I was debating with Jon Chait at a J Street panel this morning on the subject of “what does it mean to be pro-Israel?” As expected, we disagreed on a number of points, most of which I was right on and he was wrong on. But one thing he said in his opening remarks that I really disagreed with was that there was an ambiguity running through the J Street constituency as to whether the group was or should be pro-Israel at all.
That just struck me as kind of nuts. My J Street button said “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.” It’s not a subtle aspect of the messaging. But when we moved to the Q&A time it became clear that a number of people in the audience really were quite uncomfortable self-defining as “pro-Israel” in any sense and that others are uncomfortable with the basic Zionist concept of a Jewish national state. I was, of course, aware that those views existed but it had seemed to me that it was clear that that wasn’t what J Street is there to advocate for. Apparently, though, it wasn’t clear to everyone.
Two comments:
(1) As I noted Saturday, JStreet is going to have to make it really clear that it is fact a “pro-Israel” organization, albeit a “progressive” and pro-peace one, if it is to gain any ultimate traction in the Jewish community. And that means making anti-Israel people like those Yglesias describes unwelcome. Meanwhile, it doesn’t help matters that the secretary of JStreet’s student division, Lauren Barr, announced that the division is dropping “pro-Israel” from the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” slogan of the broader group, so as not to make people uncomfortable. Memo to Ms. Barr: The job of a pro-Israel [political lobbying and organizing] group is [among other things] to make people who aren’t pro-Israel feel uncomfortable. Hopefully, you can get them to rethink their position, but, to the extent that they are against Israel, they are a pro-Israel group’s adversaries. By Ms. Barr’s logic, the NAACP should have dropped the second “A” and the “C” back in the 1930s.
(2) I get the sense that Yglesias is surprised that there are actually otherwise seemingly well-meaning progressive people out there who not only seriously object to the very idea of a Jewish national state (but not other national states, including the many others that have an ethnic basis), but that they would pay good money to come to what was billed as a pro-peace and pro-Israel conference.
I surmise that we have a disconnect here. The anti-Israel progressives believe that no right-minded progressive could possibly be truly pro-Israel, so that as a progressive group JStreet would inevitably welcome them (and JStreet has sent out enough ambiguous signals to make this plausible).
Youngish Jewish Progressives like Yglesias, on the other hand, haven’t taken the real anti-Israel sentiment out there on the left to heart; they assume that eliminationist and otherwise vituperative rhetoric against Israel that, for example, shows up in their blog comments sections, is somehow lingering hostility to the Bush Administration’s Mideast policies, or perhaps hostility to Israel’s “right-wing” government, or anger at Israel’s military actions in Lebanon and Gaza, or opposition to “the Occupation.” Yglesias, et al., have a hard time grasping that fellow “progressives “could really be (a) so naive as to think that a “one-state solution” would work in Israel/Palestine, when, as Yglesias says, it’s not clear it will work in the long-term in Belgium or Canada; and/or (b) so unreasoningly hostile to Zionism as to somehow think that it’s okay for everyone else in the world to retain their states, regardless of whatever historical injustices that state was guilty of, but that the Jewish people’s state, despite being clearly more “liberal” than all of its neighbors, is somehow uniquely awful such that it must not exist even if it otherwise pursued suitably “progressive” policies.
I perfectly understand the difficulty that one could have with these ideas, because when in my twenties, I remember arguing with members of the older generation that they were too paranoid about anti-Semitism, that Israel needs to be much more flexible to achieve a peace accord, and that the murderous rhetoric about Israel emanating from the Arab world and elsewhere would go away once the parties all recognized their rational self-interest and came to a peace deal. It took many years, and, among other things, an intifada that involved a remarkable number of “progressive” Western intellectuals apologizing for, or even justifying, blowing up kids in pizza parlors in response to a serious peace offer from Israel, and a series of modern-day blood libels in Europe during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 to realize that I had been extremely naive. It’s not that I’ve given up hope; but I learned to take what seemed to a younger me like pure craziness that couldn’t possibly be serious–such as the continuing popularity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Muslim world–very seriously.
UPDATE: A few days back, Yglesias wrote: “Israel has enough problems that discerning who’s for it and who’s against it shouldn’t be that difficult.” Yet he was shocked to find that J Street’s conference attracted people who were against it, even though the pro-Israel “establishment” he excoriated a few days earlier had been warning for months that J Street’s “pro-Israel” identity was ambiguous at best.
Moda says:
With all respect, I think this is an example of why people call you “partisan” and, say, Orin Kerr, less partisan. In any sort of rational discourse, the idea is never to make the other side “feel uncomfortable”. But again, with all due respect, it is exactly how I perceive your goal in advocacy for various causes: make the other side feel uncomfortable.
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October 27, 2009, 10:40 pmDavid Bernstein says:
JStreet is a political lobbying organization. Of course, political lobbying organizations exist to, among other things, make their opponents uncomfortable, which is a natural by product of successful lobbying/organizing. Lobbying is about exercising political influence, not “rational discourse,” though the latter can help the former. Can you imagine Moveon.org saying “Geez, we wouldn’t want to make conservative Republicans uncomfortable”?
But if beyond that your point is that when I blog, I often try to persuade readers that I’m right, guilty as charged.
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October 27, 2009, 10:49 pmTal says:
I think “uncomfortable” here means something along the lines of “not at home, ideologically speaking.”
On a related note: as a long time VC reader, I can assure you that Professor Kerr is no better (or worse) than other “conspirators” in the insulting-one’s-opponents department.
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October 27, 2009, 10:58 pmYZ says:
Taking things like the Protocols seriously is a good start, but to really be realistic we need to how pervasive and deep the hatred and tendency towards wild conspiracy theories lie. Look at the present incitement among Palestinians related to the Temple Mount. Now the mainstream position among them already seemed to be that Jews have no historical or legitimate religious attachment to Jerusalem or the Temple Mount, which is of course ridiculous in the extreme (Jerusalem is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible but zero in the Koran). All it takes is a small Jewish group planning on — gasp! — visiting the holiest site of their religion, and you have the wildest conspiracy theories, which of course lead to violence (just as incitement against Jews for whatever reason (the plague, a mysterious death of a child, etc.) led to pogroms in Europe). And then they blame the Jews for incitement! This kind of thing is pure evil. It’s hard for people without a fine-grained, even-handed empirical understanding of what’s going on to understand how evil and anti-Semitic things have become — it’s so much easier to think people must be doing things for some rational reason, e.g., that Israel is as evil as they say it is. So well-meaning people get sucked into believing the Palestinian propaganda that blames everything on Israel and vociferously objects to their every action.
See http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2009/10/short-history-of-israel-palestinian.html
The funny thing about the one-state solution is the Israeli right believes in it too. The idea is that the demographic threat is actually not a big problem (according to recent reports showing systematic exaggeration of the Palestinian population), and that the Israelis will be able to more effectively police terrorism (and prevent kids from being taught in school to hate Israel and idolize suicide bombers) if they control the whole territory. Palestinians would benefit economically too, as long as the security situation in their areas improved. Among the right-wing parties the two-state solution is still quite controversial, and I personally think people are right to oppose it. Palestinian leadership has never shown the ability or will to really root out hatred, or to encourage a prosperous market society or a functioning welfare bureaucracy. Arms would inevitably be smuggled into a Palestinian state, and the Israelis would respond with war. A Palestinian state was never inevitable, it’s not inevitable now (it still seems quite unlikely), and people in the U.S. and the world should consider the existence of other options.
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October 27, 2009, 11:23 pmstash says:
I have also noted the ambiguity of the J-Street membership and support. Not that it matters to them, but I have withheld judgment and potential support until I have a better idea of their positions and policies. I think it would be useful to give pro-Israel folks who are sometimes or often uncomfortable with AIPAC or the more bellicose partisans a place to go. That is, I think it is important to eliminate a falsely imposed dichotomy between left and right on this issue.
Anti-Israel progressives have an incentive to push the idea that to be left one must be anti-Zionist, while the right is only too happy to reinforce it. Both sides are attempting to make a wedge issue. But it is not that simple.
It was a Labor government that fought the Six-Day War, and it was a Likud government that made peace with Egypt. There is internal disagreement in Israel on the path to peace and security, so there is no reason why there should not be similar disagreement here among people who are fundamentally pro-Israel. J-Street has the potential of being a healthy development by changing the debate so that “support for Israel” is stripped of the left-right trappings that both left and right have an incentive to impose.
I do not know if anti-Israel progressives should be made “uncomfortable” but, to be effective, the organization must successfully define itself as pro-Israel to have any credibility with people who are.
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October 28, 2009, 12:01 amthe federal white-collar criminal says:
I have to admit that I am finding your posts increasingly out of place. It seems like all you are blogging about recently is how victimized Israel by organizations like HRW. In particular, it seems like you are developing the plot of some kind of soap opera with Kevin Jon Heller. I don’t really see what that has to do with the law.
This post seems to carry that trend further. I’m not really sure what an internal dialog about the mission of “J Street” should be is doing here. It’s particularly confusing when there are plenty of legal issues surrounding Israel and its recent uses of forces to talk about.
Also, I think the argument about there being so many other nations that have their own states go somewhat far afield. There are certainly plenty of countries which are historical homelands for particular ethnic groups, but none of them take the concept as far as Israel does. For example, Italy does not extend citizenship to any Catholic in the world. I don’t really think it’s crazy to oppose things like that. Nor is it crazy to oppose established state religions. Your Canada and Belgium examples are a little far-fetched as well. Neither is anywhere near dissolving. Moreover, there’s a pretty big example of a multi-ethnic state with substantial regional cultural divisions that’s swimming along fine. It’s called the United States.
[Editor: I find it amusing that you first complain about the subject of my post, but then it turns out that you found it provocative and interesting enough to respond to it. So I suppose the post had some value after all!
And, substantively, if you follow the link in the post you will find that there are MANY other countries that grant citizenship to “foreigners” based on ethnicity. I agree that one can oppose this, but it’s rather illogical to say that this somehow calls Israel’s legitimacy into question, but not Armenia, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece etc.]
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October 28, 2009, 12:09 amMark N. says:
The past (though perhaps not the present) of the Union of Progressive Zionists, which now seems to have been attached to JStreet as its university wing, is an interesting counterpoint. Being strongly rooted in the Labour Zionism tradition, in a lot of ways it was both further left than JStreet (explicitly socialist, for example), but also much more outspokenly Zionist (it’s in the name, after all).
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October 28, 2009, 12:19 amLeo Marvin says:
J-Street isn’t pro-Israel like John Kerry isn’t pro-U.S.A. I realize there are people in these threads who would argue they’re both anti-Israel and anti-U.S., but it takes a pretty strong bias to see either one that way. Like every political organization, J-Street’s identity may ultimately turn on the success or failure of extremists who will try to subvert its mission — removing “Pro-Israel” from the student division’s slogan is an unfortunate step in that direction — but as long as people like Shlomo Ben-Ami are actively associated with the group, the burden is on those who dispute its support for Israel to prove it. (FWIW, I don’t consider myself a J-Street supporter. I have about as many problems with J-Street as I have with AIPAC, though obviously different ones.)
I don’t think the relative idealism of your youth was naive. I too was more idealistic then, and I’ve also been very discouraged, though not yet completely disillusioned, by the events of the last decade. I just think that while anti-Semitism was receding into practical insignificance in the U.S., and Israel was crushing any conventional, existential threat from its neighbors, other things were getting much worse in ways that weren’t easily foreseeable 25 or 30 years ago. Why that happened and what it means going forward are bigger, off-topic questions.
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October 28, 2009, 1:39 amTNeloms says:
You aren’t the first person to complain about posts here not relating to law. The obvious response has always been the same: the bloggers are allowed to blog on whatever they want, and the fact that they are all law professors means that they are more likely to post on legal issues. The founder of this blog in fact posts non sequiturs all the time.
With regard to the actual topics, I think the drama with Heller is a little too much sometimes and gets too personal, but the HRW issue is important to highlight, and Prof. Bernstein has been one of those spearheading the case against HRW. I find the J-street series especially compelling, and I also find Prof. Bernstein’s recent tone refreshing. While most groups and debates surrounding Israel (and actually anything political) are hyper-partisan, J-street’s struggle to find a role that doesn’t seem to fit into an existing partisan mold is interesting and important.
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October 28, 2009, 1:55 amSteve says:
One of the reasons J Street attracts the wrong crowd is that their mission statement basically portrays them as a Zionist organization, but they don’t seem to like using the word. Maybe “Zionist” is too in-your-face or something but it sure gets the point across. J Street does not hesitate to announce that they support Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish democracy, yet they sure seem to be attracting a lot of folks who don’t.
I think there are quite a few Jewish-Americans in my demographic: middle-aged, relatively secular folks who consider ourselves pro-Israel but think the settlers are nuts and AIPAC is too hawkish. According to J Street’s stated principles, we are basically the target audience. But the problem is that people like me may be pro-Israel but that doesn’t mean Israel is at the top of our list of issues. The result is that we’re going to be underrepresented in a protest march or a J Street conference or whatever, and the people who are more radical and therefore more energized on the Israel issue are going to be overrepresented. Personally, I would think they would rather have a smaller organization that is clearer in its mission as opposed to a larger organization that is politically toxic because they attract too many of the wrong kind of people, but that’s their choice.
Another issue is that the younger generation seems to think of the Israel debate in completely different terms. I don’t really have a handle on it but I’m not sure how many college-age folks are in the same category I just described for myself.
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October 28, 2009, 2:12 amComp Sci Phd says:
I started this discussion w/ David over email, I’ll make my point here.
I don’t see how any foreigner can be considered “pro” a country “A” when they lobby other countries to be against the policies of country “A” or to pressure country “A” to do things they do not want to do.
If you are against the policies of a country and you are “pro” that country, your job is to use the internal means of that country to change it. If you believe your goals cannot be accomplished via internal means, I have no idea how you can be “pro” that country. You can be “pro” that idea you feel that country should represent, but you are certainly not “pro” the country.
Now for examples:
Who is considered “Pro Cuba”, those who support continued US sanctions or those that are against them? Answer acc to google: http://www.google.com/search?q=“pro+cuba”
Who is considered “Pro Iran”, those who want the US to intervene, or those who do not? Answer acc to google: http://www.google.com/search?q=“pro+iran”
I can go on and on.
No where is one considered “Pro” a country by doing what they “feel is best” for that country. One is only considered “Pro” when one is supporting the government of said country. when you do what you “feel is best” for a country, you aren’t supporting the country, but supporting an idea. In this case, I don’t think j-street and its supporters can easily come to an agreement on even what that idea should be.
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October 28, 2009, 2:45 amSteve says:
The generally accepted meaning of “pro-Israel” is that one supports Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. There is no analogous term for other countries because no other country’s existence is up for debate in the same way.
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October 28, 2009, 2:52 amRicardo says:
Israel’s Law of Return is very unique. It allows for any “ethnic Jew” to claim citizenship but forbids those ethnic Jews who voluntarily converted to another religion. Agnostics and atheists are OK but not baptized Catholics. Aside from some Muslim countries, I think you would be hard pressed to point to another country where citizenship is contingent on religion. Converts to Judaism who are not “ethnic Jews” are also eligible for Israeli citizenship.
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October 28, 2009, 2:55 amComp Sci Phd says:
Steve: I think you’d be hard pressed to actually prove that this is the generally accepted meaning of the term “Pro Israel”. It also means you are basing the definition of the term on those who are “Anti Israel”, in the sense that they are for the non continued existence of Israel, and therefore being “Pro Israel” must be the opposite of that. It basically means being “Pro Israel” is reactionary, not a strong position.
In general, the use of words have specific meaning and specific conotations. AIPAC claims that they are pro-israel and I think you would be hard pressed (I’d say its impossible, but I could be wrong) to find a situation where they publicly lobbied the US government to pressure the Israeli government.
In some ways, this makes it easier for a “right wing” (on israel spectrum) person is the US to be “pro israel” as if they are against the policies of a more left wing Israeli government, all they have to do is lobby their government to not pressure israel (i.e. this isn’t about changing the policies of a foreign country, but the policies of your own), they’d be foolish to believe that it be correct to think the US would pressure Israel to be more “right wing”. On the other hand, for some reason many feel its ok to feel that the US should pressure Israel to be more “left wing”.
It’s pretty simple, there’s no way that can be considered “Pro-Israel”. It can be “Pro US” (it might be in the US’s best interest to pressure Israel to be more “left wing”). It might be “Pro conception of what I think Israel should be”, but it’s not Pro Israel.
As I demonstrated one is being obtuse and intellectually dishonest when they use the term this way, as its not used this way in any other context. It’s similar to those who claim that arab’s can’t be anti-semites. Anti-semite/ism does not mean “anti those who use semitic langage”, it means “anti jew”. If you are intellectually dishonet to try and be purposefully obtuse about the meaning, it means you are probably an anti-semite yourself. I’d argue that those who are purposefully obtuse about what it means to be pro-israel are probably not really pro israel themselves. They are pro something else, but it’s an idea, not Israel itself.
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October 28, 2009, 3:16 amiolanthe says:
Why the quotation marks around “occupation”? Obviously whether or not Israel occupying the West Bank (Judea and Samaria if you like) is a good thing is the subject of much debate but, given that a) Israel took it over b) has not annexed it and c) controls the place surely there can be no question that there is an occupation?
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October 28, 2009, 4:19 amDavid Nieporent says:
No, but it extends citizenship to any Italian in the world, which is sort of more to the point, don’t you think?
Israel is a secular state. (They don’t have complete separation of church and state, U.S.-style, but neither does just about any other country in the world.)
Quebec came within a few percentage points of voting for secession in the not-too-distant past.
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October 28, 2009, 7:23 amYankev says:
Stash, as you point out, it is not that simple. AIPAC works with both parties, and with both the left and the right, in the US, and leaves Israel’s policies up to whatever Israeli government is in power there, whether left or right. It has been fashionable for US anti-Zionists, or at least highly naive peaceniks, on the extreme left to brand AIPAC as right wing, but these tend to be the same people who tend to use words like “neocon”, “Likkudnik” or “ultra-Orthodox settlers” without the least understanding of what those words mean (or the inherent contradiction in some of them) other than “something I don’t like and therefore want to discredit with a label so that you will not even consider their arguments.” That fact does not make AIPAC a right wing organization.
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October 28, 2009, 9:27 amYankev says:
Except that as you point out, religion “contingent” only insofar as it is used as a negative screening factor, not as a requirement. Ethnic Jews who are agnostic, atheist, or who subscribe to a heterodox form of Judaism are still eligible; religion is relevant only insofar as the Law of Return does not except those who ethnic Jews who have voluntarily attempted to renounce their Jewish ethnicity by taking baptism or otherwise joining Christendom.
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October 28, 2009, 9:32 amYankev says:
Many of the VC bloggers have discussed this before. I claim no familiarity with international law, but among those who do, there is a respectable body of opinion law that Israel’s possession of Judea and the Shomron (which were never called the “West Bank” until Transjordan illegally invaded and annexed them in 1948)is not an occupation in the legal sense of the word because various prerequisites of occupation have not been met, chief among them the requirement that the territory in question is that of another state. It should be noted that Jordan’s attempted annexation was never recognized by international law, that Jordan rescinded the annexation some time in the 1980s, and that the most recent recognized sovereign over those territories was the Ottoman Empire, which designated them part of South Syria. When Turkish sovereignty over the area ended with Turkey’s defeat in the World War, Britain controlled the area under a League of Nations mandate to create a Jewish homeland. After WWII, the UN partitioned the area into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Transjordan, along with the rest of the Arab League, unlawfully invaded both and was repelled from parts of both. What you call the “West Bank” are those parts of the land that Transjordan invaded and held after the 1949 armistice and that Jordan then lost after being defeated in 1967 after its renewed attempt to invade and destroy the Jewish state. I am told by those who know much more than I about international law that it is far from clear that Israel’s possession of these territories meets the definition of occupation, and that indeed the better (though politicially less popular) opinion is that it does not.
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October 28, 2009, 9:45 amYankev says:
Just spotted an ambiguity. Should have written:
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October 28, 2009, 9:55 amRicardo says:
Of course, my only point was that no other Western country and maybe only few non-Western countries do anything comparable to this. Ethnic Italians who convert to Islam don’t lose their eligibility for citizenship, ethnic Greeks who convert to Methodism don’t lose their eligibility for Greek citizenship, etc. Israel is quite unique in this regard.
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October 28, 2009, 10:23 amComp Sci Phd says:
your mistake is that you view judaism as simply a religion in the form of christianity. if one goes through classical jewish sources, you would see judaism would view itself as a nation.
And then your analogy falls apart. many countries say that if you accept the citizenship of a foreign country, you lose their citizenship.
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October 28, 2009, 10:50 amYankev says:
Ricardo — what Comp Sci Phd said.
Here in the US we tend to think of being Jewish as a matter of religion, and think of ethnicity as a matter of where our families emigrated from. But by that standard, many US Jews would not be considered Jewish, though ironically, the laws of the Orthodox Jewish religion DOES consider them to be Jews. The definition applied by the Law of Return is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive as compared with Torah Judaism’s definition.
In Europe, being Jewish was more a matter of ethnicity than in the US.
Benjamin Disraeli’s parents adopted Christianity and raised him as a Christian, but he was still taunted as being a Jew, and members of Parlement tried to deny him a seat in the commons on the ground of his being Jewish. Cardinal Lustiger is still considered by Catholics to be a Jew despite his undeniably being Catholic.
In the early 1980s I met Jews who had escaped the USSR and who were amazed that anyone would think being Jewish was anything but ethnicity, or that there was any religious component at all.
As Isaac Bashevis Singer observed when some newspaper referred to him as a Polish nobel prize winner, “The Poles did not consider us Polish, and neither did we.”
Israel may be unique in disqualifying applicants on ethnic grounds based on their having accepted another religion (by the way, can anyone here tell me whether the same disqualification applies to Jews who have adopted non-Jewish religions other than Christianity?), but that’s because Jewishness is unique in being both an ethnicity and a religion.
Don’t dare tell me it’s a religion only– I do not take kindly to people telling me that my parents, brother and extended family are not Jews. According to Torah law they are.
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October 28, 2009, 11:29 amPragmaticist says:
In ancient times differing nations had different religions, e.g., Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, etc., each had their own gods (or in the case of the Hebrews, god) and their own religion which was inextricably part of the national culture.
Jews, today’s Hebrews, are a nation/religion/ethnicity unlike, for example, Christianity which is merely a religious faith.
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October 28, 2009, 12:03 pmDilan Esper says:
I claim no familiarity with international law, but among those who do, there is a respectable body of opinion law that Israel’s possession of Judea and the Shomron (which were never called the “West Bank” until Transjordan illegally invaded and annexed them in 1948)is not an occupation in the legal sense of the word because various prerequisites of occupation have not been met, chief among them the requirement that the territory in question is that of another state.
Nice double standard there, Yankev. Transjordan had no right to “illegally invade and annex” the West Bank for precisely WHAT reason? I thought you said that nobody has had sovereignty over there since the Ottomans!
Or is it only OK when ISRAEL does it?
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October 28, 2009, 2:02 pmYankev says:
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the distinction between aggression and self-defense. If you see no legal or moral distinction between (a) invading with the announced goal of not only preventing formation of a state (or in fact, two states) and exterminating the members of a given ethnic group inhabiting either of them, actions that international law condemns, as Transjordan did in 1948, and (b) invading land during a defensive war against a state that has twice invaded you, each time after being entreated not to and each time with the announced goal of ending your state and exterminating all members of an ethnic group found within that state, and retaining possession of the land in order to keep it from being used as a base for further aggression and for genocide, an act permitted by international law, as Israel did in 1967, then I can’t help you. If you consider that a double standard, it says a lot more about you than it does about me. It is not the application of a double standard on my part; it is the application of a depraved and immoral standard on your part.
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October 28, 2009, 2:24 pmConnecticut Lawyer says:
David,
Very interesting post. I began my journey away from the left in 1969 when it became clear that left meant anti-Israel. I wonder if Yglesias might have the same epiphany?
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October 28, 2009, 2:30 pmDilan Esper says:
Yankev:
1. The Six Day War was preemptive, not defensive. That matters a lot when it comes to self-defense arguments.
2. Even if we accept your characterization of the Six Day War, it doesn’t get you where you want it to get you to. Essentially, a nation-state is entitled to occupy territory as part of a war. I don’t doubt that, and I criticize critics of Israel who claim that the occupation is illegal. Indeed, I don’t know any principle of law that limits this to non-aggressive wars– if you win territory in an aggressive war, you are permitted to occupy it as well, and many countries have conquered territories in this fashion. In other words, you can argue that Transjordan had no right to invade Israel, but any territory seized in that conflict could be occupied.
The problem is, once you occupy territory, what do you do with it? You can annex it, as Israel did with Jerusalem. You can hold it until the cessation of hostilities. You can build military garrisons within it and fortify it.
What you can’t do with it is colonize it and then grant your colonists rights of citizenship while denying any rights to the people who already lived there.
And saying “well, the territory isn’t really occupied because of some convoluted things that happened with the British at the end of the Ottoman Empire” is stupid. You don’t get to oppress and discriminate in favor of Jewish colonists and against Arabs already living on the West Bank based on 100 year old technicalities.
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October 28, 2009, 2:42 pmEngineer says:
Dilan Esper wrote:
> Even if we accept your characterization of the Six Day War,
Typical progressive ... no awareness at all of history except what comes premasticated from some dishonest revisionist.
>And saying “well, the territory isn’t really occupied because of some
> convoluted things that happened with the British at the end of the
> Ottoman Empire” is stupid.
Some great argumentative skills there (not).
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October 28, 2009, 4:36 pmYankev says:
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October 28, 2009, 4:53 pmYankev says:
Not to any lawyer,jurist, philosopher or for that matter anyone concerned with the rule of law. To someone concerned with the rule of law, arguing “ignore the facts when determining whether a given legal test has been met because the facts are too remote and too convoluted for me to want to bother with” might well be considered as stupid.
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October 28, 2009, 4:59 pmDilan Esper says:
Yankev, I really take issue with this Judea / Samaria crap. The territory is called the West Bank because it sits on the West Bank of the Jordan River. The only reason to call it Judea / Yehuda is to emphasize that Israelites (who, by the way, are not the same thing as modern Jews) lived there thousands of years ago before they were kicked out. In other words, it’s classic spin– if we just change the name of the place, we win the argument.
It’s the West Bank. Anyone who calls it anything else loses credibility.
That said, you miss the forest for the trees. I concede that the occupation is legal– it’s only the settlements are illegal. But to the extent that Palestinians are being oppressed, it is no defense to that oppression to say that it is all legal because of some complicated finagling of 100 year old actions by British colonizers dealing with the detritus of the Ottoman Empire. As justifications for oppression go, that’s an incredibly weak one. Not really any better than claiming God gave you the land.
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October 28, 2009, 5:59 pmComp Sci Phd says:
Dilan, I think yankev’s point was that it wasn’t called the west bank until after 48, and were in fact apparently known as judea and samaria before that point.
hence while you want to argue that calling them judea and samaria is to try and show an inauthentic jewish tie to that territory, it would appear the truth is just the opposite. that those who insist that it must be called the “West Bank” are trying to sever a jewish tie to that land.
A quick cursory search leads me to believe that the area was regions called Judea and Samaria under the british mandate and possibly under Ottoman rule as well.
as an aside, how can you argue that modern jews aren’t the a direct, unbroken continuation of the jews who lived 2000 years ago? That’s like saying that someone isn’t the same type of american as his great-great...-great grand daddy who might have signed the constitution or deceleration of independence.
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October 28, 2009, 6:48 pmYankev says:
So do I. The actual geographic names, used by the locals for thousands of years, are Yehuda and Shomron. But I use the Greek equivalents because they are easier for English speakers for some reason.
Then why isn’t Jordan called the East Bank? And why was it referred to on maps as Judea and Samaria for centuries, until the Jordanian invasion of 1948?
And the only reason to call it the Est Bank is to spin the Arab-inspired fiction that Jews had nothing to do with the land before 1948 or 1917 or whatever arbitrary date you choose to apply. use.
Duh. And the Britons of today are not the same as the Britons, Celts, Saxons or Normans who lived in England centuries ago. For that matter, today’s Americans are not the same as those who fought the revolution. Sorry, I fail to see the relevance, though this same argument is popular among a wide audience including Soviets, Arabs and Christian supercessionists.
Not just ancient Israelites, who were exiled ca 586 BCE (hope the BCE doesn’t offend you, too). Also Jews, who returned about 100 years later or so, and called themselves Jews (actually, Yehudi or Yehudim, which translates into Judean or Jew), until they were exiled by the Romans not quite 1940 years ago. Despite that exile, some Jews (no one called them Israelites by then) remained. Others returned, some sooner, some later. Some of them could trace their families back to the exile or earlier. Their descendants are still there, and were there at the beginning of the Zionist immigration of the 19th century. They saw themselves and the modern Jews who returned as the same people as each other; they did not tell the Jews who came later “Sorry, we are descendants of those who were exiled and you are some other people.”
Now you’ve got it — that was exactly the Jordanian’s purpose in changing the name in 1948. People who ignorantly buy that spin are helping them. It’s worked pretty well for them so far, but I don’t see any need to help them.
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October 28, 2009, 6:51 pmYankev says:
Take two, they’re small.
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October 28, 2009, 6:53 pmYankev says:
And in today’s other hot breaking news stories, Dilan reveals that modern-day French are neither Franks nor Gauls, modern day Greeks are not Ionians, and modern day Spaniards are not Visigoths.
Rabbi Mordechai Berger observed during a lecture he was giving that Jews are the only people in the world who are granted no credibility when describing their own customs and rituals. Dilan wants to expand that to include identity and descent.
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October 28, 2009, 7:00 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I call it the West Bank because that’s how it’s commonly known. But I do get irritated when media sources say that “Judea” and “Samaria” are the “Biblical names.” No, they are the Hebrew names, and the geographic names. Outside of the events of 1948, there is no such geographic entity as “the West Bank,” whereas Christians and Jews (I don’t know about Muslims) have known these areas as Judea and Samaria for centuries.
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October 28, 2009, 7:05 pmYankev says:
Sort of like NPR’s favorite “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem”, which more accurately would be “the Old City of Jerusalem which was the Jewish Quarter from the 1300s or so until Jews were killed or driven out at gunpoint by the Arabs in 1948, who kept it free of Jews for 19 years in violation of international law until Israel recaptured it to Israel’s surprise as much as anyone else’s in 1967, and to which Jews have returned, sometimes to the same properties their families owned before 1948,” but then again, that does take a while to say, and radio time is expensive.
But while we’re taking issue, I take issue with this whole “today’s Jews aren’t the Jews of the Bible” shtuyot. I just don’t see any need to match Dilan by getting scatological about it; being scatological tends to get in the way of being logical.
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October 28, 2009, 7:18 pmDilan Esper says:
hence while you want to argue that calling them judea and samaria is to try and show an inauthentic jewish tie to that territory, it would appear the truth is just the opposite. that those who insist that it must be called the “West Bank” are trying to sever a jewish tie to that land.
I don’t believe in “ties to the land”. The people who lived there thousands of years ago are the ancestors of a heck of a lot of people, Jews and non-Jews alike, and nobody’s modern culture is the same as any ancient culture either.
Indeed, part of the reason we have a middle eastern conflict is that way too many people, on all sides, either believe in fairy tales about supreme beings giving them land or believe that things that happened 2,000, or 700, or 100 years ago determine the state of things now.
The beauty of “West Bank” is it is GEOGRAPHICAL, and thus neutral. If we want to call it Judea and Samaria, than I am sure that Jews would have no problem calling Jerusalem “Al-Quds”, right? Oh, that’s right, it only applies to names that emphasize JEWISH ties and not names that emphasize ARAB ties!
By staying away from “Judea”, we stay way from stupid arguments that say that 2,000 year old alleged “land grants” are valid.
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October 28, 2009, 10:02 pmDilan Esper says:
Not just ancient Israelites, who were exiled ca 586 BCE (hope the BCE doesn’t offend you, too). Also Jews, who returned about 100 years later or so, and called themselves Jews (actually, Yehudi or Yehudim, which translates into Judean or Jew), until they were exiled by the Romans not quite 1940 years ago. Despite that exile, some Jews (no one called them Israelites by then) remained
This is idiotic too. I guess the claim is that anywhere where a handful of Jews congregated is Jewish land.
This conflict doesn’t get solved until everyone– Jew and Arab alike– learns that you don’t get to live in places just because some predecessor group to yours lived there.
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October 28, 2009, 10:04 pmDilan Esper says:
as an aside, how can you argue that modern jews aren’t the a direct, unbroken continuation of the jews who lived 2000 years ago?
So are modern gentiles. You see, we all have lots and lots of common ancestors from 2,000 years ago, and lots of cultural practices have spilled over and melded into other practices.
We’re all much more alike with each other and much more different from people from 2,000 years ago. It’s fine to talk about cultural heritage and things like that in an anodyne fashion, but any argument that is based on there being a group of people who are the “same” as people who lived 2,000 years ago is one that is blind to how culture changes and assimilates over time. And it is also silly to argue that wherever anyone was 2,000 years ago should have any bearing at all as to where anyone has a right to be now.
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October 28, 2009, 10:07 pmRicardo says:
That’s exactly the point I’m making: this exclusion is unprecedented in the rest of the Western world and even appears to run contrary to Halakha law. As I understand it, traditionally, one would be regarded as a Jew if born to a Jewish mother even if that person converted to or practiced another religion. Under Israel’s Law of Return, voluntary religious converts lose their eligibility for citizenship.
And the analogy with dual citizenship falls flat. First, the State of Israel has no problem with literal dual citizenship: any Jewish American who qualifies under Law of Return can keep his or her American passport after immigrating is Israel. Second, under Halakha law (such as I understand it), one does not lose one’s place in the Jewish nation by converting to another religion. I stand by my original statement: Israel’s nationality law is highly unusual.
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October 29, 2009, 12:29 amComp Sci Phd says:
I don’t think you’re right. I believe according to halacha, if you are practicing a different religion, you are on the outside. you always have the ability to return, but you would have to give up the religion and return to judaism and do “teshuva”.
see the concept of people who did shiva in the past for children who apostated themselves (unsure if its actively practiced today or not, don’t really have any real world experience with it)
so to some extent Israel’s law of return is very much in tune with halacha, though I don’t think it was really informed by it.
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October 29, 2009, 2:26 amRicardo says:
But presumably this “outsider” status applies equally to atheists or others who have renounced their Jewish religious faith but have not converted to another religion. Yet Israeli law makes a distinction between the merely non-religious and those who voluntarily converted. One way or another, that appears to run contrary to the traditions that determine who is or is not a member of the Jewish community.
All I’m saying is that you cannot say that Israel’s nationality law is comparable to the nationality laws of European countries like Germany or Italy since it simply is not due to its restrictions on religious converts. Furthermore, you cannot really say that Israel’s nationality laws somehow derive from the traditional way in which the Jews defined themselves as a nation as they are inconsistent with Halakha law in several significant (and, as I understand it, controversial) ways.
Israel’s nationality law may well be defensible as a matter of public policy. But the claim that it is somehow like the laws of many other countries (and the implication that those criticizing it maintain double standards) is wrong.
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October 29, 2009, 3:34 amGuillermo says:
To me, it is like if someone expressed discomfort at the height of the Red Scare with calling their group “pro-American AND pro-peace” at a time when “pro-American” and “patriotism” had been so thoroughly hijacked by jingoists that to emphasize it might risk being mistaken for one. The situation of total hijacking of the Israeli cause by far rightwingers and jingoists today is so extreme, I can see why rational, peace-loving young people could cringe a little at the label “pro-Israel.” I say this as a Jew who grew up in an environment saturated with Zionism.
I think more and more young people today, faced with the truly staggering problems we face, ecological, economic, social and political, would sooner characterize themselves “pro-human”, whatever their birth identity, than pro-this-or-that ethnic or religious group. More power to them.
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October 29, 2009, 3:52 amGuillermo says:
Another thing: I find it staggering that people are still pulling out this absurd canard that we should logically attribute criticism of Israel by default to anti-Semitism, since there is always “country X” somewhere else, near or far, with worse human rights abuses, and so why aren’t the critics over there in country X staring down the bulldozers?
Israel is simply incomparable to any other nation in countless ways. There is no other case of a stateless people plunking themselves down all of a sudden in perhaps the most famous world historical location for three major world religions, earning the resentment of a large number of the adherents of one of the three by dispossessing numerous of the indigenous inhabitants of that religion from that place, and later becoming the largest recipient of US military aid on Earth, bar none. If these things taken together are not a logical explanation for the very high profile that Israeli human rights abuses get, I don’t know what is.
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October 29, 2009, 4:03 amYankev says:
You presume incorrectly. One does perform the mourning ritual for a relative who adopts Christianity. One does not do so for a relative who merely stops believing. The latter has abandoned belief and practice, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently, but the act is passive — he has stopped believing and practicing the Jewish religion. Among other things, he can still be counted in a minyan (prayer quorum). The former has actively attempted to severe his ties to the Jewish people and cast his lot permanently with another. My understanding is that Halaka puts him in the same legal status as a gentile who worships idols, except that if he repents, he does not need to undergo conversion.
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October 29, 2009, 9:53 amDavid Bernstein says:
Only if you don’t consider the much greater amount of money the U.S. has spent directly defending Japan, South Korea, and Europe, with large military bases and a nuclear shield, to be “military aid.”
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October 29, 2009, 1:00 pmDilan Esper says:
The millitary aid to Israel is quite defensible. They are a staunch ally, and they kept their promises in the peace accord with Egypt (which also gets a boatload of aid from us). And while I don’t buy the more apocalyptic rhetoric about Israel being in grave danger, it is nonetheless true that Israel is under constant attack and there’s nothing at all wrong with the US government helping Israel defend itself.
We COULD decide to use the aid to put more pressure on Israel on the peace process. I wouldn’t mind that. But I certainly don’t see anything immoral about providing military aid to Israel.
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October 29, 2009, 3:08 pmLeo Marvin says:
The rarely seen compound straw man with a hyperbolic twist. Big degree of difficulty points.
And while I agree it’s morally justified, I’d rather end it for Israel’s benefit as well as ours. If I recall correctly, that’s David Bernstein’s view too.
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October 29, 2009, 5:30 pm