Israel's sixtieth anniversary poses the question--though not apparently to its many unquestioning supporters here in the United States--of what actually happened in 1948. Reviewing in The New Yorker the career of Israeli historian Benny Morris, David Remnick fills in some of the complexity. I highly recommend the whole article, and have added to my list of things I want to read (which grows longer as time spent loitering in coffee shops is replaced by the pastime of returning the cooing sounds of a 4-month-old) Morris's Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, "the most useful survey of the conflict," according to Remnick.
The most arresting passage in Remnick's article comes, I think, when he relates the details of a conversation David Ben-Gurion once had with a political ally. Said Ben-Gurion, Israel's George Washington:
Why should the Arabs make peace? . . . We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them?
In legal proceedings, such statements are known as "declarations against interest," and are an exception to the hearsay rule. They may be admitted into evidence on the theory that, their content being an embarrassment to the declarant, the only plausible motive for making the statement is to tell the truth.
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