Great reading last night: Robert Schaeffer “Warpaths: The Politics of Partition” (1990). It makes a convincing argument of why dividing countries into separate states sucks. It discusses the failures of Ireland, Korea, China, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, and Israel-Palestine.
I really recommend it, especially as folks like Joe Biden put the partitioning of Iraq up for serious consideration.
There’s a great piece in there, at the end of the first chapter, that discusses the unfortunate Zionization of Judaism:
“…prior to the late nineteenth century, the goal of establishing and maintaining a state for a Jewish nation in Palestine was not one of the characteristics used by Jews or Gentiles to define what it meant to be Jewish. Quite the opposite. Many Jews, particularly Orthodox Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, opposed the inclusion of this “secular” goal into the definition of Jewishness. Walter Laqueur notes that when Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” appeared, Vienna’s chief rabbi, Mortiz Gudemann, attacked Herzl in a pamphlet in which he protested against the ‘Kuckucksei of Jewish nationalism,’ maintaining that Jews were not a nation, that they had in common only their belief in God, and that Zionism was incompatible with the teachings of Zionism.
“In recent decades, however, the Zionist movement has argued fairly successfully that its secular goal–the creation of an Israeli state for the Jewish people–has become part of what it means to be Jewish. But as critics in the Jewish community make clear, this has not always been the case, and the definition of what it means to be a Jew is not immutable or uncontested. Despite Weizmann’s claim [that Jewishness and Zionism are interchangable], the Zionist movement is itself responsible for changing the meaning of Jewishness. By grafting cosmopolitan ideas onto parochial religious stock, it has changed the meaning of religion and ethnicity for Jews around the world.”
(See Walter Laqueur’s “History of Zionism” p. 96. See also Laqueur’s identification of three basic anti-Zionist positions within the Jewish community: “the assimilationist, the orthodox-religious, and the left-wing revolutionary” on p. 385)
Related posts:
- Olmert Openly Rejects Equality (Not a Satire)
- SIGN AGAINST THE PARTITION OF IRAQ
- We Are Not Anti-Semites!
- Anglicans Strike Back: Anti-Semitism Charge Empty
- Israel’s Biological Clock
(See Walter Laqueur’s “History of Zionism” p. 96. See also Laqueur’s identification of three basic anti-Zionist positions within the Jewish community: “the assimilationist, the orthodox-religious, and the left-wing revolutionary” on p. 385″
Is this an attempt to seem academic?
Posted by arland | October 10, 2008, 10:14 amNot read it but the problem with these sort of critiques is that they rarely speculate convincingly as to what might have happened without partition especially, as with Pakistan/India and Israel/Palestine, the cultural differences were of a more fundamental nature.
Civil wars or suppression of the minority are not great outcomes either. How long have the Tamil Tigers been at it now? Perhaps autonomy can be a better solution in some cases.
Posted by xoggoth | October 10, 2008, 1:34 pmOMGWTFKRNBBQ! You mean to tell me that messy political disputes often have no easy solutions, and even the least-worst options can have serious downsides? Fetch my smellin’ salts!
As for Judaism, some Jews are Zionists, others aren’t. Even if I have problems with many of the Zionists, I’d say that the Jews that want Judaism to be a religion, first and foremost, are significantly more counterproductive for global progress.
Posted by Joe | October 10, 2008, 5:02 pm