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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Israeli new historians, like all intellectual dissidents, use intellectual solidarity with the far enemy (Arabs in this case) as weapons to attack the proximate enemy (the established intellectual/political order of the current moment). Without mass annihilation of dissident intellectuals like what all communist and most fascist regime's did, these new waves ALWAYS cherry pick their data to support their arguments, because destroying the near enemy matters more. Note that Morris himself has recanted from his earlier 'Arabs have always been peaceful victims of my ancestors violence' following the second intifada: perhaps once the far enemy makes its intentions more clear it becomes unwise to continue advancing their cause.

I find it especially disingenuous to presume innocence in Arab intentions. Jewish cruelty has to transformed out of the fog of war, but Arab genocidal intentions are always downplayed. Azzam Pasha gleefully called for the genocide of Israel at 1948, and intellectuals sympathetic to palestine have to morph this somehow into Azzam being a pro peace champion of Palestinians, ignoring that the Arabs started the war and were busy trying establish success to divide up the spoils.

Israel is certainly no virtuous lamb innocent of sin, but the endless attempts to castigate Israel by ascribing unlimited moral virtue to explicitly genocidal Arabs is loathsome even to casual normies. For members of this board who have a few more brain cells than average (108 iq gang rise up!) the Palestinian cause is the meme of the bike guy tripping himself over.

benny morris changed his political views and said "transfer/expulsion is good actually", but he is still willing to call it such.

Why would I listen to him more than to British or American or Australian ‘anticolonialist’ historians who are also fundamentally ideologically motivated to hate civilization.

morris's view is basically the same as yours - Both sides did awful things, which is what happens in wars. The Arabs were the losing side and my view is that if people commit major mistakes in history they pay for them and perhaps that’s how it should work out. The Palestinians should have agreed to a two-state solution.

Generally speaking once a historian/academic/intellectual exposes themselves a reflexive contrarian their opinions can be dismissed on first order principles for being intellectually disingenuous. After a certain point you will always see the same few names pop up as an appeal to intellectual authority, as if their name alone is enough to carry the weight of an argument. Chomsky is the top of my mind for this cadre of notables, but journalists such as Herman and Pilger are thrown about by tankies too. Once these names pop up uncritically as justification for a pet cause, they can be ignored.

Benny and his fellow travelers are postmodernists that sought to subvert how reality itself is understood by spuriously dismissing countervailing evidence as 'biased' and spinning motivations out of fairy farts. That Benny adjusted his position after his pet palestinians turned out to be the violent assholes they always said they were is merely an inconvenient blip on his quest to tear down the oppressive political/academic climate preventing them from ascending to their natural state as intellectual gods to be feted by proles.

i don't know what postmodernism has to do with this. it seems entirely possible to determine what in fact happened in 1948, whether arabs left because arab leadership told them to leave, or because they were afraid of being massacred, or because they were forcefully expelled by jewish soldiers, or for any other reason. motivations are more nebulous but you can look into official idf documents (plan D) and what leaders such as ben gurion wrote.

Ideologically motivated historians have unearthed Azzam Pashas genocidal statements, Khaled Azm (president of Syria in 1949) said that the Arabs themselves exhorted the Palestinians to leave first, the Jordanian papers blamed Arab generals for making such declarations... all this evidence is dismissed by postmodernists because it is 'manipulated', with only Plan D (why D instead of earlier plans) being proof of the evil of Israel. I think it is far more likely that people panicked and left of their own volition in the face of an advancing enemy, like what is happening to Ukrainians and Masalit, than it is a deliberate strategy crafted by the adversary. A coincidental benefit, but hardly any more deliberate in intent compared to the more pressing objective of killing armed combatants.

Fifth: the Arab governments' invitation to the people of Palestine to flee from it and seek refuge in adjacent Arab countries, after terror had spread among their ranks in the wake of the Deir Yassin event. This mass flight has benefited the Jews and the situation stabilized in their favor without effort.... Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homeland, while it is we who constrained them to leave it. Between the invitation extended to the refugees and the request to the United Nations to decide upon their return, there elapsed only a few months.

so it was about deir yassin. people panicked and left of their own volition... because they believed they would be massacred

But again, this is standard practice in these kinds of tribal conflicts, see October 7. I don’t think it makes the case that Jews are worse than Arabs; in fact far earlier than 1948 there had been violent Arab campaigns against Jewish settlers including slaughter of civilians, mass rapes and so on.

i don't think the jews were worse than arabs, at least in their intentions. certainly, if the arabs had won, the end result for jews would have been worse than expulsion. but expulsion was still a Bad Thing, although there's nothing to be done about it now.

Except, apparently, endlessly castigate the jews for being evil meanies and continue advancing the cause of Hamas because they will magically become good religiously tolerant liberals once the debt is paid (all jews dead).

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