Should Israel exist?

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Those of you interested in the issues regarding Israel and Lebanon's current war are referred to this July 2006 entry.

Israel is the only country on Earth about which this question is seriously asked; fortunately, it's also one of the few countries which exists for a real purpose, so it works out.

Before continuing, let me tell you more about my biases:
Immediately after the foundation of Israel in May, 1948, thousands of youths left their families and homelands, coming from Northern Africa and Europe to help make the desert grow. Huge amounts of hooking up and fornication ensued, and the desert did indeed grow. My mother's grandmother and grandfather were married within months of moving to Israel, two weeks after meeting. (*) They conceived my mother (their second daughter) in July 1949. Since Israel conscripts both men and women, everybody around 18 to 19 is hanging out in the army, working out and wasting time. Much hooking up and fornication ensues, and so my mother met my father. It was more or less a fluke that I wasn't born in Israel myself.

[* 21 December update: I just met with my mother, who tells me this version of the story, which I coulda swore my grandmother had told me, was completely wrong, and that my grandfather was either born in Israel in 1910, or born in Cypress and moved to Israel within the year. My grandmother came to Israel in the 30s with a youth group, and that's how she avoided persecution in Romania. My mother did indeed meet my father while they were both in the military, which she describes as a "meat market".]

But I'm digressing from Israel, a country which is, at its heart, the attempted solution to a migration problem. Back up to the 10 December essay: there are 18 million Jews today, and the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in the 1940s. Since it was so completely obvious that the Nazi party had a platform based heavily on eugenics and explicit, open persecution of Jews, why didn't more Jews just up and leave in the late 30s?

The answer, of course, is that they had nowhere to go. It was so obvious to the world that Jews were being persecuted and wanted to leave that a conference was called exclusively to discuss the emigration question, at Evian, France. It was completely obvious to all involved that life sucked for lots of people in Germany and the newly-annexed Austria, and yet only one country out of the 31 attendees agreed to expand its immigration policy in light of the emergency (you'll never guess which). Yeah, it spells `Naive' backwards. It's also a ubiquitous symbol of a willingly missed opportunity to prevent one of the great humanitarian disasters of the modern era.

And don't forget the story of the St Louis, which needs no further commentary.

After the war, when the horrors of the Germans were blatantly and graphically laid out for all the world to see, the migration problem only got worse: now there were all these Jews who had been taken from their homes and shunted into ghettos and then to concentration camps, and now had no home to go back to. Sentiment in Eastern Europe was still anti-Jew, as evidenced by a July, 1946 pogrom in the Polish town of Kielce. Migration restrictions throughout the world failed to lighten. And so, based upon a still-ubiquitous desire to keep immigrants away, Israel was founded.

Modern Israel The main lesson I get from our history is this: people are assholes. Our institutions should not be designed around ideals about egalitarianism and fluffy bunnies; they should be designed to minimize the damage assholes can do. This was one of Madison's primary explanations for the USA's current form of government: preventing the tyranny of the majority. Whether the government as it exists succeeds in this goal is up for debate, but the sentiment is there.

Applying this to Israel is a no-brainer: the world has collectively been an asshole to Jews, and there isn't particularly evidence that the people of today are suddenly enlightened relative to the people of fifty years ago. Historically, other minorities would be persecuted with a chant of `Go back to (distant geographic location)', but before there was a location for Jews, the only choice was to kill them. Whether antisemitism in the world is in decline since fifty years ago is a question of measurement; but like the persecution of other groups, it has not---and never will be---eliminated.

The second lesson I get from history is that people don't learn from history. Asylum laws are not informed by Evian. Migration laws the world over still place undue restrictions on movement even in emergencies (see below). A country which unconditionally accepts Jews is, in this context, an eminently sensible damage-minimizing move. The USA is not that country, for reasons I've harped on enough.

In summary, Israel should exist because it is the only reasonable solution to the pervasive, unending, universal fact that people hate Jews, because they're Jewish. It's not the perfect solution, however, because that country has to be somewhere, and wherever it is, its neighbors will hate Jews.

One more migration problem I resolved not to get into the Arab-Jew conflict today, but since this is a migration essay, let me point to one oft-overlooked migration issue: people in the Palestinian Authority face many restrictions when entering Israel, which we read about all day long, but they are also completely and totally barred from Egypt, Syria, or Lebanon. To impute an intent on the law: these migration restrictions are in place because as long as there is a mass of poor and miserable people right on the border of Israel, there is pressure for Israel's dissolution and a mass of people who have nothing better to do than to try to kill Israelis.

Jordan is an exception, by the way, because they don't recognize Israel as a state, and therefore consider migrants from the PA to be internal travellers. [A reader points out that Jordan is in some ways friendly to Israel: they have free trade (consistent with not acknowledging the border) and they each have an embassy in the other country (decidedly inconsistent with the denial of Israel's existence).]

Harping on migration problems is literally my full-time occupation, but the border restrictions of Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon are the number one most asshole immigration restrictions I have ever seen. If you squint a bit, you can see why Israel has its checkpoints---people keep walking over the border and killing Israelis. But the restrictions keeping Arabs out of the surrounding, more stable Arab countries have no merits beyond run-of-the-mill xenophobia, and blatantly support direct, tangible suffering among the people that these countries claim to stand behind. [some notes. (A-bias)]

Asst footnotes Yes, I'd also support carving out some protected territory for the Roma. The Parsi also aren't doing so hot, but at least that's not due to external persecution.

The United Kingdom, a country of 60 million people, is obsessively working to reduce the 10,000 asylum applications it gets every quarter, fearing the horrendous impact these asylum seekeres will have on the population. Tony Blair got heaps of press the other day because the application rate recently halved, from 0.033% of the British population to 0.016%. They've come up with some novel methods, such as sending 14,000 Iraqi refugees back to Iraq to, um, help rebuild the country. No need to wait until Britain stops bombing it, I guess. [Here is a nice collection of articles on the British obsession with refugees.]

Oh, and if you want to read more about my rantings about things we should have learned from the holocaust but didn't, check out this essay. It's the first of 188,000 you'd get when you ask Google about IBM and Evil. [Also notice the category they put that query under. Tee hee.]

This is part one of three. Click "Next entry" below to read on.

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