Says who? We have 2,000 years worth of evidence that shows how well relying on the tolerance of other peoples’ states works out for the Jewish people. You want to demote us back to that sort of existence, you can do it over our cold, dead bodies.
You really miss the straightforward point of the question. I do not deny they exist. I do have a hard time finding many examples that did not get there by way of one culture being the overwhelming identity with other cultural identities being subsumed or actively suppressed. I am curious if there are some common paths to having gotten there.
Canada is an interesting one. The suppression of indigenous cultures is a clear part of the path but despite some friction the French heritage and British heritage have managed to mostly respect each other. Plus various immigrant communities are able to maintain identities without the resentment of being other seen most elsewheres. The British approach is as much a model for the colonialist method to many cultures as it gets.
The United States is not on your list but is somewhat similar to Canada. Suppression of the indigenous cultures and having other newer than the primary colonists immigrant cultures tolerated to various degrees over history, until they are accepted as functional white Christian too.
Mostly (not only) it seems the path to have an establish majority culture that allows immigration of minority cultures as long as they make some effort to assimilate into the majority.
None of the examples I listed are monocultures.
No, it isn’t. That’s quite deliberate.
Actually, it’s worked out great for very many Jewish people, self and family included. Has it always worked out great, for Jews or for any other tiny ethnic minority over 2000 years of history? Of course not. Small minorities are innately the most vulnerable in cases of catastrophic failure of principle in nonsectarian democracies.
But when nonsectarian democracies are working as designed, they do the best job of protecting individual freedoms for all the inhabitants. A nonsectarian democratic Israel-Palestine, for example, with equal civil rights for all, would permit individual freedom of movement, equality before the law, and a lot of other desirable liberties that have been in very short supply for Palestinians under Israeli control for many decades now.
Do I think that such a nonsectarian democratic Israel-Palestine is the most realistically attainable or sustainable solution at present? No, certainly not. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be, as I said, the optimal ideal in terms of individual freedoms for all the inhabitants if it did exist.
And a nonsectarian democratic United Nations of Earth would offer even more people equal rights for all, a much wider area to freely roam around in, and lots of other desireable liberties that people all over the planet lack.
It’s about as likely to happen as giving everyone flying unicorns who fart rainbows to ride around on, though.
That’s great for you guys. Didn’t work out as well for my family; the only ones who didn’t die are the ones who were early Kibbutzniks before the war.
Oh certainly, if you’re interpreting “family” to include pre-WWII ancestors and collaterals, there was massive devastation at that time in my family too, from the same causes.
But that doesn’t negate the fact that, as I said, very many Jewish people throughout history have survived and thrived in peace and freedom in religiously tolerant societies where they were a small minority. By my rough estimates, over the entire course of Jewish history the number of Jews who have lived in peace and freedom in non-Jewish-majority societies is larger, in absolute terms, than the number of Jews who have done so in Jewish-majority ones. (And that’s even after throwing out the entirety of medieval and early modern Christendom as failing to meet the criteria, disregarding occasional exceptions.)
I didn’t claim or imply they were?
Again this was a major tangent and it seems very clear that we are destined to talk across each other, so I’m dropping it
To being relevant to this thread: Israel itself is not “monoculture”. There is contained within “Jewish” a broad swath of cultural identities and practices, and of course Arab citizens of Israel are citizens, discrimination against them notwithstanding. It is of course the only country in which the predominant strand of majority identity is identification as Jewish, with many many countries having Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Chinese, Arab, and other majority common unifier strands.
That would be something few Jewish Israelis would be wont to give up.
Any “solution” that eliminates that would be a 100% non starter. One in which two states had mutual best interests comingled is less impossible. However improbable.
You and I have very different definitions of “thrived”.
Sure, there were times when things were a little less shitty. The Sefardic Golden Age comes to mind, for example. And yean, it was great. Until the peasants got tired pf a Jew in the Vizier’s office and burned down the Jewish quarter of town. Or until the Christians took over and decided it was time for a mass conversion.
Until they didn’t. The period of “didn’t” relatively usually didn’t last long as it included expulsion or genocide.
If there are still Native Americans on reservations in a couple hundred years, you could likely say the same about them. It would be pretty disingenuous to say that this means they’ve “thrived” under the conquest of Europeans.
Yeah, and likewise in Jewish-majority societies: conquest by the Babylonian Empire, oppression under the Seleucid Empire, conquest by the Roman Empire, etc. Tiny minorities are fundamentally more vulnerable, as I said. That’s true whether they’re tiny minority populations in larger societies, or tiny states among larger states.
It would certainly be disingenuous to say that the European conquest per se was beneficial to Native Americans. It wouldn’t be at all disingenuous to say that the nonsectarian democracies of modern North America have included very many Native Americans who thrived.
If by “thrived” you mean “they sat around in the places the wider society allowed them to live, usually in extreme poverty and without the right to own the land they lived on, and every few decades their neighbors got together, agreed to blame all their problems on this minority group, and massacared a few hundred of them” then sure.
? Wait, you think that Native Americans in North America nowadays (or during the next “couple hundred years” you mentioned) don’t have the right to own land? Is this a quibble about definitions of “trust land” and “fee land” in tribal lands?
Or are you simply retroactively deciding to limit the period under consideration to the pre-1934 Indian dispossession era, in order to make the purported “thriving” of Native Americans look shittier?
Wait, you seriously think Jews in pre-modern times had ad many rights as Native Americans living in America today? I was pretty clearly talking about Jews in history, not about native Americans in the bit you quoted.
Oh, I see. Did you miss the part in post #187 where I said that my back-of-the-envelope calculations wrote off the entirety of medieval and early modern Christendom as not meeting the requirements for Jewish “thriving”?
What are you defining as “medieval” here? What about the period between the conquest of Judah and the fall of Rome? I seem to recall quite a bit of persecution in that time period.
And that covers basically 0-500s, and “medieval-early modern Christendom” covers the remaining part of that 2,000 years.
Where and when exactly did Jews have it better? Certainly the Persian and Islamic worlds were often less zealous about killing Jews, but Jewish people were still very much 2nd class citizens with controlled rights, and pogroms did happen every so often. And the really far flung Jewish communities were either persecuted (Ethiopia) or exceedingly tiny (India, China).
Israel, let’s say Israel today, is not some paradise, even for Jews, and plenty of Israeli Jews are voting with their feet and moving to places like Tokyo, Berlin, New York, etc., where their lives are presumably less shitty, and can anyone blame them?