re: #26 Obdicut

There are two problems, in my view, with the position you stake.

First, the Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel, including an uninterrupted presence in the land dating back several millennia, is important because it bears on the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their historical homeland. Israel is not Madagascar or the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is the birhplace of Jewish national identity and the Jewish people’s ancient and continuous homeland. This is important to understand in the face of the accusations by the historically-challenged that Israel is merely a colony implanted by the West among an indigenous “Palestinian” people in order to assuage their feelings of guilt over the Shoah. Incidentally, this particular point is what rankled many Isarel supporters about President Obama’s speech in Cairo. The Jewish claim to self-determination in Israel is not based upon their ability to establish a Western colony by force.

Second, Israel’s raison d’etre is not to be a democracy, but to be the national home of the Jewish people, a place where, ironic as it may be given the Arab states’ attempts to destroy Israel, they can exercise their right to self-determination without fear of being set upon, denigrated and killed solely because they are Jewish. The modern Zionist movement began as a response to the treatment of Jews by the far too numerous antisemites of the world, and conceived the idea of a revived Jewish state as a safe haven. The Jews who managed to revive the state chose to adopt a form of parliamentary democracy to govern that state not because democracy was their reason for being but because, as Winston Churchill once said, it is the worst form of government except for the others that they might have tried.

To base legitimacy solely on whether Israel is a democracy, moreover, will invariably subject Israel — in a way that it does not subject any other country — to accusations that it is not legitimate because it is imperfect. That is the essense of the libelous “Israel = apartheid” meme - that Israel does not give the Palestinian Arabs in the territories full democratic rights.

Thus, while I personally agree with your general proposition that all governments are legitimate only as and to the extent they draw their legitimacy from the people, and while it woudl certainly be nice to be able to rely solely upon that proposition in discussing Israel’s legitimacy as a member of the family of nations, the reality is that it is not sufficient to merely argue that Israel is a democracy.