Does it surprise you that liberal internationalists wish to provide neocons political cover unto the last day? Not really. George Packer wants David Frum to replace Bill Kristol as a columnist at the Times. Frum is a smart guy and he writes well, but he did say "victory or holocaust," a hideous creed, when he was promoting the Iraq war, and his wife said he wrote "axis of evil," thereby taking the lead in the giant IQ-drop known as the Bush administration. I guess the intellectuals who underwrote the Iraq disaster will continue to flourish so long as the editors who underwrote it are still needing to cover their fannies.
Here is Frum, writing lately on the Nakba and the new historians, Benny Morris's book:
important regional Israeli commanders did pursue a policy of expulsion,
sometimes deliberately committing atrocities to hasten flight. By the
standards of 20th century cruelty, these atrocities hardly begin to
compare. But they fell below the standard Israelis expected of
themselves – and professed before the world. And all Israelis, up to
Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, understood that those Palestinians who
fled would never be allowed to return.
This is smugly ethnocentric. The atrocities of the Israelis are parallel to ethnic cleansing activities in the former Yugoslavia, and in India and Pakistan. The "atrocities" included massacres. The central city of Arab life in Palestine, Jaffa, was reduced in a matter of weeks from 70,000 to 4 or 5,000 Arabs; the residents were terrorized and in many cases literally forced into the sea; and a city that was to be Arab under U.N. partition became a suburb of Tel Aviv, with primo real estate. Frum says the Israeli/yishuv leaders were not to blame. This defies common sense. It is denial disfigured by the fact of his religious identification. Consider the abuses that go on routinely in the West Bank: what is the "standard" Israelis expect of themselves? And if they expect it, why is it so casually and routinely violated?
