Is Israel Falling Apart? By Dror Wahrman

[UndertheOcean]

http://www.hnn.us/articles/35958.html

I won't paste some of it , the whole thing is worth reading.

[madrchsod]

1. i found this several weeks ago

“Almost half of the population does not enjoy the boom,” Mr. Plocker said, noting these statistics: The unemployment rate is 8.3 percent. Israel’s poverty rate is still the highest in the West, by far: 24.4 percent of the entire population and 35.2 percent of all children are described as poor, living under the official “poverty line.” In the Arab and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sectors, child poverty is especially high: more than 50 percent. The real income of the poorest quarter of Israelis is lower than six years ago.
from
http://bocaguy.blogspot.com/2007/02/outsource-cabinet.html
BocaGuy: Outsource the Cabinet?

this is what happens when-any- society places war above social justice

[papau]

2. Ironic that those most hurt - the Arab and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sectors - are most afraid of a

Taba/Geneva peace with compensation but near zero right of return, and again compensation but zero right to stay in the new Palestinian State for the settlers not in the areas that would be included in the border adjustment/land swap.

[Bryan Sacks]

3. Maybe Thomas Frank needs to write another book to explain it n/t

[BayCityProgressive]

4. One secular state

is the only long term solution. Dividing people into different countries based on race or religion is bound to failure. No matter how much frosting you want to put on the cake..that is still the bottom line of it. Dividing a region based on race and religion..apartheid didn't work in South Africa, segregation didn't work here, Catholic states didn't work in Europe and it isn't going to work there...I wonder how much longer it will take people to wake up.

[papau]

5. I expect a workable secular state in Israel/West Bank about week after Arab states go secular. n/t

n/t

[rockymountaindem]

6. On the other hand, one could say that multi-ethnic states haven't done well in the long run either

Iraq, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Timor, Russia (Chechnya)...

[BayCityProgressive]

7. very true

you point out good examples. While far from perfect the US, Canada, Cuba, Australia and Western Europe all have diverse populations though. I would say the scenerio in Yugolslavia and Russia is similar to that of Nazi Germany...their economies collapsed so demagogues came to power who wanted to blame minorities to keep the country together. I thought this is what progressives are supposed to oppose though? I also agree with the post above yours, not only do I wish to see a secular Israel/Palestine but secular Iran, Saudi Arabia ect as well. I am against all nationalist or religious states.

[BayCityProgressive]

8. Also

many of those states you listed were forced to integrate by colonial powers. I don't think you can force people to integrate. Look at Ireland...no one ever thought the stability they have now could be possible. It isn't perfect but people finally came together and decided killing eachother over being protestant/catholic just wasn't worth it anymore. People need to come to the realization themselves, and sometimes it takes a lot of suffering to make that happen. The Middle East is such a boiling pot for so many reasons though, that it is imperative that we try to work out some kind of peace there.

[rockymountaindem]

9. Well, let's continue this

The US, Canada, Cuba and Australia have all been multi-ethnic states since their inception. Multi-ethnicity is part of our national culture in these states. The US' "nationality" is based on adherence to a shared set of ideals rather than blood ties. In places like Europe and the Mideast, however, blood ties remain very important. For instance, Yugoslavia was a figment of the Versailles conference wherein six nationalities (seven, if you count the ethnic Albanians who didn't get their own constituent republic) were assimilated into the same state. This was done in part to prevent more fighting among groups who have hated each other for centuries. The problem is that this solution only turned what would have been inter-state wars into civil unrest and conflict that in the long run was only contained by Tito's oppressive regime who treated nationalists of all seven stripes with equal contempt. Tito's aim was to abolish Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegran, Albanian and Macedonian national identity and replace it with a unified "Yugoslavian" national identity. His project, as we have seen, only functioned during his lifetime. Otherwise, IMHO, putting multiple groups with centuries-long antagonisms in the same state is a recepie for disaster.

This has happened more often than a lot of people think. For instance, Ireland today (as the Republic of Ireland) is an ethnically homogeneous state. 100 years ago, however, it was riven with conflict between the Irish and the English/Scots, some of whom had been resident in the country for 400 years. Poland of the inter-war period embraced not only Poles, but large populations of Ukranians, Ruthenes, Lithuanians, Belorussians and Jews. The tumultuous relations between them helped seal the fate of Polish democracy in 1926, a mere five years after the conclusion of the Russo-Polish war that brought all those non-Poles (except Jews, who already constituted 10% of the Polish population) under Polish rule. Democracy was replaced by the dicatorship of Josef Pilsudski who ruled until his death and whose regime continued after his demise until the German invasion of 1939.

Now, if people could get over their national hatreds, that would go a long way towards making war a thing of the past. But, alas, humanity is not at that stage yet, and asking Israelis and Palestinians to try and live peaceably in one state after all that has happened is, IMHO, a formula for conflict that will be worse than that which we have already seen.

[breakaleg]

10. Your argument seems to go back to the makeup of the state when it was created.

Israel had a mix of both Arabs and Jews at it's inception. So wouldn't this fit under the umbrella of being a mixed population from the beginning?

It's only after Israel changed the laws to encourage immigration of Jews that the makeup changed.

[rockymountaindem]

11. No, only after Israel was proclaimed a state did that change

Israel was concieved and founded as a state that is majority ethnically Jewish. That's the whole point. They don't call it the "Jewish state" for nothing. The thing I was trying to bring up with Poland was that it was a singularly ethnic state that took in millions of non-Poles and still tried to be just "Pole-land". That didn't work out.

[breakaleg]

12. But there were people already living there. They had to be accounted for and included in an equal

way in the new state. That's how they got into problems. You can't just expel them from their homes and replace them with another set of people.

[rockymountaindem]

13. That was generations ago

If "Israel/Palestine" was concieved and built as a multi-ethnic state, as the United States and Canada have been, that would be one thing. But the facts are that the UN partition provided for two seperate ethnic states, and that for the past sixty years Israel has been built as the Jewish State, and that ethnic homogeniety is a core part of what Israel means to its majority Jewish inhabitants. On the other side of the equation, the Palestinians have also fought for decades to establish their own singularly-ethnic state of one form or another. They have not been fighting for Israeli citizenship, but to create their own Arab state out of part or all of the land between the Jordan and the sea. Neither side has had multi-ethnicity as a founding principle.