I really don't understand how people can go so far in life without accumulating any wisdom.
Ehsan Ahrari holds a PhD, (further proving that one can acquire a degree without acquiring an education), and bills himself as a "strategist", but also calls the IAEA a "force for morality".
Apparently, the IAEA's complete inability to detect North Korea and Libya's nuclear programmes, and the way Iran and Iraq played the IAEA, escapes his notice.

Further, it's not as though Israel built nuclear weapons for some vague and ill-defined future threat or out of paranoia; they're attacked on a regular basis.

The failure here is a familiar one.
Not of Israel to conform to accepted moral standards, but of Arab nations to meet any kind of minimum standard of effective governance.

What also doesn't get enough emphasis is that Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and thus, unlike the other nations IAEA comes down on, is not in violation of "international law" for having nukes.

But I don't understand why OJ is so in favor of statehood for Israel.

Because it's doomed otherwise.

Of course, if Israel did become the 51st (or whatever) state, the next step would be to question America's need for nukes....

Either that or justify "asymmetrical warfare" against the US because it has them.

How would that mark a change?

Israel's not doomed, but what it has to do to survive is pretty unpleasant, so it might not. But which of the threats against it would be solved by statehood?

In any event, the survival of Israel is not the same as the survival of Judaism. There is also some question about whether Judaism will survive, but that will be decided in the US regardless of what happens to Israel.

David:

The inevitable demographic transformation into an Islamic state.

1. Why wouldn't that happen to Israel, the 51st state?

2. When we go to the doctor and ask him to cure our cancer, we're really not looking for him to shoot us in the head.

It would, but it wouldn't change the nature of the state. Also, immigration by Christian millennialists would be much easier--they'd likely outnumber the Muslims.

That's my second point.

You're equating being an American Jew to being dead?

No. I'm equating saving Israel from an Islamic future by importing millions of Christian millennialists to curing cancer by shooting the patient in the head.

If Israel is not the Jewish homeland, then what's the point? Give them all green cards and let them move to the Dakotas.

Being a Jewish homeland doesn't require political control. Indeed, the idea of statehood was a fairly late part of Zionism, wasn't it?

The Holy Lands aren't in the Dakotas, but that would have been a better option for all concerned than Israel turned out to be.

After seeing what they did with that arid bit of rocky ground, this North Dakotan would welcome any and all Isrealis who want to come here. (A lot of Scandinavians and Germans thought the Dakotas were the Promised Land. We are, after all, west of the Jordan.)

Being a Jewish homeland doesn't require political control.

True, I suppose. But Israel without the right of any Jew to make aliyah, to mention just one major part of Israeli identify, is not Israel.

As for statehood and Zionism, I'm no expert but I think that having a state was always the core of Zionism. A religious state in biblical Israel is a relatively late development in Zionism.

Heck, we let Mexicans make aliyah, we can stretch the point for Jews--most of them are here already.

"Also, immigration by Christian millennialists would be much easier--they'd likely outnumber the Muslims."

"No. I'm equating saving Israel from an Islamic future by importing millions of Christian millennialists to curing cancer by shooting the patient in the head."

David, it's just that the new guy gets stuck with the crappy jobs that noone else wants, like babysitting the Millenials. Why do you think Puerto Rico won't sign on?