On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Ireland, e.g., has generous passport and citizenship laws for
> descendents of emigrants from Ireland, but it is not the "state of the
> Irish people world-wide," such that I, a US citizen whose
> great-grandmother was Irish, have more rights in Ireland than Mr.
> Leopold Bloom of Dublin, a life-long resident of that city,
I believe you are confusing two things here, CG. The problem is not that they are letting you in. The problem is that they are oppressing Mr. Leopold Bloom. If they stopped letting you in but continued oppressing him, the world would be no more just.
> barred from marrying (!),
While we're on the subject, you're exaggerating this. It's a de jure prohibition, not a de facto one. Any Israeli citizen can get married in Israel to any other one, either in another faith, or in Cypress, which is rather like Reno: In and Out in an hour and you can gamble while you're there. All such out of state marriages are automatically recognized by the state; it's an expansive part of the law of return. In the end it's like lots of other kosher laws written into the state code: a pain in the ass more than anything else.
IMHO, most of the real acts of racism in Israel that are peculiarly its own, like the shooting of Arab citizens last October, or the "Jewish Majority" requirements of the Knesset, are institutionalized outside of its citizenship law and in its spite. Just like here in the US.
> And if I insisted that apartheid South Africa had displayed an
>"ethnocultural definition of nationhood," you might think that
> although accurate I was being a bit euphemistic.
Your original point, the one I was responding to, was that Israel's law of return and its relation to its diaspora was unique. It is not; it is common. Do you want to concede that point and move on to another? On some other point we may be in perfect agreement.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com