IsraCampus.Org.il

'You cannot say "whether a person will basically refuse to support the ideaof a Jewish state of one sort or another". One sort or another is very different. In Israeli political reality there is only one sort of a Jewish state, and that is the exclusionary sort, which has a system of knowing (marking) people as Jews and Arabs, and applying different laws accordingly.

'Beyond this kind of legal discrimination, there is also budgetary discrimination that I cannot support. Therefore, I am against Israel as a Jewish state. I am also against recognizing the Palestinians as a minority with group rights. I want to de-nationalize Israel, leaving ethnic identity to, say, what it means to be Bavarian in Germany: some food, festivals, church, Lederhosen, beer, museums, local newspapers and books, a sense of community, language, and other things that make people happy. The Jewish ethnic group in Israel is in no danger of losing its Jewish character, and discriminating against Arabs does not enhance it. 'All of us in the loony left agree on that. Believe me, if Israel had been defined as a Jewish state only on some declarative level, no Israeli Palestinian would have made a big deal about it. Now, after 60 years of discrimination, they demand also symbolic rights. I can't blame them. But as is often the case in (post-)colonial situations, the oppressed adopts much of its future (and present) identity from the oppressor. Theirs is merely a mirror image of our segregational nationalism.

Where you find more diversity in the loony left is in the attitude towards historical Zionism. But I find this issue of little political consequence these days. This indeed was the original meaning of "post-Zionist", namely a group of people who do not agree on the historical analysis (some being Zionists, others anti-Zionists) but who share the feeling that this is no longer politically relevant, hence post. What they do share is the analysis of the present.'

Ron Kuzar
Feb 17, 09