MembersAgainst All Odds, the Zionist Projects Have Been Successful

The trigger for the following is the short piece written on July 30 by Ha’aretz senior publicist Oudeh Basharat. It would be one thing to address a casual columnist writing for this anti-Zionist newspaper. It is quite another thing to address something a senior staff member has written and which genuinely reflects the position of the Israeli Left as a whole. Basharat, a Christian Arab Israeli, comes from a family that lived in the village Ma’alul that was destroyed during the 1948 War of Independence.

In this piece, Basharat (read: Ha’aretz) laments the fate of Ma’alul, whose lands were bought by the evil Zionist Yosef Weitz, who from the 1930s played a major role in land acquisition, a policy that was bitterly contested by those Jews who believed the land should be conquered. The buying of land, often at exuberant price, was called by Jews “redemption,” and characters like Weitz were called “land redeemers.” That’s how esteemed they were in the eyes of the early Zionists.

But...