Sunday, March 16, 2008

Letter from the OZ. A sensible middle ground?

THERE can be no denying that the Jewish people have a moral and historical claim to their homeland. But what they don’t have is the right to extend this claim to a greater Israel on the basis that it constitutes the prophetic fulfilment of the Jewish Torah.

Such prophecy is not only a clear breach of any standard moral claim, it also looks to the day when Israel’s Arab neighbours will be obliterated by a cataclysmic divine intervention.
The time has come to now finally recognise that the prophetic dimension of religious fundamentalism is what constitutes the greatest threat to our democratic freedoms.
Dr Vincent Zankin
Rivett, ACT

27 comments:

David Barry said...

I agree that that is sensible. I don't think too many Israelis would actually act on the belief that the Jews deserve greater Israel and that the Palestinians should all go to Jordan (some of the far right, including the settlers, but not many others). How many believe in the principle without wanting to act on it I don't know.

If players on both sides adopted the principles of the letter (ie, Hamas stopped acting towards its goal of destroying Israel, and a few settlers abandoned their new houses and went back to Israel), we'd be back where we were in the late 1990's.

And the next sticking point is not technically a religious one - the right of return. In practice, the right of return is code for destroying the Jewish state. And I don't know of any Palestinian leader who's renounced the right of return, though some negotiators have privately told journalists that they'll have to give it up one day.

Andrew said...

Sam, are you actually .... posting again?

I suppose Dave has a point but, personally , I'd have to say I agree with the letter. The right of return doesn't scare me nearly as much as the prophetic fulfillment stuff does. I can understand the right of return sentiment. The Palestinians really are under military occupation in a land which, in every sense that matters, was theirs in living memory (even if distant living memory by now). Also, it's a pipe-dream.... it's just never going to happen.

On the Torah justification thing I offer an anecdote: Upon first arriving in NZ, I picked up a history book and read a bit. In particular, about this widespread myth that, before the Maori got here, NZ was occupied by an 'inferior' race called the Moriori (the indigenous inhabitants of Chatham Islands who are in fact direct descendants of the Polynesian colonisers from whom the Maori are also descended) who were in turn conquered and driven out by the Maori. The story is completely without any type of evidence - in fact all evidence is to the contrary tale. It was believed, however, largely because it made European colonisation seem kind of O.K.: the British just did to the Maori what they did to the Moriori - they stole from the thieves, so to speak. You can make similar parallels to the whole "Terra Nullius" doctrine and such-like in Australia.

My point being, people like to feel that they have some kind of long standing justification to the land they're in. If you're an Israeli, the only story you can really hang your hat on in this regard is the biblical one, which makes me suspect that almost all Israelis have sympathy with the beliefs of the settlers somewhere in the less rational portions of their brain.... and it's all irrational fairy-tale bullshit that you just can't reason with. And by way of invoking Godwin's law I'd point out that only a small proportion of the population in Germany had to actually act on long-standing historic anti-semitic sentiment given enough of the greater population's willingness to acquiesce with them. So it scares me.

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