A good book, and a bad essay

Fresnozionism.org
17 May '10

I’ve just started reading the new book by Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed. I’ll write a review at some point, but there is a good one by Daniel Pipes here.

Karsh refutes the revisionist view of the history of the state of Israel that has become the standard version taught at American (and other) universities, according to which early Zionists advocated expulsion of Palestinian Arabs and then the Hagana, Etzel and Lehi carried it out. In fact — and Karsh carefully documents this — Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky and others did not call for or desire ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and most of the exodus of Arabs in 1947-49 was not directly caused by the actions of the Jews. The nakba (catastrophe), presented in Arab mythology as an unprovoked mass expulsion on racial grounds, Karsh argues, is exactly that — a myth.

Further, he argues that the disaster that overtook the Palestinian Arabs was entirely caused by the stubborn insistence of their leadership, particularly the antisemitic, Nazi-admiring Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to oppose any accommodation with the Jews in Palestine. The violence that characterized the pre-state period, he shows, was almost entirely provoked by these leaders, who cynically fostered hatred and suspicion of the Jews and disseminated antisemitic propaganda while profiting massively from the sale of land to those same Jews whose death or expulsion they called for daily.

In the years since 1948, the view of the ‘new historians’ has almost entirely replaced that found in contemporary accounts, and has done enormous damage to Zionism and Israel. Today most American university students accept as given that the state was founded in a racist, colonialist act of oppression in which most of the indigenous population was expelled and the remainder exploited. Their opinions on today’s events — and their decisions about whom to believe — are built on the foundation of this myth. An ironic thanks is due to Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, etc., the dishonest historians who, in part because they are Jews — Israeli Jews — did so much to arm Israel’s academic and media enemies.

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