I questioned, in a Facebook post, the legitimacy of Israel's self-proclaimed right to exist. It seems to me, anyway, that God did not give Israel to the Jews, but rather England did. And I think Palestine is the main test of Israel's right to exist.
The way Israel is treating the Palestinians is not justifiable. Israel isolates them from the outside world. It would be better if the Palestinians could leave, or become a part of Israel. But this is impossible. Why? Because Israel sees it in their best interests to isolate them. The problem, of course, is that the Palestinians probably have a more legitimate claim to that land than Israel.
Israel is forced to battle Palestine. Peace is impossible for them. Why? Because if they make peace, the Arab states will take advantage of a weak stance and attack Israel one way or another. I believe this is the case. Also, I believe that there are Arab states who might ultimately win in the conflict (if peace were made) which are worse states than Israel. States like Syria.
But really, all this is a battle more for the State of Israel than for anyone else. Israel was founded on questionable principles. The right of an ethnic-based State to be formed by an external oppressor because it's in the Bible is questionable. The right of any ethnic-based state to be formed is questionable. If Israel has any shred of legitimacy to its existence, I think the true test will be Palestine. Also, I think Israel fully realizes this, which is why they are in so much trouble about it.
Israel has very few options. They can't exterminate the Palestinians. They can't let them emigrate to Israel or elsewhere. They can't make peace with them. They can't fight them too hard. They can't fight them too soft. There are no choices for them. And the way they behave in Palestine is very similar to the way a failing regime behaves when its legitimacy comes into question. They imprison people without cause, place them in concentration camps, incite violence to legitimize violence, spend more money on security than research, and so forth. I've never been to Palestine, but from what I've read of the situation there, it's like a concentration camp. It's very similar to psychiatry. A failing regime grasping at straws to ward off its inevitable defeat.
I've had experience living in a concentration camp kind of existence. And when you're inside the concentration camp, sometimes it's a difficult decision you have to make whether to threaten or use violence or not. Because sometimes an oppressor will only respond to violence. This is a fact. I had to threaten to stab hospital wards with a pen in order to force them to bring food to my seclusion room. The decision was part of a long series of pressures I put on them (this one being the only truly violent one), which probably resulted in enough food to survive. Barely.
But oppressors all ultimately act the same. They inevitably spend all their energy on bolstering security rather than gaining knowledge or helping people. This is why fewer and fewer people choose to be psychiatrists: the pay really isn't very good, the training is exhausting, and the fact that they will be pigeonholed into an existence where they must oppress people every day really makes it hard. Why is the pay not so good? Probably because psychiatry prisons are locked down tighter than military compounds. They spend all their money on more and more traumatic seclusion rooms, rather than actually helping people, or gaining knowledge. Why don't they spend money on knowledge? Because as research comes out about psychiatry, it shows them that they're all doing it wrong; that psychiatry is an illegitimate institution.
And the fact that these oppressors act the same, when they're not bolstered by an external oppressive force, indicates that they all eventually cannibalize themselves in the end. So the smartest strategy for someone who is NOT living in a concentration camp system is non-violence. It is to put political pressure on the oppressors, forcing them to cannibalize themselves, without resorting to violence, and thereby legitimizing their oppression. The problem comes when your motivation is bad. People with bad motivation will collect up these victims of oppression and pray on their sufferings to the point of inciting them to violence. It will legitimize both oppressors, until they go to war and one oppressor is defeated. All oppressors act the same.
In a lot of ways, America is behaving the same way. But I'm not sure that the outcome for any of these oppressors is set in stone. I feel America will survive. America is a legitimate state with a troubled history of oppression. That's how I feel. But in order to survive, America has to do soul searching. This is what is happening with the Occupy / Tea Party movements. This is happening internally within the Republican Party, I'm aware, and may also be happening in the Democratic Party. Obama has made surprising decisions, such as the decision following the will of the people not to go to war with Syria. Even this decision may have been a mistake, but it's an example of soul searching.
The problem for Israel is that I'm not sure they have the luxury to be able to do soul searching, surrounded as they are by all these Arab states who do not believe in their right to exist. America is a world superpower, very rich, and having the most powerful military in the world. We can do soul searching. Allowing Israel to do soul searching for the benefit of Palestinians, unfortunately, is not very much on the to-do list for these Arab states. A lot of them are very authoritarian, and rely on strong security forces. And the problem is, these security states require some kind of propaganda to keep their publics supportive of the current regimes. Palestine is a good propaganda point for any dictator in a Muslim majority state.
So really, the right for Israel to exist is less of a test for Israel as it is a test for Arab Muslims. Are these Muslims going to point to the passages in the Qur'an which say that Jews will be hiding behind rocks and the rocks will tell them to kill them? While conveniently ignoring the passages enjoining us not to dispute with the People of the Book except by means better than mere disputation? Or are these Muslims going to work to promote more and more functional democracies at home, so they can deal with Israel intelligently? This is the test. Arabs as a nation have a right to exist on their own land, of course, but many of their states, I feel, are as illegitimate as Israel's or more so. The fate of Israel rests on the fate of Palestine. And the fate of Palestine, and Palestinians, I feel, rests on the ability for Arab Muslims to combat oppression in their own states so they can restrain their own militants from attacking Israel, and allow Israel to sort out its right to existence on its own. If Israel is purely an oppressor, the more it becomes isolated from support from the outside, the more they will cannibalize themselves. If not, they will survive, and peace will prevail.
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