User:Avengerofthe BoN/Israel-article

The following is the Israel article as it was on October 2, 2015 at 21:23 UTC

Israel is the state formed in the aftermath of World War II for the Jews of the world, located in the Middle East, on the south-eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. It has borders with Lebanon in the north, Syria and Jordan in the east, Egypt on the south-west, and the Palestinian territories to the east and south-west. Israel has passed a law declaring its capital as Jerusalem, and much of its government meets there. However, most countries and the UN do not recognize the law establishing all of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and all embassies - including that of the US - are therefore in the city of Tel Aviv. Republicans in the US like to call for the embassy being moved on any given occasion - as a political statement of sorts. In case you need consular service in Jerusalem, there are still a lot of consulates though, but they are obviously not the same as embassies.

One of the most common names in Israel is Yael.

Territory
The total area under Israeli law, including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, is 22,072 square kilometers (8,522 sq mi). The total area under Israeli control, including the military-controlled and Palestinian-governed territory of the West Bank, is 27,799 square kilometers (10,733 sq mi).

The international community, even including Israeli allies, recognizes neither the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza nor the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Supporters claim that any land occupied is only being held for security purposes, and point to the fact that Israel was not the aggressor in all of its wars (a surprisingly common opinion among participants in wars). The Arab League declared after the war that despite its defeat, no member would recognize the State of Israel or come to any peace agreement.

Founding
Immediately prior to World War II, what is now Israel was part of the British Mandate Territory of Palestine. The British Mandate incorporated two main areas: Transjordan (now the Kingdom of Jordan), and the area today known as Israel and the Palestinian territories. Relatively few Jews inhabited the Mandate territories, but they were the majority in the areas designated to them in the partition plan of the United Nations. The work of Zionists like David Ben Gurion resulted in a growing demand for a Jewish homeland in the region. Initially both areas (Transjordan and what would later be known as "mandatory Palestine") were open to Jewish settlement, but Arab pressure led to the Brits declaring all land east of the Jordan off limits to Jews.

In 1917, Arthur James Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, wrote a letter to Walter, the 2nd Baron Rothschild, in which he promised the Jewish people would return to their homeland in Palestine, as though such a thing was Britain's to give. That letter contained the key phrase "a national home for the Jewish people" which was regarded by many as a binding statement. All they had to do was wait, it seemed. Unfortunately, the British had also, as though such a thing was theirs to give, promised Palestine to the Arabs, during a Cabinet Eastern Committee meeting that same year. Initially Jews and Arabs lived if not in harmony than at least in an uneasy truce in Mandatory Palestine, with moderate Arab leaders even welcoming Jewish settlement as a means to "develop" the mostly barren and arid land. However, one Arab leader, a certain Amin al-Husseini, said that there should be no cooperation, no living side by side or indeed no selling land to Jews. It was mostly him and other extremists like him, that caused a massive anti-British and anti-Jewish uprising in 1936. While the British authorities tried to work together with moderate Arab and Jewish leaders to suppress the uprising, many Zionists saw that their continued presence and security in Palestine was not guaranteed and thus formed several self defense groups, among which Haganah (moderate) and Irgun (radically anti-British) were the most notable. When the Arab uprising was finally suppressed by the British, thousands of Jews - both Zionist and non-Zionist - and hundreds of Arabs were dead and al-Husseini had greatly increased his influence among many Palestinian Arabs. The British in an effort to keep some semblance of control published a "White Paper" that limited Jewish immigration to mandatory Palestine to no more than 10 000 per year for the next five years and none without Arab approval thereafter. Further restrictions were put on Jews buying land inhabited by Arabs.

Of course the White Paper plan did not work; illegal Jewish immigration and political violence made it impossible. As the 1948 British Government Statement on the End of the Mandate states: The Arabs were critical of many of the provisions in the White Paper but it seemed probable that they would eventually acquiesce in their application. The Jews, on the other hand, were bitterly opposed to it and its publication was immediately followed by an outburst of Jewish violence which continued until the beginning of the war.

...1939 also saw the beginning of organized attempts by large numbers of Jews to enter Palestine in excess of the permitted quota. These attempts have continued ever since, and, by exacerbating Arab resentment, have greatly increased the difficulty of maintaining law and order in Palestine. ...but was also the principal cause of the steady increase in Jewish terrorist activities. These had ceased at the beginning of the war, in whose prosecution both Jews and Arabs had loyally cooperated, but broke out again in 1942. From that year until the end of the war Jewish extremists carried out a number of political murders, robberies and acts of sabotage...Once Germany had been defeated, these activities, previously sporadic and supported by only a minority of the Jewish community, increased in scale and intensity as the efforts of terrorist gangs were supplemented by those of Haganah and assisted by members of the Jewish Agency. Communications were attacked throughout the country; Government buildings, military trains and places of entertainment frequented by Britons were blown up; and numbers of Britons, Arabs and moderate Jews were kidnapped or murdered. This wholesale terrorism had continued ever since.

Jewish violent groups like Irgun and Lehi bombed the King David Hotel (where the British authorities were headquartered), assassinated UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, and murdered Arab civilians and politically unacceptable Jews.

The aftermath of the war in Europe left large numbers of stateless Jews, many of whom fled to Palestine. The terrible treatment of Jews under Nazi Germany and other Nazi-occupied and Nazi-allied nations during the war, and especially the horrors of the Holocaust, led to growing Zionist movements among the Jews of Europe and Palestine, and increasing sympathy for the Zionist cause from the international community.

After the Second World War, the battered British declared that they would step out of Palestine, and both Jews and Arabs seized the chance. The Haganah and Jewish Agency began mobilizing, ready to take control at a moment's notice. The Arabs mobilized faster, drumming up support from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, as well as John Bagot Glubb's Arab Legion. (The Mufti is a notable character because he consorted with Hitler during the war, helping found the SS-Handschar Brigade, composed mainly of Balkan Muslims, after local (Bosnian) clerics forbade collaboration with the Nazi puppet state Ustasha regime.)

In the meantime, the UN agreed to conduct a partition vote. The Jews accepted the agreement whereas no Arab state did. Israel ended up in a dominant position after all Arab states surrounding Israel and the Palestinians themselves failed to "drive the Jews into the sea" as they so delightfully "promised". This defeat and the fact that many Palestinians permanently lost their homes because of it is referred to as "an-Nakba" (tellingly: the catastrophe) in Arab discourse. The wars of 1967 and 1973 have to be understood at least partially as attempts to reverse said "catastrophe" and the associated loss of face.

The Transjordan area (approximately 80% of the British Mandate Territory) was given to the Arabs and became the Kingdom of Jordan, under the Hashemite royal family. The remaining 20% of the land was divided between the Jews and the Arabs based on population densities with the intention that a corpus separatum centered on Jerusalem but also including Bethlehem would remain an international entity under UN control.

Arab-Israeli conflicts


Though the original UN partition of the area into a Jewish and Arab state would have disrupted relatively few people, when the neighboring states attacked Israel in 1948, a massive dislocation of Arabs in Israel and Jews in Arab countries followed. Claiming that Israel was a European colony, many Arab states (once they achieved independence) tried to destroy the state of Israel. In the first war from 1947-49 (Arab-Israeli War), the Arab forces greatly outnumbered the Israeli forces, but the Israelis, perhaps due to better leadership and troop morale, prevailed. The Suez War (1956), the Six Day War (1967), the War of Attrition (1967 again) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) all followed the same pattern. After 1967 in particular, Israel took large portions of the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria as well as Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, controlling their territory and population without annexing them outright. Currently, Israel is in something of a Cold War-esque conflict with Iran, with such proxies as Hamas in Gaza (from 2006 to the present) and Hezbollah in Lebanon arrayed against Israel since the presidency of the Dinner Jacket. Things have calmed down, for now, with Hassan Rouhani replacing Ahmadinejad in mid-2013. However, even the "moderates" in Iranian politics are not all that chummy with Israel and ultimately no important decision in Iran can be made against the will of Ayatollah Khamenei (the successor of Ruhollah Khomeini) who - like his predecessor - is no big friend of Israel to say the least.

Hamas' status as a terrorist organization is disputed, though it's not unreasonable to call it one because it targets civilians. Oddly, Hamas's parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, is considered to be a terrorist organization by more countries in spite of it being less violent; politics and all that. The secular PLO however, which was considered the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people for the majority of the situation, is not currently considered a terrorist organization by any nation. (Historically, only the United States and Israel have ever designated the PLO as a terrorist organization.) The PLO did engage in the 1970 Avivim school bus massacre, airplane hijackings, Munich Olympics Massacre, 1974 Ma'alot Massacre, 1975 Savoy Hotel hostage crisis and the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, but then denounced violence, and the US and Israel adjusted their positions. The 1977 hijacking of the Landshut passenger jet was conducted by the PFLP, than a subset of the PLO in cooperation with the German leftist terrorist group Rote Armee Fraktion (the "Bader-Meinhof gang"). During this as well as other hijackings by Palestinian terrorists, Jews or people believed to be Jewish were treated worse than the rest of the hostages.

Human rights
Israel is the only state in the Middle East to extend gay rights. However, Palestinian gay rights groups resent being used as "cover" for Israel's treatment of Palestinians in general. Moreover -- and as true in many countries-- there are still significant homophobic members of the Israeli parliament.

Israel's relatively positive stance on homosexuality is often used by its supporters as evidence that it is an inherently progressive country. There is, however, no gay marriage in Israel because Israeli marriage law falls firmly under the control of the Orthodox rabbinate. Therefore, neither Reform nor Conservative rabbis may perform marriages in Israel, although Israel recognizes both gay and straight marriages entered abroad.

Some have pointed out how gay rights has been used to "pink wash" Israel's oppressive policies toward Palestinians. During one of the Freedom Flotillas made up mostly of Americans who set out to break the controversial blockade of Gaza, an anonymous gay man named Mark posted a YouTube video, claiming to be shocked by widespread homophobia among those on the flotilla. The Israeli government initially promoted this video, however, it turned out that "Mark" was actually an Israeli actor and the video was tweeted by Guy Seemann, an employee of the prime minister of Israel. Seemann denied that he had posted the video in any official capacity.

When it comes to other minorities, Israel's record is somewhat more complicated. Defenders of Israel point out that while Israel is infringing on the rights and freedoms of Arabs by building settlements on occupied Arab territory in violation of the Geneva Conventions, Arabs living within Israel's borders are granted more freedoms than most Arabs in Arab countries. Arab Israelis have the right to vote, to organize, and to conduct their own religious services. Such rights do not, however, extend to the approximately 4 million Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Moreover, many Israeli Arabs consider themselves to be second-class citizens, who suffer from discrimination, and are poorer compared to Jews.

Israel has come under fire for banning a few Arab political parties, but the Supreme Court quickly overruled the bans. The justification given for banning the parties was their alleged support of terrorism and their refusal to recognize the existence of the state of Israel. However, there have in the past also been bans of Jewish political parties and terrorist organizations and most of those were held up by the Supreme Court, which might indicate in fact an anti Jewish bias, for fear of criticism of a perceived anti-Arab bias. There's also the occasional call for the genocide of the Palestinians issued by hardcore rabbis.

Many Arabs living in Israel support Zionist parties, and a few Muslim Arabs do serve in the IDF. Israeli Arabs have risen to fairly important positions in the military the government the foreign service and even the supreme court. Arab citizens of Israel have been elected to every Knesset thus far, both running for Arab political parties and on the lists of non-Arab parties, including - perhaps surprisingly - Likud. Israel has a large population of Africans, which includes African Jews (mostly from Ethiopia), as well as asylum-seekers from war-torn nations like Sudan and Eritrea. African Jews experience racism in Israel which leads to protests. The plight of Ethiopian Jews in Israel has been compared to the plight of Italian and Irish migrants to the US who where "becoming white" in the late 19th and early 20th century. Public and legal opinion on the Sudanese asylees is split, as many entered Israel illegally through border with Egypt after a long and often dangerous journey. Many Israelis refer disparagingly to the asylees as "infiltrators," and Israel holds thousands of these refugees in encampments surrounded by barbed-wire fencing somewhere deep in the Negev desert. The Washington Post reports that in May of 2015 the refugees were given "30 days to accept Israel’s offer of $3,500 in cash and a one-way ticket home or to an unnamed third country in Africa, or face incarceration at Saharonim prison." Those that stay are helped by organizations such as B'nai Darfur (Sons of Darfur), which provides them with economic and social aid while raising awareness about the Darfur genocide.

The centrality of religion to Israel's identity leads to particular tensions for women. Israeli women enjoy all of the rights and social mobility that one would expect in a liberal democracy. They are also subject to obligations that women in most other states are free or barred from, namely conscription - though the period of conscription is shorter for women than for men. However, the strong social and political influence of certain strains of Orthodox Judaism means that women in Israel are sometimes faced with official and unofficial sexism justified by religious dogma in places where fundamentalist communities are predominant, such as Meir Shearim in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, where some buses and public utilities serving these areas are sex-segregated. Nonetheless, women's rights in Israel are higher than those in most, if not all, Arab countries, where women may not be allowed to drive or vote, and women's rights activists (including Arabs) have come out in defense of Israel on feminist grounds.

Israeli nukes and Iran
Of all UN Member states only India, Pakistan, Israel, and South Sudan have declined to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (India, Pakistan, and Israel all have nuclear arsenals, but South Sudan is a new country which happens to be really busy and hasn't yet found the time to sign it.) Israel's close relationship with the US shields it from the possibility of American pressure to sign that treaty.

Israel currently has a policy of "," where it refuses to confirm or deny the existence of its arsenal despite common knowledge of its existence. Israeli leaders have repeatedly pledged not to be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons to the Middle East, which makes you wonder what "introduce" actually means to a native Hebrew speaker. Israel's nuclear program had French assistance and was opposed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, although the Nixon administration agreed to turn a blind eye. According to Avner Cohen, probably the most famous historian of Israel's nuclear program, Israel was able to assemble two nuclear weapons just in time for the 1967 Six Day War. It is generally accepted that Israel had nuclear weapons by the time Yom Kippur War of 1973, and that Egypt and Syria knew this when they chose to launch a surprise attack against Israel. The fact that the Israeli government has never threatened to use nuclear weapons, even during two wars including one in which it was caught unprepared, does not stop hipsters on the internet from calling Israel a "nuclear rogue state" that poses a threat to world security. Critics might argue that Israel and in particular its supporters have breached codes of the UN Charter by threatening to use nukes in a "pre-emptive nuclear strike" of Iranian facilities. This same history also might make you wonder what the point of Israel's arsenal is. This example, along with the and, are often cited by critics of.

The question of Israeli nukes is inseparable from the fact that it is surrounded by states that have historically adapted an aggressive stance towards its very existence, and needs to ensure its survival. Critics of this argument would point that in wars excluding the 1948, Israel more often than has emerged as a less than peaceful partner (even in 1973 when it rebuffed Sadat's offer to withdraw from occupied territories) according to declassified Israeli documents, as military historian Zeev Maoz notes in "Defending the Holy Land". Maoz notes for the Six-Day War in 1967, "Israeli misconduct during border conflict with Syria was to a large extent responsible for the process of escalation that evolved into the May-June 1967 crisis. . . . The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] command was not too worried about an Egyptian surpriseattack. . . . Most observers seem to agree that Nasser did not want a war."

In recent years, more open threats on the part of Iran to destroy Israel have complicated the issue. However, there is some controversy over the Dinner Jacket's 2005 speech in which he was quoted as saying "the occupying regime must be wiped off the map." Every scholar of Persian who commented on the alleged speech, as well as Mossad's own notes on the speech, do not translate Ahmadinijad's words as threatening to "wipe Israel off the map." The expression "wipe off the map" does not exist in Persian; Ahmadinijad was quoting from Ayatollah Khomeini, referring to a call for regime change in Israel as opposed to the obliteration of the state. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told the Iranian government's own staff translators that the Persian doesn't translate to "wipe off the map."

On the other hand, Ahmedinejad has unabashedly said such deligitimizing things about Israel and Jewish history that many consider fear of Iran to be wholly justified. Ahmadinedjad's government has on different occasions hosted Holocaust denial conferences with speakers including anti-Semites and white supremacists such as David Duke. This headache of a man finally left public view in 2013, when he was term-limited from running again; nobody's sad that he's gone now, not even Ali Khamenei, who himself is very much anti-Israel.

Politics
The Israeli parliament is called the Knesset; it sits in Jerusalem, is unicameral and has 120 members. The Israeli electoral system is based on a party-list proportional representation with the entire country forming a single electoral district. The threshold for an electoral list to enter the Knesset is two percent, although there are efforts within the Israeli Knesset and the government to raise it to three or four percent. All of this naturally results in a very fractured political landscape and most governments thus far have been broad coalitions, often including one or more religious or ethnically based party.

The Israeli political system is a parliamentary one in which the support of a majority of Members of Knesset (MKs) is needed in order to form a government. After the Knesset is elected the President of Israel gives the task of forming a government to the head of the parliamentary faction whom he sees as most likely to get the support of a majority of MKs. If the person chosen by the President succeeds in this task he becomes Prime Minister. The term of a Prime Minister is set in law as four years, although in reality no government has managed to survive an entire term due to intragovernmental conflicts. Presidents in turn are elected for a seven year term by the Knesset; other than their aforementioned role in the formation of government and their authority to grant pardons to prisoners, their function is largely ceremonial.

Under current Israeli law, in order to register a party for the parliamentary elections one must receive the support of 100 sponsors, although a new parliamentary list can bypass this requirement by running in the name of a registered party which no longer actually operates. The proportional allocation of seats and the low threshold for entering the Knesset allows many political parties to gain parliamentary representation. With so many political parties it's bloody well impossible for any one of them to get a majority by itself, so most Israeli governments have been coalitions, leading to intense power struggles between and within parties, palace revolts, and split-offs. This effectively proves the "two Jews, three opinions" theory.

Israel has a whopping array of political parties. Almost all are split-offs from larger parties (in the best Jewish tradition) and many of them don't get along with each other. The six largest Israeli parties are:


 * Likud (Benjamin Netanyahu, conservative/bordering on reactionary)
 * Yisrael Beiteinu (Avigdor Lieberman, nationalist. In the current Knesset Yisrael Beiteinu caucuses with the Likud in a joint parliamentary faction, similar to the way independent Senators in the US caucus with another party despite not being formal members.) - As Liebermann was born a Soviet citizen and Yisrael Beitenu has in the past run ads in Russian, they are often perceived as a party mostly catering to Soviet born Jews and their descendants
 * Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid, centrist, liberal)
 * Labor (Shelly Yehimovitch, centre-left/social democracy) - Labor Zionism was the dominating political force in Israel at least from the founding of the state into the 1970s. It was still an important force until the 1990s. However, as Labor is perceived as a dovish party and the peace process seems to have mostly stalled, Labor has been struggling a lot recently and is only a shadow of its former self.
 * The Jewish Home (Naftali Bennet, religious party, nationalist, far-right)
 * Shas (Eli Yishai, a party representing Haredi Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent.)

Keep in mind, these are not actual parties; these are amalgamations of smaller parties, who are represented as themselves in the Knesset. Thus, a candidate from Ahdut HaAvoda (merged with Labor) could run on the Labor ticket but still be Ahdut in the Knesset. Crazy, no?

There are also a truckload of others, many of them two parties amalgamated due to lack of funds/actual leadership. These include:


 * United Torah Judaism, (Ya'akov Litzman, a party representing Haredi Jews of Ashkenazi descent.)
 * United Arab List/Ta'al (Ibrahim Sarsur, Israeli-Arab interests/anti-Zionism.)
 * Kadima (Shaul Mofaz, centrist, was the largest party in 17th and 18th Knesset but in the current 19th one it has only two seats, making it the smallest party )
 * Hadash (Mohammed Barakeh, socialist)

As for Arab parties, there are several. The largest is the United Arab List, with four three seats. The other United Arab List, which is called "United Arab List (1976)," does an effective job of confusing people when they are looking for the actual UAL campaign headquarters. The most visible, however, is Balad, led by Jamal Zahalka. Zahalka earns special mention because he earned his BA, MA, and PhD at Hebrew University, is the leader of an Israeli political party (on three Knesset committees), and complains vocally that he is a victim of Israeli apartheid.

There are currently five parties without Knesset seats:


 * Hatzohar
 * the Popular Arab Bloc
 * the Women's Party
 * Tafnit, and
 * Yamin Israel

These parties have all been disbanded as of this writing. There is one party that has been banned from the Knesset, the militantly anti-Arab Kach party. No one misses it.

Benjamin Binyamin Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel, with Reuven Rivlin as President. Netanyahu's Likud merged with Yisrael Beiteinu, the nationalists, before the most recent election. However, they needed even more parties to join them to form a coalition after Yesh Atid did better than expected. The Likud Yisrael Beiteinu merger invited Yesh Atid and two more parties (the liberal centrist Ha'Tnua and the religious nationalist The Jewish Home) to form an extremely broad coalition of conservatives, centrists, nationalists, secularists, and orthodox Jews. They tried to include Shas (basically the Jewish Constitution Party), but disagreed with the ruling coalition on conscription (see below), so the social conservatives joined their polar opposites, the Labor party, in opposition.

Conscription
In Israel, because the population is so small and the nature of some of its not-so-friendly neighbors, all Jews (and several non-Jews ) are required to join the military. When Israel was founded, there was (and still is) a large ultra-orthodox population who devote their lives to studying the Torah. In fact, they are very large welfare recipients and a lot of them are not employed. To appease these fairly politically powerful groups, Israeli conscription law gives what some may consider to be actual "moochers" (as opposed to welfare recipients in the United States) an exemption from serving in the military. This is similar to conscientious objection, but they don't even have to work nonviolent but productive jobs. Therefore, most of the political parties want to end the exemption, but the Shas party is powerful and valuable in a coalition (which always happens), so this exemption is still in place. Some of these orthodox groups even object to the very existence of Israel as they believe, according to their interpretation of the Torah, that a Jewish state is not supposed to exist until the Jewish Messiah appears.

Due to the fact that most of Israel's military engagements have been with Arab nations and terrorist organizations, Arab-Israelis are not drafted to the military. However, they can volunteer and some, especially Bedouins, have done so. The Israeli community (a monotheistic ethnoreligious group) has a generally good relationship with the Israeli authorities, and therefore Druze men are also drafted to the military (women are exempted) unless they decide to devote their life to religious studies and service, in which case they are exempted. The same holds true for the Israeli community.

Torture
The Israeli government admits that its security forces tortured prisoners between 1988 and 1992, and human rights organizations have stated that torture has continued on a widespread institutionalized basis into the present.

Although in large part outlawed by the Israel's High Court of Justice in 1999, their verdict left open an allowance for torture under certain circumstances which human rights organization B'Tselem said "legitimated, if only by implication, the use of torture and ill-treatment" and left open "the slippery slope leading to an increase in torture and ill-treatment."