Shavit’s Lydda “Massacre” Reaches Israel
Ari Shavit
Ari Shavit has won enormous adulation among American Jews for his book, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, in which he movingly recounts the early years of struggle to establish Israel but which also alleges Jewish fighters committed a massacre in the town of Lydda during the 1948 War of Independence.
So striking was the Lydda story that The New Yorker excerpted a version of it as a stand-alone article — one critiqued by CAMERA for its inflammatory distortions and omissions.
CAMERA was hardly alone in challenging Shavit’s account. Scholar and President of Jerusalem’s Shalem College Martin Kramer deconstructed the implausible Lydda charges in a July 2014 Mosaic magazine article and now has presented much of this information to an audience of Israeli veterans of the 1948 war, including some who fought at Lydda.
Because Shavit’s book was published in English, most Israelis have been unaware of its massacre allegations. When Professor Kramer spoke to the veterans as part of a December 4 panel sponsored by the Galili Center for Defense Studies, the response to claims of a “revenge” atrocity against Lydda’s Arabs was shock and anger. Kramer recounts:
The reactions tumbled forth in immediate response to Shavit’s text. I heard gasps of disbelief and angry asides.
He reports the anguish of some of the audience:
At this point, none of them is up to challenging a well-connected media celebrity of Shavit’s caliber, and the persons specifically accused by him are gone. An elderly gentleman came up after my presentation and asked if I intended to publish my article in Hebrew. We ourselves can’t set the record straight anymore, he pleaded.
So, while Ari Shavit is reaping accolades across America for a book with shoddy, unsubstantiated charges of a Jewish atrocity, those who actually fought in the War of Independence hope their countrymen will come to understand one of their most celebrated journalists has gone abroad and defamed them all.
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