"How can citizens view the birthday of the country they live in as illegitimate?"

The dean of an Israeli law school, speaking in support of a proposed Israeli law banning the marking of Israel's founding as the "Nakba" (catastrophe) for Palestinians (via Mondoweiss):

I don't see anything wrong with a State that proclaims it is Jewish not giving legitimization to the denial of it being so. Imagine US Jews declaring a day of morning on July 4 - that would be unacceptable. How can citizens view the birthday of the country they live in as illegitimate? People forget where we are living.... The moment the Arab public in the country says the establishment of a Jewish State is a catastrophe, it contradicts not only the Zionist outlook, but also the principles of international law. Just as I don't have the right to defame people in the street, they do not have the right to defame the State.

-- Eliav Shuchtman

July 4 as a day of mourning? Whoever could think that? Hmmm...

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

-- Frederick Douglass, Rochester, NY, July 5, 1852

I guess Frederick Douglass must have forgotten where he was living.