Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1970), p. 259-60.
2.
Israel Shahak (with Norton Mavinsky), Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (London, 1999).
3.
Edward W.Said, The Question of Palestine(New York, 1980), p. 177.
4.
Marx and Engels, Selected Works (vol. 1, Moscow, 1975), p. 499.
5.
Benjamin, Illuminations , p. 263.
6.
For a useful discussion of Benjamin’s new concept of history and the controversy around it, see Alex Callinicos’Marxism and Philosophy(Oxford, 1983), pp. 61-95.
7.
See Timothy Brennan’sWars of Position(New York, 2006), pp. 233-72.
8.
See Verso’s new volume of Handala cartoons, A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji Al-Ali ( London and New York, 2009), the first complete collection of Naji Al-Ali’s work.
9.
See Ra‘ad’s ‘The geography of occupation: Palestinian education today’, in which he gives a detailed account of everyday life at Al-Quds University (Socialism and Democracy, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 33-43).
10.
Blaming the Victims: spurious scholarship and the Palestinian Question, edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (London and New York, 1988).
11.
See, for example, Rosemary Sayigh’s Palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries (London, 1979).
12.
Jews who convert to another religion are generally regarded by their former co-religionists as non-Jewish. True, by the late nineteenth century there were in Europe and America many ‘secular’ Jews, who no longer practised Judaism but did not convert to another religion. But these are better described as persons of Jewish origin or background. Their ‘Jewishness’ somehow dissipated after a couple of generations: you would have been hard put to find a person who identified as a Jew but did not practise Judaism and had no parent or grandparent who had practised that religion. This is still true today everywhere outside Israel.
13.
Genesis 32:28.
14.
Genesis 15:18.
15.
Symbolically, individual male converts often adopt the name Ben Avraham (Son of Abraham).
16.
‘Jewish History: Inventing an invention’, Ha’aretz, 6 July 2008, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/999386.html
