Re: The Europeans in Algeria were the minority......an elite minority.
Ditto for the Jews in Palestine. Hence Israel's gerrymander conundrum: all along, Israeli leaders have been at pains to draw the proper lines of Israel's purview. They jettison the Gaza strip all the more eagerly as they've understood that, demographically speaking, it's a lost cause (3 million Arabs vs a handful of Jewish settlements). Yet, at the same time, they straightjacket Jerusalem with a wall to check any Arab sprawl around Eastern Jerusalem....
I maintain that the US-Israel relationship perfectly mirrors the France-Algeria one in the 1950s/60s. In both colonies, the European masters (Pieds Noirs in Algeria, Jews in Israel) are a domineering minority. Somehow, the entire Middle East lives under the nuclear threat of a minority of 4 million Israeli Jews.
Both minorities enforce housing segregation yet are compelled to mingle with Arabs in the workplace --be it factories, farms, waiters in cafés and restaurants,.... Both grant Arabs formal citizenship but, at the same time, manage to retain the real power (financially, politically, militarily). However you look at it, Israel is a COLONIAL enclave.
Gus |
