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Book Review: The Latest Word in Israel-Bashing

(New Republic) Benny Morris - "New historian" Avi Shlaim will probably earn more Israel-bashing brownie points for his newest book, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations, than all his previous books combined. This collection of academic essays and reviews are mostly an extended exercise in anti-Zionism, nothing more. On page 307, for example, he tells us that the establishment of Israel "involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians," and goes on to quote a leading British Foreign Office anti-Semite, John Troutbeck, in 1948, to the effect that the Americans were responsible "for the creation of a gangster state headed by 'an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders'." While Palestinian political aspirations, then and now, were "just," according to Shlaim, he never applies the word to Zionist aspirations, before 1948 or after. Nowhere in his book does Shlaim say a word about the Jewish people's three-thousand-year-old connection to the Land of Israel. Nor does he mention that the Arabs, who had no connection to Palestine, in the seventh century conquered the land "unjustly" from the Byzantine Empire and "illegally" settled in it, forcibly converting it into an "Arab" land. The writer is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University.
2009-12-04 07:54:51
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