http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/world/middleeast/13israel.html?_r=1

Jan 12, 2009

“To Israel’s critics abroad, the picture could not be clearer: Israel’s war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of Hamas, causing untold human suffering and bombing an already isolated and impoverished population into the Stone Age, and it must be stopped

Yet here in Israel very few, at least among the Jewish population, see it that way.”

Link

Notice how he thinks the massacres (he is careful to call them small in scale, though some involved the deaths of hundreds) and forced expulsions
are somehow the same as Arab governments offering to accept women and children, and local village leaders telling some people to flee for their own safety. He actually thinks that the concern for the safety of Arab civilians by other Arabs somehow gives us a more complicated moral picture of the cause of the Palestinian refugee problem–somehow this is supposed to lighten the guilt of the Zionist side. It’s bizarre. Nobody would ever say this in any other conflict. The only reason he thinks this way is because for decades the official story was the the Arabs all fled at the orders of their leaders and none were expelled. Even this story doesn’t really make any moral sense, because in that case, if the Israelis didn’t want them leaving, they’d have let them return after the fighting stopped.

If he wants to talk sensibly about Arab guilt then he should talk about Arab atrocities, of which there were no shortage, but it’s as though when speaking of Zionist ethnic cleansing he has to somehow dilute the effect by claiming it’s partly the fault of the Arab leaders, because some of them were concerned for the safety of Arab civilians.

You also do something that many do who write comments here criticizing me for something I haven’t written that they think I should have. That is, you haven’t reviewed my archives by doing a simple site search based on the keywords in your question. If you search on ‘Holocaust’ you will find numerous posts about the subject. And I don’t only post about it on Yom Hashoah. As for Yom Haatzmaut, I don’t recall I’ve ever written something specifically devoted to that day. But the fact that I haven’t doesn’t mean you can assume I’m not pro-Israel or a progressive Zionist. I see my role as filling in the empty spaces which others in the media and blog world leave empty regarding Israel & the I-P conflict.

The post you are commenting on is my meditation on the nature of Israeli society & my prescription for curing what ails it. That’s as close as you’re going to get to a post dedicated to Yom Haatzmaut this yr.

I just went back & reviewed that passage & I read it slightly differently than you. I think he was setting up a juxtaposition bet. the cities & villages into which the Arabs are NOW packed & the abandoned villages which are sitting vacant. In other words, he’s implying that the Arabs should be allowed to go back & repopulate those villages since they are “unused.” I don’t think his word choice made that super clear. But I don’t read it as negatively as you.

I wonder who coined that euphemism?