In two weeks, the Washington DC Jewish Community Center is holding an event about the new history of the creation of Israel:
Embracing Democracy: Examining the History of 1948
The creation of the State of Israel and its subsequent victory over the assembled Arab armies arrayed against it was widely regarded as a modern miracle in 1948. The War of Independence, coming after the trauma of the Shoah and fulfilling an ancient longing for a return to Zion, made for a heroic moment in Israeli and Jewish consciousness. In the years since, different historians have helped to uncover the more complex history of the war and its aftermath, even as that history has become an object of political debate. Our panel will discuss the developments in the historical research of 1948, the uses of that history and its impact on contemporary political discussions.
The historical research the community center refers to is the work of the new historians, and the growing awareness in the west that 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically-cleansed during the Nakba. Those Palestinians fled or were expelled, then were not allowed to return to their homes in the new country of Israel lest they dilute the nation’s Jewish majority.
Here’s the panel:
Moderator, Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate
Panelists include:
Professor Donna Robinson Divine, Morningstar Family Foundation Professor of Government and Director of Middle East Studies at Smith College
Shay Hazkani, Visiting Scholar at Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israeli Law, Economy and Society
Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America
Lithwick lately went to Israel on a celebrate-Israel tour. Donna Robinson Divine is a serious scholar, and very pro-Israel; see this post deriding Israeli apartheid week and bragging about Brandeis University’s support for Israel. Hazkani is an Israeli, per Berkeley. Kurtzer’s institute is a pro-Israel organization that works with the Israeli army.
And that’s your panel, to address ethnic cleansing of Palestinians before a Washington DC audience? Hazkani is impressive, but do the victims get to narrate?
One of our big themes on this site is that the requirement to support Israel has made American Jews stupid. This is further evidence. It’s almost worth paying the $15, to hear how they deal with the Nakba.
P.S. Speaking of the Jewish cocoon, the night before the Nakba event, Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land, will be at a Washington, DC, synagogue for a conversation with Leon Wieseltier, who is somewhat to Shavit’s right. Shavit’s book has gained attention because he discusses the Nakba (The New Yorker published that chapter). But again, expect no real openness to the victims’ perspective.
Presented to you by “Jews for History” in association with “Jews for Earth rotation” and “Jews for linear time concept”.
There’s another polar vortex in the air.
I smell desperation. They’re circling the wagons as never before. It’s flop sweat.
FLOP SWEAT
: nervous sweat (as of a performer) caused especially by the fear of failing
(merriam- webster)
“One of our big themes on this site is that the requirement to support Israel has made American Jews stupid. This is further evidence. It’s almost worth paying the $15, to hear how they deal with the Nakba.”
LOLOL!
It reminds me of the conference on Holocaust in Iran.
Quote from Announcement: “In the years since [1948], different historians have helped to uncover the more complex history of the war and its aftermath, even as that history has become an object of political debate. ”
If the historians had to “uncover” the “more complex history”, then someone was covering it up. [Ahem; well, duh!] What I meant to say was that the covering up of the full story has always been a political-manipulative thing, a story-telling aiming at developing support for Israel among diaspora Jews by exposing Israeli heroism and bravery and by covering up any crimes, treachery, cruelty, and so forth that were [ahem; may have been] committed by Jewish/Israeli forces along the way.
My first guess is that this conference is PROPERLY a Jews only meeting, because its real topic is not the I/P history but, rather, the manipulation of diaspora Jews by Israel and its hasbaristas.
My second guess is that this meeting will not go very far toward revisionism, will not demand BETTER story-telling by the Jewish Establishment, the Hebrew Schools, the synagogues, the BIG-ZION organizations, etc. Imagine what might happen (for the discussion of the announced topic) if Blumenthal were on the panel, or Phil, or Finkelstein, or Chomsky. No: they are playing it safe. Baby steps.
Remember: every one of them hopes that a good-for-Israel two-state-solution will be resolved (no matter how Palestinian arms are twisted to get there), and that the real stories need not be told — in full horror — until AFTER success has crowned and ended the I/P conflict. So looking at revisionist history in a deep way will — if my guesses are right — wait until the PA signs on the dotted line adn BDS is a dead letter, perhaps “not in my lifetime.”
“The creation of the State of Israel and its subsequent victory over the assembled Arab armies arrayed against it was widely regarded as a modern miracle in 1948”
A “miracle?!!! So that’s what they call the secret amassing of western guns and firepower?
Do them DC jews even know how to spell ‘Nakba’? Do they know how to even spell ‘Truth’?
Eff ’em! Boring, boring, boring LIARS! I’m sick of them!