From: Richard Duffee <richard.duffee@...>
Subject: Re: [FairfieldCountyGreens] Fw: [AmeriConscience] Zionism is the problem
To: FairfieldCountyGreens@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Duffee" <Duffeecommittee@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Friday, July 10, 2009, 1:33 PM

Hector & David,

I am glad to see this intelligent and reasonable discussion on such a hot potato topic. When you grow up in the US, Israel appears to be the foremost example of apparently irreconcilable religious difference s poisoning politics on the international scene. In India it doesn't appear that way because conflicts between Hindus and Muslims seem far more urgent since the Partition in 1947. The Indian government has tried to establish relative harmony between Muslims and Hindus in India by allowing two versions of family law, Hindu and Muslim, and this has worked pretty well inside India. 

 

Studying Indian constitutional law showed me that Indians distinguish between church and state, and between religions, differently from the way we do. This made me aware that the way the US Supreme Court claims to have marked off boundaries between the secular and the religious--and  tacitly, between religions- -is far more arbitrary than we believe. The quandary that becomes visible when you compare different ways of distinguishing between the religious and the secular is that there ISN'T any rational way to do it. All you can do is rely on more general cultural beliefs that are held by members of different religions.    

 

There is no way to accommodate the beliefs of all religions to the norms of any state, let alone the norms of all other religions. If the reconciliation of religious beliefs were actually possible, there would be no rational reason for the existence of more than one religion. But even the reconciliation of all religious beliefs with the demands of a state is impossible. Some religious beliefs just won't fit. 

 

When a person regards any belief to be truly essential to life--so that if it is not acted upon, it would be better if one did not live--the holder of the belief regards him-or-herself as sincere or devout while those committed to the secular state regard him or her as fanatical, unreasonable, idiotic, or insane. You don't actually have to look far to find such belief-holding. Conscientious objectors hold non-killing to be such a belief. In general, the US makes special exceptions for them: it sort of tip-toes around the problem because it is obvious that jailing or executing sincere conscientious objectors is going to alienate a lot of people from the state, which will appear too bloodthirsty to be worth defending. But the US government IS essentially that bloodthirsty; all imperial states are; so in cutting out this exception to the rule, that citizens must support the state in its aggressive endeavors, the state is merely saving face. 

 

But look at this exception closely. What the conscientious objector is really claiming is that no one has the right to make him kill. But the state is a monopoly of violence: the basic rule of the state is that if there is going to be any violence, it is only going to be violence that the state authorizes. The state's capacity to authorize violence is essential to the rule of the state. THAT is essentially what the conscientious objector is denying: he's saying the state should not have the right to authorize violence. This, of course, is totally intolerable to the state. But state  agents know it is impolitic to insist on the outright, to have an open public debate. So instead of admitting what the C.O. is actually claiming, the state reduces its interpretation of his claim to one it can accommodate: it says he is claiming only the personal right to be exempt from the general state authorization. 

 

The state can manage to do this only because there are so few C.O.'s. The C.O.'s only practical alternative to  responding to the state's reduced version of his claim is to go to jail. But it is just here that you can see the basic problem: church and state are competing for the same moral space. There's no way to end the competition for that space. To ask the C.O. to end it is essentially to ask him to act on the belief that some people (state agents) have the right to compel others to commit murder. Duress, of course, is a defence against a criminal charge. But the state does not want to admit that it is in the role of the criminal who compels one to commit a crime because it wants to claim that killilng another person in war, far from being a crime, is some sort of good deed--on the pretext that its wars are defensive (not that war is a racket, as Smedley Butler informs us) and that they are necessary because other states are aggressive (which is not supposed to be such a problem if we follow the UN Charter.)  

 

But what if there were more C.O.'s? If there were, one would have the problem that a state has in accommodating antagonistic religions, say Muslim and Hindu, or Hindu and Christian. The devout believer asks the state official, "Who are you to tell me what I must do? You are not a moral person. You have not studied the texts of my religion, as I have, for many years. By what right do you claim you can tell me what is right? My God commands me. How can I bow to you when it is obvious that the only reason to do so is that you hold a gun? What can I tell my God except, "I did it because I am a coward"? Do you expect me to tell my God, "I'm sorry, God, but I don't have the courage to obey your commandments. I would rather kill than be killed." If I tell my God that, why shouldn't he answer, "You are telling me that you are willing to kill a man you don't know merely because someone threatens to kill you? Consider the fact that you know you will die and you know that if you die as a killer, I will not be pleased with you. But what do you know of the man you will kill? Do you know what he will lose or gain by his death besides the fact that he will not be guilty of having killed you? So why will you trade a certainty for ignorance? Does not your willingness to do this imply that you do not actually believe in me?" 

 

How can the state respond to such a position? So far as I can see, there isn't any way. The state just calls such a man a fanatic while those who love him call him a martyr. 

 

Look at the implications about strongly held beliefs. If a state wants its citizens to have strongly held beliefs, it can only admit citizens who hold similar beliefs. If it doesn't want strongly held beliefs, then it does what OUR government does: it trivializes religiou s belief in a massive effort to make everyone equivocate on their beliefs. When it fails, it does what it did in Waco, Texas, and to Move in Philadelphia. 

 

The state really doesn't have an answer to the problem of strongly held beliefs. That's why it just demonizes them. But there's nothing demonic about a strongly held belief: it's merely a belief one actually feels bound to act upon regardless of the opposition and consequences. So all the state can do is rant and rave and oppress, making itself the mirror image of what it claims is the demonic believer.  

 

And that is the basic reason that Israelis can't coexist with Palestinians, that all the portmanteau colonies the Western powers created--like India, Nigeria, Rwanda, etc.--tend to have civil wars. For instance, it was administratively convenient for the British to treat the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa as subjects of one state, but civil war was inevitable. If you define the state to exclude those who believe differently, as Israel does in making Palestinians non-citizens, or as Ethiopia did by giving all power to 5% of the population.  or as Nigeria did by  you get civil war. If you redraw the state boundaries, as India did during the Partition, or as Eritrea did in cutting itself out of Ethiopia, you get war between states.  

 

Which would you rather have, civil wars or wars between states? Civil wars seem to be more traumatic and wars between states should be more easily controlled through the UN. So it would seem more sensible to allow further divisions of states into discrete peoples. Then you'll get states in which more people feel they have the legal right to act consistently with their religious beliefs. The price will be that it will be harder to be cosmopolitan and that tensions BETWEEN nations will increase. 

 

To me the ultimate good to look for is the condition that favors the development of individual perception and conviction. Both internal consistency and cosmopolitan openness appear to favor individualization. So what is the least harmful sort of state? 

 

Richard  

 

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Hector Lopez <lopez_hector_ l@sbcglobal. net> wrote:

Dear David, To be fair to all concerned in Palestine/Israel or Israel/Palestine, I favor a bi-national state where both Peoples, who are both Semitic, either by tradition or blood,  could work out a system founded on peace and secularism where there is room for some populations who are neither, for example Arabs and Jews who do not profess any religion or who practice other religions. I do not favor ethnic cleansing of any group, the planet belongs to us all and we descend from the same human roots. According to the most prestigious anthropologists, who are specialists in human origins all nationalities are extended families of other nationalities. Regardless of cultures and religions we are all related and we are brothers. According to Don Pedro Albizu campos, one of the liberators of America, the Puerto Rican nationality is descended to a great degree from Semitic peoples from Spain, Spanish Jews and Spanish Arabs. Of that I am proud. Up until religion appeared as an exclutionary force in Spain, the Arabs and the Jews lived in peace as brothers and I don't see why it can't be the same now. As I understand during ancient times some or many Semitic individuals of changed religions back and forth and and the bottom line is that Arabs and Jews, according to scientists, share genes. Hate, fanatism, and the destruction of the environment are enemies of the survival of humanity. Thank you for your comments and reciprocity. Hector L.Lopez --- On Tue, 7/7/09, David Bedell <dbedellgreen@ hotmail.com> wrote: From: David Bedell <dbedellgreen@ hotmail.com> Subject: Re: [FairfieldCountyGre ens] Fw: [AmeriConscience] Zionism is the problem To: FairfieldCountyGree ns@yahoogroups. com Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 2:26 PM Thanks, Hector; this is a well-argued essay, and I think it points out the essential root of the Middle East conflict: "Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity."  Criticizing Israeli ethnic policy is not anti-Semitic (or anti-Jewish, if you prefer that term).  It is only anti-Semitic if Israel is demonized or held up as a unique instance in the world.  Similar ethnic nationalism has cropped up repeatedly in recent history: the breakup of Yugoslavia into ethnic enclaves like Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo; the treatment of ethnic Russians in the newly independent Baltic states; Japan's treatment of ethnic Koreans and other immigrant workers; Germany's denial of citizenship (until 2000) to ethnic Turks and others born there.    Many countries have a "Right of Return" similar to Israel's "Law of Return" that applies to a single ethnic group and excludes others (e.g., China and Germany, to name just two).   Not all these cases have led to state-sanctioned violence like in Israel or were armed by US weaponry, but they were all motivated by a desire on the part of one ethnic group to have its own state.  In this sense, Zionism is no anomaly.   This is not to condone or excuse Israel's treatment of Palestinians; I just want to point out that in origin, Zionism was the movement for an oppressed ethnic group to control its own future--not unlike the Tibetan or Puerto Rican or other independence movements.  The tragedy is that Jews had long since been deprived of their territory, and when the UN granted them Palestine, the Palestinians were deprived of their territory. David Bedell ----- Original Message ----- From: Hector Lopez To: fairfieldcountygree ns@yahoogroups. com Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 8:54 PM Subject: [FairfieldCountyGre ens] Fw: [AmeriConscience] Zionism is the problem --- On Mon, 7/6/09, visionaries4 <visionaries4@ yahoo.com> wrote: From: visionaries4 <visionaries4@ yahoo.com> Subject: [AmeriConscience] Zionism is the problem To: AmeriConscience@ yahoogroups. com Date: Monday, July 6, 2009, 12:53 AM Zionism is the problem The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace. By Ben Ehrenreich March 15, 2009 It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism. Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes. To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else's. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor. For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy. Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific! policie s, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism. It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement -- founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem -- argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean "premeditated national suicide." The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children. Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem ha! ve metho dically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults. All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas' ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take -- a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist system -- would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United States. Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an "epidemic" more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel's apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can't be said. It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground." Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah. Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel "The Suitors."