In 1963 the young Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests, a novella destined to become a classic of Hebrew literature. It is a nightmarish story, the kind of dread-filled dream from which you awake shuddering, about a student who takes a job as a watchman in one of Israel's newly planted forests. His task is to watch day and night for fire; his only company is an old Arab whose tongue was cut out in "the war" — meaning Israel's war of independence in 1948 — and the Arab's young daughter. The forest, as the watchman learns, hides the ruins of an Arab village, the remains of an erased past: once other people lived here, members of a different nation. Their departure has to do with vague, unrecorded violence.
At the end, the mute Arab ignites the forest. The watchman-scholar does not participate in the arson, but welcomes the climax of fire and what it reveals: "And there, from within the smoke, from within the mist, the little village rises before him, reborn in its most basic outlines, as in an abstract painting, like every submerged past." As a watchman, the Israeli has failed. Perhaps as a scholar he has succeeded: he has uncovered history, as if in a hidden archive.
And in the past decade despite the campaign of the New Historians and the Post-Zionist academics and groups like Zochrot that have done much to revise history and also reveal history, the Arabs are still burning our forests despite no need - real or imagined, to unerase their past.
Here:
Fire Causes:
The first and most important cause of forest fires in Israel is arson (Table 2). In the 1980s and early 1990s arson comprised about one-third of all forest fires in Israel -- a very large proportion. Some of the sources for this arson were identified as the work of criminals whose sole aim was to collect insurance money. Many cases of arson in the late 1980s, however, were directly related to the Palestinian uprising (Intifada). Palestinians used fire as a means of their resistance movement as early as the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1980s it was adopted as a highly visible action against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Arson was found to be easy to execute: all one had to do was cross the old border, which was unguarded and open to all, start a fire in one of the many forests which straddle the mountainous areas near the border, and then disappear. The occurrence of forest fires in areas adjacent to the old "Green Line" border between Israel and the West Bank was very frequent: in the years 1988-1990 between 288 and 388 forest fires were caused by arson and took place in areas near the old pre-1967 border (Kliot and Keidar 1992). In some of the fires which took place in northern Israel, Israeli Arab Palestinians were found to be responsible. These fires were extremely remarkable because 1988 was also rich in precipitation and, as a result, the vegetation concentration was highly combustible. Intifada-induced arson gradually faded out as the uprising started to die out in the early 1990s.
Guess either they don't like trees or they very much don't like Jews.
Getting back to the review essay, Gershom can't forgive Benny Morris his "dizzying movement rightward", that Morris' book is "unavoidably one with its own slant". Gee, that's so terrible. Are his facts wrong?
Gershom uses "1948 veteran Amos Keinan" to justify the showing of the Hirbit Hizah but neglects to note that Keinan himself participated in the conquest of Deir Yassin.
He also congratulates Morris:
"Morris is an unbending believer in the value of the paper trail: documents establish fact; interviews with participants are too subjective."
Ah, but who writes up reports? Objective persons?
Another point:
"Morris is using Arab statements from sixty or eighty years ago to make sense of today's stalemate; but it seems he is also reading those statements through the lens of today's events".
Or, of course, Gorenberg, et al., have been avoiding the "Mufti angle", that the so-called "Palestinian nationalism" has always been of a character of the most negative Islamic essence. That religious fanaticism is the basis of their movement, denial first, along with a horrendous capacity for hate and death although when forced to deal with a third book there on the issue, Gorenberg must conclude:
Exploiting Islam, al-Husseini succeeded in making Palestine a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic issue.
Gershom could have done more with this:
Arab forces also expelled or massacred Jews or prevented their return to places they had fled— but they could do so rarely, for the simple reason that the Arabs had few opportunities. They were losing on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Jordan's Arab Legion emptied the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City; Arab fighters massacred about 150 Jewish defenders of the religious kibbutz Kfar 'Etzion after they surrendered.
He could have mentioned Atarot, Neveh Yaakov, Bet Haaravah, all of Gush Etzion (Masu'ot Yitzhak, Revadim, Ein Tzurim) which he left out.
And he reveals his own slant:
This time, he leaps back much further: "The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries," until the Romans crushed the last, brief Jewish bid at independence in the second century CE. Later Muslim rulers never treated it as a separate province. By the nineteenth century it was an "impoverished backwater"—albeit one where Arabs outnumbered Jews by a ratio of eighteen to one.
Morris's underlying point here is that Jews were returning to their ancient homeland. In itself, this is correct, and is essential background to the events of 1948. But it is also a classic Zionist account, and is just one face of history.
Just one? It isn't factual? Gorenberg prefers prejudices one must assume.
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