Do I support the right of the Jews to a national home? Again, kind of loaded. I support the right of the Jews (and what's up with that definite article anyway?) to live freely. I welcome "the" Jews as my friends, neighbors and fellow citizens (and jewish men are proportionally completely over-represented on my list of admired individuals). I do not, and cannot, support the notion that there is something fundamentally just about an officially "jewish" state. I certainly sympathize with the aspiration. Jews are hardly the first group to appreciate the benefits of homogeniety. And practical reality requires immigration controls. But using the instruments of the state to promote and preserve a religious majority among the citizenry (in fact, denying first class citizenship to the minority) isn't something I'm comfortable with.
People identify themselves as "cradle catholics," "recovering catholics," and "fallen away catholics." People retain a catholic identity long after they stop practicing and believing in the catholic faith. And catholics spent centuries fighting for the state to endorse and protect the catholic church and its interests. There are countries that are heavily associated with catholicism - Ireland being a great example. It would be odd for Ireland to stop being so catholic, but would it be an essential threat to being Irish? Only if you define "Irish" as being limited to one religion.
Catholicism is not an ethnicity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnoreligi ous
Assyrians, Nasranis, Yazidi and Mandaeans don't have their own countries. Next?
Neither do Palestinians, for that matter.
The point is, the Jewish community is the largest of these ethnoreligious groups, and they DO have a state already.
If you have specific problems with something Israel is doing, that would be worth discussing, but whether they are officially a Jewish state or just "de facto" like the US is a "de facto" Judeo Christian state is really pretty pointless to me.
At the end of the day, however, do I believe that there should be special provisions in Israel so that Jewish people from around the world should be able to return to a homeland where they can be protected? Yes.
Maybe you feel differently when there are 500 million or 3 billion of you Christians or Muslims or whatever - with plenty of your own states which are either de-jure or de-facto safe-havens, but when there are less than 20 million of you and nearly half of your European population was decimated the last century, you view these things a little differently.
Simply put you have taken an exceptionalist point of view that Jews should have the right to take land from another people, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians forcibly from their homes and property, essentially to colonize their lands if necessary. Well, actually that did and is happened. But I don't believe all Jews think that they are excepted from moral-ethical principles and actions toward anyone, that there is a you and us, and that different ethic or moral rules apply.
If that were true of Jews then it should certainly be true of other ethnic groups who feel excepted in order to redress past wrongs. Take the Serbs. Didn't the Turks invade and then take lands belonging to them. Wasn't that history the justification of the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians less than a decade ago? Or is it that we have an exception among the exceptions, Israel only, and that the Serbs were not justified in their actions?
