For our anarcho-zionist friends out there:
"Perhaps my revolutionary education has been sadly neglected, but I have been taught that the land should belong to those who till the soil. With all of his deep-seated sympathies with the Arabs, our comrade cannot possibly deny that the Jews in Palestine have tilled the soil. Tens of thousands of them, young and deeply devout idealists, have flocked to Palestine, there to till the soil under the most trying pioneer conditions. They have reclaimed wastelands and have turned them into fertile fields and blooming gardens. Now I do not say that therefore Jews are entitled to more rights than the Arabs, but for an ardent socialist to say that the Jews have no business in Palestine seems to me rather a strange kind of socialism."
Emma Goldman
August 26 1938
reprinted in 'British Imperialism & The Palestine Crisis: Selections from the Anarchist Journal 'Freedom' 1938–1948' London: Freedom Press, 1989 pp 24–27]
2 comments:
I was perusing the internet for information about Emma Goldman when I came across her 1938 essay and then your utter distortion and mistitling of her words as, "Emma Goldman on the Jewish right to the Holy Land." Nowhere does Goldman suggest a "right" to what Israel has imposed on the subject Palestinian population. The essay near the end of Goldman's life is primarily a call for a right of asylum for Jews in Palestine against the horrors of the Holocaust just beginning to come into view. That is very far from any "right to the Holy Land" that extremist Lukidniks have been promoting to justify their ultimate goal of expelling all Palestinians from their ancestral land and homes.
This is a full quote, and there is no misrepresentation. And Emma was right. The Jewish community worked the long neglected land and made it bloom. Long may Israel continue to prosper and bloom
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