04-30-2008, 12:13 AM
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Blood and Sand
Blood and Sand: Books: The New Yorker
from an article
by David Remnick
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In Soviet-era Russia, honest young men and women of academic inclination knew never to enter the field of modern history. In order to live a scholarly life relatively free of cant and suppression, one studied Byzantine manuscripts, Mayan civilization, medieval Burma—anything that would safely skirt mention of one’s own time and place. In the new society of Israel, however noisily democratic, national history is inescapably political, too. And, like any young nation, especially one born of conflict, Israel did not readily accept scholarly work that challenged its most cherished national myths.
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In 1988, Morris published “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” which revolutionized Israeli historiography and, to a great extent, a nation’s understanding of its own birth. Relying less on testimony than on the newly available documents, Morris described how and why sixty per cent of the Palestinians were uprooted and their society destroyed. It was a far more complex picture than many Israelis were prepared to accept. The book features a map that shows three hundred and eighty-nine Arab villages, from upper Galilee to the Negev Desert. Morris revealed that in forty-nine of these villages the indigenous Arabs were expelled by the Haganah and other Jewish military forces; in sixty-two villages, the Arabs fled out of fear, having heard rumors of attacks and even massacres; in six, the villagers left at the instruction of Palestinian local leaders. The refugees, who probably expected to return to their homes in a matter of weeks or months, went to Gaza and the West Bank, and also to surrounding Arab countries—Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria—where, to this day, they have never been fully absorbed.
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Israel, led by a “party hack of a prime minister,” who botched the war with Hezbollah in 2006, will now be “like a rabbit caught in the headlights” as Iran prepares to launch nuclear-tipped Shihab missiles at Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. In this scenario, which Morris implied is nearly inevitable, the Israeli leadership knows that it cannot launch a unilateral attack on Iran, for fear of igniting a “world-embracing” terror campaign:
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So Israel’s leaders will grit their teeth and hope that somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will behave “rationally”?
But the Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes—not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing.
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Blood and Sand: Books: The New Yorker
This article is worth a read. Explains much about the current middle east conflict in a concise easily understandable format.
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