Joanna wrote:
> Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>>Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, the mistake some on the left make is
>>to
>>confuse their own bias in favour of breaking down national barriers with
>>the
>>right of others who are disgruntled to opt out of multinational states.
>>This
>>has always been a problem on the Canadian left in relation to Quebec, for
>>example, and there are many other similar examples of how leftists react
>>to
>>separatist movements which invoke the right to national
>>self-determination.
>>
> And yet, one of the greatest problems in the founding of the Zionist
> state was to get the "Jewish people" to be one people, rather than the
> dozens of people with dozens of different cultural practices (and
> languages) issuing from all of europe and the middle east.
===========================
That's true. In fact, there probably wouldn't have been a Jewish state
without the Holocaust. The Sephardic emigration followed the establishment
of Israel and the continuing conflict with the Arab states, while the
Russian emigration, like most emigration, was driven mainly by economic
motives. But the efforts to get better-off North American and European Jews
(outside Brooklyn) to emigrate to Israel were conspicuously unsuccessful. A
near majority of Jews now intermarry and the rate is steadily rising, and as
the memory of the Holocaust recedes further, it will be even harder to, as
you put it, get the "dozens of people with dozens of different cultural
practices (and languages)" to think of themselves as one people.