HELEN THOMAS AND THE RITES OF RETURN
Israel has been in an uproar about the comments made by Helen Thomas. The reality is Israel has been doing exactly what was inferred in those comments…. sending Jews back to where they came from. The following is written by one of those Jews, Jared Malsin. He was the English editor for the Ma’an News Agency, deported to the USA for telling the truth! A crime unforgivable in the Holy Land.
Jared ‘dug up’ the video presented to demonstrate the hypocrisy displayed by Israel. They would much rather such truths remain buried….
HELEN THOMAS AND THE RIGHT OF RETURN
By Jared Malsin
The furor over Helen Thomas’ remarks reminded me of this lecture Amira Hass gave in New York two years ago.
I wasn’t personally at the lecture, but I had a long talk with Hass in my office in Bethlehem that spring, a few weeks before she left on her speaking tour, and she expressed to me some of the main ideas contained in it.
In the talk Hass recalls an anecdote about a foreign solidarity activist who makes an ill-considered comment about Israeli Jews going back to Europe.
What she eloquently manages to do is capture the intersection between Israel’s Law of Return and the Palestinian right of return. She talks about the tension between the desire for Jewish concrete return after the Holocaust (returning to communities in European communities in Europe that no longer existed) and the abstract Zionist “return” to a place most Jews had never been, Palestine.
What Hass recognizes and I also believe is that this history and this politics is intimately bound up with the history (past and present) of Palestinian dispossession. And it is this latter, ongoing expulsion that is still unresolved.
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