[lbo-talk] "Does the Jewishness of the neocons influence American foreign...

[C. G. Estabrook]

With respect, this is nonsense. The state that Israel most resembles is
its former ally, apartheid South Africa.  It privileges one racial group
and discriminates against others, a racial group being defined solely by
descent (i.e., one is a member not on the basis of what one says or does,
but who one's parents were).  Israel is a uniquely racist state, in that
all other states are the states of their inhabitants, but Israel is by law
the state of that one racial group worldwide. (Even racist South
proclaimed itself a white state but not a state of the "white people
worldwide.")

Since the illegal occupation and the racist settlements (only for Jews,
not for all Israeli citizens) in the Occupied Territories seem not about
to end, so long as Israel is backed by the US as its permanent aircraft
carrier in the Middle East, we should demand what was necessary in South
Africa -- an end to apartheid: one person, one vote from the Jordan to the
sea. --CGE

On Fri, 9 Apr 2004 MOTECK1457 at aol.com wrote:


> Israel is not, and never was "a single-race 'Jewish' state." Israel's
> Basic Law, (similar to the American constitution), makes racial
> discrimination illegal.  Conceptualizing the multi-ethnic and
> multi-racial Jewish people as a "race" is racist in and of itself.
> Hundreds of languages are spoken in Israel;  newspapers publish in
> scores of different languages.  Demographically speaking, the
> population of Israel is far more diverse than the population of
> Palestine.  The Jewish population in Israel includes people from
> hundreds of different countries; as diverse as Russia and Ethiopia;
> and many Jews who speak Arabic;  given that the response of many Arab
> governments to the creation of Israel in 1948 was to ratchet up the
> level of oppression against the Jewish population.  (This is ironic,
> becuase these anti-Zionist governments were encouraging increased
> Jewish emigration into "the Zionist entity."(One could argue that a
> far more effective anti-Zionist strategy on the part of governments in
> Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco etc. would have been to do everything
> possible to encourage Jews to stay and to keep them safe; rather than
> scapegoating them because they were unhappy that the modern state of
> Israel was created in 1948.)
> 
> It is also worth noting in this context that Palestinian suicide
> bombers have scored many "hits" against Israeli Arabs. To date, I have
> not heard of an instance in which Palestinians have proposed
> compensating Israeli Arabs for these tragic losses in any way.
> 
> There are also longstanding Christian, Circassian, Bedouin and Druze
> communities in Israel.
> 
> Please note that none of the above is an endoresement of Ehud Barak or
> the Likud Party. If I lived in Israel, I would have voted Labor or
> Meretz (soon to become Yahad) in the last election.
> 
> Marion
>