Viggo Andersen: And then the key gets stuck for me: "It's not to Westernize the Middle East and make it more democratic." Because while Israel of course is a democracy it's at its core not Western, and it can't be, because Judaism is Middle-East, it's not Western.
Me (Ed): I don't agree. While Israel has ancient roots in the Middle East (like Christianity does) it is a western implant in the region. Some half dozen years ago, I put together some notes on the creation and status of Israel for an Ottawa Dissenters meeting. Here is an excerpt from them: To understand what is underway in the Middle East right now, one has to go back into history and recognize that Israel has been the Jewish Holy Land and Promised Land for some 3,000 years. One also has to consider the Islamic Ottoman or Turkish Empire, which extended from the Anatolian peninsula (Spain, mainly) through the Middle East, parts of North Africa and into much of South Eastern Europe all the way to the Caucuses. While already in long decline, it finally collapsed at the end of WWI and because as part of the Central Powers during the war it was divided among the victorious Allied Powers, with Britain getting what was known as the Palestine Mandate, which territorially included modern Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Thus the Ottoman Empire's decline and fall enabled the non-Islamic west to divide it up and impose its will on its peoples. One has to understand the frustration and resentment that arose out of this. All that glory gone for naught! But one also has to understand that the Jews were never Europe's favourite people. England expelled them in 1290. France in 1306, Lithuania in 1395, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497. Jews were not readmitted to England until the time of Cromwell, in 1655. Many of the expelled Jews wound up in places not especially good for them - the various principalities of what later became Germany and in eastern Europe. Throughout European history, Jews were both demons and victims. The Holocaust was not the first mass killing of Jews, even if it was by far the largest and most efficiently organized. There had been many other mass killings based on little more than the need for an ultimate victim - a victim that was anti-social, anti-religious, or anti-human and who was both despised and dreaded. The Jews of Europe, seen as insular, secretive, and at times sinisterly wealthy, filled this role admirably. So it was not surprising that the British, a major European power, given a rather difficult chunk of the Ottoman Empire, decided that it would be a good place to send the Jews of Europe. It was their ancient homeland, after all. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, named after the British Foreign Secretary of the time favoured the creation of a Jewish state, and was a primary instrument in making the ancient homeland into a modern one. However, the Declaration was simply recognizing something that was happening anyhow. Beginning in the latter part of the 19th Century, Jews had bought a considerable amount of land from Palestinian Arabs. The rise of Nazism spurred the migration so that by 1940, some 30% of the land of the Palestine Mandate was owned by Jews, who comprised about as high a proportion of the region's people. The creation of a Jewish State While many minor conflicts occurred between the Jewish landowners and their Arab neighbours, it wasn't until the period following WWII that problems escalated to their present dimensions. In 1947, the British withdrew from the Palestine Mandate and a United Nations Partition Plan divided the territory into two states. Jews got some 55% of the land and the Arabs about 45%. The Arab parts included the West bank and the Gaza strip, areas to which most were forced to move. Israel officially became a state on May 14, 1948. Jerusalem, sacred to Islam, Judaism and Christianity, was supposed to be an international site but it was taken over by Israel and soon displaced Tel Aviv as the Israeli capital. Large numbers of the Arab population fled or were driven out of the newly-created Jewish State. (Estimates of the final refugee count range from 600,000 to 900,000 with the official United Nations count at 711,000.) The continuing conflict between Israel and the Arab world resulted in the lasting displacement that persists today. Immigration of Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Arab lands doubled Israel's population within a year of independence. Over the following decade approximately 600,000 Mizrahi Jews, who fled or were expelled from surrounding Arab countries and Iran, migrated to Israel.
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