Happy birthday to Israel
Francis Sedgemore, Saturday 14 May 2011 at 13:42 UTC
The State of Israel is today 63 years young.
Down with all nation states, but may Israel be the last to go.
Feed the writer! Feed the writer! 
Feed the writer! -
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Saturday 14 May 2011 at 19:30 UTC
“Down with all nation states, but may Israel be the last to go”
How is this not a mirror image of the anti-zio treatment of Israel as a special case?
It’s worth unpacking as a statement. I’ll start with some premises I think you’d see yourself as sharing.
1. The nationstate is a bad thing.
2. The nationstate is a tool of the ruling class, regardless of the specific nationstate in question. It therefore follows that it is a structure that runs contrary to the interests of the working class.
3. “The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves”. In other words, no top-down ‘liberation’ can abolish the state or free the workers from its malign influence.
Conclusion: If those premises are accepted, the quoted statement is objectively identical to “Emancipate the workers, but may the Israeli working class be the last to be emancipated!”
Assuming you don’t take issue with those premises, I think that is an utterly logical extrapolation from it. And no other is possible.
So there’s two potential explanations I can think of.
Either you think that, ideologically, Israel should be the last nationstate to be abolished. And you’re prepared to sacrifice the emancipation of Israeli workers “ahead of time” to achieve that aim.
Or you somehow think that the Israeli workers are currently too “backward” to emancipate themselves, moreso than those of any other nationstate in the world.
Whichever, your position is against the Israeli working class. If you’d deny that, I’d pose one simple question to you.
You choose to post about Israel on your blog (if you didn’t, it would be different; no blogger posts about events in every nationstate in the world). Among all those posts, can you point me towards a single one that covers workers in struggle in Israel?
Saturday 14 May 2011 at 20:00 UTC
There’s another possibility: that my comment is an ironic extrapolation of the antideutsch libertarian communist position, for which I have some sympathy.
You take me seriously, and therein lies your error. I am an anarchist by inclination, but age and experience has tempered this with a very liberal, even bourgeois, pragmatism.
I am not particularly interested in overtly political blogging about workers in struggle, wherever they may be. I write here about Israel as I care about the place and its people, and regard the community of souls that is modern Israel as a jolly good thing.
Saturday 14 May 2011 at 20:13 UTC
So, in essence, your position is a combination of antideutschism and hipster irony? *Shudders*
Actually, I’m pretty sure Vice don’t currently have a science writer, if that’s helpful.
Saturday 14 May 2011 at 20:44 UTC
And heretical cymru-rougism. No doubt Boyo will be along presently to impose yet another disciplinary sanction.
Sunday 15 May 2011 at 11:23 UTC
Waterloo Sunset,
As a person who has a small stake in the issue, I shall make a small step towards your points 1 and 2 (being unsuccessfully indoctrinated for 28 years, I don’t give a flying donut whether the liberation comes top down or flippers up). So let’s agree that all nationstates to be abolished at the same moment. I insist on a simultaneous act, if you will.
Oh, and for No Good Boyo, if he appears: we, the Jooz, will abolish the above only after the Welsh do it. He is getting too frisky lately, challenging the supremacy and chosenness of you know who.
Sunday 15 May 2011 at 13:49 UTC
Snoopy, my dear friend, the Welshes abolished themselves a long long time ago. Now we do no more than worry the carcass of a dead sheep.
Monday 16 May 2011 at 02:51 UTC
Hey, what’s this taking of the Dai-alectic in vain? Israel has favoured-nation status in the Cymru Rouge’s book, as it is a country the size of a Wales – that is, a unit of measurement the size of a piece of Brazilian rainforest the size of Wales that’s destroyed every year.
If there’s any abolishing to do, we’ll be doing it, and I can see a few more urgent candidates in the Middle East.
Monday 16 May 2011 at 12:00 UTC
Phew! So I don’t have to shoot myself … again?
Monday 16 May 2011 at 19:00 UTC
Yup, and it’s nothing to do with our being out of bullets either.
Tuesday 17 May 2011 at 06:28 UTC
[...] and on top of all this (sorry, Francis, my sincere apologies) I encountered a blogger who, being a nice and sincere socialist, tries to persuade us (look in the comments, please) that [...]
Tuesday 17 May 2011 at 07:25 UTC
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