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Harvard’s ‘one-state’ conference spurs ‘National Review Online’ to suggest expelling Palestinians from Jewish state

Alan Dershowitz
Alan Dershowitz

There’s going to be a one-state conference at Harvard this weekend. One of the fascinations of my latest trip to Israel/Palestine was seeing how Palestinians have given up on the two-state solution because Israel has destroyed the possibility and the U.N. has pocket-vetoed Palestinian statehood, and people who are sick of occupation are desperately looking around for other ideas (including, inevitably, armed resistance).

The critics are going nuts. Carol Iannone of National Review Online writes:

however, as long as Harvard wishes to allow students to entertain different ideas, how about this — resettlement of the Palestinians now residing in refugee camps to Arab countries, with full financial compensation. Left-wing Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose earlier work often seemed to condemn Israel’s actions in 1948, has more recently argued that transfer even of Israeli Arab citizens residing in Israel proper cannot be ruled out if Israel one day faces an existential threat as it did in the year of its birth….

“Existential threat” from Palestinian babies? These people are off the rails. We can only hope that they are separating themselves from the American discourse with this type of speech. The dissociation is reflected in Caroline Glick, whom Iannone quotes. Glick seems to understand that her Jewish nationalist reality would be unpopular in the U.S. Because we’re Germany in the 1930s, or we’re liberals? 

Now, writes [Caroline] Glick, ”anti-Zionism” has replaced anti-Semitism among the fashionable, and the “embrace of the cause of Israel’s destruction by so many celebrity professors today is part and parcel of the destruction of the U.S. higher education system.” But Glick gives the most compelling rationale for the existence of Israel when she tells how she read about the one-state conference “as I was feeding my newborn son. I looked out the window at Jerusalem and all I could feel was thankful to be living in the independent, free Jewish state of Israel. I am thankful that these pseudo intellectuals no longer can determine the future of my people, as they could in the 1930s.”

Alan Dershowitz also targets the conference, with another bogus analogy, suggesting that anyone who calls for one state is denying Jewish peoplehood. There’s not really a connection:

What would Harvard do if a group of right wing students and faculty decided to convene a conference on the topic, “Are the Palestinians Really a People?” and invited as speakers only hard right academics who answered that question in the negative?…

They will claim that the “one-state solution” is a serious academic subject, whereas the question “are the Palestinians really a people?” is not. This is a pure rationalization. The question regarding the Palestinians was raised by a candidate for President of the United States and has been the subject of debate and controversy in the media and in academic writings. Both subjects are essentially political in nature and both have similarly phony academic veneers.

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This is how you know, you KNOW the zionists mean to expel palestinians from all of palestine. Babies are an existential threat. A nuclear power “faces extinction” from giving people civil rights.

I do agree on one point – Israel is on its last legs.

Glick is a radical nut case

Dan: nowadays, people on their “last legs” have walkers, motorized wheelchairs, and who knows what more — if they can pay for it — and their days are not particularly numbered! And Israel has shown it can pay for anything it wants. I’d prefer to believe — ethically — that Israel is on its last legs as it throws in its lot with the absolutely, crazed and murderous zealots among the nationalist settlers. I’d prefer it. But the USA rules the world, just now, and the USA has a taste for supporting some — if not all — crazed and murderous zealots.

Let us hope — and work — for better days.

i’m sorry, but isn’t inaneony aware that harvard is/was home to that great proponent of 21st eugenics in the ME, martin kramer?

http://www.juancole.com/2010/02/harvard-professors-modest-proposal.html

these people are clinically insane.

I am thankful that these pseudo intellectuals no longer can determine the future of my people, as they could in the 1930s.

no, caroline, of course, the future of ‘your’ people is securely in the ideological hands of the settler state. that should work out well.

these people are off the rails. they don’t like the idea of one state but won’t allow for 2. sh*t or get off the pot israel.