<HTML><HEAD> <META charset=US-ASCII http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1106" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff"> <DIV> <DIV>In a message dated 4/9/2004 9:27:11 AM Eastern Standard Time, michael098762001@earthlink.net writes:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><BR><FONT face=Arial>Myself, i would be as proud to be Jewish as any ethnic group.  But I would have to take a hard and open stand against a single-race "Jewish" state, particularly one forcefit in the multi-ethnic Palestine and practicing Apartheid on its native peoples and participating in terrorizing the region with the world's #1 superbrute state, US. </FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV> <DIV>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.)</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>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.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>There are also longstanding Christian, Circassian, Bedouin and Druze communities in Israel.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Please note that none of the above is an endoresement of Ehud Barak or the Likud Party.</DIV> <DIV>If I lived in Israel, I would have voted Labor or Meretz (soon to become Yahad) in the last election.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Marion</DIV> <DIV> </DIV></BODY></HTML>