"But if that state instead dropped its anachronistic attachment to ethnonationalism and state religion, perhaps that hatred would not prove so implacable." "Perhaps" is doing a lot of heavy lifting right there . . . would Israelis want to take that bet? What do you figure the over and under to be?
Eh, as an American Jew whose a Zionist and right now writing this from a hotel bed in Tel Aviv after two long weeks of volunteering, I can’t really agree with you that America is all that much a safe haven anymore.
We have neo-Nazis on the right and sadly in the center and left, including many readers of your blog, some idea promoted by critical theory, “anti-racism” and intersectionality that Jews are now “white oppressors” of “people of color”, which underpins the propaganda that Zionists are engaged in racism, apartheid and genocide.
Therefore, not buying it that these people are just “anti-Zionist” and not just plain old anti-Semites. Not looking forward to my return shortly when I can again have gentiles white-splain to me what anti-Semitism is who wouldn’t dare to explain racism to a “person of color” or mysogeny to a woman.
You admirably covered a lot of ground here, Freddie, including a slight detour into hate crime statistics more generally. You say you shopped this around with no takers. Did you approach The Free Press?
While I disagree with a lot in this piece, it seems the core objection I have is that you seem to be conflating object level safety with self determinism with respect safety. I think it's nearly impossible to say that a jew is safer in Tel Aviv with daily rockets pouring down on them and mandatory military conscription than in Brooklyn, but the idea behind Israel is that no other party can change that. One might argue that, say, 1930s Vienna was one of the best times and places to ever be a Jew, but without the influence over the political environment ....well we all know how this went.
2020s America is, indeed, a fantastic place to be a Jew, but we are still enough of a minority in voting/power/etc that that could change on a dime. Hell, look at the heel turn that left-wing politics has taken towards us in the last few years. You mention in your piece that America could easily lose its power and/or drop it's support of Israel, which would be catastrophic for it's people's safety, but seem to gloss over that the internal attitudes and conditions could shift as quickly.
I basically agree with this, but I think this argument misses the strongest case for Zionism. Which is: The Jewish people have had a long history of living peacefully in cosmopolitan nations where they were welcomed as neighbors... right up until they weren't. Lots of the statistics about Jewish flourishing in America today were also true of Jews living in Europe in the 19th century. It didn't last. Sooner or later, there's always a movement that arises, declares the Jews to be hostile outsiders, and begins the slaughter. We've even got a word for that: pogrom. Zionism is the dream of a land where pogroms are impossible because the basic social, political, and demographic facts make it impossible. Is the US a land where pogroms are impossible? Well, we haven't had one here yet. But we're a young nation with a lot of heavily armed, racist people. Give us time; we'll get there eventually.
I'm not saying I agree with that argument, but that's the steel man argument for Zionism. And I don't think this piece really rebuts it.
Without commenting on the central thesis of Freddie’s article about the best home for the Jewish people, the idea that smaller populations constitute some kind of “disaster” is simply nonsense. Smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and help save the other species we share the planet with by protecting their shrinking habitat.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food. Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions reaching this conclusion: "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.”
Ok, but so what? Had the USA of the 30s-50s been a ready place of refuge for world Jewry, there might not have been a need for the state of Israel. But we weren’t and there was. Israel may get aid from the US, but its existence doesn’t depend on American largesse. So we have an Israeli state regardless of how anyone feels about the necessity of its original or its currently existence.
Similarly, some like to assert that before the late ‘40s there was no Palestinian national identity. Even if that is true, so what? There is now.
I would love to see this idea come to fruition. Although if it worked, it would also make manifest the unmarked caste system that determines a lot of US policy (Jews and Northern European migrants are worthy of becoming one of us; people from the Global South are unworthy of the prize). That would have bad knock-on effects.
One potential upside, though: it would call the bluff on the Christian nationalists and reactionaries who natter on about our "Judeo-Christian" heritage. They would likely be more vehement than the most vehement Jewish Zionists that a mass migration of diasporic Jews was not to be tolerated. I wager they would quickly start to sling the same slogans defying "replacement" as the white supremacists.
I note that Freddie mentions Jew hatred only twice; it's taken for granted that the British created the state of Israel out of a genteel version, but when Jew hatred appears again a few paragraphs later, its status is more tentative, contingent on the Israelis being such meanies:
“If it is indeed true that Israel’s neighbors bear implacable hatred against the idea of a small Jewish state in a sea of Muslim countries, then it’s foolish to think that such a state can survive the end of the American century. But if that state instead dropped its anachronistic attachment to ethnonationalism and state religion, perhaps that hatred would not prove so implacable.”
That is a seriously load-bearing “perhaps”! And I don’t think you can blame the Israelis for saying to their neighbors, “you first.”
I think the backdrop for all your assumptions are a reverence for liberal multicultural democracy
I have the same reverence. I am a Jew in the US, with no interest in living in Israel, and have a deep discomfort with ethnostates
But when you look around the Middle East and in fact most anywhere with Muslim majorities all you see is ethnostates. When given the chance to vote, people in these countries vote for Islamist parties a lot
I’m not judging them, their values are different. I think mine are better, but that’s a given right?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but how are the Jews in these countries doing? They’ve all moved to Israel right?
I just don’t see any evidence that any country in the Middle East wants a non-sectarian democracy
"Defenders of the modern Israeli state are in this constant argumentative bind: they must ceaselessly insist that Israel is teetering on the brink of destruction, in order to keep American money and weapons and diplomatic muscle flowing, while at the same time claiming that Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe."
Moreover, the numbers of Israelis leaving Israel after October 7, presumably to whatever countries they originally came from, shows that they do in fact have somewhere to go and that Israel isn't the only place where Jews can be safe.
Anyway, when I was a kitten, I heard a rabbi say the same thing - that The Promised Land wasn't Israel at all but the United States.
There was an argument in Tablet a while ago that Israel would be better off with less US funding because it has smothered the domestic defense industry.
In addition there is a school of thought that the patron-client model of foreign aid that the US pursues is an artifact of the post Cold War era. The US since the fall of the Soviet Union has seen aid as a vehicle for exercising influence across the globe. In that sense Israel as a recipient of US largesse is hardly unique.
"But if that state instead dropped its anachronistic attachment to ethnonationalism and state religion, perhaps that hatred would not prove so implacable." "Perhaps" is doing a lot of heavy lifting right there . . . would Israelis want to take that bet? What do you figure the over and under to be?
one state please
Eh, as an American Jew whose a Zionist and right now writing this from a hotel bed in Tel Aviv after two long weeks of volunteering, I can’t really agree with you that America is all that much a safe haven anymore.
We have neo-Nazis on the right and sadly in the center and left, including many readers of your blog, some idea promoted by critical theory, “anti-racism” and intersectionality that Jews are now “white oppressors” of “people of color”, which underpins the propaganda that Zionists are engaged in racism, apartheid and genocide.
Therefore, not buying it that these people are just “anti-Zionist” and not just plain old anti-Semites. Not looking forward to my return shortly when I can again have gentiles white-splain to me what anti-Semitism is who wouldn’t dare to explain racism to a “person of color” or mysogeny to a woman.
You admirably covered a lot of ground here, Freddie, including a slight detour into hate crime statistics more generally. You say you shopped this around with no takers. Did you approach The Free Press?
While I disagree with a lot in this piece, it seems the core objection I have is that you seem to be conflating object level safety with self determinism with respect safety. I think it's nearly impossible to say that a jew is safer in Tel Aviv with daily rockets pouring down on them and mandatory military conscription than in Brooklyn, but the idea behind Israel is that no other party can change that. One might argue that, say, 1930s Vienna was one of the best times and places to ever be a Jew, but without the influence over the political environment ....well we all know how this went.
2020s America is, indeed, a fantastic place to be a Jew, but we are still enough of a minority in voting/power/etc that that could change on a dime. Hell, look at the heel turn that left-wing politics has taken towards us in the last few years. You mention in your piece that America could easily lose its power and/or drop it's support of Israel, which would be catastrophic for it's people's safety, but seem to gloss over that the internal attitudes and conditions could shift as quickly.
I basically agree with this, but I think this argument misses the strongest case for Zionism. Which is: The Jewish people have had a long history of living peacefully in cosmopolitan nations where they were welcomed as neighbors... right up until they weren't. Lots of the statistics about Jewish flourishing in America today were also true of Jews living in Europe in the 19th century. It didn't last. Sooner or later, there's always a movement that arises, declares the Jews to be hostile outsiders, and begins the slaughter. We've even got a word for that: pogrom. Zionism is the dream of a land where pogroms are impossible because the basic social, political, and demographic facts make it impossible. Is the US a land where pogroms are impossible? Well, we haven't had one here yet. But we're a young nation with a lot of heavily armed, racist people. Give us time; we'll get there eventually.
I'm not saying I agree with that argument, but that's the steel man argument for Zionism. And I don't think this piece really rebuts it.
Without commenting on the central thesis of Freddie’s article about the best home for the Jewish people, the idea that smaller populations constitute some kind of “disaster” is simply nonsense. Smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and help save the other species we share the planet with by protecting their shrinking habitat.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food. Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions reaching this conclusion: "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.”
If you're proposing the US take in a few million immigrants, why not take the Palestinians instead?
Ok, but so what? Had the USA of the 30s-50s been a ready place of refuge for world Jewry, there might not have been a need for the state of Israel. But we weren’t and there was. Israel may get aid from the US, but its existence doesn’t depend on American largesse. So we have an Israeli state regardless of how anyone feels about the necessity of its original or its currently existence.
Similarly, some like to assert that before the late ‘40s there was no Palestinian national identity. Even if that is true, so what? There is now.
I would love to see this idea come to fruition. Although if it worked, it would also make manifest the unmarked caste system that determines a lot of US policy (Jews and Northern European migrants are worthy of becoming one of us; people from the Global South are unworthy of the prize). That would have bad knock-on effects.
One potential upside, though: it would call the bluff on the Christian nationalists and reactionaries who natter on about our "Judeo-Christian" heritage. They would likely be more vehement than the most vehement Jewish Zionists that a mass migration of diasporic Jews was not to be tolerated. I wager they would quickly start to sling the same slogans defying "replacement" as the white supremacists.
I note that Freddie mentions Jew hatred only twice; it's taken for granted that the British created the state of Israel out of a genteel version, but when Jew hatred appears again a few paragraphs later, its status is more tentative, contingent on the Israelis being such meanies:
“If it is indeed true that Israel’s neighbors bear implacable hatred against the idea of a small Jewish state in a sea of Muslim countries, then it’s foolish to think that such a state can survive the end of the American century. But if that state instead dropped its anachronistic attachment to ethnonationalism and state religion, perhaps that hatred would not prove so implacable.”
That is a seriously load-bearing “perhaps”! And I don’t think you can blame the Israelis for saying to their neighbors, “you first.”
I think the backdrop for all your assumptions are a reverence for liberal multicultural democracy
I have the same reverence. I am a Jew in the US, with no interest in living in Israel, and have a deep discomfort with ethnostates
But when you look around the Middle East and in fact most anywhere with Muslim majorities all you see is ethnostates. When given the chance to vote, people in these countries vote for Islamist parties a lot
I’m not judging them, their values are different. I think mine are better, but that’s a given right?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but how are the Jews in these countries doing? They’ve all moved to Israel right?
I just don’t see any evidence that any country in the Middle East wants a non-sectarian democracy
"Defenders of the modern Israeli state are in this constant argumentative bind: they must ceaselessly insist that Israel is teetering on the brink of destruction, in order to keep American money and weapons and diplomatic muscle flowing, while at the same time claiming that Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe."
Moreover, the numbers of Israelis leaving Israel after October 7, presumably to whatever countries they originally came from, shows that they do in fact have somewhere to go and that Israel isn't the only place where Jews can be safe.
Anyway, when I was a kitten, I heard a rabbi say the same thing - that The Promised Land wasn't Israel at all but the United States.
There was an argument in Tablet a while ago that Israel would be better off with less US funding because it has smothered the domestic defense industry.
In addition there is a school of thought that the patron-client model of foreign aid that the US pursues is an artifact of the post Cold War era. The US since the fall of the Soviet Union has seen aid as a vehicle for exercising influence across the globe. In that sense Israel as a recipient of US largesse is hardly unique.
Yeah, but you’re forgetting an important variable—Israeli Jews are, on average, way hotter than American Jews.