While I regard the Nakba as an ongoing crime that needs to be prosecuted and reversed...Shavit defends its necessity and lectures Palestinians trapped in squalid refugee camps to just get over it.
It was not the right-wing Russians or the gun-toting settlers who carried out the Nakba. The Nakba is the legacy of Zionism's putatively socialist wing. It was the grandfathers and mothers of the "enlightened public" of today's Israel who literally drove tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinians into the sea in 1947-48 all along the Mediterranean coast, or who marched them at gunpoint to Ramallah.
Only Zionists get to proclaim their fear of a brown planet while simultaneously maintaining a patina of liberal respectability.
I think we need to draw a contextual distinction between what the neo-fascists of Europe would like to do and what the state of Israel has done.
There are fewer Arabs in Tel Aviv, one of the largest cities in the Middle East, than there are in Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. How do you accomplish such a remarkable feat of social engineering without massive violence?
There will be no Palestinian state
You can be a bigot in the US, but you can't come out and openly declare your support for racial nationalism.
I haven't seen American Sniper, but correct me if I'm wrong: An occupier mows down faceless Iraqis but the real victim is his anguished soul.
After a few months you stop noticing every incarnation of radicalism and violence. It is so saturated into your reality that it practically fades into the scenery.
My privilege as a white Jewish American in Israel is a major factor in getting me so much access to the key institutions of the Jewish state.
It is depressing but not shocking to witness the liberal intelligentsia embrace Ari Shavit so enthusiastically. Shavit is someone who is as consistently wrong as Thomas Friedman on major issues, and at least as much a courtier of power.
If we don't kill, we will cease to exist
There's still massive racism in the United States today that is rooted in sexual fears, but it's at least considered unacceptable. In Israel it's a mainstream phenomenon that's encouraged and supported by the state because it supports Israel's demographic imperative in its ethnocratic political structure.
