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Originally Posted by Bluegoat  Thinking about it, what would people say it means to talk about "the right of a nation to exist"? I tend to think of people as having the right to exist, and cultures in a certain way, but not necessarily nations. Of course being Jewish is cultural (among other things) and Jews are individuals. But the idea of the right to exist as a modern nation state is an interesting one. I can see that it could have inherent problems with it, and I think it would be important to deal with those even at the theoretical level to make that statement sensible. (For example, what if two cultures living in the same place both wanted to exist as a nation state, and their wasn't room for both to have enough space to create a viable state, or they were entirely entwined? I am thinking particularly of the Balkans.)
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The whole "right to exist" issue is almost laughable in this case. How were most nation-states created? Tribes did their thing and kings arose and conquered and then somewhere or other they got rid of the kings (or not, as the case may be) and fashioned a government.
How did the nation-state of Israel get created? The League of Nations investigated the situation in the British Mandatory Palestine region and then its successor, the United Nations, voted to partition that land into two states, because the two cultures living there now wanted to exist as separate nation states. The land was partitioned into a Jewish state, which in 1948 became Israel, and an Arab state, which in 1948 was conquered by Jordan and Egypt and was therefore unable to be declared as an independent state.
So there's your two-cultures issue played out right there.
The Arabs have yet to declare their state still, 62 years on. A lot has happened since then, including, after 20 years of occupation by Jordan and Egypt, Israel conquering it and now there's been a further 40 years of occupation by Israel.
Unfortunately, when Israel conquered it, there was a 20-year history of attacks on Israel from within that land when it had been under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, so what followed ... well, there are a lot of different ways to look at it.
But anyway, that's how the situation was dealt with: Partition, with the majority-Jewish regions being marked for the Jewish state, and the majority-Arab regions being marked for the Arab state, even though the actual borders of the thing were positively ridiculous and unwieldy from any way you look at it.
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Originally Posted by Bluegoat Also, what does he mean by "legitimacy"? I can think of many states that have very questionable legitimacy. What is it about Israel that tells us that there is no real question about this, that to question it would be anti-Semitic?
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Israel is more legitimate than most. The nations of the world had a vote and voted to create two states in that particular piece of land. One of them was Israel. Its legitimacy comes from many different directions, but primary among them is the fact that the nations of the world agreed that the Jewish right to independence/sovereignty was, well, legitimate.
And backing that world-agreement-vote is the fact that the *only* sovereign state ever in that land in history was the state of the Jews, and the fact that the Jews were present in that land throughout and never left (even when the vast majority were expelled and exiled, there was always a remnant there).
Israel has arguably more legitimacy than most nation-states that were created in the 20th century. But that's more than the thread is about, I guess.
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Originally Posted by Bluegoat Before the creation of the modern Jewish state, there were Jews who were against the whole idea on religious grounds, and I believe some still do although it is much less common. I wouldn't consider them to be anti-Semitic, but rather have a different vision about what Israel is supposed to be and I suppose what would make it a legitimate Jewish state. So I would like to know just what he means by that and why it should be a key factor in identifying anti-semitism.
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The question of legitimacy isn't about it being "a legitimate Jewish state." The question of legitimacy that Sharansky is referring to is about Israel being
a legitimate state altogether. Those who question its legitimacy by saying it is a "foreign implant" and a "colonial remnant" and the like, *that's* what he's talking about. Negating the Jewish history as having the only sovereign state in that land in history, negating the Jews' right to be there.
Did you see the video making the rounds this week, of Helen Thomas saying that the Jews should "get out of Palestine," and "go back to Germany and Poland"? *That* is anti-Semitic delegitimization. (Totally ignoring the fact that the Jews from Germany and Poland are *not* the majority in Israel ...)
The Jews who were (and are) against the idea on religious grounds don't agree with it purely on religious grounds. They don't argue with its legitimacy as an independent nation state; they argue with its right to call itself "the Jewish state" because they want a religious state, which it most definitely is not.
And Licq'e, Palestine's "right to exist" was also voted on by the UN and passed in 1947. How is that undefined? Sounds pretty specific to me.
) Making the rest sort of moot.
