OK – where on this earth, in this universe, can the existence of the Jewish people be justified by the numbers?
A similar calculation justifies assimilation/genocide anywhere.
Many politically active Muslims are making the same calculation – with regard to their “liberation” of Spain and Austria, and domination of Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
Does that mean all these nations should just roll up their tents before the Islamic agressor?
This is patent nonsense.
The fact is that the Islamic world is hardly united – Hamas have recently been met with harsh words and closed doors at several Arab capitols.
In addition, it’s likely that Iraq will be a US protectorate for another decade, it’s Marshall Plan funded by its own oil – tilting the balance of power and cultural weight away from Saudi fundamentalism towards representative democracy. The “Arab Street” is a-changin’ – and is increasingly unlikely to blindly come to the Pali’s aid, or to listen blindly to your hypothetical fundamentalist jihadi.
The Jews should long ago have disappeared if you go by the numbers. So? Considering that self-defense is an aspect of national identity in which we are a bit rusty – we haven’t been doing too badly.

How much can we ever really do at all. and for how long?
maybe forever, we don’t believe smoking will kill us
till it doesn’t.
how long can we support the good thing we’re doing?

“The enemy – activist fundamentalist Islam – is not the majority of Muslim people. ”
Wrong. Survey after survey has shown that the majority of Muslims want their countries to be governed by Shariah.
Heck, even in Britain, where Islam is the religion of a small minority, 40 percent want Sharia in the UK, with only 41 percent opposed to the idea.
Can you imagine British Jews being evenly split on whether the UK should be governed by halacha?
How do you reach such a conclusion? Is there a factual, statistical basis? Or is this simply wishful thinking?
I suspect the latter. Sure, not all Muslims are fundamentalist (heck, I’m friends with a handful), but the sooner we dispense with the myth that it’s a tiny minority of extremists, the sooner we can deal with this problem from an informed perspective.

I dunno. “Might have been” is one of those statements that just castrates me on the spot. I think you need to look at “The Jewish Century” http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/lazare and this review by David Lazare.
When you come down to it – what might have been is pretty useless.
We are here, deep in the mire, living and breathing and trying to do something right. Or at least survive.
Jews all over the world are at our mercy – that is, Jews all over the world are seen as responsible for what Israel is doing. Whether it is for good or for bad. So get your ass on over here and help us do it right!

I finally agree with Mobius. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

A similar argument: would America be a safer place were the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution never ratified? Let’s test it out — by banning all guns now. Why doesn’t this work? The guns don’t uninvent themselves, and we’re in a different situation than in 1789.
So too here, much of this is moot. A dismantling of Israel is not the same as rewinding time to 1948. Ein hacha namei, looking in hindsight, perhaps a better thing to do would have been to develop Palestine and then gradually phase in a Jewish identity. Perhaps in hindsight, all the ppls houses should have been bought in front of international courts so as to preempt laws of return.
The decried fundamentalists are riding on waves of hatred and are bastardizing the Qur’an as many ways as they need to to fit their desired targets. This would happen — pls see Iraq — whether we were singing HaTikva in Yerushalayim or giving zakaat in Al-Quds…

Imagine Zionsim had never been thought up, and thus there was no Israel. Things would still not be all that great….
There would still be Islamic Fundamentalism, only all the sephardim throughout the Islamic world would be on the receiving end of pogroms and terrorist attacks (much like Christians are now in Iraq and Egypt).
Many of these communities would be feeling the pinch to migrate to the west – france, USA etc.
Assimilation would be rampant in the west.
Without the option of Aliyah, communities who are bailing (eg in LAtin America and South Africa) would not have the option of Israel: they would have to move to west. And thus they would not have the option of joining the Jews together to be a tightly bound collective (to paraphrase one of the above comments).
There is also the the very real possibility that without Israel, the sense of ‘Jewish pride’ which we take for granted now, would not exist [as much of this came about after the victory of Israel in 1967], and there would not be the widespread acceptance of the idea that being Jewish is a living dynamic and powerful force.
As long as we have each other there will always be hope!!

Fundamentalist Islam is ravenous – and will not stop with the little snack that is the Jewish people … have they not declared war on Western decadence? So… let’s look at those numbers again … all those Americans and Canadians and Brits and French folks, Spaniards, Germans, etc. etc. etc. They, too, must join Dar Al-Islam … or else!
I guess when Crusades II hits the front page – as Kelsey kinda predicts – the Jews might just find themselves on the Christian side of the barricades this time … ack!

We’ve been linking to some of the Arab blogs and forums discussing (in English) the current war here and here. (I’m not gratuitously tooting my own horn – there is some interesting discussion here.)
Long story short, there is more sympathy for Israel than you would think. And being fed-up with Hezbollah and Hamas, and the feckless Palestinians.
Zooming back to a regional level: the Arab bloc didn’t like Saddam and were glad we took him out, although they wouldn’t say so because there is this myth of pan-Arab unity. He was a loose cannon. They feel the same way about Iran (which isn’t Arab, but counts as Muslim in the same region). Nobody wants any of the other regimes to get too big for their britches. As far as I can see everyone but Iran (the crazy imperialists), Syria (as a client state of Iran) and Lebanon (as a colony of Syria) are sitting this one out. (Unless there’s some breaking news I don’t know about as I write this.)
Everyone is getting tired of this shit, it isn’t as popular anymore among the masses, so acceptance of Israel may be closer than you think. Ironically, Iran’s excesses may be the catalyst for the whole region to say “enough.”

Never thought I shall find myself in agreement with our friend Ben David, but such is the mystery of life.
David, If you are concerned for disappearing ways of life, lament large trees and mammals, which are likely to disappear in our life time. To the extremists’ chagrin, sorry state of the world will be largely dictated by the ‘American Zionist plot’ to rule the world by capitalism, while religious intricacies will play sub-plots and dramas. Terrorism by the disaffected will continue, and it is indeed a large feature on the evening news, but the global financial markets are the big guns nowadays. Silly little humans and their squabbles just make it messier.
Incidentally, the real issues are social, and stem from the fact almost all of those hating this, that and the other are lacking access to food, or at least decent education. Empty stomachs and dull minds are the breeding grounds of fervent ideologies. The Madrassas just capitalize (haha) on that. That is also the reason why religious practice in general is on decline in the West, or rather, Mammon has replaced the old deities.
The likelihood of Judaism to fall by the sideline has lots more to do with the conceptual co-existence of bibles and laptops than with competing religious narratives. This website here is a good example of the kind of dialogues and technology that are necessary for such survival, and it is the lacking of such renewal in the Muslim world (or rather its insignificance so far – this is where your numbers carry some weight) that perpetuate the myth of the war of civilizations.

in the end of the story, all the victims have to be able to be victimizers, just for a moment, so that they can see how bad it is, how little it has to do with what they really want.
how could we have resisted the chance to have everything god’s always been promising us?

“get off oil and legalize drugs and islam ceases to be a threat … 1.2 billion muslims and no oil market = 1.2 billion starving muslims (as if most of them aren’t starving already)” :Mobius
I’m pretty sure after a short while you’ll be calling for food aid to these countries.

WEVS1
Not so. The oft quoted case of the WTC atrocity, and in particular Mohamed Atta who was a well-educated son of a respected Egyptian family, and even the recently trumpeted phenomena of so-called ‘home-spun’ terrorists, which are usually (in the West) locally born and educated children of immigrants, are still relatively an unusual blip in the suicidal market place.
The fact that cruelty is an inherent human disposition has been proven scientifically and is plenty apparent in the mirror our daily news provides, but it still take either some serious childhood damage, or extremely narrow and selfish perception (or both), to bypass the other inherent human trait – the ability to empathize with suffering. Having no hopes for a better future (and we are not talking just being poor but emotionally debilitated by despair) precursors the kind of psychological make up that allows for dreadful action to be seen justified, and it is no coincidence that a ‘better world’ is promised so lavishly (what do they say to the virgins, I wonder). And if it is so happens that a better future in the economic sense is not an issue, you will still find that a person capable of acts beyond the ‘normal’ range of human fallacies (road rage included), has subscribed – by coercion or isolationist immersion – to a very narrow version of the tribal code for Fear, Fight or Flight. And, occasionally, people who are just screwed up for what ever reason and get their kicks out of violent activities make their way to where violence is available. Mercenaries are a good example.
June Chang, in her wonderful book about ‘state terrorism’ of a Maoist flavor (Wild Swans), says “When people are happy, they are kind”. For many of us in the West, it is hard to be happy with our lot, no matter how cushy that is. But for the majority of the people on the planet, the assurance of daily bread and a little hope for a better future for their children is enough to bring enormous satisfaction and sunny attitudes we can only wish for in our rainy days of greed and envy. One can only wonder what results could be gained by spending a fraction of this ‘War on Terror’ accumulating cost (now estimated at & Billion dollars a month!) on universities, hospitals and green houses…

I’m posted on Shabbos too. Shabbat Shalom peoples.
“Not so. The oft quoted case of the WTC atrocity, and in particular Mohamed Atta who was a well-educated son of a respected Egyptian family, and even the recently trumpeted phenomena of so-called ‘home-spun’ terrorists, which are usually (in the West) locally born and educated children of immigrants, are still relatively an unusual blip in the suicidal market place.”
Komai, I must respectfully disagree. I’ve done a bit of research on this subject and most of the evidence produced by social scientists (not anecdotal comments) points to the conclusion that poverty does not cause terrorism. It’s a common assumption but it is simply not the case. Whether Islamist groups like Al Queda, or secular terrorists such as ETA, PFLP, etc. many of these people come from the middle classes and quite a few of them have some level of post-secondary education. These are not the “masses” as is so often assumed. To simplify, these terrorists—whether religious or secular—have a vision of the “good life” that is not reflected in contemporary society i.e. reality. They are quite often educated people who have utopian expectations of their society that are not being met and they resort to violence to achieve their goals.
In Policy Review Online (http://www.policyreview.org/aug04/laqueur.html) Walter Laqueur at the International Research Council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes, “It is not too difficult to examine whether there is such a correlation between poverty and terrorism, and all the investigations have shown that this is not the case. The experts have maintained for a long time that poverty does not cause terrorism and prosperity does not cure it. In the world’s 50 poorest countries there is little or no terrorism. A study by scholars Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova reached the conclusion that the terrorists are not poor people and do not come from poor societies. A Harvard economist has shown that economic growth is closely related to a society’s ability to manage conflicts. More recently, a study of India has demonstrated that terrorism in the subcontinent has occurred in the most prosperous (Punjab) and most egalitarian (Kashmir, with a poverty ratio of 3.5 compared with the national average of 26 percent) regions and that, on the other hand, the poorest regions such as North Bihar have been free of terrorism. In the Arab countries (such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also in North Africa), the terrorists originated not in the poorest and most neglected districts but hailed from places with concentrations of radical preachers. The backwardness, if any, was intellectual and cultural — not economic and social.”
Alberto Abadie an Economist and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s JFK School of Government agrees, “In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but … when you look at the data, it’s not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism … but … also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin.” Prior to conducting the study, “Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation’s wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.” (http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05-terror.html)
As far as totalitarian states, they are a different matter with different dynamics than those of terrorist groups. In the case of totalitarian states, those with the radical utopian vision of the good life are insiders, they control the mechanisms and institutions of power. In the case of ETA, PFLP et al., they are outsiders. This is a key distinction that must be taken into account.
“But for the majority of the people on the planet, the assurance of daily bread and a little hope for a better future for their children is enough to bring enormous satisfaction and sunny attitudes we can only wish for in our rainy days of greed and envy.”
I agree it is enough for them (the parents). It’s the children who have rising expectations and want those expectations met expediently. They are ripe for being sucked in by all manner of f-ed up ideologies. That’s where the troubles start.
Anyway, here’s something to consider. There are billions of poor people living on this planet but for some reason terrorism is clustered most heavily in a few regions of the world and by no means in the countries with the worst poverty. Just something to think about.
Here is the study referred to by Laqueur:
http://www.juandemariana.org/article/196/
Poverty Does Not Cause Terrorism
A study by Alan Krueger, from Princeton University, and Jitka Malečková, from Charles University, reached empirical conclusions showing terrorism does not come from poverty.
I also suggest having a look at the study by Alberto Abadie at Harvard:
Poverty, Political Freedom and the Roots of Terrorism
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~aabadie/povterr.pdf
This article provides an empirical investigation of the determinants of terrorism at the country level. In contrast with the previous literature on this subject, which focuses on transnational terrorism only, I use a new measure of terrorism that encompasses both domestic and transnational terrorism. In line with the results of some recent studies, this article shows that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries, once the effects of other country-specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account. Political freedom is shown to explain terrorism, but it does so in a non-monotonic way: countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes. This result suggests that, as experienced recently in Iraq and previously in Spain and Russia, transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy may be accompanied by temporary increases in terrorism. Finally, the results suggest that geographic factors are important to sustain terrorist activities.
Noach writes, “Clearly, the people who are willing to commit acts of suicide terrorism are not happy with their lots in life. And yet, I’m not sure that either as Jews, or just as people in general, it’s necessarily our task to reach out to this kind of nutjob. I mean, honestly — how generous can you be?”
You’re absolutely correct, Noach. People in general should not allow their suppositions (poverty causes terrorism) to cloud what is actually happening (terrorists commit acts of terrorism). Furthermore, as Jews, we should always be aware (to paraphrase):
“If you are kind to the cruel, you will be cruel to the kind.”