I have been progressing, even more slowly than I projected here, through Benny Morris's Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. I can't just sit for hours in coffee-shops, as in the pre-Amanda era, and, besides, the book presents some difficulties for this general reader. The dramatis personae is interminable, the individual names sometimes hard to fix in the mind on account of their foreign-ness, and the index is not always very helpful. There is an acronym soup of organizations that frequently has me paging backward, trying to identify it by locating the first occurrence in the text. Also, Morris's writing is mainly colorless, which, given the charged emotions attaching to his subject matter, may be a deliberate strategy. The result, however, is that you have to be careful not to drowse through sentences that say much, in few words, on important subjects--such as the following paragraphs from his analysis of the political and psychological aftermath of the six-day war:
Nevertheless, the war had opened the way for a possible solution: The Israelis at last had something they could give the Arabs in exchange for peace, and the Arabs gradually would come round. But the war also unleashed currents within Israeli society that militated against yielding occupied territory and against compromise. Expansionism, fueled by fundamentalist messianism and primal nationalistic greed, took hold of a growing minority, both religious and secular, getting its cue, and eventually creeping support, from the government itself.
"There is nothing so dreadful as a great victory, except of course a great defeat," historian Walter Laqueur has written. Jewish settlements in the West Bank began, in effect, in Jerusalem and its environs during the first days after the guns fell silent. On June 14, Allon proposed to the cabinet that Israel immediately begin to reconstruct and settle the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, and to surround Arab East Jerusalem with a ring of new Jewish neighborhoods. The aim was to turn all of Jerusalem into an inalienable part of Israel. "If we don't [start doing] it in a day or two, we never will," he said.
The Jewish Quarter was actually inhabited by Arab families who had moved in after the Jews were expelled in 1948. Allon proposed that the Arabs be evicted; he was backed by Dayan, the cabinet approved, and about three hundred families were removed. The eviction, Lior was to write, "passed without violence and in a pleasant enough atmosphere." What he meant was that the shock of the war and the fear of the Jews were such that the inhabitants were submissive and frightened and readily packed up and left when ordered out.
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