States of Exile

As Stalin asked, how many divisions does the pope have? None, so his fine words are useless : Pope Benedict XVI urged Christians to remain strong in the face of intolerance and violence in a New Year's appeal Saturday that came hours after a bomb blast outside an Egyptian church killed 21 people as worshippers left Mass. The pope condemned a widening campaign against Christians in the Middle East in his homily at St. Peter's Basilica, echoing comments last month in which he called a lack of religious freedom a threat to world security. "In the face of the threatening tensions of the moment, especially in the face of discrimination, of abuse of power and religious intolerance that today particularly strikes Christians, I again direct a pressing invitation not to yield to discouragement and resignation," he said. Benedict has repeatedly denounced a campaign against Christians in Iraq blamed on al-Qaida militants, including an October attack on a Baghdad Catholic church ...

Meeting of the World Antizionist Congress. I am a Zionist because all the right people - neo-Nazis, communists, postmodernists, Islamic fundamentalists, supersessionist Christians, queer activists, Haredi obscurantists, conspiracy theorists - hate Zionism. Anti-Zionism is like Sauron, uniting the scum of the earth under one convenient banner for all good men to rise against.

The kings of Judah and their subjects could call themselves Israelites just as Darius and Xerxes could call themselves both Persian and Iranian ("Aryan"). In sum, descent from the eponymous ancestor established the "common blood" of the Israelite nation. - David M. Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism Bemoaning the increasingly theocratic character of the state of Israel, Uri Avnery argues : The source of all this evil is, of course, the original sin of the State of Israel: the non-separation between state and religion, based on the non-separation between nation and religion. Nothing but a complete separation between the two will save Israel from total domination by the religious mutation. Is it possible for Israel to separate nation and religion? Is it possible to be an Israelite, but not a Jew; a Jew, but not an Israelite? The example of the Samaritans proves it is indeed possible. Sean Ireton notes : Samaritans comprise the Cohanim from the priestly ...

An article in Tablet magazine discusses the phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionists. Personally, I think the term Zionism should either be abandoned as a holdover of a now completed historical quest or expanded in universal terms . However, I would never join an "International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network" because in today's discourse anti-Zionism inevitably means "opposing the activities of the international Jewish conspiracy." Respectable Jews like Franz Rosenzweig were anti-Zionist when it was a matter of intellectual debate and not facts on the ground. To nowadays advocate turning Israel-Palestine into some binational Belgium, when even Belgium is falling apart, is prevarication or stupidity. Yet the article rightly distinguishes between people who should really be termed non-Zionists, who hold to a less Israel-centric Judaism, and the apparatchiks "who argued that Jewishness was relevant to the group’s mission primarily to the extent to which it could be us...

Have Jews learned anything since the time of Jesus about not creating martyrs? Actually I retract the term Jews. This flotilla debacle demonstrates the difference between Jews and Israelis. I may not be macho and extroverted, but I'm clever enough not to play into my enemies' hands. Israeli have been in the sun too long. It's wiped away their Yiddish cunning.

If you are a people struggling for survival, there are two models to follow: the proto-Zionist model of linguistic revival and kibbutzes, and the Nazi model of beer halls and putsches. The fate of the Boers is demonstrative of the pitfalls of the latter model. I look at the flag of assassinated supremacist Eugene Terreblanche 's movement and I see a variation on the swastika. The Boers have a case for national independence or autonomy, but they sabotage themselves by looking to the Nazi twelve-year reich instead of the Jewish millennia-long exilarchy for inspiration. So do some Israelis, unfortunately. The Guardian has an interesting article on ties between Israel and white-ruled South Africa. One man draws the inevitable comparison: "The whites [in South Africa] always saw their fate in a way related to the fate of the Israelis because the Israelis were a white minority surrounded by 200 million fanatic Muslims assisted by communism," says Liel. "Also, there was th...

Robert J. Lewis introduces the novel (at least for me) idea of lower-case, or generic zionism: Reduced to what is universal in its objectives, zionism is the appeal of a people (identified by either race, religion, ethnicity, language or combination thereof) for a special territorial dispensation necessitated by imminent threat. It asserts that without recourse to sovereignty, the threatened group risks obliteration through either annihilation or assimilation or combination thereof. Throughout history, there have been many peoples and cultures that have disappeared from the face of the earth because they were not able to negotiate for themselves that special territorial dispensation upon which self-preservation is predicated. Thus, we speak of zionism as a threatened people’s unalienable right – in practice rarely secured -- to selfhood. Since no nation or identity is exempt from the vagaries of history, we are all implicated in the zionist prerogative in that we all recognize the leg...

Anti-Semites cite the following passage from Genealogy of Morals to enlist Nietzsche into their cause: All the world’s efforts against the “aristocrats,” the “mighty,” the “masters,” the “holders of power” are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realized that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, “the wretched are ...

Zizek makes a valuable point in the article Let's be Realists, Demand the Impossible! : Many political theorists, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant to Joseph de Maistre, have elaborated on the ways in which nation-states have manufactured heroic national mythologies to replace and ultimately erase their "foundational crimes," i.e. the illegitimate political violence necessary for their creation. With regard to this notion, it is true what has often been said: The misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century too late, in conditions when such "founding crimes" are no longer acceptable (and-ultimate irony-it was the intellectual influence of Jews that contributed to the rise of this unacceptability!). The foundational crime of the establishment of a nation-state is an act beyond good and evil - but given enough time, the amoral interlopers become the rightful natives. The Turks may have once been migrant hordes, but they've sett...

What is it to be a Palestinian, as distinct from an Arab? Animus toward an other (the Israeli, the Jew) does not a nationality make. Edward Said, who once called himself a "Jewish-Palestinian" and "the last Jewish intellectual," offers several relevant observations in After the Last Sky : Palestinian life is scattered discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, by the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed time where no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity, all events are accidents, all progress is a digre ssion, all residence is exile. . . . The Palestinian is very much a person in transit. Suitcase or bundle of possessions in hand, each family vacates territory left behind for others, even as new boundaries are traversed, new opportunities created, new realities set up. . . . We are migrants and perhaps hybrids in, but not of, any situation in which we find ourselves....

Assyrians: Fellow Semites who already use the Hebrew alphabet. Black Hebrew Israelites : In honour of the Queen of Sheba. Dönmeh : Messianic Jews (Sabbatai Zevi, not Yeshua) of Anatolia. Messianic Jews: Jews who worship a Jew are still Jews. Palestinians: Just kidding. Syrian Malabar Nasrani : O.G. Hebrew Christians of India. Roma: Fellow recipients of Aryan hospitality.

An article in National Geographic details the plight of Middle Eastern Christians: But the 196,500 Palestinian and Israeli Arab Christians, who dropped from 13 percent of the population in 1894 to less than 2 percent today, occupy a uniquely oxygen-starved space between traumatized Israeli Jews and traumatized Palestinian Muslims, whose rising militancy is tied to regional Islamist movements that sometimes target Arab Christians. In the past decade, "the situation for Arab Christians has gone rapidly downhill," says Razek Siriani, a frank and lively man in his 40s who works for the Middle East Council of Churches in Aleppo, Syria. "We're completely outnumbered and surrounded by angry voices," he says. Christianity is a religion born of Judaism. Both Jesus and Paul the Apostle considered themselves Jews. Why then should Israel not open its doors to the Christians of not just the Palestinian territories, but all of the Middle East? Over the generations the prese...

I found the following from a Mr. Bharat Singh in the comments section of a Standpoint Article : Oh Jews, come and live in India! We've had you among us for 900 years and never harmed a hair on your head but then most of you still left - for a condo and a stipend in Tel Aviv! We can assimilate 7million of you no problem - a drop in our billion+ ocean. Your kids come here every year after being in the IDF - and no one bothers them. 7million smart, resourceful Jews would be a godsend to us. Europeans and Arabs will always hate you - because you make them feel guilty, or stupid and inadequate. Over here, you'll be able to relax for the 1st time in 2000 years. Think about it... It strikes me that the man is correct! India has a tradition of religious pluralism and lacks any ingrained culture of anti-Semitism. On a theological level, I've always been bored with the notion of a "Judeo-Christian tradition." I would love to see a Judeo-Vedantic tradition emerge that bridg...

From a recent article by Gideon Levy: Israel's only real existential danger is losing U.S. support. Yes, there is no Israel without America - not only the $30 billion annual defense aid (without which the IDF would be a shadow of itself), or the market for one-third of Israeli exports, but also international support. Israel, which has become a leper in many circles, is lost without Washington's sponsorship. There is no alternative superpower - having Micronesia alone on our side at the UN will not get us very far. There is Israel without America - the nation of Israel, not the state of Israel. Recall the words of the righteous gentile Friedrich Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra : State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." It is a lie! The most fanatical Zionists and the most fanatical anti-Zionists have united to propagate that lie. The result has been to bind the Jewish...

Following the advice of some website I decided to compare the Israeli and Palestinian national anthems: Israeli National Anthem: While yet within the heart - inwardly The soul of the Jew yearns, And towards the vistas of the East-eastwards An eye to Zion looks. It is not yet lost, our hope, The hope of two thousand years, To be a free people in our land In the land of Zion and Jerusalem, To be a free people in our land In the land of Zion and Jerusalem. Palestinian National Anthem: My country, my country My country, the land of my grand fathers My country, my country My country, my nation, the nation of eternity With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my revenge The longing of my blood to my land and home I have climbed the mountains and fought the wars I have conquered the impossible, and crossed the frontiers My country, my country, the nation of eternity With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the guns And the determination of my nation in the land of struggle Pales...

The following excerpts from the journal article 1890s Zionism reconsidered: Joseph Marco Baruch attest to the sublimity of this Hebraic D'Annunzio, who sadly killed himself in 1899: Baruch was a Turkish-born Frenchman, whose Zionist conception was independent from, yet nourished by, Central and East European Zionist trends. Geographically, his activism was not limited in scope and was well received in a variety of European and Mediterranean contexts. Conceptually, his social vision juxtaposed political action and an affirmative Jewish identity that called for a distinctly Jewish/Hebraic society positioned among a panoply of other nations. This contrasted with a Herzlian "liberal utopia" largely devoid of Jewish content. . . . Of passionate character, Baruch was given to singing songs about "Carmel" (presumably the mountain) and composing poetry in French. But he was also prone to more belligerent behavior, frequently engaging in both verbal and physical confron...

For one sees that the wise die, that the foolish and ignorant both perish, leaving their wealth to others. Their grave is their eternal home, the dwelling-place for all generations of those once famous on earth. Man does not abide in honour; he is like the beasts that perish. -Psalm 49 Zionism is the movement to restore the Jewish people to their temporal home. Necro-Zionism is the movement to restore the human race to their eternal home. Our goal is the ingathering of the exiles from Adam on down. We preach katabasis, not aliyah. We build uniting pyres, not dividing walls. Settlers are welcome. Am Sheol Chai!

Zionism is not synonymous with Jewish nationalism. The Zionist revolution that meant to uproot diaspora culture is more accurately termed Hebrew nationalism. Like all revolutions, the Zionist revolution was forced to compromise with the (Jewish) establishment to achieve its goals; thus the current identity crisis of the state of Israel. Israel's secular socialist and nationalist pioneers would look in horror on the millennialist settlers who have a strangehold on contemporary Israeli politics. Radical Zionism meant to create a new Jew, not provide a home for the old one. Yet history had other plans, as Israel emerged after the Second World War as the de facto home for all Jews. And yet I've always been intrigued by the lost alternative to Hebrew nationalism: Yiddishism, or Ashkenazi nationalism. Here are some excerpts from a book review that deals with the topic: Yiddishism can be defined as a romantic nationalist ideology in which Yiddish reflects the Jewish spirit--a concep...

I define myself as a six-thousand-year-old European. - Irving Layton The name Kafka is both Hebrew, from Jakov-Jacob , and Czech. Kavka , spelled with v, is the Czech word for black bird. . . . The Jews' gratitude to the Emperor was enormous and their loyalty to Habsburg intense. Kafka's first name offers a good example. His parents named him Franz, token of their affection for Franz Josef. - Walter H. Sokel, "Kafka as a Jew" Of course "Semite" refers to the speaker of a language group and was turned into a racial epithet by a German pedant. That being said, "Semite" in the broader sense has its use. Middle Eastern nationalities that share certain linguistic, cultural and yes, racial affinities can be categorized as Semitic. These include Arabs and Hebrews, but also other nationalities that were either assimilated or decimated in the wake of the Islamic wars of expansion: Assyrians, Arameans, Chaldeans, Phoenicians (arguably still around in Lebanon...

. . . in 1981 Dar al-Hurriyya, the government publishing house, widely circulated a pamphlet whose title in translation is Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies . The author is Khairallah Tulfah, former governor of Baghdad and foster-father, uncle, and father-in-law of Saddam Husain. Persians, Tulfah says, are "animals God created in the shape of humans." Jews are a "mixture of the dirt and leftovers of diverse peoples," and flies are a trifling creation "whom we do not understand God's purpose in creating." - Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear The above is racism and unduly harsh to Jews and flies. Zionism is not racism; it is arguably chauvinistic and illiberal (as are many of its enemies and all of its neighbours), but it is not racist for the simple reason that it discriminates based on religion and not race. The Islamic Republic of Iran, which discriminates against the Bahá'ís based on religion and not race, should be co...