RAMALLAH, April 24 (JMCC) - Former
Knesset member Azmi Bishara warns of a process of cultural colonization underway, and says the best way to fight it is to treat all of historic Palestine as
Jerusalem -- as sacred.
A sacred historical right of another people has been given precedence over the right of the indigenous populace to their land, a right acquired by virtue of their continued presence on it for hundreds and thousands of years. The Palestinians today are the product of centuries of the intermixing, interacting and intermingling of people on the ground from the age of Canaan to the age of a prevailing Arab Islamic culture. That lived history of uninterrupted demographic and cultural fusion on the ground is now being supplanted by another history, one that in the eyes of its proponents is true and sacred and, hence, justifies the destruction of an existing society and the creation of a new one on its ruins. This other history is being used to produce an ideological rhetoric that is being put to the service of an expansionist colonialist project.
Read the op-ed at
Ahram Weekly...