Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Isaiah 49:17

Gershom Gorenber I have sparred with on a number of occasions, primarily before visiting American Jewish groups.

His latest attack, a book on the Jewish civilian communities populated by revenants in the area intended to be part of the Jewish national home merited a laudatory (what else?) review in the New York Review of Books (where elese?)

An excerpt:

The settlement project remains a main, some say the main, impediment to a historic compromise to end a hundred-year war between two national movements over the same piece of real estate.

How this mini-empire first came into being after the brief 1967 war is brilliantly described by Gershom Gorenberg in The Accidental Empire, his masterly book based on original research. The empire was not founded in a fit of absentmindedness, as was once (wrongly) said of the British Empire, but as Gorenberg's documentation shows, it was the result of deliberate decisions by Israeli governments of the left and the right. In a book that could have served as a telling additional chapter in Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, he shows how only seven months after the 1967 war there were already eight hundred settlers living in the West Bank.




Isaiah 49:17

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