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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   25875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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What about the position that it’s perfectly fine and dandy for the Jews to have somewhere they can exist, but that it should be somewhere other than the Levant?

A great many peoples of the world currently reside somewhere other than where their primordial ancestors lived thousands of years ago. If every ethnic group on earth were welcome to pursue irredentist claims on territory that changed hands in the Iron Age, the planet would be consumed by wanton slaughter.

Let’s take, I don’t know, Poland. The current geographic boundaries of Poland are substantially different from the political boundaries of Polish-speaking people 300 years ago. The current borders were carved out of the former territory of states that were defeated in the World Wars, leading to the forced deportations of huge numbers of non-Poles from the newly-delineated territories. If I were to argue that this was a bad policy and that the Poles should have continued to occupy their previous borders, it would be risible to accuse me of hating Polish people, of not wanting Poles to exist, etc.

Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews have occupied several different territories throughout Europe since their ethnogenesis as a people. What if I say, “Why don’t you build your homeland in the old Pale Of Settlement instead? It’s more fertile, has more natural resources, more space, and is not in the middle a powder keg of religious hatred which will require you to be a nuclear-armed siege state for the rest of your national existence?” Is that anti-Semitic? Now, certainly there are plenty of totally valid rejoinders to such an argument - and to be clear, such an argument is not my position - but I don’t see how it’s questioning the Jewish people’s right to exist or to have their own territory. It’s a practical argument about what territory is realistically defensible for the Jews to carve out.

Saying "it would be great if the US decided to gift what is currently New Mexico to Israel, and Israel and all of its Jewish inhabitants would elect to move there and gift the territory previously claimed by Israel to the Palestinians" does not sound antisemitic to my ears.

It also is not a realistic proposal, however. Current borders are the results of random happenstances, but it is rare that they can be moved without bloodshed, which makes them practically sacrosanct. Thus, I oppose both new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Hamas slogan "from the river to the sea", because both would entail the forced displacement of the people presently living in these areas.

This is basically my position - I think it would be great if Australia (for example) gave the Jews a chunk of their desert or whatever. But as you say, not going to happen.

What about the position that it’s perfectly fine and dandy for the Jews to have somewhere they can exist, but that it should be somewhere other than the Levant?

That would not necessarily be anti-Semitic, if it were argued in good faith, and the proposal involved the alternate Jewish homeland being an independent state, with a Jewish majority, and whichever country it was carved out of renouncing all claim to the territory.

Why don’t you build your homeland in the old Pale Of Settlement instead? It’s more fertile, has more natural resources, more space, and is not in the middle a powder keg of religious hatred which will require you to be a nuclear-armed siege state for the rest of your national existence?

I have some bad news for you about current events in Ukraine.

Right, yes, again, there are perfectly legitimate counterarguments. I’m just saying that this would not be an antisemitic argument.

What about the position that it’s perfectly fine and dandy for the Jews to have somewhere they can exist, but that it should be somewhere other than the Levant?

"Should be" or "should've been"? Because they're already there, and as the US immigration discussions tell us, deporting 10M people is pretty hard, particularly if there's currently not an existing country to deport them to.

Right, I agree that at this point Israel is where it is and needs to make the best of it. I guess I could imagine a potential future in which Israel in its current location becomes so untenable that the people there are forced to relocate to, I don’t know, the greater NYC metropolitan area. This seems unlikely, though, given the recent track record of Israeli foreign policy victories. All I’m saying is that it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to believe that the measures necessary for Israel to thrive in its current location are morally unacceptable, not worth the tradeoffs, etc., and for that to not be an anti-Semitic position.

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