cousin basil wrote:Just a question of semitic semantics. Let's say God hasn't died. Let's say an American Jew, who supports Israel, is married to an Evangelical Christan, who also supports Israel. Say the couple has never been to Israel but decides to live out their retirement there. Why would one of them - the Jew - be returning to Israel? God didn't promise Israel to the Jews or anyone else, including the Palestinians - and he didn't give it to the Allies to slice up and mete out. If a Jew who has never been to Israel can speak of "returning" to Israel, why should a Palestinian from whom the Israelis confiscated property and kicked out of his home not dream of returning?
I think you might have taken an even more tenuous case: say a woman who had a Jewish grandparent on her father's side. She marries a non-Jew who really couldn't care less about Judaism or Christianity or anything at all. They decide (perhaps reading these posts) that there exists an option of taking up residence in Israel, and they work to make it happen. Wouldn't that point all the more to the absurdity? So, our charming couple goes through all the right channels, get their papers in order, and land in Israel. But hold on! An official did some research and found that this grandfather had actually voluntarily converted to Catholicism. What now?
To understand any of this, one has to understand what a Jew is. And to know this one has to examine the issue historico-culturally. As you may or may not know, 'believing Jews' believe that God intervened in history and pulled this proto-Jewish nation (the Hebrews) out of bondage in Egypt. 'God', then, forced a 'pact' on this group of people, a specific group of people. They got something (freedom) but in return there was a very large price to pay. Technically, there was no re-nogotiating the deal. The deal made (forced) was inviolable. Those people who became 'the Jews' remained within the structure of the Deal as long as they remained in that cohesion. And in that cohesion (according to the story, the narrative structure, the belief, the perception, the understanding) there were all sorts of rules and regulations. Read any of the Prophets to understand the general outline. As far as I know, there is no similar group of people who have established this identification, or had it established 'on them'. In almost any light it is one of the strangest 'trips' of self-identity.
So, that is the historical base, which extends back into time and back into labyrinthian structures of belief. All people---you and me and everyone---come from, are the products of, absolutely bizarre structures of belief about our origin, about the nature of this sphere and 'world' where we live. We all arise from some order of cosmogenisis, some strange group of metaphors to describe how we arrived here and where we are going. So too these Hebrews understood themselves as having a certain (and unique) origin.
To understand the historical Israel upon which the present actual Israel is founded, you have to understand all that 'old metaphysic', all that old history and the mythologems that support it. All people, in all times, use a metaphorical structure (though they may not see it is 'metaphor') to describe who they are, how they got here, and where they are going. Because Israel is such an ancient place, and because the 'archaeology' of belief, identification, self-definition, and historical placement and event, goes so far back in time, and continues in the present, everything about Israel and Jewishness is tremendously complex. The question you have asked cannot be answered as simply as you might suppose and hope.
Though I might, today, say with you: "There is no God who gives land or countries to a certain people!" I could say such a thing because I now 'live' within a mental structure, an apperception, that is quite different from one that, just a few years ago, was nearly universal in Christendom. And still, today, there are millions and millions (if not billions) who 'believe' that there
IS a God who indeed gave that land to that people. If you and I were to talk about it, we would likely only be able to speak in metaphorical terms. But we would also have to trace back along all those ancient routes by which we have arrived in our present. Now, taking all that into consideration, should we (can we?) retro-fit history as it were? Revise history, perception, understanding, the organization of perception, on the basis of our present understanding?
When Nietzsche said
God has died...and we killed him! he said a great deal. There are quite a number of levels of irony encapsulated in it, and Nietzsche, the true mercurial spirit of our age, felt them all, registered them all. An old, Titanic God has died, or rather
IS dying a long, terrible, twilight death. A dramatic and drawn-out death, a death well suited to such a god. But death
in that context implies resurrection. This Titanic God, then,
should resurrect. But alas, He just continues to die.
In my view, the hatred and contempt for Israel and for Jews, is one of the most deliciously intricate kinds of hatred and contempt there is. It offers to those who desire it, who relish all the subtle and not-so-subtle nuances of flavor, everlasting fun, sport, amusement and most interestingly, and most relevantly, an opportunity to act as Judge. What is it exactly that causes such a Judge to arise in diverse persons, both high and low? Who feel that they, right here and now, shall pronounce Judgment on Israel, on Jews, on Jews in history, and Jews in our present? I suggest that if you go into that (and you would have
no good reason to do so) you will enter into what verily seems to be a sort of Kingdom of scorn, of contempt, of desire to see history enact judgment, to get even, to get revenge. But on who exactly? On what? I suggest there is a great mystery here. Nevertheless, for the sake of this conversation, one can only allude the fact of extreme complexity, and deep psychological layers hard to fathom.
In the most simple terms, to answer your question, the answer is this: a State has determined that becoming a citizen of Israel depends on certain requisites. Those requisites stem from, originate in, an 'old metaphysic' but have become a fact of law in the present. What supports that determination, and what prohibits a diaspora Palestinian from 'return' is, simply, power. Power makes that determination. Not righteousness, not his or her (studied or unstudied, fair or unfair, friendly or antagonistic) personal sense of the True and the Correct, but raw, basic, root
power. And that power derives from the State of Israel. The beauty in declaring it in that way is that it gives to everyone and to anyone the opportunity to
DEFEAT Israel's decision, correct or spurious,
on exactly the same terms: through root and brute power. And it may indeed happen. Jewish history has not ended though we may have come to 'history's end'. The difference now, as opposed to within the period of Jewish diaspora in Europe is precisely that of
power. And you heard it from an Ass Who TalksĀ® right here on the Genius Forum...
As to the really touchy part of your post, about [the] "Palestinian from whom the Israelis confiscated property and kicked out of his home", you have indeed entered an area in which many people 'bristle'. But I would suggest that the entire issue, if examined in its fullness, has many more layers of complexity and that it cannot be decided with a
simple judgment. Because, on those terms and expressed in that way, there is no other way to decide it. There is no doubt in my mind that Israel arising again in modernity is the cause of displacement of people, of that there is no doubt. But I have learned to see and understand (if not 'appreciate') the levels of complexity in that situation, in Jewish history, and in Jewish identification.