Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: The Global March to Jerusalem, a brave and admirable attempt to awaken the world’s conscience [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)were in the U.S. Constitution. The existence of those words didn't stop the slave trade from continuing until 1808, slavery itself from continuing until 1862, and Jim Crow from hanging on until 1964...this, in a country that had its first presidential election in 1793.
(There's also the fact that women didn't get the vote until 1920.)
In every instance in which any group won legal equality with property-owning white men(the only type of people who had full citizenship in 1793)in the U.S., they did so ONLY after decades or even generations of struggle. LGBT people STILL haven't won full legal equality here. It will be years more, if not decades before the transgendered win full legal equality.
Working-class people are in the process of LOSING full legal equality as the unions continue to lose power.
Thus, despite your smug assumptions to the contrary as a former American citizen(at least, I assume you were born here and lived here before you made aliyah...correct me on this if I am wrong)it was NEVER valid to say that the achievement of human rights in the United States was bound to happen, was "only a matter of time". It came at a massive cost in human lives(and, in part, helped lead to a civil war, as you may recall from your grade school history class).
Those lofty words in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence also did nothing to stop the theft of the continent(and what amounted to genocide)against Native Americans(an act which, combined with the long heritage of slavery, Jim Crow and homophobia/transphobia, means that the U.S. has committed much greater and far more vicious crimes against human rights than any Palestinian state ever could).
The United States is still, over 230 years after the Declaration of Independence, unable to truly claim that it treats all people as if they were created equal. By your logic, knowing how hollow the notion of "freedom" was and is in the U.S., everyone who did NOT insist on full 21st Century democracy as we know now it BEFORE the U.S. gained independence was guilty of preferring "right-wing nationalism" to democracy and had no right to claim that they cared about human rights at all, even if they helped slaves escape on the Underground Railroad!
Alll of which supports my main contention...if my OWN country did not have full democracy and legal equality for all(both of which I support everywhere)AT the beginning, what moral standing to I have to demand it of any OTHER country?
And who is anyone to say that Palestine must have democracy before independence if, really, not that many currently democratic countries in the world had it when they gained sovereignty, or when they emerged from the prehistoric mysts to build shacks(as was the case in, say, England and France, neither of which were democratic in any real sense for at least the first 1800 years of THEIR existence as national entities).
I support democracy AND self-determination...and my support for self-determination does NOT compromise my support for democracy. The history I laid out above proves my point.