holy land: where the heart is without violence ...

~*~

I have
painfully renounced
the possibility of realizing my very strong feeling
of connection to the Land
[or rather, deferred it to some Messianic redemption,
when all will be clarified]
in favor of what I take to be
the only possible end to violence and
movement toward
justice.

Am I now
to be condemned
as a person who has
lost his roots?

I think
that the uncritical valorization of indigeousness
[and particularly the confusion between political indigeneity
and mystified autochthony]
must come under critique,
without wishing, however, to deny the rights of Native Americans, Australians, and Palestinians to their lands
precisely on the basis of real
and not mystified
political claims.

Thus
I find the arguments
of some Palestinians
that they are the direct descendants of the Jebusites
and therefore exclusively entitled to the Land
frightening in their implications,
for the same reason
that I find such claims frightening
in the mouths
of Jews.

If Jews
are to give up hegemony over the Land,
this does not mean that the profundity of our attachment
to that Land
and the crucial cultural significance
of a large grouping of Jews
in one place,
speaking, writing, and creating in Hebrew,
can be denied;
these also must have a political expression
in the present.

The cultural rights
of a Jewish collective
or collectives must be protected
in any future Palestine
as well.

~~