Israel's early days in order to create its "Jewish character". One such law, passed after three quarters of the Palestinian population was expelled in 1948, stripped the refugees of the citizenship that they were entitled to (by international law) as rightful residents of the area that came under Israeli control, and facilitated the theft of their land. These laws and others are discussed in detail in Uri Davis's book "Israel: An Apartheid State".
All of this concerns just the situation within Israel. The racist character of the regime is actually far more obvious in the occupied Palestinian territories, where Arabs cannot vote in state elections at all and are subjected to arbitrary and brutal collective punishment, while Jews, who live in fortified Jewish-only towns connected by Jewish-only roads, have maximal rights and freedoms as they use resources stolen from Palestinians. It's basically a situation of liberal democracy for the Jews, military dictatorship for the Arabs.
I encourage everybody to find out about the occupation that they're funding by reading the reports of human rights groups, and then to act on it.
Oct. 30, 2002
[This article was originally published as an editorial in the Daily Collegian, the student-run newspaper for the University of Massachusetts Amherst]
For more information:
http://www.westmasspac.org/straussisraelde...
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