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"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy." Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, 1971
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Chomsky's baseline appraisal helps explain why in the court of world opinion, comments understood to be pro-Palestinian such as the one by Thomas -- who is of Lebanese descent -- are torridly dismissed. Meanwhile, pronouncements supportive of Israel -- regardless of how specious --are generally accepted on face value. One recent example involves Stanford University Professor Shelby Steele, whose attempt at repudiating Thomas in a Wall St. Journal article this June entitled: Israel and the Surrender of the West offered the typical boilerplate sophism that characterizes much of the give-and-take on the Israeli/Palestine issue.
"If Helen Thomas' remarks were pathetic and ugly," wrote Steele, "didn't they also point to the end game of this isolation effort: the nullification of Israel's legitimacy as a nation? The Jews are being scapegoated again."
Obviously, Steele's interpretation should raise questions as to whether the presumed scholar -- or anyone who embraces an apparent "see no evil" allegiance to Israel -- has bothered to completely examine the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If so, how was it possible to have overlooked the part about the Palestinian Mandate: the British proclamation, effective in 1923, which decreed the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people? Shortly after that declaration, supported by the League of Nations and the Principal Allied Powers, the Jewish population in Palestine mushroomed from 160,000 to 400,000 to comprise roughly 30 percent of its total population. Hence, if any group has been, in Steele's word, "scapegoated," history seems to indicate it was the Palestinians. Yet today, the phrase "Palestinian statehood" remains little more than a hilarious non-sequitur in a geo-political sense; more a cruel oxymoron than an ideal whose time has come.
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