Reddit's search function is constantly down, but when it comes back up, I'll post a screenshot of worldnews search results for "Israel" descending from highest upvotes over the last year.
It is not hard to make a case against Israel. It reneges agreements, claims antisemitism when criticized, commits crimes against human rights and the Geneva Convention, undertakes programs like that organ donor preferential treatment, and even publicly funds a special religious bus fleet that sends women to the back. It's a pissed off little country and virtually a theocracy with nukes. Sure, the countries around it are no better, but Israel is far, far from being some kind of saint.
That item at the top of your list (about Hamas being willing to accept Israel's right to exist) shows some promise. I did the background reading and determined that the person who made the comment did so by his lonesome, and that the was “clarified” a day later by Hamas officials. Nevertheless, the emergence of any moderate voice in Hamas after the organization's transition from social movement to political institution is an encouraging sign, and one that many of us have been hoping for ever since Hamas conquered Gaza from the PLO and was suddenly faced with the pragmatic realities of governance. There are many parallels between the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Irish problem of the 20th century. In that case, economic growth and hard-won diplomatic agreements, along with the inclusion of radical elements in government coalitions, led to virtually the end of terrorism in Northern Ireland and a socioeconomic stability on the island. Whatever the hardliners might be saying today about an “eternal” Palestine or an “eternal” Israel, the fact of the matter is that once peace is struck it will be much easier for both peoples to accept the current borders.
Your actual post, however, is as foolish as many of the other items on that Reddit list. Each of your criticisms, when considered in the context of your thesis that “It is not hard to make a case against Israel,” is faulty. Some of your claims are outright wrong regardless of the context. Israel certainly has its problems, and I didn't mean to imply that the country is ethically impeccable. In addition to all the usual problems a developed nation faces, and those unique to Israeli culture, there is also Israel's conflict with its neighbors, which provides both the opportunity for greater misdoing overall, and a fierce spotlight of scrutiny on all of the nation's doings, thus amplifying any wrongs that are found. No justification can be made, and no excuse offered, for the crimes of Israeli citizens or the abuses of Israel's government, where they occur.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Israel compares favorably to some of the greatest nations in the world in terms of human rights, civil liberties, quality of life, civic responsibility, economic development, technological progress, scientific advancement, cultural sophistication, environmental conscientiousness, and sheer personal fortitude. Israel is living in a time that America hasn't seen since the early 1800s, when those who led the country were also those who created it. It is an era of tremendous growth and experimentation, of desire and maturity. Israel faces incredible adversity, more so than any other developed nation. Its success in that context is a testament to the resourcefulness of its people. It is often claimed that Israel is a mirage built on U.S. aid and Palestinian labor, an aberration or a sin that could not exist without the great evil supposedly coursing through its very fiber. Such a claim, and all those other fantastic claims of oppressive racist colonial war-mongering apartheid which ultimately boil down to that spectacular “case against Israel,” are an affront to those who know better, and an insult to those who are there.
Israel, being a “Jewish state” under the law, in the very way that makes the Christian fundamentalists here shit themselves with envy, suffers, as we do, from the vices of religion. Your sexist bus story is one example of many injustices in that country resulting from religious zeal. I oppose the public funding of segregated buses anywhere. Nevertheless, this is hardly a problem that is unique to Israel. Every nation from the United Kingdom on down, including the U.S., spends public money on religious initiatives, and forgoes additional public money through tax exemptions on religious organizations. In your narrow and dogmatic phrasing, Israel as a whole is a failure for this one injustice. Such is typical of your purist thinking pattern. Burn the farm down to spite one bad apple. That's ridiculous. Where my pursuit of sexual equality is concerned, I would sooner have three hundred Israels than the actual slate of nations in the world today. For all the criticisms I have of our own country, I'm damn grateful to live here, and Israel is much the same. The list of countries I would choose to live in above Israel is not long.
When it comes to Israel's new law to encourage organ donor by offering preferential treatment to those who agree to donate their organs when they die, I find your criticism baffling. Anyone can choose to opt in. It's a good policy, and all the better given Israel's unusually low organ donor rate. I fully endorse it. People die from organ shortages all the time. Increasing the donor rate will reduce that death statistic. The few ethical quibbles I might have are addressed by the fact that the most urgent cases are granted an exception, so it's not as if a non-donor individual who needs an organ transplant will perpetually end up next in line behind a constantly replenished stream of donor individuals.
Your objection that Israel “reneges agreements” is too generic to warrant a response.
As for your objection that Israel claims anti-Semitism whenever it is criticized, many times those claims are actually true. Christianity and Islam are both filled with worshipers who hate Jews—religious Jews or otherwise—and those two religions also happen to dominate the world and the region, respectively, in which Israel resides. We're talking plain old xenophobia and religious tribalism. There is also a secular anti-“Zionist” movement, which focuses specifically on Israelis, with less emphasis on Jews, but has the same xenophobic bottom line.
To the extent that the charge “Anti-Semite!” becomes a catchphrase for any criticism whatsoever of Israel, Israelis, or Jews, I would agree with you that it is intellectually dishonest, and ineffective in argument. (Those are not actually the claims you made, so my “agreement” with you is primarily a charity. What you actually said is that spurious charges of “Anti-Semite!” contribute to “a case against Israel,” which is detestable and with which I do not agree at all.) Fortunately, the people making these bogus accusations are usually on the political right, who are usually easy to dismiss without loss. They seek to leech off the memory of the Holocaust, which is detestable, or else they genuinely are deluded to the point where they interpret all criticism as anti-Semitic, which is tragic. (Their sentiment is made understandable by the truths of history, where the money is better than even that a given plot against the Jews would be real rather than existing only as a figment of somebody's paranoid imagination.) Meanwhile, you would do yourself a service to study anti-Semitism before dismissing it as purely a trick.
I would be remiss not to condemn your accusation of “crimes against human rights” in strong terms. So here they are: That's obscene and you're an idiot for saying it. If Israel had wanted to, they could have committed atrocities that would curdle milk. They have the Palestinians at their mercy. They could invade any neighboring country they want and commit all the war crimes under the rainbow. Genocide? Easy! They could do it all. The world already accuses them, with such irresponsibility, of everything short of genocide right up to “ethnic cleansing.” So what's to lose, eh? Wipe out the enemy and win the conflict by default.
Except that's not what Israel does, nor has it ever been that way. The Israeli Defense Forces are a professional developed world military force, possessed of all the modern ethics to which developed nations hold their armed services accountable. The Israelis have bent over backwards to treat their vastly outgunned enemies humanely, even though the Palestinians have employed every tactic of guerillas and urban warfare within their grasp. You like shooter games, don't you? They're not very realistic. The enemies are usually clearly defined. You're rarely likely to be knocked unconscious or killed by a single bullet. And if you kill a civilian by mistake, you're not going to be put on trial. The Israeli military deals with all of this. Their enemies use human shields, guaranteeing either the deaths of Israeli soldiers or the deaths of Palestinian civilians, and usually both. Their enemies hide war materials on farms, forcing the Israelis to commit the PR nightmare of chopping down olive trees. Their enemies hide radicals in civilian homes, leaving the Israelis no choice but to allow themselves to be attacked with impunity, or else send their bulldozers in to wreck civilian homes and civilian lives.
You have no idea what it's like to be an ethical soldier fighting an unethical enemy. You have no idea what it's like for the superior power to be the just one and the inferior power to be the terrorist threat. You have no idea what it's like to do your job as best you can, taking care to respect and preserve human life, and then be condemned by a misinformed and ignorant world, and accused of those very crimes. But most of all, you have no idea what it is like to exist under constant threat of annihilation. America hasn't faced the existential threat of whole-scale invasion since World War II, and more plausibly since the 1800s. Israel faces it right now. If it were to demilitarize, it would be invaded the next day. For you, Z, to accuse Israel of “crimes against human rights” is beyond stupid. It is more than simply irresponsible. It is, itself, a crime. It is a crime against all decency, and a crime against your personal integrity. It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen you write on the Compendium. I'm aware of your anti-military attitudes, which stem from the military population in your area as well as your awakening liberalism, but I've never seen you cross the line from picking on a few “jarheads” to slandering a just nation's last and in some ways only means of self-defense. If our country is ever faced with an attack, and you find yourself grateful for our ability to defend ourselves, you will be a hypocrite for the rest of your life.
By accusing Israel of crimes against human rights, not only do you undermine the entire Israeli nation, but you make it that much harder for the actual abuses committed by Israeli troops to be brought to light when they do occur. And they do sometimes occur—especially in combat zones, which are plentiful enough in the IDF theaters of operation. Individual troops, low-ranking and sometimes higher-ranking, do break down and commit horrible wrongs. Or, sometimes, they were vile people to begin with. In addition to the ethical obligation owned by any just nation, it is precisely because Israel is so routinely accused of war crimes that the Israelis have tremendous and urgent need to enforce discipline, ethics, and responsibility in their military ranks. Just behavior is one of the only factors that has prevented world opinion against Israel from coalescing into a far more dangerous threat of action. Israel's military may well be the squeakiest clean conscription-based force on Earth, and is probably ethically competitive even with the world's premiere militaries—the United States, Great Britain, and France. The occasional reports of abuses committed by individual soldiers pale in comparison to the overall degree of contact between Palestinians and Israeli troops. The IDF protects Palestinians from itself. It protects Palestinians and Israelis alike from ultrareligious or ultranationalist Israeli settlers and various fringe extremists. It is a remarkably just organization, especially considering its undisputed indispensability to Israel's continued existence.
That fact, the fact that Israel remains a democratic nation with a government elected freely by the people, including the Arab minority, which has full voting rights, when the military has so much power that it could easily stage a coup, is remarkable—and a very optimistic sign both for Israel in particular and humanity in general. But you don't consider that to be remarkable. You don't even consider a democratic Israel to exist. You consider it an autocracy. Except you didn't say “junta” or “military dictatorship.” You used the word “theocracy.” A religious tyranny. Well, sir: That's plain, dumb wrong. Hardcore religious parties control about sixteen percent of the Israeli parliament. Hardcore religious individuals are exempt from compulsory military service, meaning they seldom get to be in the position of subverting the military's power for their own religious purposes. The major population center, Tel Aviv, is the most secular location in the entire Middle East. The lifestyle of a secular Israeli is comparable in latitude and liberty to that of you or me. Perhaps I have never taught you the danger of saying words that don't mean anything. In addition to humiliating yourself in the eyes of anyone who knows better, you also serve to confuse the minds of people who don't know any better. What good does it do you to become so intellectually cheap that your arguments would have no power even if they drew the right conclusion? Israel certainly is a heavily religious country. Most countries are. Religion dominates the government more than I wish it would. But to call it a theocracy, when it is the one of the few Western-style democracies in that entire part of the world, and when there are plenty of examples of real theocracies all around it, is preposterous.
So what are we left with, at long last? Ah yes: The nukes. Israel has nuclear weapons. The trump card in your “case against Israel.” The final word in your substantive argument. The bottom line. The full stop.
That's tendentious.
Maybe there is a valid case against nuclear weapons themselves. If used, somebody loses big. Is any conflict worth that big a loss on either side? And what of the risks of nuclear holocaust? What if both sides have nukes, and use them? Until superviruses and gray goo came into the public eye, nuclear weapons were everyone's leading bet for the doom of civilization. That may yet happen someday.
On the other hand, some of the best nations have nuclear weapons. The United States. Great Britain. The upcoming powers, China and India, have them too. And Israel's arsenal, for its part, is not world-destroying, and serves a legitimate deterrent function.
And so, I find it hard to construe an argument “against” Israel that does not have much more serious implications for the justice of our own nation, and the West generally. Perhaps the possession of enormous destructive power is the inevitable, inexorable legacy and onus of any great nation. To paraphrase the words of Q, the greatness ahead of us is not safe. Even if we did renounce nuclear weapons, we would rebuild them the day a serious war ever broke out. It is a power that we may have no choice but to accept as one of the penalties of human knowledge amongst the universe.
If you want to make your case against Israel on the grounds of nuclear weapons, you will find yourself in good company among certain factions on the left that I myself prefer to avoid. I'm sure they'll love to hear also of your proud ambition and imperialism. Go ahead and tell them what you really think.
It'll get you exactly as far as your antagonism toward Israel gets you with me.
