Hilton Obenzinger is an author and a long-time Palestine solidarity activist who now teaches writing at Stanford University. In a posting of his on an anti-Israel/anti-Zionist web forum he also shares with us his awakening to the Zionist evil and the Palestinian cause after a stint working on a Native American reservation.
My response to his anti-Zionism:
I appreciate that for Mr. Hilton Obenzinger involvement with the native American community was cause for an awakening experience. I too was privileged to live with an intertribal band of young native Americans in the wilderness of California and was truly inspired to return to my tribes ancient land.
So I can not help but wonder what would his reaction be if, against all odds, those same native Americans were to organize themselves sufficiently so as to be able to challenge the people who had assumed control of their tribal lands?
I know it’s a stretch, Mr. Obenzinger, but the same violent and cruel Europeans who exiled the Jewish people from their ancestral lands thousands of years ago, also exiled the “natives” of the Americas from their land. Is that the similarity you realized between “them” and “us”? For some reason I doubt it.
When you speak of Israel’s colonization, I wonder, which is the home country which sends the Jewish colonists there, to the eastern end of the Mediterranean? In traditional, classical colonial script, those colonists then strip the colony of its natural resources which are returned to the mother country from which the colonists were sent, no? Can you name the mother nation from which the Jewish colonists were sent and to whom those same colonists return the plundered wealth. And could you be so kind as to tell us what wealth did these colonists come to plunder. Could it be the immense riches held within its earth, of oil and diamonds or maybe even coal? Or is it the exploitation of the vast lands of rich fertility, well watered soil, bursting with produce? (In Roman times it was indeed considered one of the bread baskets of the empire)
You did not know that there was such a thing as Palestine? How ironic. Up until 1948 the people who answered proudly to the designation Palestinian were the Jews who came to rebuild and reclaim their ancient homeland.
The name Palestine is in itself an interesting historical anomaly. I think that it is the usual SOP for people to name their nation according to their language in a way that represents and reflects who they believe themselves to be. It is not by chance that the very people who claim to be “Palestinians” can not even pronounce the name of their nation properly. Perhaps that is because the name has nothing to do with them. In historical fact the Philistines, who conquered the coastal plain came from the Greek islands and are known historically mostly in their relation to the Hebrew tribes with whom they competed and fought. The story of David and Goliath is their star appearance in history along with the chapters of Samson and Delilah. I recently learned that they too were exiled to Babylon at the same time as the Hebrew tribes. Seventy years later the Jews returned but the Philistines had assimilated and disappeared. So that by the time the land was given their name by the Roman emperor Hadrian, they had already ceased to exist five hundred years before.
You wondered why the Arabs “wanted to push the Jews into the sea”? The simple answer has to do with the inability and/or unwillingness to share. We all have only this one small planet to live on. Much of it is water; some of it is desert, or high uninhabitable mountains. On the little that is left we must make room for everybody. For us, Jew and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian to be able to live here together, to prosper and contribute our individual creative talents to the welfare of all mankind it is necessary for the Arab / Muslim world to recognize the legitimate historical claim of the Jewish people to any of the land between the river and the sea. That is the entire issue, all the rest is distraction, reaction, smoke and mirrors.
I used to think that for the Arab, Muslim people of the land of Israel it was particularly difficult to accept the prior claim of another people and consent to sharing their land. But I now understand that this challenge would be difficult for any people.
And this Mr. Obenzinger is the essence of the conflict.
Can you imagine Sioux people; still practicing their ancient nature based spiritual traditions, speaking their own unique language, requesting of the non-Sioux occupants of Nebraska for a degree of independent sovereignty over one or two counties of the state? Or of the state where you live, would you be sympathetic to returning native Americans? Would your neighbors? Would you understand their claim? Would you be willing to share your home?
I can understand the difficulty of the decedents of the people who came out of Arabia, conquered and occupied an empire, then a few hundred years later found it difficult to relate to the claims of a returning people to what had been their ancestral homeland. Nothing had prepared them for this possibility. At least in America, as I remember it, we were taught that there were a people living on the land when we Europeans crossed the sea and discovered a whole New World. There is enough historical consciousness in America of a past before most “Americans” came to conquer the land and made it theirs.
I can also understand how difficult it is to grasp the fact that a conquered and exiled native people could return and reclaim possession of the lands from which they were exiled. After all it is an extraordinary event in the story of human existence.
I know of only one other example in modern history (you may know of others). In the 18th century after “discovering” the Pacific island known as Saipan, the Spanish exiled its native inhabitants known as Chamorros to the island of Guam to work the sugar plantations. Another island people, the Carolinians found the empty island to their liking and moved in. Some time later when the Spanish closed the sugar plantations, and the Chamorros returned to their homeland, they found the Carolininans happily living on their island, in their homes.
Perhaps there is something cyclical to this process as we know that the Judeans (ancestors of the Jews) who were exiled to Babylonia, in the 5th cent BC returned to their ancestral homes to find another people, who were to be known as Samarians (of Good Samarian fame) comfortably living in what had been their land before the forced exile. And now once again we have a returned, a people native to the land, once again confronted by those who moved in during our absence. (1100w)
If the “Palestinians” were indeed a legitimate and true Movement for National Liberation that deserved your respect and sympathy they would have been agitating for their national liberation when they were ruled by fellow Arabs, by Jordan & Egypt from 1949 to 1967. But their call for national liberation specifically rejected a struggle for national liberation from Jordan or Egypt, who occupied a most of the area assigned by the UN to fulfill the national aspirations of the Arabs of Palestine. They could also have accepted the independent nation they were offered in 1938 and again in 1947.
You write that Israel “believed” it had been provoked. You do not consider the firing of thousands of rockets on civilian targets a provocation? How would you describe it, if it were your children or parents or grandparents under the falling rockets? But maybe you are correct it is not a provocation, anywhere else in the world it would have been considered an outright declaration of war.
“Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod “self-hating Jews ”NO, they are simply foolish or stupid or both not to understand that attacking an organism brings it’s separate competing components into a stance of united defense. Surely intelligent, university educated graduates, as they probably are, would understand that such policies would only strengthen Netanyahu, and that’s the real tragedy; they have brought his popularity to such heights, we could be burdened with him as Prime Minister for another decade.
“…a distraction from Israel’s on-going colonial project.”It’s a case of a distraction of a distraction; that the Arab/Muslim world, including the Palestinians, is unable to share their vast geographic resources with anybody, Christians or Jews, Hindus or atheists, and as such are committed to destroying Israel. In all there has been no readiness to share or compromise, their demands is for exclusivity. Part of the reason for this is that all those Arabs who voiced an interest and willingness to live and develop the country with the Jews were killed off in the “disturbances” of 1936-’39. There has been no intention of accepting an independent Jewish state at any time, within any borders!
I am not here to defend or support the settlement project, which I strenuously object to however the focus that the Arabs have succeeded in placing on that issue succeeds in obscuring the true structure of the conflict.
Interestingly it is not only you who has been successfully distracted.* It’s the sidetracking fantasy that has confused your concerns about “The Settlements”, in the areas Israel took control over in 1967 that you claim are your bottom line. Along with many other people you believe they are the primary issue in this generations old conflict. This has succeeded in distracting good and well meaning people like you for years now. It distracts from the blunt facts that as far as the Arab/Muslim world is concerned the entire area from the river to the sea is Arab. In fact there is no room anywhere from the North African Atlantic coast east to the Philippians that for any other sovereign entity, with the exception of India, which is just too big to war against.
The belief and attitude that we stole the land from the Arabs is absurd and reflects a shallowness and true ignorance on the part of people who seem to believe in the principles of justice. The Jewish people are the last living coherent community of
*Along with most people you have been co-opted into believing that the Arab issue is about the lands occupied in the 1967 war. The simplest most obvious demonstration of the falsehood in that belief was the response to the withdrawals from both Gaza and south Lebanon.
You may not be aware that the rational for Hezbollah attacks on Israel over the years has been their legitimate “resistance” to the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. So we were taught and foolishly believed that ending that military occupation would equal ending attacks by Hezbollah. How foolish. If we had any illusions about the true structure of this conflict Mr. Nasrallah himself, and with great clarity helped us to understand what the true dimensions are when he stated: “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” (NY Times, May 23, 2004, p. 15, section 2,)
