Probably everyone has a bad habit. Some people eat at McDonalds. Some like to stop at traffic accidents, the gorier the better. Mine is to read Mondoweiss, a truly weird blog, mostly written by Jews, and with the aim to destroy Israel. (Yeah, I sum it up that way.)
This Mondoweiss post Nakba in The New Yorker, BDS in Variety links to Ari Shavit: Lydda, Zionism, and the Middle East Today, which article supposedly explains why it was so important that the Palestinians of Lydda had leave. Look for the key sentences: "If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist." Can you explain why? I do not understand the logic. There are plenty of Palestinian Israeilis and it must have been obvious that Ben Gurion and company in that era would have understood it. So why the importance of Lydda? Is it a matter of literal geogoraphy? Of location? I don't track.
Shavit writes (and anyone who writes "The truth is..." arouses immediate suspicion.)
Lydda is the black box of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist. In retrospect, it’s all too clear. When Siegfried Lehmann arrived in the Lydda Valley, in 1927, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to a Jewish state, and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Dr. Lehmann did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For decades, Jews succeeded in hiding from themselves the contradiction between their national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive groves and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, Lydda was no more.
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