Who in addition to his ugly domestic polices was a leading supporter of strong international institutions and international law to prevent conflict; a key figure in the movement for a non-punitive peace after WWI and for international understanding. Life isn't always black and white (no pun intended)
(AFAIK Israel still prohibits mixed marriage or 'miscegenation'; the supreme court of the State of California recognised such laws as unconstitutional in 1948, but as late as 1967 there were still US states with antimiscegenation statutes).
There is no civil marriage in Israel, that means no religiously mixed marriages since neither the Jewish nor the Muslim religious authorities will permit them. If you're a mixed couple either one partner has to convert or both have to hop on a plane to get a civil marriage abroad. Foreign civil marriage certificates are is recognized in Israel.
In 1923, well before the Holocaust was more than a nasty, obsessive fantasy in the minds of rightwing euroneandercons of their day
And you think that it just came out of nowhere? I've read mainstream right wing political writing from that period in Germany and Poland. I've read about those views in other European countries. No, they weren't talking about extermination. They were talking about Jews as a grave threat and either a major source of everything that was bad (the moderates) or the major source (the hardliners) and the need to do something about it.
You include a lot of quotes from Jabotinsky, but I wonder how much you've read of his writings. He was strikingly honest for a European of his time about what colonialism meant, and not particularly racist. Instead he felt that the only hope of survival for Jews was a state of their own - for him the Jews were in the same position in Europe as the targets of European colonialism were abroad. He also was contemptuous of liberal democracy and sympathetic to fascism. Not particularly nice.
irc at least one of the German Left parties did something equally foolish, refusing to make common political cause with anti-Hitler liberals -- perhaps hoping that the fascist crackdown would awaken the masses and spur on the Revolution?
Yes, rather poor analysis on the part of the Comintern. Then again the Comintern weren't much better than the fascists - nicer dreams but in practice just as intent on mass murder, which they were carrying out on a grand scale at that moment.
The argument that all nation states were founded in blood and theft, that most of the western powers have a sordid and sadistic colonial episode in their past, etc. -- and therefore no criticism should or can be levelled at Israeli policy in the OT -- are not, imho, valid arguments against intervening in a re-run of the same old movie.
No they're not valid arguments. The problem is that some people seem to think that not only does it not excuse current crimes, but that it somehow puts Israel's right to exist as a state in question. A lot like the American right seems to think about Muslim states, think of it as the left wing mirror image of neo-conservatism. The fact that Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, or the Iranian theocrats are rather unpleasant doesn't mean that the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians have no right to exist in their own state. Same goes in reverse for Israel.
that's the problem I have with Israel - you don't just take land that belongs to someone else and say that it belongs to you. If the Israelis really wanted peace and their own state, they would have built their country elsewhere.
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...and the people at that elsewhere would object to it violently as well.
What people like Manon don't understand is that "Palestine" is one of the two poles that the Jewish religon revolves around (the other, of course, being God)
The Mishnah, which is the core of both Talmuds, is mostly about how temple practices should go once the "Palestine" has been regained. That was written back in the Second century CE.
Yeah, the Kenya idea was put to a vote, but it failed almost unanimously. So what? The Soviet Union didn't want a Jewish state anywhere in Northern Eurasia. Poland was activly expelling what remained of it's post-holocaust Jewish population [a book on the subject called "fear" just came out, check the NY Times book review from a week ago]
Where would you have had the Jews go? The US had quotas, the Aussies had quotas, The Soviet bloc didn't want them...where?
But Israel was established where it was. We aren't in 1918 or even 1947. At this point your argument is no different from the Israeli hard right one that if the Palestinians want a state they can just leave the West Bank and go establish one elsewhere.
Is anything I said inaccurate? Messy thinks that by yelling "anti-semite" she/he can get you to stop criticizing Israel. I haven't called anyone names or treated them as racists. I just referenced a few current events
