To do so when the danger is at the gate is suicide. What he says about small nations is true. But he fails to mention that, unlike other small nations, Israel can call on the services of the greatest power in the world. Israel's enemies, on the other hand, have no one to call on. Instead, Israel's amen corner is notable for the virulence of the attacks it directs at the national aspirations of others.
Few publications are as filled with visceral hatred as The New Republic.
You get the idea. Jewish nationalism is good and every other nationalism is bad. Yet endless repetition scarcely makes the claim any more plausible. And the argument from necessity that a people savagely persecuted and denied refuge in every corner of the globe needs at least one place of its own was made 50 years ago, tragically and definitively, in the wake of the Holocaust. This is the standard argument and just about every ingredient in it is unsustainable.