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I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part. I didn't get to poll many of them after the October 7th attack, but the few I did poll seemed to have shifted a bit after that. More pro Zionist obviously.
There is something to be said about the people harping on the Jewish state online the loudest are just generally not happy with Jewish people.
I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America. The middle east seems like a shit hole. The fact that they really want to stay there and make it work seems strange to me. I feel no animosity towards Jewish people, and I certainly tend to enjoy their comedy (ari schafir) and writing (scott Alexander). I'd be happy to have more of them as neighbors.
It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever. Unless it was a naked attempt to just kick the remaining Jews out of Europe and let the Muslims finish the ethnic cleansing that Hitler started.
Hmm. While very far from feasible, it looks to me like the best course of action would be to move all the Israelis to Japan.
There's actual historical precedent here, one that's charming/alarming depending on how you feel about inheriting a plan whose original architects cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a strategy primer.
In the 1930s, Imperial Japan seriously proposed resettling up to a million European Jewish refugees in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. Officials in the Japanese military and foreign ministry had read the Protocols, naively took it as genuine, and concluded that people with such allegedly vast economic power would be excellent to have on the team.
They called it the Fugu Plan, after the pufferfish: dangerous if mishandled, a delicacy if prepared right. The plan kinda sputtered out when Japan allied with Nazi Germany, but Chiune Sugihara's visas and the Shanghai ghetto made their mark on history, and they saved thousands of lives.
There's a real philosemitic strand: Den Fujita, the Japanese founder of McDonald's Japan, wrote The Jewish Way of Doing Business and exhorted readers to imitate Jewish commercial methods. Shichihei Yamamoto's The Japanese and the Jews sold over a million copies as the bestseller of 1970.* But the "Jewish corners" of Japanese bookstores also stock overtly antisemitic works, including The Secret of Jewish Power to Control the World, authored by a sitting member of the Japanese Diet. Then again, there are scholarly claims that Japanese philosemitism and antisemitism sit on the same underlying belief structure: that Jews are a uniquely powerful, unified, globally influential people. Which is... true? How you feel about it is your problem.
And Japan has its own demographic crisis, so it's not like the influx of people would be bad for them. Scraping off a few feet of top-soil from the Holy Land shouldn't be beyond the ability of modern Israel, and that's what they care about, right? Move the magic dirt and we're good. Plus given the popularity of anime and Japanese culture, it's not like there aren't going to be hundreds of thousands of weebs in Israel who'd consider Japan to be their new holy land anyway.
(The AMAI run Animatsuri at the Jerusalem Convention Center, the Israeli embassy making anime shorts(!), manga tributes to the IDF)
I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a good idea, but it's also far from the worst idea, and it's also very, very funny. If I was the ruler of the world, you bet we'd put a premium on funny. And this would put me in the good graces of the future Judeo-Hapa master race, so I'm covering all my bases.
*published under the pseudonym "Isaiah Ben-Dasan," a fictional Jewish observer who supposedly explained Japan to itself. A Japanese man writing as an imaginary Jew to tell Japanese people what they're like is almost too on-the-nose for the thesis.
Oh dear, am I allowed to say "on the nose" without accusations of either/both antisemitism or anti-Asian discrimination? I don't know.
Definitely a funny option. Though if they had somehow ended up in Taiwan as a result of this, and been right on top of computer chip production. Oy vey, imagine those rumors of Jewish control.
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Freddie deBoer argued that, if the purpose of Israel is to be a country where Jews will be safe forever, the US already fits the bill. If I recall correctly, he posted this article before that couple were shot dead in DC and that Egyptian guy threw Molotovs at a group of Jews, one of whom died from her injuries. I'm curious if he's revised his position any.
I think DC would need a few hundred more incidents like that in a year to rival an israeli citizen's terrorism danger. I think I'd revise my position if these sorts of incidents became neighborhood awareness of threats rather than national news. Which would maybe be around a few dozen happening each year in most or all cities, and many more happening in Jewish centers like New York.
The perpetrators are also as far as I'm aware still treated like full criminals, with no chance of them being handed off to a neighboring nation in a hostage exchange.
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I think there's plenty of places that they could have stuck the Israel project and it'd be a pure unalloyed good. Northern Australia, for instance, where there's fuck all people right now and I'd expect the Jewish diaspora to be far more productive than what's currently there. I do also feel that a lot of the Israel in the Middle East situation was impacted by the sheer amount of Oil reserves in the region, as otherwise the neighboring states would have very little scope to productively oppose the country of Israel since they are not good at creating organized affluent societies.
There's lots of places Israel would have been better off for practical purposes. But it's where it is now, and the particular land IS significant. And in practice, there was no free land; drop them in Northern Australia and aborigine advocates would hate them today (even if there were insignificant numbers of aborigines in the area).
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Yeah I also had the thought of something akin to the Indian reservation system that US has for old tribes. They get their land, they are a semi sovereign entity within US territory. And their people can choose integration or separation. The Amish and Mennonites also are able to maintain extreme religious beliefs and a separate society within America. Orthodox Judaism seems to also have thriving communities in New York city.
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I think "opposed to the existence of Israel" spans a spectrum. There are people who think Israel in its present form is an oppressive ethnostate and it needs to be reformed ("reform" meaning anything from a one-state solution to a two-state solution to various other proposals that have been floated and failed over the years), and there are people who think Israel should literally cease to exist and if that means Israelis literally ceasing to exist, oh well.
Jews and other progressives who oppose Israel on moral grounds but don't actually hate Jews tend to be more of the former; they don't like Israel, but they also tend to not like the United States, or indeed the West. But they don't want to see a bloodbath, however unrealistic the alternatives they suggest.
The actual anti-Semites, of course, tend to be in the latter category, with their answer to "What about the Israelis who live there now?" ranging from "They can all move elsewhere" to "They should die."
In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.
I believe you. I'm not gonna read books on the topic. My level of interest in foreign affairs tends to drop precipitously off of a cliff somewhere at the edge of my neighborhood. Its a benefit of living in the US that I dont have to understand foreign peoples and conflicts.
Im curious if you know if any of the architects of the Israel project ever expressed regret or a moment of 'whoopsie, that was the wrong place'?
I don't know that any of the founders of Israel ever regretted it (though I am not that knowledgeable about all the personalities). Certainly they knew from the beginning that it was a fraught project that might fail. They were definitely aware the Arabs didn't want them there, though the more optimistic ones thought they'd eventually reach an accommodation and normalized relations.
The thing is, they really didn't have a lot of other choices.
Despite the fact that I am usually in the role of "Israel defender" here because the Jew-haters are so tediously disingenuous and ahistorical, I actually am not particularly invested in Israel. I wish them well but I also wish the Palestinians well - my preference would be for an impossible peace. I blame the impossibility mostly on the Palestinians, but not entirely. I also don't think the US should be so heavily invested in Israel. What do they do for us, really?
But I do like to understand where both sides are coming from. For example, I completely dismiss the "This is our ancient homeland" argument because that only plays if you are religious. Otherwise, no one has a right to land just because your ancestors lived there 2000 years ago.
That said, there are a lot of lies about Israel being a "settler-colonialist" project as well.
If you don't want to read books, my favorite current media figure speaking from the Israeli POV is Havig Rettig Gur. He has a YouTube channel and he is a Free Press columnist now. He's unabashedly Zionist, but he's very articulate and a clear explainer, without any of the anti-Arab vitriol you get from some Israel-explainers.
I wish there was an equivalent on the anti-Zionist side, but aside from people like Norman Finkelstein, there aren't many who aren't just antisemites with a coat of paint.
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It describes me, that's for sure. Israel doesn't have a right to exist actually, it has a right to try to exist; and I don't think my country should be there permanent backstop. Israel can lay in the bed it's made.
That said I would happily welcome all the jews living there not just to my country but into my state and neighborhood; the ones I disagree with politically seem like problem gamblers. Maybe if they weren't in the middle east they'd stop doing things that look so bad.
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