Taboos

It is clear that in the international arena there are double standards in dealings with different countries. Israel has consistently been a victim of these double standards: it is the only country not allowed to serve on the security council, Israel's fence is judged illegal while similar fences in Saudi Arabia or India are not even considered. Bret Stephens points out that there is another much more serious double standard applied to Israel - that of national self-definition.

For Israel, the question is whether the privileged Jewish character of the state is a matter of choice or necessity. But before that can be addressed, there is a prior question: Who gets to answer it?
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Israel, however, is consigned to a separate category: It chooses a Jewish identity, yet the United States is the only country I know of that both recognizes that identity as well as Israel's right to choose it as a matter of sovereign and democratic right. The rest of the world divides between those who seek to expunge Israel's Jewish identity via the so-called right of return to a so-called state of all its citizens, and those who think the question ought to be decided via negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians.

In other words, Israel is the only democracy where the taboo against foreign interference on questions of national self-definition has been lifted. In itself, this is extraordinary. More extraordinary is the fact that it has been lifted for a country whose name is synonymous with its self-definition.

The appropriation of Israel's right to self-definition is inextricably linked to the questioning of Israel's right to exist. No other country is subjected to this kind of questioning. The argument of the far Left - now the same as the far right and the rejectionist Arab world - is that Israel's creation in 1948 was in some way different from the creation of half a dozen countries in that area of the world, although almost all were set up by the British and French Mandates of the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

It is fast becoming accepted wisdom in Europe that the only genuinely democratic, just and equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is either a two-state solution - A state of "Palestine" on the one side, a state for "all its citizens" on the other - or a binational state. Excluded from the list of acceptable options is a Jewish state (whatever its geographical extent), a state that functions primarily and explicitly for its Jewish citizens. This is the new taboo.

At the same time, the same Europe that denies the possibility of a Jewish state, eagerly accepts the idea of another Arab state that will, unlike Israel, be racist and exclusionary from its very founding.

I have deliberately omitted from this essay a discussion of what a binational state would soon descend to, namely, Lebanon. Right now, I'm not interested in practical arguments or probable consequences. The Dutch journalist made an argument from principle, and those are the grounds on which I have responded. Those principles seem to be that Jews have neither a right to national identity nor to democratic choice. There's a term for this too: Anti-Semitism.

By coincidence, my encounter with the Dutch journalist fell very nearly on the 60th anniversary of Anne Frank's arrest. That's barely two generations. The fruit never does fall very far from the tree.