Comment by hypeit
1 year ago
I don't believe that might makes right and just because Israel is armed and backed by the West does not give them impunity to steal land. 1948 was not hundreds of years ago, there are people who are still alive who were ethnically cleansed from their land and forced into Gaza. Palestinians have a much stronger right of return than anyone who wasn't living in Palestine prior to 1948.
I think you might believe might makes right more than you realize, because, as I've laid out, it's easier to make a moral case for Israeli sovereignty over Tel Aviv than for American control of Texas --- you advocate against Israel because it seems like a plausible cause, and that plausibility is denominated in international military might. You don't advocate for the return of Texas to the people of Mexico because you viscerally understand it's never going to happen.
That being the case (maybe it isn't!), there are two big problems with your strategy:
1. It isn't possible. They're not going anywhere.
2. It's incoherent. There are very few countries in the world with a morally-hygienic claim to their land. Certainly, with the possible exception of Egypt, none of Israel's neighbors can! They're all of them creations of France and the UK.
You're making a lot of assumptions about my position. I most certainly do think we owe both indigenous people and Black people massive amounts of land reparations in the US.
Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was disbanded. It has less support than ever before politically.
Several additional problems with your argument past what D.C. just said:
1. Israel has in fact immense support, far more than the South African government ever had.
2. Apartheid South Africa was a system of minoritarian rule, which does not exist within the 1967 borders of Israel (further, Arab Israelis have nominally full citizenship rights, and in fact fight for the IDF; they are a minority, unlike the victims of Apartheid, but they're also not living under an apartheid system).
3. For a majority of Israeli Jewish people, there is no other place in the world for them to go. There is no prospect of a negotiated settlement that forecloses on a Jewish state. Their BATNA is war. That wasn't the case with the Boers.
In these kinds of discussions I feel like people conflate the situation in Gaza and the West Bank with that of Israel proper. Continued Israeli occupation of Gaza probably is untenable! That occupation will eventually be disbanded, the way South African Apartheid was. But here we're talking about the entire state of Israel. Like I said, start with Texas, because that'll happen first.
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> Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was disbanded.
South Africa wasn't disbanded, not even close. Apartheid ended more-or-less peacefully; non-whites were given the vote; and more-or-less democratic elections have been held ever since.