Letters to the Editor
-
Garbage
The character returning to his old home is visiting a place "abandoned freely by his family on the recommendation of the Arab governments," huh, No Name Given? Tell that to the people massacred at Deir Yassin. And do give us your name, instead of hiding behind anonymity.
It is not necessary to be anti-Jewish or even anti-Israel to recognize that the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 was one of the tragedies of the 20th century. The history of the world we inhabit is made of such tragedies, and obviously they cannot be fully undone: Native Americans cannot entirely recover their lost lands, Indians and Pakistanis cannot 'go back' to their old homes on the other side of the border, and Palestinians cannot reclaim what they abandoned in 1948 without a radical and politically impossible restructuring of the Israeli state. What's done is done; the right of return, if it is ever acknowledged by the Israeli government, must necessarily be largely symbolic. But it takes an extraordinary moral stupidity and ignorance of history, comparable with Holocaust-denial, to deny the human cost of mass eviction, or to state that Palestinians "freely" abandoned their homes. It is further proof, as if any was needed, that Salon's 'open' letters policy has succeeded only in turning the magazine into a garbage dump.