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An Aboriginal People

[Jerusalem Post] Irwin Cotler - Israel, rooted in the Jewish people, is a prototypical First Nation or aboriginal people, just as the Jewish religion is a prototypical aboriginal religion, the first of the Abrahamic religions. The Jewish people is the only people that still inhabits the same land, embraces the same religion, studies the same Torah, hearkens to the same prophets, speaks the same aboriginal language - Hebrew - and bears the same aboriginal name, Israel, as it did 3,500 years ago. Its birth certificate originates in its inception as a First Nation, and not simply in its United Nations international birth certificate. The State of Israel, then, as a political and juridical entity, overlaps with the "aboriginal Jewish homeland"; it is, in international legal terms, a successor state to the biblical Jewish kingdoms. It is not the case, as it is sometimes said, that if there had been no Holocaust, there would not have been a State of Israel, as if a state could somehow even compensate for the murder of six million Jews. It is the other way around: If there had been an Israel, there would not have been a Holocaust. The writer is a member of the Canadian Parliament and the former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada.
2008-05-16 01:00:00
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