2 Because Israel is fighting our war.
If the forces in the world aligned so emphatically against Israel were to succeed in overcoming her it would be catastrophic for the world not the least because it could have only been done by force.
It would be a catastrophe for us.
Those who think of Israel in terms of South Africa and apartheid are badly and dangerously wrong. That way lies terrible war.
3 In the meantime just as bad is the chronic illness of anti-Israelism in the West and its corrosive effect on thought especially in the media, universities and increasingly among politicians.
This is our problem far more than it is the Israelis.
The "Nakba" was the fault of the Arab world, was no big deal anyway relative to what else was going on in the world in 1948 and became a crime only when the Arab world herded the people into camps and subjected them to a savagely enforced apartheid that with the bottomless support of the UN and the West endures to this day.
It is indeed perhaps one of the worst crimes against a people since the war.
This is an enduring war crime against the refugees of 1948 in which the West was and is complicit. Help the people on the ground of course but it had to be explicit that the people will be set free.
Why was it not?
Those with somewhere to go and can support themselves or who have support must be free to go anywhere including anywhere in the Arab world.
They must have full national and civil rights where they go especially if they are in the country they are born.
Basic. But that almost only ever happened in Israel, the US and the West
Freedom did not enter into the calculations of the body charged with the guardianship of human rights as it hasn't much ever since. Nor any others who are vocal about human rights. There has never been a campaign anywhere calling to let these people go.
That there has not been a movement and barely a voice to free these people is an example of the corrosive impact of anti-Israelist ideology on political thought in the West
Instead the UN created some new kind of citizenship in the form of a card which bestowed entitlements, an identity and a curse that can be passed on and split among the generations for eternity.
Now the refugees have become a people and the people demand recognition as a nation with a sovereign state.
OK. It wouldn't be the first time in history that refugees have become a people, a nation and a state.
But it would be the first time that a nation was brought forth by keeping a people with no particular national identity in a tightly laced straitjacket that ensures a burning core grievance nurtured from birth against another nation for a crime that has been projected on to them by the true criminals who are all around them and within. A nation forged in hate and chains. A nation forced to life by refusing human rights to the people. A state born not of freedom but of the card.
That is the curse of the Palestinian people.
You cannot shake the queasy feeling that the UN and the world have been playing with the stuff of our souls and that will be delivered out of this is something new and nasty. A nation recognized without the "land for peace" and "mutual recognition" deals that are critical but are refused, refused still even to discuss, least of all with the nation that it has vowed to destroy and supersede.
So let us talk for the first time of the true Nakba of the Palestinian people to understand the nature of what we have done to them. The Nakba that started when the Arab world, with unspeakable cruelty, turned their backs on them and with the aid of the West were turned into a subclass in the lands where they were born. A subclass with an ideology that demands hatred of a state and people wholly innocent of the crimes against them that they see every day.
We are expected to recognize a nation that is locked into a war that it cannot win and cannot withdraw from either, and by doing this we are anointing the curse that has been brought on these people.
This hurts the Palestinians far more than the Israelis and as our handiwork is likely to blow up in in our faces, it is as good a reason as any to advocate for Israel.
This has to stop. Not in our name.
The dilemma of "Palestine" is not our fault. It is not the fault of Israel. Let us be clear about whose fault it is. It could head off a disaster for all of us.
h/t Rita
