The Narrative Of Colonial Imperialism

 

 

You hear a story over and over and over again, and you start to accept it. If it's a really good lie, then they've got a little truth mixed in… maybe he's got a lot of truth mixed in, and it's hard to catch the lie. Like he's selling an old Hillman. He tells you about the history of the car, the romance, the movies it appeared in, who drove the old car. He just admits it's a wreck, and that you can't get parts for it, and after a while you start thinking, wow, it would kind of be nice to have a vehicle that no one else is driving… not that the name of the car is important… if you're living in the states, you can replace Hillman with Chevy…

 

The Arabs here in Israel, they've taken the Jewish story, and made it their own. They try to copy everything they can. Listen to them, and you think that the Palestinians are an ancient people; that they've been around since time immemorial… Maybe Jesus himself was a Pal. Forget the fact that there is no Palestinian language, no Pal history, no Pal literature, no Pal philosophy (except maybe for killing their own daughters if and when they discover she's no longer a virgin). But there are some things they just can't copy. We saw them celebrating the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, looking like Ninja turtles with the black masks over their heads and shooting into the air. They really go for that; the brutality… the gunfire.

 

With the help of western intellectuals, they adopted the narrative of colonial imperialism, and they play it like a broken record. You can check out Mark Twain if you want to know how the holy land looked a little over a 100 years ago. Jews have lived in Israel since the Romans drove them out of the land 2000 years ago. In small communities, and most of them in four cities that were called holy cities, and the few Arabs who lived here as well, were nice to them at times, and devastating at other times. There were some famous pogroms against the Jews. If it interests you, all you have to do is read a little history.

 

Then, when the Zionist movement started bringing large groups of Jews back to their homeland, back to the place that they had prayed for and written poems about, and described in countless books and songs, the Arabs started coming round looking for work. That was always one of the Jews' weaknesses, big ideas, but not too much physical labor. One of the ideas of the Zionist movement was that Jews should do their own work, but on the whole, it was always a temptation to use cheap Arab work. And so the Arab community grew as the Jewish community grew. But they despised us for our softness, our freedom, our unwillingness to accept outsiders, and a whole lot of other reasons. You don't have to be a Gentile to know all that's wrong with the Jews. I know it myself… sometimes I can't help but sympathize with certain anti-Semites… But then, there's the good parts that can't be denied either.

 

You look at all the resolutions against Israel in the UN, you'd think that we're some international giant and not just a thousandth of a percent of the world's population, and one of the minority of democratic nations living in a sea of dictatorships… actually, without checking it out, you could get the wrong idea…

 

I'm not going to defend us. It's boring. I'll leave it to the professionals. I'll just say this, to some of my friends who hear the lies and don't know what to make of them… look at the people on both sides… look at their institutions, and their literature, and their aspirations… and the way they treat their women… and the way they treat their children… and the way they treat their poor and crippled… and you'll understand.

 

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