What Is the Problem With Israel

A More Nuanced Critical Response to Ben Burgis' article

A counter-essay generated by CLAUDE.AI:

Your Jacobin piece raises important questions about Democratic foreign policy positioning, and I appreciate your documented concern for the tremendous suffering of the Palestinian people. However, your analysis contains several internal contradictions that appear to undermine your broader argument—contradictions that even thinkers you likely admire would recognize.

On Your Ethno-State Argument:

You argue that Israel's character as a state "established for the benefit of a particular ethnic subset" makes it fundamentally illegitimate. Yet this description applies to dozens of nations you don't critique. Lithuania's constitution declares it "the state of the Lithuanian nation," Poland's references "the Polish Nation," and Japan maintains citizenship laws explicitly designed to preserve ethnic homogeneity. The 22 Arab League states you ignore include several that constitutionally enshrine Arab and Islamic identity.

When I point this out, you'll likely respond that I'm engaging in "whataboutism"—that other nations' policies don't justify Israel's. But as Edward Said noted in Orientalism, the problem isn't comparison itself but the selective application of universal principles. Your framework treats Jewish national self-determination as uniquely illegitimate while remaining silent about identical practices elsewhere. This isn't consistent anti-nationalism—it reproduces the orientalist double standards Said criticized.

Anticipating Your Response on the Occupation:

Israeli human rights organizations like B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence do provide compelling evidence of discriminatory practices that constitute forms of racial segregation. This is a legitimate concern that distinguishes Israel's current situation from simple nation-state policies.

But here's your internal contradiction: you simultaneously argue that the occupation constitutes apartheid and reject the two-state solution that would end it. You quote approvingly the Knesset's rejection of Palestinian statehood as evidence of Israeli extremism, but then advocate for a one-state solution that would require an even more dramatic transformation. You can't coherently argue that ending the occupation through partition is both necessary (to end apartheid) and impossible (due to Israeli intransigence).

Your Counter-Response and the Deeper Problem:

You'll likely respond that the two-state solution is dead because of settlement expansion and Israeli political dynamics. But this reveals precisely the fatalistic determinism Marx himself rejected. In The German Ideology, Marx criticized philosophers who "believe that to live for an idea is the true human life" rather than working with actual material conditions. Your analysis treats Israeli political culture as permanently reactionary while offering no realistic pathway for the transformation you demand.

Moreover, your own polling data undermines your argument. If 82% of Israeli Jews support Gaza "transfer" and 56% support expelling Arab citizens, doesn't this suggest that maintaining a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one might be more politically feasible than dismantling the Jewish state entirely? You're demanding the more difficult transformation while rejecting the easier one—classic utopian thinking Marx consistently criticized.

On Marxist Analysis and Its Specific Failures

Your class-reductionist framework, viewing everything through the lens of capitalist exploitation versus displacement, reproduces analytical errors that have consistently led Marxist predictions astray. Marx's specific predictions failed systematically: the reserve army of labor was supposed to keep wages at subsistence (instead real wages rose dramatically), the rate of profit was supposed to fall toward zero (instead we see persistent profitability), and class consciousness was supposed to override national identities (instead the 20th century proved nationalism far more powerful).

When contemporary political polarization gets cited as evidence of capitalism's failures, this actually proves the opposite point. Discontent in democratic societies gets channeled through institutions that allow peaceful transitions of power—something systematically impossible under the "dictatorship of the proletariat" Marx advocated. As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, attempts to eliminate political plurality in favor of economic determinism lead inevitably to tyranny.

Your Predictable Counter-Counter

You'll argue that "real" socialism has never been tried, that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot weren't following Marx's vision. But this reveals Marxism's core epistemological problem, identified by Karl Popper: it's unfalsifiable. When predictions fail, the theory is preserved by claiming conditions weren't right. This isn't scientific analysis—it's theological thinking.

Noam Chomsky, whom you likely respect, made precisely this point in Manufacturing Consent, distinguishing between Marx's analytical insights and his predictive failures: "Marx was a great social analyst but a poor prophet." Chomsky recognizes capitalism's flaws while acknowledging that Marxist solutions have proven catastrophic in practice.

The Paradox at Your Analysis's Heart

You criticize Israeli democracy as insufficient while advocating policies that would eliminate it entirely. You quote approvingly from Ofer Cassif—whose ability to speak in the Knesset, avoid expulsion, and publish his views demonstrates the very democratic pluralism you claim doesn't exist. Would Cassif have similar freedom to criticize government policy in Hamas-controlled Gaza or the PA-controlled West Bank?

As Michel Foucault noted in Discipline and Punish, power operates through multiple mechanisms beyond state coercion. Israeli democracy, however flawed, enables the very dissent that makes your critique possible. Your one-state solution would require dismantling these institutions—replacing them with what? Maintained how?

Using Marx Against Your Position

Marx warned against exactly this kind of abstract moralizing in The Eighteenth Brumaire: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." You're demanding that Israelis and Palestinians conform to your theoretical framework rather than working with the messy realities of national identity, religious attachment, and historical trauma that actually motivate people.

Even more pointedly, Marx criticized German idealists for whom "the important thing is to find some abstract conception" rather than engaging with concrete conditions. Your analysis treats seven million Israeli Jews as an abstraction to be theoretically dissolved rather than as people with legitimate security concerns shaped by historical experience. Doesn't genuine concern for the children of Gaza and the West Bank require grappling with concrete conditions?

The Reality You're Avoiding

Your concern for Palestinian suffering is legitimate and necessary. Israeli human rights organizations consistently and thoroughly document real abuses. But what would actually happen if Israel faced the total isolation you advocate? Would this make Palestinians safer, or push Israeli society toward the very extremism you condemn?

You'll likely counter with South Africa, arguing that international isolation successfully ended apartheid there. But this analogy reveals another blind spot in your analysis. South Africa's transition worked because the white minority ultimately recognized they couldn't indefinitely control a black majority, the ANC explicitly committed to non-racialism and property protections, and the country faced no existential external threats. Israel's situation differs fundamentally: it's surrounded by actors with explicitly eliminationist goals, its high-tech economy is globally portable (unlike South Africa's commodity-dependent system), and major Palestinian factions have never made equivalent commitments to Jewish minority rights in a one-state solution.

More troubling, isolation often produces the Iran outcome rather than the South Africa one—greater extremism rather than liberalization. Iran became far more repressive under sanctions than under the Shah, precisely because external pressure validated hardliners' "the world is against us" narrative. If isolation pushes Israeli society toward genuine belief that they face genocidal rather than liberation movements, they're more likely to choose fortified resistance over negotiated transition. Your framework, by treating all Israeli security concerns as illegitimate rather than distinguishing between legitimate fears and illegitimate policies, makes the destructive Iran path more probable than the South Africa path you presumably want.

Both peoples need security and dignity. Your zero-sum framework makes both less likely by demanding complete negation of one side's national aspirations. Even Edward Said, in his later writings, moved toward acknowledging the need for mutual recognition rather than the eliminationist logic he had earlier advocated.

The Democratic Accountability Question

Perhaps most fundamentally, you've missed the strongest argument against current US policy: if 85% of Israelis oppose their own government, why should American taxpayers fund policies that even most Israelis reject? This creates a perverse dynamic where unconditional US support actually undermines Israeli democracy by insulating unpopular leaders from electoral consequences. The real question isn't whether Israel should exist, but whether America should subsidize governments that lack legitimacy among their own citizens—a more democratically grounded and answerable question than the abstract debates about ethno-states and absolutist philosophy.