Thank you for this piece, Nada. I share your overall concerns, particularly the importance of rejecting the “balance” of Jewish and Palestinian speakers at public events. I do think, however, that some Jewish critics recognize and are willing to own their privilege, as it were, just as some white solidarity activists with #BLM are.

Excellent, thanks for this!

Jackdaw,
Others have written great books on this subject. On Egypt, see Beinin’s _Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry_; on Iraq, see Bashkin’s _New Babylonians_ and everything written on Iraqi Jews in Israel by Yehuda Shenhav, Sammy Smouha, and others. On claims of unresolved compensation disputes, see Michael Fishbach’s _Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008_.

Hi Hostage, thanks for your comment here. I don’t use the word “unique” in the interview, but your point about the murkiness of rights accorded to those living in the unincorporated US territories is great! There’s some terrific new research being done on America’s “Insular Empire,” to quote the name of a new documentary about the Guam and the Mariana Islands (http://www.horseopera.org/Insular_Empire_2010/), some of which I cite in the introduction to the book. The point I’m trying to make is that for a host of reasons, Israel was forced to formally share politically power with the very indigenous population whose land it sought to take on behalf of its “nationals,” the Jews who moved there. It was this dynamic that made it historically unique, not the fact that it wrote inequality into its laws. If you look at the question of Native Americans, for example, the US spent 2 centuries attenuating their land base before extending citizenship status to them. In Algeria the French spent over a century dispossessing the indigenous population before granting them French citizenship, and at that point (in the late 1940s/early 1950s) it was only a desperate move to hold onto the territory. I elaborate on this stuff in the book.