Said on American Zionism

Brad DeLong delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Fri Oct 13 15:30:18 PDT 2000



>And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have
>been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been
>involved in terrorism, why will you not recognize Israel, why was
>Hajj Amin a Nazi, and so on...

These *do* seem like interesting questions. Why was Hajj Amin a Nazi? Why did Arafat's organization decide that killing olympic athletes was a peachy-keen thing to do? Why the prolonged refusal to recognize Israel?

Does anyone know the answers?


>What I shall discuss in my next article is how the only possible
>political strategy for the US so far as Arab and Palestinian policy
>are concerned is neither a pact with the Zionists here nor one with
>US policy, but a mobilized mass campaign directed at the American
>population on behalf of Palestinian human, civil and political
>rights. All other arrangements, whether Oslo or Camp David, are
>doomed to failure because, put simply, the official discourse is
>totally dominated by Zionism and, except for a few individual
>exceptions, no alternatives to it exist...

In large part because the image of Palestinians in the mind of America's necktie-wearing class is of the people who rolled people in wheelchairs into the ocean and started hijacking airplanes--thus leading to our current air travel ritual passages through the metal detectors and the x-ray machines. Wasn't the decision to take the Black September road (as opposed to, say, the Gandhi road) a decisive political error on Arafat's part? Is there any way it can be repaired?

Brad DeLong



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