Most nationalist movements do not derive from people being driven off their land. And many of those same people are still alive. How many people here are supporters of ETA or the full independent Kurdish nation? Nobody would claim that Chileans and Argentines have to get along but somehow in the middle east things should be easier. Blah Blah.
Israel is considered one of “us.” It should not be. What demands have ever been made of it? And I mean DEMANDS!

There’s another thread on deconstruction running at CT right now and they should be joined together. There is no arab point of view represented on this site yet John Quiggen can crack wise about easy and false dichotomies. “Trust us” I hear again and again. But still someone has to respond “No, trust no-one, least of all yourselves.”
Interrogate everything. An old lesson maybe not not one people learned, least of all neoliberal bureaucrats.

Although if it had been given to the Jews, it would probably have been a nominally-independent Soviet satellite rather than an integral part of the Russan Federation. Fast forward 60 years and you’d have a moderately prosperous EU-10 (or would that be EU-11?) nation, although the period in between wouldn’t be very pleasant.

“I suspect that any other plan for mass sanctuary in the West would have been almost equally quixotic.”

East Prussia comes to mind, but was it “Western” after 1945?

Fair point, but I’m still not sure I agree with it. There’s a wide range of cultures among Arabic-speaking people, and someone from the Maghreb or the Arabian peninsula won’t necessarily be at home in Egypt or the Levant. The largest single group of Mizrahi Jews in Israel is of Moroccan ancestry, and I believe the second largest comes from Yemen, and I doubt either would have an automatic affinity for Palestinians or vice versa. Although, if peace ever reigns, I wouldn’t rule out such an affinity developing over time.

OK, Serge, I concede your point. Let’s not call them ‘Arabs’, let’s do it properly: ‘a group of people indigenous to the Middle East’, ‘a group of people indigenous to the Arab culture’, whatever. Same difference.

On the first part, well, sure; “Americans” is a signifier of citizenship, not ethnicity. Your error, I think, is in the unwritten assumption that “Arabs” is commonly understood as a geographic, rather than an ethnic, signifier. This assumption is wrong.

On the second part, I would suggest you take care not to put words in my mouth, especially if you seek to dramatize them.

First, why is it an either-or question whether Joe Lieberman is an American or a Jew? People can, and usually do, have more than one identity. I’m an American citizen and a member of the Jewish people. I’m also a resident of New York City, a member of my family, a lawyer, a social democrat and an atheist. There’s nothing incompatible about all American citizens sharing one identity while not sharing others, just like an Iraqi Jew (or an Iraqi Kurd) might identify as an Iraqi but not an Arab.

Second, don’t people have a right to define who they are? Nations are constructs to begin with, so the views of those who construct them seem entitled to respect. If Jews see themselves as a distinct people, and if Mizrahim regard themselves as part of that people, then it isn’t for outsiders to tell them they aren’t. Somehow I doubt you’d be sympathetic (nor am I) to the flip-side argument that Palestinians are no different from any other Arabs and should just blend into Jordanian or Syrian society.

For what it’s worth, a sense of peoplehood has been an ongoing Jewish cultural thread through well over a millennium of dispersion. It’s reflected in ninth-century poetry as much as nineteenth, and cuts across the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide which those who deny Jewish peoplehood often paint as much sharper than it really was. Peoplehood isn’t the only conception of Jewish identity, of course, and there are both historical and modern countercurrents, but it’s not something that can be dismissed out of hand by saying “they’re Arabs” or “they’re Russians.”

In October 2001, the publishers of Human Immunology retracted an immunogenetics paper that some readers felt contained inappropriate political content. They also deleted it from the online edition of the journal and asked librarians to physically remove the pages the article was printed on. The first author of the controversial article was also guest editor of the special issue the paper appeared in. The case triggered much debate in editorial organisations and internet discussion groups, and the guest editor, editor in chief, sponsoring society, and publisher were all criticised for their roles in the affair. This article examines the claims and counterclaims.

…The paper attracted attention not only for its scientific content but also for parts of the text some readers felt reflected political bias. The authors reported that their analysis of human leucocyte antigen gene variability and haplotypes showed that “Jews and Palestinians came from ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times.” The abstract concluded that “Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based on cultural and religious, but not genetic, differences.

Can I call them all ‘Americans’ and assume that their ability to get along with each other would not be significantly affected (if at all) by whatever it is you insist separates them so dramatically? Or does doing so make me guilty of projecting ethnic homogeneity on multicultural, heterogeneous place?

You mean in the way that Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, Kurds and so forth are Arabs? Then, sure, but I don’t think your argument is a very good one.

(I guess you could quibble about how those ethnic minorities had, in most cases still have, their “own” languages whereas the Judeo-Arabic dialects and written communications of the Jews—I’m not sure whether you are willing even to acknowledge that we constituted an ethnic minority—weren’t “really” a language. But that would be an even weaker argument, and—not that it matters, I guess—a considerably more offensive one.)

They speak the language, they are a part of the culture, little idiosyncrasies of their particular Arab tribe are irrelevant.

Again, you seem to be anxious to homogenise geographic areas, and to close off the possibility of transnational communities—diasporas—actually existing.

The retrospective projection of ethnic homogeneity on multicultural, heterogeneous places seems to me a particularly poor way to try and win an argument.

Just make sure we’re talking about the same thing: ordinary Sephardi, not the religious nuts among them.

Given the relative absence of your Euro-Enlightenment shearing of “religion” from the rest of culture among, erm, those who are “ordinary Sephardi”, I doubt it is as easy as you apparently think to draw such a line.

fascinating stuff; hadn’t known it before, but hardly surprised to learn it.

Be that as it may, was this intended to suggest that Jews & Arabs ought to love each other like brothers because they are close genetic relatives? If so, there’s crowd of Serbs/Croats/Bosniaks, Indians/Pakistanis, N.Koreans/S. Koreans, Czechs/Slovaks, Jaffas/Taigs, etc., etc., here who’d like a word with Dr Ostrer.