All kinds of wrong

Within just one article (and some wild accompanying video), we have:

-The creepy solicitation of schoolgirls as young as 13 for what it's not entirely clear isn't at least partly about something even worse than dead-end attempts at becoming a supermodel.

-The exploitation of poor families.

-A racism so open that it demands specific amounts of specific ethnic blood, using genealogy as a guide. German blood, at that, with a teaspoon of Italian as some kind of eugenic self-tanner.

-All that fun body-image stuff. (Note the "don't feed the models" sign in the model holding pen in the video.)

-The journalistic technique of baiting readers with tragic yet titillating stories the face of which is a pretty young blonde. (See also: missing persons.)

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Tangentially related, the Helen Thomas Palestine remark. What struck me about it - aside from the obvious - was the same thing that strikes me when reading works about The Jews by non-Jews in France, from the 18th and 19th centuries (and I suspect the same goes for earlier, but need to have a look myself to verify, something I intend to do once finishing up an unrelated academic project, aka my dissertation). Which is (and this is long-winded, but bear with me), for all the talk today about Jews' connection to the land of Israel as something Jews a) always cared about, or b) decided, with the advent of modern Zionism, to care about, or c) began caring about after the Holocaust, what's lost is the popular conviction among non-Jews that a) the land that's currently Israel was quite literally where Jews came from (and I'm not talking proto-Palins who may have believed in something apocalyptic, although of course this is an understanding of history influenced by the Bible), b) the "Jewish Question" was the question of what to do with a foreign group that was foreign on account of coming from somewhere else, and that somewhere else was Palestine, and c) the Jews' finest, most noble hour was when they had a land of their own. Which is to say, the notions that a) Jews are best as a nation in the geographic and political senses, and b) this nation is located in and around Jerusalem, were, historically, not specific to Jews. The classic example of this phenomenon, the anti-Semitic cry we don't hear so much these days of "Go back to Palestine," is telling, but it fails to capture that even kinder, gentler Gentiles (Montesquieu and Grégoire come to mind - I know I've seen this elsewhere but am not going through my notes for this post) understood Jews to be a people dispersed from the land of Israel. Of immigrant origin, as it were.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that now that it's unpopular to suggest Jews belong in Palestine, now that the (re)placing of Jews in Palestine has turned out not to go 100% smoothly, it's like, who were those Jews to demand this? It must be their fanatical religion, telling them that some random bit of land is rightfully theirs. It's easily, easily forgotten that non-Jews also thought that Jews came from Palestine, and were sometimes if anything more convinced than Jews were that Palestine was the Jews' home in a way the European countries could never be. Not to generalize, but Jews were frequently more convinced than others that a Jew could truly be at home in this or that European country. It's not merely that Jews were amorphously unwelcome in various countries at various times. It's that Jews were understood to be unwelcome intruders from a specific geographic locale. It's not, "There was anti-Semitism, which Jews for some quirky reason decided to respond to by colonizing the Middle East." It's that anti-Semitism was intrinsically related to the belief that Jews belonged in the Middle East.

All of this, meanwhile, is a roundabout way of saying not that I personally believe that Jews today all have a traceable, historical connection to the Middle East. (My own family heritage, as far back as I know, is utterly Pale.) My point is that if Jews were/are deluded in thinking they belong in Palestine, if you're going to call Israel a great big mistake (which, for the record, if this hasn't been clear enough, I don't), the blame for this ought to fall a teensy percent to the Jews, for taking their religious texts so damn literally, but the bulk of the guilt falls on the people who actually ruled for all these years, who were in the majority, and who in effect determined the "truth" about who Jews were and where they came from. For supposedly educated, informed non-Jews today to throw their arms up and ask what the heck these white-as-white Jews were thinking, setting up shop in the Middle East of all places, is, on a historical level, disingenuous.