tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post1617952813711566246..comments2023-09-30T08:07:26.165-04:00Comments on Mystical Politics: What If Israel Ceases to Be a Democracy?Rebeccahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17626228106192215280noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post-85697438411484437552010-12-30T20:43:12.943-05:002010-12-30T20:43:12.943-05:00To me the basic notion is that a democracy is kind...To me the basic notion is that a democracy is kind of binary condition--either a country is a democracy or it is not. In reality, things are probably less clear cut. The real question is to what extent Israel may or many not share political power with its non-Jewish residents. I'm not buying into the notion that we are going to wake up one day and find Israel has rejected democracy. More likely there may be a gradual shift one way or the other..The Village Elliot.https://www.blogger.com/profile/04067573537341001185noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post-67902880750539904132010-12-30T14:21:23.538-05:002010-12-30T14:21:23.538-05:00QUOTE CONTINUED:
This basic Palestinian rejection...QUOTE CONTINUED:<br /><br /><i>This basic Palestinian rejectionism, amounting to a Weltanschauung, is routinely ignored or denied by most Western commentators and officials. To grant it means to admit that the Israeli-Arab conflict has no resolution apart from the complete victory of one side or the other (with the corollary of expulsion, or annihilation, by one side of the other)—which leaves leaders like President Barack Obama with nowhere realistic to go with regard to the conflict. Philosophically, acceptance of the rock-like unpliability of this reality is extremely problematic, given the ongoing military and philosophical clash between the West and various forces in the Islamic world. Perhaps the fight between America and its allies and its enemies in the Middle East and South Asia and North Africa and the banlieues of Western Europe will go on and on, until one side is vanquished?<br /><br />In this connection, our age, it may turn out, resembles the classic age of appeasement, the 1930s, when the Western democracies (and the Soviet Union) were ranged against, but preferred not to confront, Nazi Germany and its allies, Fascist Italy, and expansionist Japan. During that decade, Hitler’s inexorable martial, racist, and uncompromising mindset was misread by Western leaders, officials, and intellectuals—and for much the same reasons. Living in unideological societies, they could not fathom the minds and politics of their ideologically driven antagonists. The leaders and intellectuals of the Western democracies, educated and suffused with liberal and relativist values, by and large were unable to comprehend the essential “otherness” of Hitler and ended up fighting him, to the finish, after negotiation and compromise had proved useless.</i>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448657.post-89723973100397515722010-12-30T14:20:28.184-05:002010-12-30T14:20:28.184-05:00It is always interesting that rightists believe le...It is always interesting that rightists believe leftists will destroy democracy and that leftists think rightists will do the same. However, as for the reality here, the real concerns for Israel are that it has intractable problems and few people willing to bother understanding such problems as other than solely self-inflicted.<br /><br />Reading the recent Tablet Magazine <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/51926/bleak-house/?print=1" rel="nofollow">article</a> by Benny Morris, it is rather important to understand that we live in a time of great self-deception, just as - as he notes - the 1930's was. So, all of this talk about the failings of Israel - and some are rather undeniable - are, nonetheless, entirely missing the point. To quote Morris, whom I think has it exactly right here:<br /><br /><i><br />The first, the one that American and European officials never express and—if impolitely mentioned in their presence—turn away from in distaste, is that Palestinian political elites, of both the so-called “secular” and Islamist varieties, are dead set against partitioning the Land of Israel/Palestine with the Jews. They regard all of Palestine as their patrimony and believe that it will eventually be theirs. History, because of demography and the steady empowerment of the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West’s growing alienation from Israel, and because of Allah’s wishes, is, they believe, on their side. They do not want a permanent two-state solution, with a Palestinian Arab state co-existing alongside a (larger) Jewish state; they will not compromise on this core belief and do not believe, on moral or practical grounds, that they should.</i><br /><br />Quote continued in next post.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com