In 1948, a handful of Jews performed an act of political resurrection when they re-established a state in the land of Israel. Daniel Gordis asks: Has it fulfilled its founders’ dreams?
As in America, it is the privileged elites who are driving reform. Gordis admits as much: "...the young, successful, secular Ashkenazi elites love this country. They took to the streets to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it." What Gordis does not admit in his essay is that Supreme Court members are self selecting.
We are fortunate to have a Constitution with three separate branches of power and a bicameral legislature. We have had bad Supreme Court decisions but the court does not have carte blanch to overrule Congress or vice versa. I'm not convinced that Israel won't overcome its current crisis and continue as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
A superb essay that provokes two overview thoughts for me:
1. The Arabs proved that hatred and bigotry lead to dumb decisions. Had those fools simply accepted the partition, they'd have a state today in twice as much land as remains from all of their wars. And that the Palestinian Arabs still favor war as their primary goal shows they are dumber than ever. Really stupid. 25,000,000 refugees from WWII were resettled within just 5 years -- most often to places where they didn't know the language. And here are, 75 later, and these whiny fools don't get it -- you fought multiple times, you were offered a state 3 times -- you lose.
2. This "threat to democracy" talk is BS. There is no list from the Greeks to elsewhere as to its components -- but one, which Israel has -- government by vote of the people. None of the judicial reforms was other than the result of a vote of the people. Besides, sicne there is no constitution to amend, the "reforms" could be stripped away by a subsequent Parliament.
In the US, we have components of these hated reforms : the executive nominates our judges, the Senate has to confirm. Further, if we don't like a Supreme Court rejection of a statutory interpretation, we can legislate it back. But true, we have other better components -- bicameral legislature, etc. But the absence of those things does not mean there is no democracy as long as the government results from a popular vote.
Left does what it always does. It won't let good crisis be unused. We already know that money from United states are involved, even directly from State department. Left will do anything, including hurting Israel, to accomplish its goal-to maintain power. Despite voting for the right Israel is still governed by the left because of the Supreme court. The left think they can get life with the Palestine as the neighbor and being safe. There is witness story from Vilno September 1941. Jews came to the police station for registration as they were ordered to do but the door was closed. They stood there in line patiently waiting and waiting. One of them said: I am a lawyer I know the Law, they must at least let us know when they will open the office. He turns to the German soldier who was there as sentry and asks him in German: gerr soldier do you know how long we have to wait? The soldier turned to him and hit him in the face with the butt of his rifle. This is true story.
These civilized good people, like our rabbi think they can talk to people which hate them. They cannot. Until Palestinians continue their propaganda and all supposedly "humanitarians" support their lies including the lie of 700000 expulsed Palestinians, until they teach their children to kill the Jews on sight peace is not possible and two states solution is Utopia. There is no conversation or negotiation. Only temporary truce agreements. The Nobel prize for Rabin and Arafat should be withdrawn.
What purpose left has in mind? It is still same: to get power and be close to the feeder as left in USA (BLM, Socialists), Cuba, Venezuela already proved many times.
When addressing the issue of whether Israel is a success, I like to start with the section in Rousseau's Social Contract called the marks of success [and by extension legitimacy]: population growth. When Israel was founded, the country included under a million people. It is now approaching 10 million. That is a critical statement of success as a country
There are several facts that come to mind. When the U..S was celebrating it's 75th fourth of July, Blacks were enslaved, Native Americans were systematically being slaughtered, children were working in mines & sweat shops & women were disenfranchised. So people in glass houses.......! The majority of Israeli Jews were either survivors of the Shoah or forced to flee Muslim countries where they had lived for a mellinium. The majority landed in what is now Israel because there was no where else to go. No one country wanted them. The Shoah along with the universal rejection by every civilized nation is & will always be a stain on humanity. Why should there exist a Jewish state? It's estimated that several hundred thousand Jews were killed by the Romans. Not to be outdone Islam including Mohammad, Saladin & the Ottomen Empire killed several hundred thousand Jews. The Crusaders murdered 1-200,000 while the Inquisition murdered 3-400,000. Pogroms managed to murder 200,000 & we all know the number murdered between 1933-1945. And the beat goes on! Wir sind zuerst Deutche, Keine Juden. Food for thought!
Correct me , but "the Arab state that the UN had voted to create never came to be" is mistaken. Jordan (transjordan) was created at the same time as (new) Palestine from the old Roman province Palestine
I thought this article was excellent. I’m not sure why Americans (and I am one) feel the need to draw comparisons to the US. Israel is a beautiful complicated teeny tiny country surrounded by countries that at times have vowed to wipe them off the map. No comparisons necessary.
Bari, as an Israeli living in the US, and who loves your work generally, I'm disappointed in your approach to this subject.
After Matti Friedman's essay, I was hoping that this time around you'll bring someone (for or against, it's your choice) that will go into the details of this incredible constitutional moment that Israel is going through. Typically a nation's constitutional moment is at its time of birth, but not here. Instead, you chose to (again...) bring someone who does not add anything substantial or detailed to the table, but again whines and panics about how bad Bibi and IBG are. How can you "paint in broad strokes" as you put it, a judicial and constitutional crisis that has been 75 years in the making, created by Ben Gurion and weaponized by Aharon Barak?? There are incredibly interesting and fascinating questions to be asked here from the legal and political science standpoint, and all we get (yet again) is a subjective emotional point of view of a single individual? It would've been intriguing to have a discussion similar to the one you had with the Yale constitutional law expert after the Dobbs ruling.
An excellent article. I believe Israelis will find a way to undo this latest Gordion Knot, a quite inconsiderable task when compared to past tests. Consider the miracle that was the recreation of the state of Israel on its ancient homeland. I wish them Godspeed.
As always from this Substack, thoughtful, enlightening ideas with which to wrestle. There is nowhere in the world quite like Israel. From my religious conservative brother"s apartment in Jerusalem to my left wing friend's beautiful home in Tel Aviv and everything in between, the gratitude, variety, spark, life, and dynamism of a nation of people given a 2nd chance after near obliteration, is woven into this at once both ancient and modern land.
Please don't project your limited and self-centered American perspective in the commentary here. Israel is not a mini America nor are its politics a microcosm or offshoot of the US. Go see it. Spend time there. Experience it and widen your perspective.
No amount of immersing yourself in political rhetoric is going to compare to being there to experience the wonder that is Israel.
Secular elitism is the destruction of Zionism; Israel must, if it is to survive as a Jewish state, avoid at all costs the malaise of our western liberal post-modern nonsense. Israeli culture must embrace a muscular nationalism based on the Jewish culture and yes identity and thereby exclude, yes exclude, non Jews. It’s a big world, tell them to go elsewhere; the all encompassing nonsense of globalization and cultural annihilation preached from the pulpits of the liberal cathedral cannot be allowed to destroy Israel, and destruction it will surely bring. The religious left will destroy Israel, their nonsense will lead to another catastrophe for Jews, what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called: “the pitiless crowbar of events.”
If any group can escape the nonsense afoot in this world, it must be the people who survived the holocaust; you must defeat the leftists or perish.
Some argue that it was the lefty leaning group (I forget the name) within ancient Israel that caused the Romans to target and focus on this former colony, and to destroy the Second Temple.
The elitist left will indeed destroy Israel. The good news, as a population this group is in decline in Israel.
I think the lefties are well intended, but frankly, dangerously deluded. The holocaust demonstrated the Jewish people have a different reality, their history is one of unparalleled and unremitting tragedy. Israel is in a tough neighbourhood and we know sooner or later Christians and Muslins alike will scapegoat the hebrews. It won’t be different this time - that’s arrogance. These leftists risk everything, for what, political fashion, bogus woke claptrap, idealistic wishful thinking, this is beyond comprehension. The religious left is dangerous.
As a non=Jew Christian I have spent weeks in Israel studying archeology and its connection to the Hebrew scriptures and do admire the advances that they have made . Trying to walk where Jesus walked without running into a new settlement is impossible.
I Ihave also spent a great deal of time in the Palestinian refugee camps so I admit to a bias. I probably should not take the chance to say that on this comment page since I know I will be vilified but there you go.
I was surprised that there was no mention that the rise of one of the world's strongest military from a fledgling army might have been due at least in part to the $250 billion the US has contibuted to Israel. USAID Data Services reports Israel is the largest recipient of US aid something close to $150 billion a year or more. One would think that now that Israel has booming hi-tech industries and is able to care for its people because of better fiscal policies we might spend our money elsewhere.
Seventy-five years after the founding of Israel, there should be no more refugee camps. These people should have been absorbed into whatever state they ended up, just as Israel itself absorbed the hundreds of thousand of Jewish refugees from post-war Europe and (mostly) from the surrounding Arab states from which they were expelled. There were actually more Jews displaced after 1949 from those Arab lands than Arabs displaced by the Israeli War of Independence.
Why do the Palestinian refugee camps remain? There are multiple reasons. First of all, the UN, rather than including them in their main refugee agency, created a special agency—the UNRWA— just for the Arabs displaced by the war. (The Palestinians didn’t start calling themselves that until the early 1960’s. Earlier in the 20th century, before Israel was established, only the Jews living there called themselves Palestinian.) The UNRWA has markedly different criteria and rules than the main UN refugee agency. Most importantly, it makes refugee status heritable, so grandchildren and great-grandchildren, etc., of the original refugees get refugee status. The funding is separate from the main agency and never apparently runs out. Therefore there is great incentive to perpetuate the refugee population to keep the funds rolling in.
As you may have noted, though, a lot of that money never reaches the refugee camps. Palestinian leadership is notoriously corrupt, and they have gotten extremely rich siphoning money meant for their people into their own pocketbooks.
What about camps in other countries like Lebanon, etc.? The surrounding Arab countries have refused to absorb the refugees. There are strict limitations of the rights of those refugees in terms of where they can live, what work they can do, etc. They actively work against absorbing the refugees.
Aside from the economic reasons the refugee camps have remained, the biggest reason is political. The refugees are used as a political cudgel against even the existence of Israel. As long as the camps remain—and the people in them are needy—the money will keep flowing and the pressure on Israel will remain.
The continued existence of the camps are not Israel’s fault, but the world naively doesn’t see it that way.
By the way, your figure of $150 billion per year to Israel is absolute nonsense. That is about the total they have received since Israel was established. They do get a lot these days—in the neighborhood of $4 billion per year—but nearly all of that is required by the US to be spent on US military goods, injecting money into US companies. It still is a generous aid package for sure, but nowhere near what you claimed and it is basically subsidizing US companies in the bargain.
Blame rests at the feet of the British and the French for messing up how the lands contained within the former Ottoman Empire got allocated after WWI. The Jews followed international laws within the League of Nations and was granted, by that international community (via a vote) certain lands from its former self. There are many “peoples” “nations” etc.. that did not get land. The Kurds are but one example. There were no “Palestinians” at the table when the Ottoman Empire was busted up. So they got nothing. It was not until the early 1960’s that the “Palestinian” cause was stated.
I am sorry that you feel that you cannot speak your mind about the Palestinian (they are just Arabs) situation. Your contribution would enhance this discussion, but only IF you would admit to the current Palestinian leadership's rabid "Death to Israel" mindset.
Much has been made of the expulsion of Palestinians (There never was a country named Palestine) from the declared country of Israel, but rarely, if EVER, is it mentioned that these Palestinians oppressed Jews living in the land before its founding. Nor has the vast majority of Americans been told of the Jewish expulsions from north Africa where they had lived and prospered for centuries, nor the vanishingly small Jewish presence in many Arab countries where they had been, and still ARE, subjected to punishing social laws and practices.
When Zionist Jews declared Jewish independence, the so-called Palestinians had that same opportunity, but they refused to act on it, preferring to use the camps as a cudgel with which they could beat the Israelis about the head and shoulders for political purposes.
None of this justifies any crimes perpetrated against them by Israel, but it NEEDS to be noted that the Palestinian situation is a cause used to bring about the destruction of the nation of Israel.
Might be in part to the many Jewish people in the US. Though I stand with Israeli, I have watched for many years all the attempts by the US to broker a peace settlement with the Palestinians to no avail. Some people just don’t get it. Kind of like the idiots in the leftist/Democratic Party brainwashed by the universities.
THANK YOU!!! This is a story that is ignored by most of the chattering classes in the media, and DEFINITELY in academia! They prefer a "simple" narrative so as to not confuse readers and listeners and with the intention of shaping a national view. But there is nothing "simple" about the situation in the Levant.
It’s an interesting article, but I would hope that an article from the Israeli right gets shared, too. Every Jew should love Israel and I’m afraid, here in America, the Jewish left have left the love fest. Am Yisrael Chai! Long live the state of Israel, regardless of its political and judicial warts.
As in America, it is the privileged elites who are driving reform. Gordis admits as much: "...the young, successful, secular Ashkenazi elites love this country. They took to the streets to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it." What Gordis does not admit in his essay is that Supreme Court members are self selecting.
We are fortunate to have a Constitution with three separate branches of power and a bicameral legislature. We have had bad Supreme Court decisions but the court does not have carte blanch to overrule Congress or vice versa. I'm not convinced that Israel won't overcome its current crisis and continue as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
A superb essay that provokes two overview thoughts for me:
1. The Arabs proved that hatred and bigotry lead to dumb decisions. Had those fools simply accepted the partition, they'd have a state today in twice as much land as remains from all of their wars. And that the Palestinian Arabs still favor war as their primary goal shows they are dumber than ever. Really stupid. 25,000,000 refugees from WWII were resettled within just 5 years -- most often to places where they didn't know the language. And here are, 75 later, and these whiny fools don't get it -- you fought multiple times, you were offered a state 3 times -- you lose.
2. This "threat to democracy" talk is BS. There is no list from the Greeks to elsewhere as to its components -- but one, which Israel has -- government by vote of the people. None of the judicial reforms was other than the result of a vote of the people. Besides, sicne there is no constitution to amend, the "reforms" could be stripped away by a subsequent Parliament.
In the US, we have components of these hated reforms : the executive nominates our judges, the Senate has to confirm. Further, if we don't like a Supreme Court rejection of a statutory interpretation, we can legislate it back. But true, we have other better components -- bicameral legislature, etc. But the absence of those things does not mean there is no democracy as long as the government results from a popular vote.
Long live Israel!
Left does what it always does. It won't let good crisis be unused. We already know that money from United states are involved, even directly from State department. Left will do anything, including hurting Israel, to accomplish its goal-to maintain power. Despite voting for the right Israel is still governed by the left because of the Supreme court. The left think they can get life with the Palestine as the neighbor and being safe. There is witness story from Vilno September 1941. Jews came to the police station for registration as they were ordered to do but the door was closed. They stood there in line patiently waiting and waiting. One of them said: I am a lawyer I know the Law, they must at least let us know when they will open the office. He turns to the German soldier who was there as sentry and asks him in German: gerr soldier do you know how long we have to wait? The soldier turned to him and hit him in the face with the butt of his rifle. This is true story.
These civilized good people, like our rabbi think they can talk to people which hate them. They cannot. Until Palestinians continue their propaganda and all supposedly "humanitarians" support their lies including the lie of 700000 expulsed Palestinians, until they teach their children to kill the Jews on sight peace is not possible and two states solution is Utopia. There is no conversation or negotiation. Only temporary truce agreements. The Nobel prize for Rabin and Arafat should be withdrawn.
What purpose left has in mind? It is still same: to get power and be close to the feeder as left in USA (BLM, Socialists), Cuba, Venezuela already proved many times.
When addressing the issue of whether Israel is a success, I like to start with the section in Rousseau's Social Contract called the marks of success [and by extension legitimacy]: population growth. When Israel was founded, the country included under a million people. It is now approaching 10 million. That is a critical statement of success as a country
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. May God continue to bless the State of Israel.
There are several facts that come to mind. When the U..S was celebrating it's 75th fourth of July, Blacks were enslaved, Native Americans were systematically being slaughtered, children were working in mines & sweat shops & women were disenfranchised. So people in glass houses.......! The majority of Israeli Jews were either survivors of the Shoah or forced to flee Muslim countries where they had lived for a mellinium. The majority landed in what is now Israel because there was no where else to go. No one country wanted them. The Shoah along with the universal rejection by every civilized nation is & will always be a stain on humanity. Why should there exist a Jewish state? It's estimated that several hundred thousand Jews were killed by the Romans. Not to be outdone Islam including Mohammad, Saladin & the Ottomen Empire killed several hundred thousand Jews. The Crusaders murdered 1-200,000 while the Inquisition murdered 3-400,000. Pogroms managed to murder 200,000 & we all know the number murdered between 1933-1945. And the beat goes on! Wir sind zuerst Deutche, Keine Juden. Food for thought!
Correct me , but "the Arab state that the UN had voted to create never came to be" is mistaken. Jordan (transjordan) was created at the same time as (new) Palestine from the old Roman province Palestine
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Kingdoms_of_the_Levant_Map_830.png/800px-Kingdoms_of_the_Levant_Map_830.png
from
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Roman_Empire_125.png
Very helpful. Thanks for a great insight into a country which still lies at the heart of world history.
I thought this article was excellent. I’m not sure why Americans (and I am one) feel the need to draw comparisons to the US. Israel is a beautiful complicated teeny tiny country surrounded by countries that at times have vowed to wipe them off the map. No comparisons necessary.
Bari, as an Israeli living in the US, and who loves your work generally, I'm disappointed in your approach to this subject.
After Matti Friedman's essay, I was hoping that this time around you'll bring someone (for or against, it's your choice) that will go into the details of this incredible constitutional moment that Israel is going through. Typically a nation's constitutional moment is at its time of birth, but not here. Instead, you chose to (again...) bring someone who does not add anything substantial or detailed to the table, but again whines and panics about how bad Bibi and IBG are. How can you "paint in broad strokes" as you put it, a judicial and constitutional crisis that has been 75 years in the making, created by Ben Gurion and weaponized by Aharon Barak?? There are incredibly interesting and fascinating questions to be asked here from the legal and political science standpoint, and all we get (yet again) is a subjective emotional point of view of a single individual? It would've been intriguing to have a discussion similar to the one you had with the Yale constitutional law expert after the Dobbs ruling.
Please keep up the good work! Up and Up
An excellent article. I believe Israelis will find a way to undo this latest Gordion Knot, a quite inconsiderable task when compared to past tests. Consider the miracle that was the recreation of the state of Israel on its ancient homeland. I wish them Godspeed.
As always from this Substack, thoughtful, enlightening ideas with which to wrestle. There is nowhere in the world quite like Israel. From my religious conservative brother"s apartment in Jerusalem to my left wing friend's beautiful home in Tel Aviv and everything in between, the gratitude, variety, spark, life, and dynamism of a nation of people given a 2nd chance after near obliteration, is woven into this at once both ancient and modern land.
Please don't project your limited and self-centered American perspective in the commentary here. Israel is not a mini America nor are its politics a microcosm or offshoot of the US. Go see it. Spend time there. Experience it and widen your perspective.
No amount of immersing yourself in political rhetoric is going to compare to being there to experience the wonder that is Israel.
Well said.
Secular elitism is the destruction of Zionism; Israel must, if it is to survive as a Jewish state, avoid at all costs the malaise of our western liberal post-modern nonsense. Israeli culture must embrace a muscular nationalism based on the Jewish culture and yes identity and thereby exclude, yes exclude, non Jews. It’s a big world, tell them to go elsewhere; the all encompassing nonsense of globalization and cultural annihilation preached from the pulpits of the liberal cathedral cannot be allowed to destroy Israel, and destruction it will surely bring. The religious left will destroy Israel, their nonsense will lead to another catastrophe for Jews, what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called: “the pitiless crowbar of events.”
If any group can escape the nonsense afoot in this world, it must be the people who survived the holocaust; you must defeat the leftists or perish.
This is so very true.
Some argue that it was the lefty leaning group (I forget the name) within ancient Israel that caused the Romans to target and focus on this former colony, and to destroy the Second Temple.
The elitist left will indeed destroy Israel. The good news, as a population this group is in decline in Israel.
I think the lefties are well intended, but frankly, dangerously deluded. The holocaust demonstrated the Jewish people have a different reality, their history is one of unparalleled and unremitting tragedy. Israel is in a tough neighbourhood and we know sooner or later Christians and Muslins alike will scapegoat the hebrews. It won’t be different this time - that’s arrogance. These leftists risk everything, for what, political fashion, bogus woke claptrap, idealistic wishful thinking, this is beyond comprehension. The religious left is dangerous.
As a non=Jew Christian I have spent weeks in Israel studying archeology and its connection to the Hebrew scriptures and do admire the advances that they have made . Trying to walk where Jesus walked without running into a new settlement is impossible.
I Ihave also spent a great deal of time in the Palestinian refugee camps so I admit to a bias. I probably should not take the chance to say that on this comment page since I know I will be vilified but there you go.
I was surprised that there was no mention that the rise of one of the world's strongest military from a fledgling army might have been due at least in part to the $250 billion the US has contibuted to Israel. USAID Data Services reports Israel is the largest recipient of US aid something close to $150 billion a year or more. One would think that now that Israel has booming hi-tech industries and is able to care for its people because of better fiscal policies we might spend our money elsewhere.
Seventy-five years after the founding of Israel, there should be no more refugee camps. These people should have been absorbed into whatever state they ended up, just as Israel itself absorbed the hundreds of thousand of Jewish refugees from post-war Europe and (mostly) from the surrounding Arab states from which they were expelled. There were actually more Jews displaced after 1949 from those Arab lands than Arabs displaced by the Israeli War of Independence.
Why do the Palestinian refugee camps remain? There are multiple reasons. First of all, the UN, rather than including them in their main refugee agency, created a special agency—the UNRWA— just for the Arabs displaced by the war. (The Palestinians didn’t start calling themselves that until the early 1960’s. Earlier in the 20th century, before Israel was established, only the Jews living there called themselves Palestinian.) The UNRWA has markedly different criteria and rules than the main UN refugee agency. Most importantly, it makes refugee status heritable, so grandchildren and great-grandchildren, etc., of the original refugees get refugee status. The funding is separate from the main agency and never apparently runs out. Therefore there is great incentive to perpetuate the refugee population to keep the funds rolling in.
As you may have noted, though, a lot of that money never reaches the refugee camps. Palestinian leadership is notoriously corrupt, and they have gotten extremely rich siphoning money meant for their people into their own pocketbooks.
What about camps in other countries like Lebanon, etc.? The surrounding Arab countries have refused to absorb the refugees. There are strict limitations of the rights of those refugees in terms of where they can live, what work they can do, etc. They actively work against absorbing the refugees.
Aside from the economic reasons the refugee camps have remained, the biggest reason is political. The refugees are used as a political cudgel against even the existence of Israel. As long as the camps remain—and the people in them are needy—the money will keep flowing and the pressure on Israel will remain.
The continued existence of the camps are not Israel’s fault, but the world naively doesn’t see it that way.
By the way, your figure of $150 billion per year to Israel is absolute nonsense. That is about the total they have received since Israel was established. They do get a lot these days—in the neighborhood of $4 billion per year—but nearly all of that is required by the US to be spent on US military goods, injecting money into US companies. It still is a generous aid package for sure, but nowhere near what you claimed and it is basically subsidizing US companies in the bargain.
Well put.
Blame rests at the feet of the British and the French for messing up how the lands contained within the former Ottoman Empire got allocated after WWI. The Jews followed international laws within the League of Nations and was granted, by that international community (via a vote) certain lands from its former self. There are many “peoples” “nations” etc.. that did not get land. The Kurds are but one example. There were no “Palestinians” at the table when the Ottoman Empire was busted up. So they got nothing. It was not until the early 1960’s that the “Palestinian” cause was stated.
I understand that the Arabs in the region when the UN called for an Arab and a Jewish state called it “a catastrophe.”
Yes, but the vote @ The League of Nations (predecessor to the UN) was in favor of a Jewish state.
I am sorry that you feel that you cannot speak your mind about the Palestinian (they are just Arabs) situation. Your contribution would enhance this discussion, but only IF you would admit to the current Palestinian leadership's rabid "Death to Israel" mindset.
Much has been made of the expulsion of Palestinians (There never was a country named Palestine) from the declared country of Israel, but rarely, if EVER, is it mentioned that these Palestinians oppressed Jews living in the land before its founding. Nor has the vast majority of Americans been told of the Jewish expulsions from north Africa where they had lived and prospered for centuries, nor the vanishingly small Jewish presence in many Arab countries where they had been, and still ARE, subjected to punishing social laws and practices.
When Zionist Jews declared Jewish independence, the so-called Palestinians had that same opportunity, but they refused to act on it, preferring to use the camps as a cudgel with which they could beat the Israelis about the head and shoulders for political purposes.
None of this justifies any crimes perpetrated against them by Israel, but it NEEDS to be noted that the Palestinian situation is a cause used to bring about the destruction of the nation of Israel.
For an alternate reading try Joan Peters' book, "From Time Immemorial" https://www.amazon.com/Time-Immemorial-Publisher-JKAP-Publications/dp/B004XDFY0Q/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1DFI0RURPLQVV&keywords=from+time+immemorial+by+joan+peters&qid=1684424759&s=books&sprefix=From+Time+Immemorial%2Cstripbooks%2C163&sr=1-2
Might be in part to the many Jewish people in the US. Though I stand with Israeli, I have watched for many years all the attempts by the US to broker a peace settlement with the Palestinians to no avail. Some people just don’t get it. Kind of like the idiots in the leftist/Democratic Party brainwashed by the universities.
THANK YOU!!! This is a story that is ignored by most of the chattering classes in the media, and DEFINITELY in academia! They prefer a "simple" narrative so as to not confuse readers and listeners and with the intention of shaping a national view. But there is nothing "simple" about the situation in the Levant.
It’s an interesting article, but I would hope that an article from the Israeli right gets shared, too. Every Jew should love Israel and I’m afraid, here in America, the Jewish left have left the love fest. Am Yisrael Chai! Long live the state of Israel, regardless of its political and judicial warts.