A typical kind of column in the Boston Globe that blames the Arabs for the Middle East crisis. Why can’t those annoying Arabs just accept the scraps offered by Israel, asks Jeff Jacoby?
A great response was posted on the paper’s website:
Dear Jeff Jacoby,
Your column in today’s Boston Globe defending Israel and titled, “Peace isn’t Arab goal” is a perfect demonstration of the unselfconscious racism of those who defend Israel.
You argue that “Arabs” have rejected historic opportunities for a two-state solution because what they really want is not peace but “Israel’s liquidation.”
The racist premise of your whole column is that there is something wrong and shameful about wanting “Israel’s liquidation.” You use the word “liquidation” because it has a negative connotation. You could have used the word “abolition,” which means the same thing but has a positive connotation. American Abolitionists fought to abolish (or liquidate) the slave-based Confederacy. Many Americans fought to abolish (or liquidate) the Nazi’s Master Race-based Third Reich. Even you, Jeff Jacoby, may have participated in the world-wide effort to abolish (or liquidate) the apartheid South African state.
Mr. Jacoby, here is why the state of Israel should indeed be abolished. If anybody declared 78% of Massachusetts to be a White state, that state would be a racist state that should be abolished. Ditto if it were a Black state or a Muslim state or a Christian state or a Native American state or a Blue-eyed peoples state or a Brown-haired peoples state. Do you not agree Mr. Jacoby? Do you not agree that a state should never be for just one kind of people, but for all of its citizens regardless of their race or religion or ethnicity? Well then, Mr. Jacoby, what’s wrong with “Arabs” thinking that it is wrong to declare 78% of Palestine to be a Jewish state? Nothing! That’s what’s wrong with it.
But you are so racist when it comes to this issue, so incapable of seeing that there is nothing less racist about a Jewish state than a White state, that you actually have no clue why your readers won’t agree with you in thinking there is something shameful about wanting to abolish–excuse me, liquidate–a Jewish state.
Mr. Jacoby, Palestinians are the victims of ethnic cleansing carried out in the name of making Israel a Jewish state. Seventy-five or more percent of the non-Jews living in what is now Israel were driven out of their homes and villages in 1947-9 by Zionist military forces whose leader, David Ben Gurion, declared that they had to make the population of the new Jewish state be at least 80% Jewish. These Palestinians want the right to return to their country, a basic human right (article #13 in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) Yes, if they returned, the population of Israel would not remain a majority Jewish and it would no longer be a Jewish state. So what! Ordinary Jews can live perfectly well as the equals of non-Jews in a state of all its citizens. If you disagree, I suggest you get help for your racism.
John Spritzler