Have you read ‘Six Days of War’? It’s widely accepted as the best ‘factual’ account of the war …

Secondly, Israel was already fighting the ‘independence war’ in 1947.

Lastly, from Ben-Ami:

“Israel was not in a military disadvantage when the war took place. The Arab armies were disoriented and confused, and they did not put in the battlefield the necessary forces.”

They were at a numerical disadvantage. And while I know Ben-Ami likes to blame those vicious Zionists for the Arabs’ disorientation and confusion, no one was probably really aware of that during the war itself …

Btw, you don’t have to defend your comment about Oren – I know what kind of poster you are and where you lean politically as I do read Weiss (who’s blog does contain quite a few flat out lies, with one recent one being “all Israeli soldiers go up to Masada” (paraphrased) and then he proceeded to completely mislead the reader as to why that WAS a finishing point for the ‘beret journeys’ by – mostly at least – heavy artillery and tank units.) and other blogs where you’re an active contributor (and who can’t remember you taking shots at Alex too, an Israeli British dove!)

Weiss’ references to Oren’s piece in Commentary aren’t to the passage I chose. He critiques parts of the piece unrelated to what I quoted. He doesn’t mention that bit AT ALL. It’ not a case of “giving more credence to a blog writer than to a respected historian-again simply because of their political views”.

As regards ‘respected historians’, respect is no guarantee of veracity.

“What you quote from Oren is generally regarded as true by mainstream history.”

This is simply untrue. Oren plays to the ‘David and Goliath’ myth, thoroughly rebuked by most modern Israeli historians and historiographers. You want to believe in nationalistic bedtime stories to tell your kids and grandkids, go right ahead. The reality-based community knows better.

Like the embryonic nationalist narratives of most (if not all) emerging states, the Zionist narrative contains a number of self-serving and self-glorifying elements, some of which even blatantly contradict each other. It’s hardly an Israeli prerogative.

Palestine was far from empty, the Arab armies didn’t call for the indigenous population to flee so they could ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ and the 1967 war, going by the outcome (persistent to this day), can hardly be called ‘pre-emptive’. Get over it.

Hehehe…

That must be the weakest rebuttal I’ve come across this week. From the Oren piece:

This fact was well understood by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, at the time of the state’s creation in 1948. Though Israel was attacked simultaneously on all fronts by six Arab armies, with large sections of the Galilee and the Negev already lost, Ben-Gurion devoted the bulk of Israel’s forces to breaking the siege of Jerusalem.

Contrast this with the more realistic version of Shlomo Ben-Ami:

SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Well, for all practical purposes, a state existed before it was officially created in 1948. The uniqueness of the Zionist experience, as it were, was in that the Zionists were able, under the protection of the mandate, of the British mandate, to set up the essentials of a state — the institutions of a state, political parties, a health system, running democracy for Jews, obviously — before the state was created, so the transition to statehood was a declaration, basically, and it came about in the middle of two stages of war, a civil war between the Israelis and the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine and then an invasion by the Arab armies. The point that I made with regard to the war is that the country, to the mythology that existed and exists, continues to exist mainly among Israelis and Jews, is that Israel was not in a military disadvantage when the war took place. The Arab armies were disoriented and confused, and they did not put in the battlefield the necessary forces.

So, in 1948, what was born was a state, but also original superpower in many ways. We have prevailed over the invading Arab armies and the local population, which was practically evicted from Palestine, from the state of Israel, from what became the state of Israel, and this is how the refugee problem was born. Interestingly, the Arabs in 1948 lost a war that was, as far as they were concerned, lost already in 1936-1939, because they have fought against the British mandate and the Israeli or the Jewish Yishuv, the Jewish pre-state, and they were defeated then, so they came to the hour of trial in 1948 already as a defeated nation. That is, the War of 1948 was won already in 1936, and they had no chance to win the war in 1948. They were already a defeated nation when they faced the Israeli superpower that was emerging in that year.

So we have Michael “the Historian” Oren rehashing some early Zionist mythology but he’s not an ideologue??? Michael reminds me of the many Meircan sages that get paraded on Faux Noise, always with their backs to a wall of books they’ve never read (but that come in handy to hide their ill-gotten gains behind?)