Ich bin ein Jude

In fact, to hear Mark Steyn (who is not Jewish) tell it, all right thinking who believe in Israel’s sovereign right to exist are Jews:

Under the 1935 German laws on race, I would have qualified as a bona fide citizen of the Reich. But the cyber-enforcers among my readers run a tighter ship than the Führer. Half my mail reads like some ancient Woody Allen pickup line: Have you got a little Jew in you? Would you like one?

Nick Cohen, of the Observer in London, found himself in a similar situation. Pre-9/11, I always thought of him as an Old Labour leftie — i.e., well to the left of Tony Blair. But he knew enough about the Iraqi victims of Saddamite totalitarianism to be unimpressed by the pre-war London “peace” marches. And so he too was deluged by mail accusing him of bad faith or, more to the point, bad blood:

“I typed out a reply that read, ‘but there hasn’t been a Jewish member of my family for 100 years.’ I sounded like a German begging a Gestapo officer to see the mistake in the paperwork. Mercifully, I hit the ‘delete’ button before sending.”

So, yes, I am a Jew, because, after all, only a Jew could “defend” Israel, right? I don’t really “defend” it on anything but utilitarian grounds: Every country in the region — Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia — dates as a sovereign state from 60–70 years ago. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it. So should we have more states like Israel in the region or more like Syria? I don’t find that a hard question to answer.

And the minute people start arguing about going back to the “1967 borders” or the “1949 armistice,” I figure, Why stop there? Why not go back to the 1922 settlement when the British Mandate of Palestine was created and rethink London’s decision to give 78 percent of the land to what’s now Jordan? If you propose that, folks think you’re nuts. But why should 40- or 60-year-old lines on a map be up for perpetual renegotiation but 80-year-old lines be considered inviolable?

Well, because one involves Jews and the other doesn’t. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are — so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they’re hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless-cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they’re hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist Entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they’d be hated for that, too.

There is, of course, more that Mark Steyn has to say on this subject, and you can find it here.