How one reads Shavit’s chapter on Lydda is a Rorschach test of one’s Israel politics

One chapter has garnered more attention than others.  It is the one serialized in the New Yorker in October 2013, on the expulsion by the nascent Israeli army of the Arab residents of the city of Lydda in July 1948.  How one reads this chapter is a Rorschach test of one’s Israel politics.  Eshman began his interview of Schoenberg Hall by asking Shavit if this chapter, in its unvarnished depiction of Jewish cruelty and even murder, lent succor to Israel’s enemies, as some maintain.   Meanwhile, many other readers have heralded Shavit’s exposé in this chapter as a bold and courageous confrontation with an unsavory past.

I see it as neither, and in fact regard this chapter as the triumph of Zionist amorality.

David N. Myers, “The Failed Promise of ‘My Promised Land'”, The Jewish Journal (28 February – 6 March 2014), 29.