Lately Ralph Seliger responded here to Saif Ammous on the issue of refugees from '48, saying that the compensation envisioned by the Geneva initiative of '03 is sufficient to extinguish the right of return. Below Saif Ammous responds. I'd offer one comment ahead of time. It is interesting to me how the failures of the "peace process" to give anything to the Palestinians for lo these many years has caused many to look back not to '67 but to '48, as the late Tanya Reinhart noted. Also, the other night in Brooklyn, I heard Hannah Mermelstein citing Zochrot's position on the right of return; and so the right of return is gaining support in the left community. And with Israel turning the West Bank into a biblical colony extraordinaire for "revenants," a fancy name for returners, who's to say this should go one way? Ammous:
Ralph Seliger shows that he views American non-Christian civil and
human rights as more important than those of Palestinian non-Jews,
whose rights are secondary in his clinging chauvinistically to the
Jewish state. Stating that he supports only "compensation" for the
refugees in no way changes the fact that the Palestinians were ethnically-cleansed from Palestine and that he supports the continuation of this ethnic cleansing. Compensation does not abrogate the crime nor his support for it.
As for Seliger's revisionist history on the establishment of Israel;
for his own sake and reputation, I urge him to stop repeating this
stuff because it sounds about as intelligent as a flat-earther
insisting that the sun goes around the earth. Few in Israel
even believe this nonsense, yet it continues to live in America and is
repeated by people who would otherwise be considered reasonable sober
adults. I cannot dignify this rendering of history with any comment,
except to suggest that Seliger read histories that are not distributed
by AIPAC, J-Street, the ADL or other residents of Cloud-Cuckoo-land.
