A Back and Forth on Israel
I got an email from a reader the other day saying:
I was wondering if you would consider opening up this question to response:
Do the people of Israel have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Jewish state?
I ask, not because it necessarily precludes judging the nation’s recent actions in Gaza, but because the passion of the discussions on your blog and others seem to indicate, on some level, a disagreement on this point.
For example, I have noticed some commentators may say “of course, Israel has the right to defend itself”, and then go on to compare it to apartheid South Africa — which is problematic at the least, since nobody would say the Boers had a fundamental right to a Boer nation.
Ditto for criticism of Israel’s “racist immigration policy”, and so forth.
In reply, I said:
Sure. I don’t think Israel has any obligation to give in to, say, demands for an unrestricted Palestinian “right of return” to live within Israeli territory. Nor do I find it especially problematic that Israel uses Jewish ancestry as the basis for its immigration policy. Germany and other countries do the same.
But this is precisely what makes it so untenable for Israel to be exercising sovereign control over the Palestinian territories. What Israel is governing right now isn’t a Jewish state, it’s a binational state in which most of the Arab population is being denied its basic rights. We can see from the condition of the Israeli Arab population that Israel is perfectly capable of functioning as a Jewish state that respects the rights of a smallish Arab minority, but it’s obviously untenable to remain a Jewish state while granting full rights to the Gaza and West Bank Arabs. So under the circumstances, Israel has no choice but to cease governing and colonizing the territory in the West Bank and Gaza.
I’d say that’s a pretty conventional wisdom opinion in the United States. And even to some extent in Israel where really all the Labor and Kadima politicians acknowledge the basic reality of the point. But they’re not actually acting like they believe it nor does American policy really seem to reflect a belief in these points.
220 Responses to “A Back and Forth on Israel”
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January 4th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I don’t think Israel has any obligation to give in to, say, demands for an unrestricted Palestinian “right of return” to live within Israeli territory. Nor do I find it especially problematic that Israel uses Jewish ancestry as the basis for its immigration policy. Germany and other countries do the same.
Matt:
So what happens if most people in countries neighboring Israel disagree with you?
If the opposite point of view is a valid position that you disagree with, the US is forced to use a LOT of resources taking the most expensive side of this argument.
Then, there is also a direct connection between US support for dictatorships in Egypt, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia and enforcing your position on this issue. But the downside to that is an order of magnitude more Arabs must live under authoritarian dictatorships so a small number of Jews can live in a Jewish state.
Lastly, when the blockade on Gaza was first introduced, it was done as a means to pressuring Hamas to accept Israel as a Jewish state. That policy led directly to hundreds of civilians dying, not only starved by the blockade, but retaliatory measures have escalated to children being bombed coming home from school in Gaza city.
Do you hold Israel’s jewish identity to be worth that?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
What would be nice is stop referring to Israel as a “western democracy”. It stains democratic values among Arab moderates. I can’t think of any other western democracy where religion plays such a role in public policies, and in some respect Israel is closer to Iran than to Sweden or Australia.
OT: nice that this blog comments include a spell check, that’s the first I’ve seen. A hint for Matt?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Also the question you were asked was about a “fundamental right” not “do you have a problem with Israel ignoring demands”. There is a difference. Let me reask the original question:
Do the people of Israel have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Jewish state?
And to move this forward provocatively:
Do the people of South Africa have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Boer state?
Do the people of Alabama have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a White state?
I wonder if knowing these questions would come up is the reason you posted this.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I don’t see how Israel remaining a Jewish state requires the Arab states to be ruled by dictators. I think that if the U.S. took seriously its role as a leader in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we would be doing our best to force the Israelis and the Palestinians to sit down and negotiate a peaceful solution. Sure, plenty of American Jewish “leaders” (I enclose the word in quotes because no one elected them leaders) would complain that the U.S. would be “anti-Israel” in that case, but I think that the final result would be profoundly pro-Israel, since Israel could at last live in peace with its neighbors. The Bush administration has abdicated any responsibility for peace-making and has only made the situation worse.
As for the second commenter – if you can’t tell the difference between Iran and Israel, I’m not sure any of my arguing about it would help. I have lived in Israel several times over the last 20 years, and while the religious parties have too much power, in my opinion, the country is not ruled by the law of the Torah, and there is a lot of loud argument over what the role of religion should be.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
if you can’t tell the difference between Iran and Israel, I’m not sure any of my arguing about it would help
Well I did qualify my comment by “in some respect” and obviously I would rather live in Tel-Aviv than in Teheran.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Re: But the downside to that is an order of magnitude more Arabs must live under authoritarian dictatorships so a small number of Jews can live in a Jewish state.
The Arabs would be living under dictatorships anyway. Liberal democracy will never, I think, take root in the bulk of the Arab world. Those countries need to be ruled by authoritarian leaders, in order to keep down the Jihadists.
Moreover, I’m not sure how it is any of your business how Arabs run their own affairs. Not everyone wants the same things you want, and I don’t see why the United States should think it has the right to impose liberal ‘democracy’ on other countries.
Of course Israel has the right to be a Jewish state, much like Iran has the right to be a Muslim state, and Peru has the right to be a Christian state.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Much of the problem is due to the use of “Jewish people” to refer to an ethnic group (as Matt seems to be doing here), a religious group, and a culture (the best description, in my opinion). Advocates on all sides of the Middle East struggle tend to exploit this ambiguity to their benefit.
I’m strongly opposed to a religious state, mildly antipathetic towards an ethnic state, and have no opinion on the third.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Did the Soviet Union have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Communist state?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Rebecca:
None of the peace treaties Israel has signed has withstood any form of democratic referendum. It is widely believed that they could not, and leaders accountable to their people would renounce them essentially because they disagree with Matt on the question of this post.
Here is one advocate of Israel, MJ Rosenberg:
January 4th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
The Arabs would be living under dictatorships anyway. Liberal democracy will never, I think, take root in the bulk of the Arab world. Those countries need to be ruled by authoritarian leaders, in order to keep down the Jihadists.
I argue that the Jihadists are radicalized and perpetuated by the authoritarian states.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Reframing the question: Do the Palestinians have a right to reclaim the land of their parents and grand-parents? Do they have a right to setup an Arab state in Israel and retake their land? Do they have a right to a country where they control its borders, military, air space, immigration, and coast-line?
Yes, Yes, and Yes. It is basically an Apartheid state right now, and the Palestinians have chosen violent action to change that – that is their right, and the US should be making up for all that we have indirectly done to the Palestinians (Those bombs dropping all say “Made in the USA”). We should make up for it by helping the Palestinians – we should start by softening up the IDF, the Knesset, and the Israeli navy. We need to practice fighting advanced targets anyways, why not?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
DOB:
Oh my goodness, if only the Boers/Afrikaaners had realized that they are a “culture” and not an ethnic group. Then their efforts to maintain a Boer state would have been reasonable.
Does culture really pass generationally through the identity of the mother? Don’t they have blood tests to determine Jewish “culture” in Israel? Are the Russian immigrants really part of this culture, all of them, even the ones who’ve never observed any of the customs and speak only Russian?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Duncan Kinder,
The answer boils down to what you mean by a “Communist state”. I do think that a government devoted to economic socialism has a right to defend and uphold that ideology, whether they be a liberal “democratic” regime or not. In the specific case of the Soviet Union, I think they committed enough bad behavior so as to negate their right to exist. But I certainly think that, for example, Cuba or North Vietnam had the right to exist.
Arnold Evans,
I’m not sure why the feelings of Israel’s neighbors should determine what the Israeli government thinks is right for its citizens. I’m pretty sure that many Latin Americans would prefer for the United States to collapse, does that mean that the United States should dissolve itself?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
This fighting is not about whether Hamas “accepts Israel as a Jewish state.” It is about whether Hamas shoots rockets at Israel.
The two issues get mixed up in the comments on this blog (and many others) when commenters argue that Hamas has a right to shoot rockets at Israel because Israel is not legitimate as a Jewish state.
Another line of argument against Israel’s current policy – the one Matt makes – is prudential: it won’t work. When it’s all over, Hamas will still be shooting rockets. The problem with this argument is that Israel tried the alternative policy of withdrawing from Gaza (including dismantling settlements) and that obviously did not succeed in stopping rocket fire. It’s undeniable that the current policy is not likely to lead to Mideast peace – but the question, for the prudential argument, is whether it is likely to lead to a better outcome for Israel than an alternative policy.
Then there’s the disproportionate argument. Those who make this assertion (it’s more assertion than argument) miss the point that the whole purpose of military action is coercion. If stopping rocket fire across a border is a legitimate military objective (and it’s hard to think of one more legitimate), force is disproportionate only if it’s excessive in relation to the amount of force needed to coerce the adversary into compliance. The arguments made by the prudential critics – which are cogent on this point – show that the amount of force is not disproportionate to what is needed to obtain the objective.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Aaron Miller, who has had far more experience in Middle East negotiations then any of the kibitzers on this blog, has written in the Washington Post and stated on cable TV that a final settlement of the Israel/Palestinian problem is not possible at this time and that President Elect Osama would be wasting his time and credibility if he tried to achieve it. Mr. Miller stated that the best thing that the president elect can do when he assumes the office is to attempt to manage the situation. In particular, he recommended a full bore effort to reduce the level of violence so that possibly in the future, cooler heads might prevail and a solution would become possible. This view is also held by Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, both of whom also have far more experience then the blogs self appointed “experts” with simple solutions to complex problems.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
How do you think America could defeat Al Qaeda?
Remove the Iraqi Government, Decimate the Iraqi Military, and Kill 500,000 Iraqis
OR Remove the Israeli Government, the IDF, and Kill 500,000 Israeli Civilians.
Tell me which would work better at destroying future recruits for Al Qaeda?
January 4th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Anyway, there is no such thing as a state’s right to exist. Not in any practical way. States either exist and are able to defend their existence, or they don’t. What is true and generally accepted is that people of a province have a right to self-determination and independence if the majority of people vote for it (see: Quebec – referenda failed).
So what nobody should argue with is that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have the right to an independent, viable (not a swiss-cheese reservation between colonies) state, since given the choice they would overwhelmingly vote for independence. Then Israel can do whatever it wants inside her internationally recognized borders.
Now if removing all colonies from the West Bank is impossible, then the only other solution consistent with democratic principles is to give Israli passports to all Palestinians. Otherwise, Israel is nothing more than an Apartheid regime.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Wondering, I typed up a history going back to 1948 of why there are all those Palestinians penned up in a ghetto on the border of Egypt but something interests me more:
How big a douche do you have to be to get fired up and defend the IDF launching F-16 strikes, artilery, and Merkevas into Gaza over sugar and fertilizer rockets? What’s happening inside of the skull of someone who would do that? What kind of fucked up ghoul gets amped enough to type up a blog comment to fluff this sort of thing?
January 4th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Hector:
The original question is “fundamental right” not “what Israel thinks is right for its citizens.”
Most non-Jews in the Middle East not only believe Israel does not “have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Jewish state”, but believe that justice would be served if the Palestinian refugees returned and ended Israel’s term as a Jewish state.
Given this opinion, which I hold is a valid opinion that you and Matt disagree with, there comes a serious question of how to ensure the non-Jews of the region do not have leaders who would apply effective pressure on Israel that would force it to accept the refugees and therefore stop being a Jewish state. (Kind of the way South Africa was forced to let Black people vote and stop being a Boer state.)
The answer to the question of how to prevent Egypt from acting on the widely held opinion of Egyptians, for example, is a US-supported authoritarian dictatorship.
What if Mexico and Canada were hosting millions of Native Americans who could not return to the United States because their ethnicity would upset the US’ status as a White nation?
Of course Mexicans and Canadians would oppose that. The price of keeping Mexico and Canada under undemocratic governments would have to be added to the cost of maintaining and protecting the US as a White nation, and added to the calculus of whether the US’ status as a White nation is worth it.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Arnold Evans,
Don’t be absurd. It’s perfectly possible to convert to Judaism, as you know. If you, or me, or any Palestinian converted to Judaism, then they would be welcomed as an Israeli citizen. Now, I don’t have any interest in doing so, but it’s important to note that the possibility exists. Hence, Judaism isn’t a race, and a state that privileges Jews over other people isn’t a racist state.
Really, it’s depressing to see purportedly intelligent people getting sucked into these idiotic skin games pitting the brown man against the white man or some such nonsense. Not everything in the world is about race.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Arnold Evans,
Who the f– cares whether the government of Egypt is authoritarian or not? Frankly, I think (and any reasonable person should) that Egyptians are better off being ruled by an authoritarian regime, since the alternative is rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. (Liberal “democracy” is, of course, a pipe dream.)
January 4th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I don’t think Israel has any obligation to give in to, say, demands for an unrestricted Palestinian “right of return” to live within Israeli territory. Nor do I find it especially problematic that Israel uses Jewish ancestry as the basis for its immigration policy. Germany and other countries do the same.
Do you have a defense of this position, Matt? The closest thing to one that I can see here is the analogy with Germany, which is hardly persuasive. Germany is not much of a model for smooth and just relationships between majority and minority demographic groups… even if you restrict yourself to the post-Nazi period. You give no reason why this particular aspect of German policy ought to be considered acceptable, let alone worthy of emulation.
I think neither Matt nor most of his commenters, Steve Sailor aside, would have much tolerance for anyone who argued that US immigration, or land-use, or any other policy ought to be determined by the US’ nature as a “white and democratic”, or “Christian and democratic”, or Huntington-style “culturally ‘Anglo-Protestant’ and democratic” state. Liberals usually (and correctly) recognize this kind of formulation as bigoted. Why should Israel get a pass? The Holocaust may explain but it cannot justify.
It’s probably worth pointing out in this context that Israel’s Arab minority, while easily better off than Gazans (a low bar), faces systematic discrimination in ways large and small.
Last point, on Palestinian refugees. Matt places the right of return between quotation marks, as if it is somehow inherently suspect. But what exactly are Palestinian refugees supposed to do? Remain stateless and without political or social rights forever, a permanently homeless caste scattered across the Middle East? Settle in as citizens of other Arab states? Certainly they ought to have the latter option – and would were Arab dictatorships the friends of the Palestinians that they pretend to be, with continuously decreasing credibility. But no intellectually honest person could demand this of Arab governments without demanding it of Israel, when it was Israel whose founders, by violence and terror, forced the refugees and their ancestors to flee their homes.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I will persist in saying two things.
1. Israel’s actions have moral content of their own, regardless of the moral content of Hamas. Hamas is, to be plain, that of a horrid, murderous terrorist organization. That doesn’t change the fact that Israel needs to act morally in the world.
2. We should expect Israel to be a good actor in the world, in that it’s a robust, liberal democracy. If Israel is to be the symbol in the Middle East and the world that we want it to be, it needs to fulfill that promise as a moral actor.
Look, for forty years now we have had an distinct ethnic and religious group living under the imprimatur of another country, with no meaningful self-governance and no citizen rights under that country. That’s just untenable, if we are to believe in democracy and human rights, regardless of who makes up that group. It just can’t stand. Human rights aren’t something you deserve, they’re something you enjoy no matter what. None of that is at all disqualifying in believing in continued peace and prosperity for the Israeli people. And I’m tired of people acting as if desire for justice for the Palestinian people means you can’t be supportive of the state of Israel. You can argue that I am wrong in thinking as I do about what is best for Israel, but I am so tired of having my motives questioned.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Liberal “democracy” is, of course, a pipe dream
Lebanon had a bright and liberal future until it was screwed up by a Big Game between France, the US, Israel and Syria. Or look at Turkey. Foreign meddling in those countries close to world oil reserves explains a lot of the current situation (see: Iran, Iraq, Egypt… in the last 60 years).
January 4th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Ed – If the rockets are so harmless, why does Hamas insist on firing them? Anyway, Katyushas are not sugar and fertilizer rockets. They kill.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Hector:
I’ve been led to understand that while a convert to Judaism in the United States could “return” to Israel, it is effectively impossible for a Palestinian to convert to Judaism and thereby get automatic citizenship.
I could be wrong, but I doubt it. How many Palestinians in the occupied territories have converted to Judaism and been given a right to return so far?
January 4th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Re: Liberals usually (and correctly) recognize this kind of formulation as bigoted. Why should Israel get a pass? The Holocaust may explain but it cannot justify.
Kalkin,
Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t think that the United States is a culturally or religiously defined nation, so I don’t have strong feelings about U.S. immigration policy. I do think, however, that England should try to maintain its identity as a Christian nation, so should Greece, and Argetina, and Peru. Nations have a perfect right to decide who they allow to immigrate, and a big concern in doing so should be how to maintain their cultural identity. The cultural identity of Greece, for example, (unliek the United States) is an essentially Orthodox Christian nation. A country of agnostics, Pentecostals, or Muslims who spoke Greek would simply not be truly Greek.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Yglesian hipster crowd don’t just oppose Israel. They oppose the very idea that any nation, anywhere in the world, should be based on illiberal and antiliberal premises. They oppose the idea that any nation anywhere in the world should hold to the idea that loyalty to one’s one faith, one’s own ancestors, one’s own kin is a higher loyalty that loyalty to silly pap about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. They oppose the idea that any nation anywhere should be based on the idea that one religion, one ideology, one set of values is truer than another. Instead they want every nation in the world to be melted down into the homogenous, tasteless gruel of cosmopolitan liberalism. I don’t particularly love or hate either the Israelis or the Palestinians, but I do detest cosmopolitan liberalism, and so I will take the side of those who the cosmopolitan liberals despise.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Anyway, Katyushas are not sugar and fertilizer rockets. They kill.
That’s exactly what they are but why do the five people or whatever they killed over the last eight years fire you up? Why would any sane person look at piles of corpses and get outraged by these rockets? What’s going on in your head? I’m seriously trying to wrap my mind around this.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I think this debate points to a problem at the heart of civic nationalism, which Yglesias points to as a “Jewish state that respects the rights of a smallish Arab minority.” In this case, a Jewish state is defined as a liberal democracy which happens to have Jews as its ethnic majority, but where all citizens have equal rights.
However, civic nationalism is something of a problematic concept. To begin with, some of the principles of the nationalist element – privileging immigration rights by ethnicity and religion – contradict some of the principles of the civic element, namely equality of all persons under the law. But you also get the problem of what happens when the “original group of people” who constituted the original majority population of the state are no longer the majority.
We’ve seen one form of reaction to this kind of situation in the United States during the 19th and 20th century, where fears of being numerically outnumbered led “native Americans” (i.e, white, Northern European, protestants) towards nativism, Chinese exclusion, immigration restriction, forcible assimilation, etc. Arguably, we’re seeing similar reactions in Israel and throughout Europe right now (arguably, it’s happened recently in the U.S with the rise of anti-Mexican sentiment). Indeed, a lot of what underlies the debate on the Israeli side over the need for a two-state solution is that they don’t want to lose their numerical majority. You even see this when you exclude the question of Gaza/West Bank, and just look at Israeli Arabs – there’s the same fear that Israel is going to become minority Jewish.
The major problem with this thinking is that it ultimately denies the proposition that people of a different ethnic background could become full citizens of the nation, due to inherent differences of culture, religion, language, or race. Tolerating people only when they’re small enough not to be a threat isn’t really tolerating them.
The other response is to simple redefine what it means to be a citizen of the nation – whether we’re talking about Americans, Germans, French, or Israeli. In the case of the U.S, I think the best answer to this problem came from Randolph Bourne in Trans-National America, where he argued that allegiance to democratic ideals while preserving one’s own ethnic traditions was the correct basis for Americanism. The French have historically had a similar belief in civic republicanism – that Frenchness means adherance to “liberte, fraternite, egalite,” – but their opposition to the second half of Bourne’s formula is, I would argue, a major source of racial strife in modern France.
To cut a long story short, I don’t think maintaining a demographic majority is a healthy project for Israel. Not only will it harm their democratic culture, but it will also reduce the rich and complex meaning of Judaism and Jewish identity into a cramped, Boer-style herrenvolk provincialism. Simply put, Israel needs to redefine what it means to be an Israeli that includes everybody, regardless of what happens in the occupied territories.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
They oppose the very idea that any nation, anywhere in the world, should be based on illiberal and antiliberal premises.
Either that or they oppose the idea that any nation, anywhere in the world should “uphold and protect” illiberal and antiliberal premises while necessarily using a huge amount of support from the United States.
If the United States stops guaranteeing that Israel will have a military advantage over its neighbors, stops bribing and expending resources to maintain authoritarian dictators and stops giving Israel more aid per capita than any other nation, more aid than all of sub-saharan Africa, then Israel cannot continue as “upholding and protecting” its identity as a Jewish state.
Greece is a lot more independent than Israel, especially on this issue.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
I do think, however, that England should try to maintain its identity as a Christian nation, so should Greece, and Argetina, and Peru.
My guess is that you have never lived in any of those countries. “England” [The UK] a Christian nation? Laughable.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Hector:
@20 – Suppose that I locked you in a cage and told you that you were allowed your freedom any time, on the condition that you gave me a blow job. Now, one blow job would certainly involve less change in your life than converting to Judaism, especially according to the rather strict standard of the Orthodox Israeli rabbis who must certify converts before they can immigrate. Would you say that in this hypothetical situation, you were free to go?
@21 – That’s condescending, colonialist crap. Egyptians are no happier to be living under Mubarak than people in the US would be. Moreover, it’s ludicrous of you to tell others that its not their “business how Arabs run their own affairs” just a few comments away from where you write that Egyptians need an authoritarian government so that they will not be allowed to vote in the Muslim Brotherhood. You’re blunt, but you’re dishonest. Despite some of your rhetoric, you’re not defending the right of Arabs to self-determination; you’re defending the right of Mubarak & co to rule.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Hector @27: If there’s any silly pap which is freer of meaningful content than neocon yapping about “freedom and democracy”, it’s nativist cant about “cultural identity”, “loyalty to one’s ancestors”, and the state of being “truly Greek/English/Peruvian/whatever”.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
The reason for the apparent contradiction that Matt has spotted is that Israel wants the land (the territories) without the people (the palestinians).
The only reason that this appears to be a contradiction is because you believe that the Israelis have acted in good faith. Of course they have not. Nor do they have a duty to. The duty of the Jewish people is to preserve the Jewish people. Given their history how could it be any different?
They have been shrewd and pragmatic and the have built a country from nothing. Nobody will hand the Palestinians the victory that Israel has worked so hard to build, least of all the Israelis. Why should they?
The responsibility for the Palestinian cause lies with the Palestinians. The responsibility for their well being does not lie with their enemies. If they are to survive as a people they need to become shrewd and pragmatic and (worse still for them) they will need powerful friends. They have none, and they have no bargaining chips.
Seems to me that their best (only?) hope is abject surrender and demand for civil rights in a binational state. Israel will do everything in its power to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
Only an idiot would believe that any of this was good for a free democratic Israel. The outlook is not bright.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
“The two issues get mixed up in the comments on this blog (and many others) when commenters argue that Hamas has a right to shoot rockets at Israel because Israel is not legitimate as a Jewish state.”
No one argues this. Why must Israel’s apologists resort to such dishonesty when arguing on it’s behalf?
January 4th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
“They have been shrewd and pragmatic and the have built a country from nothing.”
And 3 to 6 billion dollars a year in US subsidy.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
I’m not sure I understand what the hang up on Israeli democracy is, other than democracy is supposed to be short hand for “they have to be fundamentally good.” But if I said something to the effect that “Israel is a state that keeps millions of people in a state of oppressed colonization without any sort of basic rights, pursues policies that leads to mass starvation, poverty, and disease, and pursues policies that increase the frequency of terrorist attacks against its own population,” you could respond with “Israel is a democracy,” and you’d be right. But it wouldn’t actually contradict anything I said, it’d just make them a democracy that does all of that stuff.
It seems to me that part of the problem with understanding the situation is a certain amount of belief that Israel being a democratic state must mean they’re operating in good faith, rather than, say, the Israeli people simply being complicit in a system that oppresses millions of people in the name of regional hegemony and grabbing ever more valuable land.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Just a very general comment-
Some people need to understand what a nation state is – are they just a bunch of governments with randomly defined borders or are they something more than that. For example, if say France is a modern liberal democracy, and so is Japan, are there any meaningful differences between the 2 (aside from them being thousands of miles apart)? In other words, what makes the French state French?
It is very possible that the idea of a nation state is not compatible with a tolerant liberal democracy – perhaps a true liberal democracies cannot have a cultural/ethnic/religious component. But I don’t see this argument being made.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
No one in this blog has argued that the choice of Iraqi and Iranian voters for Islamic parties and an Islamic state means that those countries are not democratic. Indeed, the very same commenters who deny Israel the right to be a Jewish state uphold Hamas’s right to rule Gaza as an Islamic polity.
The idea that a binational state is the solution is absurd when the result of a binational state is the extermination or expulsion of Israel’s population. If you think ethnicity is irrelevant as a basis for policy making, tell the Palestinians on the West Bank that they have no right to object as a collectivity to Israeli settlements. All there is is a right for individuals whose land was taken without payment to seek restitution.
We have a bunch of commenters here who think that Jews are not entitled to the same rights as other nations. And who think it’s fine for Jews to be shot at and killed, but wrong for them to shoot back. At least Jimbo is honest about what he thinks.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Ed Marshall,
Actually you sir are incorrect.
Quassam’s are the homemade “sugar and fertilizer” rockets.
Katyushas are Russian made and imported via the tunnels Israel spent the first few days bombing. Additionally they have recently been importing (read smuggling) Grad which are much more “high-tech” and have a farther range and warhead size..
January 4th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
I find it interesting that none of the pro-Israel commenters has answered:
Yes, the people of Israel have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Jewish state.
Matt didn’t either.
It is weird to hold that Hamas should when Matt can’t, and neither can SLC, Hector, Wondering or any pro-Israel commenter posting here.
Once somebody answers yes, then we can ask that person to explain why Whites in Alabama don’t have that same right, but it looks like we’re not even going to get to that point.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
you could respond with “Israel is a democracy,” and you’d be right.
Not really, that’s even more infuriating. Israel doesn’t have borders, ask their consulate. Using the basic definition of a government as “an entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force” you would at least have to define Israel as including the West Bank and Gaza.
There is this doublespeak where they are defining Israel as “Green line” Israel when they talk about democracy while defending, apologizing for, or are ignoring Israel as it exists in the West Bank.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
@namhenderson I stand corrected.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
It is very possible that the idea of a nation state is not compatible with a tolerant liberal democracy – perhaps a true liberal democracies cannot have a cultural/ethnic/religious component. But I don’t see this argument being made.
What in France or Japan contradict the Enlightenment ideals of a liberal democracy, exactly? Especially compared to Israel (including all the territories it controls).
“Nation state” is 1910s rhetoric. How can France be a nation state while delegating much of its sovereignty to European institutions?
January 4th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Re Ed Marshall
Israel doesn’t have borders, ask their consulate
Mr. Marshall is totally full of shit. Israel has a border with Egypt that has been agreed to by both countries and certified by the UN. Israel has a border with Jordan that has been agreed to by both countries and certified by the UN. Israel has a border with Lebanon that has been certified by the UN, except for Sheba Farms which is not claimed by Israel but which Israel says belongs to Syria while Lebanon says it belongs to Lebanon. The border between Israel and the PA is still up in he air as the two sides have thus far failed to agree. The border between Israel and Syria is still undetermined as Syria claims that Israel, and in fact all of Palestine is part of Greater Syria (which claim also includes Jordan and Lebanon by the way).
January 4th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
The need for a dictatorship is in part a function of how many citizens are insane. In Arab countries, that number is really high involving Islamic fundamentalists and even the “moderates” who are willing to oppress women. Israel is not a dictatorship because even though the crazies are there, they only represent 10-20% of the population. Actually, the US is closer to a dictatorship with probably 30% of the population delusional between the neo-cons and the fundamentalists on the Right (20-25% of the population) and (the much fewer, ~5%) anarchists, communists, and assorted crazies.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
I’ve got your idea of Israel’s borders, SLC. That doesn’t jibe with democracy in any sense of the word, I think you are right in a number of ways in your assessment of what Israel’s borders are de facto. If those are Israel’s borders it’s impossible to pretend it’s a “democracy”.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Why oh why,
France is defined in part by what it is not – and it is not say Germany, or Japan. Something separates France from those other entities. If that something is a random and arbitrary border, then there is no reason for that border to exist. In that case, all countries that meet certain requirements should just form one giant superstate. US should join Canada, EU, Australia, Japan, etc. Or perhaps there is more to France (and Germany, and Japan, and the US) than a set of borders administrated by one government that would make it impractical for it be just a province.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
@39:
It’s telling, I think, that Israel’s defenders so frequently resort to red herrings:
No one in this blog has argued that the choice of Iraqi and Iranian voters for Islamic parties and an Islamic state means that those countries are not democratic.
… to shotgun-style accusations of widespread anti-semitism:
We have a bunch of commenters here who think that Jews are not entitled to the same rights as other nations. And who think it’s fine for Jews to be shot at and killed, but wrong for them to shoot back.
… and to hysterical claims that anyone who does not agree with them is planning genocide:
The idea that a binational state is the solution is absurd when the result of a binational state is the extermination or expulsion of Israel’s population.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Israel itself is currently postponing its debate on what its Jewishness means. The last couple of decades of immigration have changed the demographic profile of the state, which, combined with the idiosyncratic PR system, empowers the hyper-religious minority. Tzipi Livni may end up PM after the elections, but there’ll be a substantial chunk of the Knesset, and perhaps even the governing coalition, that won’t look her in the eye.
The open question is what a two-state solution might do for the Jewishness of Israel. Or even, what time is doing for it, segregated buses and all.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
“Germany and other countries do the same.”
Well, it is one thing for a country like Germany to say that only people of German ancestry can immigrate. But that’s not what Israeli immigration policy does – it gives people who’s ancestors have not lived in Israel (the modern state) and may have left centuries ago priority over people who either personally or within 1-2 generations of ancestors have lived there. That is ethnic cleansing, and I would like you to flesh out why you’re cool with that.
Why is ethnic purity in Israel – or however you want to describe it- more important that the right of refugees to return home that is enshrined in international law?
January 4th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Watch that “full of shit” also, SLC. Pick up your phone and ask your consulate office if those are Israel’s borders. SLC isn’t an MK or related to the Israeli government in any way other than you have decided to wage an internet jihad on their behalf.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
@46:
The need for a dictatorship is in part a function of how many citizens are insane… Actually, the US is closer to a dictatorship with probably 30% of the population delusional between the neo-cons and the fundamentalists on the Right (20-25% of the population) and (the much fewer, ~5%) anarchists, communists, and assorted crazies.
This is pretty funny. And I bet one of the problems this person claims to have with us communists is that we’re “totalitarians”.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Or perhaps there is more to France (and Germany, and Japan, and the US) than a set of borders administrated by one government that would make it impractical for it be just a province.
Yes, they are all different states with different languages, customs and values. None of them regularly bombs parts of the territories they have control over, as far as I know. Marveling at the fact that there are many countries in this world, or using irrelevant concepts like “nation states” doesn’t excuse in any way what Israel is doing now.
What France did in Algeria during the 60’s, or Japan in China during the 30’s was despicable, sure. Those democracies know better now.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
What is a “fundamental right” in the context of the question?
Does that mean the ability for a nation-state to do something without international intervention to reverse that policy? Does that mean the policy must not be criticized or praised or discussed elsewhere?
I don’t think there’s a “fundamental right” for nations or nation-states to “exist” at all. Any of them. If we all decide tomorrow to merge the USA with Canada or Mexico or Guyana for that matter, then the current nation-state ceases to exist and a new one is born. If in 100 or 1000 years there is some Star Trek-y type “federation” and no real nations and nation-states, no “fundamental rights” have been lost.
If you’re trying to obtain some philosophical inquiry, you don’t ask if “Israel” has a “fundamental right” to remain a “Jewish” state.
You ask the question in such a way that could be generalized, and you define your terms.
I.e., can a (conventionally-defined) democratic national government enact policies intended to preserve the dominant majority of some ethnic, religious, or cultural group without legal intervention against said policies by the bodies which are conventionally assumed to be authorized to enforce international law?
Other than that, I’m not sure what’s being asked.
If my version is the question, I don’t know the answer, since no relevant international legal points spring to mind. Maybe I’m just forgetting something.
If the question is more specific, such as “which such policies” were “legal”, that’s different too. It’s considered pretty unlawful just to kill a bunch of people in general, particularly for ethnic cleansing purposes; but if you were to practice favoritism in subsidizing birth control or in offering tax incentives for the birth of certain ethnic / religious / cultural groups, I don’t know.
I know that if I could snap my fingers and change governments around the world the way I wished, many such fears by groups of annihilation would go away. But that’s fantasy, and no one cares. I wish I could stop all sorts of governments from imposing their nitwit religious nonsense on the population, but, you know, I can’t.
Or you could be asking if it’s morally the right thing to do for some country to be pursuing such policies right now. I.e., Israel was mentioned. I can certainly see some strength to the argument that for some time period people of Jewish descent might see that as a crucial goal for survival.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Actually, it most certainly does justify. Last century, the proposition “Is there any state in the world willing and able to defend the rights of the Jews” was definitively answered, “No.” Moreover, the proposition “Is there any state in the world willing, when push comes to shove, to defend the rights of its own Jewish minority?” was, in the vast majority of cases where it was tested, answered in the negative as well.
Those events proved the Jews needed an independent homeland. To be effective, that homeland needed to be a place where sufficient quantity of Jews would be willing to recognize as such. The only such place on the planet was and is Palestine.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
El Cid:
OK, here is a specific policy intended to preserve the dominant majority of some ethnic, religious, or cultural group:
“refuse reentry to members of an unfavored ethnic group who fled a war zone”
If you hold that it’s pretty unlawful just to kill a bunch of the unfavored ethnic group, then this also should be a relatively simple call.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Let me get this straight. 6 million Jews died at the hands of Germans in the Holocaust so that gives the Jewish people the right to subjugate the Palestinians to apartheid and genocide?
HUH?
I say its time that the USA stands up for the side of justice and levels the playing field by softening up the IDF, bombing the Knesset, assinating that woman who keeps coming on the TeeVee with a precision guided bomb, and bombs the Israeli navy back to row boats.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
“Just a very general comment-
Some people need to understand what a nation state is – are they just a bunch of governments with randomly defined borders or are they something more than that. …
It is very possible that the idea of a nation state is not compatible with a tolerant liberal democracy – perhaps a true liberal democracies cannot have a cultural/ethnic/religious component. But I don’t see this argument being made.”
Well, a territorial nation state is a combination of a piece of land (territory) a cohesive group of people (Nation) and a specialized bureaucratic apparatus (state). None of these have any reality – metaphysical, biological, etc.- outside of the arbitrary happenstance of history. So you can look at, for example, the ways in which modern Chinese identity was constructed in the early 1900s and show that it was self-consciously constructed by nationalists in order to make a modern state. But that doesn’t make it any less real to a nationalist.
So, they are both a lot less than “a bunch of governments with randomly defined borders” and a lot more than that – a group hallucination or the most fundamental basis of individual identity – depending if you’re talking to a social scientist or a nationalist.
As far as nationalism not being compatible with liberal democracy, didn’t Habermas say something like that – that nationalism was necessary for the creation of the liberal democratic state, but that now it is an impediment to liberal values – because people identify the nation-state with provincial identities (culture, race, religion) and not a civic identity that encompasses the increasing diversity within the nation-state?
January 4th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
@51: Israeli immigration policy… gives people who’s ancestors have not lived in Israel (the modern state) and may have left centuries ago priority
This is an understatement. My Jewish ancestors have been in the US for more than a century, and before that in Eastern Europe since time immemorial. I am neither religiously Jewish, being an atheist, nor ethnically Jewish according to the traditional definition, since my Jewish ancestry is on my father’s side. My only connection to Jewish tradition growing up was a half-hearted Hanukkah celebration, and I have never been to Israel. But, thanks to my Jewish grandmother, I could immigrate tomorrow – and, should I choose to live in a settlement, receive nice state and private subsidies, some paid for by tax-exempt contributions from American Zionists. Meanwhile, my Palestinian friend, who was born in the West Bank, to a family which has lived in historic Palestine as far back as records go, has a great deal of trouble even returning home for a visit, and will be allowed to move to Israel when it undergoes regime change or when pigs fly, whichever is sooner.
Sounds absurd, no? But this state of affairs isn’t just defended by Likudniks. It’s defended by many liberals, too – Matt joins them in this very post.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Re Ed Marshall
What does democracy have to do with Israels agreed upon borders? Or is Mr. Marshall now claiming that Israels’ borders with Jordan and Egypt are illegitimate because Jordan and Egypt are not democracies? If that’s the case, then Egypts borders with Sudan and Libya are also illegitimate and Jordans’ borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq are illegitimate because none of those countries are democracies. I would suggest that Mr. Marshall provide a citation to a responsible web site that claims that Israel has no borders, rather then wasting the time of officials at the Israeli embassy in Washington with such stupid question.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
The only such place on the planet was and is Palestine.
Oh bullshit. Given the amount of money we have pissed away on Israel we could have built a scale model of Palestine and anchored it off the coast of Florida and came out way ahead. This is all about Mr. Sky God and unless you want to be honest about it you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Re Kalkin
And a former blogger, Alon Levy, who was born in Israel and has never set foot in Germany in his life was granted citizenship in Germany and currently travels on a German passport because one of his grandparents was a German citizen.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
As Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela have pointed out many times – Nazi Israel’s crimes dwarf those of Apartheid South Africa’s. The monstrous slow-genocide and modern-day Guernicas of this shitty little country will forever stain its name. 9/11 happened because we underwrite this Terror Junta, and the blowback from this will happen soon enough.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Why or why,
Feel free to use whatever term you want to describe countries located in most of Europe and North America – it is semantics as far as I’m concerned.
My point wasn’t to excuse what Israel is doing – it was merely to point out that Israel has a right to maintain its primarily Jewish identity as much as any other country does with their identity. In the same way Palestinians have a right to their own self-determination.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
“Those events proved the Jews needed an independent homeland. To be effective, that homeland needed to be a place where sufficient quantity of Jews would be willing to recognize as such. The only such place on the planet was and is Palestine.”
So, for their safety, the Jews needed to move into a place smack in the middle of another peoples who have been ancient ethnic rivals, and where the Jews would be vastly outnumbered by people who wanted the land back? That makes sense?
Why, still, can people not just acknowledge that some Westerners exploited the Holocaust to get the Western powers to acquiesce to a Zionist vision they’d been pushing for decades at that point? I mean, I’m not even saying there’s anything wrong with that, which is part of why I don’t understand why we’re not allowed to understand these things I suppose.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
How about this instead SLC, pretend your borders are de jure instead of de facto Israeli policy. Pretend seems to work for you. Now figure out who is in those borders and who votes: is that in any possible way a democracy?
January 4th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Re Trevor
Mr. Trevor fucks his mother.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Do the people of Israel have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Jewish state?
First of all, I assume the questioner means the Jews of Israel, because I can’t imagine the non-Jewish people of Israel wanting to do any such thing.
Given that assumption: Clearly, no, because in order to do so they would have to do one of two things:
1. Ethnically cleanse (kill, expel, convert) all non-Jews in Israel; or
2. Make non-Jews second-class citizens in Israel, obeying laws and paying taxes that support a religion they don’t believe in.
As far as I know, 2 describes the current state of non-Jews in Israel. (And many other religious minorities in history, including Jews in many other places and times.)
Clearly, the Jews of Israel or any other place don’t have a right to do either of those things. Modern enlightened governments recognize (at least in principle, if not always perfectly in practice) that human rights are not conditional on having the right religion and that this is one of the places where democracy has to give way to human rights.
(And of course there’s nothing special about Jews in this analysis; Christian or Islamist or communist governments don’t have a right to oppress *their* religious minorities either, whether those minorities are Jewish or otherwise. If there are any Islamist governments that the US is providing billions of dollars of military support to, we should stop that too.)
January 4th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
First of all, thanks to Matt for this post (I’m the e-mailer).
Chris
There is a third way — just adopt immigration and family policies designed to create a Jewish majority.
Aside from arguably having minorities pay taxes that pay for this (and even here, you could hypothetically give them tax breaks to make up for it), they don’t suffer any punishment for being non-jews.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Arnold Evans: If you’ll notice, I was simply trying to get clarification on the question, and not attempting to argue that (a) it was in fact a question of international law; (b) or that I would agree with some outcome whether it was or was not. I doubt if even the original e-mailer to Matt could define what he or she meant by “fundamental right”.
Personally, I’m not a fan of nation-states at all, and I’m not a believer in using state power to maintain the dominance of any ethnic, religious, or cultural group.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
There is a third way — just adopt immigration and family policies designed to create a Jewish majority.
I find this idea a bit disgusting on it’s face, but where do you intend to do this exactly?
January 4th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
““Nation state” is 1910s rhetoric. How can France be a nation state while delegating much of its sovereignty to European institutions?”
If the nation state is outdated, what is the basic unit of political organization in the world right now? Before the 20th century you had city states, Empires, Sultanates, Prinicipalities, tribal confederations, Monarchies, etc. Now outside of the Vatican you have nation states. Sure, you can point to Saudi Arabia as a monarchy pretending to be a nation state, but the fact that they do make that pretense – of a fundamental unity between the throne and the people (in a way that wasn’t there in, for example, England which was ruled by Germans for centuries).
Yes, what a nation state is has changed since 1910 with the rise of international law, but that doesn’t make the nation state irrelevant.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Err, never heard of the Irgun then, mate? Or the Stern Gang? Because they had brutal but effective ways of dealing with that.
Those guys and the Haggannah Socialist kibbutzniks – don’t forget the USSR voted in favor of their independence, and that Israel was, especially under Ben Gurion the closest to “real Socialism” we’ve ever seen, and that it actually can work not too badly – were quite open and ruthless about what they were doing.
What changed is that by 1968, they had gotten soft. Now I’m not saying the fact they weren’t willing to be so ruthless was a bad thing. I’m only saying that those hard men (and women) had either a. died, b. retired, or c. mellowed after the end of the Independence War.
Thus when the new IDF – as opposed to the hardbitten Holocaust surviving Irgun, Stern and Hagganah militias – took control of the new territories, they forgot their Tacitus. Instead, they believed that they could create those small-minded “facts on the ground”, which would in some magical land where milk and honey flows from the Negev, and people dance about in harmony, result in the Palestinians disappearing. They figured, I assume, that the Jewish populations of the world would return and that the Palestinians would just give up and leave.
That humanity or softness – depending, of course, on your point of view – meant that they would, eventually, face a Palestinian population that could overwhelm them demographically.
Now, they could have just driven them out of the territories, as their grandfathers and fathers and uncles had done in the 40s. I still cannot understand, from a professional perspective, why they did not.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
I think Anon’s third way has pretty much been tried and failed. Even with discriminatory immigration policies and state attempts to encourage Jewish childbirths, the Palestinian population is still growing a lot faster.
Unless “family policies” is an euphamism for forced sterilization, I think Israel is limited to some combo of ethnic cleansing and aparteid if it wants to stay a Jewish state.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Once somebody answers yes, then we can ask that person to explain why Whites in Alabama don’t have that same right, but it looks like we’re not even going to get to that point.
Arnold Evans,
I’ll answer yes. Israel has a fundamental right to uphold a Jewish state. Provided of course, that the rights of their minority populations are zealously guarded. Clearly, even within Israel proper, amongst Israeli-Arabs, this isn’t always the case. That is a shame, and every effort should be made to correct it, but it would be naive to think that can happen overnight, especially considering the geopolitical situation Israel finds itself in.
As for the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government has been trying to give them to the Palestinians for a while now. Unfortunately, at this point in time, it would be political suicide (and quite possibly, national as well) to do so. After they left Gaza, the security situation in Israel did not improve, rather it decreased markedly. Rockets and mortars were fired from settlements the Israelis had just abandoned. Attempts were made to kidnap soldiers in Israel proper. The governing factions smuggled in weapons, and declared that they would not be satisfied until Israel was destroyed. In such a situation, how could the government return the West Bank? So, that in addition to Ashdod, Ashkelon, Be’ersheba et al, Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem could also have rockets launched at them? Throw in the fact that the North of the country is within easy range of terrorists in Lebanon and the country becomes a giant “hit me” sign. When the Hamas government was making every effort to smuggle weapons into Gaza for the continued offensive against Israeli civilians, how could it just keep the border open without conditions?
As for Alabama, well the State of Alabama of course has no right to deny its indigenous population their due civic rights. Neither does Israel. I’m not sure what authority (if any) Alabama has to reject American citizens from migrating to Dixie, so perhaps a better example would be a more sovereign state. Does France have the right to uphold a French state? Sure. All countries have the right to set the national character of their state, so long as the equal rights of all are respected. Did the Boers have the right to a Boer state? No, because that would have required the suppression of a whole class of citizens, whether they be in the majority or not. If there was a small enclave where they wanted to set up a Boerstan with a Boer culture, where the rights of all were respected, why not?
January 4th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
El Cid:
The poster didn’t ask the clearest question, but he/she asked an answerable question. He gave an example of a country that clearly to him does not have a fundamental right, Boer South Africa, and asked does Matt see (Jewish) people of Israel as having this right that his example of Boer South Africans clearly (to him) did not have.
Matt skipped over the “fundamental right” part, but said he has no problem with denying return. I and several other posters answered no and Israel’s supporters have not yet said yes, as far as I can see, but have written things that I’m sure they consider supportive of Israel even as they are not able to assert that Israel has a fundamental right to maintain and protect its ethnic identity in a way Boer South Africans do not.
In the context of Israel though, we don’t have to talk about policies designed to maintain a demographic composition in the abstract. We’ve seen the policies and can address them specifically.
Israel’s policies have, in my opinion, been nearly as clearly unlawful as your hypothetical example of killing a bunch of people. I actually think you probably agree.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
For the record, generally speaking we do NOT hold that there is a “right” for democratic countries to preserve some sort of ethnic or culutral identity. Especially when the means to that end involves wildly undemocratic and inhumane oppression.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Thus when the new IDF – as opposed to the hardbitten Holocaust surviving Irgun, Stern and Hagganah militias
Almost no one in mandate Palestine gave a shit about the Nazi’s attempted extermination of European Jewry. In ‘41 an Orthodox paper in Jerusalem wrote a (rather stupid) editorial called “The High Price of Blood” that delved into the atrocities happening in Poland and blamed the zionists for calling down God’s wrath on the European Jews. The reaction for years was to say it wasn’t happening and it was just the Rabbinate making up stories.
This attitude didn’t change until the mid 60’s with the capture of Eichman.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Ed: Its Eichmann. Two n’s, not 1.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
What France did in Algeria during the 60’s, or Japan in China during the 30’s was despicable, sure. Those democracies know better now.
I’m sure you recognize this, but just pointing out:
The situations are somewhat different. In Algeria, the question was whether France could keep Algeria, even if the Algerians wanted it. Algeria had no designs on Metropolitan France, though.
Similarly, China has no designs on Japan. (Also, the Japanese atrocities were not committed by a democracy.)
If this was just a question of Israel leaving Gaza and the West Bank, we could have this wrapped up by Thursday. The sticking point is Israel itself. Until the question of whether Israel will remain a state independent of the Palestinian Territories is settled, the situation will not be resolved to the satisfaction of either the Palestinians or the Israelis.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Eh, I fucked up worse than that, Eichmann was very late 50’s and early 60’s. I beg forgiveness. That’s what I get for not cross-checking things for a blog comment.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Richard,
Israel has made no serious attempt to give the Palestinians control of the West Bank. The settlements expanded more in the 10 years after Oslo than they did in the 10 years before.
Now, the issue of a two-state solution is moot. There are 270,000 settlers in the West Bank and another 200,000 in East Jerusalem. They won’t leave willingly, and the IDF will never fire on fellow Jews to remove them from the West Bank, nor will it stand by and allow a Palestinian state to do so. The settlers will also never agree to live under Arab jurisdiction. A state with hundreds of thousands of people within who are subject to none of its laws is not a state.
So, if seperation from the Palestinians is not an option, what can Israel do to remain a Jewish state? Only practise ethnic cleansing, aparteid, or some combination of the two. This of course raises the question of what moral price the people of Israel are willing to pay to preserve Israel as a Jewish-dominated state.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
That humanity or softness – depending, of course, on your point of view – meant that they would, eventually, face a Palestinian population that could overwhelm them demographically.
Now, they could have just driven them out of the territories, as their grandfathers and fathers and uncles had done in the 40s. I still cannot understand, from a professional perspective, why they did not.
Yes, let’s mourn the fact that more ethnic cleansings and genocides were not committed in the 20th century because of “softness”. Tough and “professional” (what profession exactly, SS?) guys like Greg would not have hesitated.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Almost no one in mandate Palestine gave a shit about the Nazi’s attempted extermination of European Jewry. In ‘41 an Orthodox paper in Jerusalem wrote a (rather stupid) editorial called “The High Price of Blood” that delved into the atrocities happening in Poland and blamed the zionists for calling down God’s wrath on the European Jews. The reaction for years was to say it wasn’t happening and it was just the Rabbinate making up stories.
This attitude didn’t change until the mid 60’s with the capture of Eichman.
I think you’re greatly mistaken, Ed. So greatly, in fact, that I am unsure how to begin approaching a rebuttal. Instead, I’ll just ask you, why, conceivably, would the Jewish authorities and people of Mandate Palestine be indifferent to the genocide of six million of their brethren in Europe? Especially if all of these people were potential recruits for settling of Palestine?
If they were indifferent, why would they have petitioned the British Army to allow Jewish battalions to form and assist with the liberation of Occupied Europe? Why would the leaders of the Irgun have called a truce with the British until Hitler was defeated? Why were they frantically petitioning the British to bend the rules of the White Papers to get more Jews to safety? Why would they take part in suicide missions via parachute, into Occupied Europe, where the best they could hope for was not being tortured before they were killed?
The list goes on.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Besides the whole issue of Eichmann raises the question of the rights of nations to take by force citizens out of other nations. As I recall he was captured by the Israeli soliders in Argentina and the Argentinians were not too pleased by this operation.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
S Beit Zvi’s ‘Post Ugandan Zionism on Trial’ Volume 1, Chaper 2 – The Truth Suppressed:
‘Beit Zvi comments that Goebbels “in his wildest dreams” could not have dreamt of the kind of treatment that the Zionist press accorded the Holocaust. On March 23 1943, Davar was reprimanded by Yosef Gravitzky of Palcor for copying a ‘report’ from the Nazi paper Ostland, that two million Jews remained in Poland.
Numerous ‘reports’ and false information were concocted by the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin. Unfortunately they found an echo in the Palestine press. On June 18th religious Zionist paper, Hatzofeh, printed an editorial ‘The High Price of Blood,’ four days before the Zygelboim Report. It declared that ‘if authentication should prove impossible, it is better not to carry the report.’ As Beit Zvi remarked, ‘Before a report concerning the annihilation of Jews could be absorbed in the country… it required confirmation by the information apparatus of the Third Reich.’ On 10th August 1942 in an editorial Davar argued that ‘Some of the numbers concerning the slaughter of tens of thousands which were published recently seemed to be exaggerated… From this point of view, the Nazi denial may be trustworthy.’
On November 8th it reported that its information on Poland was being supplied ‘according to German statistics which are faithful in these instances.’
January 4th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Count me in on the side that says that nation-states have a pretty broad (I’m not sure if I would use the word “fundamental”) right to maintain their own identity, even if that identity is based on a foolish idea. If apartheid-era South Africa had granted free citizenship to any Dutch person who landed on their shores but denied such a benefit to citizens of other African countries, I don’t think that could be counted as one of the crimes of the apartheid state.
I would concede that the Israeli state committed injustices against the Palestinians in the way that it seized territory in 1948, but I think there are ways to remedy those injustices other than giving those Palestinians an unrestricted right to come back. (Especially since none of the Arab states seem interested in providing the same welcome-back to the Jews whom they kicked out.)
January 4th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
The e-mail that Matt got says that we can’t say that Israel should exist and that it imposes Apartheid in the Palestinian territories? I’m pretty sure people against apartheid didn’t want Boers to stop existing…
January 4th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Yes, what a nation state is has changed since 1910 with the rise of international law, but that doesn’t make the nation state irrelevant.
There are, however, certain ironies in the creation of a nation-state in the classic mode as a kind of offset for a century of nation-state-building and the consequent persecution, relocation and mass murder of minorities. The decrepit empires of the Habsburgs and Ottomans were, for better or worse, functional multiethnic entities for extended periods.
Still, lots of Americans squint at Israel and see a little America, the descendent of the plucky independence seeker of the 1770s, when what they ought to see is the epitome of post-colonial colonialism in its imposition of nation-statism. The Sick Man of Europe may be nearly a century dead, but no-one’s dealt with the body without getting sick themselves.
But as I said, the ongoing question may well be how Israel can maintain the secular element of its Jewish identity. In that sense, I’m not going to be so down on those half-hearted Hannukah Jews who got their Israeli passports through ancestry. They’re the ones who want to stop women from being assaulted for wearing trousers or sitting in the ‘wrong’ section of the bus.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Jay,
Israel has made no serious attempt to give the Palestinians control of the West Bank. The settlements expanded more in the 10 years after Oslo than they did in the 10 years before.
What you say is true. The actions of the settlers and those who support their further expansion in the West Bank is abhorrent.
So, if seperation from the Palestinians is not an option, what can Israel do to remain a Jewish state? Only practise ethnic cleansing, aparteid, or some combination of the two. This of course raises the question of what moral price the people of Israel are willing to pay to preserve Israel as a Jewish-dominated state.
And this was Ariel Sharon’s calculus as well. A Jewish democracy that aimed to include the Palestinian Territories would remain neither Jewish nor a democracy. Hence the need for withdrawal. However, the process of separation is proving to be much stickier than expected.
Understand Israel’s position, though. Do you remember the Gaza pullout? How hard it was for the IDF to physically remove a mere 10,000 recalcitrant settlers from the Gaza Strip?
Now imagine how hard it is going to be to remove 300,000 settlers from the West Bank. Does it surprise you that Israel isn’t rushing to dismantle settler outposts as we speak? They have a miniature war with the crazies in Hebron every other month. They aren’t going to jump into this unless they know it will go somewhere. Especially while Hamas is firing rockets into Ashdod.
As well, as I’m sure you know, Israel isn’t interested in dismantling many of these settlements at all. Their plan, per Oslo and Camp David, is to keep many of them, while trading parts of Israel for them. This can’t be done until a comprehensive agreement is reached.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
If this was just a question of Israel leaving Gaza and the West Bank, we could have this wrapped up by Thursday. The sticking point is Israel itself. Until the question of whether Israel will remain a state independent of the Palestinian Territories is settled, the situation will not be resolved to the satisfaction of either the Palestinians or the Israelis.
Now this is just hypocritical. We all know that:
1. Israel will never leave the West Bank unless it is forced to
2. Israel can dictate whatever peace agreement there is, as long as the US supports anything Israel does
3. Palestinians have zero real influence on Israel or a peace treaty
4. Israel – nuclear weapons and all – has nothing to fear from Iran, Egypt, Syria, or especially a new Palestinian state
So there is one way only for peace in the region: force Israel to evacuate every single colony and comply with all UN resolutions passed before the US started vetoing everything, especially resolution 242. If not, let Israel deal with this timebomb and Apartheid situation, and stop funding this regime at the cost of our relations with Muslim countries.
By the way, Israel defies UN resolutions and has built tons of WMDs. What difference is there exactly between Israel and Iran or Iraq circa 2001, except that Israel actually has WMDs and massacres parts of her population? Enough with double standards already.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
“Especially since none of the Arab states seem interested in providing the same welcome-back to the Jews whom they kicked out.”
I believe they left voluntarily, no? I know that Iran (yes, not Arab) has a large Jewish population. Did they miss the memo on the expelling the Jews bit?
January 4th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Re Jay, #75:
“the Palestinian population is still growing a lot faster”
Sorry, I was talking about Israel proper.
For Israel to function this way, they would have to cease the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
# Zaid Says:
January 4th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
The e-mail that Matt got says that we can’t say that Israel should exist and that it imposes Apartheid in the Palestinian territories? I’m pretty sure people against apartheid didn’t want Boers to stop existing…
No one is saying that the Jews (=Boers in this analogy) should stop existing, rather that the state of Israel (=National Party of South Africa) should cease to exist.
DUH.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Jay, regarding my last comment. For some reason, the comment inverted the order in which the paragraphs should be read. The last three paragraphs should be read before I quote you for the second time. Like so:
Jay,
Israel has made no serious attempt to give the Palestinians control of the West Bank. The settlements expanded more in the 10 years after Oslo than they did in the 10 years before.
What you say is true. The actions of the settlers and those who support their further expansion in the West Bank is abhorrent.
Understand Israel’s position, though. Do you remember the Gaza pullout? How hard it was for the IDF to physically remove a mere 10,000 recalcitrant settlers from the Gaza Strip?
Now imagine how hard it is going to be to remove 300,000 settlers from the West Bank. Does it surprise you that Israel isn’t rushing to dismantle settler outposts as we speak? They have a miniature war with the crazies in Hebron every other month. They aren’t going to jump into this unless they know it will go somewhere. Especially while Hamas is firing rockets into Ashdod.
As well, as I’m sure you know, Israel isn’t interested in dismantling many of these settlements at all. Their plan, per Oslo and Camp David, is to keep many of them, while trading parts of Israel for them. This can’t be done until a comprehensive agreement is reached.
So, if seperation from the Palestinians is not an option, what can Israel do to remain a Jewish state? Only practise ethnic cleansing, aparteid, or some combination of the two. This of course raises the question of what moral price the people of Israel are willing to pay to preserve Israel as a Jewish-dominated state.
And this was Ariel Sharon’s calculus as well. A Jewish democracy that aimed to include the Palestinian Territories would remain neither Jewish nor a democracy. Hence the need for withdrawal. However, the process of separation is proving to be much stickier than expected.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Agree with Richard Blanco’s #91 post answers Why’s #92
“We all know that… Israel will never leave the West Bank unless it is forced to”
If it can happen in Gaza, it can happen in the West Bank. You just need to make Israel see that leaving Gaza was a good idea that can be repeated.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Their plan, per Oslo and Camp David, is to keep many of them, while trading parts of Israel worthless, radioactive pieces of the Negev Desert for them.
Fixed.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
CAP ate my strike tags along with Matt’s soul :\
January 4th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Nor do I find it especially problematic that Israel uses Jewish ancestry as the basis for its immigration policy.
Wow. So you don’t see anything wrong with the Chinese Exclusion Act? The White Australia Policy?
This is what passes for “progressivism”?
January 4th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Does Quebec have the right to be a French-speaking state? What would readers of this blog think if English-speaking Vermonters started shooting rockets into Quebec?
January 4th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Now this is just hypocritical. We all know that:
1. Israel will never leave the West Bank unless it is forced to
2. Israel can dictate whatever peace agreement there is, as long as the US supports anything Israel does
3. Palestinians have zero real influence on Israel or a peace treaty
4. Israel – nuclear weapons and all – has nothing to fear from Iran, Egypt, Syria, or especially a new Palestinian state
1. It will, just as soon as it can. Nobody forced it to leave Gaza, did they? The fact is, Israel has given up on Greater Israel – it’s not going to happen. Sure there are plenty of delusional settlers who think it will, and they will have to be dealt with. But as soon as the Israelis find a way of handing off the West Bank to the Palestinians without expecting a fistful of rockets in return, it’s theirs. You really think Israel doesn’t want out of this?
They have made peace and returned land to Egypt and Jordan. They have pulled out of Lebanon twice, and were recently negotiating the return of the Golan Heights to Syria for peace with them as well. Clearly, they don’t mind returning land in return for genuine peace.
2. Not true. There have been plenty of negotiations, but no peace treaty. Israel has not been able to force its treaties on anyone.
3. Palestinians have most of the influence. Again, if the Israelis believed that the Palestinians would stop trying to kill Israelis, I could have you a deal by Thursday.
4. The Israelis thought so too, until 1973. The fact is, that with a country the size of Israel, there is really no margin for error. All the Egyptians or whoever would need is 25 miles to bisect the country. And this is without the Iranians gaining first strike capabilities. Keep in mind the fact that rockets coming into your bedroom, or suicide bombers blowing up your shopping mall can be pretty scary too.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I must have missed the part where the Quebecois took the Vermonters land, closed their borders, blockaded their ports, bombed their land (yeah Israel actually broke the truce first), and closed off their airspace.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
You really suck with analogies, wondering, but this would be the right to frame it.
Say Quebec got serious and conquered Vermont. They built a handful of french speaking colonies and after awhile they decided that was bad business an left.
Then they ringed Vermont on all sides and blockaded the place. You can’t get medicine, you can’t do much of anything inside your insidious French pen. Someone started firing crappy rockets at Quebec. Frankly I’d look at the whole situation and think I’d got off lucky if that was all they could do to me.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Does Quebec have the right to be a French-speaking state?
Yes. But Quebecquois (?) have rejected independence at least twice already. Palestinians never had the chance to vote on independence along the lines of UN resolution 242.
What would readers of this blog think if English-speaking Vermonters started shooting rockets into Quebec?
What would readers of this blog think if Martians started shooting spatial missiles into Quebec?
Unless you include the context of a 40-year occupation and 2-years embargo, those Canadian metaphors are just dumb.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Again, if the Israelis believed that the Palestinians would stop trying to kill Israelis, I could have you a deal by Thursday.
Israeli paranoia is part of the deal. No one is ever going to convince them to quit being victims. That’s why a third party needs to make them quit acting like shits.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Richard,
My point is that withdrawal from the West Bank is off the table. The resistance of the 10,000 settlers in Gaza is nothing compared to what would happen if the IDF tried to forcibly remove settlers from the West Bank. The settlers are fanatics and many would fight to the death before leaving. Moreover, the sight of patriotic Jewish settlers being killed by IDF soldiers would tear Israel apart.
Israel’s leaders know the hell that would result from trying to remove the settlers. Every day that both the settler population and the Palestinian population grow makes seperation more implausible.
The most likely outcome is that, at some point in the near future, Israel will resolve the demographic problem the Palestinians present by drastically reducing their numbers.
The fact that a binational state is unthinkable to even most liberals in the U.S. and Israel suggests to me that when all hope for a two-state solution is acknowledged to be lost, the reponse will be to exterminate the Palestinians, rather than to make a genuine effort to create a state that provides equal rights to all ethnic and religious groups.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Their plan, per Oslo and Camp David, is to keep many of them, while trading parts of Israel worthless, radioactive pieces of the Negev Desert for them.
Your criticism of the plan is appreciated, but it is the plan nonetheless. This was also agreed to in principle by the Palestinians at Camp David 2000.
To respond to your criticism, it is my understanding that part of the land Israel would give up would be in the Galil as well. Also, just because something is in the Negev, does not mean it is not a valuable piece of real estate. Technically, Jerusalem is in the Negev. As well, Dimona, which I assume is the radioactive Negev to which you refer, is probably too far south to be of any real bargaining use. As well, I’m sure the Palestinians would have to agree to any land swap first.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Check out this patriot game, below. Why doesn’t the same argument apply to the Palestinians? Don’t tell me it is because the Holocaust was bigger than the Nakbah. In any case, Israel is slowly but steadily working to even that score.
Scott de B. Says:
January 4th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Why should Israel get a pass? The Holocaust may explain but it cannot justify.
Actually, it most certainly does justify. Last century, the proposition “Is there any state in the world willing and able to defend the rights of the Jews” was definitively answered, “No.” Moreover, the proposition “Is there any state in the world willing, when push comes to shove, to defend the rights of its own Jewish minority?” was, in the vast majority of cases where it was tested, answered in the negative as well.
Those events proved the Jews needed an independent homeland. To be effective, that homeland needed to be a place where sufficient quantity of Jews would be willing to recognize as such. The only such place on the planet was and is Palestine.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
So Matt,
You dont find it problematic that you have more rights as a citizen of a foreign nation (American Jew) than someone who was born and has lived their entire lives in that country (Palestinians living in Israel)?
You dont find it problematic that you have more rights as a citizen of a foreign nation (American Jew) than someone who was born in that territory, has a deed to land in that territory and has lived in a refugee camp for the last 60 years as a result of being ethnically cleansed from his land?
Finally, The major difference between Germany and Israel:
1) Germany was forced to recognize their crimes against European Jewry and pay reparations for those crimes. Israel still regularly massacres the refugee population it created.
2) Germany has a process to facilitate the immigration of non Germans to become German citizens, Israel does not because,
3) Germany is a state of its citizens, Israel is a state of the Jewish people.
Have you considered that you “do not find it especially problematic that Israel uses Jewish ancestry as the basis for its immigration policy” because you also happen to benefit from it at someone else’s expense, its what I call the “Apartheid Premium”. But you wouldn’t admit to such a thing, that might damage your liberal credentials. Oh wait, I forgot – we are talking about depriving the rights of Palestinians, you dont have to worry about a thing.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Israeli paranoia is part of the deal. No one is ever going to convince them to quit being victims. That’s why a third party needs to make them quit acting like shits.
Ah, because the best way to show the paranoid Jews how silly they’re being is to have reigning superpower come in and bang their heads together and decide their borders, reasonable defense capabilities, etc.
Also, as Woody Allen said, just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get me. Do you think the Israelis are being unduly fearful? Do you think that if the Israelis right now, stopped the bombing, opened up the Gaza borders, began clearing out the West Bank, etc. they would not be fired at?
January 4th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
The Israelis thought so too, until 1973. The fact is, that with a country the size of Israel, there is really no margin for error. All the Egyptians or whoever would need is 25 miles to bisect the country. And this is without the Iranians gaining first strike capabilities. Keep in mind the fact that rockets coming into your bedroom, or suicide bombers blowing up your shopping mall can be pretty scary too.
And what country has posed a serious military threat to Israel since 1973? None.
How many countries has Iran attacked in the 20th century? Zero, in contrast with Israel (or the US).
And that “first strike” argument is non-sense. Iranians are not crazy or irrational, no matter what neocons say. Even if they had nukes, the last country they would go to war with is Israel with her submarines and dozens of nuclear weapons. Just like any other nuclear country in history (except the US) it would use nukes only as a deterrent. Iran is not even particularly unstable compared to Pakistan or North Korea.
Nuclear non-proliferation should be a priority and apply to countries like Israel, India and Pakistan as well as Iran. Letting all those countries get nukes is a major failure and should be reversed. Iran is just another logical new member and not especially troubling.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Zaid: Iran didn’t get the memo. (Iran was ruled by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the time, and if Wikipedia is to be trusted, he was the first Muslim ruler to officially recognize the State of Israel.) Other Muslim countries, however, either deported their Jewish citizens outright or subjected them to such harsh official discrimination that they didn’t take much encouragement to leave.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Last century, the proposition “Is there any state in the world willing and able to defend the rights of the Jews” was definitively answered, “No.” Moreover, the proposition “Is there any state in the world willing, when push comes to shove, to defend the rights of its own Jewish minority?” was, in the vast majority of cases where it was tested, answered in the negative as well.
Actually it was “Yes” to both questions in (at least) the US, the UK and France. The last two countries even had Head of Government who were Jewish in the first half of the 20th century.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
# Seth Gordon Says:
“(Especially since none of the Arab states seem interested in providing the same welcome-back to the Jews whom they kicked out.)”
Why should Palestinians be penalized for what Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, etc. did to their Jewish populations? There’s a subtle (or not so subtle) racism implicit in that statement – that this is a conflict between THE Arabs and THE Jews, instead of Israelis and Palestinians.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Re 109: “Why doesn’t the same argument apply to the Palestinians?”
patriot games
For the record, I think it does. That’s another reason I support the two-state solution.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Jay,
My point is that withdrawal from the West Bank is off the table. The resistance of the 10,000 settlers in Gaza is nothing compared to what would happen if the IDF tried to forcibly remove settlers from the West Bank. The settlers are fanatics and many would fight to the death before leaving. Moreover, the sight of patriotic Jewish settlers being killed by IDF soldiers would tear Israel apart.
Israel’s leaders know the hell that would result from trying to remove the settlers. Every day that both the settler population and the Palestinian population grow makes seperation more implausible.
The most likely outcome is that, at some point in the near future, Israel will resolve the demographic problem the Palestinians present by drastically reducing their numbers.
Firstly, the West Bank withdrawal is not off the table. Will removing all those settlers be a huge pain in the ass? Yeeeeeesss. But it will get done. Also, keep in mind that as per any probable future agreement, Israel will probably retain quite a few settlements in the West Bank.
Secondly, the Israelis are not, nor can I imagine them ever being genocidal. At all. Are they heavy-handed at times? Sure. But they really don’t want to be in this line of work at all. You can believe them that much when they say that.
You would be hard-pressed to find a bigger Jewish butcher of Arabs than Ariel Sharon, and he understood this, withdrawing from Gaza. Keep in mind, that he was in many ways the father and patron of the settlement movement.
Whenever people (not you) compare the Israelis to the Nazis or say they are of genocidal intent, it only further drives the notion into their minds that you are delusional hypocrites, and then they become more intransigent.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
I believe they left voluntarily, no? I know that Iran (yes, not Arab) has a large Jewish population. Did they miss the memo on the expelling the Jews bit?
This is wrong, and, though the “Jewish Virtual Library” (operated by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise) is a suspect source, Seth is closer to the truth. There were different circumstances in different countries. In some cases (IIRC Egypt is one) Jews were pretty unambiguously expelled by force. In Iraq, there’s reasonably good evidence that Zionist fanatics faked a series of anti-Jewish bombings to get Jews to panic and leave for Israel. In Iran, most Jews stayed.
This is all a red herring, though – few anti-Zionists will defend any aspect of the policies of the Arab dictatorships. Jews who left for whatever reason deserve the right of return, too – it’s a basic human right, to be able to live in one’s home without disturbance and to return if forced to leave. The only people denying this are the governments and supporters of (1) Israel and (2) the US-backed, now Israel-friendly Arab dictatorships.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
I vote for “Israel does not have a right to exist”. It was dishonorably set up and has no legitimate rights.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
“Secondly, the Israelis are not, nor can I imagine them ever being genocidal. At all. Are they heavy-handed at times? Sure. But they really don’t want to be in this line of work at all. You can believe them that much when they say that.”
I don’t doubt it at all. But, I don’t think that its much consolation to a Palestinian child killed in an Israeli bombing or Gazans who can’t get a proper meal or clean water due to Israeli blockades that the people who inflict it upon them feel awful about it. Really, I think getting killed or maimed by sadists or genuinely nice people who find themselves in unfortunate circumstances feels about the same.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
I probably should have responded earlier, clarifying the meaning of a “fundamental right”:
All I mean is: The right to keep the state Jewish being tied directly to the right of a people to form a state (I would say, a fundamental one).
As an example:
If a nation-state (with the right to exist) is attacked for the purpose of its dissolution, the government and army of said country is ethically permitted to resist and/or respond with violence (i.e. war).
They may well be restricted in how they do so by proportionality, the laws of war (minimizing civilian casualties, etc.), and what have you — but the fundamental right remains.
If the people of Israel have the right to uphold a Jewish state (which I believe they do), then they have the right to treat ultimatums that would require them to abandon as a threat to dissolve their political entity (i.e as aggression).
January 4th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Justaguy: I see your point, but it seems to me that a lot of people on the Arab side of the fence do see it as a conflict between THE Arabs (or THE Muslims) and THE Jews. Palestinians seem to get a lot more press and fraternal support in the Arab world than, say, Kurds, Turkish Cypriots, or the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir.
I don’t think the Palestinians should be penalized. I would like all the refugees to live long and prosperous lives and have some kind of compensation for the injury done to them (or their parents or grandparents). I would just prefer to not have that compensation be delivered in a way that prevents a Jewish state from continuing to exist. (For example, as a US citizen, I would happily support a law that gave a large number of Palestinian refugees permanent-resident status and eventual citizenship in the US. And if they end up as a voting bloc powerful enough to give AIPAC serious competition, so much the better for them.)
Historically, the emergence of other nation-states (e.g., Turkey, India, Germany) has led to interethnic warfare, which has led to refugee crises, which have been resolved in part by refugees being permanently settled outside of the country they were kicked out of. I think a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going to have to involve some similar resolution for the refugees from 1948, and I would like to see the international community do more to make that possible. But of course the Palestinians will decide for themselves what is in their best interest and if they prefer war to resettlement, their soldiers have as much right to shoot at Israeli soldiers as vice versa. “War is the last argument of kings” and all that.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Jews who left for whatever reason deserve the right of return, too – it’s a basic human right, to be able to live in one’s home without disturbance and to return if forced to leave.
I’m not sure I agree. On the one hand, yes, it sucks mightily to be kicked out of your home and forced to move to another country (that doesn’t really want you) with just your clothes on your back, just because you happen to have the wrong ancestry or religion. On the other hand, there have been so many displacements of this kind all over the world, even if we just restrict ourselves to the last century, that I don’t see how it’s practical to unwind them all. (Consider Stalin’s strategy of forcibly relocating ethnic groups within the USSR and how the residue of those policies is making trouble within various post-Soviet republics.)
January 4th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Seth,
Yes, I agree that a lot of people on both sides of the issue essentialize the conflict to be about Jews vs. Arabs, and its racist no matter who does it.
Your solution to the Palestinian refugee problem presupposes that there is no fundamental tie between the Palestinian people and their land. Moving them from the place that they’ve lived for generations to Jordan, Egypt or New Jersey is no big deal. You write it in a very reasonable tone, but it amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Why do Zionists have a fundamental right to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land? Can you answer that in a way that recognizes that Palestinians are just as fully human as are Israelis?
January 4th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Wondering (@39) writes:
All there is is a right for individuals whose land was taken without payment to seek restitution.
As I understand matters, under the terms of all 5 schools of Islamic law and the explicit terms of the pertinent portions of Geneva Conventions (Isreal being party to the latter) that amounts to those people having their land returned to them (this being restitution), or put another way in the Palestinian case one key element of restitution is the right of Palestinian return. MY, am I wrong, or did you say that this right of return is something you oppose?
Anon (@ 70) writes:
There is a third way — just adopt immigration and family policies designed to create a Jewish majority.
As I understand the context of his comments (expanded a bit @ 94), this does away with even the vaguest possibility of restitution as defined in the Geneva conventions, to which Israel is a party, and under Islamic law, which in its 5 forms informs Muslim responses to Israel; various states in the islamic world may be intellectually perverse, but most Muslims I’ve known from a wide number of countries are pretty sincere in their identification with Palestinians and in their holding Jeruslem to be the third of the three holy cities of Islam, so the point about Islamic law is not irrelavant. How would the policy you suggest allieviate Palestinian distress?
Seth Gordon (@88) writes:
I would concede that the Israeli state committed injustices against the Palestinians in the way that it seized territory in 1948, but I think there are ways to remedy those injustices other than giving those Palestinians an unrestricted right to come back.
Q: What would those remedies be? How would they amount to resitution under the terms of the Geneva Conventions and the 5 schools of Islamic law?
1) I no longer have a dog in the I/P fight. I no longer see any good reason for the US to have a dog in this fight either.
2) I no longer care or am moved if someone calls me an anti-semite or says I’m anti-Israel.
3) I no longer see much possibility of a political solution.
I hope I’m wrong about the last.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I’m surprised by this post, Matt. I do think Israel has a right to exist, and yes, I do think there needed to be a Jewish homeland after the Holocaust and the Second World War. But that being said, I think the more ethnically-exclusionist aspects of Israeli law *are* fairly questionable.
Yes, all Israeli citizens are supposedly equal. But given the influence of Jewish religious authorities on Israeli civil law, and given the types of systematic benefits the Jewish majority gets through official bodies like the Jewish Agency, it’s clearly a two-tracked citizenship.
The best way I’ve read as to how to resolve the issue is Bernard Avishai’s proposal of Israel defining itself as a “Jewish” state by defining it as a “Hebrew” state, using Israeliness, the Hebrew language, and syncretic Israeli culture as the basis for Israeli identity. Such a state would still be Jewish in heritage and could still define itself as a “homeland” for the world’s Jews, especially in cases of persecution, but the categorizing of its citizens on the basis of “Jew,” “Arab,” “Druze,” or “Bedouin,” as Israeli law currently requires could cease.
Moreover, especially if Israel withdraws from the territories, Israel’s Jewish majority will not be in jeopardy (despite some wild-eyed demographers) and it would be more tenable to be move towards being a state of all its citizens as opposed to an ethno-nationalistic “Jewish” state.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
@125: I should add that, of course, rockets wound, do psychological damage, etc, too, and that’s quite real. By the same token, this is what Gaza residents are facing on a much larger scale – not just by the hundreds, but all 1.5 million of them.
@123: I don’t see how it’s practical to unwind them all
But I’m not advocating a systematic effort to unwind them. Only that those who wish to return, have that right. I see no reason to believe that the world would wobble too far from its axis if we gave people a little bit of the flexibility we’ve given capital over the last few decades to move around at will.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Anon (@121) why would the following not apply to Palestinians? Please, nothing about how the Palestinians don’t have a state–that begs the entire question.
For the record, you wrote:
I 9i.e. Anon) probably should have responded earlier, clarifying the meaning of a “fundamental right”:
All I mean is: The right to keep the state Jewish being tied directly to the right of a people to form a state (I would say, a fundamental one).
As an example:
If a nation-state (with the right to exist) is attacked for the purpose of its dissolution, the government and army of said country is ethically permitted to resist and/or respond with violence (i.e. war).
They may well be restricted in how they do so by proportionality, the laws of war (minimizing civilian casualties, etc.), and what have you — but the fundamental right remains.
If the people of Israel have the right to uphold a Jewish state (which I believe they do), then they have the right to treat ultimatums that would require them to abandon as a threat to dissolve their political entity (i.e as aggression).
I (more in sadness) ask again…don’t Palestinians also have a right to resist ultimatums, etc?
January 4th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Actually it was “Yes” to both questions in (at least) the US, the UK and France. The last two countries even had Head of Government who were Jewish in the first half of the 20th century.
While I would agree that the United States and the United Kingdom did a very good job of protecting their Jewish minorities, everything else you suggest is wrong.
Firstly, at the 1938 Evian Conference, it was pretty much established that no country (except I think the Dominican Republic) was interested in taking any Jewish refugees at all. The propaganda effect of this statement was not lost on Hitler and Goebbels.
Secondly, France’s “protection” of its Jews, whether in Occupied France or Vichy France was abysmal. Have a look.
Third, I’m not sure to which Prime Minister of the UK you’re referring to. Benjamin Disraeli, a convert to Anglicanism, mind you, was Prime Minister in the 19th century.
France has had a few Jewish heads of government. The one you’re referring to, I think, is Leon Blum. Interestingly, and somewhat detrimental to your point, he was handed over to the Germans by the Vichy regime, who put him in Buchenwald.
While Jews the world over are grateful for their liberation by the Allied powers, many wonder why it is that more was not done to hinder the Nazis’ genocidal efforts. (Perhaps bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz, etc.)
January 4th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
I read Bakunin so I get lumped in with neo-cons and fundies? :p
January 4th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Richard:
Jewish PM of France post WWII:
Léon Blum
Laurent Fabius
Pierre Mendès France
Also you will note that there are 13 Jews in the US Senate, and NO Muslims despite very similar populations in the US.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Israel has no choice but to cease governing and colonizing the territory in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel does have a choice: another expulsion of the Palestinians. The kind of expulsion the Palestinians experienced in 1948 isn’t possible in the age of television, but a slow-motion expulsion might work. Maybe that’s what we’re seeing now.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
The sad irony here is that Israel will ultimately cease to exist as a nation because of its own brutal efforts to supress the Palestinians. By adopting more reasonable policies it could have (eventually) lived peacefully in the middle east, but as it is its days are numbered. Those of us under the age of 50 who live a normal three score and 10 will live to see the end of Israel.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
JimboSlice,
Thanks for the comment. I think whyohwhy was talking about Jewish Prime Ministers in the first half of the twentieth century, though, from what he said, and consequently, I only mentioned Blum, though acknowledging there were more. Blum survived Buchenwald and would lead France briefly after World War II, which is interesting.
I agree that America has been very good to the Jews and said so in my comment. I was wondering where America was, though, in helping the Jews out at the Evian Conference or bombing the train tracks at Auschwitz. All in all, though, if all countries were like America, we’d be in pretty good shape.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
More in Sadness (#128)
Short answer, yes.
Long answer, with regards to its existence as a country and what happens within its borders (which, I hold, stop at Israel proper), yes.
To add to the longer answer, yes, that means that Palestinians have a just case for using violence (within the laws of war) to force Jewish settlers from the West Bank. (Which, somewhat gratefully, they are not doing at present.) And yes, this implies that Israel has a moral duty to withdraw from the West Bank, independently of security concerns, as it did with Gaza.
As to post 125, Israel’s right to exist only does away with the possibility of restitution in the form of a right of return. Even if restitution is practically impossible, it makes comparatively little difference so long as said Palestinians have the opportunity to start anew, which, I believe, could largely happen given a functioning Palestinian state.
And another reason I support the two state solution.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
“Also you will note that there are 13 Jews in the US Senate, and NO Muslims despite very similar populations in the US.”
Maybe if Muslims hadn’t killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 — the worst foreign attack on the Continental U.S. since the War of 1812 — we might have had a Muslim Senator by now. So sorry that that benighted religion isn’t more popular to the U.S. electorate, but what can ya do.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Richard Blanco you have been a remarkable commentator on this thread.
I really hate to think what happens to the overall dialogue when your very reasonable arguments are thrown out the window as commentators seek your ostracism:
“All in all, though, if all countries were like America, we’d be in pretty good shape.”
This is about to get ugly.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Why do Zionists have a fundamental right to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land?
Trying to be brief, because I really ought to go to bed (anyone who really cares to follow up can email me)… if I thought they had such a “fundamental right”, I wouldn’t be saying that compensation for the refugees’ loss was appropriate. The exact nature of the compensation (to answer another question upthread) should be the subject of political negotiation, and I classify war as one form of political negotiation.
I generally don’t think that any ethnic group has a fundamental right to any piece of territory, because I don’t think ethnic groups are well-bounded enough to have corporate identity. (The boundary of “Jew”, for instance, is very heavily contested in some circles….)
January 4th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Bernie Maddoff stole $50,000,000,000 yet we keep electing Jews to the Senate. Joe LIEberman has been the worst Senator in US history, yet we keep electing Jews to the Senate. Barnie Frank has been horrible in this financial crisis, yet we keep getting Jews in the Senate. Same goes for the last 20 years of Fed Chairmen. And on and on and on and on the Jews destroy the financial well being of America yet we keep putting them in the Senate – maybe that has to do with who owns the media … hmmm …
January 4th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
I don’t doubt it at all. But, I don’t think that its much consolation to a Palestinian child killed in an Israeli bombing or Gazans who can’t get a proper meal or clean water due to Israeli blockades that the people who inflict it upon them feel awful about it. Really, I think getting killed or maimed by sadists or genuinely nice people who find themselves in unfortunate circumstances feels about the same.
Oh, definitely. But in order to truly understand the Middle East, and any world conflict, we have to understand the goals and beliefs of the players. While one could be genocidal and bomb Gaza with just such an intent, it would be a fundamental mistake to just assume that any country that bombs Gaza is genocidal, even if the immediate aftereffects seem remarkably similar. It hinders our ability to predict what the Israelis will do next, because we have mistaken notions as to what their goals are. Such misunderstandings can lead to further tragedies. If the Israelis and Palestinians were capable of looking at each other with more empathy, and knowing what they were really saying and what their actions truly meant, there would be a lot less bloodshed, and we’d be a lot closer to a deal. For that reason, I urge you to draw necessary distinctions whenever possible.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
“The sad irony here is that Israel will ultimately cease to exist as a nation…”
People have been predicting Israel’s demise from the moment it was founded. Today it is more populous and wealthier by a factor of ten. Jews are an old people, predating Arabs and Islam by thousands of years. They will outlast them yet. Radical Islam’s days are numbered. Post-Christian Europe may be too self-hating to defend itself against virulent forms of Islam but the civilizations of India and China have no such compunction. Radical Islam is already a thorn in the side of India and China – two countries with which Israel happens to have productive relations. Islam’s more violent, nihilistic adherents will be defeated, as they are being defeated now in Gaza. Islam will become a civilized religion and learn to play well with others or it will be marginalized. The Chinese and the Indians won’t be as tolerant with Muslims as Israel has been.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
“Bernie Maddoff stole $50,000,000,000 yet we keep electing Jews to the Senate.”
At least “we” didn’t elect Madoff to the Senate. “We” did elect the Arab-American Darrell Issa to Congress though, even though he was a car thief.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Not only does Israel have no “fundamental right to be a Jewish state”, it has no fundamental right to even be a state in any sense of the term.
I will repeat a historical fact: the UN’s own commission set up to study this point reported to the Security Council that the UN had no legal authority to partition Palestine, let alone HOW it partitioned Palestine. The UN ignored this fact because it felt the conflict between Arabs and Jews was getting out of hand, and because Britain was preparing to wash its hands of the situation due to Jewish terrorism perpetrated by the Irgun and the Haganah and other Jewish terrorist groups against British personnel.
Therefore Israel is an illegal state. Period.
Matt skips the main question because he’s ignorant of the history of the UN partition and he’s also ignorant of the basic nature of the Zionist philosophy which is colonialist, imperialist, racist and fascist.
Israel has no right to exist on either the legal score of being a state or the philosophical score of being a colonialist, racist philosophy, let alone as a result of its sixty years of state terrorism conducted against the Palestinians and war mongering conducted against its neighbors and its direct espionage against the US and its direct military assaults on US personnel (the Liberty incident).
How any country can engage in what Israel has engaged in for the last half century and not be universally condemned and even militarily attacked is explainable only by the massive propaganda campaign that somehow anti-Semitism in general and the Holocaust in particular justifies this Zionist barbarity.
And they don’t.
Israel as a state must be dissolved by the UN and disarmed of its nuclear arsenal and that decision enforced by the international community by a full boycott and blockade and if necessary multinational military action if Israel refuses to comply.
After the dissolution of the Israeli state, a Palestinian state must be created wherein all citizens of whatever religion or ethnicity are treated equally under the civil law. If the Arabs want Islamic law, they can have it, but under the proviso that it does not govern criminal law which must be secular, or that only secular law applies to the Jewish population. The resultant state must have its territorial boundaries specified with its neighbors and its territorial integrity guaranteed by the international community.
This is the only workable solution.
The only workable alternative solution is the military destruction of the Israeli state.
The amusing thing is that nobody thinks this is possible – despite the US having militarily crushed TWO Muslim states with a much larger population, having killed a million of them in one such state (perhaps one sixth of the population of Israel) and having displaced nearly the population of Israel (four million) more from that country AT ISRAEL’s URGING and without any international legal justification!
And yet a radical solution to the Palestinian issue is not even considered. Israel is inviolate. No change must be made to the conditions inside Israel, no change must be made to the state of Israel, no changes must be made to the Jewishness of Israel – and whatever happens to the Palestinians, well, they’ll deal with it.
This degree of racism expressed toward blacks in the United States would be grounds for universal condemnation. Matt would be driven out of his blog in tar and feathers.
Let’s hear Matt discuss that, if he has the balls.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Fred and JimboSlice really need to get a room for a night of spitefucking.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Fred conflates a car thief with someone who steals $50 billion.
Brilliant work.
This is why America is doomed – fucktards like Fred make up at least thirty percent of the population.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
It would be enough for Israel to stop expanding, stop oppressing Palestinians,and stop occupying the occupied territories. From the Palestinian point of view, they see themselves being pushed into smaller and less livable spaces, while Israel pays people from all over the world to move to Israel because they are Jewish. Of course they have a problem with a Jewish state.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
A number of things can be said in response to Richard Steven Hack, but what first comes to mind is:
This…
“Israel is inviolate. No change must be made to the conditions inside Israel, no change must be made to the state of Israel, no changes must be made to the Jewishness of Israel
… does not mean that it follows that:
“and whatever happens to the Palestinians, well, they’ll deal with it”
In fact, proponents of Israel in this thread, including Matt, have been pretty clear on that point.
Once this break is made — and the possibility of a two state solution made clear — making the case for the destruction of Israel gets really… well, I’m actually at a loss for words.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
I’m surprised. Usually it would have been much earlier that the bitter squad would have signed on and spent the rest of the evening insulting each other with racial and sexual spew.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:16 am
For reasons I go into here: http://www.scriboergosum.org.uk/revamp/2088 the abandonment or removal of the West Bank settlements is unlikely to occur. The Israeli Right is a strong force and so dedicated to it not happening that even a single small settlement’s removal almost brought down the government.
Accordingly things don’t look to bright – unless that can get overcome then the whole place is a demographic timebomb of the highest order and its a choice between apartheid or non-existence. Alas, even the Two State solution would probably need Hamas to make it work (Fatah would just steal all the money needed for infrastructure and Islamic Jihad…Well…Y’know…) and so there is no solution that isn’t going to upset people.
Ah well, that’s the sort of situation which will arise when you build a nation upon a botched piece of ethnic cleansing…
January 5th, 2009 at 12:45 am
It appears this thread may soon be the third longest on Matt’s blog since the start of the war in Gaza — and it’s over the question of Israel’s right to exist!
If you wanted to know why Israel is supposedly represented by the far right, this may be a clue.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:03 am
A much larger clue, OHS, would be Israel’s tendency to overstep its boundaries.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:13 am
And of course, you now have John fucking Bolton getting space from Fred Hiatt in the WaPo to argue the ‘Gaza to Egypt, West Bank to Jordan’ case, which presumably will earn him an open-ended commitment to sexual favours from Pamela Oshry Geller. Has that man ever spoken a word that was not reprehensible?
January 5th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Ah, because the best way to show the paranoid Jews how silly they’re being is to have reigning superpower come in and bang their heads together and decide their borders, reasonable defense capabilities, etc.
Pretty much.
When I watch what the Israeli’s have made of a society I think they may may need something much darker than a stern talking to. They have gotten away with so much and if the tables ever turned and it was them who was dying the way they have cornered their enemies they would scream bloody murder.
Maybe it would be much more prosaic if in some future 300 random Israeli’s died because one of them lit off a rocket and accidentilly killed an Arab Palestinian.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Ed, I’m very pro-Palestinian, but even I have to say that “accidentilly” is hardly the mot juste, even without the spelling error. It’s not like we’re talking about July 4 mishaps—intent may not trump effect, but it counts for something.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:41 am
“I vote for “Israel does not have a right to exist”. It was dishonorably set up and has no legitimate rights.”
Which countries, in your opinion, were set up honorably?
“Fred conflates a car thief with someone who steals $50 billion.”
The salient point, which you, un-augmented by transhuman technology, miss, is that no one elected Bernie Madoff to Congress, unlike Rep Issa.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:58 am
“Well, it is one thing for a country like Germany to say that only people of German ancestry can immigrate.”
Well, this is not what Germany actually says. Yes, they offer citizenship to people of German ancestry. But there is also the possibility for ethnically non-German immigrants (of which there are a lot who live in Germany as permanent residents) to be naturalized.
The comparison is obviously silly in at least one other important respect. Germany wasn’t recently founded on land stolen from other people. But whether a political community has a right to preserve its ethnic or cultural or religious identity by keeping immigrants out clearly depends on whether its claim to exclusive control of the territory in question is legitimate in the first place. So even if German immigration policy were what it is falsely believed to be by the average American ‘progressive’, that would establish very little about the legitimacy of Israel’s practices.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:01 am
I’m starting to agree with JimboSlice that Jews have too much influence in this country. Yglesias, J Street, Ezra Klein, and Joe Lieberman should all move to Sderot — in the same house, in fact. We could put cameras in a film it. It would be like MTV’s Real World, with the added suspense that any day a rocket could hit the house and blow them up in the middle of one of their pointless arguments.
At the same time, we should put more Muslims in the Senate. Not half-ass assimilated Muslims either, but some hardcore Wahabbis educated in Saudi-funded mosques. We could probably find some good candidates in our corps of Muslim prison chaplains. We should install foot baths in the Senate Cloakroom to make them feel welcome, and let them slaughter their own sheep on special holidays.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:04 am
“The comparison is obviously silly in at least one other important respect. Germany wasn’t recently founded on land stolen from other people.”
No, Germany was founded a long time ago on land stolen from other people, like most other countries were. In fact, if you study history closely, you’ll find this phenomenon of countries founded on the conquest of territory to be pretty common. Israel is unique in that it was founded on land that belonged to the Jews long before Mohammad was gleam in some idol-worshiping Bedouin’s bloodshot eye.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:42 am
Jews are an old people, predating Arabs and Islam by thousands of years.
Think about that statement again, and see if you can figure out why it’s stupid.
Israel is unique in that it was founded on land that belonged to the Jews long before Mohammad was gleam in some idol-worshiping Bedouin’s bloodshot eye.
By what mechanism did the land “belong” to “the Jews”? Stipulating that divine covenants don’t count.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:48 am
One point interestingly absent from this thread:
40% of the world’s jews live in Israel; another 40% live assimilated in America.
On the one hand, they could not be more different in how they live and define their Jewish identity — one assimilating and thriving in a liberal democracy, largely as individuals; the other devoting everything to each other (military service, etc.) to preserve a Jewish state. Both processes are complex in themselves.
On the other hand, the two populations make up the vast majority (growing vaster by the year) of the world’s Jewish population, and as such there is special pressure on them to preserve, defend, and define the legacy of their ancestors, and, in large measure, of Western civilization.
American Jews have a variety of opinions on Israel that cross the political spectrum, but even most of the states harshest critics show a genuine commitment to the preservation of the Jewish people.
Speaking of Israel’s critics more generally, even those who criticize the existence of a Jewish state do so, in large number, out of a conviction that such a state is a greater danger to the tribe than a boon.
But there are also those who do not — who see just about every attempt at the attempt by Jews to preserve their identity as a people in a negative light.
And what other words can describe such a sentiment but anti-semitism?
January 5th, 2009 at 2:49 am
the tamil tigers are losing their homeland, can we carve out a piece of israel for them or should we squeeze them into the gaza strip?
January 5th, 2009 at 2:50 am
Syd, don’t you mean the Tamil people?
January 5th, 2009 at 3:04 am
I cannot condone either a race-state or a theocracy, particularly one that does not respect the rights of its minority inhabitants. No state should have the right to construct itself in such a manner as to maintain an artificial standard of ethnic or religious purity.
The two state solution is ideologically offensive because it would result in two “separate but unequal” entities. This would be tolerable if it could get the job done in a pragmatic sense, and end the sickening cycle of violence. Unfortunately, it remains an unachievable fairy-tale. I’d rather my impossible pipe-dreams represented an actual just and equitable world, rather than a glorified segregation.
January 5th, 2009 at 3:08 am
while the israelis are blowing up children in gaza with u.s. weapons purchased with u.s. taxpayer money, can they also remove those settlers?
i thought not…
israel and the u.s. both know that killing poor brown muslims is good domestic politics and generally acceptable to each of its populations
January 5th, 2009 at 3:11 am
the tamil people need more friends in washington, shame they don’t have the money to make them
January 5th, 2009 at 3:21 am
“and the possibility of a two state solution made clear”
Look, stupid, as long as Zionist freaks are running Israel, the “possibility of a two state solution” is ZERO. Can’t you get that through your head?
The goal of Israel’s leaders is to drive the Palestinians out of the country entirely, then expand north and east. That has been Zionism’s goal since the beginning.
Until you find a way to remove Israel’s Zionist leaders, there is NO possibility of a two-state solution. If somehow Palestine were allowed to form a state, the first time somebody threw a rock across Israel’s border, Israel would declare “war” and proceed to destroy the Palestinians in the same manner as they are doing now.
Then they would claim, “Well, we conquered the land fair and square, we get to keep it” – just as they did in 1948 and in 1967.
Get a clue.
January 5th, 2009 at 3:28 am
Fred: “The salient point, which you, un-augmented by transhuman technology, miss, is that no one elected Bernie Madoff to Congress, unlike Rep Issa.”
And the salient point which you, the uneducated numbnuts, miss, is that no one in the government did a damn thing about Bernie Madoff’s fraud for nine years. Care to guess why? That he was an influential Jew probably with plenty of AIPAC friends in Congress.
The only thing that would amuse me about Bernie Madoff is if he took a big chunk of AIPAC’s change with him when it collapsed.
Instead, apparently he sent it all to Israel – which I’m sure AIPAC would approve of.
As for criminals in Congress, perhaps you’re familiar with that list someone made up a few years ago, listing all the deadbeats, bankruptcies, misdemanors, felonies, drunks, drug addicts, and child molesters who were CURRENTLY in the Congress. So a little ol’ car thief would have fit right in.
Here it is:
Congress: America’s Criminal Class: Part I
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/Aug1999/081699/criminalclass1-081699.htm
January 5th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Israel rains fire on Gaza with phosphorus shells
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5447590.ece
In other words, Israel is doing to Gaza what the US military did to Fallujah – burning civilians to death.
January 5th, 2009 at 4:36 am
Germany wasn’t recently founded on land stolen from other people.
Well, 1867 is only 80 years before 1947. Though history makes it seem like longer. The interesting historiographical question is whether the creation of Israel is a late-in-the-day bit of 1919 re-mapping, or more akin to the colonial powers drawing uneasy borders across former conquests. Bit o’both really.
Israel is unique in that it was founded on land that belonged to the Jews long before Mohammad was gleam in some idol-worshiping Bedouin’s bloodshot eye.
Where’s their fucking title deed, Fred? And no, the books of Moses don’t pass legal muster, you LGF-beholden shitstain. The Levant is, historically, mongrel country, a patchwork quilt of ethnicities and languages and religious practices, and all the better for it.
Here’s my one-state solution: bring back the fucking Ottomans, and let everyone suck it up equally.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:13 am
To Ed Marshall, et. al… What would you have Israel do?
January 5th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Pseudonymous in nc, please enlighten me on part of what is today German land was stolen from non-German people in 1867. I’m German, but I honestly don’t know.
Fred says that “No, Germany was founded a long time ago on land stolen from other people, like most other countries were. In fact, if you study history closely, you’ll find this phenomenon of countries founded on the conquest of territory to be pretty common.”
Well, Germany was not founded long ago. But you’re probably right to say that the ancestors of today’s Germans settled what is today Germany by conquest at some point in the very remote past. You’re probably also right to say that this is a common phenomenon. But so what? Either this implies that no nation state today has a legitimate claim to its territory, or else, there must be some principle that gives you a rightful title to your territory at some point, such as long, uncontested, and generally recognized possession.
As far as I understand, there are people on this thread who deny that Israel has such a title to its territory. I don’t agree with that view, but I wouldn’t say that it is obviously ridiculous. Clearly, there are issues here that don’t apply to cases like todays Germany, Italy, France, such as the fact that the people who were dispossed still live next door and uphold their claims.
Of course, none of this is relevant if you believe that Israel’s claims should be grounded in divine right, but in that case, there’s not much of a point in arguing with you.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Italy wasn’t a unified country until roughly 1870.
Nationalism itself was a huge product of the 19th Century. Led to a lot of cool, really big wars.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Also, people in the USA shouldn’t be talking too casually about other nations’ lack of having ancestral ties to some land. This whole nonsense of reifying the nation-state into some eternal entity instead of a purely political, power creation, typically constructed or reconstructed quite recently, causes an awful lot of problems everywhere.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:03 am
Well it seems that in the last 60 years all attempts by the Jews to preserve their identity of their people has involved killing and displacing brown Muslims. So yeh, I view that in a negative light, and I guess I’m an anti-Semite because I hate Israel, and according to you anyone who is hating a terrorist state committing genocide is an “anti-semite”.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:24 am
And belonged to the Canaanites long before that.
Personally I think the idea of giving the whole mess back to Turkey and having both sides live under the hyper-secular Turkish constitution would be absolutely hilarious. Too bad there’s no way that the Turks would be stupid enough to agree to it.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
DaveNYC,
Better yet, give the territory back to the Knights of Malta. (Or, perhaps, the Russian government, since Russia was the traditional military patron of the Knights. I seem to recall that the governments of Spain and France have arguable claims to the territory of Palestine as well, dating back to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem).
Kalkin and Arnold Evans,
I fundamentally disagree with you. Greece has the right (and, I would say, the duty) to maintain itself as an Orthodox Christian nation, and Argentina has the right and duty to maintain itself as a Catholic nation. They also, of course, have the duty to allow religious minorities to practice their faith in peace, and to enjoy equal civil rights to the extent that it does not threaten the basic religious and ideological identity of the state. And so it goes for the Jews of Israel.
Your basic error is that you think in terms of individual rights and not in terms of a collective rights. (For a self-professed communist, Kalkin, that’s truly absurd. You make the same error that Lenin and Marx made, which is not to put enough weight on the fact that people value non-economic things such as loyalty to religion, nationhood, ideology, etc.) Each distinct people is deserving of a homeland and a nation, and that every nation has a collective right to determine what faith, what ideology, what socioeconomic system and what culture shall prevail within their borders. (As well as a collective obnligation to make due provision for small minorities within those borders to maintain their own identities.) The English are entitled to an Anglican nation, the Argentines to an Catholic nation, the Nepalese to a Hindu nation and the Jews to a Jewish nation.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Well, I’m an atheist, so that’s irrelevant. As for your other point, it’s not like other alternatives weren’t proposed over the last century and more. There’s a reason none of the other alternatives gained traction. But if you think it’s a reasonable alternative, I encourage you to start raising money.
Under no circumstances can the Arabs be called ‘ancient ethnic rivals’ of the Jews. Nor did the establishment of Israel require the dispossession of large numbers of Arab residents. The 1948 UN proposal didn’t call for such a thing.
Perhaps the notion that a large number of foreigners could move into Palestine without conflict with the indigenous inhabitants was a pipe dream, but so was the notion that they could live in peace anywhere else.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Re: JimboSlice 174
“Well it seems that in the last 60 years all attempts by the Jews to preserve their identity of their people has involved killing and displacing brown Muslims. So yeh, I view that in a negative light, and I guess I’m an anti-Semite…”
This may be a moment of breathtaking honesty; but then again, it may just be a sign that Jimbo can’t read, since the sentence that came before the post he responds to (160) reads:
“Speaking of Israel’s critics more generally, even those who criticize the existence of a Jewish state do so, in large number, out of a conviction that such a state is a greater danger to the tribe than a boon.”
January 5th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Um, no. Once you start off saying that country X has the right/obligation to preserve it’s ethnic and religeous nature it’s a real short step to get to forced deportations and plain old genocide.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
First of all, let me thank Matt once again for this post. This discussion has been a real experience.
One thing I can take from this is that anti-Israeli sentiment is, in fact, complicated. Some of it, true, is based on good old-fashioned anti-semitism. Some of it from a devotion to cosmopolitanism. And much of it, in part, from a devotion to the survival and (what they say is) the moral state of the Jewish people.
But most importantly of all, a good portion — I would venture to say most — so called anti-Israel statements are not anti-Israeli at all. In much the same way the right used the word “patriotism”, zionism is all too often defined by the right to mean a blanket defense for Israeli aggression and occupation.
And the right, as they do with patriotism, insults and undercuts zionism in this way. Because a true devotion to a Jewish state, itself devoted to the survival and flourishing of the Jewish people, cannot occupy another nation, for it threatens Jewish identity doubly:
it creates a binational state which cannot long endure, and which threatens the very existence of its occupiers; and it defies the very moral code that defines Jewish tradition.
That liberals debate anti-semites and anti-Israelis to such length rather than dismissing them outright may strike the right as weakness on Israel. It may tempt the Jewish people and their supporters to adopt the right’s definition of “zionism”.
But it is not out of weakness that liberals debate, but true moral conviction. It makes us wiser. And it makes us the true friends of Israel.
Thanks again to Matt and to everyone who took the time to participate in this discussion.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
“By what mechanism did the land “belong” to “the Jews”?”
The usual mechanism: possession. The Jews had a state there long before Islam even existed. Now, that alone doesn’t entitle them to a state there now. That they fought for the land and won does.
“Where’s their fucking title deed, Fred? And no, the books of Moses don’t pass legal muster, you LGF-beholden shitstain.”
You kiss your mother with that mouth, Pseudomonas? The Jews’ possession of the land predates the concept of legal title. You don’t need to believe the books of Moses to know that the land belong to the Jews long before it belong to the soi disant Palestinians; you just have to have the slightest knowledge of archaeology or history.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Either that or they oppose the idea that any nation, anywhere in the world should “uphold and protect” illiberal and http://www.makkale.blogcu.com antiliberal premises while necessarily using a huge amount of support from the United States
January 5th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
you just have to have the slightest knowledge of archaeology or history.
Oh, that’s hilarious. Here’s a hint, Fraud: watching the “Digging Up The Truth Of The Bible” marathon on the History Channel doesn’t make you an expert in anything but pop-archaeology shows for Americans.
January 5th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
“Oh, that’s hilarious. Here’s a hint, Fraud”
Quite a refutation there, Pseudomonas. Care to name a respected archaeologist or historian who denies that Jews inhabited the area currently occupied by Israel/The West Bank in ancient times?
January 5th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Anon (@135)
Fair enough, but then it seems there is a termendous problem with much of the Isreali right. As I understand matters, much of the Isreali right would be unwilling to grant any concessions leading to a meaningful Palestinian state; I would include Ehud Barak in this. Any Palestinian state, like any other state, would have to have minimally control of its own borders and a monopology of legitimate force therein. Pardon me, but I no longer find the argument that the Palestinians could have this if the Palestinians would just behave well in the least bit convincing.
January 5th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Seth Gordon (@ 138)
I classify war as one form of political negotiation.
Mr Godron, war may be politics by other means (as Clauswitz I think it was said but it is not a form of negotiation.
I, therefore, suggest that you have refused to answer a legitimate question. What measures do you propose?
January 5th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Speaking of Israel’s critics more generally, even those who criticize the existence of a Jewish state do so, in large number, out of a conviction that such a state is a greater danger to the tribe than a boon.
But there are also those who do not — who see just about every attempt at the attempt by Jews to preserve their identity as a people in a negative light.
And what other words can describe such a sentiment but anti-semitism?
This is just wacky. The only valid reason for criticizing Zionism is that it’s bad for the Jews? As it happens, I do think it’s bad for the Jews. But that’s not really why I care – it’s much much worse for the Palestinians. Unless I’m seriously misreading you, you’re saying that’s a priori an illegitimate criticism.
I’m pretty tempted to turn your rhetorical question back around and ask what could describe such a sentiment besides anti-Arab racism.
Really there are lots of reasons why one might be opposed to Zionism besides anti-semitism or a tribalistic concern for the welfare of the Jews as Jews. Here are a few: a similarly tribalistic concern for the welfare of the Palestinians, as Palestinians. A humanistic concern for the welfare of Palestinians and others among Israel’s victims (eg the Lebanese). A principled opposition to nationalism, along communist, anarchist, or simply cosmopolitan lines. A militantly atheist opposition to religion and religious states. A legalistic commitment to international law and the right of return. Etc, etc. Most anti-Zionists probably are motivated by some mixture of these reasons.
January 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
“Pardon me, but I no longer find the argument that the Palestinians could have this if the Palestinians would just behave well in the least bit convincing.”
Since behaving badly hasn’t panned out too well for the Palestinians in Gaza, why not try behaving well and see what happens? I’d bet that if the Pals decided collectively that for one year they would stop their genocidal rhetoric, stop lobbing rockets at Israel, they’d find willing partners in Israel to help them build decent society for themselves in Gaza.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Hey Fred – why don’t you stop with calling the Palestinians “Pals”.
How would you feel if Israelis were referred to as “Izzies”?
January 5th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
For what it’s worth, we know very clearly that groups and societies lived in parts of what is now Israel (as well as the West Bank and other parts of the region) in ancient times. We suspect that these folks include ancestors of modern ethnic Jews (as well as modern ethnic Arabs as well). We have no idea what their specific religious practices were, and little idea whether what ancient Judaism (even if that was what was practiced) was like compared to modern Judaism, Christianity, or Islam for that matter.
It always amazes me when people are quite certain of what things were like thousands of years ago. There is so much we don’t know. While it is probably quite fair to say that Jews lived in the Holy Land, the idea that they were a majority or formed some sort of cohesive state with definable borders or that the current state of Israel in any way approximates where they lived seems quite far beyond the evidence.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Dilan Esper,
Ancient Middle Eastern history isn’t a big interest of mine (well, a few specific cultures are, but there are just too many different civilizations to keep track of in general). However, wouldn’t it be fair to say that while the ancient territory of Palestine probably included the _genetic_ ancestors of today’s Palestinians, it wasn’t the cradle of their _cultural_ roots. The Arabic language, as far as I know, as well as the Islamic religion, originated in the Arabian Peninsula and not in Palestine. (Feel free to correct me if this is wrong.) People in the first few centuries AD in that region tended to speak Syriac, not Arabic.
We do have _some_ idea, I think, what ancient Judaism was like, based not only on the Jewish scriptures but on the large body of Talmudic commentary and scholarship on said scriptures. (As well as the annals of Babylonian, Persian, and other empires).
January 5th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
JimboSlice,
Well it seems that in the last 60 years all attempts by the Jews to preserve their identity of their people has involved killing and displacing brown Muslims.
They’re the same colour. In fact, as others have pointed out, Ethiopian Israelis are about as black you get. Additionally, the Sephardic and Mizrahi populations have been living in the Middle East for hundreds and thousands of years, respectively. Yemenite Jews look just like their Arab neighbours in Yemen, just like Moroccan Jews look like theirs. There is no reason to think that Jews living under Muslim rule would think of Arabs as racially inferior, a common trope of white supremacy. Also, Arabs and Jews are pretty closely related genetically.
So yeh, I view that in a negative light, and I guess I’m an anti-Semite because I hate Israel, and according to you anyone who is hating a terrorist state committing genocide is an “anti-semite”.
It’s not genocide. Are they being heavy-handed? Yes. But unless there is a definition of the word I am unfamiliar with, aiming for terrorists and causing civilian casualties is not genocide.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Personally I think we should all just set aside our differences and agree that things would be a lot better if the Byzantine Empire was still in charge.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Um, no. Once you start off saying that country X has the right/obligation to preserve it’s ethnic and religeous nature it’s a real short step to get to forced deportations and plain old genocide.
I would argue that it’s not that short of a step. Every country has the right to set their own immigration goals, and if Israel wants to encourage the immigration of Jews in particular, that’s their business. Similarly, if the Germans decide they have quite enough Turks already and wouldn’t mind some more ethnic Germans, I have no problem with that, either.
Obviously, were they to start forcibly deporting people or “encouraging them to emigrate” it would be another story. But there’s no reason a liberal democratic country can’t decide to protect it’s culture without falling into ethnic cleansing.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
“Hey Fred – why don’t you stop with calling the Palestinians “Pals”.
How would you feel if Israelis were referred to as “Izzies”?”
Chet,
Pro-Palestinians call them Pals all the time. You can call Israelis “Izzies” if you want, I really don’t care. As for what the Palestinians call themselves, it’s interesting to note that most of them can’t even pronounce the world “Palestinian” because there is no “P” in Arabic. The Roman word “Palestine” in fact didn’t refer to Arabs at all, but to Phoenicians, who are of Southern European ancestry and completely unrelated to the Arabs we call Palestinians today.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Personally I think we should all just set aside our differences and agree that things would be a lot better if the Byzantine Empire was still in charge.
With regards to comments like these that suggest that the Middle East was better off when being ruled as an Empire by the Romans, Byzantines or Ottomans:
There’s a couple million Armenians who probably would disagree with you.
The Armenian genocide under the Turks is probably the most famous, but Jews, Christians and Muslims were frequently massacred by the other superstates as well. Anyone remember the Crusades? The Roman-Persian Wars? The Byzantine-Arab Wars?
January 5th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
The Roman word “Palestine” in fact didn’t refer to Arabs at all, but to Phoenicians, who are of Southern European ancestry and completely unrelated to the Arabs we call Palestinians today.
A minor quibble, Fred. While modern scholarship has not come to any definite conclusions, it would appear that you’re referring to two different ethnic groups. Judea was renamed Palestina after the Bar-Kokhba revolt to evoke the Philistines, a group that inhabited the southern shore of what is now Israel and Gaza. While they seemed to have adapted to local Semitic (i.e. Canaanite) culture, many think that they are Mycenean in origin, like I think you were suggesting. (Although, of course, once they set up shop in the Levant, it was only a matter of time, before they assimilate completely into the Semitic gene pool.)
The Phoenicians, on the other hand, seem pretty clearly to have been a Semitic group. Their alphabet forms the basis for the Semitic alphabet on a whole.
Of course, I don’t know where the modern Palestinian Arabs were at that time. If they are descendants of Arabs they were probably in the Arabian peninsula and the Sinai. If they’re the descendants of the Semites of the Levant they could very well be connected to the Philistines, Phoenicians or whoever.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
However, wouldn’t it be fair to say that while the ancient territory of Palestine probably included the _genetic_ ancestors of today’s Palestinians, it wasn’t the cradle of their _cultural_ roots.
This assumes that culture simply “comes” out of one place. In fact, all cultures are agglomerations of things that were picked up along the way in different places. Much of what we now think of Jewish culture, for instance, comes from Europe, not the Middle East, and a fair amount of it comes from America as well. And when you go back 2000 or 3000 years, we really have very little idea what the culture was like or whether it had very much at all in common with modern culture.
And those texts you mention are elliptical, often unreliable, and contradictory. We rely on them because they are all we have, but that doesn’t mean they even approximate the truth.
The reality is that beyond very broad brush strokes, there’s very little one can say definitively about the cultural practices of people from long ago, let alone their commonalities with modern descendants. At bottom, sure, Jews lived in the Holy Land. So did the ancestors of Palestinians. It wasn’t a state, it didn’t in any way approximate the modern State of Israel’s boundaries, and we have no idea whether there was any cohesiveness between those folks’ way of life and that of modern Israelis OR Palestinians.
When it comes down to it, I don’t think that is what is doing the work for most people who are making this argument. Rather, they believe that God covenanted the land to the Israelites (whoever they happened to be), and that’s good enough for the modern state of Israel’s claims. And of course, since that claim is false and absurd and does not bind Muslims, it isn’t worthy of any consideration or weight.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Dilan Esper,
We have no idea what their specific religious practices were, and little idea whether what ancient Judaism (even if that was what was practiced) was like compared to modern Judaism, Christianity, or Islam for that matter. … While it is probably quite fair to say that Jews lived in the Holy Land, the idea that they were a majority or formed some sort of cohesive state with definable borders or that the current state of Israel in any way approximates where they lived seems quite far beyond the evidence.
Well, there were independent Jewish (or if your prefer, Israelite) states in the area to which we are referring. The most recent independent state would have been the Second Commonwealth (168-63 BC). While the borders of states and provinces in this era were fluid, that doesn’t mean states and governments did not exist. This concept of internationally recognized borders is an anachronism. What is pretty clear is that the Israelites inhabited a pretty wide swath of this land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. Archaeological evidence backs up there being a continuous Israelite presence going back for thousands of years as well.
Now, what does this mean? What connection do ancient Israelites have to modern Israeli Jews? It’s debatable, I suppose. Modern Judaism seems to descend from one of the main Israelite sects operating at the time, the Pharisees. The Samaritans, who were also operating at that time, are the only other surviving sect (I think) – a few thousand of them live in Israel – which they also regard as their homeland. Modern Judaism is largely based on the Talmud, which seems to have been completed around 500 AD (although it began much earlier, before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD). If you read the Talmud and modern Jewish legal responsa, the connections are pretty clear.
Add to this the fact that there has been a continued Jewish presence in the area since then, and that Jewish literature and people have always been attempting to return there and it seems pretty clear that today’s Jews are very much connected to the ancient Israelites. (Of course, Muslims have kept a continuous presence of their own there since the Arab conquests.)
January 5th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Kalkin #187
Yes, you are misreading me.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Kalkin 187
“But that’s not really why I care – it’s much much worse for the Palestinians. Unless I’m seriously misreading you, you’re saying that’s a priori an illegitimate criticism.”
I would say you might be misreading me. Remember what I said was those “who see just about every attempt at the attempt by Jews to preserve their identity as a people in a negative light” are anti-semites.
This is to say: if the Jewish people may not seek the safety of a state of their own, how are they to collectively seek their preservation? By absolute devotion to assimilation? This certainly has advantages, but the Holocaust really did show its limitations.
But one implication seems clear in a number of responses here: there is no answer. The Jewish people have no right to self-preservation, nationalistic or otherwise. And this is called anti-semitism.
For example, if a motive for anti-zionism is “a similarly tribalistic concern for the welfare of the Palestinians, as Palestinians”, but oppose a two state solution where Jews may maintain assure welfare by similar means, then they are giving rights to one for the express concern of giving it to another. The most pragmatic explanation is that the Jewish people are not entitled to the same rights, which is anti-semitism. (Opposition to a Palestinian state for the protection of a Jewish one can likewise mainly be attributed to anti-Arab racism.)
As to “a principled opposition to nationalism, along communist, anarchist, or simply cosmopolitan lines” or “a militantly atheist opposition to religion and religious states” — I will grant that I did not consider these motives. (But as an atheist myself, I would have to wonder what my fellow nonbelievers are smoking if they think the end of Israel would mean less theocracy in the region?)
January 5th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
I see that my earlier comment is in moderation limbo, but to summarise: Fred went from talking about archaeological proof that ‘the land belong to the Jews[sic]‘ then backpedalled to ‘Jews inhabited the area’, and as others have pointed out, not even the Israeli historical authorities are comfortable endorsing the American Sunday-school depiction of David and Soloman, let alone Moses and Joshua.
You also have eminent archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein who are happy to differentiate between the evidence in the ground and the traditions passed down to modern Judaism. That reflects the delicate cultural balance I talked about upthread.
Dilan Esper: Much of what we now think of Jewish culture, for instance, comes from Europe, not the Middle East, and a fair amount of it comes from America as well.
And again, there’s an interesting dynamic in Israeli society, given the orthopraxic character of Judaism, on how to synthesise the cultural elements that appear rooted in the land with the ones rooted in one’s ancestry.
Richard Blanco: There’s a couple million Armenians who probably would disagree with you.
Point taken, although the Armenian genocide was triggered by the collapse of Ottoman authority — the lashing-out of a dying beast. I’m certainly not going to over-romanticise those sprawly, heterogenous imperial edifices, but we’ve also reached a point where we can look critically at the romantic view of self-determination wrapped around the emergence of the nation-state.
January 6th, 2009 at 2:19 am
So-called “Right of Return” after all or most of the actual inhabitants who were expelled/fled/forced out is bullshit, to be perfectly honest. Population transfers, by hook or by crook, happen throughout history for largely bad reasons, but once they’re done and the people expelled are dead, you need to get the fuck over it and see if you can get some restitution in the form of money and an apology, maybe.
Where’s the “Right of Return” for native Americans, for example? Or the “Right of Return” for the various colonists, some of them living there for well over a hundred years, from North Africa? “Right of Return” presupposes that there is some fundamental “homeland” that a group of people have a “right” to live in, which is nonsense.
Before anyone brings up compensation for Holocaust victims, keep in mind that this was Germany apologizing and rewarding the actual victims and their immediate families. The problem with the Palestinian refugees (who are the suckiest position of all) is that we aren’t largely talking about “Give me back my land!” – we’re talking about “Give me back Great-Grandpa Achmed’s land!”
January 6th, 2009 at 5:11 am
Last century, the proposition “Is there any state in the world willing and able to defend the rights of the Jews” was definitively answered, “No.”
This is a ridiculous comment. States don’t typically defend the rights of any population within another country – especially when that country has a superior military (as the Germans did in the 1940s).
This is why Israel, among others, wasn’t willing to “defend the rights” of Cambodians in Pol Pot’s killing fields, or Muslims in Bosnia, or Tutsis in Rwanda. Do those populations also deserve exclusive homelands in a land of their choosing, regardless of whether it’s already occupied? Can they choose Israel?
January 6th, 2009 at 5:18 am
Where’s the “Right of Return” for native Americans, for example?
Last I checked, they can live anywhere in the United States, and even get to vote.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Re: a principled opposition to nationalism, along communist, anarchist, or simply cosmopolitan lines
I forgot to comment on this. Kalkin refers to himself as a self-professed communist, and appears to be making the same mistake that previous generations of communists made, which is to casually dismiss religion, ethnicity, and ideology as just so much nonsense. Kalkin, that’s idiotic, and if you continue in propounding it you will fail just the way that the Soviets failed. The only socialist states which ever proved themselves long-lasting and able to maintain the loyalty of their people, were the ones which placed a heavy emphasis on nationalism as well as socialism (Cuba and Vietnam for example). The most _economically_ and _socially_ successful socialist state, Yugoslavia, eventually failed for _political_ reasons: because Tito had failed to account for the power of ethnic nationalism. If Tito had decided to make himself the leader of a small and mono-ethnic Serbia instead of the entire state of Yugoslavia, his regime might still be around today. That’s probably the reason why the socialist revolutions in South America today are as much nationalist as socialist. (One might also add that, in contrast to the Soviets, they aren’t atheistic. Peguy and Maritain, among others, predicted that that would be the reason why Soviet socialism would fall, and they were right.)
If you ever want to create a society in which self-interest is given a less prominent role and self-sacrifice a greater one, and in which people value the collective over their individual well-being, then you’re a fool if you mock religion and nationalism, which are two of the strongest forces that can get people to do this. (This would be a terrible reason to be a Christian, of course, but it’s not a terrible reason _not_ to be an atheist.)
Dilan Esper,
The Talmud and the Old Testament are, at the least, evidence that the ancient Jews _believed_ certain things, whether or not you think those things or true or false. They are, in other words, evidence about what Jewish culture was like at the time. If you have a visceral antipathy to those texts then you can look at Josephus, or at the archives of the Greeks, Persians, and other empires that ruled over the Jews.
I disagree with the Jews’ belief that they are a Chosen People, and that any covenant they may have had with God still obtains today. I wouldn’t, however, call them ‘obviously false and absurd’. As for the origins of Palestinian culture, it’s pretty clear that the language and religion originate from elsewhere, so it would seem that those are pretty big elements of their culture.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The Talmud and the Old Testament are, at the least, evidence that the ancient Jews _believed_ certain things, whether or not you think those things or true or false. They are, in other words, evidence about what Jewish culture was like at the time.
But that’s reductionist. How important was their religion in their lives? What other religious practices did they have that have been dropped or lost? What religious texts have been lost? What did their preachers preach?
And of course, what were the other non-religious aspects of what they believed and how they lived their life?
I do not deny a Jewish presence in the ancient Holy Land. I think that’s a reasonable conclusion from the evidence. I deny that it means anything. We are talking about very different people with very different beliefs living in a much more undefined and amorphous space. And we really have no idea how close their connections to modern Jews are. (And this goes the same for the Muslims who have lived in the Holy Land over the last 1300 years.)
I disagree with the Jews’ belief that they are a Chosen People, and that any covenant they may have had with God still obtains today. I wouldn’t, however, call them ‘obviously false and absurd’. As for the origins of Palestinian culture, it’s pretty clear that the language and religion originate from elsewhere, so it would seem that those are pretty big elements of their culture.
Well, many Jews until about 75 years ago spoke Yiddish, and I don’t think that came from the Holy Land either. The Israeli government has promoted Hebrew usage for purposes of obtaining a closer connection to their forbearers (many of whom themselves spoke other languages besides Hebrew).
You see, Hector, that’s the problem with reducing culture to religion and then simply saying that “these people lived there”. No, VERY DIFFERENT people lived there, and the cultural connections are not nearly as clear as you think they are. Plus, we don’t have any idea about much of their culture at all.
Finally, I know you are a believer. But when you get into stuff about “chosen people”, I am sorry, that’s complete BS. How, exactly, are human beings supposed to determine who the “chosen people” are? Who qualifies as a “chosen person”– do you have to descend completely from “chosen people” or can there be intermarriage? And what effect does a group of people being the “chosen people” have on the determination of where they are entitled to live?
You yourself have conceded that at least in America, a separation of church and state is justified. Let me suggest to you that these sorts of unanswerable (by humans) problems is one reason that one is wise. Once you get into debates about what God said and did, there’s no proof, and no guidance as to how the dictates, even if proven, should apply in daily life. Plus there’s the matter of the people next door who believe in a different God. Better to keep the state out of these things and just try to determine these sorts of questions via secular criteria.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Dilan,
I believe I made it clear that, on theological grounds, I _disagree_ with the concept of the ‘Chosen People’. I think that whatever covenant existed between God and the Jews no longer obtains (although I’m open to changing my mind on the issue, as the Church of Rome has.) I support the existence of the State of Israel on nationalist and ideological grounds, not theological ones.
As for separation of church and state, I didn’t precisely say it was ‘justified’, I said that it was (in America) a necessary evil, as any attempts to do away with it would be a cure worse than the disease. That’s a long way from saying that a secular state is a positive good.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:33 am
I support the existence of the State of Israel on nationalist and ideological grounds, not theological ones.
Precisely what grounds are those? You’ll have to explain yourself better than that.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Longest..thread…ever.
Its pretty sad to see the original question used as a way to justify behavior of either side.
The situation has evolved into one where historical context is basically meaningless. Matthew himself has done this exercise, tracing this attack or that response back far too many years to make it useful. The Anon who posted the original question then stated “If a nation-state (with the right to exist) is attacked for the purpose of its dissolution, the government and army of said country is ethically permitted to resist and/or respond with violence (i.e. war).” Trying to analyze the ethics of war is giving war way too much credence. There is a much more simple solution to the question. War is never ethical. Its tragic, awful, objectionable, and much more. If you want make a case that a nation must defend itself because, for obvious reasons, we can’t just have nations taking over other nations, then fine. But don’t do so by trying to define the ethics of it.
As far as I’m concerned, Hamas and its allies, the Israeli government and the hardliners, have lost ALL moral standing in this war. They are like fighting children that need to be separated by force. There are only few ways to do that, and given the complexity of the situation, I’m not even going to be begin to analyze whether any of those ways actually amounts to a solution.
January 11th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
“Trying to analyze the ethics of war is giving war way too much credence… War is never ethical. Its tragic, awful, objectionable, and much more. If you want make a case that a nation must defend itself because, for obvious reasons, we can’t just have nations taking over other nations, then fine. But don’t do so by trying to define the ethics of it.”
Adrock,
I don’t know if anyone is paying attention anymore, but:
I would say that it is precisely because it is both sometimes necessary and always horrible — “tragic, awful, objectionable, and much more” — that war must be understood ethically.
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