Which provides the perfect lead-in to my….

Two-state solution
(A modest proposal for peace in the Levant)

Allow Lebanon to become an independent country, with its own flag (maybe something friendly like Canada’s, only with a cedar?), a seat at the United Nations, and full formal recognition by the Great Powers. Let Beirut hold democratic elections, to create an accountable legitimate government that can coopt and rein in the extremists. Carefully delineate the international boundary, and then put UN observers at the fence, to make sure any border incidents are sharply deterred and promptly contained. Above all, pull the Israeli right-wing settlers out of Lebanon permanently, ending the territorial dispute. (Heck, evacuate the Israeli- tainted Druse and Christian partisans of the South Lebanon Army, with their families, to new homes in northern Israel, too.)

Once the benefits of lasting and secure peace are obvious to all the involved parties, apply some of the same ideas, as appropriate, to the other theaters in the conflict.

If it’s so predictable, perhaps your sensible self could explain why Israel made no moves to colonization for the 18 years it controled southern Lebanon?

‘The Israeli military began preparing to reoccupy southern Lebanon on Thursday, and Israeli officials conceded that their three-week bombing campaign has had no significant impact on Hizballah’s ability to fire short-range rockets into northern Israel.

The dispatch of thousands of Israeli soldiers to retake as much as one-fifth of Lebanon—the operation must still be approved by the Israeli cabinet—would mark a major expansion in Israel’s Lebanon campaign and would reverse Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon six years ago after a troubled 18-year occupation.’

After invasion comes colonisation, as anyone with any sense could have predicted. And will the troops be home by Christmas? Perhaps. But Christmas in what year?

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060804/NEWS07/608040379/1009

Yiddish saying (attributed to Israel Zangwill, long before 1948): A loshn is a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot. (A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.)

It’s years since I read about it, but I think the record shows that anti-Semitism declined in Europe and America after (and presumably because of) Israeli victories over the Arabs. Most likely this has to do with demolishing the stereotype of Jews as being weak, cowardly and incapable of building a state of their own. So my guess is that, outside the Middle East, the success of Israel raised the status of Jews. It raised their status in the eyes of Arabs too of course, but since they became the new holders of the wooden spoon it’s hardly surprising that their hostility increased.

Nor is this peculiar to Jews. The story of “how the Irish became white” is linked to the story of Irish nationalism. In fact there may be a general rule at work here. As Machiavelli remarked, to be weak is to be despised. It’s for reasons like this that rationality and war don’t mix.

When people say that the creation of Nigeria, Iraq or the Soviet Union was a mistake, what they mean is that the world is better off without the sovereign instantiation of a national identity, because without a state that national identity itself is likely to evaporate, to the benefit of its members and the world. The nation of Israel (am Yisrael, “nation” as the King James Version used it) is, however, demonstrably unlikely to evaporate, and a fond desire that it might evaporate is closely associated with ideologies that are unspeakable in polite company.

The example of (Metternich’s or Bismarck’s) Germany is an apt one; the history of its first century makes clear that the question of whether there is a “German nation” is a consequential one. But the analogous question about the Jewish nation is not (openly) in the dock, in most cases where “Israel’s right to exist” is raised rhetorically. That is, an attempt to end am Yisrael by banning infant circumcision, abolishing the public reading of Hebrew, knocking down gravestones and so on is almost never what is (openly) meant.

Instead, the rhetorical pose is that a return to the pre-Zionist status quo ante is desirable: Israel should continue to exist as a nation, but once again as a stateless one. This is unusual enough to be slightly unbelievable; it was slighly unbelievable during the nineteen centuries it was real. No one wants a stateless Soviet Union, a spiritual union of former Iraqis or a common Nigerian flag to fly in the hearts of independent Yorubas and Ibos alike.

(To forestall the inevitable tedious objection to “am Yisrael’s” connection to the modern state of Israel, on the grounds of a 20% minority of the latter’s citizens with no stake in the former, I agree it’s a thorny problem, though not different in kind from problems other new countries, notably the US, have faced with minority threads in the national narrative. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us.” How Israel will come to terms with its Arab citizens when its continued existence behind secure borders is assured will be a severe moral test of a nation and a people; luckily, the standard of “one law for the homeborn and the stranger” has been a Jewish text for much longer than it has been a concern of Israel’s critics. Would an Israel at peace eventually add an Arabic verse to ha-Tikva? It would be nice to have the luxury of finding out.)

Nearly all African ones, plus Iraq/Mesopotamia and several other Gulf States. You don’t hear many people arguing that the creation of modern Germany and Italy was a mistake but there were plenty of people arguing about it at the time. More or less everybody agrees that the creation of the Soviet Union was a mistake. I never understand why people ask this question rhetorically.

Why? Seems counterintuitive.

Doesn’t the whole chain of events leading to the creation of Israel make nonsense of any effort to think of war as the outcome of a rational decision-making process? The idea of a Jewish state was a (rational) response to the irrationality of gentiles, which Jews had endured for centuries. The choice of location was completely irrational. Of course the individuals involved were making perfectly sensible decisions, but they were working on the assumption that other people are not sensible and they were quite right to do so. That sounds like a paradox, but I don’t think it is. It’s just an example of assumptions being self-fulfilling.

Linda, you say you think the establishment of the state of Israel was a mistake. About what other country is this “serious” question asked? Just in the last decade (and a bit), the USSR,Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Serbia-Montenegro. Latvia and Lithuania are now back, but they didn’t have an enforceable right to exist during the seventy years of the USSR (and the Ukraine has been unstated since Ivan the Terrible, and Livonia is still waiting its turn). If we’re talking about existing within their own chosen boundaries, Germany and Danzig, Indonesia and Timor, and Serbia and Kosovo had to be reminded that there are limits to this, too. At another level, Armenia, Kurdistan, and Pashtunistan drift in and out of existence from time to time with different boundaries.

your very question seems to challenge Israel’s right to exist. States don’t have rights. People have rights. The people, for example, who live within the currently enforced boundaries of Israel have the right (subject to the human rights of the minority) to whatever kind of state the majority of them want.

Chris’s question presupposes that the existence and military viability of Israel can be causally decoupled from the modern lack of overt antisemitism in the Diaspora. Yet in practice American Jews only get to stay at Conrad Hilton’s hotels, work in Henry Ford’s boardrooms, and run for vice president in Huey Long’s party, in decades when Israel is strong and secure. The causal link thus seems to me at least an open question.