[joelbluminator]

> It was also determined long ago that all ethnostates are stupid and dangerous and should not exist.

It would have spared millions of innocent deaths if Jews had a country during WW2. So maybe it's not always that stupid. And in fact, taking a whiff at the current state of things for Jews in the diaspora, I still think Jews should have a place of their own. I am not forecasting another holocaust, hell no, but it sure becomes harder to be openly Jewish in the West.

[Hizonner]

All of those innocent deaths were "justified" by the "need" to defend the "Aryan people".

The whole Nazi project was precisely to create an ethnostate. The enthnicity they had in mind didn't have much of a historical existence, true, and neither did the genetic group they imagined to make it up. But what defines an ethnicity? They had a founding myth, and they definitely managed to generate some real "Aryan" self-identification in people's minds. What does any ethnicity, including Jews, have besides founding myths and shared self-identification? It seems to me that the Nazis either had as valid a "people" to work with as any other, or at least were well on the way to creating one.

And yet somehow I really can't work up any sympathy at all for the Nazi's "purification" project, or for the "Aryan people".

Speaking of "states for peoples", a whole lot of those innocent deaths were aided by other states' unwillingness to admit Jews who were trying to get away from the Nazis. It seems they also wanted to keep their countries pure for their own "peoples". Maybe if they'd been less concerned about having states "for their peoples", they'd have been more willing to take in the actual individual human beings who were about to be slaughtered.

For that matter, even after the war, creating Israel let the winners feel a bit better about themselves while still not, you know, letting too many Jews in. I don't know if not having to "take" Jews was a major motivation, but I've heard that some of their leaders at least thought about that.

Oh, and by the way, while the Nazis definitely had a special hardon for Jews, they killed a shit-ton of non-Jews, too. If making sure people have their own country is the method we're using to save people when a genocidal psychotic system takes over the place they're living, then it seems like maybe we have to create some more countries.

Should the Roma get a country? They're definitely a "people", and they were targeted on the basis of it. Should there be a gay country? OK, not a "people", but still a targeted group that's at very serious risk in a bunch of countries today, if that's the criterion you're using.

Or, better yet, why not just take the view that Nazis, or equivalent, don't get to run any countries? And why not put a big fence around that possibility by saying that countries shouldn't be built on ethnicity at all? Would it be so awful to have a system of administrative districts without "national identity"?

Maybe there's no way to get there. I fully understand that that's now how people work.

But I don't like the idea that the way to protect against ethnic violence is to feed and further legitimize the "this for our people only" tendency, to do things that generate stronger ethnic divisions, or to make your personal safety contingent on you being able to find a state that happens to consider you one of "its people".

[raxxorrax]

Israel is not an ethnostate. The racial definition of jews is actually mostly induced by their detractors and the history of prosecution. For some there is a religious component, but that isn't too relevant here.

Finally and most importantly Jews aren't responsible for your personal shortcomings.

[joelbluminator]

You are all over the place sorry.

[Hizonner]

No, you're unable to take my point unless I spell it out for you.

Israel is in some important ways analogous to what the Nazis were trying to create. It is amazingly clueless for you to offer the Nazis as an example of why Israel should be around, when in fact they are an example of exactly why Israel should not be around.

The creation of Israel fed into and sustains exactly the phenomenon that you claim it's there to protect against. Having states for "peoples" is part of the problem. People identifying with either real or imaginary "heritages" or "cultures" or "races" or "tribes" or whatever is a bad thing. Building governments around it is a worse thing. That includes Israel. And you compound that when you suggest that the way to protect somebody from violence is to have a state that's in the business of protecting that individual's "people".

And, no, for the slower-minded readers, I am not claiming that anything Israel has actually done is the same as what the Nazis did.

[joelbluminator]

> It is amazingly clueless for you to offer the Nazis as an example of why Israel should be around, when in fact they are an example of exactly why Israel should not be around.

You sound borderline anti semitic saying stuff like that. You have no idea how obtuse that is.

[sndman]

Not all anti-Zionists are antisemitic. And Zionism is not the same as Judaism.

In fact, I would have a hard time finding one Jewish friend who was even mildly Zionist.

[joelbluminator]

You have a Jewish friend got it.