Rashid Khalidi is the most prominent Palestinian-American. He is friends with Barak Obama and teaches history at Columbia. I've read all his writings since I was in college. I used to subscribe to his position, until I grew up. I'd be happy to debate Khalidi one day, if he thinks an immortal like him should debate a mortal like me. Until that happens, I watched his most recent interview (90 minutes), and this statement of his caught my eye: "[Jews] who came didn't come to live with the residents of the country [Ottoman provinces, then Mandate Palestine]. They didn't come to live with the Arabs. They didn't want to learn Arabic or take the citizenship." I've always been a proud Arab. One day, during the peak of the Syrian revolution against the Assad tyranny, I was moderating a panel for Syrian opposition speakers. One of them, an Assyrian, said "Syria was designed for the Arabs only and never treated us as citizens with equal rights. The name of the country is the Syrian Arab Republic. The official language is Arabic. The national anthem says that Syria is the Den of Arabism, and from us came the Walid [Islamic conquest general Khalid Ibn Al-Walid] and the Rashid [Baghdad Islamic Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid]." That was the first time that I noticed that Arabism was neither neutral nor secular. Arabism is cultural heritage. Islam is even a narrower identity than Arabism. Neither can serve as a national identity. Assyrians are mostly Christians who speak Syriac, a Semitic language older than Arabic (it is believed that Syria is named after their civilization). To them, Arab Islamic conquests decimated their culture and homeland. The Arab and Muslim majority of Syrians wants Assyrians as citizens, but Arabized and preferably Islamized. This is is exactly what Khalidi wants Jews who moved from Europe to Palestine to have done: Learn Arabic, become Arab, not have your own national state with your own Jewish heritage. Many years later (after moderating the panel with the Assyrian Syrian), I read some of the debate of the Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah. Iraqi Jews debated whether they should learn the revived Hebrew or stick to their Arabic tongue. The argument for Hebrew and against Arabic won. Arabic-speaking Jews said that they disliked when their names were Arabized (Musa instead of Moshe for Moses). Jews also did not appreciate praying in one language and living their lives in another, arguing that their youth were not using Hebrew outside of religious service, and hence that threatened millennia of their written and oral heritage and tradition. But here you have Khalidi, a prominent historian, blaming Jews -- without blinking -- for not Arabizing. And he's being generous here. When you add the Palestine emblem (Dome of the Rock) and Basic Law (Arab Palestinian people is part of the Arab nation, Islam is the official religion and a source of legislation), you will further understand why non-Arabs and non-Muslims -- including Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Copts and others -- want their own states. Arab countries, including Palestine, were conceived as monolithic Arab and Islamic, and never tolerated the existence of other identities. At the London Conference in 1939 (when Britain abandoned Jews in favor of Arabs), the Jews proposed to the Arabs a binational state, with each community practicing autonomy. The Arabs refused, and told Jews that they can live in Palestine as an Arabic-speaking religious minority, like Jews were living in Iraq. And Khalidi talks for 90 minutes, about history and the inevitability of the end of Israel, but never notices why Israel MUST exist: As long as Khalidi and the Arabs and Muslims cannot offer multi-ethnic, multicultural, tolerant societies and countries based on liberty and equality, non-Arabs and non-Muslims have every right to demand their own sovereign nations. Israel MUST exist. --END https://t.co/TX280kNoPg
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