Matt Yglesias had a long rumination about Israel and Zionism yesterday that matches a lot of my thinking. My shorter version is more or less this:
Zionism was solely a movement of the first half of the 20th century. In 1948, when the UN created Israel, Zionism won—and thereby wrote itself out of existence. There is now nothing more to Zionism than the belief that Israel was legitimately created and has a right to exist. Arabs initially refused to accept this and declared war on Israel, but they lost in 1949 and that was that—or should have been. Instead they kept on starting wars and losing even more territory to Israel every time they were defeated. That's hardly exceptional: Gaining territory by war is mankind's oldest way of creating states, and peace treaties after losing a war are a close second—from the Congress of Vienna to Versailles to Yalta to Camp David and beyond.
Even the PLO finally accepted this in the '90s. Ditto for Jordan and Egypt. On the other hand, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, a bunch of dead-ender Arab states—and, apparently, a lot of US college students—still don't accept Israel's right to exist. It's kind of ridiculous, like not accepting the right of the US to exist even though, obviously, it does and has no intention of stopping.
The short version of all this is that the question "Are you a Zionist" is no more sensible than "Do you support independence for the United States?"¹ It's a question that made sense once upon a time, but no longer. All that's left is whether you refuse to accept something that even the PLO has accepted for more than three decades.
¹A country created by war from 1776-1781 and confirmed by peace treaty in Paris in 1783.
“Winning territory by war is mankind's oldest way of creating states, and peace treaties after losing a war are a close second...”
I look forward to Kevin’s upcoming article complaining about the refusal of the United States to recognized the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (created in 1992).
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This may be picking nits, but my sense is that "Zionism" is a quick ref to not Israel-needs-to-exist but instead to there-must-be-an-apartheid-Jewish-ethno-theocracy. You could argue that America was originally a white-male-land-and-slave-owning state but "America" doesn't mean that any more either.
Perhaps if people switched from anti-Zionism (or anti-Israel) to anti-apartheid-and-multi-ethnic-democracy "from the river to the sea" they'd get better traction?
Like!
But that is not what Zionism means. Propaganda by Israel's opponents have wrapped the two together. And murdering people like Daniel Pearl after they state they are a Zionist, makes it seem like it is controversial.
Being a Zionism means that you support Israel's right to exist as a national homeland for the Jewish people.
No endorsement of any policy. Just its existence and Jewish ascendancy to be like all other peoples.
I agree with Kevin here in that the discussion about Israel's right to exist is moot* and in that sense Zionism is meaningless. The discussion needs to focus on Israel' conduct in the "war" against Hamas; its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; proliferation of settlement; and many other topics.
* Some commenters on this blog will continue to insist that Israeli Jews need to pack up and go back to the European countries from which their 4th and 5th generation ancestors had come from.
not sure I've seen that written here. Certainly not by continually by multiple commenters.
* Some commenters on this blog will continue to insist that Israeli Jews need to pack up and go back to the European countries from which their 4th and 5th generation ancestors had come from.
Who are these commenters? Provide names along with supporting cites that they ever insisted any such thing.
In case that wasn't abundantly obvious, that was the long version of 'fuck off, troll'.
"Jewish ascendancy to be like all other peoples."
I think this sentence is way off the mark. There are almost 200 countries in the world at the moment. While the numbr of "peoples" is very dependent on how you define that term, the estimates seem to start at around 10,000 and range up to more than twice that. I think we can be extremely conservative and still easily say less than 5% of peoples get their own country.
The pro/anti Zionist/Isreal debate is just so full of wildly inaccurate yet widely accepted claims like this one.
Like all other peoples? Kurds, Basques, Catalunyans, Frisians, Bretons, Sorbs, Baluchis, and scores of others are distinct peoples without states.
Ah, wrote this before I saw Coby Beck’s comment; ten or twenty thousand ‘peoples’ seems believable.
Are you opposed to those nations becoming nations?
Are you saying that if they became a nation, that station should be destroyed?
I oppose attempts to change borders by force of arms, in nearly all cases. At the other end of the spectrum we saw the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two states (though the Moravians are still stateless; there doesn’t seem to be an independence movement, however). Slovenia’s exit from the Yugoslav federation was mostly uncontested, iirc. Unfortunately, Serbia contested the departure of most of the other republics, against the wishes of their citizens. Saarbrucken was briefly French after WWII, but rejoined (West) Germany via plebiscite. I’m fine with those. I strongly oppose Russia’s occupations of parts of several of its neighbors, though for Georgia and Moldova, sanctions are about all that can be done without risking large-scale war. I support arming Ukraine, on principle.
We are clearly just refuting the notion that creating a Jewish national homeland is only asking for something "all other peoples" get to have. Sorry, not engaging in distractions and strawman arguments if you won't concede this point.
Are you opposed to those nations becoming nations?
Nations are, by definition, nations. However, I am absolutely opposed to every nation having its own state. Once again, everyone likes to say that national self-determination is a good thing. In practice no one actually believes that.
Rigidly applied, national self-determination doesn't work. All of those nations are too thoroughly mixed together for there to ever be borders that make any sense whatsoever if one tries to use national self-determination to design them. Where should the border between Hungary and Romania be, if that is how you go about it? Should Spain be dismembered into 4-5 different states? What are we to do with India?
The fixation on national self-determination causes more harm than it prevents. It becomes a reason why members of different nations refuse to learn how to live together in states, which is 100%, absolutely a necessity.
This is to say nothing about ethnostates such as Israel, in which members of the majority ethnic group have, de jure, more rights than the members of other ethnicities.
Literally none of those peoples claim to have a right to a nation in a different continent than the one they are actually from. Can you imagine the Roma suddenly demanding the right to a new nation in the middle of India?.
Jewish ascendancy pretty much requires "apartheid-Jewish-ethno-theocracy".
In the long term, I think Israel will be caught by the distinction between Judaism as religion and Judaism as ethnicity. Religion everywhere is on the decline and that decline is most pronounced in countries with high education levels and high per capita wealth, countries like Israel. (The US is lagging other "first world" countries in that respect, but even in the US the trend is clear.) What happens to Israel when it gets to the point where the population is still dominantly of Jewish ethnicity but no longer Jewish by religion?
Judaism has never been just a religion. It has always been an ethnic nationality (without a nation for 2000 years). If a Jew is an atheist they are still a Jew—and always have been.
There is no universal agreement on the question of “who is a Jew?” Different traditions within Judaism answer differently.
More relevant to lawnorder’s question, though, is, what would be the attitudes of secular Jewish Israelis with regard to the rights of secular Arabs living under Israeli governance, In a foreseeable future?
A corollary, and important, question is what would be the attitude of secular Jewish Israelis to religious Jewish Israelis.
It’s not that difficult to imagine secular Jews chafing under strictures imposed by Haredim, finding certain common cause with secular Arabs chafing under sharia imposed by Islamist factions…
Well, pretty simple.
For those willing to stop trying to kill us and to stand with us against those Palestinians and Arabs who are trying to kill us, then welcome to the club of sane, civilized people.
For the others, obviously we will do what it takes to protect ourselves.
Now the hard part is how do you separate the two groups?
Standing with you means standing with people who are terrorizing Palestinians and forcing them to abandon their land and homes in an effort to cleanse them from the West Bank.
But you develop an allergy that prevents you from responding any time someone brings up terrorism perpetrated by Israelis.
What happens to Israel when it gets to the point where the population is still dominantly of Jewish ethnicity but no longer Jewish by religion?
You haven't been paying much attention to developments in Israel, have you? The idea that secularism is taking over there is farcical.
You have an issue with tenses. I didn't suggest that secularism IS taking over Israel; I predicted that secularism WILL take over Israel (and the rest of the world).
" Just its existence and Jewish ascendancy to be like all other peoples." That's a bald face lie. Reality is that the majority of peoples don;t have a nation of their own. Talk to any native american tribe/nation. Talk to native Hawaiians. the Roma, Kurds, samaritans, assyrians, chadeans etc. etc. And it is utterly bizarre to think a european ethnic group should have the right to take over a piece of asia without regards to the wishes of the people already living there.
“On the other hand, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, a bunch of dead-ender Arab states—and, apparently, a lot of US college students—still don't accept Israel's right to exist. It's kind of ridiculous”
And add to that group: a whole bunch of the people who comment here on Kevin’s blog. There have been many comments (on several of Kevin’s blog posts) specifically asserting: Israel has no right to exist.
Such commentators don’t even utilize the vague euphemisms currently in vogue for these sentiments: from the river to the sea, Hamas is on the way, etc. Nope, they just blurt it out: the only Jewish nation in the world should cease to exist.
So, along with the genocidal terrorists of Hamas, the brutally theocratic regime of Iran, and the comically stupid activists at our so-called elite schools, you can add a bunch of loony leftists as well.
Yep. Again, however, this is not an endorsement of Israel's behavior in this war and in general.
Actually in any other context Liberals would all be saying that "rights" do not apply to states, they apply to individuals. And in the Israeli context there are millions of people who have their rights largely respected, and millions of people who do not, and the focus should be on how to get the latter group its basic rights.
In the black is white way that Israel is discussed, Israel's right to exist has become a way of saying that since Israel currently has a state and the Palestinians don't ignoring the rights of Palestinians is within the reasonable range of positions one can hold, but ignoring the rights of Israelis is not.
This should be thought of as up there with the idea that Jews are the only people whose right to a state is questioned, which is true only if one ignores all of the other peoples who do not have a state without there being any view that they have to get one, and also the other countries that get criticized for the way they abuse minority populations. Of course in Israel the Palestinians aren't actually a minority population. They are just a minority of the population that has a say in how Israel is governed.
I tell you: a lot of the same people said the last white-dominated majority Black state in Africa should cease to exist, and look what happened to it!
Tissue, Leo1008?
"white-dominated majority Black state in Africa should cease to exist, and look what happened to it!" It still exists but is no longer white dominated.
I think you;re confusing those who correctly believe that it was fundamentally evil to have created israel but it nevertheless exists with those who think israel should be destroyed.
I can’t see how there is a ‘right’ for any nation to ‘exist’ when there is no governing authority to enforce such a right. There are self-proclaimed states that are recognized by few or no nations (Transnistria, Abkhazia, North Ossetia) but over which the international community takes minimal action. What happened to the Republic of Artsakh’s right to exist when the Republic ceased to exist?
It is kind of silly that people want to relitigate the 1948 decision. It happened, it wasn't ideal, and now people have been living in this country for over half a century.
However -- I would like a two state solution. But a majority of Israelis don't, and a majority of Palestinians don't. And while I think it would be horrible at this point to ethnically cleanse the Israelis, I think it's equally horrible to consider ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. But if the only options being considered are one side or the other gets the whole thing, I think they deserve equal weight.
(There's another option -- Palestinians keep their land but are completely subjugated to Israeli forces. That's basically the status quo, and it sucks.)
I don't think there's an imperative that there be a "Jewish state", at least not one right there. I certainly think it's great if there is one for a lot of reasons, but is it worth a genocide? No.
Really hope they work out a two state solution, but if they don't, it's a tragedy, whichever way it ends.
" Palestinians keep their land " This option fundamentally means israel ceases to exsist since all of the land historically belongs to the palestinians.
"Zionism was solely a movement of the first half of the 20th century."
Zionism on the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum is still going strong. Creating Israel was the first step toward the restoration of "Eretz Israel." That project is still incomplete, so Zionism is very much a 21st scentury movement.
Glad I skipped to the end. This comment is correct.
Events on the ground provide all of the evidence necessary.
Well, there's one other thing left -- whether or not you support the right to exist of people who accepted yours, oh, let's say three decades ago.
This is a very partial definition of Zionism. The more complete definition definition, as acknowledged by the founders, includes the idea that the creation of Israel requires kicking out local Arabs by force, in other words ethnic cleansing.
In particular, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and his branch of Revisionist Zionism, the one which is active nowadays at least since Nenatnyahu came to power, was very clear about the fact that the goal is to take land from their owners and that violence was necessary for this.
It matters because Zionism did not at all finish when Israel was created: first, because there is strong evidence that Israeli founders officially accepted the partition but unofficially intended to conquer more land. Second, because Zionism is still very much alive as Israeli settlers continue the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank: the goal of Zionism is not to have some land, it's to have all the land.
Zionism was morally acceptable in the first half of the 20th century because the Western world was fine with colonization. But a few things have changed (the right to self-determination, for instance). The question is not whether Israel has a right to exist, the answer to this is obviously yes. The question is whether Palestine has a right to exist... Zionism clearly says no.
Zionism dates back to the era of Babylonian empire and the Judean's wish to return from exile. Had a big uptick after 70AD when the romans expelled all of the jews from the holy land. One can see it had always existed in modern europe by the fact that the majority of jews in palestine in 1880 spoke a dialect of spanish and many of the rest spoke a dialect of German. Jews moving to palestine and hoping to create a new jewish homeland is as old as history.
As far as Kevin's contention that israel is a fait accompli, he should look up the fate of the crusader states of the holy land.
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