I write my stuff so hurriedly these days that I seem to miss everything. I would just like to note that in the excerpt I offered yesterday from Bernard Avishai, Avishai points out that a Palestinian scientist who participated in a major breakthru in Israel recently is "the child of a family which a 1948 version of national unity failed to drive away."
This is a beautiful and ironic statement (about Avigdor Lieberman and liberalism) that will I think be the doorway for a lot of Jews– this morning and tomorrow morning and the morning after that– to a bigger understanding of Israeli history in the age of Obama. The failure to do anything about the 1967 borders has made 1948 the new backstory– not 1967– and 1948 (as Walt and Mearsheimer and Jerry Slater have shown us) was about ethnic cleansing and a Jewish majority in Palestine.
Avishai is trying to undo Exodus, the story by Leon Uris that so baked the American and American Jewish understanding of Israel/Palestine 50 years ago. We are all in our way, undoing Exodus. Barack Hussein Obama, Slumdog and a stage filled with South Asians at the Academy Awards… culturally the global moment is ours.
