Khalidi’s “Palestinian Identity”

I just finished reading Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi’s seminal book Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia Univ. Press, 1997) and I thought I’d share a paragraph that I found very concise: “Ironically, it is Israel, the prime agitator for and beneficiary of the free movement of Soviet Jews, which has been responsible for many of these suffocating restrictions on the movements of Palestinians.  There is clearly a paradox here. Its core is that Israelis, many of them descended from victims of persecution, pograms, and concentration camps, have themselves been mistreating another people.  We thus find that the sins done to the fathers have morally desensitized the sons to their sins toward others, and have even sometimes been used to justify these sins.” (p. 5)

 

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