Well in that case, we’ll just annex everything except a five square-mile piece of it somewhere in the Arctic. We’ll get Canada * without * the weather. Ha!
Do you know how they named Canada? The Prime Minister pulled random letters out of a hat and said, “C, eh? N, eh? D, eh?”
That’s funny!
I like the Canadian National Motto, too:
"We’re Canadians, and we’re, um, here!
No!!! You fools, don’t you realize that the border is what keeps metrification out too? Get rid of that and we’ll be up to our keisters in kilometers in no time!
BTW, did you know that American Heritage recently declared Canada our Most Underrated Enemy.
No no no. You see, if we annex all of Canada except for a small area, all the cold and metric will compress into it, completely warping the Canadians forever. Not that they aren’t already…
Amazingly, some people seem to have missed my point.
My point is that there is only one nation on earth that is constantly asked to justify her existence: Israel. There is only one nation on earth that is held to a higher moral standard than any other: Israel.
That’s blatant anti-Jewish feeling. Why should Israel be singled out?
We never ask about justifying the existence of the Italy, or of Mexico, or of Arizona? Anyone try to demand that Zaire or Nigeria justify their existence? How about Pakistan? or Belgium? All of those nations came into existence within the last 150 years (OK, Belgium was 1830, I exaggerated slightly. OK, so Arizona aint a nation per se. I’m making a point, let’s not get bogged down in details.)
Only poor little Israel, surrounded by nations that have several times tried to destroy her, has to justify her existence.
And, coincidentally, there’s only one Jewish state in the world.
So, why is the Jewish state held to moral standards (“justify your existence” is about the most bottom-line moral standard you can find) that are not applied to any other state?
Because anti-Jewish sentiment is still virulent, that’s why, even though it may be well hidden. And that’s why Alessan took the defiant position that he did.
CKDH: *My point is that there is only one nation on earth that is constantly asked to justify her existence: Israel. *
Serbia? Chechnya? Kashmir? Northern Ireland? Tibet? Macedonia? East Timor?
When territory is still being disputed by people who want self-determination and people who want annexation, the “self-determinationists” have to keep justifying their stance.
Yes, Israel has more of the “trappings of nationhood” (a seat in the UN, etc.) than most of the other regions I mentioned, but that primarily reflects the fact that powerful Western nations were and are on the “self-determination” side. To many people in the region, it’s still disputed territory, and therefore the validity of its status as a nation is questioned. No point kvetching about that.
<< To many people in the region, it’s still disputed territory, and therefore the validity of its status as a nation is questioned. No point kvetching about that. >>
To many native Americans, most of the United States is still disputed territory.
And I disagree with you. People are fighting in the areas you name, but I don’t see any threads here about “How does Northern Ireland justify its existence?” There’s a difference between political battling over control, and consistently calling upon a nation/people to justify that they EXIST. There may be disputes about who should control Tibet, or whether Kashmir should be independent. But no one questions their “EXISTENCE IN THE FIRST PLACE.”
I do believe you have a point. the thread was ill-titled. In it’s semi-defense it was spun off of another thread. If a discussion on Northern-Ireland had been going on, someone might have spun off that thread. I doubt they would have used the same language. A better title is “should Israel, as a nation, exist”. “should Germany, as a nation, exist”. and so on.
CKDH: *There’s a difference between political battling over control, and consistently calling upon a nation/people to justify that they EXIST. There may be disputes about who should control Tibet, or whether Kashmir should be independent. But no one questions their “EXISTENCE IN THE FIRST PLACE.” *
People certainly are questioning the existence of Tibet and Kashmir as autonomous nations: battling for political control is the ultimate questioning of political existence.
Nobody here is raising the question of whether Jews as a people should “exist in the first place”; they are merely asking whether and why the modern nation of Israel should exist in its current location. As long as the ownership of a geographical region is politically disputed, such questions will always be asked.
CKDH: *To many native Americans, most of the United States is still disputed territory. *
Is it? That is, are there Native American organizations that officially refuse to recognize the sovereignty of the U.S. government? Would you tell me what they are?
And if they do exist, then some people will surely ask (as some people have asked on these very justification-of-existence threads), “Well then, how do you justify the US’s existence in the first place?”
Fact is: It does exist – can’t dis-invent the place unless you want to go against the will of the people by dividing it all up again. They might get upset and do something crazy……………like elect a madman, start a war, something off the wall.
(P.S. Chunks of ‘Greater Germany’ was annexed as partial reparations under the Versailles Treaty at the end of WW1 – caused a little resentment. Probably not a good idea to do it again – I live nearby, couldn’t bear all that again)
LC: *Fact is: It does exist – can’t dis-invent the place unless you want to go against the will of the people by dividing it all up again. *
Actually, I agree. I was just objecting to the OP’s claim that questioning the validity of Israel’s status as a nation is a historically unique phenomenon whose only possible explanation is “blatant anti-Jewish feeling.” Uh-huh.
Kimstu,
None of these examples is even a passable analogy for Israel. CKDH’s point is that there is not another independent, sovereign, democratic state; whose existence is recognised by the UN, the EU and virtually every other reputable international body (though I don’t know about the Arab League); which has government under the rule of law; and issues its own passports and currency of which people routinely ask whether it can justify its existence.
The point of the OP is that if you substitute any other nation state for X in the question, How do you justify Israel’s existence in the first place?, the question simply sounds absurd.
Yes, Tom, I mentioned those differences in my first post:
In other words, the organizations disputing Israel’s right to exist argue that it is an “independent, sovereign” state (rather than, presumably, struggling through an alternative existence as a mere contested territory like Kurdistan or Macedonia) only because the Western powers decided it should be one, and therefore endowed it with all the features of nationhood that you mention. Or are you saying it’s somehow illegitimate to question the existence of a nation if it’s recognized by the UN?
My point is that what really raises such debates about national legitimacy is the existence of official competing claims to the territory, rather than global religious prejudice.
Kimstu, My point is that these are not minor differences that need to be recognised and acknowledged, but fundamental differences which render the comparison completely invalid.
Nobody has ever seriously suggested, for example, that Northern Ireland should be an independent state. Conversely, nobody is seriously suggesting that Serbia should not exist as a nation — the dispute is about the extent of its borders and its relationship with its neighbours.
“Trappings of nationhood” can be weasel words. The point is that Israel has all the “trappings of nationhood” (including recognition by other nations). That is, by any objective standard it is a sovereign state. There is nothing you can point to and say, “Israel is not a nation state because it doesn’t have so-and-so”.
Given that it is a sovereign state, I don’t see any merit in questioning its “right to exist” any more than there is any merit in questioning the right to existence of the USA, Germany, the Republic of Ireland or Pakistan. Either every state needs a “right to exist” (in which case an unlawful insurrection against the Crown by a group of slave-owning aristocrats who wanted to avoid paying taxes might not go down too well as a basis for nationhood), or no state needs a right to exist. I tend towards the latter view.
Tom: *The point is that Israel has all the “trappings of nationhood” (including recognition by other nations). That is, by any objective standard it is a sovereign state. There is nothing you can point to and say, “Israel is not a nation state because it doesn’t have so-and-so”.
Given that it is a sovereign state, I don’t see any merit in questioning its “right to exist” any more than there is any merit in questioning the right to existence of the USA, Germany, the Republic of Ireland or Pakistan.
*
Then you essentially are saying, as I queried in my most recent post, that it’s somehow illegitimate to question the existence of a sovereign state. So at what point does this immunity from questioning kick in? UN recognition? Issuance of passports? Democratic elections? Is it automatically not “meritorious” to challenge any territorial claims of a nation that has these things?
You seem to be claiming that once a political entity has obtained a certain measure of official status, it’s wrong (not just impractical or pointless, but actually lacking in “merit”) to question whether the entity deserves that status. That seems to me rather unfair, especially since it makes such immunity easier to obtain for entities that have the backing of the powerful nations that are the arbiters of official status.
That is, you and CKDH say that it’s not right that Israel should be the only sovereign state whose existence is contested. But the critics you complain about are arguing that without the strong-arm stuff from the Western powers, an entity as contested as Israel wouldn’t have become a sovereign state in the first place. Saying “but there’s no merit in contesting the existence of a sovereign state” seems to me like merely a convenient way of dismissing that argument.
“We’ve got it, we can defend it, we’ll keep it”—that’s a pragmatic argument that I can respect, and really the only one that matters in practical politics. But “we’ve got it, and therefore you can’t debate our right to it, and if you do then you’re just anti-Jewish”—I’m not impressed.
When I said I don’t see any merit in challenging its right to exist, I didn’t mean that it was morally objectionable to do so, I meant that I couldn’t see any point or value in asking the question.
You seem to be arguing that the “right to exist” of any nation state is up for dispute, which I think is a perfectly internally consistent position, but not one I agree with. It is also the point I think the OP is getting at: if you can question the right of Israel to exist, you can question the right of any state to exist. So why pick on Israel?
That’s a good question. How many grains of sand make a heap? I’m sure there are problem cases at the margin, but I don’t think Israel is one of those.
Kimtsu, if the question were being raised BY THE ARAB STATES, I would not have raised my point about the uniqueness. If the question were being raised BY THE PLO, I would have doubts about the ultimate success of any land-for-peace deal, but I would not have raised my point.
The question is commonly raised by AMERICANS. Or Brits. Or Canadians.
No one is saying that there is somehow an immunity from asking the question. I am asking WHY IS THIS QUESTION ONLY ASKED OF ISRAEL?
I am not denying anyone’s ability to ask the question. I am wondering why it is only one nation that is the butt of this question. And I use the term “nation” to mean “member of the U.N.” for want of a better definition.
Let’s reason by analogy. Imagine an individual who constantly makes comments about how blacks are inferior. I challenge that person for being a racist. You leap to their defense and say, “Well, that person has the right to free speech. He could be saying that women or Americans or the blind or people who score lower than him on SATs were inferior.” And I say, yeah, he COULD BE, but he isn’t: the ONLY group he has talked about in a derogatory fashion are blacks. I claim this is racism.
So, I repeat: the notion of an independent nation having to justify its existence – constantly! – is absurd, and is ONLY applied to Israel. To me, there’s one logical explanation for this, though I would be delighted to hear others.
On the question of native Americans not recognizing the U.S. – I confess, I have no expertise here, I was trying to pick an analogy. I assume there are such individuals, since I hear every so often about court cases brought by native Americans to restore their lands or ancient graveyards, etc.
Hey, for many years, like 1949 through 1970s, the U.S. refused to recognize the government of China, and blocked China’s admission to the U.N. But the debate was never over China’s right to exist – only over whether she should be admitted to the U.N. when she had a Communist government.
Tom: *It is also the point I think the OP is getting at: if you can question the right of Israel to exist, you can question the right of any state to exist. So why pick on Israel? *
CKDH: *No one is saying that there is somehow an immunity from asking the question. I am asking WHY IS THIS QUESTION ONLY ASKED OF ISRAEL? *
Because in the case of Israel, the existence of a major competing claim to the disputed territory, whose current national status was established only 52 years ago, is widely known and officially recognized as an international problem.