Posted on 09/06/2003 9:52:10 AM PDT by quidnunc
Having read (almost daily in the New York Post) that Israel is a “democracy like the United States,” it might be useful to examine this proposition. Note there is nothing wrong, in my opinion, if Israel does not fit the regnant U.S. model, a managerial regime that holds periodic elections, has a mixed economy, and, perhaps most importantly, makes a fetish of diversity. In fact it is not clear that the U.S. has always been what it is now. Up until well into the twentieth century, wide popular support and even Supreme Court decisions favored the view that the U.S. was a Western Christian (and not even Judeo-Christian) country.
What bothers me is not what Israel is but the manner in which its well-wishers blatantly misrepresent it. For them the “only democracy in the Middle East’ is a carbon copy or a perfected form of what they advocate for the U.S. Because they endorse a multi-ethnic America with a swinging-door immigration policy, they wish us to assume that the same is true for Israel. Unfortunately for the comparison, it is not. Israel is an ethnically particularistic state, in which non-Jews exist as second- or third-class citizens. Unlike Jews in the U.S. or England, Israeli gentiles have never achieved (and perhaps never will achieve) prominent places in the military or in government. The Israeli regime was created for and gives preferential rights of citizenship to Jews. Intermarriage between this preferred group and non-Jews can not take place legally in Israel, except in the highly unlikely situation that the non-Jew can arrange to be converted by Orthodox Rabbis. What separates Israel’s majority population from non-Jews, moreover, is perceived as an inborn identity that is passed down from one generation to the next. In their understanding of ethnicity and religious observance, Jews, including Israelis, are far closer to Japanese Shintoists than to American Presbyterians.
A proper analogue for Israel is not multicultural America but Poland in the 1920s, when that newly recreated nation state was under the benign authoritarian direction of Marshall Joseph Pilsudski (see J. Rothschild’s Pilsudski’s Coup d’Etat). Like Israel, Poland was then a reluctant multi-ethnic state, whose Polish majority had to deal with ethnic minorities, constituting about 30% of the total population. Pilsudski’s government, which exercised emergency powers in an unsettled situation, tried to keep the German, Jewish, and Ukrainian minorities from growing dangerously restive but was also happy to see them emigrate. Poland did allow these minorities to vote and provided for at least minimal religious freedom for non-Catholics but also made no pretense of being culturally pluralistic. The Polish state under Pilsudski stressed national solidarity (although not as much as did his Teutonophobic and anti-Jewish opponents among the National Democrats) and kept tightly in Polish hands military and governmental positions.
The parallel being drawn is by no means arbitrary. The Zionist Right, now in power in Israel, has always been led by Polish Jews, some of whom, like Menachem Begin and Zev Jabotinski, admired the Marshall profusely. In 1934 when Pilsudski died of stomach cancer, as Amos Perlmutter tells us in The Life and Times of Menachem Begin (New York: Doubleday, 1987), Revisionist (rightwing) Zionists marched in his funeral cortege, in their paramilitary uniforms. Contrary to what is now heard about the “global democratic” Israeli Right and contrary to the impression conveyed by Walter Laqueur in his History of Zionism, such Zionist founding fathers as Begin and Jabotinski, not to speak of the ultra-nationalist Stern Gang, felt no distaste for authoritarian nationalists. By the 1930’s, as Renzo de Felice explains in Gli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo, Zionists, and not only their nationalist Right, looked to Mussolini as a successful architect of a national revolution. Revisionist Zionists based and trained their forces in Italy, in preparation for a conquest of Palestine. They continued to extol Mussolini as late as 1936, after he had begun to move into the Nazi German orbit, and hailed his invasion of Ethiopia as a harbinger of their impending conquest of the Arabs. The Herut Party, which was the predecessor of Likud, proclaimed its unswerving intention to incorporate into a Jewish state “both sides of the Jordan.”
Note that Zionist attraction to Fascist Italy came in the early and mid-thirties, before Mussolini had begun to court Hitler. After Hitler’s accession to power, moreover, both he and Pilsudski had called for a unified stand by the European powers against the emerging Nazi dictatorship; Mussolini, a Latin elitist, had also loudly attacked the “German barbarians” for harassing the Jews. It is therefore hard to blame European Jews for seeing in the Duce their champion in his pre-Axis period in the thirties, particularly since at the same time he was opening his borders to Jews refugees from the Third Reich.
But most Jewish nationalists at that time did not celebrate the pluralistic or multicultural democracy that Jewish organizations now routinely call for and which they identify with Israel. And the state these nationalists helped build continues to reflect the ethnic concerns of its founders, who treated multiethnicity as a burden, rather than as something that, as pluralists would have us believe, “enriches.” The argument I heard as a young man, that Israel has in fact absorbed many nationalities, really won’t do. All of these presumed nationalities are Jewish and, according to the Zionist doctrine, “the entire Jewish people is one.”
Is Israel, one might ask, the kind of polity that its Jewish defenders would want for a Christian America or for a nationalist Europe? And if not, why do Jews have a preferential right to be ethnic nationalists? Does believing that Jews have a right to their own country require for the sake of consistency the acceptance of an English right to an English country? I have asked these questions many times, but honest answers, as opposed to outbursts of sputtering rage, have been few and far between.
Israel recognizes non-Jewish marriages. The fact is that a Jew and a non-Jew can get married by a minister or priest, if that's their choice, and that marriage will be recognized.
Mark
I consider the paloecons to be pariahs who bring nothing but discredit on the conservative movement.
Besides, the Patsies hold too many views with common with the loony left and the anti-globalization anarchists/nihilists for me to consider them to be comrads in arms.
Pat Buchanan, Taki Theodoracopulos, Eric Margolis, Georgie Ann Geyer, Llewellyn Rockwell and Joseph Sobran would be a good beginning.
She has taken to bashing the Bush administration on a regular basis.
She's a lot like Eric Margolis except she's not stridently anti-American.
He's an American who writes for the Toronto Sun, where you can find his column on Sundays.
He also writes the occassional column for Buchanan's American Conservative Magazine, and he regularly appears on the CBC to trash the U.S.
He's anti-American as hell.
I don't know why since the posts have all been civil if spirited.
They only make a few of their articles available on-line.
Now with regard to a specific in the first article, I can imagine under certain circumstances as a young man, becoming overwhelmed with a sick kind of humor on first seeing a horrible event, live from a distance. And then as a tourist marking the maps where it happened, and possibly routing out my trip to the location. Then after realizing the full impact of what I had witnessed, feeling quite sick about my first reactions. That story said nothing significant about those so accused.
Of course Israel has spies in this country. They would be fools not to have them.
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