Wow – check it out!
Andrew Sullivan — who I’ve feted here before — used the word “colonization” to describe Israeli settlement on the West Bank earlier today, and not only does this happen to be a pet peeve of mine, but I happen to have just written someone an email about the very same issue, and so my thinking about it was very fresh in my mind.
So I shot off an email, and lo! I am “a reader”!
The one graph from my email that didn’t make it into the post was this:
It’s important to acknowledge peoples’ perceptions of themselves and their narratives. Unlike the English or the French, to Jews, Hebron is just as much “home” as is Tel Aviv — more so, in fact. If I want Israelis and Jewish nationalists around the world to acknowledge the Palestinian narrative, to come to a place where they can realize that the Palestinian narrative is absolutely equally legitimate to our own — well, I have to acknowledge the Zionist narrative as well. I won’t win anyone over by saying “Look, this thing you’ve thought about yourselves for centuries is all wrong,” but I might (very big might) win them over by saying “Look, I understand why this is important to you, and I’m not saying it shouldn’t be. I’m saying that there is something even more important going on here, and we all need to find a way forward together.”
Please click on the “I am a reader” link above and flood Mr. Sullivan with pageviews of luv!
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 
Congratulations.
Andrew has put a couple of my emails up over the past couple of years. It is always a thrill to know something I’ve written actually breaks through enough to warrant posting because I know he gets thousands of emails each day. Sullivan is quite the many faceted person. His longer pieces are so wonderfully written it is difficult not to admire his talent. Then he can go on about the “Bell Curve”, Palin’s baby, and other mysterious things that drive me insane. But, alas, I cannot quit him.
Yes. Congratulations. I’m here from TNC and you are now in my feed.
You were given to thinking about how your A Reader thoughts were, because of Andrew’s readership, now in front of a world wide audience and just as you were saying “That’s right!” I was sitting at my desk at work thinking the same thing. Since I enjoy your comments so much there — your personality comes through five-by-five — I look forward to reading your posts here over my very early LA morning coffee.
Ella have you read much of Martin Buber’s views on Zionism? After reading this, I googled it, but got only the sketchiest idea that reaffirmed my already superficial aquaintance with his ideas.
I am not a Zionist, though I understand the longing. Zionism seems not unlike President Lincoln sending former slaves back to Liberia, where they enslaved the local populations, a phenomenon that had a catastrophic blowback in the 1980s and 90s when members of disaffected populations participated in some of the most horrific bloodletting orgies, including that done by drugged children, of the twentieth century.
It is also hard for me to accept the idea of Zionism, if one is complacent about being a grandson of American immigrants, for there are a whole raft of prophecies about the return of the American continents to their original inhabitants.
But in larger terms, I see Zionism succeeding in ways that the enemies of Judaism have successively failed as a mechanism that will destroy rather than preserve our heritage. What I know of Buber is that he envisioned a Zionism of cultural principle in which all humanity would be served, but as I say, I have only scratched at the surface of his thoughts on the topic.
Good post, Emily. A couple or so years ago Sullivan used something I sent wrote to him…now that I think about it he actually used TWO e-mails I sent in within about a month of each other. One was about dealing with an illness and the other was to express my sheer mortification yet morbid fascination at a YouTube video he dredged up about my favorite performing musician from an early stage in her career.
Yeah, I got carried away and started to pepper him with scattered opinions and various other wild hairs I pretty much pulled out of my butt. But it was cool to see those earlier items posted.
I haven’t been over to read him much of late. He sort of soured me out a while back with his “Palin’s Baby” obsession and a couple other things, but he can be thought-provoking and interesting.
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