• "Murdered Nahal Oz peace activists are 'oppressors'"
He makes no mention of Nahan Oz. This is your talking point if the word "oppressor" is ever used. It is used once in the piece. Do you disagree that Israel has become a sometimes oppressor of Palestinians in its occupied territory, and that some "ferocity" is predictable, if not justifiable, as a result of that? Predictable is not exclusable. Lots of what is predictable in human affairs is inexcusable.
1/
• "Palestinians were 'dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit'"
Here he is explicitly characterizing the arguments of "darker" people. Do you disagree that many in the global south view Israel's founding this way?
Do you disagree even with the full substance? "Punished" you and I would agree is not accurate, but Arabs of the mandate were dispossessed — as well as Mizrahi Jews! — as a result of primarily European problems and events.
2/
Do you object to this characterization when it is presented as exonerative of Jews? In fact, post WWII Europe was presented with terrible refugee problems, there were paroxysms of ethnic cleansing, the remaining Jews had no European home that they would accept settlement in and that would accept them. Europe needed Israel and Zionism gave it cover to present its own ethnic cleansing as a gift to the Jews.
3/
@BenRossTransit
• "Israel, with its survivalist psychosis"
I understand that you find this description objectionable, it is obviously contestable, but to claim that a country has its psychoses is not to claim that it is "uniquely evil". I would accept claims that the United States is "psychotically" consumerist and deferetial to plutocratic romanticism. Does that mean I say the US is uniquely evil? Is any disparaging characterization of Israel's culture out of bounds?
4/
I'd mostly endorse the claim, by the way. I think Israel does suffer from a culture of perhaps-we-are-vulnerable-but-never-again-a-victim in ways that twist it towards actions that are supremely maladaptive. Perhaps you disagree, and I'd not characterize a position I disagree with as "psychosis" in a cordial discussion. But to claim Israel's culture is deformed by its traumas in ways that lead it to err against its own and others' interests I would defend as a true claim.
5/
● It's wrong & evil to say Israel has a right to defend itself"
He never said its wrong or evil to say that Israel has a right to defend itself. He talks about a "chorus" and about politicians affirming that right in ways that don't include and aren't balanced against the rights of Palestinians. Obviously, that is a selective critique. One can find plenty of politicians who rehearse the rights of Palestinians without acknowledging those of Israel and Israelis.
6/
But criticizing some (pretty important!) politicians and influence communities for lack of balance isn't in adjudicating Israel's rights against the rights of others doesn't somehow suggest that Israel is "uniquely evil". You can criticize his lack of balance, for sure.
But again, I think you are letting your own sensitivities override a fair description — to yourself! — of what is being said and argued.
7/
@BenRossTransit
• "The history of revisionism as told by Rick Perlstein was a basic part of the history of Zionism and Israel as I learned it in the 60s. Jabotinsky's split, Irgun vs Haganah, Altalena, etc."
I guess what's new is that side seems to have pretty definitively won the battle for how the Israeli polity actually behaves, if not for its soul and the meaning of the project to roughly half the country.
8/
In my own 1980s Hebrew school education, this stuff was entirely omitted. Begin was a good guy, a leader of Israel, the country where we were vicariously planting trees, a land without a people for a people without a land. You are fortunate to have been educated when you were, before history and a holocaust in amber froze Jewish education into a fairy tale vulnerable to the sharpest disillusionments when younger Jews learn a bit of what was omitted.
/fin
