“…as if the dead soldiers were not 18 year old kids raised on war and drafted by law into it by their leaders but somehow patently evil in their blood and their bones…”

I’m reliably informed that in Israel if you’re on the government’s records as “Jewish”, you have a hundred times better chance of being issued a building permit to build a house than if you are registered as not being Jewish. I cannot believe that any Israeli Jew is not generally aware of this kind of arrangement. Therefore I do not believe that any of them (you?) regard this arrangement as lawful.

To relate that to your general argument, I do not know what your general argument is. What is it about, we ask? We answer, it’s about four hundred thousand words.

The Pope commenter down here came the closest to any of the commenters in grasping your polemic in saying something about identity. I believe you used the term, collective liberation. There is the phrase, politics of identity. I say, peoples do not have rights. (“Free Palestine” — do you mean Israel should adopt the rule of law?) People have rights: that is, persons have rights. If you try to establish a scripted reality (“the bourgeoisie believe that reality is scripted” — a student of Nietzsche speaking on BBC World Service in the ‘80’s), you enshrine solipsism (“the self alone”) as the inverse of liberalism, and you pave the way to fascism.

You’ve come of age in the Global War On Terror — post 2001. We have been inhabiting an inversion of liberal government since then, drawing on the roots, admittedly, of centuries of only playing around with the rule of law — but my social scientific, political-scientific claim would be that the only way you can have a police state is if the middle class enforces it. Athol Fugard, “The secret police are in your head,” only works if you have serried ranks of citizens in the professions maintaining that fear among the working class and peasantry (I think South Africa could speak of its peasantry).

I can only guess at what you’re afraid of. George Mitchell of Maine said about five years ago that the Israel lobby had never been stronger in Congress. Are you suspecting that the entire imperial formation, with the Israel task force near its spear-head, is about to disband, opening the way to settling of grievances? If so, I would suggest that your concern for the Jewish brand would be most aided if Israel adopted the rule of law, abandoning racial-ethnic tests for citizenship. “Majority rule, minority rights” is the formula that history has finally stumbled upon. It would be a shame to lose it now, but I go too far there: this formula is written in our DNA. It always bubbles up (to paraphrase Bernard Schwartz in his brief history of the English constitution. I suggest this consideration: when the ins regard the outs and decide to exclude them from the democratic enterprise, that is always where democracy itself has come apart in the past. Against that sort of lesson, we have the infrastructure for democratic rule-of-law, essentially a connected citizenry, as never before. It would not be wise to bet against its victory, unless you think you have some inside knowledge of a serious plot to squash it — such as a Jewish state in Palestine that is prepared to eliminate all the strangers in order to survive. Dahrendorf says a German folk-wisdom at play in Naziism was the identification of the stranger with the enemy. Cannot we see in that the challenge of the ages?