On Ramzi Kyzia’s 2005 writeup on the barrier wall

 I can say that I only find some accuracy in the last paragraph of this writeup for CounterPunch, a "left"-wing op-ed site which makes it a point to target Israel as much as possible in a large chunk of its stories. 

I mourn the violence committed on all sides of this conflict. War and terror is throwing our entire world into Diaspora. I mourn the existential fear, born out of the Holocaust, which so many Israelis suffer from. The Palestinians have become the final victims of that catastrophe. Israel’s fear is a greater wall than any barrier Ariel Sharon could ever dream of. After 2,000 years, the Jewish people have finally returned to their promised land. And, yet, living there–they are still desperately trapped in, and surrounded by, diasporas of their own making.

The interesting thing about this part of Kyzia’s op-ed is that he ties the post-Holocaust Hebrew-Jewish diaspora’s search for a permanent, independent homeland to his own Palestinian Arab people’s displacement as a consequence of the prior people’s liturgically-mandated reclamation of that same area, and then insinuates (through the essay, btw) that the Hebrew-Jewish diaspora is still in diaspora, even in a region in which their people are openly-competing in a seemingly neverending war of demographic numbers.

And what if Hebrew Jews in I/P, or just the West Bank settlements, are still in a mental diaspora? What if the move to become a reconstructed people (in a similar vein as other peoples who have had a significant minority or outright majority be placed outside of their last known area of ethnonational consolidation) is motivated by their collective "existential fear" of persecution?

But what if Kyzia is inaccurate in his appraisal of the root of the Hebrew nationalist dilemma, since that same existential fear is motivated not just by the Holocaust, but by nearly 1,800 years of persecution and victimization of the Jewish religious identity by antagonistic Christian state and non-state terrorists and polemicists?

If Kyzia is really concerned with why the predominately-Ashkenazic settlers are angrily and emotionally driven to settle in the West Bank, then it would be wise for him to look at the last 2000 years of Jewish religious history and interaction with Christianity (see "blood libel", "pogroms", "Pale of Settlement", Judeophobic media, etc.) to see why they’re driven to be as far removed from the concerns of Christian-majority countries.

He could also look at why Hebrew Israelis of Ashkenazic descent view past Islamic interactions and relations with Jewish religious minorities in places such as Iraq, Morocco, Syria, etc. as being all too similar to their own ancestors’ experiences in Christian-majority states, often (mistakenly) conflating Islamic treatment of the Jewish minorities with the Christian treatments of their own.

There were outstanding examples of religious supremacism by the majority peoples in both cases, but were motivated by slightly-different concerns due to the different stipulations of each religion, and the ramping-up of Muslim religious rages against the Jews is a rather recent political phenomenon, having gone to at least the Damascus affair of the mid-19th century (which most historians now blame upon Christian incitement of the Muslim population against the Jewish minority in the city and surrounding area). 

So the Holocaust was merely icing on the cake for why Jews in Israel (and Jews abroad, and even the wider, more religiously-diverse Hebrew ethnic diaspora) possess such an existential fear regarding their place in the world.

So, for his effort to address the Hebrew Jewish Israeli dilemma in the West Bank from the perspective of an Arab Palestinian nationalist, he is simply not paying attention to its root. I’d expect him, a Semitic-speaking individual in diaspora, to understand the existential fear of being a Semitic-looking individual in Europe in the 12th century, to understand the existential fear of practicing a non-Christian religion in a Christian-majority state like Spain in the 15th century, to understand the existential fear of having non-European, Semitic blood running through your veins or associating with any political movement which had a non-European, Semitic individual or two at the ideological helm in the 19th century.

I’d expect him to understand why conspiracy theories about the all-powerful, all-controlling, all-wealthy, all-diabolical Semitic peoples abound on the Internet and in various media in the 21st century, and why the settlers are so driven in their goal of religious settlement away from the rest of the world at the exact same time.

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