Massacre & Incident

Another book review* by Paul Monk in The Australian. Here's how it begins:

"'Barely in modern times has so short and localised a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences,' Michael B. Oren wrote in the opening paragraph of Six Days of War (2002),** his compelling history of the June 1967 conflict in which Israel crushed its Arab neighbours and seized control of Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. He listed some of those consequences: the Black September incident in Jordan (1970), the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes (1972)..." (Partial gaps in revisionist critique of Israel, 4/10/14)

So when 11 Israelis are killed it's a massacre, but when nearly 3,500 Palestinians are killed it's merely an incident.***

Why would you bother reading on?

[*Cursed Victory: A History of Israel & the Occupied Territories, by Ahron Bregman; **From Norman Finkelstein's 2002 review of Oren, Abba Eban with footnotes: "Whenever Israel faces a public relations crisis in the US - ie, a jot of the reality of its brutal policies manages to break free of ideological controls - a new propaganda initiative is launched to lift the spirits and close the ranks of the Zionist faithful. After Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Zionist book of the month was Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial. Soon after the Palestinians entered into revolt in September 2000 and Israel unleashed a new round of violent repression, From Time Immemorial - although definitively shown to have been a hoax - was reissued and soared to the top of the Amazon list, soon followed by Oren's book (Amazon frequently featured them together). While certainly a much more sophisticated enterprise, Six Days of War serves the same political agenda as From Time Immemorial. In the introduction Oren states as his goal that the June war 'never be seen the same way again.' In fact he simply repeats the same old, tired apologetics. Like From Time Immemorial, its real purpose is to reclaim the lost world of Zionist heroism and innocence. With so much water under the bridge, however, except among true believers (admittedly not a small number) it's unlikely to succeed."; ***See my 14/8/12 post Bob Carr Rewrites Jordanian History.]