Hitchens (no, the other one) on Israel

Damn you for tricking me into reading this highly unpleasant stuff.

Demographic arguments are unreliable, especially ones that seek to project out to 2050. One shouldn’t appeal to fear in the discussion about Israel Arabs. They shouldn’t be actively discriminated against, and it’s the responsibility of the government to end that. It’s simply the right thing to do. Jonathan Edelstein is particularly good on this issue.

The rest is just fatigue and gloom and doom. Things will happen a certain way or they won’t, but this need to pronounce something as complicated as a state a “failure” or a “success” beforehand, in some cases by decades is ridiculous.

“And then, in the increasingly realistic dreams of the cleverer Arabs…”

Ah yes, just the cleverer Arabs, of course. One can’t really talk about them having sensible beliefs without distinguishing the cleverer ones. One must simply be even-handed, mustn’t one?

Weird article. Half of it is a very reasonable argument that Israel can survive as a modern, democratic state only if it abandons its exclusively Jewish identity. The other half is standard issue handwringing about political correctness. All mixed together, almost like some kind of exquisite corpse thing

I also realize that liberals are strongly biased against demographic arguments because they often support xenophobic positions

Liberals are strongly biased against straight projections of current demographic trends, because the exercise almost always turns out to be—to put it politely—misleading. (A less polite but perhaps more accurate description would be “bullshit.”) I’m actually surprised at the frequency with which that sort of thing gets a pass in the Israel debate, often from people whose alarms would be immediately set off in other contexts.

Israel can survive as a modern, democratic state only if it abandons its exclusively Jewish identity.

One might insert the word “become” in that phrase, in place of “survive”.

Martin Bento,

The reason that doctor slack is right is that it is in fact quite possible that the Arab birthrate could quite easily suddenly drop. Birthrates rise and fall all the time, sometimes remarkably precipitously. (In fact, birth rates in many parts of the third world (Bangladesh, India, North Africa, etc.) have been declining precipitously in the last twenty years.) People also are known to emigrate to other countries. There are even, in rare cases, catastrophic declines in life expectancy (see much of the CIS, post 1987 or so). This is true in general, for all the population groups in Israel. It’s just hard to predict what is going to happen. So far at least, birth rates are falling for all population groups in Israel except Bedouins and Haredi, but that situation could change quickly due to outside events.

An op ed from Today’s NY Times

As Israel prepares to celebrate its 60th birthday next year, it’s time to update its national anthem, “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”). Only a single phrase needs to be changed: “nefesh Yehudi,” which means a Jewish soul, should be replaced with “nefesh Israeli,” an Israeli soul. Why tamper with a beautiful, stirring hymn? To solve what we might call the “Hatikvah” contradiction.

Israel strives to be both a Jewish state and a democracy, yet about a fifth of its population of 7.1 million people are not Jewish, but Arab Muslims, Christians and Druse. Among the emerging middle class, many Arabs are thriving. There are diplomats and judges, beauty queens and army officers, television anchors and members of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament.

Hitchens: “The wholly false idea that Israel is another South Africa, a country founded on racial bigotry, is being spread – by respectable people such as former President Jimmy Carter.”

I’m with Laleh, but it’s better than might be expected. Still as i always say these days, when I hear the words “Jewish State” I switch in the word ‘German” and see how it reads.

CB and others haven’t gotten quite yet to that point of elementary logic.

CB and others haven’t gotten quite yet to that point of elementary logic.

Why do you say that? What’s Chris B written to suggest he supports less than full citizenship for Israeli Arabs?

Israel can be either a democratic state or a Jewish one.

I agree. What makes you think Chris doesn’t?

Why do people think having an established religion is incompatible with democracy? I’m serious. Britain has an established religion (Anglicanism and Presbyterianism in Scotland). Do people think Britain is not a democracy?

One can definitely argue that certain policies of states with established religions are incompatible with democracy, but I’m not convinced having an established religion is ipso facto incompatible with democracy. I don’t see secularism as a requirement for democracy.

#14 I switch in the word ‘German” and see how it reads.

Why are you so hung on the Germans? What about a state of the White People? At least they look different than the others, more or less, so that would’ve been a kind of racism with at least a veneer of rationality. ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’ are totally fictitious, absurd concepts. Any bored Eastern European can go buy a birth certificate where he is a Jew, move to Israel the next day and instantly (doesn’t even need to learn that broken Aramaic dialect) become a victim of centuries of persecutions fighting for his survival against bloodthirsty Arab hordes. And no one will ever be able to prove otherwise. This is soooo stupid.

Yeah, yeah. Take it up with someone else, franck.

I’m not convinced having an established religion is ipso facto incompatible with democracy

That rather depends on the religion in question, and its beliefs and practices (and on what you mean by democracy).

My understanding is that Judaism, or Jewishness or whatever is not directly comparable with Christiany, Islam, Hinduism etc because it is both a religion and an ethnicity (a fact which enables Hitchens to generalise about Jews and Arabs without immediately being taken to task for comparing chalk and cheese). I can imagine that this might cause problems in a multi-ethnic state, in which different ethno-religious groups have different rights – does that description fit Israel?

The Jews are a people, or the descendants of a people, not a religion.

Isn’t the issue whether the public and quasi-public institutions of a society unevenly confer goods, services, advantages and disadvantages on the basis of something ascriptive (inclusive of religion)? The exercise of Shar’ia in Pakistan, which formally disadvantages non-Muslims claims to legal restitution and justice against Muslims (I don’t recall the difference in the number of witnesses needed), is an example. There may be worse examples than Israel, which may also confer more rights on Israeli Arabs than say North Korea does on any North Korean subject, save Kim Jong Il, but the unequal distribution of rights in Israel is the issue.

In much of the debate, the unequal rights conferred on Israeli Arabs is framed by defenders of Israel purely as the right of non-Israeli Jews to automatic citizenship. And in light of the history of anti-Semetism, it’s explained in terms of Israel’s role as a refugee state. Critics point to the relatively uncontroversial fact that unequal rights seem to extend to a lot more than immigration rights to Jews.

This and not whether an established religion is compatible with democracy (the establishment of Anglicanism seems to have no real effect on non-Anglicans in the UK), or whether Judaism is an ethnicity or a religion* seems to be the heart of the matter.

*After all, discrimination against Christians in Pakistan or Hindus in Bangladesh is offensive much in the same way that the second class status of blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa (if not to the same degree in light of the later two’s colonialism and Nazi-like ideological practice respectively) or, perhaps better, Indians in Fiji.

robin, you’re comparing “immigration rights to Jews” from other parts of the world to “immigration rights” to those who were thrown off their land of their birth in what is now Israel. Israel refers to the former as the “law of return” and offers this right to people such as me, whose connection to the area is of only slightly more recent vintage than the Florentine’s to Anatolia, and considers the right of the Palestinians as null and void.—-
Once again Keely, you imagine I defend German blood nationalism, though I’ve said I find it offensive. I live in a multiethnic country, in Queens NY.

An astounding 46% of Queens residents were born outside of the U.S. That’s just over one million people (1,028,339). And foreign-born residents of Queens were born in over 100 nations, which makes Queens the most diverse place in the world. Other counties in the U.S. have greater percentages of foreign-born residents, but nowhere else do they represent so many different homelands, ethnicities, and cultures.

We even have our own General Assembly. [NY Times article here]
Interestingly, I live in a neighborhood full of traditions that is also what you could call a very ‘traditional’ neighborhood. People get along very well. The fact that the traditions may all be different from one another doesn’t seem to bother people much. It’s worth studying.
In the long run the tendency of the newer generations of immigrants to maintain ties to their homelands will be seen as one of the factors in the creation of an American social democracy.
Just so you know.

Seth, it sounds to me like a good approach. If we had handled Iraq this way, it might have come off reasonably well, but we had to have a grand free market experiment, and we are, even still, pushing for permanent bases and the oil, so the people rightly do not trust us. The notion that the Gaza takeover could actually be to US/Israel advantage because it separates Fatah from Hamas is quite interesting.

I’m no longer so sure if it would be a bad thing, from a purely Israeli Jewish perspective, to just make the Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Israeli citizens, with votes in Israeli elections. Their political organizations (Hamas, Fatah) coudl then compete in those elections, provided they met the requirements of the Israeli constitution (which is doubtful at least in the case of Hamas).

The fear is that if this was done, non-Jews would have a voting majority in Israel, and would vote to end the Jewish character of the state, such as by changing the immigration laws, or even put in anti-semetic measures. But if this was done tommorow, Jews would still have a voting majority. As others have pointed out, these demographic projections are just projections, and I think a large number of Palestinian Arabs are not of voting age. Also, there is a strong correlation between high birth rates and lack of education and opportunity, and I suspect that if the Israeli government made an effort to treat the Arabs under its rule as full citizens, these demographic trends might reverse. Also, I don’t think the Arabs are politically homogenous and would not necessarily form a unified voting block; after all many Arabs who already are citizens in Israel vote for Jewish led political parties.

The advantage of this policy is that it would end the main grievance of the people in the occupied territories, that they basically are stateless people with few legal rights. There would be no need to find an acceptable “negotiating partner” and no need to haggle over boundaries. The settlements could even stay. There would be no need to worry about giving up any military advantages that the West Bank supposedly gives Israel.

The longer the Israeli government waits to do something like this, the less of a chance of this policy succeeding, but this is even more true of the two state solution.

Interesting stuff.

But where does Hitchens find the missing
“Palestinian Million”?

pro-Israeli demographers looking at the
same population statistics concluded that
the Palestinian “official” numbers were – at a minimum – one million people higher
than the “real” rate.

Not to mention the hundreds of thousands
of Israelis who have … ummm … immigrated
to the USA. Most of them say they will
return to Israel if either of two things
happen. Actual Peace breaking out between
Israel and the 20 odd Arab countries that
still continue to insist that Israel doesn’t
exist. Of a major war breaking out between
Israel and those non-existent 20 odd Arab
countries.

Dream on guys.

There is a more chance of an UK academic
boycott forcing the Israeli government
to change it’s policies than that of the
Palestinian “womb” to erase the Jewish
demographic majority.

At least Hitchens mentions that Austrailia
and New Zealand too, have “no right to exist”.
Pity he didn’t mention the same about English
rule of Wales, Scotlan, Northen Ireland,
Gibralter, Diego Garcia and the Malvinas.

Read the goddamn post, and the comments too
Badger quotes Mark Perry, of Conflicts Forum

“So here is what will happen. The United States will fail to deliver. Some money will trickle in, but not nearly enough. The little that does trickle in will be spent unwisely. Israeli may remove some outposts, but only a few, and the settlements will continue to expand and settler roads will continue to be built and Palestinians will continue to die. Israelis will die too. A Palestinian security guard will be trained and it will march smartly through the streets of Ramallah. If it should exchange fire with a militia led by Hamas it will just as smartly be defeated. And if there is an election in “Fatahstine,” Hamas will win, while at the White House, Tony Snow will talk about how the outcome was engineered in Tehran. And nineteen months from now, in the waning days of the Bush Administration — with American foreign policy in tatters — Elliott Abrams and Keith Dayton will proudly stand alongside a smiling President Bush as he honors them, the newest recipients of the Medal of Freedom.”

As a German, I’d be rather interested to hear by what standard Germany is not a democratic country?

martin bento,

I don’t know how the demographics of Israel/Palestine will play out ultimately. But we do know one thing – total fertility rates do not remain constant. The long-term trend in TFR in most of the world is strongly negative. I don’t see any evidence why we would expect the ratio of TFRs of all the population groups in Israel to remain the same for the next thirty or forty years.

In fact, right now the Arab Muslim TFR is decreasing faster than the “Jewish” TFR, but who knows if that will continue. Things like this simply can’t be counted on.

This focus on demography to lift the burden of thought or strategy from one’s shoulders is ridiculous.

Your desire for a final end is understandable, but wrongheaded. History will continue, and the far more likely case is that Israel will continue to exist, as will the Palestinians, eventually culminating in some number of small states in the area.

franck, I looked at the current demography and, in the brief manner befitting a blog comment, looked at what factors could make this work out in various different ways and what options Israel had to respond to the trends. That is explicitly embracing both thought and strategy; saying that we don’t know what will happen with regards to demography explicitly rules out strategy and pretty much thought on the question as well, as it is a call for us not to think about the question.

It is true that I would like to see the problems solved or at least lessened. I do not regard the current situation as sustainable, and what can’t go on won’t. Now, you may not agree with my pessimistic assessment of Israel’s future if things go on as they are, but I have given some rationale for my position, while you are simply asserting yours (that it is more likely that Israel will go on and so will the Palestinians). I never said “history” would end, whatever that might even mean, so that is a straw man. For a particular state, in this case Israel, to end, is not an unusual event historically.

Why should Sammy Davis, Jr (as a convert to Judaism) have a better right to live in Israel than a non-Jew who grew up in the territory?

Converting to the Jewish religion does not get you the right to Israeli citizenship, HTH.

Converting to the Jewish religion does not get you the right to Israeli citizenship, HTH.

No, it doesn’t. But the actual standard – broad enough to include anyone who has a single Jewish grandparent, while still excluding millions of non-Jews living under Israeli control or driven from the country since 1948 – isn’t significantly more just.

Seth:

Some mild nitpicking, comin’ up.

Richard, the discussion is not the state itself but citizenship and Jus sanguinis. That “beautiful sentiment” we both quoted was not present until recently in German law. I take it for granted that anyone calling himself a liberal should agree that it should be universal.

The thing about ius sanguinis in Germany is somewhat less linear than you appear to think.

Not that I want to defend the Krauties from ominous charges of racism et al much, mind. Love the place to bits but, the history being chequered and national pride being bollox and all, it does the aboriginals good to keep them on their toes. Still, I’m a sucker for all that fact-based business.

I’ll be crap with the letter but according to my lights I’ll be nailing the spirit of this.

Before 1913, there was no unified nationality law. Some parts of Germany were quite liberal in this point, in fact. Then came this 1913 law bit ( ius sanguinis a patre , to the hilt). Then the Nazis. Then, after the war, all Nazi changes to the 1913 law were cancelled, but the law itself was retained. It had to do mostly with international law. The Federal Republic was the legal successor of the Wilhelminian empire, and by sticking to the old law, it was still possible to define the people of East Germany as German citizens. A new Wessi law that had insisted on extending the love to the Ossis would have been against international law, because no state can declare the whole people of another state its nationals. So it was a sort of legal standoff that lasted for as long as the country was divided.

After the 1999 law, the German system is in line with Western practice, pretty much. And you’ll ask, what took it so long after reunification to change the law? What can I say, progressive stuff, meet resistance; resistance, meet progressive stuff.

On a related note, the definition of “ethnic German” in the post-war period was not 100% “W00T he has the blood of Arminius wtf 1“. It was about being displaced or otherwise deprived of citizenship rights on account of being of German descent and so. Again, pressed the right buttons with the whingey set, accounted for the unfinished business of the massive deportations at the end of WWII, and fomented dissidence in the commie block. It started as an interim thing right after the war (buried in Article 116 of the Basic Law) and never quite got away.

Not that it couldn’t backfire, mind. Ceausescu was cash-strapped and sold his Krauts in droves. The fucker said that it made more business sense to educate minority Germans than to raise pigs. It’s an urban legend but I like it all the same. Hahaha what a funny motherfucker, the video of his execution still cracks me up.

Plus, just to focus the mind and all, I’ll add that “nationality” and “citizenship” get mixed up all the time, but it’s useful to distinguish them. Think of nationality as a traditional prerequisite to the enjoyment of the full benefits of citizenship/integration, and of those benefits in turn as something that can acquire a trans-national dimension these days (highly-qualified, travelling folks, that kind of shit). There must be something about it but can’t be arsed to google.

Absent the crimes of the occupation (and allowing the irony that Israel is Palestine) the question of Turks and Algerians in Germany and France are analogous to that of Arabs in Israel.

In principle, why yes. You can argue for there being a difference of degree, though. I mean, I live in Berlin, and during the 2006 World Cup everybody was, basically, making a fucking bloody racket to support the deutsche Elf . Sort of rubbish, you wanted to get some sleep. Folks of Turkish or Arab descent? The loudest of the lot.

But yeah, long ways to go yet, all over the “free” world. Way things are shaping up, “open communities” are on par with magic jelly beans.

franck, up to now, you’ve made essentially two arguments. One is the endorsement of Dr. Slack’s view that projective demographic arguments are always wrong, and the other that the Israeli situation specifically is intractable. Now, we seem to be down to the latter, which is fair enough.

It is always possible to undermine a theory by postulating something contrary to its assumptions. For example, the argument that Social Security has long-run viability – itself largely a theory of demographic projection, just not a racial or ethnic one – is based on assumptions about long-term economic growth and long-term advances in life expectancy, more-or-less expecting both to follow established trends. If either does not, said projections could be in trouble, or, conversely, too pessimistic. And it is quite possible that either or both of these assumptions are wrong, and it is legitimate to point out that the argument for SS viability is based on highly uncertain projections. In fact, I think it entirely fair to say that unequivocal statements that SS will or will not be viable in 40 years are claiming a spurious certainty about the future. If one wants to reject the argument, though, one has an obligation to say why and how one of these variables is likely to change. I actually think the economic growth assumption is probably wrong because of global warming and oil depletion, though those are arguments the Republicans cannot or will not make. But if I want to attack that projection, I have to give a reason (as I just did) why I think that particular variable will change. Why would there be a significant increase in Jewish immigration to Israel at this point?

In any case, that’s probably a secondary matter, as, like I said, I think Israel has more immediate problems. The long-term trend is not for empires to disappear; all had to appear before they disappeared. The last century or so has just seen some European empires dissolve. A look at the map before those empires were established shows much of the world lacking “nations” in the modern sense, but nonetheless having units of political organization, many of which no longer exist or are no longer sovereign.

Israel may be internationally recognized, but virtually all extent states are. Unlike almost all others, Israel’s right to exist is controversial. So its level of recognition is lower than most. I believed in the strength of its military too, till I saw what Hezbollah did to it. It is too easy to see a similar attack with guided missiles, perhaps a bit better in payload and range. I’ve yet to see anyone argue why such a thing is unlikely, or how Israel can defend against it if it occurs. A strong military doesn’t matter if it cannot protect you against a real, existential threat.

Unlike almost all others, Israel’s right to exist is controversial.

This, BTW, is another largely meaningless routine bromide of Israel debate which should be retired. It’s basically a form of question-begging about whether Israel would somehow “cease to exist” if it ceased to engage in the various activities that arouse international controversy.

Nice post Seth however: would not immigrants keeping their ties to their old homelands lead to national fragmentation? Does not America have a right to it’s own (not worse not better just different)identity? And would not such ties lead to, say, Poles demand that the United States continue the Cold War to the bitter end for the sake of Poland? Just asking.

One sign of the way things are going is that in Israel itself – not even counting the occupied Arab zones of the West Bank and Gaza – the most popular boy’s name is now Muhammad.

This remark, all by itself, more or less deflates the alarmist tone of the article for me. It’s been a wry and proverbial Israeli truism at least since the mid-1970s when I first heard it, and probably has been true ever since statehood in 1948 (and, therefore, since the Umayyads).

The commonest Israeli surname is Cohen—and would probably remain so after even a bloody demographic inversion on the scale of Lebanon 1975-90. (These two facts in tandem frame an amusing counterexample in elementary statistical inference.)

Nothing to see here, truly. The Palestinian birthrate story is really all about Ulster, sheer projection.

The demographics themselves don’t matter, idiots. The fact that there’s a debate over them is what’s offensive. It’s not about demogrphics, it’s about racism.

The issues concern threats to “the jewish nature of the state”, and at this point… all together now…
let’s plug in the word “German” and see who doesn’t need to fight the urge to puke.

My god how hard you all work to avoid the issues at hand.

“”I fail to understand how an enlightened, sane Jew allows himself to ask a Muslim person with a different language and culture, to sing an anthem that was written for Jews only.”
Raleb Majadele

See comment 15 above. I take it you’re in agreement with the author of the op ed. So what’s your opinion on the issue of a binational state?

oy.
I made a wise-ass comment with a trick name and now it’s in moderation hell.
I’ll leave it at that. I’m done.

Seth, I was making no such comparison (the immigration rights of Jews to non-Jewish Arabs born but expelled and displaced). The right of return is a right, even if it seems to be one which will never be allowed to be exercised.

I was suggesting rather that unequal rights in Israel extend beyond the issue of a right to immigrate to Israel, e.g., access to land, etc.

First of all, can we please all try to keep the rancor down? Israel/Palestine threads round here routinely get shut down for this reason, and I think it is well worth talking these issues out.

Dr. Slack, if the objection to demographic projections is simply that such are uncertain, they are not necessarily any more likely to be in error in one direction than the other. “Might Jewish immigration increase?” asks franck. Yes, and it might also decrease – on current conditions, one could well see why it might, or might even become a net outflow – in which case the demographic challenge case is stronger than stated. If the objection is random variations, then the continuation of current trends should be near the center of the spectrum of possibilities – that’s what one would expect from simple deviation from a trend. If it is at one or another extreme, one should give an argument why this would be so.

At the outset of this discussion, I said liberals were biased against projective demographic arguments because they don’t like the policy prescriptions that frequently accompany them. By invoking the kind of thinking “undergirding the intransigence of at least some of the parties to the conflict in question”, I think you have proved my point.

Although, as an argument against such parties, I think my position works better than simply disputing their premise. Grant the premise and walk them through the possible outcomes. I list a) assimilation, b) genocide (counting expulsion under genocide; otherwise, you could give it a separate category, but I don’t think that changes anything), and c) apartheid. I did leave one out: d) failure, that is to say, accept that Israel will no longer be a specifically Jewish nation, but will instead be a nation where Jews are potentially a minority and where another culture may come to dominate, which would be “failure” of the Zionist objective, regardless of whether one regards such objective as legitimate. That’s it, right? Is there any response that does not fall into one of these broad categories? Well, the right, and I imagine the Jewish Israeli public generally, wants desperately to avoid d, and the international community will not tolerate b or c. That leaves a. Putting it this starkly makes clear that the right-wing solutions are non-starters, which disputing the premise does not.

As for the right of Israel to exist being controversial, do you think it is not? Hasn’t Israel had to fight for it tooth and nail through the various peace negotiations? Hasn’t the President of Iran explicitly denied it? Did not the UN conference on racism come almost to a halt a few years ago over the insistence that Zionism be characterized as racism, a position that implicitly delegitimizes Israel, as the UN has a strongly-established position against tolerance of officially-sanctioned racism?

I suppose I should state my own position here. I think the case for establishing the state of Israel in the Middle East was very weak. However, history is full of injustices, and, in general, I see no redress for them. For me, the question is: given the current situation – because it is given – what course forward causes the least human suffering, for the nation of Israel to continue as a Jewish entity or for it to be subsumed into some larger whole, and under all the scenarios I can see as realistic the answer has been the former. So I am a Zionist, but a provisional, not an absolute, one. If the cost of maintaining Israel as is is going to be the decimation of the Middle East, however, then I am looking for the most humane way out of the Zionist experiment. And if the US goes to war with Iran at least partly over potential nukes that do not pose a threat to the US, but do to Israel, decimation of the Middle East is on the table.

I was also going to respond to Seth, but he seems to have decided to drop out of the discussion. A shame.

Please don’t be rude, even in ignorance.

“Not the preferred nomenclature,” as Walter Sobchak would say. A bit rich on some levels coming from someone who just tried to adduce Ethiopian Jewry as a defense against the supposedly “facile” charge of racism, but a reasonable point nonetheless.

Martin, your post deserves a full answer and I’m en route to bed. (You probably won’t be surprised to find I disagree with you.) I’ll get back to you tomorrow.

The fact that there’s a debate over them [demographics] is what’s offensive.

Now, that’s exactly right.

I still don’t understand how educated people here can call this kinda stuff “generally civilized”. It’s exactly the opposite, generally uncivilized. Same, exactly the same kind of concern expressed by a Southern good ol’ boy over, say, Latinos’ high birth rate and white people becoming a minority would’ve been immediately condemned. Someone’s messing with your heads, professors.

… someone who just tried to adduce Ethiopian Jewry …

I was in Rehovot on the shabbat when Operation Solomon was in the air, and I remember the rumors flying through the streets – “We saved the Beta Israel!” “How many?” “All of them!” People were literally crying with joy, and the whole nation was glued to the TV just after the sabbath when the news came on.

The two kids I tutored in physics have done pretty well. I would give you email addresses so you could get first-hand testimony, if I cared enough about your opinion to impose on them.

Oh, and not to be pissy about it, but how many Turks are on the short list for German chancellor these days? Isn’t the UK long overdue for a Pakistani PM? (Or a Chinese one, after a decade of full British citizenship for five million HK voters—oops, where did they go?) And how’s that “Draft Condi” thing coming along?

“nuanced racism problem”

Hahaha. Please stop, man, you’re cracking me up.

Sorry to disappoint, but in fact ignoring person’s every characteristic (like where he/she was born) but their race/ethnicity seems like an excellent definition of blatant racism.

There is of course controversy over whether it has the right to exist as a state based on and promulgating the Zionist ideology

Doctor Slack, wouldn`t any other form of Israel but this one be, well, a one-state solution? A democratic, non-sectarian Palestine, in fact?

I mean, you can either have a state run by and for Jews, a Jewish homeland, or you can`t. It`s hard to imagine any other type of state in Palestine either needing the 2 state solution (since it will either be secular, or it will be Islamic); or rejecting the right of return (since it will be secular, or it will be islamic).

So how can you accept the existence of Israel, and yet reject the existence of Israel as a zionist project?

In the Israeli case, for instance, granting the inevitability of an Arab majority in the state—when no such majority is in fact inevitable—shores up precisely the kinds of fears on which the Israeli right wing thrives.

Just so. Given the cohesion of the haredi fraction (comment 19), it’s not even a likely scenario on straight extrapolation. Every other Israeli community is subject to economic and cultural influences on demography, but that one knows its destiny.

As I said, Britons who obsess about Palestinian birthrates are almost always projecting unresolved personal issues about Northern Ireland; there’s no percentage in taking their polemics seriously.

Godfrey you’re more loyal to your tropes and mannerisms than to what passes for ideas. You’re an annoying sort of queen.

Jason Stanley:
I still identify as an American of German descent, and I have a number of strong emotional ties to my father’s homeland (and indeed, returned for a year of college). There are a great many things I admire about current German society, from their remarkable acceptance of the sins of their forebearers to their social welfare system. But in the end, I probably couldn’t live there. The fact that most Germans would view a blond person from Pennsylvania whose great-grandparents were German as more German than me would be a perpetual annoyance. The fact that most Germans still can’t really think of the German Jewish population of the past as genuinely German makes me pessimistic about their ability to eventually accept Germans of Turkish descent as genuinely German. And perhaps the inability to think of Germans of Turkish descent as genuinely German is part of what leads them to accept e.g. the abuses of women in that community of the sort that Schneider describes.

The last time you referred to my standard practices I sent you a link to Haaretz. This time I’ll let my comments and reference stand. Perhaps you should get out of Berlin more.—-

#67 is up, Mr Burton, and the answer to your question is… Maurice Motamed. Your reference to the terrorist “Menachem Begin’s rebuke to Japan” just made me laugh. And regardless of your wishful thinking, the Jews except for a few converts to religious judaism are descendents of a desert tribe, genetically identical moreover to Palestinians. Israelis like their DNA studies, exccept those with results they’d rather ignore.—-

“I mean, you can either have a state run by and for Jews, a Jewish homeland, or you can’t.”
Precisely.

“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return … The old will die and the young will forget,”
etc. etc.
But I’m getting away from my original point, which was not to argue with schmucks, but with the passivity of liberals who don’t stand up to them, even if it means betraying what they claim to represent.

I’d like to know whether you think much of the Israeli public sees the significance of the Hezbo missile attacks last year the way I do.

It’s a potentially existential issue, but so’s this. The point is that the Israeli public is basically OK with that. See esp. comments 80 and 88 here.

Hizb’allah will not in this decade (or probably in the next) have the capability to bomb Haifa and Tel Aviv back to where they were in 1997, before the tech boom; short of air superiority, and something like the ordnance load the US dropped on Belgrade, no conventional attack could do so. My students and I wore gas masks in 1991; in 1967 they dug anticipatory mass graves in the public parks; in 1948 “Dr. Ruth” Westheimer was deemed an able-bodied infantryman. And more Jews died in Christian pogroms in the first six years of the 20th century than have died at Muslim hands in the century since. It’s always desperate, and yet it gets steadily better.

A conventional Hebrew greeting worth learning is “Ma yihyeh?”—“Yihyeh b’seder!” (“What’ll be?”—“It’ll work out.”)

See esp. comments 80 and 88 here.

And 116, 122.

Understand that nothing I´ve said is to be seen against the backdrop of the main topic of the thread: I do think indeed that Israel is faced with a problem of racism, and that it is a direct consequence of the state´s founding ideology.

The progenitors of that ideology are indeed well known.

And Hitchen´s piece is disgusting.

It may sound frivolous, but that´s all so obvious to me as not to be worth posting about, especially when other commenters are doing good yeoman work on the topic.

What I´m taking issue with is the frankly Biblical conflation of past and present you´re indulging in, in order to underscore all the above.

Not that I´d want to present myself as an Interesting person who´s led an Interesting life, but I happen to know something about nationalism in Europe. I´ve lived (as in: spent more than two years of my life) in five different countries. And I´ve done NGO work in Bosnia for almost a year. I´d say that current-day Germany is, on the whole, no more and in most cases far less blatantly nationalistic than e.g. Romania, Catalonia, Serbia, Croatia, and even France. As for the Dutch, they´re great at PR.

In other words, while German nationalism does exist and is indeed becoming less closeted, it´s not at this point the most virulent strain of what is, has always been in fact, a broader European phenomenon.

Simple, isn´t it?

[Oops, bad link. Trying again.]

Viva rootless cosmopolitanism.

Imagine all the people ….