A lot of people have sent me the Sir Max Hastings piece from the Guardian, a veteran journalist's lecture about falling out of love with an Israel that loves violence. (I posted about it the other day; I see that neocon Melanie Phillips, doing her best to persuade inquiring minds of Sir Max's error, calls it "another rancid dropping from the British camel corps"). You may recall that the piece included this thumbnail:
One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young
Israeli talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. "In
the next war," he said, "we've got to get the Palestinians out of the
West Bank for good."… The Palestinians were perceived as losers,
a mere incidental impediment to the fulfilment of Israel's historic
territorial destiny. By a curious quirk, that young Israeli whom I
heard enthuse about emptying the West Bank of Arabs was Binyamin
Netanyahu, today his country's prime minister.
Assaf Oron, of dailykos, (and an Israeli reservist refusenik) had this response:
I thought the most important immediate contribution of Hastings is the
Bibi blip from 1977. If true, this is huge. Bibi has been very careful
about masking his I-P worldview. The guy has been on Israel's front
stage for 2 decades and we still don't know what he really thinks. He
always offers distractions instead (terrorism, Iran, the latest haggling over this or that document).
I wonder though why Hastings hadn't released this info before, say,
when Bibi was PM in the late 90's. It was pretty clear then already
that Bibi was up to no good. Why the wait?
