Lucianne Goldberg had a wonderful expression for Bill Clinton’s predicament. She said that when he said, "I did not have sex with that woman," he drank the Strontium-90. After that it was just a question of how long it would take for him to turn to jelly. (Still developing!) In the Israel/Palestine situation the Strontium 90 is the New Historians. Their work in the 80s-90s was utterly staggering; it revealed among other things that members of Ben-Gurion’s inner circle in 47-48 coldly plotted to cleanse the land of Palestinians; and then did so through violence, murder, intimidation…
The New Historians are the Strontium 90 because their truth is just too powerful and well-documented; and Jews here in the U.S. were going to read this stuff and have their minds blown. I got around to reading it in the last year or so. And here is the amazing Hannah Mermelstein, of birthright unplugged, writing in the Jewish Advocate on-line that "The Land Was Theirs." Yes in the Jewish Advocate!
On March 20, 1941, Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund wrote: “The
complete evacuation of the country from its other inhabitants and
handing it over to the Jewish people is the answer.”
… in 1948, almost two months before the first “Arab-Israeli
war” technically began, the 1,125 inhabitants of the Palestinian
village Umm Khalid fled a Haganah military operation. Like their
brethren from more than 500 villages, they likely thought they would
return to their homes within a few weeks, after the fighting blew over
and new political borders were or were not drawn.
Instead, more than 6 million Palestinian people remain refugees to this
day, some in refugee camps not far from their original towns, others in
established communities in Europe and the US, all forbidden from
returning to their homeland for one reason: they are not Jewish…
Let us, as Jewish people with a history of oppression and a tradition
of social justice, work for the right of indigenous people to return to
their land. This is our only hope for true peace and security in the
region.
I love you Hannah. "Can you believe your eyes?" David Bloom writes to me, in sending this along. No I can’t believe my eyes. Don’t you see what is happening!? Jewish identity is changing before our eyes! Militant colonialist Zionism is being questioned by American Jews. The tide is ours.
P.S. Note the related petition from a group called No Time To Celebrate: Jews Remember the Nakba. These are Jews like me and Mermelstein who are trying to do what is utterly essential to any movement forward historically: acknowledge, honor, apologize for the Nakba (which some of our own grandparents and parents helped to foster). And then do something about it!
