Jack Ross, first on Obama's game, then on the Nakba:
It's important to cut through the smoke and mirrors of biblical references - which is not to say that Netanyahu's "Amalek" mindset isn't real and threatening. But the sense of mysticism reflected by Jeffrey Goldberg seems to confirm that the bottom line is that Iran has become a scapegoat for all of Israel's problems. I think Obama knows this, which is why he's publicly countered "no Palestinian state until Iran is disarmed" with "no helping you on Iran until a Palestinian state".
Obama knows he has to deal with the Israelis as did De Gaulle the pied-noirs, gingerly but with no illusions about what must be done. It seems his stratagem is use the smoke screen of a continuing "peace process" to put in place a Palestinian unity government, which at this point would almost certainly demand a binational state.
Now on Gershom Gorenberg and the Nakba:
He seizes upon a fine piece of truth, but uses it to obfuscate, rather than take it to its logical conclusion, which is the most damning of all: that Israeli behavior, from 1948 to now, is simply and brilliantly an illustration of the banality of evil - not mystical, not methodical, just simple human brutality by humans in a position and with a motivation to do so.
While I would never pretend to be an expert on the Nakba, it does seem entirely possible that the truth is a bit more complicated than that it was directly executed by the Yishuv, end of story. Based on my crude understanding, it seems that for the most part the Yishuv and Haganah simply manipulated events by giving the Irgun and Stern Gang a green light to do their dirty work.
As to Benny Morris's archival standards, I would be all for applying his "archives-only" standard to Holocaust studies. Not that we should be indifferent to human suffering in either that case or with the Nakba, but that it must be taken out of the equation in understanding evil, so that we do not ascribe the mysticism to evil that we have in the case of the Nazis.
Well, Gershom has certainly managed to get the banal tone right.
Some things never change.The Israeli have been portraying Iran's nuclear program as their "biggest threat" for at least 15 years now: http://tinyurl.com/obcvrv
I don't get it — Benny Morris says there was no real plan for ethnic cleasing? That's not what he said in his interview with Ari Shavit (http://tinyurl.com/8fky4w) SHAVIT: Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion? MORRIS: "From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created."