issa khalaf welcomes you to palestine

17Feb11

A provocative piece in mondoweiss:

Welcome to Palestine, even if it’s a century later. Now let’s reset the relationship. You came from faraway lands claiming an already inhabited one. Oppressed, massacred, and socially separated in Christendom/Europe, you felt as outsiders subject to anti-Semitic threats. Eventually, with the colonial age, a group of you, Eastern Europeans called Zionists argued your right to Palestine, from which ancient Jews were virtually absent from the 1st century and of whom you claimed tenuous descent. You claimed that Jews had a three thousand year cultural and emotional attachment to the holy land; that you are a single group whose roots are to this land and whose heart, spirit, character and center is Jerusalem. That your project wasn’t settler-colonialism, conquest through immigration under the aegis of a colonial power, but return or restoration, rendered moral by your religious roots in the land and in your suffering, hence giving you title to the land that transcends Palestinians rights, claims, attachments, and needs. You insisted that Jews require sovereignty for their safety, protection, and, in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, survival.

check it out here