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Rights of Return Compared

Israel's defenders often ask how third-generation Palestinians can possibly be recognized as refugees with a right of return to the properties from which the Zionists drove their grandparents in 1947-48. But didn't those Zionists, most of whom had arrived ony three years earlier, claim to be 80th-generation refugees with a right of return to Palestine? (In the latter case, it could not be a real return because their ancient ancestors had not been exiled by the Romans and thus were not a diaspora. Most Jews today are likely the descendants of converts, of which there were many far and wide in...

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TGIF: Let’s Make Sure the Nazis Killed in Vain

TGIF: Let’s Make Sure the Nazis Killed in Vain

I don’t know how many times I've heard that if we don’t stand by Israel, the victims of the Nazi Judeocide will have died in vain. I knew something was wrong with that claim, but for the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now I think I can. The claim is peculiar right off the bat. How would backing an Israeli regime that systematically and indiscriminately oppresses an entire non-European population in the 21st century possibly honor the victims of the Nazis, who were in power in Germany from 1933 to 1945? It makes no sense. But that’s not all. To die in vain means to die in the...

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What Is Judaism?

From Rabbi Elmer Berger's A Partisan History of Judaism: The Jewish Case against Zionism (1951): Judaism evolved from a primitive tribalism to as noble a spiritual and universal vision as man has ever attained. This fact attests, even without detailed proof, to the truth that "unity" and segregation may have had their partisans but that there must also have been undiscourageable partisans of another kind through the long history of Jews and Judaism. For change and evolution rarely, if ever, are born from uniformity. Uniformity is imposed, as our modern world knows, in order to suffocate...

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Is the Bible a Title Deed?

I was asked on Facebook, "What is your response to many Jews and Christians who believe the Bible makes it clear that the land belongs to the Jews?" Here's is my (slightly edited) response: The Bible isn't a history book, and archaeology has not been kind to it. See Spinoza's and Paine's critiques, and more recent work by Rabbi Elmer Berger and Shlomo Sand. If it is, Joshua committed genocide, which can't be grounds for legitimate title. If it is, God threw the Jews out. Where's the Messiah? Most Jews are the descendants of converts who never set foot there. Judaism, which proselytized...

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Judaism, Zionism, and the Dual-Loyalty Charge

Zionists, that is, Jewish nationalists, who hold that Jews qua Jews constitute something more than a religious community, open themselves up to the dual-loyalty charge. And that is exactly what the majority non-Zionist Jews warned against from the start. As Joseph Levine writes: It’s particularly ironic that Zionists should be making this charge [that dual-loyalty is an anti-Semitic trope]. When [Howard] Lovy (along with many others...) refers to the “ancient specter of Jewish disloyalty”, I take it he means in particular the standard anti-Semitic charge during the 18th and 19th centuries in...

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