The question is not the usage of the term "race" but the applicability of the phrase "racist state." No one doubts that it can be applied to apartheid South Africa, to Germany in the 1930s, or to several US states within living memory, because they established in law privileges for one group defined by descent, and disabilities for others -- the situation that obtains in present-day Israel, even inside the 1967 borders. --CGE
On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Max Sawicky wrote:
> Response to M&M:
>
> I'm aware of laws defining a Jew, but not of laws defining Jews as a
> race, and so far you haven't stipulated any.
>
> Start with an arbitrarily selected group of people, and stipulate that
> their descendants are part of that group, and you still haven't
> established that group as a race.
>
> Race means some kind of common biology. Blood is continuous in terms
> of latitude as well as longitude. Such understandings could well be
> rubbish in any scientific sense, but they are distinct in my view from
> ideas of the Jewish nation.
>
> Jim Crow had explicit pretensions to being about "race." Are you
> translating Zionist doctrine as race, or are you arguing that it is
> tantamount to, very similar to, but not the same as race?
>
> At its worst, legal establishment of race of course refers to Nazism.
> To allude to this by the casual ascription of race terminology to
> Zionism is slander. It is possible to slander bad people. If I said
> OJ murdered Chandra Levy, that would be slander. Lord knows there is
> enough substantive material with which to indict Zionism, but
> establishment of race is not part of it.
>
> Mat's response below doesn't make the case either. References to
> blood don't fill the bill, as above. Miscellaneous zionists may have
> had pretensions to be a unique race, but the rest of Mat's post
> underlines the inherent infeasibility of understanding Jews or Israeli
> Jews as a race, even from a zionist point of view.
>
> On a list where quotation is ubiquitous, nobody has cited any real
> zionist pretensions to establishing race.
>
> A people are not a race. If all peoples were races, the meaning of
> race, such as it is, would be emptied. If we are each races, then none
> of us are. Neither is a nation a race, for the same reasons.
> Zionism is often racist, but zionists do not pretend to be a race.
>
> mbs