Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Onward to apartheid in Greater Israel

The surprise agreement bringing Israel's leading opposition party into the governing coalition will have uncertain impacts.  Andrew Sullivan has the rundown - I tend to think it makes a disastrous attack on Iran somewhat less likely.


I'm less optimistic about the effect on apartheid in Greater Israel, where there's some bad news:
  • American Congressman Joe Walsh supports soft ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, with annexation, second-class citizenship for Palestinians and incentives to leave the country for Jordan.
That second proposal is only somewhat different from the present situation, where there's a longstanding, tacit agreement that a ruling majority will not rely on Arab parties to survive no confidence votes.  (Sorry I can't find a link referencing this, please leave one if you've got one in the comments.)

To The Point discusses Israel's decision to exclude visiting foreigners whose political viewpoints it dislikes (the US has also done this in the past, but I don't know of it happening recently for people not supporting violence).  The show discusses more extensively Peter Beinart's book, which seems to make a lot of sense about how Israel is betraying the democratic dream and what American Jews should do about it.

While I think partial democracies can last for a long time, they're not stable at a fixed level of partial democracy but instead change over time.  While it usually changes towards improvement, that's not always the case.  The pre-Civil War American South became more oppressive in some ways in the 1800s, criminalizing attempts to discuss abolition in the press.  Israel can become more democratic in some ways (gay rights) at the same time that it may double down on oppressing West Bank Arabs.  An oppressive policy creates its own tension - do you ease off on the policy, or double down to reinforce it?  We're seeing that in play in Israel.

And despite that fact, the room for political discussion on this is still wider in Israel than in the US.  A major Israeli politician can accurately call the situation apartheid, while a retired American president gets pilloried for doing the same. Whether either country will do anything to fix the problem is much less clear.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dr. Jay Cadbury, phd.

"To The Point discusses Israel's decision to exclude visiting foreigners whose political viewpoints it dislikes (the US has also done this in the past, but I don't know of it happening recently for people not supporting violence). The show discusses more extensively Peter Beinart's book, which seems to make a lot of sense about how Israel is betraying the democratic dream and what American Jews should do about it."

And what was the policy the last time the Palestinians were in power? Current Israeli policy on foreign travelers is far more lenient than under previous Palestinian rule?

Are non Muslims allowed in Mecca?

I smell a dubble standard!

Jeffrey Davis said...

"Dubble standard"?

Maybe you mean "dybbuk".

Patrick 027 said...

I looked up dybbuk. I'm not >50% sure that Jeffrey Davis's point is the same as mine so here's mine:

1. Why should bad behavior by others give one permission to behave badly? - and in particular toward individuals who did not commit the original undesirable behavior but just happen to be in the same group?

2. The dubble standard accusation regarding past behavior makes an assumpation (I believe an incorrect one) about how such past behavior would be judged today (by the people whose judgement was questioned).

3. As for Mecca - well I'm not sure, here's some thoughts:
- sometimes we have different standards for different situations - may sound like a cop-out but really, it's sometimes justified.

It's natural to be more dissappointed in, hurt by, or concerned about another's bad choices when that person is allied with you or is your friend - this can be motivated in part by concern for your own image, which for a country is certainly important; also, it may be more realistic to hope to change a friend/ally's behavior than someone else's. We do what we can.

- Can a whole city (or whatever part is applicable - I'm not familiar with all the details here) be equivalent to a temple? - compare to Mormonism. Etc. Is Mecca being contested?

- Also, what about North Korea, etc. These were not criticized here. Should they have been mentioned? No person can fight for every just cause; fortunately there are many people.