in a grim mood. Today’s Isabel Kershner piece about the militant blindness inside Israel is echoed by Tom Segev’s piece attacking Avi Shlaim in the forthcoming NY Review of Books. Both pieces are written by Israelis, for American publications, and from inside the Zionist perspective: a vision Segev holds on to, of a majority Jewish democracy in historical Palestine. Nostalgic for the good old rebel days of the New Historians, before the New Anti-Zionists, Segev suggests that the Palestinians should fold into Jordan, so that Israelis don’t have to deal with a non-Jewish majority; and he has little to say about the incredible violence Israel has unleashed to obtain the managed situation that he seems to abide.
I’m criticized by some commenters for being inside the Jewish perspective. And I am that. I fear for my religious group. There is such indifference, and such a claim, alive in American publications, on a liberation story that is totally out of touch with reality. Let my people grow, before it’s too late…
