The review is here:
A War to Start All Wars
Will Israel Ever Seal the Victory of 1948?
I have selected a few excerpts with my comments following:
1.
The birth of the state of Israel in 1948 has long been the subject of self-congratulatory historiography by the victorious side and grievance-filled accounts by disinherited Palestinians. To the Israelis, the 1948 war was a desperate fight for survival that was settled by an almost miraculous victory. In the Arab world, accounts of the war tend to advance conspiracy theories and attempt to shift the blame for the Arabs' defeat. In both cases, the writing of history has been part of an uncritical nationalist quest for legitimacy.
This time element is BS. Since the early 1980s, that is, 28 years ago, the Post-Zionist historiography trend has been around. That is almost as long as the 32-33 years of the former 'official' historiography.
2.
Refusing to admit that the noble Jewish dream of statehood was stained by the sins of Israel's birth and eager to deny the centrality of the Palestinian problem to the wider conflict in the Middle East, the Israelis have preferred to dwell on their struggle for independence against the supposedly superior invading Arab armies.
The ruling political and social elites did, not those, like me, who were blamed for the few instances of ill-disciplined fighting like at Deir Yassin when Palmach and Hagana battles, some even more ferocious were ignored or downplayed.
3.
When the war was over, the Palestinian problem practically disappeared from Israeli public debate, or it was conveniently defined as one of "refugees" or "infiltrators." It was as if there were no Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Palestinian people. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously put it in 1969, "They did not exist."
More BS. First of all, Golda said the enityt termed "Palestinian Arabs" did not exist as a category of a people. The Arabs who called themselves "Palestinians" did exist but not as a separate national grouping. She even reminded all that she herself, with a former British Mandate document was "Palestinian". It wasn't "conveniently defined" but that was the reality. There was no "Palestinian people" before but various groupings of Arabs who were in or who flocked to the Mandate area, like the Arabs of the Golan or earlier, in the 19th century who came from North Africa (see: From Time Immemorial)
4.
Once a peacenik with impeccable credentials -- he went to jail for refusing to serve as an Israeli army reservist in the occupied territories during the first intifada, in 1987 -- Morris has gradually drifted, together with most Israelis, toward a position vehemently critical of the Palestinians. He has blamed Palestinian leaders for the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the al Aqsa intifada, which began in September 2000.
In January 2004, Morris famously lamented that the architects of Israel's 1948 war strategy had not more thoroughly purged the Jewish state of its Arab population...But even if his left-wing critics consider him a controversial citizen of the present, Morris remains an honest and superbly professional student of the past.
So, there is yet hope for Ben-Ami?
5.
No such new history has yet emerged in the Arab world, nor have any Arab archives been opened to allow for such a fresh perspective. Most Arab historians continue to absolve their countries' militaries of all responsibility for the defeat. By exonerating the Arab armies and attributing their failure to the treachery and incompetence of conservative civilian elites, such scholars provided legitimacy for the revolutionary military regimes that took power across the Arab world after 1948.
Exactly. It's all in their minds.
6.
...the idea of population transfers had a long and solid pedigree in Zionist thought. The evictions of 1948 stemmed from an ideological predisposition in the Jewish community and a cultural and political environment that made military commanders feel comfortable initiating or encouraging the mass eviction of Arabs. Zionist leaders differed on many issues, but they generally agreed, as Morris points out, on the benefits of "transfer" -- a euphemism for "expulsion." The idea of forced transfer was explicitly endorsed by the British government's 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine...
Well, since Nansen received a Nobel Prize for Peace for his transfer scheme between Greece and Turkey [Nansen arranged an exchange of about 1,250,000 Greeks living on Turkish soil for about 500,000 Turks living in Greece, with appropriate indemnification and provisions for giving them the opportunity for a new start in life] and the British Labour Party's 1944 support for transfer of Arabs from the Palestine Mandate to Iraq or Herbert Hoover's 1943 plan, why should Jews be less Catholic than the Pope?
7.
Morris' characterization of the conflict of 1948 as an Islamic jihad against Jewish-Western infidels in Palestine is also unpersuasive. It is true that the figurehead of Palestinian nationalism at the time was the fanatically religious and viscerally anti-Semitic mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. And Arab discourse during 1948 was occasionally peppered with the rhetoric of holy war: the Syrian author Vadi'a Talhuq's book A New Crusade in Palestine, published on the eve of the Arab invasion, compared the war to the liberation of Palestine from the crusaders. Yet Israel in 1948 was no tool of the West.
Stupid. What has the "West" got to do with Arab antisemitism and jihadist orientation against Jews and Zionists?
8.
...In 1967, a powerful group of settlers in the Galilee region pressured the government to take over the Golan Heights. The hunger for land persists to this day, as settlers lobby politicians to allow the expansion of outposts in the West Bank. The redemption of the land of Israel by settling it -- which was encouraged just as enthusiastically by Labor Zionists as by those on the right -- was always central to the Zionist enterprise.
That first group were secular, left-wing Zionists of the Ahdut Ha'Avoda faction. Using "settlers" indicriminately, Ben-Ami would have us think all "settlers" are all right-wing religious national fanatic extremists. Of course, redeeming the land was a central Zionist tenet. Without land, what do you return to? A dream? A vision? Or something real?
9.
And in today's era of long-range ballistic warfare, the belts of Jewish settlements in the West Bank along the Jordan River and the old Green Line offer Israel no military advantage whatsoever.
More stupidity. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff report demolishes this theory as did the Second Lebanon War.
10.
The Zionist tradition of support for settlements should be challenged on political grounds as well; after all, a normal state is not supposed to occupy land beyond its legitimate borders.
Legitimate borders? Does he mean the temporary armistice lines never internationally recognized? (The armistice agreements were intended to serve only as interim agreements until replaced by permanent peace treaties. However, no peace treaties were actually signed until decades later. The armistice agreements, except for the one with Lebanon, were clear (at Arab insistence) that they were not creating permanent or de jure borders. The Egyptian-Israeli agreement stated "The Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question." [11] The Jordanian-Israeli agreement stated: "... no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims, and positions of either Party hereto in the peaceful settlement of the Palestine questions, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations" (Art. II.2), "The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in articles V and VI of this Agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto." (Art. VI.9) [12] 11 The Avalon Project: Egyptian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, February 24, 1949 12 The Avalon Project: Jordanian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, April 3, 1949 )
11.
It is worth remembering that Arab armies did not invade Palestine in 1948 for the sake of the Palestinians; it was their war against the Jews that drew Arab governments into the Palestinian question.
Yes, but why did the so-called "Palestinian Arabs" launch their war on the day following the Partition Resolution that awarded them a state?
12.
Israel...must now belatedly seize this unique opportunity and negotiate peace agreements with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians for a return to the June 4, 1967, lines -- essentially the same borders established in the aftermath of Israel's crushing 1948 victory.
That's just great. What didn't impress the Arabs in 1967 when they went to war to obliterate Israel, something they failed in 1948 and couldn't accomplish with the fedayeen in the early 1950s, will grant them sdatisfaction in 2008 after the disengagement failure with the Hamastan Gaza and the Qassams, etc.?
13.
A failure to do so, coupled with rapidly shifting demographic trends -- namely, a higher birthrate among Arabs than among Jews -- will permanently destroy the credibility of the two-state solution, allowing the binational model to gain sway among the Palestinians as they become a majority.
Demographic demonlogy. Arab birthrate is lowering and the figures are unrealiable as to exactly how many Arabs there are between the Jordan River and the Green Line. And if demography really is a problem, what are we to do with the Galillee?
14.
...Israel must admit once and for all that the territorial phase of Zionism has ended, dismantle most of the West Bank settlements, and help create a viable Palestinian state as soon as possible.
Just the opposite, that would be the worst scenario possible. "Palestinianism" is the negative of Zionism. It's rational is to destroy Israel as an independent political entity, in whatever border configuration. It is not a matter of geogrpahy but ideology.
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1 comment:
Re point seven: I think he's saying that since the Arabs were wrong (i.e., Israel is not a representative of the "crusaders"), then there's nothing to see here, move along.
Like you said, stupid.
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