That must be a German thing. I don't see any vogue of "critical solidarity with Israel" in autonomist, libertarian communist, anarchist, etc. milieux elsewhere in Europe or America or Japan (not to mention the rest of the world).
> > <blockquote>"[Theodore] Adorno says that in the 20th
> > century the idea
> > of home has been superseded. I suppose part of my
> > critique of Zionism
> > is that it attaches too much importance to home.
>
> That's cool with me. Why all the noise about a
> Palestinian right of return, then?
When you don't have a right, you don't have an ability to refuse to exercise it either.
> > "Of course. I'm the last Jewish intellectual. You
> > don't know anyone
> > else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now
> > suburban squires.
>
> It seems to me that Said is just engaging here in the
> sort of Holocaust envy that you've correctly diagnosed
> in other posts.
Before the founding of Israel, Jews were the emblem of statelessness in political and aesthetic consciousness of modernity; today, Palestinians (and Kurds, perhaps to a lesser extent, because they now have a chance to carve a state in northern Iraq) are.
Aside from attracting ardent support of such fine intellectuals as Jean Genet, it's generally no fun being stateless. Imagine trying to travel when no government issues you travel identity documents that other governments accept.
The government of Japan is run by people whose ideology is on the opposite end of the political spectrum from mine, but it's still that government's power, resting on the wealth of Japan, that guarantees that I'll be welcome almost anywhere I want to go, from America to Venezuela, Israel to Iran.
> > Japanese imperialists developed the rhetoric of
> > anti-colonial
> > imperialism much earlier than today's European far
> > right did
>
> True dat. Add to that a book like Francis Parker
> Yockey's Imperium, and it's a wonder that "national
> liberation" was ever even a credible idea among
> communists, let alone the dominant conception of
> revolution for much of the 20th century.
If you had ever lived as a colonial subject, you would understand why national liberation became a demand pushed from below. Colonialism was, among other things, a process of primitive accumulation, dispossessing peasants and uprooting agricultural laborers, and that is why class and national demands became inseparable. To see how that worked in the context of Palestine, read Rashid Khalidi on Palestinian peasant resistance. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>