Exiled nations

There is a fine piece by Howard Jacobson in The Independent today:

Why the rhetoric of sympathy for Palestinian homelessness – "When we lost our country, we lost respect," Pilger has a Palestinian refugee lament – but no answering sympathy for the lost respect and homelessness that found expression in Zionism? I am one of those who believe that Jewish experience of exile obliges Israel actively to comprehend the sorrows of Palestinian exile. But I also believe this must cut both ways. If it is terrible to lose your home today, then it was terrible to lose your home yesterday, whoever you are. For Pilger, there are no such competing claims on his understanding. There are the forgotten, disrespected Palestinians on the one hand, and the "fanatics of Zion" on the other.

The issue of justice and nationhood is intractable, and not only when two peoples have national claims to the same territory. But the Jews' claim to nationhood is as just as any, even without taking account of its particular urgency in the 1940s. It is a perplexing omission in much modern discussion of nationalism; as Jacobson says, that dismissal is the rhetoric of bias.