In my last post on the subject, several commenters took offense with my intermingling of race and religion with regard to Israel, i.e., that it's wrong to call Jews a race (I didn't actually say that, but implied it by saying the state of Israel seeks to maintain a single racial/religious identity).
Clearly, it's an occupational hazard to be the horizontal thinker who skips across subjects and is willing to share first-draft thinking, virtually live. And in this increasingly intolerant intellectual environment we find ourselves in, where the new motto seems to be, "saying sorry isn't enough," one risks banishment by all sorts of people every time you open your mouth
So I asked myself, "was that just sloppy on my part (I am constantly guilty of universalizing everything as a top-down, big picture thinker) or do I see Israel's identity based not merely on a religious affiliation argument but also on a blood argument?"
And my answer is, I honestly believe that I do see the Israeli argument based on blood as well as religion: the notion that "natural" Jews are biologicals (to borrow a phrase from the world of adoption; here, simply defining "natural" as being by birth). If your mother is a Jew, you're naturally a Jew. Doesn't mean you'll follow the faith, but it does mean you're automatically qualified for membership. If your mom isn't Jewish, then you have to convert. You have to choose the faith.
And that's different from my faith (Catholicism), because having a Catholic mom doesn't get you anything in Catholicism. You get a children's pass with baptism, but then you're required to redeclare your faith at various stages or you're out, no matter who your mom is. You really can't be Christian by birth
If the blood tie is meaningless in Christianity, it does seem to mean a lot in Judaism (there are Christians, but not really a Christian "people"; if you're not a practicing Christian, you're not Christian, but if you're not a practicing Jew, are you not still considered Jewish?), so clearly there's a mingling of racial and religious identity, and that's seen in the Law of Return, a profound mechanism designed to attract as many Jews as possible to the homeland from the various locations (and yes, from various ethnic identities achieved through intermarriage) reached by Jews scattered in the historical diaspora. That law allows (by my knowledge) converted Jews to emigrate to Israel, but it does not allow non-Jews to emigrate to Israel and Israel restricts full citizenship to Jews. So if my mom's Jewish, I've got the free pass to Israeli citizenship, but if she's not and I marry a Jew, then I can't manage citizenship unless I convert.
To me, that whole story allows Israelis to define themselves in both a racial manner (blood ties trump) and religious (converts are welcome) manner, so it gets a bit disingenuous to say Jews are not defined somehow by race even though self-identification can be proven primarily on the basis of blood ties (i.e., my mom's Jewish). Then again, it's clear that Jews exist, with their bloodlines, across numerous racial groups, and maybe the matrilineal aspect accounts for that.
Moreover, the historical basis for Israel as a state is to recollect that tribe that got spread all over the planet in centuries past, and it doesn't get much more racial than that. It's just that, starting with Israel's birth in the late 1940s, and given all this time, to engage in the process of re-concentrating some portion of the Jewish tribe is to accept that many come back looking like people from the world over (due to past intermarriage and cultural assimilation). That reality does make Israel a multi-racial society, and yet the undeniable ethnic-specific reality also exists: non-Jews need not apply.
I imagine it's the peculiarities of this complex argument that gives rise to a special name for being anti-Jewish, because calling it "racist" would seem to offer more confusion than understanding.
I know I'm taking profound points of self-identity (often held to the point of irrationality by many) and treating them as so many trade-able items. I make no bones about being casual in this manner, which I consider to be the essence of being American. And I readily stipulate than anyone's group identities are always perceived by that person as being far more profound than any outsider can understand. That's just the nature of the beast.
But I will confess a certain ambivalence on such things, and--again--that marks me as hopelessly American. For example, I am the only member of my family to date who's married a non-Catholic (the daughter of a Congregational minister, no less) who converted just before the wedding to make my parents happy. When, years later, we were fighting my first-born's cancer, we very casually switched from a Catholic parish to an Episcopalian one for a couple of years (baptizing our first son as an Episcopalian, which my parents took as a profound departure but which meant essentially nothing to me). Later on, when our kids got to grade-school age, we discovered we weren't rich enough to be Episcopalians (or at least pay for their version of parochial schooling), although, quite frankly, I would be surprised if I left this world a practicing Catholic, because (even more frankly), I love my wife more than Catholicism, which I don't confuse with my belief in God (which is profound) but rather consider one formal rule set for practicing that faith (and frankly, the Episcopalians got a cooler rule set). As for my ethnic identity, none of that blood stuff really holds anything for me, and whatever self-identity those ties gave me evaporated when we adopted a Chinese daughter. In the end, I consider my identity as overlapping and synthetic and flexible as that of these United States, which is why I consider this country the greatest place in the world to live and be whomever you want to be, aka, the pursuit of happiness.
So yeah, you can have an Arab Jew as president of Israel, but it would seem unlikely you could ever have a non-Jew as the president of Israel. Members of the Knesset, sure, but I don't see how Israel could allow them to become anything beyond a small minority. And that's a fundamental difference between what we call democracy and what Israel calls a democracy. Yes, there was a time when we claimed we had a democracy in which your black skin ruled out the possibility of your citizenship (your blood is "wrong"), and that was profoundly wrong. Of course, it would also be profoundly wrong to say you couldn't be a citizen of our country if you didn't believe in our officially sanctioned state religion (your faith is "wrong").
But you know what (as I anticipate the comments...)? It would still be wrong if your state combined those two notions in the following manner: you can become a citizen if your blood checks out, or if you convert to our implied state religion, but if you're not blessed in the first instance and unwilling to comply in the second instance, then you're automatically disqualified from membership in our country, because we have a collective identity to protect.
Now, if I'm wrongly interpreting what it takes to be an Israeli citizen, somebody please correct me and much of this post's logic will gladly dissolve, but it's long been my impression that only Jews (defined by blood or faith) are eligible to become full citizens of the state of Israel. If a Muslim resident living within the areas Israel controls enjoys all the same citizenship and political participation rights as any Jew living there, then I withdraw this post entirely and confess my profound ignorance on this particular subject.
But clearly, because of the diaspora, Israel's been able to build an amazingly globalized society that's a shining example of what needs to happen throughout the Arab world/Middle East, something I written about many times in the past. It has achieved a very decent and noble form of democracy as well, despite the implied political apartheid between those considered real citizens and those people who just happen to live there (Carter's attempted point). In many ways, then, Israel is a model for globalization, like the United States.
But none of that changes the underlying reality that Israel's identity as a state is built on a combined blood tie/religious identity of its people, and to me (and this has been my point all along in these posts), that gets a lot harder over time as globalization penetrates the region and demands economic and social and political change from the countries there (and no, I would expect Israel to make any great progress on this front absent similar movement by the countries around it, because that would be asking too much; then again, that harsh reality suggests that a region-wide security-political dialogue is therefore all the more necessary if states are going to make these progressions in tandem).
And as I've written before, I don't think Israel's plight is particularly unique in that way. I think France is being forced to redefine its Frenchness, with the underlying driver being demographics. The same thing is happening in Japan, a notoriously insular, racially-specific nation.
God knows it's been happening here in the United States since the beginning of our nation. But the key thing that's saved us throughout (but not without our share of bloodshed) is the founding vision that there be a separation of church and state. Jews can apply for full citizenship here. So can Muslims. So can Christians. So can anybody.
And that's why America, the most synthetic of racial identities (and yes, we're getting there on religion too, which is why you see so much resistance from the religious right) on the planet, is the best and most logical sourcecode for globalization's advance.
The same challenge facing all these states is also happening with my primary pre-American homeland: Ireland. Ireland's historical diaspora was and remains vast, as the island, through various forms of difficulties and oppression by others, has always been a place to leave, not to stay.
Now, as Ireland's successfully globalized its economy (which came with a clear diminution of the influence of the Catholic Church, meaning secularization), it confronts the strange reality that non-Irish want to immigrate there.
Now, ask yourself, what would it seem like if Dublin put forth a law stating that the only immigrants it would let in would be those with strong blood-tie Irish standing, and that the only people who could become full citizens would be those who could prove their Irish blood tie, or, if they couldn't, at least had to convert to Catholicism.
Would that seem racist?
My guess is that Ireland would be decried as racist the world over, or at the very least a systematic religious persecutor.
And if the Irish government, long persecuted both in their homeland and pretty much everywhere else they went originally as immigrants (they were routinely considered "non-whites" when they landed in America in the 19th century, for example), stated that it had the historic right to pursue these policies to retain the essential character of the Irish tribe and to counter-act those past historical sins, would that pass muster in most people's minds? Or would it come off as hopelessly backward for an era in which the movement of people--and their multiple identities--across borders seems historically destined to match the rapid and free movement of goods, services and intellectual content (all of which is bound up in multiple and overlapping identities) across borders?
Now take that thought and think again about the EU's apparent unwillingness to admit Turkey, and tell me that isn't basically the same deal: a combined blood-and-faith exclusion?
If that issue alone defined Israel, it probably get a free pass from everybody on the basis of past suffering, despite the fact that those who were asked to give up the most to make this rectification happen (the Palestinians), basically had nothing to do with the Holocaust (Ahmadinejad's snarky jab). And I mean that seriously, because world history is crammed with people driven from original lands. Frankly, that is human history, to include our treatment of basically every other species on the planet.
But clearly something had to be done in the aftermath of World War II, so the world goes along with the creation of the state of Israel, and now you have only the most recalcitrant fighting the notion that Israel has a right to exist. Not a perfect solution, but--historically speaking--it beat the alternative.
And again, if that's all there was, the problem would seem much smaller.
But because of the dynamic by which Arab neighbors tried repeatedly to dissolve Israel through war, Israel grew by land expansion in defensive retaliation. And through time, some of that expansion has been effectively recognized (the whole argument about the 1967 borders, for example).
And here, the dynamic is not unlike the sort of "defensive acquisition" claimed by America vis-a-vis Native Americans as our country expanded across the 1800s, a long and bloody history in which whites repeatedly struck out against Native Americans after the latter began retaliating for progressive incursions into lands previously declared off-limits to whites and to be kept in perpetuity for the natives. With each war, the white settlers would claim more Indian land, and the tribes would be forced to accept yet another treaty defining yet another off-limits land until Native Americans were so cowed and decimated that only a fragment of the original numbers retained their collective identity on the reservation system America created.
Nowadays, that historical wrong seems partially corrected by the special, nation-within-a-nation schemes that allow gambling to become legal on tribal lands. At least that's what we non-Native Americans tell ourselves.
But with Israel, the demographics are completely reversed: it's the Palestinians (both within Israel proper and in the West Bank and Gaza) who are having lotsa babies and it's Israel worrying about becoming demographically crowded out (the reality for Native Americans throughout the expansion of the U.S.). Naturally, it's much easier for a tribe that's having lotsa babies to keep up the fight, and when you add in the reality that Palestine (the historical geographic entity) is the home to sacred sites for three of the world's major religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), you've naturally got a lot of outside interested parties.
Fortunately, for Israel, it also has interested outside parties. As with any ex-pat (if you want to include all Jews who "left" the homeland centuries ago) population, the most vociferous and unblinking supporters for the cause back home are found inside the ex-pat group. Why? Guilt, pure and simple. That's why the IRA could tap Irish funders so easily in the U.S. all those years, and it's why the Jewish lobby in the U.S. is so strong. Hell, it's why it's not hard to find ex-pats always chomping at the bit for America to go topple that horrible dictator back home (our Iraqis, our Iranians, our Cubans--you name it). The blood tie, no matter how time passes, is typically very easy to tap ("If you were a true X, you'd be fighting for your people's freedom back home right now, so the least you can do is give money/political support/etc."). The American Jewish lobby is hardly unique in this regard, just very successful. And if you say that's only because money talks, well then I say, welcome to America!
And I say that with no cynicism whatsoever, because our democracy has always been fed by our market success, far more than the other way around, so it's only natural that political influence reflects economic success. Worked for my Irish. Working for the Indians (from India, that is) right now. As American as apple pie and Mom (not that the blood tie matters...).
Israel's also had the U.S. as a strong ally, because we feel profound guilt over the Holocaust (to wit, we've got a Holocaust memorial in the center of our capital, which is kind of weird by any reasonable measure, because last time I checked, that entire ugly show was based in Europe; and yet, our inaction was a clear sin, so there's some logic there; it's just so odd that the Native Americans couldn't get such a museum first), and because it only made sense for us to support a democracy in that sea of authoritarianism.
But back to my original point in this non-consecutive string of posts: Israel's got a real problem in trying to retain an exclusionary blood/religious identity in an era of globalization. And I make that point in the same manner I make the point about why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict changes nothing about the Arab world's problem with globalization (as in, remove Israel from the equation and the Middle East still sucks at globalization, and that's the real problem in the end--not Israel).
Remove Iran and its threat of nukes and Israel's still got a serious problem with retaining an exclusionary identity in a globalized world. Remove all the Palestinians and the problem's still there. Remove Islam as a whole and the problem's still there.
The problem is always still there because the world is moving inexorably toward a future of multiple and over-lapping identities for everyone, so that nation-states, in the logic of Juan Enriquez, will be increasingly defined--brand-wise--for the excellence of the services they provide. In a sense then, the same civic pride competition we've long had in America gets replicated the world over: "Live in France, where you'll never have to worry again about X, Y, and Z!" "If you lived in Iceland, you'd be home by now!"
In that future world, if your brand is self-limited ("Come live here, but only if your blood tie can be proven or you agree to our faith and no others!"), you will not survive--plain and simple (the basic pathway awaiting intolerant Islamic states). You'll shrink, others will grow, and eventually your claim to equal status with the rest of the world's identities (currently called nations) will fall by the wayside. You can say, "they'll just have babies like crazy to surive," but then you look at Iran, and it's clear that authoritarianism begets unhappiness and unhappiness ain't great for making babies.
Citing this profound challenge for Israel is not to pretend Israel's the only nation facing it. The entire world is facing this challenge. In the future, we'll see nations fade away just like languages fade away--unless they synthesize and abandon exclusionary practices.
I tend to have very low thresholds for liking books: if the volume contains one idea that triggers new thinking in my head, I like that book, no matter how many flaws others may see in it. For that reason, I'm glad Jimmy Carter wrote his book, because it's triggered a lot of thinking in myself and a lot of debate among others that I think is both useful and long-needed.
Yes, Carter's attempts to further debate will be attacked by Israel's strongest supporters in that sort of all-or-nothing way that they've always employed against anyone who raises any criticisms of their beloved country. Like another tight tribe, known as the Marines, Israel's self-awareness of its vulnerability as an institution makes it (and its supporters) close ranks like few collective identities in the world when it senses danger. Such strong supporters will attack any argument with the justification that "if we give them an inch, they'll take a yard."
I understand that logic. I just think it'll get increasingly harder for Israel's supporters to maintain it in the future, because globalization enables and promotes individual identity, not tribal identity. So states that maximize their citizens' potential for self-growth and creativity through multiple and overlapping individual identities will flourish, and those that restrict their pool of fully functioning citizens through exclusionary race-and-or-religious-based discriminatory practices will eventually marginalize themselves because the costs involved will poison their societies.
In that sense, Israel truly is a Core-like state trapped in a larger Gap reality.
Do I extend that dire analysis to Jews the world over? Hardly. Again, I think individual identities survive just fine in this globalized world, and there will be concentrations of identity in every state. People simply like to self-select geographically speaking. I just don't see states surviving along these lines, no matter what their historical justifications (just watch Utah lose its Mormon-ness progressively with time).
On the other hand, that's why faith in America's future knows no bounds.
As with all posts, this one is subject to further adjustment depending on what I learn and how my thinking changes. So I thank everyone again for commenting on previous posts, even as I note that ones decrying even worse situations in neighboring countries only state the obvious (which I believe I've stipulated in print more than most) and divert my argument for no useful purpose (last time I asked the Lord, pointing to another's sins does not justify your own).
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 3:46AM 
