[lbo-talk] Benny Morris responds

[Brad DeLong]

>Ha'aretz - January 23, 2004
>
>Right of Reply / I do not support expulsion  By Benny Morris
>
>A few days after the publication of the interview with me ("Survival 
>of the fittest," Haaretz Magazine, January 9), an angry Israeli-Arab 
>student came to my office at Ben-Gurion University. He suggested 
>that the Holocaust never happened (he cited what he called "an 
>important and world-renowned Egyptian historian"), and claimed that 
>the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed at the order of the CIA 
>or the Mossad, and that Israeli soldiers and pilots in the 
>territories are deliberately targeting and murdering innocent 
>civilians. I mention this so that we all understand the kind of 
>world we in the Middle East are living in.
>
>The war being waged against us since September 2000 is 
>three-dimensional: On one level, which is the one highlighted by 
>Palestinian spokespersons, a struggle is being waged for liberation 
>from Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; on the 
>second level, the Palestinians - according to spokesmen for Hamas, 
>Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants - are waging a war to eradicate 
>the Zionist state and to restore their "rights" over all of 
>Palestine; on the third level, the Palestinians' struggle is part of 
>the global struggle being waged by jihadist Islam against the 
>"Western Satan," with Israel being a vulnerable extension of Western 
>culture in our region.

I really *like* the identification of all Palestinians with "Hamas, 
Islamic Jihad, and Fatah." I really *like* the failure to distinguish 
between Israel's struggle for survival and Ariel Sharon's struggle to 
create the preconditions for expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza 
and the West Bank.

I don't think I want to read beyond Morris's paragraph two. Is there 
any reason to do so?
-- 

Yours,

Brad DeLong