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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsnow who wrote (2062)	6/25/2001 5:36:15 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

On the subject of Israel's apartheid... Israel, Palestine and American Values By Iden_Rosenthal on 10/10/00, 2:47 PM (viewed 1388 times) Popularity: 20 (24 encourage, 4 discourage) Relevant Issue: Foreign Policy I am an *American* Jew. I emphasize the American part because that is what I want to focus on. As an American, I was raised and believe in certain pluralistic values of tolerance and universal equality and fairness. It was my short stay in Israel in 1992 that made me understand truly how American I really am and what it means to be an American. Israel is a parliamentary democracy but not a 'melting pot'. Israel has a conflict in its political soul over whether it believes in the equality and rights of all human beings (Arabs included) before the law, or whether it is going to remain a state where preferential treatment is given to Jews and discrimination against its Palestinian citizens is accepted. This issue is especially timely now that the entire country smolders with smaller and larger outbreaks of mob violence from both Jewish and Arab sides. One relatively newer wrinkle in the latest crisis is that the Palestinian citizens of Israel proper, about 18% of the Israeli population, are involved very visibly in sympathy with their ethnic non-citizen Palestinian cousins. It is not widely understood or appreciated in this country that Israel discriminates openly against its own Arab citizens as a matter of public policy. Arab Israeli schools are funded at lower levels, it is difficult for Arab Israelis to obtain the necessary building permits to add on to their houses, they cannot get permission to dig wells, they have a harder time finding work professionally and so forth. This discrimination is done openly in the name of promoting a Jewish state. It is repugnant to people such as myself and others raised with the American values of equality of opportunity and fairness toward all humans. But in the context of the Middle East, it makes at least some sense. Middle Eastern culture is tangibly different from our Western one. I am no expert by any means, but our concepts of good behavior and respectfully taking the wishes and opinions of the minority culture into account are somewhat less applicable in the context of Middle Eastern society. They have different manners and different assumptions. What seems rude to us Americans, is normal to Israelis and possibly other Middle Easterners. To Americans, it is hard to understand how Israelis can be so intransigent and even arrogant in their dealings with their Palestinian neighbors. To an American point of view, Old City Jerusalem cannot be given to either side therefore it must be given to the United Nations to administer. I doubt this idea would satisfy either the Palestinians or the Israelis. For better or worse, the United States' two largest recipients of foreign aid are Israel and Egypt, respectively. We have bound our foreign policy up in the conflicts of that region and it has a disproportionate hold on our collective imagination and public purse. I sincerely hope and pray that a wider war than the one already being waged on the streets will not come to pass in the coming weeks. But I also firmly believe, as an American Jew raised with American democratic values, that Israeli society will have to consciously choose to evolve in the direction of equal treatment for all its citizens and justice for the disposessed Palestinians if peace is to be achieved for the long term. quorum.org