A reader, sympathetic to Israel but troubled by its existence as "Jewish state," asks: "Can you point me to any case in any example where you would say '[Country A] has the right to exist as a [Race B] OR [Religion C] state?' I can think of numerous claims like this by societies in the past, which are now widely condemned."
Actually, many, many countries, have an official religion, including not only "backwards" countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, that enforce religious law, but "progressive," liberal bastions such as Norway, Denmark, and Iceland (all Lutheran). By contrast, Judaism is not the official religion of Israel. Jewish holidays are government holidays, but that's like Christmas in the U.S. [Family law is controlled by religious bodies, but that's true for Moslems, Christians, et. al, as well as Jews, and is an artifact of Ottoman and British rule. My understanding is that most Jews in Israel are against the religious monopoly on family law, but it survives because the religious parties have disproportionate power. The Arab community, which is far more traditional in its religious practices than is the Jewish community, almost certainly is more supportive of this arrangement than the Jews are, so this has really nothing to do with Israel being a "Jewish state," as such.]
As for the question of "race," the problem can't be "self-determination" of a group, because the propriety of that principle seems rather well-accepted. "Jewishness" is not a racial identity, but complaints about Israel being a "Jewish state" are often put in terms of the Law of Return being "racist." The Law of Return is based on ethnic (not racial) heritage grants anyone with a Jewish grandparent automatic citizenship (the Israeli Supreme Court has held that one is not eligible for the Law of Return if one has adopted the Christian religion, because in the complex area of Jewish identity, Jews who become Christians have left the Jewish people). Non-Jewish immigrants with no ethnic Jewish background can become citizens, with some difficulty, as can, automatically, non-Jewish immigrants closely related to Jews (e.g., spouses), many of whom have recently arrived from the former Soviet Union. Arabs who lived in Israel during the War of Independence (and thus presumptively accepted the existence of Israel and were not engaged in warfare against Israel) and their descendants have full citizenship rights, but they are relieved of one of the major obligations of Israeli citizenship, military or other national service (I think this is a big mistake, but that is a topic for a separate post).
One's liberal, progressive, or libertarian hackles can easily be raised at Israel's citizenship policies. Why should ethnic background entitle one to citizenship? On the other hand, Israel's defenders would argue that given that the Jews have been the subject of massive state and private violence over the last few centuries, including one attempted genocide (by Hitler) and another one that was averted only by Stalin's timely death, Jews need a homeland/refuge where they can go with automatic citizenship rights.
Whatever side you take on that debate, the more interesting question is why the question of basing citizenship (in part) of ethnic descent only calls the right of Israel to exist into question.
My correspondent was unaware of any other countries that have an overt ethnic identity, but, judging by immigration laws, there are quite a few, and with a few exceptions (Armenia and Germany), their discriminatory immigration policies exist, unlike Israel's, without any justification resulting from persecution of that group.
For example, according to Wikipedia: "Japanese citizenship is conferred jus sanguinis, and monolingual Japanese-speaking minorities often reside in Japan for generations under permanent residency status without acquiring citizenship in their country of birth." Why does Japan have the right to exist as a Japanese state? Has this question ever been asked?
Ireland: "If you are of the third or subsequent generation born abroad to an Irish citizen (in other words, one of your grandparents is an Irish citizen but none of your parents was born in Ireland), you may be entitled to become an Irish citizen" [if, as I understand it, you register properly]. Does Ireland have the right to exist as an Irish state?
Several other countries recognize a "right of return" similar, but often broader, than Israel's (via Wikipedia):
Armenia: "Individuals of Armenian origin shall acquire citizenship of the Republic of Armenia through a simplified procedure."
Bulgaria: "Any person ... whose descent from a Bulgarian citizen has been established by way of a court ruling shall be a Bulgarian citizen by origin."
Finland: "The Finnish Aliens Act provides for persons who are of Finnish origin to receive permanent residence. This generally means Karelians and Ingrian Finns from the former Soviet Union, but United States, Canadian or Swedish nationals with Finnish ancestry can also apply."
Germany: "German law allows persons of German descent living in Eastern Europe to return to Germany and acquire German citizenship." My understanding is that this German descent may go back many generations. [Note that until recently, Germany's citizenship law was less liberal than Israel's, in that it did not allow non-ethnic Germans, including Turkish who had lived in Germany for generations, to be become citizens.]
Greece: "'Foreign persons of Greek origin', who neither live in Greece nor hold Greek citizenship nor were necessarily born there, may become Greek citizens by enlisting in Greece's military forces."
Wikipedia provides a several other examples, none of which seem to ever raise the same questions about the legitimacy of the states involved as the Law of Return does for Israel.
Of course, Israel has the added burden that the Palestinians claiming that they are the true "owners" of the relevant land, or that at least the Palestinians who fled in 1948 and their descendants should have their own "right to return". But I think that issue exists quite apart from whether Israel's Law of Return is objectionable, and, indeed, must, given that the Palestinian side is calling for even fourth generation descendants of residents of what is now Israel, who never set foot there, to be allowed based on their ancestry to return.
In short, the perception my correspondent had, which in my experience is shared by many, that Israel is a uniquely "religous state" is not only wrong, it's backwards--Israel has less of an explicit religious identity than many countries (complicated, I admit, by the fact that one can in an odd way assume a Jewish ethnic identity by converting religiously.) And Israel is hardly unique in basing immigration and citizenship policy at least partly on ethnic heritage (the thought that Israel is unique in this regard seems bound up with the confused notion that it must have something to do with Jews thinking they are God's "Chosen People," misconceptions about which I addressed a while ago here). The big difference is that unlike, say, Japan, Israel actually has especially strong, though I wouldn't say completely unassailable, reasons for doing so.
UPDATED: I meant to save this for further editing, but I accidentally posted it instead. Now that it's out there, I'll leave it up, but I don't have time to moderate comments now. I'll open comments anyway, but ask commenters to be especially careful to keep their comments polite and on-topic.
I wonder how much of the misimpression of Israeli immigration policy stems from the relative ease with which anyone can become a U.S. citizen after establishing permanent residency (which itself can be difficult, but I would guess not more so than in other countries)?
Bernstein simplifies it somewhat,
For example, there was a big controversy a couple of years back, where Russian-Jewish soldiers who died in Lebanon and in Gaza were not allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetary because their moms weren't Jewish, even though their fathers were.
You die for your country and cannot be buried with the rest of the troops? That's as big of a slap as any to the vision that Ben-Gurion had.
This is not true as stated. It's my understanding that Germany always was legally able to naturalize non-citizens, but that there was not entitlement to naturalization if one fullfilled certain conditions. Instead, naturalization remained subject to judicially unreviewable administrative discretion — and moreover, that discretion rested at the state level, not the federal level: who could naturalize depended in part on the political climate of the state of residenced in (or even urban/rural differences within a given state, or just which case officer one got). One of this year's reforms in Germany is to finally fully federalize the adminstration of naturalization.
Sorry, not link off the cuff.
Or Iran?
This may be the single silliest thing I've ever seen you write, and I say that as someone who supports Israel. The situation of ethnic Koreans in Japan (the problem to which the passage above primarily relates) not only has been asked, it's a frequent topic of conversation among students of the country. Japanese treatment of its ethnic minorities--and particularly the Koreans--is generally seen as a black spot on its human rights record, and rightly so. It would be hard to find a commentator knowledgable on the area who believes that the jus sanguinus policies of Japan (particularly as historically applied to Koreans) are right, righteous, or in many cases even congruent with the constitution. If your defense of Israel is, "Well, Japan does it, so Israel should be able to do so as well," I'd advise that saying "Good as Japan" in this case doesn't put you in very good company.
The issue doesn't get as much attention, true, but this is largely due to the lack of a shooting war between the two sides of the conflict within Japan. But although it's not headline news, Japan isn't being given a pass for its behavior in this case. It would have behooved you to do even a small bit of research before asking your rhetorical question. "Has this question ever been asked?" Why yes, it has. You just weren't listening at the time.
No, I cannot point to anyone that says Japan has "no right to exist." On the other hand, the Professor's question was whether I could think of anyone who said that Japan has "no right to exist as a Japanese state." Now, he rather implied that this meant "no right to exist as a state that denies citizenship to non-blood Japanese while allowing a right of return to those of Japanese blood." And as a matter of fact, there have been many voices for many years--and quite a few of them Japanese--who have said that Japan should not exist as that kind of state. As soon as you add the qualifying clause, the question isn't between existence and non-existence, but between differing types of continued existence.
Re: anon252, it's important to be clear about what exactly you mean when you say that people suggest that Israel has NO RIGHT TO EXIST. While there are certainly some who support killing/expelling the Jews (and should be reviled), their position is often conflated with those who question Israel's "right" to exist as a Jewish state (i.e. the one-state, or binational, solution). Whereas even granting Japanese citizenship to anyone who wished to claim it would almost certainly still leave ethnic Japanese in the majority, the same is most definitely not the case for Israel (depending on a variety of factors, birthrates, etc, the Jewish majority may yet erode anyway).
There has always been a tension between the ideals of a Jewish and a democratic state (discussed by Tony Judt, among others), and this will probably only increase over time as demographics shift. While I am sympathetic to the aspiration for a Jewish state, I believe that since that goal cannot be achieved justly, then a democratic state is ultimately more important.
I would think the well is a bit poisoned for that now.
So wouldn't that make it a policy based on religious, not ethnic, heritage? And doesn't that point to a major distinction between the Israeli situation and those of the European countries to which you refer?
If Ireland grants you citizenship because you have an Irish grandparent, it's restricting that grant of citizenship to people who have both an ethnic Irish heritage and recent familial roots in Ireland. Israel, in contrast, grants citizenship to people who are ethnically Eastern European (for instance), and who have no familial ties to Israel, on the basis of religion alone.
This may or may not be an appropriate policy --- I can certainly see arguments in favor of it. But isn't it disengenuous to say that the Israeli policy of granting citizenship to Jews with no traceable ethnic connection to Israel is directly analogous to the Irish policy of granting citizenship to people whose parents or grandparents were Irish emigrants?
What international law or treaty precludes such a right? Perhaps that's the question which should be asked.
Incidentally, Japan's principle of "jus sanguinis" figured prominently in U.S. WWII history. At the time of Pearl Harbor, because Japan regarded children born in the U.S. of Japanese fathers to be Japanese citizens, those of military age were expected by Japan to serve the Japanese nation in time of war. This situation was taken seriously by our wartime government because before the war thousands of such children had, in the formative years of their lives, been sent to Japan by their parents to receive a Japanese education. Many of these dual citizens had returned to the U.S. as young adults holding reserve positions in the Japanese armed forces. Many others had remained in Japan to serve their ancestral country in its war against the U.S.
Accordingly, in view of the special relationship which then existed between the Empire of Japan and persons of Japanese ancestry in the U.S., our wartime goverment found it prudent for security reasons and time constraints to evacuate persons of Japanese descent from West Coast military zones in case of further attacks by Japan .
I happen to be a Christian, and none of my ancestors were Jews. Assume I convert to Judaism. Under the Law of Return, I can "return" to Israel because I converted to Judaism, and despite the fact that neither I, nor either of my parents, nor either of my grandparents, nor any of my ancestors stepped foot within a thousand miles of Israel. In contrast, an Arab who was born and grew up in a village in what is now Israel, who owned land in what is now Israel, and whose family lived for generations in what is now Israel, and who fled during the 1948 war because he feared for his life and the lives of his wife and children, has absolutely no right to return to his property.
I, who never lived in Israel, whose family never lived in Israel, and whose ancestors never lived in Israel, have a right to "return" to Israel simply because I convert to Judaism. The person who was born in what is now Israel, owned land in what is now Israel, and whose family lived for generations in what is now Israel cannot return there... unless, of course, he also converts to Judaism.
This is, by definition, racist and/or "religionist." It may be racist and/or "religionist" with an excuse, with a justification. But it is, as a matter of pure, hard fact, nonetheless racist and/or "religionist."
In addtion, no one I know who are troubled by the Law of Return because those who actually lived in what is now Israel for generations have no right to return would assert that Israel has no right to exist anymore than they would say that Japan or Korea has no right to exist. To opine that a certain policy or practice is immoral is not to say that the perpetrator thereof has no right to exist.
Further, as A. Rickey pointed out, to say that Japan and Korea may have equally troubling policies proves nothing. If something is morally wrong, it is morally wrong even if Japan or Korea do it. And again, the people I know who criticize the Law of Return do no assert that Israel has no right to exist, just as they do not assert that Japan or Korea have no right to exist.
Finally, the policy of Israel in this regard may be of particular concern to the citizens of the U.S. for the following reason. We do not subsidize Japan or Korea in the amount of $2.5 billion a year. The possibly immoral policy of a third party may be of concern to me. It is more of a concern to me when my government is subsidizing that behavior in the amount of $2.5 billion per year.
Is there some religious test one must go through, or is it strictly the matrilineal issue? If it is only the matrilineal link (and I believe that is the case), then it is clearly an ethnicity issue. It is no different than the fact that my children could be Hungarian citizens simply by virtue of their mother being Hungarian born. It seems to me to really be that simple.
As for ethnic vs. racial- it's a finer screening- based generally on language and geography, though in the case of Israel the geographic component has been removed. Think about Puerto Rico for example- the people of that island are quite racially mixed, but will be the first to tell you that they have a distinct culture and dialect from their neighbors, and as such have a separate ethnicity from Mexicans, or Hondurans, or Jamaicans. Consider also Europe- they're all caucasian, but tell me there's no difference between Italians, Germans, French... the counter to Puerto Rico, same race, clearly varying ethnicities. There's a certain non-specificity to the term ethnicity, but I think that's a reasonable summary.
I think race describes physical characteristics common associated with a group of people while ethnicity describes a group of people who have the same/similar culture, language and religion. But it's been a long time since I took anthropology in college, so forgive me if I mucked that one up.
You have to prove you are Jewish according the an Orthodox definition of "who is a Jew." You don't have to prove that you are an Orthodox Jew (or practicing any "denomination" of Judaism, for that matter) only that an Orthodox Jew would consider you Jewish. You do this by proving that you mother was Jewish or that you converted according to the rules of Orthodox Judaism.
"Race" purports to refer to a biological difference, while "ethnic" refers to a cultural difference (which may be conflated with a biological difference in common speech). So someone could be ethnically Polish, but most people would not attempt to describe a person as racially Polish. However this can occasionally become confused, as I *think* I'm right in saying that being, e.g. an inuit, would put you in an ethnic group that overlapped perfectly with a so-called racial group.
To the main point:
Questions about whether a state ought to disenfranchise/discriminate against certain of its members are surely ethical rather than legal. You can certainly try to iron out a legal argument either way, but ultimately it's down to whether you think it's right or wrong. I imagine most people would agree that in ideal circumstances this would not happen.
But suggestions that Israel has no right to exist don't really relate to that question, unless I have misunderstood Mr. Ahmadinejad. The primary argument against Israel's existence is that they occupy land that "should" belong to neighbouring states and was "stolen" from them. I would be very surprised if, should Israel suspend all activity that could be construed as discriminatory toward non-Jews, Ahmadinejad stopped calling for the destruction of Israel.
Nor Hindus returning to Karachi and Lahore.
Nor Greeks to Smyrna and Constantinople.
What biological differences are you talking about? How many "races" are there?
Race is a myth, and not based on biology. Instead, race is socially constructed, any way you slice it. See Omi and Winant for their complete take on the subject
Israeli Jews from, e.g., Poland, are not "ethnically Eastern European," they are ethnically Jewish. The Poles didn't think the Jews were Polish, and neither did the Jews. Polish usually wasn't even their first language (it was Yiddish).
For millennia, people have been moving around the globe, taking land, and then declaring and defending borders. That’s what the founders of Israel did. Regardless of whether Jews had any special right to take the land in 1948, Israel won its wars. It’s a country.
Anyway, the obvious question is not whether race is socially constructed, but whether Jews think of themselves as a race, or treat themselves like a race. No.
Chapman: It's clearly not "racist." It may be "chauvnistic," but many countries, as noted have chauvinistic policies. As for the Palestinians, find me any Palestinian leader who supported a binational state in which Palestinians could potentially be a minority, and then talk to me about whether any sane country would allow the refugees who, as a community, made war on them to return. (Israel did allow tens of thousands to return under a family reunification policy, and offered to negotiate return of 100,000 more as an opening offer as part of a peace deal, but were rebuffed.) The Pals could have accepted the U.N. Partition, and lived in either Israel or their own state, but chose to make war instead. They lost. Jordan and Egypt took the rest of their land.
And it may not even be chauvinistic; if the purpose of Israel is to create a homeland/refuge for Jews, of course Israel is going to prefer Jews for citizenship, converts or not. Can you seriously make the case that as of 1948, with Holocaust survivors languishing in DP camps because no country would admit them, and Stalin gearing up for a mass deportation of Soviet Jews, that the moral case for a Jewish homeland was merely a cover story for "racism." Please.
Finally, did anyone note that one of Siniora's conditions for peace in Lebanon is that Lebanon be asked not to permanently absorb its Palestinian population, which has been living there for 60 years? Why not, and where's the outrage?
I'd agree with this (excepting #2, which doesn't fit), but perhaps in drawing the analogies what you are demonstrating is how, paradoxically, there are harder feelings when you lose your land due to fiat rather than a specific war. There's a certain undeniable finality to being vanquished...the Palestinians never got to taste it, though with their dogged persistence, they might yet.
Didn't Israel go so far as to prove through DNA testing that Ethiopian Jews were related genetically? and the same applies to Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews as well?
Also why are Europeans upset with Israel's right of return? Most European countries extend the right to citizenship to the grand children of natives regardless of birth country.
"Finally, the policy of Israel in this regard may be of particular concern to the citizens of the U.S. for the following reason. We do not subsidize Japan or Korea in the amount of $2.5 billion a year. The possibly immoral policy of a third party may be of concern to me. It is more of a concern to me when my government is subsidizing that behavior in the amount of $2.5 billion per year."
Then you should be equally appalled at Arab behavior since the US government subsidizes Arab nations as well, and if you count oil revenues, US residents subsidize Arab behavior far more.
Fair enough. But they're ethnically Jewish, not ethnically Israeli, right? And I don't know much about this stuff, but Wikipedia suggests that Ashkenazi Jews' ancestors left the Middle East about a thousand years ago.
It's different from the Irish situation in significant ways, is all I'm saying. And disingenuous to claim otherwise.
So Jews were in Israel well before Palestinians? and Judiasm existed well before Islam? So by the logic posted by some here , I guess Jews right to Israel must trump the Arab's claims to it.
The tens of thousands of American soldiers in Korea and Japan cost the U.S. far, far more than $2.5 billion a year.
Brooklynite, would it help you to see the point if Israel were called "Jewland"? Can you see the absurdity of saying "Jewland has no right to exist as a Jewish state?"
"The tens of thousands of American soldiers in Korea and Japan cost the U.S. far, far more than $2.5 billion a year."
I think he was more concerned with the apparent subsidizing of Israel to commit havoc on the Arabs, not quite the same. However, I guess he's not appalled by the billions we give Arab nation for subsidy or for that matter the oil money we give that rich Arab nations then use to subsidize havoc around the world.
For millennia, people have been moving around the globe, taking land, and then declaring and defending borders. That’s what the founders of Israel did. Regardless of whether Jews had any special right to take the land in 1948, Israel won its wars. It’s a country.
Excellent, excellent point. I would add that the vast majority of Palestinians now alive never lived in Israel proper. I'll take all this wailing about the illegitimacy of Israel a little more seriously when the Turks return their entire country to the Greeks. Or when various members of the American far left give their houses back to whatever tribe of American Indians had the land 400 years ago.
Professor Bernstein, can you expand on this point? What makes Israel's reasons to exist as a Jewish state so much more compelling than Japan's reasons to exist as a Japanese state?
If I'm missing a point, it's not Bernstein's.
Bernstein is arguing by analogy. He's saying that because some countries have non-controversial policies granting citizenship to the children and grandchildren of their citizens, Israel's policy of granting citizenship to its co-religionists --- people who have an attenuated ancestral connection to Israel, or none at all --- should be non-controversial, too. I'm saying that's malarkey. Israel's law of return may be a good idea or a bad one, but it's vastly different from (most of? all of?) Bernstein's proposed analogues.
And in response to Mongoose: I haven't mentioned the fact that Israel is contested land, claimed as the ancestral home of both Jews and Palestinians. That's a fact that weakens Bernstein's argument further, it seems to me, even if one makes the argument that Jews have the better claim.
Cardinalsin beat me to the punch. It's essentially the same argument so often made against America (i.e. that its land was stolen from Native Americans, Mexicans, Hawaiians et al), but with an Islamic twist. Islamic law holds that once land falls under Muslim control it shall remain rightfully Muslim land for all of eternity. This is the same reason why you often hear Spain mentioned as a target for Muslim reconquest (such as in Ayman al-Zawahiri's message last week, in which he spoke of re-establishing Muslim rule "from Spain to Iraq") - both present-day Spain and present-day Israel were once Muslim territory. Why Spain is not therefore under the same sort of constant threat as Israel is an interesting question, but one for another thread.
Similarly, American Indians were rioting, killing white people, and attacking white settlements in North America long before 1948.
Let's keep those redskins on the reservation, deny them citizenship, and forbid them to return to their ancestral homes.
Were Hindus denied the right to return to Karachi or Lahore if they fled communal rioting in 1948, but wanted to come back after the violence died down?
But even if so, are we really *approving* those instances of ethnic cleansing? And if so, do we similarly argue that Serbs should never be allowed to return to Kosovo or the Krajina, or that Greeks should never be allowed to return to Northern Cyprus?
Arguably, though, if we take this tack, not only all of Turkey, but the Levant, Egypt, half of Iraq, and most of the Balkans should be returned to Greek rule. This was, if I recall correctly, the deal the Emperor struck with the Crusader armies during the first crusade -- that the territories they recaptured would be returned to imperial rule. They skipped out on that bargain, but as long as we're toting up old claims, Greece's claim to Jerusalem is at least as good as the Jews' or the Arabs', if we accept modern Greece as the legitimate successor state to the Roman Empire (a big "if," to say the least!) In which case Greece has a claim running some seven centuries or so, as I see it, the Palestinian Arabs (assuming Arab Palestine to be a legitimate successor state to the Arab caliphates, another huge "if") have claims running to some five or six centuries of history, and Turkey (as the legitimate successor state to the Ottoman Empire) has claims running about six centuries.
That said, all the modern European nations are illegitimate in some sense, France having emerged out of the illegal act of regicide, and a plethora of illegal revolutions since then, and most of the others having emerged from outside powers divvying up the lands following the Great War or WWII. Some countries still haven't quite accepted the lines we gave them (e.g. down the Balkans), and others maintained their claims until recently (e.g. Germany did not accept that Prussia was legitimately western Poland until 1991.)
Contested land? Israel has won every war since 1948. I think it's theirs. They've already ceded enough it as it is. Ancestral home to the Palestinians? I think you mean Jordan.
one very salient difference, though, is that the injury done by these policies to (say) ethnic koreans in japan, or people who are not ethnically irish and live outside ireland, is much smaller than the injury israel's policies inflict on ethnic arabs in gaza and the west bank. presumably ethnic koreans in japan (who are not japanese citizens) are still free to move about the rest of the country. if they or their parents lived and owned property on the other side of the archipeligo, they're presumably free to move to that community, file suit to reclaim the property (subject to applicable statutes of limitations), etc. ethnic arabs in gaza and the west bank are by and large being confined to those areas even if they or their parents were born in israel, lived there, owned property there, etc.
similarly, there's no population of non-ethnically-irish refugees who used to live in ireland (or whose parents or grandparents used to live in ireland) who have been forcibly prevented from returning to ireland and have no state to call home.
and as others have noted, the policy is "ethnically jewish," not "ethnically israeli." an individual need not have any family connection to israel, or some region in the general vicinity of isreal, in order to be entitled to "return" to israel.
so clearly there are some salient differences that mitigate in the direction of israel's policy being even worse that those other terrible policies.
there are other salient differences too, notably that a significant number of the ethnic arabs in the west bank and gaza are murderous anti-semites.
Its not similar. The difference being that Jews, unlike Europeans in America, have been in Israel since biblical times. It is their ancestral home too. Why is their ancestral claim any less valid than their fellow semites the Palestians? Or maybe the Jews should make a claim on Egypt too, where they were previousy slaves?
And do these hypothetical non-ethnic refugees want to return to Ireland to wipe out all the Irish? Maybe the problem is the Israelic in just wanting to defend themselves. If they just resoreted to the Islamic policy of wanting to wipeout their enemies completely....
Or how about the Japanese settlers in Korea? Japan ruled Korea between 1910 and 1945 (and effectively controlled Korea between 1905-1945). That's 40 years, two generations of Japanese colonists born in Korea. They were, of course, expropriated and expelled after WWII. Should they be allowed to return and petition for citizenship? It is, to me, inconceivable that the Korean people would accept that. But that's "ethnic cleansing," pure and simple. Do we disapprove?
The independent government of Gaza in its first act as a government expelled all the Jews. You want to talk about racist, the government of Gaza (with assistance by the Israeli Left y"sh) ethnically cleansed people who had been living there for generations.
Hence, Gaza has no right to exist and I support the genocide of every resident (just like you liberals support the genocide of every Israeli).
while i of course can't speak for every leftist on this board, i'm pretty sure there's an invalid pointer in this sentence.
As did most middle eastern Islamic countries after 1948. Funny but not many after talk about the Jewish refugees expelled from several Arab countries following the 1948 war. Funny that Arabs never mention the Jews that lived among them for centuries.
perhaps i'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure the population of jews who "have in israel since biblical times" is pretty small. there are lots of jews whose ancestors were in israel in biblical times, but many fewer whose ancestors stayed there more or less continuously, which is what "since" implies.
isnt the palestianians' "ancestral claim" based on the fact that they personally, and/or their parents and/or grandparents and/or great-grandparents actually lived in israel, owned property there, etc.?
The Japanese, on the other hand, do not have that long history of existing as a minority in other countries. Indeed, the only time they've been a minority, expropriated, and expelled, it was their recent ancestors' fault for invading and enslaving their neighbours. On top of that, there's also 120 million Japanese living in Japan; any attempt to render them a minority in their own country would require the movement of a whopping 120 million people. This is not really within the realm of possibility.
as for the mass expulsion, i certainly disapprove. i'd need to know more about the situation to decide whether a right of return was an appropriate remedy.
If somebody took a large sum of money from another person by force, then we would say they had stolen it and expect them to return it. If they divided it into one thousand equal sums and shared it between one thousand others, we would probably still call it theft and want to find a way to recover the one thousand parts. If they did this and then each of the thousand did the same, repeated over several decades, we would start to find it hard to decide what to do - it would be unjust to take the money away from those people, not to say impractical. But the person from whom the money had been taken would still be aggrieved. If we continued this process for a thousand years, then not only would we be certain that no just resolution of the original theft could be made, but we would also be surprised if anyone was still aggrieved about it.
Ok, so replace money with land. Turkey would manifestly be in the final category, at least in respect of the Greeks, who (correct me if I have this wrong) lost control of Anatolia thousands of years ago. Israel on the other hand would be in the middle category. Nobody can see a "fair" solution, but there are still people around who feel that they have been stolen from. You can't really blame them for feeling that; on the other hand, you can't really take away Israeli homes for something that happened way back.
I'm not saying this makes Ahmadinejad right, or owt like that. But people who try to brush aside that sort of concern should think a little harder about what they are saying.
Why? What is "immoral" about any country defining its "right of return" as described above?
I'm an anti-genocide leftist, so I wouldn't know. Isn't it funny how so many American Jews have allied themselves with pro-genocide leftists, though?
it discriminates against people because they don't have the right ethnic background. we generally regard such practices as reprehensible unless there is an unusually good reason, which there is not in these cases, except possibly the case of israel (where in that case the "unusually good reason" would be the subset of palestinian arabs who are genocidal).
Not funny-ha-ha, more like funny-sad.
Yes, and BiDil isn't based on biology either. How does it work? Who knows? Maybe Chrise would say "Magic".
I love it when the scientifically ignorant buy into Lewontin's Fallacy -- it makes it so easy to just ignore everything else they say.
Of course, Turkey disagrees that it was genocide, and the U.S. has never recognized it to maintain good relations with that country, but Hitler said, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
The difference between Israel and just about everyone else, is that most base their automatic grants of citizenship on nationality, not race, ethnicity or religeon. The right comes from citizenship: citizens are promised that their offspring will also be included.
I tend to agree with Ship Erect...and would probably go further. You don't have to know Armenian history. At the end of the day, it's really none of our business. All this talk of applying good ol' American notions of statehood and what kinds of irredentism are justifiable is giving me the creeps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Israelis
Most of us here are Americans. American (USAian) is not at all an ethnicity, almost not at all a religion, and barely a culture; it's a nationality and is completely dependent on the state whose capital is Washington, DC. You get to be a natural-born American through jus sanguinis with minor exceptions, and also through jus soli, a you get to be naturalized through well-understood paths.
Japanese is both a nationality and an ethnicity.
Jewishness is largely an ethnicity (biological), but it is also a religion, and it also has been for most of the past 1936 years and a day or so a nation-in-exile. You can divide that money a thousand thousand times, but the set of people who are members of a nation (or other group) shrinks and grows over time.
For most of the past 2000 years that nation-in-exile, the the religion, the culture, and the shared gene pool were highly coincident. When the nation-in-exile becomes a nation-no-longer-in-exile, the edge cases have to be dealt with in ways that nations in exile, without borders or governments, nations that exist more as concepts, do not have to deal with.
Under that kind of analysis, the lack of a right of return for those who have renounced Judaism (the religion) in favor of another religion, which conversion is probably not recognized relgiously, represents a path of losing the citizenship in that nation-still-half-in-exile.
800 years of German civilization snuffed in an instance.
At the same time.
Sheesh.
Well, that Palestinian claim of being there "from time immemorial" doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.
Looking at Ottoman census records of the late 1800's and then British census records of the late 1930's, you can see the following (I can't remember or immediately find the exact figures, so I'll use relative numbers):
In areas of western Palestine (i.e., excluding TransJordan) where there was little Jewish settlement, Arab population increase about X percent.
In areas where there was substantial Jewish settlement, Arab popluation increased about 1.8X to 2X percent.
The X percent would be reasonable to attribute to natural increase explainable based on fecundity and mortality rates.
The increases in the areas of Jewish settlement were too high to be explained by "natural increase" alone, and must, therefore, represent the effect of substantial Arab immigration to these areas (i.e., from Lebanon, Syra, Egypt, Transjordan, etc.). The immigration can easily be explained by the large rate of economic growth in the areas of substantial Jewish settlement versus essentially stagnant economies of the non-Jewish areas.
The conclusion is that a large segment of the Arab population in Mandatory Palestine by 1948 were immigrants, many of them newer to that area than much of the Jewish population.
In fact, this explains the strange wording of the UNRWA definition of what constitutes a "Palestinian Refugee", which is purposely, cynically DIFFERENT than the internationally accepted definition of "refugee" for everyone else in the world:
"Under UNRWA's operational definition, Palestine refugees are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine BETWEEN JUNE 1946 AND MAY 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict" UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948.
For everyone else in the world EXCEPT PALESTINIANS, the definition is "Any person who is outside any country of such person's nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last HABITUALLY resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to ..." This definition implies a much longer attachment than 24 months, and is intended to cover the types of situations you would expect as a reasonable person: for example, a person like my father, who was born in Germany and lived there through age 19, whose family lived in that same hamlet for 400 years, and who had to leave because of the threat to his life.
Also, note that the normally-accepted definition of "refugee" applies to the person who actually had to pick up and leave - not to any of his/her descendents that are born later outside of the place where "...such person habitually resided...."
The other thing to realize is that pretty much all of the area designated as the Jewish state in the 1947 UN Partition Plan had been legitimately purchased by the Jewish National Fund. The 1948 War of Independence, in which the nascent State of Israel defended itself against attack by 5 Arab nations, resulted in additional areas becoming part of Israel. Well, that's History, man! I mean, my mother's family lived in the 50%-Jewish city of Kalisch (Poland) for almost 1000 years, but we're not agitating to get it back.
There is one more piece of this issue that most people don't understand. Recent genetic research indiciates that most Jews today, whether their ancestors spent the past 1000+ years living in Europe, North Africa, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Persia (Iran), India, etc - they have a significant set of DNA "markers" in common, indicating a strong common ancestry. Furthermore, those markers do NOT match those of European ethnic groups, but rather are closest to those of Kurds and certain other middle-Eastern groups. The Kurd thing makes perfect sense, as our Patriarch Abraham came from Mesopotamia, not far from where the Kurds live now. So there is now also scientific, not just "faith-based", evidence that the Return of Jews to Israel of "Get Back to Where You Once Belonged."
This caused endless trouble. The Germans -- despite Twirlip's comment -- hardly injected anything like civilization; the Poles were oppressed by the Germans, while the Ukrainians were oppressed by Poles. Everybody beat on the Jews and Gypsies.
The Red Army swept most of this away. In late 1945, the big issue in Europe was DPs, Displaced Persons.
In the end, most of the DPs drifted back toward the national state that represented their language group. Europe has been a lot quieter since, except in the Balkans, where this rearrangement didn't happen.
The superficial argument from this happy outcome would be that removing the Israelis from western Asia would quiet down the inhabitants.
I don't believe Arabs will ever quiet down, so I reject this notion on practical grounds.
I also consider that Islam is my enemy, so if I were going to advocate a clearance, it would be of Muslims, not Jews, who never did me any harm.
Furthermore, if language/ancestry is to be taken as the basis of nation-states (the unspoken assumption of almost every poster here, although a few have noted the USA is the oddball in this respect), then there should be at least 19 nation-states in western Asia instead of 10.
People who get all bent out of shape about the presence of Israel but never mention Kurds, hardly ever mention Armenians etc. are open the suspicion of selective outrage.
Why isn't this discussion about breaking up Turkey? What possible right can Turkey have to exist, based on any arguments advanced here by anybody?
and i'm pretty sure nobody in this discussion favors dissolving israel, so your analogy to turkey is irrelevant.
Second, here are some things to consider:
1. I think what might be called the "practical" case for Israel's existence is overwhelming, and a lot stronger than what might be called the "theoretical" case. The practical case is that there's a ton of Anti-Semitism in the world, even now, and even among "enlightened" nations (such as in Europe). And it wasn't too long ago that someone almost succeeded in wiping most Jews off the planet. Given those facts, there needs to be a Jewish homeland, and policies that would result in its elimination (such as allowing all displaced Palestinian Arabs to return to Israel) are nonstarters.
2. That said, it drives me crazy that rather than emphasizing this point, so many defenders of Israel's policies focus on the weaker "theoretical" case for Israel. Let's be clear here. Israel's formation was a mess, which displaced thousands of Arabs who had no say in the international community's decision to plop a Jewish state down where they were living. Further, while Israel had every right to occupy territories that it acquired in post-1948 wars, the settlement policies were driven by mostly religious and partly strategic desires to hold onto territory by changing its ethnic balance and disenfranchising local Arab populations.
And most notably, the favorite talking point of many pro-Israel commentators-- that Jews lived there before Arabs did-- misses a crucial point about human geneology. Every person who lived more than 2,000 years ago and who has human descendants is most likely an ancestor of almost every person living today. (This was confirmed in some recent genetic studies.) And the religious practices of every major religion are very different today than they were 2,000 years ago. To argue that modern Jews have some claim to the land because ancient Israelites who had very different religious practices and who are, to the extent they are related to modern Jews, are related to everyone else in the world as well, is not any more persuasive than arguing that Israel should be Jewish because the Bible says so.
The point is, Israel is there and it fulfills a necessary purpose, to protect Jews from the all-too-real threat of anti-Semitism. And ensuring that Israel remains able fulfill that mandate justifies at least some of Israel's policies to maintain its demographic balance. But that's the case for Israel. Arguments that talk about mandates from colonial powers and tribes driven out of the country in millenia past really have no binding force whatsoever, especially on Arabs who paid the cost of the nation's formation.
Because Jews are so much more secure in what's now Israel than they would be in, say, the United States -- or even in Germany, Poland, or the Ukraine.
Actually, no country other than the UK (and Pakistan, according to some people) ever recognized Jordan's right to the West Bank.
Anonymouss, so much for international law, then. OK by me, but I'm surprised to find you on my side about that.
Your assumption here is that every human being somehow has a "moral right" to become a citizen of any country on the planet and to live anywhere they like. This is manifestly not true, as well as irrelevant from a practical standpoint. Do you also argue that the existence of the nation-state is immoral and illegitimate?
Clearly, you are not a doctor. Race can be a vital factor in diagnosis of certain conditions. In case others aren't aware- BiDIl (as astutely mentioned earlier) is a heart failure drug specifically for African Americans (or presumably any patient of the negroid race).
Oh, they're really based on ethnicity, let's be honest here. It's just convenient that it corresponds to nationality in most cases. And Germany, Bulgaria, and Armenia have already been pointed out as clear exceptions.
Wow, that's a rather euphemistic phrasing for it. Millions (perhaps as many as 15 million) ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from pretty much all of Eastern Europe, most notably the Sudetenland. I wouldn't call that 'drifted'. Certainly the Palestinians situation pales in comparison. Of course, even if their cause was completely valid, I'd reject it strictly on their embrace of terrorist tactics. The laws of warfare are probably the single most civilizing thing man has ever done. The worst times in history have been when warring parties tossed aside those rules, as the Islamic terrorists do today.
If there is no American culture, and with it's distict dialect of the English language, ethnicity, what do we have? You can't be culture/ethnicity free? If there's no American culture, what are the French so worried about with our music, food, and fashion becoming more popular there? They probably think McDonald's is a greater threat than the muslim demographic that's eating them alive.
I posit as an example, my father, a typical American whose ancestry is Germanic. He's an ethnic American. Period. As much as any Hungarian named Muller or Bosenbacher is Hungarian, and not German. For that matter, I am the product of his marrying an ethnic Chinese woman. I am not ethnically Chinese, don't even speak the language. I have no ethnicity according to you, I suppose. If you ask me my ethnicity, I'll answer you American. I have no choice.
The issue isn't that there was a sovereign Arab nation in Palastine, but that there were Arabs living there. Essentially, Zionism (and I mean the the movement of Theodore Herzl and others, not the warped anti-Semitic slur that this word is used for in some quarters) came along and started settling Jews in the area, in the hopes of convincing the international community of recognizing a future homeland for the Jews in Biblical / historical Israel. For various reasons, the British, which had established a colony in Palastine, recognized the claim of the Zionists. Eventually, over the course of several decades (and thanks in part to the Holocaust and the imperative it created to create a Jewish homeland where Jews could take refuge if anti-Semitism threatened their existence once again), a Jewish state was created. What was ignored during all of this is that there were actual Arabs living on the land. They may not have had a state, but their views with respect to the issue of the creation of a Jewish homeland were never consulted either.
If you strip away all the issues of religious and cultural identity (which I don't suggest anyone really do here), what happened is a former colonial power drew a line on a map, and the international community eventually recognized it. There's nothing particularly unocnventional about that method of creating a state-- indeed, many of the Arab states in the Middle East were created the same way. But if you are one of the people living there when the international community or colonial power does that, it can be a very bad thing for you-- especially if the state then invites thousands of immigrants in and threatens to render you into a member of a religious minority.
Thus, what we are left with is the historical imperative for a Jewish homeland. And frankly, every time I read about anti-Semitism in Europe or even the idiotic remarks of a Mel Gibson, I am reminded why I strongly support Israel's continued existence. I would also add that Israel's status as a modern, successful democracy is an important reason to protect it as well.
But it is infuriating when I hear arguments that assume that Palestinians never existed, that they all left voluntarily, that the "Israelites" who inhabited the land in biblical times are the same "people" as the modern Jewish diaspora, etc. (And of course, the worst one of all is the one Bernstein rightly disclaims-- that God "gave" the land to the Jews.) Those sorts of arguments actually make the case for Israel sound WEAKER than it is, though I realize they have a powerful force in many communities.
Why? There were no "Palestinians" (as in nationals or even as a tribe or arab sub-ethnicity) before 1948. There were Jordanians, too bad for them they had a hashemite monarchy installed over them. Oh, except for the Egyptians (like Arafat) in Gaza. And those who did not leave in 1948 (at the urging of the Arabs who attacked Israel)- they and their descendants are now Israeli citizens- not so bad really- much better than being "palestinian".
Let's say we discovered a drug that worked, in general, on people of German and British descent, but not on Italians or Portugese or French or Spaniards. Would that demonstrate the existence of a "German-British" race?
Let's say further that we did trials on American whites, and discovered --- since so many American whites are descended from Brits and Germans --- that it had a statistically measurable effect. Would that demonstrate the existence of the "caucasoid race"?
You are placing ethnic identities on people who lived in Palestine in 1948 that those people themselves do not accept. The fact is, in the relevant sense, there WERE Palestinians-- there were Arabs living in Palestine before Israel was founded. Indeed there were Arabs living in Palestine before Zionism started up in the late 19th Century. Whether those people were "Jordanians", "Transjordanians", or anything else was irrelevant. They were Arabs living in Palestine, and over the course of time, a lot of Jews emigrated, got the international community to declare a state (for entirely good reasons, as I have said), and a good number of the Arabs were either forced out or left because they reasonably believed that they would be a persecuted minority if they stayed.
The point of saying "there were no Palestinians" is to deliberately confuse the descriptive point, i.e., what nations were recognized by the international community in 1948, with the normative point, i.e., the formation of Israel was done without the consent of the occupants of the land and resulted in many of those Arabs being forced to leave their homes.
In the only sense that matters, there were Palestinians. To say otherwise is to commit one of the worst sins possible-- to claim that those who were living in Palestine were less than human beings because they hadn't been recognized as a nation-state.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that a biological difference attributed to "race" can never be significant. I think I'd be right in saying that having darker skin protects you from the sun better. Not being protected from the sun can lead to cancer. So dark skin - correlated with certain "races" - can be important. What I am saying is that the biological differences between "races" are incidental. They are no more significant than the fact that I have dark hair and my friend Chris has blonde hair - or if you're talking about medical conditions, than the fact that I have asthma and he doesn't.
(A) that critics of Israel's founding want to conjure up images of the former when they mean the latter, and
(b) the latter is inaccurate anyway, because there wasn't a sovereign Arab nation there.
Very little of what is now Israel was actually "Arab land" -- and most of what was, still is, and has a million Israeli Arabs living on it.
But the point is that those "identities" were not authentic; they were created after the formation of Israel for political reasons. They "do not accept" them because it's convenient for them not to, not because they ever identified themselves that way before 1948.
People from Harper's Ferry did not change ethnic identity from Virginian to West Virginian in 1863.
No. It would demonstrate that a difference between German-British and Italian-Portugese-French-Spanish is biological. That doesn't prove that there is anything particularly important underlying the distinction, other than a certain amount of geographically contained interbreeding, resulting in some common genes.
But this is reeeeally getting off-topic.
If there is no American culture, and with it's distict dialect of the English language, ethnicity, what do we have?
A nationality.
For you, and for me, our primary identity is as a member not of an ethnicity (a shared gene pool) but a nationality.
I omitted language, you're right, but we may be losing it as a common element. I don't think Big Macs are what define us, even if enough of us carry the Big Mac meme that the French are concerned.
In the shtetl from which my grandfather came there were Jews, Poles and White Russians. Living there shoulder-to-shoulder for hundreds of years, members of those groups maintained the ethnic identity. They didn't identify with geography (Poland) or government (The Tsar) and they didn't share religion or language. It just doesn't work that way here. (Melting pot details of my children and their cousins omitted, but they're about as mixed as is Douglas.)
You can't be culture/ethnicity free?
Sure you can. When I was a kid we were divided into Yankees Fans and Mets Fans. Surely everybody is one or the other, right? Or at least fans of some of other major league baseball team! And then we found out that some people aren't fans of baseball at all. Just as the model "Everybody is a fan of some baseball team" fails to describe European ethnicity, neither does our experience of what it means to be an American model the factors that go into various policies of the State of Israel, including here the Law of Return.
By your definition, there was nothing wrong with the US' Indian policies, because the international community hadn't recognized any Indian tribes as nation-states.
I think you are being deliberately obtuse here. You need to place yourself in the perspective of an Arab living in Palestine in 1948. All these people of another ethnic and religious group have moved to Palestine. The international community has recognized a state as a homeland for those people (and again, it did so for very compelling reasons), and they have invited many more to come. Further, the new state's army is involved in a war with neighbori