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!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 ….

Imagine all the people…

Siberia sure looks far more attractive than your hi-tech armed-to-the-teeth insane Zhmerinka. Not to mention that whatever interesting they did have there in real Zhmerinka you, crazy palmachniks, destroyed, starting with the language. No wonder your own speaker of the parliament says you’ve finished what Hitler started.

oil refineries

There was a rather close call toward the end of the 2nd intifadeh; the Pi Glilot facility has since been decentralized and hardened.

But it’s worth remembering that both intifadehs sputtered out in an orgy of collaborator killings, as the Palestinian factions tried to respond to Shin Bet infiltration by high self-amputation. Non-state actors have strategic strengths, but also profound weaknesses, and it’s vanishingly rare in all the history of warfare for a new doctrine to overturn the ancient balance of offense and defense permanently. Los Alamos is the only example that comes to mind; we adapted to Beziers, Magdeburg, Shiloh, the Somme, the Blitz.

Joshua says: I don’t mean to hold up my personal connections against your Google search

A wise decision, grasshopper. Only my kung fu is stronger than my Google search.

but this happens to be a problem I actually care about, am connected to by family ties, and have put hours and hard-earned shekels into helping to solve.

I respect that. All the more reason, perhaps, not to attempt the rhetorical maneuver “Racism? Pah! Operation Solomon, beeyotch!” in a situation where you wish to accuse the other party of being facile. I’d give the same advice to an American trying to deflect mention of racism by citing the Civil Rights movement or the Emancipation Proclamation, or a Canadian trying to do so via the Underground Railroad or official multiculturalism.

(As far as “neighbouring states” being “poised to judge” Israeli racism, well… I don’t know. Do Mexico’s obvious flaws render Mexicans incapable of identifying and judging America’s anti-Latino racism? I don’t think that kind of chain of logic holds, though I can see how it’s tempting, obviously.)

Israel got the dregs of Persian Jewry

Oof! That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?

sg: You’re right that the choice is between a Zionist state or a democratic one, though wrong that the choice is between “secular” and “Islamic” — that would be more of that question-begging I’ve been talking about. Nor is the choice between “democratic” and “a safe haven for Jews;” presumably any state that wants to function as the latter would have to not be in perpetual conflict with its neigbours and would have to be an attractive destination for Jewry, both considerations in which the officially Zionist project is visibly faltering. (And given that a sectarian one-state solution has basically been implemented on the ground at this point, I think we’re past the stage where we can talk about the two-state solution with any realism. That ship has sailed.)

Martin: the best and really only viable response is to try and improve living standards, education, and assimilation of the Arab minority. Ruling out demographic arguments also rules out this response.

If the Arabs remain in the minority, this rules out treating them humanely and as equals, or trying to “assimilate” them? I don’t see how that follows at all, sorry. If you’re intimating that Israelis would only take such a course under threat, I think that’s false.

A Zionist state is what it is, though, and how its establishment was justified, and major extant sticking points – such as a Palestinian right of return – turn on this.

Actually, just in terms of raw numbers the right of return really shouldn’t be such a barrier. In the highly unlikely event that implementing a democratic, non-sectarian country in the region in the near future led to the right of return being granted, and in the even more unlikely event that every single Palestinian refugee took advantage of this while not a single Jew from abroad immigrated in the same period, the Jews would still be a majority in Israel. And a prosperous, heavily-armed majority to boot.

Despite the vogue for comparisons of Israel with South Africa, the demographic question is one sense in which the comparisons just don’t work. Israelis do not, in any very plausible near-future scenario, face the kind of leap of faith in democratization that South African whites faced in abolishing apartheid.

On the July War: AFAICS its major lesson is that the business of going on the offensive has gotten more complicated for the IDF, not that Israel’s Arab neighbours pose a credible offensive threat to the country in a conventional sense. In this I think Joshue is quite correct.

Israel got the dregs of Persian Jewry

Oof! That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?

I have strong feminist sympathies.

(AG Mazuz is Tunisian-born, by the way, now that I’ve begun keeping senseless count of the Israeli government-as-Bennetton-ad. Those darn European colonials were so sneaky.)

It’s 2007, you know; wake up.

5768, actually.

“Look, Israel is going to lose bridges and hospitals. The US is going to lose cities (or at least city centers; tritium is a lot easier to contain than plutonium). Suicide bombers will eventually be an existential threat because Israel can’t really afford to lose any cities.”

This bullshit as if Hamas and Hezbollah are Al Qaeda.
The world press, outside the US and Israel, doesn’t even refer to the first two as terrorists except in scare-quotes, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. The same is not true for Al Qaeda. And I’m not aware of anyone, other than israeli fearmongers, claiming that Hezbollah is a threat to Israel itself.

The growing acceptance of islam, its growing moderation, the rise of Iran which will not stop when the Mullah’s fade, and the growing impatience of the world with Israeli actions (and your piss-poor defense of same): all describe Israel as shrinking. Can you give us any in depth analysis of Israel’s ties with the worst of the Arab regimes, who are as terrified of Arab democracy as Israel? What are their long term prospects?
And by the way, Iran is your enemy, not mine.

Zionism can fade quietly or violently, it’s up to you. But the stilted pedantry of it’s defenders isn’t helping. If you really believe what you say you should talk less.
You’ve been speaking to an audience of Americans and a few others. You should remember that this began with someone calling an article “even-handed.”
I think by now we’ve decided it isn’t.

A lot of arguments have gone this way recently.

…but his hatred for the state of Israel and its inhabitants is undeniable and ugly.

Wait a minute, not all the inhabitants certainly. What’s your problem, novakant, it’s not your wife, it’s just a friggin state, the army and a bunch of politicians. Get a life.

seth: I don’t doubt that you’ve been to Germany (how long has it been?) and enjoy a cup of coffee with your german art dealer, that’s great. I do doubt that you’re quite up to date with the developments in german society in, say, the last 20 years, because the points you were making would have been quite apt back then, but are less so now

abb1: that “insane, frigging” state, its politicians and army are here to stay and I don’t think its inhabitants are going to vote for its dissolution in the forseeable future – live with it and stop ranting forever and ever on every thread on CT

joshua: abb1 has a bit of a history in this regard

Those two comments were about me, not by me.
I remember going ballistic on Gary Farber. The man was an idiot. The barbarism of the computer geek who never leaves the house.

novakant, are you going to Documenta this year?

I have a sweet aunt in Kassel, who with growing age has mutated into the biggest documenta fan ever (a bit of local patriotism is involved too) and I haven’t been for ages, so yeah, I’m considering it.

Novakant, for reasons I’m sure you understand, while the beneficiaries (like Joshua) of Israel’s “nuanced ” racism get to come on forums like this and pump the benefits of their settler state, its victims generally don’t get a chance. You may have noticed their absence. In the absence of such victims being able to make their own case, it seems reasonable to expect that occasionally someone like Abb1 will put the case of trenchant criticism for them. You may suspect Abb1’s motives and you may not like his tone, but if I have to read Joshua’s cheerful spruiking of all the bits of Israel’s policies except the deliberate murder of Palestinian children, I don’t see why you should be exempt from reading a little bit of criticism of same.

For all that you may not like his tone, I have yet to see you dispute the basics that Abb1 puts forward. For example, in the last thread on this topic he posted that nice little link to the account of the racist murder of those Palestinian children. Unless you can convince us that that account and all similar accounts are wrong, criticisms from people like Abb1 should be welcome, whatever you may think of their reasons.

This discussion may be academic and (relatively) polite, and it may be fun for you to call people who remind us of the plight of the Palestinians “trolls”, but please try to remember that it is actually a serious issue which some of us actually take seriously. Some of us may even have honest reasons.

Seth,

As I said, I am a provisional Zionist. Primarily, this is because I think that under a one-state solution, there will be massive retaliation against the Jews. Not “pushed into the sea”, but revenge nonetheless. This is not because I think Palestinians are intrinsically bloodthirsty. I think they have real grievances, and in their situation I would be angry too.

Now, this may or may not be true, but, for the sake of relying on a moral rather than factual question, suppose that it is. Suppose that retaining Israel as a state with an official and deliberately maintained ethnic identity causes less suffering than combining it with the rest of Palestine into a single multicultural state. Does liberalism demand multiculturalism even if it means more people will die than otherwise?

I thought about not reponding to your comments to me but I think I should, if only to call them silly.
I’ll leave it at that.

… no realistic prospect of peace (and therefore no reason to seriously attempt to achieve it)

I was with you right up to the parenthesis, and there you lost me. Do you feel there is no good worth attempting against odds? Or none whose intrinsic worth makes even repeated failure redemptive? Or are you only a cynic about the peace of Jerusalem?

I agree heartily that the US should look to its own interests, and especially should stop using Israel as an excuse to do and say stupid things.

I’m actually feeling cautiously hopeful this month about the new prospect of a three-state solution.

Joshua, I think a serious attempt at peace will involve investment of significant energy and probably some risk. Those with no serious expectation that peace will come will be much less inclined to do this. Why would they?

Because it’s right.

Joshua, sorry I don’t ascribe that kind of virtue to any nation. You have yourself blithely said that you expect America to lose some cities, and approved a comment that suggested a permanent (on the scale history is knowable at all) state of war. If these are things you really believe, then your risk calculus is going to reflect them, no? It seems a truism of human nature that you will not invest as much in a goal in which you do not believe.

If these are things you really believe, then your risk calculus is going to reflect them, no? It seems a truism of human nature that you will not invest as much in a goal in which you do not believe.

Tenacity works both ways — stubborn survival, and patient hope. My ancestors had no realistic prospect of seeing many things for which they hoped, and which I have lived to see, yet they worked and died in good faith for their dreams. I too have dreams.

Rabbi Tarfon, Ethics of the Fathers, 2:20-21, circa 130 CE:

It is not upon you to finish the task;
Neither are you free to desist from it.
The day is short, the job is enormous,
The workers indolent, the reward bountiful,
And the Master insistent!

Do you think they believe that struggling for 100 years to stop them getting their homes back is “right”?

Rehovot was bought fair and square in 1890, barren fallow land. The magnificent trees down Herzl Street, all of that vintage, are the oldest within ten kilometers of town. More broadly, I wrote this over a decade ago, walking through some of the issues.

But let’s consider your corner case: stolen Arab houses in Ramla, inside the 1949 Green Line, forcibly evacuated, never paid for, and now Jewish deeded while the rightful owner sits in a refugee camp near Ramallah. The theft was wrong, and the wrong is an impediment (among many, both sides) to peace. A comprehensive peace in which Rehovot, Ramla and Ramallah can all prosper will offer a lot of slack to right such wrongs. Germany and Poland are at peace today, and both grateful for it, though millions of Poles (dwarfing both the Palestinian Arab and Arab Jewish diasporas) now live in homes from which Germans were brutally expelled.

I was referring to your reference to Martin Bento`s example of Israel struggling to remain a separate zionist state 100 years from now; not to some idea that every Palestinian currently trying to restore lost lands in Israel necessarily struggled there for 100 years. Under Martin Bento`s scenario, Israel remains for 100 years as a Zionist project; it retains its “nuanced” racism against Palestinians whose homes it took for that 100 years; and you seemed to be inferring at #127 that this struggle would be worth it – even if the odds of peace were seen as zero by those on the Israeli side of the struggle – “because it is right”.

Perhaps I have misinterpreted your response to Martin`s example, but it certainly doesn`t seem like a very righteous process to me. And even if I have misinterpreted you, and you don`t think a Zionist settler state is right, we both know that those in charge at the moment in the US and Israel do think it`s right and it should go on forever.

Martin: if you dismiss the argument in principle, you also lose the opportunity to respond to the substance.

Right, and thanks for the clarification, but if there isn’t much “substance” to begin with, maybe you don’t need to be responding specifically to it to convincingly advocate that maintaining Arabs in second-class status is a bad idea.

When I brought up the Palestinian right of return, it wasn’t in the context of the demographic argument, but of Israel’s status as a Zionist state.

The Zionist objection to right of return is a demographic argument: in the extreme evoking the (rather fantastically unlikely) spectre of eight million descendants of the original refugees flooding back into Palestine and voting or driving the Jews out, with some less extreme versions contending that the addition of a few hundred thousand Arabs would unacceptably compromise the Jewish character of the state. (The spectre of a wave of revenge killings accompanying democratization is a common manifestation of that argument.)

Does asserting that Israel should stop being the state that it is and become a different one with a different population, different ideological and cultural commitments, and different borders . . . constitute calling for the state to “cease to exist”? . . . one could make a case for “yes”.

Well, in propaganda terms, a great deal hangs on such semantics, since they can be and have been used to imply any number of disagreeable things. If some fundamentals of a state are changed, that form of the state can be said to “cease to exist,” but it’s no great secret that in the Israeli context this rhetoric is usually meant to hint (supportably or not) at horrific, epochal atrocity, in some views on or near the scale of the Holocaust. The fact that states often “cease to exist” in the restricted semantic sense without apocalyptic consequences is not what’s being hinted at.

It’s also not a particular secret that the argument about “right to exist,” as it is usually advanced, is an argument that Israel is being unfairly singled out in circumstances where most other states would not be questioned. This is simply false in at least the most basic sense, in that it is actually quite routine to question whether any state has the “right” to maintain a particular set of demographic and ideological commitments. It can also be argued (and I think it’s probably obvious by this point that I would argue) that the argument about Israel needing to have an inbuilt, ideologically Zionist “Jewish character” is also in the process of failing on the merits of what it professes to achieve.

“The loyal Druse and Bedouin and Christian communities.”
oy…

“Of course there are loyal Jews, and we have no problem with them. It’s the conspirators, hiding in the shadows…They’re the….”

“Huh? Oh…excuse me, I must’ve fallen asleep… Did I miss something?”

Mr Burton… Junior… boychik… Schmendrik…

Putz!!

As HerrDoktorProfessorSlack put it: “The Zionist objection to right of return is a demographic argument”[!]
It’s racist.

sg,

While I appreciate being credited, just to be clear on this, the “hundred-year” example is not mine. It’s from a comment that Joshua linked to approvingly earlier in the thread, so it is a view I assume he endorses (and he has not suggested otherwise).

Joshua, I want to reiterate that the notion that Israel could survive for a hundred more years as a Zionist state without ever reaching peace with its neighbors (or, as in the original comment, with the whole world) sounds delusional. Right or wrong, it simply won’t work. Suppose Iran is prevented from getting nukes in the next decade. Nukes are on the black market. There’s lots of money flowing around the Mideast, some of it in the hands of people very hostile to Israel. And that’s only looking at the current state of weaponry. What will nanotech make possible? Since weapons are sold in the marketplace, it is only reasonable to assume that whatever exists will eventually find its war into the hands of your enemies if they want it bad enough. And it is easier to develop weapons than to develop defenses against them: nukes have been with us more than half a century and there is still no defense against them, nor against many chemical and biological weapons. Now this kind of talk is more typical of the Right and the conclusion that they would have to come to is quite scary: Israel can only be made safe by pre-emptively decimating its enemies, making them incapable of attack. Even this looks pretty doubtful to me, but it is a self-fulfilling logic, as your “enemies” have every reason to seek your destruction if they think you believe this; indeed, they must. I’m sorry, if the conflict is truly intractable, Zionism must end, or must be pursued somewhere else. The Jewish right to feel validated and safe by having their own country cannot trump the need of the region not to be decimated.

Dr. Slack, the context in which this came up is when I said that Israel’s “right to exist” was controversial. I think this is correct, and not just in the sense of “the right of the Jewish people there to remain alive”, but also “the right of a Zionist state in the Middle East to exist”. Indeed, you seem to dispute the latter yourself. I agreed earlier that these two propositions are sometimes propagandistically conflated. But that doesn’t mean we cannot acknowledge the controversy about the latter sense of the phrase; indeed, it would be kind of ridiculous not to, since we are engaging in said controversy now.

It looks impossible to the point of frivolity to me.

Further thoughts about doomsday here. (Don’t misattribute the blogger’s words to me, please!)

I think a lot of the panic around here comes from Americans imagining what they would do in Israel’s shoes. That worries me a lot, too, since September 2001. The US likes its problems solved.

Joshua, if by “survival of the Jewish nation” you mean the maintenance of Jewish identity and cohesion in the absence of a state, the fact that it happened shows that it was not, in fact, unworkable. It may have appeared unworkable to some, but I don’t see how it could have happened if the Jews themselves did not largely regard it as possible for each of those centuries as they lived through them. Yes, Israel has been under existential threat before, indeed to varying degrees throughout its modern existence. But destructive power on all sides will only increase, and, as I said, it is much easier to develop weapons than to develop defenses against them. Even guns can only be defended against in limited ways. Retaliation is the key modern defense. That’s what made the Cold War stable, even though each side had the capability to annihilate the other many times over. But Israel is not going to develop the ability to annihilate the sum of its adversaries, and, even if it did, it could not deploy it without effectively destroying itself as a functional state in the process, both because the destruction and ancilliary effects could not be so contained, and because the world would embargo it. So you have a situation akin to the Cold War in that technology will continually increase the destructive capability of both sides, but unlike it in that the potential for being destroyed will never by symmetrical. The best Israel could do is put itself in a position where it can take much of the Mideast with it if it goes. If the Mideast were a single player, that might be sufficient, but it is a complex and shifting amalgam of state and non-state actors. Perhaps a threat to Mecca would be respected by all, but it seems a thin reed.

Retaliation is the key modern defense.

Didn’t somebody just call me “grasshopper”? You unaccountably neglect stealth tactics, though they have already imploded two major intifadehs from within.

For the record, I’m in favor of deterrence, but against retaliation. This is, if you like, a nuanced view of the Strangelove dilemma.

The best Israel could do is put itself in a position where it can take much of the Mideast with it if it goes.

God forbid. Over and out.

Joshua, this business with 1000 years and Dan Simmons is just paranoid rot. Sure, 1000 years from now “someone, somewhere” from a kooky judaeo -christian religious organisation is going to want to kill people from some other judaeo-christian group, but this is hardly going to put the Jews in a unique position. After all, 1000 years from now someone, somewhere from a kooky religion is going to want to kill someone from another religion – buddhists, hindus, animists undoubtedly all subscribe to the same stupidity. Indeed, “even” the Jews have had this attitude (as in, for example, the Irgun) and no doubt will in the future. The only solution to this problem is for everyone to throw their hands up in the air and retreat into racially, religiously and culturally pure nation states to protect themselves.

No, your implication with this line of thought is that 1000 years from now Jews will still be under threat from genocide everywhere in the world by States, the only organisations which pose a real threat to any minority group. But this is also not true. There are many states in the world which have no historical or cultural context within which killing Jews will ever occur. Examples which spring to mind are Australia, NZ, Japan, Papua New Guinea, the United Kingdom, and probably China. Sure, these nations might one day get into a weird situation and start killing foreigners en masse, but whether or not Jews will be singled out for that treatment will depend upon the context, not their Jewishness – witness the side of teh apartheid line in South Africa on which the Jews fell for examples of what happens in countries with no context for killing Jews.

(However, we could be confident that if one were to tear out a chunk of land from any of those countries and give it to [insert racial group] it would lead to conflict with [insert racial group] and potentially slaughter – isn`t that interesting?)

The fact is Jews will never be under any serious threat in Australia. I would go so far as to add a lot of the Muslim countries to that statement, due to religious protection afforded the Judaeo-christian minorities. Furthermore, it`s blatantly obvious to everyone in the post-world war 2 world that no Western European country is going to get its State worked up into a genocidal rage over Jews for hundreds of years at least. Which, given the way religiosity is declining in Western Europe, means probably never. And gives Jews a long time to work in which to make sure genocide becomes an impossible thought in those countries.

By spouting this nonsense you have fallen for either 1) a really limited understanding of the world 2) a really strong desire to misdirect the blame for Arab rage onto anti-semitism or (I think most likely) 3) the racialist view that Jews and Gentiles cannot live together. Number 3) is a particularly odious misconception because of its provenance, and the fact that it is so little held by the majority of the Western world.

So you have to do better than that if you want to defend Zionism. Paranoid delusions don`t cut it as argument.

…that is a factual not a moral question.

How so, what are your facts on this? In the last thousand years the only serious massacre of Jews in the Arab world (unless you want to count relatively minor political-Zionism-related skirmishes) was when they (along with Arabs) were slaughtered by crusaders about 900 years ago. Check it out.

If you want to argue that “the Jewish population will be in serious danger” as Jews (as opposed to political Zionists), you need to produce some proof. Warning: many quotes you’ll find on the internet are fabricated.

Note, BTW, that a few years ago a guy named Adam Shapiro spent months in Ramallah (iirc) living among Palestinians without any danger whatsoever, while his parents had to flee Brooklyn, NY, facing multiple credible death threats and general hatred. Check it out.

Let me leave you with this scene, from about a month ago:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3398969,00.html
Hundreds of Jews protested against an Arab family moving into the Naveh Zayit neighborhood in Lod on Saturday, and two demonstrators were taken in for questioning.

“We have no problem with Arabs living in their own neighborhoods, but they’d better stay out of our neighborhood,” one of the residents told Ynet, “this is their way to slowly kick us out of the city by taking over Jewish neighborhoods. Just like we don’t go live in their neighborhoods, they shouldn’t come live in our neighborhoods.”

Don’t these people deserve some danger; not for being Jews, but for being the scum that they are?

These people (from the ynetnews above) don’t deserve to die or any physical injuries, but they certainly deserve to be stripped of any political power. Yet these people and the way they behave is what the present-day political Zionism is all about (in my humble opinion, no offense, nothing personal). What is going to happen to them when they lose power is up to them, they will have to change. I don’t see how anyone could suggest that they should keep the power because they would face danger from people they’re oppressing now; that don’t make sense to me. I don’t see a good way to protect these people, other than them changing their attitude.

Arguments about what’s possible in the near future are always risky, but I want to make some that I didn’t notice getting presented.

1. Hezbollah-style attacks on israel won’t really threaten israel in the next 10 years or so. Here is my reasoning — the missiles have to be aimed very carefully to do more expensive damage to their targets thank they cost their makers. In economic terms Hezbollah’s missiles cost the arabs more than they cost israel, they cost more to make than it cost to repair the damage they did. They had a *political* result, they made it look like israel was not invincible. Of course, it did and will cost more for israel to shoot them down than they cost themselves, and the tiny weapons that damaged or destroyed israeli tanks cost much less than the tanks. This sort of thing is likely to continue. It has gotten more expensive for israel to attack lebanon but it’s still less-than-useless for lebanese to attack israel.

If that changes — if Hezbollah-etc find ways to make truly effective attacks on israel, then israel will stop them. Israel could have stopped all the missiles in about 2 days by making nerve gas attacks on all suspected missile sites. They would have killed maybe a few hundred thousand lebanese civilians and they would have looked very bad to the world, and it clearly was not worth it. But if they needed to stop a crippling attack on israel, would they do it? In about 12 heartbeats. If they’re truly threatened of course they’ll use the WMDs and deal with world opinion later.

2. Israel will not get a tremendous number of new jewish immigrants because they don’t have the water and they can’t get it. I don’t know where the limit comes, I’d certainly expect comes at less than twice the current population. The water just isn’t there to support anything like a western-style lifestyle for that many people. It isn’t just waterless toilets and 1-minute showers, the effects ripple everywhere.

3. People at the bottom of the economic heap tend to have as many children as they can raise at all. For various reasons that works for them. People closer to the middle realise how poor they’d get if they had more children and so they don’t. But when there aren’t big economic rewards, when you’re still on the bottom with fewer children, why bother? Israel can reduce israeli-arab birthrates by increasing their wealth to the point they don’t want to lose it raising more children, or by decreasing their wealth to the point that all but 1 or 2 children die in each family. Or the israeli government and israeli society can ignore the situation and hope it turns out well. But unless they do nothing then it isn’t just an uncertainty. Israel can regard it as a threat and do something about it. And they probably will, since it’s publicly recognised as an existential threat.

4. The threat of high palestinian or israeli-arab birth rates might not happen, and if it truly looks like an existential threat then the israelis will probably find ways to keep it from happening. But I thought it was interesting how the argument went. Racist zionists made the same arguments about the threat that I used to hear from racist whites complaining about high negro birthrates. And the obvious implication in both cases was that something had to be done to prevent it. But here, zionist opponents made the argument that high israeli-arab birthrates implied that zionism would fail. I think what they meant was that to do anything effective to stop it, zionists must do something so terrible that they couldn’t live with themselves and they’d have the world against them so the israeli government would have to be replaced with something else. They used the exact same argument to say that zionists must give up!

The nice-guy zionists here responded that it isn’t inevitable that arab populations will keep growing relative to jewish populations in israel and so it might not come to that. But I want to point out that all the other links in the logical chain are broken too. Zionists can probably reduce arab birthrates without agonising over the ethics involved. The world probably won’t do anything about it. The israeli government can chug right along, perhaps they’ll have a scandal about bribery or foreign bank accounts or something that will bring down the government but relations with arabs probably won’t do it.

The point was made that if the USA tries to reprimand israel then israel will immediately ally with china. I think this deserves careful thought.

Certainly if the USA didn’t provide israel with all their great-power needs they’d look for another great power. But ….

First, what would israel have to offer china? They could give china all the military secrets we’ve trusted them with. But that wouldn’t be enough to justify an alliance. China would buy those for money or trade them for their secret info about the USA or russia or whatever, but they’re surely already doing that.

Israel could attack arab nations for china. I doubt china would want them to.

China could threaten arab nations with israel. They could say unless those nations did what china wanted, china would let israel attack them. But I don’t think the chinese would be that stupid.

China is negotiating things like oil and security with iran and other oil states. How would an alliance with israel play on that? “The friend of my enemy is….”

Well, israel could offer ports for chinese warships, and airbases for chinese warplanes. No.

I just don’t see that israel has much to offer china. Or any other great power, actually. Our unconditional support for Likud comes because we believe in doing the right thing despite its giving us nothing of material value. Or something like that.

What could china offer israel? They don’t have carriers or airbases nearby, to provide clandestine military assistance.

If israel got into a war and needed a lot of resupply, could china provide a massive airlift? No.

China could provide a Security Council veto, that’s one thing israel absolutely needs.

I hear the USA provides israel with all its oil, for free. I don’t hear much about that but the CIA factbook seems to confirm it. A quarter million barrels a day we give to israel, and israel pumps 100 barrels a day of israeli oil. That isn’t a whole lot, really, only about $6 billion a year at current prices, not counting shipping oil from the north sea or wherever to the middle east. Would china do that for israel? No way.

Would china give secret military technology to israel? No possible way even if china had something israel could use, not after israel sells our secret military technology to china. Obviously if israel would sell out the USA they’d sell out china.

China has very little to offer israel. There is no alternative to the USA to be israel’s only friend.

And israel has essentially nothing to offer china or any other great power.

When I look at this list, I find myself imagining what would happen if the USA and israel did get into a serious disagreement. I see no likelihood that anything like that might happen in the foreseeable future, but what if it did?

First, the USA would cut out whatever economic and military assistance we provide to israel, as well as the free oil. That’s about $8 billion/year plus whatever doesn’t get publicised.

Then the USA would presumably make the case that israeli WMDs are a threat to the world. There are the nukes, and the biowarfare weapons, and the nerve gas, and the weapons that are better left unmentioned. The nukes are obvious. The bioweapons are less so. Israel has enough vaccine to immunise all israelis against smallpox and they’ve immunised key people already. The claim was they thought Saddam might attack them with smallpox, though there was no particular reason to think he had smallpox stocks. Israel was known to have smallpox stocks, but we were ready to assume israel would never use them. Hmm.

If the USA led the charge against israeli WMDs, who would oppose it? China? Hardly. Presumably israel would refuse inspectors, and the USA could then embargo israel leading to tremendous suffering for palestinians, and then…. I dunno. My crystal ball was pretty murky already and at this point it just fades out. I can’t see the USA giving up unconditional support for Likud in the foreseeable future, anyway.

At any rate, it doesn’t work for zionists to threaten to play the china card. It isn’t a strong card at all. They do better to play the lobby card. Go to each individual politician in DC and tell them “Unless you give us single-issue zionists everything we demand you’ll never work in this town again.”. That’s a trump.

“Israel gets free oil” is a rather weird one, that’s for sure.

It also looks as though we urgently need a link to Borats Anonymous.

Various people have argued that arabs will continue to be important because of their oil. That both gives them a negotiating edge, and gives them money that they can use to buy weapons, bribe others, etc. Israel will have to deal with this power opposing them for the next 100 years or something like that.

However, within the next 20 years or so, that oil will be mostly gone. Maybe sooner than we expect — arab nations do not estimate their reserves the way we do it in the USA, and international oil companies don’t estimate their reserves in arab countries or the arab countries’ reserves our way either. These nations may have significantly less reserves than they claim. In one case — iraq — our government got to actually look at the books. We were claiming that the war would pay for itself, that international oil companies would move in and develop iraqi oil fields and sell lots of oil making iraq rich. Then we took Baghdad and guarded only the oil ministry and started looking at the books, and right after that Bush started talking like it would be a long slow grind and started cutting costs. I haven’t seen new public estimates of iraq’s reserves, except that an iraqi expert points out various places that have never been explored and suggests they’re probably full of oil.

In perhaps less than 20 years, arabs may have no oil to sell and there may be no international oil market for israel to buy. The israeli economy and israeli military might have to adapt to operate mostly without oil. I don’t think any of us are in a good position to predict how that would turn out.

We simply aren’t in any position to look ahead 100 years. These days the foreseeable future is probably more like 5 years.