Originally posted by Bonnie
This proves you have no tolerance for Jews or Israel, you don't believe they are equal to Arabs!!
Look Bonnie...
I couldn’t be farther from the ME, genetically, physically and culturally than I am.
I’m a white brazilian, I can’t speak a single word in Arabic besides habib (darling), I have no arab relatives (well...maybe in Portugal in 1200 during the arab/moor conquest of the Iberian Peninsula...but they don’t count....lol).
I can hardly be accused of being a leftist (or “liberal” as you call leftists in the US) since I have a business in south of Brazil (I can’t be against myself...lol).
I must admit that I met palestinian refugees during the time I spent in the ME but I have also met brazilian jews whose parents and grandparents survived WWII, so that doesn’t mean anything.
Since I’m neither an american, nor jew, nor arab I feel that I have the necessary distance to judge the state of Israel objectively, in a fair manner.
As someone who is not directly connected with that land conflict that is going on in the Middle East, I can say that, leaving the politican spectrum (right/left) aside, leaving American/Israeli and Arab propaganda aside, any serious, dispassionate political analysis reveals that Israel is not a democratic state.
<B>Modern democratic states are not “owned” by any ethnic group, they respect the rights of all ethnic groups that have a historical presence in a given region.</B>
Without this basic feature shared by all liberal democracies around the world, you can’t even think of calling a country a modern democratic state.
So what leads so many people around the world, particularly in the US, to regard Israel as a democratic state despite overwhelming incriminating evidence of Israel’s guilt in creating the world’s oldest and largest refugee problem?
Here we go again: dehumanisation of the dispossessed people.
This is the rational hidden behind the famous “Israel’s right to exist”, a dirty little secret too obscene to be said outloud:
“What’s so wrong with displacing a bunch of arabs in order to make room for the jewish people?”
All the regulars here surely remember ajwps’ famous line:
“Palestinian arabs could very well be absorbed by one of those giant, empty arab countries.”
I, who already met several palestinian refugees, know first hand that they don’t want to be “absorbed” by anyone, they want to be considered as full human beings and allowed to live in their own homeland in a democratic state.
These are all examples of the dehumanisation of the arab population of Palestine.
Dehumanisation, which is the common denominator of all ideologies based on ethnic supremacism, can be defined in these terms:
<B>Certain human beings lack some of the attributes necessary to be considered humans and therefore, being only partially humans, they are entitled to only a fraction of the rights enjoyed by “full humans”</B>.
People in the West, in the US in particular, perceive the palestinian people as only partially humans, “just a bunch of arabs”.
Being humans only in a relative sense, they can be deprived of the rights entitled to other human beings in order to serve a greater good (provide space for european settlers).
From the moment you reject dehumanisation, from the moment you perceive palestinians as full humans, Israel becomes a political entity as disgusting and repulsive as SA under apartheid.
The bottomline is that ethnic supremacist states have no “right to exist”, they have the “right” to be peacefully dismantled and replaced by democratic states. And armed struggles against these kind of states is absolutely legitimate.
In this big mexican soap opera that is the coverage of Israel by the western press, people, particularly in the US, are brainwashed to believe that there are two kinds of racist states:
“evil” racist states such as Nazi Germany and South Africa under white rule and “good” racist states such as Israel that exist to protect persecuted ethnic minorities (boers in SA are also an ethnic minority and as you can see they didn’t need a supremacist state to live in peace there, in a democratic state that doesn’t even have their security as an absolute priority).
My problem here is that 99% of the members of the USMB are average americans who feel a kind of emotional, psychological and patriotic bond with Israel. They see Israel as part of the essence of the US, so they are inclined to believe in this “good” racist state myth perpetuated by the western press and want me to state that the parallel universe they live in, in which Israel is portrayed as a democratic state, is indeed an acurate description of reality.
This idea of common identity share by the US and Israel, the mistaken idea that Israel reflects the values of the US, together with the dehumanisation of palestinians is part of the “American/Jewish paradigm” through which most people here judge Israel.
And in your particular case, I think there is another paradigm through which you perceive Israel, the religious one.
Correct me If I’m wrong, but you are an evangelical christian, right?
You believe that the creation of a jewish state comprising all Palestine (Eretz Israel) is a prerequisite for the fulfillment of the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelations (the tribulation, the second coming of JC), don’t you?
So instead of one, you look upon Palestine through two pro-israeli paradigms.
What should I do??
I usually like to please people but not enough to distort reality.
As an impartial observer I have to say that there is no fundamental difference between South Africa’s denial of the right of the black population to leave the Autonomous Republics (Bantustans) in which they were confined and Israel’s denial of the right of return of palestinian refugees.
Even the most passionate supporter of Israel know that the whole country was stolen from palestinians and that Israel is the phoenix born from the ashes of palestinian society instead of reborn from its own and you can see that by the code language people use here when they talk about Palestine.
When people in the West support “Israel’s right to exist” they feel, somewhat unconsciously, ashamed for dehumanising palestinians in the process, so they use a series of euphemisms to hide it:
“Israel needs a peace partner, two states solution is the only solution (according to biggots and racist jews it is indeed the only solution), only radicals support the idea of a unitary state, Israel has a right to defend itself (against the displaced natives of the land) etc...”
And then we have the sickest of all pathetic excuses:
“Israel’s laws prevent the “immigration” of arabs to western Palestine.”
Racism must necessarily be blind to its own immorality; the burden of conscience is otherwise too great.
