The Israel Discussion Thread

[Super Dude]

I thought this would be a more neutral, much healthier form under which to discuss any goings on in the region.  That said, amazing article from a Mr. Friedman of the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/opinion/02friedman.html?_r=1

B.E., Before Egypt. A.E., After Egypt.

I’m meeting a retired Israeli general at a Tel Aviv hotel. As I take my seat, he begins the conversation with: “Well, everything we thought for the last 30 years is no longer relevant.”

That pretty much sums up the disorienting sense of shock and awe that the popular uprising in Egypt has inflicted on the psyche of Israel’s establishment. The peace treaty with a stable Egypt was the unspoken foundation for every geopolitical and economic policy in Israel for the last 35 years, and now it’s gone. It’s as if Americans suddenly woke up and found both Mexico and Canada plunged into turmoil on the same day.

“Everything that once anchored our world is now unmoored,” remarked Mark Heller, a Tel Aviv University strategist. “And it is happening right at a moment when nuclearization of the region hangs in the air.”

This is a perilous time for Israel, and its anxiety is understandable. But I fear Israel could make its situation even more perilous if it succumbs to the argument one hears from a number of senior Israeli officials today that the events in Egypt prove that Israel can’t make a lasting peace with the Palestinians. It’s wrong and dangerous.

To be sure, Hosni Mubarak, Israel’s longtime ally, deserves all the wrath being directed at him. The best time to make any big, hard decision is when you are at your maximum strength. You’ll always think and act more clearly. For the last 20 years, President Mubarak has had all the leverage he could ever want to truly reform Egypt’s economy and build a moderate, legitimate political center to fill the void between his authoritarian state and the Muslim Brotherhood. But Mubarak deliberately maintained the political vacuum between himself and the Islamists so that he could always tell the world, “It’s either me or them.” Now he is trying to reform in a panic with no leverage. Too late.

But Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is in danger of becoming the Mubarak of the peace process. Israel has never had more leverage vis-à-vis the Palestinians and never had more responsible Palestinian partners. But Netanyahu has found every excuse for not putting a peace plan on the table. The Americans know it. And thanks to the nasty job that Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV just did in releasing out of context all the Palestinian concessions — to embarrass the Palestinian leadership — it’s now obvious to all how far the Palestinians have come.

No, I do not know if this Palestinian leadership has the fortitude to close a deal. But I do know this: Israel has an overwhelming interest in going the extra mile to test them.

Why? With the leaders of both Egypt and Jordan scrambling to shuffle their governments in an effort to stay ahead of the street, two things can be said for sure: Whatever happens in the only two Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel, the moderate secularists who had a monopoly of power will be weaker and the previously confined Muslim Brotherhood will be stronger. How much remains to be seen.

As such, it is virtually certain that the next Egyptian government will not have the patience or room that Mubarak did to maneuver with Israel. Same with the new Jordanian cabinet. Make no mistake: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has nothing to do with sparking the demonstrations in Egypt and Jordan, but Israeli-Palestinian relations will be impacted by the events in both countries.

If Israel does not make a concerted effort to strike a deal with the Palestinians, the next Egyptian government will “have to distance itself from Israel because it will not have the stake in maintaining the close relationship that Mubarak had,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster. With the big political changes in the region, “if Israel remains paranoid and messianic and greedy it will lose all its Arab friends.”

To put it bluntly, if Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

What the turmoil in Egypt also demonstrates is how much Israel is surrounded by a huge population of young Arabs and Muslims who have been living outside of history — insulated by oil and autocracy from the great global trends. But that’s over.

“Today your legitimacy has to be based on what you deliver,” the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, explained to me in his Ramallah office. “Gone are the days when you can say, ‘Deal with me because the other guys are worse.’ ”

I had given up on Netanyahu’s cabinet and urged the U.S. to walk away. But that was B.E. — Before Egypt. Today, I believe President Obama should put his own peace plan on the table, bridging the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and demand that the two sides negotiate on it without any preconditions. It is vital for Israel’s future — at a time when there is already a global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state — that it disentangle itself from the Arabs’ story as much as possible. There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way.

says: I think this is a pretty fair and balanced article, as it makes neither side look like a bad guy, merely as being trapped by the security dilemma which they should ignore at this time to make strides towards lasting peace.  And I do like Friedman's idea of getting Obama to be proactive on that front.  Bush was really pro-Israel, but he made zero effort to actually get aggressive with both sides and both in getting them to the table and keeping them there until a breakthrough was reached.

[Super Dude]

Nobody?

[Perpetual Change]

Sorry, Superdude. I'm still not completely sure where I stand on this. Israel does have a problem with being illegitimized. But I really do wonder why we're supposed to take it legitimately?

And, as always, I'm completely for the United States not playing around in the middle east.

[Riceball]

Sorry, Superdude. I'm still not completely sure where I stand on this. Isreal does have a problem with being illegitimized. But I really do wonder why we're supposed to take it legitimately?

And, as always, I'm completely for the United States not playing around in the middle east.

+1

They have far too big a conflict of interest relating to oil. Plus, from what I've read, Middle Eastern citizenary is overwhelmingly different from the US, and as such they should keep their paws nose out

(I think I just made up two words )

[ack44]

I still have no idea what a Jewish state is

[El Barto]

Whatever happens, happens. 

Will Hosni's successor be as friendly with Israel?  Probably not.  Will he abdicate the treaty?  Probably not. 

Deal with it.

[Super Dude]

Sorry, Superdude. I'm still not completely sure where I stand on this. Israel does have a problem with being illegitimized. But I really do wonder why we're supposed to take it legitimately?

And, as always, I'm completely for the United States not playing around in the middle east.

Perhaps because they are recognized by numerous members of the UN as a legitimate state?

Actually, fuck this.  I know exactly where this discussion is gonna end up.  I quit.

[Perpetual Change]

Super Dude, I don't know what I did to deserve your wrath, but I just don't get it. The whole problem exists because when Jews and Arabs sat down at a table together, the UN decided to force a plan that the Jews were OK with but that the Arabs never accepted. What are you expecting Obama to be able to do at a new meeting table?

That, in sum, is why the Israel arrangement is the UN's greatest fumble ever. And the violence which has never stopped is directly related, in a lot of ways, to the fact that the UN arrangement was never agreed upon by most of the people it effected.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that not the case?

It's hard for me to get this whole situation down when I've always heard such conflicted things about the very core.

[ack44]

... never agreed upon by most of the people it effected.

Correct me if I'm wrong

I see wat you did thar.

[Super Dude]

Super Dude, I don't know what I did to deserve your wrath, but I just don't get it. The whole problem exists because when Jews and Arabs sat down at a table together, the UN decided to force a plan that the Jews were OK with but that the Arabs never accepted. What are you expecting Obama to be able to do at a new meeting table?

That, in sum, is why the Israel arrangement is the UN's greatest fumble ever. And the violence which has never stopped is directly related, in a lot of ways, to the fact that the UN arrangement was never agreed upon by most of the people it effected.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that not the case?

It's hard for me to get this whole situation down when I've always heard such conflicted things about the very core.

I wasn't directing my wrath at you specifically, I'm just tired of fighting this fight.  Instead of laboring through the explanation I'll just show you this: https://www.mideastweb.org/ - Literally everything you need to know about the conflict, from a brief introduction to historical relations between Jews and Muslims, to the ancient land of Judea, to the subsequent Ottoman territory, all the way to the recent secret Palestinian peace plan.  And yes, it's balanced.

[Perpetual Change]

Thanks man, I'll check it  out.


Also, I've never participated in this argument before so be easy on me 

[AcidLameLTE]

Looks like Louis Theroux has a documentary coming out about "ultra-Zionists" :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12347050

Louis Theroux spends time with ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers and discovers a small, but very committed subculture.

On a hilltop in the Northern West Bank, not far from the large Palestinian city of Nablus, I met 17-year-old Yair Lieberman.

A part-time labourer and student, Yair's home was a makeshift canvas-covered structure, only slightly more solid than a tent, which he shared with three other young men. The bed was a tangled mess of sheets, in the style of a conventional teenager's, and hung around the dwelling were posters - though not of pop groups, but of favourite rabbis. Outside, in the neighbouring lots, was a scattering of fifteen or so caravans and trailers - the outpost of Havat Gilad.

Like the settlements up and down the West Bank, Havat Gilad is illegal under international law. It lies miles inside the territory won by Israel in the 1967 war and the vast majority of the surrounding population is Palestinian. But Havat Gilad is also illegal under Israeli law. Electricity comes from a generator. Water is trucked in.

Yair moved up to Havat Gilad a couple of years ago. On a tour around the hilltop, I asked him why he'd decided to make his life in this ramshackle encampment, at the end of a dirt road, on an inhospitable hilltop among Arab olive groves.

"If we're not here there's a [Palestinian] city and we don't want another [Palestinian] city," he said.

What, I wondered, would be so bad about another Palestinian city?

"Because it's my land! It's the land of Israel. It's not the land of Palestinians."

Yair's beliefs are shared by a hardcore religious nationalist fringe of Jewish Israelis who have chosen to make their home up and down the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. They say that those areas belong by right to the Jewish people - a title claim based mainly on the bible.

The fact that there are nearly ten times as many Arabs as there are Jews in the West Bank, with their own dreams of a national homeland, they regard as a side-issue.

I was making a documentary about these ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers, called The Ultra-Zionists. For several weeks I'd been spending time in some of the most hardcore and uncompromising sections of the Israeli nationalist community - the Jewish enclave in Hebron, in the hilltops in the north of the West Bank, and in the crowded Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem - choosing to come at a time when peace talks were ongoing and the extreme settlers were therefore more embattled.

For many years I'd been fascinated by extreme nationalists - and I'd hoped the issue of the West Bank and its settlement by extreme religious Jews would be a chance to understand this mindset at first hand.

The day before meeting Yair I'd travelled up to the nearby outpost of Givat Ronen, known to be, if anything, an even more radical and nationalistic community. Early that morning I'd learned that the Israeli army had taken the fairly unusual step of actually enforcing the law against the extreme settlers and dismantling a small house and a goat shed.

Given that the whole community was illegal under Israeli law, the army's action was somewhat tokenistic. But even this was enough to set off local Jewish settler youths who reacted by stoning the shops in a nearby Palestinian village and setting fire to the hillside.

It might be easy to write off these "ultra-Zionists" as people on the fringe of a fringe in terms of their outlook and beliefs. And it is true that many, if not most, Israelis say they would be happy to pull out of most of the occupied territories if they were confident it would lead to peace.

But what makes the extreme settlers more troubling is that they also enjoy a degree of support from the Israeli state. Surprising as it may seem, many illegal outposts like Yair's are protected by the Israeli army. And in East Jerusalem and Hebron the Jewish presence is fully legal under Israeli law and underwritten and guaranteed by a vast security force.

The anger and despair of the Palestinians at the settling of foreigners in their midst is palpable. Many say they would be happy to have Jewish neighbours but not while they don't enjoy the same rights or have the same sovereignty. Towards the end of my stay, one of the settler security guards in East Jerusalem shot and killed a Palestinian man. Rioting was widespread and it seemed to me how close the country was to a third intifada.

Not long after that I left Jerusalem, but not before I visited Yair again. Once again I found him friendly, likeable, and yet profoundly lacking in perspective of how his national aspirations were trampling on the rights of millions of Palestinians.

With the very vague possibility of peace on the horizon, I asked if he wasn't worried about being told to leave.

"If they want they can take me by power and I'm going to come back illegally," he said. "This is our land. You can come and kill us and do whatever you want. We're going to die for this country."

[rumborak]

I know this must be very disconcerting for Israel to see their fragile alliances being shred to pieces right now, but in the end it was also just a question of time and in fact it is amazing this lasted for 30 years.
The thing IMHO it comes down to is that the public actually knows what they want, not just what they don't want. It seems the Egyptians want more freedom, and that can never be a bad thing.

rumborak

[Super Dude]

I mean it remains to be seen whether the Muslim Brotherhood can indeed provide said freedom, but we'll have to wait on that one.

[ack44]

I'm having serious trouble trying to understand what "Jew" means. The first definition I found is,

"A member of the people and cultural community whose traditional religion is Judaism and who trace their origins through the ancient Hebrew people of Israel to Abraham"

... which clearly doesn't fit the way the word is used, since we still call non-practicing Jews "Jewish." The reason this is so confusing is because in the ancient times they didn't distinguish between race, religion or nation, elements that, in theory, have no connection whatsoever in Western democracies. It seems like the vagueness of this term covers up to an extent the ideology of Israel as a race-based nation. Except it's not the modern understanding of a race, which is purely biological. It's the more ancient view of a race, where there are spiritual characteristics as well (chosen people). Of course this is a view that originated when conversions to different religions very rarely occurred and when kings would intermarry their children as signs of peace. It's the view of a god having his own group of people. And this view seems to have died out in other parts of the world (as "my god is stronger than your god" was replaced by monotheism) but it survived in the traditions of the Jews. The contradictions of modern Israel seem to be a result of trying to integrate democracy with this old race identity. There seems to be a need to define Israel as "Jewish state" in order to make sense of its existence, and yet the term "Jew" is still just a vague idea in people's minds, and vague ideas are problematic in politics.

[PlaysLikeMyung]

So, Super Dude, how many times have we explained that here now?

[Super Dude]

I'll just try to simplify it as much as possible: to be a Jew is to belong a national group that identifies most by culturo-historical commonalities.

[rumborak]

I don't see how the definition of "Jew" is in any way different than that of "Christian" in that sense, other than that being Jewish is officially considered hereditary.

rumborak

[Super Dude]

It's more complex than that, but it's damned hard to explain why.  One part is the hereditary issue, but there's also that thing about Jews who identify as such and are atheists or totally non-practising.  And although our culture and history is spiritualized, our secular culture and history is "consumed" (for lack of a better term) in the way American cultural history or German cultural history might, especially in the modern period.  Ugh, I wish there was a better way of grasping at what separates Judaism from Jewishness and I'll keep trying, but the best I can do right now is to tell you to watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  I know that sounds lame and unscientific (in terms of its imprecision and the reliance on a movie of all things), but just do it.  You learn a lot about how Jewish culture and Jewishness works by looking at real-world and artificial representations of other Mediterranean-based cultures.

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not saying that MBFGW is supposed to explain to you what it means to be a Jew.  I mean that the way in which it goes about explaining what it means to be Greek is similar to how I might explain what it means to be a Jew; the movie itself makes plain that it's more than a racial, national, or religious thing, but rather it encompasses all aspects of the lives of those who retain that identity, in ways that it's difficult to explain in words.

[ack44]

I'll just try to simplify it as much as possible: to be a Jew is to belong a national group that identifies most by culturo-historical commonalities.

Not all Jews have a sense of belonging to a national group. Mike Portnoy for example. When he says he's a Jew he's talking about something racial or ethnic, not something connected to anything national.

[Super Dude]

They may not have that sense, but that's the best I can do.  There is a thread floating around somewhere containing a good five or six pages of trying to get at a workable definition, look it up if you want.

[ack44]

The Dutch have apparently accepted Israel as a Jewish state.

https://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=208099

[Super Dude]

FINALLY.

This is an interesting development, considering the widespread anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish protests in the 2009 Gaza War (in fact the Netherlands were noted for their instances of protest and rhetoric that went as far as being anti-Semitic).

[rumborak]

Is this good though? I mean, I fully support the recognition of Israel as a country, but recognizing Israel as a Jewish state sounds, if anything, as a step backwards. If the Dutch are praising Israel as the only country in the ME that can call itself a modern democracy, I don't see how firmly lodging the religion into the definition of that state would help. The only effect I could see is an invitation to treat non-Jews as second-grade citizens.

rumborak

[Super Dude]

True, but identifying the state as Jewish does not mean defining it as religious to all Jews.  That's just something the religious right and the rest of the country are going to have to work out themselves.

[rumborak]

 Maybe. It just strikes me that Israel could, or maybe should, lead as an example of secularism in that region. That is, make the country a haven for the Jews of the world, but at the same time be a modern state that separates church and state.

rumborak

[Super Dude]

Maybe. It just strikes me that Israel could, or maybe should, lead as an example of secularism in that region. That is, make the country a haven for the Jews of the world, but at the same time be a modern state that separates church and state.

rumborak

Yeah, believe me, that is at the core of the state's problems right now.  In the "Israel Assassinations" thread I discussed how a lot of the domestic and foreign relations problems that beset Israel, including and especially the deal with the Palestinians, can be traced back to the religious right.  Where leftists see relations with the Palestinians as a security issue and therefore enact policies and deploy the military based on a defensive stance, where they are willing to make concessions with the PLO and other factions for lasting interstate peace, the religious right will not have it.  Rightists are the ones who go into Gaza and the West Bank, without endorsement and sometimes even with active defiance of the Israeli government, and establish settlements in what they consider the full and complete ancient kingdom of Israel.  They're the ones who, as opposed to leftists who remain in the state of war as a response to terrorism, advocate military missions in Palestinian territory because they are in favor of a one-state solution ONLY.  It's even worse because Jewish Orthodoxy also comes with automatic exemption from the Israeli army (courtesy of their own historic push to make it so), which is compulsory for all other non-Arabs.

I've always said that the one thing that the US and Israel have in common is the root of all their problems, and that's the religious right.

[rumborak]

I hear ya, and it's frankly the reason why I just can't mount much sympathy for the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Both sides still value their religious goals higher than the loss of life, and before that changes there will be no peace.

rumborak

[Super Dude]

I wouldn't say that's *totally* true; it's just the religious nuts speak the loudest, while the non-religious and leftists on either side represent the quieter moderate voice.

[ack44]

It's even worse because Jewish Orthodoxy also comes with automatic exemption from the Israeli army (courtesy of their own historic push to make it so), which is compulsory for all other non-Arabs.

 I'm assuming you're speaking of the Hassidic Jews with their black costumes and long side burns (because if I understand correctly they are the ones who are exempt from the military, for whatever reason). Are those really the people who represent the political far-right in Israel? Those guys are pretty much bums. I don't see how they could survive in the settlements.

[Super Dude]

Black costumes?  They're suits, dude.

And yes, that's them.  The only Hasids more ridiculous than them are the Diaspora anti-Zionists, who base their hatred of Israel on the fact that the messiah has not arrived.

[PlaysLikeMyung]

... bums?

They're hardly bums

[Super Dude]

Well in the sense that they demand so much of the state to its own detriment without contributing anything of their own except burdensome religious laws (amid a modern social democracy) might qualify them as such.

[ack44]

Do they even have proper jobs? My tour guide called them bums because they are tax exempt and get state support.

[Adami]

Do they even have proper jobs? My tour guide called them bums because they are tax exempt and get state support.

.....like american churches?