Tags

, , , , , , ,

Inspiration: claim that Israel is not a liberal democracy.

You’re wheedling for power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_members_of_the_Knesset

And you have to use a rhetorical approach to do it.

Here’s a piece from Foreign Affairs titled to reflect the dissenting Arab attitude: “Israel’s Second-Class Citizens”. The reading, however, tells a different story. If within Israel, one is an enemy of the state by way of action or speech, one may expect the state to defend its interests internally. On your basis, one might argue that France is not a democracy either as it defends its heavily Catholic culture as well as its laws in the humanist tradition.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2016-06-08/israel-s-second-class-citizens

The author of the summer 2016 piece, As’ad Ghanem, actually titled it with his own Palestinian agenda and here by inference is what he has said about himself in self-revelation:

The various strains of Arab political thought were brought together in December 2006, when a group of Arab activists and intellectuals published a declaration, The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, that sought to define Arabs’ relationship with the state and their hopes for the country’s future. The document, which I co-authored, called on the Israeli government to recognize its responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians around the time of Israeli independence and to consider paying reparations to the descendants of the displaced; to grant Arab citizens greater autonomy in managing their cultural, religious, and educational affairs; to enshrine Arabs’ rights to full equality; and, perhaps most striking, to legally define Israel as a homeland for both Arabs and Jews—a direct challenge to the historically Jewish character of the state.

As much appears similar to the Black Panthers / New Black Panthers demanding from the United States reparations for slavery that ended officially in 1865 and which results by 1965 had produced a slew of racial equality programs that remain in force today in the form of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, Federal set asides for minority-owned businesses, etc. And yet that demand lays emphasis on racial resentment with the intent for getting something out it.

How is the Palestinian cause within Israel both different and less marginal?

Does the displacement and disempowerment of Israel’s Jewish majority in character remain of primary interest to the whole of Israel’s Arab constituency or just some part of it?

Related Online

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/new-black-panther-party

The New Black Panther Party (NBPP) is a black separatist group that believes black Americans should have their own nation. In the NBPP’s “10 Point Platform,” which is taken from the original Black Panther Party, the NBPP demands that black people be given a country or state of their own within which they can make their own laws. They demand that all black prisoners in the United States be released to “the lawful authorities of the Black Nation.” They claim to be entitled to reparations for slavery from the United States, all European countries and “the Jews.”

–33–