Apparently, duplication is necessary and appropriate:

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Mark Levine:Author; Professor, Middle Eastern History, UC Irvine & Center for MES, Lund University

A Dear Jon (Voight) Letter About Gaza and the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Posted: 08/15/2014 10:36 pm EDT Updated: 08/15/2014 10:59 pm EDT

Dear Jon Voight,

We write to you as admirers of your work for many years. We are also professors of modern Middle Eastern studies, specializing on the history and contemporary realities of Israel, Zionism and Palestine, and between the two of us, we have written and edited over half a dozen books on the country and the two peoples who are destined -- or doomed, depending on your point of view -- to share it.

We have read your open letter to Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and other critics of the latest Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza, in response to their own open letter condemning Israeli actions during the war. Your passion for defending Israel is clearly as great as your passion for acting. However, behind your passion is a view of Israel's history and current actions that are utterly at odds with the actual history and present-day realities in the country. They are simply dead-wrong, and your belief in them has led you to adopt views that will ultimately -- and at this rate, sooner rather than later -- doom, not defend, Israel. Moreover, while you have laudably said that they or other actors should not face industry sanctions for standing up to Israel, we believe that the intensity of your criticism, coupled with the inaccuracy of the arguments, not only exacerbates the rewriting of the conflict's history in the mainstream media but contributes both to a toxic atmosphere of hatred against Palestinians and to a purported blacklist against them.

Let us begin with your opening argument:

They are obviously ignorant of the whole story of Israel's birth, when in 1948 the Jewish people were offered by the UN a portion of the land originally set aside for them in 1921, and the Arab Palestinians were offered the other half. The Arabs rejected the offer, and the Jews accepted, only to be attacked by five surrounding Arab countries committed to driving them into the sea. But the Israelis won. The Arabs tried it again in 1967, and again in 1973, launching a sneak attack on the holiest Jewish holiday. Each time the Jews prevailed but not without great loss of life. And when Israel was not fighting a major war, it was defending itself against terrorist campaigns.

This is the traditional narrative of Israel's birth, part of what Israeli hisitorian Simha Flapan described as the "myths" surrounding Israel in his famous 1987 book The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. However, this is a distortion of the actual history, which saw Zionism arrive on the soil of a Palestine that was already in the midst of its own modernization, against which what Israeli sociologist Gershon Shafir describes as a "militant [Zionist] nationalist movement" developed, deploying the "conquest of labor" and then the "conquest of land" to increasingly powerful effect once the British conquered Palestine in 1917.

After three decades of British rule that was legally committed -- through the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate -- to facilitate the creation of a Jewish "national home" at the expense of fostering Palestinian Arab nationalism, outright civil war became inevitable. When war finally came, the Zionist leadership "accepted" the terms of the 1947 Partition Plan. In reality, they had little intention of actually fulfilling them, and over the next year, through intercommunal conflict and then all-out war, three quarters of a million Palestinians were permanently forced from their homes, and over 500 villages were destroyed.

As for your claims that Israel was attacked by surrounding countries determined to throw it into the sea, this too is belied by the historical record. As Oxford University professors Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan demonstrated in their book The War for Palestine, Rewriting the History of 1948, minimal and badly trained and equipped forces were sent; their main goals were to prevent themselves from looking like collaborators and their rival Mufti of Jerusalem from establishing a state, and, where possible, to take whatever territory they could for themselves. Most important here, Jordan -- the one neighbor with an effective, British-run army -- had reached a modus vivendi with the Zionist/Israeli leadership in which it would take over the West Bank and leave Israel the rest of the country. The only exception was Jerusalem, about which the two sides couldn't agree and which therefore became the scene of the worst fighting of the war.

Let's leave aside the fact that you don't mention the 1956 tripartite invasion of Egypt by Israel, France and the UK, which not even Israelis argue was a defensive war. Similar to your description of 1948, your description of 1967 as the "Arab trying again" to destroy Israel is historically inaccurate. There were certainly many threats emanating from Arab capitals in the late spring of 1967, but ultimately it was Israel, not the Arab states, that clearly launched a "sneak attack." The CIA even predicted that Israel could wipe out the combined forces of the surrounding states in roughly five days, which is exactly what happened.

While presented to the world as a war of survival, 1967 was in fact a war of conquest and expansion. How do we know this? Quite simply because that's just what Israel did: It conquered and occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights and proceeded to settle them intensively, particularly in the biblical heartland of the West Bank.

Here, Mr. Voight, it is absolutely crucial to understand that if Israel were really afraid to turn over the West Bank to Palestinians for security reasons -- that is, if the occupation were in fact about security -- it could have maintained a military occupation to this day without violating international law. But instead it began a settlement enterprise that came to dominate Israeli political life, eventually placing well over half a million settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in clear contravention of international law, which expressly forbids transferring civilians from one country into an occupied territory.



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