Zionism is a moral expression of Jewish Nationalism

Even the most religious extremist Zionist Jew isn't calling for the genocide of all non-Jewish inhabitants of Biblical Israel, and in fact nothing of the sort has happened. Nothing would change in that regard by Arabs recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

I can find plenty of Arab and Muslim quotes from the past century that echo the most violent parts of the Bible - and the Koran, for that matter - mostly against the very Jews that Nusseibeh is trying so hard to paint as bigoted ethnic cleansers.

And this is a crucial point. In 1947, scared by the chance that the UN would partition Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, the Arab leaders scrambled to come up with a plan for a single state where the Muslim majority would treat its Jewish minority impeccably - which is, they said, how they always had treated Jews. Yet immediately after the UN vote - before the State of Israel was declared - Arabs attacked and killed Jews in other Arab countries!

In fact, how Jews were treated by the Arabs in the 1940s and afterwards is the major reason why a Jewish state is correct, moral and necessary. The Jews of Arab countries at the time, whether they were Zionist or not, were scapegoated and subjected to a reign of terror. Their only recourse was to flee, penniless, to the new Jewish state.

Nusseibeh never deigns to mention why a Jewish state is necessary, why the Jewish people have the right to self-determination as well as anyone else does, why the existence of such a state could have saved millions of lives in the 1940s. He uses tunnel vision to frame the argument in terms of "rights" - but only Arab rights. The Jewish right to have a physical nation as much as, or more than, any other people is completely ignored. It is not an issue of Arab human rights - it is an issue of competing human rights between two groups of people.

One of those groups claims to be part of a larger nation that stretches across hundreds of millions of square miles across two continents. The other has nowhere else to call home, has fervently wished to return to its home for millennia, and indeed has rarely felt to be full citizens of any other country that hosted them.

This is why Zionism is a moral expression of Jewish nationalism. As much as possible, Zionist leaders have and continue to do everything possible to give the most possible rights to non-Jewish citizens and others under their control - up to the point of endangering the human rights of Jews themselves. The line between the two exists and it sometimes moves from one side to the other as Israeli leaders wrestle with the difficult ethical issues of how to maximize human rights for all - non-Jews and Jews alike. For the most part, they have been spectacularly successful in finding the best way to balance the two, and Arabs in Israel have far more rights than any Jews have ever had in Arab countries.

There is one other point that Nussibeih pointedly ignores. All Arab countries define themselves in their respective constitutions as Arab countries, and almost all of them define themselves as Islamic countries. The exact same arguments that Nussibeih posits here apply to all of them, including "Palestine." If Israel calling itself a Jewish state is so problematic, then every Arab country is on much weaker rhetorical ground - especially since their discrimination against non-Arabs and often against non-Muslims far outstrips the worst Israel could be credibly accused of. Where are Nusseibeh's anguished articles  in Al Jazeera about how Arab countries need to stop being defined as Arab and Muslim?

The article is high-minded, pseudo-intellectual, hypocritical claptrap.
Elder of Ziyon