Affirming that Israel is not an apartheid state if one overlooks its treatment of Palestinians, Benjamin Netanyahu said this on Thursday to a reporter from The Onion Haaretz:
The State of Israel is doing “not badly” compared to other countries, and “if you deduct the Arabs and ultra-Orthodox from inequality indexes, we’re in great shape,” said Netanyahu.
He was responding to the latest annual International Monetary Fund report on Israel, which showed that inequality has worsened significantly over the past two decades and that Israel is now one of the three IMF members with the worst inequality.
He said that? Is Bibi asking for the world to unite behind an Israeli-Palestinian Equality Movement, as recently contemplated by card-carrying liberal Zionists Gideon Levy and Bradley Burston?
On Passover, Bibi might remember that according to Jewish mythology, ancient Egypt didn’t do badly compared to other countries of its time, and if you deducted the Israelites from Pharoah’s inequality indexes, the land of the pyramids was in great shape!
Imagine if an American political leader today said something similarly racist and prejudicial involving 18 percent of our population– “If you deduct the Blacks and Mormons from unemployment figures, the U.S. economy is in great shape” — the outrage and criticism that would deservedly descend! Doesn’t Bibi’s quip sound like it could have emanated from the mouth of the governor of a Jim Crow U.S. southern state in the 1950s?
Memo to Peter Beinart: As Bibi has tacitly admitted, on neither side of the green line is Israel a “flawed but genuine democracy.” Israel is now, and always has been, the Middle East’s Only Pretend Democracy™. It’s time to end the pretension.
hmm
my guess is that Mormons have a very low unemployment rate and a pretty high standard of living.
Egypt had, on the face of the biblical record, a remarkably generous policy of receiving refugees in the face of famine, in the time of Joseph, and in the face of political instability, in the time of Jeremiah. Relations with the Babylonian empire were tense already, no doubt, but taking in people whom the Babylonians would have regarded as terrorists might have been quite a risk.
Roflolololol@- ” the onion ”
As to the rest of your article Matt, our zionist shortbus insist on making analogies to America only when it serves their interests (ie blah blah imagine if Mexico were lobbing rockets at Texas).
So when you add some context to said analogy like, oh I dunno, maybe we were occupying and colonizing Mexico for fifty years and killing them at a ratio of 10 to 1 and it was only in the last ten years of the conflict that you could say that any rockets were being lobbed anyway and that these rockets were more or less worthless in and of themselves – not even relatively speaking.
Etc etc
Every comparison = Israel loses.
Any empirical approach to this conflict = Israel loses.
Only when you employ racism and sophistry (tough neighborhood, it’s complicated, plenty of Arab countries for the Palestinians to migrate to, blah blah) does Zionism fly.
Continuing the Bibi-logic:
And if you subtract all Jewish people from the 1%, they will become automatically more like 5%. Bingo! inequality reduced by a factor of 5!
But there’s more! subtract jewish people from the top 5% (which includes lots of acadmia) and the inequality curve flattens to 80-20. Now we are almost talking European index (almost).
According to GW professor of archeology Eric Cline, http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/anthropology/people/153
1. There is no proof that Israelites fled across the desert from Egypt; Hebrew scriptures contain the only information about the event (“but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”).
2. If the biblical story is to be believed, at very least the numbers of Israelites who fled from Egypt are wildly exaggerated — the most reasonable estimate is that about 600 Israelites were in the group.