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The Revisionist History of Sari Nusseibeh

(Jerusalem Post) Efraim Karsh - Sari Nusseibeh has done it again. In an article titled "Why Israel Can't Be a 'Jewish State,'" the supposedly moderate president of al-Quds University goes to great lengths to explain why Jews, unlike any other nation on earth, are undeserving of statehood. A Jewish state cannot exist, he argues, because "no state in the world is - or can be in practice - ethnically or religiously homogenous." But the Jewish state that has existed for over 63 years has never been, nor aspired to be, totally homogenous: unlike the Palestinian Arab leadership which, since the early 1920s to date, has insisted on a Judenrein Palestine. Rather, Israel has been home to diverse religious and ethnic minorities accounting for nearly 20% of its total population. Nusseibeh claims that a Jewish state must by definition be either a theocracy or an apartheid state, and that its Jewish nature opens the door to legally reducing its substantial non-Jewish minority "to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights)." This, too, flies in the face of Israel's 63-year history, where Arabs have enjoyed full equality before the law. In fact, from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the legal recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays, to the granting of educational, cultural, judicial, and religious autonomy, Arabs in Israel enjoy more formal prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world. The writer is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, and director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia).
2011-10-21 00:00:00
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