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Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people's mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people's right can be secured at the cost of another's.

Little wonder such an approach has not delivered peace. The only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end the denial of rights that fuels it, and to ensure that both peoples' rights are equally protected.

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...the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians is – and has always been --– driven by the notion that hundreds of years of cultural heterogeneity and plurality could be negated overnight by the creation of a state with a single cultural and religious identity.

It hardly matters that that identity was never as homogeneous as Zionists like to claim: witness Israel's methodical de-Arabisation of its Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) population in the 1950s and 1960s, or the perennial debate over "who is a Jew" – an unseemly question that in Israel is not merely a matter of arcane theological exegesis but tied directly to matters of citizenship, nationality, and law.

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It's time to end the delusional project that has done nothing but cause misery in Palestine and conflict in the rest of the region. Like the author says:

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Negation, denial and imprisonment have run their course. The future should be built on affirmation, cooperation, and the constitution of a democratic and secular state that guarantees the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.

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On the subject of boycotting Israel, I wonder how many of us, without our knowledge, have blood oozing out of our computers.

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In an extravagant ceremony that featured acrobats, drummers, a children's choir, and speeches by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (in person) and the two top executives of chipmaker Intel Corp. (on giant video screens), the company this month dedicated a new, state-of-the-art chip-manufacturing plant in the south-central Israeli town of Kiryat Gat.

...Sixty years ago, there was no Kiryat Gat. The land it now occupies was divided between two Palestinian villages, al-Faluja and 'Iraq al-Manshiya. While the area is well within the Green Line, Israel's 1949-67 border, its history is in one way unique: Israeli forces never captured it during the 1948-49 war. Egyptian forces occupied it in late May 1948, and although later Israeli counter-offensives broke up their front and laid siege to the two villages -- known at the time as the "Faluja pocket" -- the 4,000 Egyptian troops deployed there (including a young officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser, soon to become president of his country) held out until Egypt and Israel agreed to an armistice on 24 February 1949.

That's when the Nakba befell al-Faluja and 'Iraq al-Manshiya.*

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(from the same article) Meanwhile, the local authorities in Kiryat Gat are focused on preventing yet another kind of "disaster," as they put it: Jewish girls taking up with Bedouin boys. So common has this phenomenon become that the municipality last year convened an "emergency" conference to address it. The upshot: a program run by the municipal welfare department, with support from the police, that sends speakers into public school classrooms to warn girls about the dangers they face from Arab boys. The curriculum even includes a 10-minute video entitled "Sleeping with the Enemy."

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Or all three perhaps?

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Especially since Rene Levesque to give speeches comparing Quebecers battle for their own country to Jews wanting their own country and he frequently drew parallels between Zionism and Quebec nationalism.

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I wonder what Mordechai Richler had to say about that (if it's even true).

[ 29 July 2008: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

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Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:

I wonder what Mordechai Richler had to say about that (if it's even true).

[ 29 July 2008: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

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Originally posted by remind:
Canada's Israel? In the possessive? Good grief!

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