Insisting that Israel is Both Necessary and Just
I’m a Platonist, wholly convinced that Ideas Pre-exist (and will post-exist) the material and that we could not apprehend/say anything meaningful about both concepts and objects of the senses without Ideas/Universals existing behind what our senses access. This is incompatible with ancient Hebraic theology. While Platonism allows for a God, Platonism’s is penultimate, not ultimate, and I have never been, therefore, a believer in a God as a Prime Mover (the basis of the Hebraic paradigm), The One in fundamental control. (If such a fellow/gal does exist s/he’s had some really bad decades, as between the mid ’30s and mid-’40s, and many other really awful eras.)
What I am, in this context, is a Zionist; it needn’t have anything whatever to do with religious faith. It’s a simple recognition, a necessity.
My family and I have as much a right to thrive as anyone despite the clear-as-a-bell truth that well too many as yet believe that Jews do not have an equal claim on living, let alone thriving, as white Christians have and as long as there are people who identify me and mine with people who would do well to be lobbed into ovens, Zionism is a practical alternative, the most practical alternative going.
Why? Because conversion and an announced atheism do not answer the concern: while the Nazis lost a war, their ideology of Racial anti-Semitism won. Even today the mildest anti-Semite assumes something genetically worthy of machine-gun ditches for Jews.
The gist is this: No other group besides Jews claiming some affinity to that strip of land has been routinely expelled from scores of other nations and targeted for extinction. Other cultural nations in the 19th/20th C and before…Native Americans by the ancestors of white Christians here, Armenians by Turks have, various African ethnicities by one another have…all have been marked for extinction, but without having zip to do with what Rome called “the pest-hole of the Empire”, the “rock and dust-filled” eyesore, Palestine, now Israel. Israel’s the sole sane answer to a history of routine expulsions and mass murder.
My family’s life isn’t worth a Dave & Buster’s slot coin without a Just and robust Israel, vital and strong. And, again, this is practical: without Israel it’d be open-season on Jews everywhere, again — and we know anti-Semitic violence is on the rise here, now, and in Europe — and people denying that or lacking this understanding have no reading of history worth a damn.
And I insist, along with tens of millions of other Jews, that Zionism is critical, as are Just Israeli governments.
07/10/2019 @ 1:36 pm
“No other group besides Jews claiming some affinity to that strip of land has been routinely expelled from scores of other nations…”
.
.
That will come as a bit of a shock to the people who had lived on that strip of land for generations (and who are still prohibited from returning to it.)
Your sense of Jewish tribe entitlement not withstanding, moving right into the self same homes of the people who were rousted out at gun-point is far from “just”.
07/10/2019 @ 3:01 pm
I will insist that Israel give itself back to “the Palestinians” as soon as the United States gives back Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming etc. to Mexico. While we are at it, let’s cut loose the Hawaiians, give Alaska back to the Russians (we underpaid for it) and insist that Great Britain leave Northern Ireland, not to mention Scotland and Wales. (Oh wait. That seems to be happening.) And let’s not forget the repatriations of the rest of the Western Hemisphere back to the descendants of their original rightful owners.
The law of conquest is a natural law. You keep what you win in battle. We did it. The Russians did it. The Chinese did it….the list goes on and on into the depths of history.
It’s not fair. It is the law of the jungle…but that’s exactly where we are living. We just like to pretend otherwise.
In no other time and no other place has one nation been told to give back land taken by right of conquest. In point of fact, however, the Jews were thrown out of Israel in the second century AD, around 500 years before the advent of Islam. (Well, they’ve been told….but nobody listens.)
Here we it a very interesting conundrum. Until the advent of Islam, there were no distinguishing racial characteristics separating the various tribes, and that’s what these people were: tribes from the same basic stock. Then, having been evicted, the Jews wandered around the world for two thousand years and then gathered back together again in Israel, bringing their mixed genetic heritage back with them, now no longer so semitic but still related by blood and heredity to the Jews who were evicted from Israel in 73 AD.
Since the only real differentiating characteristic between classical Arabs and classical Jews was the religions they adopted, we are looking at a battle between cousins over the estates of their grandparents.
Today there are cultural characteristics separating the Israelis from the Palestinians, but if they both gave up their religions and became satanists together, what would they have to argue about? The entire mess would end up in law suits over specific pieces of property.
The whole situation is an impossible conundrum, and this argument is pointless, because the Israelis don’t give a shit about what we think or say or write and neither dio the Palestinians.
07/10/2019 @ 4:48 pm
Plus there’s yet another dimension: Up until not all that long before independence, how Jews got land in Palestine was not by conquest but by purchase. This is completely unprecedented anywhere with the possible exception of Manhattan Island, where it is probably it was sold to the Dutch by a tribe that didn’t actually own it. Israel is one of the Least violent conquests in history.
But we’re not finished yet, because now we have to define “Palestinian.” Some of the so-called Palestinians came to Palestine for the first time around the time the Ashkenaz Jews did, coming mainly from Syria looking for employment from the growing number of…..Jews. Arafat, for example, was not Palestinian. In fact, he wasn’t born in Palestine.
And then there’s who left how. There are three populations: the population that left on the advice of surrounding Arab states, the population that was forced out (the only one with any kind of a case), and the population that stayed. The population that stayed still has property in what is now Israel because they’re Israelis.
And, by the way, it’s not like the fact that Jews originally came from Palestine is under dispute. Technically it can’t be because it’s in the Qur’an, aside from a whole lot of historical and archeological (and genetic) evidence.
None of which justifies Netanyahu or the sicker members of his administration and allies. That’s not the point. We’re not interested in justifying him. Whether or not anyone thinks anyone has a right to any land, at this point these areas have been populated by these groups for a couple of generations. No one is moving. If that’s a given, and it is, then some sort of accommodation needs to be made to adjust to this immutable reality.
07/11/2019 @ 7:26 am
Wholly right, Kosh.
07/10/2019 @ 5:28 pm
reasonable deal….
07/10/2019 @ 6:06 pm
You realize that you just tried to justify every genocide, act of “manifest destiny” racism and even the actions of the Nazis, right?
07/10/2019 @ 6:18 pm
Your thought-thread escapes me. Perhaps others here can sort it out.
07/11/2019 @ 10:08 am
Her thought thread doesn’t escape me. She makes a valid point. That conquest has been the norm doesn’t make it moral.
07/10/2019 @ 6:27 pm
MLK: “WHEN PEOPLE CRITICIZE ZIONISTS THEY MEAN JEWS. …IT’S ANTI-SEMITISM.”
(uhmhmm…and in nearly every case)
07/10/2019 @ 7:10 pm
That is a zionist trope, JW. In fact, you differentiated between Zionism and being Jewish in this very post. Are you saying that it is somehow okay for zionists to do it (when it suits their agenda), but no one else?
07/10/2019 @ 7:29 pm
In nearly every case they mean Jews.