The Middle East: How to Talk about Israel and Palestine
In view of the ongoing debate about the Palestinian Problem here on BindleSnitch, I offer this link to a very perceptive article on the subject of how to talk about the subject. Its from Tablet, an online magazine aimed at and catering to American Jews. Click the image to read the story.
07/10/2019 @ 3:24 pm
Palestine was, I believe, Rome’s word for the land, “place of stones”, or as one Roman put it, the Stink-hole of the Empire. I’ve never fathomed why any modern people would want to call the place what 2000 yrs gone imperial Rome called it.
07/15/2019 @ 6:33 pm
This totally not true Jonathan. The province was originally named Syria Palestina by the Romans. The word Palestina itself is of Greek origin and isderives from Philistia, the name given by Greek writers to the land of the Philistines. The Philistines, in turn, derived that name from their Phoenician origins. I cannot find it defined as place of stones anywhere Some sources relate the word to the Hebrew peleshet, which means “rolling” or “migratory.”
07/10/2019 @ 4:54 pm
This is quite good
07/10/2019 @ 6:01 pm
“the Palestinian Problem”??? Geez… Zio-racist much? Is that your version of “the Final Solution to the Palestinian Question”???
BTW, regardless how much two (three?) Zionism advocates might like that article it is pure propaganda, tried & true deflections and half truths and plain old fashioned hasbara. That it was written by an avowed Zionist “astroturfer” and associate of several noted Islamophobes isn’t a great surprise. That you are trying to pass it off as “perceptive” is.
07/11/2019 @ 8:52 am
Israel does have a Palestinian problem. They can’t establish a Palestinian state and they can’t not establish one. If they establish one, they will establish a state with a major political party dedicated to Israel’s destruction, which is not someone they can afford to give power to. If they don’t, they’re an indefinite occupying power ruling a population with limited rights as compared to their domestic population (though not necessarily compared to the populations of neighboring states), which seems to be what Netanyahu has accepted and which most American Jews think he shouldn’t. There is no third alternative. Internally, Israel doesn’t have an Arab/Muslim problem, just the illusion of one that’s strictly of its own making.
There is an ambiguity about the use of the term Palestinian. It depends whether it’s being used as an ethnic designation or a political one.
07/11/2019 @ 2:26 pm
I have written several articles on the problem with the word Palestine and its application to the piece of land we designate with that term. The problem just never goes away. It’s the same problem I have discussing God, where the generic and the specific term are the same in English. Palestine applies to everyone who lived in the Palestine mandate, regardless of religion. The term did not become equivalent to “Muslim Arab” (there are obviously Muslims who are not Arabs, and there are Arabs who are not Muslims and it therefore becomes necessary to identify the group currently identified by the term Palestinian by describing them as “Muslim Arabs who have lived in the areas now occupied by Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria for at least three generations, or after 1920” because that was the area identified as the Roman province of Syria Palestrina from 135 AD onward.
Doctrinists will not deign to understand this reality. I get that.
07/11/2019 @ 3:21 pm
Well, yes. A lot of people don’t realize that during the 1940’s when the term Palestinian was used in the press, they meant Jews.
07/10/2019 @ 7:50 pm
”I felt some tough love was in order. “Has it occurred to you,” I asked her, “that the way you are talking about a place you’ve never been to and about people you have never met constitutes white saviorism and colonialist thinking?”’
07/11/2019 @ 3:32 pm
You want an “s” in “Palestine”. (title)
07/11/2019 @ 4:47 pm
That was embarrassing. Thank you.
07/12/2019 @ 3:11 am
The author Carly Pildis of the cited Tablet piece says,
“Israelis and Palestinians need to solve the conflict. It is not for the American activist to decide for them what the correct outcome should be. We can support, mediate and deescalate—but we cannot rescue. It never works.”
Presumably the author considers herself to be an “American activist” and not one of “them”; but she is a zionist American activist talking to an anti-zionist American activist. Her hypocrisy reveals her prejudice: ” …we cannot rescue. It never works.” Really? Then Israel is just a very expensive U.S. rescue project doomed to fail?
07/12/2019 @ 7:19 am
That’s a good point and also, from the standpoint of the piece’s author, factually incorrect. Ask the Bosnians.