(no subject)

[meanfreepath]

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?

Comments

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

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).