Wednesday, September 27, 2017

The most honorable thing that the State of Israel could do is warn the Kurds not to make the same error we did and become a state.

Rather than wanting to become a state and having to make the moral compromises to the int'l military-industrial complex that come with becoming a state, stateless peoples should form a Federation of their own and forge a new kind of cooperation.

I would not want to see the Kurds and the many other stateless Peoples in the world in the position of Israel - and I know that as a small state, they too would be forced to do "odd jobs" - as would the Palestinians and any other People who became a small state.
Iceland could do much to help forge such an alliance - together with the Basque People (who put together Mondragon) and other stateless Peoples.
I never, ever want to see a stateless people in the position we are in because they think that statehood is the only way to defend their right to exist and live on land. No one should ever have to make the kinds of moral compromises to survive that Israel did - and it need not be.
Statelessness affords the freedom to forge a new path. They should embrace that with open arms.
The dream of statehood is alluring and intoxicating with its delusions of self-determination and flowering of one's culture in repose - but it ends in tragedy because a state must form alliances and alliances are military in nature when they involve other states. There is no way to be a state without realpolitik and military-industrial business and it is ugly. Let no one make Israel's mistakes again.

I read a lot of the Zionist literature when I was studying Jewish Philosophy. Very few of the Zionists were militant. Most of the Zionists were effete intellectuals who were carried off by the heady promise of a genteel return to our cultural and moral ideals, together with some gardening for balance, and the hopes of becoming a normalized People living in serenity and security high on the lofty hills of the Zion of the Prophets. They envisioned the creation of a Golden Age of morality, culture and physical restoration. They envisioned a return of the scattered throughout the Diaspora - each carrying the intellectual and cultural treasures they had gleaned from throughout the world and the sharing of their knowledge and experience one with the other.

I too saw it that way. All very seductive stuff. They meant it too. So did I.
Then reality hit.

Geographically, Israel was far away from European anti-Semitism. Yet, we could not escape having to come under Western influence. They managed to cook up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from across the sea.

The Kurds are right in the thick of the geographic area of their traditional tormentors. How could they possible avoid ongoing, inter-generational war?