The Basics of Government

Originally Posted by pb & spanglish

Arabs from...?

Pretty much anywhere you find 'em, Israel would like to kill 'em and vice-versa. I'd say the 'destroy Israel' sentiment is rather less prevalent in people of Arab descent who live in Western countries, but it's not entirely absent in those people either.

The short answer is "Arabs from..." mainly the places near to Israel. They don't get on with their neighbors, for the reasons described below. To an extent, this has the effect of uniting the otherwise divided Arab world. Not entirely, but enough to make it a pretty big problem.

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And what's that whole thing about Lebanon wanting to be recognized or something?

Perhaps you mean Palestine? There's a whole big dispute over which land belongs to which people, and basically... it has been going on forever. The modern version can be traced back to 1948 when the State of Israel was first established.

It was still going on prior to that, of course. Just in a different form, since there was no official State of Israel. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Jews began to migrate to what they believed was their 'promised land, which set the stage for the current conflict.

It would be wrong to think that even that migration was the root of the conflict though. I think it could be stated with some justification that the dispute over territory goes all the way back to Biblical times.

I apologise that my understanding is not sufficient to give any more detailed of an answer.

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Originally Posted by pb & spanglish

Yeah, I totally meant Palestine (whoops). So are Israel and Palestine fighting like whoa?

Well, it's not like you would normally imagine a war. It's more like constant conflict of a more low-key nature, with innocent people getting cought in the middle most of the time. They both claim the right to the same land, so you have people from both sides trying to occupy that same territory a lot of the time.

You shouldn't think of it as two armies marching to war. It's not that simple at all. It's something that I think I'm not qualified to really discuss. I can't really claim to understand it entirely myself, so I won't presume to try and explain it any further.

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Basically my friends tell me just to assume that everyone in the middle east is fighting with everyone...

It's not exactly quite that bad, but the thing about these conflicts is that they never really stop. They just form part of everyday life in some of the worst areas. In some cases, the roots of the conflict go back for hundreds of years, so it's hard to imagine the problem will ever go away.

I'm sure there are relatively peaceful areas in the more prosperous countries. It's not constant warfare all through the region. It just happens to be the case that there are several trouble-spots which have very prominent, well-known problems. I've never been there myself, but I imagine there are places where you'd never know anything about any conflicts.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by pb & spanglish

Thanks for your thoughts, though. I can totally follow what you're saying. I'm just one of those annoying people who has to understand all the little details before being able to grasp the big picture, and that doesn't tend to work very well with politics...

I guess that a moderately decent starting point would be Wikipedia's Israeli-Palestine conflict page, but remember that it is Wikipedia. Consider it a basis for further study, rather than a source of facts. You'll learn the names of some of the major players from reading that page.

You'll drive yourself insane before you learn all about this conflict though. There are just so many small, but important details. So many groups, so many agendas and so many things happening. It's fascinating, but I don't think I'd ever understand it well enough to try explaining it to others.

I'm just hoping I didn't make any glaringly obvious mistakes in what I did tell you, as basic as it is.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by pb & spanglish

Arab/Jewish (is that more religion-based, territory-based, or race-based?)

The territory that is in dispute happens to be sacred to both religions involved, as far as I know. That makes it at least both of the first two, and I think you could say it has evolved to become both.

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So "Arabs." At the risk of sounding very ignorant... Is this a really broad term of what? To whom does it refer, exactly?

It identifies an ethnic group that you will find spread out across the whole of the Middle East. They share the common language of Arabic, and the predominant religion is Islam, of one type or another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_world

The most functional definition would be to describe it as an ethnicity, equivalent in that regard to Caucasian, or Afro-Carribean.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by pb & spanglish

Though of course, I always struggle with the difference between race and ethnicity and all that.

As far as I know, the term "race" refers to things which are identifiably different between groups of people originating from different parts of the world, such as dark skin in Africans, while "ethnicity" refers to a more specific subset, which incorporates aspects of both race and culture. As such, I believe that the term Arab is an Ethnicity, since it is strongly tied to a culture, rather than just a genetic heritage.

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And I get confused about such things as, are white and Caucasian the same? Are Asians white? But they aren't Caucasian, clearly. So there must be a distinction... Etc.

You mean East Asians, such as Chinese? There's more than one kind of people native to East Asia, and not all of them look white. Some of them have quite dark skin. I believe they are sometimes called "Asiatic", or just "Asian", when referred to as a group.

I was speaking idiomatically.