While I regard the Nakba as an ongoing crime that needs to be prosecuted and reversed...Shavit defends its necessity and lectures Palestinians trapped in squalid refugee camps to just get over it.

It was not the right-wing Russians or the gun-toting settlers who carried out the Nakba. The Nakba is the legacy of Zionism's putatively socialist wing. It was the grandfathers and mothers of the "enlightened public" of today's Israel who literally drove tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinians into the sea in 1947-48 all along the Mediterranean coast, or who marched them at gunpoint to Ramallah.

There are fewer Arabs in Tel Aviv, one of the largest cities in the Middle East, than there are in Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. How do you accomplish such a remarkable feat of social engineering without massive violence?

You can be a bigot in the US, but you can't come out and openly declare your support for racial nationalism.

Only Zionists get to proclaim their fear of a brown planet while simultaneously maintaining a patina of liberal respectability.

There's still massive racism in the United States today that is rooted in sexual fears, but it's at least considered unacceptable. In Israel it's a mainstream phenomenon that's encouraged and supported by the state because it supports Israel's demographic imperative in its ethnocratic political structure.

I haven't seen American Sniper, but correct me if I'm wrong: An occupier mows down faceless Iraqis but the real victim is his anguished soul.