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An intriguing quote
The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single one – Eric Hoffer
Offered without comment.
Published in General
This doesn’t sound believable. Do you have a link to the source of this info?
More broadly – if you look at the information I provided above (with a link) can you see any double standards in how the West deals with Israel and how it deals with Palestine?
For example:
Predicating aid on accepting conditions going into negotiations. I think that it’s within a country’s rights to demand that certain conditions be met before giving another country aid. I think it was unwise and unrealistic to demand essentially surrender on core issues from a Hamas led Palestine before engaging in talks with them, but it was certainly within the US etc’s rights to do so. Would the US predicate the $3.8 billion in annual aid to Israel on Israel ceasing settlement activity? Clearly the US hasn’t done that and neither has Israel.
What drives the difference in how the US deals with these two countries and peoples?
How about the difference in respecting democratic outcomes? Can you imagine the US plotting a coup if Israel by some strange quirk elected a Meretz led Government? Or France a National Front Government? Or Germany an AfD led Government? Or Hungary a Govt led by an antisemitic party? [Hungary actually has done this, so it’s not a matter of conjecture.]
But there’s no problem not respecting democratic outcomes in places like Palestine, or Iran or South America? In fact that’s kind of normal.
Why is there a double standard?
And that’s an honest question.
Why do people of generally good will and presumably morals automatically (instinctively?) have this double standard operating when assuming:
What it is acceptable or not to do to other people,
What is acceptable or not to respect re other people’s decisions,
What seems totally believable (Hamas shoots at returning refugees, Israel shoots at returning refugees ) about other people,
When the same British colonialism was good (India, Africa) and when it was bad (America, Ireland).
Edit: when some groups are ‘intrinsically bad’ so they lose any moral right to civic and political freedoms (or worse) while other groups are intrinsically good and could never justifiably lose these rights as a group (though they may have some bad individuals).
Etc.
I think it’s how we tend to view ‘us’ and ‘not us’, and stems from our own history, beliefs, assumptions and self-perceptions, but ??
Zafar, you offer comforting rationale that can sound convincing when you go on for long enough. But I find the most important thing is always to check our human reasoning (even the best of us only approximate “reason”; our brains aren’t logic machines they’re pattern matchers) against objective reality. It might be useful to take a few minutes, step back, and ask yourself why Arab societies suck so bad. Once you feel (again, I’m sure, but hang in there) the awfulness and sorrow of their reality in your bones, then try reformulating your last response.
Excuses are not responsible human behavior. Those of us blessed with good minds owe all of us more than that.
There is not a double standard. There are individual people and identifiable cultures that meet our cultural standard and those who do not. That no one of us is ever fit to make a precise statement of that standard doesn’t mean we don’t all know it’s there.
I’m going to state this explicitly: It would be foolish and wrong for anyone to treat Israel and the “Palestinians” equivalently. That is the problem and fault of the Palestinians, and no others.
A rationale for what? I am inviting you to think.
There’s immense confirmation bias in what we select to notice as meaningful (or disregard as unimportant), and in how we assign a piece of data or information to a pattern. Nobody’s immune from that, and certainly not on this subject.
Why and how is this relevant to whether Palestinians have civic and political rights?
I’m not the one making excuses here.
There seems to be.
What does equivalently mean?
It makes no sense.
Fairly? Honestly? Decently? These do make sense.
Equivalently? I don’t understand that.
Too often an argument that the basic rights of two groups do not have “moral equivalence” seems like a search for an excuse (see your comment above) that justifies being unfair, dishonest and not decent.
That’s what it seems like to me.
How about this?
“If the Arabs/Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Jews/Israelis put down their weapons, there would be no Jews/Israel.”
It makes no sense to treat the aggressor and their victim equally, or equivalently, or whatever term you might prefer.
I sometimes wonder what happened to all the looted greenhouse parts, etc. Obviously they were not made into Arab or Palestinian Greenhouses. Are some people using pumps as foot-stools and others using pipes as… whatever… and they won’t get together and make a working greenhouse from them, because one family “disrespected” another family, 1000 years ago?
Maybe they were sold as scrap to China for a few bucks to get more rockets to shoot into Israel?
Maybe they took the far-too-common instant-gratification path and traded them for one sack of beans to eat for a week, rather than growing food for decades in functioning greenhouses?
Maybe they were burned/buried/whatever because they carried “Jew Cooties?”
Whatever happened, it seems like the old adage is true, “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Indeed, but if you ask the Palestinians it was the Yishuv that was the aggressor. And the West still treats the Yishuv’s successor and achievement, the State of Israel, as the victim.
Snappy one liners to the choir don’t change that, in fact they are illustrative of the issue.
It’s also interesting that all of us (me included) focused on the bolded part of the quote in the OP without actually thinking about how the situation is similar, and where it differs from, what happened in Russia [in the North Caucasus, absolutely similar, but before WWI so well before the Geneva Conventions were signed off on], Poland and Czechoslovakia [sorta? though again people had citizenship where they were going], Turkey and Greece [a compulsory population exchange post WWI between two States, with no individual left Stateless, looks different – same thing happened in South Asia in 1947], Algeria [on the face of it the most similar underlying situation, but without an official metropole that grants citizenship and with 2 in 10 Pieds Noirs choosing to remain in Algeria after Independence, so…??], Indonesia [I have no idea what they’re talking about, Indonesia has a history of violence against ethnic Chinese, not of expelling them].
We assumed that Eric Hoffer had a valid point, but now I’m not so sure that he does.
Yeah, about that:
Further from the article:
Whaaaat?
Bought? Bought?!!! The settlers didn’t give the Palestinians the Greenhouses? What world is this that I find myself in?
*rocks back and forth*
*pulls himself together*
Which hooks back to confirmation bias, what we [you?] tend to believe and why.
And also to continued occupation.
??
I’m not sure that argument holds up, even if true. (Anyone want to be their house or whatever, on a NY Times story being true, accurate, and honest?)
If the Palestinians were, and are, importing most of their food – including from Israel – why the need/expectation/requirement to export what was produced by whatever greenhouses existed? They should have plenty of customers right there at home!
IF the demand isn’t great enough to support all the greenhouses, then just plant what can be sold and consumed domestically.
They shouldn’t even need to turn a profit, if Hamas or the Palestinian Authority or whatever, actually wants to feed their people and not just make them feel like perpetual victims. Use some of the money they get from other countries, for food instead of rockets.