re: #308 steve_davis

It is not apartheid because Israel has palestinian arabs in its parliament. Israel offered the Palestinians East Jerusalem in 1947 for their capital. Palestinians responded by cutting off the water supply to West Jerusalem and spending the next 70 years attempting to drive Jews into the sea. I hope it absolutely eats up Palestinians every time they consider that they could have had a large country in 1948 with a capital in Jerusalem, prosperous countryside filled with orchards, while Israel would be a tiny little nation-state without enough room for an international airport, and that the reason why millions of Palestinians are living in camps is because they and their ancestors were mostly a bunch of religious bigots. Sorry, there’s my two cents’ worth. And yes, Israel has its religious bigots as well, but that’s hardly surprising, considering history. Territorial triumphalism kind of gets baked into everything when every conversation is about land.

It is apartheid because there are different rules for Israeli citizens and Palestinians in the West Bank — civil rule for the former and military rule for the latter.
Even Apartheid South Africa had groups in between the whites and blacks who had some but not all of the privileges of white people, like Asians, the multi-racial “Coloured” community of mixed White, Asian, Black and Khoisan origin, and the “honorary whites” like some East Asians and Black diplomats from friendly African countries.

There was no Palestinian state in 1948. The Kingdom of Jordan, which wasn’t anything like a democracy, annexed the West Bank shortly after they invaded in 1948, so any assertion that the _Palestinians_ made this decision is bogus. The Palestinians weren’t even able to build up a government during British rule, while the British and French allowed local governments to be built up in all their other Middle Eastern colonies.

Jewish local government was allowed by the British during Mandatory Palestine — this transitioned into the multi-confessional Knesset, but the Muslim and Christian equivalent was only allowed to pay for the costs of teachers and preachers.

The West Bank has roads and buses where only Israelis can travel and roads and buses where Palestinians can travel. And in my understanding (someone can correct me) settlements can to a certain extent chose who lives there, so they’re 99.8% Jewish.