Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Settlements are not illegal

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Settlements are not illegal

BY DAVID SUISSA


If you think the West Bank settlements have been an albatross around Israel’s neck up until now, brace yourself. With the new governing coalition announced this week, and the settlers enjoying even more power, all bets are off.

As Barak Ravid writes in Haaretz about Israel’s new government, "it seems that most of the key positions will be filled by settlers and their supporters."

Since “Jewish settlements” are two of the most hated words in international diplomacy, we can expect that, peace process or no peace process, the pressure on Israel to stop its settlement activity will only get worse.

This pressure will be fueled by the global campaign to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state, commonly known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

What should Israel do in response to this pressure?

If it were up to me, I’d call a good lawyer.

That’s right, not a PR genius or a brilliant policy analyst, but a lawyer.

The most severe charge against Israel is a legal one. Let’s face it: The whole movement to delegitimize the Jewish state is based on this one accusation that the occupation of the West Bank is an illegal enterprise.

Much of the world has bought into the Palestinian narrative that Israel stole their land and needs to give it back.

It’s fine for Israel to keep repeating “we want peace” and “we’re ready to negotiate,” but if people think you’re a thief living on stolen land, it doesn’t have quite the same impact.

That’s why, even though one can argue that the Palestinians deserve most of the blame for the failure of the peace process, it is Israel that gets the blame.

Outlaws rarely get the benefit of the doubt.

A good lawyer would look at this mess and tell Israel: Until you can make a compelling case that you’re not an “illegal occupier,” nothing good will happen. Even friendly acts like freezing settlement construction will only reinforce the perception of your guilt.

As it turns out, and to the shock of many, a commission led last year by the respected former Israeli Supreme Court justice Edmund Levy did, in fact, conclude that “Israeli settlements are legal under international law.” (You can Google it. It’s pretty convincing.).

“The oft-used term ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ has no basis whatsoever in law or fact,” Alan Baker, director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and a member of Levy’s commission, wrote recently in USA Today.

“The territories are neither occupied nor are they Palestinian. No legal determination has ever been made as to their sovereignty, and by agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, they are no more than ‘disputed’ pending a negotiated solution, with both sides claiming rights to the territory.”

Baker adds that Israel has “solid legal rights” to the territory, including “the rights granted to the Jewish people by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1923 San Remo Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate instrument and the United Nations Charter,” and that the Oslo agreements “contain no prohibition whatsoever on building settlements in those parts of the territory agreed upon as remaining under Israel's control.”

The reason this point of view is so shocking to many is that it’s hard to separate one’s emotion from the law. In other words, you can love or hate the settlements on moral or strategic grounds, but that doesn’t make them illegal. “Disputed” is light years away from “illegal.”

What’s truly illegal and immoral, if you ask me, is how Israel’s enemies have exploited the dispute to try to delegitimize Israel as a criminal state worthy of the most extreme boycotts and condemnations.

So, given all this, why did the Israeli government not take advantage of the Levy report to push back and defend its honor? My guess is that they felt it would be too controversial and would only complicate things.

After all, since Israel has already shown a willingness to offer up land for peace, why make a big fuss over having a legal right to that land?

Well, for one thing, because you can’t make a deal if you’re seen as a thief who has stolen property. The other side has no reason to negotiate-- all they want is for you to return their stolen property. Your concessions have no value.

But if you assert your legal right to the land, you give your concessions real value and give the other side an incentive to negotiate.

Beyond the dynamics of the peace process, Israel’s failure to champion its legal rights has allowed dangerous movements like BDS to continue to wreak havoc. BDS is an anti-Israel runaway train. It sponsors hundreds of Israel Apartheid Week events around the globe. Its mission is not to seek peace but to isolate Israel as a criminal state, and its major piece of evidence is the “illegal occupation."

No amount of clever PR can rebut that evidence.

Israel’s best hope is to fight back by making a compelling legal case in international courts, while unleashing a global diplomatic offensive around this clear and simple message:

“According to international law, Israel has a legal right to settle in the West Bank. After 45 years, Israeli settlements account for less than 2% of the territories. Our willingness to dismantle settlements and give up precious land for a hope of peace-- which we’ve demonstrated in the past-- is not an endorsement of the spurious accusation that settlements are illegal. It’s a statement of how much we value peace."

“What is illegal, immoral and unacceptable is the attempt to use this dispute to delegitimize the Jewish state.”

This message is sure to trigger a few heart attacks at the United Nations, but the fact that it goes against the conventional wisdom is precisely why the legal case must be made. Silence in the face of accusation only conveys guilt and nourishes the forces that are out to delegitimize the Jewish state.

For far too long, while being hypnotized by the peace process, Israel has let its enemies portray its presence on the West Bank as a criminal act. This unchallenged narrative has not only undermined the peace process, it has damaged Israel’s standing beyond all proportion.

If Israel doesn’t respond directly and soon, its global isolation will only worsen.

You can hate and criticize the settlements all you want and still push back against unfair accusations that they are illegal. One doesn’t preclude the other. Any good lawyer understands that.

Maybe instead of looking towards Madison Avenue to defend itself, Israel’s new government should look towards Century City.

David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.


http://www.jewishjournal.com/david_suissa/article/this_just_in_settlements_are_legal

The zero-sum game and Arab mentality

The zero-sum game and Arab mentality

In the wake of the 2006 Lebanon war, with hundreds of dead Lebanese civilians and a destroyed infrastructure, a Gulf News analyst - and professor of political science at UAE University - wrote:
The controversial discussion about the quality and significance of the victory and the size of destruction caused by the war is legitimate and healthy. But, despite the massive destruction in Lebanon, the Arabs seem to be better off after the war.

Logically, when Israel is in a worse condition, which is the case now, Arabs are definitely better off.

Although Israel was not routed in the battle, it surely seems defeated and frustrated. It is also living in a state of doubt and comprehensive review of its military and political performance during the war.

The equation of victory and defeat between the Arabs and the Zionist state has always been and will remain zero equation. This means that when Israel is defeated, Arabs have the right to celebrate victory.

Hatred of Israel can be found in the genes of all Arabs. Although it is hereditary, its intensity varies from time to time. All facts on the ground indicate that the Arab rejection of the Zionist entity reached its peak after the aggression.

The unification of Arabs in their deep enmity against Israel is a positive matter.
This is not some crazy member of the "Arab street". This is someone who has a respected job as an intellectual, who is saying that anything that is bad for Israel is, by definition, good for the Arabs. The Arab world, and a large number of its supporters, look at the Middle East as a zero-sum game where when one side wins, the other loses.

History shows that this is not an isolated opinion; in fact, it is still mainstream Arab opinion. Even as pragmatic and moderate a leader as Jordan's King Abdullah reveals that he still looks at the conflict the same way, that what is good for Israel is bad for the Arab world, although Abdullah is much more nuanced.

Westerners must understand this mindset. We grow up with the idea ingrained in us that the best solutions to problems are "win-win", where each side can gain or at least compromise in ways where their losses are minimized. This is so obvious to most Westerners that we cannot conceive of a mentality that is exactly the opposite - that if I win, you must lose, and vice versa.

The writings of the early Zionists show that rather than trying to hurt the surrounding Arab communities, Zionism intended to enrich them with a growing economy and modernization. When Israel won the Six Day War, it immediately set out to build a new infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank for the Arabs - electricity, hospitals, clean water. The Palestinian Arab mortality rates plummeted and their life expectancy soared under Israeli rule. From the outset, Zionism was meant to be a "win-win," not zero-sum.

On the other hand, the zero-sum mentality is heavily tied to the genetic hatred of Israel that was mentioned by the professor above that is endemic among the Arabs. It goes to the root of the divide between the two cultures. Zero-sum implies hatred and eternal conflict, "win-win" implies pragmatism and peace.

At the outset of Operation Cast Lead, Israeli President Shimon Peres asked an extremely good question:
Still I have not heard until now a single person who could explain to us reasonably: why are they firing rockets against Israel? What are the reasons? What is the purpose?
Everyone who has answered that question in the explosion of anti-Zionist articles that have been written recently uses a variant of this zero-sum answer. Rockets hurt Israel, therefore it is obvious that they must be good for Arabs. Hurting Israel is a worthy goal in and of itself, independent of any consequences. From their perspective, Israel's pain equals Arab gain.

This twisted mentality is most prominent in Hamas' actions now. Hamas has stated that Israel's killing of civilians is evidence of Israel's failure in battle. In other words, Hamas considers the death of Palestinian Arabs to be a victory! There is a complete disconnect between the major goal - Israel's pain - and any desire to defend Gazans.

For Westerners, it is self-evident that the purpose of a military is to defend one's citizens. When your own population is being killed, your military has failed.

Hamas' purpose, though, is not to defend Palestinian Arabs - it is to destroy Israel. This necessarily means that they want to inflict pain on the enemy by any means possible. Their own people are not to be defended: on the contrary, they are to be used for this ultimate goal. Dead civilians are just another weapon to "win."

Moderate Arab rulers have been able to at least understand the pragmatism of the West; they know that any open conflict with Israel will cause them to lose their own positions. But as we saw with King Abdullah, the Arab mentality of seeing Israel not as a partner but as an enemy is still ingrained in the collective Arab psyche. For the "moderates," the zero sum game is still very real, but it is played diplomatically, rather than militarily.

While Israel would be thrilled to send its experts throughout the Arab world to help with agriculture, desalination, solar energy or medicine, to increase two-way trade with the Arabs, the Arab world remains leery of anything that makes Israelis happy - even if it helps the Arabs. From the beginning, Israel has wanted "normalization" to be part of any peace agreements precisely because Israel thinks in terms of win-win - but the Arabs just cannot wrap their heads around this concept.

To the Arab world, if Israel wins, the Arabs must be losing. And as long as they have this mentality, there can be no real peace.

http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2009/01/zero-sum-game-and-arab-mentality.html

The 'Closed Circle' of the Arab

The 'Closed Circle' of the Arab

By Glenn Fairman

Viewed through the prism of the West, which draws its sustenance from the twin fountains of Athens and Jerusalem, the character and plight of Arab existence has been viewed as romantic, tragic, and uniquely foreign to our sensibilities.  The fact that its spirit is wholly antithetical to ours has been a point of contention between advocates of multiculturalism and those jealous of the West's rich patrimony.

That the Arabs are a civilization deeply stratified along lines of family, clan, and tribe is a fundamental observation.  If, however, one overlays the Arab's psychological predisposition to the "power/challenge," money-favoring, careerist, and "shame/honor" dynamics of culture, we in the West cannot hope for any genuine alliances based upon anything more solid than contingencies of transitory mutual advantage.  Moreover, the liberal West must come finally to the stark realization that the Arab world is a zone where democracy and human rights, as we view them, cannot flourish, because such a Western abstraction cannot set its tendrils down in the flinty earth of unenlightened self-interest. In the realm of the Middle East, politics and prestige are as they have always been -- the currency of a zero-sum game.

In the late 1980s, David Pryce-Jones authored a book entitled The Closed Circle, in which he interpreted the psychic rudiments of the Arab weltanschauung -- and unless one understands this mentality on its own terms, the Occidental mind will never gain traction either in negotiations or in bridging the gulf between civilizations -- to the West's own peril.  Although it was written several decades ago, no other book has ever offered a convincing understanding of the Arab's rationale in decision-making and conduct.  Without understanding the dynamic of the Arabic "power/challenge" struggle, their entire culture appears to the West to be one of madness instead of intense and never-ending calculation for superiority and honor at the expense of anything that even approaches what the West views as political stability, human rights, and moral virtue. 

In the light of such cultural dynamics, we err gravely when we rely upon projecting the suppositions of Western values into the cauldron of the Middle East.  As a case in point, the Western powers have naively sought to reduce the Palestinian question to one of real estate and the contractual exigency of a settlement where give-and-take is an implicit axiom.  However, undergirding the prospects of such an agreement are the complications of the "shame/honor" dialectic and the Islamic tenet that once a land has been claimed for Allah, it belongs in perpetuity to the faith.  Therein, the struggle between Arab and Jew is fraught with the contagion of shame and the resulting loss of honor at having been bested by the loathsome Jew.  If one throws into the mix the military humiliations of the last century at the hands of Israel and the Western Powers, it becomes readily apparent that the Arab psyche that glorifies domination and revenge cannot countenance such a transaction, especially now that the Star of Islam is ascending on the world's stage.

The Arab world and its Islamic worldview have proven inconsistent with the tenets of modernity and free intellectual exchange because of the former's inability to both wield and relinquish power and to brook dissent.  Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the close of WWl and the creation of the Middle Eastern nations out of whole cloth, the orderly transfer of power in Arab States is practically a null set.  Instead, we see the ancient motifs of "power challenging" occurring again and again -- actuated through conspiracy and temporary coalitions that are usually stratified along tribal loyalties.  No sooner, however, than one dog reaches the top of the heap does a new round of murmuring arise through those participants who feel that they are being shortchanged or disrespected through the money-favoring nexus -- proving true the old adage quoted in a recent column that "an Arab cannot be bought, only rented."

Without institutional mores set in place in which power devolves peacefully and without rancor, ruthless violence has been the only means by which power is maintained or usurped in the Arab world.  Despite the window dressing of political rhetoric that promises freedom and change following the downfall of a corrupt regime, no amount of ideological overlay ever changes the deep-set cultural barbarism in which only the names change at the top while the losers are purged and the weak brutally fleeced.

For the suffering millions who have endured life under Islamic theocracy or Pan-Arabic Socialism, the song has ever remained the same.  The West, and in particular the American administrations of the past century, have been played like proverbial fiddles because in failing to understand the Arab consciousness and its animating interests, they believe, like all good liberals believe, that all cultures and moralities are commensurate and therefore rational and receptive to calculations of long term expedience.  By not heeding the "power/challenge dialectic," we fail to understand what motivates the manifest treachery and butchery in the Middle Eastern arc -- either from paranoid dictators or in the rising host of new tyrannical carnivores who wait in the wings in hopes of one day being given the opportunity to strike and therein wield the reins of unmixed power.

By ignoring the "shame/honor" duality, we fail to grasp the subterranean darkness that motivates the honor-killings of daughters or apostates who "blacken the face" of the Arab family.  In this perverse milieu, the shedding of "guilty" blood is the only manner in which a face can again "be whitened."  As a tribute to the cultural gulf that separates our sensibilities, it is incomprehensible to us that this barbaric filial vengeance is not only deemed justice, but indeed morally laudable in the twisted logic of the Arab's exaggerated sense of pride.

The great schizophrenia of the Arab mind must wrestle with two mutually exclusive thoughts: that Arabs are the most blessed of the earth while in fact being the most wretched.  Unable to reconcile these twin polarities and in turn incapable of the self-reflection necessary for a civilization's enlightened Reformation to occur, a host of scapegoats are necessary in the form of Jews, infidels, and imperialists who are persistently denying the chosen people  their proper station.  Until this transformation occurs, the remedy for the Arab soul will be "more Islam" and an unending return to filial bloodshed, intrigue, and unrelenting tyranny both between man and woman and between regime and subject.  Having proved the biblical adage that "the dog returns to its own vomit," the closed circle of the Arab heart retains a sickness that is never cured and a lesson that is forever unlearned.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/01/the_closed_circle_of_the_arab.html

The Arab Mind

The Arab Mind

John LeBoutillier


Well, it did not take long for the case of the two MIAs to end: They were brutally tortured and then apparently beheaded by the new head of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Perhaps this is their (demented) view of payback for our killing al-Zarqawi two weeks ago. Whatever it is, it further illustrates the brutality of the militant Muslim enemy that we face across the world. And it needs to be made clear that while most Muslims do not behave this way - indeed the overwhelming majority do not - that majority for whatever reason also does not condemn it.

However, the Iraqi government - elected thanks to the courage and sacrifice of our soldiers and taxpayers - seems incapable or unwilling to crack down on these militants.

In fact, many of these murderers are actually members of the Iraqi Army by day, and then at night maraud as Muslim militia members sometimes even killing their own fellow Army troops!

Today's abduction and murder of one of Saddam's lawyers is a case in point: He was abducted from his house by Iraqis wearing police uniforms - and then hours later he was found shot to death and dumped on the street in the Shi'a part of Baghdad.

This is a daily occurrence in Iraq. These militants play both sides of the game - and can't be trusted.

Now, as to our ultimate game plan in Iraq:


What is victory?

In the ideal sense, it is for the elected government to settle things down and establish that indeed democracy can work in an Arab country. The argument goes that in this case, the other neighboring Arab nations would see this, thirst for it and freedom and democracy would grow.

A noble goal indeed.

This depends on Arabs controlling Arabs, however. It requires Shi'a and Sunni to live peacefully together.

So far this is simply not happening.

And we haven't even mentioned the presence of al-Qaida helping to fuel the flames. We make a mistake to believe most of the violence in Iraq comes from al-Qaida; it doesn't. It is homegrown sectarian violence in the form of payback for Sunni brutality over the Shi'a majority under Ba'ath Party rule.

All of this has turned Iraq into a mess.

Yes, a majority of Iraqis were happy to get rid of the brutal Saddam and then to vote in three national elections.

But we have to remember something: They are devout Muslims who do not want Christian and Jewish American troops on their soil for any longer than necessary.

The problem is when do we begin to leave? G.W. Bush says that will be up to "the next president." Thus, we are staying - in some form - through 2008 anyway.

Do we really believe that Iraq will settle down? That Sunni and Shi'a will peacefully coexist? That Iran won't continue to fan the flames of this insurgency if only to gain a stronger foothold in Baghdad?

I believe the Arabs have proven themselves to be incapable of democracy and freedom and dissent and all that goes with it. Plus, other than oil, what have they produced for the world? Anything? Any scientific or creative advances? And progress for their own people?

No.

What we need to do is simple: Stop buying their oil and stop thinking we can change their mentality. They take those dollars and fund terrorists and enrich a few at the upper level - and treat the masses like dirt. Then they allow these poor souls to believe in this insane concept of martyrdom and violence against westerners.

The Arab mentality is the problem here - and we can't change it, as much as we would like to.

The sooner we realize our limitations, the better off we will all be.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/6/21/100826.shtml

The Big (Arab) Lie

The Big (Arab) Lie

There is an anecdote about an Israeli driver who accidentally hits a sheep belonging to an Arab. The driver gets out and offers to pay for the sheep. The Arab refuses. The driver offers to pay for five sheep, for ten sheep. The Arab still refuses. “What do you want?” the frustrated driver asks. “I want that sheep,” the Arab says, pointing to the dead sheep. That is the Nakba in a nutshell. The Arabs don’t want to negotiate an agreement like adults. They want the dead sheep that represents their dreams of a united Arab empire ruling over the region. And the wars will go on until they finally learn that they can’t have it back.

via Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield.

I lived once in Kiryat Arba, before the intifada (first and second).  I would actually walk alone down into the heart of Hebron toi catch an Arab Shirut to Jerusalem twice a week to attend a course I took there – there weren’t any buses from Kiryat Araba to Jerusalem in those mid-morning hours.

As my twice weekly journeys were pretty consistent, it occurred that I rode with a certain Ahmed who also started his daily Hebron-El Quds route around the same hours. Often as not I sat beside him and over the weeks and months we opened our own private Arab-Israeli dialog, each trying to understand the other better, hopefully with the hope of closing the wide gap that separated us.

It was during one of those trips, in response to some unfathomable remark made by an Arab politician of the time, that I asked my mentor on all things Arab, how could a man who did exactly the opposite in public, at the same time publicly declare he was against what he did?  After a few minutes of quiet Ahmed answered me.

“Do you want to hear a story every Arab mother tells her children?”

Appreciating that this was to be one of those indirect answers to difficult questions I readily assented.

Acmed then shared the following story:
Mustafa wanted to get out of the late morning sun and take a nap before be returned to his labours in the early afternoon.  To this end he sought a quiet out-of-the-way corner in the back of his home where a hammock beckoned him.  No sooner had he climbed in and settled down but a small group of noisy children ran screaming into the yard playing some Middle Eastern form of Cowboys and Indians.  When after a couple of minutes Mustafa saw that they were not about to leave, he yelled at them to be quiet and play somewhere else.  Not particularly in awe of him, the children continued in their noisy activity.  Finally, Mustafa realized that if authority wouldn’t work, he would have to use guile.

“What are you doing here?” Mustafa asked the boys.

When they answered uncomprehendingly that it was plain to all concerned what they were doing, Mustafa continued.

“Why aren’t you down at the marketplace?”

Normally the marketplace was not a welcoming environ for noisy  boys.  Vendors do not appreciate wild children running between their carts and annoying their customers. “Why should we be at the shuk?” was all the boys could muster as a reply.

“Haven’t you heard!” Exclaimed Mustafa, in as convincing a display of incredulity as he was capable. “Abbu Bechar is giving away dates for free!”

After a moment’s hesitation, the boys decided, despite their suspicions of being played, that it was worth the effort of going down to marketplace on the off-chance Abur Bechar really had lost his mind and was giving away his merchandise free.

Ahmed went back to his driving, satisfied that he had somehow answered my question. Similar stories and experiences have convinced me of one simple fact, reality for an Arab has much less to do with the objective facts and far more to do with whichever lie will best bolster their self-image and make them feel good about themselves.  Like Ahmed they are more often than not going to give up the creäture comforts they crave to chase after an imaginary benefit they themselves dreamed up out of fantasy.

What is important to all of those who will now attack me for slandering the Arab and mocking the Arab “mentality”.  This is not my story nor my answer but Ahmed’s!  An Arab born and raised in Hebron who learned these stories with his mother’s milk  and this was his way of trying to help me understand the illogical nature of Arab life.

http://yoel.ben-avraham.info/letters/the-big-arab-lie/

A Jewish state can be democratic and moral

A Jewish state can be democratic and moral

Joseph Levine is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he has published an essay in (where else?) the New York Times, in which he argues that the proposition ‘Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state’ is false.

There are many things in the article to complain about, but I am going to content myself with pointing out the single massive howler by which his argument collapses.

He makes the distinction between “a people in the ethnic sense” and in the “civic sense,” which means either residents of a geographical area or citizens of a state. He generously grants that there is a Jewish people in the ethnic sense who live in Israel, but only an ‘Israeli people’, which includes Arabs, in the civic sense. Then he tells us,

…insofar as the principle that all peoples have the right to self-determination entails the right to a state of their own, it can apply to peoples only in the civic sense…

But if the people who “own” the state in question are an ethnic sub-group of the citizenry, even if the vast majority, it constitutes a serious problem indeed, and this is precisely the situation of Israel as the Jewish state. Far from being a natural expression of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, it is in fact a violation of the right to self-determination of its non-Jewish (mainly Palestinian) citizens. It is a violation of a people’s right to self-determination to exclude them — whether by virtue of their ethnic membership, or for any other reason — from full political participation in the state under whose sovereignty they fall…

Any state that “belongs” to one ethnic group within it violates the core democratic principle of equality, and the self-determination rights of the non-members of that group. [my emphasis]

His exposition is much more lengthy and you should read it. But I think I have extracted the gist of it.

Interestingly, while he explains what he means by ‘a people’ and draws a distinction between two senses of the expression, he does not even hint about his understanding of the concept of ‘democracy’ and especially “the core democratic principle of equality,” the violation of which he believes disqualifies Israel from continued existence as a Jewish state.

Levine explains how Israel violates these principles:

The distinctive position of [a favored ethnic people] would be manifested in a number of ways, from the largely symbolic to the more substantive: for example, it would be reflected in the name of the state, the nature of its flag and other symbols, its national holidays, its education system, its immigration rules, the extent to which membership in the people in question is a factor in official planning, how resources are distributed, etc.

Actually, concerning the “more substantive” things, Arab citizens of Israel are doing quite well: they have the right to vote, to hold political office, and a large degree of control of their educational system; there are rules against discrimination in housing and employment (with exceptions related to national security), etc. In other words, they have full civil rights.

Naturally there are differences in the treatment of Jews and Arabs. Some are due to cultural differences — Arab towns are governed by Arabs and distribute resources differently — some are related to security, and some to anti-Arab prejudice. But the degree of prejudice in Israeli society is not particularly great compared to other advanced nations like the US, and nobody is suggesting that the US does not have a “right to exist” unless all discrimination can be eliminated.

In any event, discrimination in what he calls “substantive” ways are not essential to the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, and there is a general consensus that such discrimination is wrong and should be eliminated.

Israel’s immigration rules are certainly unequal. But immigration rules by definition do not apply to citizens; and few — if any — of the world’s nations permit free immigration.

Levine also does not consider security issues at all. If Israel ignored them it would cease to exist without philosophical arguments. This would be bad both for the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel (just ask any of them if they would prefer to be citizens of Israeli or the Palestinian Authority).

Levine is quite correct, though, that symbolic items like the name of the state, the flag, and the national anthem belong to only one group of citizens. But are these included in the “core democratic principle of equality?” Why should they be?

After all, many states with ethnic or religious symbolism associated with them have been called ‘democratic’ since the word was invented by the ancient Greeks (incidentally, most of the residents of Athens, the paradigm of democracy, weren’t even citizens).

I could argue strongly that only civil rights are essential to democracy and that “equality” in many senses is not. And Arab citizens of Israel have civil rights, even if they find the national anthem — which they are not required to sing — offensive.

And here we come to the fallacy in Levine’s argument. Can you say petitio principii? No? Then how about “assuming what you purport to prove?”

Because that is exactly what this Professor of Philosophy has done. He has built the negation of the fundamental idea of an ethnic nation-state — the expression of the beliefs, yearnings and fellow-feeling of an ethnic group in the symbols and moral principles of a state — into his definition of ‘democracy’, and then ‘proves’ that no such state can be democratic, and therefore ought not to exist in that form!

Another way of looking at it is that there is a hidden premise that is not true. In this case, that would be that democracy entails “group political equality” in which every group, whether a majority or minority, has an equal vote on all matters. But the usual idea of democracy is that each individual has a vote, as long as the civil rights of minorities are maintained. This is quite different.

There is another hidden premise, which is that if a state is not completely democratic, it is morally defective. This is also not self-evident; indeed, both Plato and Aristotle thought the opposite.

Many years ago, I had a short career as a college teacher of Philosophy. This is an undergraduate error; Levine should be embarrassed.

***

But now I have further questions for Professor Levine:

Why did you not write an article about whether Saudi Arabia has a right to exist as a Kingdom, or indeed whether any of the kingdoms, dictatorships, Islamic ‘republics’ or other undemocratic entities have a ‘right to exist’ as such?

Why did you not argue that the Kingdom of Jordan should not exist as such, not only because is it an undemocratic monarchy, but because a minority of Bedouins there rule over a majority of other Arabs? This is especially relevant, because Transjordan was created from the territory called ‘Palestine’, precisely to create an Arab state that would be a counterpart to the Jewish National Home that Britain was supposed to nurse into existence in Western Palestine.

Why do you find the relatively mild discrimination against Arab residents of Israel — especially in the context of the security situation — important when so many other Middle Eastern states with ethnic or religious minorities completely disenfranchise, even viciously oppress them (e.g., the Kurds or the Palestinians in Lebanon)?

You will say that this is because the question of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is much-discussed today, and as a philosopher you are equipped to add clarity to the discussion.

But it is discussed today precisely because those who deny it primarily do so not as an academic exercise, but in the context of a desire to end Jewish sovereignty, to establish insecure borders, and to allow the almost 5 million claimants to ‘Palestinian’ nationality (an absurdity if there ever was one) to enter the territory, which would result in the re-dispersal  of the Jewish people and quite probably the deaths of many of them. If this isn’t an antisemitic enterprise, I don’t know what is.

So your focus on Israel among states, your hypersensitivity to its perceived (by you) moral defects, your fallacious attempt to lend support to those who would destroy it, is de facto antisemitic, even if some of your best friends (and relatives) are Jews.

The antisemitic shoe fits. Wear it proudly.


http://fresnozionism.org/2013/03/a-jewish-state-can-be-democratic-and-moral/

Learning to Think like an Arab Muslim: a Short Guide to Understanding the Arab Mentality

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