Both Static members and primitive constructs are additions to the
language to speed things up, and make things more efficient. The Java
police are not going to come to your place of work if you decide to make
every single int an Integer.

Seeing that Static members are not forced (in the nature of the
language) and there are Object representations of all primitives, I
wouldn't feel confident taking those facts into a debate.

Java is OO ... it just has primitives (and static members) as well.

Lastly if SmallTalk had come out a little later, or if Sun had decided
to modify SmallTalk instead of making its own language  then things could
be vastly different.