A legitimate Jewish perspective

[Gentle Giant]

I just received something via email from a Jewish acquaintence, and I assume it's making the rounds from Jew to Jew. I found it very powerful in its pithiness. I'm not saying it's the last word on the Mideast mess, or that it's the only possible truth, but if I had to sign onto just two sentences that I feel accurately represent my views on the subject, I'd have to go with these. Because the reality is that peace (God willing) between the Israelis and the Palestinians would not mean peace for Israel; just one fewer enemy bent on her destruction.

Here it is:


Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the
Palestinians and Arab neighbours, even if you believe there is more
culpability on Israel's part for whatever reason, the following two
sentences really say it all:

If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more
violence.

If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no
more Israel.

[Cem]

Don't you think that's too simplistic & naive a view? Attitudes along with degrees of trust need to change gradually. That kind of change could not come about overnight. I understand Israelis' self-congratulatory tone here, but imho any kind of radical change would lead to more chaos &/or uncertainty. Either side may take as much as they can, should the other side show a weak side.

[Pete C]

Two sentences; one word:

Platitudes.

Trite and self-serving blather.

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by Gentle Giant

I just received something via email from a Jewish acquaintence, and I assume it's making the rounds from Jew to Jew.

Actually, it's been making the rounds for quite some time. I'm surprised it's new to you.

[Captain Hate]

I agree with Gentle Giant.

[saltwatersnow]

not like israel has any powerful alies or anything

[Gentle Giant]

Obviously, two sentences cannot encapsulate the entirety of what is an incredibly complex and tragic situation. However, look at a map of the region. Look at tiny little Israel surrounded by large Arab countries that not only are not friendly to Israel, they each at some point in modern history has explicitly called for the destruction of the state of Israel. And they have acted on it as well. The only reason that Israel is still around today is because it kept kicking the invaders' asses. Obviously, that's due in no small part to the financial and military assistance of the US (which, however, has never deployed troops on Israel's behalf, only arms).

But if every Arab nation suddenly said, fuck it, I guess Israel is here to stay, might as well make peace with them, do you think Israel would take advantage and start invading them? That's totally ludicrous. However, if Israel scaled back its military, stopped making service mandatory for all men and women (except the frickin' Orthodox), showed itself to be at all vulnerable, you don't think there would be continued attacks, suicide bombers, terrorist strikes? You have to know there would be.

Another thread had crawjo asking about US defensive wars. Aside from a widely criticized offensive against Lebanon several years ago, and Sharon's continued belligerence, every one of Israel's wars have been defensive. Considering its size and isolation in the region, it would be suicide to go around picking fights. Just as it would be suicide to let down its guard.

[crawjo]

GG,

I agree with the "platitudes." They are simplistic but they contain truth, and I believe you have hit the nail on the head.

I hadn't heard it before myself, so thank you for sharing them.

[tippy]

Originally Posted by Gentle Giant

But if every Arab nation suddenly said, fuck it, I guess Israel is here to stay, might as well make peace with them, do you think Israel would take advantage and start invading them?

Isn't the problem though that the creation of Israel itself is what they consider the invasion? The present incarnations was never agreed to by those present on the land that was handed over by Western countries. Isn't that the basis of this seemingly insolvable (?) problem? I don't know, it seems to me they should have created a New Israel in Germany. Imperfect as it's not the Holy Land, but perhaps less stressful on the world as a whole.

I give up, everybody light their nukes and let's party like it's 1999.

[Pete C]

Tippy, I agree that a Jewish homeland elsewhere would have been a better idea, but too many people were tied to the biblical bullshit.

I'm sympathetic to the position that Israel Zangwill took.

from Jerusalem Report:

Not a Mere Place
Stuart Schoffman


Like many residents of Efrat, the comfortable West Bank settlement that is a de facto suburb of Jerusalem and home to many Orthodox “Anglo-Saxon” professionals, my friend D. works in the city and commutes by car or, more recently, bulletproof bus. The “tunnel road” built in the mid-90s to skirt Bethlehem and link Jerusalem and the Etzion settlement bloc has lately come under sporadic Palestinian attack. A Molotov cocktail exploded as it bounced off the side of D.’s armored bus the other evening, with no ill effect but scaring her considerably. Yet D. remains philosophical. “Thank God I don’t live in Psagot,” she said, referring to the settlement next door to Ramallah, whose residents have been terrorized throughout the current intifada by Palestinian shooting.

Of course D. could just as easily have been someone from Jerusalem’s German Colony, breathing with relief that they don’t live in the sniper-plagued Gilo neighborhood a few miles away; or a mother in Psagot saying you’d have to be nuts to raise your kids in Hebron; or a North Tel Avivi expressing that exact sentiment about Jerusalem; or, for that matter, a good Jew in the Old Country remarking frankly on the idea of aliyah — not to mention a good Zionist in Israel reflecting on the perils of assimilation in America. At the end of the day, the geography of your Jewish life is calculated on a highly personal cost-benefit basis that derives from how you view the dilemmas of Jewish history, or what used to be called “The Jewish Question.”

Thus it may be instructive, in this supercharged political season, to revisit a couple of alternative solutions to the Jewish Question that were floated with great seriousness by some of our deepest thinkers a century or so ago, ideas that have been steamrolled into oblivion by the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel, but that are worth a moment’s notice, nonetheless. First let’s talk about the prolific London-born author Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), who stood by his friend Theodor Herzl when the latter proposed a Jewish state in British East Africa. The nasty battle over the Uganda Plan contributed to Herzl’s early death, after which Zangwill founded the Jewish Territorial Organization, a group that advocated rescuing Russian Jews by shipping them to the American West via Galveston, Texas, while searching, at the same time, for an autonomous territory “for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they live in the present.” Venues considered by the Territorialists included Australia, Mexico and Mesopotamia.

That final suggestion in particular seems laughable today, but what worried Zangwill about Zionism, as he wrote in an essay called “The Territorial Solution of the Jewish Problem,” was that it “takes its vision and ideal from the past; Territorialism places them in the future. Zionism is not safe even from animal sacrifices.” How chilling are these last words, penned in 1919. What Zangwill was getting at was this: Once you agree that the Jews need their own territory, to insist that it be only in Palestine stems from a religious imperative — and who knows where that could lead? He warned that “progressive” Zionists would “be exploited by Jewish clericalism,” and expressed dismay that “advanced Jewish thinkers” — Jews who had “overthrown the Mosaic code” — “should babble about the irreplaceability of Palestine.” Wrote Zangwill: “Jewish differences were laid aside by the Zionists for the task of rebuilding Zion. But Zion is not a mere place ... and the evasion of all root questions in the interests of a sham unity will one day have to be paid for, and with heavy interest.”

Compounding the problem, he continued, was that “Zion is a bride who after her divorce from Israel has been twice married to Gentiles — once to a Christian and once to a Mohammedan — and when Israel takes her back he will find his household encumbered with the litter of the two intervening ménages. Such considerations, however, are still invisible to the stock Zionist on whose self-spun structures realities impinge in vain, and whose Zion is as much a city of dream as that builded on celestial foundations by the popular imagination yearning for the Messiah.”

So too, in an essay called “Reality and Fantasy in Zionism,” first published in 1898, the historian Simon Dubnow wrote: “Political Zionism is merely a renewed form of messianism that was transmitted from the enthusiastic minds of the religious kabbalists to the minds of the political communal leaders. In it the ecstasy bound up in the great idea of rebirth blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.” Dubnow, born in White Russia in 1860, and author of the classic “History of the Jews in Russia and Poland” and a magisterial 10-volume “History of the Jews,” was the leading proponent of Diaspora Autonomism, an ideology that held that Jewish national renewal should come about via social and cultural autonomy, based on humanistic values, as an unassimilated ethnic minority within various Diaspora countries, and not in an independent territory.

As conditions grew worse for Eastern European Jews in the 20th century, Dubnow advocated emigration to the United States and became more sympathetic to Zionism, but rejected the notion that Zionism was the ultimate solution to the Jewish Question. He lived and worked in Odessa, Vilna, St. Petersburg and Berlin before moving in 1933 to Riga, Latvia. Friends implored him to emigrate to Palestine, but as he wrote to one of them: “As an ‘affirmant of the Diaspora’ I cannot participate in the ‘emptying of the Diaspora,’ in voiding the Diaspora of its spiritual forces.” On December 8, 1941, at the age of 81, he was shot by a Latvian militiaman during the Nazi liquidation of the Riga ghetto.

It came as little surprise to me to open, at my children’s ele-mentary school, a volume of the Aviv Youth Encyclopedia to the entry on Dubnow, and read the crude assessment that he “paid with his life” for his opposition to Zionism. But before many more Israelis pay with their lives for their devotion to the Zionist cause, consider this: The fact that the fantasies of the Territorialists and Autonomists were overruled by history does not render irrelevant their critique of the messianic fantasies of Zionism, secular Zionism included. As Zangwill wrote, “Zion is not a mere place.” If it were, Israel’s problems would not be so staggering.

[RBS]

I agree with Gentle Giant, too.

[Gentle Giant]

Originally Posted by tippy

Isn't the problem though that the creation of Israel itself is what they consider the invasion? The present incarnations was never agreed to by those present on the land that was handed over by Western countries. Isn't that the basis of this seemingly insolvable (?) problem? I don't know, it seems to me they should have created a New Israel in Germany. Imperfect as it's not the Holy Land, but perhaps less stressful on the world as a whole.

I give up, everybody light their nukes and let's party like it's 1999.

I don't claim to know the history perfectly, but this I know: present-day Israel, what used to be called Palestine, was British territory for ages. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government decided to endorse the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. The declaration read:

"His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

So let's get one thing straight. The Jews didn't "invade" Palestinian land. The land was controlled by the British, and the British invoked their authority to decide what to do with the land. As it is, it took 30 years and the death of 6 million Jews for the international community to act on this intention.

When Israel was established as a state in 1948, it was an arid desert. In between fighting defensive wars, Israelis were able to establish a thriving agriculture (I remember when I was in Sunday School the thing to do was to give money for the planting of trees in Israel, and that is still a very popular philanthropic program among American Jews), and today boasts one of the world's most fertile high tech centers. A democracy (the only one in the region), Israel has always had a large number of Arabic citizens who enjoy full civil rights, work rights, ownership rights, and legal rights.

The problem with the Arab nations, as it was and has been in Germany, Poland, France, and other hotbeds of anti-Semitism around the world, is the very presence of Jews.

[Monte Smith]

I also agree. The platitudes are true.

[Uli]

The solution is so easy.

If both the Arabs and the Jews would put down their weapons there would be no more violence and Isreal would continue to exist.

Uli's utopian solution nails it.

[Pete C]

Originally Posted by Uli

The solution is so easy.

But perhaps not self-congratulatory enough for some.

[tippy]

I've tried to be a kinder gentler agnostic of late, you know granting that religion can edify human beings since our reality is inextricably informed by our psychological perception but I just gotta say what a whole lotta bullshit and mess. Right on down to this Iraqi torture mess. It just blows my mind that anal rape isn't bad enough on its own but somehow made exponentially unfathomably worse by the presence of women and such rot thinking all around. And to know, to understand that to them it really is made worse somehow by that little glitch which as an American and as an American woman at that I have no control over what people are being subjected to under the title of my nationality and how just the presence of my physical self, the body I happened to be born into, is a shame and a sin or maybe a punishment by God and indicator of my lesser soul. I'm sick of the way that I feel I have to question myself for being critical of the Israelis need to have ownership of that particular piece of land because of religious-ethnical ties and have to worry whether I am further persecuting the persecuted in my thought processes. To hell with religion. To hell with racism. To hell with sexism. To hell to hell to hell.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by tippy

To hell to hell to hell.

[Slap]. Snap out of it, Tippy! Pull yourself together, girl.

I've always wanted to do that.

[tippy]

I guess it's impossible for me as an ethnic mutt with no strong feeling about where I live (while at the same time having a huge swathe of land of varying environments and climates to choose from) to ever relate or understand.

[Pete C]

I've never wanted to slap Tippy.

[Monte Smith]

Originally Posted by Pete C

I've never wanted to slap Tippy.

No, not Tippy particularly. Just anyone who is in a meltdown--you know, slap 'em across the face like they do in the movies. Like the thing that is going to calm someone down and bring them to their senses is a good quick hand across the puss. Snap out of it, goddamn it!

[tippy]

It's alright, Pete. I am certain that there are a gaggle of people experiencing a vicarious thrill from Monte's post. It's cool too you gotta be able to laugh at yourself (a LOT when you are me...) I suck at being safely inconspicuous. Plus I learn a lot more by sticking my simple neck out of the shell. Of course when we are able to zap each other through the screen, I'll be in Big trouble.

[Monte Smith]

No slam on you, Tip. You're OK. It's just when you typed "to hell to hell to hell," my immediate thought was to administer the medicinally acceptable slap across the chops to make sure you maintain your mental composure. I mean no insult.

[tippy]

I got you Monte and I really wasn't insulted, but thank you. To continue, I think it's possible that anyone who is comfortable summarizing this situation so easily is demonstrating a bias and it is this kind of bias that impedes a workable solution. But obviously these biases exist on both sides. It's just more of the same kind of ad infinitum head butt. Not that my thoughts aren't even more facile, but at the same time I don't think that a British provision for land that they controlled in the Middle East necessarily creates a sense of de facto legitimacy in the Arab world. And what is the mention of agricultural success but a rationalization of the same bias. I don't see that it necessarily strengthens the argument. Look at what we've done with Native American land here in the States and how do the Native Americans really feel about it. Hey in this world, might might make right but not in the eyes of the losers.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by tippy

I got you Monte and I really wasn't insulted, but thank you. To continue, I think it's possible that anyone who is comfortable summarizing this situation so easily is demonstrating a bias and it is this kind of bias that impedes a workable solution. But obviously these biases exist on both sides. It's just more of the same kind of ad infinitum head butt. Not that my thoughts aren't even more facile, but at the same time I don't think that a British provision for land that they controlled in the Middle East necessarily creates a sense of de facto legitimacy in the Arab world. And what is the mention of agricultural success but a rationalization of the same bias. I don't see that it necessarily strengthens the argument. Look at what we've done with Native American land here in the States and how do the Native Americans really feel about it. Hey in this world, might might make right but not in the eyes of the losers.

And when you realize that the dividing up of the Middle East, was done by the British in 1947 and was almost arbitrary. Then the British went back to Britain, leaving this mess. The whole thing boggles the mind. How can we be surprised that the residents of the region are less than pleased at foreigners deciding what their boundries are and even WHO they are, ethnically??
Imperialism, at it's worst.

[Brian Olewnick]

I'm sure most people here already know it, but I can't help recalling Mencken's:

For every complicated problem, there's a simple solution. And it's wrong.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Brian Olewnick

I'm sure most people here already know it, but I can't help recalling Mencken's:

For every complicated problem, there's a simple solution. And it's wrong.

EXACTLY.

[Al in NYC]

Ummm... I can't be the only one here who is having a little problem with GG's potted history above.

First of all, Palestine was never "British territory," it was occupied by the British military under what was supposed to be a temporary League of Nations mandate. And they certainly weren't there "for ages" -- the British held their mandate in Palestine only from 1922 to 1948. Before their defeat in WWI the area had been under the relatively loose rule of the Ottoman Empire for several hundred years, with much of the real power held by various local Arab groups.

The Balfour Declaration was made during WWI, while the British were just an invading force against the Ottoman Empire and had no real legal authority there. This was done in an effort to gain Jewish, and particularly Zionist, support for the British war effort. In so doing the British hoped to destabilize their enemies in Germany and Austria (which had large Jewish populations then), gain the support of local Jews in the mideast in their fight against the Turks and local Arabs, and to secure their post-war territorial ambitions in the area against those of the French.

As for the contention that " The problem with the Arab nations, as it was and has been in Germany, Poland, France, and other hotbeds of anti-Semitism around the world, is the very presence of Jews." this is simply not true. Jews lived peacefully and productively in Palestine, and indeed throught the Muslim world, for many centuries. In fact, there was nothing in Islamic history that comes close to the pogroms and other persecutions that Jews suffered in European christiandom. For instance, Jews were treated as full citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

In fact, it wasn't until the designs of Zionists on Palestine became known, and Jews from Europe began emigrating there in large numbers, that the great emnity between Jews and Arabs that we know today began to appear. And it really wasn't until the rise of the idea of pan-Arabism in the 1950's and 60's (much of it in response to the Zionist assertion of a particularistic and exclusive ethnic "Jewish" identity that went beyond mere religious practice and heredity and encompassed all Jews, European and Middle Eastern, Ashkenazi and Sephardic), and particularly after its humiliating defeat in the 1967 war, that very large numbers of Jews were discriminated against and attacked in Islamic nations and began emigrating to Israel.

[Gentle Giant]

Originally Posted by tippy

I got you Monte and I really wasn't insulted, but thank you. To continue, I think it's possible that anyone who is comfortable summarizing this situation so easily is demonstrating a bias and it is this kind of bias that impedes a workable solution. But obviously these biases exist on both sides. It's just more of the same kind of ad infinitum head butt. Not that my thoughts aren't even more facile, but at the same time I don't think that a British provision for land that they controlled in the Middle East necessarily creates a sense of de facto legitimacy in the Arab world. And what is the mention of agricultural success but a rationalization of the same bias. I don't see that it necessarily strengthens the argument. Look at what we've done with Native American land here in the States and how do the Native Americans really feel about it. Hey in this world, might might make right but not in the eyes of the losers.

FWIW, I agree with this completely. I've tried to include every reasonable level of disclaimer against absolutism in my posts, understanding full well that one schmuck like me sitting on my ass in Boston, Mass isn't going to unravel and resolve what may be the stickiest goo in the history of international relations.

I also understand the perspective of that writer who faulted Zionism for its past-inspired vision. However, that past, filled with innumerable expulsions, attempts at genocide, teachers being burned for their beliefs, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, is a uniquely horrific one. The one thing that has kept the Jews alive throughout this awful history is the Torah, the law. Theologians call Jews "the people of the Book" for a reason. And the book says that God promised a certain region (quite a bit east of Galveston) to the Jews. You may scoff at if you want, but that's a very powerful, ancient belief, and an incomprehensible price has been paid by Jews throughout history for fidelity to that belief.