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PARTISAN REVIEW
My second comment has to do with the onging canards against Israel.
Were you alluding to one when you began your remarks by saying that
Israel "dispossessed" the Arabs in the 1948 war? For seventy-five years
before that, the Jewish people had been buying up the Arab lands, not
taking them by force . The plight of the Arabs from nascent Israel, as I
understand it, was due to the Mufti panicking the Arabs and getting them
to flee. I don't know of any instance where an Israeli bayonet or bullet
was used to get the Arabs out. I think it's wrong to keep repeating these
canards.
Robert Wistrich:
I'm sorry that I didn't make my point more clearly.
When I mentioned the question of the "dispossession" of the Palestinians,
I was talking about the current school of Israeli historians who define
themselves as post-Zionists and who make this kind of argument. I was
not identifYing with it, and I certainly would not identifY with it in any
way. The story of the 1948 War is of course more complicated than the
official views that were still accepted in Israel until very recently. We
know this from the serious research of some Israeli scholars in the archives
now available after thirty years. Of course, there is no equivalent to this
kind of access in any Arab country, where no state archives are available
at all to any researcher (whether Arab or non-Arab) who deals with con–
temporary history. Hence there is no way to find out the truth about
government policies in the Arab world.
On the other hand, some Israelis have come up with a new version of
what happened in 1948 that is very different from the earlier one. Some
have used this to bolster or to support a particular ideological or political
agenda. They stress the "dispossession" of the Palestinians because they
identifY more with the losers and the victims. They want to show that
Zionism fostered on the Israeli public a series of myths about the heroic
war of independence. This view is vigorously resisted by many who re–
gard it as a form of self-flagellation. The people in Israel who see the 1948
victory as an act of historic injustice and dispossession are only a small
mi–
nority. But it is a point of view that is heard more than in any previous
period in Israel that I can recall. That is what I was trying to make clear.
With regard to the politics of fear, again, my point is this: objectively
speaking, Likud spokesmen find themselves, in the current pre-elections
debates, confronting these questions: What is the Likud offering to the
Israeli public beyond what it has already experienced over many years?
Does the Likud want to go back to the
intifada
impasse, to return to Gaza
and Jericho, to a new state of siege with the Arab world? The Likud tells
Israelis that they have to be constantly on their guard; no risk can be
taken because we cannot trust any of our Arab neighbors, least of all the
