Douglas J. Feith: Can Israel Be Jewish and Democratic? - WSJ.com

Douglas J. Feith: Can Israel Be Jewish and Democratic? - WSJ.com: "The democracies of Europe and East Asia and those in the former republics of the Soviet Union, meanwhile, tend to cluster on the ethnic side of the spectrum. Numerous laws and institutions in those nations favor a country's principal ethnic group but are nevertheless accepted as compatible with democratic principles. Christian crosses adorn the flags of Switzerland, Sweden, Greece and Finland, among other model democracies, and the United Kingdom's flag boasts two kinds of crosses.

Several of these democracies have monarchs—and in the U.K., Norway and Denmark, the monarchs head national churches. France famously protects the integrity of the French language and the interests of French speakers, as do pro-French forces in Canada.

Ireland has a law that allows applicants of 'Irish descent or Irish associations' to be exempted from ordinary naturalization rules. Poland, Croatia and Japan have similar laws of return favoring members of their own respective ethnic majorities. Many other examples exist.

Israel was founded as a national home for the Jews, recognized as a nationality and not just a religious group. After Allied forces conquered Palestine from the Ottomans in World War I, Britain, France, Italy and other leading powers of the day supported the idea that the Jewish people, long shamefully abused as exiles throughout the diaspora, should be offered the opportunity to reconstitute a Jewish-majority state in their ancient homeland of Palestine.

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Mark Helprin: Why Israel Needs the Bomb - WSJ.com

Mark Helprin: Why Israel Needs the Bomb - WSJ.com: "Sixty-five years after Germany's campaign to exterminate the Jews, of the many countries in the world Israel is the only one repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction. Though Pakistan and India, like Israel and the Arabs, have suffered population exchange and territorial wars, neither questions the other's right to exist. So rare and extreme is such a position that one might think the countries of Europe, so many of which cooperated in hunting down their Jews, would do more to recognize its endemic presence in the Middle East.

They don't—their publics having largely accepted that, in regard to the question of Palestine, Arabs were the victims and Jews the victimizers and colonialists to boot. Even though, strangely for colonialists, the Jews had no mother country and it was their armed struggle that ejected Great Britain from the Levant. Conveniently forgotten is that the Jews accepted partition and the Arabs did not; that half the Palestinians who left in 1948 did so of their own volition; that more Jews left and were expelled from Arab countries than Arabs left and were expelled from Palestine; that Arabs were able to remain in Israel whereas the Arab states are effectively Judenrein; that Israel ceded the Sinai for a paper treaty, and Gaza in return for nothing but rockets and bombs; that, amidst a sea of Islamic states, it has accepted a Palestinian state while the Palestinians indignantly refuse to recognize it as a Jewish state; and that it was ready to compromise even on Jerusalem had Yasser Arafat been willing to take yes for an answer.

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