I don't obsess about Israel like many in the US do, but ...
"I need to save Israel as a Jewish-majority democratic state. That for me is non-negotiable. That's the Israel that I moved to."
I live in a neighborhood that is within walking distance of Jewish schools and synagogues, so I have more direct contact with Jewish folks than most. I support freedom of religion, and I enjoy living in a diverse neighborhood. It's fun when my neighbors celebrate holidays that are not standard throughout the US, such as Purim. I also work with a lot of Jewish attorneys -- the DC area has a higher-than-average proportion of Jewish residents.
I also oppose Zionism, but I've barely written about this in my LJ, and sometimes when I write about it I make sure to point out that I also oppose any other system where a government has an official religion. I oppose the Church of England; I oppose Buddhism as the state religion of Bhutan, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka (even though I'm Buddhist); I oppose Catholicism as the state religion of Costa Rica (even though I was baptised Catholic); I oppose Islam as the state religion of our US ally Egypt; and I oppose Judaism as the state religion of our US ally Israel.
But I was reading a transcript of an interview with a Jewish immigrant to Israel, in which they hold a civil debate about the origins of the state and various peace plans that have been floated over the decades ... and this is the immigrant's bottom line, that Israel must remain a Jewish-majority state. Oh, and yet somehow a democracy also.
I've long viewed these two goals as incompatible. I don't think you can have a democracy (much less a liberal democracy) while giving only one group permanent majority status within that state. "Jewish-majority democratic state" is an oxymoron.
It does remind me of a discussion I had with a Jewish classmate of mine in high school, when I told her that so long as the Jewish people believed they were the special chosen people, so long as they thought they were better than everybody else, they were practically inviting anti-Semitism to be thrown back at them. This doesn't mean I'm anti-Semitic, but this is part of the dynamic of human relationships. Acting like you're "better than" breeds resentment.
But this is not a problem specific to a certain slice of the Jewish people. [It's one of the major problems within the Democratic Party and the Left in the US today.] So many versions of nationalism, ethnicity, and religious faith postulate that We Are #1, and want to control a territory and the people therein based on a brand of Manifest Destiny or Divine Right. Even practitioners of democracy tend to limit membership to their club of voters, certainly to those people who live within a particular set of borders, and then further limiting which residents within those borders may actually vote. I'm not aware of a country that would automatically grant me entry, citizenship, and full voting rights merely for showing up and stepping across their border.
The tragedy of Zionism is that Jewish people have been horribly persecuted around the world for centuries, culminating with the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, so many of them reasonably want to have their own state for protecting themselves, but instead of choosing an uninhabited, or even lightly inhabited area for this Zionist state, they chose Palestine, where nearly two million people already lived in 1948, and most of them were not Jewish.
In the interview, they discuss the early idea of partitioning Palestine into one Jewish state and one Muslim state, but why should the people who were already there allow themselves to be "partitioned" and made into refugees from their own homes? Of course they didn't want this, and were willing to fight to avoid this. But the Zionists won, repeatedly, and continue to hold Palestine and continue to enforce an undemocratic occupation in which most of the non-Jewish people in Palestine are not allowed to vote in Israeli elections, even though a majority of the people in Palestine are not Jewish.
This "non-negotiable" desire for a Jewish-majority state is depriving most of the non-Jewish people any say in their state, even though most of the people living there are not Jewish.
So, it is difficult for me to "support" the state of Israel or the Zionist movement that animates it. And I'm not anti-Semitic, it is also difficult for me to "support" the state of Egypt or the UK or any other country that has an official religion (or a hereditary monarch LOL).
Israel has a solution staring it in the face -- let everybody in Palestine vote in a truly democratic election. But way too many of the Jewish people in Israel don't consider non-Jewish people to be equivalent to themselves. They want a Jewish-majority "democracy" in a land where most of the people are not Jewish. This was never going to work. It will only work by keeping the non-Jewish majority living in an apartheid state.
I live in a neighborhood that is within walking distance of Jewish schools and synagogues, so I have more direct contact with Jewish folks than most. I support freedom of religion, and I enjoy living in a diverse neighborhood. It's fun when my neighbors celebrate holidays that are not standard throughout the US, such as Purim. I also work with a lot of Jewish attorneys -- the DC area has a higher-than-average proportion of Jewish residents.
I also oppose Zionism, but I've barely written about this in my LJ, and sometimes when I write about it I make sure to point out that I also oppose any other system where a government has an official religion. I oppose the Church of England; I oppose Buddhism as the state religion of Bhutan, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka (even though I'm Buddhist); I oppose Catholicism as the state religion of Costa Rica (even though I was baptised Catholic); I oppose Islam as the state religion of our US ally Egypt; and I oppose Judaism as the state religion of our US ally Israel.
But I was reading a transcript of an interview with a Jewish immigrant to Israel, in which they hold a civil debate about the origins of the state and various peace plans that have been floated over the decades ... and this is the immigrant's bottom line, that Israel must remain a Jewish-majority state. Oh, and yet somehow a democracy also.
I've long viewed these two goals as incompatible. I don't think you can have a democracy (much less a liberal democracy) while giving only one group permanent majority status within that state. "Jewish-majority democratic state" is an oxymoron.
It does remind me of a discussion I had with a Jewish classmate of mine in high school, when I told her that so long as the Jewish people believed they were the special chosen people, so long as they thought they were better than everybody else, they were practically inviting anti-Semitism to be thrown back at them. This doesn't mean I'm anti-Semitic, but this is part of the dynamic of human relationships. Acting like you're "better than" breeds resentment.
But this is not a problem specific to a certain slice of the Jewish people. [It's one of the major problems within the Democratic Party and the Left in the US today.] So many versions of nationalism, ethnicity, and religious faith postulate that We Are #1, and want to control a territory and the people therein based on a brand of Manifest Destiny or Divine Right. Even practitioners of democracy tend to limit membership to their club of voters, certainly to those people who live within a particular set of borders, and then further limiting which residents within those borders may actually vote. I'm not aware of a country that would automatically grant me entry, citizenship, and full voting rights merely for showing up and stepping across their border.
The tragedy of Zionism is that Jewish people have been horribly persecuted around the world for centuries, culminating with the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, so many of them reasonably want to have their own state for protecting themselves, but instead of choosing an uninhabited, or even lightly inhabited area for this Zionist state, they chose Palestine, where nearly two million people already lived in 1948, and most of them were not Jewish.
In the interview, they discuss the early idea of partitioning Palestine into one Jewish state and one Muslim state, but why should the people who were already there allow themselves to be "partitioned" and made into refugees from their own homes? Of course they didn't want this, and were willing to fight to avoid this. But the Zionists won, repeatedly, and continue to hold Palestine and continue to enforce an undemocratic occupation in which most of the non-Jewish people in Palestine are not allowed to vote in Israeli elections, even though a majority of the people in Palestine are not Jewish.
This "non-negotiable" desire for a Jewish-majority state is depriving most of the non-Jewish people any say in their state, even though most of the people living there are not Jewish.
So, it is difficult for me to "support" the state of Israel or the Zionist movement that animates it. And I'm not anti-Semitic, it is also difficult for me to "support" the state of Egypt or the UK or any other country that has an official religion (or a hereditary monarch LOL).
Israel has a solution staring it in the face -- let everybody in Palestine vote in a truly democratic election. But way too many of the Jewish people in Israel don't consider non-Jewish people to be equivalent to themselves. They want a Jewish-majority "democracy" in a land where most of the people are not Jewish. This was never going to work. It will only work by keeping the non-Jewish majority living in an apartheid state.