"Wanted: A New Model Zionism" should be read in the spirit of A Modest Proposal.
>The so-called NMZ is more analogous to telling African-Americans to
>go back to Africa: telling a population to solve their problems by
>abandoning their homes and migrating somewhere else.
One can say, of course, that any quitter -- quitting a job, quitting the country of birth, quitting the country of residence, or whatever -- is trying to solve his problem by migrating somewhere else. Sometimes, it works, individually or collectively or both; and other times, it doesn't.
Comparison between the new model Zionism and the Colonization Society of the sort that many whites and some Blacks once supported (and in one case -- Liberia -- disastrously put into practice) is imperfect. Most migrants seek to move from poorer to richer countries and/or from countries with less freedom to those with more freedom.
Going back to Africa didn't really make much sense for Blacks even during chattel slavery, for fleeing from the Americas to Africa, even if successful, meant that Blacks would discover that Africa itself was in the grips of slavers and colonizers. Take Cinque, the leader of the Amistad revolt, for instance: "Cinque returned to Africa with missionaries and the remaining Amistad survivors. After his return he discovered that his family could not be found and his entire village had been destroyed. It is suspected that his family was taken and sold into slavery" ("Cinque," <http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/amistad/AMI_BCIN.HTM>). After Blacks won abolition, going back to Africa made even less sense than before. By now, the income and wealth gaps between Africa and the United States are higher than ever, and there is no chance that a large number of Blacks would even contemplate moving to Africa.
Not so with Israel and the United States. Israel is by no means a poor country -- it's actually among the richest nations in the world -- but its income is still below the US's: <http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_ppp_cap>. More importantly, it imposes duties (three years of compulsory military service and a month of reserve duty every year for men, two years of compulsory military service for women) and dangers (chances of getting injured or killed by Palestinian militants) on its Jewish citizens that other countries as rich as or richer than it, such as the United States, do not on theirs. That is why the United States, not Israel, has the largest Jewish population in the world, and more Israelis immigrate into the United States than vice versa every year, even in the absence of the new model Zionism. That being the case, we might as well declare the United States to be the premier Jewish national home. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>