Continuing on with the interview of Ali Abunimah, this one I liked because of how he logically destroys the argument that Israel needs to exist because it is a place of refuge for all Jews in the world.
First of all, no one in the world has another country as an insurance policy that if something ever happens to someone in another country, they run back to another country. That other country is most likely of lower social & economic value. So, if a Jew / Israeli Zionist living in Toronto or Montreal or Chicago or Paris or Adelaide or Seoul ever feel threatened, then he / she has another developed country, Israel, as an insurance policy, where he / she can move to, with full citizenship rights, as soon as he / she steps on that land. That "insurance" is also maintained with heavy militarization & brutal control of its indigenous population, & that indigenous population doesn't have any citizenship rights in that country. Doesn't that sound like early European colonizations of North America, Australia, South Asia, Middle East, & the whole African continent, where Europeans brutally controlled the indigenous populations of these continents up until as recently as the mid-1900s? So, the early colonizers of the world are in full support of latest colonizers of Palestine. That's definitely "shared values," & in some respect, even "shared history."
Secondly, what really struck home with what Abunimah says that how Israel can say that it is a safe refuge for all Jews of the world & then essentially contradict that by saying that it is a country which is under constant threat of annihilation by its Arab neighbours. If it's under constant threat of annihilation, then it cannot be a safe refuge.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... in chapter two, Ali discusses does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state. And here's a quote from that chapter:
States either exist or do not exist, as other states either recognize them or they do not. But no other state has claimed the abstract right to exist. If Israel is indeed a normal state among the nations, as its Zionist founders wished it to be, then it has no greater "right to exist" than East Germany, Czechoslovakia, South Vietnam, or the Soviet Union. All those states dissolved, and there's no one with any standing to bring a case in any form demanding they be resurrected on any abstract right to exist separate from their legitimate residents' right to self-determination.
So the right of the Jewish state to exist is usually stated as something based in something--what they would say would be unique, which is the Holocaust, or the genocide against Jews in World War II, that--they would argue, I would say, defenders of the Jewish state, that this isn't like a Soviet Union or any of these other places; because of this genocide, Jews need this state to defend them because of hundreds and even thousands of years of discrimination in Europe. So what do you make of that argument? 'Cause they do see the Israeli state as an exceptional case.
ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, I actually discuss all those claims in the book and, I think, address them fairly systematically.
But a basic point is that, of course, historically Zionism began--yes, it began as a response to the systematic persecution that Jews faced in Europe. It was rejected by most Jews at the time, and, in fact, for many decades. But it started long before the Holocaust. I mean, the Holocaust would be a sort of a post hoc justification for Zionism, given that the two are separated by many decades.
But I question the claim that the way for Jews to have security and to feel secure is through an exclusivist state that requires so much violence against the Palestinians. And it required immense violence to create it, because, of course, Palestinians were the majority in the area that became Israel. And it requires immense violence to maintain it, because I think Israel's struggle over the past few decades has been, really, to conceal from the world the amount of violence that is needed to maintain an exclusivist state in a geographic area that didn't have a Jewish majority, and today, where Jews are at most 50% of the population, if not already a minority.
And so this requires you to think about different ways of organizing life so that you don't have this constant combat to maintain the supremacy of one group over another.
JAY: Well, just to give the argument, I know people ... that support a Jewish state will give the argument, it could happen again, what happened in Europe. And, actually, you can see the rise of fascism in Europe again in Ukraine and in France, and also in Germany and other places. And this idea that's fairly deeply rooted because of what happened during World War II, certainly in the Israeli public opinion, to some extent in Jews outside of Israel and North America, that there's this place of refuge--and there's certainly this idea that this tiny little state is surrounded by this far, far larger Arab population, and only through having essentially a militarized state could you have a safe haven. I mean, that's the psyche.
ABUNIMAH: Well, there's a number of claims there. First of all, you have to examine from a moral and ethical point of view the notion that Jewish Americans or Jewish Canadians should have a spare country as an insurance policy when the creation and maintenance of this spare country comes at a brutal price and brutal suffering of its indigenous people, who have to be expelled, kept as refugees, corralled in ghettos like Gaza or Qalqilya, treated as second-class citizens, and constantly demonized. Is that ethically a price that anyone should be asked to pay as an insurance policy for people living quite comfortably in Montreal or Chicago or other parts of the world? I think that's questionable.
The other point is that even if one accepts the premise, there's a basic contradiction in the Israeli narrative, or the Zionist narrative, of Israel as a safe haven and a final refuge for Jews should things go bad in other parts of the world, and the propaganda message that Israel is under constant threat, constantly beset by enemies, whether it's Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza or Iran's nuclear weapons, and is always on the brink of destruction. I mean, it can't be both. It can't be both a safe place and this dangerous place.
And to the extent that Israel has become, really, the most dangerous place in the world for Jews, one has to examine what are the dynamics, what are the structures, what are the realities that perpetuate conflict and bloodshed and hostility, and I would argue, and I do argue, that it is the effort to create and maintain an exclusivist state at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population, a colonial state, and therefore the way to undo this hostility is through decolonization, is through going forward to a situation and, in a sense, returning to a situation where Jews and Palestinians can be part of the same entity, and to do away with this notion of Palestinians as a demographic threat, which is how the Israeli mainstream talks about them in which I understand to be really racist language. But it's how even many liberal supporters of a Jewish state talk that we have to maintain a Jewish majority.
What's the price of maintaining it? How do you do that? What remedies do you have if Palestinians have too many of the wrong kind of baby? It creates an ugliness and a violence that I think many liberal Jewish supporters of Israel in this country and around the world have refused to recon with. And they think that this can all just be wished away by continuously repeating these slogans about two states living side by side in peace and never having to reckon with the reality of what ethnic segregation means in Palestine. It means ethnic cleansing. It means violence. It means racist laws. It means constantly viewing Palestinians as a presence that pollutes the land.
JAY: The idea of the need for a Jewish state, not a secular state, not a modern democratic state--as many people say, you can't have a modern democratic state and an ethnic-based state. Now, Israel's not the only one. You have the Islamic Republic of Iran and you have Pakistan and other countries that consider themselves religious-based, and it amounts to a large extent ethnic-based--certainly in Iran it does. I think the Iranians see it as much a Persian state as they do an Islamic state, and their laws are like that, in the sense that if you're of any kind of Iranian descent, if you have Persian blood in you, if you are Canadian and go back to Iran, they will consider you Iranian one way or the other.
ABUNIMAH: But that's not--you know, I always find it interesting when people defend Israel based on comparisons with countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran as if those are models that anyone aspires to or defends in terms of--. Israel compares itself to Western liberal democracies. It doesn't say, we're like Iran or we're like Saudi Arabia.
But the claim that Israel is, for example, the law of return that you're alluding to is just like a law that says that somebody of Irish descent can go back and get an Irish passport is a fallacy that I take on in the book. The example of Ireland comes up all the time. Ireland has a law that says, if you have one grandparent born on the island of Ireland, then you can go and claim Irish citizenship. And some people say, well, this justifies things like Israel's law of return for Jews. No, it's totally different, because the Irish law doesn't contain any provision that you have to be Catholic or you have to be Celtic or some other ethnoreligious criteria. If you're Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was from any kind of background, you qualify, whereas the Israeli law is designed to give privileges to people Israel identifies as Jewish, wherever they are in the world, and specifically to deny them to Palestinians who are born in the country or whose parents or grandparents are born there. So I'm not here to defend other states and to say that other states are our models.
First of all, no one in the world has another country as an insurance policy that if something ever happens to someone in another country, they run back to another country. That other country is most likely of lower social & economic value. So, if a Jew / Israeli Zionist living in Toronto or Montreal or Chicago or Paris or Adelaide or Seoul ever feel threatened, then he / she has another developed country, Israel, as an insurance policy, where he / she can move to, with full citizenship rights, as soon as he / she steps on that land. That "insurance" is also maintained with heavy militarization & brutal control of its indigenous population, & that indigenous population doesn't have any citizenship rights in that country. Doesn't that sound like early European colonizations of North America, Australia, South Asia, Middle East, & the whole African continent, where Europeans brutally controlled the indigenous populations of these continents up until as recently as the mid-1900s? So, the early colonizers of the world are in full support of latest colonizers of Palestine. That's definitely "shared values," & in some respect, even "shared history."
Secondly, what really struck home with what Abunimah says that how Israel can say that it is a safe refuge for all Jews of the world & then essentially contradict that by saying that it is a country which is under constant threat of annihilation by its Arab neighbours. If it's under constant threat of annihilation, then it cannot be a safe refuge.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... in chapter two, Ali discusses does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state. And here's a quote from that chapter:
States either exist or do not exist, as other states either recognize them or they do not. But no other state has claimed the abstract right to exist. If Israel is indeed a normal state among the nations, as its Zionist founders wished it to be, then it has no greater "right to exist" than East Germany, Czechoslovakia, South Vietnam, or the Soviet Union. All those states dissolved, and there's no one with any standing to bring a case in any form demanding they be resurrected on any abstract right to exist separate from their legitimate residents' right to self-determination.
So the right of the Jewish state to exist is usually stated as something based in something--what they would say would be unique, which is the Holocaust, or the genocide against Jews in World War II, that--they would argue, I would say, defenders of the Jewish state, that this isn't like a Soviet Union or any of these other places; because of this genocide, Jews need this state to defend them because of hundreds and even thousands of years of discrimination in Europe. So what do you make of that argument? 'Cause they do see the Israeli state as an exceptional case.
ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, I actually discuss all those claims in the book and, I think, address them fairly systematically.
But a basic point is that, of course, historically Zionism began--yes, it began as a response to the systematic persecution that Jews faced in Europe. It was rejected by most Jews at the time, and, in fact, for many decades. But it started long before the Holocaust. I mean, the Holocaust would be a sort of a post hoc justification for Zionism, given that the two are separated by many decades.
But I question the claim that the way for Jews to have security and to feel secure is through an exclusivist state that requires so much violence against the Palestinians. And it required immense violence to create it, because, of course, Palestinians were the majority in the area that became Israel. And it requires immense violence to maintain it, because I think Israel's struggle over the past few decades has been, really, to conceal from the world the amount of violence that is needed to maintain an exclusivist state in a geographic area that didn't have a Jewish majority, and today, where Jews are at most 50% of the population, if not already a minority.
And so this requires you to think about different ways of organizing life so that you don't have this constant combat to maintain the supremacy of one group over another.
JAY: Well, just to give the argument, I know people ... that support a Jewish state will give the argument, it could happen again, what happened in Europe. And, actually, you can see the rise of fascism in Europe again in Ukraine and in France, and also in Germany and other places. And this idea that's fairly deeply rooted because of what happened during World War II, certainly in the Israeli public opinion, to some extent in Jews outside of Israel and North America, that there's this place of refuge--and there's certainly this idea that this tiny little state is surrounded by this far, far larger Arab population, and only through having essentially a militarized state could you have a safe haven. I mean, that's the psyche.
ABUNIMAH: Well, there's a number of claims there. First of all, you have to examine from a moral and ethical point of view the notion that Jewish Americans or Jewish Canadians should have a spare country as an insurance policy when the creation and maintenance of this spare country comes at a brutal price and brutal suffering of its indigenous people, who have to be expelled, kept as refugees, corralled in ghettos like Gaza or Qalqilya, treated as second-class citizens, and constantly demonized. Is that ethically a price that anyone should be asked to pay as an insurance policy for people living quite comfortably in Montreal or Chicago or other parts of the world? I think that's questionable.
The other point is that even if one accepts the premise, there's a basic contradiction in the Israeli narrative, or the Zionist narrative, of Israel as a safe haven and a final refuge for Jews should things go bad in other parts of the world, and the propaganda message that Israel is under constant threat, constantly beset by enemies, whether it's Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza or Iran's nuclear weapons, and is always on the brink of destruction. I mean, it can't be both. It can't be both a safe place and this dangerous place.
And to the extent that Israel has become, really, the most dangerous place in the world for Jews, one has to examine what are the dynamics, what are the structures, what are the realities that perpetuate conflict and bloodshed and hostility, and I would argue, and I do argue, that it is the effort to create and maintain an exclusivist state at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population, a colonial state, and therefore the way to undo this hostility is through decolonization, is through going forward to a situation and, in a sense, returning to a situation where Jews and Palestinians can be part of the same entity, and to do away with this notion of Palestinians as a demographic threat, which is how the Israeli mainstream talks about them in which I understand to be really racist language. But it's how even many liberal supporters of a Jewish state talk that we have to maintain a Jewish majority.
What's the price of maintaining it? How do you do that? What remedies do you have if Palestinians have too many of the wrong kind of baby? It creates an ugliness and a violence that I think many liberal Jewish supporters of Israel in this country and around the world have refused to recon with. And they think that this can all just be wished away by continuously repeating these slogans about two states living side by side in peace and never having to reckon with the reality of what ethnic segregation means in Palestine. It means ethnic cleansing. It means violence. It means racist laws. It means constantly viewing Palestinians as a presence that pollutes the land.
JAY: The idea of the need for a Jewish state, not a secular state, not a modern democratic state--as many people say, you can't have a modern democratic state and an ethnic-based state. Now, Israel's not the only one. You have the Islamic Republic of Iran and you have Pakistan and other countries that consider themselves religious-based, and it amounts to a large extent ethnic-based--certainly in Iran it does. I think the Iranians see it as much a Persian state as they do an Islamic state, and their laws are like that, in the sense that if you're of any kind of Iranian descent, if you have Persian blood in you, if you are Canadian and go back to Iran, they will consider you Iranian one way or the other.
ABUNIMAH: But that's not--you know, I always find it interesting when people defend Israel based on comparisons with countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran as if those are models that anyone aspires to or defends in terms of--. Israel compares itself to Western liberal democracies. It doesn't say, we're like Iran or we're like Saudi Arabia.
But the claim that Israel is, for example, the law of return that you're alluding to is just like a law that says that somebody of Irish descent can go back and get an Irish passport is a fallacy that I take on in the book. The example of Ireland comes up all the time. Ireland has a law that says, if you have one grandparent born on the island of Ireland, then you can go and claim Irish citizenship. And some people say, well, this justifies things like Israel's law of return for Jews. No, it's totally different, because the Irish law doesn't contain any provision that you have to be Catholic or you have to be Celtic or some other ethnoreligious criteria. If you're Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was from any kind of background, you qualify, whereas the Israeli law is designed to give privileges to people Israel identifies as Jewish, wherever they are in the world, and specifically to deny them to Palestinians who are born in the country or whose parents or grandparents are born there. So I'm not here to defend other states and to say that other states are our models.
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