Four days into his new blog, Steve Walt has reponded to the smears against him by Jeffrey "Uh-oh, Discourse is Changing Fast, I Staked Out the Wrong Position on Gaza Slaughter" Goldberg and Russ Douthat. Walt specifically takes Goldberg apart on his accusation that Walt and Mearsheimer said that Jews start all wars, something Goldberg said at the Yivo monsterball in '07.Walt:
Now Goldberg refers to me as someone who thinks "the Jews start all wars." Does he have any evidence to support this very serious accusation? Of course not. He's just using the same tired smear tactics that Israel's defenders commonly rely on when they can’t refute what someone actually wrote.
If anyone's curious, here's my off-the-top of my head coding of Arab-Israeli wars since 1948:
1948:
Palestinian Arabs attack nascent Jewish state; several Arab states
eventually join in. Zionists/Israelis win, and approximately 700,000
Palestinians are expelled or flee from the new Jewish state.
1956: Israel, France, and Great Britain attack Egypt. U.S. pressure eventually forces all three to withdraw from the territories they captured in the war.
1967: Israel launches surprise attack on Egypt and then Syria. Jordan foolishly enters the war and loses the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
1969: Egypt launches the "War of Attrition" against Israeli forces along the Suez Canal Zone. Fighting ends via ceasefire agreement in June 1970.
1973: Egypt and Syria launch surprise attack against Israeli forces on the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula and are eventually repulsed by the IDF.
1982: Israel invades Lebanon and IDF occupies southern portion until 2000.
So I don't think "the Jews start all wars" and I never did. Maybe Goldberg thinks I "blame the Jews" for the Iraq war. If so, he’s wrong. We did write that the influence of the neoconservatives was one of the main causes of the war, a point that the neocons used to brag about [amazing link to Kristol piece gloating about the war] and one that many other writers have made. That claim is simply not very controversial at this point: it was the neocons who dreamed up the idea and pushed it when nobody else was, so it's hard to imagine our doing it absent their influence.
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The are a number of distinctly different narratives concerning what occurred in 1948. That "Palestinian Arabs attack nascent Jewish state" is one version, stuck to of course by the Zionist camp. Without further clarification, this leaves people with the impression that the Palestinians (and Arabs) just randomly decided to attack poor little newly-formed Israel, which was just minding its own business. Of course, in order for there to be a "nascent Jewish state," ethnic cleansing already had occurred on a large scale.
One example is "Sderot," which is actually Najd, a Palestinian village which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948, BEFORE ISRAEL WAS DECLARED A STATE AND BEFORE ANY ARAB ARMIES ENTERED PALESTINE. The 600+ villagers, were forced to flee for their lives. Britain was on watch as the mandated government, while this and many other atrocities were committed by Israeli terrorists.
http://windowintopalestine.blogspot.com/2009/01/sderot-is-lie-like-everything-else.html
What Dan Kelly writes fits in with my own research that ethnic cleansing was going on by Jews during the whole year leading up
to the point in 1948 when the mandate ended, the new state was declared, and Truman rushed to recognize it (due to his election needs & flattery he succumbed to at the crucial moment, as well
as cold war strategy.
Truman rushed to recognize Israel after he received $20 million in campaign cash with the promise that he would recognize Israel.
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"The ancient Greek poet Bion said that boys cast stones* at frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest.(Bush as a lad preferred explosives.) The neoconservatives were the boys, and the people of Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon have been their frogs. The biggest danger facing the United States is that there will be no true "Clean Break" — that the neoconservatives will somehow find a way to survive the Bush administration, and continue to influence American foreign policy."
*Bush as a lad preferred to use explosives.
What would expect the secret leader of Stormfront to say? /snark off
I admit to some professional bias here, since The Israel Lobby opens with a none-too-veiled insinuation that the Atlantic, which commissioned the original essay and then declined to publish it, did so out of fear of a potential backlash from the Jews the Israel Lobby. I wasn't privy to the editorial decision-making surrounding the piece, so I'm speaking only for myself when I say that we almost certainly rejected the essay because it was lousy – because the analysis it provided on a subject of great moment was indefensibly slanted and wrapped in frankly conspiratorial thinking. Buried within that analysis was the kernel of a good point, which might have made for a good essay in different hands – just as a foreign-policy realism in general might have had a more constructive impact on public debate in the Bush Era (and it did have a constructive impact, I should allow, in many arenas) had it not been associated with such fundamentally unserious figures as Chuck Hagel and, well, the authors of The Israel Lobby.
–Posted 06 Jan 2009 01:09 pm
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/a_jewish_gaza.php
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