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.
