Denying the right of the Jewish state to exist is not denying the right of the Jewish people to exist IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as denying the right of white Afrikaner South Africa to exist is not a call for the genocide of white Afrikaners.
Afrikaners have a right to life and a right to safety. They don’t have the right to set up an Afrikaner ethnostate on top of the rest of the people who inhabit the land.
Germany is right 100% to combat antisemitism. They are wrong, entirely wrong, to use recognition of Israel as a metric to detect it. It is in fact extremely dangerous and ultimately a generator of antisemitism. Attitudes towards Israel should never be used as proxy for attitudes towards Jews. Anti-semitism is irrational and atavistic at its core. Opposition to the existence of Israel as such is a spectrum of nuanced, but rational positions about land, rights, justice and so on. By lumping in rational arguments with atavistic feelings, they are giving the legitimacy of reason to Anti-semitism.
In fact the majority of European antisémites have zero problem with the existence of Israel “out there”. They are more than happy to see the Jews leave Europe for the middle east. American antisémites are fantasizing that Israel will be the site of the Second Coming of Christ who will then turn all the Jews into Christians. This observation alone should tell you everything about why it is stupid and wrong to use attitudes towards Israel as proxy measures for attitudes towards Jews. When the antisémites pass your metric with flying colours whereas Jewish anti-Zionists fail it, your metric is just shit, simple as that.
Germany is making an extremely dangerous choice here, when they really don’t need to. They don’t have to take a maximalist pro-revisionist-zionism position. They are in fact taking sides in an internal debate between Jews and picking and choosing certain Jews as good and others as bad. Under these statutes Jewish people who speak out against Zionism are automatically labelled as … antisémites.
This is wrong wrong wrong in every way and it makes the world worse for Jews first and foremost.
They stay right where they are. They may need to pay reparations to Palestinians they displaced however, and any laws restricting land ownership or buying and selling to Jews should be abolished.
Who is the government? Is it an elected body? Who elects them?
Because either you appoint a government that is made from basically Hamas (that’ll be peaceful!), or you open elections for a new country where Jewish people are 73% of the population… so basically Israel again but now with officially more territory.
Universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea. That, as a basic universal principle that any reasonable person wherever in the world can assert as the basic requirement for democracy. If you don’t like that, you’re against democracy, and I don’t know if anything else can be discussed.
I never said I was against that. I’m just trying to figure out the much harder act of implementing that very simple view of the world. If you just say, “here’s a new country that’s fully democratic with equal rights for all… but it now includes both Gaza and West Bank and is 73% Jewish,” you have effectively given Israel an even larger country. Hell, in the US we have universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the ocean to the ocean… but only theoretically. Ask a black man how equal he feels in the US, even though he has all the rights and suffrage of a white man. That’s how Palestinians would be treated except probably way worse.
The details beyond that are what is actually difficult and why peace hasn’t been achieved. It’s all fine and good to say, “we should all be happy brothers” but it ignores how hard that is to do when the two brothers want each other dead. I’m in favor of a two state solution along with reparations, but that will also be very difficult to achieve, as evidenced by the many times it has been attempted over the decades.
Denying the right of the Jewish state to exist is not denying the right of the Jewish people to exist IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as denying the right of white Afrikaner South Africa to exist is not a call for the genocide of white Afrikaners.
Afrikaners have a right to life and a right to safety. They don’t have the right to set up an Afrikaner ethnostate on top of the rest of the people who inhabit the land.
Germany is right 100% to combat antisemitism. They are wrong, entirely wrong, to use recognition of Israel as a metric to detect it. It is in fact extremely dangerous and ultimately a generator of antisemitism. Attitudes towards Israel should never be used as proxy for attitudes towards Jews. Anti-semitism is irrational and atavistic at its core. Opposition to the existence of Israel as such is a spectrum of nuanced, but rational positions about land, rights, justice and so on. By lumping in rational arguments with atavistic feelings, they are giving the legitimacy of reason to Anti-semitism.
In fact the majority of European antisémites have zero problem with the existence of Israel “out there”. They are more than happy to see the Jews leave Europe for the middle east. American antisémites are fantasizing that Israel will be the site of the Second Coming of Christ who will then turn all the Jews into Christians. This observation alone should tell you everything about why it is stupid and wrong to use attitudes towards Israel as proxy measures for attitudes towards Jews. When the antisémites pass your metric with flying colours whereas Jewish anti-Zionists fail it, your metric is just shit, simple as that.
Germany is making an extremely dangerous choice here, when they really don’t need to. They don’t have to take a maximalist pro-revisionist-zionism position. They are in fact taking sides in an internal debate between Jews and picking and choosing certain Jews as good and others as bad. Under these statutes Jewish people who speak out against Zionism are automatically labelled as … antisémites.
This is wrong wrong wrong in every way and it makes the world worse for Jews first and foremost.
So what is your solution to all of the people living in Israel (not in the occupied West Bank)? Where do they go?
They stay right where they are. They may need to pay reparations to Palestinians they displaced however, and any laws restricting land ownership or buying and selling to Jews should be abolished.
Who is the government? Is it an elected body? Who elects them?
Because either you appoint a government that is made from basically Hamas (that’ll be peaceful!), or you open elections for a new country where Jewish people are 73% of the population… so basically Israel again but now with officially more territory.
Universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea. That, as a basic universal principle that any reasonable person wherever in the world can assert as the basic requirement for democracy. If you don’t like that, you’re against democracy, and I don’t know if anything else can be discussed.
The details beyond that are not for me to decide.
I never said I was against that. I’m just trying to figure out the much harder act of implementing that very simple view of the world. If you just say, “here’s a new country that’s fully democratic with equal rights for all… but it now includes both Gaza and West Bank and is 73% Jewish,” you have effectively given Israel an even larger country. Hell, in the US we have universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the ocean to the ocean… but only theoretically. Ask a black man how equal he feels in the US, even though he has all the rights and suffrage of a white man. That’s how Palestinians would be treated except probably way worse.
The details beyond that are what is actually difficult and why peace hasn’t been achieved. It’s all fine and good to say, “we should all be happy brothers” but it ignores how hard that is to do when the two brothers want each other dead. I’m in favor of a two state solution along with reparations, but that will also be very difficult to achieve, as evidenced by the many times it has been attempted over the decades.