Total number of comments: 3 (since 2013-11-28 16:53:44)
Adrienne Redd
is a professor of sociology and anthropology at the Community College of Philadelphia, an environmental advocate, outdoors-woman and political organizer. She is the author of Fallen Walls & Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World (2010) and numerous articles and lectures on the trajectory of the public view of the nation-state in an increasingly fragmented planetary economy and international system.
Dear Yusuf,
In reply to your question about why the policies of Israel now appear to mirror what the Nazis perpetrated, I belief that Israel still operates out of the fear and horror of 65 years ago. This is not justify putting Palestinians in a nation-sized armed compound. Roger Cohen discussed this foreign-policy-crafted-from-fear in an editorial of April 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/opinion/20iht-edcohen.html My pointing the depth of dread in the Israel psyche (what people now glibly refer to as an existential threat to Jewish state) is not meant to justify the misguided belief that Israel must buffer and wall itself off from all threats, merely to explain the terrible root of that fear. Only through inclusion and shared sovereignty can the threat - the time bomb of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff be address. And Fareed Zakaria intelligently talked about this in a piece for Newsweek: How to Stop The Contagion; This is battle, not an academic seminar. August 1, 2005.
Dear Herman, I don't deny that boundaries and territory are still crucially important to people, both in terms of international function and identity that connects with land and lines around land. I would like to expand the essay based on comments such as yours. Will you email me directly at adrienne@redd.com if you would like to participate in that process?
There are various sources of statistics about how many people into any given ethno-religious group. Depends on whether you emphasized the "ethno" or the "religious" part, for one thing. Also depending on whether you use cultural identity or religious practice. There are enough gusts up to an estimate of 20 million that I felt I could say that for rhetorical purposes.