Jewish State Nakba – A One Narrative Solution

Posted on March 26, 2014 by zjb

Truman letter recognizing Israel

Palestinians today say that they cannot recognize Israel as a Jewish State because it would violate their own national narrative, just as most Israelis are as jealous as to the coherence of their own narrative. One would think that after 100+ years that we could enjoy some historically informed political perspective about Israel and Palestine. But this kind of political perspective gets overwhelmed by the moralizing that saturates the discourse, especially when it comes down to narrative. It too often seems as if the narratives about either place are mutually exclusive. As a critical outsider, albeit one with a definite and obvious bias, I don’t understand why one cannot grab both sides of the narrative horn. It would require that one recognize reasons, i.e. the reasons that motivated both competing sides to what could be a single historical narrative.

I can’t see why Palestinians cannot recognize the reasons why, historically, as many Jews that did decided to organize or re-organize themselves as a people in the face of intensifying waves of anti-Semitism. With strong historical and cultural connections to the Land of Israel and with nowhere else to go, especially after 1924 when Congress shut off immigration to the United States, where were they going to go? Given the state of emergency suffered by the Jews of Europe, immigration was the one thing the mainstream of the Zionist movement could not compromise. If Jews hadn’t started coming to Palestine in mass waves of immigration, starting in the 1920s, again in the 1930s with the rise of Hitler, and then again after the Holocaust, there’s no way that the Zionist project in Palestine would have ever taken root as a “nation state.” It would have foundered, demographically, as a variant form of “settler colonialism.”

I can’t see why Israelis can’t recognize the reasons why, historically, the Arabs of Palestine wanted nothing to do with this mass immigration. They did not want to lose their country, any part of their country, an Arab majority culture to foreigners no matter how in need of refuge they might have been. That’s the simple reason why Zionism was resisted to the bitter end, without compromise, without cutting a deal. Morally and demographically, there was no reason to cut such a deal, even if, in hindsight it might have made sense to do so, tactically and politically.

Maybe after all and over time it turns out to be one single narrative, an amalgam forged out between the micro-narratives of two opposing sides in an asymmetrical conflict over power. What’s surprising about the historical drama is that every character played the part one would expect, precisely. Ideally and perhaps practically, any form of mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians would begin with the historical recognition of the genuine reasons prompting Jewish immigration and the genuine reasons prompting Arab resistance to it so many years ago already. That might be a more interesting place to start than Zionist “settler colonialism” and Arab perfidy.

Rights and responsibilities devolve into each other. One of the problems with Prime Minister Netanyahu wanting to impose the Jewish narrative as a political negotiating principle is that it is one-sided. One should have to ask what Israel should offer Palestine in return for such recognition? Regarding historical narrative, in return for recognition of a Jewish State, I don’t see why Palestinians should not insist upon a formal recognition on the part of Israel as to the historical catastrophe suffered by the Palestinian people as a result of the establishment of Israel in 1948. Or is it simply the fact that neither side is prepared to recognize the other? On the other hand, the idea that you can compel someone to recognize you as a political condition seems fatally flawed. And if Palestinians balk at the idea that Israel is Jewish State because they believe that such a state would be an exclusive one with no democratic rights and protections for a Palestinian –well, it’s not hard at all to figure out from where they might have gotten that idea.

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New Deal Architecture Monumental (1938) (Hunter College)

Posted on March 25, 2014 by zjb

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This too is liberal, an example of New Deal architecture from the 1930s –big stone blocks and unadorned window panes pressed flat along the surface of the building, bold script carved onto the side of the structure, an architectural monument to public education and democratic values. I took these digital shots of the modern North Building at Hunter College at Park Avenue between E. 68th and 69th Streets, and at 68th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. The other day I posted a picture of the inscription by Emerson on the building wall along E.68th, which you can find if you do a word search for “Emerson.” The pictures finish the idea.

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Synagogue Part of the Street (Anschei Chesed)

Posted on March 24, 2014 by zjb

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Unlike in the suburbs, urban synagogues and churches are more integrated into their environment. Anschei Chesed at 100th St is nestled and blends into and alongside the apartment buildings up and down West End Avenue. The high arched doors and the domed roof facade distinguish it from the surrounding architecture. Modest in stature, it’s a handsome little building, part of the Street.

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Deconstructing Zionism Liquidating Heidegger (Vattimo, Butler, Ellis, et.al)

Posted on March 24, 2014 by zjb

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On a lark I picked up Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics. It looks pretty much like you would think such a thing would look like. Perhaps the least interesting point about the book is the most obvious one, which bears repeating even if it’s obvious. The book’s entire theoretical framing around metaphysics (of presence) does little to explicate the subject it wants to deconstruct as a human phenomenon.  This may bear upon larger confusions that beset the project of political theology, or the analysis of things like Zionism as political theology. The focus on metaphysics and the critique of metaphysics only works to obscure the object itself.

About these kinds of critiques, to quote Judith Butler, “there will be those who suspect that really something else is being said” (p.26). (The contribution by Butler in this volume is a reprint of her chapter on Arendt from Parting Ways.) Indeed, the book’s contents seem to be less about Zionism and Israel and more about Europe. Examples would include Butler writing about Arendt’s Europeanness, Zizek trying to trace “Zionist anti-Semitism” in relation to the rise of new forms of the old anti-Semitism in Europe, Walter Mignolo opining that the root ill of Zionism was the European nation-state, Christopher Wise’s complaint against Derrida’s eurocentrism, and Artemy Magun’s discussion  of Marx and “the Jewish problem” in Europe.

Vattimo’s contribution to Deconstructing Zionism only bolsters the suspicion suggested by Butler that something else is indeed going on here in the book. Tracing the love affair of the European left with Zionism in its struggle against fascism prior to 1967, Vattimo then goes on to describe the place of Zionism on the European left after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, and the struggle against U.S. imperialism. What’s at stake for Vattimo has less to do with placeless sense of justice that marks the surface rhetoric in much of the book. For Vattimo, what matters about Zionism is is instead the unbearable burden “imposed” upon Europe by Israel and Judaism “like a penalty…for which we have yet to atone” (p.19).

Driving the book as a whole, I suspect, wanting nothing more to do with Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism, the battle lines for Europe get drawn hard and ugly as Vattimo continues: “When I confront the question of Israel today, particularly with the bad conscience of the Christian world for the persecution the Jews have suffered over the centuries, more and more I have the impression that this history has nothing to do with me.” Usually, in these kinds of books, and this book is no exception, a free form of diaspora Jewishness is recommended for the Jewish people. But there’s no sympathy here. What matters more is Europe. Carping about the Bible and the psalms, Vattimo sees in them “perhaps none other than the feeling of a nomadic people with whom, in the end, I have nothing in common” (p.20). Named as such, “Jewish tradition” is “only so much putrid, hot air form which one must free oneself in order to stop spilling [more] blood on account of…the sacred rights of the Jews to the Promised Land” (p.21).

Perhaps surprisingly in a book about Zionism, Heidegger’s name pops up a lot. In the index he appears in as many items as “Herzl” and “Hitler.” At the most bizarre moment in Deconstructing Zionism, it is Vattimo who assures his readers that he will not do to the emblematic jews whom he claims to hold dear such as Kafka, Benjamin, Block, and Rosenzweig what “the Zionist Nazi hunters have done to Heidegger, when they think of liquidating him because he sided with Hitler” (pp.20-1).  Something else is going on here in Vattimo’s remarks, reflecting the rank anti-Semitism about which Butler warns in her chapter on Arendt, the very real “question of whether the criticism can be registered publicly as something other than an attack on Jews or on Jewishness,” “the suspicion that the person who articulates [these criticisms] has something against the Jews or, if Jewish herself, has something against herself” (p.27).

Should one listen to this? That is Butler’s question posed about certain types of critique about Israel and Zionism (p.27). For the most part, what’s up for offer in Deconstructing Zionism is national self-divestment and hyperbolic non-identities, a hyperbolic sense of justice based on a vague utopian sense for the whole, language that belongs to no one, etc. But is it coherent? Ironically, the kind of non-identitarianism proposed for the Jews on the basis of Europe, or on the basis of justice, on the basis of relating to non-Jews ethically can only make sense when Jews occupy positions of power like they do in Israel, and to a lesser extent in the United States. That capacious ethical relation recommended by Butler and Ellis can happen only when Jewishness and Judaism are placed, not dis-placed (as per Butler, p.26) because it’s only in Israel, and parts of the United States, that Jewish culture has a place in the public sphere.

Ellis’s own contribution to this project of Deconstructing Zionism is distinguished because it’s actually concerned with the actual objects of criticism, namely Israel and Zionism. Extending a distinction made by Lyotard in Heidegger and the jews, Ellis compares [1] “the real Israel” and “the real Zionism,” and “the real Jews” in all their “complex, difficult and interesting configurations” versus “conceptual Israel” over against [2] “conceptual zionism” that are “endlessly held up as [archetypes] of goodness by some and the epitome of evil by others” (p.100). Aware of complexity, Ellis understands how the practical upshot in deconstructing Zionism will depend upon the transition to a non-state form of Jewish identity in a one state solution in Israel. Most of the thinking reflected in this book presumes a smooth transition, assuming the “continuing acceptance of millions of Jews in the Middle East following the demise of the Jewish character of the State of Israel.” Ellis seems to be less sure. Overall, there’s a willingness to admit here that “the historical situation of Israel’s existence” may be “too complex and immediate…to probe” by “Jews of conscience” and other critics of Zionism. “It may be that the sheer existence of Israel makes the theoretical work less compelling” at what is understood to be a “historical impasse.”

Perhaps because the book intends to be a philosophical critique, the “jews,” “zionism,” and “israrel” on hand in Deconstructing Zionism are of the conceptual sort. What goes missing as a whole is just how hopeless and misbegotten it is, this attempt to deconstruct Zionism from outside. The concepts and their application to historical situations are too clunky to do the critical work they are intended to perform. This is especially so from the vantage point of Europe, whose starting points into the discussion are either irrelevant or thoroughly corrupted by historical guilt and resentment. This kind of philosophical performance, it’s either not worth listening to or almost not worth listening to at all, except as agitprop

More to the point, was deconstruction ever a transitive verb, and in that sense political? Was it something that a subject does to an object? Probably not. Deconstruction is something that a subject follows in an object. It’s that object itself that deconstructs; in one case, Zionism and Israel; it unwinds on its own, or at points and positions of historical impasse and compression at which it finds itself and in which it has placed itself. But it’s apparent that anti-Zionism can also deconstruct, built upon its own metaphysics of presence and rigid designators. With Vattimo clearly agitated about Zionist Nazi hunters out to liquidate Heidegger and Zizek opining about Zionist anti-Semitism, the whole production ends up looking clownish.

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Palestine Pleasures (Photographs) (Tanya Habjouqa)

Posted on March 23, 2014 by zjb

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“Palestinian Pleasures” is a project by Tanya Habjouqa,  a founding member of Rawiya — a collective of Arab women photographers. Photos and an essay describing the project appear at the New York Times. The photographs are lovely, but what about politics? The photographs stage everyday look with nary a look at anything Israel. No soldiers, no martyrs. The occupation remains part of the background but only a part. Since Electronic Intifadah gave the project a thumbs up, I think we’re okay here.

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Neo Medieval Southern Baptist Church (New York)

Posted on March 23, 2014 by zjb

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Neo-medieval Southern Baptist church on a quiet street, 108th near Manhattan Avenue, just off Central Park West. The bold red doors and bright white modern crucifix sign are stand out features.

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Omar (Inexperienced & Unprotected) (Spoiler Alert)

Posted on March 23, 2014 by zjb

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I saw Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar nominated Omar the other week on a Monday afternoon. The movie tells the story of four young Palestinians somewhere in the West Bank: Omar, Amjad, Tareq, and his sister Nadia, who’s in love with Omar. That’s how the movie starts. You already know that it’s not going to end happy. It can’t, because it’s about Israel and Palestine and the occupation.

The film is composed of three interlocking narrative elements — a love story, collaboration, martyrdom

[1] Omar is a beautiful film. The interior scenes evoke Palestinian urban life, the courtyards and tiled living rooms of old houses, the easy concourse between people, and strict social mores. The actors are young, the energy virile. Nadia loves Omar and Omar loves Nadia. The homely Amjad, plays the part of the group jester; he too loves Nadia. She’s still in high school, very much under the watchful supervision of her brother Tareq. Omar and Nadia steal glances, steal time to flirt, to make plans. He’ll take her to Paris for their honeymoon. The only place she’s ever been to is Hebron. The scenes between them are touching, chaste, and full of promise.

[2] The entire romantic plotline is doomed. I won’t tell you how, except that the story is riddled by lies and betrayals. It starts off when the three young men shoot a soldier at a checkpoint. We can assume it’s the Shin Bet that goes after the group. They want to catch Tareq, they arrest Omar, whom they interrogate and torture him. They turn him into a collaborator. All bound up with love, requited love, and unrequited love is the quotidian humiliation marked by the occupation, and the more acute forms of physical abuse and psychological manipulation suffered by Omar in prison by his handlers, and by the ostracism, shame, and danger at home outside prison that comes with collaboration.

[3] The moment of catharsis is bound up with martyrdom. I won’t tell you how the movie ends, but it will be no surprise that it’s an act of violence that relieves the film’s tension by redeeming the broken romantic and political plotlines. Two years pass. Nadia, now a mother of two sits in her living room surrounded in a transfiguring glow of radiating white. Clutching one last love note, she understands everything. Lives will be lost, sloughed off in a militant gesture of defiant resistance. I won’t say how it happens, but that it happens should be as clear as day.

What’s supposed to matter most in this film? Or are the romantic and political plotlines, desperate plotlines, so impossibly entangled that you can’t decide? In an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, it’s clear that Abu-Assad wants to draw our attention to the young people. Of course he talks about the occupation, but it’s the young people he cares most about. The filmmaker claims that he wants the story to outlive the political conflict over Israel and Palestine, which will one day end, he states, one way or the other.

What caught my interest in the interview is precisely how Abu-Assad describes the young people, especially in relation to their parents. The parents of these kids were all revolutionaries. But they failed. You know the ’60s. In the ’60s everyone was a revolutionary, not just in Palestine. And after you’ve failed, and you’re disappointed, you don’t have the courage to tell the kids what to do. You failed to protect him, to bring him a better life. So you become absent.

I want to come back to that point, the failure of the parents to protect their children. It too is part of the film, the powerlessness and power of young people facing overwhelming exercise of state power on the part of their oppressors. The protagonists are young, and the young people who play them are inexperienced actors. This was intentional. About this Abu-Assad says in the interview: Inexperienced actors are more malleable and you can mold them, but you also have a sense that they could break at any second. Which is what I love about them, because you want to get this purity that looks very solid and you can get just one time. I believe that every actor will be only be truly pure in his emotions once in his life, because after that every time, he will always be acting. And with these young actors, it was almost as if I took their virginity as actors — it’s so good to see.But this inexperience is also sad to see. The young people are unprotected, and there’s nothing, or almost nothing the parents can do for them. This has everything to do with the occupation, which serves as both backdrop and foreground to the film. This failure speaks too to the failure of the parent’s generation, who were unable to lift the occupation, unable to liberate Jerusalem and the land, unable to protect their children, at least according to Abu-Assad.

I suspect that this failure might also speak to the failure of the film and its filmmaker, this failure to keep their heroes alive and whole if not untouched. On one hand, the unhappy story reflects the political realism and hard logic of the film and to its conventional narrative structure, as the film moves inexorably from exposition to crisis to catharsis. On the other hand, I’m wonder about the responsibility of art and the responsibility of the artist to show an alternative way out, here an alternative to martyrdom and to the wasting of young life.

I tend to go to the movies that interest me professionally either late at night in Syracuse or on weekday afternoons in New York. Since I can be pretty sure that most of these kinds of independent films relating to Israel and Palestine won’t make it up to Syracuse, I end up seeing them in New York. Inevitably in Manhattan, this means that I see a lot of those particular films with a lot of Jewish retirees. I’m sure I was the youngest person there. Almost to a person, my fellow filmgoers all got up to leave quickly as soon as the credits began to roll. I did too, and then stopped myself, to sit back down to watch the film credits.

I think “we” got up to go as quickly as we did not because of the politics. It’s not really a political movie.  It is, but it isn’t. I think it is more because the movie was such a sad and painful one. This may be my response as an older viewer. The sadness came to me actually after I left the theater and had time to think about what I had just seen. Inside the film, the tension builds up over the course of the movie. You see it coming, you know it’s coming, but you don’t know how, and the abrupt final scene will catch you up short. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, it happens so fast. What’s left? The beauty and defiance of a militant act or the waste of young life, inexperienced and unprotected?

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Hebron Ridiculous (Neighbors + Soldiers = 1 State Social Contract)

Posted on March 21, 2014 by zjb

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This story made the rounds last week.You can watch both video here.

Scene 1: A settler in Hebron, of course he’s religious, gets caught in barbed wire as he tries to climb up to remove a Palestinian flag from the rooftop of his neighbor (yes, let’s call them that: “neighbors” because that’s what they are). You can see it on video. The Palestinian homeowner is basically asking what the settler thought he was doing. All the settler can do is mumble that “this is his country,” or something like that. The Palestinian homeowner’s Hebrew is pretty good. The settler’s Hebrew is awful.

Scene 2: Three young soldiers, armed, confront the Palestinian homeowner on his roof. There’s a video of this scene as well. They order him to take down the flag. The homeowner refuses. The soldiers insist. No guns are actually pointed. The homeowner continues to refuse. When the soldiers threaten to arrest him, the homeowner insists on seeing an order, which he knows the soldiers don’t have. He refuses to go. The soldiers understand that whole episode is being videotaped. One of them mutters, “Totally fucked up” (dafuk l’gamrei). They soldiers leave.

Benign, not benign, these kinds of encounter are interesting. From the look of it, the entire encounter is more ridiculous than malign. The soldiers are more like bumbling idiots than Nazi stormtroopers. They don’t point their weapons. They don’t beat up the householder. Their argument with him appears more intimate and familiar than actually threatening. As for the settler, his appearance is unbelievably cretinous. On both sides, the tone of voice is subdued and rational. With the soldier, the argument shifts from Hebrew to English to Hebrew. The homeowner’s assertions stand.

Thinking about it some more, what makes me wonder is if this is how a 1 state solution actually begins to happen from the ground up, the amalgamation of one society (Jewish-Arab, Arab-Jewish) out of two separate societies (Arab and Jewish, Jewish and Arab). In this episode, no political principles or ideological claims are staked, apart from the settler’s claim to ownership to the land that he himself undermines in his attempt to assert it. What strikes me watching the video is the very intimacy and familiarity of the encounter. Perhaps it’s the staging of the encounter in front of a video camera that blunts what might have been a more violent episode. Instead, drawn out is the on the ground familiarity with each other of the parties representing two sides of the conflict. Maybe this is how societies meld together as new social contracts are formed out of conditions marked by territorial realignments, violence and inequality, and the strange and mediated interpersonal cum social contacts that they make possible.

In the epilogue to the story, as reported in Haaretz, more soldiers, including senior officers returned to the scene and took the Palestinian flag down. But apparently, it was on condition that the army release a neighborhood teenager who had been arrested for stone throwing. Again, in this story, deals get cut between the occupier and occupied in the process of social contract formation. In my book, the hero of the story is the Palestinian homeowner who stood his ground with calm and dignity. Its catalyst is the settler, caught in his own rhetorical design. I’m glad no one got killed.

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Judith Butler Liberal Zionist (Parting Ways at the AAR)

Posted on March 20, 2014 by zjb

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“Judith Butler is a liberal Zionist.” Only a little tongue in cheek, I’ll make this claim on the basis of her remarks at a panel at the American Academy of Religion conference (2013). Organized by Ellen Armour and sponsored by the section for the study of Judaism to discuss Parting Ways, the panel was mostly dominated by perspectives drawn from Jewish philosophy and thought. These were advanced by Rebecca Adler, Sam Brody, Yaniv Feller, Claire Katz, and Martin Kavka. A recording of the panel is now up at the AAR website. It was a remarkable and thoughtful event, remarkable for its deliberative, as opposed to declarative tone. They brought out dimensions to Butler’s thinking about Israel and Palestine that I don’t think were much in evidence in Parting Ways.Butler responded to the panelists and to the general controversy that her book has generated in some circles.

The first thing that bears saying is how her talk here at the AAR in a Jewish philosophical circle was very different than talks she gave at Brooklyn College to support BDS, at Columbia University with Cornell West to honor the memory of Edward Said, or her participation at a teach-in at Berkeley. Instead of being grandstanded as “settler-colonialism,” Zionism was discussed by the panelists and by Butler herself, in far more nuanced terms, as a variegated political phenomenon with deep philosophical stakes that are both particular and “universal.” Instead of separating Jewishness and Zionism, which I thought was a central line of argument in Parting Ways, the discussion and Butler’s contribution to it forced their imbrication even deeper.

Perhaps most surprising, considering the hullabaloo, Parting Ways is driven by philosophical theses regarding [1 subjectivity and subject formation, as well as regarding [2] Jewishness and Judaism, and [3] Israel that do not stand out in any particular way as radical, at least not in relation to the Jewish philosophical tradition.

[1] Most of these are readily recognizable to any reader of the Jewish philosophical tradition starting with Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweing, including Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, and up to Yeshiyahu Leibowitz and Emmanuel Levinas.  The philosophical points developed by Butler regarding cohabitation, precarity, and responsibility integrate easily into that philosophical tradition, whose proponents have long understood the relational, non-substantivist character of human subjectivity.

[2] Consider too the idea that Jewish philosophy or Jewish identity is not exclusively or even explicitly Jewish per se, the notion that Jewish identity is not static, that Jewish social and religious identities are defined in relation to their broader historical contexts and geographical environments. These are already staples of 19th century historicism and the science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judenthums). As for anti-essentialism in Judaism, that topos has been honed to profound effect by Buber, Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem in the 20th century.

[3] Lastly, given the recent, reactive, and reactionary fear and fury in the Jewish community surrounding BDS, it’s hard to remember that there are very few people in the community, at least statistically, who would actually recognize the notion that Zionism “controls” Judaism and Jewishness or that any and all criticism of Israel equals anti-Semitism. There would be a broad consensus in across the Jewish community that what Butler has called “the wretched bi-nationalism” on the ground in Israel/Palestine is morally and politically unsustainable.

You can follow a recording of the entire event here at the AAR website. Her comments start at around 1:13 in the recording. What strikes me as genuinely noteworthy about the comments made by Butler herself in her remarks at the AAR is how they place her in the liberal Zionist mainstream. Federated, shared concepts of sovereignty and citizenship are now recognized by her not as anti-Zionism, but as a form of historical Zionism. Buber is now considered to be worth a second look. More to the point is the closeness of Butler’s remarks to a liberal kind of political Zionism. Even the critique of sovereignty loses some of its absolute force. Butler now ascribes value to the idea of Jewish political self-determination, which she situates alongside the rights of others, namely the Palestinian right to self-determination. The assumption is that the rights of others and the creation of a just polity necessarily condition any people’s right to self-determination. Butler no longer wants to talk about being pro- or anti-Israel or pro- or anti-Palestine. While I am sure she must have used the term “settler colonialism,” there is this other understanding, paraphrasing Arendt, that regarding Zionism and the establishment of the State (?), historically Jews need or needed sanctuary when they are or were refugees.

Such statements lend themselves to the possibility of discursive mischief. Butler’s thinking here reflect a perfectly parve form of liberal Zionism that might come as a surprise to many of the people who read her as situated on the more radical side of these kinds of debates. Her remarks at the AAR do not reflect the rhetoric and the arguments in Parting Ways, suggesting why it’s important to open the Jewish community to dialogue about alternative points of view. They suggest something too about the effective and moderating power of genuine civil discourse to shade or blunt sharply held points of views. Maybe it should have been no surprise at all that these remarks by Butler responding to remarks at the study of Judaism section, responding to perspectives that reflect Jewish philosophical and political interests, are the kinds that one might find at J-Street, not at Electronic Intifadah. The depth of the discussion suggests that in these kinds of circles, it may not be so easy to divest Jewishness and Judaism from Zionism and Israel.

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1 State Palestine (Tareq Abbas)

Posted on March 19, 2014 by zjb

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This is how Israel loses the debate. As expressed by Tareq Abbas in this article in the NYT, the logic for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impeccable and human. Abbas is the son of the Palestine Authority President Mahmood Abbas. It’s been a long time coming. “If you don’t want to give me independence, at least give me civil rights.” I’m about his age. If I were Palestinian, I’d think the same thing he does.

 

 

 

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