I wonder what he considers the greater threat to Israel: Phil's deficient Jewishness or Hamas' guns?
__________

Bill might try to think of us deficient gentiles also once in a while. Israel is a problem for us also not just for world Jewry.

I was the person whose question prompted JJ Goldberg to relate Abba Eban's anecdote (which I thought was insightful). As you may recall, I introduced myself by saying that I wasn't raised to be Jewish and only came to feel Jewish at a later age. In fact, my Jewishness is such that I've got my mother asking curiously the nature of my identification. (I even attended the event with my Korean girlfriend, who I know from a Zen center.) Then I asked how this debate was different from other debates.

(As an aside, Dan's comment about the effects on the soldier are echoed in Buddhist teachings.)

Your answer was just that these were the things you wanted to talk about. I gathered that you view it as different because you have a different relationship to the issues – because you are Jewish. Fair? If so, isn't that a kind of particularism, not so different from that which you criticize?

I think it's an important point (not only because the same claims made about the NAACP as made about AIPAC don't resonate in the same way, as I suggested in my question), but because it gets to the heart of particularism.

For me, acquiring a Jewish identity has helped me to understand others better. What I had already learned about racism and queer theory, before coming to understand my vague Jewishness in part through those theories, took on quite a new life. My identity and another's may be quite different in many ways, but we each have identities, and each came to have them in roughly the same process. In that way, I can relate on what I think is a deeper level than I could through mere acknowledgement that we're all human. That erasing of differences seems to require recreating the other as a copy and denying them their identity. So for me, particularism isn't antithetical to universalism. We are all, universally, particulars.

1.
Part of the 'Holy Land' should be turned into religious resorts for Jews to go to on their vacation.

2.
Another part should be turned into a large graveyard for Jews to be buried so they are in the right spot when the Messiah finally comes.

3.
The rest of the land should be turned back to the Palestinians and the rest of the Israeli Jews should go back to the countries they come from and still hold or are entiteled to citizenship.

Don't tell me I'm not funny.

The problem was that even if the wall had been built as Labor wanted it would still only have been a means to "manage" the Palestinian Problem, not end it.

But no question, you have that teutonic jocularity going, without a doubt.

Indeed, but we all don't base our allegiances on our mother's bloodlines. There is particularism and then there is tribalism, and if we're gong to think clearly about them we must be careful with our language.

Another distinguishing characteristic is the depth of commitment. We all have private allegiances, but the willingness to see others suffer on behalf of these interests varies widely.