illegal israeli barrier - your views, page-13

re: a terrorist who turned to love Quote (from Forums powered by Reason and Principle):
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I can only recall the very widespread attitudes of the U.S. military and State Department in the late 1940s that support for Israel would be a long term disaster in the region, and that it would ensure problems with the Arab world for decades into the future. They were absolutely right.

Another part of this logic of war on the entire Islamic world is that Israel is an outpost of Western culture — that it is a beacon of democracy and freedom surrounded by irrational, fanatical Islam. However, it is simply not true that Israel is a Western culture. Israel is an ethnostate with an apartheid-type legal system that distinguishes Jews and non-Jews in everything from immigration to public services. At the core of the state is a very large group of Jewish fanatics including the great majority of the settler movement — at least 25% of the electorate — for whom Western culture with its emphasis on democracy and individualism is anathema (see Shahak & Mezvinsky, 1999). In their hatred toward the West they are really only conforming to traditional Jewish views of the culture and peoples of outgroups. Fanatic Jewish ethnocentrism in Israel is a problem because it makes the situation there completely intractable — the settlers would presumably commit suicide rather than go back the pre-1967 borders. I think that if the settlements were abandoned and the pre-1967 borders restored there would be much less sympathy for the Palestinians in the international community.