You wrote, "When Jews were facing genocide and unable to find refuge anywhere else, it was completely legitimate for them to flee to their ancient homeland. . .". Assuming this is a reference to the holocaust, I think it's important to remember that modern Zionism very much predates the holocaust. We have to clarify that the state of Israel is not a 'reward' for having suffered through the holocaust or some kind of holocaust compensation, but rather the moral and political underpinnings of Jewish statehood were already there.
That is true, but the fact is that Jews were being attacked pretty much nonstop for well over a thousand years before modern Zionism began, and the movement's origin (more than a decade before Herzl) is linked to major pogroms in Russia. (A far greater effect of the latter was the big move to America.)
In my opinion, using the persecution of the Jews as a justification for the existence of the state of Israel is a poor argument because it implies that if the Jews were not persecuted, they would have no right to a state. It also precipitates the common counter-argument that if Israel is a refuge for victims of anti-semitism, then the countries that committed the persecutions (i.e., Europeans) should be the ones to donate the land for a Jewish State. However, I think that this is all besides the point. There is no state, once established and internationally recognized, that has to justify its existence, no matter how it was formed. No one questions the rights of ethnic Europeans to live in Australia, the US, and Canada, or, for that matter, ethnic Africans to live in South America and the Caribbean. Once a population is established in a territory, it has the right to remain; to suggest otherwise is to promote ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But the rights to Jewish immigration go beyond that. The Jews are an indigenous people of Israel who were forced out by wars and persecutions. It would be similar, for example, if a native American tribe was forced to leave the US in the 18th century and moved to Canada and then returned to the US 70 years ago. How many of these people delegitimizing Israel would deny this tribe the right to its territory?
I actually once knew an American Indian woman who had both Canadian and American citizenship, as her tribe straddled the border and moved back and forth. (She married a guy from Northern Ireland who had both British and Irish citizenship, and then each passed their two citizenships on to their spouse as well.) The two countries seem to have come to an understanding that as the tribe had been there before either country, they merited both.
Of course, the anti-Israel types freely peddle the absolute backwards lie that the Palestinians "took in" the fleeing Jews and so...deserve a medal or something. There's no point even trying.
In what sense are the Jews indigenous to Israel? Maybe if you take the view that the Jews are actually the descendent of the Canaanites, and that Yahwism was imported into Canaanite culture by a small group of immigrants, you could make that case. That is certainly not the account presented in the Bible however, which alternately presents a picture of genocide or slow cultural decimation of the native inhabitants.
Thank you for your comment. You seem to be assuming that the definition of "indigenous" is "the original inhabitants" and that the Canaanites were the original inhabitants according to the Bible. However, this is not what indigenous means. Since the beginning of humanity, all inhabited lands have experienced repeated population transformations, replacements, migrations, and mixtures as different groups invade, split off, or evolve. (See the book "Who We Are and How We Got There"). Scientifically, there is no such thing as an indigenous population today in the sense of the "original" population, as someone always preceded it. According to this definition, are the Cannatines the indigenous population of Israel? Certainly not, as innumerable other groups preceded them. It seems to me that the definition of indigenous is any people that is established in a territory that forms a unique culture so that it cannot be said that there is another territory that they are from. The Israelites/Judeans/Jews were established in Israel for over a thousand years and so are indigenous to it. There is no other Jewish homeland.
I have no objection to what you write. So long as it is noted that according to Biblical narrative we actually seized that land from another people and exterminated them and their culture in an entirely predatory manner. But this is why I think our claims to indigeneity are actually stronger if we adopt a secular historical approach that views most of the "Conquest of Canaan" narrative as legendary. At some point in history the Israelite culture emerged in that region, and we don't know verifiably exactly how this occurred, but it was somehow a transformation internal to the people and culture of that area. This leaves the Israelites/Jews with a very strong historical claim upon the region. Of course, in the secular historical approach you lose the ability to argue that "God said it belongs to us," but that argument to my mind is by far the weakest anyway.
Obviously, for an audience that doesn't believe in the Bible, you would not use a biblical argument. By the way, your characterization of the nature of the wars against the Canaanites as described in the Bible as criminal ("genocidal") is anachronistic. It is unlikely that any of the ancient Near East peoples, including the Canaanites themselves, would have considered the nature of the wars unusual or especially immoral. Presumably, they also often fought their wars that way,
I agree. The Bible is relating activities that would have seemed comprehensible and justified at the time the account was composed. I am describing the events using a modern moral framework and terminology. But I don't think we can really get away from that if we are trying to assess questions of legitimacy in a modern setting. For example, if we know of instances where the medieval Church expropriated Jewish property, we would not regard the Church's current possession of that property to be legitimate, even though it may have been entirely acceptable practice at that time.
And even for an audience that DOES believe in the Bible, the argument from "God said it belongs to us" is a weak one. Except for perhaps US Evangelicals, very few Bible-believers among Christians and Muslims believe that the Bible justifies the Jews' current claims to Israel. I wouldn't either, if it came down to that, because the Bible is equivocal about what the status of our expulsion from the land is, and it is dubious if a secular state could conceivably be what the Bible imagines as justifying a return to the land.
My in laws were not Indian but we're married in New Delhi. My father in law worked at the US Embassy but my mother in law was one of those rare emigres from the UK.
The world is full of idiots and morons. Why Hashem allows them to populate and propogate is only known to G-d. Best to ignore them but beware when they are nearby and you are on a bicycle, or crossing the street, and they are driving a car.
Why the need to add the necessity of the state for Jews fleeing genocide? That undermines the Jewish indigeneity argument. It’s simpler than you make it out to be.
Jews have always lived there. They were second class citizens. They are entitled to a nation of their own. Period.
The more we claim the Holocaust as a justification for Israel, the more we imply that we are not indigenous.
Jews have always lived in the Land of Israel but the numbers were reduced to barely above zero after the destruction of the First Temple and the massacres of the First Crusade. :(
Historians are increasingly recognizing that there was always a not-insignificant- and often significant- presence of Jews, especially in the Galil. It went up and down, of course, and there were times when there were few if any Jews in Jerusalem, but even there there seems to have almost always been a presence.
More importantly, suggesting that being ethnically cleansed from an area causes you to lose any claim on your ability to ever live there ever again effectively makes you a legitimizer of ethnic cleansing.
The importance of claiming that we were never totally "cleansed" from our land is not a theological argument, but a political one. In social reality, squatters have rights. Certainly when its been a couple of generations. "Home" is relative to present experience. So, thankfully, on top of our theological and historical rights to the land, we also never lost the present.
Well, ethnic cleansing has been legitimized over and over again.
NATO fought a war in the nineties in Yugoslavia that was ostensibly aimed at preventing ethnic cleansing, and then the whole war got settled by a peace deal which...utilized ethnic cleansing. I guess it's only OK when the UN approves.
"It was only as a result of the Arabs flatly refusing to share the land"
The land did not belong to the Arabs to decide whether or not to share. If you're talking about the 4 centuries before the State of Israel, the Ottomans and (briefly) British were in charge, not that either one had any right to the land, besides conquest. And both allowed Jews to live in Israel (at times more or less reluctantly)
I did think of you when I heard of this, and wondered which sharks they were.
But there were people (multiple sets of parents) who actually sent their small children (at least one of whom looked terrified) into the water to pet the sharks so they could upload it to social media. That's some combination of really, really stupid, irresponsible, and evil.
It goes without saying that quite a few Israeli commentators drew comparisons to the general attitude of "the cousins love us and we can all get along" that's been such a smashing success for us over the decades.
"It might be prudent to avoid swimming in warm waters around the Hadera power station"
-
You thunk?!?!?!?
This is what came to my mind when I originally saw Rabbi Slifkin swim with the fishies a few years ago and what I forwarded to my family WhatsApp group last week:
There is a different reason not to swim in the ocean, at least in an unguarded beach. There are in average about a hundred deaths from riptides annually in the United States alone, compare to about seven deaths from sharks worldwide. People in the East Coast associate riptides with the Pacific, but Florida and New York (!) often have dangerous riptides that can be fatal. I once got caught in a riptide and was pulled about a half mile out to sea. Fortunately I am a strong swimmer and was able to swim parallel to shore ling enough to get away from the riptide. But sharks look menacing, have gotten bad media (including a movie with a larger than life mechanical shark playing the role of the bad guy) and make big news for their rare attacks. Riptide deaths are too common to get big play in the news.
These kinds of jokes are always distasteful, but I've heard Jews make similar jokes many times at the expense of peoples to whom they are ill-disposed. But yes, it's callous and disgusting, whoever does it.
"It was only as a result of the Arabs flatly refusing to share the land, starting to massacre Jews and launching a war of annihilation that many Palestinians ended up leaving, fleeing or being driven out."
Well, yeah, it's that last part where things become a bit contentious.
David, why is it contentious? They had made it clear that they want to annihilate Israel. It was vital to have borders with a modicum of defensibility, and to stabilize the demographics. Otherwise there would have been a much worse bloodbath - on both sides.
It seems that your little narrative is a quick synopsis of the rights of the Jews to dwell in Israel because it's our ancestral home, but it does not address the rights of the other people who regard it as their ancestral home. It seems your argument, if it is one, is that "well, we like the way this turned out, otherwise WE'D have gotten the short end of the stick," but I don't see how this addresses the questions of legitimacy.
The entire outrage is manufactured nonsense. If this conflict involved any other people other than Jews, no one would care. Arabs have expelled and massacred each other in far greater numbers than anything Israelis have ever done.
Correct. If I understood what he is trying to do, then the question of what the status of those who left, fled, or were driven out is rather significant. The way he leaves it is kind of like saying "This house belongs to me now because the former owner left, fled, or I drove him out." If you want to assess the legitimacy of my claim to the house, it's kind of important what exactly happened. You wouldn't just expect someone to say, "well, that sounds legit."
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that they declared a war of extermination. Which they then lost. You reap what you sow. We are not obligated to give them the opportunity to do it again.
Who is "they"? You have to recognize what the weak point in your argument is. If you are conceding that Israel took the houses and land of Arab refugees, which it seems you are, then you have to address why it was legitimate to continue to deprive the refugees of their property following the wars and so on. You are not going to convince anyone by saying, "Well, returning the refugees would have been quite inconvenient for us."
Those "people" are the people in the choir that you are preaching to. Most people in the world don't think of the Palestinian refugees as having tried to "genocide" the Israelis. If anything, the past year and a half has solidified quite the opposite notion, if anything.
If the average person knows the history at all, which is a big "if", they will have learned that the Arab countries attacked Israel, and that Israel defended itself. However, the refugees they regard as innocent victims of that war, and it seems in fact that you regard them the same way. So if you don't address the question of the refugees' rights, I don't see how your synopsis is going to reach the intended audience.
You wrote, "When Jews were facing genocide and unable to find refuge anywhere else, it was completely legitimate for them to flee to their ancient homeland. . .". Assuming this is a reference to the holocaust, I think it's important to remember that modern Zionism very much predates the holocaust. We have to clarify that the state of Israel is not a 'reward' for having suffered through the holocaust or some kind of holocaust compensation, but rather the moral and political underpinnings of Jewish statehood were already there.
That is true, but the fact is that Jews were being attacked pretty much nonstop for well over a thousand years before modern Zionism began, and the movement's origin (more than a decade before Herzl) is linked to major pogroms in Russia. (A far greater effect of the latter was the big move to America.)
I'm honored to be your first commentator : )
Total kudos. Couldn't find a single thing to take issue with. Let's celebrate!
I saw such comments as well, and am thankful you've pushed back.
Shavua tov
In my opinion, using the persecution of the Jews as a justification for the existence of the state of Israel is a poor argument because it implies that if the Jews were not persecuted, they would have no right to a state. It also precipitates the common counter-argument that if Israel is a refuge for victims of anti-semitism, then the countries that committed the persecutions (i.e., Europeans) should be the ones to donate the land for a Jewish State. However, I think that this is all besides the point. There is no state, once established and internationally recognized, that has to justify its existence, no matter how it was formed. No one questions the rights of ethnic Europeans to live in Australia, the US, and Canada, or, for that matter, ethnic Africans to live in South America and the Caribbean. Once a population is established in a territory, it has the right to remain; to suggest otherwise is to promote ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But the rights to Jewish immigration go beyond that. The Jews are an indigenous people of Israel who were forced out by wars and persecutions. It would be similar, for example, if a native American tribe was forced to leave the US in the 18th century and moved to Canada and then returned to the US 70 years ago. How many of these people delegitimizing Israel would deny this tribe the right to its territory?
I actually once knew an American Indian woman who had both Canadian and American citizenship, as her tribe straddled the border and moved back and forth. (She married a guy from Northern Ireland who had both British and Irish citizenship, and then each passed their two citizenships on to their spouse as well.) The two countries seem to have come to an understanding that as the tribe had been there before either country, they merited both.
Of course, the anti-Israel types freely peddle the absolute backwards lie that the Palestinians "took in" the fleeing Jews and so...deserve a medal or something. There's no point even trying.
In what sense are the Jews indigenous to Israel? Maybe if you take the view that the Jews are actually the descendent of the Canaanites, and that Yahwism was imported into Canaanite culture by a small group of immigrants, you could make that case. That is certainly not the account presented in the Bible however, which alternately presents a picture of genocide or slow cultural decimation of the native inhabitants.
Thank you for your comment. You seem to be assuming that the definition of "indigenous" is "the original inhabitants" and that the Canaanites were the original inhabitants according to the Bible. However, this is not what indigenous means. Since the beginning of humanity, all inhabited lands have experienced repeated population transformations, replacements, migrations, and mixtures as different groups invade, split off, or evolve. (See the book "Who We Are and How We Got There"). Scientifically, there is no such thing as an indigenous population today in the sense of the "original" population, as someone always preceded it. According to this definition, are the Cannatines the indigenous population of Israel? Certainly not, as innumerable other groups preceded them. It seems to me that the definition of indigenous is any people that is established in a territory that forms a unique culture so that it cannot be said that there is another territory that they are from. The Israelites/Judeans/Jews were established in Israel for over a thousand years and so are indigenous to it. There is no other Jewish homeland.
I have no objection to what you write. So long as it is noted that according to Biblical narrative we actually seized that land from another people and exterminated them and their culture in an entirely predatory manner. But this is why I think our claims to indigeneity are actually stronger if we adopt a secular historical approach that views most of the "Conquest of Canaan" narrative as legendary. At some point in history the Israelite culture emerged in that region, and we don't know verifiably exactly how this occurred, but it was somehow a transformation internal to the people and culture of that area. This leaves the Israelites/Jews with a very strong historical claim upon the region. Of course, in the secular historical approach you lose the ability to argue that "God said it belongs to us," but that argument to my mind is by far the weakest anyway.
Obviously, for an audience that doesn't believe in the Bible, you would not use a biblical argument. By the way, your characterization of the nature of the wars against the Canaanites as described in the Bible as criminal ("genocidal") is anachronistic. It is unlikely that any of the ancient Near East peoples, including the Canaanites themselves, would have considered the nature of the wars unusual or especially immoral. Presumably, they also often fought their wars that way,
I agree. The Bible is relating activities that would have seemed comprehensible and justified at the time the account was composed. I am describing the events using a modern moral framework and terminology. But I don't think we can really get away from that if we are trying to assess questions of legitimacy in a modern setting. For example, if we know of instances where the medieval Church expropriated Jewish property, we would not regard the Church's current possession of that property to be legitimate, even though it may have been entirely acceptable practice at that time.
And even for an audience that DOES believe in the Bible, the argument from "God said it belongs to us" is a weak one. Except for perhaps US Evangelicals, very few Bible-believers among Christians and Muslims believe that the Bible justifies the Jews' current claims to Israel. I wouldn't either, if it came down to that, because the Bible is equivocal about what the status of our expulsion from the land is, and it is dubious if a secular state could conceivably be what the Bible imagines as justifying a return to the land.
"No one questions the rights of ethnic Europeans to live in Australia, the US, and Canada,"
All of which actually ARE settler colonialist states!!!
And which I guess prove the point that that's not a bad thing.
Europeans by and large *didn't* settle Africa and it's not in such good shape. On the other hand, India is better and also didn't have many settlers.
My in laws were not Indian but we're married in New Delhi. My father in law worked at the US Embassy but my mother in law was one of those rare emigres from the UK.
The world is full of idiots and morons. Why Hashem allows them to populate and propogate is only known to G-d. Best to ignore them but beware when they are nearby and you are on a bicycle, or crossing the street, and they are driving a car.
Why the need to add the necessity of the state for Jews fleeing genocide? That undermines the Jewish indigeneity argument. It’s simpler than you make it out to be.
Jews have always lived there. They were second class citizens. They are entitled to a nation of their own. Period.
The more we claim the Holocaust as a justification for Israel, the more we imply that we are not indigenous.
Jews have always lived in the Land of Israel but the numbers were reduced to barely above zero after the destruction of the First Temple and the massacres of the First Crusade. :(
Historians are increasingly recognizing that there was always a not-insignificant- and often significant- presence of Jews, especially in the Galil. It went up and down, of course, and there were times when there were few if any Jews in Jerusalem, but even there there seems to have almost always been a presence.
More importantly, suggesting that being ethnically cleansed from an area causes you to lose any claim on your ability to ever live there ever again effectively makes you a legitimizer of ethnic cleansing.
The importance of claiming that we were never totally "cleansed" from our land is not a theological argument, but a political one. In social reality, squatters have rights. Certainly when its been a couple of generations. "Home" is relative to present experience. So, thankfully, on top of our theological and historical rights to the land, we also never lost the present.
Well, ethnic cleansing has been legitimized over and over again.
NATO fought a war in the nineties in Yugoslavia that was ostensibly aimed at preventing ethnic cleansing, and then the whole war got settled by a peace deal which...utilized ethnic cleansing. I guess it's only OK when the UN approves.
I'm an expert on sharks.
Martin Brody
(Someone will figure it out.)
Beautifully written, Rav Natan. Our hearts go out to the family, and that really is the only immediate reaction we need to have.
"It was only as a result of the Arabs flatly refusing to share the land"
The land did not belong to the Arabs to decide whether or not to share. If you're talking about the 4 centuries before the State of Israel, the Ottomans and (briefly) British were in charge, not that either one had any right to the land, besides conquest. And both allowed Jews to live in Israel (at times more or less reluctantly)
I did think of you when I heard of this, and wondered which sharks they were.
But there were people (multiple sets of parents) who actually sent their small children (at least one of whom looked terrified) into the water to pet the sharks so they could upload it to social media. That's some combination of really, really stupid, irresponsible, and evil.
It goes without saying that quite a few Israeli commentators drew comparisons to the general attitude of "the cousins love us and we can all get along" that's been such a smashing success for us over the decades.
The Left does not have a monopoly on delusional fantasies.
Oh boy no it doesn't. But so what? I'm talking about one specific fantasy. Last I checked no one wants to chase the sharks away.
And, bottom line: Which fantasies result in dead people and which don't? That's what we should care about.
Along with that statement, could we also have its source?
"It might be prudent to avoid swimming in warm waters around the Hadera power station"
-
You thunk?!?!?!?
This is what came to my mind when I originally saw Rabbi Slifkin swim with the fishies a few years ago and what I forwarded to my family WhatsApp group last week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw
There is a different reason not to swim in the ocean, at least in an unguarded beach. There are in average about a hundred deaths from riptides annually in the United States alone, compare to about seven deaths from sharks worldwide. People in the East Coast associate riptides with the Pacific, but Florida and New York (!) often have dangerous riptides that can be fatal. I once got caught in a riptide and was pulled about a half mile out to sea. Fortunately I am a strong swimmer and was able to swim parallel to shore ling enough to get away from the riptide. But sharks look menacing, have gotten bad media (including a movie with a larger than life mechanical shark playing the role of the bad guy) and make big news for their rare attacks. Riptide deaths are too common to get big play in the news.
These kinds of jokes are always distasteful, but I've heard Jews make similar jokes many times at the expense of peoples to whom they are ill-disposed. But yes, it's callous and disgusting, whoever does it.
"It was only as a result of the Arabs flatly refusing to share the land, starting to massacre Jews and launching a war of annihilation that many Palestinians ended up leaving, fleeing or being driven out."
Well, yeah, it's that last part where things become a bit contentious.
David, why is it contentious? They had made it clear that they want to annihilate Israel. It was vital to have borders with a modicum of defensibility, and to stabilize the demographics. Otherwise there would have been a much worse bloodbath - on both sides.
It seems that your little narrative is a quick synopsis of the rights of the Jews to dwell in Israel because it's our ancestral home, but it does not address the rights of the other people who regard it as their ancestral home. It seems your argument, if it is one, is that "well, we like the way this turned out, otherwise WE'D have gotten the short end of the stick," but I don't see how this addresses the questions of legitimacy.
Sure it does. They chose to make it into a zero-sum game.
The entire outrage is manufactured nonsense. If this conflict involved any other people other than Jews, no one would care. Arabs have expelled and massacred each other in far greater numbers than anything Israelis have ever done.
The way R' Slifkin is phrasing it, the only "contentious" part is what percentage left, fled, or were driven out. No doubt there were some of each.
Correct. If I understood what he is trying to do, then the question of what the status of those who left, fled, or were driven out is rather significant. The way he leaves it is kind of like saying "This house belongs to me now because the former owner left, fled, or I drove him out." If you want to assess the legitimacy of my claim to the house, it's kind of important what exactly happened. You wouldn't just expect someone to say, "well, that sounds legit."
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that they declared a war of extermination. Which they then lost. You reap what you sow. We are not obligated to give them the opportunity to do it again.
Who is "they"? You have to recognize what the weak point in your argument is. If you are conceding that Israel took the houses and land of Arab refugees, which it seems you are, then you have to address why it was legitimate to continue to deprive the refugees of their property following the wars and so on. You are not going to convince anyone by saying, "Well, returning the refugees would have been quite inconvenient for us."
Actually, I think that plenty of people understand that if a nation tries to genocide you, you don't let them back into your land.
Those "people" are the people in the choir that you are preaching to. Most people in the world don't think of the Palestinian refugees as having tried to "genocide" the Israelis. If anything, the past year and a half has solidified quite the opposite notion, if anything.
If the average person knows the history at all, which is a big "if", they will have learned that the Arab countries attacked Israel, and that Israel defended itself. However, the refugees they regard as innocent victims of that war, and it seems in fact that you regard them the same way. So if you don't address the question of the refugees' rights, I don't see how your synopsis is going to reach the intended audience.
Thank you for illuminating this. It sickens.