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Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

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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.

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!

This collection of essays draws from a wealth of scholars to support the existence of Palestine before and after the rise of Zionism. The authors therein never once resort to the name-calling tactics of Zionist supporters, but rather intelligently dissect the Zionist agenda and put it to shame as the bigoted movement it is.

Edward Said, known for his ability to provide clarity to the heavily distorted pro-Israel perspective out of the U.S., presents solid arguments on the Israel-Palestine issue. Said and Hitchens expose unacademic "pop" critics such as Thomas Friedman as those who write to inflame prejudice and hatred against the Palestinians, rather than make any effort to provide well-researched information on the complexities of the issue. A must read for anyone who can accept the fact that the powerful Jewish influence on the U.S. media has resulted in a loss of some of its journalistic objectivity and integrity.

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

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.

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.

"resolution 194, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 11, 1948, addressed a host of issues, but only one paragraph out of 15 dealt with refugees created by the conflict. Resolution 194 attempted to create the tools required to reach a truce in the region. It established a conciliation commission with representatives from the United States, France and Turkey to replace the UN mediator. The commission was charged with achieving "a final settlement of all questions between ... governments and authorities concerned." The Resolution's "refugee clause" is not a standalone item, as the Arabs would have us think, nor does it pertain specifically to Palestinian Arab refugees.
Of the 15 paragraphs, the first six sections addressed ways to achieve a truce; the next four paragraphs addressed the ways that Jerusalem and surrounding villages and towns should be demilitarized, and how an international zone or jurisdiction would be created in and around Jerusalem. The resolution also called on all parties to protect and allow free access to holy places, including religious buildings.
One paragraph has drawn the most attention: Paragraph 11, which alone addressed the issue of refugees and compensation for those whose property was lost or damaged. Contrary to Arab claims, it did not guarantee a Right of Return and certainly did not guarantee an unconditional Right of Return - that is the right of Palestinian Arab refugees to return to Israel. Nor did it specifically mention Arab refugees, thereby indicating that the resolution was aimed at all refugees, both Jewish and Arab. Instead, Resolution 194 recommended that refugees be allowed to return to their homeland if they met two important conditions:
1. That they be willing to live in peace with their neighbors
2. That the return takes place "at the earliest practicable date"
The resolution also recommended that for those who did not wish to return, "Compensation should be paid for the property ... and for loss of or damage to property" by the "governments or authorities responsible."
Although Arab leaders point to Resolution 194 as proof that Arab refugees have a right to return or be compensated, it is important to note that the Arab States: Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen voted against Resolution 194. Israel is not even mentioned in the resolution. The fact that plural wording also is used - "governments or authorities" - suggests that, contrary to Arab claims, the burden of compensation does not fall solely upon one side of the conflict. Because seven Arab armies invaded Israel, Israel was not responsible for creating the refugee problem. When hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews, under threat of death, attack and other forms of persecution, were forced to flee Arab communities, the State of Israel absorbed the overwhelming majority of them into the then-fledgling nation.
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The Forgotten Jewish Refugees
For a host of reasons - practical to parochial - Israel has failed to raise the issue of the mammoth injustice done to almost a million Jews from Arab countries. The scale and the premeditated state-sponsored nature of persecution that prompted the 1948 flight of close to 900,000 Jews from their homes has only recently begun to emerge. Arab publicists have sought to detach entirely the flight of Jews from Arab lands from the Arab-Israeli conflict, claiming they are two separate phenomena, and that Israelis should take up the issue with each respective Arab state that was involved, not with the Palestinians.
This is a clear attempt to rewrite history. One only needs to reexamine the almost prophetic article in The New York Times two days after Israel declared independence ("Jews in Grave Danger in all Moslem Lands") to confirm the tie. The New York Times reported on May 16, 1948:
"For nearly four months, the United Nations has had before it, an appeal for 'immediate and urgent' consideration of the case of the Jewish populations in Arab and Moslem countries stretching from Morocco to India."
The New York Times country-by-country table estimated the Jewish population-at-risk as 899,000 souls. The article cited the dismissal of Jews in the civil service in Syria, per capita ransom payment of $20,000 by Iraqi Jews seeking to leave Iraq, a forced levy on the Lebanese Jewish community to support the Arab war effort parallel to incitement and physical attacks on Jews, and Jews fleeing to India from Afghanistan. It quoted the UN Economic and Social Council report as saying:
"The very survival of the Jewish communities in certain Arab and Moslem countries is in serious danger, unless preventive action is taken without delay."
Hostility and oppression only grew, ultimately leading to the exodus of almost all Jews from all Arab and Moslem countries from Casablanca to Karachi.
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How and Why did Palestinian Arabs Leave, and Who was Responsible?
It is important to set the historical record straight: The overwhelming majority of Palestinian refugees left what was then the newly-established State of Israel on their own accord due to structural weaknesses within Palestinian society and their leadership.
The pressure of wartime conditions triggered the collapse of what was already a fragile Palestinian society, particularly when Palestinian leaders chose to oppose the Jewish state by a show of arms rather than by accepting a UN plan for their own state. Those events set the stage for the forceful expulsion of countless other Palestinian Arabs from Jewish-held areas. That military necessity resulted after seven Arab armies invaded western Palestine with the goal of exterminating the newly born State of Israel.
On their own accord, an estimated 600,000 Palestinian Arabs fled a war zone, which their leaders had created. An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 of those refugees in 1948 left even before their homes became part of a war zone.
The human tragedy of being uprooted notwithstanding, Palestinian refugees were neither hapless targets nor innocent bystanders. The first stage of the 1948 war was a fierce interethnic or anti-Zionist civil war in which Palestinians were the aggressors and the initiators; the second half was an all-out war involving regular Arab armies, whose participation the Palestinian Arabs engineered.
The violent path that Palestinians chose - and the ensuing fear, disorientation, and economic deprivation of war - led to their own collective undoing.
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The Collapse of Palestinian Society and Mass Flight
What caused the collapse of Palestinian society? In part, it was the absence of an alternative Arab infrastructure after the British pulled out. In addition, serious cleavages dating to Ottoman times existed in local Arab society. Because Palestinian Arab society had been so dependent on British civil administration and social services, Britain's departure left Arab civil servants jobless. As a result, most social services and civil administration ceased to function in the Arab sector, disrupting the flow of essential commodities such as food and fuel, which added to the hardships, the uncertainty, and the dangers.
In contrast, Jewish society in Palestine, or the Yishuv as it was called in Hebrew, had established its own civil society over the span of three decades under the Mandate. The Yishuv created its own representative political bodies and social and economic institutions, including health and welfare services, a public transport network, and a thriving sophisticated marketing system for manufactured goods and food - in short, a state-in-the-making. It was best described by the 1934 British report to the League of Nations:
"During the last two or three generations the Jews have recreated in Palestine a community, now numbering 80,000, of whom about one-fourth are farmers or workers upon the land. This community has its own political organs, an elected assembly for the direction of its domestic concerns, elected councils in the towns, and an organisation for the control of its schools. It has its elected Chief Rabbinate and Rabbinical Council for the direction of its religious affairs. Its business is conducted in Hebrew as a vernacular language, and a Hebrew press serves its needs. It has its distinctive intellectual life and displays considerable economic activity. This community, then, with its town and country population, its political, religious and social organisations, its own language, its own customs, its own life, has in fact 'national' characteristics."
And as time passed:
"Those characteristics have been strengthened and magnified in the course of the following twelve years. To-day there are in Palestine almost 300,000 Jews. There is a constantly flowing stream of men and money, new industries are being established, citriculture is expanding, new settlements are springing up, towns are being enlarged by suburb after suburb."
During that same period, the Arabs in Palestine, however, had invested all of their energies into fighting any form of Jewish polity-in-the-making. Although the British encouraged creation of an Arab Agency parallel to the Jewish Agency that had orchestrated and financed development of the Jewish sector, a similar Arab organization failed to develop.
So it was no surprise that when the British departed, the Palestinian Arabs remained unorganized and ill-prepared not only for statehood (which they rejected in any case), but also for sustained conflict with their Jewish adversaries. In the end, the war caused horrific casualties for the Jews and left thousands of Palestinian Arabs without their homes.
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Notes:
See: "Experts: No legal basis for Palestinian refugee demands" at: [...]
Paragraph 11 of UN resolution 194:
"Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
"Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations;"
Eli Hertz

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.

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.