Friday, June 8, 2007

The Longest Seventh Day

Earlier this week, Harry Shearer posted a short, rueful note on the Huffington Post blog (click <here>) to the effect that Paris Hilton's DUI jail time and the release forty years ago of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album had gotten more attention in the news media than the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War.

As satirists are wont to do, Shearer exaggerated — but not much.

As attention spans erode with briefer and briefer cable and Internet news cycles, the role of serious magazine journalism grows ever more important by providing middle-ground perspectives that remind us what is really significant in our world.

So three cheers for The New Yorker and its editor, David Remnick.

If you missed his book review-essay in the May 28 issue, entitled “The Seventh Day: Why the Six-Day War is still being fought,” click <here> to read it. It is one of the most compact, cogent appraisals of how (to paraphrase Remnick’s paraphrase of the Duke of Wellington) a great victory for Israel turned into a great defeat.

Especially noteworthy are the sources Remnick relies upon for coming to this conclusion: Israeli historians — Tom Segev, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, Gershom Gorenberg, and others.

The American Jewish Establishment would have us all believe that all Jews speak with one voice — theirs and that of whatever government is in power in Israel — and that it is the voice of Divine Providence.

The truth, however, as Remnick’s review demonstrates, is that Israelis have always been far more mature and intellectually honest about their “situation” than our Establishment has been or is ever likely to be.

— Adam Simms

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