OpinionJournal Federation Feature Article:
In case you missed my VC post, "Does Japan Have the Right to Exist as a Japanese State?", it's available today on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal website as the OpinionJournal Federation Feature Article of the day. The piece discusses theh fact many countries have an explicit ethnic basis, including some sort of "law of return," but only Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is ever called into question.
Does Tibet have the right to exist as a Tibetan State?
Does Kurdistan have the right to exist as a Kurdish State?
Do southern white Americans have a right to an independent southern Confederacy sanctioning white supremacy?
Do the Lakota People have a right to self-government?
Do the Biafran People have a right to independent self-government?
The right of any people, defining themselves, to organize a state and to claim for that state, independent self-government is, at best, a moral right, which must be vindicated practically by a demonstration of capacity of will, competence and resources, against whatever similar claims may be made by other groups, which claims entail a practical conflict.
Japan's sovereign unity is not much disputed, internally or externally. There is not, in fact, a complete and total absence of confict. Japan has minority groups, though the minority group population is among the smallest percentages of any large country in the world, and Japan has long-standing boundary disputes with neighbors, just as almost every country does, though Japan's current boundary disputes are among the least contentious, due perhaps to the country's nominaly pacifist military orientation.
Since the establishment of the United Nations under the U.N. charter, the obligations of all States to provide high minimum standards of legal protection and respect to all persons have been well-established, if not universally respected. Many nation-states have been rightly criticized for shortcomings in their respect for human rights.
The idea that Israel faces unique hostility to its claims of national sovereignty is just silly, a form of pointless and narcissistic special pleading.
Arabs and Palestinians are free to make claims of their own -- even claims, which conflict with Israel's. Welcome to a world of conflicting and competing claims.
Grow up and stop whining.
Israel may also be unique in the size of the groups at issue, and the political impact that the law has, by actually (correct me if I'm wrong) having a significant impact on who gets political control.
But basically, I think people criticize Israel because they're tired of the overflowing violence in the region, which may be fair or not.
Huh!?! How could any person not recognize that Israel faces a "unique hostility to its claims of national sovereignty"? It certainly does, and I would think that even the most militant Palestinians would agree. They would posit their own reasons for why it faces such "unique hostility", i.e., they would argue that it faces this hostility because, unlike Japan, it has no right to exist at all and has no historic rights to the land it claims. As a Zionist, I vehemently disagree with such arguments. Regardless, it is simply beyond dispute that Israel faces such a "unique hostility" -- whether the hostility is fair is a different question (and I think it is almost indisputably unfair).
Further, it cannot be disputed that Israel receives a disproportionate amount of attention from the world community. Now, I find the argument that this is because the "whole world wants the Jews dead" to be silly, overly simplistic and just not helpful. Rather, the reasons Israel receives such a disproportionate are due to many complex factors, including the historical significance of Israel and Jerusalem in particular to the two largest religions in the World (Christianity and Islam respectively). Of course, soem of the attention it receives is a result of Jew-hatred, but to say that is THE reason is absurd.
David's point was that a specific criticism of Israel is a ludicrous and unfair criticism. Argue that on the merits -- I agree with David on this one, but not on much else. But to deny that the criticisms exist and that it is a unique criticism that many other nations with similar national identities do not face is to deny objective facts.
we went through this last time, but that's just not right. The question of whether Jews had the right to migrate to Turkish and Mandatory Palestine and then demand sovereignty over part of the land is distinct from the question of whether Israel is a "racist" state because it has a Law or Return and is otherwise established as an ethnically "Jewish" state. To put it another way, even if Israel and the Arabs could agree now on a re-partition of the disputed lands, that would do nothing to resolve the issue of whether Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. Now, if you are arguing that most of those who question Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state are merely being disingenuous, and really just think that the Palestinians are entitled to the land, I agree with you. But there are others, like the reader who asked me the question, who are not pro-Palestinian, but have absorbed the relevant propaganda, and wonder why Israel "but no one else" exists as an ethnically based state. And the answer is that the premises that the question are based on is wrong, that ethnically based states are quite common. This will not satisfy those who were just using the question to pursue another agenda, but should satisfy the merely curious.
Does this give Japan the right to start firing missiles into Russia?
Of course, while his argument shows that other countries are similar to Israel, it does not necessarily show that the idea of a Jewish state is a morally correct idea, or that it is not racist, etc., just that it may not be so unique.
As for why people appear to criticize Israel so much for this and other perceived shortcomings, here is why:
the "left" in the US, but more especially in Europe and elsewhere, sees the Palestinians as the "downtrodden" or underdogs in this conflict. The reason for this perception is simple. Although jews were almost annihilating during WWII and the Holocaust, Israel now has a very powerful military, and a booming economy, and controls most of the land that is the jews' historic home in the middle east, whereas the Palestinians have not much of a military, a pathetic economy, many live in abject poverty, and they control very little of their ancestral lands. Of course, we can debate why, and whose fault all of this is, until the ends of time, but the Palestinians' much less powerful status vis-a-vis Israel's is the basic reason for why many lefties are so critical of Israel.
Also, even if you knock down one criticism of Israel (by showing that the jewish state ideal is not unique), you will never convince the left of the righteousness of your cause, or stop such criticism, until the Palestinians are much better off than they are now. It is as simple as this: the Palestinians are now perceived as the underdogs and many on the left think their current plight is unfair to them.
I suppose you are right -- they are different questions. But I don't think there are many people who are against ethnic states with a right of return per se. Those who are against Israel's right of return are just against the way Israel was established. In other words, they consider the original Zionism the real problem, not the right of return.
But of course, I don't really know what they think, so I can't speak for them. My own view is that all land is up for grabs -- the strongest get it. Who will have the land in a 100 years is an interesting question. Time will tell.
Israel has the moral justification to be a Jewishly ethnic state (a) because it is not solely Jewish -- it allows others to earn citizenship and has made provisions for Arabs who remained in their homes during the independence war of '48; and (b) other countries do it (i.e., Japan).
He immediately recognizes though that even with (a) and (b), Israel suffers soemthing other ethnic states do not: the Palestinian Arabs were there first and now claim it as their own. Moreover, to the thorny problem of the very undemocratic policy to allow Jews to return and not the Palestinians -- precisely because that would literally challenge the majority status of Jews in Israel -- Mr. Bernstein's sole argument is worldwide Jewish persecution -- something he claims these other ethnic states did not suffer.
But Mr. Bernstein fails to take up the Arab and now Persian argument: the Palestinians never historically persecuted Jews; why should they be forced to give up their homeland for the sins of the Europeans, the Slavs, or even the Arabs of Andalusia or the Turks of Ottoman?
Mr. Bernstein focuses on a red herring in his response and does so by artificially separating out the question whether it is "legitimate" for liberal democracies to discriminate racially or ethnically from Israel's right to exist simply. His answer: others do it.
Aside from the shallowness of that answer, unless he adheres to a kind of real politik, the question he should confront, and he runs from it, is what makes a nation and what is the basis for its claim to any piece of land? Bruce Wilder above suggests one answer. The only truth is the one you're willing to fight over and win. I believe Nietzsche's Übermensch might agree.
As a "democrat" and "libertarian" though Mr. Bernstein cannot address this most fundamental issue for his democratic and libertarian answer leads him quite quickly to a World State. And by the by, this is not an "opinion"; it can be demonstrated.
At the risk of irritating this comment thread, I might suggest "Zionism, Hamas, and Self-Destruction" found at SANE Works for US as a starting point.
Killed by racist, genocidal Russians as part of an announced and religiously-inspired program to destroy Japan? If not, then what's the point of your non-analogy?
The objection to this post is the same as it was the first time. "Does Japan have the right to exist as a 'Japanese' state" isn't a question that's never asked. It's just one that you've not heard before.
You're a 'specialist' in Israel, so you're aware of the issue as it pertains to Israel. But to a specialist in Japan, no only has the question been asked, it's been answered several time throughout our lifetimes. Often eloquently.
Israel's "exceptionalism" comes from the level of violence that attaches to the question. If ethnic Koreans had (as Palestinians did) taken to hijacking airplanes from third countries in order to enforce their demands for rights, the question would be asked much more broadly as well.
Once you have a dispute over territory, you can pretty much guarantee that all of the stuff you mention will eventually get thrown into the mix.
Anyway, are you saying that that if Hezbollah cast their attack and kidnapping of the IDF soldiers as merely a result of a territorial dispute, that the killing and kidnapping would be any more acceptable. Sounds like a weirdo international version of hate-crimes legislation.
Israel and Japan are both countries which, like all countries, maintain their territorial monopolies by force of arms.
I'm sure you would. I think, at least with Korean blogs, you might see another dimension though, at least with respect to Koreans in Japan. Under Korean law, my understanding is that those Koreans in Japan, as ethnic Koreans whose lineages were severed from Korea prior to the establishment of the ROK, are eligible for citizenship in Korea. Given the tenor of Korean nationalism and Korean mistrust of Japan, I wonder whether a significant number of Korean bloggers wouldn't actually think that the proper course for these Koreans is to return to Korea (to the Fatherland! - hah), and take up citizenship under the ROK (unlikely, given that a sizeable proportion of Koreans in Japan are apparently affiliated with or actually work for the DPRK). I speculate this in a vacuum, since my Korean is not good enough to frequent Korean blogs, but it strikes me as entirely plausible, given that Korea and Japan are genuine "nation-states."
This would be distinct from the issue of discrimination against and mistreatment of Koreans resident in Japan, of course. That gets criticised all the time, by pretty much everyone.
Am I correct in reading "nationality" as a proxy for ethnicity, i.e. that Koreans in Japan born to lineages that have not returned to Korea since the establishment of the ROK or the DPRK, are "stateless," technically, in that they have citizenship in no state, but are of a known "nationality," in that they are ethnic Koreans, who, under the Korean laws governing nationality, are nationals eligible for citizenship?
Have I got that entirely confused? I've never studied immigration law, so I have no idea how this works, or how the translations are being managed. I expect that between Japan, China, and Korea, they are all using the same term, in cognate forms, but not knowing what that term is, I cannot go and check up on it.
As to your pressing question, is Israel "uniquely" racist or discriminatory, that's a give away in the way you wish to argue it. Of course not. But as several comments have suggested to you, and you ignore them or sidestep them, it becomes an issue in Israel's case because of the violence and even more importantly from a philosophic and moral vantage, the Palestinian's claim to the same land is fairly good.
You seem to suggest that the answer to this claim is that (a) Jew's needed a sanctuary; (b) the Brits and the League of Nations gave them one; (c) the Arab nations along with many of the Palestinian Arabs rejected that "democratic" international decision; and (d) Israel won the war.
So, what is your argument based upon? Some misery index for the European Jews that entitled them to take land that had been Moslem for 1400 years and claimed as part of the dar al-Islam by the entire Umma? Or, a kind of "international democracy" claim? If that is so, what would you say if the UN voted to establish a "One State Solution". Would you be as enthusiasitic? Or, is it simply that the Jews won the war, going back to Mr. Wilder's tongue-in-cheek realpolitik?
My 10-year old son, who has never learned anything outside of the Talmud, knows that other countries discriminate based upon all kinds of factors against "others". If they didn't, they wouldn't be a nation. And, you've listed the obvious examples of ethnic nations.
But again, Israel's case is important precisely because there is a real challenge to the Jewish-Zionist claim. And, as to your historical claims about the Palestinians fighting against the Jews, you must know this has been challenged by several respected Zionist historians. Also, you don't really suggest that because the Mufti of Jerusalem sided with the Nazi's that somehow the Palestinian Arabs lost their claim to their ancestral homeland do you? Was the Mufti a representative of the Palestinian Arabs? Do you know how he was appointed? Such a claim would be, from a political theory vantage, far-fetched.
I don't know what this means to Spain's right to exist.
Now your argument is changing. Are we questioning whether a state has a "right to exist" or whether it has a "right to exist as a Japanese state"? Certainly many people have criticized Japan's immigration policies, which for a very long time were predicated upon the idea that Japan should remain "Japanese" (and that this, as you pointed out, was determined by blood).
You're right: the right of return is echoed in the laws of many other countries. Those laws come under frequent attack. And to the degree that your argument above makes a distinction, it's a distinction that has a perfectly reasonable basis. If Japan were to admit every Korean, Brazilian or indeed immigrant trying to make its way in the borders, there's little doubt that it would remain "Japanese." The numbers are simply not large enough. Even the Israelis worry, on the other hand, that if Palestinians were allowed to return on equal terms, the country's ethnic (and political) makeup would shift drastically.
I'm quite certain that if a plurality--or even significant minority--of non-ethnic Japanese were being kept out of the Japanese polity, its "legitimacy" as a state would be called into question. As it is, the immigration issue simply isn't large enough to draw a question of legitimacy.
So again, your point is either simply ill-informed (people do criticize other countries for discriminatory immigration policies) or ignores an important distinction (that the issue of immigration is not so central to the identity of those nations as to raise questions of legitimate existence).
Next, to the further claims. When people criticize the German and Japanese immigration policies what they are doing is saying, quite obviously if you read them, that Germany and Japan do not have the right to limit citizenship or full membership to ethnic Germans or Japanese, and that, for example, when they give special preference to Ethnic Germans over the children of Turkish "guest" workers, they are being unjust. Why so? Because Germany doesn't have the right to use its immigration laws to maintain its ethnic character, that is, to be a "German" state, taken as a statement about ethnicity. Such claims are quite commonly made and not hard to find. Here's two exmaples, taken because they happen to be within arm leanght of my computer on my book shelf. "We can therefore say with assurance that, in the world as it now is, and as it will doubtless be for many centuries yet, no state ought to take race, religion, or language as essential to its identity." (Michael Dummett, _On Immigration and Refugees_, p. 6. Dummett here is addressing German, Japanese, and Isrelli law as three examples of the same sort of thing.) "Criteria of selection that discriminate againt potential immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity, reltion, sex, or sexual orientation are particularly objectionable from a liberal egalitarian perspective.... The German law is troubling for two related reason. First, the explicit link between ethnicity and citizenship raises questions about whether those German citizens who are not ethnic Germans are really regarded as equal citizens. Second, the easy grant of citizenship to people who have never lived in Germany before and some of whom do not even speak the language contracts sharply with the reluctance to grant citizenship automatically to the children of Turkish 'guest' workers' even when the children were born and brought up in Germany (and sometimes speak no other language.)... Racim and other forms of discriminatory explusion are worth than policies that exclude but do not distinguish in objectionable ways among those excluded." (Joseph Carens, "A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective" in Barry and Goodin, ed. _Free Movement_. Carens thinks the German system is unjust and that Germany has no right to exclude non-Germans, even if this means it would not be a ethnically German state. He is somewhat more sympathetic to the case of Israel for much the reason I am, that its laws are perhaps best seen as a remedial measure which were necessary due to the horrors of the holocaust.) In the immigration literature there are many other examples. So, I think it's pretty clear that on any reasonable interpritation of the pharse "Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state" there are clearly cases (many, in fact) in which people have made similar claims about Japan, German, and others.
The degree to which that is true can be variously debated, but it's a salient fact nonetheless, one variously echoed and trumpeted, at times overtly (e.g., Ahmadinejad) and at other times in far more cloaked and duplicitous terms. For example, think of the Ramallah lynchings of October, 2000 as reflecting the levels of unbridled hate which are not at all anomalous but rather are ideologically, systematically, culturally, socially and politically cultivated in Arafatistan (i.e., "Palestine") and elsewhere.
h/t Augean Stables for the Ramallah lynching video
You're way off-topic -- which has to do with the (relatively) mundane nature of Israel's Law of return -- and in that sense I still wonder what your point is. But the analogy is no less inapt for that quibble: Hez's "dispute over territory" is nothing less than a quarrel over Israel's existence. If you can't grasp that much, then there's no point discussing whether Israel has a "right" to respond to Hez's act of war, or indeed whether its response in the event was "proportionate" to the threat.
Jews have always lived in "palestine". They were not as depicted mostly sudden arrivals but arrived over time.
The general public assumes that many/most arab states
have always existed but that is false since most are more recent creations like Jordan, Saudi Arabia etc. Remember that Jordan was supposed to be the "palestinian homeland". It is about 99% palestinian arab.
There was never a distinct, independent *non-Jewish* entity in this land.
There was never an ethnic group called "Palestinians".
Regarding the citizenship of Korean permanent residents in Japan... From 1910, subjects of the former Korean Empire were of Japanese nationality with Korean household registration. In 1947, the Japanese government (and MacArthur) provisionally registered those residents of Japan as aliens. Their country was registered as Chosen (Jp. geographic name of Korea) because there was no state in Korea. In 1948, ROK persuaded the Japanese government and MacArthur to allow them to change their nationality to ROK. In 1952, the Treaty of Peace with Japan entered in force, and all Korean residents of Japan formally lost their Japanese citizenship. A (stateless) permanent resident of Chosen nationality may become a citizen of either ROK or Japan, subject to the respective country's laws. A permanent resident of ROK citizenship may also naturalize as Japanese. Japan does not recognize acquisition of DPRK citizenship by either resident aliens or Japanese, because Japan does not recognize DPRK diplomatically. Although virtually all the permanent residents who are loyal to DPRK are of Chosen nationality, the converse is not true, esp. since 2002.
But I also reiterate that this is separate from the issue of the Law of Return. The person who sent the question that inspired my post was not troubled by the "displacement" of the Palestinians, he was troubled by Israel's exitence as an ethnically (and, he thought, religioujsly) based state, completely independent of any concern for Palestinians, whom he mentioned not at all. In my experience, this is not unique.
Indeed, as a libertarin, I'm somewhat uncomfortable myself with ethnically based states, but I'm also troubled that there are many ethnically based states, and only one comes in for much criticism.
As for the comments that I'm changing the basis of my argument, I am not. There is a big difference between saying, "I think Japan (Germany, Armenia) is wrong in its citizenship policies and should change them" or even "I think Japan etc. policies are evil racist and immoral" and saying "these policies make Japan (etc.) such an instrinsically evil state that it should not be considered a legitimate member of the international community, as it has no right to exist in its present form." Again, if you can give me actual examples of this phenomenon, which is quite common with regard to Israel, for any other country, I'd be happy to modify my argument, but I don't think you can. The other oddity, which I didn't get into in my piece, is that many of these same critics turn around and support the Palestinians, whose draft Constitution specifies that Palestine is to be a Muslim, Arab state. So it's intrinsicallly immoral for Israel to be an ethnically based state, but not for "Palestine" to be one. As I mentioned, the argument is merely a stalking horse for anti-Israel sentiment, and it tries to take advantage of the lack of knowledge that most people have that Israel is hardly unique.
A form of blanket dismissiveness, not a serious argument that can stand up to much of anything. Too, concerning what you "feel" and what you "know," now there's a subject for some amusing, comparative review. Further still, beyond passing over a host of other concerns which are existentially meaningful, it isn't simply that "criticisms made of states other than Israel" are far less frequently, critically and volubly made, they additionally don't receive the concerted, demanding, ongoing and repeated attentions of tranzi and other actors (e.g., potentates in the M.E., some MSM types, sundry ideologically committed academics) on the world's stage.
And while, rightly, no claims of anti-Semitism per se were claimed, either tacitly or otherwise, the sensibility forwarded by scoffingly making the charge (that criticism of Israel equals anti-Semitism) is that, eo ipso, the charge is foreclosed in toto vis-a-vis this and related subjects. Nothing could be further from the truth, some criticisms of Israel are tantamount to forms of anti-Semitism or are little or nothing more than cloaked forms of anti-Semitism.
Not all forms of anti-Semitism are undisguised or Hitlerian in nature any more than all forms of murder are undisguised acts of blunt force trauma to the head or a hollow point, 9mm round to some vital organ while the perpetrator yells "I'm going to kill you and have been planning on doing so for some time now" in a crowded room. Judging motive can be dicey stuff, but it can be done and often enough is necessary before the law. Too, the end effect, regardless of specific motive (someone is dead as a result of someone else's actions) is much the same: existentially meaningful to the dead guy, as to Israel and Israelis.
If this is indeed your argument, and it certainly wasn't specified very well in your original post, it's a bit silly, indeed trivial. You're ignoring the question of scale. In none of the other situations you mention is there an ethnic minority actively claiming citizenship or seeking status within the relevant polity large enough to call the legitimacy of the state into question.
If Tokyo all of a sudden decided that anyone to the southwest of Nagoya wasn't actually "Japanese," drove all Kansai citizens onto Kyushu (which it then ceded from its territory) and no longer considered its former residents "citizens" for purposes of sanguinity and return, then yes, watchers of Japan would question the legitimacy of that Japanese state (and its right to exist). Not that this is exactly analogous to the Israel/Palestine situation, but it would at least create a group of potential claimants for citizenship against whom the Japanese state was discriminating sufficient to call the legitimacy of the country as a whole into question.
I guess the reason M and I interpreted your post the way we did is that your new argument makes the entire posting obvious and meaningless. If you want to complain that no one questions the legitimacy of Ireland or Japan for doing what Israel does, the answer is simply that Israel has a set of claimants large enough to challenge its legitimacy. Japan (or any other country you mention) may have problems, but not enough to make a challenge to legitimacy an even laughably open question.
The United Nations approved and supported the formation of a Jewish state, and that is the end of that. Jews who moved there on the strength of that commitment have an absoute right to be there.
It was considered a refuge for Jews escaping persecution even after the close of WW2 (see any history of Jews in Poland) who believe (perhaps rightly) that Jew-hatred would have a renaissance. A single-ethnic state (not racial if you don't mind), sure. Who else would be nuts enough to want to live there?
As to the motives of the Palestinians: it is not in my view grievance about displacement but instead, the ideo-religious principle (in Islamic lands the same thing) that no proper Islamic macho man will tolerate the nearby presence of an alien enemy. If there is any racism involved, it is from that side.
It echoes the attitude of our Southerners who, despite the result of the Civil War and the 13th 14th and 15th
Amendments, were determined that the black man should not have the same rights as themselves. And the "Nigras" did not, for 100 years more!
It was recently written that Israel is the canary in the coal mine. Its destruction, by demonstrating that the Arabs and Irani are irresistable, will mean immense trouble for the rest of us. Then the large population of pettfoggers represented above, will understand what has been at stake.
That's not at all obvious, why does scale vis-a-vis the right of return issue, in and of itself, bring legitimacy into question? Israel exists in the real world, i.e. within a nexus or network of other highly charged and highly critical factors, not in some clinically sterile or utopian environment wherein scale vis-a-vis the right of return issue is the one, unbalancing anomaly. Other critical realities need to be brought within the purview of the overall dialectic and analysis.
"If Tokyo all of a sudden decided that anyone to the southwest of Nagoya wasn't actually "Japanese," drove all Kansai citizens onto Kyushu (which it then ceded from its territory) and no longer considered its former residents "citizens" for purposes of sanguinity and return, then yes, watchers of Japan would question the legitimacy of that Japanese state (and its right to exist). Not that this is exactly analogous to the Israel/Palestine situation ..." A. Rickey, emphasis added
Well yes, it's far indeed from "exactly analogous," v. Big Lies: Demolishing the Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel (small pdf), with three brief but illuminating chapters, each well documented, entitled:
1) The Origins of the Refugee Problem
2) The Eight Stages of the Creation of the Problem
3) The Question of 'Occupation' and the Settlements
Excerpt from the opening of Chpt. 1, emphasis added:
"The Arab version of the tragic fate of Arab refugees who fled from the Palestine Mandate before and during the 1948 war and from Israel immediately after the war, has so thoroughly dominated the thinking of even well-educated historians, commentators, journalists and politicians, that it is almost a given that the creation of the State of Israel caused the flight of almost a million hapless, helpless and hopeless Arab refugees. Israel caused the problem and thus Israel must solve the problem.
"This assertion, although viscerally engaging and all but canonized by the anti-Israel propaganda which makes it the core of its narratives of the Middle East conflict, is unequivocally and totally false."
The Arab refugees in question (putative "Palestinians") have in point of historical fact been used as pawns to serve a broader strategy. Some excerpts from the appendix of Chpt. 2 follow, with introductory remarks:
In the words of senior Fatah central committee member Sakher Habash, "To us, the refugee issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state." Or, as UNRWA director Ralph Galloway put it, "... the Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die. The only thing that has changed since [1949] is the number of Palestinians cooped up in these prison camps."
Additionally, most of the refugees which resulted from the creation of Israel became so as a result of their own choosing. "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem." Near East Arabic Broadcasting Station, Cyprus, April 3, 1949. Also, "The most potent factor [in the flight of Palestinians] was the announcements made over the air by the Arab-Palestinian Higher Executive, urging all Haifa Arabs to quit ... It was clearly intimated that Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades [by their fellow Arabs]." London Economist October 2, 1948. Further still, "The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously and they must share in the solution of the problem." Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph September 6, 1948. Or, "Since 1948, the Arab leaders have approached the Palestinian problem in an irresponsible manner. They have used [the] Palestinian people for political purposes; this is ridiculous, I might even say criminal..." King Hussein, Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, 1996.
As to the basic argument you have set up, I can only ask again, Why is all of this not silly? Of course the Palestinians discriminate. The very Palestine Mandate calls for a "Jewish State" and an "Arab State" that "respected" the rights etc. of others. Respect does not necessarily mean equality. And, not just the Palestinians but all Arab/Muslim countries have such de jure or de facto discriminatory practices. So this requires an entry in the WSJ which attracted my attention?
But it is silly, and this gets to the heart of the "issue" because a nation to be one discriminates. That is the essence of nationhood. A child born into a People within some "social-political construct" we call borders becomes a citizen without care or concern. The "other" child on the other side does not. This is, as I say, the essence of discrimination.
But discrimination, distinguishing, ordering, is the essence of being human, is it not? In addition to the natural discrimination that takes place between Selves, families, citizens and non-citizens, the immigration laws of a nation would be foolhardy if they did not discriminate based upon wealth, education, skills, mercy, what have you.
I just cannot understand why an adult would "debate" this issue and why you would deny by omission this most definitional argument for a "they do it so we can do it" reply.
And, of course it gets back to your libertarian "issues": You write, "Indeed, as a libertarian, I'm somewhat uncomfortable myself with ethnically based states, but I'm also troubled that there are many ethnically based states, and only one comes in for much criticism." As to your libertarian cognitive dissonance over your support of Israel based on what appears to me little more than "it isn't fair" to criticize Israel with all of the other discrimination in the world among nations, we all understand. You are a Jew and presumably a Zionist. Fine. For you, its personal. Your "ethnicity" outweighs your fidelity to libertarianism.
But this once again, beyond your fixation on the silly aspect (why criticize Israel and not the others), brings us to the real issue of "ethnic" (your word) discrimination. The very problem with libertarianism is its failure to recognize man's existence in nations as an act of ultimate discrimination. Indeed, because of this failure, libertarianism as a "philosophic" or logical whole leads to a world state.
So, in the end, you justify Israel's existence because it has some international justification and won a war. The Palestinians are attempting to do the same thing. Fair enough. Your whole argument is that if you are going to criticize Israel for discrimination, do the same with the rest of the world. Fine. As I mentioned earlier, this wouldn't even rise to the level of challenging my 10-year old.
What is a challenge to you is your incessant failure to confront the real issue standing before your libertarian world view. As a libertarian, you would not allow me a Jewish Nation-State for any reason. And, of course, that is a clue as to why you regress to a kind of infinite regress in your realpolitik definition of national legitimacy (abyssal diplomatic cover, abyssal war). (By the by, before the threaders thread, of course this is what practically results in nations; the question is what forms their legitimacy in speech – that is to say in thought.)
As a note for consistency, all of your historical and demographic "data" about pre-state Israel is just besides the point when trying to confront the Palestinian claim. Even assuming the facts as Joan Peters laid out in her book many years ago to be true, and in the main I have determined them to be, the Muslims make a claim via the Palestinians to this land. You might not like it or accept it but it is at the very least as "legitimate" as the one you have chosen to hang your hat on (i.e., Zionism).
Re: belleneige, thank you for the clarification. Is the term used across those countries 国籍, then, and nothing else?
I've seen above that you're fairly intent on addressing claims of illegitimacy based only on Israeli law's disparate treatment of ethnicity in its immigration law. To the extent that people make the narrow claim your argument addresses, I doubt they're separating Israel's right of return law from the issue of the occupation.
I suppose you can say, either "My emailers are very silly, and I've shown a trivial point to be false" or "There's an implied portion of their question that I'm ignoring."
Imagine (for argument's sake) that all facts stated by either side below are in fact true. A: "Yesterday there was an election in the Ukraine. There was voter fraud. Hence, the government is illegitimate." B: "We know there was voter fraud in the New York elections back in 2004. Yet we don't say that the 2004 Presidential elections are invalid! People are picking on the Ukraine!"
B may be technically correct, but he's simply ignoring the facts. By implication, A is considering the voter fraud in the Ukraine to be massive enough that it might effect the outcome, and the New York fraud (New York being blue) to be so small as to not call the election into question. Sure, he's not said as much, but for the vote fraud to raise a question of legitimacy, size is a necessary element.
Similarly, no one questions Japan's right to exist "as Japanese" (which seems to mean something different to you than to those who do in fact question their "right to exist as Japanese"), simply because if you credit every accusation raised by those who object to their immigration policies as true, Japan would still be a very Japanese state. The numbers are there.
Israel is simply not in the same position. Even defenders of Israel* complain of Palestinian "ticking time bombs" of population, and claim that a right of return for Palestinians would vastly change Israeli demography. Hence, Israel's "right to exist" as a Jewish state is called into question because there is a plausible argument that, under a differing set of immigration rules, it wouldn't be.
The point is that, under your now much narrower view of "right to exist as an X state", the question becomes trivial. In your original article, you say:
If the answer is, "Well, no, but only because there is no plausible scenario, under any set of immigration laws, in which it will fail to remain so, and Japan specialists are no more given to wasting their time than any other folks," then what's the point?
*Of which I'm one. I'm generally very pro-Israeli. I also object to Japanese immigration laws (and some of ours and Europes, for differing reasons). But it's a bit of a slur on Japan specialists to complain that we never asked why Japan shouldn't exist because of the immigration laws. Why would you expect us to ask a question that has an obvious counterargument not applicable to Israel's situation? Why would we be expected to make ourselves look like idiots?
Suppose that a Japan specialist did question Japan's right to exist as a state because of its immigration policies. When an opponent points out that whatever the right of return, Japan's demographics won't shift that much in the near or medium term, what should such a commentator propose as an appropriate remedy for Japan's "existence"? Forced immigration of non-Japanese? Expulsion of ethnically Japanese citizens until the country is more diverse? I suppose we could suggest Japan go conquer a country or two to gain some more diverse citizens, but we frowned on that fifty years ago.
Doesn't this rather obvious second-step problem go a long way to explaining why no one raises these questions with regard to Japan, rather than the fact that critics are being uniquely hard on Israel?
One doesn't have to look very far. From today's Ha'aretz:
From earlier this month from Jostein Gaarder, "perhaps Norway’s most well known writer abroad" (although I've never heard of him), in a paper published in Norway:
see here
"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 and grants anyone with a Jewish grandparent automatic citizenship
I think this is quibbling a bit, we just don't have a good word for "ethnist." For that matter, the law isn't even "ethnist" - it is religious. If your Japanese grandmother converted to Judaism, you're in, but you're sure not ethnically Jewish.
It would help if you clarify exactly what the comparison you're making is. You are still all over the map.
One option: "Has the question ever been asked 'Does Japan have the right to exist as a Japanese state, similar to how Israel existing as a Jewish state?"
In which case, the answer is pretty clearly "yes," and you just didn't look very hard. Commentators on Japan have questioned the right of Japan to remain that way by critiquing Japan's sanguinity rules with regards to citizenship. The zainichi-chosenjin are a hot-button issue (among other immigration topics), and Japan is criticized for them roundly by commentators that say they have no right to remain a Japanese state.
The fact remains that, right or no, Japan will remain a Japanese state, at least in the medium term. There are no demographic forces, unlike those in Israel, which are undoing this majority. Nevertheless, many commentators have frequently asserted that Japan has no "right" to an ethnic identity, nor should it use preferential policies to promote any such "right." (And as Japan ages and admits more immigrants, the question shall become more important.)
The second option is that you meant, "Has anyone ever asked, 'Does Japan's use of immigration to preserve its ethnic identity bring the legitimacy and existence of Japan into question, as Israel's policies have brought the existence and legitimacy of Israel (not its Jewishness) into question?"
And in that case, you're right. No one has ever asked the question. But given that the "right of return" rules for Japanese blood make so little difference in the overall ethnic makeup of the nation, what Don Quixote is going to call Japan's legitimacy into account? Particularly given that nothing short of a forced movement of peoples is going to make a difference? No one has ever asked a very stupid question. So what?
Further, the second answer moves the goalposts: the question isn't the existence of Japan "as a Japanese state," but the existence of Japan as a nation/government at all. If that's what you meant, you should have said so, because the answer is indeed the trivial one related above: the problem isn't big enough.
Now, it may be true that the big "important point" of your post is that there are some folks out there--particularly ill-informed--who think that Israel's use of sanguinity in immigration is unique. This isn't surprising: lacking a decades-long hot-and-cold running war with potential claimants for citizenship, Japan's immigration policies aren't front-page issues outside the Mainichi Shinbun. (If Koreans started hijacking third-party planes, this would change.) But presuming you told such an ill-informed person about Japan's immigration laws, it would be pretty simple to condemn them too, but then to point out that the matter doesn't rise to a question of Japan's national legitimacy.
In any event, that's not the question in your article that leads your article:
And of course, Japan would be one. Or
(emphasis, in both cases, mine) Japan's attempts to claim a right to this have been condemned. If you didn't want to discuss rights instead of realities, you really shouldn't have asked the question repeatedly.
"Jewish" is an ethnicity and a religion. Israel's Law of Return differs from those others in a way other than you describe: anyone can join the group. It is not as 'exclusive' as the other groups, in that anyone can make a choice (or not make a choice, as it were) about whether they want to belong or not.
To correct something you said and to confuse the issue a bit more: if your Japanese grandmother converted, you would be considered Jewish only if she came from your mother's side. Judaism is matrilineal. What is confusing about it is -- if you didn't consider yourself Jewish and didn't practice you would not be ethnically or religiously Jewish, yet you would be Jewish under Jewish law.
You would also have been persecuted as a Jew under some of the regimes that were prone to do so and would have been able to take refuge in Israel if you so desired, which is why the Law of Return was written.
I think what David has not said but that is a subtext here is the following:
The majority of people questioning Israel's right to exist (either absolutely, or 'as is') based on their immigration policy are actually against Israel existing (either abolutely, or 'as is') at all and are casting about for ways to attack the state. This is one of the big reasons why the unfairness and imbalance in type and amount of criticism exists.
You will note that many pro-Palestinian partisans make this argument while ignoring the fact that the Palestinian National Charter is not all that different.
For the record, I think that it is fine for countries to give preferential immigration status to a diaspora community and the UN agrees. To the UN, it is not racist to give preferential treatment in this manner, but is if you are exclusionary.
The majority of people questioning Israel's right to exist (either absolutely, or 'as is') based on their immigration policy are actually against Israel existing (either abolutely, or 'as is') at all and are casting about for ways to attack the state.
If so, perhaps the good Professor can do it without inflicting calumny upon those who (a) have studied Japanese immigration law, and (b) have raised exactly the question he's claiming has never seen the light of day?
As I said, I'm pro-Israeli. I'm just not so pro-Israeli that I think a clumsy, poor argument should be given a pass just because it's pro-Israeli. Israel has a host of good arguments in its defense.
You have to scroll down to get to my claim that no Islamic state has the right to exist. I was for a while the Executive Director of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society (ISIS) and (when ISIS was functioning, which it no longer is) our very raison d'etre was to argue against the legitimacy of all Islamic states.
It was an argument I repeatedly made on my (now defunct) blog at the History News Network. It's also an argument made repeatedly by Ibn Warraq, one of the founders of ISIS and author of Why I Am Not a Muslim.
As it happens, my wife, Carrie-Ann Biondi, wrote a doctoral dissertation for the philosophy department at Bowling Green State University in 2001 taking issue with all ethno-religious conceptions of citizenship, Israel's among them, and including many if not all of the other countries on Bernstein's list. I highly doubt that my wife and I are the only counter-examples to Bernstein's generalization.
http://hnn.us/articles/10866.html
ISIS is http://www.secularislam.org
--Irfan Khawaja
As for Irfan, I have no particular quarrel with anyone who claims that all ethnic or religious based governments are illegitimate, but someone who focuses their sole or primary attention on Israel in this regard, when Jews surely have more historical reason to want their own country than most, either don't fall into this category or are just pretending they do.
Really? Because the conversation reads like this:
DB: The question has never been asked!
M &AR: Well, yes, actually it has. (Quotations)
DB: But it's not asked as much of other countries, and the question of whether there is a "right" isn't what I meant. I meant "does taking action X mean that a state is illegitimate?"
AR: Well, why didn't you say so? But the quick answer to the second question is, "Well, it might if action X reaches a certain level of significance. But you can't point to any other example where X gets anywhere close to Israel's situation, so if that's your question, then you're right, but unsurprisingly so. This really doesn't get you very far.
How, exactly, are you still making the same argument?
I agree that Israel's Law of Return isn't really all that exceptional among nation states, or in practical terms all that troubling (however troubling it might be in pure theory). But, is this all there is to the "right to exist as an [ethnic] state"?
One of the problems/constraints that has plagued the Israel/Palestinian conflict from the beginning is the Israeli desire to have a territory in which Jews are a majority of the population. This would seem inherent in the idea of "a Jewish state" (or, at least, a democratic Jewish state). In addition to inviting Jews in, this seems to require keeping (if not driving) Arabs out at some level, which presents an intensely practical problem. If it is OK to be a "Jewish state," presumably some level of Arab ethnic displacement is OK too, so long as the means used are not too awful.
Jews have often been on the receiving end of this sort of ethnic purification. I know many American Jews who would say that every time it happened to Jews it was wrong in principle, even when the means utilized were not excessively awful, and I agree with them. If, for example, Virginia were to expel all Jews, providing just compensation, this would be *morally* wrong, quite apart from technical Constitutional issues. I'm still having a hard reconciling this position with the idea of "a Jewish state." It seems to just be putting the boot on the other leg.
The only answer I saw that made sense in the last blog is that Jews are uniquely vulnerable among all of the ethnic groups in the world, so that policies which would not be allowable for Arabs or Germans or Americans are OK for Israelis. I think this is true, but one of the implications is that Israel *as a Jewish state* is not a theoretical right, but rather an excusable wrong, and ought to be more careful about wreaking havoc on its neighbors, or making expansive territorial claims in support of this identity.
I know you believe that nothing that Israel has done has had the purpose or effect of driving non-Jewish residents out per se. My reading is that it has, but this is a factual question on which I might be ill-informed, and answering it requires making some judgment calls which are arguable. One problem is that judgment is heavily influenced by the starting perception of "right." If you argue that Israel didn't in fact wrongfully drive out Arabs in a particular case because driving out Arabs in that case was rightful in pursuit of a Jewish state, and therefore a Jewish state is not per se wrongful, you argue in a circle.
If you argue that an otherwise rightful territorial settlement to the conflict is inadmissible because it would result in a non-Jewish majority, you seem to run into a similar logical problem.
Of course, seeing the idea of "a Jewish state" as being a second-best solution rather than a positive good presents a serious practical problem. Its hard to get an army to fight and citizens to brave terrorism in support of a second-best solution, however necessary. Reducing it to "you're all anti-Semites" isn't much of a long-term diplomatic solution either, though.
That's a pretty bizarre assertion. It's mentioned frequently among those who care about it. Here's another way of looking at it: the question has been asked, and frequently, but simply at times and in places where you've not been looking. (Your article shows a particular disinclination to look. It's not like the zainichi-chosenjin issue isn't in Wikipedia, wasn't easily discoverable, and provided an answer to a lot of your questions.)
Further, when it has been answered, it's been answered more or less unequivocally. At least in my study of Japan, I never came across a professorial advocate of Japan's discriminatory immigration laws, nor can I find one now. They were sometimes put forward as a rather curious artifact of racism ("Japanese governments think that these people will be easier to assimilate, but there's no evidence"), or simply mentioned without much comment as "one of those things," but I never heard anyone actually defend them as a good idea. Certainly I never heard them defended as part of a "right" to remain Japanese. In contrast, of course, to you. Where does your argument leave you if the reason for the lack of argumentative heat is that in the Japanese case, as opposed to the Jewish, there's simply not that much debate because the issue is mostly settled?
If this is your case, what have you proven? Israeli immigration law gets discussed more than the Japanese? Brilliant! Given that the former is involved in a shooting war and the other isn't, that's unsurprising. More people know about Israel's policies than Japan's? Ditto for the shooting war.
When it all comes down to it, your important point has been reduced from "Israel comes under unfair criticism" to "Israel sits in a particular context where its immigration policies are more important, and given that it's tied in with war and terrorism in a way that Japan isn't, it gets more attention. If Japan were in a shooting war with potential immigrants and the zainichi-chosenjin were hijacking planes, we'd hear similar arguments about them, too."
War gets attention. This was a revelation?
David Bernstein - early Zionists were more or less in favor of reconciling with the local population, depending on who you talked to. It is an oversimplification almost to the extent of a fairy tale to say "the early zionists wanted peace with the Arabs, and the Arabs wouldn't have them." Many Zionists believed, from the outset, that the pioneers were on a collision course with the local population and that there was nothing to be gained by being 'conciliatory.' Though I don't support his normative goals, I deeply respect Jabotinsky for having the clarity of vision to look at early Zionism and to acknowledge that yes, there was going to be a big problem with merging Zionism and the native population. There were competing visions of Zionism but the ascendant one was definitely Ahad Ha-am's and that vision had no room for the fair integration of a native non-Jewish population (and was already very different from Herzl's)- it was predicated on the purity and redemptiveness of Jewish labor and the creation of a purely Jewish culture. Ironically, religious Jews have coexisted with the Arab population in Israel for centuries - it was the secular Zionists, brandishing 19th century ideas about nationhood that bordered on the mystical, that started the problem (I say that is ironic because the banner of "strong" Zionism has now been passed to the religious Jews, who were originally deeply opposed to it). Is it any wonder that labor disputes (and then riots) developed early on where the pioneers purchased land from absentee landlords, displaced the current workers (who had worked there for generations) and replaced them with Jewish immigrants in the name of a larger, mystical-national philosophy of Jewish redemption? It is silly to chalk that up to anti-semitism, as any group embarking on a similar expedition would have received identical treatment from the locals.
Nations, as with the people who populate those nations, do not and should not be overly regimented. There are boundaries and lines which cannot be crossed, but one doesn't need to accept Leftist and similar or related dogmas unthinkingly. If Israel is in fact sui generis vis-a-vis some particulars of its ethnic/quasi-religious underpinnings, then good for Israel for coming to terms with what is and what is not important to its self-identification. The quotes above, from Joseph Carens and Michael Dummett need to be supported and defended themselves, not blindly and unthinkingly accepted, as if by rote, submissively; there is much to recommend in those quotes, but there is ample enough to be critiqued as well, not the least of which is the dogmatic intonation they use in their inveighments (e.g. race, religion and language are not co-equivalents, nor are all religions co-equal, any more than all social/political ideologies are co-equal, before the norms of civil society).
The notion that religion absolutely cannot supply an aspect of that overall basis is precisely that: notional only, not at all thoughtful or susceptible to much of a thoroughgoing critique and critical review. Whether it be a "civic religion" (e.g., purely materialist, multi-culti dogmas and beliefs), a cargo cult, an animist set of beliefs (e.g., Australian aborigines, southern Sudan), a formal and traditional monotheistic religion, or some other formation, the notion such cannot inform an important aspect of the basis for the cohesion of the nation is insupportable upon very much reflection at all.
People, if we are to genuinely and sincerely (shorn of pretense, guile and duplicity) allow them their own freedom of choice, without proscribing via essentially authoritarian regiments and demands against a free peoples making their own choices, are in fact (not merely in theory) to be allowed their freedom of choice, their freedom of alliances, their freedom of associations vis-a-vis their conception of a nation and nation/state, a formal state. All of this is necessarily "at play" within the dynamics and boundaries reality imposes, and necessarily some proscriptions (e.g., against murder, genocidal intent) will need to be applied if the international order is to be maintained, but the notion Dummett and Carens (as examples only) need to be taken uncritically is precisely and only that: notional, not particularly thoughtful and certainly not reflective of a profound regard for the individual qua individual.
Likewise, if a formal state is to be formed by a nation, beyond a piece of real estate other things will need to be agreed upon. A partial list only follows:
1) property considerations (private vs. statist, etc.)
2) contracts
3) general civil vs. criminal laws
4) general conceptions of the public g