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    Depends what you call "the whole state"

    (Also Arabs are being forcibly evicted and their homes bulldozed in East Jerusalem which Israel claims)

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      Those demolitions are vile and Jerusalem is clearly being used by the right to test how many racist abuses it can get away with when such cases go to the Israel Supreme Court. But my parallel again would be the revival of segregation and gerrymandering in the Deep South. It's not (yet) a fascist regime that bans and imprisons all opposition parties and restricts citizenship laws to one dominant ethnicity.

      These distinctions may seem pedantic and small when weighed against the huge suffering of the victims but I would argue that distinctions matter when we use language like fascist and apartheid in a sloppy, imprecise, over-generalized way that weakens our argument. The problem is that we will have already used up the force of those words if and when Netanyahu or his successors turn all Israeli cities into apartheid cities using fascist tactics of paralegal violence, or the equivalent happens in a European or American democracy.
      Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 13-07-2019, 03:15.

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        Not that it matters but I don't think I have ever used the word fascist to describe the Israeli regime (though I may have I suppose). I think it is approaching that but not there yet.

        Apartheid however. Israel practices apartheid. It practices something much worse than South Africa did (pretty much all South Africans who visit will tell you that, from Mandela to Tutu to Gman to the bloke I met in Hebron who was tortured in Johannesburg). The situation in Gaza and the West Bank is so bad so vicious so brutal and appalling so racist and so fucked up that we should never try to sugar coat it.

        Like I said the situation in Israel is different. It's a legally enshrined racist discrimination. Is that a form of apartheid? I'd argue that it is but that ultimately that is not the point any more than the fact that Israel is a country which is tolerant towards LGBT people. Deflecting attention from their hideous racially motivated brutal murderous war crimes by saying "look Arab Israelis have the vote" is exactly what they want you to do.

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          I don't dispute or minimize any of the outrageous vileness of the occupation but I believe it is better politically and in a thread like this to focus upon its own unique aspects rather using a term that makes parallels with a regime in a different time and place that was vile in its own unique ways. Such parallels can themselves cause distractions.

          Where I think I was wrong above was making my own parallels with Florida, which I now think were dumb. I was getting carried away on good vacation vibes there; the food and the Arab market in Accro are amazing but can act like a blindfold to the context, for which I apologize.
          Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 13-07-2019, 14:47.

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            Why should one not make comparisons when they are relevant and appropriate?

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              Comparisons are OK provided they are not reductive and don't obscure differences. I think we have to use them cautiously, otherwise we can be accused of sloganeering, where the phrase apartheid or fascism stands in place of proper explanations and analysis.

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                But in this case it’s very specific.Legally enshrined racist discrimination where two people living 100 meters apart have different rights in law because they are of different ethnicities or religions. An Israeli settler who might be born in Melbourne or Kazakhstan has the right to vote and full legal rights. A Palestinian whose family has lived on the same land for generations has none.

                there is another historical precedent one can use, but that understandably is eschewed.

                Calling the situation in the Occupied Territories apartheid seems absolutely appropriate. The only reason not to make the comparison is that Likud supporters don’t like it.

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                  It is apartheid. It's an apartheid state. It's so similar to apartheid South Africa.

                  There's also a strong element of fascism thrown in there. What the Nazis did to the Jews before the Holocaust is being recreated in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

                  And almost every single western government has been complicit in this.

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                    Hurrah for Sheffield - still wedded to the Agit Prop and gesture politics of the 1970s

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                      https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/polit...a-state-419511

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                        [URL]https://twitter.com/jehadabusalim/status/1153363792409051136?s=21[/URL]

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                          I've more or less reached the point now where I feel like anyone not actively boycotting Israel is supporting all of this

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                            I read about this today along with other acts of seizure. I didn't know how complicit some groups were in all of this, for example the Greek Orthodox Church.

                            Boycotting this apartheid state is one course of action but it needs to be a complete boycott.

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                              How it might have been different

                              “The future of Palestine must be founded, legally speaking, as a ‘bi-national state,’” Shumsky quotes from a 1926 article by Jabotinsky, the ideological leader of Revisionist Zionism. “And not just Palestine. Every land that has an ethnic minority, of even the smallest kind, would need, after all, according to our deeply held views, to adapt its legal regime to that fact and become a bi-tri-national or quadri-national state.”

                              The Land of Israel, Ben-Gurion wrote in a 1930 article, “will be a federal state…in such a way that at no point in time will there be Arab rule over Jews or Jewish rule over Arabs.” A year later, the text of that article became the platform for Mapai, Ben Gurion’s party, which dominated Israeli politics from 1948 until 1977.

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                                There's a great clip going round of Gideon Levy speaking at an event a few days ago talking about how anyone supporting the "two state solution" (quote marks very much intentional) is by now part of the problem. I've only seen it on facebook or I';d like it here.

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                                  Hang on, found it

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                                    https://972mag.com/nation-state-law-...rtheid/142505/

                                    An excellent read.

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                                      https://972mag.com/israel-no-excepti...rtheid/142412/

                                      And another.

                                      But I guess I'm preaching to the converted on this thread.

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                                        I am learning alot here from you both, keep it coming.

                                        I think the West gave South Africa a pass for decades too. This was one of the reasons many African and Asian countries boycotted the 1966 World cup and the 1976 Olympics over the West maintaining sporting relations with Apartheid South Africa well into the 1970's (and official tours in the 1980's).

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                                          [URL]https://twitter.com/asafronel/status/1160600358302994432?s=21[/URL]

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                                            Israel bans Democrats at Trump's say-so.

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                                              Even AIPAC thinks this is a bad move

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                                                This tells you everything you need to know about both the men in this story. May they both spend their final years behind bars, which will of course never happen....

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                                                  Trump had told Rashida Tlaib to go home. Perhaps when he found that's what she was planning on doing he asked for her to be barred entry to Israel.

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                                                    It's an encapsulation of turning all people of Palestinian descent into stateless persons; a new form of genocide in the sense that the modern world is organized into states so not having a state makes your survival as a people untenable. And it's deliberate, not genocide as unintentional by-product.

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