thank you for your lucid expanation.

I suspect the original lost quite a bit in translation.

However they haven’t and they won’t for the simple reason it’s in Arab and Muslim states’ interests to perpetuate the conflict whilst looking ‘helpful’ trying to solve it. As long as there’s a major foreign enemy, internal reform can be put off indefinitely.

I think its an academic’s way of saying “spin”!

What do those gleeful anti-Zionists think that the Levantine Jews should have done instead of what they did do?

Fine to say “not Deir Yassin”, but Deir Yassin is a minor incident in the context of ethnic strife around the world. Who should have been their “role models” for the way they fought for their individual and national survival?

But while it is important to allow people to save face, it is perhaps even more important to ensure that the face-saving is implicitly understood by all concerned to be just that. In other words, if the reassertion of the traditional narrative is taken too seriously, then we really are back to square one.

Does that sentence actually mean anything?

Can anyone tell me what benefit Israel gets from a peace deal with the Palestinians?

Can anyone tell me what the unified offer from Fatah/Gaza is?

While we can whine on about the “Nakba” do we ever discuss the self-infliction bt the Palestinians by not ever making peace?

Don’t get me wrong, Israel has been brutal at times but so have Palestinians.

There’s a phase i found in Paul Blokker’s work on Eastern Europe, ‘Crisis Narrative’. Ideological movements need some kind of historical motivation for acting and for acting ‘ideologically’. It helps sustain social scision and conflict long after the material promises evaporate. By depicting a catastrosphic ‘descent’ and holding out the promises of fiery return, the ideologue can both legitimise any act and condone inaction as part of a grand historical mechanism. Conjoining Volenteerism and Fatalism, that is the key, the will for power to the chosen elite, part inertia, part choreographed movement for the masses.

The Nakba was a tragedy, but not like the easy moral tale of the Nationalists, Pan-Arabists and Islamists. The tragedy is that hundreds of thousands left, some pushed by low level Israeli violence, most by the promises of the Arab leaders to ‘return’ them. Then for sixty years, they have been parked like refuse around the Arab world, used as symbols of various craptrap ideologies whilst being distained and discriminated against. When Israel has treated its refugees from the progoms and expulsions of the Middle east with a modicum of aid and compassion, the Arab dictators and elites have treated the Palestinians like lepers. Whilst there are examples of Israeli brutality onto the camps, none (capable of holding a thought in their heads) can compare that to Syrian and Jordanian oppression.

Like the denial of the Armenian genocide or Austria’s doctrine of ‘First Victim’, it is violence primarily against the denier and their history. It is looking down a stereoscope wearing a eyepatch