Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate, is incensed by what he has read in Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land about a 1948 massacre, allegedly committed by the Palmah, in the Palestinian town of Lydda. As Martin Kramer has demonstrated, there is no evidence that such a massacre occurred—and yet Kinsley not only repeats Shavit’s claim but goes beyond it, accusing Jews of rewriting Israel’s past and adding ludicrous comparisons to the Rwandan genocide. Kramer writes:

[T]ake this point of supposed similarity between Lydda and Rwanda: “Crowding ‎people into a church (or, in this case, a mosque) and then blowing it up or setting it on fire.” ‎This originates in Shavit’s claim that Israeli troops detained Palestinian Arabs in a small ‎mosque, and then fired an anti-armor rocket into it as an act of revenge, killing 70 ‎persons.

Trouble is, to borrow Kinsley’s phrase, “all this is not even close to being true.” ‎Kinsley, far from showing himself a careful sifter of history, clearly has been seduced by ‎Shavit’s dramatic opera, mistaking it for history. And Kinsley then amplifies Shavit’s biases ‎still further, for reasons known only to him, producing a grotesque defamation of Israel that ‎goes even beyond Shavit’s account.‎ . . . To insinuate a parallel between the battle in Lydda and the most ‎heinous crimes against humanity, committed as part of a genocide, is simply obscene.‎

And it suggests that Kinsley didn’t even read Shavit carefully, for Shavit concludes his ‎account with this admission: “The small-mosque massacre could have been a ‎misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events.” But for Kinsley, ‎there are no accidents. He attributes a murderous intent to Israeli troops not because he can ‎be sure of it, but because it suits his forced narrative of Israeli sin.‎

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.