The Harvard Kennedy School is about to hold a student conference — “Israel/Palestine and the One State Solution.” The conference website states that the main idea hitherto proposed for peace in the Mideast has been the two-state solution and it is time to consider a single state in which both Jews and Palestinians would live as co-citizens. As has been pointed out by Caroline Glick and others, even virulent Israel critic Norman Finkelstein recognizes that a one-state solution means the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and he advises against advancing that notion because it is unlikely to garner widespread support. Of course, the two-state solution could also mean the destruction of Israel, only more slowly.
Leaving that aside, however, as long as Harvard wishes to allow students to entertain different ideas, how about this — resettlement of the Palestinians now residing in refugee camps to Arab countries, with full financial compensation. Left-wing Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose earlier work often seemed to condemn Israel’s actions in 1948, has more recently argued that transfer even of Israeli Arab citizens residing in Israel proper cannot be ruled out if Israel one day faces an existential threat as it did in the year of its birth.
Glick remarks that in the early part of the 20th century, ideas concerning race and eugenics “became all the rage of the anointed intellectuals. Even an otherwise liberal thinker like Oliver Wendell Holmes was drawn to the fashionable concept of killing mentally disabled in the name of eugenics.” Such doctrines (which, by the way, the thinkers derived from Darwin) “gave the German intellectuals the philosophical underpinning” for anti-Semitism and eventually for genocidal intolerance. Now, writes Glick, ”anti-Zionism” has replaced anti-Semitism among the fashionable, and the “embrace of the cause of Israel’s destruction by so many celebrity professors today is part and parcel of the destruction of the U.S. higher education system.” But Glick gives the most compelling rationale for the existence of Israel when she tells how she read about the one-state conference “as I was feeding my newborn son. I looked out the window at Jerusalem and all I could feel was thankful to be living in the independent, free Jewish state of Israel. I am thankful that these pseudo intellectuals no longer can determine the future of my people, as they could in the 1930s.”
Glick is further ”thankful that my children will in all likelihood not study in U.S. universities but in Israeli ones that are not as demented as their American counterparts.”
"(which, by the way, the thinkers derived from Darwin)"
This statement seems quite out of place amidst the rest of the argument. It's also a preposterous thing to say, because 1) animal breeders and the like had known about eugenics for centuries if not millennia before Darwin was ever born, and 2) Darwin explicitly rejected human eugenics. The former claim is obvious to just about everyone, I think, but I can give sources for the latter if anyone needs them.
Iannone goes on to say that eugenics "'gave the German intellectuals the philosophical underpinning' for anti-Semitism and eventually for genocidal intolerance." She naturally left out intermediate phases such as resettlement, because of course that's the policy she wants to suggest. She doesn't seem to know that the Palestinians have, at one time or another, been expelled from a goodly number of Middle Eastern countries (including Jordan and Kuwait and (I think) Egypt), so it's hard to figure out exactly where you'd resettle them *to*.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhether Darwin himself specifically rejected human eugenics or not, there is no question he was cited with great enthusiasm by eugenicists to justify their policies.
If Darwin did indeed oppose human eugenics, I'm curious how he justified such a position. Did he seriously believe humans were themselves unaffected by the laws of natural selection he had discovered?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt turns out to be easier than you might think, because eugenics and natural selection are not the same thing. Eugenics involves a deliberate effort to produce "better" humans via selective breeding as well as the killing or sterilization of "defective" human beings. On a mechanistic level, but not on a moral level, it's no different from trying to breed hardier roses or develop a rottweiler that isn't so vulnerable to hip dysplasia. It's a form of artificial selection, and as I said it's been practiced for centuries if not millennia.
Natural selection is different. It doesn't involve deliberate breeding. It essentially says that the impersonal forces of nature can have much the same effect as a deliberate act by a human being. Of course, these are different on a moral level: If I deliberately kill a baby, I'm a murderer; if a baby gets struck by lightning and dies, nobody is a murderer.
One can believe that natural selection occurs without believing that eugenics is morally acceptable. That seems to be what Darwin believed. Anti-evolutionists like to quote the following statement from Darwin:
"...excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
But they never, ever, EVER quote the rest of that paragraph, in which he says this:
"The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy...Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil."
Thus Darwin opposed even a passive form of eugenics that allowed the weak and helpless to die. In fact, "a passive form of eugenics" is pretty close to natural selection. He's essentially stating that natural selection can *act* on human beings--but we shouldn't sit idly by as it happens. That's not eugenics; it's the exact opposite. People may have misused his arguments, but Darwin certainly isn't responsible for that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Even an otherwise liberal thinker like Oliver Wendell Holmes was drawn to the fashionable concept of killing mentally disabled in the name of eugenics.”
Unless I'm quite mistaken, this is a slander of OWH. He famously ruled that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" in a eugenics case. But this was with regard to sterilization so no more "defective" children would be produced.
AFAIK, there is no evidence he ever advocated the murder of living "defectives."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt seems the "existential threat" to Israel as posed here comes from the "existence" of Arabs within the borders of Israel. Discuss.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLet me see if I have this correct: the "existential threat" posed to Israel is the "existance" of non-Jews in Israel? The solution, then, is their expulsion, which would "finally" deal with this "threat"?
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