The Question of Zion

If you've got a spare 15 minutes today, I highly, highly recommend reading the transcript of the interview Tony Jones conducted last night withProfessor Jacqueline Rose. Better still, watch it.

Jacqueline Rose is a British academic who works, as she said, on the borders of literature, politics and psychoanalysis. She is also a jewess. She has written a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in particular the use of rhetoric in support of the Zionist cause, that is, the expansion of Israel as a 'holy' Jewish nation. I have never been able to understand the ferocity of the hatred the Israeli right has towards the dispossessed arabs upon whose soil they live. I do not deny Israel it's right to existence. However, I am appalled by the military invasion and military occupation of the West Bank (and until just a few days ago Gaza). I am appalled by the subjugation and denial of human rights to people of the these areas. I am appalled by the policy of 'targetted assassinations'. I am appalled at the double-standard that inherently lies beneath these actions—that is, it is justifiable for us appropriate your land, because you were hostile towards us; to assassinate your leaders, because they oppose us; and to do all of this because the German Nazi party and the Third Reich treated us in similarly appalling ways. Somehow, because our people were the main victims of the Holocaust, because the property and livelihoods of (some of) our ancestors were visciously torn from them, we can do this to a current generation of people who were in no way related to the fascist concentration camps of Middle Europe, and upon whom we were foisted without their consultation.

To me, this is akin to me savagely beating and robbing a passerby, because my own great-grandmother had been murdered in another city in another part of the world many years before, and I felt I had the right to protect myself incase this person, child even, had a sinister glint in their eye. This is not respecting one's neighbour, it is not doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is not fair, nor decent, nor justifiable. Neither is suicide bombing, mind you.

Read or watch the interview. Professor Rose is a much more eloquent exponent of my point of view.