The New York Times has a forum on the question, "Do U.S. Donors Drive Israeli Politics?" following the investigation of tax deductions for the settler enterprise that it published yesterday. Sadly none of the 8 experts is a Palestinian. Two are Israeli. Looks like most are Jews. One contributor, Benjamin Schiff, calls for divestment! One commenter asks, Where are Walt and Mearsheimer? Says commenter Robert in NH:
There are many ways to donate to the colonial enterprise in the occupied territories. Today, the NYTimes made another one. Yet again, the exclusion of a Palestinian voice from this discussion speaks to your inability to view Palestine, and the Arab World in general, through anything other than an Orientalist and pro-Zionist prism. Not one contributor notes that the funding supports a criminal enterprise. Not one says that the settlements are illegal. Not one speaks about justice. The theft of Palestinian land for use by an occupying power is in direct contravention of all international law and recognized by no parties other than the Israelis themselves. Settlements are being constructed as nooses to strangle Palestinian aspirations for an independent state. The fact that these actions are being enabled by both US tax law and submission to the Israel lobby is outrageous and only prolongs the agony of all parties in this conflict.
Edward Said, in LRB, 26 years ago, on the importance of Palestinians getting "permission to narrate" their own history. The piece could have been written yesterday. Readers, writers, editors: will you help open the door? (h/t Boulos) Said:
There have been refugees before. There have been new states built on the ruins of old. The unique thing about this situation is Palestine’s unusual centrality, which privileges a Western master narrative, highlighting Jewish alienation and redemption – with all of it taking place as a modern spectacle before the world’s eyes. So that when Palestinians are told to stop complaining and to settle elsewhere like other refugees before them, they are entitled to respond that no other refugees have been required systematically to watch an unending ceremony of public approbation for the political movement, army or country that made them refugees and occupies their territory. Occupying armies, as Chomsky observes, do not as a rule ‘bask in the admiration of American intellectuals for their unique and remarkable commitment to “purity of arms” ’. To top it all, Palestinians are expected to participate in the dismantling of their own history at the same time.
