If I had any hope of having this letter to the editor of the NYTimes printed, I'd send it.
Anyone who wants to adopt it with alterations, I welcome to try.
Send to: letters@nytimes.com
A phone number is requested.
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Omar Barghouti writes ("Views of a Founder of B.D.S." April 24), justifying his mislabeling of the Zionist movement as engaged in "colonialization", that it was Ze'ev Jabotiinsky who described in 1923 what Jews were doing in their national homeland as “Zionist colonization". That is a perversion of his language, his intent and his thinking.
That term, quite simply, was what was in popular use. No Jew ever thought, a century ago or a millenium ago, that returning and resettling the Land of Israel, home to the Jews which even the League of Nations gave "recognition...to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country" was a foreign invasion. Indeed, that 1922 decision to award a Mandate to Great Britain did not mention the term "Arabs" but included all who lived there as "non-Jews", for Arabs were to have their Palestine state in Transjordan.
If anyone has colonized that territory, it was the Arabs who invaded and conquered the region in 638 CE.
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2 comments:
The infamous Steven Salaita makes the same ridiculous claim about Jabotinsky's use of the term "colonization" in his book Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. It is amazing that such an appallingly bad scholar could be offered a position at a serious university.
Salaita is now driving an uber car, he has no university position anywhere now.
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