The urge to draw analogies, many of them of dubious merit, between the present situation of the Palestinian people and the past one of the Jewish people seems to be too strong for many commentators to resist.  A case in point is Gustavo Faverón Patriau, a Peruvian academic and literary critic who teaches in the United States. His blog focuses on literature and culture and is reputed  to be one of the most widely read on these topics in the Spanish-speaking world.

He writes,  in his  tribute to Mahmoud Darwish,  that the dead poet,

…used to repeat a phrase, “For years my nation has been only language”. Curiously, the same idea could be applied to the last two thousand years of the Jewish people. A paradox and no less sad for that.

There’s no paradox and nothing sad here because the linguistic histories of  the Jewish and Palestinian peoples are completely different. Jews in Israel today speak Hebrew, effectively a dead language until it was revived in the nineteenth century, a revival usually credited to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The language that expressed a particular aspect of Jewish identity before the rise of modern Hebrew and the foundation of Israel was Yiddish and even that was far from being spoken by all Jews. And, of course, German Jews spoke and expressed their identity in German, British ones spoke and expressed their identity in English and so on.

Palestinians overwhelmingly speak Arabic, a language which is also spoken by tens of millions of other people and is the official language of a significant number of countries.

So there’s no worthwhile analogy to be drawn here.  I’m not sure where this analogy mania comes from, one doesn’t see it so starkly present in comparable conflicts, but perhaps it might be a good idea if people would go easy on it for a bit if this is the sort of stuff they are going to come up with.