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Wednesday, October 9, 2019

WHAT CAN ANYONE 'TELL' ISRAEL?

What can any state tell Israel what to do or how to live? To give credit where it's due,  it looks as if none of the Far Eastern countries would think of giving such advice, including India. But for India, the realization that it and Israel face something of a common foe seems to be eclipsing any Gandhian moralizing streak it might have had.
In any case, Israel has more to concern itself in this respect from other Abrahamian countries, in many of which at least a sizable chunk, if not always an outright majority, of their peoples believe that God has forsaken the Jews and has chosen them. Even many Christian minorities in an otherwise Muslim part of the world seem to believe that. Assyrians and Copts, I'm looking straight at you.
Apart from that, the status of Muslim nations toward Israel need hardly be discussed at the moment as the best relations Israel now has with any of them is either a cold peace (Egypt and Jordan) or an under-the-table-but-generally-known entente with other countries who fear Iran. (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman and Bahrain).
As to Christian-majority countries, their case is considerably more complicated as, at least according to a Dane who Caroline Glick debated, they now claim Israel as 'one of us'.
Excuse me?
Well, maybe Denmark can make such a claim in light of their heroic measures to save the Jews of Denmark from the Nazis during the Shoah. But in light not only of nearly all the 'Christian' countries shutting their doors to Jews before the war but also in light of the readiness of too many of their peoples to 'take water and wash their hands' in the lead-up to the Six-Day War in 1967, I can't see any other 'Christian' country that can legitimately lay claim to such a role.
When Jews needed help and had neither a state of their own to protect them nor any other state willing to do so, the 'civilized' world treated them as outsiders, as 'non-whites'. In the West, Jewish 'whiteness' is and remains quite conditional. And no Abrahamian country should expect Israel and indeed Jews worldwide to forget this. Not for centuries; perhaps not even for a thousand years.
Between the general hostility of the Muslim world, Christendom's pathetic lack of moral authority where Israel's concerned and general slanting of on-the-ground reporting, none of these have any business lecturing Israel. The only communities which can speak with Israel with some moral authority are those communities which have historically been oppressed themselves and have been forcibly removed from part or all of their homelands and have been in effective exile such as the African-American (referring to the whole Western Hemisphere here) communities. But they need to speak as one community of exiles (or occupied people) to a returned and self-liberated community of former exiles.
When it had the most consequence, Jews were mostly not seen as 'white'. Quite the contrary. And Jews themselves should treat being called 'white' as an insult. From anyone of any skin tone. And I would ask other occupied indigenous communities, and other communities of exiles, to bear this in mind when speaking of or to Israel or Jewish people over the world.
However, it is worth noting that, so far as I can discern from the news and 6500 miles' distance, that most of the Israelis who concern themselves with preventing what being 'in occupation' over another people does to the occupier from happening to Israel are either from long-established sabra families or have returned from Europe or North America. I'm very sorry to say I don't see many Mizrahis or former residents of Russia among them, although that too could be due to a news-slant.
But it cannot be stated often enough that, from the beginning of this return almost 140 years ago (before modern Zionism even) Jews have been, and still are (for the moment--how much longer?) much more willing to share the land, its fruits and power over it. The Arab majority has not been willing to share to date as have the Jews. This is not a characteristic of most indigenous peoples; it is a trait of colonial settlers. Indigenous peoples are usually much more willing to share the land while they and the newcomers can both live comfortably. Colonists cannot live with anyone but themselves holding all, or nearly all, the land and all the power.
I wouldn't be too surprised to learn the Mizrahim in Israel have been affected by that colonist mentality 'on both sides'. Meaning, while they're resolved to have no other people over them again but how much they grasp of freedom's principle is open to question.  And until and unless the Arabs show, on a continual and persistent basis, a willingness to share the land on an individually equal basis, it's all too likely to remain so. While the Arabs persist in mimicking the behavior patterns of a formerly dominant majority still smarting over being reduced to equality and lower, they'll never get anywhere except to deserved oblivion. And no one, with the exceptions enumerated above, has any business lecturing Israel about what it needs to do to continue to live and flourish. Certainly no current or former imperial power has any such right.

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