Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question [Paperback]

Christopher Hitchens (Editor), Edward W. Said (Editor), Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Contributor), Janet L. Abu-Lughod (Contributor), G. W. Bowersock (Contributor), Noam Chomsky (Contributor), Norman G. Finkelstein (Contributor), Muhammad Hallaj (Contributor), Rashid Khalidi (Contributor), Peretz Kidron (Contributor), Elia Zureik (Contributor), Edward Said (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2001 | ISBN-10: 1859843409 | ISBN-13: 978-1859843406

This book shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence.

Blaming the Victims demonstrates with cold precision how the consistent denial of truth about the Palestinians by governments and the media in the West has led to the current impasse in Middle East politics. Controversial, forceful and above all honest it attempts to redress a sustained crime against historical truth in order to make a more rational political future in Palestine possible. With a new introduction by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens and contributions by Norman G. Finkelstein, Peretz Kidron, Noam Chomsky, G.W. Bowerstock, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Rashid Khalidi, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Muhammad Hallaj and Elia Zureik.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The aim of these exhaustive, detailed essays and book reviews is to highlight what Said, a professor at Columbia, calls in his introduction the "grotesque, almost parodistic garishness" of pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian scholarship in the West, particularly in the U.S., where, he says, "it is as if even the narrative of Palestinian history is not tolerable." In one piece, Said examines the reception of Joan Peters's book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine, which argues that most of the Arabs in Palestine in 1948 were recent arrivals from other parts of the Arab world: despite widespread enthusiasm in the U.S., the book was greeted with embarrassed disavowal in Israel and a critical thrashing for shoddy methodology in Britain. Hitchens, a columnist for the Nation, attempts to debunk the longstanding Israeli argument that Palestinians left their homes in 1948 because Arab governments made broadcasts urging them to do so, not because Israelis forced them out. Noam Chomsky maintains that in the 1980s, in the U.S., terrorism as applied to the Middle East "refers to terrorist acts by Arabs, but not by Jews, just as 'peace' means a settlement that honors the right of national self-determination of Jews, but not of Palestinians." Other contributors argue that there was an Israeli policy in 1948 of expulsion of Arab civilians, discuss the characteristics of Palestinian population over the centuries, and so on. This is a challenging book.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“These forcefully argued treatises will be as enlightening as they are disturbing for anyone with an interest in Middle East politics.” (ALA Booklist )

“The wide-ranging scope and demythologising structure of Blaming the Victims makes it especially relevannt at the present time when the actions of the state of Israel seem to contradict received opinion as to its nature. The book provides a great quantity of information, analyses it convincingly and, through an imopressive body of notes on primary and secondary literature, points the reader in the direction of further information.” (Middle East International )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Verso (September 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859843409
• ISBN-13: 978-1859843406
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #185,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #55 in Books > History > Middle East > Palestine

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refuting the false scholarship of hate, July 29, 2005

By 

Dan Willard - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (Paperback)

This is an excellent book. Edward Said, in a collection of material, demolishes the scholarship of hate as practiced in Israel. That scholarship reached its absurd peak when Israelis started writing books to prove that Palestinians simply didn't exist and were never a majority in what is now Israel and occupied territories. What Said misses is that in the end, the stupidity and basic lie of the scholarship has only led to damage the Israeli cause internationally. In essence, its a self-destructive activity. The only consumers of it being Bible Belt Christians Conservatives in the rural and southern united states and at best the fringe of the right wing in Israel.

Do what they might, they can't undo the basic reality that the first census conducted after the creation of palestine showed a population of over 600,000 non-jews and 83,000 jews. And every other census before and after shows a stable and growing palestinian population over time. So what can they do when the basic facts are so firmly against their claims? They go to "scholarly works" like the travel accounts of Mark Twain to prove that the land was utterly empty until they arrived.

The true reason for all this scholarship in the end is to justify Israel's actions in expelling palestinians by force in 1948 during the war. Its well documented that in 1948 that even the villages the palestinians had lived in were erased with dynamite so that no trace of the homes of those who had lived in what is now Israel for centuries would remain.

The other purpose behind the scholarship is to prepare Israel mentally to accept the preferred solutions of the far right to the problem of palestinians. That solution is "transfer". Rounding them up in trucks and pushing them over the border into other countries. To prepare people for that step, its necessary to have a record of scholarship to "prove" that these people have no association with Israel and are just arab migrants who can be dumped anywhere.

From the book, its possible to learn the worst of the Israeli scholars like Joan Peters. Its then possible by looking at how seriously the scholarly fraud written by Joan Peters is treated to seperate out real Israeli historians with credibility from those who are unethical political operatives.

The problem of recognition of the reality of both Israel and Palestinians is core to peace. As palestinians had to accept Israel's existance, that there was no going back to 1947, so too must israelis discard the nonsense scholarship produced that aims to prove that Palestinians are not a people, have no history and do not exist.

Reality isn't to be found in the census of 1830, reality is that there is a large population of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza today that Israel can neither expell nor absorb. Everyone knows what the solution is going to be and its going to be international compensation for Palestinian refugees for their losses and an independent state of Palestine in the occupied territories.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unhappy conclusions, December 2, 2004

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (Paperback)

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 reached 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).

These are the facts, whereas each essay in this book is nothing more than a tissue of lies.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

15 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars comprehensive, October 12, 2009

By 

J. ABDO - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (Paperback)

This is an excellent and must read on the conflict, but it is very academic, I should warn you. It reads like a textbook rather than human interest, so it is hard to get into, but it is worth the trouble.

This is a great explanation of the often neglected Palestinian point of view. The Israeli position is always well supported, understood and explained in our media and government; you will be a step ahead of the majority by reading this book since you will know both sides.

In a world where criticism of Israel = anti-Semitism, you have to do yourself a favor and read this book!