Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Agree. Is there a country today with a greater amount of illegal standing under international law than Israel? Is there another country that defines itself as belonging to one religion, one ethnic group?

Is Judaism an ethnicity? A race? A nationality? Trump signs an order and provokes an identity crisis.
"A House Divided: A Palestinian, a Settler and the Struggle for East Jerusalem
"Israel's ethnic cleansing - The untold story of Sheikh Jarrah
[...]
Is Israel the only state in the world which claims to be a state solely owned by one ethnic group?"
[...]
It’s a religion, yes — but then again, many who identify as Jews aren’t religious. It’s passed down from parents to children and bears recognizable genetic characteristics — but then again, Jews come in all colors and racial backgrounds.
P - Ethnicity? Nationality? Faith? Culture? Heritage? Even Jews don’t agree on just what Judaism is. And President Trump has thrown that eternal question into sharp relief by signing an executive order meant to strengthen protections against anti-Semitism on college campuses, where the debate over Israel and Palestinian rights has grown increasingly toxic in recent years.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164666123

Or however you want to classify Judaism. Zionism sucks. It's a black hole.

"I'm sick to death of Israel hiding its crimes behind me. They can fuck off and die. They don't speak for Jews. They speak for themselves."

As a non-Jew i could never imagine with what conviction and passion you speak the truth that you do. That shouts integrity. Loud and clear.

And i agree: NOTHING in the above nor anything you have said could fairly be classed as antisemitism.

This is a very long article. I've resisted the temptation to post it all, and, for now, have settled for this tiny bit

A Threshold Crossed

April 27, 2021

Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution

[...]

Legal Status

Israel maintains a two-track citizenship structure that treats Palestinians unequally as compared to Jews. While both Jews and Palestinians living in Israel are citizens, Israel’s citizenship process privileges Jews and sharply restricts which Palestinians, beyond most existing residents and their descendants, can become citizens.

Israel’s 1952 Citizenship Law at its outset notes that the state grants citizenship via four routes: (1) “return,” (2) “residence in Israel,” (3) birth, and (4) naturalization.[572] Israel reserves the first path, “return,” exclusively for Jews. This path grows out of the 1950 “Law of Return,” which guarantees Jewish citizens of other countries the right to settle in Israel.[573] The Citizenship Law states that Jews already living in Israel at the time gain citizenship via this path, as opposed to the “residence in Israel” one.

Palestinians, by contrast, obtained citizenship in 1952 via the second path, “residence in Israel.” The law, though, conditions citizenship on proving residency before 1948, inclusion in the population registry, and continuous presence or legal entry in the period between 1948 and 1952. None of these restrictions apply to Jewish Israelis. The language not only excludes the more than 700,000 Palestinians that fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948, along with their descendants,[574] but also those not counted in the population registry due to a perfunctory registration process and those not present or not able to prove their residency either before 1948 or continuously between 1948 and 1952.[575]

Haaretz reported in 2017 that Israeli authorities had revoked the citizenship of “hundreds if not thousands” of Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev region in recent years over alleged “erroneous registration” by them or their families between 1948 and 1952.[576] In an August 2020 Knesset hearing, government officials acknowledged investigating the circumstances around the granting of citizenship to about 2,600 people and said that they had concluded that about 500 of them had been granted citizenship by mistake, although they claimed to have reestablished the citizenship of 362 of them via an expedited process.[577]

While the third path, birth, covers both Jews and Palestinians, the fourth, naturalization, applies only to non-Jews. The Citizenship Law permits the Interior Ministry to grant citizenship to those who meet a number of conditions, including several years of residency in Israel, intention to settle, knowledge of Hebrew, renunciation of foreign citizenship, and oath of loyalty.

In July 2003, the Israeli government issued Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order), which effectively suspended the naturalization process, as well as the granting of long-term status, for Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens or residents from the West Bank and Gaza.[578] The Supreme Court has upheld the law and the Knesset has renewed it every year since, most recently in June 2020. In 2005, the Knesset permitted Palestinian women over 25 and Palestinian men over 35 who are married to Israeli citizens or residents to apply for renewable temporary permits. In 2007, it expanded the scope of the restriction to apply to spouses from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.[579]

Israeli authorities also distinguish between citizenship and nationality, and structurally discriminate between citizens based on their nationality. The Israeli government registers the nationality of all citizens and, until 2005, included nationality on each citizen’s identity card.[580] Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are deemed to belong to different nationalities: “Jew” and “Arab”. While recognizing more than 140 nationalities, the government does not recognize an “Israeli nationality” and has denied requests of citizens to identify their nationality as such.[581] Citizens have appealed this denial to the Supreme Court, which upheld it. In 2013, the Court reaffirmed a 1972 ruling denying that “an Israeli nationality had come into being, separate and differentiated from a Jewish nationality.”[582] In a concurring opinion, Justice Hanan Melcer wrote that “the ‘constitutional Jewishness’ of the state negates the legal possibility of recognizing an ‘Israeli nationality’ which is distinct, as it were, from the ‘Jewish nationality’.”[583]

The bifurcation between citizenship and nationality means that Israeli law relegates Palestinians at birth to an inferior status by law. Israel has long defined itself as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” as enshrined in its 2018 Basic Law: Israel—The Nation-State of the Jewish People. That law, which has constitutional status, articulates for Jews alone the right of self-determination and makes it a national priority to build homes for Jews but not others.[584] Excluding Palestinians from the state’s definition of the nation provides a legal basis to pursue policies that favor Jewish Israelis to the detriment of Palestinians, in the name of advancing the “national interest” or “national security.” For example, in November 2020, an Israeli magistrate court cited the 2018 Nation-State law to dismiss a lawsuit by two Palestinian schoolchildren seeking reimbursement for expenses incurred commuting to a nearby Palestinian school, since there are no such schools in the city of Karmiel in northern Israel where they live. The ruling stated that “Karmiel is a Jewish city intended to solidify Jewish settlement in the Galilee. The establishment of an Arabic-language school or even the funding of school transportation for Arab students is liable to alter the demographic balance and damage the city’s character.” It added that “the development and establishment of Jewish settlement is a national value enshrined in the Basic Law and is a worthy and dominant consideration in municipal decision-making.”[585]

Legal measures aimed at protecting the Jewish character of the state that discriminate against Palestinians undermine the pledge in Israel’s Proclamation of Independence to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Palestinian citizens vote in elections and have served in the Knesset, but Israel’s Basic Law: The Knesset—1958, which has constitutional status, declares that no candidate can run for the Knesset if they expressly or implicitly endorse “negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”[586] Israel’s Law of Political Parties (1992) further bars registration of any party whose goals directly or indirectly deny “the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”[587] While the Supreme Court often opts against disqualifying candidates for violating these provisions,[588] the provisions formally block Palestinians from challenging the laws that codify their subjugation and, in so doing, diminish the value of the right of Palestinian citizens to vote. The fact that no government in Israel’s history has ever included representatives of a Palestinian-led party highlights the political disempowerment of the community.[589]

Palestinian former Knesset member Azmi Bishara, in describing the situation of Palestinians inside Israel, writes, “in 1948, we lost a country and gained citizenship.”[590]

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution