60 Years Ago …
February 10, 2008
Sixty is the number of the year. There will be three invocations of this number over the coming months: One to celebrate, another to lament and I’ll get to the third in a moment.
Those celebrating will celebrate that which the others lament – the establishment of the State of Israel, entailing as it has the Dispossession and relentless, ongoing destruction of the community of Palestinians. Much like other western colonial nations the celebration of the existence of one nation will be inescapably connected with the near decimation of another. It will celebrate the establishment of so-called security for one people, at the expense of that of another. To put a finer point on it, those celebrating will be celebrating an existence (i.e., “existence” in the sense of actual historical policies and practices) inextricably connected to ethnic cleansing and cultural destruction (with some arguing also, genocide).
Some celebration.
While some celebrate 60 years of the State of Israel and others lament 60 years since the Palestinian Nakba, I’m going to celebrate a different 60 year anniversary:
Sixty years ago the world established, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. …
