Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace
I was debating with Jon Chait at a J Street panel this morning on the subject of “what does it mean to be pro-Israel?” As expected, we disagreed on a number of points, most of which I was right on and he was wrong on. But one thing he said in his opening remarks that I really disagreed with was that there was an ambiguity running through the J Street constituency as to whether the group was or should be pro-Israel at all.
That just struck me as kind of nuts. My J Street button said “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.” It’s not a subtle aspect of the messaging. But when we moved to the Q&A time it became clear that a number of people in the audience really were quite uncomfortable self-defining as “pro-Israel” in any sense and that others are uncomfortable with the basic Zionist concept of a Jewish national state. I was, of course, aware that those views existed but it had seemed to me that it was clear that that wasn’t what J Street is there to advocate for. Apparently, though, it wasn’t clear to everyone.
Which I think is interesting. Readers will know that I’m not a big fan of nationalism and I am a big fan of trans-national projects like the European Union and the United Nations. And it’s even true that I really kind of hope that hundreds of years from now there won’t be national states at all, instead we’ll all be lumped in with the Vulcans and the Andorians in a United Federation of Planets and off we’ll go. But there’s clearly no prospects for the abolition of the nation-state in the short-term. And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim. Or, for that matter, as the Palestinian claim. By far the best way to secure a just resolution of those conflicting claims is through a two-state solution—an independent Palestine, and a democratic Jewish Israel.
I completely grasp the pull of radical cosmopolitan values, but I think people who think that the area west of the Jordan River would be a great place to try implementing them in the short-term are being a bit crazy. It’s not even clear that Belgium or Canada will be able to survive as bi-national entities.
139 Responses to “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace”
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October 27th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Abb1 bait.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
It seems to me that multinational states have a much stronger track record than binational ones. In a binational state, both groups may see the potential for complete dominance of the political system, leaving them disinclined to work with the other. Or one group attains domination and sees no need to share power.
In a multinational state, there isn’t a zero-sum contest for power: all groups can share power in different combinations and no one group dominates overwhelmingly.
I think the odds that a binational state
October 27th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I think your column this morning made the point pretty well: the existing “pro-Israel” organizations in Washington want to define the meaning of pro-Israel to be support for their larger agenda, which is way beyond Zionism. And they might be successful in their attempt to do that.
What you saw in the audience was that their efforts have already born fruit: lots of people are not pro-Israel. Heck, I’m ambivalent. It’s not you who ought to be threatened by the existence of such people. It’s those whose long-term interests are ill-served by writing off a large mass of people who don’t like aggressive wars on flimsy self-defense rationales.
It’s really a question whether the basic Zionist concept of a Jewish national state is defensible. It was initially premised on the idea that history’s victims (and God’s chosen) would not abuse state power, against every historical precedent to the contrary. Marty Peretz would have us believe that holding Israel to a higher standard is anti-Semitic because it doesn’t let the Jews do all the horrible things that have been done to them in the name of self-defense or preserving order and security. But whenever he insists on full autonomy in all political and military matters for Israel, he drives another nail into the coffin of the rationale for Israel’s existence.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Bah… accidentally hit post too soon.
What I was going to say was that I think the odds of a binational state working in Israel/Palestine are low for that reason. That being said, there may very soon be no other choice.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
But if you’re “pro-Peace”, you can’t really be “pro-Israel”, since the main political parties in Israel are all opposed to a freeze on settlements, let alone a nearly complete withdrawal from the West Bank – the minimum requirements for a “peace” acceptable to Palestinians. The peace camp in Israel is nearly dead.
There is something I don’t understand about J-Street: what do they suggest the US should do to pressure Israel? Stop handing out billions of dollars in military “aid”? Allow the UN to pass votes on resolutions condemning Israel? Or nothing at all except empty rhetoric (the Obama approach, so far) so they get to keep their “pro-Israel” bona fide?
October 27th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Bi- and multi- national entities can only survive based on two things: constant compromise and mutual self-interest. In the middle east there have never been any signs that either side is willing to compromise on anything, and no one has yet made a clear enough case that a single country would be in both party’s self-interests. So, it won’t happen.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Gee, maybe that subtitling was accurate after all. Seriously, I think what Matt is seeing is the same dynamic we get in the Democratic Party: people on the relative fringe embrace the mainstream movement that’s closest to them, even if it’s not that close in absolute terms. Lots of socialists work within the Democratic Party even though the party is socialist like I’m an astronaut because I eat at Sonic. So I can see how Jewish proponents of a de-ethnicized Israel-Palestine (I’m one of them, by the way) might gravitate towards J Street. It’s up to J Street to figure out how to politely remind them that it’s not their operation.
On the substantive side, I would agree with Matt if he substituted “Israeli” for “Jewish people” when it came to claims on a national state. The Jewish people had a serious pre- and post-WW2 claim on a national state, and Israelies obviously have a claim on a national state now. But I think it’s specifically false that the Jewish people c.2009 have a claim on a national state, which goes to the heart of the alleged Right of Return as something untenable in a peaceful Middle East.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
the basic Zionist concept of a Jewish national state
I think it’s important to unpack those last three words, particularly in the context of the last 20 years, but also because the relationship between “Jewish”, “national” and “state” have been the points of the triangle that have defined Israeli politics ever since independence.
The dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, for instance, raised questions of how many times you can subdivide a relatively small area of land into relatively homogenous — and at very least stable — political entities. You can see similar tensions in the subdivision of former Soviet republics, with the various splinter statelets in the southern Caucasus.
I completely grasp the pull of radical cosmopolitan values, but I think people who think that the area west of the Jordan River would be a great place to try implementing them in the short-term are being a bit crazy.
That’s slightly strawmannish, though. Issues like the ongoing water crisis for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank make the point that even the “side by side” of the standard 2-state formulation is problematic.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Well, there is the perfect and then there is the good.
My ideal would be that there are no Jews, Italians or Chinese, but just humans. And rationally, nationalism or ethnocentrism is ridiculous; but those sentiments are hardwired into humans and won’t disappear soon.
I think the zionists committed a crime against humanity when they displaced the palestinians, but that doesn’t mean they must be thrown out of Palestine. We are where we are and the question is: where do we go from here.
I think the practical solution is two states along the lines of the Arab Initiative.
To me, the primary villain in this piece is AIPAC and those others who choose the emotional, ethnocentric answer. At least J Street shows some sense of humanity and fights their baser instincts.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
This surprised you, Matt?
Jeremy Ben-Ami is certainly a supporter of the concept and reality of a Jewish State, but to date, J-Street has aggressively positioned itself in oppositional terms. It is not AIPAC, it does not like the Likud, it will not agree with the current pro-Israel community on a host of issues. It has been aggressive in its support for a shift in American policy, for negotiations, and for a commitment to the peace process.
But it hasn’t pushed back against Israel’s critics, on either the right or the left. It hasn’t taken a stand against those who question Israel’s legitimacy. It’s not that there’s any reason to doubt the sincerity of their commitment to these issues, it’s just that they play no apparent role in animating J Street’s agenda.
As a group, J Street is best seen as one group of Israel’s supporters arguing against another group of Israel’s supporters. And so it’s entirely inevitable that a very large percentage of its supporters will be drawn from the ranks of those who dislike the right-wing supporters of the Jewish State, and from those who simply dislike the Jewish state. J Street has done nothing to distance itself from such folks; to the contrary, it has pursued big-tent approach, seeking allies in its fight against right-wing extremism.
At some point, though, the music stops. Right-wing extremism poses an existential threat to Israel’s future, but it’s neither the sole such threat, nor the most pressing or prominent. It’s essential that it be combatted, and J Street is filling a void. But will J Street actively lobby and mobilize its members in support of the continuation of military aid like anti-missile technology? If it supports engagement with regimes hostile to Israel – an intellectually defensible position – will it also press equally hard for tough diplomatic action when those regimes cross the line by funding and arming terrorist proxies?
In short, does J Street have any intention of pursuing an active pro-Israel agenda, or is it simply a group of pro-Israel people advancing a pro-Peace agenda?
October 27th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Marshall,
Israel’s right to exist is not subject to yours or anybody else’s approval, no more than your right to exist is subject to my or anybody else’s approval. Nor is it conditional on Israel’s government being nice towards the Palestinian, useful to US national interests, or any other condition.
The current Israeli government’s policies is a problem, both to the Palestinians and to Israel, but it has absolutely nothing to do with anybody’s rights.
Guy.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Maybe J Street needs to have its own Sister Souljah moment, and distance itself from all those people who do not support Israel’s right to exist.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
[...] kind of. Matt Yglesias* realizes that, hey, some of these people supporting J Street (the liberal counterpart to AIPAC) are, in [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
In 2009 there is something fundamentally wrong with basing nationhood on religious identity. It is a deeply illiberal–positively medieval concept.
Ethnic identity might seem a somewhat less suspect basis for nationhood, but even that’s debatable. Regardless, the idea that “Jewishness” is somehow an ethnicity is offensive.
So what we have with Zionism is the idea that one religion deserves its own country and we should not argue with this concept. And this country, premised on religious discrimination and intolerance, is deserving of our support despite its lengthy record of offensive war, human rights violations, and ethnic/religious cleansing.
Is the United States “bi-national” because it includes as full citizens Jews and non-Jews? Blacks and whites and Asians? Christians and Muslims? I didn’t realize that for a nation to function it was important for one ethnic or religious group to exclude and oppress all others. I guess the racists of the old south had it right.
A two nation solution to the terrible problem of Israel/Palestine may be the only viable one at this point, and even that is a vanishing prospect at best. But I don’t think anyone should be embarrassed about not supporting Zionism. I would not support a discriminatory Christian nation. I don’t support the many discriminatory Muslim nations that actually exist. I see no reason to support a discriminatory Jewish nation.
I’m as much pro-Israel as I am pro-Iran. I support the rights of all of the people of Israel (and Iran) to be free and safe from oppression.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
“A democratic Jewish Israel” sounds nice, but if it’s democratic, how do you make sure that it stays Jewish?
October 27th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
It seems pretty dubious to expect people to self-identify as “pro-Israel” just because they don’t support the annihilation of Israel as a state. That’s simply not what the term means, and adopting has a lot more implications than what you admit.
In a discussion about Tibet, would you identify as “pro-China” simply because you don’t support the Dalai Lama leading a crusade to destroy the PRC? And would you expect other people to do so?
As to “And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim.”, while I definitely support Finland’s continued existence, I would certainly not support an attempt to define it a “Christian state”, or a “white state”, whereas identifying as pro-Israel tends to imply at the very least supporting Israel being specifically a “Jewish state”.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
In short, does J Street have any intention of pursuing an active pro-Israel agenda, or is it simply a group of pro-Israel people advancing a pro-Peace agenda?
The latter is what the world needs more of. AIPAC and ADL already exist and do the job of going up against anti-israel forces (though lately they’ve been spending more time speaking out against pro-israel voices that arent pro-israel ENOUGH). It doesn’t make sense for an outfit like J-Street to duplicate the efforts of the ADL. That’s what the ADL is for.
The political left has turned on Israel, and hard, you can see it on this blog and nearly every other left-wing blog. J-Street is trying to change the narrative, trying to present a view of israel that the american political left can support and trying to shift the opinions of powerful people towards that view (Its important to remember that, like AIPAC, J-Street’s primary purpose is lobbying members of the US government). I think it is an important and worthy goal for an organisation like J-Street.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
It probably doesn’t help that AIPAC and the like define pro-Israel as “Israel, right or wrong”. Hell, AIPAC probably considers everyone at the J-Street fest as a straight up anti-semite. ‘Pro-Israel, but not in the same way that AIPAC is pro-Israel’, doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
ron, “I think the zionists committed a crime against humanity when they displaced the palestinians” is about the most simplistic reading of 1948 imaginable. For example, there would have been little or no displacement if the surrounding Arab governments had accepted the UN’s partition plan, instead of attacking the new state. That aside, even assuming that ALL the Palestinian refugees were pushed out of the new state (in reality roughly half were pushed and half fled on their own) there were at least the equivalent number of Jews “displaced” – attacked, stripped of their assets, forced to leave, or fled in fear – from the surrounding Arab countries. The difference is that Israel accepted and absorbed them, the Arad countries except for Jordan kept the Palestinians in refugee camps. Gaza, for example, is an Egyptian, not an Israeli, construct, though of course Israel’s current blockade is unconscionable. Ditto the refugee camps in Lebanon, where Palestinian refugees and their descendants have no political rights at all. Yes, the history is much more complicated than these few sentences could possible cover, but it’s closer to the truth than the history you provided. Speaking of history, anyone who thinks the Jewish people aren’t entitled to a state of their own is profoundly ignorant of it.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
What a crock, to compare Finland – the state of all citizens of Finland regardless of their ethnicity – with the state controlled by militant ethnocentric Zionist savages.
What a fucking disgrace. 4 million people are violently prevented from returning to their homes, their only crime being their ethnic origin. Peace my ass.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
That of course should be “Arab,” not “Arad.”
October 27th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Regardless, the idea that “Jewishness” is somehow an ethnicity is offensive.
Huh? How is “Jewish” not an ethnicity? Granted, it’s several ethnicities (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Iraqi…) bound together by a common religion, but the existence of secular Jews (where there aren’t secular Christians or Muslims) should suggest that you’re missing something.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Re: Readers will know that I’m not a big fan of nationalism and I am a big fan of trans-national projects like the European Union and the United Nations. And it’s even true that I really kind of hope that hundreds of years from now there won’t be national states at all, instead we’ll all be lumped in with the Vulcans and the Andorians in a United Federation of Planets and off we’ll go. But there’s clearly no prospects for the abolition of the nation-state in the short-term
How horrid. I can’t think of a much less attractive future. Mr. Yglesias perfectly sums up the godless, soulless, lawless nature of liberal late-capitalist postmodernist cosmopolite bourgeois nihilism.
Re: while I definitely support Finland’s continued existence, I would certainly not support an attempt to define it a “Christian state”,
How vomitously disgusting. John and those who agree with him are cordially invited to go get their n*ts*ck l*cked by a leprous orangutan. Finland very much ought to remain a Christian State, with a Christian established religion. So should most of the rest of European and Latin American nations. I fail to see just why any state should base itself on the absurd and false premise that all religions are equal.
Finland should be a Christian state, just as Afghanistan should be a Muslim state and Israel should be a Jewish state. Those who don’t like this state of affairs can go f*ck a gonorrheal goat.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Marshall:
What you saw in the audience was that their efforts have already born fruit: lots of people are not pro-Israel. Heck, I’m ambivalent.
I’m not ambivalent about Israel’s right to exist. I don’t think you can just wipe nations off the map, like Saddam did when he annexed Kuwait in 1991.
I don’t support Israelis ruling the occupied territories as police states, so I guess I agree with J Street. Since their ideas seem to me to be better for the continued survival of Israel – which is a democracy in the midst of dictatorships – I’d say they’re more pro-Israel than AIPAC.
In any way I don’t see the survival of Israel in any doubt since they have the U.S.’s backing. When Iran gets nukes it will get ugly but not hopeless.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
In 2009 there is something fundamentally wrong with basing nationhood on religious identity. It is a deeply illiberal–positively medieval concept.
But Judaism’s always been more complicated than “religious identity”.
The generation of post-independence Zionists is dying. The sabra generation of Israelis the same age as Matt are generally secular hummus-devotee Levantines. The post-Soviet immigrant influx of the 1990s is a bunch of pork-eaters. The Brooklyn haredi who bring a colonists’ militia mentality to the settlements are another thing again.
I think that Bernard Avishai’s comments on the Law of Return and the binary nature of Israeli citizenship are relevant in that regard.
If J-Street has a purpose, it’s to start a conversation about Israel-the-country in relation to the US, because the legacy of AIPAC has been to turn all policy discussions into ones about Israel-the-abstract-concept.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
By far the best way to secure a just resolution of those conflicting claims is through a two-state solution—an independent Palestine, and a democratic Jewish Israel.
OK. I’m with you on almost all of this. But would you support a democratic Islamic Iran? I think the question depends on what you mean by Islamic, and on what you mean by Jewish. Has an Islamic/Jewish majority? No problem there. But as soon as you have established an official religious or ethnic identity for a nation state, you are undermining some of the most basic principles of democracy and egalitarianism. And not only is that discrepancy between what we permit for Israel and what we condemn for everyone else not explained adequately, almost no one seems to be interested in trying to explain it.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
“arad” does not imply something.yes it would be arab.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Matt
I was at the panel and found it very thought provoking.
My take is a little different, perhaps because I’m an Israeli. It seems to me that what many were upset about was the premise that expressing fealty to a very specific slogan was a condition for inclusion. When JJ Goldberg added ‘love Israel” not the mix, people erupted.
If someone is uncomfortable with allegiance to the slogan “pro-Israel”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he is for its dissolution or for one state. To illustrate this proposition, allow me to pose a question to you: how many of the people who share you’re basic world view in the US are comfortable with saying “I’m pro-American”, “America first”, “I love my country” etc.? If they aren’t, does that automatically mean that they are against the basic premise of a United States of America?
It seems to me that liberals are averse to having that kind of relationship with a state. Elevating the state to level of a value smacks of fascism. Israel, like any other state, was and is a means to an end, not an end itself. Aversion is compounded by the fact that’s very easy to confuse “pro-Israel” with “pro-Israeli government” or “pro-Israeli polices.”
Therefore, I think we should be very careful about using identification with “pro-Israel” as filter for inclusion in what appears to be an important emerging movement. We need to figure out how describe our positions based on shared for values. The Jewish religious fundamentalist movement that drives the settlements is also pro-Israel, but they are talking about a very different Israel than pretty much everybody who was in the room this morning.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim. Or, for that matter, as the Palestinian claim.
What is the Jewish (or Finnish or Dutch or Thai) claim to a nation-state? Insofar as you’re not making an argument about…I don’t really know what the right qualifier is…an anthropologically coherent people existing in a specific place for a long time, I’m not actually sure what the claim is beyond the ability the enforce such a claim. Do the Kurds have an equally good claim, even were we to offer a Kurdistan in the Dominican Republic? Is it dependent on time in place? Or what?
(Just to be clear: I’m not arguing against the right of Israel to exist. I’m not sure that “right” has anything to do with it, but I like that Israel exists. I’m just not sure what justification Yglesias has for it, or if he’s saying–without saying–that there really is no justification beyond the ability to enforce existence. Which is fine, just surprising.)
October 27th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Re: In 2009 there is something fundamentally wrong with basing nationhood on religious identity. It is a deeply illiberal–positively medieval concept.
That presumes the basic premises of hipsterism, that ‘liberalism’ is good and that the medieval era was bad. But those are, of course, false, absurd, pernicious, principles. Indeed, any healthy and morall decent state would be both deeply antiliberal and would borrow a lot from medieval natural-law moral teachings.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
MY: And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim.
I’m not a philosopher but my understanding of liberal (as opposed to communitarian or theological or whatnot) moral philosophy is that *individuals* have rights, and it is *individuals* who can make moral claims. Thus the question is better framed as, “do Jews (or Israeli Jews) as individuals have a moral claim to a Jewish nation-state?”
The question is tricky because either you have to come up with an account of why persons fitting one description have a moral claim to a nation-state of that same description while persons fitting another description do not have such a moral claim, or you have to do away with the idea entirely that individuals have claims to a nation-states with certain attributes that depend on the identity of the individual. I’m actually rather OK with the second option, which is basically political liberalism (Rawlsian or otherwise).
Of course, even if you deny that individuals have claims to nation-states with particular attributes based on the individuals’ identity, it may still be a good idea for such individuals to live under such nation states.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
“It’s not even clear that Belgium or Canada will be able to survive as bi-national entities.”
That is so hateful. Don’t you know the rules? You’re not supposed to so much as hint at the possibility of seperation. Man. And I thought you liked Canada.
Canada succeeds because of its predominently Scottish heritage. That, and Winnipeg.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I completely grasp the pull of radical cosmopolitan values, but I think people who think that the area west of the Jordan River would be a great place to try implementing them in the short-term are being a bit crazy.
I think it would be the worst idea except for all the others (h/t Churchill). Since the other ideas, specifically, are genocide, apartheid, cold war with occasional terrorism between the two states, hot (and possibly nuclear) war between the two states possibly landing right back at occupation, and perpetuation of a status quo that includes constant terrorism and the occasional bombing of civilian neighborhoods, I don’t think “better than the other ideas” is a high bar to clear.
Radical cosmopolitanism, enforced with the biggest sticks the international community can come up with and bring itself to use, seems like the only idea (other than genocide) with potential to actually solve the problem in the long term. However much of a long shot it is, that’s worth consideration. (And I would point out that a large majority of Muslims in a state’s population does not necessarily mean a theocracy — look at Turkey, for example, and it has much smaller religious minorities and isn’t under as much of a microscope of international scrutiny as a united Palestine would be.)
P.S. It’s also the right thing to do in a deontological sense (humans have rights, not abstractions like tribes), and there may be people who push it for that reason. I favor it mainly because all the other band-aids are just going to fall off anyway; even a strategy with a low chance of success is better than one with zero chance.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Nationalism is one of those weird things. On the one hand it is obviously silly to think that national differences are enything but a human creation, on the other hand if you have no nationalism you get slaughtered by people who do. Israel has the right to defend itself and to control its immigration. Its a lot easier to swallow this from someone who doesn’t think its wonderful that mankind has split itself up this way than from someone like Marty Peretz.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Hector:
Mr. Yglesias perfectly sums up the godless, soulless, lawless nature of liberal late-capitalist postmodernist cosmopolite bourgeois nihilism.
There are laws, but they are democratically decided upon and not handed down, supposedly, on tablets from some Sky God.
But Michelle Bachmann et al were smart to halt the drive for a new one-world global reserve currency b/c that would have just brought the day of one world government closer.
Maybe J Street needs to have its own Sister Souljah moment, and distance itself from all those people who do not support Israel’s right to exist.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I am a proud and peaceful American. From sea to shining sea, the United States of Amer..er..what? Yes. Yes. I know….Goddamn it I’m so tired of being interrupted.
I have just been informed that it is theoretically impossible to be proud of something that doesn’t exists. If the United States of America has no functioning government, how can I be proud of it? And as a man of peace, how can I love a nation that has one thousand military bases?
The bottom line is, if I were Jew (and a lady) in Israel I’d be a militant, card carrying member of the Women in Green. If I were a Palestinian, I’d be strapping on a beltpack filled with high explosive and making my final video.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
1) I concur that the Nation State is the basic political unit. Hence, citizens owe their loyalty to the one to which they belong.
2) Re Israel, the problem for the American Jewish community is that a few Zealots believe that their view of support for “Israel” justifies betraying the USA –and those Zealots claim to speak for America’s Jewish community as a whole.
As JJ Goldberg noted in his 1996 book, Jewish Power, that is not true and many middle class Jews do not know what is being done in their name. But Those American Jews who do speak out against the Likud line are viciously attacked by the Likudite supporters.
3) A complication is that some Zealots are billionaires — and support a cottage industry of propaganda and political retaliation. An additional complication is that some of those billionaires –like Rupert Murdoch — are Gentiles and have their own hidden agenda. Plus a number of Jewish billionaires play no role in Middle Eastern policy and some –like George Soros — fund opposition to the Likudites.
4) America cannot remedy the historic injustice done against the Palestinians by inflicting a similar injustice against the people of today’s Israel.
But she can slap the Likud down hard. There is no excuse for the Likud’s creeping annexation of the West Bank with settlements and the extensions of the high wall. Our money –$Billions per year in aid — is paying for that extension of “Greater Israel”.
5) It is ironic that all this Zealot deceit and wealth is allegedly devoted to support of a small state which is owned by about 20 families and which is on a land corridor that has been walked on by every major power in history.
6) Meanwhile, Zealot treachery and deceit here in the USA is posing a real danger to the Jewish Community here. Both in law and in acts, the US has been a secure home and refuge for 6 million Jews.
But Germany was a similar refuge up until WWI, when the acts of a few combined with the political manipulations of the Zionists and the self-interested propaganda of Britain turned the German Gentiles against their own countrymen.
7) The real future of the Jewish community lies in being a prosperous, respected and powerful element of the world’s most powerful, nuclear-armed, and richest nation. The treachery of the Likudite Zealots is endangering that. No country will tolerate thousands of its citizens being killed with lies and deceit in service of another country.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Poptarts: I’m not ambivalent about Israel’s right to exist. I don’t think you can just wipe nations off the map, like Saddam did when he annexed Kuwait in 1991.
I’m not ambivalent about Israel’s right to exist either. Israel does not have rights. Israel does not experience suffering; it does not experience joy; it does not have a conception of itself as a being with a future. Israelis, on the other hand, do have rights. I think it would be a really bad idea to wipe nations off the map, so I’m in favor of he continued existence of Israel, but this is not because the social rather than personal entity that is Israel has rights.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Maybe J Street needs to have its own Sister Souljah moment, and distance itself from all those people who do not support Israel’s right to exist.
I’ve never associated J Street with those morons who obsess about a neocon cabal secretly running the world.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Huh? How is “Jewish” not an ethnicity? Granted, it’s several ethnicities (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Iraqi…) bound together by a common religion, but the existence of secular Jews (where there aren’t secular Christians or Muslims) should suggest that you’re missing something.
Well, central European Jews (who are mostly gone) looked and acted like other central Europeans. Arab Jews look like other Arabs. Russian Jews look and act like other Russians. American Jews look and act like other Americans. Yes, there are secular Jews, but these are, at most, a couple of generations removed from religious parents or grandparents. Millions of Catholics never attend mass. What of it?
October 27th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Sure Sheldon.
The zionists were in Europe plotting to establish a Jewish state in a territory with over 700,000 Arabs, in which Jews owned less than 1% of the land.
I’ve read some of Ben-Gurion’s diary entries, like this one from 1/1/1948:
“There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction….There is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”
October 27th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
SomeCallMeTim @29: I’m not arguing against the right of Israel to exist. I’m not sure that “right” has anything to do with it, but I like that Israel exists. I’m just not sure what justification Yglesias has for it, or if he’s saying–without saying–that there really is no justification beyond the ability to enforce existence. Which is fine, just surprising.
Exactly. I think this talk about states or peoples or nations having rights is incorrect and more importantly counterproductive. We should be thinking about this in terms of how to diminish number of the people who are being killed, made into refugees, or having their property taken or destroyed. Whether the best way to do so involves one state or two states or no states or “radical cosmopolitanism” is a second-order question.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I don’t think most people support a binational state in Israel/Palestine out of idealism – as Yglesias suggests – but rather out of realism. Anyone who has been to the Palestinian territories and has viewed the current level and pace of Israeli colonization and transformation of the West Bank knows that it is increasingly difficult to see how two separate states could be established. A binational state will soon be the only way to avoid what Palestine is becoming: isolated and dominated population centers with no control over their resources and their lives.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Re chris at 33: “Radical cosmopolitanism, enforced with the biggest sticks the international community can come up with and bring itself to use, seems like the only idea (other than genocide) with potential to actually solve the problem in the long term.”
————–
I strongly disagree. As Edward Gibbon noted in 1776, the only hope of freedom and liberty lies in a system of many nation states — as has prevailed in Europe for centuries.
That way, when tyranny arises in one nation, its people can flee to other nations.
Any global government would inevitably decline into a malign dictatorship in which civilization and technology will never — because there is no incentive to pursue science in such regimes (the dictator and his subordinates seize the fruit of your work). Also, the state controls scholarship to maintain order.
Mankind will never reach the stars under such a political regime. Look at the centuries long stagnation and decay of the Chinese under the Manchus and of the Italians under the later stages of the Roman Empire.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Correction to 44: Should read
“Any global government would inevitably decline into a malign dictatorship in which civilization and technology will never ADVANCE –”
October 27th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
We should be thinking about this in terms of how to diminish number of the people who are being killed, made into refugees, or having their property taken or destroyed.
Bullshit. If that’s how we should be thinking, then why not just lobotomize everybody at birth? That’ll sure make them peaceful and obedient.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim.
Accepting this as true, it begs the question: what rights do the Fins, the Dutch or the Thai, as ethnic groups, have to a nation-state? I think it would actually be a shockingly radical claim that the Dutch ethnic group has a right to a state constituted in such a way as to deny the Dutch national identity of its non-ethnic-Dutch citizens.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Don Williams: As Edward Gibbon noted in 1776, the only hope of freedom and liberty lies in a system of many nation states — as has prevailed in Europe for centuries.
This is a joke, right? Cuz, you know, nationalist Europe for the two hundred years following Gibbon was a happy, peaceful place without the slightest traces of malign dictatorship. Whereas now that a more cosmopolitan attitude is ascendant in Europe, the whole place has gone to shit?
October 27th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Re Don Williams
Shorter Don Williams: American Jews, stop supporting Israel or be prepared to enter the gas chambers.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
And as for the Federation of Planets, oh baby! Think about the racial and ethnic divides in that organization.
Hell, just on the one Starship we were allowed to follow racial tensions were always sky high, thanks to that country hick doctor who called himself Bones. He was always throwing around the racial invectives, “pointed ears,” “green blooded,” intimating that if you weren’t human you were some kind of interplanetary untermensch.
If it wasn’t 1968 and prime time television you know the good Dr. McCoy would have been calling Spock “green nigger” behind his back.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
to me being against israel as a ethnos based nation-state is like arguing that the naacp is racist because it is based on race and for blacks only. The naacp isn’t racist because the position of African-Americans in u.s. society as a politically powerless and poor minority (though less so today). People on the left have no problem with an organizations for blacks in our white society. “normal” organizations are majority white and run by whites without considering black interests even if they are not specifically white institutions.
I think that there is a valid comparison with israel. On the international level jews are a small minority that has been shown to be politically powerless in the past when it really mattered. Why should a jewish state(ethnic, not religious) be wrong when internationally there is no way that jewish interests are going to be looked after any other way? America (or canda or australia or any other “non-ethnic” state) is still a white, vastly non-jewish country. Even though it is open to all there is no way that jewish interests are going to be considered. IT just seems to me that nationalism is good when it is ignored or condemned but still pervasive and ingrained (nthn. europe foe instance) or when the people are non-white and “anti-colonial”.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Insofar as you’re not making an argument about…I don’t really know what the right qualifier is…an anthropologically coherent people existing in a specific place for a long time
Which the Jews didn’t anyway. They existed elsewhere. There’s a fancy name for it and everything. Even if you think they have a right to a nation-state *somewhere* (which is itself troublesome, as it is for any other ethnic or religious group, as Jason L. points out), their right to put it *there* is pretty nearly nonexistent. They didn’t build their nation-state in Antarctica, or on the moon. There would have been a lot less resistance to the idea if they had.
The U.S. is not currently a target of frequent Native American terrorist attacks, so there is a possible successful outcome of colonialism even if the colonists don’t give up and go home, but the U.S. missed committing genocide by inches on our eventual path to, well, radical cosmopolitanism, so there’s a lot about our history as a colonial power we might like Israel to avoid duplicating. (The creeping settlements approach is very familiar in this light, though.)
P.S. Hector, if you haven’t died of smallpox or cholera lately, thank some liberal hipster and his false, absurd, pernicious principles that you don’t live in one of those old “healthy” societies. The spectacle of someone using the Internet to promote medievalism turns out to be less funny that it seems like it ought to be.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
the naacp is racist because it is based on race and for blacks only
NAACP is not for blacks only, and its mission is to make sure that people of all races, black or white, are treated the same (check out their website). Which is exactly the opposite of Zionism.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Which the Jews didn’t anyway.
Right. I get that. So Yglesias can’t think that’s the description of a right to a nation-state. But if, as I half-suspect and Jason L suggests, Yglesias really believes that there is nothing compelling behind claims to a right to a nation-state, it would be be nice if he would just say that. It isn’t, I think, a trivial point.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
On the one hand, you can’t just get rid of Israel as a Jewish nation anymore than you can just give Manhattan back to the Lenape.
On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that the Jewish claim to a nation state isn’t “just as strong” as the Finnish or Dutch claim. An article about Finland isn’t going to generate 50+ comments arguing about whether we should even have this “Finland” concept.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
i don’t think that the naacp is racist, thats the point. Even if others can join the organization was still started to give blacks the same rights as whites.
Zionism is giving jews (as a group) the same rights that many other groups have. Of course group rights are anti-liberal, but we have subsumed individual rights in favor of group rights for all kinds of things (for instance affirmative action, disparate impact title vii legislation) so nobody (serious) is a pure lockean liberal.
I don’t know abb1’s background, maybe he/she is a member of a minority group and still seriously feels that only individual rights matter. I commend him/her for that pure position. To me the most vocal supporters of anti-zionism are either european leftists who already live in a nation state based on their ethnicity and benefit from it every day, no matter how multicultural they claim to be. The other group are Arabs/Muslims who are either strong arab nationalists or ‘ummahists’ which is its own sort of nationalism. Its very hypocritical
October 27th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
That way, when tyranny arises in one nation, its people can flee to other nations.
Yeah, cause tyrannical nations like, say, East Germany are totally cool with their people fleeing to other nations. They’d never try to put up some kind of wall with armed guards and… oh wait.
In any case, I wasn’t talking about world government, but only about multi-ethnic and multi-cultural government in Israel/Palestine specifically. Keeping some national borders in whatever positions happen to be convenient may be harmless (as long as people don’t take them too seriously, see #48), but individuals who don’t match the dominant religion, culture, or ethnicity of their nation shouldn’t be marginalized because of it (as it seems to be the purpose of “a X state” to do, including X=Jewish).
Any nation without a reasonable equivalent of the Free Speech, Free Exercise, Establishment, and Equal Protection clauses is, IMO, illegitimate and basically tyrannical (including earlier incarnations of the US). The fact that for a long time tyrannies of one sort or another were the only game in town doesn’t really change this.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I was all prepared to jump on the bandwagon of people criticizing Yglesias for granting jews a right to a homeland (or Finns or the Dutch), and then I noticed he doesn’t actually do that.
What he says is that they have an equal claim, and that actually seems reasonable. They are in a situation in which they have a contiguous population that could have a peaceful state given approproiate borders, would have difficulty having a peaceful state in conjunction with their neighbors and want to live as a distinct nation/state. The same is true for the Palestinians who do not want to be absorbed into either their Israeli neighbors or their other arab neighbors.
Which is to say that while the idea that either religious or ethnic groups (or some combination thereof) have a right to a state is nonsense. But the jews in Israel have as much right to a state as so other groups with identifiable states. Of course there are obligations on a legitimate state whether one of Israeli jews or Palestinians or the Dutch.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Re: Any nation without a reasonable equivalent of the Free Speech, Free Exercise, Establishment, and Equal Protection clauses is, IMO, illegitimate and basically tyrannical (including earlier incarnations of the US).
Unfortunately, your opinion is irrelevant to issues of morality, and in a civilised society you would have no more influence on the public discourse then a five year old who doesn’t like to eat broccoli. You remind me a lot of a teenager whining that he’s being oppressed whenevr he can’t do what he wants to do. We don’t listen to a five year old, so why should we listen to you?
I fervently hope, and pray, that societies which hold the values you seem to, tend to decline, and that secularism, liberalism, capitalism, and all the other bastard childern of the Enlightenment meet a well deserved end.
In any case, youve made it clear that you don’t like societies which have established religions, authoritarian governments, or whatever. Fine, I don’t liek bananas. What are you going to do about it? Go to war?
October 27th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Guy #11: Israel’s right to exist is not subject to yours or anybody else’s approval, no more than your right to exist is subject to my or anybody else’s approval.
Countries don’t have a right to exist, any more than corporations have a right to exist. Countries are legal fictions. The legitimacy of a country is based on the consent of other nations to its existence. Now, I also believe in the international legal norm that the taking of territory by force is per se wrong. I’m not advocating for the invasion or destruction of any country, but it’s odd to assume that any country, which didn’t even exist 60 years ago, has a right to exist as a fait accompli.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Zionism is giving jews (as a group) the same rights that many other groups have.
Really? What is it? What rights do groups similar to “the Jews” have? What right do “the Celts” or “the Gauls” or “the Slavs” have?
October 27th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
You know, this whole conversation is hard enough without Hector coming in and bewailing modernity as a whole, and going on and on about how awesome the dark ages were. It’s really unhelpful and unwelcome.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
“And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim.”
Not really. If Jews have a right for a nation-state in Palestine, don’t another stateless people – oppressed for centuries in Europe and who have also gone through a genocide – the Roma, have a right to have a nation-state in the Indian peninsula, where their roots lie?
How many people think that the Roma have that right? And why don’t they have it, if Jews have that right? Just because there hasn’t been any great movement among the Roma to have that kind of state?
And what about the native peoples of the Americas? Wouldn’t they deserve at least one state of their own among the dozens in Americas? But how many of supporters of Israel’s existence would be ready to support the establishment of such states for native Americans, perhaps turning Guatemala and Bolivia – the states with highest native populations – over to them?
What comes to Finns, Dutch and Thais, they have all been the majority population on the areas of their current states for a long time, basically since any kind of Finnish, Dutch or Thai identity (including pre-nationalism kind of) emerged.
Israel is a result of a late European colonialism, on the same level with let’s say Rhodesia. Granted, there was a small Jewish population in pre-Zionism Palestine, but Zionist Jews themselves tend to play down the size and importance of that population, perhaps 10 % of the pre-1890 population.
And then there’s the fact that Israel consists of 78 % percent of British Palestine and Jews form only 49 % of the population and that is not including the refugees outside the borders of the former British Palestine. If there would have to be two states, shouldn’t they be divided at least equally, 50/50?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Hector:
That presumes the basic premises of hipsterism, that ‘liberalism’ is good and that the medieval era was bad.
Hipsters believe the medieval era was bad only because they didn’t have Jazz back then.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
The correct comparison is not Finland as a “white state” or as a “Christian state” but Finland as a “Finnish state”, which it is. Finnish and Jewish are two ethnicities and, like very many ethnicities, both desire national self-determination. In practice, the nations of Europe maintain their ethnic national identities by restricting immigration. And when people from other ethnicities are allowed to settle in the country in large numbers for cheap labor purposes, there is backlash. It’s not a coincidence that Europe is politically oriented around ethnic lines.
I think asking whether people have a “right” to organize themselves politically based on their ethnic identity is somewhat besides the point–overwhelmingly, this is what people in most of the world want, and historically, people have usually been prevented from doing so only by imposition from above by some imperial power (which usually ends bad).
So, yes, I think any ethnicity who controls a substantial tract of land in which a large majority of the inhabitants desire ethnic self-determination should be able to form a nation. Kosovo or Abkhazia or Kurdistan or Israel or Palestine. I prefer to live in the US, but it’s not necessary that everyone else does too.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Hector just needs to go to the barber and get his humours balanced.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Lon @58: I was all prepared to jump on the bandwagon of people criticizing Yglesias for granting jews a right to a homeland (or Finns or the Dutch), and then I noticed he doesn’t actually do that.
What he says is that they have an equal claim, and that actually seems reasonable.
I really don’t think Matt was playing games with us. When you have a “claim” to something, you say that it is owed to you: that someone has a responsibility to give it to you or at least allow you to take it yourself. It doesn’t make sense for me to speak of my having a claim on a pony unless I purchase that pony, in which case then the person who sold me the pony owes me it. It would be *good* for me if I had a pony, but asserting a claim to something is not simply saying that you want it and that it would be good for you if you had it.
Owing something is the flip-side of having a right to something. The right to free speech entails the obligation of those who could limit free speech not to do so.
Now, I guess it’s possible that Matt himself doesn’t think that either people has a legitimate claim, merely that they are *expressing* claims. But a lot of other commenters on the thread have elided the distinction or in fact do believe that peoples or states or nations have rights, as opposed to individuals.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
If the Roma had colonized an area, held it until the original inhabitants either died/were assimilated/died in exile, defended it against invaders, and created a state recognized as sovereign by other states, then we’d consider it “right”, and as just as any other’s claim.
Most of the Israeli Jews have been born and raised there, which makes their claim as legitimate as anyone else’s. It’s certainly more legitimate than a bunch of outsiders who happened to be the descendants of people who lived there 60 years ago.
The fundamental question is, do groups have a right to inter-generational “restitution” for crimes committed to and by people largely now dead?” I would argue they do not, because justice is fundamentally a matter between the actual victims, whatever state authority existed at the time, and the actual perpetrators. Allowing the refugees back immediately after the 1948 War would have been just restitution. Allowing their descendants to immigrate to Israel is no such thing, and I find it supremely ironic that people who argue they have such a “right” don’t realize that that type of thinking justifies what the original Zionists were arguing for in terms of Israel (that it had a right to develop in historical Israel because they lived there 2000 years ago).
October 27th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
What are you going to do about it? Go to war?
I don’t need to, because as you and I well know, the track record of the Enlightenment is orders of magnitude ahead of the track record of the non-Enlightenment. It is authoritarian and/or theocratic societies that are more likely to resort to war to prevent themselves from losing their grip on actual human beings.
Your standards of “civilized society” have all the credibility and relevance of a flat Earth. Manifestly, you wouldn’t know civilization if you lived in one every day of your life.
If you don’t like bananas, don’t eat any, but I’ll continue to enjoy them with or without you. Heck, I’ll even reciprocate and not object if you set up an authoritarian society — as long as you don’t force anyone into it. Have fun whipping each other if that’s what gets your motor running. But the rest of the world won’t stop for you, nor should we.
In the long run, societies that work better work better, and no amount of ranting will change that.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
So, yes, I think any ethnicity who controls a substantial tract of land in which a large majority of the inhabitants desire ethnic self-determination should be able to form a nation
I’m not sure that answers anything. Does it matter how control was gained? How recently control was gained? Otherwise, it sure looks like might makes the relevant right. Which, fine, but then we ought to say it (and maybe even accept the implications of it). What’s the definition of “ethnic” here, anyway?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
The correct comparison is not Finland as a “white state” or as a “Christian state” but Finland as a “Finnish state”, which it is.
See, only a Finnish skinhead would call Finland a “Finnish state” in this sense. Which is exactly what Zionists are – a bunch of skinheads.
Which is fine. The only problem is that they happen to control an armed to the teeth state with nuclear weapons and to have a superpower for a sponsor.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Gosh, no way! People in J-Street are anti-Israel??
You mean a group founded specifically in order to criticize Israel – and to make criticizing Israel cool and popular – is made up primarily of people who, you know, don’t like Israel?
Seriously, Mr. Yglesias, this is a surprise only to you. And how it is a surprise to you is beyond me.
Maybe you want to go back and revise that Daily Beast article now? The one where you were like “I can’t believe all you naughty people saying that J-Streeters aren’t pro-Israel! Where do you get these fantastical notions! You must all just be crazy extremist nutjobs!”
My goodness, what’s next?? Possibly the dazzling light will shine down upon you and you’ll realize that Feminists For Life aren’t actually, you know, concerned about women’s rights or welfare?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Re: It’s really unhelpful and unwelcome.
Excuse me for existing, Damianai.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Realist @65: Finnish and Jewish are two ethnicities and, like very many ethnicities, both desire national self-determination.
Ethnicities do not have desires. Individuals who identify as belonging to an ethnicity have desires.
I think asking whether people have a “right” to organize themselves politically based on their ethnic identity is somewhat besides the point –overwhelmingly, this is what people in most of the world want, and historically, people have usually been prevented from doing so only by imposition from above by some imperial power (which usually ends bad).
I agree with you that this talk of rights is a distraction. With regard to what people want, people want a lot of things, and ethnic self-determination is one of many wants, along with wanting not to be killed, displaced, or robbed. All things being equal, I agree with you that ethnic self-determination is often a good idea, but it should not dominate our thinking on peacemaking as it does, even when it is a desirable part of a particular peacemaking problem.
So, yes, I think any ethnicity who controls a substantial tract of land in which a large majority of the inhabitants desire ethnic self-determination should be able to form a nation. Kosovo or Abkhazia or Kurdistan or Israel or Palestine. I prefer to live in the US, but it’s not necessary that everyone else does too.
This is problematic. Kurds do not control areas in Turkey and Iran; they merely populate them. Same thing with Muslims in Tingbjerg. How is it determined what constitutes an ethnicity? And why is ethnicity the criterion for self-determination, rather than religion, or ideology?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I’m not sure that answers anything. Does it matter how control was gained? How recently control was gained? Otherwise, it sure looks like might makes the relevant right.
By control I simply mean ownership of the land and residence in some sense, not military control. If the Basques, for example, voted to form their own nation, I would support them even though they have no means of militarily asserting that preference.
What’s the definition of “ethnic” here, anyway?
Any group for which identity is sufficiently deep to inspire broad support for nationalism qualifies.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Re: My goodness, what’s next?? Possibly the dazzling light will shine down upon you and you’ll realize that Feminists For Life aren’t actually, you know, concerned about women’s rights or welfare?
Of course not. Because as we know, the only women’s right that matters to the Yglesian yahoos is the right to butcher one’s children in the womb. The inhuman moral vacuity at the heart of the cosmopolitan late-capitalist project is starkly demonstrated.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Brett @68: If the Roma had colonized an area, held it until the original inhabitants either died/were assimilated/died in exile, defended it against invaders, and created a state recognized as sovereign by other states, then we’d consider it “right”, and as just as any other’s claim.
…
[D]o groups have a right to inter-generational “restitution” for crimes committed to and by people largely now dead?” I would argue they do not, because justice is fundamentally a matter between the actual victims, whatever state authority existed at the time, and the actual perpetrators.
The people who colonized the area, held it until the original inhabitants either died/were assimilated/died in exile, defended it against invaders, and created a state recognized as sovereign by other states are the parents and grandparents of most current Israelis. Similarly, the people displaced by the creation of Israel are the parents and grandparents of current Palestinians. If restitution for the crimes against Palestinians’ ancestors are not owed to current Palestinians, why are the rights won by Israelis’ ancestors inherited by current Israelis?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
My attitude is pretty simple: I’m pro-Israel anytime Israel decides it’s willing to give up its occupation and settlement of a land whose people it’s not willing to give full citizenship and voting rights to.
But I cannot support the Israel that’s committed itself over the past 30+ years, via the establishment of an extensive network of settlements, to a continuing occupation of that land.
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Sinai during the period between the Six-Day War and the Camp David talks was quite understandable. Israel had been attacked by conventional armies four times in its first quarter-century, so maintaining a buffer of conquered soil was what it had to do.
But when it began authorizing settlements on the West Bank in the wake of the Camp David agreements as ‘facts on the ground’ to impede the possibility of giving up the West Bank as it gave up the Sinai, it became clear that Israel viewed Camp David as a simple play to buy off its strongest adversary, Egypt, so that it could continue doing whatever it wanted in the other occupied lands.
Those of us who were hoping that Camp David was a first step toward Israel’s living in peace with its Arab neighbors have been disabused of this notion by over thirty years – half its history! – of consistent Israeli policy.
That Israel is, as far as I’m concerned, on its own. I don’t wish to see it destroyed, but I don’t wish to be numbered among its supporters, either.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Any group for which identity is sufficiently deep to inspire broad support for nationalism qualifies.
Now, that’s bullshit again. By this definition the stamp collectors and Star Wars buffs need their own states. This is all bullshit; how can you people not to see it?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Realist @75: What’s the definition of “ethnic” here, anyway?
Any group for which identity is sufficiently deep to inspire broad support for nationalism qualifies.
You realize this is circular? That this gives a green light to separatists anywhere? Maybe you do think that if a sufficiently large supermajority (hopefully not a bare majority — the results would be even more disastrous) in a sufficiently large area of land wants a separate state, it should be able to have it, but this seems to me to be a recipe for chaos.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
74:
I have zero interest in supporting ethnic political self-determination as a goal in itself–I’m happy with the American/Canadian way of doing things. I also fully agree that the desire not to be killed, displaced or robbed are more important than the desire for ethnic self-determination, to the extent that we can and must choose between them. I simply think that when a group of people want to form a nation and there is a feasible way of doing so, they shouldn’t be prevented due to either desire for national integrity by some other group or a cosmopolitan antipathy towards the idea of ethnic nationality in general. I cannot personally internalize the nationalistic desire, but I recognize it for what it is historically and respect its power over people.
I’m fine with religions or ideologies forming nations on the same basis as ethnicities. I doubt it would happen very often because ethnic ties seem generally much more dominant.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Not so circular. There should be a mechanism for areas that have a “broad support for nationalism” to secede without having to resort to guerilla violence and terrorism, although i would add that it should be a “broad and deep support for nationalism”. A bare majority vote I agree is probably too low a bar to clear, since a referendum is only a snapshot of public opinion at a specific time. The Canadian supreme court spent a decade wrestling with this question, and I think they never really did settle it.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
There is no such thing as “ethnic self-determination”. Your ethnic self-determination is the food you eat and dances you dance. You have it, you already have it, you idiot.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
“Now, that’s bullshit again. By this definition the stamp collectors and Star Wars buffs need their own states. This is all bullshit; how can you people not to see it?”
Abb1 do you believe there is any legitimate basis for any state?
October 27th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Yes, Sebastian. People living in a geographic area organize together to cooperate, to do things collectively: to build roads, defend themselves from invasions, to have common laws, common currency, etc.
Needless to say, this has nothing whatsoever to do with any imaginary categories that might exist in their heads.
Sometimes these imaginary categories make some of them act crazy, that’s for sure. Those need to be shunned and possibly isolated. Encouraging this kind of madness should be a criminal offense. But that’s all obvious, everybody knows this, it’s just that Zionism has managed to carve an exception for itself by sophistry, and by constant whining and complaining.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
I simply think that when a group of people want to form a nation and there is a feasible way of doing so, they shouldn’t be prevented due to either desire for national integrity by some other group or a cosmopolitan antipathy towards the idea of ethnic nationality in general.
The problem is that I’m not sure that there’s nothing “simple” here at all. Say the Arabs of Palestine want a state that excludes Jews, but that the Brits don’t recognize that right. Does that prior claim–and I’m guessing here that at some time X, the Arabs (if they are Arabs; are they?) had sufficient ownership of the land, but not military control–supersede Jewish/Israeli claims based on ownership that would not be possible but for the Brit wrongful rejection of the Palestinian/Arab claims? How coherent to the positive claims for nationhood have to be? That is, is it enough that everyone wants an Arab state encompassing that land, even if there is no agreement about size of the state, type of govt., etc.?
It’s one thing to say that you accept what comes, it’s another to treat that as a principle.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
You’re taking my point about how justice is not inter-generational, and unreasonably extending it to refer to all inter-generational connections. But for the record, it’s because the Israelis happen to be living and born upon the state in question, compose the body of that state, and therefore receive whatever privileges that state deigns to give.
In other words, you’re trying to portray me as justifying the rights and rule of the Israelis born and living on the land in question as being due to the fact that their ancestors took the land in question. I’m making no such claim (other than that justice is not inter-generational) – I see the justification of Israeli rule in the area in question as being a result of their current residency and composition of the state that is Israel.
That’s why I add the components of being able to defend their territory from other claimants, and being recognized as sovereign by other groups.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
defend their territory from other claimants
Might makes….
being recognized as sovereign by other groups.
This seems circular. Other groups recognize legitimate sovereigns, which they know is legitimate because other groups….
October 27th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
It’s still insane, Brett, even more so. So, the Star Wars buffs should take over Vegas and expel everyone else? And be recognized by the swingers?
In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: people living in a geographic area organize in community, state, and then they (or some of them) might get this new identity (the Finns, for example). They might have a million other identities: tribal/ethnic, professional, whatever; a million different languages (in Italy every village still speaks its own dialect) – it’s all completely irrelevant.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Say the Arabs of Palestine want a state that excludes Jews, but that the Brits don’t recognize that right. Does that prior claim–and I’m guessing here that at some time X, the Arabs (if they are Arabs; are they?) had sufficient ownership of the land, but not military control–supersede Jewish/Israeli claims based on ownership that would not be possible but for the Brit wrongful rejection of the Palestinian/Arab claims?
The historical case is not so important. The “rights” to the matter are irrelevant, in my opinion, what matters is the preferences of the people living there today. There are two large groups of people in the region who both want ethnic political self-determination, and the rational answer to that is two nations. There are details to be worked out on who gets what land and who gets what resources, but those details have to be worked out regardless.
How coherent to the positive claims for nationhood have to be? That is, is it enough that everyone wants an Arab state encompassing that land, even if there is no agreement about size of the state, type of govt., etc.?
Yes, provided the main internal factions are willing to form a state with each other. They can work that out the same way established nations work those issues out (preferably by democratic means). There is never total agreement on such issues anywhere.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
abb1: Let’s assume you’re completely correct on what ethnicity is–an arbitrary, irrelevant, imaginary, racist category that should have no bearing on anything. OK. Now the question is what we should do with the vast majority of humanity which thinks differently from you on that point. Should we force them to organize themselves politically the way we want them to rather than the way they want to? How do you propose to accomplish that? If two groups of people refuse to get along with each other in a single state and both express a desire to separate politically, do you really want to stop them just because you don’t respect their internal motivation?
October 27th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Or the Afrikaner claim?
October 27th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Brett,
I don’t mean to be twisting your argument; it read to me like Israelis inherited rights while Palestinians didn’t, which is why I wrote what I did.
Even if the claim current Israelis have to the land in question does not directly stem from the fact that their ancestors acquired and defended the land and established a state there, but rather is
it seems like you’re just inserting one element between what contemporary Israelis’ ancestors did and their present claims, namely that their ancestors gave birth to them or their parents, which resulted in them currently residing and composing the state that is Israel, and then saying that that one element is sufficient to separate contemporary Israelis’ claim from the actions of their ancestors. I don’t find this convincing, as I could easily insert the same element between the displacement of the ancestors of contemporary Palestinians and the claim that contemporary Palestinians assert to the territory controlled by the state of Israel.
Even if history starts in, say, 1974, your argument seems to be that residence in a territory and inclusion in the state corresponding to that territory is self-justifying. That is, it sounds to me like you’re saying that Israelis have the right to occupy the territory in question because they reside there, and they have the right to compose the state governing the territory in question because they compose that state.
Practically speaking, I think there are plenty of good justifications for a jus soli as opposed to a jus sanguinis, I agree with you that contemporary Palestinians should not be granted a right of return (whether people who were displaced 60 years ago should be able to go back is moot because almost none of them are alive right now), and I think that the borders of the 1949 armistice are fait accompli, but I think your justifications for why the territory currently controlled by Israel should remain so controlled are weak.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Let’s consider if even Israelis are really pro-Israel. Not if the result of its official actions only engenders fear and loathing. Regardless if you are living in the Gaza prison, or the Sderot prison, or whether you fear the Zionist fist, or hide behind the Zionist fist, any which way there doesn’t seem to be much being done that is truly pro-Israel.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
I think your justifications for why the territory currently controlled by Israel should remain so controlled are weak.
To be fair, I don’t think he’s offering justifications (see quotation marks around “rights”). He’s calling for recognition of the facts on the ground. There is nothing, as far as I can see, to prevent current Palestinians from taking back the land by driving the Israelis/Jewish people out and declaring a state. If they could defend it, it would be theirs and it would be, to the extent the word can be said to be applicable, legitimate. If those driven out Israelis could then turn around and drive out the Palestinians, you could have another legitimate Jewish state. And so on. Insofar as there is a constraint on this sort of passing of statehood, it would be the pragmatic considerations of other states and presumably particularly world powers.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
[...] Yglesias has some interesting thoughts on conflicting values for progressives in the Israel-Palestinian [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
SomeCallMeTim,
To be fair, I don’t think he’s offering justifications (see quotation marks around “rights”). He’s calling for recognition of the facts on the ground.
I suppose that’s a fair reading of what Brett wrote. And in the spirit of what I and Realist had been arguing earlier, talk of who has rights is distracting and a bit of an academic exercise (in this particular case). In my initial reading, it seemed to me he was being inconsistent and was offering a weak justification for why the facts on the ground are the way things ought to be. That’s still what his words look like to me, but I’m willing to give it a rest.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Sometimes these imaginary categories make some of them act crazy, that’s for sure. Those need to be shunned and possibly isolated. Encouraging this kind of madness should be a criminal offense. But that’s all obvious, everybody knows this, it’s just that Zionism has managed to carve an exception for itself by sophistry, and by constant whining and complaining.
That categories are not really imaginary it’s just the geographic region is the overriding measure because that’s practical.
Also the Zionism exception is actually by continually exploiting western guilt.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Re: You know, this whole conversation is hard enough without Hector coming in and bewailing modernity as a whole, and going on and on about how awesome the dark ages were. It’s really unhelpful and unwelcome.
Anthony Damiani,
You’ll be pleased to know I am going to be rather busy for the next few months, so I am going to take a hiatus from this blog, other then perhaps interjecting the occasional shout of bestiality-themed abuse. Enjoy the charmingly airheaded moral vacuum that is late-capitalist liberalism for awhile- I should be back again in the spring, if America hasn’t gone the way of the late and unlamented Roman Empire by then.
Bye for now.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: I was debating with Jon Chait at a J Street panel this morning on the subject of “what does it mean to be pro-Israel?” As expected, we disagreed on a number of points, most of which I was right on and he was wrong on. But one thing he said in his opening remarks that I really disagreed with was that there was an ambiguity running through the J Street constituency as to whether the group was or should be pro-Israel at all. [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
if America hasn’t gone the way of the late and unlamented Roman Empire by then.
I lament it! At least if we still ran the world everyone would be eating better! That’s… probably the only benefit though.
Oh, and the world would be having lots more orgies.
On second thought, still having the roman empire around would be awesome.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
That the organization’s first big meeting had this kind of melt-down isn’t very auspicious. Who did they imagine they were exciting (and inciting) with all the “AIPAC is the enemy” rhetoric anyway? Ben-Ami’s Bernstein op-ed moment won’t take 20 years. It won’t take 20 months. What a pathetic maroon.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Now we’re talking about Zionism as if it was free.
The US is carrying out very expensive occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure that the resources of those territories are not used to fight Zionism.
There are 100 million Arabs living in US supported dictatorships because democracies in Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia would render Zionism non-viable.
The US’ single most pressing diplomatic priority is restraining Iran’s growth in the nuclear field, which would be no more fearsome than Brazil’s if not for the vulnerability of Israel as a Zionist state.
Pakistan hopefully will not be torn apart by the bribes the US is injecting into its political system to convince it to confront groups on its territory that the US would not care about if it was not in a global war to defend Zionism. But whether it is or not, this is another enormous direct outlay of resources.
A South Africa-style settlement of the Zionist project would be much, much cheaper than the status quo.
For now, the United States can afford it, and distortions in its political system have made Americans willing to pay to prevent a South Africa-style settlement. It is not clear that the US will be able to support Israel as a Jewish state indefinitely.
And if the US cannot, Israel certainly cannot support itself.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:10 am
This may sound very weird but almost nobody makes any arguments about why Americans who are not Jewish or evangelical Christians should privilege Israel’s interests over any other nation’s in the Middle East. They assume that Israels’s interests are American interest but I don’t know why that should be assumed.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:23 am
The answer that is often given, and I do not necessarily agree with it, is “democracy promotion”. The idea being that we should support Israel for the reason that it is the only “true and free democracy” in the Middle East. Of course that only makes sense for people that live in a fantasy world where democracies are somehow magically unable to commit human rights violations. Unfortunately it seems that everyone in Washington seems to live in that fantasy world.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:43 am
“The Finnish Aliens Act provides for persons who are of Finnish origin to receive permanent residence. This generally means Karelians and Ingrian Finns from the former Soviet Union, but United States, Canadian or Swedish nationals with Finnish ancestry can also apply.” First, Abb1 came for the Israelis. Then for the Finns.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Abb1 doesn’t care how hard he gets owned. He will persist in his delusions no matter how unreasonable they turn out to be.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:36 am
I don’t dispute this as formulated at the moment. But what are the criteria by which such claims are evaluated?
October 28th, 2009 at 3:11 am
@91: abb1: Let’s assume you’re completely correct on what ethnicity is–an arbitrary, irrelevant, imaginary, racist category that should have no bearing on anything. OK. Now the question is what we should do with the vast majority of humanity which thinks differently from you on that point.
Yeah, let’s assume some of it. I’m not saying that ethnicity is a racist category, only that it belongs to politics just as much as you being a Star Wars buff. Otherwise, please feel free to eat your borsch, sing your Danny Boy, and do whatever it is your ethnicity requires you to do.
Now, the problem with your second phrase is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t think differently. Typically only skinheads, Zionists, and (for some reason) some American liberals think differently.
Of course sometimes politicians (con-men) start pushing these buttons and it goes out of control, but that’s usually temporary, temporary insanity.
@106 The Finnish Aliens Act provides for persons who are of Finnish origin
“Finnish origin” means that one of your parents or grandparents was a citizen of Finland. Only a skinhead like you would imagine that it means something else.
October 28th, 2009 at 4:30 am
To be honest, it’s not so much a justification of Israelis’ right to live there as it is a rejection of the Palestinians’ claim that they are owed the right to live on land they were never born on to (of a state they are not a part of and actively reject) simply because their ancestors once occupied the land (which, by the way, applies to the original Jewish claim that they had the right to set up their own state in the land because their ancestors lived there 2000 years ago).
I don’t really think you can say that “I was born on this land, govern it, and make up the state, therefore it’s mine even if the reason I was born here is because my ancestors conquered it” with “I am owed this piece of land because my ancestors lived there at one point and did not voluntarily relinquish it, even though I was never born and have never actively lived upon it or as part of the state governing it” are equivalent, in the way you seem to imply they are. The former has the ancestors as a reason for why the people with the claim are born there but not a real justification as to why they have the right, whereas the latter has the ancestors’ one-time possession as the sole justification as to why they possess it and have a “right” to it as opposed to the actual people living there.
I’m not saying they should, but that being able to control the territory in question against other claims, and being recognized by other groups as legitimate, is a requirement if they choose to do so.
That’s more or less true, although I would add that from a “justice” standpoint, if the Palestinians were to seize the land back and expel Israelis born there who controlled it, those Israelis ought to be given some form of restitution. However, if all or most of them died off after the fact, and then their descendants re-invaded and expelled Palestinians who had been living on, born on, and governing the land in question, those Palestinians would be owed restitution.
I suppose at heart it’s a recognition of what exists on the ground, and attempts to apply a concept of justice to it. Meaning that it’s not entirely a matter of amoral “Right of Conquest” – more a case of Squatters’ Rights (remember the phrase “possession is nine-tenths of the law”?).
Like I said, there really aren’t any justifications for these claims other than that the people in question have lived there their entire lives, control the territory in question and defend it against other claimants, and are recognized as the sole possessors by the peers. Looking for anything “deeper” or more “fundamental” leads you into the ugliness of claims based on some perceived “ethnic” or “religious” right (which is just another way of saying that some group has a “right” because they are just fundamentally different from other groups of human beings).
October 28th, 2009 at 4:35 am
Sorry, that came out too wordy. The basic principle is that justice is not inter-generational – just because someone’s father committed a crime against someone else’s father doesn’t mean that the victim’s son has the right for restitution and punishment against the perpetrator’s son. In the case of Israel, it means that the descendants of the Palestinians expelled do not have the right of restitution (i.e. their ancestors’ land) against the descendants of Israelis who drove them from it, who had nothing to do with the crime in question and have possessed the land in question their entire lives.
The justification for that definition of justice on the international level is basically that history is full of betrayals, back-stabbings, invasions, and so forth, and trying to get revenge and punishment against those who had nothing personally to do with the acts in question only breeds additional hatred and conflict.
October 28th, 2009 at 4:58 am
Now, the problem with your second phrase is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t think differently. Typically only skinheads, Zionists, and (for some reason) some American liberals think differently.
So I guess Kurdish nationalism doesn’t exist, Basque nationalism doesn’t exist, Quebecois nationalism doesn’t exist, Chechan nationalism doesn’t exist, Tibetan nationalism doesn’t exist, Irish nationalism doesn’t exist, Tamil nationalism doesn’t exist…and we haven’t even gotten to all the ethnic nationalisms which don’t exist in, say, the Balkans. And those are just the failed (non-existing) ones! No, only Zionists and liberals would think about orienting states on ethnic lines. And it’s just a coincidence that France is populated mostly by French people and Germany by people of German ethnicity.
October 28th, 2009 at 6:44 am
[...] of course, there is the issue of whether J Street is pro Israel at all, which Yglesias discusses. As a non-Jew reporting on what I heard yesterday, I find anyone saying J Street isn’t [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 7:03 am
@112, they do exist. When people feel they are getting a rotten deal because of their ethnicity or race, they will fight to defend themselves, of course. In that case the goal and motivation of most of them is to establish ethnic/racial equality, justice.
And those who are not satisfied with equality and justice, those who want some special exclusive “Jewish” or “Kurdish” state for themselves are skinheads. But they are a small minority, usually.
Most people co-exist with other ethnicities and races just fine. Where I lived in the US last, my neighbor on the left was an “Irish” (I think, because he was a stereotypical Boston cop), on the right a “WASP”, the one across the road a “Norwegian”. No one had any privileges because of their ethnicity, and so no one cared. And why would they – none of them was a skinhead.
Brett, your ideas are obsolete. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, acquisition of territory by means of war are simply not legal anymore. It happened immediately after the WWII, that’s the starting point.
If I kick you out of your house, move in, and start a family there – 60 years later you still can get your house back and throw my children and grandchildren out to the street. They are simply not the rightful owners.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:12 am
And it’s just a coincidence that France is populated mostly by French people and Germany by people of German ethnicity.
There is no “German ethnicity”. “The French” are all the citizens of France and “the Germans” and all the citizens of Germany. The population of Alsace are French, and they used to be Germans not too long ago. You have no idea what you’re talking about, you hold in your head some very primitive ideas, misconceptions about this world.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:46 am
No, you haven’t. If you had, you’d know he had never said that.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:11 am
No, you haven’t. If you had, you’d know he had never said that.
Ilan Pappe, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”
(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006) page 69.
Futhermore:
Ben-Gurion: “If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our god is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? Thay see only one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
Quoted in Nahum Goldmann, “The Jewish Paradox, trans. Steve Cox (New York:Grosset and Dunlap, 1978) 99
October 28th, 2009 at 11:16 am
You mean like how they outlawed war?
I think you have a rather odd position of these laws. They’re not Divine Writ handed down from heaven, nor overarching law coming from a world government – they’re just treaty arrangements agreed to by states, and only applicable to those states.
Only if there’s a treaty arrangement that says that property rights in that area pass inter-generationally unless specifically revoked by the owner. Has Israel signed anything resembling that lately?
Without that, the usual definition of justice applies. It’s particularly apt in Israel’s case, because the old legal regime that governed the property rights and legal status of the Palestinians living in what is now Israel proper – the British Empire – does not exist, and the new state does not have legal continuity with it.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:50 am
“the usual definition of justice”
Finders keepers?
October 28th, 2009 at 11:53 am
“Most people co-exist with other ethnicities and races just fine. Where I lived in the US last, my neighbor on the left was an “Irish” (I think, because he was a stereotypical Boston cop), on the right a “WASP”, the one across the road a “Norwegian”. No one had any privileges because of their ethnicity, and so no one cared.”
Holy anecdata.
First, while still quite racist, the US is one of the least xenophobic nations in the world. Now it is still pretty xenophobic, but compared to most of the major Western-style countries (say Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Australia, South Korea) and nearly all of the other major countries (China, India, anything in the Middle East, most places in Africa, most of East Asia) the US is pretty good on that score. The only places that I can think of which are better would be Canada (though mostly for Asians not black people) and arguably Brazil (though that is a really complicated topic which I probably wouldn’t want to have to defend too deeply).
So anything on the subject of people of different races/ethnicities getting along can’t use “in the US” as the norm. It is much better than the (horrific) norm.
Second, even in the US, the general trend is that up to the point of pretty much free mixing, racial/ethnic animosity becomes more and more intense the more the people who *feel* different are forced to mix together.
Third, I’m pretty sure that (and because of the success of the much derided US melting pot) the Irish guy and Norweigan didn’t actually feel much ethnic difference overall compared to what say a Chinese person feels in distinction to a Japanese person (much less Israeli/Palestinian) or an Indian and a Pakistani. So you’re comparing people who have subordinated one form of ethnicity (Irish/Norweigan) to another (Americanism) to people who have elevated their rival forms of ethnicity (Israeli/Palestinian)
With that in mind, Israelis/Palestinians are much closer to the norm of ethnic animosity than the US, AND they are forced to deal with each other a lot more closely than many in the fairly spread out US.
I guess I feel it is just fantasy to say that “Most people co-exist with other ethnicities and races just fine.” It is a great aspirational fantasy. But still a fantasy.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
With that in mind, Israelis/Palestinians are much closer to the norm of ethnic animosity
I don’t know of any Israelis/Palestinians ethnic animosity. Palestinians are a multi-ethnic society, all kinds of people lived in Jerusalem for centuries and they were getting along just fine. Like I said, the only problem is a group of skinheads who call themselves “Zionists”.
It is a great aspirational fantasy. But still a fantasy.
It’s not a fantasy, it’s reality. People of different ethnic backgrounds live together without any problems everywhere, it’s much more a norm than exception. C’mon, surely you know that.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Interesting discussion..
First of all, J Street itself has basically admitted it is not pro-Israel. That’s why their campus arm has officially dropped the ‘pro-Israel’part of the slogan.
Second, anti-Semitic revisionism aside, the fact is that if it were not for the Arab attempts at genocide, Israel today would consist of nothing more than the land they were allotted in the original 1948 partition.
That’s particularly true of the Old City and Judea and Samaria(AKA the West Bank). If King Hussein hadn’t believed Nasser’s BS about how he was winning the jihad in’67 and attacked Israel, those areas would still be exactly the way a lot of the people on this board obviously prefer them…Judenrein, Jew-Free.
Third, the refugee problem was caused entirely by the Arab nation’s decision to attack Israel in defiance of the UN and try to massacre every Jew in Israel. That refugee problem consists of about 500,000 Arabs and almost a million Jews who were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world and almost entirely resettled in Israel ( no mention of those refugees on J Street’s website, believe me). Nobody has yet convinced me why Israel is responsible for ’solving’ a refugee crisis they were not responsible for.
The real problem in Middle East peace is the Arab refusal to live with Jews in peace and equality. Mere concessions will never be enough as long as that mindset exists. The Arabs look at this as a tribal war, which is why the convenient nonsense of a two state solution is nothing but a mirage. The current government of Israel is a direct result of the realization of that basic truth.
J Street actually cares nothing about Israel in real terms. It’s primary focus is on left leaning Jews to provide the Obama Administration with a fig leaf for its pro-Arab appeasement minded policies.
It’s possible to be pro-Israel and pro-peace, but to do that one has to embrace certain truths that contradict J-Street’s basic ethos.
Regards,
Rob
October 28th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Maybe. Keep in mind that Ben-Gurion only accepted Partition as a stop-gap; he specifically said that he would not and could not renounce the claim to the rest of Mandatory Palestine. Assuming Israel somehow remained a Jewish-dominated state in the interim (unlikely, since half of the population was Arab before the 1948 War), I wouldn’t be surprised if they had begun encroaching on the remaining land.
Israel was responsible largely for driving out the refugees, even if it occurred in the context of a war.
Well, no. The problem is that the descendants of the Palestinian refugees haven’t renounced their claim to the land occupied by Israel, and the Israeli government is still tacitly promoting the de-population and removal of the Palestinian Arab population in the Occupied Territories.* Both these issues garner sympathy among the surrounding Arab states’ populations.
*In particular, they seem to want it both ways – they wanted to hold on to the West Bank forever, and are only begrudgingly willing to give up part of it for peace, yet they continue to treat the territory as if it is merely “occupied territory” with whose population they are at war with (which gives them an excuse to do religious-based favoritism).
October 28th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
EDIT: “. . . descendants of the Palestinian refugees continue to demand the land occupied by Israel . . . “
October 28th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Has Israel signed anything resembling that lately?
Israel is a member of the UN. But regardless, the only reason Israel is still controlled by Zionists is that the US provides diplomatic support. If not for that, there would’ve been economic sanctions decades ago, colonization would’ve quickly become unsustainable, and almost all them would’ve left, or never came. It would’ve been over decades ago, native population would’ve returned and restored their villages and olive groves. Simple as that.
October 28th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
When people feel they are getting a rotten deal because of their ethnicity or race, they will fight to defend themselves, of course.
OK, let’s go with that–ethnic nationalism is a result of ethnic persecution. If Zionists and liberals are the only people who mix ethnicity and politics, why are certain ethnicities getting persecuted by governments which are neither Zionist nor liberal? If Chechan nationalism is a result of Russian oppression, then Russians too must think ethnicity has something to do with politics. Indeed, it is hardly a rare thing that members of the majority ethnicity oppress members of minority ethnic groups–do you think otherwise?
There is no “German ethnicity”.
That’s just false. The Germans have a language, a culture, a cuisine, and are even genetically distinct from the other people’s of Europe. What do they lack from being an ethnicity?
October 28th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
why are certain ethnicities getting persecuted by governments which are neither Zionist nor liberal?
Quite often, in fact, because skinheads (on both sides) create various diversions and provocation.
The Germans have a language, a culture, a cuisine, and are even genetically distinct from the other people’s of Europe.
The Germans have a language because they live in Germany where German is the official language. They have many different cultures (Lower Saxony seems quite different from Bavaria; different religions, for one) and many different cuisines (kebab seems to be quite popular). And I don’t even know what to say about the “genetically distinct” thing.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
My my, such denial.
Brett..your point on accepting or not accepting partition is simply speculation twisted to serve your bias. The fact is that Israel DID accept partition and the Arabs did not, instead trying to murder every Jew in Israel. Sometimes racist aggression and attempted genocide has its consequences.
Your other point about Israel being responsible for driving out the refugees: I’m so misinformed! I had no idea that little Israel, attacked on all sides, had the ability to drive Jewish refugees out of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq..
Of course like J Street, you have no concern for those particular refugees, do you? Which shows that your humanitarian concern has some suspicious limits.
Historically, if the Arabs had not attacked, there would be no refugee crisis, Jewish or Arab. It’s that simple. The fact that Israel have driven some out due to the exigencies of war or that a number even left voluntarily ( and the tapes of radio broadcasts from the Arab world telling them to do just that still exist) is one thing, but your assumption that those wicked Jooos would have done it anyway is simply horse manure.
And in any even, they did a poor job of it, since over 100,000 Arabs stayed in Israel and were given full citizenship. As opposed to what happened to Jews in the Arab world, where they were much more efficient in ethnic cleansing.
And your term ‘occupation’ I find puzzling. The definition of ‘occupation’ in international law refers to military forces of one controlling the territory of another.
Since one side rejected the 1948 UN decision, no country legally had title to Gaza, Judea or Samaria, the parts of the Palestine mandate that still remained in British hands and had not be given by the Brits to Jordan.
The 1948 lines were thus ceasefire lines, with East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria ( which included a fair amount of Jewish owned land) remaining behind Jordanian lines. However, if you do your research, you’ll find that the only country outside the Arab World that accepted this area as ‘Jordanian’ was the UK, an din fact Jordan moved a number of its citizens into the area to become today’s ‘Palestinians’.
19 years later after Jordan attacked Israel, the area changed hands, and Jordan subsequently relinquished all claims to it. So how can Israel be ‘occupying ‘ something that never belonged to another country in the first place?
Of course, there was one other difference. Unlike the peace loving Arabs, the Israelis never attempted to ethnically cleanse the Arabs from the newly won territory. They had the naive idea they would be able to live with them in peace.
Regards,
Rob
October 28th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
This thread seems to be churning along very well. I got here late but Rob Miller’s comment above inspired me to jump in.
About the “Jewish state” thing. States are regions where a people (for whatever reasons they wish to distinguish themselves from those outside the state) gather to live under common rule and defend themselves from outside attack. What makes states so ubiquitous is the constant need in the world going back to the first nation-states several thousand years ago for that common defense from those who would attack them.
In the case of Israel the justification for a state is more than obvious. The world seems to have had a significant problem with Jews. They have attacked them mercilessly over the last 2000 years or so and especially so in the most recent seventy.
If the world had a similar problem with red-headed people and repeatedly attempted to exterminate them then you could logically expect the red-headed people to get together in their common defense if they possibly could to form a state for that purpose.
And the people who hated red-heads would certainly feel cheated and would decry as terribly unfair the notion that red-heads should be entitled to their own state where no-one could easily get at them, just as they do today with the Jews. So, yes, the Jews get to have a state if that’s what they want and need to protect themselves and those who would deny them this most basic form of defense will just have to get over it.
A separate question is whether it is a good and just state that opens its doors to non-Jews as it can accommodate them or to those peaceful non-Jews who were there before them. Also that it buys land for its formation and doesn’t confiscate it, that it offers those who don’t wish to sell their land the rights of citizenship equal to the Jews.
Of course, Israel ranks pretty well in that regard, hosting a very wide range of religions and ethnicities as well as those of the Jewish religion or ethnicity and providing very well I’d say for their rights and freedoms. This is notwithstanding the great anger of the Jew haters who would paint Jewish accommodation to its various religions through its representative government – as a form of persecution so as to delegitimize Israel’s existence.
But hey, if they get a state for their own protection it can be pretty annoying watching them survive and prosper so well in their tiny little multi-ethnic, multi-religious enclave that ranks up there with any first world democracy on almost any economic or human rights scale. But it must be especially annoying for Israel’s neighbors who now have to be content with persecuting their own dwindling minority communities while that big population of Jews sits over there – almost completely protected from them – rubbing it in.
In short, the reason for people to organize into states is defensive as it always has been. No state is perfect but I applaud any state that provides human rights and rule of law for its citizens while it protects them. I understand why some people find a “Jewish” state so intolerable. It must be hell for them.
October 29th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Wow great cooking ideas here. I will check back often.
October 29th, 2009 at 3:47 am
Non-viable sanctions, since they’d be subverted by almost everyone (and that’s not counting non-governmental support, like diaspora donations),particularly in the Cold War (if Israel had ended up never consolidating ties with the US, they’d probably turn to the Soviets). I’d be especially amused to see them try and enforce it, seeing as how a broad oil embargo on the US failed to break American support for Israel.
Too late for that- most of them came before 1967, when Israel had little in the way of support from the US government. About all you can say is that they probably would have had a harder time controlling the Occupied Territories, without US military financial aid. *
*Assuming they didn’t just say, “Screw this” and actually come down quite hard on the areas in question, using things like concentrated artillery barrages.
More likely,the rest of them get driven out en masse when they pose the first serious armed revolt against Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories. After all, what’s restraining Israel if they’re already a pariah state?
Do they not have reading comprehension in your part of the world? I was obviously referring to the Palestinian refugees.
On the contrary, those refugees are part of the facts on the ground pointing to why the Palestinian “Right” of “Return” is unrealistic. A population exchange occurred, and people need to move on (particularly considering it is the descendants and not the original refugees, more or less) instead of trying to turn the clock back to 1946.
The first part of your response is bullshit – as a number of Israeli historians (including Benny Morris) have pointed out, intimidation and the threat of expulsion and massacre played a major role in driving out many of the Palestinian refugees at the time.
As for my second point – are you denying Ben-Gurion’s answer?
They’re de facto and more or less de jure second-class citizens (particularly when you consider the number of institutions and rules that favor and promote Israeli Jews) – and before you try and say “But they have it better than Palestinians elsewhere!”, keep in mind that it’s equivalent to saying that higher living standards among black Americans following slavery’s end in the late 19th century than in Africa justifies the second-class citizenship and discrimination they faced.
I was pointing out that Israel’s government basically wanted (and wants) to have it both ways with the West Bank – they wanted to keep the territory forever as part of Israel, but be able to treat the local population as if they were enemy combatants in an occupied state as opposed to subjects of the state and taxpayers being discriminated against on the basis of religion.
Don’t make me laugh. The majority of Jordan’s citizens are descendants of the original refugees in 1948, some of whom ended up in the West Bank after the initial expulsions and flight.
The area was officially annexed by Jordan, recognized as such by a number of other states (and I’d like to see some proof that it was only the UK and the Arab states that recognized the Jordanian claim over the territory in question). Israel conquered it, but has refrained from annexing it, meaning that they are occupying. So what are the Palestinians? Are they “enemy combatants” (in which case they are well within their rights to defend themselves, violently if necessary), or subjects of the state of Israel being discriminated against on the basis of race? Particularly when many of them were taxpayers to the state of Israel when it was directly controlling the whole territory in question as opposed to using intermediaries like today (such as the PA).
No, they’ve just slowly displaced them by a combination of land seizures, squatting, and both tacit and overt support for “settlers” (a more appropriate term would be either “squatters” or “invaders”). Ethnic cleansing in slow motion.
Blacks in America were oppressed in the US for centuries. Are they entitled to a state? How about atheists and agnostics, who suffered a range of offenses up to and including being burned for denying the Trinity in Europe?
You seem to have this bizarre idea that some group is “entitled” to a state just because they were victims at some point. The only thing that “entitles” anyone to a state is whether or not they can defend the territory and be recognize as the sovereign rulers of it by other states.
The Arabs in question felt cheated because on top of years of on-and-off Zionist settling (legal or illegal) and frequent British support for said settling, they were then being essentially asked to pay the price in terms of land and politics for a crime committed in Europe, by Europeans – with no say on their part, since the UN decided on Partition without their consent.
Yeah, “tolerance” – which is why they had that lovely Family Reunion Law that made family reunions for muslims difficult, while pretty much anyone claiming to be a Jew can get citizenship and residency in Israel (including many of the Russian immigrants).
I presume tacit support for land invasions, slow ethnic cleansing, rampant discrimination against Israeli Arabs, and the like don’t count as relating to “human rights” in your book?
October 29th, 2009 at 5:34 am
Right. So you didn’t read his diary; you read Ilan Pappe’s book about Ben Gurion’s diary. Except I suspect you actually got the quote thirdhand from Walt & Mearshimer. Unfortunately, W&M misrepresented the facts. Ben Gurion didn’t say that; Ben Gurion was discussing what someone else said. And Pappe’s quote is selective in such a way as to misrepresent the entire point of the quote.
October 29th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
“the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim.”
The Finns, Dutch and Thais do not define nationhood by religion or ethnicity. Israel is in that regard an anomaly – as stateless Jewish survival was an anomaly. That doesn’t obviate Israel’s right to exist, but you can’t derive that right through a simple comparison with other nation-states.
October 29th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I said:
Brett said:
Please try a little harder to understand the point I made. I said that people who are oppressed and attacked because of their identity deserve the right to defend themselves. There are various means that may be available in different times and contexts. As long as their means don’t infringe on someone else’s rights then they should be allowed to pursue that avenue of defense as a matter of human dignity.
Jews, in the first half of this century were experiencing the violent culmination of 2000 years of oppression. They slowly came to realize that their only reasonable defense was to return to the land they were originally expelled from and re-establish a politically independent homeland there, sharing it with and bringing prosperity and human rights to the stateless indigenous inhabitants while being open to all Jews who wished to immigrate. They saw it as a win / win.
At the time they were guilty of what most of the left today exhibits: a deep ideological strain of cognitive egocentrism – an emotional belief that all humans are basically the same and will act similarly under the same conditions. They were wrong about the Arabs of Palestine. They did not understand the deep cultural differences of a zero-sum society where a gain for a rival group could only be seen as a loss of honor for the other. Understandably so, as this was the basic equation that defined all social relationships in Arab society and remains so to this day. It is the reason that there are no Arab democracies and is why the common man in Arab societies lives either in poverty or, if not, by aligning themselves with some coercive political element that maintains its power through violence.
So, I am not talking about justification for Israel’s existence as you imply. I am saying that if a people are oppressed and statehood is seen as a solution to that oppression, then they have a right to pursue it, to end that oppression. Even so, statehood needs no justification; people should be free to form states for whatever reason they wish. I’m just saying that as a solution to 2000 years of oppression it would be particularly nasty for others to deny them their quest for statehood.
Your confusion on all this shown by this part of your response where you make several errors:
“Feeling cheated” is not necessarily oppression. A child often feels cheated when an older sibling gets to stay up later at night. A driver feels cheated when they get a ticket for speeding after they were just passed by someone going faster. Feeling cheated is a psychological condition, a personal affront, that may or may not be justified on some independent scale of morality.
Arabs do feel cheated today (as they did seventy years ago) that Jews should have sovereignty over any land in the ME – even though Jews represented a majority of the population in the proposed “Israel” in 1947. On any reasonable scale of morality this is called self-determination. It was the moral basis for the Partition Plan. It’s justice lay in the equal treatment of the Arabs. They were each entitled to sovereignty in the area where they were the majority. The great majority of both Arabs and Jews were relatively recent immigrants. The population of the region before 1850 was small.
Only in a violently racist zero-sum society could peaceful immigration (rather than the usual form of conquest) by another ethnicity be seen as oppression. In fact, the Partition Plan, was part of an amazing change in social political arrangements in human history. Prior to this period, sovereignty was always a matter of violence and war and millions of deaths.
In this case a world body, the UN, with all the new Arab states participating and voting – so much for your with no say on their part, since the UN decided on Partition without their consent – came up with a non-violent win / win plan to grant sovereignty and distribute it as equally as possible among the Arabs and Jews who were living there – leaving open the opportunity in the future for the two polities to recombine. No-one on either side was asked or forced to leave their property or sell it. Everyone on both sides was free to sell and leave or rent their property out and move elsewhere – to where the sovereignty arrangements were more agreeable to them. Oppression is not when people of another ethnicity or religion buy a house and move in to your neighborhood.
It’s time that the world – but especially the progressive left – accept the false and destructive premise of cognitive egocentrism – the belief that lies at the heart of this conflict. People may be the same psychologically but they are not the same culturally. Different cultures are socialized to have vastly different beliefs about what is right and wrong. The Arabs in 1947 (and the Arabs today) do not approach problems in terms of win / win. If Jews get their own state and coerce no-one to do it and bring wealth and investment and rule of law to their state and welcome the minority Arabs there as citizens, the Arabs still see that as a gain for the Jews and a grave loss for them. Well, I’m sorry but by any rational moral standard, living in or next to a Jewish state in the ME is not Arab “oppression”. It is not an “injustice” that must by corrected by blood and violence.
The left in America and Europe, if they really cared about Arab suffering, would help the Palestinians move away from their centuries of zero-sum mentality and patriarchal “strongman” rule and embrace some new ideas about how people should get along in the modern world. This is the only possible way a good outcome for the Palestinian Arabs could come about. Encouraging and apologizing for their resistance” and for their seeking of “justice” with suicide bombs and rockets aimed at Jewish civilians, siding with them in their fanatical opposition to the West and Israel, is only ensuring that Palestine’s Arabs will continue to live in strife and poverty for decades to come and that many more thousands of them will die violent deaths long before their time.
Is your need to deny Jews their own state where they can defend themselves so strong that you’re willing to pay for it with as many Palestinian lives and as much Palestinian blood and suffering as it will take to do it – even if it could be done?
October 29th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
That sentence above should read:
October 29th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Non-viable sanctions, since they’d be subverted by almost everyone
Nah, I don’t think so. The situation Palestine is much worse than, say, South African apartheid, in several aspects: much more unjust, much more dangerous to the world. If not for the US support, it would’ve been stopped quickly and decisively, there is no doubt in my mind.
October 29th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
There is something fundamentally wrong with nationalism that seems to have escaped even a sophisticated critic like you: Nationalism is always and ever a false doctrine wherever and whenever it appears. The entire concept of a “nation” as a particular group of people with a common history that has a legitimate claims on a piece of this earth is fundamentally incorrect. A “nation” is a figment of a collective imagination; it refers is an abstract idea that has little if anything to do with history or family ties or genetic similarities. It’s an idea, and that is all.
With that as background, let us examine your claim of equivalency between the national aspirations of the Dutch and our national aspirations as Jews. Consider one simple fact: Whatever their “racial” makeup, the people who live in the coastal lowlands of northwestern Europe have a claim to that land based on their having lived there continuously since at least early Medieval times. The relationship of Jews with Israel is in no way comparable. You know as well as I do that Jews in large numbers had not lived in the Levant for close to 2000 years when the first Zionists arrived in the late 19th century. Your plea to suspend opposition to nationalism in the name of reality and based on the automatic equivalence of one form of nationalism with another sounds good and fair, but it is a transparently false argument.
October 31st, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Matt, you started out bumbling at the J Street debate but by the end you really earned my respect.Anyway one of your points it that when Israel was more “liberal” they were more loved by the “world”. That comment is like the Goldstone report. It’s not like Israeli’s woke up one day and decided to vote right wing for no apparent reason. It was after repeated massacres at discos, buses, etc. that they did that. You really can’t say any other rational people would not behave the same.
November 1st, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I wasn’t going to post on this long argument, but I noticed something that most people probably wouldn’t pick up. Abb1 said: “If I kick you out of your house, move in, and start a family there – 60 years later you still can get your house back…”
Actually, no. Sort of. There’s a legal doctrine called “adverse possession”, which basically states that if someone holds onto real property (like a house) that they don’t own, for a long enough period of time, they can dispossess the true owner of the property and acquire title to it free and clear of any adverse claim. From my Property class 1L year (a while ago), I feel like I remember that states typically required 20 years of adverse possession. If you’re curious about this concept, the wikipedia entry was very good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
The concept of adverse possession doesn’t match perfectly with all justifications of Israel, but it does seem similar to the argument that Brett was making, so I thought it was worth throwing out here. (Personally I like the oppressed redheads argument someone made above).