Pondlife Buried in the Sand

This is a guest post by Jonathan Hoffman
Yesterday night Shlomo Sand spoke at SOAS. It was again chaired by Jonathan Derbyshire, the literary Editor of the New Statesman.
Unbelievably there were as many as 300 there, only one of whom (me) made a critical comment. He must have sold over 50 books afterwards.
I challenged him on his ‘rape’ comment on BBC R4 ‘Start The Week’ on Monday:

I’m not a Zionist. I don’t define myself as an anti-Zionist …. but I’m not a Zionist …  I don’t put into question the existence of Israel. I compare when I am speaking before Arab students the birth of the Israeli state to an act of rape. But even the son that was born of the act of rape….. you have to recognise him … the existence of Israel I don’t put in question today, you understand me?

After the meeting I hung around to talk. A British white guy – well dressed, plummy accent – asked me if I was British. I said I was. “Well you can’t be, if you are Jewish” he said – several times, before I told him he was a Nazi. That’s the kind of pondlife these events attract, like fleas to a dog.
Addendum
Here is a new post on my earlier thread about Sand which just goes to prove my point:
Shlomo Sand’s agent
George Galloway, Birmingham University:
To those who believed that the Israeli state was the natural and just creation for a Jewish people exiled from their homeland in biblical times and wandering rootless ever since, Galloway said this was a fable, and a ridiculous one at that. Highlighting a new book by the leading Israeli historian Sholomo Sand, ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’, he said Jewish claims to a 2,000 year old lineage that justified theft of Palestinian land had about the same credabilty as the ‘descendents of the Romans, Normans, and Vikings’ laying claim on Britain today.
Oslo had been a disaster for the Palestinians and Zionist aggression has killed the possibility of a two-state solution. The only solution was now a single state, called either ‘Israel/Palestine or Palestine/Israel and running from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea’ in which all people are entitled to live as equal citizens under the law.
Addendum #2
How telling that Sand’s research has never – and will never – be discussed at an academic conference. See Kevin Brook here.

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