Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: The Global March to Jerusalem, a brave and admirable attempt to awaken the world’s conscience [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)You accused ME of trying to tell the future...isn't that what YOU are doing there...ascribing the worst possible intents to Palestinians simply because they are Arab?
How is that NOT racist?
It's pretty much the same thing as assuming that every white person in Massachusetts is a segregationist because most white people in Mississippi were.
You can't just come to an absolute conclusion that Arabs must forever be denied the right to govern themselves. Until the last 200 years or so, most of the governments of Europe were just as repressive as the Arab states are now...and yet THOSE places changed. Is it not the height of Euro-centric arrogance to assume that ONLY people in Europe can free themselves and govern themselves?
And...again...how can you think that maintaining the Occupation can prevent the nightmare scenarios you keep conjuring up? How can preserving the status quo possibly have ANY effect other than to give the most extreme elements in Palestinian politics the only possible conditions under which they can make their case? At one point will the Occupation create the magic alchemy you seem to think it will create and show the Palestinians "the error of their ways"? While I'll concede that democratic political cultures, in the PAST, were created under a military occupation, that does NOT mean they were ever created BECAUSE of it. The Zionists didn't create a democracy BECAUSE the British Army was occupying Palestine. And it's not even an unchallengeable position that the postwar occupation of West Germany made that country a democracy-the anti-democratic forces had already been permanently crushed in the war, and the pro-democracy people, on their own, were making the case among the German people that they needed to make a democratic future. If the occupation there had any real effect(and again, it's morally wrong to compare Palestinians to the occupants of the former Nazi state, since Palestinians never wanted anything similar to what Hitler wanted)it was to
essentially make the West Germans feel obligated to waste their votes by making the so-called "Christian Democrats" the dominant party of the Federal Republic-to put the CDU, party with more former Nazi supporters in its ranks than any other postwar party the position of "natural governing party" instead of the Social Democrats, the party that was most purely anti-fascist and anti-Holocaust-that, and the forced rehabilitation of far too many ex-Nazis, were the main things the postwar U.S. occupation of West Germany achieved.