[slightly revised to better comport with my intentions]

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1209627025568&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

2 Iyar 5768, Wednesday, May 7, 2008 2:46 IST

Sir, – Re Jacob Chinitz’s eloquent letter: The question of whether Jews have the “right” to a state is too abstract. Do the Cherokee and Iroquois and many Indian groups of North and South America have the right to a state? Do Basques, Sikhs, Jains and each of the innumerable tribes and groupings of India and sub-Saharan Africa, of western China, the former Soviet Union, and Afghanistan – the al-Qaida-run tribes of northern Pakistan?

The Iroquois used to have a nation in upstate New York. Do they have a right to return and reconstitute their state?

The answer to such a question must be based on realism and “how.” For example, people have the right to become wealthy, but not through bank robbery. It’s not whether Sikhs and Jains – or Jews – have the abstract “right to a state,” but the amount of cleansing, suffering, structural explosiveness and dangerously expanding conflict that carving one out would generate.

The Jewish state is based on recent, not ancient history. It is a messy right, as messy as the real world it reflects. It is undeniable that there could not have been a state without the Shoah. The State of Israel is based on 20th-century persecution, refugeeship and the unexpected self-destructiveness of the Arabs in their violence against the Jewish refugees.

These messy facts underscore the valid realistic rights that constitute the credible and the only believable – but deeply impressive and cogent – hasbara to the educated Western world.

JAMES ADLER
Cambridge, Massachusetts

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/975708.html

Thu., April 17, 2008 Nisan 12, 5768 | | Israel Time: 02:22 (EST+7)

Letters to the Editor

Expansionism foiling two-state solution

Israel’s settlement expansionism is reversing the long post-World War II decline in anti-Semitism.

Haaretz reports that the “construction in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem is continuing full speed ahead” (Haaretz Editorial, “Fooling Ourselves,” April 1) and that the momentum for settlement construction is unprecedented.

After Iraq occupied Kuwait, it was sent back to its borders. Tragically Israel, certainly “the only democracy in the Middle East,” now seems also to have become “the only expansionist in the Middle East.”

Exacerbating the anti-Semitic resurgence is the fact that Israel denies any fundamental barrier between state and religion, so settlement expansion is done not in the name of Israeli but Jewish state identity. Palestinians, less interested in European history and more in the continuing confiscation of their land, hear the Israelis substituting one identity for the other and simply copy it.

Ongoing expansionism rebukes the two-state solution. Israelis and Jews everywhere need and deserve the establishment of two states adjoining the 1967 borders – with Western, Arab League, and ironclad American peace and security guarantees – and, as a gradual consequence, the slow resumption of the Postwar decline and eventual disappearance of anti-Semitism from the earth.

James Adler

Cambridge, Massachusetts