Thread by @OrenKessler

I’ve read the NY Review of Books for many years, but this is journalistic malpractice:

“Seventy-six years ago, Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.”

1948 was vastly more complex than this nonsense sentence.

The word “tendentious” doesn’t quite cut it:

“Between 1947 and 1949 armed Zionist militias roamed through Palestine, ethnically cleansing the inhabitants of more than five hundred villages, massacring many, and forcing out an estimated 750,000”

nybooks.com/online/2023/03…

From this week’s issue:

“In 1948 Aziz became one of over 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homeland by Zionist militias”

nybooks.com/articles/2024/…

Naturally, this propaganda is published in the October 4, 2024 issue in order to coincide perfectly with the year anniversary of the October 7th attacks.

All of these come from Tareq Baconi, author of “Hamas Contained”

https://x.com/OrenKessler/status/1767310706494288124

There are many things in history that I wish were true, but just because something feels satisfying to write doesn’t make it so.

Twitter isn’t really the place to relitigate 1948, but there are many, many good books on it (“libraries worth of books,” as I wrote in “Palestine 1936”). Morris’s seminal Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Revisited) is a good place to start.

Were there expulsions during the war? Few serious historians deny that. It depended mostly on when and where, and the military situation in a given time and place.

But despite Baqoni’s fantasies of Einsatzgruppen with Star of David armbands, it’s well-documented that Palestinians fled many, many villages, towns and cities without seeing a single member of “Zionist militias,” as he puts it.

That tends to happen in wars. Civilians flee.

Again, Twitter isn’t the place to relitigate this. There are these things called books. I wrote one, and it also covers 1948.

But this – this isn’t history. It’s an elite American publication publishing a deliberately timed defense of the indefensible.

CC: NYRB editor Max Nelson aka @elusivecorporal.

More from Baconi:

https://x.com/OrenKessler/status/1767310899474280543

https://x.com/OrenKessler/status/1767314102118941141

For those actually interested in 1948, see eg the list in Morris ,2004:

A: Abandonment on Arab orders
C: Influence of nearby town ‘s fall
E: Expulsion by Jewish forces
F: Fear of being caught in fighting
M: Military assault
W: Whispering campaign amazon.com/Palestinian-Re…

A quick glance at the list will show you that this history, like much history, is (brace yourselves) complex.

What you don’t see is the letter “E” for Expulsion all down the line, as Baconi tries to dupe readers into believing, with the avid encouragement of the NYRB.