Daniel,
If you want to really have fun, look up "Cohen Modal Hapolyte" and "Lemba."
A couple of ironies suggested to me in this particular discussion are just delightful.
First of all, there's the spectacle of Jews being kicked out of Europe for being "Semitic," and then having neighbors who want them dead because they're "European." I can't think of a better example to point out the necessity of having a Jewish state.
Secondly, the interesting phenomenon of the same people saying "Jews are not a racial [sic] (or ethnic)group," declaring Israel racist because it is a Jewish state.
I think a lot of confusion about and hostility toward Jews comes from an inherent cultural bias in the West, which seeks to push other groups into its own models (Islam faces the same dilemma.)
During the renaissance, it became popular to come up with new and different forms of Anti-Semitism (toward Jews,) to replace theological Anti-Semitism on the part of the Church, which could only lose potency as the nation-state became more powerful.
One argument brought forward was that Judaism is not, in fact, a religion, because it had no Church. At that point, there was a great deal of interest in establishing Jews to be a sort of devolved tribe of mumbling, half-religified oddities, related by race but not by any faith to speak of.
The basic issue is that the Jewish people share kinship, but is not based solely on kinship; the Jewish people share history, but are not a historical society. The Jewish people share a religion, but even that is not the totality of Jewish "peoplehood." In the West, you can be a Catholic, but you would also be Irish, or German, or African-American. My parents are from England and Austria, but I don't identify as being of Austrian or English Stock. In fact, the Austrians and English identified my parents not as fully Austrian or English, but as Jewish. I identify as a Jew - and as an American first, so don't even bother with that one. America, to my mind, is the one place outside of Israel this denial of "autocthonous" citizenship has not been repeated.
Not fitting the categories infuriates one's detractors. They believe you to be slippery and tricky, when in truth, you simply come from a long history, with a lot of twists and turns, by comparison with historical youngsters like the European nation-states.
I think this aids in the simultaneous categorization of Jews as being behind International Capitalism and International Communism; being too European for the Middle East, and too Middle Eastern for Europe; being entirely a racial group with no church, and entirely a religion without common kinship; being simultaneously cowardly and warlike; etc.
Anti-Semitism is unlike other forms of prejudice in this regard, because you can accuse a Jew of being anything you want. Perhaps because Judaism has had such a long history, you can find the germ of a theory for anything. Simply declare your distaste for one or another trait, find this trait among Jews in some guise, and voila!
Side-road over... we now return to our actual subject of debate, Israel and Lebanon.
Dan
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