Awaiting the howling

Editorial

Remains of the earliest prehistoric building yet discovered in the Tel Aviv area have been uncovered by archeologists. Estimated at between 7,800 and 8,400 years old, the discovery in Ramat Aviv is the first proof that settled peoples were living in this area as far back in the Neolithic period, when nomadic humans first began to settle and take up agriculture.

Tel Aviv, the “first modern Hebrew city,” commemorated its 100th birthday in 2009, a cause for celebration that reached all the way to our country, where the Toronto International Film Festival marked the occasion with a focus on cinematic representations of Tel Aviv. This resulted in a boycott attempt that accomplished little beyond exhibiting the ignorance and hypocrisy of much of Canada’s artistic class. Days later, fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls – ancient Hebrew texts – were exhibited in that same centre of Canadian cosmopolitanism and they too were subject to a boycott attempt on the fantastical premise that they were stolen artifacts rightfully belonging to the Palestinian people ... a people who first organized and self-identified as a distinct national group in 1964, the year the Palestine Liberation Organization emerged.

We await the inevitable howls from such usual suspects as the Canadian Union of Public Employees and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid that this archeological find is simply evidence of more Zionist appropriation.

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