MarshalPurnell wrote:Well, Jewish does mean citizen of Israel in so far as all Jews are eligible for Israeli citizenship. The definition of Jewish in that case being on the basis of descent and not professing religion. That particular weirdness is, of course, a legacy of the Holocaust. Divorcing the situation in which Israel was created as a self-identified Jewish state from the historical context reduces the issue to an abstraction. Which I will proceed to do.
So, all Jews are (potential) Israelis.
However, it does not follow from this that all Israelis are Jews, or potential Jews. By making people swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state, they are effectively declaring that the non-Jewish Israelis are less important to the state than the Jewish Israelis.
As for the holocaust card, you would think that people who were so butthurt about what Germany did after they defined Germany as an Aryan nation would have a bit more sympathy to other ethnicities who are concerned that defining a nation to be purely identified with a single ethnic group may lead to a further loss of minority rights at a later date.
Be that as it may, France and China do not define their national identity by religion. They do define it quite rigidly and are capable of repression and even outright brutality against minorities that threaten their sense of nationhood.
I'm not entirely sure how things like China not wanting to give Tibet independence because they consider Tibetans to be every bit as Chinese as Han has anything to do with members of the Israeli government trying to define Jews as a more important ethnic group than other ethnic groups in Israel, but whatever.
Furthermore lots of countries do use religion to define their sense of national identity, so Israel is just one of dozens of countries that formally make religious minorities "second class citizens." And of course other countries have established churches or do conflate religion with their national identity as implicit rather than explicit. Even taking the secular countries it is a quality of the existence of the nation-state that it preserves nationality; which is to say ethnicity. A black man originally from Senegal can be a Frenchman, but he must speak French, venerate the French intellectual canon, and be devoted to the interests of France above any other allegiance, and must not in any sense challenge the prevailing ideas of what it is to be French. There is no place in French society for a large mass of immigrants who (for example) want to speak Arabic (or Breton or Occitan) as an officially sanctioned language, ostentatiously celebrate a "nontraditional" religion like Islam, reject the likes of Proust and Moliere, question the established historical narrative, and seek to bring their own cultural practices into mainstream life.
You know, if other countries do it, then it's wrong. Israel just happens to be making news because their social policy is now more wrong than it was before. That's why this is in the news and the Iranian treatment of non-Muslims isn't. Israel's legislation is new, so it's in the NEWs, Iran's is old, so it's not. Going on about how "other countries do it to" is like saying that America's economy isn't in trouble, because Spain is having problems too.
The criticism of Israel seems to be that the religious requirement means that people can't assimilate without changing religion.
Actually, my criticism of Israel in this case is because the ethnic requirement means that people can't assimilate without changing ethnicities. I would a religious requirement much less distasteful, because someone can at least change their religion.
