Sunday, November 18, 2007
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Ruth Gavison: The right to self-determination - '...Aloni "establishes" here an "Israeli" civic collective that lacks roots and culture. It is not at all clear whether the Arabs belong or wish to belong to this collective and, in particular, why it is here, and how it is to survive in this region, whose deepest principles of identity - perhaps regretfully for Aloni - are a complex, powerful and dynamic combination of religious and national elements...'
I think Shulamit Aloni is buying into the European idea that the nation-state is a kind of sin and that patriotism is to be debunked. The problem is that Israel can afford these attitudes even less than European countries can.
According to her definition of a nation---that's it's not a nation unless it's, well, a nation--- very few peoples in the world would qualify as nations. Even many Western European countries that were once nation states, in spite of some immigration, are nation-states no longer. So are the British now a "people" but not a "nation"? Same with the French? Also, by Aloni's count, none of the African states would be nations, and very few Asian ones, as well. Yet the announcement that they're only "peoples" would be news to them. Anyway, what is a "people"? It is such a vague word.
Many nations are built, are created consciously. And that's not only the case with newly independent states of the mid-20th century. The same was true of Italy and Germany, and even France. And France and Italy, not only were central governments imposed, but a central language and culture as well.
Ruth Gavison seems right when she says that you really cannot count Arabs in Israel as part of the Israeli collective. Except for many of the Druse, the Arabs are in Israel would rather that the state they live in not be Israel but Palestine. Who can blame them? I'd feel the same way if I were an Israeli Arab. For the moment many of them prefer the Israeli government to that of Hamas or the corrupt P.A. But that's just a preference for a lesser of evils.
Shulamit Aloni is well-meaning, but she's a fool. When will she learn that it's no sin to want for one's own people what one is willing to see others get? Open-mindedness means appreciating others; but it does not also mean depreciating oneself. The latter is not a necessary corollary of the former. Ideally, the two attitudes should exist side by side. Self-abnegation is no virtue.
Well put, Joanne.