Also, am I the only one who dislike everyone referring to Israel as the Jewish State? And Bibi's demand that the Palestinian recogize it as a Jewish State? 25% of Israeli aren't Jewish at all, and that proportion is growing.
Honestly, can you imagine Barack Obama referring to the US as "The Christian State" and asking other nations to recognize it as such or forget their recognition, trade rights and diplomatic relations?
Well, there's hardly a comparison between Jewish and Christian. One third of the world is Christian. There's an ongoing debate in Israel (well, among some) about what it even means to be a Jewish state when like you said, 25% aren't Jewish, and 20% are Palestinian, and don't identify with the state for obvious reasons but don't want their citizenship taken away. But the problem isn't that it's a Jewish state, it's that it was established with the goal of being a Jewish state in a place where, prior to the war and exile of refugees, Jews were a minority. How to solve that problem is anybody's guess. But the bigger problem is, it's trying to continue being a Jewish state but also continue holding on to territory inhabited by 2.5 million (and growing fast) Arabs who can never be given citizenship because that would destroy the character of the state.
So you have options - annex the West Bank and its population, and in decades, Jews will be a minority in Israel. Nobody wants that.
Or, get rid out of the West Bank, like everybody's been telling you to for decades. But if you do that, you have the (admittedly somewhat legitimate, although it's been shamelessly exploited for bullshit reasons to the point that everyone sees it as bullshit by now) fact that the shape of Israel makes it somewhat vulnerable to attack. And worse, you have hundreds of thousands of settlers, a minority of whom are crazy and violent enough to fight against their own country if it tries to force them to evacuate, and nobody would ever imagine in their wildest dreams that the IDF would use the force needed to remove them.
The other problem with the above option is the allegation that if a Palestinian state is formed in the '67 borders, it will instantly become a launching pad for a new war against Israel. The politicians selling this know it's bullshit, but their audiences don't. Obviously it would make no strategic sense for any Palestinian government, even Hamas, to allow such things, since it would mean the instant re-obliteration of their country. Nobody can guarantee that in 300 years things won't change, but let's face it, in 300 years we have no guarantee that humanity will still exist, much less the current configuration of nation-states, and certainly not any of the current realities in a region like the Middle East. Asking for guarantees of safety (and then refusing to admit that the Arab countries would ever in fact make peace with Israel, rather than just ceaselessly plotting to destroy it at an opportune moment) in a region like this is absurd. Nobody says Israel can't keep having the strongest military in the region, just that they can't use it to oppress an entire population in order to take the best of its land and natural resources.
So what other options are there? Well, there's to straight up do another ethnic cleansing and kick all the Arabs out from west of the Jordan. Or annex the West Bank but don't offer citizenship to the people there, creating a full-on apartheid regime (rather than the for-all-practical-purposes apartheid regime that currently exists). Or nuke Iran and somehow start a huge war during which all the Arabs will somehow end up not on Israel's side of the river (kind of overlaps with the first one in this paragraph). But those would result in Israel getting real pariah state treatment, putting their current complaining in perspective.
Basically, the "get out of the West Bank" option is the only one that won't certainly destroy Israel as a Jewish state. That the people in charge can't comprehend this boggles my mind. I have no idea what they think is going to happen if they maintain the status quo, which is what they're trying their damndest to be able to do.
The one possible way to avoid having to do this completely is to go into negotiations with the Palestinians. This means freezing settlements, which means pissing off the rightists, but shit, I mean sometimes you have to piss people off to save your country. If you go into negotiations, you have the chance of holding onto some of the western edges of the West Bank maybe and then central Israel won't be quite so skinny. Of course then you have the major challenge of trying to figure out what land you'll swap to the Palestinians in exchange for Beitar Illit and the other blocs. I doubt anybody in the Jezreel Valley or the south Judean Hills or the Gilboa will be jumping to volunteer their neighborhood for transfer and you'll have to sell the entire country on that too.
Again, I can't figure out why it is that rightist politicians act as if these realities don't exist. Have they really fooled themselves into thinking Israel can exist for more than 30 or 40 more years with the current setup? Do they just hope some magical solution will fall out of the sky and/or God will provide miracles? I have no clue. But come September, the entire world is going to start the pressure and soon they won't have any more of a chance to resolve things on anything remotely resembling their terms. And well, if the voters keep supporting them, they're pretty much also getting what they deserve.
And the piss poor excuses have to stop. Before Fatah and Hamas reconciled, Netanyahu's gang made the excuse that negotiations could accomplish nothing because the PA wouldn't be representing all the Palestinians. Now that they have reconciled, they have the excuse that they can't negotiate because Hamas are terrorists - and they're telling Fateh to "tear up" the agreement with Hamas. For what? So they can go back to the original excuse, I guess?
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Topic: Obama Pulling the Rug on Israel? (Read 13013 times)