Indecent Proposal

First of all, looking forward to the Halevi book. Secondly, why point to Clermont-Tonnerre and not Christian Wilhelm Dohmm? Dohmm is earlier - no? Thirdly, I'm not sure that your "what does it matter?" critique on "page" 2 is all that effective. Sand is not arguing that Judaism is not a nation in the real (ie the produced or imagined) sense, but that its own sense of nationhood denies its real contingency. Israelis, Sand argues, turn our their identity over the course of their history just as the french or the irish have. The problem is reification - not delusion. On this point, you seem to agree with Sand. What united Polish and Moroccan Jews was not their blood as much as their commitments, activities, and values - and these are all things that they did (or, better put, continued to do ... this is why it is so important that Jews learn Hebrew!). Whatever we may think there's no real essence or core that's going to do the work of being Jewish - whether acknowldged or not. Of course, the irony is that the persistence of this belief in identity and essence is itself a kind of activity and - as you point out - enough to keep something of the hope for "israel" alive. What that is, though, will (to my mind) turn on just how well Jews can recognize the importance of agency in the midst of all this historical/cultural reception.

“only in the nineteenth century, its first formulators being religiously lapsed European Jewish intellectuals”

While Bruno Bauer’s antisemitic “Die Judenfrage ("The Jewish Question")” was published in 1843 and Voltaire’s fulminations against Jews came a full century before that.

Antisemites then have never had any doubt about Jews being a people and a people that should be held apart.

From a more positive point of view didn’t Shloimele ever read the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela that early medieval Jew who traveled the world looking for Jewish communities and cataloguing their existence? He certainly believed that he was part of a Jewish people that he didn’t invent:

“Benjamin set out on his journey from northeast Spain around 1165, in what may have begun as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[1] It has been suggested he may have had a commercial motive as well as a religious one. On the other hand, he may have intended to catalogue the Jewish communities en route to the Land of Israel to provide a guide where hospitality could be found for Jews travelling to the Holy Land, or for those fleeing oppression elsewhere.[2] He took the "long road," stopping frequently, meeting people, visiting places, describing occupations and giving a demographic count of Jews in every town and country.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_of_Tudela

One of the major weaknesses of Shloimele Sands book is his embracing of the Khazar theory. There is no evidence that this is more than a legend.

Great takedown, completely satisfying read. A few quibbles: "Even most secular Israelis continue to think of themselves as belonging to a people" is sufficient unto itself, the notion that a country has to go back thousands of years to have validity is ridiculous, or I suppose countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. lack all validity. If America is valid on its own basis, a country united by shared values and a shared identity, then why the hell wouldn't Israel be?

A few other minor points, in fact being Catholic does mean belonging to a people. For a devout Catholic Rome represents a spiritual home, one that in tradition offered sanctuary based on belief alone (the actual confines of the Church offered itself as literally a separate state not bound by the sovereignty outside of it) Granted, this practice ceased centuries ago (at least as far as the outside state recognizing it as such, it still occurs today with some Catholic churches giving refuge to illegals with local PD's looking the other way). Suffice it to say, if Catholics suffered anywhere near the persecution and enforced separation that Jews did, it is likely there would have arisen a much more vigorous Catholic state to offer refuge. The Vatican itself is recognized in most countries, so a state based explicitly on religious faith also is considered to be valid. So this is another strike against the author.

"Sand, like other critics of Zionism, is wrong in believing that Israel cannot be both formally Jewish and functionally democratic, and that it must choose between the two." I am sorry, but more than just wrong, but outright idiotic. What, Ireland can not be both Irish and functionally democratic? There are non ethnic Irish Irish citizens. There is no reason why one can't be both Jewish (ethnically and religiously) and Irish (citizen and socially) it is just damn nice to know that if Irish ever up and decided to deprive their Jewish citizens of their rights (not that we would ever allow that to happen), they have a place to go.

The more I read the more I am convinced that the critics of Zionism are simply nothing (at best) than ignorant assholes whose arguments are infantile. At worst, well that is pretty obvious.

Blackton: not too long ago you criticized me (rightly, as I admitted) for use of the word "Jew" in an offensive context. Turnabout being fair play, your broad brush "critics of Zionism are simply nothing (at best) than ignorant assholes whose arguments are infantile" strikes me as pretty far out there. It's the same as saying there can be (or it least is not) any legitimate, measured, or intelligent criticism of Zionism - which is so intellectually dubious as to be laughable. I can't think of any social movement, party, government, or culture which is beyond legitimate criticism. That requires perfection, and I can't see Zionism as the perfection of the human (or even Jewish) condition.

And of course, you're also making a sort of a priori ad hominem attack on anyone who dares to criticize Zionism, which is frankly beneath your usual level of discourse.

"Sand, like other critics of Zionism, is wrong in believing that Israel cannot be both formally Jewish and functionally democratic, and that it must choose between the two."

What does it mean to be a Jewish (or Christian, or Muslim) nation? When my neighbors tell me I live in a Christian country (even though we clearly are not formally so), they are making the case that Christian notions of right and wrong have an assumed and to some degree enforceable primacy in this country, and that Christianity belongs in our education and laws, and public expressions of national loyalty. That is to say, they derive a good deal of the sovereign character of the country from Christianity.

Now, of course the United States is not a Christian nation, but which rather is formally a nation that declares no faith to have primacy, and which derives its charter from no particular confession. So, I see that as simply a wrong understanding of the country. But if we were formally Christian, I would find it anti-democratic indeed. Because in a Democracy, sovereignty resides in the people. It is "We the People" who "ordain and establish this Constitution" and not a confession or faith or ethnic history that does so.

A nation can exist and indeed thrive with all sorts of internal contradictions - history certainly permitted us to do very well, thank you, with our deep contradictions about equality - so I would agree that Israel has no need to choose between being Jewish and being a Democracy. But that's not because it is not contradictory - it's because as long as there is no majority pressure to undo such a contradiction, it'll never be a fatal contradiction.

All I can say is - you mean we didn't kill Jesus?

sdemuth, I have no problem with criticizing Israeli policy, I do have problems with criticizing Israel's right to exist. People are of course free to criticize America's right to exist, or Germany's or Israel, but that doesn't mean I have to take them remotely seriously. Outside of a few people extolling one worldism stating Israel, or the US or Germany is not a legitimate country is idiotic. Really, to what end, in what way is scholarship advanced or human knowledge. If I were to admit the Colonization of America was wrong, what then, shall 297 million Americans pack up and leave it to the few million native American descendants?
Certainly we can learn from history and compensate for our misdoings against the native Americans, but we cannot redo history. And I am bone weary of the sins of the fathers blather. (this goes many ways, if I hear one more American exclaim about the French that they would be speaking German if not for us I will scream, no shithead, you didn't fight at Normandy so stop taking credit for what your grandfather did)
Dictionary definition of Zionism: Zi·on·ism (zī'ə-nĭz'əm)
n. A Jewish movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel.

What really is there to criticize?

Beyond that England is officially a Church of England country, and there are many Liberal Democracies that officially recognize the Catholic church, such as:

* Andorra
* Argentina
* Monaco
* Costa Rica
* El Salvador
* Brazil
* Liechtenstein
* Malta
* Dominican Republic
* Monaco
* Poland
* Spain
* Paraguay
* Peru

* Some cantons of Switzerland
* Vatican City

Lutheran

Jurisdictions which recognize a Lutheran church as their official religion:

* Denmark
* Iceland
* Norway
* Germany

Until 2000, Sweden had the localized Lutheran Church as a state church. The Church of Sweden has now been relegated to the status of a national church. Finland's former state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, was changed into a national church (along with the Finnish Orthodox Church, which was given the same position) through the church law of 1870, the constitution of 1919 and the law on religious freedom of 1922.

Of course, as an American, I endorse our official separation of Church and state but I am not going to state that Denmark is somekind of tyranny, because, essentially at this point, the whole official status have been watered down. Provided the official status doesn't prevent the free exercise of any other religion (as it does in Saudi Arabia) I have no big problem with it. Do you really find England or Norway undemocratic?

Finally, being Jewish is also being of a people, and not of a religion, which is why on a previous thread I have so praised Israel accepting Russian atheist jews. Israel is not just Judaism as religion. And there are Muslim Israelis and Christian Israelis.

Being that I see no scores of people out there protesting Norway's legitimacy, or its having its own official religion, so why are people so hung up on Israel?

jneuberg, if you have Roman Empire Legionairre ancestry, then yes, your ancestors maybe did kill Jesus (that is if they were assigned to Galilee at that time and oversaw that particular crucifixion)

sdemuth To Blackton “It's the same as saying there can be (or it least is not) any legitimate, measured, or intelligent criticism of Zionism - which is so intellectually dubious as to be laughable. I can't think of any social movement, party, government, or culture which is beyond legitimate criticism. That requires perfection, and I can't see Zionism as the perfection of the human (or even Jewish) condition.”

You are dead wrong, sdemuth.

Zionists can be criticized Zionism as the idea that Jews have a right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland cannot. Those who do usually have ulterior motives and these include the Neturei Karta who believe that only the Messiah can restore Jewish sovereignty. Other critics are either pro Arab or ultra leftists who deny Jews their rights to self determination for national and political reasons. Other critics of Zionism are thinly disguised antisemites who would like to deny Jews the rights accorded to other peoples.

In this sense Blackton’s point that “critics of Zionism are simply nothing (at best) than ignorant assholes whose arguments are infantile" is right on.

Also your generalized comment that “ I can't think of any social movement, party, government, or culture which is beyond legitimate criticism” is wrong. The civil rights movement of African Americans which strove to restore their rights in civil society was and is above criticism as was the movement for women’s rights.

Social movements are either legitimate or illegitimate. Zionism was and is a legitimate national idea.

sdemuth “What does it mean to be a Jewish (or Christian, or Muslim) nation?”

You know very well what it means.

Muslims nations base their laws and culture on the Koran.

Israel is not a religious country in the same sense though it is culturally Jewish just as most of Europe and the Americas are culturally Christian in as much as many of the religious holidays are celebrated as national holidays. Stores are not closed here on Yom Kippur but they are closed on Christmas and in many parts of the country also on Good Friday.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A country need not be officially Christian in order to be culturally so. It also makes sense that in a country where the majority of its citizens are Christian that its culture would also be Christian.

Israel is the only country in the world where while secular has a Jewish majority and a Jewish culture in the same sense. To deny the Jewish people the right to have a sovereign State where they can practice their culture free of any constraints is offensive.

Your refusal to acknowledge that fact is simply wrong headed and obtuse!

"The civil rights movement of African Americans which strove to restore their rights in civil society was and is above criticism"

Yes, I think you are right here. My statement overgeneralized, and this is a good counterexample of a social movement whose goals would be extremely difficult or impossible to criticize cogently.

"Zionism as the idea that Jews have a right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland cannot [be criticized]"

It certainly can. There is nowhere in any international law or accepted notion of human rights, a right to restoration of a distantly ancestral homeland from other people who live there. There isn't even a general right of immigration against the wishes of the receiving country. The result of giving such a principles broad legitimacy would be utter and complete chaos in multiple places around the world. You may argue for all sorts of reasons that the relationship of Jews to Israel, or their historical persecution, uniquely justified the Zionist movement, but the very "special" nature of those arguments means they must be justified, and are not beyond criticism. The strength of the African American civil rights movement rests precisely on the fact that it required no such arguments, but rather insisted on the fulfillment of a generally recognized principle and set of rights.

Israel is a nation, properly constituted and recognized. More, it is a democratic nation, that generally respects recognized human rights. It has every right to determine its own destiny, defend itself, and exercise the prerogatives of nationhood. But that is an entirely different question from whether or not the Zionist doctrine under which it became a nation is somehow pure and beyond criticism, just as the sovereignty and attendant rights of the United States of America over this continent is a very different question from the moral legitimacy of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny under which we took it. One can respect the former, but criticize the latter in many ways, in both cases.

"You know very well what it means."

Actually, I don't. I rather suspect in fact that my neighbors who say we are a Christian nation mean something very different, and more pervasive than what you describe, which is little more than a derived affinity from a European Christian origin. They have something in mind more like what Iran means by calling itself an "Islamic Republic." You yourself point out that Israel is far more secular than either of those conceptions.

If I take being an "XXX" nation in the strong sense, of deriving sovereignty from a special relationship to "XXX" then the US is not Christian. We derive our sovereignty from a compact of the People that explicitly excludes any particular religious identity. I honestly don't know whether Israel is Jewish in this special relationship sense or not. The Israeli people I have met range from entirely secular Russian intellectuals to the ultraorthodox to kibbutzim to Israeli Arabs, and frankly, the commonalities (or lack of them) amongst them, give me no clue.

"Zionism as the idea that Jews have a right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland cannot [be criticized]"

“It certainly can. There is nowhere in any international law or accepted notion of human rights, a right to restoration of a distantly ancestral homeland from other people who live there. There isn't even a general right of immigration against the wishes of the receiving country.”

This is wrong. The 19th and 20th century was full of movements to restore national rights by different peoples. In fact most of this was accomplished at great bloodshed whose numbers make the Arab Israeli conflict seem like a minor skirmish. From the Turkish Greek wars to the wars of the Indian subcontinent the number of casualties involved were in the millions. These movements also involved the migration of millions of people in huge populations transfer.

In the case of the Jews move to their ancestral homeland there was no “receiving country” at the turn of the last century: that land was dominated by the Ottomans and then by the Brits.

Your singling out the Jewish State says much about your own obsessions but it says nothing about the rights or wrongs in international law.

The rights of Jews to self determination are beyond criticism.

sdemuth “Actually, I don't. I rather suspect in fact that my neighbors who say we are a Christian nation mean something very different, and more pervasive than what you describe, which is little more than a derived affinity from a European Christian origin. They have something in mind more like what Iran means by calling itself an "Islamic Republic." You yourself point out that Israel is far more secular than either of those conceptions.”

It doesn’t matter what you neighbors want.

What I described was a country whose culture is founded on many cultural traditions derived from Christianity. These range from celebrations of religious holidays as national holidays to cultural concepts of right and wrong.

These need not be enshrined in law for them to be real.

Moreover I suspect as the number of immigrants from South America increase (and these are overwhelmingly and some are even militant Christian) the country will become more and not less culturally Christian.

Hopefully, it won’t become formally Christian but this too is not out of the question.

"The 19th and 20th century was full of movements to restore national rights by different peoples. In fact most of this was accomplished at great bloodshed whose numbers make the Arab Israeli conflict seem like a minor skirmish."

That makes them right? There were also plenty of movements to make this or that country communist, and not a few to make one nation or another fascist. Neither the fact that there were multiple and widespread movements, nor the passion of those committed to them, legitimize those movements.

This is not a question of counting movements, or judging passion. Show me a widely accepted international principle that says it is right for a group of people to move to a place and take it over in the name of their own religion or national identity, against the wishes of the inhabitants. I don't think you can. It was wrong when the Europeans did it in in the Western Hemisphere and Australia, African and New Zealand; it was wrong when the Chinese did it in Tibet. The list is in fact rather long. Restoration of rights to worship and celebrate and educate one's family in one's own traditions, in the place where you now live are widely endorsed, not least by the UN Charter. The right to move to a place where your are not a citizen and not welcome, whether to restore yourself to your ancestral homeland, or to restore previous sovereignty, or fulfill manifest destiny simply isn't.

I'm not obsessing about Israel on this. I feel no less strongly about Tibet, or for that matter, the fact that I grew up on land which was sacred to the Lakota people, who were displaced by my own great grandparents. Were this a book review about either of those subjects, rather than about Zionism, I wouldn't be writing about Israel.

sdemuth, you still don't get it.

"The right to move to a place where your are not a citizen and not welcome, whether to restore yourself to your ancestral homeland, or to restore previous sovereignty, or fulfill manifest destiny simply isn't."

I already answered this nonsense: Jews moved to an area were there was no sovereign State. Moreover there had been Jews living there for hundred of years.

One can criticize certain Israeli policies but Zionism as the expression of Jewish desire for self rule is beyond reproach.

Your views on the subject are bullshit, and hateful bullshit at that.

JD: Nice retort - when all else fails, restate your thesis as an axiom and throw in an expletive or two. You clearly learned debate at one of the better schools.

I'm not criticizing anyone's desire for self-rule, but rather the notion that such right can ever legitimately be exercised by repopulating a a place where the immigrants are not welcome, and displacing the people already there. That there was no sovereign state in the land now called Israel is irrelevant - people - even people unlike onself - don't become ciphers just because the land in which they live has been subject to one or another imperial colonizations, or is at some particular moment, not organized as a recognized state. By that logic the dispossession of most Native Americans by Europeans was entirely legitimate, since none of them constituted a sovereign state within their lands, and they had in many cases tolerated and intermingled with Voyageurs and explorers in their presence for a couple of centuries.

Of course what Europeans did then wasn't right, and it hasn't gotten any more right with the passage of time. No doctrine, peoplehood, or aspiration, justifies imposing one group on another group in the latter's home, against their will.

sdemuth "I'm not criticizing anyone's desire for self-rule, but rather the notion that such right can ever legitimately be exercised by repopulating a a place where the immigrants are not welcome, and displacing the people already there. That there was no sovereign state in the land now called Israel is irrelevant...."

You are repeating yourself.

Your main point is wrong: There was no sovereign State of any kind in "Palestine." Not Jewish, not Arab, not Canaanite, nothing.

You seem to know very little about the general history of the area and about Jewish history in particular.

The area was ruled by various Imperial powers and the Jews who returned to Palestine throughout the centuries had for the most part the permission of these ruling authorities there.

The only time Jews circumvented those authorities was during the Hitler period when the British mandate authorities imposed limits on Jews settling there. Those who were denied access were in effect sentenced to death.

Your international law if it supported that supported the murder of Jews.

As there was no Arab State at the time in Mandate Palestine (nor a Jewish State) and as there were Jews who wanted to help their fellow Jews to migrate to the area, you can't say that all the people living there didn't want them to live there.

The issue of "migration" in the area is a lot more complicated than you make out since many of the Arabs who lived there in the 30's were themselves recent arrivals from neighboring countries who were drawn to Palestine because of opportunities created by Jewish development.

Nothing about this issue is simple and as far as I know there is no other people at least two and half thousand year old extant and that has reclaimed its right to its ancestral homeland. Hence you can’t draw any general formula from that fact.

Also international law did support the establishment of a Jewish State in Mandate Palestine hence your whole argument is superfluous.

Two more brief points about “INTERNATIONAL” law:

International law has outlawed genocide, yet that didn’t stop it from being a continuous presence and menace. International law is like the old Soviet law, except that it has no teeth since all law is as good as its enforcement mechanism.

Also, the fact that citizens of countries have a right to deny immigrants the right to stay in their country is something Jews have been painfully aware since time immemorial as they were hounded from country to country.

This was true in Arab countries which had on many occasions harassed and expelled its Jewish populations, as well as in Europe.

It also contributed to the death of millions during the Holocaust.

sdemuth,

What the Romans called Palestina, the province of their empire that was the homeland of the Jews, became a colonial conquest of Arab invaders in the 7th century. What you really seem to object to is not the displacement of Native Americans by Europeans, but Native Americans taking it back, and not all of it, but just the right to sovereignty and a majority in a small portion of what is now the United States. Given the diversity of Native Americans geographically and otherwise, I doubt that any place acceptable to them could be found and most seem to have no interest. But if they did, how could you object? Just because people currently living in whatever place wouldn't like it? They'd have to move or move over. We move them for highways, why not for justice?

The Arab Moslems are the majority and sovereign in millions of square miles comprising about 20 different nations and a large portion of the habitable globe. They had to move over and surrender a teeny-weeny piece of their colonial conquest to the Jews. So what? At the end of World War I, many nations were created, many of which had never existed before, to turn nations into nation/states. This includes many if not most of the Arab states who claimed the right to be free of colonial rule by the Turks. As a practical matter, the State of Israel was created contemporaneously although under an international mandate that did not end for another 30 years. How is it that Arabs are entitled to be free of colonial rule but Jews are not?

Millions of people, both Hindu and Moslem, were displaced in the course of the founding of Pakistan. You seem undisturbed. There is a nationalist Hindu party that wishes to undo the separation of Pakistan into a separate state. What do you say? Shall the Pakistanis be re-absorbed into India? The moral/historical lines you draw make no sense unless there is some rule that Moslems, wherever they may be, unique amongst the peoples of the world, are always entitled never to be in the minority and always to be sovereign, never subject to any law but their own. How did Moslems gain such privilege?

Roi, and JD: If you read what I have written here, I acknowledged early on that Israel is a legally constituted state with all the rights - including self defense and the establishment of their constitution, and all that flows from that. I have never suggested otherwise, and I hold no brief for anyone who does argue otherwise.

I also consider the United States to be a legally constituted state with those same rights. That doesn't mean that I think the actions by which we got to that point were right. I think they were often wrong in the simple sense that had the roles between the "winners" and "losers" of the continent been reversed, the Europeans would have considered the outcome utterly wrong. If it's wrong when applied by them to us, so to speak, then it's wrong when applied by us to them.

Is the situation around the establishment of Israel more nuanced than that in North American in the 17th-19th centuries. Probably it is. But is it so singularly different from other examples of one group of people taking over a place where they were not immediately resident and establishing their government at the expense of many of the current residents? I don't think so; nor do a lot of others. And that was my original point: one can indeed question the rightness of the Zionist proposition that Jews had a natural, incontrovertible right to a homeland where Israel now exists.

In the same vein, I reject the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. I think it was wrong. That doesn't mean I think the United States doesn't have a right to remain where it obviously is, or to defend itself or its institutions.

Note that I also do not think that the people who call themselves Palestinians have any such incontrovertible right to the region either. All the people who are in the place now must find a way to live together. Shame on anyone on either side who makes that impossible.

A lot of this disagreement can be traced to something we probably disagree on as a fundamental proposition: History matters to me only as a tool for learning about how to behave in the hear and now, and chart a future. Historical grievances or claims are to me just that: historical. Our task is to provide rights and prosperity to those now alive, and those to come, not to right things that cannot be changed. It is fundamental, on the other hand, to Jewish character, to place great importance in their history.

Roi: As to Pakistan an India - the terrible events of 1948 in that region are just that: terrible. Tragic, unnecessary, and yet another result of the notion that identity and nationalism require a nation-state of one's own, and that one cannot be safe outside such a cocoon. But the borders were drawn and recognized. So today, India has an obligation to fair treatment of it's Muslim (and Sikh, and Christian) minority. Those minorities have no claim to separatism that I can see to be reasonable. Likewise, Pakistan to it's Hindi (and other) minority. Not surprisingly, I place more confidence in India living up to their obligations here, notwithstanding its daliance with the BJP, than I do Pakistan living up to theirs. Islam appears to be particularly unfriendly at this point in history, to tolerance. Shame on them.

sdemuth, every country places great importance on their history. Tell me a single nation that doesn't. Fundamentally, I don't understand your point, unless it is to prove that within the creation of every nation state there will be some flaws inherent in its creation. I am sure 2,500 years ago when the jews fled Egypt there were some people in that area already living, so I suppose we should be calling for a restoration of the Hittite Empire. Or the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that was there first. Where would this argument end? Shall we bring back the Aztecs? Wait, they displaced the Mayans, before that were the Olmecs, on and on. But why should humans get control, all of humanity is an interloper from Africa, so perhaps it is there where we all should live.

The flaws you ascribe to Israel I don't agree since there has always been a jewish population there, and in the creation of Israel the majority jewish areas were carved out as the state of Israel. Within that area the Arabs were offered full rights of citizenship in a Liberal Democracy. The fact that many rejected this and decided to wage war on their neighbors, and in losing fled such a war, is somehow now held against Israel. This aspect is fundamental to Israel and is a key ingredient in the basis of its support. North Korea seems to possess all of the attributes you state, the Koreans who got there got there first, there is very little in the way of other peoples being oppressed. If this is your idea of determining the validity of a nation state, I think I will pass. And according to this light, America does belong to the moon since we got there first.

Now we can nitpick all day over history, but as to regards to Israel, there are people who would use these kinds of nitpicks to literally destroy it.

Sdemuth, What blackton said.

You say also:

“Is the situation around the establishment of Israel more nuanced than that in North American in the 17th-19th centuries. Probably it is. But is it so singularly different from other examples of one group of people taking over a place where they were not immediately resident and establishing their government at the expense of many of the current residents? I don't think so; nor do a lot of others. And that was my original point: one can indeed question the rightness of the Zionist proposition that Jews had a natural, incontrovertible right to a homeland where Israel now exists.”

Yes, it is “singularly different” from other examples as I and others have shown above.

Besides, your point that the Jews were merely “one group of people taking over a place where they were not immediately resident and establishing their government at the expense of many of the current residents?”

Is a repetition of what you said above which was contradicted by myself and other posters here. The Jews were not like say the Spaniards or the English or the French landing in the Americas and then taking over the continent. Nor were they like the Arabs conquering other parts of the Middle East including Palestine and imposing their religion and way of life on the inhabitants. There were Jews living in the land and some stayed on over the centuries while other Jews settled in other parts of the Middle East and Europe but often made pilgrimages to their holy land and some even built communities there from time to which were destroyed by subsequent conquerors. Still the Jews never gave up and always came back.

At the start of the 20th c btw Jerusalem had a Jewish majority till 1948 when they city was sacked and the Jews were driven out by the Arabs in their war against the Jewish communities living there.

As I said above your comments are based on ignorance. No one who knows the history of the Jews would argue that the experience of the Jews was no “different from other examples of one group of people taking over a place where they were not immediately resident and establishing their government.”

Besides, as Backton has argued above no country can claim that it has established sovereignty without breaking some moral or legal principle as you claim:

“I think they were often wrong in the simple sense that had the roles between the "winners" and "losers" of the continent been reversed, the Europeans would have considered the outcome utterly wrong. If it's wrong when applied by them to us, so to speak, then it's wrong when applied by us to them.”

There are few European country that haven’t achieved a coherent population without some either suppression of minority language rights or even ethnic cleansing. Read again the history of Europe.

The same is true for the Middle East. Even Egypt the most monolithic of Arab countries became so by expelling minorities who lived there for hundreds of years. Even today they suppress the rights of Copts who have been living there longer than the Arab speaking majority.

Finally I take small comfort from your comment that “I also consider the United States to be a legally constituted state with those same rights. That doesn't mean that I think the actions by which we got to that point were right.”

No one is challenging the legitimacy of the US or of Canada or Australia while the legitimacy of the Jewish State is being challenged continuously.

The reason is simple. The US is too strong for the present to have its legitimacy challenged while Israel is seen as vulnerable. All too often the legitimacy of a country is established by the size and strength of its economy and army as it is by “international law.”

sdemuth,

The critical point for me is that Israel and its legitimacy not be questioned on some basis, any basis, that is not applied generally. As JD points out, a large part of the Arab Palestinian population is of very recent origin in Israel, drawn there by Jewish development, and the rest of the Arab population is descended from imperial invaders. Despite that, it was never the project of the majority of Jews to expel Arabs, however they got there. And, unlike most of the Arabs, who arrived by conquest, the Jews who were not the remnants of the pre-Roman Jewish state, came, for the most part, under the auspices and with the consent of the legitimate government of the region, just not an Arab government because for centuries there was none. Finally, the partition had the blessing of the world community in the form of the UN. The fact that a sliver of the great Arab world is aggrieved by not being allowed to retain its colonial possession in Palestine does not alter this history much at all, nor does it legitimate Arab violence, nor does it de-legitimate effective Isreali defense against violence.

At the end of the day, if the Jews cannot legitimately claim statehood in the land of Israel, there are very few, if any, peoples on earth, most certainly not the Americans or the Arabs, who can claim legitimate sovereignty and statehood. To insist in the face of history that the creation of Israel is an original sin seems to me to de-legitimize only Israel by standards that no one applies anywhere else in the world. I find that wrong, and unacceptable. How does the European conquest of the Americas come to be wrong in your eyes but the Arab conquest of North Africa and the Levant come to be legitimate to the point that the original, or at least oldest indentifiable, inhabitants of the area become invaders upon their return?

Ahhh, one other thing. Can't help it.

The law of international morality that sees conquest and colonial domination as wrong is extremely recent in history and entirely of western origin -- emerging somewhere between the late 18th century (encouraged by the ethos of the American Revolution) and the early 20th century, finding its first general expression with Woodrow Wilson, the Treaty of Paris, and the League of Nations. No one else in the world believes it for a second except as expedient in world affairs. We believe it with distinct ambivalence.

In any case, the conquest of the Americas, and the conquests by the Arabs of North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe , all came at a time in human history when conquering other peoples was just what nations did and thought they had every moral right to do if their power sufficed. Perversely, the British continued to advance their colonial empire well after they had abandoned slavery, while the US continued to engage in slavery but ostensibly eschewed a colonial empire as a matter of international morality.

Most of the left-wing rejection of Israel, if not born of actual anti-Semitic feeling, seems to come with the idea that we are going to "draw the line" on past colonial crimes just before the founding of the State of Israel. This is intellectually and morally offensive, but it also betrays both western guilt and the desire for the Jews to serve as the scape-goat for western colonial guilt. Quelle surprise! The Jews as the sacrifice to expiate the sins of others. Not that that has ever happened before in history.

I don't happen to experience a shred of guilt over colonialization and conquest. I have not the slightest doubt that Montezuma, if he could have, would have conquered Spain with relish and served up Spaniards as sacrifices to the sun god. It is just an accident of history that the west decided that conquest was immoral at the zenith of western power and thus was forced, not by the rest of the world but by its own morality, to abandon the most obvious remaining examples of colonial domination. I doubt the Chinese would have retreated an inch.

We are not, however, going to give back the US, nor are the Russians or Chinese going to disassemble their empires and free minorities, nor are the Spanish or the French who incorporate unwilling minorities, nor, god knows, are any Third World countries going even to stop brutally repressing minorities. But, no matter, we can throw Israel to the Arabs and we are all cleansed of sin.

Of course, this infuriates, and should infuriate, Israelis. But what is even worse is that, to make the symbolic sacrifice of Israel work, the history of the Jews has to be perverted into a piece of the history of the world's conquerors, when the Jews were not in fact among the conquerors but the conquered. The Arabs, on the other hand, owe almost all of their current empire to conquest. The creation of Israel was not the last act of colonialism, but an act of de-colonization -- just that in this case it was not the removal of a western yoke but of both a western and Moslem yoke.

As a matter of public relations, and often effective public relations, the Arabs assume the role of victims and ask everyone to forget that they are in Palestine only as the descendants of conquerors and as aspirants to continued colonial domination (at best) of the Jews. A certain segment of western opinion is all too happy to oblige. That does not make it true.

Roi: I agree generally and in many cases specifically with your comment here. If you read this thread, I have not been arguing that the state of Israel is illegitmate, and I wouldn't for instant support, succor, or argue for the legitimacy of calls to destroy Israel, from any quarter, Arab, Shia, or something else.

I started talking about Zionism, and I was arguing that the core notion of Zionism - that Jews worldwide had a right rooted in their ancient history there, to establish a Jewish homeland in the land that is now Israel - is not beyond criticism. To characterize my argument that there are legitimate criticisms of this notion as somehow equivalent to asking Jews to expiate European guilt over colonialism is at the very least taking my argument to an extreme I don't myself begin to take it. I don't think the establishment of Israel is singularly incomparable to other cases of displacement of locally established people (not peoples, people). JD and you do. You both make some compelling arguments, but they are not made more compelling by characterizing what I was arguing (or in the case of the Blackton post that I originally responded to, calling me an asshole by association).

I also feel no guilt for past incidents of conquest, because I didn't participate in them. I feel some remorse for some things that I do o have participated in, rather by construction of being an American citizen (for example, the attempted subjugation of Vietnam to a corrupt US puppet state). I think we owe ourselves an honest appraisal of history, ours and others, to learn from what has happened. Where you and I almost certainly disagree, is that I don't think learning from history carries over into supposing we can or should solve historical grievances. We all owe the world our attention to finding succor for the dispossessed, starved, murdered, raped, and otherwise abused people of the world, without regard for the history that got them to that point.