In his “Between the Lines” column (“In Two Crucial Struggles, Arming With Jewish Values,” May 20), Gary Rosenblatt mentions Ari Shavit.
The journalist and author is hardly the right person to run around American colleges, boasting of Israelis’ miraculous achievements, yet not able to shake off what for him is (as he wrote in his best-selling book), Israel’s original sin.
[In his chapter on the Israeli evacuation of Arabs from Lydda (now Lod) in the 1948 war, Shavit wrote:] “Either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” For him the choice is, either way, a shackle that Israelis and Jews must forever live with.
But Ari Shavit’s feelings of guilt, and those of others on the left, unwittingly help promote Israelis as European colonizers. This narrative and perspective is not the shared reality of the vast majority of Israelis, especially the Mizrahi Israeli citizens, who make up more than half of the Israeli Jews, indigenous to the area and the land. The Mizrahi Jews do not feel guilty or foreign to the land — the place and culture they never left.
Manhattan
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