Palestinian Zionism

What is it to be a Palestinian, as distinct from an Arab? Animus toward an other (the Israeli, the Jew) does not a nationality make. Edward Said, who once called himself a "Jewish-Palestinian" and "the last Jewish intellectual," offers several relevant observations in After the Last Sky:
Palestinian life is scattered discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, by the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed time where no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity, all events are accidents, all progress is a digre ssion, all residence is exile. . . .

The Palestinian is very much a person in transit. Suitcase or bundle of possessions in hand, each family vacates territory left behind for others, even as new boundaries are traversed, new opportunities created, new realities set up. . . .

We are migrants and perhaps hybrids in, but not of, any situation in which we find ourselves. This is the deepest continuity of our lives as a nation in exile and constantly on the move. . . .

Palestinians, in other words, are incomplete Jews. They are a twice-colonized people: first by the Arabs who converted them from Judaism and Christianity and robbed them of their native Israelite identity, and second by the Zionists who robbed them of their native land. An end to Palestinian exile will not come with either the establishment of a miniscule garrison-state in Gaza and the West Bank or with the conquest of Israel. Rather the end to Palestinian exile will come when they unite with Israeli Jews to a form a Muslim-Christian-Jewish Hebrew nation-state based on common identification with Israelite tribal history, as recorded in the Torah and as recognized by both Islam and Christianity. True Palestinian nationalism is Hebrew nationalism. A Palestinian in a keffiyah is as incongruous as an Indian in a cowboy hat. The goal of Zionism should not be to unite Jews from around the world into one Jewish nation-state, but to unite already-present Jewish Hebrews and Arabized Muslim and Christian Hebrews into one Israelite nation-state. Palestinians must sacrifice Arab nationalism and Israelis must sacrifice Jewish nationalism at the altar of Abraham's rock to become one people, the people of Zion.

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