Israel is an Abstraction

What are my feelings about the State of Israel? I don’t think about Israel all that much. Israel is just another state, like Ecuador or Burkina Faso, and I don’t care for the government of any country. I wish the people who live in the boundaries claimed by Israel peace and prosperity, but if their government collapsed or was reorganized I would not much care.

Israel claims to have a “right to exist”. I acknowledge the rights of the subjects of Israel to life, liberty and the peaceful pursuit of happiness, but Israel is an abstraction, a fiction around which activity is organized, and as such does not have any legitimate claim to any rights. It makes as much sense to argue that General Motors has a right to exist, that the League of Women Voters has a right to exist, that Pack 2, Den 2 of the Northwest Georgia Council of Cub Scouts has a right to exist. If the Israeli people voted tomorrow unanimously to dissolve the government of Israel, would Israel's claimed right to exist overrule the will of the people?

Do the foregoing views make me an anti-Semite? I don’t think so. I feel the same way about every government all over the world. I don’t dislike Jews at all and have known a lot of terrific Jews in my lifetime. It would be irrational to form an opinion about an entire category of people based solely on the religious category which defines them for the purposes of discussion. I don’t see criticism of Israel as necessarily having anything to do with hating Jews. It certainly could be related to anti-Semitism, but it isn’t in my case. I have known anti-Semitic people who supported Israel and encouraged all Jews to concentrate themselves there, so support for Israel is not necessarily an indicator of pro-Semitism.

It has been my experience that criticism of Israel almost always invites charges of anti-Semitism. If I complained about parking enforcement in Tel Aviv, somebody would call me an anti-Semite. At lunch today, when someone remarked that he thought Israel had overreacted to the taking of its soldiers, one conspecific piped up right away with “a lot of people wouldn’t mind seeing Israel driven into the sea”. This non sequitur put the kibosh on further discussion. The anti-Semitism card must be trumps.