The Christian Brotherhood (ie, The Muslim Brotherhood)

Hi Glossy, thanks for writing.

I’m curious: do you think that the Zionist movement made a mistake when it chose to recreate the Jewish state in its current location as opposed to elsewhere?

Nope. If it had chosen any other patch of land anywhere else in the world, it wouldn’t have been Zionist; it would have been territorialist. There was a territorialist movement and it did have a lot of supporters, especially wealthy ones. It failed for the obvious reason: every place on earth where Jews go except the land of Israel is exile. Like reviving Hebrew because it was the only language with an appeal to the totality of the Jewish people, only congregating in Israel could work because, no matter what other country, state or province we could choose, a significant minority of us would still choose Israel.

Does our people need more conflict or less conflict?

I don’t really see that we have a choice between more conflict or less. The conflicts choose us and they are a function of the modern world that we’re trying to adapt to our reality and to which we’re trying to adapt ourselves. The proper approach would be that the Jewish people needs to recognize what our conflicts are, understand them and think carefully about how to deal with them. And then we’ll be half way there.

If I remember correctly, you wrote somewhere here that your ideal vision of Israel would not include Muslims. But that seems unworkable to me.

I don’t really see the absence of a Muslim community as ideal; I see it as a bare necessity without which we can’t function (Israel now is dysfunctional). I don’t have a problem with Muslims as individual; it’s the community that needs to be expelled. Fortunately, doing so is more than workable. We already have the precise legal mechanism in place that will in the future be used to expel Muslims from Israel. It’s the Evacuation-Compensation Law that was used to expel the entire Jewish community from the Gaza region in 2005. This eventuality gets closer and closer every single day. It still might not happen, but that would only be if Israel ceases to exist before it comes to pass.

If Iran had nukes today, would it use them against Israel? Most likely not. They wouldn’t want to cause tons of collateral damage among Muslims. If the two communities were cleanly separated however, wouldn’t the probability of a strike go up?

Actually there’s no evidence to suggest that the mullahs’ regime values human life, or even Muslim life, more than it does the eradication of Israel. So I do think they might nuke us when they can: they are batshit crazy and they’re not following the same logic that the Soviets used, which was that they’d want to have a planet to inherit and conquer after defeating the United States. Also, their theology quite cleanly allows for all Muslims killed in Israel’s annihilation to be martyrs and go directly to paradise without passing Go. Since, unlike most of us, the mullahs actually believe their own theology, we habitually have a difficult time understanding their true intentions.

Of course, I’ve also argued that they wouldn’t need to nuke us in order to destroy us. Just having the bomb changes the rules of the game to such an extent that we will crumble after a dozen forced full mobilizations that they make us run through. And they know it.

So it seems to me that in its current Middle Eastern location Israel can’t even become a proper ethno-state without running existential risks.

Being a Jew is an existential risk. So what else is new?

For me the ethnic, genetic aspect would be the most important one,

There’s nothing wrong with you thinking that, but the genetic relationship of Jews to one another is only part of the traditional understanding of what it means to be a Jew. Obviously one can be a member of the Jewish people without having any genetic connection whatsoever to other Jews, so that seems like a pretty high barrier against making genetics the most important factor.

so I would say “ethnocentric” instead of “territorialist”.

I didn’t make up “territorialism,” by the way.

The fact that Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Syrian, Bukhari, etc. Jews constitute related, but separate ethnicities complicates things somewhat, but not to the extent that would prevent the creation of a real ethno-state.

Constantly unfolding genetic research indicates that almost all Jewish sub-ethnicities are more related to one another than they are to their host populations (this phenomenon is most pronounced in Y-chromosomes and least in mitochondrial DNA, for obvious reasons).

I can see two arguments for choosing Israel, as opposed to a different, safer place as a modern Jewish homeland: 1) historical nostalgia 2) religious conviction.

You’re continuing to overlook the third argument that I specifically mentioned: if we’re trying to build a movement that will appeal to an entire people and attempt to speak for that entire people, and we know that a significant minority of those people are going to choose a specific country as their homeland no matter what we say or do, we’re in the end all going to have to choose that country, because if we didn’t, we’d be splitting the nation. Israel is the only choice that would ever work, period.

Historical nostalgia doesn’t seem important enough to me for such a serious issue.

If you don’t want to learn from history when the issue is serious, when would you suggest is a good time to learn from history? When the issue is trivial?

While I lack religious conviction entirely, I HAVE read that a large portion of the Hasidim were initially opposed to the Zionist project. If people who know a million times more about Judaism than I do could find arguments against Israel being built in Israel, then I’m probably at least somewhat justified in thinking that this issue is not clear-cut from the religious perspective either.

The issue is more than clear cut. You can take it from me that it is unequivocally a positive commandment in Judaism for every generation (ie, something that every Jew throughout time is obliged to do according to Jewish law) to: live in the land of Israel; ensure that the land of Israel is under Jewish control, by war if necessary; help other Jews gather in the land of Israel. You can also take it from me that Hasidut is a modern innovation that is based on Judaism but which does not and can not interpret Jewish law for you or me. Or you can go learn these things on your own and not rely on the opinion of someone wearing the costume of an 18th century Polish nobleman.

What could possibly attract Jews to a place that has no connection whatsoever with Jewish past? The prospect of a brighter Jewish future, namely of a future where we’re not at war and are not hated.

The Jews are not hated because we’re in Israel, which obviously you know from history. And we’re not at war because we’re here either. We’re at war because we’re hated. This would be replicated in any country.

We have certain unique talents. When we use these talents in science, technology, high art, the world’s attitude towards us improves.

I see no reason to believe that we have any power to make the world like us more, except perhaps by having genocide committed against us a second time.

When we use these talents for demagogy or in a way associated with market dominant minorities the world over, resentment and conflict ensue. The experience of being a market dominant minority has been negative for everyone who’s been in that position – the Armenians, the southern Chinese, the East Indians in Africa, etc., and of course for us.

So tell me, were the Jews of Yemen a market dominant minority? (Answer: No.) Why were they so hated and abused? The Jewish people is sui generis; we can learn some things from other minority groups but we simply can’t apply their case to ours.

How to get out of that position? By stopping being a minority, by getting our own state. Unfortunately this was done in a way that created a new series of conflicts. And of course the diaspora is still here, still resented.

The creation of Israel was done in the most pleasant, respectful and idealistic way possible. Probably no state in the history of civilization has ever been created with less enmity and bloodshed than Israel. Don’t believe me? Add up all the casualties in all the wars and terrorism we’ve faced in the past 100 years and compare it to one month or even one week of intra-Arab fighting.

In short I think that a state in a safe, previously uninhabited location would be a better solution than either the diaspora or Israel in Israel. The utopian goal would be to have safety and continuity, while being primarily associated by the outside world with science, hi-tech and the like.

I’m tempted to say that it’s delusional to think it would work better in another location, but I’ll let you choose the word: utopian.

If the Muslim masses are taking all of this stuff literally on every level, why aren’t more of them volunteering for paradise? Why were the strictly military stages of both Gulf Wars so short? Presumably because the Iraqis fled instead of fighting. The Finns successfully fought off the Soviet Union in 1939-1940, but the Iraqis couldn’t be bothered to risk their lives against the infidel in 1991 and then again in 2003. And what about all those Palestinian informants I’ve read about?

Why Arabs Lose Wars.

Glossy, I appreciate your comments and ideas, but this is the last I’m going to write about the Zionism vs. Territorialism issue here. Territorialism is a non-starter and the support it was able to accumulate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was fleeting for very good reasons. Nothing has changed to make it more appealing now, and there’s one huge difference to make it less appealing: we already have a Jewish state.

It’s fine to oppose the Zionist project and there are some decent reasons not to support it, but I’m afraid that anyone’s motives for suggesting the destruction of Israel are suspect.

To answer some questions:

As I understand, before the end of the 19th century this minority was not significant.

If you want to argue that Territorialism would have been better 100 years ago, that’s one thing, but if you want to argue that it would be better now, it’s not relevant how religious people were in the nineteenth century.

And on average the Jews were more religious then than now.

I guess you could see it that way, though the Ramban did write that the mitzvah of living in the land of Israel is equivalent to all the other mitzvot combined. Since the majority of Jews now live in Israel, as compared to a very tiny minority 100 years ago, you could also see it another way: more mitzvot are being performed now, and consequently as a people we are more religious than we were.

But it’s been split since antiquity. We wouldn’t necessarily be making these splits worse.

In Israel, the splits are being overcome. It’s happening very, very slowly and there are a lot of false starts and steps backwards, but the Jewish sub-ethnicities are disappearing a little bit more in each generation. Meanwhile the proportion of the Jewish people that lives in Israel has been increasing and the Jewish population in the exile is declining precipitously.

History tells me that we originated in Israel, common sense tells me that there are more hospitable places out there. Why can’t I learn from both?

You of course should learn from both, but like I’ve said, there’s no evidence that a Jewish state outside Israel would be effective at curing Jew-hatred and less chance that it could ever come to exist.

Why are you so convinced that it would be? Because it’s happened a lot in the past? Well, maybe that’s a reason to try something that’s never been tried before, namely the sort of solution that’s been proposed in the past and that I’ve called utopian above – a consensual purchase of uninhabited terrain.

Unsuccessful (or attempted and rejected) past implementations of Territorialism were: in Argentina, Birobidzhan, Kenya (ie, the Uganda Plan). There were also some Jewish settlements in upstate New York, Ohio and New Jersey (one of my ancestors was settled in central New Jersey and became… a hog farmer; his granddaughter, my great-grandmother, attended the Zionist Congress in 1919). Territorialist settlements consistently failed because they were at best a nachtasyl and offered no solution to the masses of Jews or to the Jewish future and identity of the people who were supposed to live there.

If things work out (i.e. it’s safe), the diaspora would be attracted to it. No diaspora -> no resentment from host societies.

There’s no evidence to suggest that large groups of Jews would be attracted to to alternative Jewish settlements (they haven’t been in the past and no one is expressing any desire for it now except people who strongly dislike Israel); in any case, to eliminate the diaspora you’d need to attract everyone or such a vast majority as to make the stragglers in consequential. Since a substantial community of Jews would stay in Israel irrespective of your idea, right away it would fail. Finally, you’ve offered no justification for your claim that the existence of the diaspora drives resentment of Jews.

Unless you think that the resentment is an unchangeable law of nature, independent even of the existence of host societies, or some sort of an eternal punishment from God (I’m an atheist).

I think that Jew-hatred is a phenomenon beyond understanding and explanation and it would certainly not be affected by anything like what you’re proposing.

If Israeli future is really as dire as you suggest, wouldn’t it be a crime not to try some alternatives?

Suggest an alternative that hasn’t been tried, explain how it could be made to work (like Herzl explain how Zionism could be made to work) and then we’ll see.

I don’t know too much about their history. What’s your explanation? Simply because they’re Jews? Then I want to know your theory of the origin of anti-Semitism in general.

I can’t really say why the Jews in Yemen were so poorly treated. Yemen is the world’s shittiest country though, so maybe that has something to do with it. Also: Islam, which both hates and despises Jews and seeks to compel the entire world to submit to its law. Hmmmm, suppose all the Jews go somewhere that’s totally free of Muslims. Will that make the Muslims not care about them any more? Of course not.

Yes, but all people, irrespective of origin are more attuned to offenses from strangers than from their own kin. This is a basic fact of being human. People bicker within families, tell each other things that they would never tolerate from strangers, and yet still come away loving each other. Then they go out to office parties, talk politely there with people for whom they don’t care in the least and for whom they wouldn’t lift a finger if those people ever got into trouble.

My point in asserting that more Arabs kill each other in the blink of an eye than have ever been killed by Israel was just to put Israel’s creation in perspective as relatively very peaceful. Never in history has a country been created so smoothly.