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Individual Israeli achievements in fields like science and technology are impressive. However, for all modern intent and purpose, the State of Israel, as a state building model, is a failing experience ...
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Israel: A Failing Experiment
10/3/2003
- Political - Article Ref: IV0310-2105
Number of comments: 51
Opinion Summary: Agree:37 Disagree:11 Neutral:3
By: Sam Bahour
Iviews* -
Israel's First Minister of Education, Professor Ben-Zion Dinur (1954), said it most sharply; "In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don't agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force." (History of the Haganah.) With this theme as the explicit backdrop of a newly established State, it is no wonder that Israel has had little chance of being a normal member of the state of nations.
Individual Israeli achievements in fields like science and technology are impressive. However, for all modern intent and purpose, the State of Israel, as a state building model, is a failing experience -- ideologically, religiously, politically, socially and, if US favorite nation status were removed, possibly economically as well. Without immediate and decisive intervention from the world community to stop the ongoing Israeli aggression on Palestinians, Israel's intransigence and US-equipped regional hegemony will not only fuel another generation of Palestinians willing to sacrifice their lives in order to end Israel's illegal occupation, but will also further jeopardize Israel's basic premise that explicit religious discrimination, namely a Jewish-only state, is an accepted basis for statehood in modern times.
In spite of the above comments by Israel's First Minister of Education (and reinforced by many other Israeli leaders), Israel was founded on its infamous fallacy that it was built on a 'land with no people, for a people with no land'. Israel has utterly failed to persuade the world, and more recently more of its own people, that this was a valid premise for statehood. Also, given the fact that Historic Palestine was inhabited prior to Israel being created, Israel has been unable to ignore that this very same fallacy is a raw form of outright racism. Israel expelled more than one half of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948. Ever since, Israel has assumed a policy of civil discrimination, political imprisonment, torture, deportations, beatings, collective punishment, political assassinations, settlement building, economic dominance, the list is endless and intensified after the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in 1967. For being an 'empty' land, the complications that Palestine posed to the implantation of a Western state in the midst of the Middle East seemed overwhelming.
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Since its inception, Israel has arrogantly refused to address the most crucial prerequisite of its establishment as a conventional State -- accepting the Palestinians -- those people that just happened to be living in that 'empty' land of Israel. The Palestinians, those that were forcefully expelled from their homes in 1948, 1967, and more recently in 2001, and have been living in squalid refugee camps throughout the region. The Palestinians, those that did not flee in 1948 and are now fourth class Israeli citizens. The Palestinians, those that have lived under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem for over 34 years.
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