[Too much stuff I can't remember about Chomski, Finklestein, Zionism, one state, two state...]
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Here's the way I look at it. The central issue is the concept of citizenship and its linkage to founding myths. Most nation states have their founding legend and they all build their concept of citizenship (or belonging to the social body, the tribe) around the national mythology. It's part of what Cassirer called the Myth of State. King Arthur, Thor, Jesus, Zeuz.
For example, the Hopi say The People (meaning the Hopi), the founders came from a hole or natural well in the earth in the desert. I am not sure the Hopi story is much different than the official myth of the United States. `We', `The People' were founded by pilgrams on the Mayflower seeking religious freedom. What's the difference? One came by land, the other by sea and the land-people got here first. When I asked my mother were I came from, she said I came from Los Angeles County Hospital.
The re-construction of Jewish identity was what Shlomo Sand's book was de-constructing according to reviews. The political-legal implications should be obvious, citizenship.
The problem of adopting a secular, non-discriminatory legal system of citizenship, is that people who do not match the mythological construct can get to be citizens, and the trouble starts---because they don't match the national legendary profile. The nation as a social body becomes unlike its mythic founding. How can a nation state be a `people' when they don't look, act, speak, or resemble each other or their legendry founders?
We've got the US-Mexico border to point to today. The US solution has been remarkably similiar to Israel, and the US is getting uglier and more brutal because of it. And then there are the ideological wars. Texas re-writes its history, Arizona forbids teaching ethnic studies. Are thes studies heretical texts or something? What is this shit? These boundries are imaginary lines in the middle of nowhere.
Below is a link to an essay by Jack Ross on Mondoweiss. It's a review of Sand's book, with personal and political views added. I forgot to post the link on a previous post.
``Last Spring, I asked my father over dinner why it was such an outrageous proposition, leaving aside whether or not true, that Judaism is solely a matter of confession, as opposed to an ethnonational identity. He answered with some trepidation `because it contradicts 2,000 years of history.' When I went on to concede that for most of Jewish history there existed isolated ethnic-tribal groupings who adopted Judaism - in other words, numerous Jewish peoples - but that the idea that they constituted a single pan-Jewish volk was absurd, my father rigidly retorted `they just are.' ''
Much further down, Ross quotes Tony Judt (who's he?):
``The problem is not, as it is sometimes suggested, that Israel is a European enclave in the Arab world, but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late 19th century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state', a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded, is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.''
I sure as hell wish the world had moved on, but it hasn't.