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On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation’s Basic Law.
Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and national home of the Jewish people. Hebrew is to be the state language.
Angry reactions, not only among Israeli Arabs and Jews, came swift.
Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism calls the law a “retreat from democracy” as it restricts the right of self-determination, once envisioned to include all within Israel’s borders, to the Jewish people. Inequality is enshrined.
And Israel, says Brownfeld, is not the nation-state of American Jews.
What makes this clash of significance is that it is another battle in the clash that might fairly be called the issue of our age.
The struggle is between the claims of tribe, ethnicity, peoples and nations, against the commands of liberal democracy.
In Europe, the Polish people seek to preserve the historic and ethnic character of their country with reforms that the EU claims violate Poland’s commitment to democracy.
If Warsaw persists, warns the EU, the Poles will be punished. But which comes first: Poland, or its political system, if the two are in conflict?
Other nations are ignoring the open-borders requirements of the EU’s Schengen Agreement, as they attempt to block migrants from Africa and the Middle East.
They want to remain who they are, open borders be damned.
Britain is negotiating an exit from the EU because the English voted for independence from that transitional institution whose orders they saw as imperiling their sovereignty and altering their identity.
When Ukraine, in the early 1990s, was considering secession from Russia, Bush I warned Kiev against such “suicidal nationalism.”
Ukraine ignored President Bush. Today, new questions have arisen.
If Ukrainians had a right to secede from Russia and create a nation-state to preserve their national identity, do not the Russians in Crimea and the Donbass have the same right — to secede from Ukraine and rejoin their kinsmen in Russia?
As Georgia seceded from Russia at the same time, why do not the people of South Ossetia have the same right to secede from Georgia?
Who are we Americans, 5,000 miles away, to tell tribes, peoples and embryonic nations of Europe whether they may form new states to reflect and preserve their national identity?
Nor are these minor matters.
At Paris in 1919, Sudeten Germans and Danzig Germans were, against their will, put under Czech and Polish rule. British and French resistance to permitting these peoples to secede and rejoin their kinfolk in 1938 and 1939 set the stage for the greatest war in history.
Here in America, we, too, appear to be in an endless quarrel about who we are.
Is America a different kind of nation, a propositional nation, an ideological nation, defined by a common consent to the ideas and ideals of our iconic documents like the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address?
Or are we like other nations, a unique people with our own history, heroes, holidays, religion, language, literature, art, music, customs and culture, recognizable all over the world as “the Americans”?
Since 2001, those who have argued that we Americans were given, at the birth of the republic, a providential mission to democratize mankind, have suffered an unbroken series of setbacks.
Nations we invaded, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, to bestow upon them the blessings of democracy, rose up in resistance. What our compulsive interventionists saw as our mission to mankind, the beneficiaries saw as American imperialism.
And the culture wars on history and memory continue unabated.
According to The New York Times, the African-American candidate for governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, has promised to sandblast the sculptures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis off Stone Mountain.
The Republican candidate, Brian Kemp, has a pickup truck, which he promises to use to transfer illegal migrants out of Georgia and back to the border.
In Texas, a move is afoot to remove the name of Stephen Austin from the capital city, as Austin, in the early 1830s, resisted Mexico’s demands to end slavery in Texas when it was still part of Mexico.
One wonders when they will get around to Sam Houston, hero of Texas’ War of Independence and first governor of the Republic of Texas, which became the second slave republic in North America.
Houston, after whom the nation’s fourth-largest city is named, was himself, though a Unionist, a slave owner and an opponent of abolition.
Today, a large share of the American people loathe who we were from the time of the explorers and settlers, up until the end of segregation in the 1960s. They want to apologize for our past, rewrite our history, erase our memories and eradicate the monuments of those centuries.
The attacks upon the country we were and the people whence we came are near constant.
And if we cannot live together amicably, secession from one another, personally, politically, and even territorially, seems the ultimate alternative.
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‘Dishonoring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism. Spitting on the cross, and especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews. In the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on the cross or openly before the church. The increasing strength of the Jewish state has caused these customs to become more open again but there should be no mistake: The spitting on the cross for converts from Christianity to Judaism, organized in Kibbutz Sa’ad and financed…
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CNBC.com
President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would be willing to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani “anytime they want to,” and that he would impose no preconditions on such a meeting.
“They want to meet, I’ll meet. Anytime they want,” Trump said. The president’s comments came amid escalating tension between the U.S. and Iran. Earlier this month, Trump threatened Rouhani in an all-caps post on Twitter that called out the Iranian leader by name.
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
A meeting with Rouhani would be “good for the country, good for them, good for us, and good for the world,” the U.S. president said.
It’s not clear whether Iran would accept any proposed meeting, particularly given the threats the president has issued. In July, Rouhani’s chief of staff, Mahmoud Vaezi, said that Trump had asked eight times for a meeting with Rouhani, and was rejected each time, according to a state-run news agency.
Asked by CNBC on Monday about reports that Iran had rebuffed the administration’s overtures, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he would not speak about private conversations that may or may not have taken place.
Pompeo said he is on board with Trump meeting Iran’s leadership, but he outlined several conditions for that meeting.
Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May after failing to marshal international support for a tougher approach to the Middle Eastern country. The European Union is trying to salvage the accord, which placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
“If we could work something out that’s meaningful, not the waste of paper that the other deal was, I would certainly be willing to meet,” Trump said Monday, pointing out that it would be good for the United States, Iran and the world.
In pulling out of the agreement, the Trump administration restored wide-ranging sanctions on Iran. His administration is pushing oil buyers to stop purchasing crude from Iran, the world’s fifth largest oil producer, by Nov. 4.
The ultimatum — cut Iranian crude imports to zero or face U.S. sanctions — has ratcheted up tension in recent weeks. Iran has threatened to shut down the world’s busiest sea lane for oil shipments. Its allies in Yemen, the Houthi rebels, forced Saudi Arabia to suspend oil shipments through another critical chokepoint in the Red Sea after they attacked Saudi tankers.
Trump, whose White House has stylized him as the “ultimate negotiator and dealmaker,” stressed the high stakes of any potential meeting with Rouhani.
“Speaking to other people, especially when you’re talking about potentials of war, and death, and famine, and lots of other things — you meet,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with meeting.”
The president cited his administration’s negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian leader Vladimir Putin as examples of his successful bilateral negotiations.
“As you know, with Chairman Kim we haven’t had a missile fired in nine months, we got our prisoners back, so many things have happened so positive,” the president said Monday. Trump said his summit with Putin was a “great meeting in terms of the future.”
Vaezi has warned against making comparisons between North Korea and Iran, according to the July article.
“The characteristic of this Establishment and [Iranian] people is that they will not yield to pressure,” he said at the time. “Trump should know that Iran and its people are different from North Korea and its people.”
The president’s remarks Monday came during a joint news conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. The two met earlier in the day in private.
