The two returns I was talking about were first the return of the Jewish refugees to Israel and second the return of the Palestian refugees to Israel.

When did the question of the return of the Palestinian refugees to Israel come into the discussion we were having? (It is late and I am tired and I may just have missed it.)

Tara, would you be willing to say more about how the Jabotinsky article affected you? Also, you might be interested in reading this post on my blog; it sort of outlines my positions in ways that I haven’t done here because of where this particular conversation started.

I think it was this particular article I read in a mini course on Zionism at the National Havurah Institute, and it strongly affected how I feel and think about Zionism and is pretty much always in the back of my mind when I discuss it.

Apparently it can lead to different places!

I am unclear as to what, precisely, you are arguing with me about. You refer a couple of times to “two returns.” Which is the second one?

Your other questions raise many important points, some of which require more time to respond to than I have here. So let me just say this: I have already made the point that it is important to understand that those Jews who settled in Israel felt themselves to be returning to a homeland (I don’t remember which comment it was in, though), and that it was largely in response to the oppression Jews suffered in Europe, and that I think this is a crucial point to acknowledge in any understanding of Zionism and the formation of the State of Israel. I do think that Zionism was shaped in unfortunate ways by 19th century European imperialism and that this shaping made Zionism into something other than a movement towards national liberation, self-rule or what have you.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write more. My son is calling me. I will try to come back to this later.

… whether the creation and of the state of Israel disenfranchised, and, in the form of current Israeli practice and policy, continues to disenfranchise and oppress the people of another nation, i.e., the Palestinians.

I’ll leave to others their well-argued position that there is not and never has been a nation (as opposed to a region) called “Palestine”. But you might want to look into Tara’s points further. One thing you might want to research is what happened when Jews tried to move to what is now Israel and buy property. It quickly became illegal and fatal for a Moslem to sell property to a Jew - and I’m talking decades before Israel was established. Sounds like oppression to me. And, as has been stated, when one group makes another group “the other”, you’re sometimes going to get violent results.

I believe you are correct. But more than one dictator has obtained their initial power though an election, only to adopt extra-legal methods of gaining, exercising and keeping power. We’ll have the definitive answer sometime in 2007, when we’ll see if he’ll give up power.

I don’t really catch the importance of immigrating with the intent to create a state, in this particular case. Either the mindset of the ‘founders’ is important (as opposed to the effects, actions, etc) to how we understand and approve/disapprove of the state or it’s not.

If it is, though, then I think to be fair one would have to include the information that most Zionists and proto-Ziionists (whether they were advocating a Jewish *state* or a Jewish *homeland*) understand their immigration and the founding of Israel as a return to a home/nation from which they had been exiled.

This feeling was (and is for Zionists today), I believe, intense and real, as real as the feelings of people of Arab Palestinian heritage, now generations removed from their exile, whose demand for “the right of return” is a major issue in peace negotiations.

I’m finding it hard to distinguish the two returns, to say that one is (neo) colonialism and one isn’t. Was/is the mindset of Zionists just wrong? Were we morally obliged, somewhere along the way, to give up the aspiration of returning to Israel, or to give up the aspiration of self-rule? How many generations will it be, then, before the Palestinians in exile are morally obliged to give up their demand of return?

Is it the fact that the skin color of the Jews changed in the mean time, and the cultural development was divergent? Should we have had to pass some kind of test of cultural authenticity, like the Canadian government demands of first nations before giving them rights to their traditional lands?

Would the establishment of Jewish self-rule in Israel have been less objectionable if it were headed by middle eastern Jews, or even ‘Palestinian’ Jews, if it had all the same consequences on the non-Jewish Palestinian population?

There was no ethnically distinct, linguistically homogenous, religiously unified or otherwise obviously-this-is-a-people grouping with a strong recent claim to the land where Israel is located.

I’m not going to argue this with you because it would require me to reconstruct convincing arguments that I have heard in response to this claim–which I once accepted as pretty much an irrefutable fact–and I am right now unable to do so. We’ll have to agree to disagree, at least for now.

Tara: you are referring to a history I don’t know much about, i.e. the Arab immigration into Israel. I’d be interested to hear more. I suppose, however, that my point was this: Israel was created because Jews from Europe went to then-Palestine with the express purpose of creating it; their ambitions were originally for quite a bit more land than they got in the 1948 partition. Israel was not created (at least as far as I know; there may be more history of which I am unaware) because the Jews who were living there already, pre-Zionist settlement were agitating politically or otherwise for the creation of a Jewish state. And if those European Jews could, based on a Jewish nationalism that was by no means universally supported among Jews, create a nation on land to which they immigrated, there is no reason to deny to the Palestinians the “right” to assert a nationalism for themselves on land where they had lived, for while what you say about Arab immigration into Israel might be true, there were also plenty of Palestinians who were, legally and illegally, peacefully and violently, dispossessed of land that had been theirs for centuries.

As for your point about my conflating “‘nationhood,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘national identity’ with questions of territoriality and connection to land in a not helpful way,” I think nationalism does that by default. Zionist rhetoric from the 19th century is full of that kind of conflation, and the rhetoric of Nazi Germany took it to its most logical extreme. I suppose that what I originally wrote sounded like I was validating the conflation, and that was not my intention.

There was no ethnically distinct, linguistically homogenous, religiously unified or otherwise obviously-this-is-a-people grouping with a strong recent claim to the land where Israel is located. (There is such a group now, unified by their feeling of grievance against Israel and their appalling treatment at the hands of the surrounding Arab nations - but that group has no particularly strong claim to Israeli land, either.)

Instead, you had a chaotic colonial zone with a hundred factions and two dozen peoples. Any country arising from such a soup was bound to tick off somebody or another.

only because they actually lived on the land that the Jews from Europe came and turned into Israel

To me this obfuscates the fact that much of the Arab population of Israel immgrated there at about the same time as much of the Jewish population did, as British colonialism was creating a differently structured economy.

I think it also conflates ‘nationhood,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘national identity’ with questions of territoriality and connection to land in a not helpful way.

only because they actually lived on the land that the Jews from Europe came and turned into Israel

To me this obfuscates the fact that much of the Arab population of Israel immgrated there at about the same time as much of the Jewish population did, as British colonialism was creating a differently structured economy.

I think it also conflates ‘nationhood,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘national identity’ with questions of territoriality and connection to land in a not helpful way.

You know, it’s funny. I’ve never seen anything written down about the nation of Palestine. Maybe you can enlighten me.

When was Palestine a nation? Who founded it? Where were its borders? What was the form of its government, and how did it interact with the outside world?

Of course, these questions have no answer, because Palestine was never a nation; merely a label for a colonial territory occupied by a variety of populations - including Jews, for what it’s worth.

I do not understand what you mean by this–and I think it is your wording that confuses me, not necessarily your meaning.

Almost certainly it’s my wording, yes. Sorry about that.

Sounds like you are justifying, or at least accepting as valid, anti-Semitic reasons to oppose the existence and policies of Israel.

Ahh, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, sorry.

What I’m saying is:

1) There are reasons to oppose the existence and policies of Israel that are antisemitic reasons.
2) There are reasons to oppose the existence and policies of Israel that are NOT antisemitic reasons.
3) Because of 1 and 2, if someone opposes the existence and policies of Israel, we can’t say with any degree of accuracy (based on that alone) whether or not they’re antisemitic.

I got the impression that Seattle Male was saying that anyone who opposes the existence of Israel is therefore an antisemite, and I was disagreeing with that.

What nation are the Palestinians a people of?

The Palestinian one, Robert, which they have as much, if not more of a right to claim, if only because they actually lived on the land that the Jews from Europe came and turned into Israel, as the Jews worldwide have a right to claim membership in a Jewish nation.

A&P (sorry it makes you sound like a grocery store), you wrote

My point wasn’t that there are no antisemitic reasons to oppose the existence and policies of Isreal, just that there are some non-antisemitic reasons to do so, and the claim that Isreal ought not exist (or ought not exist where it is now) isn’t, in itself, an antisemitic one.

I do not understand what you mean by this–and I think it is your wording that confuses me, not necessarily your meaning. Sounds like you are justifying, or at least accepting as valid, anti-Semitic reasons to oppose the existence and policies of Israel.