From this week's Washington Jewish Week. I provided an on-line comment to the Golubcow piece, and the WJW then published it as a Letter to the Editor. The title of the letter is the WJW's, but it fits.
If you will it, the dream gets complicated
Saul Golubcow’s reflections (“Reading Herzl’s ‘The Jewish State,’ 125 years later,” Opinions, Feb. 11) would be unambiguously uplifting were it not for the reality that the Jewish state was founded on territory that, for well over 1,000 years, was the homeland of people who were not Jewish.
Given the nature of anti-Semitism in the West, Herzl’s dream was understandable. But let us not pretend that its fruition was not without terrible cost to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land and to our own self-image as a just people.
The tragic history of nationalism has been the displacement and oppression by one group of another. How we deal with this horrible dilemma when we become the displacers will determine the spiritual and, perhaps, the physical fate of our people.
DAVID S. FISHBACK
Olney
