Seham responds to my post about the question of whether Jews agonizing over their Jewish identity is a sideshow to real engagement on Israel/Palestine:
You know how much I like forwarding news items
along, and invariably at some point a Jewish activist well say or do
something that I find particularly moving (this week it was Naomi Klein and Max Blumenthal)
and so when I email these things out I get a lot of flack– there are two "nice jerks" who
always respond and ask me why I insist on having Jews frame and
humanize the cause for me. I don't. It's a resentment that some
Palestinian activists have because as I said before: what Palestinians
say is insignificant unless a Jew of conscience signs off on it first.
Those same expectations don't apply to Tibetans, we don't expect the
Chinese to sanctify their cause nor do we demand that the government in
Sudan sanctify the plight of the people in Darfur, but like I said
before, the white man expects/demands that the Palestinians have an
intermediary and it is most palatable to the white man that the
intermediary be a Jew. So, some of us resent the fact that while we
are capable and willing to tell our narrative, nobody really wants to
listen.
I don't really mind the process that Jewish activists have to go
through until they get to the point where they are standing on the
right side of humanity and the law in regards to the Palestinian issue,
while it isn't necessarily about "you" per se, you can't be ignored.
There is an apartheid regime in Israel and they claim to act on behalf
of world Jewry and they use something that was collectively
traumatizing to world Jewry in order to gain support from world Jewry.
“Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy.
The interest in us stems from the interest in the Jewish issue. The
interest is in you, not in me. So we have the misfortune of having
Israel as an enemy, because it enjoys unlimited support. And we have
the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy, because the Jews are
the center of attention. You’ve brought us defeat and renown.” –Mahmoud Darwish
