Then that’s your own issue. Germany is a sovereign country who can choose who it wants as citizens. They have chosen to not allow in their country the kind of people who actively work against the right of a certain type of person to exist. Maybe you aren’t that kind of person and are just opposed to the creation of Israel in the middle of someone else’s country without their consent (which I agree was very wrong to do, but at some point we as civilized people need to move forward and figure out how to live in peace instead of constant fighting), but the vast majority of people who say Israel doesn’t have a right to exist are the kind of people who deny the holocaust and think Jewish people don’t have the right to exist. Germany doesn’t want any MORE of that kind of person in their country.
Now, the inverse SHOULD also be true where they require people to say that Palestine has the right to exist as a country, but that excludes most of the world right now.
But people are conflating recognizing Israel as a sovereign state with approving and condoning their actions. If all countries were held to that standard, there wouldn’t be any countries around. The shit my own country does would exclude us from being recognized as a country under that standard.
Denying the right of the Jewish state to exist is not denying the right of the Jewish people to exist IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as denying the right of white Afrikaner South Africa to exist is not a call for the genocide of white Afrikaners.
Afrikaners have a right to life and a right to safety. They don’t have the right to set up an Afrikaner ethnostate on top of the rest of the people who inhabit the land.
Germany is right 100% to combat antisemitism. They are wrong, entirely wrong, to use recognition of Israel as a metric to detect it. It is in fact extremely dangerous and ultimately a generator of antisemitism. Attitudes towards Israel should never be used as proxy for attitudes towards Jews. Anti-semitism is irrational and atavistic at its core. Opposition to the existence of Israel as such is a spectrum of nuanced, but rational positions about land, rights, justice and so on. By lumping in rational arguments with atavistic feelings, they are giving the legitimacy of reason to Anti-semitism.
In fact the majority of European antisémites have zero problem with the existence of Israel “out there”. They are more than happy to see the Jews leave Europe for the middle east. American antisémites are fantasizing that Israel will be the site of the Second Coming of Christ who will then turn all the Jews into Christians. This observation alone should tell you everything about why it is stupid and wrong to use attitudes towards Israel as proxy measures for attitudes towards Jews. When the antisémites pass your metric with flying colours whereas Jewish anti-Zionists fail it, your metric is just shit, simple as that.
Germany is making an extremely dangerous choice here, when they really don’t need to. They don’t have to take a maximalist pro-revisionist-zionism position. They are in fact taking sides in an internal debate between Jews and picking and choosing certain Jews as good and others as bad. Under these statutes Jewish people who speak out against Zionism are automatically labelled as … antisémites.
This is wrong wrong wrong in every way and it makes the world worse for Jews first and foremost.
They stay right where they are. They may need to pay reparations to Palestinians they displaced however, and any laws restricting land ownership or buying and selling to Jews should be abolished.
Who is the government? Is it an elected body? Who elects them?
Because either you appoint a government that is made from basically Hamas (that’ll be peaceful!), or you open elections for a new country where Jewish people are 73% of the population… so basically Israel again but now with officially more territory.
Universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea. That, as a basic universal principle that any reasonable person wherever in the world can assert as the basic requirement for democracy. If you don’t like that, you’re against democracy, and I don’t know if anything else can be discussed.
I never said I was against that. I’m just trying to figure out the much harder act of implementing that very simple view of the world. If you just say, “here’s a new country that’s fully democratic with equal rights for all… but it now includes both Gaza and West Bank and is 73% Jewish,” you have effectively given Israel an even larger country. Hell, in the US we have universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the ocean to the ocean… but only theoretically. Ask a black man how equal he feels in the US, even though he has all the rights and suffrage of a white man. That’s how Palestinians would be treated except probably way worse.
The details beyond that are what is actually difficult and why peace hasn’t been achieved. It’s all fine and good to say, “we should all be happy brothers” but it ignores how hard that is to do when the two brothers want each other dead. I’m in favor of a two state solution along with reparations, but that will also be very difficult to achieve, as evidenced by the many times it has been attempted over the decades.
Your math doesn’t really check out. Israel has 9 million people 2 million of which are Arabs, and Palestine is 5 million. A binational state would be about 50-50 Arab and Jewish.
Also, you’re misrepresenting the difference between the current apartheid state present in Israel/Palestine and the American problem of racism. One has different rules, different courts, different rights, and different protections there is no universal standard. The other often fails to live up to its universal standard. The latter can be improved, the former cannot.
Ultimately, getting lost in the weeds and the details has been an israeli tactic for maintaining the status quo for 50 years. The way you’re nickel and diming the details of what would happen after freedom is like asking Lincoln to produce a full account of systemic racism as a precondition to the Emancipation Proclamation. No! I don’t care what the details are and I don’t need to care, and I refuse to be bogged down with shitty minutiae while injustice reigns. The current system is unacceptable and must be dismantled in favour of universal democratic human rights. Let the people be free and let them decide. Prolonging an insufferable situation just because you don’t know every little detail about what freedom might look like is despicable, slavish and cowardly.
You’re right, I misread the number of people in the West Bank.
Israel has 10 million people, 7.3 million of which are Jewish. West Bank has 2.7 million, 670,000 of which are Jewish. Gaza has 2.3 million, roughly zero of which are Jewish. So 8 million vs 7 million.
But calling me cowardly because I’m trying to figure out a much more difficult situation than “just do it” is terrible. You have to realize it is much more difficult than just saying, “create a new government.” You are trying to do what George W Bush did in Iraq. Just get rid of the old government and start a new one. It’s that easy! Just do it! If you half-ass the implementation of the solution, you’re going to get a horrible outcome. These details need to be discussed if you want to get to your desired solution.
Then that’s your own issue. Germany is a sovereign country who can choose who it wants as citizens. They have chosen to not allow in their country the kind of people who actively work against the right of a certain type of person to exist. Maybe you aren’t that kind of person and are just opposed to the creation of Israel in the middle of someone else’s country without their consent (which I agree was very wrong to do, but at some point we as civilized people need to move forward and figure out how to live in peace instead of constant fighting), but the vast majority of people who say Israel doesn’t have a right to exist are the kind of people who deny the holocaust and think Jewish people don’t have the right to exist. Germany doesn’t want any MORE of that kind of person in their country.
Now, the inverse SHOULD also be true where they require people to say that Palestine has the right to exist as a country, but that excludes most of the world right now.
But people are conflating recognizing Israel as a sovereign state with approving and condoning their actions. If all countries were held to that standard, there wouldn’t be any countries around. The shit my own country does would exclude us from being recognized as a country under that standard.
Denying the right of the Jewish state to exist is not denying the right of the Jewish people to exist IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as denying the right of white Afrikaner South Africa to exist is not a call for the genocide of white Afrikaners.
Afrikaners have a right to life and a right to safety. They don’t have the right to set up an Afrikaner ethnostate on top of the rest of the people who inhabit the land.
Germany is right 100% to combat antisemitism. They are wrong, entirely wrong, to use recognition of Israel as a metric to detect it. It is in fact extremely dangerous and ultimately a generator of antisemitism. Attitudes towards Israel should never be used as proxy for attitudes towards Jews. Anti-semitism is irrational and atavistic at its core. Opposition to the existence of Israel as such is a spectrum of nuanced, but rational positions about land, rights, justice and so on. By lumping in rational arguments with atavistic feelings, they are giving the legitimacy of reason to Anti-semitism.
In fact the majority of European antisémites have zero problem with the existence of Israel “out there”. They are more than happy to see the Jews leave Europe for the middle east. American antisémites are fantasizing that Israel will be the site of the Second Coming of Christ who will then turn all the Jews into Christians. This observation alone should tell you everything about why it is stupid and wrong to use attitudes towards Israel as proxy measures for attitudes towards Jews. When the antisémites pass your metric with flying colours whereas Jewish anti-Zionists fail it, your metric is just shit, simple as that.
Germany is making an extremely dangerous choice here, when they really don’t need to. They don’t have to take a maximalist pro-revisionist-zionism position. They are in fact taking sides in an internal debate between Jews and picking and choosing certain Jews as good and others as bad. Under these statutes Jewish people who speak out against Zionism are automatically labelled as … antisémites.
This is wrong wrong wrong in every way and it makes the world worse for Jews first and foremost.
So what is your solution to all of the people living in Israel (not in the occupied West Bank)? Where do they go?
Around 30% if Jewish Israelis weren’t even born there. Most of the rest are just one generation in.
They stay right where they are. They may need to pay reparations to Palestinians they displaced however, and any laws restricting land ownership or buying and selling to Jews should be abolished.
Who is the government? Is it an elected body? Who elects them?
Because either you appoint a government that is made from basically Hamas (that’ll be peaceful!), or you open elections for a new country where Jewish people are 73% of the population… so basically Israel again but now with officially more territory.
Universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea. That, as a basic universal principle that any reasonable person wherever in the world can assert as the basic requirement for democracy. If you don’t like that, you’re against democracy, and I don’t know if anything else can be discussed.
The details beyond that are not for me to decide.
I never said I was against that. I’m just trying to figure out the much harder act of implementing that very simple view of the world. If you just say, “here’s a new country that’s fully democratic with equal rights for all… but it now includes both Gaza and West Bank and is 73% Jewish,” you have effectively given Israel an even larger country. Hell, in the US we have universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the ocean to the ocean… but only theoretically. Ask a black man how equal he feels in the US, even though he has all the rights and suffrage of a white man. That’s how Palestinians would be treated except probably way worse.
The details beyond that are what is actually difficult and why peace hasn’t been achieved. It’s all fine and good to say, “we should all be happy brothers” but it ignores how hard that is to do when the two brothers want each other dead. I’m in favor of a two state solution along with reparations, but that will also be very difficult to achieve, as evidenced by the many times it has been attempted over the decades.
Your math doesn’t really check out. Israel has 9 million people 2 million of which are Arabs, and Palestine is 5 million. A binational state would be about 50-50 Arab and Jewish.
Also, you’re misrepresenting the difference between the current apartheid state present in Israel/Palestine and the American problem of racism. One has different rules, different courts, different rights, and different protections there is no universal standard. The other often fails to live up to its universal standard. The latter can be improved, the former cannot.
Ultimately, getting lost in the weeds and the details has been an israeli tactic for maintaining the status quo for 50 years. The way you’re nickel and diming the details of what would happen after freedom is like asking Lincoln to produce a full account of systemic racism as a precondition to the Emancipation Proclamation. No! I don’t care what the details are and I don’t need to care, and I refuse to be bogged down with shitty minutiae while injustice reigns. The current system is unacceptable and must be dismantled in favour of universal democratic human rights. Let the people be free and let them decide. Prolonging an insufferable situation just because you don’t know every little detail about what freedom might look like is despicable, slavish and cowardly.
You’re right, I misread the number of people in the West Bank.
Israel has 10 million people, 7.3 million of which are Jewish. West Bank has 2.7 million, 670,000 of which are Jewish. Gaza has 2.3 million, roughly zero of which are Jewish. So 8 million vs 7 million.
But calling me cowardly because I’m trying to figure out a much more difficult situation than “just do it” is terrible. You have to realize it is much more difficult than just saying, “create a new government.” You are trying to do what George W Bush did in Iraq. Just get rid of the old government and start a new one. It’s that easy! Just do it! If you half-ass the implementation of the solution, you’re going to get a horrible outcome. These details need to be discussed if you want to get to your desired solution.