I just heard Ralph Nader on C-Span, speaking at Howard Zinn’s memorial service in D.C. Nader said that, scarred by his own experience of dropping napalm on French civilians during WW2, Howard Zinn denounced injustice wherever he saw it, and did not pick and choose. And lest we had any doubt what Nader meant, he singled out Matthew Rothschild’s statement on the Progressive site, "Thank you, Howard Zinn, for being a Jew who dared to criticize Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, early on." Yet another sign that the reign of being Progressive Except for Palestine is coming to an end.
Later in his eulogy Nader said that he and Zinn shared the same definition of freedom, from Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power." And I reflected that Palestinians have never been trusted with power; and their grievance never goes away.
