Liberalism, Democracy, and the Jewish State. Gadi Taub 2007

_{Another article in hebrew by Gadi Taub עודכן ב- 05:32 21/09/2010}

דמוקרטיה או אתנוקרטיה

בתגובה על "בילאדי היא ארצנו המשותפת" מאת אסעד גאנם ואילן סבן ("הארץ", 19.9)
המאמר של אסעד גאנם ואילן סבן, המגיבים על המאמר "בילאדי בילאדי" מאת פרופ' שלמה אבינרי ("הארץ", 8.9), הוא עוד דוגמה לאופן שבו הדה-לגיטימציה של זכותם של היהודים להגדרה עצמית - עמדה אנטי דמוקרטית מובהקת - מסתתרת מאחורי ערכי השוויון והדמוקרטיה עצמם.

בעיני הכותבים הרעיון של מדינה יהודית אינו אלא שאיפה ל"עליונות אתנית יהודית", שאיפה שהכותבים מייחסים לאבינרי. משמע, שאיפתם של כל העמים להגדרה עצמית היא דמוקרטית, ואילו אותה שאיפה אצל העם היהודי היא "אתנוקרטית". איטלקית ודמוקרטית, יוונית ודמוקרטית, פולנית ודמוקרטית זה בסדר, אבל יהודית פירושה לא דמוקרטית.

אלא שגם במדינות לאום אחרות יש מיעוטים. מועצת אירופה ניסחה ב-1995 כללים להגנה על זכויותיהם. בין הכללים האלה לא נזכר בשום מקום, שעל הרוב לבטל את זכותו להגדרה עצמית לטובת הגנה על אותה זכות אצל המיעוט.

איטליה לא נדרשת לבטל את הימנונה, שבמקור יש בו שמחת ניצחון על אוסטריה, מפני שיש בה מיעוט אוסטרי. יוון לא נדרשת להתנער מן הקשר בין לאומיותה לנצרות האורתודוקסית משום שיש בה גם בני דתות אחרות. פולין לא נדרשת לוותר על שפת המדינה, כי יש בה מיעוט גרמני.

זה לא הופך אותן ל"אתנוקרטיות", או בלתי דמוקרטיות. למעשה הדרך היחידה לבטל את אופיין הלאומי הוא על ידי ביטול הדמוקרטיה.

כך גם אצלנו: כל עוד בישראל יש רוב יהודי וזכות הצבעה כללית שפת המדינה הראשונה תהיה עברית, יום המנוחה יהיה שבת, וחגי ישראל - לוח השנה שלנו. ומי שתומך בעמדה זו ברצינות, כמו אבינרי, תומך גם בזכותם של הפסלטינים להגדרה עצמית. מפני, ולא למרות, שהוא ציוני.

ד"ר גדי טאוב

האוניברסיטה העברית

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http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i49/49b00601.htm

From the issue dated August 10, 2007

Liberalism, Democracy, and the Jewish State(2007)

By GADI TAUB

The future of the state of Israel is once again a topic of heated public debate. For good reasons: The possibility of a nuclear threat from a hostile Iran is one; deadlock in the peace process in the region, and the chance of a gradual shift into chronic civil war between Israelis and Palestinians, is another. But it has become common in some circles to ask not only whether Israel can survive, but also if it has a right to.
Some commentators believe that "the Jewish Question" that has been buzzing around in the West for some three centuries — the question of how this ancient people, the Jews, should fit into a modern political order — should be reopened. National self-determination for Jews in a state of their own, such critics say, can no longer be part of a morally acceptable answer. That is a telling development. As in the past, Western attitudes to the "Jewish Question" are reliable indications of larger political moods and of the shifting meanings of political concepts.
The first thing one senses about the framing of the topic today is hardly a surprise: the growing unease with nation-states. The horrors of Fascism and Nazism made us all wary of extreme nationalism. Until the 1970s, national-liberation movements in rapidly collapsing Western colonies still reminded the democratic world that nationalism is not always the enemy of liberty but sometimes its ally. But the decline of colonialism and the deterioration of liberation movements into third-world tyrannies, combined with the rise of the European Union and globalization, changed that. The postcolonial era gave rise to a hope of transcending nationalism, and has relegated nationalist sentiments in the West's political imagination to the parties of reaction. Current debates about Israel's future clearly reflect that trend. But they also indicate a less-obvious feature of the antinational mood: a growing rift between liberalism and democracy.
A recent wave of books on the future of Israel offers a glimpse into that tendency. The four discussed here (there are many others) are polemical rather than scholarly, and they are vastly different from one another. One is an autobiographical account, by Daniel Cil Brecher, a German Jew who immigrated to Israel and then back to Europe; another is the work of a French Jewish journalist, Sylvain Cypel, who spent more than a decade in Israel; the third is a fiery anti-Zionist exhortation, by Joel Kovel, a Jewish psychiatrist and now a professor of social studies at Bard College, who challenged Ralph Nader for the presidential nomination of the Green Party; and the last is an analysis of the challenges facing Israel, by Mitchell G. Bard, a pro-Israeli, Jewish-American activist. It is hard to imagine these four authors getting along around one dinner table. But they do share something: All are, to various degrees, uneasy with the idea of national identity.
Unease may be too strong a term for Bard's Will Israel Survive? A trace of discomfort does appear, though, in his understandable anger, as an American, toward those Israelis who insist that if you are Jewish and consider yourself a Zionist, you must immigrate to Israel. Bard's definition of Zionism is considerably more flexible. It includes all who generally sympathize with Israel. That helps sidestep the core of the original ideology: The founders of Zionism thought that under modern conditions, Jews would preserve their identity and sense of "peoplehood" only by shifting from a religious to a modern and national basis. They insisted that Jews have a collective right, like other peoples (as Israel's Declaration of Independence declared), to self-determination. Bard does not object to that idea so much as he is ambiguous about it. His justification of Zionism heavily accentuates anti-Semitism (especially from contemporary fundamentalist Islam) and downplays self-determination. His support of Zionism is thus more negative than positive.
In Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse, Cypel, a senior editor at Le Monde, targets nationalism more directly. In his view, Israel suffers from collective egocentrism. Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see themselves as victims, and both deny the victimhood of the other. The key to any solution is therefore putting an end to denial. But Israel, Cypel thinks, has gone the opposite way: It has built a wall, and the wall is about blocking, not seeing, the other side.
Cypel greatly exaggerates denial. He takes little note, for example, of the fact that many of the harsh truths he discusses, and which Israel, he says, denies, were not unearthed from dusty archives by his own journalistic efforts. He relies heavily on works of Israeli scholars and on Haaretz, Israel's single highbrow daily newspaper. Those are hardly clandestine sources. Contrary to Cypel's assertion that none of the works of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, for instance, appeared in Hebrew until 2000, Morris's seminal The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49 was actually published in Hebrew in 1991 and stirred a lengthy, high-profile debate in the Israeli popular news media. For someone who spent more than a decade in Israel, Cypel, now based in Paris, is curiously out of touch with Israeli politics.
It is still true that Israel's public, like Palestine's, dwells more on its own pains than on those of the other side. That is probably true of all conflicts, but Cypel nevertheless makes it the center of his analysis of this one. On that basis, he reasons that any resolution must first cure both peoples of the inherent collective egocentrism of their national narratives. Cypel, however, is a Frenchman, and France is both strongly republican and decidedly national. He also remembers the Algerian movement of national liberation. So he isn't easily tempted to say that doing away with the desire for national independence is the key to peace — or the necessary precondition for democracy. Instead he classifies Israeli and Palestinian nationalism as the wrong kinds of nationalism. The problem: They are "ethnic" national identities. Cypel does not make clear exactly how the term "ethnic" applies to Israel's national identity. But he clearly has in mind the contrast with France's brand of republican nationalism, which formally (although not necessarily in social practice) equates citizenship with national identity: If you receive French citizenship, you automatically acquire, at least in theory, a French identity.
A Stranger in the Land: Jewish Identity Beyond Nationalism, Brecher's book, is written in a more minor key, and details his personal search for an escape from the contradictions of identity. History and political analysis are woven into biography here. Brecher's parents fled Europe in the great upheavals of World War II, wound up in Israel, but never felt at home there. They finally settled in Germany in 1953. Their son, Daniel, however, was uncomfortable as a German Jew and immigrated to Israel in 1976. But its very nature as a national Jewish state was jarring to Brecher. His own humanistic view was shaped by the experience of "a minority group harmed by nationalism," and so he was uneasy with what he saw as Israel's drive for an "ethnically pure society." Falling out of love with Israel began with minor political dissent, greatly exacerbated after he served in a reserve unit in the first Lebanon war (which began in 1982). Brecher's stationing seems in retrospect singularly ironic: He served with other academics in a lecturers' unit assigned to raise soldier morale.
The book's tone is uniformly morose. But it does have a happy ending, with the author moving back to Europe and finding his home in the cosmopolitan environs of Amsterdam. The personal is also the political here: Brecher's reconciliation with himself, he believes, also applies to Israel. Israel should transcend nationalism and become "a state of all her citizens," he says, one where "the rights and development of the individual citizen are protected and promoted regardless of race and religion, where freedom and human rights stand in the foreground rather than the dogmas of Zionism."
In Joel Kovel's Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, nationalism is even more clearly equated with evil. Kovel is a man of unequivocal judgments, and his verdict on Zionism, as a particularly bad kind of nationalism, is fierce. Israel is, he says, "absolutely illegitimate," a "monstrous venture" of "state-structured racism." The history of the Zionist creed interests Kovel very little, since the problem, in his view, begins with Judaism. Judaism, he says, always had two opposing tendencies: exceptionalism and universalism. Zionism is a direct descendant of the exceptionalistic side. Its origins are in the idea that the Israelites were God's chosen people. According to Kovel's slapdash Hegelianism, all forms of identity are negations of others: If they do not negate negation, they do not achieve universalism, and they are therefore malignant. Nationalism in general, and Zionism in particular, fail on that count. They define themselves by excluding others; thus they violate nothing less than natural justice (which Kovel more or less equates with liberalism).
A more vigorous editor would have done the book a great deal of good by tuning down Kovel's shrill evangelical tone and maybe counseling against zoological metaphors. It would have been wiser, for example, not to court charges of racism by comparing Jewish settlers to "those insects who lay an egg in the interior of the prey's body, whence a new creature hatches as a larva that devours the host from within."
But the truth is that Kovel is not a racist, just an absolutist kind of liberal zealot. His crusade for "overcoming" Zionism is militant because there can be no compromise with absolute evil. He strives for complete destruction of Zionism as a creed, by calling first for a blacklist of all those who support pro-Israel lobbies in North America; then for organizing cultural and economic boycotts of Israel; and finally for overwhelming the Jewish majority with returning Palestinian refugees. Only then can reconstruction begin. Kovel would have little truck with the suggestions of a binational state currently circulating. Reconstruction should aim for something like Brecher's non-national liberal democracy.
Before Israel was founded, a Zionist leader who was to become its first president, Chaim Weizmann, said Israel would be Jewish in the same sense that England is English. What is it, then, that makes the idea of a Jewish democratic state seem more contradictory to so many critics today than an English democratic state?
The issue does not seem to be the connection of the state to Judaism as a faith. From its outset, Zionism wrought a secularizing revolution in Jewish identity. That is why most Orthodox Jews initially objected to it. To this day, the large ultra-Orthodox minority in Israel, although it takes an active part in Israel's politics, abhors Israel's national identity. It is still true, however, that Zionism preserved many ties to Judaism as a religion, and often made concessions to the Orthodox. The result is no clear separation between church and state. Is that what singles Israel out as nondemocratic? Probably not. England has a state church, as do Denmark and Norway, and that doesn't seem to constitute evidence of a nondemocratic character. The Greeks identify their religious with their national identity; the Poles don't clearly separate Roman Catholicism from theirs. But those states, too, are considered democratic. Moreover, a strict separation of church and state — as, for example, in France — is not necessarily more egalitarian. France is extremely aggressive toward minorities whose religion has a public dimension (like Muslim women who cover their heads in school). Israel's Muslim minority is, in that respect, better off: Israel has a publicly financed Arab-language school system, for example, and a state-sponsored system of Muslim courts for marriage and family status. Arabic is one of the official languages of the state.
But then there is the Law of Return. The law grants automatic citizenship to immigrating Jews. Is that what makes Israel nondemocratic? Hardly. Many other countries with diasporas have such laws: Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland, to name a few.
Or is the core of the problem, as Cypel says, that Zionism is an "ethnic" national identity? The term "ethnic democracy" is often used in the controversy over Zionism, ever since the Israeli sociologist Sammy Smoocha coined it to describe Israel in 1996. Smoocha was short of clear on what the term indicates, but he certainly did not mean what today's critics insinuate and what Israeli law clearly forbids: confining full civil rights to Jews only.
Despite repeated usage, it is still not clear why the term "ethnic" is useful for describing Israel, which is far less ethnically homogeneous than, say, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Poland, or Sweden. In what sense does "ethnic" describe the common identity of Israeli Jews from Argentina, England, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen? And how does one classify the ultra-Orthodox, a large group that does not share Israel's national identity but is nevertheless Jewish? Are they part of the ethnos but not of the nation? The real dividing lines in Israel are national — between those who do and those who don't share the national Jewish identity. And apart from adding a pejorative ring, substituting "ethnic democracy" for "national democracy" does not accomplish much.
Nor does the existence of national minorities within Israel's boundaries present any unique problem to its democracy. Other nation-states also have national minorities that want to preserve their separate identities: the Basques in Spain and the Germans in Poland, say. Few observers, however, make that grounds for denying the rights of the majority in Poland or Spain to national self-determination. Granted, Israel's situation is peculiarly complicated by the fact that the state is in conflict with the Palestinian nation, to which a minority in Israel belongs. But that, too, is not the root of the intuitive feeling that the Israeli state is inherently malignant. The origin of unease has more to do with four decades of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.
The alleged contradiction between "democratic" and "Jewish" is thus, at bottom, a reading of the occupation back into Zionism. Increasingly, Israel's most vehement critics tend to see things this way: Zionism is a blood-and-soil ideology that postulates that the land belongs exclusively to Jews. Therefore the occupation is its natural extension. And so an end to the occupation may alleviate some of the symptoms but not cure the disease. That is why Kovel and Brecher, along with many others, believe that the only way to make Israel fully democratic is to make it non-Zionist — that is, not a nation-state.
It is ironic that such a reading comes at a time when the most important change Israel has undergone is best described as the triumph of Zionism over the occupation. Contrary to the blood-and-soil theory, such a clash was inevitable. For the founders of Zionism, the idea of self-determination preceded — logically, and often historically — the decision to realize it in Zion. They considered Argentina, Australia, the Crimea, Madagascar, North America, and Uganda, among other places, for a homeland. None of those locations was more politically feasible than Zion, and none had Zion's nostalgic draw. But for mainstream Zionism, it was nevertheless clear that the land of Israel was the means, while democratic self-determination was the goal.
Hence, in Israeli public opinion, the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has won over the ideology of a Greater Israel. Shortly after the occupation began, the left (which by the early 1990s had grown to about half the electorate) insisted that the occupation undermined the very moral grounds on which Zionism rests, the "natural right" of all peoples to self-determination. Then, in recent years, many on the political right, which for decades had supported settlement in the territories, began to realize that the occupation would drag Israel into binationalism. In that case, without a clear Jewish majority, Israel would eventually have to give up democracy to preserve its Jewish identity. Very few on the right were ever willing to consider that possibility. And so the preservation of Israeli democracy necessitated turning against settlements.
It was precisely the interdependence between national identity and democracy that led even staunch hawks like Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert to turn their backs on the occupied territories. What is commonly referred to as "the demographic question" (extensively treated in Bard's book) is also "the democratic question," which, in turn, is the question of national self-determination. That is something Israel's current radical-liberal critics find so hard to imagine: that national sentiments can act to maintain and protect democracy; that Israel's national identity was the force that gave the final blow to support for the occupation. For them nationalism is, at best, an unpleasant bedfellow for democracy — at worst, its simple opposite.
But nationalism and democracy were born together, and that was no coincidence. In fact, it was the rise of modern nationalism that made modern democracy feasible.
Most 18th-century political thinkers were dubious that large states could be republics. Shaped by classic republican ideas, they believed that republics had to be grounded in the virtus of their citizens. Only a stern political education would train citizens to overcome their private egotistic passions and act in the name of Reason, for the public good. Such education was problematic in large states, the political thinkers believed. The great revolutions in America and France proved them wrong. It was passion, not its overcoming, that sustained republics: Love of one's country — patriotism — would transcend egotism and make citizens jealous guardians of their nation's interests, as well as of the liberties of their fellow citizens.
That love, revolutionaries believed, also transcended national chauvinism. It fueled what the French revolutionaries called the War of All Peoples Against All Kings. Still, the Terror that followed swiftly on the revolution in France gave republicans pause. Today, especially after the horrors of the 20th century, we remember well how extreme nationalism can turn against democracy. We easily forget, however, the extent to which democracy is functionally dependent on the nation-state.
Although some of the authors discussed here are European, today's unease with national sentiments has a distinctly American flavor. That has less to do with any short-lived hope in Europe that the European Union has transcended nationalism than with globalization. The winds of globalization have spread an American form of liberal principles around the globe, casting today's discussion in largely American terms. That includes America's tendency to misunderstand the nature of its own national democracy.
Americans often tend to believe that they have a "pure" liberal democracy — that is, a democracy above and beyond the "identity" (the way the term is used in the multicultural paradigm). To be sure, identity is in vogue in America: In the mantra of multiculturalism, a plethora of hyphenated self-definitions are created and re-created. But the unarticulated premise is that "identity" is what comes before the hyphen; what comes after — "American" — somehow stands for democratic procedures that form a universal liberal framework.
Not only does that ignore how much "American" is a strong identity, it also confuses the procedures of liberal democracy with that identity. Ever since the late 18th century, blindness to their own strong nationalism has led many Americans to believe that imposing the American Way on others is tantamount to liberating them. From Jefferson's vision of an "empire for liberty," to Woodrow Wilson's determination to "teach" South Americans to "elect good men," to George W. Bush's badly conceived war in Iraq, that streak has persisted. At its best, America was and is a true champion of liberty. But it is not at its best when liberty is confused with Americanization.
So when Joel Kovel lays out his plan of attack against Zionism, or when Daniel Brecher demands that Israel renounce its Jewish character in favor of an American-style liberal democracy, or when far more sophisticated intellectuals like New York University's Tony Judt propose, as he has repeatedly, a "one-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (one neutral political entity encompassing both nations), they are reiterating the same old blunder: For all their sometime criticisms of American foreign policy, they, too, confuse Americanization with liberation.
Imposing America's model of one liberal state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea would mean suppressing the aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians to self-determination. It may be noble of such writers to shoulder what was once called the White Man's Burden, and take it upon themselves to teach the natives the right form of self-determination. But from the point of view of the natives, that does not seem like a way to promote democracy. It seems more like an assault on self-determination with a liberal accent.
Kovel, and, for that matter, Judt on Israel are closer to Bush on Iraq than they would like to believe: American notions of democracy are what count, not what Iraqis, or Palestinians, or Israeli Jews want. And, as in Iraq, such a solution would mean civil war. If anyone needed a demonstration of that, Hamas's military takeover of Gaza has supplied it. If Hamas and Fatah cannot reconcile their differences without resorting to force, then throwing a Jewish minority into the mix is unlikely to produce a peaceful liberal democracy.
If the foreseeable future holds stability for Israel's democracy, democratization for Palestine, and peace for both, that future will be tied to national self-determination. It will have to rely on stable nation-states. Transcending nationalism would be, in this case, promoting civil war.
Looking beyond the case of Israel and Zionism, one wonders if the rising anti-national mood does not indicate a more general flaw in contemporary liberal logic: Liberalism and democracy may be drifting apart.
Reducing democracy to liberalism's protection of individual rights, and positing them in opposition to nationalism, may indeed be a step on the way to transcending nation-states. But transcending nation-states may prove to transcend democracy along with them. Some very important individual human rights may be increasingly guarded, but citizens may lose control over their institutions and political fates.
Institutions that transcend the nation-state — whether one looks at multi-national corporations, the International Court in the Hague, the World Bank, or the European Union — may stand at the vanguard of the liberal faith. But the same institutions also exercise great influence, even jurisdiction, over people and peoples who have little or no democratic control over them. The liberal assault on nationalism is also beginning to look like an assault on the principle of government with the consent of the governed. That is worrisome, because liberalism without democracy is likely to be just as unsustainable as democracy without liberty.
Gadi Taub is an assistant professor of communications and public policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of a number of works of fiction, as well as of The Settler and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (in Hebrew; Miskal-Yedioth Ahronoth Books, 2006).
Comments:
Mordechai Ben-Menachem
Monday, August 06, 2007
Taub is very confused. He ignores, i can't tell if it's ignorance or intent, that there are people involved. he subscribes to the empty mantra of those who think tht religion is a definition of negativity. There can be no resolution under such terms. Islam will not accept a dhimmi with basic rights to protection under law. Islam does not accept the Jews can have a state, anywhere. Until these so-called 'liberals' learn what the problem is, it would be better for them to refrain from offering solutions; they just sound silly and childish.
Ramesh Raghuvanshi
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Israel is brainchild of western Imperialism. Who created Israel?Why it created? Only get oil from middle east.Keep that region unrested so western countries mainly U.S. and U.K.take advantage of cheap oil.
On what basis Israel claim that this land is his property.Four thousand years back their forfather was staying there, is this logically correct?, if this logic is right then U.S.must vacate the Red Indian land and leave the united state.
Angel of History
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Unrest in the middle east creates *low* oil prices? Maybe you should ask someone who lives on Planet Earth about what happens to oil prices when there are wars in the middle east.
David J. Krause
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Let's be honest here. Israel's "nationalism" is tribalism, pure and simple, and such thinking is a major curse of today's world. We all recognize its debasing fingerprint when it plays out in Africa, or the Balkans, or Iraq, or southeast Asia, but when tribalism is openly proclaimed in Israel and its religion, many of us avert our eyes and find our moral convictions paralyzed. Israel's foundation is an alleged ancient ethnic identity of a type that most of us have somehow managed to sublimate, if not eliminate, as we search for our inner selves, but for many Jews (not all, thankfully) this tribal identity is a precious commodity that will not be relinquished. I, partially Jewish myself, find this all profoundly discouraging.
Tedd McHenry
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
I agree that "ethnic nationalism" and "tribalism" are, for practical purposes, the same thing. But Israel is also a liberal-democratic state, blind (at least in principle) to race and religion. That is worth protecting, especially in a part of the world where it is so rare.
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Rory Litwin
Monday, August 06, 2007
I think the reason that the idea of a Jewish nation state is problematic for a lot of secular Jews is that we accept an idea of Jewish exceptionalism that is based on the historical development of Jewish culture in diaspora. Jewish culture is unique in developing in diaspora beginning with the Babylonian captivity. The very idea of a transcendent, omnipresent God was a development of diaspora culture, because it allowed Jews to remain Jews away from the temple in Jerusalem, where up to then they believed that their God lived, in space and time. So to create a nation state for Jews with a capital city in Jerusalem, while it provides an answer for something that is uncomfortable about being a diaspora people, also negates large areas of the Jewish cultural identity by taking away the reasons for it. Being part of a diaspora people is what has given me my values; it's why I value cosmopolitanism and pluralism, and it's why I am comfortable in a diverse republic.
Israeli Jew
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Wow - it's been a while since I heard this naive Diasporist narrative. Here's the problem: the main literary foundations of Jewish culture (the Hebrew Scriptures and the Mishnah) were composed in the Land of Israel. The most universalistic vision of classical Judaism (the School of Hillel the Elder) was founded in Jerusalem before the destruction of the Second Temple. Judaism in the Land of Israel in the Second Temple period was extremely diverse and pluralistic, involving Pharisees, Sadducees, and a multitude of smaller sects. Judaism became much more closed-in and particularistic in reaction to antisemitism and the pressures to assimilate in the diaspora. The cultural legacy of the diaspora is victimhood, paranoia, and/or dissapearance through assimilation. No thanks!!!
Rome was not built in a day. First of all, Israel has to stand firmly on its own feet. Maybe if Israel gets enough time it will be able to restore the sane and humane non-diasporic Judaism of Hillel the Elder.
David Snyder
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Indeed, pace Kovel, Zionism is actually the antipathy of the notion of chosen-ness: Zionism holds that we Jews are a nation just like any other.
Actually, as a Jew, I find the way in which the secular doctrine of Zionism has become the sine qua non of Judaism as a religion to be quite offensive.
I would also like to add (c.f. my other comment here) that, in spite of the anti-Semitism redolent in the double-standard based critiques of Israel, one can certainly criticize Israel from even the Jewish point of view: Israel has failed to be, as a Jewish state ought to be, a light unto the nations over and over again with its refusals to act in good faith regarding the Palestinian situation.
Adam Reed
Monday, August 06, 2007
Collective "self-determination," whether on the part of those Moslems whose idea of self-determination includes forcing dhimma on non-Moslems among them, or those Jews who believe that God personally gave them the whole Land of Israel for their collective posession, is a recipe for warfare. The classic Liberal idea that individual rights come first, and that collective self-determination must be limited by respect for individual rights, is just as Swiss or Dutch as it is North American (Brecher or Cypel are hardly writing from some American context.) The primacy of individual rights over such collective "rights" as ethnic self-determination, is the only known way for people who have different ideas of self-determination to live in peace with each other.
Eric
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
You nailed it, Adam. The question is not one of "self-determination" per se, but of empowering institutions that constrain the "collective's" abuse of the individual "self".
Dan Martins
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Wrong, Adam. What if the other fellow refuses to recognize your human rights, and insists on clinging to his collective identity (Arab, Muslim, etc)? That's what Israelis are up against. It take two to tango, and a tango for one - that's the Suicide Tango.
Eamonn
Monday, August 06, 2007
Ireland doesn't have a law of return as such. There is a wishy washy reference in the Constiution to cherishing those of Irish descent overseas and that's it. You can pass your Irish mationality down to your grandchildren but not further. If your great grandfather was Irish you join the queue like everyone else.
Mr Grumpy
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
So having rejected the nation state you create a Middle Eastern Yugoslavia. Democratic? Yeah, like Lebanon and Iraq.
Karen Armstrong Fan
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
This is all too abstract. Palestinians want their land back. "What's to do?" is a complex question, but this over-analysis of the situation is denial at its finest.
Israel was a bad idea. I feel bad for the Jews living there; millions have put down roots. So you're pitting people who are there now, vs. the recently displaced who were living there for 1,000 years.
My guess is more low-level terrorism in Israel until long after I'm dead.
BDL
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Israel is the best functioning state in the middle east. In public opinion polls, very strong majorities of Israeli Arabs state that they would rather remain citizens of Israel than have their lands and villages become part of a sovereign Palestinian state of which they would become citizens. In 2006, the Israel Occupied Territories were ranked higher on the UN's Human Devlopment Index than were Syria, Egypt, or Yemen (or for that matter - Jamaica!!) See: http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/
So - of all the countries in the middle east, the one people want to get rid of is Israel?
Saffer
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
BDL, as a white South African I must remind you that a state's level of development is no measure of that state's legitimacy. Apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s had the best quality of life (for whites), the best education system, the best healthcare, the biggest and best-equipped military and the biggest economy in Africa.
alex
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
"Apartheid South Africa... had the best quality of life (for whites)"
That's the whole point; RSA's level of development was high for whites only, where as Israel's *average* (that is, for both Arabs and Jews) development is similar to many European countries.
SLK
Thursday, August 09, 2007
That is not true, it has been shown that living conditions of Arabs in Israel is much lower than that of the Jewish population.
Some sources:
http://www.dayan.org/kapjac/files/shamirEng.pdf
http://www.freedomhouse.org/inc/content/pubs/fiw/inc_country_detail.cfm?year=2006 &country=6985&pf
http://www.arabhra.org/publications/reports/PDF/CEDAW_FullReport.pdf
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/israeliarabs.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1703245,00.html
http://hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2/JILPfinal.pdf
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001/12/05/isrlpa3399.htm
Dayan
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
What do people mean Israel was a bad idea? Israel is an historical reality with a history that includes some (possibly many) bad choices. But saying that creating the state of Israel was a bad idea is like saying that Ireland, or England, or France, or India, or America, or Jordan, or Palestine (once it happens) were bad ideas. States are not bad ideas. The only bad things about them are what they sometimes choose to do.
Shalom Freedman
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The article itself is a response to a unique form of discrimination which Israel alone is subject to.
No other nation- state in the world has its very existence threatened daily , vilified and questioned as does Israel. No other nation- state is targeted for destruction as Israel is by the worst totalitarian terror states, from Iran on down.
Taub might have done better to raise the question of the very legitimacy of this question and why it is asked in regard to Israel.
David Snyder
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
It's amazing the double standard to which Israel is subjected. As the article points out Israel is routinely criticized for things considered completely appropriate when done by other nations.
Even the issue of the refugees is indicative of something amiss: Karelians were living in Karelia for far longer than Arabs lived in Palestine. But while the Finns absorbed the Karelians, Israel is still held responsible for the plight of the Palestinians?
If other nations don't have to choose between democracy and national identity, it isn't because they are more legitimate as nation-states than Israel, but because ethnic minorities that could threaten that choice were, after WWII, kicked out. Indeed, whenever and wherever that was not tried when nation states were created (post-WWI, Yugoslavia) or not accepted by those nations who would have had to accept the refugees (Israel, Pakistan or India for the Biharis in Bengladesh), nothing but trouble has arisen.
Israel can be blamed for mistreating the Palestinians ... but if you're gonna consider Israel as "wrong" because of the Palestinian refugees it created by its very existance, you need also consider almost any nation-state formed, or whose boundaries were redrawn post-WWII as wrong. They ought not to get off scott-free in the eyes of the world simply because they were lucky enough for the folks they kicked out to be resettled whereas Israel was not so lucky.
Otherwise, we Jews will naturally start asking -- why the double standard? Could it be anti-Semitism? Which of course, just plays into the hands of the extreme "Zionists" ... is that what the world wants?
AZM
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
There are many ways to consider the question of whether Israel has a right to exist.
One way is this:
Ask everyone who argues that Israel should not exist to declare whether they (themselves) should exist. If they agree that there's no compelling reason for their own existence, thank them for their consistency and shoot them.
If they disagree, fault them for their inconsistency and shoot them.
This is said in jest but the essential truth remains.
The idea of questioning another's right to exist is beyond the pale of reasonable debate.
If the debate is "why here, why now?" the answer is simple: Because.
Losers do not get to write history. If the Palestininas did'nt want the Jews there they should have never relinquished the land to the British.
Sadly Consistent
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
"Losers do not get to write history. If the Palestininas did'nt want the Jews there they should have never relinquished the land to the British."
So, for the sake of consistency, we must admit that if Germany had won the war, then the deaths of 6 million Jews would have been their own fault? One of the dumbest comments I've seen in a long time - basically the weak deserve all they get ...
Donal
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ireland does not have a Law of Return in the same sense as Israel's, it only applies to grandchildren of Irish emigrants. Israel's Law of Return applies to all Jewish people, simply because of their faith.
STUART MUNRO
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The sad fact for Israel is that a liberal idea has become a surprisingly agressive and intolerant state; denying significant political representation to Palestinians on a routine basis, and hence no end to the violence is in sight. Leaving aside Iran's nuclear option, the state and the military alliances that support its oppression of Palestinian people should indeed be wiped off the map.
The kind of Israel that could exist without the crutch of routine military violence would be supportable, the present arrangement is not.
DD
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
I don't usually respond to posts such as this but in this case, i just have to. You sir, have just provided a justification for 'wiping off the map' just about every modern state. Look around. You'll find oppression and conflict everywhere. The fact that you apply your formula solely to Israel is revolting.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Taub either does not understand what he is reading, or is deliberately mispresenting the arguments. Two examples should suffice: (1) he claims that many other countries have a law of return for their diasporas. But Israel has Jewish and Arab citizens, and only the Jews are allowed to 'return', while the relatives and former neighbours of the Arabs are prevented from doing that. Is that not a violation of democracy? (2) he claims that Israel is not an 'ethnic' state because there are Jews of many ethnic backgrounds. He clearly fails to understand the argument that Jews are an ethnic group, which enjoys privileges denied to those who are non-members of the group (namely, Palestinian Arabs). That Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews are equally privileged in that sense is hardly an argument against the discriminatory nature of Israel. Why use a dishonest reviewer?
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ran Greenstein differentiates between Israel's "Law of Return" and that of some other countries, because, he notes, Israel only allows such immigration by Jews, not Arabs. But Germany has a similar law: ethnic Germans from elsewhere may "return" to Germany, but others living in the country -- say, ethnic Turks -- do not have a similar right. Turks from Turkey cannot simply come to Germany under such arrangements.
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ran Greenstein differentiates between Israel's "Law of Return" and that of some other countries, because, he notes, Israel only allows such immigration by Jews, not Arabs. But Germany has a similar law: ethnic Germans from elsewhere may "return" to Germany, but others living in the country -- say, ethnic Turks -- do not have a similar right. Turks from Turkey cannot simply come to Germany under such arrangements.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Palestinians in Israel are not recent immigrants, like the Turks are in Germany. They are local, and are prevented from reuniting with their relatives (many of whom were forcibly expelled from the country and are not allowed even to visit), while Jews who had never set foot in it can freely visit and acquire citizenship. This is not the case with Germany, which does not have an indigenous non-German population facing similar restrictions. It is highly misleading both by Taub and the commentator above to equate the two situations.
Frederick Bartlett
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
OK -- let's get rid of Israel. What happens then?
After a decade, all the Jews will have left (probably to the US, the least anti-Semitic country left on Earth) and the Palestinians will have turned Israel (oops, Palestine) to the same cesspool of poverty, corruption, and violence that exists everywhere else in the Muslim Middle East.
And this benefits whom?
The US, actually: the infusion of financial and human capital from the resulting diaspora would ensure the US's dominance for another century or so.
I'm sure that that's what the Western liberals and Middle-Eastern Muslims have in mind.
Jim
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Without joining on either side the specific issue of the existence of the modern State of Israel, I would like to comment that there is something absurd about any argument for the existence of the modern state that relies on the existence two thousand years ago of Judah. Two thousand years ago, Celts owned what is now the Czech Republic, but no one argues that it gives the Irish a claim on Prague today. Eight hundred years ago the Normans' Crusader Kingdom lasted longer than the alleged United Monarchy under David and Solomon, but no one is saying the French therefore have a defensible claim on that real estate now. Any rational discussion concerning the existence of the modern State of Israel begins with the 20th Century. Within that context, reasonable arguments can be raised on both sides, but arguments based on millennia long past are simple nonsense.
ElvisAteMyPeanutbutter
Friday, August 10, 2007
Jews have had a constant presence in Israel. There hasn't been a time in the 2000 years that a population of Jews hasn't lived there. There are historical, anthropological records of Jews in Israel even through expulsions. You are wrong. It is irrational to ignore the truth. It is irrational to think this discussion started in 1967, 1948, or 1929, or the Zionist Conference, etc. etc. When Hertzel sprouted his first whiskers as a young tyke, Jews lived in Israel. When Jabotinski first discovered the nose on his face, Jews lived in Israel. It was Palestine then. In their time, a Palestinian was a Jew.
rak
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
"Apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s had the best quality of life (for whites),"
Yeah but israel has the best quality of life for palestinians1 In fact arabs are better off on all sorts of indicators in israel than in europe, lower levels of unemployment, higher levels of state sponsored education, etc etc etc There is a reason Israeli Arabs dont want to emigrate or be subjects of a Palestinian state.
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Actually, some Palestinians - that is, Christian and Muslim Arabs - are recent immigrants to Palestine, attracted from neighboring states by its economic development during the time of the British Mandate. And some Jews continued to live in the old land of Israel even after most others were dispersed. But never mind that. Once we start looking at who "owns" what piece of real estate on the planet, how far back do we go? It depends who's asking, of course. A Jewish state was destroyed and its inhabitants ethnically cleansed by the Romans in the first century; Islamic armies conquered Palestine some 600 years later, were in turn defeated by European Christian Crusaders, then re-conquered the land. It ended up as part of an Islamic Ottoman Turkish Empire until the end of World War I. So where is the "starting point" for a claim to ownership? For Palestinian Arabs, this would be pre-1948; for Jews, much earlier, of course. But is there a "statute of limitations" on the right to return to claim a country?
These questions come up all over the world, in contested areas. Think of Kosovo, Kashmir, even Fiji. Is it history ("we were here before you") or demography ("there are more of us than of you") that justifies a claim?
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
All this does not make the slightest difference to the fact that the State of Israel discriminates between groups of people, based on their ethnic-religious origins. The antiquity of Judaism in the country has nothing to do with the current racist practices of the modern state, which was created in 1948. A reality in which people who were born in the country and their descendants are prevented from even visiting it, let alone residing there as equal citizens, is a human rights violation. The starting point must be the rights of concrete flesh and blood individuals, rather than the supposed historical rights of abstract entities such as the 'Jewish people' or the "Arab nation'.
STUART MUNRO
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The point of course, is not to get rid of Israel, but to persaude it to act more constructively. The present arrangement, which embeds practices like the cluster bombing of southern Lebanon and the maintenance of Palestinian communities in what are effectively concentration camps is intolerable. The holocaust appears to have turned full circle, and this time the guards outside the wire are Israeli. A reduction in military support for Israel would force them to undertake real negotiations with their Arab neighbours. I am not sanguine about the results of such negotiations, but neither am I ready to cede the present state some kind of licence to kill indefinitely in defence of profoundly questionable security goals. The matter of Zionist colonialism needs to be addressed, and perpetuating the injustice does nothing to preserve the peace and stability of the region.
Frederick Bartlett
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
But by 'more constructively', you seem to mean a state in which Palestinians will either immediately or very quickly be a majority. Do you really think that Jews will long survive such a state?
There are many, many, many more Muslims and Arabs in Israel than there are Jews in Muslim and Arab states. Perhaps you should think about the reasons for this phenomenon?
Charles Zigmund
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The author has nothing to say about the annexation of the best land and resources, especially almost all the usable fresh water, and the Bantustan-like character of what is left to the Palestinians, hardly viable for making a bare living let alone creating a state. He writes as if the parties were equal, rather than hugely unequal through U.S.-supported conquest of almost all the original land.
He creates an elegant philosophical Enlightenment argument while almost toally ignoring the realities on the ground.
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ran Greenstein writes that "The starting point must be the rights of concrete flesh and blood individuals, rather than the supposed historical rights of abstract entities such as the 'Jewish people' or the 'Arab nation'." Fine. But since there are, at this very instance, more "flesh and blood" Israeli Jews in Israel than other groups, do they not have, at this moment, the better claim to a state in their part of Palestine? As for "abstract entities such as the 'Jewish people' or the 'Arab nation'," since these are mere metaphysical-ideological constructs, why then bother with states at all? We're all just "human beings," after all. A mere 5,000 or so years ago, a mere blink of an eye in the overall history of homo sapiens on this planet, there were no Jews, Arabs, or any other present-day ethnic groups. No one, probably, spoke any language we would now understand. But so what? It's today's flesh and blood people, carrying their historical memories of the past few thousand years (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all less than 3,000 years old), who feel they are part of a "Jewish people" or "Arab nation," that are quarreling over territory.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The only reason there are more Jews than Arabs in Israel today is the forcible expulsion of Palestinians in 1947/48. So, the answer is NO. Jews do not have a valid claim to a state in which they enjoy superior legal position and rights denied to members of other groups. Of course, they do have a right to live in peace and security and equality like everyone else in the country. No less than Palestinians but no more than them. Only when Israel becomes a state of and for all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, would that become possible.
ElvisAteMyPeanutbutter
Friday, August 10, 2007
Palestinians were expelled, as happens in every single war in the history of mankind. Palestinians also fled, as happens in every single war in the history of mankind. Palestinians also fled with the hopes that the invading Arab armies would destroy the Jews and return the land to Arab (mostly Syrian) ownership, as happens in... Oh, and let us look at some numbers as well. Approx. 600, 000 or so Arabs were expelled or fled Palestine. In that time period and in the immediate aftermath, about 800,000 or so Jews were expelled via pogrom, riot, government take over of their properties, etc. from Arab lands (Iraqi Jewish population was quite large, Yemenite too) and were absorbed into Israel. There are no refugee camps of Jews in Israel. Refugee camps of Arabs still exist in Arab countries. Note the recent "skirmish" in Lebanon.
Wanting justice for people is grand. But justice can not come from fantasy and wishful thinking.
Seems to me, Ran, that you see history like the archer who always hits the bulls-eye. Why? You shoot your arrow and paint the target around wherever it lands.
Paul
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
It is the legitimacy of this historical rootedness (collective historical memory) that contemporary liberalism finds abhorrent and insupportable, especially when it ramifies as real discrimination and violence-- Greenstein reminds us that these are abstract identities at war, contingent allegiances ossified in immemorial myth, and that referring to them is not, under the contemporary liberal paradigm, a sufficient defense or explanation of the sectarian horrors they continue to propagate. Even if it smacks of a distinctly American indifference to nation-state ideology and a contempt for perennial demographic and theological stakes, we have to continue to implore sanguinary groups to disabuse themselves of, or at least rationally attenuate, the identities that necessarily manifest as racist nationalism/religiosity.
Ellie K.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Doesn't anyone think it odd that of all the countries in the world, people only question Israel's right to exist?
Would anyone question Pakistan's right to exist? Or Indonesia's? Also, does anyone here care about the situation in Chechnya, where there have been tens of thousands of Muslim casualties (far far more than among the Palestinians), as a result of actions undertaken by the Russian military? People who claim a commitment to human rights are generally quite silent on these matters. And oddly enough they don't seem to care much about the gender and religious apartheid in countries like Saudi Arabia, or the systematic and brutal enslavement of black Africans that to this day still exists in North Africa, in countries like the Sudan and Mauritania.
No matter how grievous the human rights abuses of any of these countries, their right to exist is never questioned. Of all the countries in the world - no matter how they came into existence, no matter how artificial their boundaries, no matter how racist or abusive the practices of their government -it's only Israel whose right to exist is stridently and repeatedly called into question. It's an incredible double standard, don't you think?
Ellie K.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
A further point... in regards to the West Bank (and the Gaza Strip) people forget that in the aftermath of the 1948 Israeli war of independence until 1967, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. They kept these territories in a state of economic misery and did not do away with refugee camps; no move was also made to establish a sovereign Palestinian nation and no one around the world cared. Why is that? If their Arab brethren care so much about the Palestinians, why didn't they grant them their own state or do anything to improve their economic situation?
Paul
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The double-standard argument has undeniably compelling elements but it's important to keep in mind that fairness and consistency are not prerequisite to an incisive perspective or argument: in other words, suggesting a double-standard may expose an unseemly and historically insensitive prejudice without in any way addressing the merits of the case-sensitive argument itself. I think presuming that anti-Zionist discourse is necessarily anti-semitic is drastically regressive and fails to assimilate the polyvocality of such discourse.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Only people have rights. States do not. Israeli-Jews have a right to live peacefully in a state where they feel at home, but their home is not theirs only. Palestinians live in the same place and call it home as well. So, when Israel ceases to be a state of and for Jews only (where everyone else is a second or third rate citizen, or not allowed to become a citizen at all), then its 'right' to exist will not be questioned
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
An Israel that is a "state for all its citizens" in terms of national ideology would simply revert to being Palestine. It would no longer be Jewish, so why bother having founded it at all? Would Ran Greenstein also agree that the many states that are officially, not merely demographically, Islamic (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, at least 15 or 20 more)become states of all their citizens? Of course most have very few or no non-Muslim citizens, period, not even second class ones, since unlike Israel (about 20% non-Jewish) minorities were, to put it mildly, made to feel less than wlecome.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Of course, ALL states must be states that cater equally to all their citizens and are not discriminatory towards any other group
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
A non-Jewish Israel, in which Jews would be a minority, by the way, assuming all former Arab Palestinian refugees and their descendants were allowed back under their own "law of return"? Why should a Jew live there? A Jew can just as well live in California or South Africa, in that case; Los Angeles or Capetown are just as pleasant as Tel Aviv. Also they are in better "neighborhoods."
Mordechai Ben-Menachem
Monday, August 06, 2007
Taub is very confused. He ignores, i can't tell if it's ignorance or intent, that there are people involved. he subscribes to the empty mantra of those who think tht religion is a definition of negativity. There can be no resolution under such terms. Islam will not accept a dhimmi with basic rights to protection under law. Islam does not accept the Jews can have a state, anywhere. Until these so-called 'liberals' learn what the problem is, it would be better for them to refrain from offering solutions; they just sound silly and childish.
Ramesh Raghuvanshi
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Israel is brainchild of western Imperialism. Who created Israel?Why it created? Only get oil from middle east.Keep that region unrested so western countries mainly U.S. and U.K.take advantage of cheap oil.
On what basis Israel claim that this land is his property.Four thousand years back their forfather was staying there, is this logically correct?, if this logic is right then U.S.must vacate the Red Indian land and leave the united state.
Angel of History
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Unrest in the middle east creates *low* oil prices? Maybe you should ask someone who lives on Planet Earth about what happens to oil prices when there are wars in the middle east.
David J. Krause
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Let's be honest here. Israel's "nationalism" is tribalism, pure and simple, and such thinking is a major curse of today's world. We all recognize its debasing fingerprint when it plays out in Africa, or the Balkans, or Iraq, or southeast Asia, but when tribalism is openly proclaimed in Israel and its religion, many of us avert our eyes and find our moral convictions paralyzed. Israel's foundation is an alleged ancient ethnic identity of a type that most of us have somehow managed to sublimate, if not eliminate, as we search for our inner selves, but for many Jews (not all, thankfully) this tribal identity is a precious commodity that will not be relinquished. I, partially Jewish myself, find this all profoundly discouraging.
Tedd McHenry
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
I agree that "ethnic nationalism" and "tribalism" are, for practical purposes, the same thing. But Israel is also a liberal-democratic state, blind (at least in principle) to race and religion. That is worth protecting, especially in a part of the world where it is so rare.
Rory Litwin
Monday, August 06, 2007
I think the reason that the idea of a Jewish nation state is problematic for a lot of secular Jews is that we accept an idea of Jewish exceptionalism that is based on the historical development of Jewish culture in diaspora. Jewish culture is unique in developing in diaspora beginning with the Babylonian captivity. The very idea of a transcendent, omnipresent God was a development of diaspora culture, because it allowed Jews to remain Jews away from the temple in Jerusalem, where up to then they believed that their God lived, in space and time. So to create a nation state for Jews with a capital city in Jerusalem, while it provides an answer for something that is uncomfortable about being a diaspora people, also negates large areas of the Jewish cultural identity by taking away the reasons for it. Being part of a diaspora people is what has given me my values; it's why I value cosmopolitanism and pluralism, and it's why I am comfortable in a diverse republic.
Israeli Jew
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Wow - it's been a while since I heard this naive Diasporist narrative. Here's the problem: the main literary foundations of Jewish culture (the Hebrew Scriptures and the Mishnah) were composed in the Land of Israel. The most universalistic vision of classical Judaism (the School of Hillel the Elder) was founded in Jerusalem before the destruction of the Second Temple. Judaism in the Land of Israel in the Second Temple period was extremely diverse and pluralistic, involving Pharisees, Sadducees, and a multitude of smaller sects. Judaism became much more closed-in and particularistic in reaction to antisemitism and the pressures to assimilate in the diaspora. The cultural legacy of the diaspora is victimhood, paranoia, and/or dissapearance through assimilation. No thanks!!!
Rome was not built in a day. First of all, Israel has to stand firmly on its own feet. Maybe if Israel gets enough time it will be able to restore the sane and humane non-diasporic Judaism of Hillel the Elder.
David Snyder
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Indeed, pace Kovel, Zionism is actually the antipathy of the notion of chosen-ness: Zionism holds that we Jews are a nation just like any other.
Actually, as a Jew, I find the way in which the secular doctrine of Zionism has become the sine qua non of Judaism as a religion to be quite offensive.
I would also like to add (c.f. my other comment here) that, in spite of the anti-Semitism redolent in the double-standard based critiques of Israel, one can certainly criticize Israel from even the Jewish point of view: Israel has failed to be, as a Jewish state ought to be, a light unto the nations over and over again with its refusals to act in good faith regarding the Palestinian situation.
Adam Reed
Monday, August 06, 2007
Collective "self-determination," whether on the part of those Moslems whose idea of self-determination includes forcing dhimma on non-Moslems among them, or those Jews who believe that God personally gave them the whole Land of Israel for their collective posession, is a recipe for warfare. The classic Liberal idea that individual rights come first, and that collective self-determination must be limited by respect for individual rights, is just as Swiss or Dutch as it is North American (Brecher or Cypel are hardly writing from some American context.) The primacy of individual rights over such collective "rights" as ethnic self-determination, is the only known way for people who have different ideas of self-determination to live in peace with each other.
Eric
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
You nailed it, Adam. The question is not one of "self-determination" per se, but of empowering institutions that constrain the "collective's" abuse of the individual "self".
Dan Martins
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Wrong, Adam. What if the other fellow refuses to recognize your human rights, and insists on clinging to his collective identity (Arab, Muslim, etc)? That's what Israelis are up against. It take two to tango, and a tango for one - that's the Suicide Tango.
Eamonn
Monday, August 06, 2007
Ireland doesn't have a law of return as such. There is a wishy washy reference in the Constiution to cherishing those of Irish descent overseas and that's it. You can pass your Irish mationality down to your grandchildren but not further. If your great grandfather was Irish you join the queue like everyone else.
Mr Grumpy
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
So having rejected the nation state you create a Middle Eastern Yugoslavia. Democratic? Yeah, like Lebanon and Iraq.
Karen Armstrong Fan
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
This is all too abstract. Palestinians want their land back. "What's to do?" is a complex question, but this over-analysis of the situation is denial at its finest.
Israel was a bad idea. I feel bad for the Jews living there; millions have put down roots. So you're pitting people who are there now, vs. the recently displaced who were living there for 1,000 years.
My guess is more low-level terrorism in Israel until long after I'm dead.
BDL
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Israel is the best functioning state in the middle east. In public opinion polls, very strong majorities of Israeli Arabs state that they would rather remain citizens of Israel than have their lands and villages become part of a sovereign Palestinian state of which they would become citizens. In 2006, the Israel Occupied Territories were ranked higher on the UN's Human Devlopment Index than were Syria, Egypt, or Yemen (or for that matter - Jamaica!!) See: http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/
So - of all the countries in the middle east, the one people want to get rid of is Israel?
Saffer
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
BDL, as a white South African I must remind you that a state's level of development is no measure of that state's legitimacy. Apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s had the best quality of life (for whites), the best education system, the best healthcare, the biggest and best-equipped military and the biggest economy in Africa.
alex
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
"Apartheid South Africa... had the best quality of life (for whites)"
That's the whole point; RSA's level of development was high for whites only, where as Israel's *average* (that is, for both Arabs and Jews) development is similar to many European countries.
SLK
Thursday, August 09, 2007
That is not true, it has been shown that living conditions of Arabs in Israel is much lower than that of the Jewish population.
Some sources:
http://www.dayan.org/kapjac/files/shamirEng.pdf
http://www.freedomhouse.org/inc/content/pubs/fiw/inc_country_detail.cfm?year=2006 &country=6985&pf
http://www.arabhra.org/publications/reports/PDF/CEDAW_FullReport.pdf
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/israeliarabs.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1703245,00.html
http://hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2/JILPfinal.pdf
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001/12/05/isrlpa3399.htm
Dayan
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
What do people mean Israel was a bad idea? Israel is an historical reality with a history that includes some (possibly many) bad choices. But saying that creating the state of Israel was a bad idea is like saying that Ireland, or England, or France, or India, or America, or Jordan, or Palestine (once it happens) were bad ideas. States are not bad ideas. The only bad things about them are what they sometimes choose to do.
Shalom Freedman
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The article itself is a response to a unique form of discrimination which Israel alone is subject to.
No other nation- state in the world has its very existence threatened daily , vilified and questioned as does Israel. No other nation- state is targeted for destruction as Israel is by the worst totalitarian terror states, from Iran on down.
Taub might have done better to raise the question of the very legitimacy of this question and why it is asked in regard to Israel.
David Snyder
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
It's amazing the double standard to which Israel is subjected. As the article points out Israel is routinely criticized for things considered completely appropriate when done by other nations.
Even the issue of the refugees is indicative of something amiss: Karelians were living in Karelia for far longer than Arabs lived in Palestine. But while the Finns absorbed the Karelians, Israel is still held responsible for the plight of the Palestinians?
If other nations don't have to choose between democracy and national identity, it isn't because they are more legitimate as nation-states than Israel, but because ethnic minorities that could threaten that choice were, after WWII, kicked out. Indeed, whenever and wherever that was not tried when nation states were created (post-WWI, Yugoslavia) or not accepted by those nations who would have had to accept the refugees (Israel, Pakistan or India for the Biharis in Bengladesh), nothing but trouble has arisen.
Israel can be blamed for mistreating the Palestinians ... but if you're gonna consider Israel as "wrong" because of the Palestinian refugees it created by its very existance, you need also consider almost any nation-state formed, or whose boundaries were redrawn post-WWII as wrong. They ought not to get off scott-free in the eyes of the world simply because they were lucky enough for the folks they kicked out to be resettled whereas Israel was not so lucky.
Otherwise, we Jews will naturally start asking -- why the double standard? Could it be anti-Semitism? Which of course, just plays into the hands of the extreme "Zionists" ... is that what the world wants?
AZM
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
There are many ways to consider the question of whether Israel has a right to exist.
One way is this:
Ask everyone who argues that Israel should not exist to declare whether they (themselves) should exist. If they agree that there's no compelling reason for their own existence, thank them for their consistency and shoot them.
If they disagree, fault them for their inconsistency and shoot them.
This is said in jest but the essential truth remains.
The idea of questioning another's right to exist is beyond the pale of reasonable debate.
If the debate is "why here, why now?" the answer is simple: Because.
Losers do not get to write history. If the Palestininas did'nt want the Jews there they should have never relinquished the land to the British.
Sadly Consistent
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
"Losers do not get to write history. If the Palestininas did'nt want the Jews there they should have never relinquished the land to the British."
So, for the sake of consistency, we must admit that if Germany had won the war, then the deaths of 6 million Jews would have been their own fault? One of the dumbest comments I've seen in a long time - basically the weak deserve all they get ...
Donal
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ireland does not have a Law of Return in the same sense as Israel's, it only applies to grandchildren of Irish emigrants. Israel's Law of Return applies to all Jewish people, simply because of their faith.
STUART MUNRO
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The sad fact for Israel is that a liberal idea has become a surprisingly agressive and intolerant state; denying significant political representation to Palestinians on a routine basis, and hence no end to the violence is in sight. Leaving aside Iran's nuclear option, the state and the military alliances that support its oppression of Palestinian people should indeed be wiped off the map.
The kind of Israel that could exist without the crutch of routine military violence would be supportable, the present arrangement is not.
DD
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
I don't usually respond to posts such as this but in this case, i just have to. You sir, have just provided a justification for 'wiping off the map' just about every modern state. Look around. You'll find oppression and conflict everywhere. The fact that you apply your formula solely to Israel is revolting.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Taub either does not understand what he is reading, or is deliberately mispresenting the arguments. Two examples should suffice: (1) he claims that many other countries have a law of return for their diasporas. But Israel has Jewish and Arab citizens, and only the Jews are allowed to 'return', while the relatives and former neighbours of the Arabs are prevented from doing that. Is that not a violation of democracy? (2) he claims that Israel is not an 'ethnic' state because there are Jews of many ethnic backgrounds. He clearly fails to understand the argument that Jews are an ethnic group, which enjoys privileges denied to those who are non-members of the group (namely, Palestinian Arabs). That Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews are equally privileged in that sense is hardly an argument against the discriminatory nature of Israel. Why use a dishonest reviewer?
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ran Greenstein differentiates between Israel's "Law of Return" and that of some other countries, because, he notes, Israel only allows such immigration by Jews, not Arabs. But Germany has a similar law: ethnic Germans from elsewhere may "return" to Germany, but others living in the country -- say, ethnic Turks -- do not have a similar right. Turks from Turkey cannot simply come to Germany under such arrangements.
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ran Greenstein differentiates between Israel's "Law of Return" and that of some other countries, because, he notes, Israel only allows such immigration by Jews, not Arabs. But Germany has a similar law: ethnic Germans from elsewhere may "return" to Germany, but others living in the country -- say, ethnic Turks -- do not have a similar right. Turks from Turkey cannot simply come to Germany under such arrangements.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Palestinians in Israel are not recent immigrants, like the Turks are in Germany. They are local, and are prevented from reuniting with their relatives (many of whom were forcibly expelled from the country and are not allowed even to visit), while Jews who had never set foot in it can freely visit and acquire citizenship. This is not the case with Germany, which does not have an indigenous non-German population facing similar restrictions. It is highly misleading both by Taub and the commentator above to equate the two situations.
Frederick Bartlett
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
OK -- let's get rid of Israel. What happens then?
After a decade, all the Jews will have left (probably to the US, the least anti-Semitic country left on Earth) and the Palestinians will have turned Israel (oops, Palestine) to the same cesspool of poverty, corruption, and violence that exists everywhere else in the Muslim Middle East.
And this benefits whom?
The US, actually: the infusion of financial and human capital from the resulting diaspora would ensure the US's dominance for another century or so.
I'm sure that that's what the Western liberals and Middle-Eastern Muslims have in mind.
Jim
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Without joining on either side the specific issue of the existence of the modern State of Israel, I would like to comment that there is something absurd about any argument for the existence of the modern state that relies on the existence two thousand years ago of Judah. Two thousand years ago, Celts owned what is now the Czech Republic, but no one argues that it gives the Irish a claim on Prague today. Eight hundred years ago the Normans' Crusader Kingdom lasted longer than the alleged United Monarchy under David and Solomon, but no one is saying the French therefore have a defensible claim on that real estate now. Any rational discussion concerning the existence of the modern State of Israel begins with the 20th Century. Within that context, reasonable arguments can be raised on both sides, but arguments based on millennia long past are simple nonsense.
ElvisAteMyPeanutbutter
Friday, August 10, 2007
Jews have had a constant presence in Israel. There hasn't been a time in the 2000 years that a population of Jews hasn't lived there. There are historical, anthropological records of Jews in Israel even through expulsions. You are wrong. It is irrational to ignore the truth. It is irrational to think this discussion started in 1967, 1948, or 1929, or the Zionist Conference, etc. etc. When Hertzel sprouted his first whiskers as a young tyke, Jews lived in Israel. When Jabotinski first discovered the nose on his face, Jews lived in Israel. It was Palestine then. In their time, a Palestinian was a Jew.
rak
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
"Apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s had the best quality of life (for whites),"
Yeah but israel has the best quality of life for palestinians1 In fact arabs are better off on all sorts of indicators in israel than in europe, lower levels of unemployment, higher levels of state sponsored education, etc etc etc There is a reason Israeli Arabs dont want to emigrate or be subjects of a Palestinian state.
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Actually, some Palestinians - that is, Christian and Muslim Arabs - are recent immigrants to Palestine, attracted from neighboring states by its economic development during the time of the British Mandate. And some Jews continued to live in the old land of Israel even after most others were dispersed. But never mind that. Once we start looking at who "owns" what piece of real estate on the planet, how far back do we go? It depends who's asking, of course. A Jewish state was destroyed and its inhabitants ethnically cleansed by the Romans in the first century; Islamic armies conquered Palestine some 600 years later, were in turn defeated by European Christian Crusaders, then re-conquered the land. It ended up as part of an Islamic Ottoman Turkish Empire until the end of World War I. So where is the "starting point" for a claim to ownership? For Palestinian Arabs, this would be pre-1948; for Jews, much earlier, of course. But is there a "statute of limitations" on the right to return to claim a country?
These questions come up all over the world, in contested areas. Think of Kosovo, Kashmir, even Fiji. Is it history ("we were here before you") or demography ("there are more of us than of you") that justifies a claim?
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
All this does not make the slightest difference to the fact that the State of Israel discriminates between groups of people, based on their ethnic-religious origins. The antiquity of Judaism in the country has nothing to do with the current racist practices of the modern state, which was created in 1948. A reality in which people who were born in the country and their descendants are prevented from even visiting it, let alone residing there as equal citizens, is a human rights violation. The starting point must be the rights of concrete flesh and blood individuals, rather than the supposed historical rights of abstract entities such as the 'Jewish people' or the "Arab nation'.
STUART MUNRO
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The point of course, is not to get rid of Israel, but to persaude it to act more constructively. The present arrangement, which embeds practices like the cluster bombing of southern Lebanon and the maintenance of Palestinian communities in what are effectively concentration camps is intolerable. The holocaust appears to have turned full circle, and this time the guards outside the wire are Israeli. A reduction in military support for Israel would force them to undertake real negotiations with their Arab neighbours. I am not sanguine about the results of such negotiations, but neither am I ready to cede the present state some kind of licence to kill indefinitely in defence of profoundly questionable security goals. The matter of Zionist colonialism needs to be addressed, and perpetuating the injustice does nothing to preserve the peace and stability of the region.
Frederick Bartlett
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
But by 'more constructively', you seem to mean a state in which Palestinians will either immediately or very quickly be a majority. Do you really think that Jews will long survive such a state?
There are many, many, many more Muslims and Arabs in Israel than there are Jews in Muslim and Arab states. Perhaps you should think about the reasons for this phenomenon?
Charles Zigmund
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The author has nothing to say about the annexation of the best land and resources, especially almost all the usable fresh water, and the Bantustan-like character of what is left to the Palestinians, hardly viable for making a bare living let alone creating a state. He writes as if the parties were equal, rather than hugely unequal through U.S.-supported conquest of almost all the original land.
He creates an elegant philosophical Enlightenment argument while almost toally ignoring the realities on the ground.
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Ran Greenstein writes that "The starting point must be the rights of concrete flesh and blood individuals, rather than the supposed historical rights of abstract entities such as the 'Jewish people' or the 'Arab nation'." Fine. But since there are, at this very instance, more "flesh and blood" Israeli Jews in Israel than other groups, do they not have, at this moment, the better claim to a state in their part of Palestine? As for "abstract entities such as the 'Jewish people' or the 'Arab nation'," since these are mere metaphysical-ideological constructs, why then bother with states at all? We're all just "human beings," after all. A mere 5,000 or so years ago, a mere blink of an eye in the overall history of homo sapiens on this planet, there were no Jews, Arabs, or any other present-day ethnic groups. No one, probably, spoke any language we would now understand. But so what? It's today's flesh and blood people, carrying their historical memories of the past few thousand years (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all less than 3,000 years old), who feel they are part of a "Jewish people" or "Arab nation," that are quarreling over territory.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The only reason there are more Jews than Arabs in Israel today is the forcible expulsion of Palestinians in 1947/48. So, the answer is NO. Jews do not have a valid claim to a state in which they enjoy superior legal position and rights denied to members of other groups. Of course, they do have a right to live in peace and security and equality like everyone else in the country. No less than Palestinians but no more than them. Only when Israel becomes a state of and for all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, would that become possible.
ElvisAteMyPeanutbutter
Friday, August 10, 2007
Palestinians were expelled, as happens in every single war in the history of mankind. Palestinians also fled, as happens in every single war in the history of mankind. Palestinians also fled with the hopes that the invading Arab armies would destroy the Jews and return the land to Arab (mostly Syrian) ownership, as happens in... Oh, and let us look at some numbers as well. Approx. 600, 000 or so Arabs were expelled or fled Palestine. In that time period and in the immediate aftermath, about 800,000 or so Jews were expelled via pogrom, riot, government take over of their properties, etc. from Arab lands (Iraqi Jewish population was quite large, Yemenite too) and were absorbed into Israel. There are no refugee camps of Jews in Israel. Refugee camps of Arabs still exist in Arab countries. Note the recent "skirmish" in Lebanon.
Wanting justice for people is grand. But justice can not come from fantasy and wishful thinking.
Seems to me, Ran, that you see history like the archer who always hits the bulls-eye. Why? You shoot your arrow and paint the target around wherever it lands.
Paul
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
It is the legitimacy of this historical rootedness (collective historical memory) that contemporary liberalism finds abhorrent and insupportable, especially when it ramifies as real discrimination and violence-- Greenstein reminds us that these are abstract identities at war, contingent allegiances ossified in immemorial myth, and that referring to them is not, under the contemporary liberal paradigm, a sufficient defense or explanation of the sectarian horrors they continue to propagate. Even if it smacks of a distinctly American indifference to nation-state ideology and a contempt for perennial demographic and theological stakes, we have to continue to implore sanguinary groups to disabuse themselves of, or at least rationally attenuate, the identities that necessarily manifest as racist nationalism/religiosity.
Ellie K.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Doesn't anyone think it odd that of all the countries in the world, people only question Israel's right to exist?
Would anyone question Pakistan's right to exist? Or Indonesia's? Also, does anyone here care about the situation in Chechnya, where there have been tens of thousands of Muslim casualties (far far more than among the Palestinians), as a result of actions undertaken by the Russian military? People who claim a commitment to human rights are generally quite silent on these matters. And oddly enough they don't seem to care much about the gender and religious apartheid in countries like Saudi Arabia, or the systematic and brutal enslavement of black Africans that to this day still exists in North Africa, in countries like the Sudan and Mauritania.
No matter how grievous the human rights abuses of any of these countries, their right to exist is never questioned. Of all the countries in the world - no matter how they came into existence, no matter how artificial their boundaries, no matter how racist or abusive the practices of their government -it's only Israel whose right to exist is stridently and repeatedly called into question. It's an incredible double standard, don't you think?
Ellie K.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
A further point... in regards to the West Bank (and the Gaza Strip) people forget that in the aftermath of the 1948 Israeli war of independence until 1967, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. They kept these territories in a state of economic misery and did not do away with refugee camps; no move was also made to establish a sovereign Palestinian nation and no one around the world cared. Why is that? If their Arab brethren care so much about the Palestinians, why didn't they grant them their own state or do anything to improve their economic situation?
Paul
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The double-standard argument has undeniably compelling elements but it's important to keep in mind that fairness and consistency are not prerequisite to an incisive perspective or argument: in other words, suggesting a double-standard may expose an unseemly and historically insensitive prejudice without in any way addressing the merits of the case-sensitive argument itself. I think presuming that anti-Zionist discourse is necessarily anti-semitic is drastically regressive and fails to assimilate the polyvocality of such discourse.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Only people have rights. States do not. Israeli-Jews have a right to live peacefully in a state where they feel at home, but their home is not theirs only. Palestinians live in the same place and call it home as well. So, when Israel ceases to be a state of and for Jews only (where everyone else is a second or third rate citizen, or not allowed to become a citizen at all), then its 'right' to exist will not be questioned
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
An Israel that is a "state for all its citizens" in terms of national ideology would simply revert to being Palestine. It would no longer be Jewish, so why bother having founded it at all? Would Ran Greenstein also agree that the many states that are officially, not merely demographically, Islamic (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, at least 15 or 20 more)become states of all their citizens? Of course most have very few or no non-Muslim citizens, period, not even second class ones, since unlike Israel (about 20% non-Jewish) minorities were, to put it mildly, made to feel less than wlecome.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Of course, ALL states must be states that cater equally to all their citizens and are not discriminatory towards any other group
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
A non-Jewish Israel, in which Jews would be a minority, by the way, assuming all former Arab Palestinian refugees and their descendants were allowed back under their own "law of return"? Why should a Jew live there? A Jew can just as well live in California or South Africa, in that case; Los Angeles or Capetown are just as pleasant as Tel Aviv. Also they are in better "neighborhoods."
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
They can live wherever they want. That's what freedom is all about. If they feel more comfortable in the US or SA, why not?
LewisH. Dennis,M.D.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Human nature is unchanged since the writing of the tale of Gilgamesh, over twenty thousand years ago.
Ran Greenstein
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
An Israel that is a state of all its citizens is a state in which Jews as well as Arabs can live in equality with one another. If there are Jews who can only conceive of Israel as a state in which they are inherently superior, legally and socially, they have only themselves to blame if people regard that kind of Israel as a state that has no right to exist in its current form
Stuart Wilder
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Taub makes a lot of sense to me. Perhaps he can make sense of what's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where ethnic and religious groups seek not so much to dominate one another as the ability to make sure no one controls them. The old Iraq and Yuguslavia, not to mention the 20th century remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and 90% of the countries in Africa are the end results the one-state proponents seek, as if everyone can and should convert to American civic virtue and values.
Henry Srebrnik
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
"If there are Jews who can only conceive of Israel as a state in which they are inherently superior, legally and socially, they have only themselves to blame if people regard that kind of Israel as a state that has no right to exist in its current form." Really? No right to exist? But why then do the Swedes, the Finns, and the Japanese have a right to their states? Are they also not "privileged" over others in their countries, even if those people are citizens? I should be allowed to settle in those countries if I want to, no? Isn't anything else just nationalism, something now as bad, for the "Israel is the new apartheid South Africa" crowd, as racism?
Ran Greenstein
Thursday, August 09, 2007
"No right to exist IN ITS CURRENT FORM". Quote accurately. This means no right to exist as a state that institutionally discriminates against part of its population. Of course, Israelis have a right to their own state, like everyone else, but 'Israelis' are not only Jews, they include Palestinians as well. The right to self-determination thus means the right of all citizens to equality - transforming Israel into a state of all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike.
David
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
If someone wants to pitch their tent in a snake pit, god bless, by why are the rest of us obliged to support it?
Ran Greenstein
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Israel has an undeniable right to exist as an ISRAELI state, an expression of the right to self-determination of ALL its people equally. A JEWISH state, in which part of the population enjoys superior legal, political and social rights over another part, is discriminatory by nature. So, the solution is simple - change Israel from a Jewish to an Israeli state, and there will be no need for special treatment of the country.
Shalom Freedman
Thursday, August 09, 2007
One more comment on Taub's article. This is his relation to the Mitchell Bard book. Bard is a person who deeply cares for Israel and considers one by one the major threats he believes it is now facing. As a person who has worked for years to help defend Israeli against the hostile propaganda it continually faces he is to be commended by his work and not shallowly dismissed as Taub has done.
STUART MUNRO
Thursday, August 09, 2007
"Israel has an undeniable right to exist as an ISRAELI state, an expression of the right to self-determination of ALL its people equally."
States don't have rights - only people do. I can recall years of vitriolic protest against South Africa, and we can presently observe no end of spleen directed at Robert Mugabe. Both of these regimes are superior in their treatment of disadvantaged groups to Israel. So why should it get off the hook?
Run the bullet count data any time you think Israel is anything but an agressor. Facts do not support the victim state hypothesis.
Ramesh Raghuvanshi
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Iam from[Maharastra] India, From many centuries Jew community living in maharastra, we call them Bene Israel.Though caste system is srong in India, we treated Jew very respectfully and they are enjoying all rights.
when Israel was established some Jew family migrated in Israel, white Israely treated them very bladly because they are black coloured.If white jew treated their brothers so bladly how they can behave respectfully to Muslim?
If there is no support of U.S.can Israel will stand independently? In 21 century is religion so important?,why no Jew behave friendly with Mulim why there is no inter religious marrage between Muslim, jew and black jew who migrated from India
Ran Greenstein
Thursday, August 09, 2007
It is the Israelis (Jews and Arabs alike) who have a right to self-determination, just like ALL South Africans have a right to a state of their own, in which they are treated equally
yuval Brandstetter MD
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Gady Taub has made assertions whose veracity is very dubious. One is that most of the public is left-leaning. That is absolutely untrue. The left-wing parties are in deep deep recession, and the only way they survive is to invent new guises (like Kadima) and hold on to key non-elected positions (such as the Supreme court whose members are carefully selected to favor anti-nationalist views)
The one sentiment he did not address is simple good-old antisemitism. the claim that Jews are ineligible to Sovereignty is tantamount to the claim that Jews renouce their right to exist as a cultural group. Sovereignty as enjoywed by the nations is an invention of Jews, who never set out to enlist or recruit or convert or create an empire, but to be free to pursue their own brand of happiness in their own land.
The notion of forcing Jews and Arabs, two incompatibles to live together is unrealistic, for Arabs will not tolerate equality, only subservience. Churchill had it right when he designated the West Abnk of the River for Jewish self-determination, and the East Bank for the Arab self-determination. Churchill, having served in Africa, having seen the spread of Islam foresaw the incompatibility and sought to avoid it.
Ran Greenstein
Thursday, August 09, 2007
But Jews and Arabs do live together now, except that it is the latter who are in a position of subservience, not the former. You got it upside down - just like PW Botha who used to say that blacks will not grant whites equality in South Africa, therefore whites could deny equality to blacks. Very weird logic. Of course, Israeli Jews do not have to live with Arabs on a basis of equality - if they do not like the prospect, they may choose somewhere else in which to live. How about the US or Canada?
Harold V. Clumeck
Thursday, August 09, 2007
The root cause of this issue is the fact that 22 Arab states can't tolerate one Jewish one. If the Arabs had agreed to the United Nations Partition plan in 1947, we would not be having this discussion.
David Savory
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Has anyone heard the word "pluralism"? Why should Jews, Muslims, Christians or rodeo clowns expect a monocultural state of their own? Aren't cultural mosaics and melting pots supposed to be good things? Maybe it's time to embrace inclusivity rather than exclusivity.
saifedean ammous
Thursday, August 09, 2007
This article makes some very idiotic mistakes:
1- The writer asks "What is it, then, that makes the idea of a Jewish democratic state seem more contradictory to so many critics today than an English democratic state?"
There are several answer he ignores, the most important, of course, is that Israel had to systematically ethnically cleanse around a million Palestinians based on their religion in order to have a Jewish majority. Amazing how the author overlooks this.
The second main reason is that, regardless of your religion, race or ethnicity, you are an equal citizen of England, France or whichever other country; whereas in Israel you are not a fully-equal citizen with an equal sense of belonging unless you believe in(or were born into) a certain faith about God and such stuff. That is immensely important, and in effect, no different whatsoever from apartheid nationalism in South Africa making South Africa a state for whites only.
But by far the most moronic mistake in this article is the author's insistence that nationalism has triumphed over 'Greater Israel'. How can he see that when half a million illegal settlers are entrenched in the West Bank, completely controlling it and making life impossible for the Palestinians there, and building the world's only ethnically-exclusive road network in the world.
saifedean ammous
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Since 1968, every Israeli government has been completely unwavering in its support for settlements, subsidizing, promoting, protecting and arming them to the hilt. Even today, more and more land is being confiscated to build more and more ethnically-exclusive colonies, with the full support of the government.
No, Zionist nationalism did not triumph over occupation and Greater Israel; these are the all one and the same . Zionist nationalism is what ethnically cleansed a million Palestinians, formed an ethnically-exclusive and discriminatory state that treats non-Jews as second class, and occupies the West Bank to build exclusive colonies, racist roads and make the life of unfortunate non-Jews impossible.
It is truly a wondrous curiousity how one can publish this most nonsensical drivel with such schoolboy errors as Mr. taub has done here in a publication like the CoHE. Just praise Israel, it seems, and you have license to ignore facts, logic and reason while writing your drivel.
Woody Allen
Thursday, August 09, 2007
I thought we were all supposed to settle in Uganda ? What happened to that first choice ?
Am I wrong ?
anthony steyning
Friday, August 10, 2007
After 60 years of foreign policy failure and imminent danger from increasingly sophisticated adversaries it's time Israel initiates a generosity-based approach, not just reluctantly tolerating a Palestinian state but actively helping set one up, investing in it, training it's people, in worldly matters converting them to Aristotelean values as a way to prosperity instead of by graft and assassination. Perhaps even setting up twin, quasi-independent Vatican City-like entities in Jerusalem separating the two nations as the ultimate gesture of goodwill.(Rome never destroyed a badly divided Italy) Israel should now become the neighbor everyone's dying FOR, reducing all of the above to redundant postulation
R.A. Landbeck
Friday, August 10, 2007
The greater threat to Israel may very well be from the new interpretation of the moral teachings of Christ circulating on the web. With the potential to bring down existing Christian history Judaism could quicky follow.
Links:
http://www.energon.uklinux.net
Luke Lea
Friday, August 10, 2007
And now for something completely different: How's about Europe compensate the Palestinians for all their losses, and set them up with a Western standard of living whereever they choose to live (excepting Israel proper)? After all, Jewish self-preservation is the issue, so far as Jews are concerned, while injustice and humiliation are the issues for the Palestinians. Europe has a moral obligation here (via Hebraic ideas of justice as equity that are part of Western civilization) for the simple reason that it was Western anti-Semitism that drove European Jewry out of Europe and started all the trouble in the first place. The total bill would be around half a trillion dollars, nothing the EU couldn't amortize over a couple of generations.
Mary Treherne
Saturday, August 11, 2007
It material spreading on the web is authenticated, the future of the Jewish state [and the whole of Christian history] is not going to be decided by any existing political process but by their God. I quote:
'An epochal event is unfolding, the terms by which authority, knowledge,selfhood, reality and time are conceived has been altered forever.' Those
able to think for themselves and imagine outside the cultural box, who are willing to learn something new, the beginnings of an intellectual and moral revolution are spreading on the web with the most potent NVDA any human being can take for peace, change and progress.
http://www.energon.uklinux.net
http://thefinalfreedoms.bulldoghome.com
http://www.dunwanderinpress.org
http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/1676
http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/1726
Daniel Chejfec
Monday, August 13, 2007
When fanatism superseeds reason, there is no room for compromise and therefore no conflict resolution. Hamas is a fanatic movement which sees Palestinian Arabs as members "of the Islamic Nation", and they want to create an "Islamic State" which would include Palestine. Fatah on the other hand, is a nationalistic movement which contends in its constitution that Israel has no right to exist. Both of these are cases of fanaticism. Does it mean Israel has no fanatics? that would be naive by any definition of the term. Israel has its own fanatics, but the majority of Israelis keep them under control. There are those who are fanatics on the right and want the Palestinians to fo away, and there are fanatics on the left who like to flagelate themselves because they cannot accept success. My answer is "Thank God for Israel's democratic society which allows all these voices to express themselves". Arabs would do well to create their own version of it - in Palestine and elsewhere.
Fender
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
I am not jewish. all I have to say to jews who don't like Israel as a jewish state or who don't like its existence at all, is believe what you say. Don't say things to impress other liberal whites. Many muslims and africans and asians hate jews and are being taught the hatred systematically. the only reason jews in the west do not feel this is because you are protected. one day you may not be protected, if as you seem to wish, the west is destroyed. you will reap what you seem to wishing for. So only make your anti jewish and anti israeli comments if you really believe them, not to make some kind of liberal point and pat yourself on the back for how enlightened you are in that you hate yourself. No one else on earth, no african, no muslim, no hindu feels like that about themselves. and remember, your numbers are small.
Robert Kaufman
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Amazing that all these commentators, both pro and con, yet not one of them has heard of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, 1922. When the Ottoman Empire, corrupt to the core, was dissolved after WWI, the League parcelled out the land to its various peoples. The Jews already were 1% of the population and were given a grant of 1% of the land. Is there a problem here?
(Commenting is closed for this article.)
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 49, Page B6

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