Legal Activists of Color: What Is Michael Lerner Really Talking About?

From: Michael Shahin <mashahin@gmail.com>
Subject: [NLG] What Is Michael Lerner Really Talking About?
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:40:18 -0700

What Is Michael Lerner Really Talking About? by Steven Salita (for entire artilce click link below)

...Palestinians have been replaced by liberal and progressive Zionists who, like their ostensible adversaries, refuse to interrogate the discourses underpinning the divine foundations of Israel and rarely move beyond weak liberalist critiques of the state's origin and its ensuing (and continuing) brutality. These liberal and progressive Zionists therefore do not actually represent the Palestinians on whose behalf they pretend to speak. They do a much better job of unwittingly, and in some cases knowingly, representing Israel's interests than they do an interest in peace and justice.

The same is true, incidentally, of White liberals relative to all ethnic groups around the world facing some form of oppression...

......liberal and progressive Zionists aren't merely timid politically. It would be unwise for Palestinians to let them off the hook by deeming them good-hearted but a tad naïve. They play a fundamental role in the capacity of colonizers to invent a rationale for their inexpiable barbarity. They play a more crucial role on Israel's behalf by preventing Palestinians from entering into the spaces of public debate where their viewpoints and narratives rightly belong-and which are rightly feared by liberal and progressive Zionists, who cannot imagine a form of Arab empowerment that does not conform to the impotent political boundaries they have so meticulously erected. As a result, the Israel-Palestine conflict becomes a Jew-on-Jew issue devoid of Arab participation, thereby reinforcing the racist paradigms that privilege Jews as rightful stewards of the Holy Land in addition to the many issues permeating it.....

The first condition for peace that Lerner articulates includes "the full and unequivocal recognition by Palestinians and the State of Palestine and all surrounding Arab states of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state." For Lerner, peace always is coterminous with preserving at all costs Israel's Jewish majority. Therefore, rather than calling for the right of return, a basic prerequisite for any lasting peace, Lerner champions "generous reparations," thus proffering a type of liberal altruism that has caused the Palestinians and all other colonized peoples incalculable suffering for over 100 years--The first condition for peace that Lerner articulates includes "the full and unequivocal recognition by Palestinians and the State of Palestine and all surrounding Arab states of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state." For Lerner, peace always is coterminous with preserving at all costs Israel's Jewish majority. Therefore, rather than calling for the right of return, a basic prerequisite for any lasting peace, Lerner champions "generous reparations," thus proffering a type of liberal altruism that has caused the Palestinians and all other colonized peoples incalculable suffering for over 100 years