Finn dAbuzz wrote:
Clearly Israel is not so enamoured of peace that it will allow itself to be transformed into a muslim nation through peaceful means.
This is the dilemma for Israel.
It is fundamentally and unalterably a jewish state.
We can argue whether or not this is just, but the fact remains that it is.
Should the nation, for whatever reason, cease to be a jewish state, it will no longer be Israel in spirit or, I suspect, in name.
Unless there is a dramatic increase in the birth rate among jewish Israelis, "creative" and probably controversial steps will have to be taken or continued to preserve Israel as a jewish state.
Finn has stated the essential points of the Israeli perspective.
The issue for the United States is whether support for a state that so defines and characterizes itself is compatable with American law, values and practice. The answer is clearly no.
The rationale offered to justify a modern state based on such backward and regressive principles is typically the alleged need for a refuge for Jews who otherwise would be subject to universal, continuing persecution and worse.
However the rather amazing failure of Jews throughout the world to emigrate to Israel - in the absence of other unrelated hardships - is rather vivid testimony that there is no such need -at least in the perception of the majority of the Jews in the world.
The history of mankind is full of horror, persecution, oppression and death - inflicted by one nation, group, tribe, religion on another, generally for a monotonous list of similar reasons, usually adding up to nothing more than greed, fear, and intolerance.
The persecutions of Jews in Europe, from Medieval times to the modern age have been vivid and occasionally truly horrible. However they should be considered in the context of other like events -- the persecutions of Diocletian; the ravages of the Goths and later the Vikings; the persecution of the Albegensian heretics in France; the struggles attendant to the Thirty Years War and other like religious conflicts. In the recent age we need look no farther than the Soviet treatment of Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars and farmers in Ukraine; the extermination of the landowning class in revolutionary China; the extermination of millions in Cambodia merely because they had adopted some elements of modern life; the tribal genocide in southern Nigeria during the 1960s against the Ibos; the massacres in Rwanda. And, of course there is the Holocaust - an event which involved murder on a similar scale, but which combined with the methods and apparatus of a very modern state, long thought of as very progressive, reminded everyone of the dark possibilities that persist in the human spirit.
Shall every group, tribe, religion, etc that has been the victim of such acts require a piece of the world in which they can be "safe" behind walls built of the same intolerance that once injured them? The obvious conclusion is that there is no such "safety" to be found behind such walls, and there is no practical possibility of building them for every group that has been so oppressed. Indeed such attempts usually end up creating - for others - worse injustices than those from which their perpetrators were trying to escape,
We have been repeatedly propagandized into the belief that Israel is an indispensable strategic ally. This idea is palpably false. Israel is and has long been a huge burden to the United States, economically, politically and in terms of our strategic posture with states and sections of the world that represented truly serious threats to us. In most cases the supposed benefits of the strategic relation have been in partly aiding us in the management of threats that arose directly as a consequence of our support for their oppression of others.
Just as bad, our unqualified support for Israel has been harmful to it. This unquestioning support has been a significant factor in the otherwise unexplainable failure of that otherwise very progressive state to come to grips with the contradictions on which it is based and the dilemmas they create for it today.
The 'First law of Holes' is -- 'When you are in one, stop digging.'
We should stop digging.
