Required Reading

In case you've missed these:

Benny Morris on The Palestinians and Transfer:

...A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians.Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse theborder areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse thevillages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

..I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire toestablish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by thePalestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war."

Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state inthis place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."

Caroline Glick on the Israeli Media:

The fact of the matter is that at least in America, there is a reasoned, impassioned debate over whether or not the media suffers from an institutional bias. And both sides are taking the steps they deem necessary to ensure that their side wins both the debate and the support of the American public.

In Israel's media culture, no such debate exists. It isn't that Israelis do not see the far-left bias of the major media outlets in the country. Everyone here knows that the press is leftist. The problem is that now that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has himself adopted the political platform of the radical Left, there is no debate about anything at all. Sharon's political opponents receive little more than a sneering brush-off from the major papers while Sharon himself is venerated from every angle in the best tradition of North Korea.

Last weekend's mass-circulation Hebrew papers are case in point. In Ma'ariv's news supplement, diplomatic "analyst" Ben Caspit wrote yet another of his nauseating hagiographies of Sharon....Then there is Yediot Ahronot's diplomatic "analyst" Nahum Barnea. He devoted the first half of his two-page spread in Yediot's news supplement this weekend to a mind numbing, pandering interview with former Shin Bet director Avi Dichter - Sharon's latest recruit to his Kadima one-man party. Barnea, who is generally a pacifist, ignored his anti-war tendencies in this case to buck up Sharon's newest pretty boy...

Last week Israel absorbed terrorist attacks on all fronts. Kassam rockets rained down on Ashkelon, Sderot and the communities of the Western Negev. Katyusha rockets were launched against cities in the North. Palestinians attacked Israelis throughout Judea and Samaria and an IDF officer was killed when he stopped a suicide bomber at a roadblock outside of Tulkarm. The Palestinian Authority has ceased to operate in any effective way. Foreigners are kidnapped on a daily basis in Gaza. All Palestinian terror groups have called off their imaginary cease-fire. Hamas's chieftain Khaled Mashaal just rounded off a two week visit to Iran, replete with a prolonged visit to a Revolutionary Guards training base. And the IDF has acknowledged that al-Qaida has successfully seeded itself not only in Gaza but in northern Samaria. But all of this is relegated to the back pages of the newspapers, because the only thing that Israelis need to know is that Sharon is a great man and a great leader. He's as fit as a fiddle and the fact that the physicians at Hadassah hospital lied two weeks ago to the Israeli public when they said that Sharon had suffered from a minor stroke, when in fact, as came out a week later he had a major stroke, should be of no concern to anyone.

It is a terrible thing when in a democracy as small and as vulnerable as Israel the media takes it upon itself to collude with a failed, sick leader in systematically lying to the public about the state of the country in order to advance a dangerous political agenda that has already been borne out by events as a failure.

Indeed, when the history of our times is written, the treachery of the Western media will fill future generations with disgust. And the perfidy of the Israeli media will be the source of the most extreme revulsion.

UPDATE: I've corrected the link to the Benny Morris interview.