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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2014-02-22 07:34 pm
Entry tags:

Fever, Zionism, Secularism

Spent two days off sick from work this week. On Sunday afternoon fellow gamers noted that I looked decidedly off-colour, but I managed to participate in good humour just the same - having decided that the language of Middle-Earth's Dalish needs to be expressed in the accent of the Swedish chef from the Muppets (if Rohirric is similar to old Anglo-Saxon, then Dalish is Swedish). OK, maybe that was the first signs of impending delirium, because all through Sunday night and throughout Monday and Tuesday I was hot, felt cold and clammy, constantly dehydrated.

I have finally finished an essay on Apartheid and Zionism, which nobody of a partisan persuasion will agree with, and follows on somewhat from a previous essay The Country of Palestine : A Zero State Solution. Appropriately today I went to a small lunch in honor of Nigel Sinnott's 70th birthday at Halina Strnad's home; there's a four hour interview with Halina available on Youtube including her experiences in Auschwitz and Stutthof.

Nigel been a secular activist for his entire life, and is a former editor of The Freethinker. A truly intelligent atheist and committed liberal in the British Oxfordshire tradition, his opinions are deeply considered and balanced. Other attendees included a number of people involved in the Humanist Society. Halina too is a member and delighted attendees with a story of a local Jewish function where a younger member at her table (who obviously didn't know) called her self-description as a secular Jew as an oxymoron. "What right do you have to call yourself a Jew?", he asked the holocaust survivor. It's where gallows humour meets irony.

[identity profile] strang-er.livejournal.com 2014-02-25 11:54 pm (UTC)(link)

Say, do you have any more information or links on discriminatory policies that are applied within Israel?

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2014-02-26 01:38 am (UTC)(link)
Apart from citizenship and land policy, education seems to be a big issue.

* The summary of the Or commission made to: "Government handling of the Arab sector has been primarily neglectful and discriminatory. The establishment did not show sufficient sensitivity to the needs of the Arab population, and did not take enough action in order to allocate state resources in an equal manner. The state did not do enough or try hard enough to create equality for its Arab citizens or to uproot discriminatory or unjust phenomenon. Meanwhile, not enough was done to enforce the law in the Arab sector, and the illegal and undesirable phenomena that took root there."
https://web.archive.org/web/20071001144625/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=335594

* According to the Follow-Up Committee for Arab Education, the Israeli government spends an average of $192 per year on each Arab student and $1,100 per Jewish student. It also notes that drop-out rate for Israeli Arab citizens is twice as high as that of their Jewish counterparts (12 percent versus 6 percent). The same group also noted that in 2005 there was a 5,000-classroom shortage in the Arab sector.
http://www.nif.org/content.cfm?id=2343&currbody=1

There is also various religious family courts as well.