re: #253 Charles Johnson

“Apartheid?”

Look, I’m getting sick of the occupation of the West Bank too, and especially sick of the way the Netanyahu government is enabling the settlements to expand.

But this is NOT “apartheid,” and using that word to describe the situation in Israel is just stupid. It is NOT the same thing. Not even close. Educate yourself before applying terms like this, because it’s obvious you don’t have a clue what “apartheid” really was.

Botsplainer has made me want to take a hammer to my computer more then once at Balloon Juice. Nonetheless, there are parallels to South Africa, unfortunately…even if the situations are not exactly the same.

This is from an Israeli commentator, and it bears reading.

“Gaza … is a maximum-security facility. It is difficult to visit and impossible to leave. We allow in essential food, water, and electricity so that the prisoners don’t die. Apart from that, we don’t really care about them—that is unless they approach the prison fence, or the “forbidden” perimeter, where anyone who wanders too close is shot, or if they try to throw something over the fence. Indeed, they occasionally throw some homemade bombs made of things they’ve managed to smuggle into prison, and when they fall on our heads, it is really unpleasant. So we send our snipers to the watchtowers built around the prison and shoot them like fish in a barrel until they calm down. And when they finally do calm down, we cease firing because we are not the kind of bastards who shoot people for fun,” - Noam Sheizaf.

dish.andrewsullivan.com

This becomes the problem. Your place of birth becomes your entire destiny. If you are in Gaza, you can never leave. You have no ability to do anything better. You will always be looking down the barrel of somebody else’s gun no matter what you do or do not do. You may have just barely enough to eat, but that is not living. It is Hobbesian survival at its’ most base.