This was a very helpful comment, which really helps to illuminate why certain right-wing people, mostly Orthodox religious, are making such a public stink about this relationship. It seems that, contrary to Juan Cole's assertion, it is not necessary to point to "race" to account for why the Orthodox critics cited by AGP make no mention of the possibility of young woman's conversion.
In general, I've given a lot of credence to Juan Cole, whom I have seen as a reasonable and impartial observer of the Middle East, but reading this blog post and his comments have really made me think twice.
Ok, so we can agree on two things:
1. Lebanon is by-and-large more accepting and tolerant of immigrants than Israel is.
2. "That the Lebanese state is 'Arab' [...] does not function for Lebanon the way that 'Jewish' functions for Israel."
I will trust you that both of these statements are basically true. Why, however, do you choose to use Lebanon as your one example of an "Arab state" or Arab "nationalism" -- when the prime historical centers of Arab nationalism are Egypt and Iraq? And minority groups--religious, cultural, and linguistic--have had a very hard time, to say the least, under the Arab nationalist regimes in those countries, with the Kurds of Iraq being only the most tragic example. Turkey, too, for that matter, is a nationalist regime (though not Arab) and the Kurds in that country are possibly the most severely persecuted people in the Middle East.
Using Lebanon as your case-in-point of a supposedly better Arab nationalist regime is also distorting in that its pluralism and tolerance were not a natural outgrowth of nationalism; rather, that country went through years of brutal civil war between religious groups from which it is still now recovering. While we may admire Lebanon's progress and tolerance, in my view I see no reason to consider this characteristic of nationalism in general. Rather, in the deeply religiously divided context of Lebanon, national identity can tend to counteract religious divisions, whereas in Sudan, for instance, Arab nationalism has exacerbated conflicts between so-called "Arabs" and "Africans" in Darfur, all of whom are Muslim and who are closely ethnically related.
Basically, what I want to say is that appeals to nationalism--though they may in some special cases like Lebanon help to suppress other divisions--are always inherently exclusive, asserting that certain people own a country while others do not. It imagines a monolithic, ancestrally related group that never really exists. You can see things how you choose, but trying to apologize for Arab nationalism while condemning Jewish nationalism seems pretty absurd to me.
"race-based nationalisms are worse than language-based nationalisms because more intrinsically exclusive."
What are you defining as "race-based"? I thought we agreed that that was a meaningless term. And what makes one form of nationalism "more intrinsically exclusive" than another? Are you saying that I, as a gay Jewish man, could easily immigrate to Saudi Arabia and become a citizen there? Or to Libya? Qatar? And just as long as I learned to speak Arabic, I would be accepted?
This looks like sophistry to me. Tribalism, exclusion, and persecution are common, especially in the Middle East, and hairsplitting about exactly who is "more" exclusive or who is exclusive in a better or worse way is pointless.
I am not an ardent defender of Zionism, but your logic here is pathetically weak. You seem to be asserting here:
"Jewish nationalism is very bad, because Jewishness is not fundamentally a religious category, but Arab nationalism is totally fine, because Arabness is not fundamentally a religious category." See a problem here?
I think the fact that we all have to face is that natioanlism is always based on a delusion -- a cultural group masquerading as an ancestral and biological group. This is true whether the cultural group in question is originally religious (Judaism) or linguistic (the Arabic language). Putting forward such a cultural group as a "nation" and using that to lay claim to control over a country is always delusional, regardless of who does it.
This was a very helpful comment, which really helps to illuminate why certain right-wing people, mostly Orthodox religious, are making such a public stink about this relationship. It seems that, contrary to Juan Cole's assertion, it is not necessary to point to "race" to account for why the Orthodox critics cited by AGP make no mention of the possibility of young woman's conversion.
Google brought up this article which seems to speak to this issue: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-07-18-netanyahu-conversion-bill_N.htm
In general, I've given a lot of credence to Juan Cole, whom I have seen as a reasonable and impartial observer of the Middle East, but reading this blog post and his comments have really made me think twice.
Ok, so we can agree on two things:
1. Lebanon is by-and-large more accepting and tolerant of immigrants than Israel is.
2. "That the Lebanese state is 'Arab' [...] does not function for Lebanon the way that 'Jewish' functions for Israel."
I will trust you that both of these statements are basically true. Why, however, do you choose to use Lebanon as your one example of an "Arab state" or Arab "nationalism" -- when the prime historical centers of Arab nationalism are Egypt and Iraq? And minority groups--religious, cultural, and linguistic--have had a very hard time, to say the least, under the Arab nationalist regimes in those countries, with the Kurds of Iraq being only the most tragic example. Turkey, too, for that matter, is a nationalist regime (though not Arab) and the Kurds in that country are possibly the most severely persecuted people in the Middle East.
Using Lebanon as your case-in-point of a supposedly better Arab nationalist regime is also distorting in that its pluralism and tolerance were not a natural outgrowth of nationalism; rather, that country went through years of brutal civil war between religious groups from which it is still now recovering. While we may admire Lebanon's progress and tolerance, in my view I see no reason to consider this characteristic of nationalism in general. Rather, in the deeply religiously divided context of Lebanon, national identity can tend to counteract religious divisions, whereas in Sudan, for instance, Arab nationalism has exacerbated conflicts between so-called "Arabs" and "Africans" in Darfur, all of whom are Muslim and who are closely ethnically related.
Basically, what I want to say is that appeals to nationalism--though they may in some special cases like Lebanon help to suppress other divisions--are always inherently exclusive, asserting that certain people own a country while others do not. It imagines a monolithic, ancestrally related group that never really exists. You can see things how you choose, but trying to apologize for Arab nationalism while condemning Jewish nationalism seems pretty absurd to me.
"race-based nationalisms are worse than language-based nationalisms because more intrinsically exclusive."
What are you defining as "race-based"? I thought we agreed that that was a meaningless term. And what makes one form of nationalism "more intrinsically exclusive" than another? Are you saying that I, as a gay Jewish man, could easily immigrate to Saudi Arabia and become a citizen there? Or to Libya? Qatar? And just as long as I learned to speak Arabic, I would be accepted?
This looks like sophistry to me. Tribalism, exclusion, and persecution are common, especially in the Middle East, and hairsplitting about exactly who is "more" exclusive or who is exclusive in a better or worse way is pointless.
I am not an ardent defender of Zionism, but your logic here is pathetically weak. You seem to be asserting here:
"Jewish nationalism is very bad, because Jewishness is not fundamentally a religious category, but Arab nationalism is totally fine, because Arabness is not fundamentally a religious category." See a problem here?
I think the fact that we all have to face is that natioanlism is always based on a delusion -- a cultural group masquerading as an ancestral and biological group. This is true whether the cultural group in question is originally religious (Judaism) or linguistic (the Arabic language). Putting forward such a cultural group as a "nation" and using that to lay claim to control over a country is always delusional, regardless of who does it.