aqouta
Friends:
User ID: 75
aqouta
10hr ago
Yeah, I read your post and answered the narrow question of legitimacy. I think this would all be much clearer and maybe lead to better discussion if you didn't pose legitimacy as the question you are asking. People are consistently telling you that legitimacy and morality are separate questions and you keep scolding them for not answering the question of morality. As if legitimate but bad weren't a valid combination of descriptors. If you were asking "is Israel an immoral state" then there's some meat there. I'd argue that it's immoral by western standards but above par by mid east standards. Can you explain why you're insisting on the word legitimate?
aqouta
11hr ago
I mean your OP turned almost entirely on the definition of "legitimate" so yeah, people are going to argue the semantics of it. You seem to want to essentially merge legitimate with good in order to justify denying the legitimacy of states you don't like or all states for that matter. I, and many, find that to be kind of a silly word game. You can say Israel delenda est if you want. That's fine, a totally legitimate thing to believe. But playing some word game about what it really means to be legitimate is unimpressive. Legitimate usually refers to whether something is authentic and Israel seems pretty authentic from most lenses, at least as authenticate as almost any other state. Its origin and composition is relatively normal as far as states go. I don't see any reason to overload the concept of legitimacy with all this other baggage when you could just use another term, like is Israel a moral state? And cut out all the confusion. If you're just an anarchist and don't believe that any states are legitimate then we needn't confuse things by focusing on israel.
aqouta
17hr ago
I think it was an evil action taken by a legitimate nation(or at least whether nazi Germany was a legitimate state turns on questions other than just the holocaust). I think the question of whether a state is legitimate is different to whether a state is good which is in turn different to whether the actions taken by a state are good, although these different questions interact. Might may not make right but it does often make states, I would actually add that there be some kind of internal coherency that is required. In a game of chess on turn one:
- moving my rook immediately over both my own pawn and my opponents pawn to take his rook is an illegitimate yet good move.
- moving my rook over my own pawn and placing it in front of my opponents pawn line would be an illegitimate bad move.
- if somehow both our pawns were already taken taking his rook with mine would be a legitimate good move.
- if somehow both our pawns were already taken moving my rook right in front of his to be taken for no material gain would be a legitimate bad move
And all of this would then interact with the question of whether I had gambled $1 vs the orphan's life I Was playing the game of chess against, in which case it would be evil for me to make good moves.
aqouta
19hr ago
A state is what happens when a nation holds and administers sovereign land. A nation is a group of people who feel themselves bound by kinship. The nation of Judaism has long existed without a state and then founded one in Israel. It's not really much more complicated than that.
I think my definition fits all of those? It's like the "legitimate" business of a shady scrap salesman who does everything by the books but doesn't ask any more questions than required about where the copper wire the crack head brought him was sourced from. It's only really tricky because there are not widely agreed upon international "rules". So we're left with conventions, comparisons and recognition. It's hard to find some criteria in which Israel is not legitimate without knocking some other widely agreed to be legitimate state out of the category. It's recognize by other states, even ones that condemn it. It polices it's borders. It maintains rule of law and administers basic services to its constituents. The largest thing it's missing is defined borders because it got into the state it is now after a series of wars where it established control of areas of at the time attacking Egypt and Jordan but didn't annex those territories. These are just observations, and if I were to draw a line around the "legitimate states" I would find it difficult to justify a line that doesn't include Israel.
Whether a state is legitimate or not says to me something about its relationship to other states and the expectation of its citizens. Whether what a state does it moral seems to be the thing you're actually interrogating and it's getting hung up on this diction.
More options
Context Copy link