Forget the two-state solution, part 2

"Agreed. In fact, since 50% of Mandate Palestine in the 1947 Partition Plan was actually illegally acquired by the State of Israel in the 1948 War and sanctioned only by armistice agreements with the beligerent Arab states (not the Palestinian people)"

 You can't blame Israel for the fact that all the Arab countries rejected the UN partition and invaded the moment with British mandate ended vowing to "throw the Jews into the sea" and isntead they lost ground in the war. If they had accepted that deal in 1947 - there would be a Palestine today that would be far larger than in anyone's wildest dreams. But instead again and again and again and again, the Palestinians reject every single deal offered to them and the only result is that the next time around they are reduced to even less than they had before. Why don't they try something different for a change and trying saying "yes" instead of "no". There are something like 6 million Israelis now - thinking that they are suddenly going to evaporate is as absurd as thinking that everyone of European descent in Nother America is going to go back to Europe and that First Nations can turn the clock back to before Christopher Columbus or thinking that Celts can reclaim the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxons.

Ain't gonna happen. 

Israel is probably the only (bona fide) nation on earth which is (arguably) racially based.  I say "arguably" because one would have to argue that those adhering to the Jewish faith are a particular race, which is odd given that Rod Carew, for example, is Jewish (for those who don't know who Rod Carew is: He's an African-American Hall of Fame baseball player who is also Jewish).

That all being said, Israel is called a "Jewish State" for a reason (i.e., the Jews have estalished a state in which Jews are in the majority and they have established mechanisms to ensure an ongoing Jewish majority).  That is viewed by many to be "bad" and undemocratic (and perhaps it is).  If a person isn't Jewish, it's not easy to become a citizen of Israel.

In contrast, if I wanted to become a citizen of China, I probably could to so relatively easily (without any regard to my race or religion).  Likewise, if I wanted to become a German citizen or a Japanese citizen, I could probably do that relatively easily as well (again, without regard to my race or religion).

Now, what about First Nations?  If a First Nation was a truly sovereign nation, could I become a citizen of such a nation without regard to my race or religion?  As far as I know, I could not, for example, become a citizen of the Lakota Nation because of my racial ancestory (I don't possess the minimum "blood quantum" of Lakota blood).

So, why is it evil for Israel (or any country, for that matter) to be religiously or racially based) but not evil for a First Nation to be racially based?

Personally, I don't like the idea of a country or nation being based on a race (i.e., all, or most, members or citizens of the country or nation must be of a particular race or religion).  It's the very thing that is distasteful to many about Israel.  It's also why South Africa was so heavily criticized.  It's also why Germany is sometimes criticized for being xenophobic regarding Muslim immigrants (the immigrants must be excluded to maintain the German race or culture).  But, if those racial litmus tests are bad, why would a racially-based First Nations be okay?

By the way, the more I think about the "Jewish State" of Israel, the more I think a one-state solution is ultimately the only moral solution.  It would certainly mean the death of the "Jewish State" of Israel but what business does any country have using a religious or racial litmus test for citizenship? 

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Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!

As I understand it, threads get closed at about 100 posts or so because posts that are longer than that cause "sidescroll" when people try to bring them up on dialup internet connections.

Is that right, mods?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________ Our Demands Most Moderate are/ We Only Want The World! -James Connolly

It's nothing to do with sidescroll. It's a matter of how long it takes a thread to download and display in your browser when you are on dial-up.

The 100 posts rule is arbitrary, because some threads consist of very short posts (e.g. the YouTube Goodies threads) and others consist of longer ones. So one thread can have 50 posts and be five times as much of a download as another thread that has twice that number of posts.

The solution of course is to allow pagination of threads (which in fact the new babble software originally allowed for the first few days, until the moderators killed it). Pagination would allow dialup users to specify the number of posts they wanted to appear per page, so that they would only have to download the latest page instead of the whole thread; at the same time the whole problem of a single thread being chopped up into separate bleeding chunks and scattered to the winds would be avoided. But don't count on logic prevailing anytime soon.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand:

Thanks for the clarification, Spector.  I guess I was confused because as the threads got longer, people used to seem to go on more and more about sidescroll.  I stand corrected.

__________________________________________________________________________ Our Demands Most Moderate are/ We Only Want The World! -James Connolly

Yes, and you bring up this non-story about Germany's racially exclusionary immigration laws, every time this topic comes up. And you are corrected on the facts each time it comes up. So my only conlusion is that you have been informed and you are willfully spreading disinformation and lies. about German immigration policy.

German Russians were not "able" to get citizenship simply based on their blood lines. It was possible for ethnic Germans who were ethnically cleansed out of Russia, and Czechoslovakia and Poland after the war to get citizenship based on their blood lines, because they were ethnic German refugees. 

This policy was continued in a limited fashion for ethnic Germans who felt persecuted in the USSR moving to Germany, after the war, as refugees. 

It's one thing to be a dunderhead. Its another thing to spread outright disinformation and lies about German immigration laws, when I have repeatedly sourced the actual facts to you on numerous occassions.

Stop being and asshole.

As for your idiotic referecen to Turkish 'Guests workers", you can see those laws were change. Howeve, Israel's have not and they still import thousands of basically "rightless" guest workers to clean their toilets for them.

Germany: Immigration in Transition

Its simply a lie to say that Germany allows "ethnic Germans" to appear on its doorstep, and announce their ancestry and become citizens. In fact, there have been programs where they have been expelled, and strict limits put on this kind of immigration.

Not to mention the fact that the whole stipulation of tracing your ancestry through your male family was dropped in 1955.

I grow weary of the word "Zionist" being used as a pejorative and Israel being referred to as an Apartheid state. It doesn't help move debate nor peace forward.

Of course, I condemened the recent  Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip.

I received a letter from my MP today setting out the Liberal's position on Israel and Gaza. This was in response to an email I sent a couple weeks ago in which I specifically communicated only concerns about the Israeli attacks.

So, in context of this discussion, is there any reason here to think that Ignatieff's position is in any way preferable to Harper's?

Gee, maybe a nap would help.

I think M. Spector may be correct about the one-state solution in the sense that it is probably the most morally pure solution (it's democratically based and avoids the nasty concept of a racially-, or at least religiously-, based nation).

As a practical political matter, however, I'm not sure it's as achievable as a two-state solution.  There is a lot of political pressure (in Europe, among many Palistinians, and within Israel itself, for example) for a two-state solution.  As near as I can tell, there is very little support for a one-state solution (other than among a very, very few Israelis and among Hamas extremists).  So, it seems like it would be difficult (to say the least) to get broad-based political support for a one-state solution.

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Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!

If you think support for one state is limited to Hamas "extemists", you haven't been paying attention.

And again, if there has been so much pressure to create two states, why hasn't this happened yet? They've had over 40 years to get around to it.

60

Hey, I was being generous.

Bibi has already said he'll never allow a "terrorist state" to border Israel.

"That said, a two-state solution where Israel remains as a exclusionary Jewish state, is only a partial solution."

 Isreal would never be an exclusively Jewish state since in any scenario, at least 20% of the population of Israel will be made up of Arabs, who vote in Israeli elections and have more rights than they do in just about any Arab country (almost all of which are brutal dictatorships). You can be sure that in contrast Palestine in any two-state solution will be 100% Arab and that there will never be a single solitary Jewish Israeli living there.

What consitutes a "legal claim" is whatever the various parties agree to. If the peace plan of 2000 had succeeded - that would ipso-facto have become the "legal claim". Whether you like it or not "facts on the ground" are facts on the ground. The Jewish population of Israel is now over 6 million and totally dominates the post-1948 boundaries. You might as well try to claim that all of the UK should be given back to Celts and that Anglo-Saxons should go back to where they came from in what is now Germany.

 You can't force people who clearly hate each other to live together any more than you can abolish divorce and demand that a couple stay together who keep beating each other up - it just won't happen. We have already seen in places like Bosnia or Kosovo where people with far less history of violence and conflict than Israelis and Palestinians proved that they could not live in the same country and so those countries were divided along ethnic lines.