Secretary Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security announced $94 million in federal grants to over 500 Jewish-based organizations across the United States.
I recently sat down with Rabbi Sanford Akselrad from Congregation Ner Tamid, who told me the temple spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on security.
"The fight against hate against the Jews would morph yet again, um, so when someone says that they are, they, they love Jews but they, but they hate Israel and you get a little deeper, what do they mean by that… and usually when they go into the territory not of being critical of Israel which is fair game. But they say Israel has no right to exist at all now… we get into the area of antisemitism," Akselrad said.
More grants are expected in the coming months.
This gets a little philosophical, but do nations have some specific right to exist? People certainly do have a right to exist, but I just don’t see this applying to a governmental entity. We hear about human rights, but not nation rights. And if we are going to apply it to nations, then the next question is: does Palestine have a right to exist?
How many nations in other parts of the world have been “eaten” by imperialism? Does Hawaii have the right to exist as its own separate nation? Where’s the outcry for them?
Nation-states are the problem. They’re based on the belief that everyone with some common set of features (language, religion, etc) are somehow a uniform, undifferentiated whole, and anyone who doesn’t fit the template are to be excluded and disempowered. So you end up with an in-group either attemptiong to force-assimilate or exterminate everyone else. For example, the way the Castilians treat the Catalans, Basques, Galicians and others in Spain, or the way the Danes treat the Greenlanders, or the way the Han Chinese treat anyone who isn’t Han, or the way the Turks treated their Greek minority (now ethnically cleansed), their Kurdish minority (culturally suppressed and occasionally attacked), their former Armenian minority (subjected to genocide), etc, etc.
And they’re most damaging in cases where mutiple ethnicities live alongside each others-- for example, the Serbs’ attempts to subjugate minorities under their control.
There are few exceptions to this: one being Scotland, which generally constructs its national identity in an inclusive way.
As for Israel, do your own analysis.
It seems you’re conflating the words nation and state. A nation is a group of people with a shared, named identity, such as Hawaiian or Palestinian. A state is an officially recognized group with sovereignty over an area of land. Many nations exist which do not have their own states.
All nations have the right to exist by the human right to freedom of association. Sovereign states have no right to exist: their existence is asserted and defended by force and by mutual recognition with other sovereign states.
The word nation has come to mean nation-state. Borders changing does not equate people changing anymore.
Hmm, I dont think this is true in the most common usage, but it’s also not what is meant when people challenge the notion of Israel’s ‘right to exist’.
Nobody contends that the “shared identity” of Israel has no right to exist, only that Israel as a capital-J Jewish State has no unique or exclusive right to self-determination in Historic Palestine. No state or nationality has a right to deny the self-determination of another group on the basis of ethnic identity.
That’s where things get tricky. There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.
You’ll also run into trouble talking about historic Palestine, previously part of the Ottoman Empire, and long prior to that the Kingdom of Israel (around 1047-930 BCE). The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.
Yeah, if you look far enough back in history, nobody had autonomy or freedom, and amost everyone was subject to imperial tyranny of some kind. So what?
One thing that’s very clear is that things said in the Bible don’t entitle anyone to take someone else’s home. It’s a holy book, not a title document.
A small number did. Vastly more were part of the diaspora.
I’m part of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. That doesn’t mean I can go to Dresden and kick some family out of their house because my ancestors lived in that area over a millennium ago. Such a claim would be seen as manifestly idiotic. And if it were two millennia, such a claim would be even more absurd.
All our ancestors originated in Africa, shall we use that as an excuse to displace some modern African people?
That’s not true. Only 26% (and shrinking) of Israeli Jews have European ancestry. A plurality, 44% (and the fastest growing) have native Israeli ancestry. The remainder come from North Africa and Asian ancestry but all groups besides Israeli background are shrinking.
Yup, and those Nazis largely supported the Zionist mission of a Jewish state, both because they wanted the Jews to emigrate out of Europe and because they hated Arabs almost as much as they hated Jews. Nazis and Zionists share a strictly defined understanding of cultural and ethnic boundaries, and a belief that geographical boundaries are a reflection of those boundaries (or ought to). It’s only really tricky if your understanding of Zionism and Israel is limited to the specific group that is doing the cleansing.
The jewish diaspora is almost as defined by their shared cultural heritage with their middle eastern neighbors as it is by their origin. You can’t draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that’s separate from their arabic brothers and sisters. That’s exactly the problem with zionism - it attempts to forcefully separate the cultural inheritance of its arabic history and expel it from both the geographical and cultural boundaries of Israel.
People who oppose Israel as a Jewish state do so because they see Zionism as a mission of ethnic and cultural purification, not because it’s a symbolic representation of Jews as an entire people. That’s what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.
Nazis during the Holocaust might have wanted Jews deported to Israel but today’s Nazis want Israel wiped off the map and all Jews destroyed.
Not an ethnic boundary but definitely a cultural one. Judaism is very different from Islam. Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture.
The conflation happens on both sides of the argument. The two extremes need each other to justify themselves.
I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. The issue is that both claim the same land and neither tolerates the other at this point. It doesn’t help that none of Israel’s neighbours want Palestinian refugees so the crisis is exacerbated to such an extreme.
Good thing the ME isn’t mono-religious
Insofar as they are both partially defined by being on either side of an apartheid state, sure. But Jews and arabs lived very peacefully in Palestine and throughout the ME long before Palestine was partitioned. The ME was full of arab-jewish communities living alongside Muslims before Israel began their immigration campaign and before pan-arab nationalism spread through the region. I highly recommend Avi Shlaim’s “Three World’s” book if you’re curious how those cultures developed alongside each other, and how they’ve changed since Israel’s establishment.
I believe both the people of Palestine and Israel have a right to exist, but neither have a right to exist as ethno-nationalist apartheid states.