Is anti-Semitism inevitable?

Lexicus · Jun 3, 2016

Mouthwash said:
I think there's a large area between being an anti-Semite and actually criticizing Israel to protect the welfare of the Palestinians. Israel provides a showcase of the purported "Jewish fundamentalism," which leftists can equivocate with Muslim fundamentalism, to show that All Religions Can Be Extreme. There's also post-colonial guilt at work, so any real problems the Palestinians have (sectarian violence, corruption, lack of free speech) are ignored in favor the Great Crime of settling Israelis on Palestinian land.

Also, when you've devoted time and energy to criticize Israel from its early settlements (just like the conquest of the Native Americans) to its actions in the Six-Day War (USS Liberty was blown up, must have been conspiracy) to its current control over the West Bank (Palestinians are so persecuted they are driven to suicide!) than I'd say you have a teensy bit of an obsession there.

Yeah and critics of apartheid who were genuinely concerned with South African blacks were a rare breed too am I right?
I mean, obviously most criticism of apartheid was motivated by anti-Afrikaaner racism, because Afrikaaners had been oppressed in the past, right? Right? And my Jewish friends who are anti-Zionists, they're self-hating Jews, right?

Israel's government and policies have nothing to do with Judaism. Zionism (in the sense we're talking about it in this thread anyway - the spiritual Aliyah without ambitions for a Jewish state is a very different thing) is a nationalist political phenomenon, not a religious one.

Midnight-Blue766 · Jun 3, 2016

As long as people rag on each other for being different, then yes.

Flying Pig · Jun 3, 2016

Mouthwash said:
Zionism succeeded. Pretty much all religious Jews identify on some level with Israel (even if some despise the state as secular). While Israel exists, I don't think it can be extricated from Judaism.

Even if we take it as a fact that 'all religious Jews identify on some level with Israel', I don't see how that proves the point. All religious Jews identify, on some level, with where they grow up, because all people do that. More importantly, describing how Jews feel now is a long way from setting out an essential and basic fact of Judaism - you've identified that most parts of Jewish identity are essentially changeable and the product of a historical situation, but are now saying that this doesn't apply to the desire to return to Israel. That really needs something more than 'I think' behind it - especially, as I said, when it flies so close to what we see all the time from anti-Semitic stereotyping, in which a Jew can never truly be 'one of us' because they will always have divided loyalties between their own country and Israel or 'international Jewry'. People have largely stopped making the same arguments about Catholics, the Irish and Communists, because as a society we've realised that they don't actually make sense.

Mouthwash said:
Anthony D. Smith is where I got my definition. I think there are others, but can't remember.

Smith is a scholar of nationalism, which may account for the confusion: I'm happy to believe that he defines ethnic groups like that in the context of how they appear in nationalist politics. However, I can't find that definition attributed to him at all. He has two definitions which could work, for 'nation' and 'ethnie':

A nation is "a named population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for its members". Ethnies are, in turn, defined as "named units of population with common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity, at least among their elites".

In neither case do we have the perception of destiny as a key factor in defining either of these groups. At any rate, if he is using that as part of the definition of an 'ethnic group', his definition contradicts that used by just about everyone else who uses that term, and doesn't accurately describe most of the groups usually referred to as 'ethnic groups'. If you find somebody who says that he is white by ethnicity and that white people have a specific destiny, you haven't found an ethnic group, you've found a neo-Nazi.

Traitorfish said:
I agree, but I think there's a couple of things that make anti-Semitism different.

The first is that the figure of "the Jew" is something more than just the Other. Most Others are imagined as having bad culture: primitive, simplistic, decadent. But it's at least a culture, and the barbarian form of the Other is at least part of a Nation, however contemptible his nation is. "The Jew", on the other hand, is imagined to be defined by his lack of culture: the "rootless cosmopolitanism" which allows him to move between nations, taking up and slewing off languages and nationalities like a cloak. "The barbarian" is only as much of a menace as his numbers allow him to be, and is no fundamental threat to the nation so long as he is kept firmly Over There. But "the Jew", by his nature, is a permanent and ever-present threat to the Nation. "The Jew" is almost unique as a racial caricature in their consistent portrayal as powerful and sophisticated. And in that sense, I think the figure of "the Jew" supplies something crucial to the European political imagination that sets him apart from "the barbarian", which requires "the Jew" to remain a figure distinct from the Irishman, the Mexican or the Muslim.

The second point is that the Jews themselves have, by historical accident, provided an incomparable vehicle on which to project "the Jew". There's no other ethnic group which is so widely spread as to be recognised across Europe, so thinly spread as to be vulnerable, yet also so well-established as to be a credible as a shadowy menace eating at the heart of society. The only comparable diaspora are the Roma, and they're too obviously impoverished and marginal to bear that kind of scape-goating. If the figure of "the Jew" has to be identified with a particular ethnic group, it's almost natural that it should fall on Jews.

The question there, I suppose, is whether it does have to fall on a particular ethnic group. Most contemporary hostility to "the Jew" doesn't invoke his ethnicity explicitly: it's enough that he's cosmopolitan and educated and un-nation-like. But is that really enough for the latent anti-Semite? It's hard to convince people out of convinced nationalist circle that, for example, Jeremy Corbyn is "not really English" just because he doesn't share their particular chauvinism. He speaks English, he looks English, he's of English descent: even casual racists are just going to see him as "an Englishman I don't like". And if all of England's woes can be traced to Bad Englishman, what does that say about England? It's much more convenient for the source of the contagion to be identified outside of the national body. And, historically, the obvious scapegoat has been Jews. Perhaps in future it won't be: perhaps there'll be a large enough population of mixed descendant and language and identity in enough positions of power to provide the newscape. For the "rootless cosmopolitanism" to become an actual describe and not just a crude euphemism for "Jew". That remains to be seen.

So I suppose I think that anti-Semitism is and is not inevitable. Conceptual anti-Semitsm, hostility towards "the Jew" as an abstract figure, is inevitable so long as European political thought does not undergo some drastic shift away from its ethnic and quasi-ethnic preoccupations. Actual anti-Semitism, hostility towards Jews and those of Jewish descendant, is not inevitable, because it's not necessary to identify "the Jew" with actual Jews- but I still think it's hugely probable that the identification will be made, and even where it isn't made explicitly, it will still float under the surface. Taking another Labour Party figure, it was even easier for the right to portray Ed Miliband as "the Jew": cosmopolitan, urban, educated, the son of immigrants, and not at all coincidentally, an actual Jew.

I'm not sure how distinct this would be, but I would think that how Communists were presented until relatively recently has a lot to do with what you're describing - you might also see some of that undercurrent in how the media present a lot of school shooters, with regard to their connections to nasty parts of the internet and to video games. Of course, Communism and Judaism were always at least a little bit connected, but I'm not sure how far we can say that one feeds off the other, or how far they're both the same sort of thing - as you say, creating a group of people against which to define 'good' people. 'Good' people are defined by their connection to the country and (in this case) a healthy lack of greed and over-intellectualism: Jews and Communists are the exact opposite of this, so by affirming that We are not Jews or Communists (because everyone hates those), we must buy into the ideals that the people presenting those stereotypes want us to adopt.

Mouthwash · Jun 3, 2016

Traitorfish said:
Israel is still geographically smaller than its neighbours, with a lower population and with no particular advantage in terms of resources, and an aging population in the Arab or Turkish states isn't going to change that.

It has a disproportionate amount of well-educated people (which arguably will account more for future warfare than any other factor) and Egypt isn't going to go to war with an age dependency ratio higher than most Western countries have today.

How many Jews from Iraq or Ethiopia identified as Zionists? Before 1945, Jewish nationalism was an exclusively European phenomenon, and until the 1930s, the Bund always outnumbered the Zionists. And what most immediately put and end to the Bund wasn't out-competition by the Zionists, but Soviet repression, which effectively destroyed the Bund as a major European organisation; the remaining Polish branch was destroyed by the Nazis, and the always-small American branch withered in isolation.

The point is, Iraqi and Ethiopian Jews could never have identified as Bundists. It was pretty much secular Ashkenazi nationalism.

Flying Pig said:
Even if we take it as a fact that 'all religious Jews identify on some level with Israel', I don't see how that proves the point. All religious Jews identify, on some level, with where they grow up, because all people do that. More importantly, describing how Jews feel now is a long way from setting out an essential and basic fact of Judaism - you've identified that most parts of Jewish identity are essentially changeable and the product of a historical situation, but are now saying that this doesn't apply to the desire to return to Israel. That really needs something more than 'I think' behind it - especially, as I said, when it flies so close to what we see all the time from anti-Semitic stereotyping, in which a Jew can never truly be 'one of us' because they will always have divided loyalties between their own country and Israel or 'international Jewry'. People have largely stopped making the same arguments about Catholics, the Irish and Communists, because as a society we've realised that they don't actually make sense.

Uh, Israel is part of the canon of Judaism. Zionism might not have gotten that status after producing a few scattered farming communities, but almost every Jewish denomination now accepts its premise.

The central part of Jewish eschatology is that all Jews must return to Israel. You have outright rejectionists like the Satmar, who say that Jews can only return when the Temple is rebuilt. There are also fence-sitters like Lubavitch, who think it is important that Jews be allowed to return to Israel but also maintain that the diaspora is important. Finally, you have the neo-Zionists, who are a somewhat anti-Rabbinical movement advocating the settlement of the entire land in order to bring about the end times. (These are all examples; most Israelis do not fall into these categories.) Maybe if the early Yishuv had been driven out by Arabs or the Bund had become a liberal socialist utopia, Jews would remember Zionism as something akin to the Sabbatean movement.

I do think that the stereotyping of the Jews as having double loyalties is troubling, but I also don't think that there is much conflict of interest. The only real problems would occur in openly hostile nations to Israel, and most Jews have left them long ago.

Smith is a scholar of nationalism, which may account for the confusion: I'm happy to believe that he defines ethnic groups like that in the context of how they appear in nationalist politics. However, I can't find that definition attributed to him at all. He has two definitions which could work, for 'nation' and 'ethnie':

Quote:
A nation is "a named population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for its members". Ethnies are, in turn, defined as "named units of population with common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity, at least among their elites".

Yes, he defines the ethnie as having a belief in a common destiny. It's from The Ethnic Revival, though I saw it quoted in other book which was specifically about Jewishness as an identity. It's possible that Smith was referring to groups like Jews or other ethnoreligious sects, and this context was simply lost in the quoting.

Tahuti · Jun 3, 2016

Phrossack said:
I don't think we are--I know a number of people, myself included, who criticize Israeli policies while not being anti-Semites.

You are attacking my point by accidentally supporting it.

The argument can be broadly generalised in that the less politically conscious among us can easily mix up criticising actions of governments/ideologies with opposing the dominant ethnic group associated with such, whether justified or not. In McCarthy-era USA and Nazi Germany, Anti-Communism became ethnic hatred against Russians. In Europe, opposing radical Islam became calls for racist immigration policies against people from Muslim-majority countries.

Associating ideologies and governments with ethnic groups with the ensuing racism is a problem. Anti-Zionist discourse has been to some extent hijacked by antisemites. And it isn't to defend Israel, since the Israeli state clearly benefits from it.

Flying Pig · Jun 4, 2016

Mouthwash said:
Uh, Israel is part of the canon of Judaism. Zionism might not have gotten that status after producing a few scattered farming communities, but almost every Jewish denomination now accepts its premise.

The central part of Jewish eschatology is that all Jews must return to Israel. You have outright rejectionists like the Satmar, who say that Jews can only return when the Temple is rebuilt. There are also fence-sitters like Lubavitch, who think it is important that Jews be allowed to return to Israel but also maintain that the diaspora is important. Finally, you have the neo-Zionists, who are a somewhat anti-Rabbinical movement advocating the settlement of the entire land in order to bring about the end times. (These are all examples; most Israelis do not fall into these categories.) Maybe if the early Yishuv had been driven out by Arabs or the Bund had become a liberal socialist utopia, Jews would remember Zionism as something akin to the Sabbatean movement.

You're still describing a belief situated in a particular historical context. You've recognised that Jews managed to be Jewish for centuries without having a physical 'land of Israel': you might also recognise that return to Israel might, in a future incarnation of Judaism, be taken as metaphorical, or that future Jews might not accept that the State of Israel qualifies as the Promised Land. There's certainly a lot of ambiguity in the Torah as to exactly what the boundaries of the Promised Land are. You've pointed out that there are already competing ideas to physically returning to Israel, and there's no reason why the balance between these competing ideas shouldn't shift over time.

You could also recognise that people don't just follow their holy books slavishly, but are constantly focusing on parts of them and taking the focus off other parts. There's nothing stopping a physical return to Israel from becoming just as important to Jewish belief and identity as condemning interfaith marriage, which was historically seen as important but is now increasingly not. There's good reason to believe that this will continue.

I'm happy with everything you say using the word 'now', but you're trying to carry those ideas forward past huge changes in how the world is put together, when an awful lot of other fundamental beliefs and attitudes have changed. 'It's in the Scripture' isn't enough for that.

Phrossack · Jun 4, 2016

Mouthwash said:
OK, then, not an 'obsession.' An unhealthy attitude.

Have you ever had anything neutral, much less positive, to say about Israel ever? If I discussed the formation of the French kingdom under the Karlings, than modern French foreign policy, than eighteenth-century France all in the same thread, and condemned the French state strongly every time, it might be reasonable to conclude that I simply dislike France. Most people would understand this to be bigotry.

Pretty much always in response to criticism. I don't make threads for the purposes of exposing the Palestinians as ruthless barbarians, or their government as fascist.

You declared that Israel was not a true ally because they bombed the USS Liberty about fifty years ago (about the same time America was razing villages in Vietnam, but that's all in the past I guess).

Since you claim to criticize Russia, why not also criticize their destruction of an airliner from New York in 1983?

Rather than derail this thread, why don't we take your attacks to PMs?

Tovergieter said:
You are attacking my point by accidentally supporting it.

The argument can be broadly generalised in that the less politically conscious among us can easily mix up criticising actions of governments/ideologies with opposing the dominant ethnic group associated with such, whether justified or not. In McCarthy-era USA and Nazi Germany, Anti-Communism became ethnic hatred against Russians. In Europe, opposing radical Islam became calls for racist immigration policies against people from Muslim-majority countries.

Associating ideologies and governments with ethnic groups with the ensuing racism is a problem. Anti-Zionist discourse has been to some extent hijacked by antisemites. And it isn't to defend Israel, since the Israeli state clearly benefits from it.

State plainly: Are you, or are you not, accusing me of anti-Semitism? Just trying to figure out if you think it's at all acceptable to disagree with Israeli policies.

Tahuti · Jun 4, 2016

Phrossack said:
State plainly: Are you, or are you not, accusing me of anti-Semitism? Just trying to figure out if you think it's at all acceptable to disagree with Israeli policies.

No. Everything up to and including advocating the dissolution of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic.

Traitorfish · Jun 4, 2016

Mouthwash said:
It has a disproportionate amount of well-educated people (which arguably will account more for future warfare than any other factor) and Egypt isn't going to go to war with an age dependency ratio higher than most Western countries have today.

But all that being so, Israel is still a small and precarious country. Not so small and precarious as to discourage migrants from countries undergoing some serious strife, but enough so as to inhibit mass-migration from more stable and prosperous countries. Unless, as you say, things get really gruesome, but it's hard to imagine things getting that bad outside of Israel without having some impact inside, too.

The point is, Iraqi and Ethiopian Jews could never have identified as Bundists. It was pretty much secular Ashkenazi nationalism.

That's certainly what the Zionists contended. But, replied the Bund, that was what the day-to-day reality of Jewishness was for most European Jews, and what stable basis can a nationalist program have if not day-to-day realities? For the Zionist, a "Jewish nation" could only be authentic if it encompassed the Jews in their global entirety, and for the Bundist, it could only be authentic if it was grounded in the language and culture of concrete Jewish communities. One saw the the other as narrow-minded provincials who abdicated their duties to international Jewry, the other in turn saw their rivals as excitable day-dreamers who confused genealogy for nationality.

Either way, it's somewhat besides the point. Whatever doubts Bundists and Zionist might have had about the others claims to embody "Jewish nationalism", the fact is that they recognised each other as rivals for the same constituency of nationally-minded European Jews, and that both, therefore, have reasonable claim to the description "Jewish nationalism", and we must treat them as such.

So, as you say, we can imagine an alternate history in which Bundism became the only effective Jewish nationalist movement, and we'd know that the inhabitants of that timeline would be incorrect if they saw its ascendancy as inevitable. Likewise, simply because Zionism is the only form of Jewish nationalism to bring about an approximation of its goals, doesn't mean we can project its inevitable triumph backwards onto history, so it doesn't mean we can take that relative success as evidence that Zionism is an always-appropriate (or even always-effective) solution to the obstacles faced by the Diaspora.

Mouthwash · Jun 6, 2016

Flying Pig said:
You're still describing a belief situated in a particular historical context. You've recognised that Jews managed to be Jewish for centuries without having a physical 'land of Israel': you might also recognise that return to Israel might, in a future incarnation of Judaism, be taken as metaphorical, or that future Jews might not accept that the State of Israel qualifies as the Promised Land. There's certainly a lot of ambiguity in the Torah as to exactly what the boundaries of the Promised Land are. You've pointed out that there are already competing ideas to physically returning to Israel, and there's no reason why the balance between these competing ideas shouldn't shift over time.

You could also recognise that people don't just follow their holy books slavishly, but are constantly focusing on parts of them and taking the focus off other parts. There's nothing stopping a physical return to Israel from becoming just as important to Jewish belief and identity as condemning interfaith marriage, which was historically seen as important but is now increasingly not. There's good reason to believe that this will continue.

I'm happy with everything you say using the word 'now', but you're trying to carry those ideas forward past huge changes in how the world is put together, when an awful lot of other fundamental beliefs and attitudes have changed. 'It's in the Scripture' isn't enough for that.

I'm pretty exhausted from spelling it out for you. This is the central claim of Judaism. The peak of Christian interest in the Holy Land may have only lasted a couple hundred years, but that's because it is part of the old 'antedated' canon, not a necessary component of the Christian faith. And even so, it keeps popping up in various modern denominations like evangelicalism.

Jews have always prayed for the Messiah to come and take them back to Israel. This is one of the main purposes of the religion, to bring about the Jewish destiny. The idea has now taken hold that they don't have to wait. While Israel remains independent, Jewish interest in it will never decline, and while it remains relatively safe, Jewish immigration to it will never stop. That's like saying that the Hajj will fall out of fashion among Muslims, depending on certain historical circumstances; it's possible, but takes fairly extreme circumstances to bring about.

Also, you're dead wrong about intermarriage. This phenomenon has increased because Jews increasingly live among Gentiles without any community ties to other Jews (in Israel intermarriage is taboo even among secularists). These people will breed themselves out of existence and the religious will remain. That's how it always is with assimilation.

Phrossack said:
Rather than derail this thread, why don't we take your attacks to PMs?

What do you imagine we're derailing here? No one has discussed the OP since page two.

State plainly: Are you, or are you not, accusing me of anti-Semitism?

Is it possible to discuss Israel without claims that Zionists are calling critics of it anti-Semites? I see it in pretty much every thread, and try as I might, I can't recall a single instance of these accusations being made. It seems like this is simply a tactic used when critics feel they're losing an argument.

Traitorfish said:
That's certainly what the Zionists contended. But, replied the Bund, that was what the day-to-day reality of Jewishness was for most European Jews, and what stable basis can a nationalist program have if not day-to-day realities? For the Zionist, a "Jewish nation" could only be authentic if it encompassed the Jews in their global entirety, and for the Bundist, it could only be authentic if it was grounded in the language and culture of concrete Jewish communities. One saw the the other as narrow-minded provincials who abdicated their duties to international Jewry, the other in turn saw their rivals as excitable day-dreamers who confused genealogy for nationality.

Either way, it's somewhat besides the point. Whatever doubts Bundists and Zionist might have had about the others claims to embody "Jewish nationalism", the fact is that they recognised each other as rivals for the same constituency of nationally-minded European Jews, and that both, therefore, have reasonable claim to the description "Jewish nationalism", and we must treat them as such.

So, as you say, we can imagine an alternate history in which Bundism became the only effective Jewish nationalist movement, and we'd know that the inhabitants of that timeline would be incorrect if they saw its ascendancy as inevitable. Likewise, simply because Zionism is the only form of Jewish nationalism to bring about an approximation of its goals, doesn't mean we can project its inevitable triumph backwards onto history, so it doesn't mean we can take that relative success as evidence that Zionism is an always-appropriate (or even always-effective) solution to the obstacles faced by the Diaspora.

You're missing the point. Sure, Bundism could have won out over Zionism had certain historical trajectories been averted, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as successful or enduring (your words) as Israel is today. It would simply be a vague geographical and linguistic entity, much like the countries of Western Europe, lacking any 'stuff' to provide an ethnic glue. We'd remember it as simply another chapter of the Jewish diaspora, similar to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, not anything binding or final.

Lexicus · Jun 6, 2016

Mouthwash said:
Jews have always prayed for the Messiah to come and take them back to Israel. This is one of the main purposes of the religion, to bring about the Jewish destiny.

But what this actually means in practice has varied considerably throughout history, and, really, still varies considerably.
This simply does not hold up as an argument for the inevitability or historical universality of modern Zionism.

Mouthwash · Jun 6, 2016

Lexicus said:
But what this actually means in practice has varied considerably throughout history, and, really, still varies considerably.
This simply does not hold up as an argument for the inevitability or historical universality of modern Zionism.

It isn't an argument for the inevitability of modern Zionism. But Zionism is universal; it exerts a pull on all segments of Judaism and will continue to do so. The fact that "Jewish Voice for Peace" exists does not refute that, any more than the existence of the Qarmatians means that Muslims may one day stop going on Hajj.

Lexicus · Jun 6, 2016

Zionism of the spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land is very different from endeavoring to establish a "Jewish state" there, and you must know that. Your argument as stated relies on conflating very different senses of Zionism, the spiritual Zionism where Zion can simply be a state of mind, with the nationalist project of modern political Zionism.

Ironically, this notion that Zionism is 'universal' and that wherever there are Jews there will be political Zionism, is simply ammunition in the guns of anti-Semites everywhere, much as the insistence that Islam is "really" a primitive religion of violence ultimately helps the propaganda of such groups as ISIS.

The actions of Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty clique are not taken on behalf of all Jews or even all Jewish Israelis and we'd do well to remember that.

Traitorfish · Jun 6, 2016

Mouthwash said:
You're missing the point. Sure, Bundism could have won out over Zionism had certain historical trajectories been averted, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as successful or enduring (your words) as Israel is today. It would simply be a vague geographical and linguistic entity, much like the countries of Western Europe, lacking any 'stuff' to provide an ethnic glue. We'd remember it as simply another chapter of the Jewish diaspora, similar to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, not anything binding or final.

Well, possibly. I'd be more optimistic about the Bund's ability to create an enduring set of institutions, given that they were seriously committed to the whole project, and indeed the Bund itself was something of a proof of concept: a set of popular, secular Yiddish-speaking institutions that coexisted alongside and in solidarity with non-Jewish, non-Yiddish-speaking populations. In contrast, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was never a very serious point of Soviet policy- at best, it was a sop thrown to frustrated Jewish aspirations towards nationhood, and at worst, a cynical attempt to exploit those aspirations to fulfill the broader strategic goal of populating the Russian Far East.

It's easy for us to say that the Bundist goal of cultural autonomy within a multi-national state was far-fetched and without precedent. But the creation of a sovereign Jewish state, the revival of the Hebrew language, did these not once seemed far-fetched? Were these not without precedent? And would they not seem absurd to somebody living in a world in which they had not already been established as a matter of fact? So I don't think it can be reasonably argued that, simply because Zionism has been reasonably successful, it can therefore claim the status of the one "true" Jewish nationalism. That is, again, confusing the contingent with the inevitable.

After all, who's to say that Israel is "binding or final"? I'm contending that isn't, not for all Jews, not forever. Indeed, I think it's quite probable that the more entrenched Israel becomes, the less Jewish it becomes, in the sense that as its culture becomes more distinctly and coherently "Israeli" and less a collage of groups from across the Jewish diaspora, and the less Jewish it becomes, the less strongly it will resonate with diasporic Jews. The less French or British or American Jews can look at Israel and see people much like them, the more foreign Israel becomes, and despite whatever political sympathies they might retains, it's going to become harder and harder for them to think of it as a "homeland". Israel, unlike Poland or China or Nigeria, isn't able to stand for its diaspora as a great repository of history and culture, because its history and culture is the outcome of rather than the condition for the existence of a Jewish diaspora, and so not something that diasporic Jews can feel themselves to be participants in, at least not in the same way that a Polish-America or a Chinese-Canadian or a Nigerian-Briton are able to do. Israel-as-homeland was always aspirational, and the less Israel seems to be the realisation of a long-held dream, the more it seems to be just a regular old country, with the same sort of mundane problems that any country has, the less that aspirational view makes sense. There'll always be something there- when half of global Jewry inhabit its borders, it would be hard for diasporic Jews not to feel some connection to the place- but it won't be the same as it was in the early days of nation-building.

Give it another generation or two, and Israel will appear less "the Jewish homeland" and more just "a place where lots of Jews live".

Mouthwash · Jun 6, 2016

Lexicus said:
Zionism of the spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land is very different from endeavoring to establish a "Jewish state" there, and you must know that. Your argument as stated relies on conflating very different senses of Zionism, the spiritual Zionism where Zion can simply be a state of mind, with the nationalist project of modern political Zionism.

Israel physically exists, and there are Jews there. You can pose the argument to Christians that all they need is faith in Jesus, but that won't stop (most of) them from honoring their holy relics.

In any case, this hubbub about Zionism being a 'state of mind' doesn't seem very Jewish at all. No doubt some Jews somewhere must believe it, but the extreme majority of religious Jews believe that they will all return to Israel physically. Any disagreement there is about when it's appropriate to do so.

Ironically, this notion that Zionism is 'universal' and that wherever there are Jews there will be political Zionism, is simply ammunition in the guns of anti-Semites everywhere, much as the insistence that Islam is "really" a primitive religion of violence ultimately helps the propaganda of such groups as ISIS.

To some extent there is a self-selection going on, wherein the most Zionistic Jews tend to move to Israel, but yes, political Zionism is everywhere. I defy you to find an example of a community of Jews (NOT a sect, the Jews of a particular region or culture) where Zionism isn't commonplace. Jews in Islamic countries don't count.

Islam also does have a nationalist component: Muslims are obligated to help defend the Ummah and to live under a proper Islamic authority. This is inherited from the days when all Muslims really did live under a single Sharia state and were at war with their non-Muslim neighbors. Should we therefore suspect all Muslims, individually, of being ISIS supporters? No, because carving out a Caliphate in northern Iraq isn't the only thing that could satisfy this need (see 'quietist Salafis'). ISIS is a sectarian group, not a universal Muslim reaction; according to them, anyone not on board with their project isn't a true Muslim.

It's a mistake to divorce all Islamic political movements from Islam. This phenomenon will always reemerge under the right circumstances. But those circumstances aren't universal.

Lexicus · Jun 6, 2016

Mouthwash said:
In any case, this hubbub about Zionism being a 'state of mind' doesn't seem very Jewish at all. No doubt some Jews somewhere must believe it, but the extreme majority of religious Jews believe that they will all return to Israel physically. Any disagreement there is about when it's appropriate to do so.

But again you sidestep the issue which is that "physically return to Israel" is hardly the same as "create a Jewish state there."

Mouthwash said:
Islam also does have a nationalist component:

No - Islam's political manifestation is not 'nationalist' at all. It is explicitly conceived as a religious community, not a "national" one.

Flying Pig · Jun 6, 2016

We've had this discussion before, and it didn't get far. Suffice to say that you're going to have a difficult time arguing that a certain religion is necessarily nationalistic, when it chugged along for well over a millennium before anybody had come up with the idea of nations and nationalism. This is equally true for Judaism and for Islam.

Traitorfish · Jun 6, 2016

The one thing you could say, I suppose, is that Islam and Judaism both share the ideal of a single literary community, which at least anticipates certain aspects of nationalism. Muslim elites were expectant to be at least semi-literate in written Arabic, while Judaism demands Hebrew literacy of all adult men. Most other religions either demand literacy in the sacred language only from the priesthood, simply use a specialised or archaic form of the vernacular, or both. There's doubtless a few exceptions- I think Zoroastrianism might demand limited literacy in its Avestan from lay worshipers?- but none with the sort of prominence as Islam or even Judaism.

So while I don't think this implies that either Islam or Judaism inherently tend towards nationalism- and I'm not sure that Islamism is really nationalistic even today- but both certainly lend themselves to the idea of a unified political community more readily than most other religions.

Flying Pig · Jun 6, 2016

Run too far with that and you have to explain why there have never been Catholic nationalists. After all, they only stopped insisting on the dead language a couple of decades ago.

Lexicus · Jun 6, 2016

Being a lay person in Catholicism doesn't demand literacy in Latin or a knowledge of the spoken language beyond a few phrases.
Both Judaism and Hebrew are AFAIK unique in that they demand literacy in Hebrew or Arabic from laity as well as clergy.
Also, obviously the circumstances of Latin's use in Europe kind of precluded its being the basis for something like a 'nationality.'

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