🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <26138@life.ai.mit.edu> gwydion@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Basalat Ali Raja) writes:
>One cannot help but ask...  Israel is the only democracy in the middle
>east?  How many of the Palestinians whose very lives and destiny are
>directly controlled by the Zionist government in Jerusalem have had a
>chance to vote against or in favour of this government?
>
>Spare me the lawyer's answers, that these people are immigrants, or
>refugees or whatever.  They have been there for generations, in many
>cases much longer than their Jewish neighbours who CAN vote.  And yet
>you claim that Israel is a democracy?  Only if you accept as a
>corollary that the Palestinians are not human.  Will you do that?

	Your logic goes only so far as your ignorance of history. Let's call
the role:

	* By your standard, ancient Athens was no democracy. Not only
	could slaves not vote in Athens, but not all male inhabitants of
	the Polis (=city), were, in fact citizens. Athens was the first of
	many states to establish a link between voting privileges and 
	military service, and only full-fledged citizens could vote and fight.
	You will note that I used the word voting "privileges" because
	it was not until the US Declaration of Independence that we started
	to speak of "inalienable rights" of human beings. The Romans, who
	followed in the political footsteps of the Greeks, also had several
	gradations of citizenship, with Roman citizens taking precedence
	over "provincials", even though they may have come from the provinces
	initially. For many Roman soldiers, service in the army was the ticket
	by which they and their descendents obtained the rights of
	citizenship.

	* Of course, it took many of us living in the USA a considerable
	length of time to secure these "inalienable rights" from our
	independent, democratically elected representative government.
	I won't bore you with all the trendy, "politically correct" cliches
	about the "oppression of African Americans and women." The simple fact
	of the matter is that, in 18th and 19th century America, the voting
	privilege was tied to property ownership. So, even though I am a
	very White, very Male, rather Anglo-Saxon American Protestant, I cannot
	honestly say whether Great-great-great Grandfather Riggs could vote
	for Andrew Jackson or Henry Clay in 1832; the odds would seem to be 
	that, as a small farmer, he probably did not have the franchise.

	* Which, of course, leads us to ask what OTHER "democratic" countries
	are in the same boat as Israel. Certainly, the Federal Republic
	of Germany has a large number of "guest workers" who will not become
	full-fledged citizens, whose presence is tolerated, rather than 
	embraced (Their children, however, are all considered Germans if they 
	are born on German soil). Mr. Ali Raja certainly makes no attempt to
	defend any of the Arab republics who have elections, but do not 
	offer up the rights of citizenship to long-term residents, who, of
	course, are technically part of the "Arab Nation" if their native
	tongue is Arabic. 

	One might well paraphrase JFK in delineating how the Palestinians might
obtain their just deserts - "Ask not what Israel can do for you, but what
you can do for Israel."

	Bill R.

	"My opinions do not represent those of my employer or any
government agency."

-- 
Bill R.