Old Wine Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit's Promised Land
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Were he not already inured to the logrolling that passes for informed opinion on this topic, Norman Finkelstein might have been surprised, astonished even. That’s because, as he reveals with typical precision, My Promised Land is riddled with omission, distortion, falsehood, and sheer nonsense.
In brief chapters that analyze Shavit’s defense of Zionism and Israel’s Jewish identity, its nuclear arsenal and its refusal to negotiate peace, Finkelstein shows how highly selective criticism and sanctimonious handwringing are deployed to create a paean to modern Israel more sophisticated than the traditional our-country-right-or-wrong. In this way, Shavit hopes to win back an American Jewish community increasingly alienated from a place it once regarded as home. However, because the myths he recycles have been so comprehensively shattered, this project is unlikely to succeed.
Like his landmark debunking of Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, Finkelstein’s clinical dissection of My Promised Land will be welcomed by those who prefer truth to propaganda, and who yearn for a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict based on justice, rather than arguments framed by anguish and schmaltz.
Norman Finkelstein
Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate from the Princeton University Department of Politics. His many books have been translated into some fifty foreign editions. He is a frequent lecturer and commentator on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
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Old Wine Broken Bottle - Norman Finkelstein
MY PROMISED LAND by Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit has been one of the most widely discussed and lavishly praised books about Israel in recent years. It has garnered encomiums from a broad spectrum of influential voices and publications.
Were he not already inured to the logrolling that passes for informed opinion on this topic, Norman Finkelstein might have been surprised, astonished even. That’s because, as he reveals with typical precision, My Promised Land is riddled with omissions, distortions, and falsehoods.
In brief chapters that analyze Shavit’s defense of Zionism and Israel’s Jewish identity, its nuclear arsenal and its refusal to negotiate peace, Finkelstein shows how highly selective criticism and sanctimonious handwringing are deployed to create a paean to modern Israel more sophisticated than the traditional our-country-right-or-wrong. In this way, Shavit hopes to win back an American Jewish community increasingly alienated from a place it once regarded as home.
Like his landmark debunking of Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, Finkelstein’s clinical dissection of My Promised Land will be welcomed by those who prefer truth to propaganda, and who yearn for a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict based on justice, rather than arguments framed by anguish and schmaltz.
Author photograph © Maryam T. Ordoubadi
NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN is the author of eight books: Knowing Too Much, What Gandhi Says, This Time We Went Too Far,
Beyond Chutzpah, The Holocaust Industry, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, A Nation on Trial (with Ruth Bettina Birn), and The Rise and Fall of Palestine.
© 2014 Norman G. Finkelstein
Published by OR Books, New York and London
Visit our website at www.orbooks.com
First printing 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-939293-46-6 paperback
ISBN 978-1-939293-47-3 e-book
Typeset by Lapiz Digital, Chennai, India.
Printed by BookMobile in the US and CPI Books Ltd in the UK.
To Arwa, Afaf, and Sana
Three daughters of Palestine,
each a living testament
why Palestine must and will
survive
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1/ If Zionism Was to Be, Lydda Could Not Be
2/ The Real Israel Is…a Shopping Mall
3/ For the First Time in History, the Jews Could Have the Ability to Annihilate Other Peoples
4/ Operation Cast Lead Is an Intelligent, Impressive Operation
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
But Michal’s Israeliness now manifests itself in new ways. Every Thursday at midnight, she stands at the door of Allenby 58. In an extravagant getup, with her provocative mannerisms, she tells the bouncers who to let in and who to turn away, all the while looking for the guy she’ll have fun with at dawn. Selection is power, Michal tells me.
—from My Promised Land
INTRODUCTION
ONCE UPON A TIME it was a commonplace that Israel’s founding entailed the dispossession of the indigenous population. After World War II, Hannah Arendt observed matter-of-factly, it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely by means of a colonized and then conquered territory.… [T]he solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs.
¹
Nonetheless Israel’s public relations apparatus managed through repetition to instill the myth that this new category of refugees
was not the inexorable outcome of colonization and conquest, but instead the result of a circumstantial and incidental event for which Israel bore no culpability. The official Zionist tale alleged that via radio broadcasts, and despite Israeli pleas that the Palestinian population remain in place, neighboring Arab states had instructed Palestinians to flee in order to clear the field for invading Arab armies. Although researchers had already disproved this claim by the early 1960s,² it required the industry and pedigree of an Israeli historian to lay it to rest.
In 1986, scholarly US journals published a pair of articles by Israeli historian Benny Morris chronicling the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.³ In one of them Morris graphically recalled the order given by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in July 1948 to expel Lydda’s 30,000 Palestinian inhabitants, the large-scale massacre
of upwards of 250 Palestinians in Lydda that precipitated the expulsion, and the ensuing death march in which scores more Palestinians perished. The next year Morris reported this brutal episode and many others in his landmark study, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.⁴
The principal organs of American Jewish opinion ignored at the time unwelcome tidings such as Morris’s. Commentary, at the right end of the political spectrum, and The New Republic, at the center, promulgated an immaculate conception
version of Zionism, according to which Palestine had been literally empty on the eve of Zionist colonization; Israel’s founding entailed no wrong because no native population existed on which to inflict a wrong. The Nation magazine, at the left end of the spectrum, was scarcely better, and arguably worse. In 1989 it published an eyewitness account of the events in Lydda by an Israeli peacenik.
He purported that "we never really conquered Lydda. Lydda, to put it simply, fled" (emphasis in