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Shlomo, mon ami.

February 10, 2006

In News The Israel-Palestine Conflict


Ben-Ami’s Scars of War juxtaposed with Finkelstien’s Image and Reality
(56 pages; 1.6 MB)
* Ben-Ami / Finkelstein
(HTML-text rush transcript)

Image and Reality recalls that like many other states that displaced the indigenous population one of the founding myths of Israel was that the land was empty prior to foreign settlement. For supporting evidence it quoted among others Israel Zngwill, Moshe Smilansky, David Ben-Gurion, Izhak Ben-Zvi and Abba Eban:

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Image and Reality argued that the Zionist movement never accepted the partitioning of Palestine but rather intended to conquer it in “stages,” which is exactly what Israel later accused the P.L.O. of wnating to do:

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Image and Reality argued that Ben-Gurion intended to expel the Arabs and that his main concern was to get the timing right for such an expulsion:

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Image and Reality argued that historian Benny Morris’s thesis that the Palestinian refugee question was “born of war, not by design” was not supported by his own evidence, which rather pointed to the conclusion that the Palestinians were intentionally expelled. For supporting evidence it quoted among others David Ben-Gurion, Aharon Cohen and Ya’acov Hazan:

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Image and Reality argued that the reasons Israel attacked Egypt in June 1967 were that it feared Nassar would be another Kemal Ataturk who would modernize the Arab world, and that Nassar had refused to bow to Israeli diktat:

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Image and Reality argued that, although Israeli leaders would later deny it, they could have reached a separate peace with Egypt in 1971 but instead sought to retain Egyptian territory. For supporting evidence it quoted Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan:

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Image and Reality argued that when Israel turned down Egypt’s peace proposals in 1971 Sadat openly declared that he would launch an attack, but Israel ignored these threats because it didn’t believe Arabs were capable of waging war. For supporting evidence it cited Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin:

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Image and Reality argued that the P.L.O. compromised fundamental Palestinian rights in the 1995 Oslo Accord:

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Image and Reality argued that Israel’s motive for signing the Oslo Accord was for the P.L.O. to serve as Israel’s collaborator in suppressing Palestinian resistance to the occupation. For supporting evidence it quoted Uri Savir:

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