Comment by richardfeynman
1 year ago
2 million Palestinians live in Israel as equal citizens. They're called Israeli arabs. They disagree with you that Israel is an apartheid state. There are arab supreme court justices in Israel. Those Palestinians love Israel. There is no separate judicial system for them. There is no apartheid. There is a separate judicial system for foreigners, like people living in Gaza, just as there is in the United States.
I do not agree with Israel's policies on the West Bank, but the issue is more complicated than I suspect you think and I encourage you to read Israeli perspectives on it.
So there is no apartheid if we ignore those living under apartheid?
Gaza is not part of Israel. They have their own government (Hamas), their own military (Hamas) and their own administrative functions. Israel withdrew in 2005, forcibly pulling out every Jewish person that lived there (and Jewish people have lived there for thousands of years).
Gaza is and has been effectively occupied by Israel since 1967. It's independent from Israel in the same way that Xinjiang is independent from China. Sovereignty and autonomy in Gaza have been aspirational ideas since Sharon's 2005 disengagement. Meanwhile: only a small fraction of the population of Gaza has ever voted (they're too young to have, in the last election, wherein Hamas threw supporters of the PA off rooftops), so it's deeply misleading to describe Hamas as "their own government".
Pro-Palestinian rhetoric on this site goes off the rails in so many directions, and because it seems to be the majority opinion on the site, there are many more examples of off-the-rails comments from that side. But this assertion of Gaza's independence from Israel is one of the reliable off-the-rails pro-Israel sentiments I see here.
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A) You are ignoring the West Bank
B) Apartheid South Africa used the same excuse. That black people lived in independent bantustans who were self governing and therefor not apart of South Africa.
C) You are ignoring the fact that Israel very much controls Gaza, including every border crossing, the airspace and sea access, imposes a blockade, controls the registry, etc. Unlike apartheid South Africa, Israel does not recognize independent Palestine, let alone independent Gaza.
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