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Umm, no

Posted by qtns2di4 on 2011-December-28 06:18:37 EST, Wednesday
In reply to Isrealis protest sex discrimination @ Beit Shemesh posted by Lateralus on 2011-December-27 22:27:04 EST, Tuesday
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First of all, I think you are baiting those of us who you consider anti-Semites. But this is still holidays time, so I will still answer as if I didn't think that.

Israeli police are used to be very hard at repressing people. This has built up from so many years of war or tension-ridden temporary peace. They are used to be met with resistance, and they are used to crush it with no heart. It was only a matter of time before the same police that usually evicts Arabs and answers stones with bullets turned to the citizens it supposedly protects. It is a cautionary tale about what happens when police acquire too much power and too much impunity.

Israel was founded by secularists, of Jewish ethnic/family origins, but themselves secular, and some even functionally atheistic. Religious Jews were at first not very likely to migrate there - they accepted their "fate" as everywhere minority with the danger that majorities occasionally turned to them for scapegoating. But little by little that has changed, and changed most after the Cold War, when many Eastern European Orthodox migrated, and in turn attracted many more Western Orthodox to migrate. Jewish Israel is more religious now than it ever was, and will be increasingly religious as time goes by.

But then, that is how it's supposed to be. Let me leave aside the question of the Arab citizens or the broader question of relations with Muslims inside and neighboring. Israel is supposed to be the safe haven and sanctuary of the Jewish; the "guarantee" that they will always be safe from any other pogrom (not to say from any other Shoah). Israel is not just like any other place - in that case, they would have stayed in New York City, Paris and St Petersburg. It is not just to have synagogues safe from vandalism; it is to live the complete Jewish lifestyle, Leviticus and all. And that includes ghost town landscapes on Saturday, and sex segregation. If Israel is to survive as a Jewish state, it has to respect the rights of the Orthodox Jews to practice as they believe. Doing otherwise threatens the Jewish character of the State of Israel and makes it no different than any other state. And aware of their differences with the secular population, they tend to live in their own areas. Which is how self-conscious minorities preserve their identity in the face of a differing majority culture. Like Jews lived for centuries in many places.

I wonder, if the same self-righteous voices of now, would protest if it was an Anglo-Saxon American in a Hispanic neighborhood of a large American city. Or for that matter a hijab-wearing Muslim in Europe. And I seriously doubt it.




qtns2di4

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