A wave of international recognitions of a Palestinian state has prompted bitter and almost unanimous condemnation across the political spectrum in Israel, uniting political foes and, analysts said, potentially reinforcing the ruling coalition’s grip on power.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli’s prime minister, called the moves an “absurdity” on Sunday night, and a “reward for terrorism”, while Israel’s president said the “forces of darkness” would be emboldened.
Opposition leaders have used similar language. Yair Lapid, who heads the centrist Yesh Atid party, described “a diplomatic disaster, a bad move and a reward for terror”.
But there was little prospect of Israel’s government changing course as a result of the recognitions, experts said.
“This will not have one millimetre of influence on policymaking,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu and analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, a conservative thinktank.
Netanyahu leads the most far-right government in Israel’s history and his coalition is in part dependent on the continuing support of extremist religious Zionist factions, which have a messianic vision of Israel’s destiny, and ultra-Orthodox religious parties.
Capitalism has only been around since the 1800s, and humans have been hating and killing people different from them for thousands of years.
I’m a socialist is well, but I don’t like how many people see socialism as a silver bullet for everything. I think it’s dangerous.
If we take socialism just to mean something like “workers are the ones who own the means of production; they take part in decision making and share the profits”, that doesn’t mean everything else will be solved. Some people will still be bigoted. Those (worker owned) companies will still have ads because they’ll still want to make money*. A lot might still give no fucks about the environment and keep polluting. And if it’s still a hierarchical system, there’s no reason those in power wouldn’t try to abuse that system, try to profit from it, oppress people, start wars, etc.
It’s not that socialism is a silver bullet that eliminates racism. It’s that capitalism makes it virtually impossible to stop competing for profit growth. This turns more nature and human labour into things, even if we throw those things away. That drives much higher exploitation of resources and people than needed to have decent average standard of living. And when some people organize to stop their own explotation, racism is deployed by capitalists to exploit more the groups that didn’t.
Socialism allows to stop the unlimited profit growth cycle and thus decrease the intensity of exploitation, which allows decreasing or stopping the explotation on the basis of racism. Doesn’t guarantee it but it surely makes it likely. Capitalism makes the opposite likely.
And that’s before we consider class consciousness’ effects on people.