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Another day, another controversy about what is antisemitism and what is legitimate criticism of Israel.
This time, a German architecture prize was rescinded over the recipient signing a letter condemning Israel.
Of course, the Guardian is not quite sure how the founder of the prize is called, oscillating between Schelling and Schilling:
The letter in question is here. Key passages:
We still have 3/4 of that century to go, but good job being optimistic!
This would at least be debatable.
Fair enough.
That would be the the general right self-determination of peoples, as mentioned in the UN charter? Does this also apply to the Uighur, the Kurds, the Basques, the Catalans and so on?
Or is the relevant law the limited recognition of Palestine, or the Oslo Accords?
Was the Hamas rule before the Oct 7 a shining example of self-determination?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic to calls to stop the IDF from bombing the hell out of Gaza. I am also fine with demanding that Israel should stick to the Oslo accords in the West Bank and dismantle their illegal settlements.
But to demand political autonomy in the context of Gaza is where I get off the train. The force of political autonomy in Gaza is called Hamas. Their primary objective is to sabotage any peace process by murdering random residents of Israel. Asking for political autonomy for Gaza is like asking for political autonomy for Germany in 1946.
Overall, I don't think that the letter is plainly antisemitic. If the author had signed a similar pledge against Chinese institutions for the Uighur genocide, and also demanded self-determination for the Kurds, I would tend to call them a general advocate for oppressed people. If their only political topic is Israel, then that would be a bit dubious.
If, as the right (persuasively) argues, it is racist towards Anglos / French / Germans to flood these countries with migrants, ending their former status as (de facto) ethnostates, then opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is likewise antisemitic. The destruction of Japan by the arrival of a hundred million of the kind of tribesmen who lived there before the ancestors of the Yamato immigrated would be likewise transparently anti-Japanese behavior. I have no opinions on German policy in this area or the awarding of the prize. Nevertheless, advocating a people should no longer be a majority in their sole ethnostate is damning them in a way, whether it’s done to Gauls or Greeks, to Swedes or Serbs, and so on. The Arabs still have many homelands and there was no distinct Palestinian identity before Israeli independence.
I agree that anti-Zionism is fundamentally anti-Semitism, sorry to say to so many "anti-Zionists" who want to make the distinction, but you also need to decide if not supporting the Jewish state is the same as opposition. Does Israel give huge amounts of military aid to the US and England to preserve its ethnostate? Don't make me laugh. The thrust of Zionist influence in the West has been vehemently pro-mass third world immigration with organizations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, of which our DHS Secretary was on the board...
There's also the argument that it's not "racist" to oppose a state that opposes me. Israel doesn't support my right to live among other White people, and Jews are likely, especially in the face of this election, the demographic and political force that is the most pro-mass third world immigration to the West in the entire world. Why is it racist for me to oppose them when they oppose me?
You just want us on the Right to be suckers, to support Zionism with no expectation of reciprocity. You want us to support them even as they throw all of their own economic and political and cultural influence on opposing us in the West.
If Zionists oppose keeping the US and Europe White the Right should not be suckered into political support for keeping Israel Jewish.
That comparison might make more sense if white people had been a minority in every country for c. 2,000 years, been treated as second-class citizens when tolerated, expelled whenever the majority needed a scapegoat, and then subjected to attempted extermination with everyone prescient enough to try to escape refused entry by every country they tried to flee to.
Unless and until that happens, I see no contradiction in asserting that Jewish people are entitled to a state in which they are a majority, while white people are not.
I agree that Jews should have a majority state, but I don’t think it follows that other groups should be prevented from such a state. The list of genocides in history is long and the subjects are totally random. The unifying theme is that groups that fall out of dominance are at risk of genocide. It’s reasonable, then, for every group to desire a clear majority territory in order to decrease their risk of being genocided. It’s unreasonable to say, “because this group has already been subject to genocide, they should have an eternal homeland”, because that’s an arbitrary rule that favors the groups that happen to survive the genocide. It arbitrarily hurts the groups who are totally eliminated (now or in the future), or who lack the global capital and political pull to demand an ethnostate post-genocide. (It’s not as if former genocided peoples have commiseration for other genocided peoples; Israel refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide last I checked). Ironically, this standard favors the groups that are least likely to be genocided in total, because only an already-influential group can demand an ethnostate and then supply the necessary funds to establish it. (Eg, the richest family in the world supplied the funds for Zionism). If our wish is to decrease the number of genocides, then a preventative approach is better than a survivorship bias approach.
That follows from the principle of "Ethnonationalism Considered Harmful" leading to the notion that, usually, it is not justifiable to take coercive measures to keep certain ethnicities in the majority.
Not totally random. Some groups have been dis-proportionally targeted; this pattern becomes more visible with a data-set that includes sub-genocidal persecution.
No, because not every group has the same risk.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that "Because this group has been subjected repeatedly to genocidal and lesser persecutions, and were turned away and sent to their deaths when they tried to flee the most recent attempt, they should have a homeland as long as there is widespread animus against them and government control over immigration."
If the passengers on the MS St. Louis, and all the other Jewish people fleeing the Nazis, had been allowed into America, there would have been a lot less impetus for the formation of a Jewish State.
If all other countries had open borders, showed no sign of any desire to change this, and that situation continued for several decades, it would be reasonable to urge Israel to follow suit.
(Often cast is the accusation of wanting 'open borders for every country except Israel'. I think a better description, at least of those whose political opinions reside on Level 1, would be open borders for every country, with Israel bringing up the tail end of the process. [Those on Level 3, on the other hand, {if their social circle consists of the kind of people in the Respectable Media} will oppose immigration enforcement in the U. S. because their friends do, support Israeli policies because their friends do, and give no more regard to resolving any apparent contradiction in their ideas than they would give to ensuring that their ideas are expressed in sentences ending in words with an odd number of letters. {The same applies to people whose social circle consists of college radicals yelling "From the river to the sea" without any knowledge of the bodies of water to which that slogan refers.}])
The principle “usually, it is not justifiable to take coercive measures to keep certain ethnicities in the majority” has a big exclusion for “unless it prevents genocide”. Just a cursory look through the annals of history shows that every group which lacks dominance over a territory risks genocide, and that these happen at mostly unpredictable times. Therefore, it is justifiable to take coercive measures to keep an ethnic group in the majority of some territory (or subsection thereof) to prevent its genocide, as this is the best way to protect against genocide. To reiterate my original point, it’s silly to only have a principle in place for when a genocide is currently ongoing, because at that point annihilation has the greatest odds, and surely our interest is in reducing the amount and extent of genocide in total. With all this said, there are ways to reduce the amount of coercion involved in majority-fying a territory, like with payments and subsidities. Additionally, we frequently supersede the right to property when there is a distinct majority interest as in the case of eminent domain, and there is no majority interest greater than not being genocided.
If Jews have the greatest risk of genocide, it doesn’t follow that we should ignore the 90%+ of genocides which will happen to other groups (going by history). There’s so much randomness that it’s impossible to divine who will face genocide. Who would have guessed that Anatolian Greeks would have been genocided, or the Armenians? The Iraqi Turkmen had no expectation of genocide by ISIS, or the Darfuri people. You can’t go by pure “number or recency of past genocides” because this has little predictive value. For instance, it’s only recently that white people have lived alongside other people in racially-blind democracies, so the absence of past white genocides doesn’t tell us about the future. South Africa does not exactly paint an optimistic future of what happens if they become a minority.
This is an argument for why, if we had to pick one group to give a homeland to, we should all pick Jews getting one. But this is not an argument for why other groups should not get a homeland. Because again, if you look at a list of genocides in history, the vast majority of genocides happen unpredictably to formerly safe populations which aren’t Jewish. If we only protected Jews from genocide, going by history we would be allowing 90%+ of genocides. Shouldn’t our interest be in reducing genocides down to 0%?
The exception is more 'unless a group has been repeatedly been persecuted by many other groups, to a degree greatly above background, and given no refuge when they tried to escape a mad-man bent on their extermination.'
Such a plan would be very destructive to human freedom and well-being; furthermore, even if it had been accomplished fifty years ago and every ethnic group had their own country, the division between ethnicities is not a constant throughout history.
Therefore, to prevent genocides from occurring, the best method is to
Once this has been accomplished, and the ideas that 'an individual is less worthy of concern because they are of a different ethnicity' or 'we have the right to send an individual back to a country where they will be murdered rather than risk them causing some inconvenience² to us' are taken no more seriously anywhere among the Nations than the idea that '2.00 + 2.00 = 5.00', then we can discuss whether the State of Israel is justified in limiting the number of Arab citizens to less than the number of Jewish citizens.
¹'Distant' meaning 'far enough apart that even the Medieval Church wouldn't object to them marrying.'
²Such as 'they're poor enough that they might cost us money in social support', 'letting in 10,000 of them might contain one or two people who might wish us harm³', or 'we can't distinguish which ones are in actual danger, so avoiding type II errors (deporting someone who will then be murdered) will cause type I errors (some people might move here for economic opportunity, even if we have told them not to!).
³During the interbellum period, some Unitedstatesian opinionists opposed the admission of Jewish refugees on the grounds that Germany might hide saboteurs among them.
Let’s suppose that Jews do indeed have the greatest past history of genocide, and that this makes them the most liable to be genocided again, and that as a consequence they ought to be first in line for a homeland. I can follow this line of thinking. What I fail to see is why any white person would be persuaded to abstain from forming their own homeland. It is reasonable to think as follows: genocides are the worst event that can happen to you; genocided nations eagerly wish to create a majority homeland; history tells us that 90% of genocides cannot be predicted (imo); without an influential and wealthy diaspora, it is difficult to create a homeland post-genocide. Given this, why would anyone abstain from forming a majority homeland? Genocides can happen to white people, history tells us they are hard to predict, and they are the worst thing that can happen. So, it’s entirely reasonable to hedge against an apocalyptic threat that can happen to your people.
But, as in the case of Israel, this is justified on the grounds of protection against genocide. Let us say that Israel has an 80% chance of protecting against a 500-year-
stormgenocide. Well, white people have no way to know their own risk of genocide because “gradual minority status” is new to them. Certainly, South Africa doesn’t look too good. I would say that a homeland is justified even if protects against a 5% chance in a 500-year period. After all, it’s the worst thing that can happen to a population. So I fail to see why Israel’s uniquely strong interest in a homeland in any way negates white people’s very apparent interest in a homeland. A starving man should get food, and he should get food first, but this has nothing to do with my interest in eating for my nutritional needs.Sure, but this applies to Israel as well. Perhaps in a century, some subsection of Israeli Jewish society will no longer be considered Jewish. It’s hard to predict this stuff. What if DNA finds a hiccup in the maternal line?
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