Israel and Judaism have absolutely nothing to do with each other
Are* *you fucking serious?!!! I have seen a lot of ignorance on MN in my time but this really takes first prize. I’m embarrassed for you. Really. OMFG.
The connection between the Jewish people and Israel goes back long before the birth of either Christianity or Islam. Jews created a society there in the days of Joshua, a kingdom in the days of Saul, and a nation with Jerusalem as its capital in the days of King David: all this more than 3,000 years ago.
Jews are the only people who ever created a nation state there. At all other times in the past 3,000 years it was merely an administrative district in an empire whose centre was elsewhere: the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Alexandrian, Roman and Byzantine empires, the Crusaders of the Holy Roman Empire, the various Muslim empires such as the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Mamluks and Ottomans, and finally the British. Jews are the only people who have maintained a continuous presence in the land. They are its indigenous, original inhabitants.
That’s the unbreakable connection between Israel and the Jewish people. The connection between Israel and Judaism is equally ancient and fundamental. Read the Hebrew Bible and you’ll see immediately that it isn’t about the salvation of the soul (see Christianity). It’s about creating in the holy land a society based on the biblical ideas of justice, welfare, and the sanctity of life.
In the centuries of exile and dispersion Jews lived in almost every land under the sun, Israel has remained a focus of their prayers ( you know, that line in their prayer where they say “Next year in Jerusalem”) - and the only place where they have been able to do what every other nation takes for granted - to construct their own society in the light of their own ideals.
Judaism differs from the other Abrahamic monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, in that it is the only one of the three that never created or sought to create an empire. It was the imperialism of the Roman emperor Hadrian that led him in the 2nd century to change the country’s name to Palestine, one of the first, but not the last, deliberate falsifications of history by those who seek to deny the Jewish people’s right to their land.
There are 56 Islamic nations in the world, and 159 in which Christians form the majority. There are 22 Arab States in the world also. There is and only ever has been one Jewish state, tiny and vulnerable (it’s the size of New Jersey for god’s sake). And what - according to you - the Jews aren’t allowed even a tiny sliver of land, where their DNA goes back centuries. YOU GFY! Such bigotry.
Apartheid is a big word. Shame you don’t have a clue what it means. Can you explain to me how Israel is practising apartheid against Palestinians, with real-life examples? I ask because Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria, along with the Gaza Strip, are not citizens of Israel. They are citizens of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas governments, respectively. Therefore the Israeli government do not have any jurisdiction over their lives day to day. These citizens are in a different territory that they do not control. Any grievances about the civil rights of Palestinians should be directed towards those governments, not Israel.
Instead, if you interrogate what apartheid actually was, ie a system of de jure discrimination and segregation of South Africa society (from 1948-1994), you cannot claim that a similar dynamic is at play in territories beyond Israel’s borders. During apartheid, a white minority ruled and oppressed a majority black population with restrictions on housing, employment and freedom of movement. I know very well that the apartheid accusation is complete bunk because I am fully up to speed with what the word actually means and the experiences of black South Africans during the apartheid era. It really doesn’t fit in this context and when you make this comparison it really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny (and you look very silly indeed).
The Afrikaans word for Apartheid means “apartness” - and in practice, every detail of life was subject to discrimination by law. Black South Africans did not have the vote. Skin colour determined where you were born and lived, your job, your school, which bus, train, taxi and ambulance you used, which park bench, toilet and beach you used, whom you could marry, and in which cemetery you were buried. So are you really telling me that Israel controls Palestinians’ lives to this extent in both Gaza and the West Bank? Honestly?!
I’m sorry, but someone has been lying to you. Are you really that credulous?
I have seen plenty of instances where some people refer to an “apartheid wall”. This is a cynical misrepresentation of the security barrier between Israel and parts of Judea and Samaria. This barrier (which is mostly a fence in reality), was put up to stop Palestinian terrorism after hundreds of Israelis were killed or wounded in suicide bombings, stabbings, and shootings (do you remember the first and second intifadas?). It does not separate people based on race or any other criteria. However, it is fair to say that some Israelis have opportunistically twisted the barrier’s purpose to grab land from Palestinians. That is exploitative and damaging (and I utterly condemn this). But calling it the “apartheid wall”, as critics do, is untrue propaganda.
I also just want to point out that Israel issue Gazans and Palestinians from the West Bank with employment permits so they cross the border legally each day for work. The permits allow Palestinians to work mostly menial jobs that pay far higher wages than those available inside Gaza or the West Bank (another way in which the PA and Hamas have been letting their own people down - by not bothering to create a decent and robust economy that delivers prosperity). So again, this undermines your apartheid argument.
Final question on this issue. If Israel are running the same brutal system of apartheid as the South African government did all those years ago, how come the country’s black citizens didn’t rise up and rape, torture, murder and kidnap its white citizens “in the name of equality and ending apartheid”? Could it be because Hamas’ unspeakable attacks have got nothing to do with the human rights of Palestinians and improving their lives, but everything to do with wanting to kill Jews and destroying Israel?
Maybe your support of Israel is because you hate Arabs? Maybe you are a racist Islamaphobe? Maybe you are angry that people value Arab lives in a way you don’t.
God what a load of tosh. It really sounds like you’re projecting here, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest I think like this in anything I’ve written. And you know it. It really shows that you are both clutching at straws and losing the argument.