Lions of Liberty Interview
I was a guest on the Lions of Liberty podcast to talk about Coming to Palestine. You can listen to the interview here.
TGIF: To Be or Not to Be a Jewish State: That Is the Question
Israel’s champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country. To be Jewish, according to the prevailing view, it is enough to have a Jewish mother (or to have been converted by an approved Orthodox rabbi). Belief in one supreme creator of the universe, in the Torah as the word of God, and in Jewish ritual need have nothing whatever to do with Jewishness. (We ignore here the...
Word Order Matters
What people of good will seek for Israel and Palestine is not just a peace, but a just peace.
Clinton’s Legacy
It's bad enough that we are living with H. Clinton's foreign-policy legacy. What's worse is that many people are dying with it.
The Double Essentialism of Zionism
Zionism, the Jewish nationalist philosophy that underlies the state of Israel, entails two kinds of essentialism: Jewishness for Jews and anti-Semitism for gentiles. In other words, no matter how hard they try, Jews cannot stop being Jewish and gentiles cannot stop being anti-Semites. (But see Shlomo Sand's How I Stopped Being a Jew.)
Rights of Return Compared
Israel's defenders often ask how third-generation Palestinians can possibly be recognized as refugees with a right of return to the properties from which the Zionists drove their grandparents in 1947-48. But didn't those Zionists, most of whom had arrived ony three years earlier, claim to be 80th-generation refugees with a right of return to Palestine? (In the latter case, it could not be a real return because their ancient ancestors had not been exiled by the Romans and thus were not a diaspora. Most Jews today are likely the descendants of converts, of which there were many far and wide in...
TGIF: Let’s Make Sure the Nazis Killed in Vain
I don’t know how many times I've heard that if we don’t stand by Israel, the victims of the Nazi Judeocide will have died in vain. I knew something was wrong with that claim, but for the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now I think I can. The claim is peculiar right off the bat. How would backing an Israeli regime that systematically and indiscriminately oppresses an entire non-European population in the 21st century possibly honor the victims of the Nazis, who were in power in Germany from 1933 to 1945? It makes no sense. But that’s not all. To die in vain means to die in the...
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