Speaking as part of a panel of Jewish public officials on Tuesday, Robinson answered a question in part by saying there is an “entire generation” of young adults who do not know about the Holocaust or understand that the region on which the state of Israel was created decades ago was previously “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.”
“There were several hundred thousand people but, other than that, it didn’t produce an economy. It couldn’t grow things. It didn’t have anything on it,” she said during a public Zoom call hosted by B’nai Brith, an independent Jewish human rights organization.
This, right here, is our fundamental problem. The idea that everything and everyone has to be enclosed and developed or otherwise conform to some narrow master plan is behind everything from loss of access to public lands to colonialism and beyond.
If the land supported several hundred thousand people there, then it was obviously providing what the people needed and there had to be both systems of governance and economic systems. The fact that they did not conform to the ideals of someone from outside does not change those simple facts.