At 02:54 PM 05/01/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>But Justin's point is that there is no "proof". It all depends because
>there is a complicated anthropology of the odd intersection of Jewishness
as
>race, Jewishness as religion, and Jewishness as culture.
-I wasn't speaking of metaphysical or logical proof. I was just referring to -what would constitute proof to various different groups.
But proof to whom? "Proof" is an anthropological construct based on which group you are talking about-- Orthodox, Reform Jewish, Nazi Gestapo, and so on. So you cannot escape the complex anthropology of these multiple meanings of Jewishness.
> The Right of Return is as much about saving people from
>discrimination based on an external definition of Jewishness that is
>separate from internal Jewish definitions of Jewishness.
-If you want to save people from discrimination, you fight against -discrimination. Period. You don't drive 3/4 of the population of an entire -country out, steal their land and their property and then continue to -terrorize the ones who remain.
"saving from discrimination" was too mild-- saving from extermination was the view of many writing the law of return. I'm hardly a defender of Israel's policies, but I can oppose them while understanding their motivation. Even the US-- the state that Jews had the most influence on during WWII-- refused to bomb the traintracks going to Aushwitz to disable the death camps. They refused immigration. So a lot of Jews learned the lesson that no one would save them but themselves and the only way to do that was to have a state protected with guns and an immigration policy that allowed anyone fearing anti-Jewish reprisals to come. So they valued the physical survival of those Jews more than the property rights of those Palestinians dispossed of their land.
Here's a question-- if the Jews had just come in under open immigration and bought up all the land and slowly taken over all the land that way, would there have been any problem with the Zionist project in peoples minds?
-- Nathan