Although it is perhaps wearing a bit thin, the only psychological hypothesis to explain the irrationality of so many dissenting Jews is that they are “self-hating” and perhaps also “lefty” academic wankers. It’s revealing that nobody ever tries to give a serious analysis of this syndrome. What does it mean? How does it arise? Why would it lead otherwise normal people to hold such deviant views contrary to the obvious evidence that everyone knows? Above all, how can so many intelligent, well-educated and significant people be so afflicted? Of course, the trick is not to permit seriously asking these questions but just to use the label as if it needs no explanation or justification. It’s an old trick seen many years ago in the attribution of “Stokholm Syndrome” – another mental illness of a political hostage coming to see the point of view of their captors. It couldn’t be contemplated that their view might have been a rational conversion due to better information and insight since this might mean that the “terrorists” had a case. Rather, we are encouraged not to even think of such a possibility by labelling the convert as suffering from a pseudo-diagnosis dreamed up by propaganda pop-psychologists. This means that you don’t need to take their point of view seriously.

In the present case, it’s the very persuasiveness of Melanie Phillips’ story that is the warning sign. If you find it compelling, as most Jews do, then you need to stop to ask how leading Jewish commentators, journalists, historians and growing numbers of ordinary people remain unconvinced. Something is deeply wrong and can’t be ignored. Recognizing this radical divergence in the “narratives” is the first step towards resolving the apparent dispute. As in the wonderful story of the rabbi of Chelm whose wife said “They can’t both be right” we need to confront the diametrically opposed views seriously, precisely because the Melanie Phillips picture is so convincing that nobody in their right mind could deny it. Or could they?

"While it is understandable that Palestinians remember the suffering of 700,000 Palestinians who fled or otherwise lost their homes in 1948, it is worth remembering that this tragedy was completely avoidable had Palestinians and the Arab states heeded the UN's resolution calling for two states for two peoples. Instead, a war to ethnically cleanse the area of Jewish inhabitants was launched."

 In the light of the uncontroversial facts of 1948 and since, it requires a pathological chutzpah to blame the Palestinians for ethnic cleansing and for the failure of a two-state solution on the very occasion that they were expelled, dispossessed and massacred, and their towns obliterated. According to Rubenstein it seems that the Palestinians were to blame for not accepting the theft of their land and the atrocities through which this was achieved. Rubenstein's characteristic propaganda shows a contempt for a readership who may not know the truth.

Healing Israel's Birth Scar April 2, 2008 Tony Karon 

 The opening paragraph:

With the 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth — and of the Palestinian Nakbah (catastrophe) — which are, of course the same event, almost upon us, I was reminded this week that April 9 was also the 60th anniversary of an event that has long epitomized the connection between the creation of an ethnic-majority Jewish state and the man-made catastrophe suffered by the Palestinian Arabs. That would be the massacre at Deir Yassein, a small village near Jerusalem where fighters of the Irgun, led by Menahem Begin, massacred up to 250 Palestinian civilians — in what later emerged as a calculated campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” using violence and the threat of violence to drive Palestinians to flee their homes and land, which were then summarily appropriated by the new state of Israel, which passed legislation forbidding the Palestinian owners from returning to their property.

THE path to peace in the Middle East is a tortuous one. Israel and the Palestinian Authority are working together with great difficulty to establish an Israel and a Palestine living side by side together in peace, as envisaged more than six decades ago by United Nations Security Council resolution 181 and in line with the "road map" for peace proposed by a quartet of international entities: the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

The cynicism and fraudulence of such pious sentiments are clear to anyone who cares to go beyond these public propaganda statements to some informed discussion. A good example is the article by Henry Siegman in London Review of Books, 16 August 2007 titled 'The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam'.

Before noting Siegman's account of UN 181, we may note that Siegman bluntly states the theme of his detailed discussion as follows:

 The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.

 Siegman's article is shocking in its exposé of the myths that are constantly repeated about the entire history of Israel/Palestine and the "peace process". He cites James Wolfensohn's comments on the way that the US systematically undermined the agreement he had helped make in 2005, turning Gaza into a vast prison. He mentions the maps showing the 'facts on the ground'. These reveal the truths that Siegman says are drowned out by "the uninformed and/or cynical blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their culture, dismantle the ‘infrastructures of terror’ and halt all violence and incitement before peace negotiations can begin ..."

 Typical of such "blather", as I have shown in earlier blogs, is Lamm's mention of the 1947 UN Partition Resolution 181. Siegman reveals what lies behind these self-righteous remarks:

Israel’s contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a ‘just and lasting peace’ that will allow ‘every state in the area [to] live in security’, Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons, but principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.

Lamm tries to deflect our claim that Israel was never the David confronting Goliath by seeking to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt whom we quoted. Lamm tries to smear these scholars whose work is undoubtedly open to criticism for their controversial claims concerning the Israel Lobby, but this was not the issue on which we quoted them. Lamm’s effort to dismiss Mearsheimer and Walt is simply irrelevant to the David and Goliath claim. The basis for this specific claim can be found widely in the literature that is not just Israel Lobby propaganda as I have indicated in an earlier blog (Conflicting narratives, March 30, 2008). Even in 1948 the Israeli military force was superior to the Arab armies it confronted, despite being outnumbered. The 1967 June Six-Day War is always cited as another case when Israel faced destruction, but we need not rely on Mearsheimer and Walt.  Perhaps Lamm might accept as more reliable the claims of the former Commander of the Israeli Air Force, General Ezer Wiezmann, Chief of Staff Chaim Bar-Lev and General Mattityahu Peled, all of whom held that there was no threat of destruction. Other sources that Lamm could hardly discredit include Menachem Begin and Abba Eban, both of whom discounted Nasser’s intention to attack Israel - a judgement shared by US officials at the time.

It is revealing that of all the serious issues at stake concerning the dispossession and brutalization of Palestinians, Lamm thinks that “The most problematic claim” we make is that Israel is not the state of its citizens but only of the Jewish people. Not our charges concerning Israel’s disproportionate violence, collective punishment, targeted assassinations, illegal settlements, daily humiliations and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, but our claim that Israel officially makes its own Palestinian population second-class citizens is the one that Lamm regards as the most serious issue. This suggests a moral blindness of pathological extent, so that our alleged  unfairness in characterizing official Israeli domestic policies is of deeper concern than the litany of violations of international laws and abuses of Palestinian’s human rights.

Lamm’s tactic is, of course, not to deny our claim directly since it is simply a fact. Instead, Lamm uses a sleight-of-hand hoping to misdirect readers from the realities of Israeli policies, laws and official or unofficial administrative discrimination. Lamm lists other undoubted facts such as that Arabic is one of the country’s official languages. This will undoubtedly be a great comfort to those who are suffering wretched circumstances in Gaza and the West Bank under military occupation.

 Lamm becomes simply absurd in citing the growth of the Arab population as evidence against our charge of ethnic cleansing. He conveniently neglects to mention our reference to foremost Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, whose book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine provides the uncontroversial evidence for this indictment. This kind of response by Lamm is unworthy of schoolboy debaters but is evidently the best that a leading representative of the Israel Lobby can muster. Above all, it reveals the egregious inadequacy of the case against our criticisms.

With peace, the land grabs will have to stop

April 1, 2008

IT IS refreshing to see the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Opinion, 31/03) discussed in such a dispassionate manner. No emotive rhetoric denouncing the other side's horrors but conveniently ignoring their side's horrors, but simply the facts as they really are. Here is some more startling truth: the Israeli Government does not want peace with the Palestinians, at least not yet. By previously playing Hamas against Fatah, and now playing Fatah against Hamas, the Government has been able to proceed with the unfettered building of more settlements in the West Bank.

I dread to wonder when this process of claiming Palestinian land will finally stop. It might seem unpalatable for some people that this could be the case, but you need to separate rhetoric from action. The fact is that Israel has been taking Arab land since the declaration of Israel as a state. It would be naive to imagine that this was never the intended outcome.

Paul Gosling, Langwarrin

Nothing but more prejudice

WHAT we have to strive for amid the plethora of opinions on Israel is tolerance, moderation and open-mindedness. The last things we need in this raging debate are articles that are extreme and inflammatory.

Peter Slezak and Antony Loewenstein have written such an article. They accuse Israel of "ethnic-cleansing" and of killing innocent civilians. They accuse past leaders and heroes of being bigoted and ruthless, and half the population of being inherently racist. These accusations portray Israel as a bloodthirsty, inhumane and racist nation. This is not only unbelievably false, but it is dangerous and irresponsible.

Israel's problems and mistakes, although undeniable and regrettable, do not define Israel as a whole, just as suicide bombers do not define Palestinians as a whole.

Primarily, Israel is a vibrant democratic state that upholds concepts of pluralism and freedom, and that is what Slezac and Loewenstein omit from their article. Have they helped us take a step towards tolerance, moderation and balanced dialogue, or have they incited more hatred, created more polarised views and instigated more extremism in a context in which extremism is the root of all evil? The irony of their final plea for "balanced dialogue" is almost palpable.

Oscar Schwartz, Toorak

Prescription for conflict

PETER Slezak and Antony Loewenstein claim that speaking honestly about Israelis and Palestinians is fraught, which is probably why they have chosen not to do so. Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Israel's other citizens, and far more than Arabs in any other Middle East state, yet Slezak and Loewenstein accuse Israel of discrimination and "ethnic cleansing". They also blame the conflict and occupation on Israel, rather than the constant Palestinian refusal to accept land in return for acceptance of Israel's right to exist in peace.

Similarly, despite their token condemnation of Hamas and Hezbollah rocket fire, they are far more critical of Israel's efforts to defend its citizens. To ignore the facts that every aspect of Israel's conduct they object to is the direct result of Palestinian or Arab terrorism or intransigence belies their claim to be true friends of Israel. It is a prescription for continued conflict, not for peace.

Justin Lipton, Melbourne

The over-reactions to such minor departures from conformity with the hawkish Zionist doctrines of the official orthodoxy is revealing of a totalitarian reflex – even the slightest, minor dissent must be eliminated, countered and discouraged.
These reactions of the community provide an important lesson for others who might dare to think for themselves by entertaining thoughts that depart from uncritical support for Israeli government policies: They will have to endure the kind of ridicule and abuse to which even the most minor dissenting voices are subjected. A Jewish acquaintance revealed something of the psychological pressures felt at the very idea of independent thought: Although I have never had a conversation with this person, he confronted me in order to abuse me and to make me aware that I am hated by everyone in the entire Jewish community. While this is not exactly an argument against my views, it is very revealing about the fear that keeps people in line – the unthinkable possibility of being ostracized and treated like a pariah. We know from friends and sympathizers that, although they share the sentiments of our original founding statement, they were unable to sign publicly because of the impossible family tensions it would create.

Since we are, by any objective standard, pretty insignificant compared to the combined influence, resources and organized activities of the UIA, JNF, AIJAC, WIZO, AJN and  NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, you have to ask why we have been given such inordinate attention. The answer is pretty clear:  Any dissenting voice must be neutralized lest people may be emboldened to think for themselves. Michael Danby has been one of those whose role was to ensure that no critical voice ever appeared in public without some complaint or harassment. Many years ago, Chomsky appeared for 8 minutes on the ABC radio, prompting Danby to lodge a formal complaint to the ABC Board. That is, a rare few minutes of an alternative view from a distinguished intellectual must not be heard without some effort to defuse its potential harm. The irony in Danby’s complaint was his demand that such dissenting opinion should be “balanced” by a “mainstream” view. But by definition the mainstream view is the one we hear all the time and, therefore, Chomsky’s radical position constitutes balance and does not need to be countered.

The systematic activities of the Israel Lobby are needed to preventing independent thinking when the evidence of one’s own eyes concerning Israeli crimes seems difficult to justify. I was giving a lecture to a B’Nai Brith group in 1982 on philosophical topics when I was asked whether I would mind if an Israeli emissary could address the group briefly before my talk on the “crisis for Israel”. At that time the Israeli army was mercilessly and indiscriminately shelling Beirut as every TV news was showing, and it was a bit difficult to explain to one’s-self how this might be justified on the usual pretexts of "self-defence". Hence the need for re-assuring propaganda to keep diaspora Jews from squirming at what their own consciences might be hinting. And, of course, it’s very effective. In the recent Lebanon war, emails were circulating in the Jewish community expressing outrage at the criminal depravity of Hezbollah rockets. Of course, the Hezbollah crimes of targeting civilians must be readily and unreservedly condemned, but Jewish friends were incapable of making any concession that perhaps Israeli actions were also crimes and perhaps even on a larger scale. There is no apparent moral outrage in the Jewish community about anti-personnel weapons like cluster bombs etc. or devastation of entire Lebanese villages such as Bint Jbail.

Well, Harrison’s pamphlet is disappointing for many reasons that I’ll indicate more or less randomly. Starting at the end, he says (p. 39) that some left-wing criticism of Israel is “so strained, hyperbolic and defamatory as to be effectively indistinguishable from (non-Jewish) anti-Semitic propaganda.” First, I don’t quite understand Harrison's repeated use of the term “defamatory” to refer to criticisms of a state as distinct from a person. This is an odd locution that reveals much about the adulation and idolization of the State that might suffer insults and hurt as if it were a person. Since Harrison is so sensitive throughout to the nuances of language and the misuse of terms, he might reflect on the curious connotations of this one – entailing just the kind of personification of the Nation, People, Flag etc. one might find profoundly objectionable.

As these remarks suggest, there are grounds for concern about notorious attitudes that have been increasingly evident in our own societies – young people draping themselves in national flags and beating perceived “enemies” etc. Harrison’s objections to making such analogies with Nazism is a convenient ploy that would make history impossible: if every detail of historical events had to be reproduced before meaningful comparisons were legitimate, we could never draw any comparisons at all. Does Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert (or George Bush) have to have a toothbrush moustache before we can say anything at all about trends in legal, political and military behaviour that bear important resemblances. Does every feature of South African apartheid have to be reproduced before we can use the term meaningfully to highlight features of Israeli policies? Naomi Wolf’s recent book on the steps the US has taken toward Fascism may be criticized, but is not to be so cavalierly dismissed as Harrison would, by implication, dismiss it for such analogies. He lists the horrors of the concentration camps, deportations etc. as if nothing less than 6 million Jews and others can warrant serious comparisons. That’s the trick of an entire genre of commentary on Nazism – including the Heidegger industry. These are demonized to a degree that makes it impossible to recognize our own, admittedly lesser, evils. Hans Sluga’s book on Heidegger makes this point well. Of course, that’s why Jewish commentators were so harshly critical of Hanna Arendt: She saw both Heidegger and Eichmann as more like ourselves than we care to admit.

Back to Harrison’s criterion for judging left-wing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic: His criterion of the “test of truth”. Views are held to be anti-Semitic, among other reasons, if they are falsehoods. Well, his remarks suggest that he is a victim of what are, admittedly, the most widely held prejudices about Israel and its history. After all, one might expect better from him. His utterly uncritical citing of Dershowitz is unworthy of someone who pretends to give a serious scholarly discussion of these very issues. Dershowitz himself has been shown repeatedly to fail the "test of truth" – his exposure to the Boston Globe in 1973 for having knowingly misrepresented the case of Israeli human rights activist Israel Shahak, his repeated lies about Chomsky's position on the Holocaust denier Faurisson, and his plagiarism of Joan Peters' hoax book From Time Immemorial exposed by Norman Finkelstein.

Harrison's test of truth might have included mention of those, now well-known, Israeli, Jewish and other historians who have written massive, documented alternatives to the traditional narrative that Harrison recites uncritically – Israel’s repeated wars of self-defence etc. This is no longer so glibly assertable in light of the work of Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Norman Finkelstein, and others. This point is, indeed, perhaps the central weakness of Harrison’s pamphlet since the charge of “defamation” of Israel cannot be sustained if the history recounted by these new ‘revisionist’ historians is at all close to the truth. Morris is himself is a right-wing ‘tranfer’ advocate and no left-wing ideologue, but his history is more or less the same as the others – despite  some significant differences of emphasis.

On the mainstream media and its workings, Harrison just seems naïve if he thinks that they are biased against Israel – the usual cry. Comparing Israel's Ha’aretz with the New York Times or Sydney Morning Herald is sufficient to determine which way the Times and SMH are biased. Harrison’s discussion of the separation wall is just embarrassing in mouthing Israeli nonsense about keeping out terrorism. Why isn’t it constructed along the 1967 border in that case? Checking the details of its path and the destruction of villages etc. tells a different story that Harrison has managed not to discover.

Selective attention to Israel, especially by critical left-wing Jews, is further evidence for Harrison of their anti-Semitic tendencies – or perhaps unwittingly playing into the hands of global anti-Semitism (of which there is undoubtedly plenty – a matter to which I’ll return presently). Of course, I receive this criticism repeatedly and vehemently from Jews who are particularly outraged by public Jewish criticism of Israel. Even if Israel’s sins “might appear relatively venial” by the standards of other state’s crimes around the world, Harrison seems blind to an obvious moral truth – that he would see clearly in other cases. He is, of course, right to notice the asymmetry of attention to Israel’s crimes. Just as left-wing critics hold up US, or Australian crimes for particular attention. It should not require too much argument to make the point that we have a moral obligation in relation to our own crimes – that is, the ones committed by our own state in our own name and, above all, those upon which we might have some conceivable influence. Harrsion overlooks this moral truism when he insists that we should be equally or more concerned about the crimes in Darfur. The true heroes of East Timor in Australia were not those who acted as the cheer squad for our own government’s complicity in the Indonesian atrocities there. A small band of dedicated Australians devoted years of tireless activism to raise public awareness of the near-genocide in East Timor - because of our own governments involvement and because it made a difference. On Harrison’s formula, they should have agitated against larger crimes elsewhere – perhaps those of Pol Pot and other official enemies whose crimes we could not influence.

Finally, perhaps the most striking thing about Harrison’s writing and careful philosophical analysis of the criteria for judging anti-Semitism is that he gives a reasonable enough account of such racism but fails to notice what precisely fits the description – namely, the tidal wave of anti-Islam that dominates and disfigures our intellectual culture and poplular media. Anti-Semitism is undoubtedly a source of concern, but to neglect the vastly greater systematic vilification of Muslims as religious, fundamentalist fanatics – the entire “clash of civilizations” thesis that has consumed commentators and journalists – is a moral blindness that has serious consequences. Harrison might have read Edward Said with profit to recalibrate his moral barometer.

As far as encouraging anti-Semitism goes, I may unwittingly be contributing to this evil, as Harrison and Melanie Phillips suggest – despite my personal history which might have made me a little sensitive to the problem. I still have almost nightly discussions with my mother about her experience in Auschwitz but I may be deluded about my playing into the hands of the anti-Semites. However, there is another view: One can fully acknowledge the growing anti-Semitism in the world while asking what might be among its causes. Harrison seems oblivious to the serious issues that one might raise here – confining his interest to long-standing traditional and, above all, irrational hatreds. This is in keeping with the fashionable trend among so many others to ascribe irrational, fanatical and groundless hatred to Muslims responsible for 9/11 and other crimes, suicide terrorism etc.

In relation to anti-Semitism, it seems to be arguable that a more potent contribution to its causes is not irrational, unfounded hatred but legitimate grievances and the uncritical attitude of Jews towards the crimes of the Jewish State. Jews can hardly expect people to distinguish Jewishness from Zionism when they themselves make such an obsessive almost compulsory political identification, enforcing it in so many ways. I have no doubt from my own non-Jewish acquaintances and the emails we have received from non-Jews that our public stance is welcome as an indication of Jewish willingness to dissociate themselves from Israel’s crimes and thereby distinguishing Jewishness from Zionism. This is, of course, just as we expect of others, such as those we celebrate as the “righteous” among Gentiles. It’s at least arguable that just such dissent and dissociation would lessen the hostility to Jews as Jews – that is, if they were not invisible and publicly silent when Israel’s crimes are so egregious. Harrison presumably understands this perfectly well, since it’s just what we expect of anyone: We expected it of decent Germans, decent Soviet citizens etc. – not to denounce the crimes of other regimes, but the crimes of their own. Since the danger of doing so in those cases was considerable, it seems obvious that the imperative for us to criticize the crimes of our own regimes is even greater. In this case, the penalty is not a visit by the Gestapo or being sent to the Gulag in Siberia but only the discomfort of some obnoxious, ill-informed hostility.

Harrison gives no evidence of having read Morris, Pappe, Shlaim, Finkelstein, Chomsky, Reinhardt or others who are, after all, perhaps the most important objects of his criticism – namely, Jews on the left who are highly critical of Israel. He also gives no evidence of the slightest familiarity with the histories that are hardly controversial though they don't confirm the mythology of the past 60 years he seems to uncritically endorse. I'd be interested to hear what he might say in response to these people, instead of what is, after all, a pretty thin little diatribe and nit-picking rhetorical exercise.


Best wishes for now,

Peter 

The predicament of critics of Israeli government policies is that, rightly or wrongly, they have come to hold a view of the history and current state of Israel/Palestine conflict that is radically divergent from the most popular, conventional accounts to be seen in the media and even scholarship. Inevitably, such critics who seem to deny the most widely held "facts" appear absurd and even morally blameworthy, quite apart from the charges of 'self-hating' and disloyal, encouraging anti-semitism etc. These latter charges are very widespread in personal conflicts within the Jewish community and have a growing literature, and so they also deserve to be addressed separately in a subsequent blog.

Here I focus on the troubling problem of radically alternative narratives according to which the history of Jewish settlement and the founding of the State of Israel is told in seemingly incompatible ways. The differing, incompatible stories make a difference not only to the issue of historical truth but to urgent current moral and political matters - crudely, the question of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. In approaching these issues here I will repeat an edited version of emails I have been having with Jewish friends in which we debate these fundamental questions, in the best spirit of vigorous disagreement over matters we regard as important.

 
The essential issue about alternative narratives arises since the conventional wisdom of the history of Israel has been undermined by the foremost Israeli and other Jewish historians and commentators including Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and Tanya Reinhardt. The story they tell is inevitably shocking for most people and the central difficulty posed by these 'revisionist' or 'new' historians is set out in an Opinion article in The Melbourne Age.

Without further prefatorial explanations, I include here my lightly edited email in which I try to explain my approach. The context of the discussion was the issue of whether peace between Israel and Palestinians might be expected if Israel withdrew to the 1967 borders as required by UN resolutions. The specific details of the 1967 June Six-Day War are relevant here because my friend suggested that those borders did not prevent Israel's implacable enemies bent on her destruction then, and would not do so now. In reply, I had suggested that returning to the 1967 borders today is not the same as returning to 1967. The intervening years must be taken into account and, especially, the fraudulent "peace process" which might have resulted in a just solution had it not been undermined by Israel and US efforts - as documented in Said, Chomsky, Finkelstein, Reinhardt and others. Nevertheless, revisiting the 1967 June war is instructive and important as part of the overall story - especially for Jews who must face the uncomfortable facts.

Dear friend,

You say that I selectively choose to rely on historians that confirm my particular prejudices and so you don’t want to take these seriously. This is a mistake on your part for several reasons.

First, at worst, even if you are correct, this just makes the situation symmetrical between us. You choose your historians and I choose mine. So, even if you are right, this doesn’t prove that your historians are more reliable and you can’t claim to have established the superiority of your own preferred narrative.

Second however, even if you are right about their biased approach, it seems to me that you miss the significance of the alternative, admittedly radical and implausible, biased, ‘revisionist’ histories that I cite. You don’t seem to accept the serious intellectual obligation of confronting them precisely in order to show the superiority of your own story. Now, admittedly, some radically alternative accounts are not worth responding to seriously in this way. Holocaust deniers are so far beyond the pale that one needn’t feel the same intellectual obligation to enter serious debate with them. You could,
conceivably adopt the same stance here, but that would amount to refusing to discuss the issues seriously.

In the present case, unlike the case of Holocaust denials, there are not the same grounds for simply ignoring them. This is mainly because the alternative to your own favoured story is not at all the ravings of a lunatic fringe but standard and more or less uncontroversial. Of course, this needs to be qualified in the sense that, of course, there is controversy in the public sphere of political lobbying and propaganda spin. However, among professional historians, the basic story is not the one repeatedly recounted for the consumption of the lay public and especially Jewish community supporters of Israel. This should not surprise you and you would accept the general point immediately in the case of other hot topics such as East Timor. There was lots of public political disputation among the commentariat about East Timor for 24 years. It had little resemblance to what were all along known to be the uncontroversial truths. Ditto for Latin America. One could find out the truth from official US government sources, but it took some effort and didn't appear in the New York Times.

The relevance of this to our current discussion is clear. This is analogous to the “debate” about the environment and greenhouse: Al Gore makes the important point that the perception of debate is utterly misleading and entirely and artefact of the fossil fuel industry lobby. The relevant scientific professionals don’t at all reflect this so-called “debate” insofar as there is an enormous, unprecedented consensus on the basic issues (though, of course, never complete unanimity). You can get a sense of the way that the standard story of 1967 needs to be heavily qualified and filled out by looking at the Wikipedia entry which is fairly reliable – not least because it gives direct citations to crucial historical documents, letters memoirs etc. These are the historians' primary sources that are, of course, not available to the journalists who wrote the contemporaneous press stories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War#cite_ref-18

So, you can dismiss alternative accounts I rely on by saying that I choose those historians whose bias I prefer, but this is to miss the importance of these accounts for your own case - even if you are right. As J.S. Mill famously put it, you don’t know your own case properly unless you confront it with mine. You don’t understand the strengths and weaknesses of your position unless you actually show how it can withstand the strongest case against it. That should be obvious.

So, that brings us to my own approach which you say is just a matter of relying on those whose biases suit my own. Just now, I've been indicating that even if this is true, it doesn't relieve you of the intellectual obligation to take them
seriously and answer them.

Now, I fully appreciate how absurd or implausible the alternative narrative sounds to you. But you can’t avoid the logic inherent in our debate unless we just agree to disagree. If the dialogue is to be at all meaningful and not just repeating our views loudly and slowly, surely it requires comparing and contrasting the conflicting narratives. For better or worse, my story is that the most widely held views (outside professional historians) of the entire Israel-Arab conflict is a kind of mythology. So, of course, predictably, if you find what I say absurd, that’s not an answer but just re-affirming what I claim. To move beyond this, you are right to ask for some indication of the alternative. I’ll give you some compelling hints of the sorts of evidence that are relevant and that fill out the picture of your own sketch of basic facts concerning 1967 that relied on contemporaneous press reports. (The problems of relying exclusively on press reports to reconstuct the history of the Six-Day War in June 1967 is a matter for another blog).  Like adding bits to the psychology textbook drawing of a young woman, the same objective facts become transformed as parts of quite a different overall picture – the old “mother-in-law” (or the famous “faces-vase” ambiguous drawing). The “facts” you cite may not be disputed, but the overall picture can be quite different from the one you draw. That’s why it’s overly simplistic to assert that you don’t need historians or their analysis because the facts (especially as available from the press) somehow speak for themselves.

Consider Chomsky’s account (in his classic 'Fateful Triangle') that contrasts the standard story of people like Walzer concerning the “Egyptian challenge” and the “clear case” of aggression involved – the story you tell. Chomsky notes that Israeli generals take a different view: “The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weizmann, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was “no threat of destruction” but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could “exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodies”. Chomsky records that American intelligence held a similar view – as you can see from US State department documents whose originals are linked at the Wikipedia cite. Other Israeli generals who corroborate this view are Chief of Staff Chaim Bar-Lev and General Mattityahu Peled.

Now, you objected to my remark about a “land-grab” (though I don’t think I used these crude terms) by Israel, but these comments are not too far from such sentiments (and, as we have noted in The Age piece, the history of territorial ambitions are explicit from Theodor Herzl onwards among leaders like Ben Gurion, Dayan and others).

Chomsky (Fateful Triangle) cites another source that surely deserves to be taken seriously and who expresses doubts about the Egyptian “challenge” and “clear case” of aggression etc. Menachem Begin said: “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” (p. 100).  Finkelstein (Image & Reality) reports Peled, who was one of the architects of the June war as saying in 1972 that “the claim that Israel was under the menace of destruction was a ‘bluff’, adding that, for all the pretense that Israel is ‘in the midst of an anguished struggle for its existence and can be exterminated at any moment’ the truth is that already ‘since 1949’ no country has been able to mortally threaten it”. Finally, as just one further illustration, Abba Eban is hardly a lefty critic on my side of this dispute, so his own words must be taken into account if we are to tell the story with a bit of subtlety. Wikipedia records:

Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban wrote in his autobiography that he found "Nasser's assurance that he did not plan an armed attack" convincing, adding that "Nasser did not want war; he wanted victory without war".[65][66] Writing from Egypt on 4 June 1967 New York Times journalist James Reston observed: "Cairo does not want war and it is certainly not ready for war. But it has already accepted the possibility, even the likelihood, of war, as if it had lost control of the situation."[67]

As for the earlier events that were crucial in precipitating the 1967 events involving Syria, again the story is not quite the case of a passive Israel enduring gratuitous assaults by its implacable enemies bent on its destruction. Wikepedia gives a standard account of events on its borders that were part of the escalation leading to the Six Day War:

“Syria stated that in every instance where there was a Syrian firing, it was in return of provocative Israel fire directed against peaceful Arab farmers or Syrian posts. [24] Nine years later, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defense minister at the time of the war, stated a version of events very similar to this one:[25]

    “After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was.

Well, perhaps these remarks serve to illustrate a couple of points in our dispute. First, these sources are hardly to be dismissed as irrelevant or unnecessary “analysis” that is not needed. You had said “I do not need an analyst to describe these events to me” and that Nasser’s words don’t need interpretation, but it’s obviously not that simple. I’m not saying that there is no room for dispute about these analyses, but one can’t avoid them. Second, of course, you can see how none of these crucial facts can possibly be obtained from contemporaneous press reports – even if they are fully accurate in what they say, as far as they go. Finally, and most importantly, these accounts require radically revising the usual, conventional story about the Israel-Arab conflict and can't be reconciled with the stories propagated for obvious reaons by the 'Israel Lobby'.

 Cheers,

 Peter