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.

My privilege as a white Jewish American in Israel is a major factor in getting me so much access to the key institutions of the Jewish state.

I think we need to draw a contextual distinction between what the neo-fascists of Europe would like to do and what the state of Israel has done.

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.

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?

If we don't kill, we will cease to exist

It is depressing but not shocking to witness the liberal intelligentsia embrace Ari Shavit so enthusiastically. Shavit is someone who is as consistently wrong as Thomas Friedman on major issues, and at least as much a courtier of power.