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Walled

It will be interesting to see what reaction is generated by a new book, "Walled" written by a veteran French-Israeli journalist, Sylvain Cypel, a senior editor at Le Monde.

It would be surprising if Cypel doesn't cop the usual flack of being accused of being a "self-hating Jew" and the like. It will be hard to claim, however, that the writer doesn't know anything about Israel or has no connection to it - thereby denying him he right, some would say, of criticising Israel.

SFGate.com [the San Francisco Chronicle] has a piece on the book and the issues it throws up:

"Veteran French-Israeli journalist Sylvain Cypel, now a senior editor at Le Monde, has channeled his intimate familiarity with Israel into a penetrating critique of Israeli political culture, with particular emphasis on the manifest immorality of occupation. Erudite yet accessible, "Walled" is an impassioned plea for Israelis to liberate themselves from the self-serving view that Palestinians are somehow uniquely undeserving of independence, and to resist the "colonialist and ethnicist tropisms" that permeate Israeli political discourse.

Synthesizing the findings of Israel's New Historians, Cypel begins by observing that "for the Palestinians, 1948 was what we would now, after the recent war in the Balkans, call a vast ethnic cleansing," and that "nearly half of this expulsion was carried out even before the Arab states attacked Israel." The author describes the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel attacked its neighbors and seized control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as "the first of the modern preventive wars," except that it was far from certain that Egypt ever intended to attack Israel."

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