Fascinating read from The Guardian on the history of the Israeli Jew Uri Davis and his academic and political efforts to change the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The link can be found here.
Here are a few quotes:
"An important part of the education that I received from my parents," Davis recalled last week, "was never to generalise. To beware of every sentence that begins with 'all'. It was not 'all' Germans who killed my mother's family. It was some Nazis." Another distinction was emphasised by his mother. "If she heard the suggestion of vengeance, she would be horrified. She sought justice. One of the biggest problems addressing a Zionist audience is that the distinction between justice and vengeance has collapsed."
How he frames his own identity is part of his attempt to impose an "alternative narrative" to the one that has dominated Israel since its foundation in 1948 by what he describes as "a settler-colonialist" strand of Zionism built on a massive act of "ethnic cleansing"
Davis has written how his own "intellectual and moral development was profoundly influenced by Buber's writings" although he has fiercely condemned Buber's later actions, not least Buber's appropriation of a house in Jerusalem belonging to the family of the late Palestinian activist and writer Edward Said.
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