Palestinians in the “occupied” territory aren’t citizens of Israel; they don’t want to be and the world doesn’t want them to be. People would flip their shit at a one state solution, they’d be self imolating all over the place. What you’re suggesting is called annexation. I’d support annexation if it would stop all the pointless killing and help democratize the region. If Palestinians wanted to be Israeli, there wouldn’t have been 100 years of terrorism on both sides or even now, we’d be talking about lawful occupation and jurisdiction of under terra nullius, or irredentism.

Actual experts at the UN disagree strongly, and have no consensus on this. I went to school with some of them and was a better student. Some others of them, as it turns out, were actually far-right religious terrorists themselves, and were using the UN for decades as a platform to teach generations of Palestinian kids the honor of martyrdom culture and terror culture.

Here’s the thing about Desmond Tutu and other legal scholars who wrote comparative-law content on Palestine and apartheid (lower case a): “like” and “as” don’t mean the same thing.

There was a lot of legal scholarship for a while around the time that the world turned on South Africa, and for years after, during reconstruction, when it was trendy to draw comparisons to Apartheid (big A). I concede that interested people have taken that comparative work, and misquoted it to suggest that there was any kind of serious scholarship saying that Israel-Palestine was as apartheid, until it became truth for some people. I disagree with them. Racially oppressive government’s exist all over the world, yet the world has not turned on them as it turned on South Africa in an such a unanimous and unprecedented way. It was really something to behold. And even afterward, all the help and support the world gave South Africa with reconstruction: so many people were so proud to help launch a new democracy, to write from scratch a constitution for a modern nation that was freeing itself from being oppressors and its people for being oppressed.

Desmond Tutu’s work doesn’t support that he believed Palestine was literally the same as apartheid (small a), he drew certain comparisons, said certain policies were apartheid-like, and I agree. Correct me if I’m wrong. Certain policies in America are apartheid-like, too. Also, if memory serves, it was only in the last few years of his life that Tutu stopped being offended by such comparisons and started making them himself. Nelson Mandella never said it was equivalent. Correct me if I’m wrong. I agree Palestinians are oppressed people. I disagree with the Lemmy Zeitgeist about who has led them to oppression and who maintains it.

In any event, one thing Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu agreed on, and I agree with wholeheartedly, is that the cure for Apartheid or apartheid, and for systemtic oppression in all forms, is democratic governance enshrined in a written Constitution with clear minoritarian rights–freedom of speech, assembly, and a right to petition, due process of law, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment–the kind of rights that religious law cannot ever provide because religious law doesn’t have them to give and claims for itself a right to take rights away by religious proclamation, which is antithetical and mutually exclusive to democracy, a constitution, or minoritarian rights.

That is to say that, if your opinion is that Israel-Palestine is apartheid, you must agree that the cure for it as it was in South Africa is democratic governance. If you’re not totally ignorant or brainwashed, you must also agree that the first step to making that happen is to dispose of Hamas and Hezbollah. Can we agree on that?

No and no.

What could make a racism so institutionalized it’s written into the Constitution liberalism? What about a constitution that would allow such provisions to be amended? I agree they are outmoded in purpose and spirit and should be amended. I won’t go so far as to say they existed for no reason or for an offensive reason ab initio. Even if I did believe that, it’s irrelevant to reality: Israel is there and it began as an ethnostate.

The logical conclusion to your position is that you believe Israel doesn’t have a right to exist / defend itself, unless and until it amends the offensive provisions of its constituon. Is that your belief?

I don’t find arguments about who lives there now and who used to live there compelling at all. They fall apart just at face value when the earliest historical record has the land occupied by Hebrew-speaking bronze-age people called Judites. That is to say the land records are a total crapshoot of lands changing hands, peoples changing identities, cultures changing over time, and shifting borders. It’s also futile because, again, Israel is there now, is a nuclear power, and any plan forward must realistically account for this (Israel is going to defend itself).

Suppose Israel amends the offensive provisions, annexes all the disputed borderlands, and naturalizes every person therein with full rights and privileges, but then Iran and others in the region don’t stop funding terrorism at Israel’s borders and don’t stop carefully cultivating a culture of martyrdom and anti-western and anti-liberal violent extremism? Are we not right back where we started?