Four decades ago, “Entrance forbidden to dogs and Arabs” was a common sight in Germany. Xenophobia was sublimated from Jews onto Arabs. Every nation has a right to live as it wishes, including the right to live without strangers. Had the Germans evicted the Jews in 1939 to Switzerland or even to Palestine, that wouldn’t have been a crime comparable to the Holocaust. Even the impractical UN law differentiates between genocide and ethnic cleansing, the last being the much lesser crime of forcible resettlement. Xenophobia is a powerful evolutionary feature which stabilizes societies. Racism is often rooted in very real considerations: Jews have a good reason to resist Arabs in Israel—to resist people whose malicious intent has been demonstrated on myriad occasions.
Racism is insulting. No one likes being despised. The objects of racism can question whether the core population has more rights than they have. But our lives are full of minute insults and injustices. Some are born rich, others poor; some are smart, others silly; some are beautiful, others ugly. The world doesn’t offer absolute justice, but rather statistical: a person deficient in some respects sometimes excels in other respects; sort of the blonde correlation between nice looks and nice brains. The same statistical approach applies to racism. Should the entire world turn on the Arabs, as it turns on Jews, that would be absolutely unjust and worth fighting against. But here we’re talking about a country which took 0.01% of Islamic lands exercising anti-Arab racism. What if one in ten thousand clubs in Germany excluded Arabs? That’s surely not a meaningful offense. There are clubs for women, not for men; for thirty-year-olds-plus, not for teens. Such establishments technically are illegally exclusive (they are sexist, for example), but only substantial crimes are punished. In practical terms, women’s clubs do not substantially violate male rights because males can enjoy other clubs. Similar logic applies to Israeli Arabs. Islam bans Jews from all of Saudi Arabia and practically excludes Jews from most Arab countries. Almost the entire Middle East is a Muslim-only club.
Jews are entitled to a club of our own.
