Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

Rating:
Summary: Misrecognizing the victims
Review: By now more than a little dated, this collection bears a title that makes sense only ironically. The "victims" in question are the fancifully named "Palestinians," a pseudo-ethnicity that conveniently came into existence with the founding of the state of Israel. To be sure, the people now being identified by this name are poor, enjoy few political rights or privileges, and live in often appalling conditions. But their victimhood stems from two major--and consistently dissimulated--causes: first, the cynical, strategically motivated refusal of statehood as proposed by the U.N. in 1948; and, second, their unanimous rejection by Arab neighbor states.

The populace thus left without access to institutional status or means of political self-expression or determination has become the victim of yet another cynical ruse. States like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and others have exploited the disaffection they created to direct pointless Palestinian acts of aggression against the Israeli population.

The international community's deafening silence on this point is hard to miss. While dictatorial regimes with long histories of abusing the human rights of their own citizens supply weapons, money and political cover for a decades-long campaign of terror, the U.N. passes one resolution after another condemning Israel's every attempt to deal with the problem. The Israeli government's reactions over the last three decades have varied dramatically, and reducing this variety to the rubric of "occupation" or "apartheid" is disingenuous and unjust.

Perhaps the editors and authors should ask if the conditions under which the Palestinian population now lives might have been avoided or ameliorated had the wealthy neighboring Arab states directed resources toward improving the Palestinians' economic conditions. Indeed, their cause could have been helped immeasurably if these neighbors had simply recognized Israel's right to exist, thus both generating trust and applying legitimate political pressure on Israel to come to an arrangement of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians.

Instead, it is the Israelis who are charged with providing for Palestinian well-being, and blamed for the persistence of conditions which long preceded the appearance of the state of Israel. To be sure, Israeli policies are far from blameless, but the essays in this book consistently misidentify the main perpetrators of injustice against this liminal population and persistently blame the other victims of this same injustice--the Israelis. What makes this collection particularly galling is that it provides a patina of intellectual legitimacy to what amount to little more than plain old anti-Semitism. The difference is that this anti-Semitism asserts itself as political criticism directed against specific government policies. But this, too, is little more than a ruse, since the policies in question stem directly from efforts at self-preservation. It is beyond dispute that Israel has no colonial predilections; its "occupation," misguided or not, is an effort to secure itself against attacks. It is a given that if its security could be guaranteed, Israel would have no interest in governing a non-Israeli population and would happily divest itself of that responsibility.

The inflammatory charges of "apartheid" imply that the Jews who live in a democratic Jewish state are perpetrators of injustice precisely as Jews, that is, as members of a privileged ethnic group. But this "group" is simply the citizenry of the state. American citizens, too, enjoy rights not afforded to non-citizens--even ones who live inside the U.S. This is hardly apartheid. Moreover, there is no Palestinian ethnicity. The Palestinians are simply Arabs who happen to live in a certain region of the Middle East. There is nothing racial, religious, cultural, or political that distinguishes them from millions of their neighbors. They do not form an "ethnos," and their very name did not exist until 1948. By contrast, Jews are a distinct religious and cultural minority, both in the Middle East and the world. Their "ethnic" solidarity has persisted for millennia, and their nation-state came into existence for the express purpose of securing their population against universal persecution. The state of Israel was created in a region inhabited by Jewish people dating back thousands of years. To equate this with the forcible imposition of foreign colonial control over an indigenous population is the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty, to say the least.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and Insightful
Review: By way of introduction, the obvious cannot be overstressed here, namely that Israel is the occupier and therefore the aggressor while the Palestinians are the occupied and therefore the victims. Paradoxically, this fact is hardly ever even taken into consideration by western politicians, thus ignoring the fundamental element of the conflict. Needless to say, attempting to solve this conflict without differentiating between the aggressor (Israel) and the victimized (the Palestinians) will never lead to permanent peace. According to Said, understanding the root causes of the extremist movements in the Palestine is crucial. People turn to extreme measures when in extreme despair and agony. Surely, no one chooses to blow himself in the air when happy and contented with life. Instead, it is in situations in which people see no other way out but to resort to terrorist actions. Needless to say, understanding why terrorism exists does not mean that it is justifiable and morally acceptable. On the contrary, violence is never a solution to any problem. Instead, it can only further aggravate matters. Killing innocent people is always wrong and morally reprehensible. Said further claims that Israeli government mainly consists of extremists and fundamentalists. This is never mentioned in mainstream media; the sole focus is on Islamic fundamentalists. Western politicians never ask themselves the fundamental question: why does terrorism emerge? Said recognizes a number of factors, the most important of which are injustice, poverty, subjugation, inferiority and discrimination. Thus, terrorism is not a result of justice and equality. Israel commits terrorist actions every day and violates international law but no one condemns nor criticizes Israeli government. Instead, the U.S. gives a billion dollar aid to Israel even though Israel is being accused of belligerent and merciless war waging against the Palestinians. As Said puts it, how is it that Israel can remain so extremely powerful among one billion Muslims? The answer to that question is readily apparent to those who disbelieve the mainstream media.

Rating:
Summary: Unhappy conclusions
Review: The unhappy title of this book is no accident. It attempts to play on a problem that has plagued the Jewish people throughout history. The Arabs of Palestine have certainly been victimized. But unlike the Jews, who have consistently been victimized by others, the Arabs can legitimately blame only their own misguided leaders for their predicament. The supreme irony in the book's audacious subtitle is that its authors dare to accuse others of sins they have themselves committed many times over in this book.

Rashid Khalidi especially claims that the population of Palestine was overridden by Europeans. But this is false: In 1554 the land was populated by 205,000 Moslems, Christians and Jews, whose numbers totaled only 275,000 by 1800. Records from 1830, 1863, 1878 and 1893 and 1917 show that when the heaviest Jewish immigration began in 1880, a large proportion of the 425,000 to 440,000 Arabs in Palestine were themselves recent immigrants.

Palestine fellaheen, urban dwellers and Bedouin were thinned and forced out by Ibrahim Pasha's 1831 invasion, a great 1837 earthquake and successive epidemics. In 1880, the Arabs in Israel were mostly Egyptians who settled in large numbers in Akko (6,000 in 1831 alone), Jaffa (in 1893, the majority) and the Beit Shean, Jordan and Hula Valleys. Through World War I, Arab and Muslim immigrants also came from Algeria, Damascus, Yemen, Afghanistan, Persia, India, Tripoli, Morocco, Turkey, Iraq, Algeria (whose immigrants spoke Berber), and the Caucasus, despite numerous hardships that were offset by Palestine's booming economy.

These essays ignore all those nasty facts, attempting to prove prove that the Jewish people always planned to expel the Arabs of Palestine. The reading is imposed on a situation and history that shows no such thing.

Then we move on to Edward Said, who misrepresents the writings of Theodore Herzl. The latter devoted twenty pages of his June 12, 1895 diary entry to reflections on the problem. Said quotes Herzl as saying that "both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly,"[45] and that "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment in our own country."

Actually, Herzl refers neither to economic nor physical force. Furthermore, before and after these seemingly damning statements are others that substantially mitigate the "intent" that Said hopes to "prove."

Herzl wrote that upon occupying the land, the Jewish people "shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us." (Herzl, Complete Diaries, Vol. 1, p.88). In other words, the Jewish people would BUY the land. In the 19th century, the Jewish people were buying land at prices considerably above-market--and "expropriating" land ONLY via purchase. Thus, Herzl proves the righteousness of the effort and great sensitivity to others.

Second, Herzl afterwards wrote that it went without saying, "we shall respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honor, and their freedom." He added that the "harshest means" would be used against all persons who abused the rights of others. He intended to "set the entire old order a wonderful example," (Ibid), which is precisely what the Jewish people did.

Far from admitting Said's charge, namely "to a policy of systematic ethnic cleansing," Herzl promised to violently oppose anyone who might harm any people already living in the land.

Several exceedingly thorough scholars have already studied the false (albeit politically charged) purpose of this set of authors: Bernard Lewis (Islam and the West); Efraim Karsh (Fabricating Israeli History); Erich and Rael Jean Isaac ("Whose Palestine?" Commentary, July, 1986); Justus Reid Wiener (Commentary, Sept., 1999); and Werner Cohn ("Partners in Hate," online).

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Rating:
Summary: Perfectly named
Review: This book accomplishes all that the title implies.

From cover to cover, this book blames the victims of Arab aggression against Israel and against the Jews of the Middle East. Near the start, Norman G. Finkelstein, rather than seriously discussing Joan Peters' excellent work "From Time Immemorial," calls it a "hoax" based upon relatively picayune disagreements with just one of its many arguments.

Perhaps the final chapter, by Ed Said, Ibrahim and Janet Abu-Lughod, Muhammad Hallaj, and Elia Zurek, is the most amazing for its alternative version of history. Sadly, the rest of this book is also divorced from reality.

Rating:
Summary: Musical chairs for two? This isn't a game
Review: This work seems to exist in another time,for it echoes with as relevant now after many turns of the merry-go-round as it did when written. It strikes the keynote of the last fifty years of the Arab-Israeli conflict as it ticks over in its basic manufactured fallacies, invariant through all policies, editorials and intiatives. The work opens with an account of the appearance of Peters' From Time Immemorial, a concoction of disinformation on the history of Israel, in the myth of the 1948 and the non-existence of the Palestinians. As the Oslo cycle joins the rest, and the next cycle of the basic swindle begins, one might as well go backto the future by rereading this work.