About Being Palestinian

Re: Lands and Just Causes …
From “Common Lands, Common Ground” @ http://goo.gl/XZIKoa …

• The Jewish and democratic state of Israel is also one of the world’s first modern indigenous states; Palestinian demands center on their own tribal indigeneity. Both peoples require a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a specific territory, and that their cultural/historical distinctiveness from other populations, including the politically dominant, is recognized.
• To date, both Israeli and Palestinian publics have been left without real, practical building blocks leading to a shared understanding what the “near-universally recognized need for a two-state solution” can offer.
• Thomas L. Friedman, in his From Beirut to Jerusalem, (Revised Edition), provided the perhaps the best synopsis of the tribal imperative for the still-stateless people when he wrote of the continuing legacy of Yasser Arafat: “Long before Arafat came on the scene, there was a clearly defined Palestinian nation, but it was a nation to whom history had said no. … As Arafat himself liked to say, the Palestinians were being treated like “the American Red Indians,” confined on their reservations—shafted by the Arabs, defeated by the Jews and forgotten by the world. Arafat brought this people back from the dead … and transformed them in the eyes of the world from refugees in need of tents to a nation in need of sovereignty.”
A comprehensive and realistic alternative to continuing an ever-more dangerous militaristic solution is needed. The Israeli bottom line is the protection of its homeland; that of the Palestinians, the right to a nation state that provides for freedom and justice on ancestral soil. In order for both to feel that a two-state solution is feasible each side needs to encounter a common platform of thought and belief that replaces “constructive ambiguity” and accusatory political flatulence. That program is one in which narratives of “The Other” are understood for what they are, and how they are essential to any possible civilized solution.