The Establishment of a Jewish State: Classic or Dud?

I apologize in advance to anyone whose personal situation leads them to be very concerned with the sanctity of Israel, but any country that expels people of one ethnicity to accomodate people of another -- and does so because its entire point, as a nation, is to do so -- is a monstrous, horrific, dud. And if you disagree, then I claim wherever you live as a "homeland" for expatriate Ethiopians, so get moving.

As we all know, the last King of Ethiopia was Haile Selassie, AKA Ras Tafari, and one of the tenets of Rastafarianism (and the state religion of Ethiopia before that) was that they were descended from one of the 13 tribes of Israel. Hence "Iron like a lion in Zion" and so on.

By and large (as I understand it) this was treated with the same seriousness as the Japanese Emperor's claims of divine descent: IE those outside politely ignore it, those that believe cannot be swayed (but don't bring it up much). Until the LiveAid famine hit Ethiopa, at which point Isreal said "Wait! Our scholars have found out that you are descended from the lost tribe of Israel, and by our calculations, about of you are of direct enough descent that they are eligible for Israeli citizenship. Could you find them and send them here?".

The version of the story that I heard also had the ex-Ethiopians treated as the worst kind of second-class citizens once they actually arrived in Israel, but so it goes.

By the way, did I say I agree with Nitsuh? I do.

The only question amongst that lot I really know the answer to is the last one.

Andrew -- close with the Ethiopia story. The history/lore is that the Queen of Sheba who visits King Solomon in the Bible was from what is now Ethiopia, and that the decendents of Sheba and Solomon constituted the royal lineage from then on; thus the Ethiopian monarchy would stem from the lineage of Adam, Abraham, and David. (There's the related proposition that the Ark of the Covenant is now located near the Queen of Sheba's burial site in the northern portion of the country.)

As for Ethiopian Jews, well yes -- there is a significant contingent. They're normally referred to as "felasha," which means "stranger" and is therefore seen as derogatory; but on the other hand, they refer to themselves as "felasha," so the linguistic point is now somewhat moot. But yes, it's my understanding that they've not been treated especially well historically, along with a lot of other non-Amhara groups in Ethiopia. And yes, it was concluded that they were one of the 13 lost tribes, and that they were therefore eligible for Israeli citizenship, which many of them took advantage of.

Which brings us back to the central question here, which is: honestly, how can any of us condone a nation that bases eligibility for citizenship on genealogy in such a way? Which seeks to collect individuals from around the world who share a common ethnic and religious heritage while simultaneously expelling many of those already present who don't?

Well, that's nationalism for you. Israel wouldn't have existed if that didn't become an overriding political/social philosophy during the nineteenth century, when Zionism as we understand it began, one group among many.

Funnily enough, I've often said this. If the Jewish people deserve to get their own country, then Native Americans deserve to get their own country.

Well of course it's a little bit more complicated, since the idea of Israel is surely that the Jewish people got their own country back.

Flippant, I know, but you see what I'm saying...

Which, according to their holy book, they nicked off the Canaanites in the first place!

What they've essentially accomplished is a sort of voluntary, elective segregation -- "we don't want to be around you." The problem is that elective segregation always necessitates some sort of selective segregation, the brunt of which has fallen on Palestinians.

To draw a parallel, there are a few black separatists in the United States who might theoretically be pleased with the carving-out of a few black-only states (from which, to follow the Israel example, most non-black people would then be expelled, and into which black people from the rest of the country would be allowed to return). Does that sound like a good idea to anyone? Or does it sound like a recipe for disaster? And doesn't it sound like a pathetic giving-up on the idea that people can live peacefully in secular, multi-ethnic democracies at all?

Regardless: Jewish roots in or ownership of Israel are a completely moot point.

I think we should have buried the idea of mono-ethnic/mono-religious states with the 19th century.

What they've essentially accomplished is a sort of voluntary, elective segregation- 'We don't want to be around you.'"

As far as the establishment of the Jewish state was concerned, don't forget this was 1947. Fifteen years previously a lot of European Jewry didn't see any elements of their faith that made it impossible for them to live among the rest of the world- the rest of the world (not just Germany, but really every continental European country save the Netherlands) taught them otherwise.

Not to imagine that Zionism was a movement born of the Holocaust- as has been mentioned, it was a 19th century movment of the same order as Marcus Garvey's or pan-Slavism. But the experience of the Holocaust is instrumental in understanding the Jewish conception of Israel's necessity.

Ironically, it is no longer the Jews of Europe or the Americas who need to fear another Holocaust, but the nation of Israel itself. While I personally have a lot of problems with the way Israel has acted and continues to act towards the Palestinians, there is a more directly pragmatic concern that informs my agreement with continued support of Israel. That is, the campaign which would *no doubt* be brought by the Arabs of the region against Israel were Israel to lose their military superiority. The Arab solution to the Israelis' presence would probably be less systematic than the Holocaust of the 1930's and 40's but would be, I am quite certain, even more final.

So I guess I'd have to say that in principle I agree that it is an execrable idea to set up a nation-state along ethnic or religious lines, but that in practice, we still have to deal with what we have.

And while it's quite quite clear that the Holocaust was the giant impetus for the actual creation of an Israeli state, I'd say that this is something of a shame -- in that it somewhat implies that the Nazis were right, and that Jews really didn't belong in Europe.

By way of comparison, take slavery in the Americas -- which, without splitting hairs about which was worse, can surely be taken to have been on a vaguely similar level as the Holocaust. Despite continued segregation and inequality, I still think it'd have been a tragic loss if all blacks had somehow been "returned" to an African homeland (Liberia, I suppose).

But I think it's a flawed comparison. As you initially suggested, the genocidal treatment of Native Americans is much nearer the mark.

And BNW, Nitsuh did say *vaguely* similar- at a very basic level we are dealing with the oppression of others based on ethnicity

Not the Netherlands. Denmark, Italy, and Bulgaria (the last two being fascist allies of Germany) were the only three countries where the general population resisted the Holocaust.

In principle I agree with Nitsuh, but I want to point out that if we're going to think about that principle, we could just as well make the question "The Establishment of the Modern Turkish State: Classic or Dud," "The Establishment of a German State: Classic or Dud," "The Establishment of a Czech State: Classic or Dud," "The Reesablishment of a Polish State: Classic or Dud," and so forth. This is the history of 19th and 20th century Europe. The rationale for all but a handful of European states is "ethnic" (mostly linguistic) group, it was the principle behind the making of states after the breakup of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and it's the principle behind the making of states now in the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Elective segregation - we don't want to be around you.

The Jews wanted to return to Israel, they weren't being shipped there.

Yes and no. The British were actually trying to keep Jews out of Palestine, but not only did some Jews want to go there, most European Jews had nowhere else to go. No allied state was willing to accept large-scale Jewish immigration after World War 2. And some of the Jewish refugees who tried to go back to their homes in Eastern Europe were killed when they got there. So no one was offering a serious alternative to a Jewish state. And sure, the Arabs and Jews in Palestine could have gotten together and said, "Let's form a common, multi-ethnic state," but could you really expect them to work from principles that no one around them was working from, esp. given the Holocaust? I tend to avert my eyes from the situation now, it seems so insoluble. Israel is not a Jewish country, it's a Jewish- Arab country with some Arabs who are Israeli citizens and with Palestinians who are economically intertwined with the Israelis. So you have a Jewish-Arab country but a Jewish state, which is an impossible situation, and I don't know if even a Palestinian state would solve this, given the economic interdependence, but I can't think of any other solution except for a viable independent, prosperous Palestinian state. Which would be yet another nationalist ethnic state. The Establishment of a Palestinian State: Classic or Dud?

Nitsuh- a 'moot point' because religious entitlement to a piece of land holds no practical political or legal weight?

First off, you're going to have to define "religious entitlement." If land ownership is going to be meted out by divine decree, the problem of Israel/Palestine remains unsolved. Besides which, my point was that pretty much every worthwhile piece of land on this Earth has, at some point, been forcefully and "illegitimately" seized from whomever was previously occupying it. Sometimes this is recent - - e.g., farm ownership in Zimbabwe forcibly seized by whites, and now forcibly reclaimed by blacks -- and sometimes ancient -- e.g., Norman conquest of Britain from Angles and Saxons and Jutes, who were Germanic anyway. I do not believe that anyone could untangle all of the inequities of the world thoroughly enough to claim that any spot is where any particular group of people belongs. And that is why I find "entitlement" to be a moot point.

What level would that be? Or are you going to render mass extermination as another moot point?

I worded the slavery/Holocaust comparison that way because deciding which is worse is a pretty horrific concept. Would a group of people rather have a massive portion of its numbers exterminated in one blow, or have a massive portion of its lineage enslaved? One can make arguments for either being worse, really: extermination because of the immediate death, or slavery because the death comes anyway, but only after a lifetime of what can essentially be considered torture. My point, in both cases, was that something so horrible happened to a group of people that it might be reasonable for them to want to remove themselves completely from the society/region whose inhabitants had inflicted such horrors upon them. And by the way, your implication that it's somehow self- evident that the Holocaust was worse strikes me as a bit of a trivialization of slavery. The logistics of both were horrific, but in the end the choice comes down to: die now or spend the rest of your life as a pack animal. Are you so sure you'd choose the latter? And does it even fucking matter, once things are at that point? Wouldn't either be more than enough to make you want to get the hell out of there?

More of a 20C idea, this one, that Eritreans deserve their own state seperate from Ethiopia, or Bosnia- Croatia-Serbia-Macedonia- Slovenia (am I forgetting any?). Rarely disagreed with by us democratic-minded people, that a people living in a place have the right to determine their own government.

Apart from my reply to this point, I'll note first that I consider the secession of Eritrea an equally bad idea, and will say the same as every other province of Ethiopia gradually spins off (which is the direction things are headed). (Which is the problem with the self- determination concept: it has no endpoint. As I sort of jokingly said at the start of the thread: why shouldn't I and all other first- generation Ethiopian-Americans have a right to self-determination? Or more realistically: why shouldn't fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. have a self-determined state, apart from their more secular counterparts? Why did black Americans struggle to end segregation, when by this logic they should have gotten their own country out of it? And again, by this logic, wouldn't apartheid have been a-okay so long as "colored" South Africans were given an independent state? How about the Karen rebels in southeast Asia? How about Okinawa? How about the U.S. Civil War -- didn't the Union violate the Confederacy's basic right to self-determination? How about Texas -- shouldn't it be allowed to secede? How about Scotland? Breton and Basque separatists? Quebec? Or that weird Dutch region that got nationalistic last century? It's a whole lot of hair-splitting, and in the end it only attacks our ideals of peaceful secular democracies the world over. It says, "I am different from you, therefore I do not have to live with you.")

More to the point: even if you're in favor of self-determination for all of those groups, note how hugely different all of them all from the Israeli situation. All of those are groups whose post-colonial or post-imperial inclusions into one nation or another are still not completely acceptable to all of the residents already within that area. But for Texas to secede would be a very different thing from, say, the setting-aside of Texas as a specifically self- determined home for some sort of Texan diaspora -- that is, not just whoever happens to live within that newly-seceded piece of land, but for people from anywhere who happen to share some common heritage with that piece of land. Tinkering with boundaries is a far cry from tinkering with geography completely.

Because you see, once we start to associate "self-determination" not with a geographic region and it's national assignment but with a religious or ethnic heritage, suddenly Hitler and the KKK both become acceptable, don't they? They aimed/aim not for the self- determination of an area with common interests -- they aimed/aim for the collection and self-determination of people of a specific religious and ethnic background. This sort of selecting and assembly of People Who Are The Same strikes me as a bad idea, and something completely different from everyone who happens to live in a particular area demanding their independence from a regime that isn't properly concerned with their needs.

This is a fine thread, and possibly one that wouldn't prosper today </pinefox>