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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (116898)	10/15/2003 11:51:21 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "In this I agree." I'm stunned. Re: "If they start to see real hopes to improve their own lives, won't they care more about their own lives than Israel?" This is the conceit of the West. The basic problem that wealthy people have is that they think that wealth is the only important thing in the world, and that any other thing can be purchased, with wealth. But friendship cannot be purchased. Israel cannot buy peace in Palestine, nor the US buy peace in Iraq. This argument that material advancement would calm angry 2nd class citizens has been heard many times before. In the 1960s, the South Africans said that by making the blacks wealthier, they would prevent them from rioting. In the 1940s the Americans said that since the lives of blacks were improving, they had no need to rebel. The Israelis have been commenting on how wealthy, healthy, and well educated the Palestinians are, when compared with other Arabs, but still no peace. None of these 2nd class citizen groups was willing to settle for any kind of improvement unless that improvement was all the way to 1st class citizen status. For the blacks in the US and South Africa, that meant equal status before the law and equal voting rights. For the Arabs, that would mean equal status and income to the Jews. The Israelis cannot achieve peace because they cannot afford to give 1st class citizen rights to the Palestinians. 1st class citizen rights would include stuff like the ability to marry someone from Egypt and have them live with you in Israel, just as someone from Israel can marry an American and do the same. Or the right to have family members immigrate to join their relatives already living in Israel. Every now and then there are cases where people are willing to accept second class status, but that is only where their position is truly impossible. For example, the Mormons in the US accept that the US will not allow them to have polygamy. But groups that accept these kinds of societal restrictions typically are too weak, in numbers, to make an issue out of it. The Mormons know that they are out voted, and they've already found out (many years ago), that they are also out gunned. But the Palestinians feel themselves to be a part of an Arab nation that is much larger than Israel, so there is no way that they will accept 2nd class citizenship, now or at any time in the future. So back to your quote: "If they start to see real hopes to improve their own lives, won't they care more about their own lives than Israel?" Your error is that humans are jealous individuals, and instead of looking at how things are improving with themselves, they instead look at how much they have compared with others. Your wishful thinking can be corrected. Here's what you should have wrote: "If they start to see that they are fully equal to the Jews in Israel, won't they care more about their own lives than Israel?" The answer to this modification of your question is yes, but the Israeli Jews do not have enough empathy or power to make it happen. This is in contrast to the US, where our problems with the blacks were eliminated by simply removing all laws having to do with keeping them as 2nd class citizens, and, in fact, introducing new laws giving them rights that other citizens did not have (affirmative action). Israel ain't gonna do that, because they do not have the one quality that made it possible for the ruling classes in the US to be that magnanimous. Demographics. -- Carl