Word: zionist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...story of the Middle East for years has been, in many ways, an endless pageant of the self-defeating. ''We were in a different time zone 40 years ago,'' says Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian professor of philosophy at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. As the Zionist immigration came to critical mass, especially after World War II and the Holocaust, when Israel became the haven for 687,000 new immigrants with no homes elsewhere in the world, the Arabs' alarm rose to lethal levels. ''We found ourselves paying the price for something with which we had nothing...
...wilderness of the Diaspora. At last, 40 years ago the arc of the desire was completed, the dream implanted in history. Israel, thought David Ben-Gurion, would be a ''light unto the nations.'' In his memoirs in 1949, the first Israeli President, Chaim Weizmann, wrote about the Zionist ambition to build a ''high civilization, based on the austere standards of Jewish ethics.'' But the Zionist dream cracked when it fell to earth. ''A land without people for a people without land,'' said the hopeful Zionist formula. But Palestine was not a ''land without people,'' and the Jewish state from...
...Diaspora. The resurrection of a dormant language, Hebrew, for everyday use, a constantly renewed and invented tongue that has helped compose a functioning society, and democracy, out of the disparate characters and cultures that have come to the Promised Land from Poland, Morocco, Ethiopia, Mexico, everywhere. The earlier Zionist settlers had paved the way over several generations, but Israel from the moment of its beginning in 1948 was an act of collective will and courage, a valor that arose in part out of desperation. A flourishing culture. Universities, clinics, industries, social welfare, housing, an agricultural system watered by a complex...
...thought he meant Canaan and sent the children of Israel there. The Jews turn on Moses and say, ''You idiot! We could have had Canada, instead of this miserable godforsaken Middle Eastern blight, surrounded by sand and Arabs!'' The Zionist vision came to earth in a place of maximum inconvenience and danger. Multiple realities are always at work in Israel. Palestinians throw stones in the territories. Ultra-Orthodox Jews throw stones in Jerusalem -- against other Jews who violate the Sabbath. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra plays on, Zubin Mehta conducting, while Israeli soldiers sit on hilltops in southern Lebanon, training expensive...
...west bank of the Dead Sea.'' Dayan does not ''want to offer Arabs second-class citizenship.'' The Arabs must leave, or be persuaded to leave through a requirement of national service or high taxes. ''They should have 48 hours in which to sign a loyalty oath to the Zionist state. Otherwise they will be expelled in trucks.'' Dayan hates the American television networks, which he regards as virtually ! Palestinian terrorist weapons, a judgment heard often. ''Their message to the Israelis is 'Don't be brutal. Be moral.' Fine. We can be moral and surrender the territories, and after that...