Israel-Palestine Conflict

[Hnv1]

[Hnv1]

I just came across an article that predicts a very grim -- and convincing -- future for the conflict.  I encourage anyone who is interested to read it in its entirety:

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/13/8390387/israel-dark-future

You know as a far-lefty (even in non-Israel measurements) I must say this prediction are retro-70s. that was exactly what Shelly Camp and so raved in the 70s and that public debated escalated in the 80s. But honestly I fail to see how it matters to the majority of Israelis, the one from Likud rightwards don't give a toss on democracy, and the ones from Labour to Likud are perfectly fine with a strong ethnic quasi-democracy, heck even most of Meretz argue for a Palestinian state on the sake of demographics.

But to make you feel better we weren't the finest of democracies even before  67

[Hnv1]

Okay, that I get.

I don't think it's necessarily talking about citizens' actual rights though. It's more talking about how it's changed citizens' outlook about the concept of democracy. I think it's a valid point.

Then there's another debate about whether ethnocentric, anti-democratic ideals where always there, it's just that the West and some Israelis were able to more easily ignore them in the past.

This is all illustrated by the nation-state law, which I think the article is very reasonable about. It admits that it doesn't actually change people's rights in any concrete way. It's symbolic though.

The nation state law is a good example of the silliness of the article. The article itself admits that it won't make a great difference, and the only objection is with the symbolism of declaring Israel a Jewish state, as if this is somehow new rather than the very reason the country was founded in the first place.

 This is being done in the context of an article trying to show how things are getting worse in the way it starts by approvingly referring to Ben Gurion and leading to the supposedly worse present. But it was under Ben Gurion's leadership, and before the occupation, that the Arabs were under military rule and clearly had far less rights than they do now. It would be far more accurate for the article to go the opposite way and write about how much progress Arabs have made since Israel's early days to the present.

I have to agree. The nation state law is bad symbolically but legally it has nothing to it (it might even cause the exact opposite of what they intend)