" Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing." Indeed. So, would that be the nation which is composed of 76% Jews and 20% Arabs, or the one which, immediately after its founding in 1948, made itself 100% Jew-free, at the expense of approximately 100,000 Jews whose families had lived there continuously since, literally, Old Testament times? That's the part of the argument which I don't follow. Unless, of course, one holds to the point of view, still popular in many of our finer neighborhoods, which holds the purchase of legal residence by a substantial number of Jews in an area where they had heretofore been a decently powerless minority to be an appalling prospect, bordering on criminal and justifying any actions in the name of defense. (I dismiss a priori any arguments that the various riots and massacres directed against Jews in Palestine of the 1920s and 1930s were somehow caused by Israeli oppression of Palestinians following 1967, as frequently put forward under cover of copious circumlocutions and obscure rationalizations, while dismissing any suggestion that the causation ran in the opposite direction). Those holding this view of “The Jews stole the Palestinians’ country” by means of buying property and moving there should find a lot of camaraderie among those trying to similarly “defend the United States from the influx of Hispanics who will ruin our society and culture”.