Submitted by Brodsky on Fri, 08/08/2008 - 18:35
Israel faces several challenges today including a stalled peace process with an increasing worldwide call for a bi-national state solution; Iran’s nuclear program; and the growing social divide in Israeli society between religious and secular Jews. A two-state solution should remain the only acceptable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the calls for one state for Jews and Palestinians alike will continue to gather steam in the future. Given the current demographic situation and problems in Israeli society, maintaining the status quo does not benefit Israel.
Israel faces several challenges today including a stalled peace process with an increasing worldwide call for a bi-national state solution; Iran’s nuclear program; and the growing social divide in Israeli society between religious and secular Jews. A two-state solution should remain the only acceptable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the calls for one state for Jews and Palestinians alike will continue to gather steam in the future. Given the current demographic situation and problems in Israeli society, maintaining the status quo does not benefit Israel.
Submitted by Brodsky on Mon, 05/19/2008 - 11:49
The May 26, 2008 edition of "The Nation" dedicates the cover to "Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of Israel." Here, again, one of the masters of selective focus, Avi Shlaim, penned his article, "A Somber Anniversary."
Like Benny Morris, Shlaim became famous as one of the founding fathers of the New Historians and Revisionist authors. However, their journeys of late have been mirror opposites. Morris began on the left and has now fallen off the deep end on the right with his political views; Shlaim began on the left and has continued his race to the margins of the left.
The May 26, 2008 edition of "The Nation" dedicates the cover to "Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of Israel." Here, again, one of the masters of selective focus, Avi Shlaim, penned his article, "A Somber Anniversary."Like Benny Morris, Shlaim became famous as one of the founding fathers of the New Historians and Revisionist authors. However, their journeys of late have been mirror opposites. Morris began on the left and has now fallen off the deep end on the right with his political views; Shlaim began on the left and has continued his race to the margins of the left.
Edward Said's Orientalism
The following are parts of Edward Said's 1978 "Orientalism" that rocked Middle Eastern Studies to it's foundation:
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Introduction
On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that "it had once seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval,"! He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something "at stake in the process, that even "in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.
The Revisionists and New Historians
The central failing of the new historians is the removal of historical context and their selective focus. It's easy to look back on 1948 in 1988 and claim that Jewish victory was assured; however, at the time, the future was far from clear and neither the Israelis, nor the Arabs held a crystal ball. Avi Shlaim presented a similar view in his 1988 book, Collusion Across the Jordan, where there was a war in 1948 between the Yishuv, the British, and the Jordanians.[17] There were no other actors. Israel and Jordan colluded with one another with British help - never mind the fact that the most difficult and protracted battles of the war that yielded the most military casualties occurred between the Israelis and Jordan's Arab Legion.
Unlike Morris who demonstrated a consistent internal identity struggle, Shlaim is a master of context removal and selective focus - the only villains are Israel and the West. In the introduction to Collusion, Shlaim explains (p. 4), "Jewish immigration and settlement could not take place without the consent of the country's Arab owners, and this consent was emphatically denied." Yet, in Palestinian Identity, Rashid Khalidi quotes Kenneth Stein, and comes to the following conclusion: "There can be little doubt that under the kind of economic pressure combined with financial inducements that Stein describes, Palestinian landlords, both absentee and resident as well as fellahin cultivators, often sold land."[18] Shlaim simply ignores the fact that the Arab land owners sold land to Zionists, which accounted for the bulk of Zionist land purchases prior to 1948.
The Revisionists and New Historians
The Birth Revisited is nearly twice as long as the original and had the additional benefit of new documents made available in the Israel Defense Forces Archives. Like his first book, The Birth Revisited lays out an impressive indictment against Israel and once again, in the conclusions, one wonders if they were guided by the preceding hundreds of pages of evidence he offered.
In the introduction to The Birth, Morris clearly states: "It cannot be stressed too strongly that, while this is not a military history, the events it describes - cumulatively amounting to the Palestinian Arab exodus - occurred in wartime and were a product, direct and indirect, of that war."[14] From that point forward, the book concentrates on Israeli actions, loses the context of war, and proceeds to quote and misquote Ben Gurion enough to give the reader the belief that Ben Gurion was a cold-hearted, deliberate, and life-long planner of ethnic cleansing.[15] In his conclusions, he begins by restating that the refugee problem was a product of war and not by design. However, there are some subtle and important differences between the two sets of conclusions. The following are the two opening paragraphs:
From Camp David to Taba, 2000-01: Narratives, Red Lines, Justice, and Mythology
"If ever there was a regional conflict that has been sustained by mythologies, by avoiding the unpleasantness of reality, by ignoring to see the world as it is, it is the Middle East."[23]
Dennis Ross, U.S. Special Middle East Coordinator, 1988-2000
The clash of historical narratives is both a byproduct of, and has given rise to mythologies - a set of beliefs within each society that are held as sacred, whether or not the specific myth is true. Mythology regarding what happened - either in antiquity or recently - and mythology regarding past promises and future possibilities helped to ensure the failure of any attempt to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2000-01. Yet, here there is a sharp contrast between the Israeli and Palestinian approach to their own history and mythology.
From Camp David to Taba, 2000-01: Narratives, Red Lines, Justice, and Mythology
Itamar Rabinovich offers a new paradigm by separating the accounts of what happened into four categories: orthodox, revisionist, deterministic, and eclectic.[18] The "orthodox" group is detail-oriented and lays the blame squarely on Arafat's shoulders. This was the most widely propagated version of events in the wake of the peace process. It holds that Barak made an unprecedented offer, Arafat rejected it and instead opted for violence. Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, Dennis Ross, and Shlomo Ben-Ami are his examples. This group was later joined by Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan who revealed in a 2003 interview that Arafat's decision not to accept the 23 December Clinton Parameters was not only a tragedy for the Palestinians and the region, but a crime.[19]
The Revisionists and New Historians
During the 1980s, the "new historians" or revisionists (Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, and others) rose to challenge the established, orthodox history regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. The topic of choice and challenge was the 1947-1949 war for Israel/Palestine. The new historians believed that only two diametrically opposed narratives existed, the official Israeli line, and the Arab line. The Israeli orthodox narrative, as explained by the new historians, was that Zionism was a well-meaning progressive national movement. Israel was attacked by the Arabs who sought to prevent the establishment of the Jewish State. During the war for independence, Arab leaders called for the Palestinians to vacate their homes and land in order to allow their armies to defeat the Zionists, at which point the Palestinians would return to their homes as victors. The poorly armed and vastly outnumbered Jewish community or Yishuv fought bravely and defeated the Arab armies - David defeated Goliath. All peace and reconciliation attempts made by Israel in the wake of the war were rebuffed by the Arabs.
Submitted by Brodsky on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 17:53
Since the 1982 war in Lebanon, Israel has been transformed in mainstream media from the role of David fighting Goliath to the role of Goliath punishing David. In part, this is a symptom of the rise of Israeli and Jewish revisionist historians (Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, etc.) who began to publish their works in the 1980s; the increasing anti-Israeli biases in most Middle Eastern Studies departments at respected universities; Israel’s failure to present a concise narrative to combat the claims of their opponents; and laziness on the part of many mainstream reporters.
A core problem is that it has become fashionable to publicly bash Israel and draw a moral equivalency between Israeli military strikes against known terrorists and the homicidal terrorists who seek to kill the maximum amount of civilians by strapping on bombs packed with nails. With the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the mainstream media, Americans who support Israel, value America’s security, and understand that there is a global war on political Islam that must be waged and won, will not likely be armed with enough facts to counter absurd claims in Western media and on Western campuses.
Since the 1982 war in Lebanon, Israel has been transformed in mainstream media from the role of David fighting Goliath to the role of Goliath punishing David. In part, this is a symptom of the rise of Israeli and Jewish revisionist historians (Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, etc.) who began to publish their works in the 1980s; the increasing anti-Israeli biases in most Middle Eastern Studies departments at respected universities; Israel’s failure to present a concise narrative to combat the claims of their opponents; and laziness on the part of many mainstream reporters. A core problem is that it has become fashionable to publicly bash Israel and draw a moral equivalency between Israeli military strikes against known terrorists and the homicidal terrorists who seek to kill the maximum amount of civilians by strapping on bombs packed with nails. With the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the mainstream media, Americans who support Israel, value America’s security, and understand that there is a global war on political Islam that must be waged and won, will not likely be armed with enough facts to counter absurd claims in Western media and on Western campuses.
