Tuesday, May 03, 2011

My Sh'ma Piece Is Online

My contribution to Sh'ma's Israel's Independence theme issue is Israel’s War of Liberation, 1944-1948.

And I am critiqued here - and my rebuttal is below there, as a comment.

Feel free to engage.

^

2 comments:

ziontruth said...

The critic writes:

"This model casts Jews as the local 'native' population, and conveniently ignores Palestine's Arab population, which as late as 1948, constituted the country’s majority."

In other words, faulting your article for not adopting the Arab settler narrative.

The Jews are the indigenous of this land, not the Arabs. The tenth generation of dogs born in a stable are still dogs and not horses, even if the stable owner has left the stable vacant for an extended period of time for some reason.

Kateland said...

You might be interested in the contract I have to write the memoirs of the former chief military engineer from Chativa 8th. Among other things, he was part of the Anders Aliyah and an explosive expert. He was recruited by Yitzhak Sadeh, and pre-independence was stationed in Haifa by the Haganah. His contact/liaison with both the Lechi and Ezel was Shachnai, a Palestinian Jew. One of the things he emphasizes in his memoirs is that many of the operations he conducted or planned pre-independence was publicly credited to Begin’s group – this was operations policy.

For example, the British Police headquarters building in Haifa was located on the fifth floor of a 7 storey building. He ran a clothesline from the roof top of an adjourning building to the roof of the building housing the British. Then a bomb was launched across the line, hit the building and rigged to drop on impact. He had to time the explosion perfectly so that when the bomb when off it would detonate at the fifth floor.