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The lives of peaceful Israeli Arabs are on average some of the best in the region (especially if you take out all of the 'oh we have oil and support a 10%-citizen population with infinite money cheat'), peace deals have been offered previously, the best case scenario for independent Palestine is Lebanon 2: Electric Boogaloo. Any semi-rational person is surrendering.
They have denied most people living their citizenship. People are banned from living on the land the family has lived on for generations.
Why should they sign a peace deal with a country that wants 70+ of the land and with a country that is attacking all its neighbours? It is a concession with nothing to gain.
What? The Arabs living in actual Israel have full citizenship and famously have representation in the Israel parliament. If you're going to be a jew-hater at least get the facts right.
First of all, that's quite an uncharitable take. The comment didn't read to me as Jew-hating.
Equally as famously, most Palestinians in Israel (or the area overall, depending on how you parse the term) are not citizens and live under second-class conditions. If we're being fair, that's partly because the PA is supposed to be in charge but actually are mostly grifters, so they've delegated blame, but ultimately you don't really see Israel trying to expand citizenship to more Palestinians, even though by your own logic that would probably increase their peacefulness?
Given that PA territory is under full civil administration by PA, I'm not sure how would you expect Israel giving citizenship to Arabs living there. Security arrangements are more complex, but for this it doesn't matter - PA enjoys pretty much complete self-rule in civil matters (and so did Gaza btw) so calling Arabs living there "second class" compared to Israelis is just bizarre - they are not Israelis at all. As for PA leadership being grotesquely corrupt and indifferent to the needs of the population - that's extremely common situation in the Middle East, and Israel can't really fix it. It could annex the PA territory, kick out the PA and provide its own institutions, but nobody wants that. Short of that, the Arabs will have to do with the institutions they can build for themselves, and if those are not great, it's not Israel's fault.
Just simplifying a bit, there's the whole thing about zones, and of course plenty of "interstate commerce" as it were. But ultimately the PA are in charge because the Israelis let them be in charge, as the zone system demonstrates with great clarity. Of course I'd still say that the Palestinians themselves should have more urgency in trying to reform or replace the PA with something better, we shouldn't let them off the hook, but the PA is far from a full-fledged state, even laying military matters aside. The Israelis have effective veto power over the broad strokes of what they do.
Yes, PA is not a full state, because any solution that was designed to get them to full state and permanent resolution of the conflict has been thoroughly and consistently rejected by the Palestinians. And when Gaza was made an experiment in de-facto evolving towards full self-rule without a formal agreement, what Israel got as the result is October 7. There's absolutely no desire in Palestinian politics to reach any permanent solution that involves Israel existing in peace. Given that, any additional sovereignty level that Israel allows would only lead to more casualties on Israel's side. Gaza demonstrated it (and continues to demonstrate, with Hamas' thorough rejection of any arrangement that requires Hamas to give up on killing Israelis) very convincingly, and demanding from Israel to be more suicidal than it already is does not sound like a fair demand.
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This isn't a unique system, though. Maybe the degree of adversarial-ness is, but there are plenty of sub-state level actors with differing degrees of autonomy. American Samoa issues its own passports, but isn't an independent state or full protectorate ("nationals, not citizens"). New Caledonia has a somewhat similar arrangement. And it's not all obviously-colonial arrangements either: the Crown Dependencies of the UK don't seem to have active independence movements that I've heard of, but seem about as sovereign (perhaps with fewer border checkpoints) as the PA in the West Bank is on paper.
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The one-state solution with enfranchised Palestinians is my preferred solution, and when I lived there I saw some moves towards this, especially in the West Bank (particularly in East Jerusalem). Unfortunately I don’t think that’s palatable to the Israeli electorate any more after 10/7.
When I refer to Israel I’m referring to the parts of the country that are broadly recognized. Not West Bank, Gaza, or the Golan Heights. In these territories, Arabs have full citizenship and can vote and have elected many people to the Knesset. They definitely are still discriminated against, but in a manner much more similar to American racial politics vs. the apartheid. It’s also not like there’s no intra-Jewish tension either. Lots of Sephardic/Ashkenazi conflict along racial lines.
What I find frustrating is the equating of these two groups of Arabs. Those who live in Israel have relatively normal lives, probably better than they would have in their neighboring countries. Those in the West Bank/gaza are living in occupied territory.
In terms of jew hating, I'm not responding to this comment in particular but further up thread where he said things like
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I don't deny their second-class within Israel but is an independent Palestine likely to develop living conditions that are on aggregate better?
Oh, absolutely not, that's partly why I'm firmly a one-state solution advocate. Not that I have any power other than moral judgement, of course.
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As I've already pointed out in this thread, such a description applies to a significant chunk of Middle Eastern nations, which hasn't stopped them from signing peace agreements with each other in the recent past.
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Palestine, unlike Lebanon, would be ethnically pure. The Christians are mostly gone, there wasn’t a large Shia population to begin with.
Sorry they would emulate the great economic and wellbeing successes of Syria, Jordan, Egypt etcetera.
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50 thousands Arab Christians would be very surprised to know they are "mostly gone". Gaza, indeed, was pretty much cleansed of Christians by Hamas, which is what happens when you give Islamic fundamentalists free reign of the territory, but in PA, where comparatively less insane Fateh is ruling, Christians still exist. Of course, just as all the good-wishers of the world totally ignored what happened to Christians who used to live in Gaza, if PA decides to cleanse all Christians from PA territory, nobody would even squeak, no Jews - no news. Things like that happened many times in other places (in the Middle East and outside) and no students on college campuses ever protested about it. You all know why.
50 thousand out of almost five million is, indeed, mostly gone. Christians used their IQ advantage to look around, realize it was time to get the hell out of dodge, and then promptly do so. 1% of the population can't fight a Lebanese civil war.
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