Friday, February 20, 2015

Vote YES! Support BDS call for Academic Boycott at SOAS

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My comment is not about this one post of yours, but about your general position.

You say that every ethnic group should (have a right to) return to the place it inhabited in the past: Palestinians - to today's Israel, Jews from Arab countries - to those countries, Germans - to every country they lived in in FSU times.

However, this position strikes me as willfully blind to reality, to people's feelings and behavior in the RL. One can not return to the past, the best thing is concentrate on building the future. Surely, you know that zero Jews from Arab countries want to return there, and that Arabs in those countries wouldn't want to see any returning Jews. Now about the other side - Palestinians. You cannot not understand that neither Jews nor Palestinians want to live together in one country both because of decades of war and, more importantly, because of competing nationalistic desires - both peoples want to have their own nation state. That's why, in Palestinians' place, I would be fighting for creation of a Palestinian state near Israel, not for returning to Israel, the Jewish state.

Your stance seems to be "in the past people were bad and we had wars, ethnic cleansings, genocide, etc. Now we are more advanced and everybody should have the ability to go anywhere. That will solve all the problems."

But it is not so in reality. I sounded in the previous paragraph like a 3-year-old, but that's because your position is so weird. History so far supports me:

The Sudeten German Homeland Association has given up its claim to the group's former home in parts of the Czech Republic, quieting one of the final echoes of the Second World War.
[...]
Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek welcomed the decision, telling CT television that “this is no surprise – it's one of the conditions for an improvement in relations.”
http://www.thelocal.de/20150302/world-war-2-history-sudeten-germans-give-up-right-to-homeland

As long as Palestinians demand rights of return, the war will continue. As long as both Jews and Palestinians don't accept the other's right to a state, we'll kill each other. Unlike you, I think it will end or with 2 states (w/o anybody returning anywhere) or with Palestinians leaving.

~ Israeli Jew

Anonymous said...

I think you may like this blog (very Left from my pov, but he is no fool). That's one of my favorite posts about Israeli vs. Palestinian narratives. If you read, would be interesting to hear whether you liked that.

War is a State of Mind
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1130062008