“So much for poetry, the Jezebel that kept me treacherous company all these years. Olet lucernam. Now it would be nice to tell a joke or two, but I can only think of one on the spot like this, just one. What’s more, it’s a Galician joke. Maybe you’ve heard it before. A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who’re walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them why they’re crying. And one of the Galicians stops and says: because we’re all alone and we’re lost.”
“Nationalists claim that some groups have an inherent or primordial right to live as a ‘nation’ in a state of their own because they share a common ancestry, ethnicity or destiny. Most modern scholars, however, view nationalism in a different light, seeing it as an attempt to create an ‘imagined community’ based on myths, language and culture – and exploiting the means of mass communication made possible by industrialization – to construct a national identity and consciousness.”
“Belkind argued that the subsequent uprisings, from the Bar kokhba revolt to the insurgence in Galilee in the early seventh century, indicated that most of the Judeans continued to live in the country for a long time. ‘The land was abandoned by the upper strata, the scholars, the Torah men, to whom the religion came before the country,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps, too, so did many of the mobile urban people. But the tillers of the soil remained attached to their land.’ Many findings reinforce this historical conclusion.
Many Hebrew place names have been preserved, unlike the Greek and Roman names that were meant to replace them. A good number of burial places, sacred to the local inhabitants, are joint Muslim and Jewish cemeteries. The local Arabic dialect is strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic words, distinguishing it from literary Arabic and other Arabic vernaculars. The local populace does not define itself as Arab – they see themselves as Muslims or fellahin (farmers), while they refer to the Bedouin as Arabs. The particular mentality of certain local communities recalls that of their Hebrew ancestors.
In other words, Belkind was convinced that he and his fellow pioneers were meeting ‘a good many of our people… our own flesh and blood.’ To him, the ethnic origin meant more than the religion and the daily culture derived from it. He argued that it was imperative to revive the spiritual connection with the lost limb of the Jewish people, to develop and improve its economic condition, and to unite with it for a common future. The Hebrew schools must open their doors to Muslim students, without offending their faith or their language, and in addition to Arabic, must teach them both Hebrew and ‘world culture.’”
The Invention of the Jewish people, Pg. 183-184
Sand is referring here to the writings of Israel Belkind (1861-1929), a Russian intellectual and part of the First Aliyah. In his book “Arabs in Eretz Israel” he made the argument that Palestinians were the descendants of Judeans. According to Sand this fact was not disputed, and even written about by early founders of Israel, until the need for a change in ideology came about after the 1967 war.
“Recent times have witnessed a desire on our part to give expression to these emotions. And we need not fear what our neighbors will say…
Twelve years ago, we clung to the epigram “Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew.” Then we did not attach any significance to form and to the aesthetic aspects of life. It had to be that way, for then our battle was fought on two fronts: the Bundist [1] and the General Zionist.[2] Lest we be confused with the latter we had to be cautious in our terminology. But even them we did not fear non-Kosher terms. Our program of that time always employed the term “Jewish Nation.”[3]
But times have changed. The difference between our Party and the others is sufficiently clear. No one will mistake our identity. It is therefore an opportune time to introduce a newer and richer terminology. Now we can and must employ an emotional terminology. New we can and must proclaim: “Eretz Yisrael [4] — a Jewish home!”
…When the waste lands are prepared for colonization, when modern technique is introduced, and when the other obstacles are removed, there will be sufficient land to accommodate both the Jews and the Arabs. Normal relations between the Jews and Arabs will and must prevail.”
-Ber Borochov, Eretz Yisraeil in our Program and Tactics, 1917
“What is tradition?… It is the progress that was made yesterday, just as the progress that we make today will constitute the tradition of tomorrow.” -Pope John XXIII, 1968
“Tradition is the illusion of permanence” -Woody Allen, 1997
“When you have an event, when you have a ‘real time verb,’ you can have indefinite layers of possible meanings or of possible ways to open meanings. But when I refer to a ’side effect,’ able to pose new questions, I am not thinking of faithful documentation, but rather of something that was not expected in your initial project, but that comes out of it anyway.” (79)
Cesare Pietroiusti interviewed by Shane Aslan Selzer in Purves, Ted, What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.
…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda
The piece was written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. English translation quoted from J. L. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin Books, London, 1975.