On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Chris Doss wrote:
> Anyway, I will make a few comments about Diaspora Disease... The image
> fixed in the Diaspora's mind is a reified image of the place of origin
> as seen through the eyes of their grandparents.
I'm not sure it can be entirely reduced to collective memory. Israel is an interesting counter-example. It's one of the few places in the world where the diaspora came before the country, so no one has a memory of leaving it. And yet they have much the same problem with their diaspora as everyone else, maybe even more so:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/opinion/18goldberg.html
The New York Times
May 18, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Israels American Problem
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Washington
WHEN the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, arrived at a Jerusalem
ballroom in February to address the grandees of the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (a redundancy, since
there are no minor American Jewish organizations), he was pugnacious,
as is customary, but he was also surprisingly defensive, and not
because of his relentlessly compounding legal worries. He knew that
scattered about the audience were Jewish leaders who considered him
hopelessly spongy -- and very nearly traitorous -- on an issue they
believed to be of cosmological importance: the sanctity of a "united"
Jerusalem, under the sole sovereignty of Israel.
These Jewish leaders, who live in Chicago and New York and behind the
gates of Boca Raton country clubs, loathe the idea that Mr. Olmert, or
a prime minister yet elected, might one day cede the Arab neighborhoods
of East Jerusalem to the latent state of Palestine. These are
neighborhoods -- places like Sur Baher, Beit Hanina and Abu Dis -- that
the Conference of Presidents could not find with a forked stick and Ari
Ben Canaan as a guide. And yet many Jewish leaders believe that an
Israeli compromise on the boundaries of greater Jerusalem -- or on
nearly any other point of disagreement -- is an axiomatic invitation to
catastrophe.
One leader, Joshua Katzen, of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, told me, "I think that Israelis don't have the big
view of global jihad that American Jews do, because Israelis are caught
up in their daily emergencies." When I asked him how his Israeli
friends responded to this, he answered: "They say, 'When your son has
to fight, you can have an opinion.' But I tell them that it is
precisely because your son has to fight that you have a harder time
seeing the larger picture."
<end except>
Michael