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Notes -
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 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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