"We Belong to the Land: The Story of a Palestinian Israeli Who Lives for Peace and Reconciliation" by Elias Chacour (with Mary E. Jensen), San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990 (Chapter 9, pp. 67-75)

Escape

by Elias Chacour
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[Excerpt]

I knew of the suffering the Jewish people had experienced in Europe during the Second World War, how they had been without a homeland for nearly nineteen hundred years, and that our land of Palestine had been home to them before the Romans drove them out, but I also knew other things:

• that my Palestinian ancestors has been in this land before the Iraqi Gentile Abraham arrived twenty centuries before Christ;

• that Jews and Gentiles alike had been in this land when Jesus of Nazareth lived here, easily notes in all the gospel accounts;

• that my ancestors, like the Jews, had loved and cherished this land, planting their olive and fig trees that still nourished us twenty centuries after Jesus Christ had walked in these paths and fields;

• and that we as Palestinians had not been responsible for the suffering of the Jews in Europe, yet we were the ones who were chased out of our land and made to suffer so the world could soothe its conscience and pretend to repair the evil done against the Jews.

I did not begrudge a home to the Jews. As my father and our friends and relatives in Biram had often said, "Ahlan wassahlan, welcome to our home, our Jewish friends. We love to have you here as our neighbors and compatriots. We sorrow with you in your pain and rejoice in your freedom, but that welcome does not entitle you to take our lands and villages away from us, to threaten us and even kill our people, to become lord and master over us, consigning us to slavery, dispossession, and nonexistence. Come, let us be brothers and sisters together in this beautiful land in which all of us have history and roots. There is room enough for all of us. Aren't we the co-persecuted brothers and sisters?"

Israel was established on the principles of modern Zionism, which wanted a state in which Jewish people could be protected and in charge of their own destiny. By its nature, however, Zionism calls for fundamentalism, radicalism. It is built on a racial theory, and anything based on race or on blood, like nationhood, peoplehood, or homeland, always risks becoming racist. Racist thinking separates one group of people from others, favors that group over and against people who are different.
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