politics

I didn't realize that this was headed to a frustratingly pointless disagreement about a label until it was too late.

You'd think I'd learn. I try to explain myself - to provide enough context that people can grasp the point I'm trying to make - and over and over, it's all for naught because someone just grabs onto a label, substitutes the strawman that label's attached to inside their own brain , then responds to that instead of what I've actually said.

But young people — especially the college student protesters — seem to mostly use it to mean modern, expansionist Israel annexing land for settlements, keeping Palestinians stateless, etc.

Though anything but young, that's the way that I use it. And it's even the way I use it historically - not to refer to the broader set of people who favored the establishment of a Jewish homeland, but specifically to refer to, for example, Begin and those Irgun assholes, who paved the way for Netanyahu and Likud and all of the overt evil in which they engage.

And again, I should know better. Likely the best solution is to just stop using the term entirely - add it to the list of emotive terms that have been rendered useless, alongside "fascist" and "capitalist" and "socialist" and "libertarian" and, most recently, "liberal."

Like it or not, Israel exists. Much fault can be found with the way it came into existence, and much more with its conduct since, but that doesn't alter the fact that it does exist, and its citizens are human beings, exactly as deserving of consideration as any other human beings.

As the hard right in Israel so clearly demonstrates repeatedly (and likely cynically deliberately), when one sets about punishing an entire people for the evil of a few among them, one actually empowers those evil few, since the people rightly feel oppressed and rightly condemn you for their oppression, and those evil few are ready and willing to stand forward and promose to lead the people in their just quest for retribution.

The surest way to hamstring those evil few - to eliminate the excuses by which they come to power - is to eliminate the oppression - to recognize and respect the humanity of the many. And that can never be accomplished by proactively declaring the many to be indistinguishable from the evil few.

He's in favor of a two-state solution, as the article makes clear.

No - quite the opposite. Using the term to refer to all supporters of a Jewish state without distinguishing between those who wish to cooperate and those who simply intend to forcibly impose their wills "alienates the very people who might be able to make peace."

The simple and unavoidable fact of the matter is that the state of Israel existing on part of the land it occupied in antiquity is a fait accompli. It's not a question of whether or not such a state should exist, because one already does. And that's not a pholosophical point - it's a practical one. It's not that its existence somehow justifies everything about its past (it rather clearly does not) - it's simply that its existence is a fact.

The only pertinent questions are how things should work going forward, and that's exactly the context in which Jews who support its existence but call for cooperation with its neighbors and most notably with Palestinians are arguably the best possible allies we can have. No matter how determined and petulant they might be, those who call for Israel's dissolution will never succeed, so the only question is whether those who oppose them will be rational actors who wish to settle the conflict through cooperation or vicious demagogues who intend to settle it through murder and pillage.