Monday 16 February 2015

Exodus?

Telling Jews to leave Europe? I mean, doesn't that sound a bit, well, you know...?

Most European Jews have been to Israel, so not moving there is a very conscious choice: the place felt completely foreign to them in cultural terms.

But Netanyahu wants them because fewer and fewer born-and-raised, cultural Israelis would vote for him or for Likud.

I do not like intellectual and cultural boycotts, on principle. Economic ones are case-by-case, but intellectual and cultural ones are just wrong.

The kind of thing that is now being advocated is contrary to the nature of art, science and scholarship.

That said, the remarkable scientific and technological work in Israel would have happened anyway, because it is just what Jews, and especially concentrated Jewish communities, do.

It constitutes a kind of philo-Semitic argument (although I don't like that loaded term), but not necessarily a Zionist one (there's another).

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