Gershom Gorenberg–author of an excellent piece on East Jerusalem expansion at TAP–has a somewhat-literary theory of history as random. Everything is a mess and it is a fallacy to discern intention in events. No big actors are pulling strings. A lot of individuals, many of them good people, many of them maddened, come running on to the stage, and only later can we find a pattern. But no one in the event is really that responsible. Thus he termed the colonization enterprise an "accidental empire," in his book by that name, thereby cutting the Israeli government a break on its acceptance of the religious ideology that propelled the thirst for the Jordan River.
Now in this review of Benny Morris's book, 1948, in the New York Review of Books, Gorenberg suggests that the Nakba was also an accident. A "tragedy," but a haphazard one.
Gorenberg largely accepts Morris's view that there was no plan for ethnically-cleansing Palestine of Palestinians in 1948.
Responding to immediate crises, the Haganah launched local operations.
These actions added up to a shift toward taking the offensive and in
retrospect roughly fit Plan D [expulsion]. Nor was there a plan for ethnic
cleansing of the country. Villagers sometimes fled as soon as Haganah
units approached.
That's his sole reference to ethnic cleansing. Then the Israeli government saw what had happened, Gorenberg says, and came around to the idea.
In a subsequent meeting in September [1948] the cabinet rejected an immediate
return and left the refugee question to be resolved when formal peace
was achieved. In practical terms, this was a decision to make the
exodus permanent. It was the critical moment when confusion, panic, and
ad hoc choices gave way to a deliberate, fateful policy.
Confusion, panic and ad hoc–that's Gorenberg's read on history.
The problem with Benny Morris's method in 1948, and Gorenberg's take on it, is, in a word, Israeli-centrism. Morris has long sought to dignify a questionable historical process: throwing out Palestinian
memories of the Nakba because they are unreliable oral history while
relying on Israel archives because they were contemporary
documentation. In his book, (as I complained earlier) Morris has almost exclusively cited Israeli military documents
to arrive at the general conclusion that the Arab expulsion of the '48
war
was just an unfortunate concomitant of military actions. But imagine if his standard
were enforced in the case of the Holocaust Memorial. How many pages of
wrenching testimony that we accept as true would be disallowed? Elie Wiesel wrote Night 10 years after his father died in Auschwitz; does anyone question his version of events?
Gorenberg basically accepts the Morris method. While he is frequently critical of Morris, and notes that the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba is as different from the Israeli one as night and day, he doesn't tell us much about the Palestinian narrative. He does not mention three hugely-important events: the Deir Yassin massacre on April 10, 1948, which shocked and terrified Palestinians everywhere; and the emptying out of the key cities of Jaffa and Haifa through the spring of 1948. "One had to be there to describe the numbing shock and confusion that immobilized the Palestinian people who suddenly found themselves totally under Zionist control," Fay Afaf Kanafani has written about the emptying of Haifa by Zionist gangs, one of which she observed coming down her street. "How could anyone bring the war and its artillery into a civilian home?" Her book speaks of the fog of war, yes, but says that the Zionists laid siege to Haifa. On this site I've written about Palestinians literally being forced into the sea in Jaffa as the city was emptied of nearly 70,000 Arab inhabitants by Zionist militias over a week or two in late April. The noted anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has documented the "barrel-bombs" that were rolled down into the city to terrify the population and hasten the expulsion (in Nakba, a book the New York Review of Books seems to have missed.)
Menachem Begin, a Holocaust survivor, led the Irgun when it conquered Jaffa. This was no accident. Jaffa had been promised to the Arabs under the '47 Partition Plan, but seizing it was necessary, Begin said, because Jaffa was likely "the chief instrument–in the attempt to subjugate the Jews." Begin wrote that Deir Yassin helped the Jews, by causing the Arabs to flee. More recently, Shlomo Ben-Ami has written that "a panic-stricken Arab
community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be
carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred." Ilan Pappe has looked at the pattern of these events and reached the logical conclusion that there was a conscious decision by leaders of the Jewish community to cleanse Palestine.
But there is no inkling of this pattern in Gorenberg's review. And meanwhile, he approvingly cites Anita Shapira, a Zionist historian– who in a bitter dialogue with Palestinian grad student Saif Ammous
at Columbia University Hillel two years ago over the Nakba, threw up her hands and said it was a "tragedy." Very similar to Gorenberg's passive
view of the matter.
This understanding of history seems forcibly naive to me–and narrow. Gorenberg's review includes an excited discussion of Israeli historiography and the impact of the New Historians, as if we should continue to celebrate the (hugely-important) Israeli discovery of the 1948 expulsion of refugees nearly 30 years after the historians made that discovery, but 60 years after the Palestinians knew of it.
Gorenberg describes Morris's awakening:
"Yitzhak Rabin, at the time a member of the
Knesset and former prime minister, bluntly described [in his memoirs] his own actions in 'driving out' the Arabs of Lydda and Ramle, towns conquered by the IDF
in July 1948. A cabinet-level censorship committee blue-penciled the
offending paragraphs—which nonetheless were published in The New York Times. In the early 1980s, Benny Morris was given access to the archives of
the Palmah, the pre-independence underground army that became the core
of the IDF. There he found Rabin's order to expel Lydda's Arabs."
Well good for Benny Morris. But an American readership deserves to be informed that in 1978, years before Morris's epiphany, the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington published the book, To Be an Arab in Israel, by Fouzi El-Asmar, an Israeli-American-Palestinian writer. El-Asmar's book is not listed in Morris's bibliography, nor does Morris cite it.
But El-Asmar was 10 and living in Lydda when 3/4 of the Palestinians were driven out of the area. Palestinians were "removed" from Lydda, he says, by columns of Jewish soldiers who (amid some fighting) shouted, "Go, go to King Abdallah!" The Israelis were directing the Palestinian population to walk to Jordan, or to go to a military camp, from which they would be taken to Jordan. El-Asmar's family stayed because his father was an employee of the railways; and the boy watched as men with trucks removed all the furniture from the Arab houses in the city.
Not long after the removal of all of the furniture from the houses in Lydda, Jewish families began to be housed there. They would choose a house they liked and move into it. The Arabs were not allowed to leave their own ghetto without a permit from the authorities, and the most infuriating thing for us was that our area and the other areas in Lydda which were inhabited by Arabs were under military command, while the rest of the city in which Jews lived, was not. We were not allowed out without special permits until the early fifties, while the Jews, of course, were free to walk anywhere except in our neighborhood. Every time I asked why this was being done, I would hear the answer, 'Because we are Arabs,' and I always thought to myself, What does it mean, 'We are Arabs?' This is our country, and the houses in which Jews live today were until a short while ago lived in by Arab owners who had built them with the sweat of their brows, and from whom all I hear now is messages to their relatives over the radio.
I don't expect Morris, a rightwinger, to be open to this record of suffering. But I would hope for a glimmer of it from Gorenberg, a sensitive writer. Of course both writers are Israelis, and understandably have some degree of investment in the Israeli narrative.
The issue for American readers is: As our society tries to bring its enlightened experience of minority rights to bear on Israel/Palestine, why is that elite venues like The New York Review of Books and Yale University Press maintain an investment in the Israeli narrative? (Yale has also published Morris's latest book, in which he states that Palestinians value life less than Israelis do).
The Nakba happened 61 years ago. As Rabbi Alissa Wise said the other night, it is bound up in Jewish history. It's time Americans heard the Palestinian side of the story.
I don't think Morris was quite as rightwing twenty years ago as he is know. He's clearly grown with Israel's own collective psyche, from quite Left to Far Right. I wonder if he gets on better with his erstwhile foe and main critic, the notoriously rightwing Efraim Karsh?
I want to kick Gorenberg really really hard in the nuts. Surely, then, he will be satisfied with my explanation that it was an accidental kick; that kicks to the groin, historically, are an ad-hoc matter of confusion; that no one is really responsible; that nothing can be done about it except for me to sit and write a woe-is-me tear-drenched book entitled "The Accidental Kick" where I ruminate on the real tragedy of my foot having to suffer from the anguish of smashing his nuts to pieces.
Was the holocaust an accident too?
You can't make a Zionist state in Palestine – where a vast majority of the preexisting population happened not to be Jewish – without getting rid of the non-Jews. It's inherent in the project from Day One. This puzzled retrospective hand-wringing over how on earth all those Arabs happened to be so tragically displaced is just absurd. It's an attempt to hang on to the idea of Zionism as an innocent program, by presenting its terrible impact on the Palestinians as a bug, rather than a feature.
Someone should scan Asmar's book and put it online. It's virtually unavailable.
Well spoken, saifedean.
It's funny; kind of a third or fourth line of retrenchment after the first line essentially denied any Palestinians or and thus any Nakba, then the second line that yes, it happened, but the Palestinians fled voluntarily, then another line or one-half of same saying well yes some were driven but it was in the course of a war started by arabs attacking jews, and now … ta da, the current defensive line. Moreover it doesn't even hold its own water; Gorenberg admits that in that '48 cabinet meeting the inchoate was indeed made policy, which for all intents and purposes—*especially* the moral—is nothing less than approving what had gone on before and taking advantage of it. Like the commentator John above notes, if this kind of playing out of history absolves people from what they've done, what's to be said then about the Holocaust? "Well gee, at first it was all inchoate and some parts of Germany gave up their jews to these camps and some just kicked some out of the country and then the wars started again with nobody responsible and things got a little worse and then it wasn't until Hitler saw the chance of losing that, aha, everything finally became policy and he started the gassings … so, ergo, you can't really lay this at the feet of anyone who had done anything bad before that…." Even more devastatingly, look at applying this formulation to the historical record of pogroms and etc. in Eastern Europe against jews, from which jews base so much of their (understandable) suspicion about Christians in general: You probably can't even find any final "turn to policy" ever there; it was all just … some cossacks here doing this pogrom, and those Christians over there doing that one, and on and on and thus … by Goremberg's formulation there can really be no broad moral condemnation of broad anti-semitism amongst the Eastern European Christians. Wonder what the next line of retrenchment will be? You'd almost think the double standards have all run out; every other country has to face up to its huge historic sins without fuzzing; the American genocide against the Native Americans, certainly the Germans, and on and on, except that even for its intellectuals (or perhaps especially for them), for whatever reason Israel can just never be seen as a normal state, with a normal big sin in its past. Always gotta be different somehow. Special. Yeesh.
Great point, and succinctly stated.
Has anyone analyzed the evolving narrative of the Nakba against the legal theories used in support of Holocaust reparations? At first glance, it certainly appears that reparations are due. I don't know that area of the law, so this only surmise. But it seems to me that the reparations would be huge and that therefore the effort is to avoid liability. Perhaps this subject has already been addressed?
RE: "…a panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres…" HASBARA: Whatever happened in 1948 is just 'ancient history'!
RE: "Wonder what the next line of retrenchment will be?" A POSSIBILITY: Whatever happened in 1948 is just 'ancient history'! (LOL)
"Gorenberg admits that in that '48 cabinet meeting the inchoate was indeed made policy, which for all intents and purposes—*especially* the moral—is nothing less than approving what had gone on before and taking advantage of it. " Did somebody say Wannsee Conference?" There's no HItler order in existence for the "final solution." It's a fact The SS & Zionists tried to implement transfer agreements. Things just sort of got out of hand in a war when Germany found itself fighting the Brits, Canadians, Australians,USA, & the Soviet Union, not to mention all sorts of resistance fighters in OTs?
Not to worry; if Israel agrees to pay reparations in some future peace agreement, the USA will fully fund those reparations, while simultaneously donating additional funds to the Palestinians for reconstruction. On the other hand since the same roosters have been granted extended stays in the USA Wall St-Fed Reserve hen houses, even China may decide to no longer loan us money at any interest rate.
A panic-stricken Jewish community was uprooted under the impact of Germany still at core recoiling from WW1 reparations and finding itself at war with so many great powers. What happened back then is truly ancient history.
True, and there was no plan to exterminate the native Americans either; those blankets were given with the best intentions–nobody knew much about smallpox back then. Ditto Spain didn't know its Conquistadors carried germs with immunity; how were they to know the natives didn't have the same immunity?
Norman Finkelstein eviscerated the very claims Morris is hoping to recycle in his new book. The chapter "Born of war, not of design" in Finkelstein's "Image and Reality" takes up Morris' calumny in serious detail. Ilan Pappe's the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine puts the final nail in the coffin of the "fog of war" arguments of Morris and others. Of course, there's really no need to rely solely on the fossilized remnants of Israel's barbarities of 1948. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is in full swing today. Tactics have changed, the exterminationist mindset has not.
RE: "What happened back then is truly ancient history." MY COMMENT: truly, truly, truly the most ancient of ancient histories!
"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" -Gersho Marx, the lost Marx Brother
Funny, Norman Finkelstein uses Morris as his main source. Finkelstein does not speak Hebrew or Arabic. All his research is second hand and second rate. He uses no original documents, merely interprets the works of others. While I disagree with much of Morris' work, Finkelstein is not in Morris' class as a Historian. Pappe freely admits to bias. "My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers." http://www.meforum.org/897/a-history-of-modern-pa...
The purposes of the 47 and 48 wars from the Palestinian perspective were not merely defensive, but included the agenda of removing the Jews from the region, and certainly of prohibiting the then European refugee majority of Jews in the land from self-governing, from having a Jewish state. It is at the least a generalization to state that "the Jews", "the Zionists" sought to remove the Palestinians from the land. It is at worst a revisionism. (The same term used to describe the ideology of Jabotinsky and Begin and Shamir). The question to Morris and to Gorenburg is "what was intended?" With the goal of current PR to state that that prior intention is still the same today, that the history of the last 60+ years is only a conspiracy and not a mix of intention by some, uncontrollable accidents of history, and opportunism by power-seeking individuals and parties on all sides of the conflict. The description of "conspiracy" is INNACCURATE, as appealing as that may be to Ilan Pappe, or Phil Weiss. Saif, Your "accidental kick" would in fact be intentional. You stated it here. Angers, reasonable ones, but played out in ways that realize the oppossite of good for any. At the end of the 1948 war, the population of Israel was between 15 and 20% Arab, when prior it was 60% Arab. The population of the West Bank was .1% Jewish, when prior it was between 10 and 15%. There WAS an ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank. There was migration to rationally avoid the war-zone in Israel. The more significant "ethnic cleansing" events came in the early 50's, in which Israel enacted laws that prohibited return, established an unnaturally high bar for Arab legal claims to land, then expropriated land that was "abandoned" and transferred title to the land to the Jewish Agency. The war was a tragedy born of the NEED for survival on the part of Israelis/Zionists, on the NEED for survival on the part of the Palestinians, opportunism on the part of the Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis. Saif, Another oddity of your intention to "kick Gorenberg in the nuts", is that Gorenberg is a consistent and convincing advocate for decency for the Palestinian people. Similar for the idiotic conclusion that Morris is "right-wing", stated as an identity, a permanence, when Morris' work over the decades has been the difference between the silence of the history of the Palestinian experience in the west, and the acknowledgement of it.
Also, Ilan Pappe is less than an authority on the math of "what was intended". I would recommend the work of Baruch Kimmerling, also a "new historian", consistently highly critical of Israeli policies and practises (now deceased unfortunately), but remained a Zionist to his death. How is that possible? How can a committed humanist choose to remain an Israeli citizen, choose to name himself as a Zionist to his death, while still expressing such severe criticisms of Israeli policy? Its a question that is lost to Phil in his "moments" of commitment to his revisionism (also without thorough study).
if one combines the opinions expressed in polls in two recent mondoweiss posts one can reach a conclusion. young israeli jews are less likely (than their elders) to believe the traditional zionist narrative regarding the causes for the exodus of the palestinian refugees in 48 and are also less likely to support a two state solution. thus, they believe that the early zionists were largely responsible for the exodus and also that a further exodus (ethnic cleansing) will be necessary. i think that the zionist leaders were surprised by the exodus and pleasantly surprised by it. morris's most substantial narrative in his original book on the birth of the refugee problem regards the city of haifa. this largest of arab populations in nascent israel might have stayed, but chose not to. a choice to stay would have been fraught with danger, but the zionist 'gangs" that were present in haifa were hagana rather than irgun and staying was an option, which was not chosen. this does not exonerate all zionists in all situations of the war, but since it was the single largest exodus, it does deserve mention.
…and to prove his non-existent point, thedhimmi directs me to an article by the notorious Judeo-Nazi and darling of such "serious" publications as Commentary and FrontPage, Efraim Karsh, whom exactly NO ONE takes seriously, (Morris refers to him as a holocaust denier and a nut). I invite any unfamiliar with this absurd person to google him and familiarize yourself a bit with his impressively prolific stream of anti-Arab vomit. Witty (surprise surprise) has zero idea what he's talking about. Baruch Kimmerling's book "Politicide" makes a virtually identical case to Ilan Pappe's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" drawing on the same material concerning Plan Dalet, Israel's desgn for the ethnic cleansing, exhaustively documented in the 8 volume Book of Haganah History—an official document of the israeli military: http://books.google.com/books?id=TE8oCW2J2F4C&...
Dickerson, I think that's been Shlomo Ben-Ami's argument for a while, actually. (His theology gets very Christian when he talks about '48 – it's all 'born in sin', the immaculate birth of Jesus, etc. Listen to his discussion with Finkelstein on Democracy Now.)
I haven't seen any legal analysis directly relating it to Holocaust reparations, but the ICJ noted that all refugees who decide not to make use of the right of return must receive reparations from Israel.
But that's actually pure falsification of history: read, e.g., Tom Segev's The Seventh MIllion. Few in the Yishuv felt much sympathy for the 'weak' 'Old Jews' who survived the Holocaust – but they worked hard to ensure that so many as possible couldn't go to the US or other places, but had to go to Palestine to serve as fodder for the Zionist enterprise (Holocaust survivors were, for example, systematically placed in the most distant and least-defended villages. And the treatment they received from Israeli psychiatrists…)
You know, Richard, people here would grant you a brownie point or two for having the integrity to admit you have never read a word of Baruch Kimmerling and haven't any idea what his position is or where he stands relative to Ilan Pappe, Avi Shliam, Benny Morris or any of the other New Historians. Barring this unlikely event, we'll stick to our assumptions: you're a freelance obfuscater.
'Another and possibly better option, however, would be to begin differently, and to mention straightaway what had been the purpose of that entire day from the start, “operational order” number such and such, on such and such a day of the month, in the margin of which, in the final section that was simply titled “miscellaneous,” it said, in a short line and a half, that although the mission must be executed decisively and precisely whatever happened, “no violent outbursts or disorderly conduct” — it said — “would be permitted,” which only indicated straightaway that there was something amiss, that anything was possible (and even planned and foreseen), and that one couldn’t evaluate this straightforward final clause before returning to the opening and also scanning the noteworthy clause entitled “information,” which immediately warned of the mounting danger of “infiltrators,” “terrorist cells,” and (in a wonderful turn of phrase) “operatives dispatched on hostile missions,” but also the subsequent and even more noteworthy clause, which explicitly stated, “assemble the inhabitants of the are extending from point X (see attached map) to point Y (see same map) — load them onto transports, and convey them across our lines; blow up the stone houses, and burn the huts; detain the youths and the suspects, and clear the area of ‘hostile forces,’” and so on and so forth — so that it was now obvious how many good and honest hopes were being invested in those who were being sent out to implement all this “burn-blow-up-imprison-load-convey,” who would burn blow up imprison load and convey with such courtesy and with a restraint born of true culture, and this would be a sign of a wind of change, of decent upbringing, and, perhaps, even of the Jewish soul, the great Jewish soul.' –S. Yizhar [Yizhar Smilansky], Khirbet Khizeh, transl. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck, with an afterword by David Shulman, Jerusalem: Ibis, 2008, pp. 8-9 [originally published in 1949]
You know though you have to kind of admire Gorenberg's ambition. After all how many people found entire new schools of history? Marx of course, Butterfield with Whiggish history, Bloch with the Annales school. And now … the Shit Happens School.
I consistently admire Gorenberg's work, attitude, life. He's an orthodox Jew that dares to speak truth, including very candid and often very critical comments of Israeli political and social life. Phil's take on this work is only to savage Gorenberg. Its very odd if you read the whole review. The responses of the cadre are sadly predictable, and frankly thoughtless. Was the 1947-48 war a conspiracy or a tragedy? The healing of it is the same (mutual acceptance in the PRESENT). The legality of it is the same (compensation to perfect title). The only aspect of the question that stops either healing or justice, is the fomentation of angers. That would be great for Phil to assert, if he had a basis of knowledge to bring to it, from MULTIPLE sources, that added up to an over-arching conclusion, rather than an anecdotal. The logic of "shit happened, it must have been planned" is RARELY true. The logic of "shit happened, there must have been a way to have avoided it, so we can learn from history how to avoid the repetition of similar" is a worthy inquiry.
Philip asks (in an otherwise outstanding post) "How many pages of wrenching testimony that we accept as true would be disallowed? Elie Wiesel wrote Night 10 years after his father died in Auschwitz; does anyone question his version of events? " Actually, Hillberg and other holocaust historians regard Night as essentially a hoax and have pointed to particular segments that do not jibe with known history and other key eyewitnesses to the events Weasel describes. A holocaust hoax appears in the literature with dismaying regularity, invariably accepted at first blush as 'a heart-breaking work of staggering genius' before being exposed as a threadbare publicity stunt—most recently, Herman Rosenblat. http://buzznewsroom.com/wtf/oprah-supported-holoc... One could well understand skepticism of the Nakba if Palestinians were on Oprah every month hawking a new phony book they'd dreamt up.
There are two other dilemmas that a rational skeptic must address relative to Palestinian historiography. The first is the absence of any "new historians" (that I'm aware of currently. I would like to know of some if they are around) that question the "official" narrative. Certainly, there must be a variety of interpretations of what occurred. Likely, some objective Palestinian historian would conclude that the history of the nakba was more "tragedy" than "conspiracy", and for some series of evidence. With that, it would then be possible to trace the veracity and pattern, whether through overt coordinated conspiracy or collective shared consciousness (NOT a conspiracy, more a common response in a common setting). Absent any demonstrated variety in Palestinians' interpretations, it looks to me like propaganda. (There is always truth in propaganda, or else it wouldn't convince anyone. But, the MATH is for the purpose of an agenda, not for knowledge or for creative reconciliation.) The second problem is that the idea of a conspiracy, is EXACTLY the same language as is used to justify attacks on Iran (reasoning that deserves to be criticized). How does someone like Phil CHOOSE to not apply the same methodology as those he criticizes? By avoiding ANY simplistic conspiratorial orientation or implication.
senhal–awesome post.
You're right. I thinks this calls for an institute. Someone call Harvard – as long as it's well-funded, they'd love a Golda Meir Institute of Shit Happens History. The History department would probably insist on it being separate, but that's even better: a new, pathbreaking graduate program in Shit Happens History (minors in Israel Studies available). Just think: the Theodor Herzl Professorship in Advanced Denialism, the Anita Shapira Fellowship in tragedy studies… the list goes on and on.
Tom Segev's The Seventh MIllion is an excellent book. It talks about the widespread use of the slang term savonim (meaning "bars of soap") applied by Israelis to European Jews. It also mentions a shrine, which sounds utterly grotesque, maintained by a religious Jew somewhere in Israel, at which one of these bars of soap is displayed, as a sort of ex- human icon of Jewishness. Everybody knows it's phony, but what the hell, it's good hasbara.
Quite right; Wiesel is widely regarded as a shameless fabricator, many of his tales are patently preposterous, and some claim he is not even who he claims to be, but an impersonator.
Yeah, Finkelstein just thinks. He could a had class like Benny, but instead…! He could a been a doctor, but no, he has to waste his time thinking and talking; he could a had tenure! Some people!
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003, 604 pages. Read it. You guess a lot R, and innaccurately.
I think, Richard, the new Israelis looked evil in the face and didn't recognize it. After all, they'd been living with it for a while. Just more of the same.
Richard, I think Saifedean's comment may be in memoriam of May 15. That's how I responded, anyway. I think I owe Jacobwolf an apology; he caught the last of my anger about May 15.
Any reparations due will have to be paid by Britain and the UN.
Morris' work, Finkelstein is not in Morris' class as a Historian. You are comparing apples and pears. And your argument isn't especially new. It's in fact the main line of assault against Finkelstein, that he is no scholar at all. Sometimes he is even quoted out of context to show he admits that he actually thinks so himself. Just in case you have especially "Image and Reality" in mind. Already the title suggests it is an attempt at deconstructing ideoglies. A fascinating field, that is far from unimportant. Don't you think that for a political scientist it is of utter importance to not get entangled in the presented mythoi but in the reality on the ground, the intentions.
The fringe left may not take Karsh seriously, but he is a well respected historian. He is Professor and Head of the Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College London. Where does Morris call Karsh a Holocaust denier? Did you make that up? Where's the link? Actually Morris had to admit Karsh was right. "Karsh has a point. My treatment of transfer thinking before 1948 was, indeed, superficial…He is probably right in rejecting the transfer interpretation I suggested in The Birth to a sentence in [a speech by Ben-Gurion on December 3, 1947] Karsh appears to be correct in charging that I stretched the evidence to make my point.[4]."
The quote about Pappe's bias is Pappe's not Karsh. Is the quote false? What does the great Benny Morris say about Pappe "Unfortunately much of what Pappé tries to sell his readers is complete fabrication. [...] This book is awash with errors of a quantity and a quality that are not found in serious historiography. [...] The multiplicity of mistakes on each page is a product of both Pappé's historical methodology and his political proclivities[.] [...] For those enamored with subjectivity and in thrall to historical relativism, a fact is not a fact and accuracy is unattainable."[26] " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Papp%C3%A9 "Complete fabrication" Is their anything worse a historian can say about another historian that his work is "complete fabrication".
Actually, the VAST majority of Native Americans that died when the Europeans came over were from new diseases unintentionally introduced into the ecology of North America. The second most devastating source of Native American deaths resulted from inter-tribal warfare (that was an indirect result of the presence of the Europeans on the eastern seaboard, that pushed the Native Americans west, in a sort of domino effect, each tribe moving slightly west.) The third most devastating source of Native American deaths was from the results of Europeans' actions, the blankets are true but very uncommon. The more realistic causes are violating treaties (say for the purpose of Lincoln's Homestead Act) and putting them on reservations.
Something doesn't make sense here. "It is at the least a generalization to state that "the Jews", "the Zionists" sought to remove the Palestinians from the land." How were they going to have a Jewish state, then? And the Revisionists called themselves.
I believe that's because Finkelstein graduated in political science, not history. I don't speak Hebrew either, Lord help me, I can never know the truth about anything Israeli ! All Hail to the Hebrew Speaking Elites who shall lead us to a shiny and rosy future !
a perfect exercise of jewnazis in jewnazism
The generalization is in numbers. The majority of Jews that settled in the land emigrated to there to live, not to conquer perse. War came about because the residents did not accept them living there even, did not accept ANY Jewish majority plebiscite in any boundary under any non-Arab jurisdiction.
It's quite interesting Richard, that you suggest that book. Not that it's bad, but it came into existence in a short interval of hope it seems. Even Avi Shlaim's publications are inspired by this general feeling at that time. Although, I am sure you don't like Shlaim, who actually writes about a real conspiracy. Which I guess you would prefer to see censored. Politics often rely on Machiavellian rules, but please not when Israel and/or Jews are involved? See: The Protocols of Sèvres. Which Morris doesn't mention. Why didn't you suggest this one, one he wrote when he had lost hope? Politicide: Ariel Sharon's war against the Palestinians
Zionism was first and primarily a settlement movement, a residence movement. It is a revision to describe it as a colonial expropriation movement. There was NO INNOCENCE anywhere on the planet from 1930 – 1950. The suppression of Jewish residence in locales in the region by Arab violence, from the 20's on, is NOT INNOCENT. There was not innocence in Europe in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Austria, Russia, that suppressed Jews over most of a century, by violence. There was not innocence in Great Britain, France, US, Canada, that refused to absorb Jewish European refugees following the war. There was not innocence on the part of the Palestinian Arabs, nor other Arabs, in rejecting the 1947 proposed borders of Jewish state, accepted by Zionists. There was not innocence on the part of Arab and Islamic states from 1949 – in encouraging and forcing the removal of Jews from Tunisia, Morrocco, Libya, Altgeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen. What is needed NOW is reconciliation and mutual acceptance of current stability, not resentment for prior instability.
The legality of it is the same (compensation to perfect title). Are you basically relying on the registration chaos of the Ottoman period considering title and rights?
Likely, some objective Palestinian historian would conclude that the history of the nakba was more "tragedy" than "conspiracy", and for some series of evidence. Actually I think that the nakba is centrally understood as a tragedy. How could it be otherwise. But the best you can do to not let a consistent Palestinian social history or a Palestinian social science come into existence is to keep them down, destroy their schools and universities and block scholarships uproad and or put their intellectuals into prison on secret evidence that can't even be challenged by a legal scholar (remember the case Phil wrote about?). And why would it necessarily need "new historians" on the Palestine side. Do they always have to act as mirror images of Israel? I don't see why. I guess you mean with the above that the sign of objectivity would be how well it can be integrated into the larger Israeli narrative? It would be non-objective if it discovered patterns that contradict e.g. Benny Morris?
You INDULGE in false character defamation by your idiotic comment on "preferring censorship". I haven't read the Politicide book. I was INTERESTED in the history of the Palestinian people, and his work that I referred was the most consistently lauded work by any author among the solidarity people that I sought recommendations from, including Palestinians. (I've still not received recommendations from Palestinians on a comprehensive and self-inquiring history). You take pot-shots on the basis of whether one regards the Israeli/Palestinian relationship as solely or primarily a conspiratorial oppression, or a tragic conflict. Its an incredibly dumb basis of "us/them" for anyone that sincerely wishes to change the situation in any relatively positive manner. (As there is no "perfection", the relatively positive is the only game.) The reason I say that is that a true dismisser of Palestinian historial or current experience, would conclude that there is no tragedy even. To make common cause with those that see that there is a tragedy even, is a path for improvement rather than nothing, or worse. You make a friend into an enemy, rather than an opponent into a friend.
I'm referring to the current status of contested title, that requires compensation or other consented court determination to perfect the title of land to consented. I regard much of the land in Israel as in that state of contested title status as well. You've not read, or bothered to remember my posts, to imply differently.
One has to be really ignorant about the big discussions among historians to use such a statement against the author. The problem with honesty is that it can be turned against you by nitwits among your enemies. Nothing new under the sun. Better feign that "objectivity" exists. While reality as such obviously always escapes the grasp of the historian he can only come close to it.
Karsh's work on the Middle East has received criticism. In a review of Empires of the Sand, Dr. Anthony Toth (D.Phil, Oxford) says This is a polemical book whose authors have extended the intemperate and unbalanced rhetoric customarily employed by dogmatic partisans of the Arab Israeli conflict to the normally sedate and measured arena of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman history. and The book relies mainly on Western published sources and official British documents. But their use of even these sources is limited, since they actually ignore most of nineteenth-century history. Instead, the authors emphasize those episodes they feel support their interpretations. [5] In an answer to Karsh's criticism on the New Historians, Morris responded in four lines: Efraim Karsh's article (…) is a mélange of distortions, half-truths, and plain lies that vividly demonstrates his profound ignorance of both the source material (…) and the history of the Zionist-Arab conflict. It does not deserve serious attention or reply.[6] Morris later gave more extensive criticism in a review of Fabricating Israeli History: But this is Karsh's way, to belabor minor points while completely ignoring, and hiding from his readers, the main pieces of evidence. and It is a measure of Karsh's ignorance of what actually went on in the Middle East in 1948 that he writes (p. 97) of "the Arab attack on the newly-established State of Israel, in which Transjordan's Arab Legion participated." Quite simply, it did not. and Karsh employs his usual method of focusing on the one document that seems to uphold his argument-often while twisting its real purport-while simply ignoring the mas of documents that undercut it. [7] Political scientist Ian Lustick describes Karsh's writing in Fabricating Israeli History as malevolent and the nature of his analysis as erratic and sloppy. The book, he wrote, is ripe with 'howlers, contradictions and distortions'.[8] Lustick points to six instances in which Karsh gives quotes that say the very opposite of what Karsh tells his readers they say. One example he gives is of a statement made by Golda Meir that Karsh alludes to in support of his argument that there was never an agreement between Abdullah of Transjordan and the Zionist leadership. In the quote itself, according to the interpretation of Lustick, Meir explicitly writes about an agreement: 'The meeting [in November 1947] was conducted on the basis that there was an arrangement and an understanding as to what both of us wanted and that our interests did not collide'.[9] Professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of War Studies at King's College London Yezid Sayigh[10] has commented of Karsh that, "He is simply not what he makes himself out to be, a trained historian (nor political/social scientist)," and encouraged "robust responses [that] make sure that any self-respecting scholar will be too embarrassed to even try to incorporate the Karsh books in his/her teaching or research because they can't pretend they didn't know how flimsy their foundations are."[11] Citing his doctorate in political science and international relations and his undergraduate training in modern Middle Eastern history and Arabic language and literature, Karsh wrote that Sayigh's criticism were "not a scholarly debate on facts and theses but a character assassination couched in high pseudo-academic rhetoric".[12] Professor of History at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University Richard Bulliet, in an academic review, describes the Karshs Empires of the Sand as "a tendentious and unreliable piece of scholarship that should have been vetted more thoroughly by the publisher" and asserts that the authors failed to "contribute a dimension of sense and scholarship that raises the debate[s in question] to a higher level." [13] but DANIEL PIPES LIKES IT!!!!! Ha Ha Ha Ha HA!! Stop it, …my are killing me!
Yes, I have seen and heard Ilan Pappe state openly that he does not care about the facts as long as he succeeds in furthering his Communist agenda.
I must disagree on several grounds. Let's call your approach "Weiss-centric". In this approach, you assume that you are correct and everyone else is wrong. However, your central argument, that Morris dignifies "a questionable historical process: throwing out Palestinian memories of the Nakba because they are unreliable oral history while relying on Israel archives because they were contemporary documentation", is unfair and unfounded. As a historian (and particularly a military historian), Morris is perfectly correct to opt for documentation, and peasants don't tend to document events. Even if he were to include Palestinian memories, he would have to balance these with Israeli oral histories to be comparing apples with apples. (And I'm willing to bet that Lila abu-Lughod didn't even bother to interview Jews or consult with the documents in the archives.)
(Continued) You also state that "Elie Wiesel wrote Night 10 years after his father died in Auschwitz; does anyone question his version of events?" But that really isn't the point, is it, because not only did the Germans meticulously document their implementation of the "Final Solution", but so did the Jews as it was happing. So, even if Wiesel's account wasn't true or was exaggerated, there were many, many other, well-documented cases to make this one plausible.
(Continued) Finally, you fault Morris (and Gorenberg) for not consulting al-Asmar about Lydda (Lod). The "ethnic cleansing" of Lod and Ramle during Operation Dani is the chief argument for the carrying out of Tohnit Dalet as first uncovered by Uri Milstein and later used by Benny Morris! Today, most Israelis agree that Lod/Ramle had been "ethnically cleansed". Why on earth would he need to consult the memories of a 10-yearold when he had incontrovertable evidence from the IDF archives themselves that Lod had been "ethnically cleansed", and that those actions had been part of a plan? Oh, and just one minor correction. You stated that Menahem Begin was a Holocaust survivor. He was not. He was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and sent to Siberia.
richard witty While your latest contribution to aleatoric poetry contained some arresting images, I'd prefer one in which you addressed my point. Kimmerling agrees on the basis of the documentary record, that Israel's premeditated plans to terrorize Palestinians and force them to flee their villages before these villages were subsequently destroyed, as well as the incessant drumbeat of Ben Gurion and the rest that the Palestinians must be cleared from the land is entirely consistent with Ilan Pappe's rendering of this history. To deny this is to misread (or more likely, FAIL to read) either one of these scholars. Frankly, I have no objection to you posting your David Koreshian "theories" and madness. I DO mind when you put this nonsense in the mouthes of reputable historians, despite the fact that their own position is diametrically opposed to yours.
Richard, well stated. The war was one of "ethnic cleansing" on both sides, because "ethnic cleansing" was not considered unusual at the time. In fact, there wasn't even a term for it until 1991! The fact that one side failed miserably to "cleanse" the other side does not mean that they are entitled to special consideration.
How did I ever attribute a false quote to Kimmerling? "premeditated plans". You think that Plan Dalet was a premeditated plan, prior to actual war? And, you don't think that there was orchestrated efforts to remove Jews from the land? But, somehow that is excusable to you?
Pappe is not a reputable historian. I have heard him, with my own ears, say that he is willing to subordinate the facts to his chosen (Communist) narrative. Historians don't speak of "narratives"; ideologues and literary critics do. That's what Pappe is.
Pappe is a self-defined propagandist. Have you read the History of the Palestinian People by Kimmerling? He confirms that Palestinian society was in a state of internal conflict, social change, independant of and preceeding Zionism. Further, he confirms that the social pressures of increase population in the region as a whole (resulting from natural growth, immigration of both Jews and Arabs, and class conflicts) was the predominant form of social struggle in the region. I'm NOT a proponent of class struggle. I am a proponent of class and personal empowerment, and seek means to help Palestinians and all to improve their lives. I assume that a portion of that includes political efforts, to ACHIEVE self-determination primarily. I believe that it is in Israel's interests for the Arab League proposal to be ratified and implemented (with the exception of Jewish control over the Kotel and Jewish portions of the walled city). For you to describe me consistently as some "racist", or "expansionist" is idiotic on your part, an effort at radical vanity rather than practical liberation. As a result of reading Morris, and Kimmerling (who each convinced me). I've read Pappe, but I found his style to be so rhetorical as to be uninformative. I distrusted his vagugeness and negative generalization for its lack of specificity, except very selectively to propagate for his own thesis. His work reminded me of Finkelstein's and Chomsky's in that regard, NOT research with a clean slate for knowledge and/or mutual reconciliation, but research as a weapon Kimmerling's work inspired me to advocate for the rule of law as to title and sovereignty. If you don't respect the stand of advocating for the rule of law, including the repeal of 50's Israeli laws prohibiting equal due process, as progressive, then you have your head up your ass.
Of course Plan Dalet was pre-meditated "prior to actual war" you crazy timber pest. It was worked out from autumn 1947 to spring 1948 and was, as khalidi succinctly described it, a "Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" "And, you don't think that there was orchestrated efforts to remove Jews from the land? But, somehow that is excusable to you" I encourage you to ease up a bit on the hallucinogens, Witty. I assure you that life is full of enchantments even without resort to being stoned out of your ever-loving mind.
Of course you can, by residence. The Palestinians adopted the same language to prohibit Jewish immigration as Zionists adopted to prohibit the right of return of Palestinians. To a democratic consciousness, there is no valid national or ethnic screen to residence. It is SAD that the left selectively attacks only Zionist actions and functional prohibitiions but IGNORES Palestinian and Arab actions and prohibitions. (For example, currently it is illegal for a Jew to buy land in the West Bank, on punishment of death to the seller.) That does not seem "democratic" to me.
I agree with you that Israelis often rationalize their own prejudices. I just wish that the anti-Zionists would acknowledge similarly.
Jes I want to congratulate you for receiving a +1 from Richard Witty. Granted, some might view this as a dubious distinction, given the fact that he doesn't even know that Plan Dalet was formulated in 1947. For the record, Karsh (again!) lies through his teeth in the quotation supplied by DIM ini. In fact, as one keen observer noted, on the Karsh-worshipping website of the nutcase Daniel Pipes: "Karsh's treatment of Morris is deeply worrying. The quote from Morris that starts "Karsh has a point. My treatment of transfer thinking before 1948 was, indeed, superficial" particularily so. If this quotation had been fairly presented, Karsh has forced Morris to back down. But the source, (Times Literary Supplement, 28 November 1997) has Morris writing exactly the opposite. Rather that conceding about "transfer" in the direction of Karsh's viewpoint, he wrote "Since writing my books on 1948 (The Birth and 1948 and after, 1990, revised 1994), I have begun to probe pre-1948 Zionist thinking on transfer, and the evidence so far unearthed and published, of which Karsh is well aware, has only strengthened my original conclusion – that the Zionist leadership devoted much time and thought to the subject and consensually accepted a transfer solution to the Arab problem (though it preferred, for good diplomatic and political reasons, not to publicize this)." In other words, Karsh misrepresents this document. If we can't trust Karsh to be honest about such easily obtained sources as TLS, why should we trust anything he writes about obscure documents in the archives?"
Ilan Pappe's reply to the self-defined Nazi Benny Morris: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2555.shtm...
You INDULGE in false character defamation by your idiotic comment on "preferring censorship". . I was actually asking a question. Not trying to defame you or suggesting you prefer censorship. But I am simply puzzled that you keep mentioning conspiracy lately. And this is one item on the Palestinian/Arab's suggested conspiracy list. You take pot-shots on the basis of whether one regards the Israeli/Palestinian relationship as solely or primarily a conspiratorial oppression, or a tragic conflict. Absolutely not. Now you are defaming. But if you do it's objectivity, right? All I suggested is that in a conflict about the same land, something Palestinians feared early, no matter how unaware they were of the Jewish history at the time, it seems quite obvious that people would resort to ruses to arrive at an even better outcome. … Again, I am taking no pot shots at anything, I am asking questions. There is a real danger that Israel keeps simply pushing ahead since wants to avoid confronting past issues, the ultimate necessity for healing. Look if you honestly believe I am denying the tragic elements of the story, than you are even less able to read than I thought. I am not out to make either friends or enemies I want to understand.
Again, Lea, if Finkelstein's "scholarship" has any value at all, it is as a critique of narratives, not as history. Perhaps the title of his book should have been Reality and Image!
I would think that one who would like to be considered a scholar of Israel would take the trouble to learn Hebrew, and one who presumes to be an expert in Israeli-Palestinian affairs would also learn Arabic. It is not that you can never know the "truth about anything Israeli", it's just that you shouldn't pose as an expert.
You know, rykart, I can cut and paste whole, lengthy passages (replete with footnote numbers) from Wikipedia too, but it doesn't make me a scholar! ROFLMAO!!!
I believe, rykart, that Night is an autobiographical novel. Do you know what a novel is, rykart? It's essentially a work of fiction, although it can be based on fact and then embellished. I don't believe taht Hillberg ever accused Wiesel of perpetrating a "hoax". (BTW, I also heard the interveiw with him where he supposedly "lavished praise" on young Norman. I don't think that that was the case either.)
So support their schools, their universities. The significance of the new historians is objectivity and self-inquiry. BOTH are needed from the Palestinian voice. Not only self-inquiry as to inquiry into "collaboration with the enemy", but ACTUAL self-inquiry.
Autumn 1947 was in the midst of war. That is NOT "prior to war". Wake up R. There are multiple parties in this conflict, that deserve a path to reconciliation, not a path to justification for abuses of the other. Where do you quote Khalidi from? What is the context? What is the source?
Hey, does my comment and his reply show up for any one? I'll reproduce it from the e-mail with my next reply. — Something doesn't make sense here. "It is at the least a generalization to state that "the Jews", "the Zionists" sought to remove the Palestinians from the land." How were they going to have a Jewish state, then? And the Revisionists called themselves. — The generalization is in numbers. The majority of Jews that settled in the land emigrated to there to live, not to conquer perse. War came about because the residents did not accept them living there even, did not accept ANY Jewish majority plebiscite in any boundary under any non-Arab jurisdiction. — And why should they? The Jewish settlers weren't interested in conquest, but it's all the Arabs' fault for not accepting partition. Wow, partition doesn't sound a bit like conquest. Plus, every one knows during the Ottoman-era, peasants were forcibly evicted after their land was sold to absentee landlords. To pretend Zionism had a neutral effect at worst on the surrounding inhabitants is using a forked tongue. And you don't think it's a generalization that the "residents" not accepting partition made war necessary? I know, I know, the refugees were conspiring to drive the Jews out even as they fled.
I don't post + or -. The popularity approach is childish, especially on political stacked decks.
The wiki entry quotes the leading scholars in the field, including the far-right benny morris to the effect that Efraim Karsh is a fabricator and polemicist, worthy only of consideration by the likes of Frontpage and allied Judeo-nazi propagandists. frankly, if you could manage to post a link (besides one from Frontpage, Massada2000, the IDF website or similar Nazi sources) maybe someone here would take your ranting seriously.
In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel explicitly says, "Night is not a novel," calling it his "deposition,"[49] and writes that he "object[s] angrily" if someone implies it is a work of fiction.[2] He writes that he wants his readers to know that "the truth I present is unvarnished; I cannot do otherwise.[50] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book) That's right, Jes. you just suffered death by wikipedia. AGAIN! You ought to take a look at this useful resource now and then, as it stands to spare you future embarrassment. Raul Hilberg on Norman Finkelstein: "However, leaving aside the question of style — and here, I agree that it’s not my style either — the substance of the matter is most important here, particularly because Finkelstein, when he published this book, was alone. It takes an enormous amount of academic courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him. And so, I think that given this acuity of vision and analytical power, demonstrating that the Swiss banks did not owe the money, that even though survivors were beneficiaries of the funds that were distributed, they came, when all is said and done, from places that were not obligated to pay that money. That takes a great amount of courage in and of itself. So I would say that his place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and that those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost." Maybe a great scholar will one day write something as laudatory about YOU, Jes! Not bloody likely though, is it?
Benny Morris does not speak Arabic. As for Efriam Karsh, he doesn't even speak English.
Pappe is a self-defined propagandist. Look, I really hate it if people repeat what they read somewhere like parapeets. And when ethically aware people resort to slander. I try not to do it myself. If I don't know anything about it. But concerning Illan Pappe, and no I haven't read him, but I have read somewhere that he belongs basically into the same school as Baruch Kimmlering: the Colonialist School of Zionism and Israel. Baruch Kimmerling, 1983: "We are a nation of settling immigrants who came together … to dispossess other people" History has never been my field but starting in the early eighties I got interested in the larger discussion of the field,and especially in methods and the discussion and awareness for its intersections with literature. But let me cite somebody else in this context, http://www.routledgemiddleeaststudies.com/books/P...
Khalidi's landmark paper on Plan Dalet http://www.palestine-studies.org/enakba/Khalidi,%...
Ilan Pappe does speak Arabic and insists on including arab voices in his account of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the very approach you CLAIM to favor, except when the fruits of such research cast the Israelis in an appropriately despicable light.
It's pretty hard to get into the reality of historical events when you can't read original documentation and rely on the interpretations and translations of others. Karsh proved that several of the "new historians" simply mistranslated documents to prove their points. http://books.google.com/books?id=nvgat25ddU4C&...
This card is getting a bit worn out. Even if it was the agenda for both sides, the fact that Israel has been doing it non-stop for 60 years and only indicates it will continue no matter what the Arab side does means that transfer is its raison d'etre. The Palestinian refugees should be let back not just to undo their original ethnic cleansing, but to abolish Israel so it can't finish the job.
"Of course you can, by residence. " No, you can't make a Zionist state in Palestine simply by having Zionist Jews take up residence in Palestine. The size of the preexisting non-Jewish majority is simply too large for Zionist immigration to overcome. At the time of the first Zionist aliya, the population of Palestine was 85% Muslim, 11% Christian and 4% Jewish. It was never going to be possible to turn around that demographic landscape through immigration alone, no matter how much liberal Zionists would like that to be true. Israel Zangwill said as much in 1904: "There is … a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having 52 souls to every square mile, and not 25 percent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan." If you want to make a Zionist state in Palestine, with its 4% preexisting Jewish population, you have to immigrate, but you also have to get rid of the get rid of the Arabs. There isn't any other way.
In the region that the UN suggested in its first allocation, Jews were a majority by residence. The Arab locals and the Arab states rejected ANY self-governing Jewish state.
Lea, first of all, I recommend for some perspective that you read Abdullah Laroui's 1974 work, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditional or Histoicism? to gain some perspective. Laruoui (who is far from a Zionist) argues that the traditional "historiography" of the Arabs leads to a lack of acceptance of causality which, in turn, leads to a lack of acceptance of responsibility. Secondly, you are correct in your understanding that the word nakba means 'tragedy' (or 'catastrpophy') in Arabic. However, this term (as it was first used by George Antonius in the 1930s) meant the loss of Arab land; not the tragedy that befell the people who lived on that land. In fact, the Palestinians who fled were blamed for having fled (even though their leadership essentially blamed them) as opposed to fighting for the land and honor. This attitude persisted up until the 1970s when Israeli Arabs successfully carried out the first "Land Day" demonstrations.
But the best you can do to not let a consistent Palestinian social history or a Palestinian social science come into existence is to keep them down, destroy their schools and universities and block scholarships uproad and or put their intellectuals into prison on secret evidence that can't even be challenged by a legal scholar…. Well, here's what Efraim Karsh says (all based on verifiable, international sources): "…during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980s, the number of schoolchildren in the territories gew by 102 percent… though the population itself had grown only by 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the onset of the Israeli occupaton of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in those territories. By the early 1990s, there were seven such institutions boasting some 16,500 students…." [emphasis added]
Richard, your entire discourse is based on acceptance of the idea that the Jews should be sequestered in Israel, rather than integrated into the general world populace. Do you actually believe that is the better choice?
Actually, I believe that Tohnit Dalet was first formulated – as a Hagana contingency plan – in 1946, not 1947. Further, it was a military, not a political plan, and "ethnic cleansing" was an unintended consequence. But what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? The Palestinian militias, as well as the armies of the Arab states all had "Master Plan[s] for the Conquest of Palestine", most of which included the "ethnic cleansing" of most or all of the Jews. In other words, Khalidi tends to "throw out Arab memories" of the 1948 war (to paraphrase that historical expert, Phil Weiss). I take it as an honor to have received a "plus one" from Witty – what ever that signifies. At least he appears to have the intellectual capacity that you lack, particularly when getting involved in the academic duals of Karsh and Morris.
Lea, I can assure you that I have heard Pappe, in Hebrew, on local television explicitly state that he does not care about the facts or arriving at the historical truth. What he cares about is making sure that the "evidence" furthers his ideological narrative. That is not history. Neither is the "realistic symbolism" approach that David Ohana describes – which reduces all phenomena, ultimately, to cultural relativism. It may be a form of literary criticism or of philosophy, but it is not history.
As I recall, Night is an autobiographical novel. Do you know what a novel is rykart? Overall, it is a work of fiction, although it may be based on fact. I don't believe that Hillberg described Wiesel's Night as a "hoax".
Andrew, if Israel "has been doing it [ethnically cleansing Palestinians] non-stop for 60 years", why are there still Arabs left in Israel (not to mention in the occupied territories)? Not only that, but why have their numbers increased at such an astronomical rate? I think that it is your card that is getting a bit worn out.
Any partition scheme would've led to ethnic cleansing and war, although making Tel-Aviv a city state like Singapore might've been interesting. Jews were only the majority 55-45. Michael Oren doesn't think Israel can exist at 70-30. Oh, and I wouldn't complain to leftists about the death penalty for selling land to Jews. Maybe the governments that fund the PA, which includes guess what.
Margaret, do you actually believe that the better choice is for the Palestinian Arabs to be "sequestered" in Palestine, rather than integrated into the general Arab populace?
Diane, please look closely at this part of Zangwill's quote (which you probably got from an anti-Zionist Web collection): …having 52 souls to every square mile, and not 25 percent of them Jews… That puts the population density of early 20th century Palestine at roughly that of Oklahoma in 2007! And, of course there was another way. Before World War II, the Arab population had grown from about three-quarters of a million in Zangwill's time to about a million and a half. However, there were roughly 11 million Jews in Europe, half of which would fall victim the German killing machine.