If I forget thee, O Jerusalem

In response to my challenge to critics of BDS—if not BDS, what would you have the Palestinians do?—defenders of Israel, many of them Jewish, have said to me that the first thing the Palestinians need to do is get over 1948. That was the year that the Israelis drove out some 700,000 Palestinians from the land, creating a nation of permanent refugees who would never be allowed to return to their homes. Aside from not really providing a credible alternative to BDS, it’s a brutal, almost grotesque, argument for a Jew to make. We have an entire liturgy devoted not only to the sorrow of being expelled from that very land, but to the obligation not to forget it. You would think a people who never got over what happened to them two millennia ago—and whose arguments for the land are often based on claims from two millennia ago—would be a little less cavalier about the memory of a people who haven’t gotten over what happened to them less than seven decades ago.