Palestine II

I was having a think yesterday about my essay of Saturday regarding the Palestinian situation and a thunderbolt hit me out of the blue about the consequences of a paragraph.

I wrote: "The Israelis are defending the only patch of land on earth where they can feel safe from the next Holocaust or pogrom - anywhere else in the world - and if history has taught us anything, it's that Jews will continue to be persecuted somewhere, at some time in the future. No wonder they want to defend it."

However, if you accept this (at first glance) entirely reasonable premise that the Jews are entitles to a safe haven because, since time immemorial, they've been the world's scapegoats, it can lead you down some rather dark and paradoxical passages as the consequences play out. These consequences simply hadn't occurred to me until yesterday.

The corollary of the Jews having a refuge is that they must remain in full control of their own destiny within that refuge – but how can this be accomplished within a designated territory? There are only two avenues; firstly, there must be rigorously enforced immigration rules, preferably limiting immigration to Jews alone, and/or secondly, any immigrants cannot be given full citizenship and the voting rights afforded to Jews. 

The Jews, and their vote, can never be allowed to be outnumbered, or potentially outnumbered, else they lose that self-determination. One or other, or both, of these measures are a necessity and an imperative for the end objective of having a safe haven. It would lead to a ethno-religiously pure nation, at least in terms of voting rights, which means that territory becoming an apartheid state. Therein lies the dark paradox.

While the former strategy of strictly limited immigration is practiced by many nations not considered apartheid states, the latter of restricting voting rights isn't - but the result is the same.