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A short introduction to Liberal Zionist rhetoric, and why they usually just keep quiet.
A day ago a very interesting interview between Krystal Ball and Rep. Adam Smith took place. The topic of contention was Israel.
tl;dr: Openly defending Israel as a jewish ethnostate is OK as a democrat.
The interview starts off cordial enough. Adam establishes himself as the typical neo-liberal everyman who can sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden AND the military industrial complex (What a guy!) whilst Krystal fronts the now typical faux radical left 'not everyone in the DSA is insane, actually. At least I'm not' media personality that goes hard on the issues that pull on the heart strings.
Where things go south unexpectedly is around the 11:30 mark. Krystal compliments Adam on his recent strong voting pattern against aid to Israel, specifically the Thomas Massie amendment, and asks him to explain his thought process and change of heart. Adam waffles on a bit about his opposition to the Netanyahu government, a typical Liberal Zionist talking point, but then suddenly veers off the rails:
This is not out of context, this is the argument. Yes, Liberal Zionists are democrats. Yes, they are against the Netanyahu government. Yes, they believe in the concept of Israel as an explicit ethnostate. He believes it is not possible for Palestinians to represent jews in Israel. Two ethnic groups can not coexist. They are definitionally in a zero sum game of survival. That's the establishment democrat Liberal Zionist view for jews in Israel.
Understandably, Krystal catches on to this
Neo NaziZionist talking point that's somehow found its way into her otherwise progressive liberal leftist studio:Adam replies, a little more flustered than before:
Mein Kamerad... Krystal replies:
To which Adam retorts:
Which is the extent of his argumentation that isn't a soft recital of the many permutations of ethno nationalism argued for on the old /r/AltRight, RIP.
Krystal, to her credit as a host, tries to segue this into something else and asks why the US taxpayer should care about a jewish ethno supremacist project in the middle East, which Mike Huckabee would have been happy to answer. But Adam can't really seek refugee in the Scofield Bible so he doubles down on
Neo NazismZionism for jews:Well OK.
To all the Adam Smiths of the world. Why is having an ethnostate good for the jews but not anyone else? Why don't jews benefit from diversity in their western style open democratic society like everyone else? Why doesn't the magic freedom dirt in Israel transform your third worlders into engineers and scientists like it allegedly does everywhere else in the west, who would be just as jewish as anyone else in a few years. How is it possible to represent anything the Democrats have represented the world over and then believe this for Israel in the back of your brain?
Adam arrived to this interview ready to earnestly make the point that ethnonationalism is good for jews. He wanted to say this and he did. And I get it. Because he's not wrong. It's just that he believes it's wrong for everyone else. Most Liberal Zionists must understand that this contradiction is impossible to defend, which is probably why they don't talk about it at all. Hell, I'm starting to believe they can't even conceive of it. The Dual Morality is so strong it probably doesn't even register as a contradiction. But to hear it from the horses mouth is flabbergasting.
I mean, he's correct as to the issue there, right?
A one-state solution is impossible because nobody wants it. The Israelis don't want it, because they correctly believe that it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and it is an explicitly-understood goal of Israeli policy that Jews must always be a dominant majority in Israel. That was the whole reason Israel was created in the first place - for there to be a Jewish state. This isn't a secret anyone is exposing - they say it explicitly. Meanwhile, the Palestinians don't want it, because... I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the Palestinians hate the Jews. They do not want to co-exist with them. One of the reasons why Israeli Jews don't want a one-state solution is because they - still correctly - believe that the most likely result of that would be a lot of dead Jews.
The people saying, "Why can't you just all be one state together with equal rights regardless of faith or ethnicity?" are either being disingenuous or stupid. It is obvious to anybody looking at the situation honestly why that cannot work.
Moreover, don't we allow other states to do this? Israel is not unique in holding itself to be the nation of a particular ethnicity, favouring people of that ethnicity, and making policy with a deliberate eye to maintaining that ethnicity's dominant status in its homeland. Japan is probably the most famous other one, and we generally accept that the Japanese have a right to decide how they want to run Japan. Most Middle Eastern countries are like Israel in this respect - just ask the Turks about nationality.
Israel is different to the United States in being an ethno-state, but ethno-states are common. The US is the weird one, not Israel.
The Palestinians' current hatred for the Jews is a product of Israel's actions for the past 80 years. In 1948, Palestinians were advocating a one-state solution, and the Zionists were opposed to it. There is no reason to believe anything bad would have happened to the Jews if the Palestinians had got their way, given that Arabs had already coexisted peacefully with Jews for over a millennium. The Zionists just wanted a Jewish state as an ideological axiom.
It's doable with an international peacekeeping force to keep things in control until they stop hating each other.
That's true, at least to within a certain approximation, but irrelevant. Today a one-state solution is impossible because the Palestinians and Israelis hate each other.
Whether that's true or not, it's also irrelevant because there is no such peacekeeping force, nobody appears to be willing to provide one, and even if they were, such a massive garrison force would destabilise the region (even more so than it already is) and be hated by all of Israel/Palestine's neighbours.
I just don't think there's any point either arguing would'ves and could'ves, or arguing for ideal solutions that have zero chance of actually happening. It isn't 1948, and there is no giant neutral army prepared to come in and enforce a solution. Can we please be serious?
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'My fellow whites' is morphing into 'My fellow neo-nazis? Well, as a fellow neo-nazi, Of course he is right. I would welcome this brother with open arms into the pan-nationalist fold. As anything else? No, he's actually wrong in the most racist way possible. It's a declaration of war against modern liberal societies and their moral identity.
The ideological priors that underpin that identity are very robust and ubiquitous in western societies, from being taught in elementary schools to being depicted in pop media. There is only one race, the human race. We are all inherently good, of equal worth, moral character and our faults are only a product of environmental circumstance. Openness and trust good, prejudice bad. We can all learn and better ourselves if given the chance and resources. Immigration is advertised as a universal good. Economically, culturally, morally and to the exclusion of any preservative conception of an ancestral or genetic ethnic identity. It's actually a moral duty to improve the conditions of others to help elevate them to the privileged point you coincidentally occupy today and any conception of your ancestral lineage or future progeny or majoritarian ingroup bias that exists to the exclusion of others is the greatest moral evil in existence.
'Anyone who doesn't functionally grasp and agree with the principles of Neo-Nazism is disingenuous or stupid'? Apologies if I'm misinterpreting this and you are saying modern liberalism is 'working' for the west. But regardless of that I don't remember anyone proclaiming modern liberalism needs to work to the benefit of ethnocentric jews in particular. We all have to share this earth. Palestinians and jews included.
Sure, it sucks jews are a global minority and will definitely go extinct under this paradigm, but that's the case for most peoples. We will all end up beige.
We generally accept that democracy is good. Stating that non-Japanese people would be incapable of participating in it in Japan without destroying it for the Japanese is the most illiberal and racist thing I've heard in years.
Ethno-states can only be alleged to be common as a result of history and circumstance. But nigh every first world nation, including Japan, is transforming away from that. That is the direction of modern liberalism. Israel is unique in that it's demanding a different direction for itself for profoundly illiberal neo-nazi reasons.
Where are you getting neo-Nazis? Do you think that any group that wants to remain ethnically/culturally/religiously distinctive, in any way, is neo-Nazi?
I think a one-state solution in Israel is impossible for pragmatic, historically contingent reasons. This group of people and that group of people are unwilling to co-exist in the one state. You can judge one group or the other or both immoral, but I'm not making a moral judgement. I'm saying that, like it or not, you cannot jam Israelis and Palestinians together into the one state. Neither group will accept that.
I do not blame Jews (or members of any group) for not wanting to go extinct. No group has an obligation to embrace its own obliteration.
You then bring up 'democracy' for some reason even though I didn't touch on that in the slightest. I think that ethno-states are common, and I did not say that ethno-states are morally impermissible. I think that national communities have a right to self-determine and that includes the right to be an ethno-state. The Japanese people are morally permitted to constitute themselves as an ethno-state, for instance. This is a different and unrelated question to that of democracy. You can have a democratic ethno-state, a non-democratic ethno-state, a democratic non-ethno-state, and a non-democratic non-ethno-state. They are unrelated axes.
I don't think Israel is unique in being or wanting to be an ethno-state, and there are plenty of comparable nations. I just mentioned Azerbaijan, for instance. You can say that ethno-states shouldn't exist if you like - that's your own judgement. But I'm not forbidding that. Some countries are ethno-states and some countries are not ethno-states and I'm fine with this.
The case you are making for Israel is the case every neo-nazi has made for their own country. All of your assertions derive from illiberal worldview that is directly tied to the modern conception of neo-nazism. The idea of ethnostates as a coherent concept in the first place is going over the line, let alone that they could ever be good.
You're not engaging with the contention. We can agree between the two of us to any illiberal view on the world for the preservation of our peoples and whatever else, but what's the relevance of that to the discourse relating to the reigning powers that be who are liberal and don't agree with us at all? Who'd denigrate the very idea that there are coherent and exclusive groups in the first place outside of the conception that the one that is better off should help the one whose worse off.
I already explained why this line of thinking is invalid. Ethnostates can only be alleged to be common as a result of history and circumstance. But nigh every first world nation, including Japan, is transforming away from that. That is the direction of modern liberalism. Israel is unique in that it's demanding a different direction for itself for profoundly illiberal neo-nazi reasons.
To highlight this further with your example of Azerbaijan, if Azerbaijan was becoming an economic powerhouse, with opportunity that would make the life of foreign immigrants better, would they or would they not be obligated to open their borders to immigration under liberal priors? I'll repost them here:
Which one of these do you disagree with? What do liberals call people who disagree with their core values? Who do you think you are to them?
The Palestinians and Israelis can make peace and if the neo-nazi conception of Israel has to perish for that peace to happen liberals have no reason to care. It's a process that's already ongoing in the west. Why shouldn't it happen to Israel?
I don't think that's the case. Neo-Nazism is a much more specific, narrow family of ideologies than that. The analogy to neo-Nazism is not helpful or relevant here because neo-Nazism is obviously not the same thing as ethno-nationalism simpliciter.
You're talking with me, though. I don't have an army of ghosts behind my shoulder, and I'm not going to take the heat for this imaginary audience you appear to be bothered by. It's not an argument against me if some other group of people somewhere else think ethno-nationalism is always wrong. I don't think ethno-nationalism is always wrong, clearly the Israelis don't think ethno-nationalism is always wrong, Americans who support Israel don't seem to think that ethno-nationalism is always wrong, and as far as I can tell a great many people all around the world don't think that ethno-nationalism is always wrong.
Well, I don't accept that Israel is unique in that regard - there are plenty of other nations that are ethno-nationalist, some in a quite assertive way. You just don't seem to think they count. At any rate, I think that nations may constitute themselves in an ethno-nationalist way if they want. That's true for Israel, Azerbaijan, or indeed Japan. Who cares about 'the direction of modern liberalism'? Okay, it's true, there are people and organisations in the world who think that ethno-nationalism is always wrong. But those people are not everyone or everywhere, they're not me, and they don't appear to be controlling the situation in the Middle East.
What more do you want me to say? If 'modern liberalism' forbids ethno-states, then modern liberalism is wrong. That was easy.
What difference does it make whether they're rich or not? That's not germane to the point under discussion.
I'm sorry, is this meant to be a gotcha? I have said already that I think ethno-nationalism can be acceptable and that ethnic or national groups can set the terms of entry. That implies, for instance, that I think the statement "immigration is a universal good" is false. Certainly it means that I disagree with the statement "immigration should always be permitted". I think it is acceptable to have a preservative conception of an ancestral ethnic identity - come on, I just said that I think you can't blame Jews for wanting to maintain 'Jews' as a distinct ethnic, cultural, and religious group, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Should I keep going through it? I think you've come up with this aggressive maximalist, even strawman, conception of liberalism, and you're... uh... who are you disagreeing with again? You don't appear to be disagreeing with me.
You're clearly angry at someone, but that someone is not me and does not appear to be in this conversation.
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The rest of the States you mention are all outside of the liberal western world. Japan has one foot in but they are still have sovereignty outside of western society. No Western State has a right to ethnonationalism.
Says who? I don't think anyone out side the usual gaggle of pink-haired harpies would bat an eye if the Prime Minister of Finland declared Finland to be a Finnish state or Denmark a Danish state.
WWII Germany isn't hated for being an explicitly German state, they're hated for aligning themselves against the rest of Western Civilization and engaging in the industrial slaughter of millions.
“Says who”
Currently there are zero white ethnic states besides Israel and one can say slightly Argentina. The fact none exists is a strong indicator it was being enforced though not absolute proof.
Well, firstly, Israel doesn't qualify, surely? Let's say that Ashkenazim are white, but Ashkenazim are, though dominant, a minority in Israel. The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi. If you count Israel as a white ethno-state, then I think you have to count pretty much every Middle Eastern country as a white ethno-state.
Secondly... no country considers itself a white ethno-state. Ethno-states tend to define themselves more narrowly than that. Russia is in a sense an ethno-state, but the dominant ethnicity is Russian. When you say 'white ethno-state', presumably you mean 'states that organise themselves around a particular ethnicity that falls within the broad category of 'white'', and some of those do exist? To pick the most infamous one at the moment, surely Hungary qualifies?
Israel definitely isn't a white ethno-state - they've gone to great lengths to enable black Jews to immigrate, especially when one
commie junta prisoncountry banned their emigration back in the early 80s.It's not any other kind of pure ethno-state, either. I would argue that "Jewish" is a multi-racial ethnicity just like "Hispanic" is, but that's moot. Excluding Gaza and the West Bank, something like a fifth of Israelis are Muslim Arabs.
Would it be reasonable to argue that they're trying to be an "ethno-state with a grandfather clause", though? I've seen such a proposition in the American context, the idea that further immigrants from Africa to the US should be disallowed and "don't belong here" but ADOS African-Americans didn't choose to be here and absolutely shouldn't be "repatriated". This seems somewhat analogous to the belief that Arabs (including their descendants) who stuck with Israel through the 1948 war deserve full citizenship and rights while the ones who fled or fought Israel (or who were never within those borders) don't have a right to be in Israel proper. The big difference is that AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong!) the US version is believed by only a fraction of the right wing and is well outside the Overton window while the Israeli version reflects the median opinion and official immigration policy.
I think that would be reasonable, though at some point we're just arguing about labels. I don't think we have a meaningful disagreement about what Israel is. Israel is and understands itself to be, collectively, the state of the Jewish people. This does not rule out the existence of some non-Jewish Israelis, but it is obviously essential to Israel's existence that it is majority-Jewish and it is run with specifically Jewish interests in mind. In a sense the state of Israel is meant to be a kind of servant of the nation of Israel, that is, the Jewish people as a whole. 'Jewish' is a category is a bit of an odd category that cuts across simple concepts of race or religion, but I think we have a rough idea of what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state.
The United States is not that kind of state. The United States is formally committed to both racial/ethnic and religious neutrality in a way that Israel is not.
I think there is a plausible argument to be made that the United States has implicitly been founded on certain ethnic, cultural, and religious assumptions. The US is the child of a kind of Anglo Protestant establishment. That may not have been written into law, and definitely the US has included other faith communities from day one, but the unspoken assumption has been that the mainstream would remain the mainstream. The US has been able to assimilate minorities that are compatible with those assumptions to an extent, but it has often been a rocky road - Catholicism is accepted in the US now, but it was a difficult process and Catholics themselves changed as well, to accommodate themselves to the country. I take some of the current distress to be about the sense that the implicit Anglo Protestant foundation of the US is falling away.
In that light whenever this argument happens, I think there's a visible envy of Israel. It's a pretty common observation that the most vicious anti-semites often seem to have an envy of Jews, or quietly feel themselves inferior. Sometimes I see something similar in the political realm. Israel explicitly names its religious and ethnic foundations. The United States does not, even though you can argue that the United States has religious and ethnic foundations no less than Israel. I can understand wishing that the United States would say something similar.
In practice I think it would be harder for the US, particularly because British-descended people and Protestants are both minorities at the moment. Maybe individual American states could attempt something like it. But I can understand the yearning.
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Russia doesn't even define itself as an ethnostate. It defines itself as a multinational state.
My read on Russia is that it's a bit like China in that it is officially multi-national, but there is very obviously a single dominant ethnicity. If the Russian ethnos ever looked likely to cease to be the one in charge of Russia, much like if the Han looked like they might cease to be in charge of China, we would see that definition start to fade very rapidly.
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Maybe Hungary. But to note that the EU has frozen funds to Hungary and did some Article 7 TEU thing. Plus LePen was banned in France.
Sure I guess you can argue Jews are not pure white. But it is a loosely genetically related ethnostate if you want to conclude the different Jewish groups are both only partially genetically related to the original inhabitants.
Well, I think the Israeli case is somewhat complicated, because Israel understands itself as the state of 'the Jewish people', and that category is somewhat woolly. 'Jews' as a category includes lots of people who are usually considered white, and also lots of people who are clearly not white. In a sense Israel isn't an ethno-state at all, but a religious state; but of course, Jewishness is both a people and a religion. The racist right generally wants to reduce peoplehood to genetics or descent, and that doesn't really work in the case of Jews. Jews are clearly in some sense a people or an ethnos, but defining them genetically or in terms of traditional racial categories is difficult. Aliyah includes everyone from Sephardic Jews in Spain to Bnei Menashe in India, from the obviously white Ashkenazim to the obviously black Beta Israel.
I find it helpful to compare Israel to its neighbours. Is, say, Saudi Arabia an ethno-state? Not... really? It sort of views itself as a nation for Arab people, but not all Arabs belong there. It imports a large non-Arab underclass while enriching its Arab citizens. It's also a religious state, to a higher and stricter degree than Israel is. Ultimately I'm not sure the word 'ethno-state' actually helps us that much. Compare, say, Azerbaijan regularly getting shirty about Iranian Azeris and saying that all Azeris ought to be part of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan clearly understands itself to be the national homeland of the Azeris, it encourages Azeris outside the country to identify with it, and it does horrible things to non-Azeris on territory that it thinks rightfully belongs to Azerbaijan. That seems a lot like Israel.
I think that Israel is a state founded upon a particular religion and a particular ethnicity, with the explicit goal of maintaining the supremacy of that one ethnoreligious group in a particular territory. In that light I don't think it's particularly unique; most of its immediate neighbours in the Middle East are similar. The clash with the Palestinians is notable because the Palestinians are no different to Israeli Jews in this respect. The Palestinian cause is that the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is firstly Arab and secondly Muslim. The Israelis are not unusual for their region, save perhaps in having more money and guns than their rivals.
I feel like this is the no-true Scotsman fallacy. Israel is not 100% Jewish and some of the groups within Israel have significant genetic differences but as far as I know all the Jewish groups still trade 40-60% of their DNA from the historical Jewish population and common ancestors. And the shared 40-60% of genetics is a key defining point of the States.
Calling Saudi Arabia not an ethnic state seems even flimsier because it rest on them having imported temporary workers who can not stay permanently. Even here they have some minor exceptions as I know a scientists whose Muslim but not Arab who accepted the Saudi bag and they let him get citizenship but that is extremely rare.
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I wouldn't say Mizrahi Jews are "clearly not white". As with other MENA populations, the 19th century scientific racists, the US census bureau, and model HBD-aware biologists would all consider them a white subgroup.
Ashkenazi-on-Mizrahi racism is a live political issue in Israel, but western anti-racists, even ones looking for an excuse to bash Israel, don't see it as the local Israeli form of white-on-non-white racism. And I'm not seeing western pro-white voices who make the distinction - either they see all Jews as white and love Israel, or they see all Jews as <insert anti-Semitic stereotype> and think Israel is ripping us off. So I think Mizrahi Jews count as "politically white" outside Israel.
In fact, the only people I see claiming Mizrahi Jews as non-white are people trying to disprove the claim that Israel is an ethnostate of a white ethnicity.
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