{"id":48,"date":"2002-07-18T09:54:54","date_gmt":"2002-07-18T13:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=48"},"modified":"2002-07-18T09:54:54","modified_gmt":"2002-07-18T13:54:54","slug":"the-volokhs-on-zionism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=48","title":{"rendered":"The Volokhs on Zionism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/volokh.blogspot.com\/2002_07_14_volokh_archive.html#85254845\">very sensible post on Zionism<\/a> from Volokh\/Non-Volokh. A highlight:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;as far as real politics is concerned, the best shouldn&#8217;t be the enemy of the good; we should support countries and governments not according to whether they conform exactly to an abstract ideal but according to whether they&#8217;re closer to the ideal than whatever else is on offer. By that standard, Israel as it is today is vastly superior to the alternatives, the best of a really iffy lot. To the extent Israel requires a tribal\/nationalistic\/religious\/collectivistic mythology to maintain the will to defend itself against its enemies, well, that&#8217;s really sad, but possibly true.<\/p>\n<p>To the extent it&#8217;s true, Zionism is acceptable (but nothing for me to get enthusiastic about), but only because as a side effect it promotes democracy, secularism, and individual freedom. (On this account, statements like the &#8220;Zionism = Racism&#8221; resolution of the 1970s are objectionable &#8212; not because they&#8217;re false, but because they lack perspective, applying a standard against Israel that applies equally well against most other countries in the area.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A very sensible post on Zionism from Volokh\/Non-Volokh. A highlight: &#8230;as far as real politics is concerned, the best shouldn&#8217;t be the enemy of the good; we should support countries and governments not according to whether they conform exactly to an abstract ideal but according to whether they&#8217;re closer to the ideal than whatever else <a href='https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=48' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}