1) You say that ‘his prognosis is to replace the Jewish state with a Palestinian-Arab one’. But of course that is the very opposite to what he is proposing – his piece is calling for a state for all its citizens – ‘a state where all have equal right’. You are a making an a priori assumption that the nature of a state is dependent on which group is in the majority – when jews are in the majority it is a Jewish state, when arabs are in the majority it is an arab state. But this is not necessarily so. In Britain, white anglo saxons are in the majority, but it is not a white anglo saxon state. A clearer example is northern Ireland – since it’s foundation it has had a protestant majority, and for years was run as a protestant state, where protestants held all the power and ran the state for protestant benefit. Since the good friday agreement and power sharing, northern ireland has become a state of all its citizens, where both communities share power, where the police force is mixed etc, despite their still being a protestant majority. The nature of a state is defined by its constitutional setup and legal practices, not purely by the ethnic balance of his citizenship. So I reject the claim that White is calling for a Palestinian-Arab state.

2) You use the term ‘Israel-proper’. But Israel proper doesn’t exist. There is only Israel, which at present governs the entire land (except Gaza) with a very limited form of devolution in small islands of territory in the west bank. This is an important issue, you can’t talk as if there is a two state solution when the reality on the ground is a one state one in which a large number of people are denied the vote.

3) In your section ‘What if Israel had been called Jewland? Would that solve the problem?’ you have missed the point. If Israel were called Jew-land (or more probably, Judea) then all its citizens would be called Jews. Which mainstream Zionism is not willing to tolerate as it would redefine Jew as meaning anyone who was governed by the Jewish state, and thus would be a state for all its citizens. Or you keep the name Israel, and be clear that everyone in the state is Israeli, that the term Jew will have no legal status/privilege within the state. Either option represents the reasonable norm of citizenship policy. But at present the two terms (Israel, Jewish state) mean that the state only really belongs to some of its inhabitants and not others and to a group of other people who may have never been to that state). It would be a bit like saying Britain must remain an anglo-saxon state, other groups can be tolerated as national minorities, but cannot expect equality, because that would damage the anglo-saxon nation nature of the state. But of course Britain doesn’t do that – it makes everyone who resides within its borders British (and everyone in England is english) regardless of background. That’s the crux of that matter, if you have to use two different words to describe the name of the state and it’s ‘nature’ it’s a sure sign that there’s a problem.

thanks so much…

we just want to save our son

Nor did Palestinian Christians or Muslims (they historically chief among those seeing Jews exiled for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets) hence, arguably, the whole conflict to begin with.

White cannot even bring himself to acknowledge, even if he would cancel the right of Jewish return +now+, that at least the Jews who had become Israeli by the time of the founding of his Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian majority state had had some kind of right of return thither. This would at least assure them that they were in the land fundamentally as of right rather than merely on sufferance.

But we already know that White’s response to Howard Jacobson’s idea that Jewish and Palestinian Arab diasporas had some analogy/equivalence, and so an equivalent desire for return and restoration, was “there is no comparison”.

Which, again, coming from a Christian, with presumably at least a potential Christian ability to empathise with that people whom Christians have +said+ was exiled and dispossessed for most of the last 2000 years/Christian history, is odd, and suggests an a priori animus and prejudice. The same goes for Stephen Sizer.

That is simply incorrect. UNSCOP envisaged last scale Jewish immigration into the Jewish state on precisely that basis, even as UNGA Res. 181 was premised, like the League of Nations Mandate and Balfour Declaration, on the historically normative notion that the Jews were a people historically exiled and dispossessed. This last omission is especially odd in an Evangelical Anglican Christian like White, seeing that that the Jews’ being a peole exiled and dispossessed has been a/the normative Christian view from the beginning and most of Christian (and indeed Islamic) history.

It is precisely this right to immigrate which UNSCOP envisaged, equivalent, I think, to a right of return, which White has never himself acknowledged.