This is a guest post by mettaculture, in fact a comment left in an earlier thread reproduced without his express permission…but I’m sure he won’t mind:
I disagree that the Holocaust is the basis for the state of Israel either legally, politically or historically, in fact to claim so is rather ahistoric.
The state of Israel was actually a done deal after the Balfour declaration when Britain, as the sole Colonial Power in that part of the divided former Ottoman Empire, took over the administration of the League of Nations with the express provision of creating a ‘Jewish National Home’.
Once Britain decided on some form of partition, creating in the process the constructed state of Trans-Jordan,then the emergence of a Jewish state was only a matter of time.
It was the rise of German Nazism and Italian Fascism with their support for Arab independence movements that moved Britain to limit Jewish migration.
Therefore the Holocaust can be said to be a cause of a deadly delay in the creation of the nascent Jewish state.
Counterfactually, but plausibly, we can argue, that without the Holocaust a more secure British Empire would have faced down any Arab revolt, at least until such time as a Jewish state was secured (bearing in mind the intense US pressure on the British Empire for this).
The eventual emergence of a Partitioned Mandate, into Palestinian Arab and Jewish states in this light is seen as no more exceptional than the partition of British India into Pakistan and India.
From a perspective where the case for a Jewish state made on post Imperial concerns for ethnic self determination, Israel should simply be seen as yet another of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire.
Importantly all the other successor states to the Ottoman Empire involved both the political involvement of European Imperial powers and the creation of states with a predominant single ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious population out of what had been a multi-ethnic, multi national multi-religious polity.
Mass exchanges of populations took place to create these ethno-religious-linguistic states out of the former Ottoman Empire, to more narrowly defined States with ethnically, religiously and linguistically defined notions of belonging
All the other successor states to the Ottoman empire (with the exception of Lebanon and the precarious Nato ruled Bosnia) have a strongly ethnic and religious character.
The Majority of the successor states either specify a National Religion (or predominant religion if granting non constitutional status to the majority faith) and, or, a strongly ethno-cultiural basis to their Nation State.
Greece is more constitutionally Christian and most Arab states are more consitutionally Muslim than Israel is in fact constitutionally Jewish, as they have consitutionally protected State Relgions.
Not only is it counter-productive to make a case for Israel that is so wholly exceptional as to rely on extreme suffering as the moral basis for the state it is also, legally and politically and historically speaking wrong.
Israel is wholly unexceptional as a state. It is yet one more ethno-religiously defined nation state that the splintering of the Ottoman Empire and the meddling of the Great Powers produced.
Israel is not the result of Imperialism then, but of post Imperialism in the decolonising age where coherent ethno-cultural religious groups, who could demonstrate a continuing claim to a territory, demanded the right to self determination.
Now what could be more progressive than that?
