We're all going to be talking about the Obama effect. It's happenin. Soon we're all gonna be talkin like Reverend Wright. Here's Christopher Hitchens defending Khalidi, and riffing on a divided Jerusalem, occupation, the right o' return, radical settlers, and by implication, The Is lob, all at once. Beautiful:
Khalidi's family is a famous one in Jerusalem ,
long respected by Arab and Christian and Jew and Druze and Armenian, and
holding a celebrated house and position in the city since approximately the
time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house.
If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his
ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn
who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so. I
would go further and say that if Barack Obama was looking for a Palestinian
friend, he could not have chosen any better. But perhaps John McCain has
decided that he doesn't need any Palestinian friends and neither do we. Perhaps
he thinks it's all right to refer to refugees and victims of occupation, who
have been promised self-determination and statehood at the podium of the United
Nations and the U.S. Congress by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, as if they
were Hitlerites. How shameful. How disgusting. How ignorant.
One could go a
step further and say that many Israelis have used the words apartheid and terrorist to
describe at least some of their government's policies.
One other point: A couple years ago Hitchens attacked Walt and Mearsheimer and said that they were wrong to single out Israel/Palestine when there were border disputes of a similar character between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and India and Pakistan too. I found his worldly glibness impressive, and helpful: it is precisely the comparison to so many other states that have quarreled, as states, that makes the dispossession of the stateless Palestinians the more unjust. Now Hitchens seems to be coming round to the right idea on this…
