Comment by shykes
10 hours ago
> Israel has a large portion of its population completely disenfranchised.
Care to elaborate? As far as I know, this is false. All Israeli citizens 18 or older can vote; there are no voting restrictions based on race, religion, gender or property; prisoners can vote (unlike in many US states for example); permanent residents who are not citizens cannot vote in national elections but may vote in municipal elections (not the case in the US). National turnout ranges between 65% and 75%.
Minorities are well represented: Arab and Druze citizens vote and have representation in the Knesset.
I struggle to find any dimension in which your statement is correct.
Very obviously, I’m referring to the Palestinians in the “Palestinian Territories” being de facto governed by Israel and are not allowed to vote in Israeli elections.
There is nothing obvious about that statement. In fact it's catastrophically wrong.
Palestinians in Gaza have been governed by Hamas since 2006. Before that, they had been governed by the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) since 1994.
Palestinians in Judea and Samaria ("West bank") have been governed by the Palestinian Authority continuously since 1994, with the exception of Area C.
Palestinians who live there are NOT "de facto governed" by Israel. They pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority; receive birth certificates, IDs, business licenses and social security payments from the P.A.; Go to schools, hospitals, courts, police stations and jails run by the P.A. And most importantly, they vote in elections run by the P.A. To say that they are "de facto governed" by Israel is ridiculous, and shows a lack of basic understanding of Israel and Palestine, and the conflict between them.
"The exception of Area C" is doing a lot of work in this argument. That's 61% of the territory of the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria") (those scare quotes also doing a lot of work).
To counter your list of things that the PA does de facto control, I will add: who controls the criminal court system? The checkpoints which lead to the outside world? The airspace? The ability to import and export goods? The roads? The territorial contiguity of Areas A and B? The decisions on building new settlements?
Aside from the municipal things you mentioned, which in most places in the world are controlled by subnational entities, Israel is in de facto control of the lives and futures of all 15 million people "from the river to the sea", roughly half of them Jews and half of them Arabs, while only one of those groups has what anyone in the West could consider to be a normal existence.
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I shouldn’t even have to argue here. Access to the West Bank is controlled by Israel. That is de facto governance.
At best the Palestinian Territories have “quasi-governmental control.” I’m saying this as someone who isn’t particularly pro-Palestine. Pretending that Israel isn’t de facto the government of the Palestinian Territories is an unserious position.
By de facto I mean explicitly not de jure.
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The person you're responding to said they were unable to vote in Israeli elections. You said "no, they're able to, uhh, not vote in the case of those under Hamas and they're able to vote in elections held by the Palestinian authority in the case of those in the west bank." I don't know a ton about this, but I don't believe the Palestinian authority elections are the same as the Israeli elections. As I understand it, the right to vote is gated behind a citizenship process that is restrictive enough to generally prevent Palestinians from obtaining it.
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Counterpoint, Palestinians (many of whom were not alive in 2006, as they are children) are not exactly drenched in sovereignty at the moment.
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Nakba.
Wow can you stop spreading misinformation.
Palestinians living in the Palestinian Territories are not Israeli citizens and cannot vote. I would say the Palestinian Territories are occupied, not part of Israel (though Bibi definitely has a sizable camp in his government that would love to make it so).
Do we expect occupied peoples to have a vote? sort of depends how you define democracy. Under an American interpretation (no taxation without representation, 1 person 1 vote) there’s a good argument that you should count occupied peoples.
It’s never so simple is it
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Yes, but how many adults in land controlled by Israel are Israeli citizens?