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Internal vs external criticism of Israel


Elrostar

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Its complicated. :P

Basically, requiring arabs to serve in an army thats usually in some state of war with other arabs is probably not a good idea for either the army or for them. I'd love to see it proposed to the Knesset for the expression on several Arab MK's faces though.

They can volunteer. Lots of Bedouins for example do. Theres also civilian national service, which was hashed out exhaustively last time round and I can't be bothered to do again.

Thanks. I really didn't know.

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Is it just not a requirement, but they can serve if they volunteer? Or are they not permitted in the military at all?

They can volunteer, yes. Ironically, while IDF vets get numerous benefits (taxes, scholarships) as a result of their service, Arab-Israeli's get them regardless.

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Can you explain this informal discrimination more fully?

I mean that the law does not discriminate, but on a private practical basis, they are. They have a far smaller chance getting a job in private companies, restourants, etc.. compared to Jews. This isnt state based discrimination but private discrimination by people in the street. On the other hand, they do pretty well in public law, or in governmental jobs where there is a minimum quota for minorities. All in all, its complicated.

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I mean that the law does not discriminate, but on a private practical basis, they are. They have a far smaller chance getting a job in private companies, restourants, etc.. compared to Jews. This isnt state based discrimination but private discrimination by people in the street. On the other hand, they do pretty well in public law, or in governmental jobs where there is a minimum quota for minorities. All in all, its complicated.

Going by what I've read (I'm not sure how relevant this is at the moment, btw. So the israelis can feel free to correct me) part of the issue is that a lot of stuff in Israel is... Kind of handled by the government but not really.

One thing f.ex. is that Israel's welfare policies are (at least it used to be) tied to military service (which is compulsory for jews and much harder for arabs) Also the Israeli Land Code technically means that all land is owned by the government and then rented out to various agencies, many of which are more or less explicitly biased towards jews. (I remember reading in the Economist about a court-case a year or so, but never caught how it ended, I think the Supreme Court was expected to rule in favour of the arab claimants though)

Most of the discrimination seems to be either by private individuals though, and to some degree by local governmental agencies (arab-dominated municipalities tends to get shafted when it comes to allocating funds, for instance)

Civilly, Israel also operates (operated?) on a version of the Ottoman Millet system, which means that jews, muslims, christians, samaritans etc. have their own civil laws (for stuff like inheritance and marriage) from what I've heard this mostly shafts secular jews though.

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What, to Saudi Arabia? You won't find any Israeli Helen Thomas in this thread, my friend.

Some things I take from this:

1) The IDF clearly started with shooting painball guns. Anyone who knows about these things can hear the sound is different from the regular gunfire later.

2) They conveniently didn't film the actual violence on the upper decks.

3) Loved the bloody knife shot next to one of the wounded. Peaceful activists, my ass.

4) They actually admit, on film, to holding two IDF soldiers by force. At this point, what did they think would happen?

5) Israeli MP Hanin Zuabi (female, dark hair, glasses), seems to be in the thick of it. Saying later she saw no evil is sounding like a bad lie.

Also her attempt to direct the camera away from her doesn't look good. I hope the AG brings her to justice.

This also shows that in the fiasco of trying to disqualify all but one Arab party from running to the Knesset last time, only one guy kept his head. The Knesset let populist motives drive them to be trigger happy with the disqalifications (also they knew the Supreme Court would rein them in), and the Supreme Court was so in love with their own reflection and their idea of an enlightened country they overturned all the disqalifications en masse, while ignoring the law and the facts. Only one man, Supreme Court justice Edmund Levi, said the party this woman belongs to is an evil enemy party (well, paraphrasing), and this party alone should be disqalified from Israeli political life. I think this whole country sees by now, that he was right.

6)_ Loved the comic bit in the end: "We are paeceful, don't shoot". :lmao:

Ahh so you are saying that they came back later and shot him 4 times in the head at close range? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/gaza-flotilla-activists-autopsy-results

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Ahh so you are saying that they came back later and shot him 4 times in the head at close range? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/gaza-flotilla-activists-autopsy-results

From the article.

"We knew they were peace activists. Though they wanted to break the Gaza blockade, we thought we'd encounter passive resistance, perhaps verbal resistance – we didn't expect this. Everyone wanted to kill us. We encountered terrorists who wanted to kill us and we did everything we could to prevent unnecessary injury."

Obviously not buddy or you'd be dead.

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To the people who responded to my previous post. It was a joke. The Palestinians are from Palestine. The current Israeli Jews are from Europe & Americas.

Not exactly. First of all, more than half of modern Jewish Israeli's originated from the middle-east. Close to a million Arab-Jews were ethnically cleansed / fled or immigrated from the Arab world during and after the creation of Israel. Nor is your other claim precise: Many modern Palestinians are infact Arabs from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon who immigrated to the region due to the economic incentives created by the Jewish industrial/agricultural development of the land in the 20's, 30's and 40's.

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I mean that the law does not discriminate, but on a private practical basis, they are. They have a far smaller chance getting a job in private companies, restourants, etc.. compared to Jews. This isnt state based discrimination but private discrimination by people in the street. On the other hand, they do pretty well in public law, or in governmental jobs where there is a minimum quota for minorities. All in all, its complicated.

Thanks for clarifying. When you said "public" I thought it referred to the government, as in the government's policy was one of discrimination.

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Not exactly. First of all, more than half of modern Jewish Israeli's originated from the middle-east. Close to a million Arab-Jews were ethnically cleansed / fled or immigrated from the Arab world during and after the creation of Israel. Nor is your other claim precise: Many modern Palestinians are infact Arabs from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon who immigrated to the region due to the economic incentives created by the Jewish industrial/agricultural development of the land in the 20's, 30's and 40's.

If Palestinians were from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon, they'd be genetically closer to Jews. Take a look at these charts, from the articles earlier up thread:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewfig2c.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewfig2d.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewsFST1.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewsnat2.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewsnat1.png

They're definitely a genetically distinct population, the vast majority of Palestinians are probably descended from Samaritans, who were the majority population of Palestine into the Middle Ages.

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If Palestinians were from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon, they'd be genetically closer to Jews.

Why closer to jews then? Wouldn't they be closer to Jordanians, Syrians, etc?

Genetic speculation aside...there are facts about 19/20th century migrations, people. Stop tossing stuff out there.

The "palestinians are mostly migrants" is probably nonsense, sorry. There was migration of various small groups - Circassians, Mughrabis, Bosnians to Ceasarea, Sudanese who ended up today in Jasr-a-Zarka, etc. (There was a brief moment of the Ottomans trying to be useful around the turn of the 20th c and starting some small scale migration programs within the empire. But they also built Beer-Sheva then, for which they probably don't deserve to ever be forgiven.) The area was always realtively cosmopolitan for being in every way but religeously a backwater, true, but most Palestinians mostly owe their existence to native population growth during the 19-20th centuries. I've got the best estimate numbers somewhere (Ottoman cencuses - problematic.) if I can be bothered to find my notes.

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If Palestinians were from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon, they'd be genetically closer to Jews. Take a look at these charts, from the articles earlier up thread:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewfig2c.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewfig2d.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewsFST1.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewsnat2.png

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2010/06/jewsnat1.png

They're definitely a genetically distinct population, the vast majority of Palestinians are probably descended from Samaritans, who were the majority population of Palestine into the Middle Ages.

The Palestinians arn't genetically distinct from Jordanians/Syrians/Lebanese, since during the last few hundred years, populations moved around constantly within the ottoman empire. They were never a distinct nationality nor ethnic group, and Samaritans definately were not a majority population of Palestine in the middle-ages.

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Close to a million Arab-Jews were ethnically cleansed / fled or immigrated from the Arab world during and after the creation of Israel.

I don't like the term Arab-Jew. The Arabs accepted the Jewish population as Jews, nothing else. Wouldn't a more accurate term be Spanish Jews driven from Europe, who settled in the Middle-East?

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I don't like the term Arab-Jew. The Arabs accepted the Jewish population as Jews, nothing else. Wouldn't a more accurate term be Spanish Jews driven from Europe, who settled in the Middle-East?

No. After the expulsion from spain most of the sephardic jews settled in southern europe(then part of the ottoman empire). Jews from arab lands however originate from different populations predating the arab conquest of these lands.

And besides, calling every non-ashkenazic jewish population sephardi is an abuse of the term.

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No. After the expulsion from spain most of the sephardic jews settled in southern europe(then part of the ottoman empire). Jews from arab lands however originate from different populations predating the arab conquest of these lands.

And besides, calling every non-ashkenazic jewish population sephardi is an abuse of the term.

Yeah, I actually know a few people trying to rehabilitate the term "Arab Jewish" as a mizrahi identity sort of thing. And Iraqis/Yemenis/Lots of Egyptian defnitely aren't Sephardic (never mind Iranians/Indians/Bukharans and so on.) in the ethnic sense. I think the blanket term comes from Ashkenazim having particular religeous practices to almost everyone else, but I couldn't actually recognize an Ashkenazi vs Sephardic religeous practice if my life depended on it.

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Why closer to jews then? Wouldn't they be closer to Jordanians, Syrians, etc?

My statement was "If Palestinians were from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon, they'd be genetically closer to Jews." Not "If Palestinians were from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon, they'd be genetically closer to Jews than to Jordanians, Syrians, or Lebanese." Jordanians, Lebanese, and Syrians are closer to Jews genetically than Palestinians are, per current evidence. But Palestinians are genetically distinct from Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians, hence, they're pretty far from Jews genetically. Look at those charts I posted. There is a pretty clear genetic distinction between the Northern Levant (Jews, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians) and the Southern Levant (Palestinians). That's the Judea/Israel divide, and that's also where the Samaritan population was based until mass conversions in the Middle Ages.

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My statement was "If Palestinians were from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon, they'd be genetically closer to Jews." Not "If Palestinians were from Jordan/Syria/Lebanon, they'd be genetically closer to Jews than to Jordanians, Syrians, or Lebanese." Jordanians, Lebanese, and Syrians are closer to Jews genetically than Palestinians are, per current evidence. But Palestinians are genetically distinct from Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians, hence, they're pretty far from Jews genetically. Look at those charts I posted. There is a pretty clear genetic distinction between the Northern Levant (Jews, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians) and the Southern Levant (Palestinians). That's the Judea/Israel divide, and that's also where the Samaritan population was based until mass conversions in the Middle Ages.

I, er, just don't buy that. There is no historical evidence for this Samaritan population that I know of, ever, and the Judea/Israel split is like 3000 years old, and sources for that period - not so great. (and the geography is wrong anyway, since both Israel and Judea were mostly in areas that are today Palestinian. Where you get the Judea/Israel split affecting Syria and Jews from I find baffling.) Whatever the genetics, they require better historical explanation than this.

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