Monday, October 09, 2023

On the Existence of Israel

First, neither Israel nor any other nation has a "right to exist." The right to exist belongs to persons, not to corporations, nations, glee clubs, secret societies, governments, unions, bowling leagues, or any other group of human beings. It is an individual personal right, not an aggregate right. While Judaism has had a long history of hatred for Christians, and nearly as long a history of hatred for Islam, the faith system itself has been steadily declining for two millennia.

Historically, European Jews have not been particularly favorable to Zionism:

In fin-de-siècle Budapest, for example, where Zionism made few inroads, assimilationist spokespersons lashed out at the new movement as incompatible with the patriotism of Magyars of the Mosaic faith. Márton Schweiger, president of the Neolog (Reform) community, declared: “Every endeavor of Hungarian Jewry is diametrically opposed to the trends of Zionism. It does not dream of a Jewish kingdom but wants to merge with Magyardom while maintaining intact its ancestral religion.” Sámuel Kohn, chief rabbi of the Neolog congregation in Pest, considered Zionism “sheer folly, a dangerous craze,” predicting it would attract few followers in Hungary, since it aimed to make a nation out of a religious denomination....

As was true of their nineteenth-century predecessors, [Polish Jews] blamed Jewish cultural distinctiveness for Polish antagonism. They were particularly troubled by the gains made by the Zionist movement in the years immediately after the war, both on the international diplomatic scene and in the Jewish street. They condemned Zionism and, indeed, any effort or measure to treat the Jews as a distinctive national group, including the Minorities Treaty of 1919....

From the late nineteenth century, more than 90 percent of Budapest Jews were associated with Neolog Judaism, the Hungarian variety of Reform Judaism, which defined Jewishness as a religious identity alone. The obverse of this was the absence of support for Zionism, which attracted a smaller percentage of the Jewish population than elsewhere in East Central and Eastern Europe. Only in provincial towns, where Magyarization was less prevalent than in Budapest, was Zionism attractive to more than a handful of Jews ... Most, especially the communal leaders, continued to think of themselves as Hungarians of the Mosaic faith, denounced Zionism as a reckless folly, and minimized the scope of antisemitism.

 As for modern Israel itself, the demographics are pretty clear on how this plays out.

More than half of all U.S. Jews belong to the two long-dominant branches of American Judaism: 37% identify as Reform and 17% as Conservative. Roughly one-in-ten (9%) describe themselves as Orthodox. Other branches, such as the Reconstructionist movement and Humanistic Judaism, total about 4%, and due to small sample sizes cannot be analyzed separately. One-third of Jewish adults (32%) do not identify with any particular stream or institutional branch of Judaism.

Notice two things: (1) Orthodox Jews represent less than 10% of the total, and (2) non-affiliated Jews (32%) plus Reform Jews (37%) make up over two-thirds of all Jews. So, the opinions of Orthodox Jews don't actually count for much. 

Younger Jews don't give a crap about Israel.

Another way of examining differences among Jewish Americans is to look at age gaps. While Orthodox Jews tend to be relatively young and feel a strong attachment to Israel, younger Jews – as a whole – are less attached to Israel than their older counterparts. Two-thirds of Jews ages 65 and older say that they are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel, compared with 48% of those ages 18 to 29.

Neither do Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up over 13% of Israel's population:

Ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredis, burned Israeli flags Thursday while unfurling the Palestinian flag to protest the establishment of Israel.
Gathering in the Mea She’arim neighborhood of Jerusalem, a group of Haredi Jews carried Palestinian flags while chanting "Zionism does not represent the Jews.”
Later, the group, including members of the anti-Zionist Jewish group Neturei Karta, burned Israeli flags on the streets of Mea She’arim.
The protest came amid celebrations of the 73rd anniversary of Israel's establishment.

Orthodox Jews do give a crap about Israel's existence, but they make up less than 10% of the Jews in the world. While they have a positive TFR, they hemorrhage followers because Orthodox Judaism is mostly pure bull. The only reason Orthodox Judaism survives is due to the subsidies it gets from the Israeli government:

Since Israel’s founding, the ultra-Orthodox – also called the Haredim – have been exempted from military service, which is mandatory for all Jewish Israeli school leavers. The various ultra-Orthodox sects see it as a religious commandment to only study Jewish texts and separate themselves from modern society. They consequently receive government subsidies to study rather than work, along with general social services and benefits relating to unemployment, poverty and their large numbers of children.

Today the ultra-Orthodox, an umbrella term for different sects and communities, are 10% of Israel’s population of more than 8.5 million – and are growing fast.

They have strategically cultivated a role as kingmakers in Israeli politics, making or breaking coalitions based on which politicians best support their interests.

Sure, Jews over 65 identify strongly with Israel, but they will all be dead in 30 years. Meanwhile the Arab TFR is at least as high as the Orthodox Jewish TFR. At some point, the non-Jews will be majority in the Knesset, and then the whole game changes.

It’s true that Israel accepts patrilineal Jews and non-Orthodox converts as citizens, despite rejecting their status as Jews. But what is this really worth? It means that these “non-kosher” Jews won’t be allowed to get married to other Jews in Israel. They are essentially second class citizens. How exactly is that meant to comfort potential Jewish escapees of anti-Semitism? You have an escape hatch, but the escape hatch will both deny your identity, and forbid you from establishing a family.

It’s an unacceptable and humiliating possibility. Israel has a long track record of treating non-Jews — be they Palestinians, Filipino migrant workers, or Eritrean refugees — with hostility at best.

In thirty years, the Holocaust will be over a century old. It will no longer elicit a knee-jerk reaction from anyone. Zionists have spent the last half-century trying to make themselves the victims of the world, even at the expense of writing all other Jewish viewpoints out of history.  

As Zertal observes, the Jewish resistance was presented as having been organized and led solely by Zionist movements and their leaders, while the role of the Bundists, Beitarists and Communists was either downplayed or ignored. Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the deputy commander of the uprising under Mordechai Anielewicz, was not even mentioned. Edelman, who represented the Jewish Socialist Party (Bund), opposed Anielewicz’s decision to commit suicide (accompanied with the murder of one’s relatives). After the war, Edelman rejected the very idea that one could draw “lessons” from the Holocaust, as well as the notion that Zionism provided the “answer” to the Jewish question. He remained in Poland and achieved fame as a leading cardiologist and a key figure in the Solidarity labor movement of the 1980s. In 1946 he published one of the first accounts of the ghetto uprising, The Ghetto Fights, in Polish, Yiddish and English. The book was translated into Hebrew only in 2001.

Right now, a plurality of Jews are secular atheists who view the whole Middle East imbroglio as an ancient land dispute of no particular importance, and that will only increase in the next 30 years.

Orthodox Jews were also more likely ... [to say] that God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people. By contrast, most Jewish Americans said they did not think that either the Israeli government or Palestinian leaders were sincerely seeking peace. And most Jewish adults took the position that God “did not literally give” the land of Israel to the Jewish people (42%) or said they do not believe in God or a higher power at all (24%).

And this has been going downhill for the Zionists for a long time:

"Even before 7 October, support for Israel among American Jews – who constitute the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel – was shifting. One poll showed that while most Jews see caring about Israel as important to their Jewish identity, more than half disapprove of the country’s rightwing government. Another found that a quarter of American Jews agree Israel is an “apartheid state”, and one-fifth of those under 40 do not think the Jewish state has a right to exist."

As a result, Israel will functionally disappear, just like Poland did. Trying to keep it alive is just pouring money down a rat hole. The Jews themselves increasingly don't care. Religious Jews, both in Israel and the US, are increasingly abandoning their faith, with more than half of children in Orthodox families simply walking away. 

94 percent say a person is Jewish even if they work on Shabbat, 89 percent say a Jew can be strongly critical of Israel, and 68 percent say Jews don’t have to believe in God, but an astonishing 34 percent say a person is still Jewish even if they decide to believe in Jesus as the messiah.

The number of irreligious Jews is growing:

While the Orthodox appear to be proportionally growing, Pew found even more Jews becoming more secular and unaffiliated. “Jews of no religion” — Pew’s term for people who identify as Jews and do things they see as Jewish but do not identify with the religious parts — in 2020 made up 27 percent of all U.S. Jews, up from 22 percent in 2013.

The majority of the world's 20 million Jews live in just two countries: Israel (6.9 million) and the US (5.7 million). According to Pew Research, the majority of US Jews under age 30 don't give a crap about Israel. Meanwhile, 13.7% of Israel's population is ultra-Orthodox Haredi, who oppose the existence of the secular state of Israel. That will rise to 40% by 2065. The Haredi don't serve in the military or participate in the economy in any meaningful way, they just study Torah. 

Pragmatically, this will translate into at least three consequences: first, additional resources for social welfare, as demanded by the ultra-Orthodox population, whose male component contribute little to the workforce and whose large families require social support and housing....Second, an ever-worsening separation between secular and religious educational systems, which will translate into cultural battles and rising social tensions between haredim and liberal Jews, who might be shrinking demographically, but on whose shoulders rest the burden of the country’s defense through the compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as well as being responsible for fiscal revenues....Third, the impact of haredi growth within the juvenile cohorts of the population and their systematic exemption from army service is already triggering a debate within the Jewish majority about the sustainability of the IDF as a “people in arms” based on a universal draft

Unless someone can drum up a 21st century Holocaust to generate interest, the secular state of Israel is in serious trouble by 2050, and probably toast before we enter the 22nd century.

UPDATE:

The elimination of the secular state of Israel wouldn't necessarily cause the death of a single Jew. Jews could emigrate from the region, or, as Rambam points out, they could simply recite the Shahada, the Muslim testimony of faith.
From a rabbinic point of view, Judaism is passed on through the mother, not through belief. Even an atheist can be a Jew. There's nothing in particular in the Islamic profession of faith that violates Jewish faith. As one Jew stated, "Personally, I am quite happy to say the shahadah in full sincerity but in the belief that prophet Muhammad was a gentile prophet and that Judaism and İslam can coexist as two approaches to the same truth. At the core, our religion is the same and I have no issue with İslamic claims to that effect."

Rabbi Fayyumi, who influenced Maimonedes, held a very positive opinion of the Koran:
"He analyzes the words of the Koran carefully, to such an extent that in the second chapter of his book he finds mystical meaning in the Shahada (the Muslim declaration of faith). A substantial part of the sixth chapter of Fayyumi’s book is dedicated to analysis and interpretation of the Koran. He concludes from this analysis that Islam is not directed to the Jewish people; rather, it is intended to provide religion and faith to the nations. Its purpose is not to abolish the Torah―just the opposite: the Koran confirms the obligation of the Jewish people to keep the Torah. At the same time, Fayyumi asserts that the Koran teaches that there are additional revelations to other nations, revelations that obligate them to their own religious systems."
Once a Jew recites the Shahadah in Arabic, his Muslim brothers will leave him alone. Islam isn't interested in a biological cleansing, just theological agreement.
There is no actual need for the state of Israel to exist. Jews can continue to live there as quasi-Muslims or move somewhere else and live quite happily.

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