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[...] It is almost attractive to see the first-generation Israeli leaders openly confessing the fact that their claims to the land of Palestine cannot be grounded in universal justice, that we are dealing with a simple war of conquest between two groups between whom no mediation is possible.

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[...] Many conservative (and not only conservative) political thinkers, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant and Joseph de Maistre, elaborated the notion of the illegitimate origins of power, of the ‘founding crime’ on which states are based, which is why one should offer ‘noble lies’ to people in t…

along the lines of Kant’s notion of the negative use of reason as the only legitimate one when we are dealing with noumenal objects, one should limit its use to a negative mode

We are thus caught in a Kantian antinomy (though it would be too obscene to call this ‘the antinomy of Holocaust reason’): while any positive reference to the Holocaust amounts to its instrumentalisation, the reduction of any reference to the Holocaust to such an instrumentalisation (i.e. the imposition of total silence about the Holocaust in political discourse) is no less unacceptable.

[...] What is correct about the quoted statement is the reminder of European hypocrisy: the European manoeuvre was indeed to pay for its own guilt with another people’s land. So when the Israeli government spokesman Ra’anan Gissin said in response, ‘Just to remind Mr Ahmadinejad, we’ve been here lo…