Is there anyone out there who doesn't know Israel's full of Jews?

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Is there anyone out there who doesn't know Israel's full of Jews?

Claire Berlinski · June 6, 2010 at 3:21pm

It's a minor thing with which to be annoyed these days, all things considered, but I wonder why it's become a journalistic convention to alternate references to "Israel" with "the Jewish state," as in this report from Bloomberg:

Israel says its blockade of Gaza is legal because it is in “a state of armed conflict” with Hamas. Some countries, such as Turkey, dispute the legality of the blockade.
Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.

After all, no one writes "The French prime minister returned to the French state on Monday," or "Governor Purdue led a 43-person delegation in a business mission to explore trade and tourism opportunities with the Cuban state." My objection to this is aesthetic, not political. I just don't see the need for three words when one will do perfectly well.

Speaking of aesthetic objections, Alice Walker's punctuation leaves much to be desired.

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→ show George Savage's comment (#21)

Re: Is there anyone out there who doesn't know Israel's full of Jews?

George Savage

John Tabin: I dissent. "The Jewish State" is a useful phrase to break up the monotony of copy, and is certainly preferable to using "Israel" repeatedly within a few hundred words. It's no different than switching off between "the French government" and "Paris" or "the Obama Administration" and "the White House." I will continue to use it (as I did in this post), and if you have an aesthetic problem with that, too bad. There's no accounting for taste. · _{Jun 6 at 3:33pm}

Ricochet is living up to its name this evening. The many cogent arguments presented in the thread so far have convinced me, happily, to withdraw my earlier suggestion to retire "the Jewish state" from routine use.