Yousef Munnayer does a fine job responding to Roger Cohen’s latest column, “The Blight of Return.” So do many of the Times’ own readers (see the comments: reader picks).
One of the most unappealing character traits anyone can exhibit is excessive self-love. For liberal Zionists, the tragedy of Israel is what it’s done to the Jewish people… and that’s basically it. The Palestinians are minor bit-players in a titanic family drama that sets the smart, sensitive and urbane (Cohen) against the smart, rough and gruff (Lieberman). They ‘love and wrestle’ with one another on stage.
Sometimes, self-love can make one appear less-than-smart or sensitive or urbane. Like when it causes one to substitute Zionist exceptionalism for the basic ability to apprehend the obvious. Norbert from Finland put it this way:
No right of return after 65 years for one side but a right of return for the other after 2000 years. I sense a certain contradiction here.
Cohen is too smart and genteel to respond with the argument that God gave him the land. But that’s something that lots of other Zionists openly claim. So the more analogous question is whether Jews of German descent ought to have the right of return to Germany – a right they’ve enjoyed since 1949. A right all of their descendants continue to enjoy:
A study at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University study found 100,000 Israelis have German passports.
During the Nazi era, the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws stripped Jews of German citizenship. But since May 1949, German law gives Jews who fled Nazi Germany the right to German citizenship, including all their descendants.
How would Cohen respond to that? I don’t know – and it doesn’t really matter. Liberal Zionists have about as much influence on Palestinian agency as a midnight cricket in Palau. And Palestinian agency is what he’s really whinging about.
Liberal Zionists have about as much influence on Palestinian agency as a midnight cricket in Palau.
sweeeet
A comment on Cohen’s article, can anyone check this out?: I found this and another mention of the book with interesting history, (by Sands)
There is nothing here too difficult to understand. Germany has exercised its absolute right as a sovereign state to determine its own policy of immigration. Israel has done exactly the same. Neither country’s rights have been trumped by dubious RoR claims with tenuous legal authority.
I left a similar comment as Norbert’s on Yousef Munnayer’s The Jerusalem Fund blog. Indeed the hypocrisy shines.
Roger Cohen also tweeted last night that a two state solution would entail no right of return for either side. However I called him out on his incorrect statement saying that the losers here are the Palestinians, as Jews would still be able to make aliyah to Israel as they have done in the past years.
Human Rights Watch had an internal debate about whether or not the Palestinian Right of Return (ROR) was enshrined in international law. Some people inside HRW claimed the answer was “no”, and some external people agreed. But in the end HRW stood by its principles.
An internal HRW document that explains it all can be found on Norman Finkelstein’s website
here.
Some anonymous person inside HRW leaked it to Finkelstein.
Thanks, Norman!!