July 21, 2005

When Israeli Arabs protest that talk of the \”demographic threat\” is racist, can Israeli Jews blame them? If non-Jewish professors and politicians anywhere on earth spoke of a Jewish demographic threat to their countries, what would Jews call it? What, for that matter, would decent non-Jews call it?

Raising the specter of the Arab demographic threat to Israel is, in fact, racist — if you believe that Zionism is racism, that a Jewish state is a racist state.

I don\’t believe that (even while I know there is no shortage of Jews whose Zionism doesn\’t amount to anything more than racism). Although the Jewish state by definition \”belongs\” to the Jews more than it does to its non-Jewish citizens, I don\’t consider it a force for racism, but the opposite: Whatever racism exists in Israel, the Jewish state came into being as an answer to racism of a rather larger magnitude — the habit of anti-Semitic oppression.