…of the (un)American Studies Association:
On our troubled globe, where states do truly terrible things to their people, gassing them, slaughtering them en masse, impoverishing and immiserating them, I am aware of only one country whose continued existence has been called into question. Should Zimbabwe exist? Or Sudan? Or Syria? Only Israel is subjected to constant questioning of its right to remain a nation. Israel, a sliver of a country surrounded by tyrannical regimes or perpetually unstable governments, free for the moment from war because of strength and not because of neighborly goodwill, this Israel is the target of the opprobrium of preening academics the world over. The question is not whether members of the ASA are anti-Semites, as individuals. All this is not because the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely evil. It is just uniquely Jewish.
Yup.
I doubt its right to exist would be an issue if the strife and displacement of other people that happened with its creation hadn’t occurred, or if it existed some place else.
You are confusing cause and effect. That strife and displacement of other people happened largely because those other people were unwilling to accept its existence.
No, some displacement happened before the creation of Israel, more happened with the Israeli victories against her neighbors, what happened to the British protectorate of Palestine? It ceased to exist, Palestinians lost what would have been their country.
Ummmm…those “Israeli victories against her neighbors” were a result of her being attacked by said neighbors. When you start a war and lose it, you often lose territory. Unless you lose it to a Jew.
I think you dodged the point I was making, the land lost by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan isn’t what the dispute is about.
What the dispute is about is that the Arabs can’t tolerate a Jewish state in the Middle East.
Which Arabs? The Egyptians and Syrians don’t seem that interested interested these days, neither does Jordan, the only Arabs in the middle east that seem to have a problem with Israel now are the Palestinians.
There is no such thing as “Palestinians,” and there was never a nation called “Palestine.” They’re just Arabs. You don’t think that millions of Egyptians and Syrians wouldn’t like to see Israel disappear? Really? The only reason they aren’t trying to wipe it out directly any more is that they’ve figured out they can’t win a war with it. That’s why they’ve been supporting warfare against it by other means, via their pawns, the “Palestinians.”
And with a few taps on his keyboard Rand thinks he disposes of the problem of a few million people.
Those few million peoples’ problems were brought on to them by their ancestors, not Israel. They could be living peacefully in Israel, or could have been living peacefully in Jordan or Syria or Egypt or Lebanon, but their ancestors and those countries decided that destroying Israel was more important than dealing with their problems, which were mostly self induced.
The same logic can be used to blame the ancestors of any victims for those victims plight.
The people who should be solving their plight are the people in the Arab countries who caused it. There is no way for Israel to do it without inviting its destruction.
I should have read the article before commenting, Rabbi David Wolpe does make good points about the complexity of the situation that caused the strife and acknowledges the plight of the displaced people. However, in the comments people have drawn parallels with the apartheid regime in South Africa, criticisms that I think have some validity, and that regimes right to exist was likewise questioned.
The American Studies Association do sound like a pack of twits, but for it to be antisemitism, rather than anti-Israeli, wouldn’t they need to bar Jews from other countries as well?