I went to the talk by Sand at the Brecht Forum last night (see Sebastian's post announcing it). It was disgraceful. If anyone goes to the one today, make sure to ask Sand about his position on the right of return of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, he opposes it. Sand deconstructs the myth of a worldwide Jewish people and shows how this myth was used to justify the theft of Arab land (he doesn't think there was a Palestinian people until 1948, when it was formed by antiZionist consciousness!). But in the decades since 1948, Sand believes, a new Israeli people has been formed -- and therefore only a two-state solution is possible, and the right of return of the Palestinian people can only be admitted verbally but not in practice. Like the hypocritical Zionist "soldier who weeps," Sand is a historian who weeps. Israel should recognize the tragedy of the Palestinian people, but doing anything about it is impossible. He calls the creation of Israel a "rape," to impress us with how radical and sorrowful he is, but insists nothing can be done to rectify this injustice. He even calls "criminal" those who teach Palestinian refugee children that they can and should return! Asked why return is impossible, he says because Israel has nuclear weapons, and because Israelis will never consent to being a minority. These reactionary positions seem to me to derive from two sources. First, the backward theory of Matzpen, of which he was once a member, supporting the "Hebrew right to self-determination" (a theory opposed when it was first formuilated by other Trotskyists groups, first and foremost the US SWP. Second, Sand's own further conservatization. The notion that a country like Israel, with all its wealth, can't accommodate the return of Palestinian refugees, flies in the face of material realities. And the notion that Palestinians SHOULDN'T return and that the current colonizers won't accept being a minority, flies in the face of a variety of historical examples, from Algeria to South Africa and so on. The main lesson of those examples being, of course, that the majority will find a way by whatever means it can to assert its rights. Andy Pollack
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