World News

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Thanks for the link, I learned some things. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms, and some that I don't think hold water.

Israel has been a theocracy ever since they declared themselves to be the homeland of the Jews. As there are many lineages of Jews, and religious converts of any background qualify for Israeli citizenship one must assume they are referring to the religion and not the ethnicity when they made this declaration. A better analog than the US declaring itself the home of the white people, would be if Vatican City declared itself to be home of the Catholics, (and had a much bigger population, some of whom weren't.) Still not great but different in some very relevant ways. This matters because the video then goes on to build a case from this faulty premise that Israel is an apartheid state because it employs systemic racial oppression and discrimination. However, this internal legalized discrimination doesn't seem to be racial at all, in fact they have laws explicitly forbidding racism. Within Israel, what legal discrimination exists seems to be religious, or political and from the examples provided, manifests itself as:

• Right of return only applying to Jews (religious)
• Outlawing political parties and candidates who deny that Israel is a democratic state and a home to the Jews, (probably a response to Sharia and Palestinian attempts to deny Jews equality in their imagined one-state solution. Political and religious.)
• Withholding government funds from organizations that commemorate the Nakba, the "remember the Alamo!"-like rallying cry of their enemy (political)
• Jews are allowed to marry individuals from the West Bank or Gaza, Israeli Palestinians are not; many Palestinian spouses are prevented from living together in Israel (probably due to fears of anti-Jewish belligerents getting into the country through marriage and being outnumbered via fertility. Political and religious.)
• Inequities via the military court system and military administration of territories (political)

Theocracy isn't great but not exactly racial discrimination either, although since ethnicity and religion overlap so much on the Palestinian side of this conflict I suppose it's easy to use it as a proxy there. Less so on the Israeli side, which is comprised of many Jewish and Arab ethnicities.

Then there's also extralegal discrimination, something most countries have to contend with, only moreso here. Citizens of countries at war are often unsurprisingly prejudiced against the groups that they are at war with, like how many Americans freaked out and became anti-Islamic after 9/11. I can only imagine how much worse that would have become if the attacks against the US were ongoing for a century. This generational hatred and cycle of violence has gone on so long in Israel that there certainly seems to be many social discrimination issues to be addressed, at all levels of society. Certainly among police and right-wing politicians. Some examples of inequities that are not because of current laws:

• There are still generational socioeconomic consequences to systemic discrimination of the past.
• Accusations that there are prejudiced people on public land use committees who interpret rules about culture and community standards in a discriminatory way, some who do so explicitly.
• Bibi seems like a little Trump working with the Likud party to intimidate voters. (Fuck them. It'll be great to see them kicked out of power.)
• Unequal and often inhumane treatment of suspects and prisoners by the legal system.

Continued...