[...] 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 long before his ancestors were here. Therefore, we have a birthright to be here in the land of our forefathers and to live here,’ he evoked a historical right which, when applied universally, would lead to universal slaughter. That is to say, can one imagine a world in which ethnic groups would continually ‘remind’ their neighbours that ‘we’ve been here before you’ – even if this means a thousand or more years ago – and use this fact to justify their effort to seize the neighbour’s land? Along these lines, a French Jewish writer, Cecile Winter, proposed a nice mental experiment: imagine Israel as it is, and its trajectory over the last half-century, ignoring the fact that Jews came there stigmatised by the signifier of the absolute victim, and thus beyond moral reproach. What we get, in that case, is a standard story of colonisation.