#if you're anti divorce you live in a complete fantasy land

[gowns]

the notes on that post are nuts... whenever you see an anti-abortion person on tumblr it's always like... are you lost?? let alone the ANTI-DIVORCE contingent that apparently walks among us

[selormohene]

day 133 (monday, november 13th 2023)

On how one���s normative orientation is shaped by the historical circumstances of one’s birth. So this starts with a concrete example. Personally, I think the existence of the state project of Israel in anything like its presently existing form is utterly indefensible. I have no objection to Zionism in principle, if only because the idea of Zionism has room in it for realisations utterly remote from present historical circumstances. That is, I absolutely do not begrudge anyone their belief, at least insofar as it is specified in this abstract way and to this extent, that someday, somehow, God is going to lead the Jewish people into their promised land. But I think any version of the claim that anyone could possibly ask me to take seriously must be utterly divorced from anything like the state of Israel as it currently exists. And as far as I'm concerned, any view to the extent that respect for the religious view I've called Zionism above must grant as legitimate the idea that it has its realisation in anything like the present nation of Israel only strikes me as excusable if it’s interpreted as a complete fantasy, divorced from any honest reckoning with the history of Israel's founding, the explicit ideologies of settler colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing that guided its establishment and has inspired its leaders from Herzl to Jabotinsky all the way to Netanyahu, the role of European anti-Judaism and cavalier disregard for the inhabitants of historic Palestine in designating that geographical area as the site for the realisation of the Zionist project, and the subsequent relentless expansionism manifested in the violent siege and decimation of Gaza and the occupation and terrorism of the West Bank. In the face of this history, to hold to such platitudes as that Israel is nonetheless a democracy, or that it’s an imperfect state but could be made better, or that all that the people of Israel need to do is vote out Netanyahu’s right-wing government and elect some “progressives” and things will be better, or that the best outcome is a two-state solution within which reconciliation between the deeply-held ideologies of Israelis (or Jews) and Palestinians is to be sought, or whatever, but sorry we’re still going to maintain dominion over sixty percent of the land, half of your main city, and ninety percent of the border of one of your two non-contiguous territories, regarding which our bad, by the way, and the thousands of people who kicked Palestinians out of their homes and lands — Palestinians many of whom are still alive! — can keep those homes because what are you going to do, give the houses and the land back, can only be the product of wilful ignorance of a sort which I simply cannot take seriously, to say the least. Like thinking of people whose Zionism commits them to the actually existing state of Israel as deeply deluded is the most charitable I could possibly be.

Now there’s an objection I’ve heard to this, which is that at this point there are people who were born and raised in Israel, whose parents and grandparents have spent their entire lives there, and for whom “going back” to Eastern Europe or whatever would be impossible because they're not from there in any real sense, because Israel is the only place they’ve ever known — after all this is the same argument that's made against sending people back to Latin America whose parents brought them over without papers as kids (and of course their political positions are very different but if you're going to make that argument incorporate it directly into your case I'd imagine instead of trying to retrofit reasons why it's different in this instance). This situation of native Israelis is of course quite separate from the question of Jewish people who have lives in other countries but have claimed the present-day territory of Israel as their birthright. And to be fair the question of native Israelis is a hard one. But it strikes me that the response to that issue is to recognise that just because we find it difficult what to say about individuals caught up in certain circumstances, or just because we should not want to judge those individuals morally on the basis of the circumstances in which they find themselves, doesn’t thereby make the circumstances morally just. It’s true that it would be rather perverse to want to uproot someone who at this point only knows that place as their home, but that does not mean the state-making project into which they have been conscripted by their birth (and perhaps into identification with which their upbringing has aligned them) is thereby morally defensible. I actually said this about the Queen once. She didn’t choose to be born into the British royal family, and yet once born there was basically no chance, given the circumstances of her birth, that she would have formed the sort of moral or political consciousness under which she would have come to believe the monarchy was unjust and should be overthrown. You could say the same for the many of us who are participating in the state project of the USA, which is built on the destruction of the First Nations. And yet one still wants to say that that state project is not thereby rendered just simply because we cannot extricate ourselves from our default stance towards it, which is to see it as legitimate. We must work from within that situation in the recognition that it is not necessarily all right, instead of assuming that it must be because that's all we have to start with.