Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia
Titolo: revisionismo sulla questione medio-orientale.

Riporto da un thread di IPI dell'autore lunogled.
L'articolo è interessante e riguarda il revisionismo sulla questione
medio-orientale e la storia di Israele. 
Qualcuno puo' commentarlo/criticarlo, fonti alla mano?
sergio
---------------------------------------------
"Nowhere has revisionist history played a more crucial role in the
political and moral consciousness of a nation than in Israel. The
state came into being in 1948, and, almost immediately, its
prehistory--the origins of Zionist ideology, the behavior of the
British during the Mandate period, and, critically, the relationship
with the Other, the Palestinian Arabs-became matter for schoolbooks,
journalism, military indoctrination, scholarship, and public rhetoric.
The founding generation that had come to Palestine and then fought
what it called its war of independence against Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and
other hostile neighbors was now in charge of its own story. To the
victor goes the narrative. As in any fledgling state, that narrative
tended to be set down in the most glorious terms-history as if written
by a Hebrew-speaking Parson Weems. For a while, it was as if even the
most basic facts could be wished out of existence. An entire group
could be made invisible. "There was no such thing as Palestinians,"
Golda Meir said in 1969"
-----------------------------------
L'articolo sotto (quotato sopra) va letto riga per riga.
Negli anni '80, il mito fondante della purezza dello stato di Israele,
"I Palestinesi sono scappati da soli", e' crollato, non solo fra le
pubblicazioni "dissidenti", ma in tutto l'estabilishment accademico.
Oggi, il fatto che la "guerra di indipendenza Israeliana" comprese
anche una banalissima pulizia etnica simile a quella fatta nella Ex-
Yugoslavia fa parte integrante persino del programma scolastico di
Israele.
Oggi, e' il turno del mito successivo; "nel 1967 Israele e' stata
attaccata, ma miracolosamente e' riuscita a vincere": I lati oscuri
dell'"attacco preventivo" lanciato da Israele nel 1967 che ha portato
all'annessione dei territori occupati vengono dissossati non solo nei
libri di Noam Chomsky, ma anche in una rivista moderata e
estabilishment Americana come il New Yorker.
Di solito, la "coscienza intellettuale" e l'azione politica sono
separati da qualche decennio. Ma il loro succedersi e' inevitabile.
E lo sara' anche qui.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/05/28/070528crbo_books_remnick?printable=true
The Seventh Day
Why the Six-Day War is still being fought.
by David Remnick May 28, 2007
The Six-Day War;
In June, 2003, President Bush tried to discredit any critics who dared
dispute his artfully twisted intelligence assessments of Iraq by
slinging the worst name he could think of: "Revisionist historians is
what I like to call them." This was intended as something more than a
schoolyard taunt or an allusion to the sort of pseudo scholars who
would deny, under a blizzard of footnotes, the existence of the
Turkish massacre of Armenians. In the political context of the moment,
it seemed a warning to all who would dispute the monarch's version of
reality.
Rigorous revisionism is, of course, at the heart of historical
practice, and to practice it in the face of a state-endorsed orthodoxy
can require a considerable measure of gall, as well as craft. No
country easily accepts a figure like Charles Beard, who, as the avatar
of the Progressive School of historians, informed Americans that the
founders were wealthy landholders employing ideological trappings to
garland their self-interest. But, without revision, what? Without
Marcel Ophüls, who practices a filmmaker's version of revisionist
history in "The Sorrow and the Pity," it would have been far easier
for the French to go on ignoring their complicity in the deportation
of Jews to the death camps. The assault on the American Indians; the
ruthlessness of European colonialism in Africa; the decision-making
process that led to Hiroshima; the reëvaluation of Presidential
reputations-these are all, unendingly, fodder for "revisionists" who
go on challenging accepted truths and complicating the story of the
past.
Nowhere has revisionist history played a more crucial role in the
political and moral consciousness of a nation than in Israel. The
state came into being in 1948, and, almost immediately, its
prehistory--the origins of Zionist ideology, the behavior of the
British during the Mandate period, and, critically, the relationship
with the Other, the Palestinian Arabs-became matter for schoolbooks,
journalism, military indoctrination, scholarship, and public rhetoric.
The founding generation that had come to Palestine and then fought
what it called its war of independence against Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and
other hostile neighbors was now in charge of its own story. To the
victor goes the narrative. As in any fledgling state, that narrative
tended to be set down in the most glorious terms-history as if written
by a Hebrew-speaking Parson Weems. For a while, it was as if even the
most basic facts could be wished out of existence. An entire group
could be made invisible. "There was no such thing as Palestinians,"
Golda Meir said in 1969.
It was not until the nineteen-eighties, after the opening of various
state archives and the coming of age of a generation more
disillusioned and less beholden to the old myths than the founders,
that Israeli scholars began to confront some inconvenient facts. The
most important of the Israeli New Historians was Benny Morris, a
leftist (at the time) who had taken part in the disastrous Lebanon war
both as a soldier and as a reporter, and who then went to jail rather
than complete reserve duty in the West Bank during the first
Palestinian intifada. In 1987, the year the intifada erupted, Morris
published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,"
in which he demolished a cherished Israeli notion: that the three-
quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs who fled their villages during
and after the war did so voluntarily and at the behest of their own
leaders, who promised they could soon return. Instead, Morris made
clear, a large number of the Palestinians were expelled by Israeli
military leaders (including the young Yitzhak Rabin), and many others
fled out of fear after hearing about the killings and the destruction
of homes in nearby villages.
Most of the New Historians did their doctoral work abroad, which gave
them a chance to question the narrative they had grown up with. And,
though they were never a cohesive school, personally or ideologically,
their work did come in a kind of wave that challenged traditional
Israeli historiography. After Morris came Ilan Pappe's "Britain and
the Arab-Israeli Conflict," Avi Shlaim's "Collusion Across the
Jordan," and work by the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, which
described the ideology of Zionism in colonial terms. Critics accused
the New Historians of politically tendentious readings of the
archives, of slandering a people that had barely escaped
extermination, and of trying to undermine the foundations of the
state. In the liberal daily Ha'aretz, the novelist Aharon Megged
asked, "What is it that moves Israeli scholars to distort and make
ugly the Jewish national liberation movement, whose only desire was to
realize the two-thousand-year-old hope to return to Zion?"
Over time, though, the best revisionist scholarship had an effect on
Israeli political thinking, even among some public officials. Shlomo
Ben-Ami, who served as Ehud Barak's minister of public security and,
later, his foreign minister, wrote in his memoiristic history of the
state, "Scars of War, Wounds of Peace," published last year, that the
expulsions of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948 were due to "an
ideological predisposition, a mental attitude, a supporting cultural
environment" that allowed such cruelty in the first place. It is hard
to believe that, without the New Historians, an Israeli official could
have brought himself to such self-critical conclusions.
Tom Segev, who has just published, in English, an account of the most
pivotal of all the Arab-Israeli wars, "1967: Israel, the War and the
Year That Transformed the Middle East" (Metropolitan; $35), is the
most journalistic of the New Historians. His style is drier and more
distanced than that of some of his more overtly ideological
colleagues; for years, his domestic-affairs column in Ha'aretz was
called "Foreign Correspondent." Segev's parents fled Germany for
Palestine in 1935, and his father was killed in the 1948 war. Segev,
who received his doctorate from Boston University, has been a
consistent voice on the Israeli left, but his views are generally more
tempered than the anti-Zionist leftism of Pappe and the sui-generis
politics of Benny Morris, who, after the failed summit at Camp David
in 2000, despairingly came to believe that David Ben-Gurion should
have expelled many more Palestinians "when he had the chance," in
order to insure a Jewish majority and Israeli security.
Segev, who is sixty-two, has written books on the nascent state
("1949: The First Israelis"), on the Jews and the Arabs under the
British Mandate ("One Palestine, Complete"), and on the "post-Zionist"
Americanization of Israeli society ("Elvis in Jerusalem"). In "1949,"
he helped upend the notion of the early Israelis as an unambiguously
homogeneous pioneer society, presenting evidence that, from the very
beginning, there were troubling divisions between Arabs and Jews,
religious and secular Jews, Europeans and North Africans. Segev's most
controversial book was "The Seventh Million," in which he wrote about
the Zionist movement's inability to help the Jews of Europe as they
were being slaughtered, and the afterlife of the Holocaust as an
emotionally charged issue in Israeli society. The book, which was
greeted with some of the same disdain that met Hannah Arendt's
"Eichmann in Jerusalem," described the Zionist pioneers' embarrassment
at the lack of widespread rebellion against the Nazis among the
European Jews, and showed how survivors were received in Israel not
only with relief but also, at times, with suspicion and bureaucratic
indifference. Segev won few friends among the Israeli establishment
when he quoted Ben-Gurion as saying in 1938, "If I knew that it was
possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to
England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I
would choose the second-because we face not only the reckoning of
those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people."
For the Israelis, the 1967 war was a triumph of such miraculous speed
and fantastic territorial consequences that its leading military
commander, Moshe Dayan, quickly helped brand it "the Six-Day War"--a
deliberate echo of the six days of creation in Genesis. (In the Arab
world, the defeat was such a humiliation that when it was spoken of at
all it was commonly referred to as an-naksah, the "setback," an echo
of al-nakba, the "catastrophe," of 1948.) The Israeli victory changed
the country in nearly every aspect. The response, both within the
country and among Jews abroad, ranged from the joyful to the
distinctly messianic-a messianism that helped lead to the occupation
of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, and
the establishment of one settlement after another. It was a war that
Israelis regarded as existential in importance--defeat could well have
meant the end of the state after less than twenty years--and yet
winning had Pyrrhic consequences. Out of it came forty years of
occupation, widespread illegal settlements, the intensification of
Palestinian nationalism, terrorism, counterattacks, checkpoints,
failed negotiations, uprisings, and ever-deepening distrust. What
greater paradox of history: a war that must be won, a victory that
results in consuming misery and instability.
How did it all happen? Why was it fought at all? Segev is far from the
first historian to argue that the 1967 war resembled less the David-
and-Goliath narrative popularized by romantic propagandists than a
multi-sided tragic march to folly. Even Michael Oren, a historian well
to the political right of Segev, does not fail, in his own valuable
book, "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle
East," to account for the mistakes, miscommunications, random events,
and lethal vanities on both sides.
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Israeli society was in the doldrums. The
economy was suffering a recession. The Ashkenazim, the European-born
Israelis, who were the nation's pioneer aristocrats, were seeing
themselves eclipsed demographically by generally less educated and
more religious Mizrahim, immigrants from North Africa and other Muslim
countries. The pioneers' socialist ethos began to decline, along with
the kibbutz population. Also, the country was no longer in the hands
of Ben-Gurion, the country's first and most charismatic leader. His
successor, Levi Eshkol, was a dull and windy specialist in finance and
resource management, who hadn't had a strong military career.
Although Israel had fought successfully in the muddled Suez Crisis, in
1956, by the mid-sixties it was facing a series of pressing security
problems: the anti-colonial ideology of pan-Arab nationalism was at
its peak. The Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, won a mass
following throughout the Arab world with rousing speeches aimed at the
"liberation" of Palestinian lands and the elimination of the "alien"
Israeli state. Fledgling Palestinian guerrilla groups, especially
Fatah, were carrying out attacks on Israeli territory mainly from
bases across the border in Syria and, to a lesser extent, Jordan. In
the eighteen months before the 1967 war, there were a hundred and
twenty attempts at sabotage by Palestinians--bombed water pumps, land
mines, skirmishes along various highways. Only eleven Israelis were
killed in those incidents, a small number by today's standards, but,
Segev writes, their "psychological effect, like that of the recession,
was far more profound than the tangible damage."
In November, 1966, after three Israeli paratroopers were killed by a
land mine planted near the Negev town of Arad, Eshkol ordered
Operation Shredder, a retaliatory strike on a rural area in western
Jordan. In the village of Samua, the Israel Defense Forces blew up a
medical clinic, a school, a post office, a library, a coffee shop, and
more than a hundred houses. The operation so exceeded the Cabinet's
directives that it led to an aerial battle between the two air forces
and left fourteen Jordanians dead. The misjudgment was not just the
excessive force; it was the decision to attack Jordan, whose king,
Hussein, had been the most conciliatory of all the Arab leaders.
Syria, which gave safe haven to Palestinian guerrillas and had plans
to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River from Israel, was the
clearer problem. The Israelis had played a risky cat-and-mouse game
with the Syrians in the Golan Heights but had never attacked, as they
had at Samua. "We meant to give the mother-in-law a pinch," Eshkol
said later, "but instead we beat up the bride."
By the spring of 1967, tensions had begun to escalate. Soviet
diplomats informed Syria and Egypt, wrongly, that Israel was about to
launch a full-scale invasion of Syria, further inflaming Nasser.
According to "Foxbats Over Dimona" (Yale; $26), a new book by the
Israeli writers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, the Soviet Union was
so anxious about Israel's nuclear capabilities that it did everything
it could to provoke a war. At the same time, the Americans, obsessed
with the catastrophic war in Vietnam, were offering little assurance
of help--"Israel will not be alone unless it decides to do it alone,"
Lyndon Johnson, delphically, told Abba Eban, Israel's foreign
minister--and Charles de Gaulle, who had supplied Israel with Mirage
and Mystère fighters, the core of the Israeli Air Force, now refused
support, darkly warning Eshkol against a preëmptive attack. Israel
felt isolated, Egypt emboldened. Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer,
Egypt's top military official, assured Nasser that the Army was ready,
if necessary, to attack Israel and win.
In the second half of May, Nasser made one provocative move after
another. Although his own intelligence officers told him that Israeli
troops were not massing on the Syrian border, he pressed forward. On
May 16th, he told the United Nations to remove from Sinai its
international forces, which had maintained the peace since the Suez
Crisis. U Thant, the Secretary-General, was ineffectual in his efforts
to persuade Nasser to let the troops remain and, without consulting
the Security Council, acquiesced. Once the international forces left,
Nasser sent his own armored divisions right up to the Israeli border.
On May 22nd, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping,
cutting off Israel's access to the Red Sea. Since 1957, the Israelis
had said that such a blockade would be considered a casus belli, but
when Israeli diplomats appealed to the United States and Great Britain
for help both maintained their neutrality. On the thirtieth, Nasser
signed a defense pact with King Hussein, after having declared, "Our
basic objective will be the destruction of Israel." He said that
Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon are "poised on the borders of
Israel" and would be backed by Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan, "and the
whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. . . . The critical
hour has arrived." It was this kind of language, coming little more
than two decades after the Holocaust, that allowed Menachem Begin to
call Nasser "the Arab Hitler." The Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian
leaderships all made similar declarations about erasing Israel from
the map.
Nevertheless, even in late May and the first few days of June the
Israeli leadership continued to debate Nasser's ultimate intentions;
the military almost unanimously favored a preëmptive strike against
the Arabs, but others-including Eshkol, Abba Eban, and Ben-Gurion in
his retirement--cautioned against overreaction. When Nasser spoke to
the Soviets, he was counselled against striking first. "Nasser did not
want war," Eban later wrote. "He wanted victory without war." After
the war, even some right-wing politicians, including Menachem Begin,
admitted that the Israelis had never been sure that Nasser wanted war.
"The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove
that Nasser was really about to attack us," Begin said in a speech to
the Israel National Defense College. "We must be honest with
ourselves. We decided to attack him."
Both Segev and Oren describe in alarming detail the state of anxiety
and disarray in the Israeli leadership. During the crisis, Yitzhak
Rabin, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, suffered a nervous
breakdown, for which he later blamed "nicotine poisoning." There was
fear that Egypt would bomb the Dimona nuclear plant. There was fear of
a two- or three-front surprise attack, of chemical gas, of radioactive
weapons. The military leadership and even liberal media like Ha'aretz
saw Eshkol as weak, incapable of leading the country in crisis--an
impression that hardened when, on May 28th, he gave a radio address
that was a stammering, confused disaster. Eshkol, who had barely slept
and was trying to read his text after cataract surgery, panicked the
nation even as he tried to reassure it.
Meanwhile, rabbis were consecrating parks as cemeteries, and thousands
of graves were dug. In the press and within the Cabinet, there were
calls for Eshkol's resignation as Prime Minister and defense minister;
Ben-Gurion was so worried about the possibility of a military coup
that he issued a public warning from Sde Boker, his kibbutz in the
Negev. Just four days before the war, Eshkol was forced to give up the
defense portfolio to the most unpredictable figure in the country,
Moshe Dayan.
Eshkol remained unsure of what to do. "Must we live by the sword
forever?" he asked his generals. The government had always given the
Army all it asked for, Eshkol said, but "you didn't get all that
matériel so that one day we would get up and say, Now we can destroy
the Egyptian Army--so let's do it."
Michael Oren, who spent more time studying the Arab memoirs and
available literature than Segev, places greater emphasis in his book
on Nasser's malevolent intentions, arguing that a full-scale invasion
plan, Operation Dawn, was cancelled only at the last moment. He quotes
this from Salah al-Hadidi, the chief justice in the trials that Egypt
convened for officers held accountable for the defeat: "I can state
that Egypt's political leadership called Israel to war. It clearly
provoked Israel and forced it into a confrontation." Segev is less
sympathetic toward Israel's decision to attack first. While Eshkol was
withstanding the pressure from his generals, Segev writes, he emerged
as a "statesman with nerves of steel." But, unlike Ben-Gurion, he did
not have the stature to resist. "His weakness ate away at him," Segev
concludes. "He wanted to be remembered as a patriot, and at this point
the public equated patriotism with war."
The Israeli leadership ultimately justified a preëmptive attack as the
only way to end an unbearable threat and, if war must come, to prevent
huge casualties. Eshkol, who had for weeks resisted the pleas and
imprecations of his generals and ministers, now asked, "Must we allow
ourselves to be worn down and killed bit by bit, if not destroyed in a
future all-out war, as promised by Nasser? Must we wait for Hannah
Arendt to write articles about our failure to resist?"
On June 5th, at 7:10 A.M., Israeli fighter jets launched an early-
morning air assault on Egypt's airfields, effectively destroying
Nasser's Air Force on the ground and, in just a few hours, deciding
the course of the war. On the sixth and the seventh, Israel,
exploiting its dominance of the skies, shattered Egypt's ground
forces.
The six days of fighting between Israel and the combined forces of
Egypt, Jordan, and Syria is the most straightforward aspect of the
drama. In just a hundred and thirty-two hours, Israel captured the
Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including
the holy sites and the Old City, from Jordan, and the Golan Heights
from Syria--twenty-six thousand square miles of additional territory.
At first, Radio Cairo assured listeners that the Egyptians were
winning great battles against the Israelis. Nasser's deputy and
eventual successor, Anwar Sadat, who knew the truth, took a nighttime
walk in his Cairo neighborhood, "dazed and brokenhearted," as he wrote
in his memoirs, and saw people dancing in the streets to celebrate
their "victory." Nasser's dream of a pan-Arab nation, of eliminating
Israel, was finished. "If I had known the Army wasn't ready," Nasser
said, "I wouldn't have gone to war. I'm a chess player." (Nasser and
Eshkol both died within the next few years.) Egypt lost more than
fifteen thousand men in the war, Israel about eight hundred. Rabin
wrote in his memoirs that the Israelis easily could have taken Cairo,
Amman, and Damascus.
So profound was the Israeli national delirium in the days and weeks
after the war that it was impossible for most Israelis to think
straight about the long-term consequences of retaining conquered
territory. After being told that the state was in mortal danger,
Israel was now in possession of Biblical Israel-the Western Wall, the
Temple Mount, all of Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron,
and many other such sites scattered throughout the West Bank. Once the
Old City was secured, on the third day of the war, Dayan, the most
theatrical of all Israeli commanders, flew by helicopter to Jerusalem
and staged his arrival in the manner of General Allenby, the British
general who took Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917. "We have returned
to the most holy of our places," Dayan declared. "We have returned,
never to part from them again."
General Shlomo Goren, the chief rabbi of the I.D.F., blew a shofar at
the Western Wall and advised his commanding officer, Uzi Narkis, that
now was the moment to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the mosque that
sits on the Temple Mount. "Do this and you will go down in history,"
Goren said. "Tomorrow might be too late."
Narkis refused the lunatic suggestion and even threatened the rabbi
with arrest. Nevertheless, the national poet, Natan Alterman, was
accurate in declaring, "The people are drunk with joy." A photograph
of a weeping I.D.F. soldier at the Western Wall was published all over
the world and seemed to embody the new conflation, for many Israelis,
of the state and the sacred, the military and the messianic. The song
"Jerusalem of Gold" displaced, for a time, the traditional anthem
"Hatikvah." In the daily Ma'ariv, the journalist Gabriel Tzifroni
described the "liberation" of the capital in terms rarely used in
traditional news reporting: "The Messiah came to Jerusalem yesterday-
he was tired and gray, and he rode in on a tank." When the fighting
broke out, Ben-Gurion had written in his diary, "There was no need for
this. I believe it is a grievous mistake." But now Ben-Gurion was
suggesting that the walls of the Old City be destroyed. Eshkol
himself, posing the question of how Israel was going to rule a million
Arabs, briefly considered a plan of transferring hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians to Iraq and elsewhere.
Since 1949, there had been talk of "recapturing" the holy sites of the
West Bank and Jerusalem--most Israeli generals still considered 1948
to be unfinished business, just as their Arab opponents did--but
permanent conquest had never been, as policy, the goal of the war.
Occupation was to be temporary. And then it wasn't. Under the bizarre
and often harsh leadership of Moshe Dayan--"the mysterious Cyclops of
Israeli politics," in the words of the distinguished historian and
journalist Amos Elon-the Israelis thought of themselves as
"enlightened occupiers," and yet in time they resorted to many of the
methods employed by the British colonials during the Mandate period:
collective punishment, torture during interrogation, the demolition of
Arab homes. Israel also expelled entire Arab communities and destroyed
villages; around two hundred thousand Arabs fled the West Bank for
Jordan. Israeli forces destroyed the villages of Beit Mirsim and Beit
Awa, in the southern West Bank; nearly a third of the city of Qalqilya
was razed before the U.N. and the United States demanded that Dayan
stop and rebuild. In the meantime, religious Zionist leaders such as
Zvi Yehudah Kook, of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, in Jerusalem, and Moshe
Levinger, a founder of the Gush Emunim settler movement and the
settlement in Hebron, went from being marginal dreamers to armed
prophets and politicians.
The Israeli leadership could not conceive of itself as anything less
than benign, and even persuaded itself that a subjugated Arab
population would come to appreciate its overlords. "The situation
between us," Dayan creepily informed the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan,
"is like the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the young
girl he has taken against her wishes. But when their children are
born, they will see the man as their father and the woman as their
mother. The initial act will mean nothing to them. You, the
Palestinians, as a nation, do not want us today, but we will change
your attitude by imposing our presence upon you."
Segev's and Oren's books have their limitations. Segev, by design,
ignores the Arab political situation and seems reluctant to credit the
Israelis with a legitimate sense of threat; Oren, a more versatile
scholar, has taken great pains to read whatever Arab sources are
available (most archives are closed) and is more at home with big
power politics, but he tends to scant the negative aspects of victory
and conquest.
The most complete book on the war's aftermath--the "seventh day"--is
the journalist Gershom Gorenberg's riveting and deeply depressing "The
Accidental Empire," which describes how, in the decade following the
war, the mainstream Labor governments of Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and
Yitzhak Rabin either feigned ignorance of the growing settlements or
blatantly encouraged them. As a result, they helped to legitimatize
the settlement ideology of their right-wing successors Menachem Begin,
Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon. Gorenberg makes clear that,
though the Israelis at first designated the early settlements
"temporary" military outposts, in order to avoid violation of the
Fourth Geneva Convention, "the purpose of settlement, since the day in
July 1967 when the first Israeli settler climbed out of a jeep in the
Syrian heights, had been to create facts that would determine the
final status of the land, to sculpt the political reality before
negotiations ever got under way." Here the project of revisionism was
neither scholarly nor benign; the creation of "facts on the ground"
was a political attempt to rewrite, with bricks and mortar, the
contours of one nation at the expense of another.
In those early days of postwar euphoria, there were a few prominent
Israelis who dared to warn of the moral and political degradation that
would come with the occupation. The novelist Amos Oz wrote
prophetically in the newspaper Davar:
For a month, for a year, or for a whole generation we will have to sit
as occupiers in places that touch our hearts with their history. And
we must remember: as occupiers, because there is no alternative. And
as a pressure tactic to hasten peace. Not as saviors or liberators.
Only in the twilight of myths can one speak of the liberation of a
land struggling under a foreign yoke. Land is not enslaved and there
is no such thing as a liberation of lands. There are enslaved people,
and the word "liberation" applies only to human beings. We have not
liberated Hebron and Ramallah and El-Arish, nor have we redeemed their
inhabitants. We have conquered them and we are going to rule over them
only until our peace is secured.
But who was listening? Oz was just twenty-eight at the time. An
isolated minister or intellectual might speak of "land for peace," but
the emotional tide of the country was against it. The ennui had
lifted. A new kind of Zionist, one that fused faith and nationalism,
replaced the old pioneers, the kibbutzniks. And, with time, the
settlements became a matter of literal concrete facts; flimsy outposts
were transformed into suburban bedroom communities with government
subsidies and short commutes to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Forty years later, a quarter of a million Israelis live in a hundred
and twenty officially recognized settlements; an additional hundred
and eighty thousand live in annexed areas of East Jerusalem, and
sixteen thousand in the Golan. In the years before Israel was
established, settlers argued that the more land they bought or seized,
the greater their security. The settlers of "Greater Israel" and their
supporters, who regarded the old borders as "Auschwitz frontiers,"
refused to see the peril in their policy. The worst consequence of
occupation, of course, has been the terrible privations, physical
isolation, and psychological disfigurement that it has imposed upon
the Palestinians. For the Israelis, occupation has been, as Gorenberg
describes, a grave security hazard and source of moral corrosion.
A nation's ongoing process of assessing its past to chart its future
is hardly an academic exercise. Revisionist history has played a role,
but political folly on both sides has overwhelmed it in importance.
The insistence on further settlement, the failures of the Palestinian
leadership to respond to Israeli offers during the negotiating process
at Camp David and Taba; the rise of suicide bombing, martyr worship,
Islamist ideology, and internecine violence; the myriad misjudgments
of the Olmert government-all have deepened the sense of hopelessness.
At the moment, Palestinian support for a two-state solution has
plummeted, and the settler movement is, once more, the strongest lobby
in the country. The war of 1967 casts a shadow still. As the Duke of
Wellington said, the only thing worse than a great victory is a great
defeat.
-- 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 Qualcuno puo' commentarlo/criticarlo, fonti alla mano?
toh, lo "storico" Nahum non si fa vedere...che strano....ROTFL