NOVANEWS
As’ad AbuKhalil is attacking Amira Hass here:
Amira Hass wants Egyptians to roll out the red carpet for her
“While In Cairo, I finally found out that Israel is an occupying state. This is thanks to all those people who refused to meet with an Israeli journalist. In this way, my three-week stay in revolutionary Cairo turned into an adventure of seek bypass routes, and not without a great deal of professionalfrustration.” Good for you, Egyptian people. (thanks Ali)
Everyone knows that the Israeli left is feeble. Everyone knows that Zionism is hegemonic amongst Israeli Jews. We also know that the Israeli radical left gets over-promoted, and that people, especially left-liberal Americans and Europeans, are quite desperate to hear rustlings of change from within Israeli society. They are not there yet. But I don’t see the point of this sort of attack. First, read Hass’s article. It’s excellent: running short of playing the ingénue, what Hass is trying to do is to show both why the dominant Egyptian anti-normalization discourse is the way it is, why it is heightened in the current atmosphere, as well as why in some respects it’s quite blinkered (or “dumb” as one Egyptian leftist rightly commented to me).
I have news for As’ad: we need cracks within Zionist hegemony. Big ones. They have nuclear weapons and plenty of non-nuclear weaponry, and we need forces within that society at some point who can stop it from going out with a bang. The seeds of those forces, no matter if they seem sterile at the moment, are in the Israeli radical left. Stop playing demagogue by ridiculing them. There are plenty of Israelis we can ridicule who richly deserve it.
Technorati Tags: Amira Hass, Angry Arab, As’ad abuKhalil, capitalism, Israel, Israeli left,Palestine, utopia, Zionism
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