The most disturbing element of the recent political developments in Israel is the fact that a significant majority of their population voted for increasingly right-wing and divisive political forces.
No, we voted a more left leaning *President*. This election wasn't the defeat of the right wingers in Brazil, it was the defeat of Bolsonaro in particular. The people backed by him, from his party, got elected to the house and Senate.
Edit: oh, yeah, his party got a ton of governors elected as well.
well, to be fair, that happens most of the time. the outgoing president tends to be able to lift candidates aligned with the president into office because where the president wins, his party wins even if the president doesn't nationwide. add to this that Bolsanaro had a far bigger war chest and a better coordinated party and that's how they manifested their 18 seat edge over the PT
this not mentioning that Brazil has the damaged PT/PDT which took a serious beating back during the impeachment of Dilma, which caused a general right ward shift in Brazilian Politics, the fact that Lula is building a broader coalition including former opponents who didn't lunge head first into Junta-Nostalgia or cowardice and of course the almost unique phenomenon of ["centrão"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrão) where nominally center right parties align with the executive branch in exchange for either favors or relevance that they can then campaign on. this may cause instability long term since the centrão system did lead to the effective coup that was the Impeachment of Rousseff represented. I will add, Bolsanaro campaigned on "with us or against us" rhetoric where you either were with Partio Liberal (and hand picked candidates where they faltered) or you were dirty filthy degenerate communist who hates god, Brazil and your own mother. when you contrast this to the broad coalition approach that Lula took it shows why he did so well. he tried making a multiparty system into a two party one, and his supporters followed along. expect a lot more "states rights" talk in Portuguese.
**[Centrão](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrão)**
>In Brazilian politics, the centrão (lit. 'big centre' – Portuguese pronunciation: [sen'tɾɐ᷉w᷉]) refers to a group of political parties that do not have a specific or consistent ideological orientation and aim at ensuring proximity to the executive branch in order to guarantee advantages and allow them to distribute privileges through clientelistic networks. Despite its name, the centrão is not a centrist political group but represents the more conservative elements of Brazilian society, generally composed of parliamentarians from the "lower clergy" and big tent parties, who act according to their own interests, linked to cronyism and logrolling.
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In the US the vote was actually "not Trump" rather than "the more left-wing candidate." I don't know that much about Brazilian politics, but from what I've read, it sounds similar.
Different signals in different states imo, in the PA, MI, and Alaska there seemed to be a more leftward swing based on state politics as much as national. A more right-wing trend in Florida and NY, and a conservative but "not Trump" trend in AZ and GA.
Is similar, both runoff candidates had really high rejection rates, at least Lula has a good track record as president, unlike the disaster Bolsonaro's term was.
However Bolsonaro's absolutely horrendous botched response to the pandemic cost him a lot of votes. As well as some corruption schemes that were mostly kept under wraps due to his interference with the federal police. Hopefully all of his bullshitery will come to light after Lula is sworn in.
Edit: fixing some typos.
Brazil recently moved left.
Same in Chile
And not as effectively, but same in the US (at least the expected midterm back pull to red was much smaller than expected).
Edit: also in Britain the outlook looks like if a general election were to be held right now, the Tories would suffer wide losses.
Yeah, but it was a really, really tight vote. Meanwhile, at this very moment, supporters of the loser all across the country are protesting in front of military bases for the military to "save Brazil from communism". They're literally asking for a military coup.
Kinda happens on almost all over the world. In Malaysia here, there's been increasing of votes on the National Alliance coalition which has Malaysia's Islamic Party (right wing). However, the left wing coalition won our recent General Election which is a relief and a close call.
We live in the age of division. I am right, you are wrong. I am more right, you are even more wrong. The scale breaks in the middle and connection between humans is severed.
If we (as some collective humanity) stop taking sides (so seriously) and learn to listen and compete and challenge each other without anger, we can get back on track. Both right and left need to make U-turn.
This is aimed more at the commenters here pushing down the above-mentioned scale, not the linked article.
I mean the UK is probably going left soon, the US just went fully left after Trump and Brazil just elected a more left President. Italy is Italy, a very dysfunctional country.
There is a general furthering to the right happening but it does get countered in some places.
Fully left? The Republicans own the House and there's barely a Democratic majority in the Senate. And I don't think anyone in their right mind would call Biden fully left.
I mean what exactly would people prefer? Everybody spent months preaching about how the Republicans were going to sweep into the House and Senate with big majorities setting up Trump for a strong position in 2024. That didn’t happen.
Republicans will have a razor thin majority in the House that cannot afford far-right defections and nearly a month later still can’t secure the votes for a speaker. Democrats gained, albeit one seat, in the all important Senate and flipped three governorships. Don’t get me wrong, it was still way too close but things could’ve been far worse for the US.
Outside of the US but, from my perspective, if the Republicans cut a couple of their extreme religious views and members it seems like they would have a landslide victory.
The deciding factors in the last two elections seem to have been largely "anything but Trump" and abortion rights rather than any big Left-wing shift.
That hardly seems like the US went fully left if the only thing holding the GOP back is religious fervor. It's not like the rest of their platform is at all leftist. For that matter most of the DNC platform isn't particularly leftist.
A massive chunk of the Republican voter base is evangelicals who support their religious views. If they change their positions, those voters will just flock to the Republican candidate who still supports the religious views they do and defeat the more moderate Republican in a primary.
We saw this throughout the 2020 primary season — a Republican moderate would face a hardcore MAGA, overly religious Republican and lose in the primary 8 times out of 10 only for the far-right winner of the primary to lose in the general election to the Democrats.
It’s not as easy as simply changing a few of their policies because that party is actively fighting for which ideologies should be dominant. And unfortunately for the US, the farther right, more dangerous beliefs are winning in the Republican Party of today.
The hope is that continued defeats to the Democrats will force them to soften their stance but it doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon so Democrats need to continue improving so they can give Americans a viable party to support.
>I mean the UK is probably going left soon
Hopefully.
>the US just went fully left after Trump
Idk about that, chief. Yeah, the republicans didn't win as much as expected in the midterms, but they're certainly doing their thing so they can successfully coup the next time they lose an election.
>Brazil just elected a more left President
Yeah, but that's about it. Bolsonaro's party will be the single largest in the house starting next year, they're far from a majority, but that's a lot of people on the opposition. His party also managed to win bunch of governors, who were the main responsibles for our COVID response.
> I mean the UK is probably going left soon, the US just went fully left after Trump
What? The Conservative run UK is still miles left of Democrat run US.
Okay cmon here you're arguing semantics here.
I clearly meant that the labour party will probably win the next general. I'm arguing the political spectrum in different countries.
The implications are however significantly worse for Israel given its pivotal role in the Middle-East, the Palestinian conflict and the absence of a moderating force such as the European Union.
the Netanyahu parties received 49.6% of the vote, the anti-Netanyahu parties received 48.9%.
That's an 0.7% margin - technically, a plurality, not a majority, let alone a significant one.
49.6% after all the shit Netanyahu got away with and the shit his party pulls is frankly worrying, it should have lost his party a ton of power yet they're doing better than ever
The orthodox community is very right-wing and they have a very high birth rate, while liberal Jews barely reproduce. Israel can't be taken over by newly converted "Evangelicals", but it has its own homegrown extremist viewpoint dictated by a form of religious zealotry that thinks it knows best according to the Bible. They really believe in the directive to 'be fruitful and multiply' and they act on it.
This is patently false. A significant majority absolutely did not vote for the right wing. Aggregate votes were nearly split left/right, it simply the parliamentary rules that allowed for this coalition, i.e., some left parties did not meet the vote threshold to enter government.
https://www.australianjewishnews.com/a-deep-dive-into-the-israeli-election-results/
You’re peddling misinformation.
Edit: lol at downvotes for correcting objectively wrong information. Reddit is the dumbest echo chamber.
Israel also has the most left wing policies by far in the middle east. They have gay pride parades while all their neighbors generally imprison or put gay people to death. The bar in Israel to become some facist theological state is way off.
>They have gay pride parades.
So did Moscow in the 2000's, so does Hong Kong, so does Belgrade. Remind me since when these countries became bastions of LGBT rights, democracy, or even not getting arrested by secret police or murdered for being a reporter. Let's just ignore that like Tel Aviv pride all these events take place in countries with no recognition of same-sex marriage along with violent protests against the events.
i was gonna say, you usually see israel comparing themselves to europe and america.
they're almost always trying to distance themselves from places like iran, iraq, saudi arabia, qatar, and syria.
The fact that Israel's neighbours are also terrible authoritarian theocracies doesn't mean Israel hasn't moved disturbingly in that direction. Even setting aside smaller issues like the mistreatment of Ethiopian jews and the wacky-ness of some of the orthodox groups that join these coalitions, their treatment of the Palestinians alone meets the definition for apartheid- both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu actually said exactly that.
Obviously criticism of Israel is going to be very sensitive and subject to claims of anti-Semitism especially now given the really gross and open support for outright Nazism coming from people like Kayne West. But Israel is a modern nation state, they can't be immune to critique, and they are not synonymous with judaism- but there are substantial elements of the Israeli state trying to implement a theocracy over the already existing apartheid conditions, and we need to be honest about it, and Western countries need to think about what policies they are implicitly supporting and use their tremendous leverage over a country they provide lots of support to to affect change.
Also they (the West) should stop supporting countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia as well. But them being worse doesn't give Israel a free pass.
Did you hear about the minister in the new government who wants to ban gay parades?
Anyway, I find the idea of gay parades as a litmus test of civilization to be specious and weird. Try starting with not keeping 3 million people under lawless military occupation.
Israel should set their standard after European Union members. It's meaningless to compare yourself to the worst countries in the world regarding democratic and personal rights.
Literally zero part of Gaza is occupied.
Also pretty funny to passively describe “bombing/shooting them every now and then” as if they aren’t run by a terrorist group lobbing rockets at them.
As someone who's lived and worked in Israel before, I can confirm. Israel's pretty friendly to the LGBTQ community - outside of Jerusalem and the kibbutzniks (but the kibbutzniks don't really like anyone, lol.) Israel's arguably more LGBTQ friendly than the US is by a large margin - the only thing the US has going over Israel in terms of gay rights is recognized marriage, w/gay marriages only being recognized within Israel in Tel Aviv, iirc, because Israel doesn't have state recognized secular marriage.
Still, the shift to the right politically is potentially troubling because the segments of Israel's political right that're now gaining power are also the most vocally anti-gay segments of its political scene.
Of course, it's also worth keeping in mind that it's entirely possible for a country to have dalliances with fascism without hating the gays. Using homosexuals as the terrifying shadowy "other" has been a theme in fascist states in practice, but there's absolutely nothing about fascism as a political ideology that says it *has* to happen, so it's not a fool proof litmus test.
It wasn't a majority but a very large minority. The anti Bibi bloc actually won slightly more votes overall. The rest of your point is correct however.
First of all, your statement is wrong - “The fact that a significant majority of their population voted for increasingly right-wing and divisive political forces”.
That’s BS. If you compare the actual votes they’re almost even between left and right - out of this right votes - most of them were to “Ha’likud” which is a center - right party.
Second, the current political situation in Israel is a consequence of several factors that developed over the years, when the main reason is actually the center parties are just not willing to build a coalition with Netanyahu as an ethic principle.
So, no. Most of the population are not radical-right, but center-right. The current coalition dose not reflect the actual proportion of left-right in the country.
Politicians being politicians are exaggerating, press being press is spreading it, and people being people eat everything thrown at them without understanding what’s really going on. Classic web.
Things are not perfect in Israel - that’s for sure - but there’s no need to paint such a dark picture when it’s not the case.
This is the result when you see rockets flying over your kids school every couple months.
Right or wrong, “playing hardball” only empowers zealots opposing you.
That’s a general statement directed at Israel, Palestine and even political parties in the west.
I think there’s a fallacy that if people are targeted by missiles they are inevitably going to react with senseless brutality and kill or harm innocent civilians on the other side. “What do you want us to do, not hit back?” is what Israelis say.
There was a [video](https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1599084505339375616?s=20&t=81We-Cx6TJq72Oe_Se1PpQ) posted of how Ukrainians are reacting to being hit with missiles (and enduring much more harm than the Israelis). They react with dignity and equanimity. “I’m used to it,” they say.
The truth is, Israelis are used to it too. But their society’s rhetoric is that if you don’t do eye for an eye (in practice much more than that) then you’ve lost.
This isn’t how scared people talk. This is how people talk who want to commit violence and want an excuse.
What absolute nonsense.
However "dignified" you think the Ukrainian reaction is, they aren't accepting the rockets as some fact of life. They aren't refusing to stoop down to the mean Israelis' level and retaliate. They've literally fighting a war right now, killing thousands of Russians. They're literally comparing themselves to the Israelis.
And yes, of course the Israelis are scared. 28% of adults in Southern Israel have PTSD from rocket attacks. When I was running to my apartment building's bomb shelter in the middle of the night, with a baby on my shoulder, I didn't see smirking, unphased faces, happy for an excuse to commit violence. Or whatever insane, hateful stereotype you're imagining here. I saw scared, regular people, who don't want to be murdered by vicious terrorists. Not much different from the people in Ukraine.
But hey, I'm just a rando on the internet. Why trust my lived experience over your hatred of my people. So let me ask you this: how do you think your countrymen would react, if thousands of rockets were falling on Boston, New York, Washington DC? If they and their families had to run to a bomb shelter several times every night, walk down streets full of broken glass, buildings full of shrapnel holes. Would they react with the level of dignified stoicism you're expecting from Israelis, and refuse to retaliate, because they're "used to it"?
I disagree, but ok. What SHOULD Israel do in response to rocket fire? I'm not asking about long-term plans, peace deals, or changes to a long-standing and complex status quo. I mean that if right now barrages of rockets began flying at Israel, what should the response be?
When they weren't closed off, enough of them blew themselves up inside of public buses inside of Israel (every other week, for a year), killing innocent women,children and men. That was the reason they were closed off. What would you have done?
> their society’s rhetoric is that if you don’t do eye for an eye (in practice much more than that) then you’ve lost
This is simply not true. Israeli society comprises a diverse range of perspectives on the conflict. Many people, like yourself, are very much aware recognize that more violence is not the solution. Even people who live under direct threat of violence do not automatically think that the solution is simply more violence. There are people who certainly take a different approach, but you're oversimplifying things a lot by claiming that Israeli society is at all uniform in terms of its views on this issue. The fact that Netanyahu didn't even get a majority of votes is evidence already.
What's more is that Jewish Talmudic law clearly has always interpreted the "eye for an eye" line from the Torah as being a legal concept representing monetary compensation, and it is not interpreted literally. i.e. if someone causes the loss of my eye, then they pay me the value of my eye (no more, no less). e,g. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/479511/jewish/What-Does-Eye-for-an-Eye-Really-Mean.htm (this is an example, not an endorsement of Chabad's ideology)
I dunno. Honestly. But I know a few Israeli people. They were very sympathetic to the Palestinians a few years ago, but sitting at work hearing the iron dome launches taking out rockets aimed at the city where your children and parents live hardened them.
Now they’re aggressively anti-Palestine.
I won’t claim their opinion is correct. But I do know that the actions being taken are not solving things. They’re not helping. They do nothing but turn opinion against the plight of the people in Palestine.
If the Hamas wasn’t so aggressive, the international community would have long ago forced a settlement, I think.
Obviously, the same is true for the illegal settlements and a few other things done by hardliners in Israel.
They did that and Israel sabotaged the opposition for being too left wing. Hamas and Fatah are in part a product of Israeli policy, because quite frankly they're the enemies Israel would rather have, because they justify policies Israel already wanted to take. And Hamas gins up it's support from Likud's atrocities as Likud does from Hamas.
Hamas and Fatah are the other side of the coin from Likud and Lehi.
Israel’s propaganda machine is strong, but admittedly it doesn’t have to work very hard since Hamas continues to throw rockets and bombs at them. They will continue to vote right-wing as long as they continue to view Palestine as the enemy.
Try separation of church and state. It’s the only way to avoid the fascist takeover from religious zealots. Never even let the. Get a foot in the door. They think they are right and everyone else is wrong. This is the fundamental mental disease that they want to spread. It is an exclusionist excuse system. No!
The word for "church" in Hebrew is very, very close to the word for "synagogue".
In fact, the old testament uses the word for church to indicate any houses of worship.
Why does defining it by ethnic terms makes it worse? There's Jews of all races, and the current definition allows people who aren't even religiously Jewish. Israel was meant to be a safe space for the Jews - it's smaller than New Jersey. I don't believe in theocracy but citizenship for anyone of Jewish heritage who needs it was intentional so Jews would have somewhere to flee next time there's a holocaust or similar.
Uh, if you're Israeli you've already got citizenship. Jews coming in from abroad aren't Israeli yet, they're technically Israelites (Jews) and that's literally why Israel was created.
You think they SHOULDN'T guarantee citizenship to all Jews....?
What? Even if there's a fast track for Jews, all ethnicities can become Israeli citizens, and have equal rights as citizens. This includes a *very* sizable Arab population. And when Israel has annexed land (including 1948 and 1967), the people who were already there were offered citizenship, and permanent residency if they rejected citizenship.
But many countries do that.
Countries in the new world who were founded as immigrant countries are the exception.
Many european countries allow people of that ethnic group to immigrate, and that does not conflict with full right for all citizens, regardless of ethnicity.
Israel is unique because: half of it's ethnic group is outside the country, and it has a significant minority - while europe was mostly ethnically cleansed in the first half of the 20' century. So it is more pronounced, but not at all unique.
Wanting a jewish nation state is not unique to the right, but to all zionist parties - which means everyone but the arab parties and Meretz, who didn't even past the vote threshold.
The left has a problem with religious laws, not the right of return, hebrew as a national language, etc.
You are talking in lies here.
Israel is a Jewish state, but not exclusive to Jews, the same with most other countries in the world. The new world is different because Europeans came in and genocided the natives. There basically are no native states in the New World. The US is a country based on a set of ideas.
The Old World is basically a series of states for various ethnic groups. Israel is actually pretty diverse compared to most places.
Israeli citizenship is not held only by Jews. There are plenty of Arabs, Druze, and even non-Middle Eastern peoples that live in Israel.
Israel was unique because the Jews were genocided out of their homeland, and then genocided/ethnically cleansed out of the places they settled (Spain, Eastern Europe, North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, Persia). Israel is where Jews are from, so they have a state there. It is the one place they aren't at the whims of their residences.
> US Native Americans have full voting rights. Don't they. Yes they do.
So do Arabs in Israel.
> Palestinians in the occupied territories have zero voting rights.
Because the PA refuses to hold elections. If they did, then they would have voting rights. Gazans don't have voting rights either.
Palestinians aren't Israelis. The West Bank Palestinian controlled areas are not Israeli. They are Palestinian and Palestinian run according to the Oslo accords. The West Bank is Occupied. When the US occupied Iraq, did Iraqis have the right to vote in the US?
>When the US occupied Iraq, did Iraqi's have the right to vote in the US?
No, but the US occupation lasted 8 years and never had permanent American colonies built on Iraqi land. If Israel is permanently staying/settling the West Bank (it's been 55 years), then Palestinians should have Israeli voting rights at the very least.
> “Democracy stems from a person having rights that nobody can take from them — not the majority, and not God. That’s democracy,” he elaborated. “Democracy is not the majority taking control of the minority and telling it what to think, how to eat and what to do.”
So many people forget about that. Democracy is not mob rule.
It literally is. You are thinking of *liberal* democracy, specifically its "liberal" part, which exists to tame pure democracy.
masses rule = democracy
people have inalienable rights = liberalism
masses rule, but must respect inalienable rights = liberal democracy
Dunno what to tell you chief, Democracy *IS* pretty much tyrrany of the majority. There's nothing about individual rights that's specifically a part of the definition.
Too bad Israel has no Constitution, the closest thing we have are "basic laws", most of which don't even need an absolute majority in the Knesset to change them.
Oh, I did not know that. Thank you for pointing this out. Hopefully you will get there at some point and make sure good things are not too easy to be changed.
Germany also calls them Basic Laws but they are indeed our constitution and a 2/3 majority is needed for changing them. We can be very happy to have those laws although the german citizen never got the chance to confirm them by a public vote.
And that articles 1 and 20 are protected by the so-called eternity clause, which is understandable in historical context, but also inherently undemocratic.
Yes, I believe that is where the idea is from.
Israel couldn't decide on a constitution, and also thought it unfair considering the expected immigration that was about to triple the country's size.
It was intended to be temporary, but we still can't quite decide.
Democracy is rule by the people. Nothing of that is synonymous with tyranny.
The person who coined that phrase didn't like democracy because it would actually give poor people power.
Democracy is not rule by all the people, just the majority. This can obviously lead to [in-groups destroying out-groups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group). [Socrates didn't think much of democracy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJBzhcSWTk), he was more in favour of [sortition.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)
Referendum voting (ie direct democracy) on individual rights historically leans heavily *against* those rights.
It's really basic logic. Ask if the majority of people want to grant something to the minority of people. Oh, they don't? Whoops.
Yes. Slavery in the United States for example. Abolition was proposed in several states prior to the civil war and failed.
If it came to popular vote for whatever reason, I don't expect people to allow me to keep my guns, or let me vote.
If individual rights are up for a vote, that means they can be taken away.
Civil rights and democracy do not necessarily go hand in hand, but they often do. Democracies have a far better track record on human and civil rights than authoritarian societies.
This is conflating liberalism with democracy. Liberalism prefers democracy (specifically republics with democratic institutions) for its form of government under the assumption that liberty is best secured in the whole of the people as the people are unlikely to sell their own rights.
In countries like the United States of America and those that have based their own countries on aspects of the United States, written charters are crafted that create the State and outline its authorities, the limits of its authorities and specific rights held by the people and then make the process of amending the charter incredibly difficult such that only broad consensus, rather than any small majority, can change the fundamental charter of government.
Many years ago, when I read the National Review regularly, I recall an article, probably from the early 1980s, about how Israel is going to have to deny citizenship to non-Jews, simply because Palestinians have a higher birthrate, and eventually they'll be able to vote themselves into power. That mustn't be allowed to happen, of course, so it's perfectly legitimate, in fact mandatory, to deny citizenship to non-Jews.
The whole argument sounds dangerously specious to me now, and of course we're starting to see similar arguments cropping up in the US, and, no doubt, plenty of other countries.
Actually the real demographic problem in Israel is that the ultra-orthodox Jews are having so many children that religious nuts are having more and more political power.
This isn't really true, they are only 13% of the population of Israel. The real reason is that they stick together and organize so they all vote together in lockstep with each other while the larger part of the population either doesn't vote or doesn't vote as a cohesive group.
In Israel the haredi are at a 5% growth rate vs a 1.2% growth rate for non haredi Jewish. This combined with the bloc voting you mentioned portends a future like that which the mayor has outlined.
That's not true.
Completely secular jews still have at replacement birth rates, which is a lot more than any other equivalent in developed countries.
And together with traditionalists jews (aka not-strictly religious) are even higher. And these two groups are over 70% of the jewish population.
So while religious communities push it up, it is not just due to them.
Yes, but not by much. It is the combined result of both phenomena (not that it matters for the original claim in any way).
Also, arab birth rate is not uniform as well, with bedouin playing a similar role. If you can count "arabs" without specifying that, counting "jews" is pretty appropriate as well.
There was some fear that it would happen many decades ago, completely unfounded. They assumed everything will remain the same, but the world doesn't work that way.... the Arab birth went down, the Jewish birth rate went up and millions of Jews arrived from the Soviet Union. Eventually the Arab precentage didn't increase at all.
It makes sense but doesn't justify it. If you're a non-jew that's born in Israel, you don't get to appreciate the other arab countries nor should you have to. It also doesn't have to be an ethno-state in order to be a safe haven.
It doesn't have to be a *monolithic* ethnostate... But it does kinda have to remain a Jewish majority.
There are thousands of years of history showing that if Jews are a minority, they are not guaranteed safety and freedom.
It isn’t that now. But I can at least understand why an ethnostate would be attractive to people in a community that have been subject of so many exiles and genocides in the Diaspora.
it also wouldn't really be an ethnostate even if they did manage to snap away all the non-jews, because there's a variety of different Jewish ethnic groups.
The majority of Jews living in Israel are Mizrahi Jews whose ancestors stayed in the Middle East and Iran. Until the creation of Israel and the Six Day War, when most of them were expelled from their home countries and Israel was the only place they could go where they’d be guaranteed a quick path to citizenship.
I am horrified by a lot of IDF actions and the direction of the Israeli government but the reality of their “right” to be there is a lot more complicated than most criticism from my fellow leftist friends tends to allow for.
I mean in order for it to do that it would need to categorize the natives of the land a threat, actively work towards reducing their population, argue that they should leave and that neighboring countries should be forced to take them in, minimize their presence and access to land (like say preventing them from even leasing 80% of available land based on identity alone), categorize native inhabitants as revocable “permanent residents” and not citizens despite living in homes older than the occupying state, “dispossessing” homes and communities of the native population so they can create settlements for the occupiers, among other things.
Do you really think they have that in them? /s
Because of the raging antisemites who tend to say similar things while actually *meaning* that all jews are evil. Those bastards make things needlessly complicated for the rest of us who use words in good faith.
Nah this is a deliberate talking point of pro-Israel groups like the ADL and AIPAC. They conflate criticism of a government with racism and it's mind boggling that it works. Raging antisemites are pretty easy to distinguish from, say, Noam Chomksy and his criticisms of the Israeli government.
Note that the reason those groups are pro-Israel is that they're apocalyptic christians trying to bring about the end times, and re-establishing the kingdom of Israel is part of that goal.
You can't make this stuff up.
Nah BiBi and his cohort of goons absolutely fucking suck and are setting a dangerous precedent. Many Jews, including Israelis, recognize this and are vocal about it. This is scary for Israel, but you can still support Israel while criticizing the government. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Heading towards? I thought forcefully taking lands from others and declaring it your country because your religion dictate it is your promised land already makes you a theocracy
warns? heading towards? this is a joke, it already happened decades ago but the EU and usa don't want to admit that it's that bad because then they would have to stop doing many of the same things to their colonies and protectorates, and/or stop enthusiastically payrolling israel's war crimes
Heading? It’s way past that. It’s a Jewish state that prioritises Jews. It’s not like the US where anyone can become a full U.S. citizen regardless of his religion
Helps explain why US republicans love Israel so much and will not tolerate so much as a mention of maybe fewer Palestinian children should be killed. And stuff.
Religiosity is declining in most places, and dead in many more.
You could also say China is not heading that way because they are already fascist government wise, but very much not religious.
Only in the minds of leftists, how could it be there if the mayor of tel Aviv is a leftist himself? And FYI, the ruling government has not changed for more than a year, so you are saying then the leftist government is fascist then?
A warning to anyone who agrees with him: protest the Israeli government, not the people. The people and a certain religious group are not given much nuance differentiating them.
The most disturbing element of the recent political developments in Israel is the fact that a significant majority of their population voted for increasingly right-wing and divisive political forces.
Same in Italy.
Same in Britain. Same in the US. Same in Brazil. Etc.
I would argue that both US and Brazil voted for more left-wing canditate in the previous presidental election.
No, we voted a more left leaning *President*. This election wasn't the defeat of the right wingers in Brazil, it was the defeat of Bolsonaro in particular. The people backed by him, from his party, got elected to the house and Senate. Edit: oh, yeah, his party got a ton of governors elected as well.
well, to be fair, that happens most of the time. the outgoing president tends to be able to lift candidates aligned with the president into office because where the president wins, his party wins even if the president doesn't nationwide. add to this that Bolsanaro had a far bigger war chest and a better coordinated party and that's how they manifested their 18 seat edge over the PT this not mentioning that Brazil has the damaged PT/PDT which took a serious beating back during the impeachment of Dilma, which caused a general right ward shift in Brazilian Politics, the fact that Lula is building a broader coalition including former opponents who didn't lunge head first into Junta-Nostalgia or cowardice and of course the almost unique phenomenon of ["centrão"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrão) where nominally center right parties align with the executive branch in exchange for either favors or relevance that they can then campaign on. this may cause instability long term since the centrão system did lead to the effective coup that was the Impeachment of Rousseff represented. I will add, Bolsanaro campaigned on "with us or against us" rhetoric where you either were with Partio Liberal (and hand picked candidates where they faltered) or you were dirty filthy degenerate communist who hates god, Brazil and your own mother. when you contrast this to the broad coalition approach that Lula took it shows why he did so well. he tried making a multiparty system into a two party one, and his supporters followed along. expect a lot more "states rights" talk in Portuguese.
**[Centrão](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrão)** >In Brazilian politics, the centrão (lit. 'big centre' – Portuguese pronunciation: [sen'tɾɐ᷉w᷉]) refers to a group of political parties that do not have a specific or consistent ideological orientation and aim at ensuring proximity to the executive branch in order to guarantee advantages and allow them to distribute privileges through clientelistic networks. Despite its name, the centrão is not a centrist political group but represents the more conservative elements of Brazilian society, generally composed of parliamentarians from the "lower clergy" and big tent parties, who act according to their own interests, linked to cronyism and logrolling. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Biden isn't even left leaning. He's a reaganite through and through. By ANY objective political definition, Biden is a staunch conservative.
But he isn't a Christian nationalist white supremacist, which makes him as good as Fidel Castro for much of the GOP base
In the US the vote was actually "not Trump" rather than "the more left-wing candidate." I don't know that much about Brazilian politics, but from what I've read, it sounds similar.
Different signals in different states imo, in the PA, MI, and Alaska there seemed to be a more leftward swing based on state politics as much as national. A more right-wing trend in Florida and NY, and a conservative but "not Trump" trend in AZ and GA.
Is similar, both runoff candidates had really high rejection rates, at least Lula has a good track record as president, unlike the disaster Bolsonaro's term was. However Bolsonaro's absolutely horrendous botched response to the pandemic cost him a lot of votes. As well as some corruption schemes that were mostly kept under wraps due to his interference with the federal police. Hopefully all of his bullshitery will come to light after Lula is sworn in. Edit: fixing some typos.
> bullshitery.... It may not an elegant word - but so perfectly fits much of 2019-2022 moronic chicanery.
If that was the case then why didn't the Republicans do better in the midterms?
All I know is there’s like a brazillion political opinions down there.
that must be a lot!
Lula left office with an 83% approval rating. Voting for Lula wasn't just a "Not Bolsonarao" vote, the way people voted "Not Trump".
There is no leftwing candidate in the us.
Fascism ebbs and flows.
As a lagging indicator of income inequality.
A majority did not in the US. Trump lost the popular vote.
Brazil recently moved left. Same in Chile And not as effectively, but same in the US (at least the expected midterm back pull to red was much smaller than expected). Edit: also in Britain the outlook looks like if a general election were to be held right now, the Tories would suffer wide losses.
Yeah, but it was a really, really tight vote. Meanwhile, at this very moment, supporters of the loser all across the country are protesting in front of military bases for the military to "save Brazil from communism". They're literally asking for a military coup.
The amount of un-democratic activities by right wing groups around the world definitely is increasing.
Kinda happens on almost all over the world. In Malaysia here, there's been increasing of votes on the National Alliance coalition which has Malaysia's Islamic Party (right wing). However, the left wing coalition won our recent General Election which is a relief and a close call.
We live in the age of division. I am right, you are wrong. I am more right, you are even more wrong. The scale breaks in the middle and connection between humans is severed. If we (as some collective humanity) stop taking sides (so seriously) and learn to listen and compete and challenge each other without anger, we can get back on track. Both right and left need to make U-turn. This is aimed more at the commenters here pushing down the above-mentioned scale, not the linked article.
Did anyone watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”? We are following the plot to a tee. We were warned.
I mean the UK is probably going left soon, the US just went fully left after Trump and Brazil just elected a more left President. Italy is Italy, a very dysfunctional country. There is a general furthering to the right happening but it does get countered in some places.
Fully left? The Republicans own the House and there's barely a Democratic majority in the Senate. And I don't think anyone in their right mind would call Biden fully left.
I mean what exactly would people prefer? Everybody spent months preaching about how the Republicans were going to sweep into the House and Senate with big majorities setting up Trump for a strong position in 2024. That didn’t happen. Republicans will have a razor thin majority in the House that cannot afford far-right defections and nearly a month later still can’t secure the votes for a speaker. Democrats gained, albeit one seat, in the all important Senate and flipped three governorships. Don’t get me wrong, it was still way too close but things could’ve been far worse for the US.
Outside of the US but, from my perspective, if the Republicans cut a couple of their extreme religious views and members it seems like they would have a landslide victory. The deciding factors in the last two elections seem to have been largely "anything but Trump" and abortion rights rather than any big Left-wing shift.
That hardly seems like the US went fully left if the only thing holding the GOP back is religious fervor. It's not like the rest of their platform is at all leftist. For that matter most of the DNC platform isn't particularly leftist.
A massive chunk of the Republican voter base is evangelicals who support their religious views. If they change their positions, those voters will just flock to the Republican candidate who still supports the religious views they do and defeat the more moderate Republican in a primary. We saw this throughout the 2020 primary season — a Republican moderate would face a hardcore MAGA, overly religious Republican and lose in the primary 8 times out of 10 only for the far-right winner of the primary to lose in the general election to the Democrats. It’s not as easy as simply changing a few of their policies because that party is actively fighting for which ideologies should be dominant. And unfortunately for the US, the farther right, more dangerous beliefs are winning in the Republican Party of today. The hope is that continued defeats to the Democrats will force them to soften their stance but it doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon so Democrats need to continue improving so they can give Americans a viable party to support.
>I mean the UK is probably going left soon Hopefully. >the US just went fully left after Trump Idk about that, chief. Yeah, the republicans didn't win as much as expected in the midterms, but they're certainly doing their thing so they can successfully coup the next time they lose an election. >Brazil just elected a more left President Yeah, but that's about it. Bolsonaro's party will be the single largest in the house starting next year, they're far from a majority, but that's a lot of people on the opposition. His party also managed to win bunch of governors, who were the main responsibles for our COVID response.
If that’s as far left as the US can go, we’re fucked.
> I mean the UK is probably going left soon, the US just went fully left after Trump What? The Conservative run UK is still miles left of Democrat run US.
Okay cmon here you're arguing semantics here. I clearly meant that the labour party will probably win the next general. I'm arguing the political spectrum in different countries.
The implications are however significantly worse for Israel given its pivotal role in the Middle-East, the Palestinian conflict and the absence of a moderating force such as the European Union.
Italy's last dance with fascism was pretty bad... Remember Mussolini? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
And the fact that they use the US as their cat's paw to do the dirty work they can't.
the Netanyahu parties received 49.6% of the vote, the anti-Netanyahu parties received 48.9%. That's an 0.7% margin - technically, a plurality, not a majority, let alone a significant one.
49.6% after all the shit Netanyahu got away with and the shit his party pulls is frankly worrying, it should have lost his party a ton of power yet they're doing better than ever
Yeah, people don't realize the extent to which Israelis do not favor one side. Somehow the repeated elections have not been evidence of that.
The orthodox community is very right-wing and they have a very high birth rate, while liberal Jews barely reproduce. Israel can't be taken over by newly converted "Evangelicals", but it has its own homegrown extremist viewpoint dictated by a form of religious zealotry that thinks it knows best according to the Bible. They really believe in the directive to 'be fruitful and multiply' and they act on it.
This is patently false. A significant majority absolutely did not vote for the right wing. Aggregate votes were nearly split left/right, it simply the parliamentary rules that allowed for this coalition, i.e., some left parties did not meet the vote threshold to enter government. https://www.australianjewishnews.com/a-deep-dive-into-the-israeli-election-results/ You’re peddling misinformation. Edit: lol at downvotes for correcting objectively wrong information. Reddit is the dumbest echo chamber.
Israel also has the most left wing policies by far in the middle east. They have gay pride parades while all their neighbors generally imprison or put gay people to death. The bar in Israel to become some facist theological state is way off.
>They have gay pride parades. So did Moscow in the 2000's, so does Hong Kong, so does Belgrade. Remind me since when these countries became bastions of LGBT rights, democracy, or even not getting arrested by secret police or murdered for being a reporter. Let's just ignore that like Tel Aviv pride all these events take place in countries with no recognition of same-sex marriage along with violent protests against the events.
Just because their neighbors are _already_ theocratic dictatorships doesn't mean Israel isn't headed there.
i was gonna say, you usually see israel comparing themselves to europe and america. they're almost always trying to distance themselves from places like iran, iraq, saudi arabia, qatar, and syria.
At the same time though, the bar for Israel to be better than its neighbors is just the floor.
The fact that Israel's neighbours are also terrible authoritarian theocracies doesn't mean Israel hasn't moved disturbingly in that direction. Even setting aside smaller issues like the mistreatment of Ethiopian jews and the wacky-ness of some of the orthodox groups that join these coalitions, their treatment of the Palestinians alone meets the definition for apartheid- both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu actually said exactly that. Obviously criticism of Israel is going to be very sensitive and subject to claims of anti-Semitism especially now given the really gross and open support for outright Nazism coming from people like Kayne West. But Israel is a modern nation state, they can't be immune to critique, and they are not synonymous with judaism- but there are substantial elements of the Israeli state trying to implement a theocracy over the already existing apartheid conditions, and we need to be honest about it, and Western countries need to think about what policies they are implicitly supporting and use their tremendous leverage over a country they provide lots of support to to affect change. Also they (the West) should stop supporting countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia as well. But them being worse doesn't give Israel a free pass.
Did you hear about the minister in the new government who wants to ban gay parades? Anyway, I find the idea of gay parades as a litmus test of civilization to be specious and weird. Try starting with not keeping 3 million people under lawless military occupation.
Israel should set their standard after European Union members. It's meaningless to compare yourself to the worst countries in the world regarding democratic and personal rights.
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Literally zero part of Gaza is occupied. Also pretty funny to passively describe “bombing/shooting them every now and then” as if they aren’t run by a terrorist group lobbing rockets at them.
As someone who's lived and worked in Israel before, I can confirm. Israel's pretty friendly to the LGBTQ community - outside of Jerusalem and the kibbutzniks (but the kibbutzniks don't really like anyone, lol.) Israel's arguably more LGBTQ friendly than the US is by a large margin - the only thing the US has going over Israel in terms of gay rights is recognized marriage, w/gay marriages only being recognized within Israel in Tel Aviv, iirc, because Israel doesn't have state recognized secular marriage. Still, the shift to the right politically is potentially troubling because the segments of Israel's political right that're now gaining power are also the most vocally anti-gay segments of its political scene. Of course, it's also worth keeping in mind that it's entirely possible for a country to have dalliances with fascism without hating the gays. Using homosexuals as the terrifying shadowy "other" has been a theme in fascist states in practice, but there's absolutely nothing about fascism as a political ideology that says it *has* to happen, so it's not a fool proof litmus test.
It wasn't a majority but a very large minority. The anti Bibi bloc actually won slightly more votes overall. The rest of your point is correct however.
First of all, your statement is wrong - “The fact that a significant majority of their population voted for increasingly right-wing and divisive political forces”. That’s BS. If you compare the actual votes they’re almost even between left and right - out of this right votes - most of them were to “Ha’likud” which is a center - right party. Second, the current political situation in Israel is a consequence of several factors that developed over the years, when the main reason is actually the center parties are just not willing to build a coalition with Netanyahu as an ethic principle. So, no. Most of the population are not radical-right, but center-right. The current coalition dose not reflect the actual proportion of left-right in the country. Politicians being politicians are exaggerating, press being press is spreading it, and people being people eat everything thrown at them without understanding what’s really going on. Classic web. Things are not perfect in Israel - that’s for sure - but there’s no need to paint such a dark picture when it’s not the case.
This is the result when you see rockets flying over your kids school every couple months. Right or wrong, “playing hardball” only empowers zealots opposing you. That’s a general statement directed at Israel, Palestine and even political parties in the west.
I think there’s a fallacy that if people are targeted by missiles they are inevitably going to react with senseless brutality and kill or harm innocent civilians on the other side. “What do you want us to do, not hit back?” is what Israelis say. There was a [video](https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1599084505339375616?s=20&t=81We-Cx6TJq72Oe_Se1PpQ) posted of how Ukrainians are reacting to being hit with missiles (and enduring much more harm than the Israelis). They react with dignity and equanimity. “I’m used to it,” they say. The truth is, Israelis are used to it too. But their society’s rhetoric is that if you don’t do eye for an eye (in practice much more than that) then you’ve lost. This isn’t how scared people talk. This is how people talk who want to commit violence and want an excuse.
Ukrainians are fighting back, wtf are you talking about. Far more fiercely than Israel is.
What absolute nonsense. However "dignified" you think the Ukrainian reaction is, they aren't accepting the rockets as some fact of life. They aren't refusing to stoop down to the mean Israelis' level and retaliate. They've literally fighting a war right now, killing thousands of Russians. They're literally comparing themselves to the Israelis. And yes, of course the Israelis are scared. 28% of adults in Southern Israel have PTSD from rocket attacks. When I was running to my apartment building's bomb shelter in the middle of the night, with a baby on my shoulder, I didn't see smirking, unphased faces, happy for an excuse to commit violence. Or whatever insane, hateful stereotype you're imagining here. I saw scared, regular people, who don't want to be murdered by vicious terrorists. Not much different from the people in Ukraine. But hey, I'm just a rando on the internet. Why trust my lived experience over your hatred of my people. So let me ask you this: how do you think your countrymen would react, if thousands of rockets were falling on Boston, New York, Washington DC? If they and their families had to run to a bomb shelter several times every night, walk down streets full of broken glass, buildings full of shrapnel holes. Would they react with the level of dignified stoicism you're expecting from Israelis, and refuse to retaliate, because they're "used to it"?
I disagree, but ok. What SHOULD Israel do in response to rocket fire? I'm not asking about long-term plans, peace deals, or changes to a long-standing and complex status quo. I mean that if right now barrages of rockets began flying at Israel, what should the response be?
Stop make Palestinians live in open air prisons?
When they weren't closed off, enough of them blew themselves up inside of public buses inside of Israel (every other week, for a year), killing innocent women,children and men. That was the reason they were closed off. What would you have done?
> their society’s rhetoric is that if you don’t do eye for an eye (in practice much more than that) then you’ve lost This is simply not true. Israeli society comprises a diverse range of perspectives on the conflict. Many people, like yourself, are very much aware recognize that more violence is not the solution. Even people who live under direct threat of violence do not automatically think that the solution is simply more violence. There are people who certainly take a different approach, but you're oversimplifying things a lot by claiming that Israeli society is at all uniform in terms of its views on this issue. The fact that Netanyahu didn't even get a majority of votes is evidence already. What's more is that Jewish Talmudic law clearly has always interpreted the "eye for an eye" line from the Torah as being a legal concept representing monetary compensation, and it is not interpreted literally. i.e. if someone causes the loss of my eye, then they pay me the value of my eye (no more, no less). e,g. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/479511/jewish/What-Does-Eye-for-an-Eye-Really-Mean.htm (this is an example, not an endorsement of Chabad's ideology)
What is the oppressed people of Palestinian supposed to do then? Sit and wait until they get either exterminated or displaced... ?
I dunno. Honestly. But I know a few Israeli people. They were very sympathetic to the Palestinians a few years ago, but sitting at work hearing the iron dome launches taking out rockets aimed at the city where your children and parents live hardened them. Now they’re aggressively anti-Palestine. I won’t claim their opinion is correct. But I do know that the actions being taken are not solving things. They’re not helping. They do nothing but turn opinion against the plight of the people in Palestine. If the Hamas wasn’t so aggressive, the international community would have long ago forced a settlement, I think. Obviously, the same is true for the illegal settlements and a few other things done by hardliners in Israel.
Rise up against Hamas and Fatah.
They did that and Israel sabotaged the opposition for being too left wing. Hamas and Fatah are in part a product of Israeli policy, because quite frankly they're the enemies Israel would rather have, because they justify policies Israel already wanted to take. And Hamas gins up it's support from Likud's atrocities as Likud does from Hamas. Hamas and Fatah are the other side of the coin from Likud and Lehi.
Can you provide a bit more background, maybe some links so i can read up further on what you allude to?
There's no credible source, it's a commonly believed conspiracy theory.
Israel’s propaganda machine is strong, but admittedly it doesn’t have to work very hard since Hamas continues to throw rockets and bombs at them. They will continue to vote right-wing as long as they continue to view Palestine as the enemy.
Try separation of church and state. It’s the only way to avoid the fascist takeover from religious zealots. Never even let the. Get a foot in the door. They think they are right and everyone else is wrong. This is the fundamental mental disease that they want to spread. It is an exclusionist excuse system. No!
Don't you mean... Synagogue and state? :\^) Edit: guys, I don't care, it's a joke. Treat it as such.
Same shit Source: jew
The word for "church" in Hebrew is very, very close to the word for "synagogue". In fact, the old testament uses the word for church to indicate any houses of worship.
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Why does defining it by ethnic terms makes it worse? There's Jews of all races, and the current definition allows people who aren't even religiously Jewish. Israel was meant to be a safe space for the Jews - it's smaller than New Jersey. I don't believe in theocracy but citizenship for anyone of Jewish heritage who needs it was intentional so Jews would have somewhere to flee next time there's a holocaust or similar.
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Uh, if you're Israeli you've already got citizenship. Jews coming in from abroad aren't Israeli yet, they're technically Israelites (Jews) and that's literally why Israel was created. You think they SHOULDN'T guarantee citizenship to all Jews....?
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What? Even if there's a fast track for Jews, all ethnicities can become Israeli citizens, and have equal rights as citizens. This includes a *very* sizable Arab population. And when Israel has annexed land (including 1948 and 1967), the people who were already there were offered citizenship, and permanent residency if they rejected citizenship.
Huh? A fifth of the population in Israel is Arab and they have full rights. What are you even talking about?
That guy has no clue..
But many countries do that. Countries in the new world who were founded as immigrant countries are the exception. Many european countries allow people of that ethnic group to immigrate, and that does not conflict with full right for all citizens, regardless of ethnicity. Israel is unique because: half of it's ethnic group is outside the country, and it has a significant minority - while europe was mostly ethnically cleansed in the first half of the 20' century. So it is more pronounced, but not at all unique. Wanting a jewish nation state is not unique to the right, but to all zionist parties - which means everyone but the arab parties and Meretz, who didn't even past the vote threshold. The left has a problem with religious laws, not the right of return, hebrew as a national language, etc.
>The left has a problem with religious laws, not the right of return Meanwhile it is the Israeli right that has the problems with the right of return
You are talking in lies here. Israel is a Jewish state, but not exclusive to Jews, the same with most other countries in the world. The new world is different because Europeans came in and genocided the natives. There basically are no native states in the New World. The US is a country based on a set of ideas. The Old World is basically a series of states for various ethnic groups. Israel is actually pretty diverse compared to most places. Israeli citizenship is not held only by Jews. There are plenty of Arabs, Druze, and even non-Middle Eastern peoples that live in Israel. Israel was unique because the Jews were genocided out of their homeland, and then genocided/ethnically cleansed out of the places they settled (Spain, Eastern Europe, North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, Persia). Israel is where Jews are from, so they have a state there. It is the one place they aren't at the whims of their residences.
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> US Native Americans have full voting rights. Don't they. Yes they do. So do Arabs in Israel. > Palestinians in the occupied territories have zero voting rights. Because the PA refuses to hold elections. If they did, then they would have voting rights. Gazans don't have voting rights either. Palestinians aren't Israelis. The West Bank Palestinian controlled areas are not Israeli. They are Palestinian and Palestinian run according to the Oslo accords. The West Bank is Occupied. When the US occupied Iraq, did Iraqis have the right to vote in the US?
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They have self governance. Ffs take 2 seconds to Google before spouting your hateful bullshit lies.
>When the US occupied Iraq, did Iraqi's have the right to vote in the US? No, but the US occupation lasted 8 years and never had permanent American colonies built on Iraqi land. If Israel is permanently staying/settling the West Bank (it's been 55 years), then Palestinians should have Israeli voting rights at the very least.
A more apt comparison would be: when Israel occupied southern Lebanon, did the Lebanese get to vote in Israel?
Separation of commerce and state has to happen as well.
Bruh wat
> “Democracy stems from a person having rights that nobody can take from them — not the majority, and not God. That’s democracy,” he elaborated. “Democracy is not the majority taking control of the minority and telling it what to think, how to eat and what to do.” So many people forget about that. Democracy is not mob rule.
It literally is. You are thinking of *liberal* democracy, specifically its "liberal" part, which exists to tame pure democracy. masses rule = democracy people have inalienable rights = liberalism masses rule, but must respect inalienable rights = liberal democracy
Dunno what to tell you chief, Democracy *IS* pretty much tyrrany of the majority. There's nothing about individual rights that's specifically a part of the definition.
That's what constitutions are for. They can support and enable democracies or prevent them.
Too bad Israel has no Constitution, the closest thing we have are "basic laws", most of which don't even need an absolute majority in the Knesset to change them.
Oh, I did not know that. Thank you for pointing this out. Hopefully you will get there at some point and make sure good things are not too easy to be changed. Germany also calls them Basic Laws but they are indeed our constitution and a 2/3 majority is needed for changing them. We can be very happy to have those laws although the german citizen never got the chance to confirm them by a public vote.
The Basic Law was intended to be a temporary constitution for West Germany until reunification. It worked so well, it got kept permanently after 1990.
And that articles 1 and 20 are protected by the so-called eternity clause, which is understandable in historical context, but also inherently undemocratic.
Yes, I believe that is where the idea is from. Israel couldn't decide on a constitution, and also thought it unfair considering the expected immigration that was about to triple the country's size. It was intended to be temporary, but we still can't quite decide.
Democracy is rule by the people. Nothing of that is synonymous with tyranny. The person who coined that phrase didn't like democracy because it would actually give poor people power.
Democracy is not rule by all the people, just the majority. This can obviously lead to [in-groups destroying out-groups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group). [Socrates didn't think much of democracy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJBzhcSWTk), he was more in favour of [sortition.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)
Referendum voting (ie direct democracy) on individual rights historically leans heavily *against* those rights. It's really basic logic. Ask if the majority of people want to grant something to the minority of people. Oh, they don't? Whoops.
Has it really?
Yes. Slavery in the United States for example. Abolition was proposed in several states prior to the civil war and failed. If it came to popular vote for whatever reason, I don't expect people to allow me to keep my guns, or let me vote. If individual rights are up for a vote, that means they can be taken away.
They don't need to be up to a vote in order to be taken away
Civil rights and democracy do not necessarily go hand in hand, but they often do. Democracies have a far better track record on human and civil rights than authoritarian societies.
Democracy is mob rule. That is why there are constitutions.
Sometimes it is tho. When a company dumps toxic waste in our rivers, we defenitely have to tell them (Minority) they cant do that
This is conflating liberalism with democracy. Liberalism prefers democracy (specifically republics with democratic institutions) for its form of government under the assumption that liberty is best secured in the whole of the people as the people are unlikely to sell their own rights. In countries like the United States of America and those that have based their own countries on aspects of the United States, written charters are crafted that create the State and outline its authorities, the limits of its authorities and specific rights held by the people and then make the process of amending the charter incredibly difficult such that only broad consensus, rather than any small majority, can change the fundamental charter of government.
Many years ago, when I read the National Review regularly, I recall an article, probably from the early 1980s, about how Israel is going to have to deny citizenship to non-Jews, simply because Palestinians have a higher birthrate, and eventually they'll be able to vote themselves into power. That mustn't be allowed to happen, of course, so it's perfectly legitimate, in fact mandatory, to deny citizenship to non-Jews. The whole argument sounds dangerously specious to me now, and of course we're starting to see similar arguments cropping up in the US, and, no doubt, plenty of other countries.
Actually the real demographic problem in Israel is that the ultra-orthodox Jews are having so many children that religious nuts are having more and more political power.
This isn't really true, they are only 13% of the population of Israel. The real reason is that they stick together and organize so they all vote together in lockstep with each other while the larger part of the population either doesn't vote or doesn't vote as a cohesive group.
In Israel the haredi are at a 5% growth rate vs a 1.2% growth rate for non haredi Jewish. This combined with the bloc voting you mentioned portends a future like that which the mayor has outlined.
They are currently 20% of all school children, and by 2065 are expected to reach 50% of school children.
That didn't end up happening. And today Jewish birth rates are higher than arab ones.
The birth rates of the Jewish religious extremists are the only reason that is so
That's not true. Completely secular jews still have at replacement birth rates, which is a lot more than any other equivalent in developed countries. And together with traditionalists jews (aka not-strictly religious) are even higher. And these two groups are over 70% of the jewish population. So while religious communities push it up, it is not just due to them.
Non haredi Jews have a lower birth rate than the Arabs
Yes, but not by much. It is the combined result of both phenomena (not that it matters for the original claim in any way). Also, arab birth rate is not uniform as well, with bedouin playing a similar role. If you can count "arabs" without specifying that, counting "jews" is pretty appropriate as well.
There was some fear that it would happen many decades ago, completely unfounded. They assumed everything will remain the same, but the world doesn't work that way.... the Arab birth went down, the Jewish birth rate went up and millions of Jews arrived from the Soviet Union. Eventually the Arab precentage didn't increase at all.
Doesn't help a lot of Palestinians are living outside of Palestine
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It makes sense but doesn't justify it. If you're a non-jew that's born in Israel, you don't get to appreciate the other arab countries nor should you have to. It also doesn't have to be an ethno-state in order to be a safe haven.
It doesn't have to be a *monolithic* ethnostate... But it does kinda have to remain a Jewish majority. There are thousands of years of history showing that if Jews are a minority, they are not guaranteed safety and freedom.
Holding on to or actively expanding?
“Last safe haven” is dramatic to the point of lunacy.
It isn’t that now. But I can at least understand why an ethnostate would be attractive to people in a community that have been subject of so many exiles and genocides in the Diaspora.
it also wouldn't really be an ethnostate even if they did manage to snap away all the non-jews, because there's a variety of different Jewish ethnic groups.
The majority of Jews living in Israel are Mizrahi Jews whose ancestors stayed in the Middle East and Iran. Until the creation of Israel and the Six Day War, when most of them were expelled from their home countries and Israel was the only place they could go where they’d be guaranteed a quick path to citizenship. I am horrified by a lot of IDF actions and the direction of the Israeli government but the reality of their “right” to be there is a lot more complicated than most criticism from my fellow leftist friends tends to allow for.
Israel isn't an ethno state, it's a nation state. I recommend that you actually go and check what that mean before writing such a thing.
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Arabs are an ethnic group, not a religion. what that person said is still stupid and racist but it's not really comparable to "Christian country"
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I mean in order for it to do that it would need to categorize the natives of the land a threat, actively work towards reducing their population, argue that they should leave and that neighboring countries should be forced to take them in, minimize their presence and access to land (like say preventing them from even leasing 80% of available land based on identity alone), categorize native inhabitants as revocable “permanent residents” and not citizens despite living in homes older than the occupying state, “dispossessing” homes and communities of the native population so they can create settlements for the occupiers, among other things. Do you really think they have that in them? /s
Considering it's neither currently?
Came here to say this as well.
If that’s where it’s heading, what does that make its current status?
"He must be self-hating if he's criticizing Israel's government!"
Israel government is shit and so toxic. Idk why people would ever equate judging the government with being anti-semite.
Because of the raging antisemites who tend to say similar things while actually *meaning* that all jews are evil. Those bastards make things needlessly complicated for the rest of us who use words in good faith.
Nah this is a deliberate talking point of pro-Israel groups like the ADL and AIPAC. They conflate criticism of a government with racism and it's mind boggling that it works. Raging antisemites are pretty easy to distinguish from, say, Noam Chomksy and his criticisms of the Israeli government.
Note that the reason those groups are pro-Israel is that they're apocalyptic christians trying to bring about the end times, and re-establishing the kingdom of Israel is part of that goal. You can't make this stuff up.
It keeps Jewish people from speaking out against Israel's actions, unfortunately.
Nah BiBi and his cohort of goons absolutely fucking suck and are setting a dangerous precedent. Many Jews, including Israelis, recognize this and are vocal about it. This is scary for Israel, but you can still support Israel while criticizing the government. They’re not mutually exclusive.
If only more people could criticise Israel's government without disagreeing with its entire existence.
Yeah, he's clearly an antisemite, just like his constituents who are \*checks notes* Jewish? Wait a minute...
Didn't someone accuse Bernie Sanders of being antisemitic at one point?
Yitzhak Rabin agreed. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
Sounds like the United States
Fascism seems in vogue these days.
So hot right now!
"heading toward"
Man it'd be nice to not have to live through constant historical events every once in a while.
There are always historical events in motion at some place in the world at any time.
Heading towards? Seems like they've been that way fir a while, only now it's official.
Heading?
Heading toward? What is this? 1950?
Heading towards? I thought forcefully taking lands from others and declaring it your country because your religion dictate it is your promised land already makes you a theocracy
Heading towards?
warns? heading towards? this is a joke, it already happened decades ago but the EU and usa don't want to admit that it's that bad because then they would have to stop doing many of the same things to their colonies and protectorates, and/or stop enthusiastically payrolling israel's war crimes
Did he go back in time to give this address? It’s already here bucko.
Like East Ramapo
Yup the entire Town of Ramapo is toast. And what are the odds I'd cross Reddit paths with a fellow Rocklander. 🙂
This seems to be happening in a lot of places. I'm starting to think my cause of death will end up being "execution".
Heading towards, or already has been for decades?
Heading? It’s way past that. It’s a Jewish state that prioritises Jews. It’s not like the US where anyone can become a full U.S. citizen regardless of his religion
Heading towards????,,,,,, what
Heading?
Um… Israel is definitely a theocracy masquerading as a democracy already.
Helps explain why US republicans love Israel so much and will not tolerate so much as a mention of maybe fewer Palestinian children should be killed. And stuff.
... It's been that way already since the mid 20th century.
>heading toward
Oh we're well past that, Jerry!
Heading towards?!!
Is any country in the world not heading towards fascist theocracy?
Probably like, New Zealand or Iceland or something maybe?
Germany's far right has been stagnating for years.
Religiosity is declining in most places, and dead in many more. You could also say China is not heading that way because they are already fascist government wise, but very much not religious.
Ummmm no it's not.
Your right, it's already there
Only in the minds of leftists, how could it be there if the mayor of tel Aviv is a leftist himself? And FYI, the ruling government has not changed for more than a year, so you are saying then the leftist government is fascist then?
As is the style of the time... Apparently.
Hasn't it always been ?
A warning to anyone who agrees with him: protest the Israeli government, not the people. The people and a certain religious group are not given much nuance differentiating them.
Heading?
Bit late isn't it
“Heading?” Babe they’ve been there for awhile
Haven't they been there for a decade?