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The Birth of Israel: Myths And Realities
By Simha Flapan. New York: Pantheon, 1987. 277 pp. $6.95 (paper)
A dimly lit chamber, a _ spotlight focused on a massive table at the center. On the table a beautifully wrapped package labeled: Israel, America's Strategic Ally.
Seven pencil-thin legs "support" the table. And a surrealistic touch out of Salvador Dali: the legs do not quite reach the floor.
The subject is not levitation. In a literal sense, it is a review of Simha Flapan's seminal book The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, in which the Israeli author demolishes, based on irrefutable Israeli sources, the seven basic myths upon which an aggressive Israel has depicted itself as the victim of aggression and on which it asserts a claim to be America's valuable ally.
The most egregious of the seven delusions is that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes in 1948-1949 in response to calls from their leaders, who asked them to get out of the way temporarily while the Jews were driven into the sea. Flapan poignantly concedes that he, like most Israelis, accepted this and the other six myths as the...