I’d like to continue a recent discussion at this site on the Jewish state and a possible settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and do so by addressing the very interesting and subtle comment by Shmuel.
Shmuel begins by quoting my response to another critic: “I am suggesting that in a Jewish state it would be possible to privilege certain matters of particular concern to Jews, but yet not mean that the Arabs would be treated as second class in all other ways of far greater consequence. You appear to be simply denying such a possibility, but you have provided no analysis of why such a system is impossible.”
Shmuel then writes:
“This was actually the premise of Israel’s declaration of independence, the platform of various political parties and governments throughout Israeli history, and it is an idea still espoused by many Israelis. Yet, it has never worked, de jure or de facto. Furthermore, there is an “us or them” attitude – reflected most grotesquely in the Israeli obsession with the “demographic problem” – that is unlikely to change as long as any sort of preference or privilege is afforded to one group over the other. With a Palestinian state next door, this may even get worse. You are basically talking about nuances of identity and administration that require an incredible amount of good will – far more, in my opinion, than the un-nuanced “one man one vote” approach. As Jerry Haber (Magnes Zionist) points out, the part of whatever democratic polity may emerge that will be Jewish will not cease to be so simply because it does not have greater privilege or control than the non-Jewish parts of society. What comes naturally will come naturally, but I believe it is asking for trouble to begin the entire experiment with any kind of declared inequality – even nominal inequality. With regard to Israel continuing to serve as a safe haven for persecuted Jews, I’m convinced (and have heard as much from Palestinians) that a solution is possible, without the need to define Israel as a specifically Jewish state."
I would like to see Shmuel develop his argument, and I have several queries for him:
First, you do not appear to reject my argument that in principle there is no inherently irreconcilable conflict between a formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the treatment of its Palestinian citizens as full equals. Rather, you say that this was the way it was supposed to be, but it hasn’t worked. Does that imply that it can never work?
Second, if so, what is the alternative? If I understand your argument correctly, the implication of “the un-nuanced one man one vote approach” that you favor would require a single binational state. If so, why would you consider that a more realistic alternative than relatively small privileging of Jews in a Jewish state? That a binational state would be morally preferable in an ideal world is not the issue--we don't live in that world. If the Israelis won’t grant full equality to a minority currently constituting 20% of a de facto Jewish state, what possibility is there that they would do so if they became a minority in a binational state?
Third, I agree that the need--or alleged need, if you prefer--for a specifically-defined Jewish state would be greatly and maybe completely alleviated if the Jewish “right of return “ to Israel could be maintained. Can you develop this? Has it become part of the negotiating process, even informally? Would that work even in a binational state? And if immigration were unlimited for Jews but not for others, why wouldn’t that be an inequality? And if you concede that it would be, then wouldn’t that undercut the argument that other inequalities--which you agree might be nominal--cannot be allowed?
Here’s my own bottom line. Given the history of the Jews, it was necessary to establish a Jewish state, somewhere, and in light of that same history, it cannot be said that the need for a Jewish state—de facto or formal—has definitively ended, for all time. That the creation of that state in Israel in a land already inhabited by another people created an injustice is undeniable, but the dilemma of Zionism—there was an imperative need for a Jewish state, but no place to put it—could and of course should have been mitigated in many ways by the Israelis, none of which they did.
It’s not too late to mitigate the inevitable injustice to the Palestinians, but given Israeli attitudes, not to mention the inevitable consequences of more than 80 years of binational conflict, the most that can be expected is an end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state, along the lines accepted by practically everyone, including, it now appears, the West Bank leadership.
We all know that Netanyahu raised the issue of a formal acknowledgment of Israel as a Jewish state as a pretext to avoid any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but unfortunately the demand apparently has taken on a life of its own among most Israelis. That being the case, the Palestinians should agree to the demand, but only as part of an overall settlement that created a viable Palestinian state, accompanied by guarantees that the Israelis would now grant fully equal economic and civil rights to the Israeli Arabs.
This latter argument cannot be refuted by observing that the Israelis have already made that commitment to its Arab citizens and violated it, so what would stop them from doing so in the future? Not much, probably. But that’s not the point: what is the alternative? Isn’t it more likely that the Israelis would live up to their principles in conditions of peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole, than under the current circumstances?
To conclude: we live in an imperfect world, full of injustices, tragic dilemmas, and circumstances we can’t control. There is no perfectly just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even in principle, let alone in practice. If those who rightly abhor Israeli policies give up on a two-state settlement in favor of a binational state that under all present and foreseeable circumstances is pure fantasy, they will get nowhere at all.
I was at a local college campus the other night and realized that the vast majority of students (born in late 80′s and early 90′s) had no idea of the magnitude of changes that had occurred during the early years of their lives, things like the collapse of the Soviet Empire, end of Apartheid, adoption of the Internet, to speak of only a few major shifts. What’s so devilishly implacable and knotty about the I-P conflict, as Norman Finkelstein never tires of asking in all earnestness? The ostrich-like mentality of the colons? They were that way in Algeria too (the current system of the French Republic comes almost entirely out of the “Algeria era”), not to mention Kenya and several other “villas in the jungle”, but they all came to a foreseen end that was the only way left along which madness did not lie.
Don’t shackle us with your lack of vision Mr Slater. More than sixty years of work by Israelis to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state is about to pay off. The moral of the story is “be careful what you wish for”.
Sumud, Slater’s is simply another vaselined version saying that what Israel has done is bad and tough luck for the Palestinians as they have learn to live with it. He talks of mitigation when he should be talking about atonement. He sinks further down in taking for granted the bogus concessions on borders, returnees and Jerusalem made by the illegitimate PA clowns.
this just reads to me as an excuse for Israel’s crimes and the crime of its creation.
it feels more like an attempt to placate those that understand the monstrosity that Israel’s creation was and the deplorable acts it continues to commit to this day rather than honestly formulate an idea that ends the conflict. the idea that a jewish state was needed is constantly repeated ad nausem. I have yet to see an argument that is valid for this much less the assumption that is demanded to us by the likes of witty and all of ISrael that somehow this “need” that has never been shown to exist somehow trumps another people’s legal rights
Jerome,
I’m admire and respect your work greatly, but I have to admit, your thesis is filled with contradictions and flawed arguments.
I cannot speak for Shmuel, but I for one, cannot fathom how you fail to perceive the contradiction between a formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and the treatment of its Palestinian citizens as full equals. Even in theory, this is a fundamental paradox.
By your own admission, Israel’s track record with regard to the treatment of it’s Arab citizens is poor; you use this observation to reject a single bi-national state while simultaneous arguing that there is no reason to believe things won’t get better once Israel is recognized as a Jewish State.
To paraphrase you, Jerome, if the Israelis won’t grant full equality to a minority currently constituting 20% of a de facto Jewish state, what evidence is there that they would grant full equality to a minority in a formally recognized Jewish state? Especially when you introduce a layer of Jewish privilege on top? And how can you not consider that this small privilege would not be exploited to the nth degree?
Contrary to your argument, Netanyahu has actually backed away from the demand that Israel be recognised as a Jewish state, though as you observed, the argument has taken on a life of its own among most Israelis or Israeli supporters on many blogs.
What also concerns me about your insistence that the Palestinians agree to the demand, is the full implications of what this might mean in reality. I’m sure you’re familiar with the concern that once accepted, Israel would use this position to reject any reparations or discussions regarding refugees.
Given Israel’s propensity to demand more and more, and refusal to give back, I’d say there is little evidence to suggest that Israelis would live up to their principles in conditions of peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole, given everything they want. One has to only consider Israel’s repeated rejection of the Arab Peace initiative, without so much as a tacit endorsement or willingness to discuss it.
No Jerome, the demand to be recognized is nothing more than a meaningless stunt to humiliate the Palestinians.
There is no guarantee that a binational state would produce an ultimate outcome, but it would be by far the most just. If that binational state is founded on the principal of one man, one vote and equality among all citizens, then at the very least, there are legal options for the oppressed to fight injustice.
And to be frank, to believe that a two state solution can be revived, given the existence of the settlements and the Palestine Papers revelations, is pure fantasy. It is the 2SS that is going nowhere at all.
Last but not least, I reject that we are powerless all the injustices, tragic dilemmas, and circumstances. We simply haven’t tried, much less been allowed to.
RE: “No Jerome, the demand to be recognized is nothing more than a meaningless stunt to humiliate the Palestinians.”
It’s more than just a stunt. If the Palestinians agree that the Israel they recognize is “a Jewish State” then the Jewish Israelis will milk that macro-pneumbra forever to negate the full thrust of the equality of all Israel’s citizens before the laws of that so characterized state. Imagine the increased power and influence of American’s Christian population if the US was defined as a “Christian state,” or, more, a “white Christian state.” I’m sure Mr Slater would fight such an official characterization with all his might. We don’t live in an idealized world, but the real point is do we move in straight concrete ways towards the ideal (even while recognizing this will always be a work in progress), or do we pour cement on crooked retrogression, on “the survival of the fittest?” Even Truman only recognized the state of Israel–he scratched out “the Jewish” adjective.
JEROME SLATER- “Given the history of the Jews, it was necessary to establish a Jewish state….”
Says who? Zionism sprang up in response to the advent of “blood and soil” nationalism in Eastern Europe. The intent was to colonize Palestine where the Jews would become the “Volk,” and the Palestinians ethnically cleansed. Israel was never intended to be a Jewish refuge, and was totally inadequate to provide a safe haven for Jews prior to and during the Holocaust, Zionist propaganda notwithstanding. In fact, the complicity of the Zionists with anti-Semites, including the Nazis, and their opposition to Jewish immigration to places other than Palestine, contributed to Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. The Zionists went so far as to refuse entry to “unsuitable” Jews from Eastern Europe facing death in favor of American Jewish Zionists. Need we review the episode involving Dr. Rudolph Kastner?
The Jewish state was established to achieve the nationalistic power seeking objectives of the Zionist elites, and for no other reason. The creation of the state of Israel depended upon imperial sponsorship and the support of the Jewish Diaspora to provide additional resources and to lobby for continued imperial support. The support of the Jewish Diaspora has been maintained in large measure through the exploitation of the Holocaust and inculcated Jewish anti-Gentile chauvinism. Peace in the Middle East absolutely requires a change in the attitude of Zionist Jews and of cultivated Jewish tribal solidarity. Not only is a Jewish state not necessary, it is absolutely counterproductive.
Professor Slater, with all due respect, you strike me as a died-in-the-wool Zionist, defending your ideology and group identity against all reason. Rather than challenge Shmuel’s accurate critique, you should justify why “it was necessary to establish a Jewish state” rather than simply assume it to be self evident. To my thinking, except for the Zionist elites who benefited, political Zionism and the Jewish state which it spawned has been a disaster for all concerned.
Actually you make a good point Keith.
Slater also slips a rather dishonest comment in there too:
This is simply untrue. There weer locations in Africa, South America and Australia that were considered, where the creation of a Jewish state would not have required taking land from anyone else.
Texas was another location considered. As to British controlled land in Africa, e.g., Kenya, Uganda, the British people were mostly against all plans for Jews to move there en masse, and this view was across all sections of Brit society, both in England and within the English settler groups in Africa. Here’s a lot of interesting details in a little article, among them that Zangwill’s proposed solution (after he switched from Africa to Palestine as the right area for Jews to settle) to the Arab problem was to transfer all the Arabs out of the land selected to be state grounds for the Jews. link to ou.org
Good points Keith. I’ve seldom read Slater articles over the years, and these last two make me realize that there is a need for new ideas regarding the state of Israel from the aging Zionists. The situation has changed and they fail to adapt (witty included)
Does Slater realize his contradictions brought up By Shingo and Avi? I wonder, since he fails to address them.
“Given the history of the Jews, it was necessary to establish a Jewish state, somewhere, and in light of that same history, it cannot be said that the need for a Jewish state—de facto or formal—has definitively ended, for all time. ”
I too take exception to this claim. I do not see the necessity for a Jewish state. In many parts of the world Jews worked out how to live with the neighbours and be part of the country they lived in. They had no need of a Jewish state.
“That the creation of that state in Israel in a land already inhabited by another people created an injustice is undeniable, but the dilemma of Zionism—there was an imperative need for a Jewish state, but no place to put it—could and of course should have been mitigated”
And this simply says that Jews are more important than other people. “For the sake of Jews, others must suffer an injustice. Try to mitigate that injustice, but it is necessary for the benefit of the Jews.”
This is the core of Stalter’s argument and his moral blind spot. If Jews should be given higher status in Israel that Arabs, then why not in every other country in the world?
Imagine how that would be received in the West? That Jews be granted privileges denied the rest of humanity? Imagine such privileges being granted to any ethnicity?
Thanks, Keith. I’d like to add that no one in the early Zionist colony, especially from the turn of the century to WWI (Roughly the second aliyah) thought they were building a refuge for Jews persecuted in Tsarist Russia. Their goal was more long-term and abstract, basically restoring the Jewish Volk, or what they believed as such, to its native soil. The Zionist colony in Palestine did not function as a safe haven; only physically able, ideologically committed workers were permitted in, and they couldn’t bring their parents or extended families, only their own. Almost all of the second aliyah immigrants failed to remain, leaving around 2,000 people to found the first kibbutzim and Ruppin’s training farms, while most of the children of the first aliyah emigrated to the US or back to Europe.
Of course this doesn’t go into the ideological affinity with European colonialism and German eugenics, both the major influence on the initiative to colonize Palestine and the formation of the “conquest groups.”
And while legal barriers into Palestine under the Ottomans were diffuse, no one at the time could have expected an independent state to emerge quickly. The idea among the WZO/Palestine Office was to establish a Jewish majority in the Galilee/Judea area and achieve autonomy. The Zionist leadership made a lot of long term predictions, including perpetual conflict with the Arabs failing a mass transfer, none of which took a worsening situation in Europe into account.
Jerome is giving the Zionist movement credit for failing to save Jews en masse, something it never even tried to do. That’s why this history is important, so the segregation in Palestine can’t be explained away by the upshot. Please look at what Zionism actually is and how the various figures and groups have acted, not at how it’s been sold to you.
I see no evidence that a Jewish state was ever necessary. With the exception of the nazi period, Jews haven’t been exceptionally oppressed throughout history. They’ve also been oppressors in past places/times. You’re basing your thesis of the need for a Jewish state on myths of exceptional persecution. As for the nazi period, it started well after the zionists had already decided to get rid of the native people of Palestine and replace them with Jews. Not to blame the zionists too much, but the two movements, naziism and zionism, certainly played well together in the early years of naziism.
As justifications for mass murder and ethnic cleansing of native people, this is lame.
I won’t compare oppression of Jews throughout history with the oppression of any other group, but if you go to the link I provided in my earlier comment here today, lyn117, you will see that Zangwill, one of the chief proponents of a safe haven in Africa, was motivated by a particular egregious pogrom (among others) in the land of the czars during the early 1900s. I don’t think people like him cared much about the oppression of any other groups–he wanted to save his fellow Jews. He felt a Jewish state was the only way. He wasn’t in a contest for who were the real most victimized people in history. That narrative, it seems, he left to others, at least as between the two zionist camps regarding the best location. The link also shows that those zionists advocating for a jewish land in part of Egypt always regarded such a place as temporary, a spot from which to jump to historical Palestine.
Let me clarify. I wasn’t saying Jews weren’t ever persecuted, I was saying the persecution they suffered wasn’t at all exceptional (excluding from the nazis). You’re dismissing the huge religious wars curing which Catholics murdered Protestants, the many pagans burned at the stake, native Americans and earlier pagans and many others who were forcibly converted to Christianity. During periods of European history when a majority of the people were serfs, i.e. slaves, many Jews were in a literate class of traders and bankers, I’m not saying they weren’t held in contempt or persecuted but I don’t think they weren’t on the bottom rung of society either. It’s a myth that they were always persecuted wherever they went.
In fact when early Jews conquered and took power over parts of the Levant they forced people to convert to Judaism and likewise persecuted minorities.
Jerome,
Thank you very much for your response and your queries. I’ll post my thoughts within the next couple of days.
Insightful post, Jerome.
In a democracy, an inevitably imperfect one (every one on the planet, present and future), it is necessary for those committed to democracy to constantly remind the society of that commitment. It is a constant and lifelong tension, that is just part of life.
There is no “standing on laurels” from any movement. By saying that Israel is “Jewish AND democratic”, there is no guarantee that that #and# statement will be realized, or to what extent. As, there is no guarantee that a Palestinian state will remain “Palestinian AND democratic”. Or, that a federal state will remain “AND democratic”.
There is an appeal, and an opportunism, to commitment to the oppressed. The appeal is that people are suffering, and there is the fulfillment of relieving that suffering, healing what is broken. The opportunism is in committing to the oppressed community, RATHER than to democracy. Rather than restoring a balance, a solidarity movement can easily establish a new imbalance, one intended to be protective of dominance and permanently so.
When Jews demonstrate a commitment to oppose the affects of Zionist calcification and actively accepts the “other”, it contributes to a basis of trust in democracy as a dynamic living system. When solidarity and the Arab world demonstrate a commitment to oppose the affects of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic or pan-resistance calcification and actively accepts the “other”, it contributes to a basis of trust in democracy itself.
Primarily, we need to reduce the toxic calcification, not kill the coral.
This latter argument cannot be refuted by observing that the Israelis have already made that commitment to its Arab citizens and violated it, so what would stop them from doing so in the future? Not much, probably. But that’s not the point: what is the alternative? Isn’t it more likely that the Israelis would live up to their principles in conditions of peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole, than under the current circumstances?
Contrasted with this:
Given the history of the Jews, it was necessary to establish a Jewish state, somewhere, and in light of that same history, it cannot be said that the need for a Jewish state—de facto or formal—has definitively ended, for all time.
I sense a double standard here: one that you may not immediately recognize, but a potent one nevertheless.
With regards to the Palestinians, they should forget their history of mistreatment at the hands of the Israeli Jews, regardless of the fact that the mistreatment continues up to this very day, and accept Israel as a Jewish State, which will surely allow Israel to continue to treat its non-Jewish citizens as second class at best. The Palestinians are supposed to trust the Israelis not to abuse this major concession, even though history tells us that such trust is counter indicated.
With regards to Jews, they are supposed to always remember their past history of mistreatment, even though the history for the last several decades has not been one of mistreatment, and they are supposed to cling to a system that grossly mistreats Palestinians in the very present because of some possible “need” for a place to run to in some unknown future. Palestinians are supposed to accede to Jewish fears, even when those fears have no real basis in the present or in fact.
Why is it imperative for Jews to “remember history”(a very selective one at that) and Palestinians to forget or ignore history? Since the Palestinians are the ones currently suffering, why is it all about retaining privilege for Jews in Israel?
And, as I mentioned before, where is your proof that Israel is needed as a Jewish State/ It has been disastrous for the Arab Jews for the the most part, Jews are in most danger in Israel, Israel has been known to attempt to force Jews to Israel whether they really want to go there or not, and conversely to put roadblocks in the way of Jews its doesn’t want, and , on a more general note, “having a country” doesn’t guarantee you won’t be persecuted or mistreated, by your own country, or by your neighbors, or the big bully on the block. See Poland, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Vietnam, China, etc. at various times. If Britain didn’t have a strong presence in Palestine during WWII, its likely that Germany could have easily invaded and ruled a Mandatory Palestine, or even an independent Israel, if there had been one at the time.
And then of course there is this: Some of the most vicious attacks on Jews that I have witnessed in the US are attacks from other Jews, who didn’t think the Jews they attacked were “loyal” enough to other Jews. (This “disloyalty” usually took the form of criticizing Israel for its actions.) How does Israel “protect” those Jews? It doesn’t. It can’t. Its less than useless for that because it encourages this unthinking demand for uniformity of thought among Jews. And by demanding the uniformity of thought among Jews, Israel is responsible for spreading an anti-semitic trope about Jews.
To conclude: we live in an imperfect world, full of injustices, tragic dilemmas, and circumstances we can’t control.
So why insist on the “need”for a Jewish State? We live in an imperfect world, so the Palestinians have to take it and lump it, while the Jews get to lord it over them in Israel because someday in this imperfect world that we can’t control it just might provide a shelter for some Jew. Or not. It seems more likely to me that Zionists live in a fantasy world, where treating the other poorly is the only way to ensure their safety. In my experience, if someone treats people poorly it will eventually redound against them.
>> To conclude: we live in an imperfect world, full of injustices, tragic dilemmas, and circumstances we can’t control.
And as long as the imperfect world doesn’t affect the Zio-supremacist “good in the world”, that’s cool.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not “necessary” and it was far from being an “uncontrollable circumstance”. It was an immoral choice.
Israel’s ON-GOING aggression, oppression, land theft, colonization, destruction and murder are not “uncontrollable circumstances”. They are immoral choices.
Israel chooses to be a religion-supremacist state instead of the “beacon unto the nations” democracy it professes itself to be. This is not an “uncontrollable circumstance”.
Israeli politicians refuse to engage in sincere and equitable negotiations for peace. They are choosing to be immoral and unjust. This is not an “uncontrollable circumstance”.
Tree, you are a very wise (and articulate) person. Thank you for your contributions.
well said Tree ;D
To conclude: we live in an imperfect world, full of injustices, tragic dilemmas, and circumstances we can’t control.
This is Hophmi’s argument when all else fails. The world is a tough place he says.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Auden – September 1, 1939
But sometimes, heroically, they don’t.
Tree –
Well said.
Jerome – I have Holocaust survivors in my immediate family. The Holocaust was ever-present in my formal education and hung over our community in may subtle and obvious ways.
Yet, I don’t believe what you posit as a given – that Jews have to have a Jewish state.
I don’t know how old you are, but my sense is that Jews younger than 35 overwhelmingly do not buy into your argument. Even the Orthodox and other ardent Zionists are motivated by lifestyle, privilege and the like.
Even the most Jewish Jews today do not experience Jewish history this way. And this will just increase with time.
Underpinning this is that there has been a historic change in the experience of Jewishness coupled with an equally historic shift in non-Jewish attitudes to Jews.
Younger Jews have not experienced the anti-Semitism (real or imagined) older Jews may remember; the Holocaust has passed from history into mythology.
Yes, Israel is an adult, no longer identifying solely through its earlier traumatic history.
For those of us with close family that survived, and survive, the holocaust is not mythology.
For those Palestinians that are told of the nakba even second hand, the nakba is not mythology.
In the statements of ideologs, they are both mythology more than experience. For a grandchild that lives in the midwest or Lebanon even, the nakba is a story.
For many Palestinians, the nakba continues, and unbroken stream. That can stop with negotiation, with a two-state solution.
The experience is similar for many holocaust survivors, and immediate children, that experience a never-ending stream of persecution, with different faces and accents, but similar expression and willingness to harm on ethnic stimuli.
The single state approach inevitably continues both the nakba and holocaust with struggle. If the struggle is for victory by any definition, and not a struggle for reconciliation, then it is in fact a continuation of the unbroken stream.
It would be wonderful if the content of dissent were pro-reconciliation, pro-assertion, pro-humanization; rather than anti-.
Pro movements can be framed as skew to resistance movements, so Palestinian ecologists working and studying with Israeli ecologists, don’t even know that they are forging a bi-national state.
The academic boycott does the opposite. It says “don’t work with an Israeli ecological academic institution”.
No unification in consciousness, no unification in institutions.
Phil says that he is an “integrationist”. Time to actually be one, if that is your conviction.
>> For those Palestinians that are told of the nakba even second hand, the nakba is not mythology.
No, the Nakba is not mythology, and the knowledge that it was “necessary” must really warm the heart of many a Palestinian.
>> … and the knowledge that it was “necessary” must really warm the heart of many a Palestinian.
Knowledge Perhaps even more than the knowledge, it’s the self-righteous and unapologetic insistence by Zio-supremacists that the Nakba was “necessary” that warms Palestinians’ hearts.
Although, to be fair, not all Zio-supremacists would have actively participated in the cleansing. Some would have simply “held their noses” and approved of the immorality.
Disgusting.
Eljay,
For many Palestinians though, the nakba is mythology in similar ways that the holocaust is mythology to many Jews.
Many have literally never experienced anything of it. Many Palestinians live in the west and Arab world, have good middle class jobs, and that is all they have known.
The diaspora Palestinian community contains many that are angry in sympathy, and many that are as indifferent/integrated as some in the diaspora Jewish community.
>> Richard Witty @ February 15, 2011 at 10:34 am
That’s a nice bit of speechifying but it doesn’t change any of the facts regarding Zio-supremacist attitutes regarding the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
The Holocaust may be “mythology to many Jews”, but I suspect even to those Jews the assertion that the Holocaust was “necessary” would be unacceptable.
Keep “holding your nose” – the stench of your staunch support for immorality (“I cannot consistently say that ‘ethnic cleansing is never necessary’.”) hasn’t faded away yet.
Haven’t I been saying all this time? Haven’t I been saying this? That Zionists are like Holocaust deniers? And now, for the sake of Israel, Witty actually has to type the words “the holocaust is mythology to many Jews,” because Israel is more important to Witty even than Holocaust survivors. He’s so desperate to debase Palestinians that he’ll toss a few Jews into his rhetorical meat grinder to make sausage.
You’ve crossed one hell of a moral event horizon, man.
For many Palestinians though, the nakba is mythology in similar ways that the holocaust is mythology to many Jews.
Many have literally never experienced anything of it. Many Palestinians live in the west and Arab world, have good middle class jobs, and that is all they have known.
This is your wishful revision of history speaking, but it has zero basis in reality for one obvious reason: Unlike the Jewish diaspora, the Palestinian diaspora was CREATED by the nakba. Just about every Palestinian today who lives in “the diaspora” got there in one form or another because of the establishment of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians that came in its wake.
Your lack of understanding and empathy is stunningly on display for everyone to grasp. You know absolutely nothing of what it means to live as a Palestinian. If you did, you would understand that the Nakba is (a) not some event that ended, but an ongoing and continuing process up to this very moment; and (b) inextricably entwined, one way or another, with the existence of every single Palestinian, wherever he or she happens to reside presently.
Please, please don’t presume to speak for those about whom you are glaringly ignorant any more. It’s just enraging.
The significance of calling both the nakba and holocaust “myth”, is not to say that they are untrue, but that they function currently now as story, more than as personal experience.
And then you follow that up immediately with a comment elsewhere pointing out that the Nakba is still happening. You can’t make a myth out of something you are watching happen in front of you with your own eyes, Witty.
The significance of calling both the nakba and holocaust “myth”, is not to say that they are untrue, but that they function currently now as story, more than as personal experience.
The Nakba is imposed each time the Palestinian right of return is rejected.
There is no equivalence between the two. One ended a long time ago, personally experienced by those subjected to the Holocaust, the other continues to this day, if not through the relentless dispossession of Palestinian property then by the exile in place by the Zionist regime.
Its time to stop the nakba.
Two states accomplishes that. Single state doesn’t. Struggle doesn’t. Fantasy of justice rather than reality of peace, doesn’t.
The Nakba affects every aspect of a Palestinian’s life, from the (non-Palestinian) travel/identity document that s/he is issued at birth up to the place of burial after death. You do realize, don’t you, that dispersed Palestinians are not allowed to be buried in Eretz Israel either?
I could write volumes about this, but for what? At the end of the day you would still seek to minimize and dismiss and trivialize and wish away Palestinian suffering. Because it just doesn’t fit neatly into your sanitized ‘liberal Zionist’ narrative. That’s where the myth resides, Witty, not in the ongoing raw, searing pain caused by the Nakba or the Holocaust.
Actually Witty, a single state would be the only way to end the Nakba because it would put an end to teh refugee problem without any compromise.
Bijou,
The elements of Palestinian suffering that occur in relation to Israel, don’t begin to unravel until there is a peace agreement.
Its a sequence.
Excellent observation and response Chaos.
It only just occurred to me that the reason is so at ease with the status quo and rejects the one state solution so desperately, is because he sees himself making Aliya one day and quite likes the idea of being given a home on someone else’s lans, where he doesn’t have to look at Palestinians next door or on the street.
This is Witty’s retirement plan.
Peace follows a ceasefire or an end of war agreement. In other word,s you have it backwards, as always.
Or, you can just remain a Zionist and continue to believe two wrongs make a right. And that dissent is ipso facto negation. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
RW
<em"For many Palestinians, the nakba continues, and unbroken stream. "
The Nakba IS STILL HAPPENING for ALL Palestinians!!! FFS!!!!
“That can stop with negotiation, with a two-state solution”
It can stop with Israel adhering to the law!! Negotiations = Israel not having to adhere to the law. Negotiations = the Palestinians forgoing their full, legitimate and legal rights. They are the same rights should be afforded everyone. They’re rights formulated BECAUSE of events like the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, albeit an affront to humanity, was decades ago! It’s ghastliness was a large part in producing the very rights Israel refuses to acknowledge for Palestinians.
The Palestinians had NO THING to do with the Holocaust when it happened. Husseini did not represent them or anyone else when he met Hitler he’d bee booted out of position and the country and NO Palestinians served in the Balkans.
link to wp.me
The Palestinians of today were ALL CHILDREN. The Nakba is still happening to them. All of them.
Zionism and the notion of a Greater Israel began BEFORE the Holocaust. The Holocaust was NOT Zionism’s reason for seeking a Jewish safe haven, a Jewish state or even a homeland in Palestine as Palestinians, per the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
Zionism’s aim was already in motion, already had financial institutions, was already arming terrorist activities, lobbying, corrupting, creating facts on the ground, mis-interpreting, adding words to mandates and declarations, lying, BEFORE the Holocaust. It continues today.
If you read, I stated that the nakba continues today, in the form of settlement expansion and lack of freedom and sovereignty for Palestinians.
When a peace treaty is signedand ratified, the nakba officially ends.
>> When a peace treaty is signedand ratified, the nakba officially ends.
But, like the Holocaust, it will live on in memory (“Remember the Nakba!”), and Palestinians will rightly be encouraged to hunt down Nakba war criminals and to build Nakba museums, et cetera. Never forgive, never forget, eh? ;-)
And since Israel refuses to even look at such agreements (e.g. the Arab Peace Plan), as long as Israel exists, so will the Nakba.
Only if that peace treaty includes ROR.
It wouldn’t be a peace treaty if it didn’t address the fact that Israel purged the original residents of Palestine and are refusing to allow them to return home, as is their right under international law.
It will live on memory. It is time to change the quality of the relationship, so that the nakba becomes ONLY story, rather than at least partially reality currently.
When a peace treaty is signed and ratified, the nakba officially ends.
Only if that peace treaty addresses all the deep issues that stand in the way of historic reconciliation between the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples, including the fate of refugees outside and internally displaced persons inside. Only if that peace treaty acknowledges, face on and in full, the immeasurable losses and suffering inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the establishment of the state of Israel – the human cost. Only if that peace treaty provides dignity to every Palestinian, wherever in the world he or she may be.
Israel’s attempts to “extort peace on the cheap” are terribly short-sighted, as they guarantee that reconciliation cannot be achieved. The only path to true reconciliation and forgiveness is to first acknowledge the extent of the harm inflicted, and to seek to redress it in one fashion or another for all who were harmed, even symbolically.
Man, please be careful with your language! “Only story???” Was this a Freudian slip? Do you so desperately wish that this Israeli-inflicted collective trauma will evaporate into a cloud of myth?
I hope very much that you meant rather to type “only history,” which is still offensive in its suggestion that Palestinians should just “get over it.” The pain of the Nakba should vanish, unlike the pain of the Holocaust, which should be allowed to burn in perpetuity, never forgotten.
I hate to break it to you, but the Nakba was, is, and always will be, REALITY, whether you like it or not. Just like the Holocaust.
Richard Witty February 15, 2011 at 5:16 pm
” If you read, I stated that the nakba continues today, in the form of settlement expansion and lack of freedom and sovereignty for Palestinians.”
And if YOU read carefully, I said ALL Palestinians. Unless they have taken up citizenship in a country other that that of return, (wherein they are no longer Palestinians, no longer qualify as refugees anything due them would be reparation for Israeli intransigence, LOSS of property and or inheritance)
“When a peace treaty is signedand ratified, the nakba officially ends”
COMPLETELY irrelevant to Israel’s illegal activities. It is Israel’s ILLEGAL activities created/ing the Nakba.
wrong no it doesn’t. until the crimes against them stop and our recitified( which you don’t want to see. you have shown your steadfastly against justice) it will still be on going.
I’d have to disagree with you about the whole citizenship thing. the whole point of the right of return is to give the refugee the choice between returning and resettling. I feel the fact that they were essential denied that choice( ie. the only reason it happened was because of the denial of choice) that they should still get it but without some of the arangements for those that did not fall to despair.
I get your argument but rather than help the palestinians these arguments only stregthen the ISraeli resolve to deny the palestinians their rights
Bijou,
“Only story” is a contrast to occurring. Better that it be past already, not occurring. Thats the goal of negotiation that is truly consented.
I fear that in opposing consented peace, you guys act to continue the nakba, to not make it a phenomena that ends.
Did you oppose the Egypt Peace treaty Witty, because that clearly was no consented.
“I fear that in opposing consented peace, you guys act to continue…”
Witty likes to imagine a world where the Palestinians have consented to a peace agreement that he himself would approve (because it lets Israelis benefit from land theft right up to the present day) and we’re all desperately trying to stop it. Meanwhile, in the real world Israel continues to steal land and the PA security forces beat up Palestinians who gather in support of democracy in Egypt.
Witty, when someone is gunning down your family and setting fire to your farm, there is no amount of negotiation that will make thugs like that stop.
Israel will always break its agreements. That’s not a prediction, that’s an established pattern backed up by historical repetition.
“That the creation of that state in Israel in a land already inhabited by another people created an injustice is undeniable, but the dilemma of Zionism—there was an imperative need for a Jewish state, but no place to put it—could and of course should have been mitigated in many ways by the Israelis, none of which they did.” Mitigation? atonement? Both are desirable.
Mitigation could (very unlikely, as is atonement, of course, given Israel’s realities) take the form of a SMALLer Jewish state. Let it be VERY Jewish (even 100%) and VERY SMALL. (Then “return” of Palestinians would not impact if, because they would be going to other parts of Palestine than the SMALL PART dedicated to the SMALL ISRAEL.
New York city is very small and its population is like that of ALL Israel, including resident Palestinians and Jews who would agree to live outside Israel. Imagine a NYC-sized (or twice that) SMALL ISRAEL, Why not?
The answer to “why not?” is likely to be that Israel’s Jews “want it all”, want “Jewish”, want BIG, want no-Arabs, want no-enemies that they cannot regularly pulverize, want a permanent condition of war-readiness and regular war-not-dangerous-to-Israel. Do ALL Israelis want these things? Not necessarily, any more than ALL Americans want the USA’s empire. But there is no sign that — absent a major change in exterior circumstances — there will be any change in Israeli governance.
I think mine was one of the comments that was subject to Professor Slater’s elaborate disdain last time round. So I’ll try again -
If one racial group is ‘privileged in certain matters’ and other groups not privileged in any matters then it stands to logic that there is, according to the prevailing law, a significantly privileged and a significantly underprivileged group, which is not consistent with human right.
If it is the whole purpose of the state, overriding all or many other objectives, to maintain and emphasise this difference of status, then the other groups are reminded of their lesser status – ie humiliated – often and forcefully. This too is contrary to human right.
This situation could not in principle have been put right by moving the location. Even if we had been talking about a few Patagonians with their migrating llamas rather than numerous Palestinians with their fixed olive groves it would still have been wrong to force secondary status upon them.
No system of refuge (and refuge in certain circumstances is a human right) should be based on race rather than on the need of the time, that is on shared humanity. Rights accorded on the basis of race rather than of humanity are an affront, quite a profound one really, to the principle of human rights.
If empirical arguments are demanded then I’d say that the terrible experiences of the Palestinians stand before us as incontrovertible (and here uncontroversial) evidence that this particular system of ‘privilege in certain matters’ is a bad one, has been bad for a long time and is getting worse by the day. The next empirical question should be ‘is there any comparable system that works just fine?’ and I would think that the answer is that we can’t find one. So the ‘privilege in certain matters’ idea doesn’t work in practice. But then it conflicts in basic principle with human rights, always has done and always will do, and we shouldn’t be surprised when the empirical problems jump up and bite us.
Given the history of the Jews, it was necessary to establish a Jewish state, somewhere, and in light of that same history, it cannot be said that the need for a Jewish state—de facto or formal—has definitively ended, for all time.
When you start your argument with a false premise, there’s no need to follow the rest of it.
Over time, the body sometimes produces too many antibodies, resulting in exactly what they were produced to avoid.
When you start your argument with a false premise, there’s no need to follow the rest of it.
Reminds me of the opening gambit in Jewish Poker:
You could not have a more supportive person to your cause than Jerome Slater. Stop getting so upset that he believes that a Jewish state is necessary. In the end, this is a judgment call as no one can predict the future.
I suspect that the reason you are so frustrated with his view is because you realize that if Slater’s view is such, then a vast majority of Jews also believe that a Jewish state is necessary and are unlikely to change their view. Wailing at the moon will not change anything. That is indeed what the predominant majority of Jews believe and it is something you have to accept.
If a majority of flat-earthers believe the Earth is shaped like a pancake, I don’t get upset by this. I’m pretty sure events will come along to shake them out of their delusions.
But I also don’t credit their arguments that begin, “Given that the Earth is shaped like a pancake …”
>> But I also don’t credit their arguments that begin, “Given that the Earth is shaped like a pancake …”
You lack eee’s so-called “common sense”.
When you are able to discern the difference between a fact and a judgment call, let’s resume this discussion.
Having considered all the relevant information, Jerome Slater has made the judgment call that a Jewish state is necessary. So have most of the Jews. Are they certain a Jewish state is necessary? No, because no one can predict the future. But we have to make judgments now and not at the end of time.
A judgement call still needs to be supoted by evidence or examples. Jerome assumes that a Jewish state is necessary, and apparently didn’t feel this needed to be justified. He’s been asked to explain on what basis it is necessary.
When you can identify facts as something other than inconvenient data that are an obstacle between you and your land grab, then the discussion with you might actually start. Until then, I guess, troll on.
The point isn’t certainty. The point is that there is no use in a discussion that begins with such an assumption.
“then a vast majority of Jews also believe that a Jewish state is necessary and are unlikely to change their view.”
And why should the rest of the world accomodate their foolishness?
“And why should the rest of the world accomodate their foolishness?”
This is the beauty of a Jewish state and for me the essence of why I personally think the Jews need one. It is exactly to make a question like yours an anachronism. The Jews will decide for themselves what is “foolish” or not. And if you have a problem with that, write your representative or don’t buy Israeli produce at your supermarket.
so why do the jews of the world get to decide what happens in palestine but the palestinian the actualt rightful legal residents don’t???
the answer is you don’t. Israel is a crime and no amount of lying and ppropaganda on your part can change that.
That’s a bit like arguing that an alcoholic will know when he’s had to much to drink.
no, that is an argument made from impaired judgement. the judgement of jewish people is not impaired. its more of an argument of were better so you lower people cannot pass judgement on us though we can make decisions for you.
Jewish exceptionalism? Holocaust guilt? Rogue nuclear armed state holding the plutonium pistol to our collective heads if we don’t accept their demands? Oh, sorry, I should really let eee and fuster and company speak for themselves. Mea culpa.
EEE once again the arrogance of Israel and its supporters is shown through you. your basicly saying we have to accept that they were right and no we don’t. we might have to accept that they think that way but until an actual rational logicaly consistent argument is made for it we don’t have to accept such a thing as right.
Judaism is a religion. To associate with a state will do nothing but profane the religion, and impede the state.
Am I the only one who sees it that way? Isn’t a state simply the monopolisation of violence for the state’s ends? So that is what Judaism should be used for?
Isn’t a state simply the monopolisation of violence for the state’s ends? So that is what Judaism should be used for?
yes, and it just goes to show how pedestrian an enterprise zionism is. instances of gentile persecution of jews are rightly condemned. judaism/zionism’s persecution of jews is not a topic for polite conversation. and zionist persecution of gentiles? meh, the world’s a tough place. but you’re right. if a state and religion are conflated, then religion cannot help but be an agent for violence, and generations of palestinians will now associate judaism with violence.
This is the central issue as I see it, anyway. By defining the state, and how “Jewishness” can become a nationality/ethnic group/territory rather than simply a religion, touches on all the issues : ethnic cleansing, Zionism, class structure in Israeli society (the formation of an elite), treatment of the Palestinians. I think we need to back up and define what exactly a “state” is and what purposes it serves. (It’s a discussion that goes for other countries and societies as well)
Murray Rothbard, “The Anatomy of the State” :
link to lewrockwell.com
lareineblanche, we agree that conceptions of the state are central to this discussion. I’d be very wary of being tied to Rothbard’s definition or even his mode of definition. In addition, we have a major competing definition of the state and its purposes being advanced by Hamas in particular that needs at some point to be taken into account.
For example – here’s Rothbard subverting his own premise, arguing against the Hegelian concept of the state without identifying it as such, and turning to a radically ill-chosen example:
While misstating both the history of Nazi Germany and the theory of the state as positive collective enterprise, Rothbard sloppily moves from the “we” to the “they” and implicitly the “I.” As a result he misses the devastating and very real conclusion of history, which validates the point that he is trying to argue against: The Nazi state was a suicidally self-destructive collective. The genocide was a primary expression of that collective’s inherent self-destructiveness, the “we” of the German state turning against itself and achieving as close to a total annihilation of itself as a nation-state can achieve. I think it clearly resonates with Zionism in the latter’s pathological dimensions – not that Zionism is the “same” as Nazism (or could be), merely that the conversion of a faulty concept into a bad reality cannot be evaded forever.
CK MacLeod :
So would I, but this particular phrase resonated with what Mooser was saying. While looking at many events over the past decade, and history in general, however, the privilege of keeping a monopoly on the means of coercion and violence does seem to be one of the most important aspects of the nation-state. If you like to go back further than Westphalia, and to feudal times, you can substitute the various fiefdoms and seigneurs and their armies for the state, as their function is analogue. Rothbard is not always right, nor is his analysis always clairvoyant, but on this issue I think he is correct. His other writings are worth reading as well, notably his essay on Etienne de la Boétie :
link to lewrockwell.com
- what do you mean by this?
The nazi Germany references shouldn’t be understood as a historically accurate portrayal of the events, but rather as an extreme example to illustrate his point, namely that the patriotic “We” is often an illusion. In this sense, it is more a discussion of the language we have a tendency to use, and addressing a rather narrow linguistic point – which is that the “state” should not be confused with the people living in it, they are two different things. Those Jews, and others, who were targeted by the regime were not part of the conception of the “state” as the nazis saw it, even though they resided in the territory (maybe this is what you mean by, “I think it clearly resonates with Zionism in the latter’s pathological dimensions”, as it is similar to the Zionist conception of the “state”).
As for anthropomorphizing a country so as to allow it to be treated psychoanalytically (“self-destructive”, “suicide”), I’m not sure how much this holds. Clearly with nazi Germany, and with fascism in general, there is a large group of corporate influences grafted onto the state, to the point where the two become indistinguishable. Now, whether it self-destructed (which I think is not the case) or were destroyed from the outside (which seems to fit the historical record, notably from Russia on the eastern front), is another point altogether from the main thrust of Rothbard’s argument in the rest of the paper.
As regards the state of Israel, if you read a little on the political economy and history of it, you see that the dominant economic institutions were state enterprises at the beginning (into which foreign money was funneled), which later gave way to private corporations, and then private transnational corporations we have now. Part of what is happening is that the political economy has been changing, and therefore the notion of what the state is is changing too. It’s just happened quickly. On the one hand, you have the “blood and soil” nationalism, and on the other hand you have the increasingly international nature of capital flowing in and out if Israel, which contradicts that. All this to say that the “state” is a very fluid and unstable concept, and that a monopoly on coercion is one of the things which seems historically consistent when looking at them. Of course there are others.
lareineblanche,
Maybe we can set aside a discussion of Nazism for now.
Regarding Hamas and its competing alternative definition: Hamas explicitly favors the establishment of an Islamic state – Article 6 of the Charter reads as follows:
Anti-semitic statements by Hamas spokespeople (“The Jews can’t be trusted,” “the Jews are animals,” etc., etc.) tend to attract much more attention than this traditional Islamic mode of co-existence “under Islam.” If the latter is noted at all, it will typically be in the context of scaremongering.
I think Hamas means it, and, furthermore, I think this form of Islamism does constitute one coherent and pragmatic theory of the state. In relation to Rothbard and/or Hobbes, it stands as a typical example of the state both as guarantor of order and final adjudicator of claims (through the monopoly on violence), but as much more besides. In this respect Islamists are, I would argue, rather more typical of the norm, and closer to a truth of human existence in general – because who and what we are as individuals, every aspect of our realization of ourselves, occurs in relation to others, to some collective or set of collective identities, and that this is as much the human reality of the state as the monopoly on violence that helps to facilitate its operation.
What I’m saying is that it’s not a question of “psychoanalyzing” states, but of recognizing that even the idea of psychological identification falls short of expressing the degree to which any “I” is an “I” at all only to the extent that he or she relates to others as part of a “we.”
I agree that the definition of the state in general and of the Israeli state in particular have been subject to change historically, but that’s a circular statement, since such change occurs not just in history, but as history – not in a vacuum or as mere theory, but in a sense as its own ground.
The commenters who say, simply, “it’s not for others to decide whether or not we should exist” are castigated in various ways, but the beginning and end point of this discussion is still what people are willing to fight for, and how hard (to the death). From this perspective, perhaps we can acknowledge that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are going to give up their identities as they know and have constructed them because someone else thinks they should, because it suits someone else’s moral determinations. That’s like asking them simply to cease to be.
It’s more complex than “blood and soil,” though blood and soil shouldn’t be underestimated as powerful human motivators in their own right. You mention the alteration in the Israeli self-conception brought about by political economy: I do think that an alternative path of collective and individual identity formation is every day more available to the Israelis and everyone else, and can be detected and described on this level as on others – perhaps an emergent transnational or global human identity (flowing with those rivers of capital) that prior to our age was hardly conceivable except as messianic prophecy or through its twin, worldwide revolution. But that identity, or strand of identity, is still being born. It is more frequently encountered as a transitory loss of interest in the prior identity-formation than as a concrete idea for someone to live, fight, and die for.
The willingness, however, to sacrifice for a religious culture-state has been amply evidenced, for thousands of years. In this context the Hamas Charter becomes directly relevant: Islam presents a vision of a world community, and is distinguished among religions for the concreteness of that vision. The Islamists possess an historically field-tested transnationalism – a model for a global state designed to submerge national, ethnic, and religious conflict. It would be a mistake to proceed as if they don’t, even if we also believe that in one way or another they will be compelled to adjust their beliefs and practices, perhaps as Zionists will be compelled also to transform themselves.
CKM how much did your idea of what people were willing to fight for change watching the Egyptians not murder people? I.e., the army was not williing to fight for an outmoded idea. Similarly what would be the effect onIsraeli identity, which I agree is constituted in such a way that many would right now die/kill for Zionism, if American Jews had to stand up tomorrow–after forced reading of Mondoweiss in classrooms for 8 hours with strict silence– and answer honestly: Do you think there’s a need for a Jewish state?
Phil,
If Jerome Slater knowing what he knows has answered that a Jewish state is necessary, why do you think other American Jews given the same information available to Slater would reach another decision? You are missing one of the major points Slater is trying to get across, we are not living in an ideal world.
The reason the left in Israel is such a failure is not because people do not know the facts, it is because the conclusion that the left reaches from these facts do not ring true for most Israelis.
PW: In re Egypt, George Friedman summed things up this way:
I think that’s an excessively cynical way of putting things, but Friedman kind of sees that as his job. I think the rest of us can, without getting carried away, acknowledge that the mere opportunity going forward for Egyptians to “speculate” in a way that matters, to shape their future self-consciously, is a significant objective achievement, a great thing for anyone who believes in human freedom. On the other hand, if the protesters hadn’t put forth a reform deal that even the most cynical member of the regime could rationally take, or if they had mounted an objective threat to the state as an organic whole (which includes the army), they might gotten nowhere – or have been slaughtered.
As for Israeli identity, if I understand your question correctly, I think it would be (and on its present course likely will be) affected over time by a sense of divergence from America. But I don’t think Israeli identity is dependent on the opinions of American Jews. I think it’s re-created and reinforced daily in the lives of Israelis. How American Jews in general would answer your question, even after prolonged intense exposure to MW, would still depend most on who was asking and how.
This is true over matters we have no control over, but Israel has completel control of it’s policies and actions. Israel uses the imperfect world argument to justify their immoral choices. The world sucks, so why should we even bother to make it better?
And what’s more, hugely hypocritical. As others have pointed out, iargument is biased entierly gainst the Palestinians.
This is further reflected in Rice’s comment in the Palestine Papers when she responded to the Palestinian refugee issue by arguing that bad things happen to people. Can anyone imagine the outrage had that comment been made about the Holocaust?
Judaism is a religion. To associate with a state will do nothing but profane the religion, and impede the state.
Am I the only one who sees it that way?
No. You’re not. I see it that way. All religions, too. Otherwise by its very nature, the priestcraft, the clergy, becomes the elite, the ruling class. (Even though there is no such thing as a priestcraft or clergy in Islam, they do have religious scholars that address, or corral, their brand of Islam.) The monopolisation of violence is therefore in the hands of the elite.
When the French Revolution happened and the priestcraft saw their chance to make hay at the demise of the aristocracy, the intellectuals moved like lightning to get a theatre on almost every street corner. theatre troupes grew up everywhere. They knew France would become an inquisition prison if the priests were allowed to rule the minds of the uneducated masses; theatres functioned like a free press and got new ideas out to the people quickly, and there was nothing anyone could do from the pulpit. North America wasn’t so lucky: we got churches on every corner instead. But Jefferson sure the hell noticed the difference when he was in France…the church shit had already happened in the American colonies, long a Vatican tool in Europe…so he got to work on the free press and separation of church and state business when he got back home.
This is also what Yaakov Rabkin observed in his book A THREAT FROM WITHIN: A CENTURY OF JEWISH OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM — from an extensive review here: link to acjna.org
Something got screwed up.
I was quoting from this: link to acjna.org
The quote was
(I broke up the paragraph arbitrarily for better readability.)
The Jews are a nation.
I am an atheist, but a Jew nonetheless. Once you understand that there are many atheist Jews you will see where your point of view fails. I suspect even Phil is an atheist Jew. Perhaps Shmuel also. Tony Judt was certainly a self described atheist Jew.
I love it how athiest Israeli Jews still insist on their God-given right to Jerusalem. “I don’t believe in God but…. we have a deal!”
No they aren’t. a definition cannot be inconsistent to demand jues as a nation is to demand inconsistenicies. are christians a nation? are muslims, hindus, and shintos nations?
eee,
I am an atheist, but a Christian nonetheless. Once I understood, with great sorrow I must add, that my upbringing had imprinted on me some ways of life I could not part with, even though I rejected all religious and spiritual meanings of these ways of life, I accepted that part of me will for ever be Christian.
Does that make me part of a Christian nation. Not at all. As an atheist, would I want to live in a Christian state. No thanks. I meet regularly other atheist Christian friends of mine when I travel to Europe. We share many things in common but many things also separate us. Last year, as a guest, I attended a baptism ceremony in France. For my friends, this ceremony had no religious meaning whatsoever, it was simply a rite of passage to welcome this new child in their family, for themselves and their friends. Did that event made us part of a Christian nation? No pun intended but, God no!
An atheist Canadian friend of mine, who happens to have been brought up in a religious Jewish family, went to Argentina where he lived there for 2 years while studying music in Buenos Aires. As you probably know, Buenos Aires is home to a large Jewish community. He met with members of that community that introduced him to Polo games on Saturdays, to asado (Argentinian BBQ) in the country side, to every thing that made them proud of being Argentinians. Did my atheist Jewish friend – he is from Montreal, Canada – feel at any time that he was part of a Jewish nation? I’m sorry to say he didn’t. Sure he recognized that they had commonalities in certain ways of life but all in all he felt more Canadian there than ever before. He missed playing hockey at the local ice ring with his friends and going out to watch a game of the Montreal Canadien, Polo just didn’t do it for him.
So you happen to be an Israeli atheist Jew and he happens to be a Canadian atheist Jew. Does that make you part of the same nation? My Canadian friend would say: Hell no!
Surcouf,
Who cares what your Canadian friend says?
You are completely missing the point. I am part of the Jewish nation. So are millions of other secular Jews. We have self determined ourself in such a way. There is nothing you can do about it.
It is not a question of logic, it is an essential part of who I am.
No your not you can not be a part of something that doesn’t exist.
Keep ignoring reality, it will get you far.
I’m not ignoring reality. and your right ignore reality allows one to go far. you clearly have. jews are not a nation. a nation implies nationality which is mutually exclusive in regards to other nationalities. if you want to believe in jewish americans or any jewish-nationality jew cannot be a nation.
one can not be both Zimbabwean and well as South Africian.
the simple honest answer to the question of are jews a nation is no. because they have nothing uniquely jewish that is not connected to the faith. everything else is taken from their places of residence.
What are the criteria for being a “nation”, and how do Jews fulfil those criteria?
The criteria for being a nation is very simple. If a large enough group of people self determines itself as a nation, it is a nation. Usually nations have a common language and so on, but the “secret ingredient” is self determination. Millions of Jews have self determined themselves as a nation. Just as the Palestinians have self determined themselves to be a nation.
So all there is to being a “nation” is that a group of people say “we are a nation”.
The two standard ideas of nations are, first, independent states. Australia is a nation in that sense. Israel is a nation in that sense. Jews are not.
The other idea is the nineteenth century tribal group concept. This involved a group of people with a common language and a common culture living in a territory. Most of those people lived in that territory, and most of the people in that territory spoke the language and shared the culture. Finns were such a group. Jews clearly are not a nation in that sense.
Jews are only a “nation”.
Why is being a “nation” of any importance at all?
>> So all there is to being a “nation” is that a group of people say “we are a nation”.
Don’t forget the “secret ingredient”! If I recall correctly, stamp collectors possess it, too. ;-)
Your misrepresenting self determiantion for your own sleflish purposes.self determination resides in the people of a territory. the only time the right of self determination has ever resided in an ethnic group/nationality is when like in the case of the palestinians when they were denied the right to in the first place. you can’t self determine your self as a nation you either meet the definition and you are a nation or you don’t meet and aren’t
from the world english dictionary
a community of persons not constituting a state but bound by common descent, language, history, etc
jews don’t meet this definition and I am throwing you a bone by not using a definition that includes reference to territory.
the palestinians didn’t decide they were a nation the just were one.
I believe I asked you before to quit using the lie that Israel had anything to do with self determiantion.
self determination is defined as the people of a teritory deciding their own political status. no what part of the definition makes makes sense in the way your using it?
none because your not using the word properly. your giving it a new meaning that suits your purposes. Your a rather sick individual to try and use a right that the palestinians have to try and deny them that right.
No, Ashkenazi Jews are a nation. Jews have never been treated as one people by the Zionist movement. When Yemenite Jews began working in the cooperatives, they had to live in special quarters away from the settlements. The Palestine Office even considered them Arabs – ouch. Sephardim and Mizrachim weren’t allowed in the kibbutzim at all until the 60′s. Even now some African Jewish communities live in shanty towns in the desert.
We can debate that Jews are a people or not. There’s a difference between the internal workings of a movement and its propaganda. The WZO, the Palestine Office and the Israeli govt. have never taken the notion of Jews as one people seriously.
No. That is a totally reductive interpretation of what a state is or should be. Even for Hobbes, the justification for the monopolization of violence was the common interest of the governed. Your definition is circular: The “simply” turns monopolization of violence into an end in itself, as though “state” = “monopolization of violence for the sake of monopolization of violence.”
What I believe is more true, and has a bearing on all of this discussion, is that any formation of any state always inherently implies some reduction in absolute freedom and equality, but absolute freedom itself is an unreal ideal. Real freedom requires actualization, a positive content, and that is the basis of the state: The state properly understood is the realm of actualization of freedom both individually and collectively.
The above holds only for certain views or definitions of religion and certain views of the state. From the perspective of many who consider themselves devout, in all of the great religions, acceptance of a non-religious state would be the profanation, the blasphemy.
One problem is the concept of Judaism as an ethnicity mainly – a peculiar kind of birthright rather than a set of beliefs. In this connection, we encounter two main moral justifications for support of Israel, especially from the American perspective. The main justification that “sells” durably is support of Israel as a “fellow democracy” – actually a fellow democratic capitalist state. This justification has nothing directly to do with Jewish ethnicity, but in effect substitutes an alternative ideology – for Americans a quasi-religious ideology – for the traditionally religious or even ethno-religious one. The second justification is a form of international “affirmative action,” often reduced in these discussions to “making up for the Holocaust,” but actually a much more complex historical discussion that eventually overlaps with the first justification.
In all of this discussion, however, the ardent critics of Zionism seem to slide all the way over to a moral absolutism regarding such “affirmative action” – also, as we say in the U.S., “quotas and set-asides.” Are we all really sure that negotiating or legislating preferential treatment for one group in the interests of the good of all is always inherently immoral? I think, to the contrary, that any real world transition to a more just set of arrangements is going to entail numerous compromises, and inescapably involve recognition of special rights and special classes – the dispossessed and who qualifies for compensation, access to and preservation of significant sites, bases of law, etc. I think this is the underlying truth in Mr. Slater’s argument.
No real state of any kind – Jewish, Islamic, non-denominational; bi-national, confederative, post-national; Israel, Palestine, or Freedonia – can exist except within such less-than-ideal determinations.
Mooser
“Judaism is a religion. To associate with a state will do nothing but profane the religion, and impede the state.”
Ever read the declaration care fully.
the ‘state’ is, reduced to its simplest terms, the monopolization of ‘violence’, which is not only physical violence, but the threat of physical violence (the important bit of Hobbes), and the means of coercion.
eee unintentionally makes a good point, highlighting the contradictory strands/brands of jewish identity, which is by turns a religion (with atheist and agnostic adherents), an ethnicity (with polish, ethiopian, and chinese members), a race (with, well you get the point). this confusion is intentional in my opinion, with each theory of identity serving its purpose.
That the creation of that state in Israel in a land already inhabited by another people created an injustice is undeniable, but the dilemma of Zionism—there was an imperative need for a Jewish state, but no place to put it—could and of course should have been mitigated in many ways by the Israelis, none of which they did.
This is the most insightful passage in your post. You need to examine it further.
The creation and existence of the state of Israel is the injustice. Ideally, the Israelis can only hope to “mitigate” this injustice, never resolve it. Never mind that history and current affairs remind us that the Israelis have spectacularly failed even in this regard, and that your own outlook on their future conduct wrt to Palestinians and Arabs is not positive. But you have pointed out the central force of opposition to Zionism, that it can only exist on the basis of injustice and the prevention of justice. Promising to be tolerant of Arabs and making “guarantees” of extra freedoms are good aspirations, but they are akin to putting lipstick on a pig.
The reason I find you to be an apologist is that you recognize the fundamental problem, but then go on to support the privileged and superior status quo of Israeli Jewry. Instead of proposing to resolve the injustice created and sustained by the state of Israel (even if such a proposal is flawed), instead you demand that the Palestinians accept it and move on in this “imperfect” world.
That is viciously racist, especially in regards to your central theme of the absolute necessity of the Jewish state which required the oppression and permanent exile of the Palestinians. Why don’t you tell the Jews that they also “live in an imperfect world, full of injustices, tragic dilemmas, and circumstances [they] can’t control?” If the world we live in is so horrible and circumstances beyond controllable, what is the moral thrust of having a Jewish state in the first place instead of appeasing Jewish ethno-religious nationalists? And how do you justify its continued operation in face of its oppressive and racist existence?
But of course, just like any other supremacist Zionist, the solution you prescribe to them is to take control at any expense in establishing a state, while telling the inhabitants of that cleansed state to accept and legitimize their oppressors and the ‘cruel world’ they live in..
prior to january the 25th
no ideal world for the children of the nile
but after liberation square
those eighteen days of infinite promise
so unbelievably much energy and good cheer
the future racing pell mell towards us all
peacefully
joyously
not only there
everywhere
in pursuit of an ideal world?
no reason why not
I have debated these issues with Jerry Slater a number of times. Essentially, he is for two states and I am for one. While we disagree about what a final resolution should look like, I associate Jerry with a number of other two-staters who have done great work on behalf of the cause of Palestinian justice: Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Uri Avnery, Mearsheimer and Walt, Goldstone. It may be true that Jerry, while fairly well known, is not as uber-famous as the people on this list, but his contributions are quite significant. In fact, Jerry gets in trouble here precisely because he dares to do what I haven’t seen from these other prominent commentators, with the exception of Avnery. He tackles head-on the difficult issues raised by the existence of the Jewish State, and tries to provide a detailed analytical support for his position. For the most part, the other people on this list assume that a fair two-state solution is possible, and while they primarily blame Israel for the failure to reach that agreement, they do not explore in any depth the moral implications of a Jewish State.
Jerry’s conclusion that the transformation of Israel away from a Jewish State is not feasible because Israeli Jews would never agree to it may seem facile and unconvincing, but it is a conclusion that is shared to some degree by every one of those highly-respected individuals mentioned above. The two-state outcome also enjoys widespread support among the Palestinian community, whose opinion is obviously of far more importance than any of ours. Jerry is a highly intelligent, fair and compassionate scholar, and I greatly appreciate that he has tried his best to justify the two-state solution. Those of us who favor one state should not resent his sincere efforts to convince us otherwise, which at most test our own assumptions. Mearsheimer and Walt’s book featured a great quote from Bertrand Russell: “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” All of us, including Jerry Slater, should take that to heart.
That being said, I look forward to Shmuel’s response.
Well, apparently Jerry Slater did hang a question mark on things he took for granted. He’s changed his mind about Israel/Zionism three times in his life; he gave a great speech about it a year or two ago. Slater thinks. You (rhetorical) may not like his thinking, but he thinks.
David Samel and MRW are right; Jerry Slater has great intellectual courage. We don’t have to look far on this site for counter-examples — people who writhe and twist and distort the facts to pretend there is no inherent contradiction between a “Jewish state” and universal human rights.
I also wait for Shmuel to finish his latest translations and re-enter the discussion.
“Jerry Slater has great intellectual courage. We don’t have to look far on this site for counter-examples — people who writhe and twist and distort the facts to pretend there is no inherent contradiction between a “Jewish state” and universal human rights.”
Agreed. He doesn’t conceal the difficulties with his position.
I second that. he does show great intellectual courage, and it’s refreshing that he’s prepared to have his views scrutinized by a crowd of people he’s never heard of before.
I too appreciate Slater’s comments. By openly discussing his ideas he reveals, it seems to me, the inherent contradictions of liberal Zionism. This has been well covered above by others.
There was one surprise here for me and that was his feeling that the Palestinians will have to recognize Israel as a Jewish State. Apparently the Israeli public now demands that before they will sign off on a peace treaty. This strikes me as gratuitously insulting to the Palestinians. They of all the people of the world are being asked to make such a recognition. I am sure, Israel will not demand this of Europe and the US. What will they do if they are refused? Cut off diplomatic relations? No this is just reserved for the Palestinians. Perhaps the Israelis will insist that only those countries that recognize Israel after a certain date will have accept the Jewish state part. In that case, it will mean that the majority of Arab and Muslim states will be forced to accept this condition. And, in any way you cut it, it is a condition where that recognition means that Christian and Muslim Israelis have a lessor status than do Jews. It will be a license for discrimination.
Even Hamas make this argument well, that the victims need to recognize their oppressor.
It’s also a license to circumvent claims by refugees.
“There was one surprise here for me and that was his feeling that the Palestinians will have to recognize Israel as a Jewish State. Apparently the Israeli public now demands that before they will sign off on a peace treaty. This strikes me as gratuitously insulting to the Palestinians.”
I praised Jerome Slater above, but I have to agree with this. Even if one accepted the two state solution, asking Palestinians to endorse Israel as a Jewish state is like asking them to endorse their own ethnic cleansing–it’s a really degrading and basically racist demand and it’s hard to imagine a Palestinian agreeing to it.
2011, the year the world turned for the better
compliments of the children of the nile
liberation square
those glorious eighteen days of unlimited possibilities
the all for one and one for all in pursuit of a better world
the beginning of the end of racism
those who live in fear of the haters
join the revolution
only way to go
Enough with this tired lie of “safe haven”! If anything, Israel is a fact which drives anti-Semitism in the world today.
I’ll take some Haitian flood victims and find them a safe haven in your living room. Are you crazy with this stuff? Maybe we should have released the Japanese from the internment camps in California and sent them to colonize another country so it could be their “safe haven”. This is really offensive and racist actually, because you are ignoring the real safe haven needed for 5 million + Palestinian refugees! Why do the lives of prosperous European lifestyle living Israelis come before the safe haven needed for Palestinians?
Yeah, I think there are a whole heap of destitute starving Bangladeshis, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Haitians, and Zimbabweans that we need to parachute in to central Tel Aviv because they are seeking a safe haven… sorry but their situation is life or death, so you don’t have any say in the matter.
For thirty years I taught classes about the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and for over forty years I have written about it—for professional journals, for the general public, and recently in Mondoweiss and my own blog. During that time I have been a strenuous opponent of Israeli policies and behavior towards the Palestinians. Consider my concluding sentences in three of my most recent commentaries:
1. In a March 2009 article for Tikkun, in which I argued that Israel’s 2008-09 attack on Gaza violated every single moral principle that governs warfare, I concluded: “The continuing Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is not merely immoral, it is almost unfathomably stupid.”
2. In my chapter in the Horowitz/Ratner/Weiss book, The Goldstone Report, I argued that in some ways the Goldstone report actually let the Israelis off the hook; I concluded with these words: “The uncontestable facts leave no doubt that the Israeli attack on Gaza constituted a grave war crime. Indeed, by accepting that Israel had a case for self-defense and by failing to include a full discussion of previous Israeli attacks on Palestinian and other Arab civilians and infrastructure, the Goldstone Commission actually understated the full range and import of Israeli criminality. “
3. And in the very column that set off a storm of insults and outrage on this site, my Feb. 7 comment on a recent article about Israel, I wrote: “How can it be that a Jewish state has become so degraded, so criminal, so hopeless?”
One might think this record would immunize me against the charges in this blog—not, mind you, from “pro-Israeli” quarters but from people with whom I am about 90% in agreement–that my argument, among other things, was “offensive,” “appalling,” “disgusting,”and “viciously racist”; that I am “dishonest,” a teller of “tired lies,” a “lame apologist” for “Israel’s crimes and the crime of its creation”; and that I am a justifier of “mass murder and ethnic cleansing.”
Please do not misunderstand me. I am NOT arguing that my experience and record should make me immune from substantive criticism—that would be absurd. Rather, what I am arguing is that those who make such inane charges eliminate themselves from any serious discussion.
To elaborate: if you want to be taken seriously in debates or discourse over serious and often complex issues—like whether Israel should be considered a Jewish state—you must meet certain intellectual requirements. These are not my requirements, they are those that have long been recognized as necessary prerequisites or components for serious discourse.
First, you must argue with at least minimal civility, avoiding ad hominum arguments, insults, and rants.
Second, you must be aware of and acknowledge the relevant facts. As Daniel Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” A number of comments here fail to meet this rather obvious criterion, for they fail to acknowledge—indeed, a few seem to be quite unaware of—the long history of global anti-Semitism, often quite murderous anti-Semitism.
It is a demonstrable fact that such murderous anti-Semitism has repeatedly broken out around the world, even in countries in which Jews were not only long treated with tolerance but rose to positions of power and honor, sometimes for centuries. I am not here going to go into those two thousand years of history—it is sufficient to observe that it was the Russian and East European pogroms of the late 19th-early 20th century that led to the creation of the Zionist movement, and it was the Nazi Holocaust that convinced most people, around the world, that the creation of a Jewish state was a moral necessity.
Put differently, both recent and past history led to a strong (though not unanimous) consensus that the Zionist case for the creation of a Jewish state to serve as a refuge against anti-Semitism was an exceptionally powerful one. However: the Zionist case that such a state had to be in Palestine and nowhere else, regardless of the will and the rights of the indigenous people, was not at all a powerful one. Hence the tragic dilemma: there was a prima facie case for the Jews to have a state of their own, but no place to put it without violating another people’s rights. In my short blog I suggested that there were a great many things that the Zionists and Israelis could and should have done to mitigate, to make up for, the inevitable injustice done to the Palestinians, none of which they did. To begin but hardly to end with the most blindingly obvious point, the Zionists should not have murdered and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, regardless of their need for a Jewish state.
I recognize the need to develop this argument, and will soon do so soon on my own blog. Moreover, I have not addressed the argument that even if a Jewish state was a necessity over half a century ago, it no longer is, allegedly because anti-Semitism has been eliminated. For now, just a brief comment. Some of my critics seem to be arguing that because anti-Semitism has essentially ended in the United States, that destroys the argument that a Jewish state is still necessary. The refutation of such an argument should be obvious: fifty years is way too soon to be so confident and, more importantly, if there should be any recurrence of murderous anti-Semitism, the U.S. is not likely to be the problem. .
A third requirement for serious discourse is that you must have the ability to make distinctions, particularly elementary ones. I acknowledged that a Jewish state would and probably should continue to grant Jews around the world the right to emigrate to Israel, a right that it would not grant to non-Jews. I further argued that this was a relatively small departure from what must be the rights of the Israeli Arab minority to be treated with full dignity and with full human, political, economic, and social rights. Nonetheless, there was much huffing and puffing to the effect that ANY privileging of one group over another was a moral catastrophe that “conflicts in basic principle with human rights,” as one comment went.
In the real world, there are always differences of circumstance and degree. There are not just two possible societies, one of them perfectly just and the other perfectly unjust. A refusal to recognize that reality is utopian, simplistic, and an impediment to clear thinking. In this connection, I would refer you to CK MacLeod’s Feb. 15 comment, which makes this point much better than I have.
A final criterion for serious discourse is that you must state the argument that you wish to refute AS YOUR ADVERSARY STATES IT, avoiding strawmen and caricatures. Here are a few of the comments that fail to meet that criterion, and are therefore beneath any extended refutation:
*The “core” of my argument was not that the “Jews are more important than other people” nor that, in a particularly loony charge, that “Jews be granted privileges denied to the rest of humanity.” The core of my argument is that the Jews have the same “privileges” as do all humanity, meaning the rights to a free, secure, and normal life– rights that historically have been repeatedly denied to them. Nor do I need to be told that the Palestinians also have that those rights—that’s precisely what I have been teaching and writing about for the last forty years.
*I argued that the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 was “necessary,” not the Nakba. Indeed, I know of no other “self-righteous Zio-supremacist” who argues that the Nakba was necessary. On second thought, I suppose there are some–these days Benny Morris comes uncomfortably close—but they are hardly typical of Zionists, and damned well not of me.
*I did not argue that the Palestinians “should forget their history of mistreatment at the hands of Israeli Jews,” that “the Palestinians have to take it and lump it,” or that they should “trust” the Israelis to live up to any commitment to treat the Israeli Arabs with full equality. I argued, rather, that there was still a case for a Jewish state, and that in the context of the creation of a genuinely independent and viable Palestinian state, together with an Israeli commitment to full political, social, and economic equality for the Israeli Arabs, the Palestinians should acknowledge it. I specifically stated that there would be no guarantee with the Israelis would live up to such a commitment, but that there was no way to force them to do so and that therefore the best hope that they would do so lies in a settlement of the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a settlement that would be made more likely by a Palestinian acknowledgment of Israel as a Jewish state.
Why more likely? Because whatever the cynicism of Netanyahu, the demand for a formally-recognized Jewish state is not merely “a meaningless stunt to humiliate the Palestinians,” but reflects a genuine and deep-seated Israeli fear of the ultimate intentions of the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. This fear may be misplaced, exaggerated, or the unavoidable consequence of the Israelis’ own occupation and repression of the Palestinians; even so, it is a reality that must be reckoned with, even if only by a symbolic Palestinian acknowledgment of a fact of life, namely that Israel has always been, precisely, a Jewish state.
I do not mean to imply that all of the comments I received on my blog failed, in one way or another, to meet the necessary criteria for serious discussion. On the contrary, many of the critics of my argument stated their position civilly, thoughtfully, and subtly. As I have said, it is my intention to discuss those criticisms in a new and extended piece I plan to write in the near future.
“Hence the tragic dilemma: there was a prima facie case for the Jews to have a state of their own, but no place to put it without violating another people’s rights.”
“The core of my argument is that the Jews have the same “privileges” as do all humanity, meaning the rights to a free, secure, and normal life– rights that historically have been repeatedly denied to them.”
But as soon as you say that the Jews have to violate the rights of others in order to gain those rights for themselves, you are saying that Jewish rights are more important than the rights of those others.
and once you do that your saying all are not equal before the law and open a can of worms of people saying their better than other so as to take their rights away so they can victimize them.
weather you wish to admit it or not if I read the opening post correctly you said Israel( a Jewish state) was needed in doing that you said that denying people of their legal rights was needed. that what was necessary for it to happen was needed. well WAR CRIMES were needed so that a Jewish state could be created. that by definition makes you a justifier of their crimes. You can’t be a friend nor supporter of the Palestinians while saying the crimes committed against them were needed. what you did was ethically and logically the same as saying you all for the Jews while saying the holocaust was needed. At the end of the day you can say your for the Palestinians and their rights but you still want and think Israel should keep the loot an get away with its crimes. Your basicly saying we should allow Israel, a criminal enterprise, dictate what is justice for it victims
With all due respects Jeremy, why do you insist on repeating this false argument? Do you expect anyone to believe that in the early 1900′s, there was no empty piece of land anywhere that could have accommodated a Jewish state?
Jerome,
First of all, I want to say that I am appalled that you have had to tolerate such inflated rhetoric. You deserving of far greater respect. Your points about meeting certain intellectual requirements are entirely valid, and I want to reiterate my admiration for your intellectual courage to willingly partake in this discussion in this forum.
With all due respects, while your pro Palestinians credentials are impeccable, you continue to exhibit a cognitive dissonance that appears unique to Zionism. I am left wondering if there is any threshold of violence and carnage that Israel can unleash before you would be forced to rethink your position on a Jewish state.
Your follow up post clarified a number of your points however, the same contradictions persist. You appear to oscillate between the argument that we are stuck with certain immovable realities and the possibility that some outcomes are possible, no matter how highly unlikely. As I pointed out earlier, you accept that Israelis won’t grant full equality to the Arab minority currently under the status quo, but want us to entertain the possibility that Israeli society might grant full equality to the Arabs in a formally recognized Jewish state.
The thesis that the creation of a Jewish state was a moral necessity is a always going to be a difficult one to defend, because a) nothing of the kind has ever been done before and b) it was performed so badly in Palestine While you don’t support the Nakba, how else could the state have been created without violating another people’s rights? As has been mentioned a number of times, there were many locations that could have accommodated such a state that were not already inhabited, though you are reticent to accept this argument.
There is never going to be a sufficient period of time to assure Jews that they are forever safe from persecution. The slaughter of 6 million people can ever be erased from our memories nor our psyche (certainly not for Jews). Nevertheless, one could argue that if 50 years is way too soon to be confident of the recurrence of murderous anti-Semitism won’t be repeated, then why are most of the world’s Jewish population (especially Jewish Zionists) refusing to migrate to Israel? If it is necessary to have a Jewish state (for the security of Jews) are the Jews in the diaspora being reckless and taking unnecessary risks? And if not, then isn’t it somewhat presumptuous and indulgent for Jews around the world to insist on having a state reserved for them (at the expense of the Palestinians no less) but not commit to it by residing there?
I would also contend that there is no such thing as a relatively small degree of privilege. Human kind is notorious for exploiting any perceivable differences to disenfranchise minorities or the weak. History has shown that granting legitimacy to privilege is guaranteed to end in a permanent caste system. Israel today is a case in point.
link to haaretz.com
To argue that the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 was “necessary,” but not the Nakba also strikes me as an unserious proposition. To create a Jewish democratic state (on inhabited land), ethnic cleansing was always going to be required. Today, Ehud Barak acknowledges that in the absence of a two state solution (which is undeniably dead) Israel would have to face a choice between being Jewish or democratic, but not both. That was the dilemma Israel’s founders were confronted with.
So that raises the next question Jerome. Is a Jewish state still necessary and justified when it becomes an apartheid state?
I continue find your argument for the acknowledgement of Israel as a Jewish state by the Palestinians to be your weakest argument. The more you elaborate, the more unpalatable it sounds.
On what evidence (historical and otherwise) do you base your thesis that a peaceful settlement is more likely if the Palestinians officially recognize Israel as a Jewish state, when you admit that there is no guarantee Israelis would live up to a commitment (of protecting equal rights), nor that there is any means to enforce it? When has Israel ever demonstrated this degree of good will?
Indeed the Palestine Papers reveal that even when Erekat offered to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Tzipi Livni declined the offer. Your thesis simply doesn’t hold up.
You empathise so deeply with “ deep-seated Israeli fears” and yet remain almost impervious to the deep-seated Palestinian humiliation and despair. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the demand to be recognized as a Jewish state only came about quite recently, and to the impartial observer, wreaks of a blatant attempt to test how far the Palestinian spirit can be pushed before it breaks.
You even accept that the “ deep-seated Israeli fears” may be “misplaced, exaggerated, or the unavoidable consequence of the Israelis’ own occupation and repression of the Palestinians”, yet you still insist that the Palestinians need to make the first move and the concessions, and do so based on blind faith that Israel will do the right thing by them.
It really does beg the question Jerome as to who is negating reality
Shingo:
Thanks for your courteous and articulate comments. Some of the issues you raise I will address in a forthcoming essay on my own blog. Others I have already addressed–you just don’t agree with the answer.
One query for you: so far as I know, the only serious alternative to Palestine as a homeland/state for the Jews was the British colony in Africa, now Uganda. But Uganda was also populated and the British had no more right to designate it as a Jewish homeland than they did in Palestine. Had it been offered to the Zionists–and had they accepted, which they wouldn’t–it would have just created an Israeli-African conflict.
Where else in the world was uninhabited, disposable, and a suitable place for a state? I have a certain perspective on these arguments, for I sometimes see it written that one of the other places “suggested” for a Jewish state was Grand Island, NY. I was especially curious about this suggestion because Grand Island is a few miles from my home–a small island in the Niagara River, just south of Niagara Falls. I don’t remember the details, but it turns out that it crossed someone’s mind that Grand Island might make a nice Jewish homeland. So far as I know, there was no such “offer” made to the Zionist movement, nor could there have been by anyone with the real power to dispose of Grand Island.
There was only one place in the world that might have really been a serious alternative to Palestine: parts of Germany after WWII. An area that clearly could have supported the creation of a state, one that could have been offered to the Zionists by an authority that had both the power and moral legitimacy to do so, and one in which the fact that it already had a large indigenous population was entirely irrelevant, both in moral and power terms.
I believe that there is some evidence that this possibility was briefly considered by the U.S., but quickly dismissed. Too bad.
A final comment. You and many others often commend me for my “courage.” It doesn’t take much courage to take on the issues I write about, as there are no consequences, other than a few insults. Let’s reserve the characterization of courageous for, say, truth-tellers who face jail or worse in autocratic states.
hello Mr. Slater, the only serious alternative to Palestine as a homeland/state for the Jews was the British colony in Africa, now Uganda.
i’ve heard this before and it just doesn’t make sense to me. israel is such a tiny country. look at it compared to argentina. the bush family just bought an area almost the size israel in paraguay 5 years ago. how is it on this entire globe w/miles of open space a people with no land couldn’t find a land with no people? don’t you mean the only alternative seriously considered outside of Palestine as a homeland/state for the Jews was the British colony in Africa, now Uganda? or could it be possible there were no areas the size israel that were unpopulated at the beginning of last century that couldn’t be acquired somehow. it just doesn’t seem logical to me. could you please explain further how the holy land became the only refuge available?
‘But we don’t live in an ideal world’
Exactly! So why a ‘Jewish State’?
‘but we don’t live in an ideal world’
Exactly! So why a ‘Jewish State’?
I exchanged views with Jerry on this issue on his blog last year and I concluded that Zionism provided a necessary haven for Jews due to the horrors of the pogroms, a need later confirmed by the holocaust. However, I felt Zionists used unnecessary and brutal means that were and are oppressive to the Palestinians.
Jerry’s courage and honesty in reopening this issue in two long Mondoweiss threads by laying out his full argument for all to analyze discuss and attack is commendable. This discussion has caused me to modify my earlier position: Prior wrongs, genocides or other calamities, no matter how extreme, cannot justify the taking of the land of another. While Jews may have wanted and felt they desperately needed a land of their own that need could not justify their taking the land of the Palestinians.
If the threat or fear of future harm by one people creates a justification to move and conquer the land of another people, then why don’t the Ukranians, Poles, or other historically oppressed people also have that right? Someone recently provided an extensive list of all holocaust-like events in the last 100 years which showed that Jews are not unique as an oppressed people or as genocide victims. If Jews get a state of their own, why not Romas (Gypsies), or gays, both of whom suffered severely under the Nazis and who also have suffered and continue to suffer severe discrimination? Perhaps we Irish should have qualified for a separate state of our own when a million or more of us died of starvation during the great potato famine of the 1800s, showing Ireland could not provide sufficient food for millions of its citizens?
While I do not mean to belittle the extremes of Jewish historical suffering, lots of other groups have also suffered from oppression, genocide and other catastrophes and may continue to suffer. Yet, the risk and fear of future oppression and suffering can’t provide a valid justification for land theft and oppression of another people, particularly in a post-holocaust world. So, despite being victims of the horrors of pogroms, holocaust, and genocide, neither Jews nor Ukranians, Cambodians, Armenians, Bosnians, Ruandan Tutsi, Sudanese Darfurians, or any other group subjected to genocide or great calamity has the right to a new land of its own at the expense of another people. There simply can’t be a Jewish exception to this basic moral rule.
So what options do an oppressed people or victims of a genocide or other great calamity have? Emigration as refugees or as legal immigrants to another country is the most common. The latter was the tack taken by Eastern European Jews in emigrating to Palestine after the pogroms of the late 1800s, as well as by millions of Irish who emigrated throughout the world during and after the great famine. While these solutions are imperfect, there is no easy solution for victims of genocide or other great calamities. Nonetheless, I can’t see any rationale for a separate, immoral exception and solution reserved for oppressed Jews.
I recently came across a fascinating free E Book from Google (via my Nook) on the history of Palestine. It was written in 1917 by the renowned British Zionist, Albert Montefiore Hyamson. Here is a quote: “Local autonomy is all the Jews of Palestine ask….The Jews desire no favour as compared with the other inhabitants of the land. They are willing for all the advantages of a free and liberal government to be enjoyed by all equally.” (“Palestine: The Rebirth of an Ancient People”, p. 238)
That Jewish/Zionist spirit of sharing the land with equal rights and freedoms for all, including Palestinians, soon dissipated, post Balfour, into the extremes of Zionism, exclusion and discrimination in the 20s, terrorism against Palestinians, British and UN representatives in the 30s and 40s, massive ethnic cleansing in 1948 and 1967, the settlement enterprise beginning in 1967, all culminating in the ghastliness of Zionist conduct in today’s Israel.
I think once Zionist Jews decided they were entitled to seize a portion or all of Palestine from the Palestinians all moral constraints were removed. That end, a Jewish State, justified any and all means. In a real sense the Jewish people, or at least Zionist Jews, sold their soul for their Jewish State.
Righting that wrong is not an easy task. A two state solution along 1967 borders with no settlements in the West Bank or East Jerusalem is a pipe dream at best and does nothing for the millions of displaced Palestinians many of who still reside in refugee camps in other countries. As difficult and unrealistic as it may seem, I think the only remaining viable and moral solution is a single democratic, perhaps federated state. I suspect we will first need to progress through the horrors of an apartheid state before we get there.
I am glad I am not Jew facing that reality, although as an American I have to share in the collective guilt for our funding and political enabling of this ghastly situation.
Gil Maguire
Gil,
If you are a student of history, you will note the MANY migrations of peoples. In almost all cases, new people are not welcomed. Their presence threatens.
And, as people need to survive, they will fight to.
In the case of Jewish Zionists, it is only now, 60+ years later, that with the forgetting of the actual experience, the reduced numbers of people with tattoos on their arms, with traumatized looks, a revisionist history of the time emerges.
Its more important to remember than to skillfully forget.
Zionists do not have a right to all. They/we have a right to enough. Not less, not more.
Wrong zionist have a right to nothing. their is no right to theft. there is no right to deny another people their right to self determiantion. the only right zionists have is to be residents and citizens of a future palestinian state on all of palestine.
Richard,
The 1948 ethnic cleansing and land theft was post holocaust and post WWII. The post WWII UN and new Geneva rules were all intended to prevent another occurance. Yet, irony of ironies, the Jews themselves violated the very rules designed to protect them and prevent what happened to them and did so against a people who had no responsibility for either the pogroms or the holocaust.
As to the trauma of the holocaust being the cause, my reading of the history of Palestine and the Zionists shows they had every intent to seize all or as much of Palestine as possible from Herzl on down. It is that strain of hard core Zionism that wanted and still wants all of Palestine for the Jewish State, and was and remains willing to use any means to get it. That is not to deny the trauma of post-holocaust Jews, but that trauma provided neither the motive nor justification for what happened and continues to happen. War crimes are war crimes. There is no Jewish exception or absolution for that conduct.
Part of the problem is that the hard core Zionists were and are just as effective in public relations as in military dominence. The narrative they spun and continue spinning is highly effective and tends to control the message. All Zionist actions are couched as defensive or holocaust-related; all Palestinian/Arab actions as aggressive, existentially threatening and/or terroristic. It’s an effective program but I’ve lost my taste for the Koolaid.
Israelis/Zionists have a right to exist side-by-side with Palestinians in a democratic single state. Until that happens, it’s nothing more than cleverly disguised and spun apartheid. Wikileaks and Palestine Papers disclosures have reinforced the conclusion that hard core Zionists have no intention of allowing any version of a two state solution that is remotely fair or acceptable to the Palestinians. That solution is also no longer possible except in the minds of Jewish/Zionist progressives who are merely manipulated tools in the hands of their far more driven and clever hard core brethern.
I suspect the hard core Zionists have probably concluded they can survive just fine and dandy under continued apartheid conditions so long as they have continued total control over the Palestinians, media and their feckless opposition. They certainly have no worries that Obama will oppose them since they know their lobby has him and congress totally under their contol for funding, UN veto protection and “moral” support.
The scary part is that Israel has done immense harm to its sole ally and great benefactor, the US, reducing our influence in the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world to one of ridicule and hate. e.g. Our relations with and influence in Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan, three of the most critical countries on the planet, are at all time lows. If the Arab democracy movement florishes, the hatred toward the US and Israel will boil over and cause further loss of US influence and increasing influence from China, Russia, Iran and India in the Middle East, not to mention Islamic extremists. That is bad for the US but potentially life threatening to Israel.
Progressive Zionists and rightous Jews in general should be putting all their efforts into stopping Israel’s mad, immoral, suicidal dash to oblivion but instead they waste their efforts being apologists for the unforgivable actions of their hard core Zionist compatriots.
Too bad Barbara Tuchman is not longer around; this circus show would be the folly of all follies for her.
No offense, but it is what it is.
Gil Maguire