meanfreepath | (no subject)

(no subject)

Why does Israel have to be put on the defensive internationally after its commandos use limited force in response to being attacked with potentially deadly weapons? Would anyone be complaining if the men and women of the US Navy were to use lethal force to defend themselves in the course of interdicting Somali pirates?

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I would never take charge of Israel for the same reason I don't want to be in charge of America's withdrawal from Iraq. It is a huge, intractable mess that can never be resolved without hurting a whole lot of people. The only way to cleanly fix things would be to have a magic time machine that would allow you to reverse history so that it never happened in the first place -- but it's impossible now to actually return to that status quo ever, not without a ton of death and destruction.

(Seen from this perspective the common Palestinian opinion -- "We wish Israel didn't exist" -- isn't genocidal, it's a wish for a return to that status quo that unfortunately cannot now happen without something approaching ethnic cleansing/genocide. But I don't think that makes the wish unreasonable.

This is partly because I now look at the basic and foundational argument of Israel's existence -- wishing Israel didn't exist equals wishing that the Holocaust would recur, because Israel is the only possible insurance policy against another Holocaust -- and I think it's crap.

It's crap for numerous reasons, but one of the primary reasons I dislike it is that it's only a tenable position if applied evenhandedly and NO ONE actually proposes applying it evenhandedly. Not even for ACTUAL VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST -- who is out there campaigning for the creation of a Romany homeland?)

If Israel didn't exist, would the modern plight of the Jews be any better than the modern plight of the Romany, who, to this day, continue to suffer pogroms, and for the most part live in abject poverty?

But do you really think that would be happening to Jews if Israel didn't exist? I mean, I guess the question is where all of those Jews would have gone after the war if not to Israel. I don't know the history well enough to know, but could they all have come to America if they had wanted to? Or would they have had to go back to Eastern Europe and/or stayed in the various Middle Eastern countries where Sephardic Jews lived? I mean, I disagree with Arthur in that I do still think it's nice that Israel exists, and I don't think going back and un-creating it would be an ideal outcome (although I also don't have any ideas for what WOULD be a realistic, ideal outcome)...but I also don't think Israel's existence really has that much of an impact on the lives of American Jews, even if it is nice to have it as a refuge in case Sarah Palin ever becomes president or something...

They could not have all gone to America. Only the ones with close relatives who could sponsor them could have gone to America (and a lot of them did), but it took a long time to get the paperwork through, and the Iron Curtain was rapidly falling.

My grandfather, from Budapest, was faced with the choice of settling in Palestine, or being disappeared by the Soviets (this is what happened to all of his high school friends--one of them had a British uncle, so the whole social group got implicated as spies). So he couldn't stay in Eastern Europe at all. He had no family in America, and so couldn't go there. And his home in suburban Budapest had been demolished anyway, so his whole family was homeless, even the ones not being hunted by the Soviets.

My grandmother was liberated from Auschwitz. (Well, not literally, since most people were marched out of Auschwitz a couple months before the camp was liberated; she was liberated from whichever camp it was she was marched to.) Other people had taken her family's house in the meantime. She and her surviving siblings tried to go to Vienna but there were no jobs there, especially not for foreign, homeless, Jewish teenagers, so they went to Prague, where a Jewish Soviet officer warned them that the borders were about to close and they had better not be in Eastern Europe when that happened. Their one American aunt had come back to support the family when the war started, and so was herself stuck in a liberation camp, not in America where she could fill out paperwork so the extended family could immigrate. So... they had two choices: 1) being homeless in France or Italy for a few years until their aunt was set free, sailed back to America, filled out the paperwork, and the US government processed it (one aunt did choose this route; it ended up taking about five years, during which time she and her family lived in a tent in a refugee camp in France, because they weren't allowed to actually settle in Western Europe), or 2) smuggling themselves into Palestine where there was a network in place to help people like them find housing and jobs. That was the Sephardic community that was taking people in.

Anyway, if these things are happening to the Romany, is there any reason to think the Jews would have fared better if they'd stayed in Europe?

Also, keep in mind that it wasn't just the Nazis who shipped the Jews off to concentration camps. There were some countries who tried very hard to protect their Jews. Some countries stood passively by, or made only token protests, when the Nazis demanded that the Jews be shipped to concentration camps or killed. But there were some countries who volunteered to ship their Jews to concentration camps before the Nazis even asked, or even orchestrated their own local Holocausts based on the Nazi model. Unlike Germany, who've had their noses rubbed in it, these countries have never really been forced to face what they did, or the underlying hatred that caused them to do it.

In those countries, I find it hard to imagine that Jews in modern times would be treated any better than the Romany currently are, if they had remained there.

Well, sure...I mean, I don't know if you read about this when I posted on my LJ about this in the fall, but from my trip to Lithuania last summer, I learned about some strange anti-Semitism going on in Lithuania today. And actually, I've now written a 5 page essay about it that I'm trying to get published somewhere (hopefully the LA Jewish Journal...although I'd be interested to hear if you have other suggestions. (I put it online at http://mcohen1.bol.ucla.edu/Holocaust_Obfuscation_essay.pdf .)

But even though the Eastern European countries haven't come to grips with their complicity in the Holocaust, and are doing some disturbing things with that history...they in fact aren't physically threatening the Jews who are there. Maybe it would be different if there were more Jews there, or if Israel didn't exist, I don't know...but there is in fact international pressure today for them to not do things that are too blatant. (On the other hand, maybe some of that pressure comes from Israel... Or at least, at one place where we went, the Ninth Fort in Kovno, the story we were told was that the only reason why the Holocaust-related history of the site was represented in the museum is that a high ranking official from the Knesset visited as some point in the mid-1990's, was appalled that that was left out, and threatened to publicize it internationally unless they made changes.)

I don't think "The Jews all staying exactly where they were" and "The creation of the State of Israel in the specific form in which it is now constituted" are two binary, black-and-white choices.

Honestly I think the trouble all starts with the point at which it was decided that because a Jewish state needed to be specifically defined and protected as a Jewish state that there was *no other option* but ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It's the same kneejerk negative reaction I have now to hearing the "But if we even *start* letting the Palestinians back in they'll outbreed us and Israel won't be Jewish anymore!" thing, which is only slightly -- because of the stated intent of preventing a second Holocaust -- less racist than when Americans make the same argument about Mexican immigrants or French make the same argument about North African immigrants.

It is true that if ethnically cleansing a region of Palestine to make sure a specifically ethnically-Jewish state could be founded was taken off the table as an option, then the specific plan of going to Palestine and creating Eretz Yisroel in the Biblically-determined region would become a lot less attractive (because no matter what the option of magically snapping one's fingers and pretending that a region of land was an intrinsically Jewish homeland and had never been and could never be anything else would've been off the table) and other alternatives -- other locations, other ways of legally constituting a Jewish enclave, etc. -- would've seemed more attractive in comparison.

But of course this would never have actually occurred because there was nothing as galvanizing and attractive as the idea of a real Jewish nation-state on the same plane as the ethnic nation-states of Europe and because, depressingly, the idea of ethnic cleansing just didn't seem that bothersome to anybody at that point (either the Zionists themselves or the paternalistic, let's-play-games-with-people's-lives Western diplomats who came up with the plan for how to carve up the Balfour Declaration).

I just think the whole claim that "If we have our own country and our own stockpile of guns no one can hurt us" is a very lame claim. If everyone wants to kill you, you're really screwed no matter what happens -- plenty of people who *have* had their own nation-states have been very badly screwed once everyone wanted to kill them. The problem is really the problem of everyone wanting to kill you in the first place -- and I would argue that Israel has harmed rather than helped that cause (it has not, as far as I can tell, made Europe or America less anti-Semitic but has provided a great excuse for the Middle East rapidly and fervently increasing their levels of anti-Semitism to fever pitch).

Also, yes, I would heartily agree that when presented as the only option Israel was a much more attractive option than staying in the aftermath of WWII.

I would then point out that this was intentional -- that the Balfour Declaration was a cheap and easy way (or so it seemed at the time) for the Allied Powers to wash their hands of the "Jewish problem" in a way that involved minimal costs to themselves (or so it seemed at the time) and scoring maximum political points (or so it seemed at the time).

But it is an awfully cheap and shoddy way to try to help out survivors of the Holocaust and provide insurance against such a thing happening again, compared to what they could have done. Far from being a truly magnanimous act it was a brush-off -- "If we give you this useless land that's of religious and political significance to you we can stop feeling guilty, right? We can walk away".

It's almost exactly the same logic behind the Back-to-Africa movement among white abolitionists in antebellum America, people who wanted to have to stop wringing their hands over the plight of black slaves but who didn't want to deal with the responsibility of letting freed slaves become full and fully protected participants in their own country -- just plunk them back where they "belong", in a "homeland" they've never seen and that is of little intrinsic value, and let them deal with their own problems from then on. Clean hands, problem solved.

And it was nasty, ugly logic when applied to African slaves and it was nasty, ugly logic when applied to the Jews, no matter how much people argue that it was the only "realistic" solution. Hoping that all the Jews will flee to Israel and leave your country so you don't have to deal with it is not nearly as malicious or horrific as actively wishing genocide upon them, but it is, qualitatively, sprung from the same root -- a wish that there weren't any Jews around. (Indeed, in very early talks about what the "Final Solution" should be shipping off the Jews to an island somewhere *was among the possible plans* that Hitler and his cronies discussed, before they decided it was too costly and bore too much risk of the Jews someday coming back, and that they'd been successful enough at exerting their iron will over Europe that they weren't really worried about the bad international PR of actually killing them.)

Umm... you have your chronology a bit mixed up. The Balfour Declaration was in 1917, and was defunct by the middle of WWII. The Jews were not legally allowed to immigrate to British Palestine after the war--any more than they were legally allowed to move to the British Isles--although the enforcement was patchy. My grandfather was nearly killed for being on a ship headed to British Palestine in 1947 (he jumped ship and swam over a mile to shore; most of his shipmates drowned, were shot, or went to jail, although a few others also managed to wash up on shore), and his two sisters were jailed by the British for several years. The enforcement of the borders may have been intentionally patchy because they felt guilty about not letting the Jews live anywhere else, but the fact is one couldn't just move to Palestine.

The Jews already in Palestine--the ones who'd been there all along and the ones who'd come a generation earlier under the Balfour Declaration--were the ones who invited the Holocaust victims in, and provided them with housing and jobs. It was emphatically not a project of the Western diplomats--they merely turned a blind eye. It was only once the European Jews were mostly already there, at the end of 1947, that the UN decided to partition the land into Israel and Palestine.

The Jews and the Romany didn't start in the same place and therefore comparing their endpoints seems like a bit of an unfair argument.

Is it your contention that if a homeland was cleared for the Romany people to live in and have their own nation-state that this would substantially reduce their problems to the point where the average Romany would now enjoy a standard of living comparable to the average Israeli? Because frankly I have a very hard time seeing how that happens.

*Especially* if the creation of the State of Rom in some historically appropriate location -- say, in their most likely area of origin, what is now modern-day Northern India and Pakistan -- involved forcibly displacing the many existing ethnic Indians living in the region, establishing the State of Rom as a "Western invader" within the Indian subcontinent and surrounding the State of Rom with hostility and violence for much of its history, requiring the Romany settlers to spend a tremendous percentage of their resources securing their position and making them a flashpoint of international controversy.

Seriously, I haven't crunched the numbers on this but I'd be very surprised if in pure economic terms Israel gives back more total to Jews outside Israel than Jews have put into it. The Romany, starting with far fewer resources, wouldn't have been able to even start making a go of it -- colonizing a hostile territory is a high-capital-barrier-to-entry enterprise.

And frankly I think the idea of "nationalism" as a shield in and of itself is kind of a fetishized idea within Western political discourse that isn't really true. There is a certain psychological safety that comes with thinking "We have our own country which is ours where we make the laws and we raise the taxes and we command the military", but does that actually make Jews safer? If the paranoid fantasy came true and the Holocaust reignited tomorrow and, as the angriest Zionists claim is always on the brink of happening, the Christian West and the Muslim Mideast united to stomp out Judaism forever, would Israel really be an impregnable fortress of protection or just a convenient target for a first strike? (Remember that we're talking a fantasy where the United States jumps on the anti-Semitic bandwagon -- the possibility of this is the primary justification for why a specifically Jewish state was necessary and just going to America was not a solution. How long does Israel hold out against the *entire world* if the USA isn't at its back?)

And, see, if we're not talking about that specific counterfactual -- the *entire world* turning against Israel -- then what we're talking about Israel protecting people from is largely protecting them from problems created by Israel's presence and geographical location in the first place. If we're not talking about the EU becoming a new Third Reich, then the threats against Jews we're talking about come from Muslim suicide bombers and whatnot -- Muslims suicide bombers who are only there to bomb Jewish people because the Jewish people are in the Middle East, and whose primary motivation for doing so is the existence of the state of Israel in the Middle East. (Yes, a convenient motivation often stirred up by politicians to distract people from their own internal problems -- so?)

If we're not talking about the EU becoming a new Third Reich, then the threats against Jews we're talking about come from Muslim suicide bombers and whatnot

I thought the Big Scary Threat (tm) these days was Iran nuking Israel.

Last time I was there--last summer--Israel was far more afraid of the Pakistani government collapsing and having tribal anarchy with preexisting nukes than they were of Iran developing nukes and deciding it would be worthwhile to bomb Israel.

You start talking about a fantasy where there's a second Holocaust; people of my grandparents' generation were afraid of that and saw Israel as the solution, but I certainly don't. I will point out, for the millionth time, that I am, in a sense, in hiding from the Israeli government because I don't want citizenship--it has no upsides and many downsides for me. If a second Holocaust looked like it was about to happen, the safest thing I've ever been able to think of to do would be to hide in the jungles of Central America. Which isn't a great option, either.

What Israel provided was place for a whole generation of orphan teenagers and 20-somethings with no education to get back on their feet. The Romany didn't have that, and still continue to live in shanty towns and refugee camps. It doesn't matter much that the starting point was different--that the Jewish homeless, uneducated teenagers' now-deceased parents were largely middle class, while the Romany homeless, uneducated teenagers' now-deceased parents were mostly poor.

Have you read The Yiddish Policemen's Union? I'm curious what your thoughts are on the society it envisions.

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