Beyond Chutzpah
On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism
and the Abuse of History
Beginning of Quote :
IN THE COURSE of writing this book, I passed a small milestone in my life.
Twenty years ago, while researching my doctoral dissertation on the
theory of Zionism, I came across a newly published book on the Israel-
Palestine conflict: "From Time Immemorial : The Origins of the Arab-
Jewish Conflict over Palestine" by Joan Peters. (1) Promising to revolutionize
our understanding of the conflict, the book was adorned on the
back cover with glowing praise from the Who’s Who of American Arts
and Letters (Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, Barbara Tuchman, Lucy Dawidowicz,
and others), and it went on to garner scores of reviews in the
mainstream media ranging from ecstasy to awe. Its first edition, eventually
going into seven hardback printings, became a national best seller.
thousand notes and a recondite demographic study, was that Palestine
had been virtually empty on the eve of Zionist colonization and that,
after Jews made the deserted parts of Palestine they settled bloom,
Arabs from neighboring states and other parts of Palestine migrated to
the Jewish areas and pretended to be indigenous. Here was the, as it were,
scientific proof that Golda Meir had been right after all: there was no such thing as Palestinians.
As it happened, From Time Immemorial was a colossal hoax. Cited
sources were mangled, key numbers in the demographic study falsified,
and large swaths plagiarized from Zionist propaganda tracts. Documenting
the hoax and the rather more onerous challenge of publicizing
these findings in the media proved to be a turning point for me. From
then on, much of my life has, in one fashion or another, centered on the
Israel-Palestine conflict. (2)
Looking back after two decades of study and reflection, I am struck
most by how uncomplicated the Israel-Palestine conflict is. There is no
longer much contention among scholars on the historical record, at any
rate for the foundational period from the first Zionist settlements in the
late nineteenth century to the creation of Israel in 1948. (3)
This wasn’t always the case. For a long time two acutely divergent narratives on the
Israel-Palestine conflict coexisted. On the one hand, there was the
mainstream, or what one might call, with considerable accuracy, the
Exodus version of the past—basically the heroic, official Zionist tale
immortalized in Leon Uris’s best-selling historical novel. (4)
On the other hand, beyond the margins of respectable opinion, a small dissenting
body of literature challenged prevailing wisdom. To take one indicative
example, the mainstream Israeli account maintained that Palestinians
became refugees in 1948 because Arab radio broadcasts had instructed
them to flee. Yet already by the early 1960s, Palestinian scholar Walid
Khalidi and Irish scholar Erskine Childers, after examining the archive
of Arab radio broadcasts from the 1948 war, concluded that no such
official Arab exhortations had been given. (5)
But revelations such as these had little or no impact on mainstream opinion. Beginning in the late
1980s, however, a steady stream of scholarly studies, mostly by Israelis,
dispelled much of the Zionist mythology enveloping the origins of the
conflict. (6) Thus, it was now conceded by all serious scholars that the
“Arab radio broadcasts” were a Zionist fabrication and that the Palestinians
had been ethnically cleansed in 1948, and scholarly debate now
focused on the much narrower, if still highly pertinent, question
of whether this cleansing was the intentional consequence of Zionist
policy or the unintentional by-product of war.
Ultimately, on this and related issues, the dissenting narrative, proving closer to the truth, displaced
the official Zionist one while, after heated polemics, a broad
scholarly consensus on the historical record crystallized.
A similar process of displacement and simplification occurred, coincidentally
at just about the same time, on human rights questions. Up
until the late 1980s, two fundamentally conflicting claims were put
forth regarding Israel’s human rights record in the Occupied Territories.
The official Israeli contention, echoed by mainstream media, was that
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza benefited from the most “liberal”
and “benign” of occupations. However, a handful of dissidents,
mostly Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists like Israel Shahak,
Felicia Langer, Lea Tsemel, and Raja Shehadeh, charged, for example,
that Israel systematically ill treated and tortured Palestinian detainees.
Only a small number of independent human rights organizations
existed back then, and these few either whitewashed or maintained a
discreet silence on Israel’s egregious human rights violations.
It was notable—indeed, a scandal of sorts—that Israel’s torture of Palestinian
detainees first became known to a wider public (if still largely ignored),
not on account of a human rights organization like Amnesty International
but due to an investigative study published by the London Sunday
Times.(7) At the end of the 1980s, as I said, things started changing. (8)
Israel’s brutal repression of the largely nonviolent first intifada, which
erupted in late 1987, proved impossible to conceal or ignore, while new
human rights organizations, both local Israeli and Palestinian as well as
international, started springing up, and older, established ones stiffened
resistance to external pressures.
In the course of preparing the chapters of this book devoted to
Israel’s human rights record in the Occupied Territories, I went through
literally thousands of pages of human rights reports, published by
multiple, fiercely independent, and highly professional organizations—
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem (Israeli Information
Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), Public
Committee Against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights–
Israel—each fielding its own autonomous staff of monitors and investigators.
Except on one minor matter, I didn’t come across a single point
of law or fact on which these human rights organizations differed. In
the case of Israel’s human rights record, one can speak today not just of
a broad consensus—as on historical questions—but of an unqualified
consensus.
All these organizations agreed, for example, that Palestinian detainees
have been systematically ill treated and tortured, the total
number now probably reaching the tens of thousands.
Yet if, as I’ve suggested, broad agreement has been reached on
the factual record, an obvious anomaly arises: what accounts for the
impassioned controversy that still swirls around the Israel-Palestine
conflict? To my mind, explaining this apparent paradox requires, first
of all, that a fundamental distinction be made between those controversies
that are real and those that are contrived.
To illustrate real differences of opinion, let us consider again the Palestinian refugee question.
It is possible for interested parties to agree on the facts yet come to
diametrically opposed moral, legal, and political conclusions. Thus, as
already mentioned, the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were
ethnically cleansed in 1948. Israel’s leading historian on the topic,
Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify
exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a
good thing—just as, in his view, the “annihilation” of Native Americans
was a good thing—that, legally, Palestinians have no right to
return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel’s big error in 1948
was that it hadn’t “carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole
country—the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan” of Palestinians. (9).
However repellent morally, these clearly can’t be called false conclusions.
Returning to the universe inhabited by normal human beings,
it’s possible for people to concur on the facts as well as on their moral
and legal implications yet still reach divergent political conclusions.
Noam Chomsky agrees that, factually, Palestinians were expelled; that,
morally, this was a major crime; and that, legally, Palestinians have
a right of return. Yet, politically, he concludes that implementation of
this right is infeasible and pressing it inexpedient, indeed, that dangling
this (in his view) illusory hope before Palestinian refugees is deeply
immoral. There are those, contrariwise, who maintain that a moral and
legal right is meaningless unless it can be exercised and that implementing
the right of return is a practical possibility. (10)
For our purposes, the point is not who’s right and who’s wrong but that,
even among honest and decent people, there can be real and legitimate differences of political
judgment.
This having been said, however, it bears emphasis that—at any rate,
among those sharing ordinary moral values—the range of political disagreement
is quite narrow, while the range of agreement quite broad.
For the past quarter century, the international community has held to a
consensus on how, basically, to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict: a twostate
settlement based on full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and
Gaza and full recognition of Israel within its pre–June 1967 borders.
Apart from the United States, Israel, and, usually, this or that South
Pacific atoll, the United Nations General Assembly, in a rare and consistent
display of near unanimity, annually reaffirms this formula. A 1989
General Assembly resolution, Question of Palestine, effectively calling
for a two-state settlement and “[t]he withdrawal of Israel from the
Palestinian territory occupied since 1967” passed 151 to 3, the only dissenting
vote apart from those of the United States and Israel being cast
by the island state of Dominica.
Fifteen years later and notwithstanding sweeping geopolitical changes—
an entire social system disappeared in the interim while many new states were born—the consensus continued to hold. A 2004 General Assembly resolution, Peaceful Settlement of the
Question of Palestine, that stresses “the necessity for a commitment to
the vision of the two-State solution” and “the withdrawal of Israel from
the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967” passed 160 to 6, the dissenting
votes apart from the United States’ and Israel’s being cast by
Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Uganda. (11) Were debate to
focus solely on real areas of disagreement, the conflict could probably be
resolved expeditiously—if not to the liking of Israeli and American elites.
Most of the controversy surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict is,
in my view, contrived.
The purpose of contriving such controversy is
transparently political: to deflect attention from, or distort, the actual
documentary record. One can speak of, basically, three sources of artificial
disagreement: (1) mystification of the conflict’s roots, (2) invocation
of anti-Semitism and The Holocaust, (12) and (3) on a different plane,
the vast proliferation of sheer fraud on the subject. In this introduction
I will briefly discuss each of these in turn. The bulk of this study focuses
on the second and third points.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is often said to pose questions of such
unique profundity or complexity as to defy conventional analysis or resolution.
It’s been variously cast as a cosmic clash of religions, cultures,
civilizations. Even normally sober observers like Israeli writer Meron
Benvenisti used to contend that its essence was a “primordial, irreconcilable,
endemic shepherd’s war.” (13) In fact, such formulations obfuscate
rather than illuminate.
No doubt, the conflict raises thorny theoretical
and practical problems, but not more so than most other ones. It is also
perfectly amenable to comparative analysis, bearing in mind, as always,
the limits to any historical analogy. The obvious reason Israel’s apologists
shun such comparisons and harp on the sui generis character of the
Israel-Palestine conflict is that, in any of the roughly comparable cases—
the Euro-American conquest of North America, the apartheid regime in
South Africa—Israel comes out on the “wrong” side in the analogy. (14)
Serious analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict rarely makes resort to
ponderous explanations, if for no other reason than because its origins
are so straightforward. In 1936 a British royal commission chaired by
Lord Peel was charged with ascertaining the causes of the Palestine conflict
and the means for resolving it. Regarding the aspirations of Palestinian
Arabs, its final report stated that “[t]he overriding desire of
the Arab leaders . . . was . . . national independence” and that “[i]t was
only to be expected that Palestinian Arabs should . . . envy and seek to
emulate their successful fellow-nationalists in those countries just
across their northern and southern borders.”
The British attributed Arab anti-Jewish animus to the fact that the Jewish claim over Palestine
would deny Arabs an independent Arab state, and to Arab fear of being
subjugated in an eventual Jewish state. It concluded that there was “no
doubt” the “underlying causes” of Arab-Jewish hostilities were “first
the desire of the Arabs for national independence; secondly their antagonism
to the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine,
quickened by their fear of Jewish domination.” Eschewing airy formulations
like Benvenisti’s “primordial, irreconcilable, endemic shepherd’s
war” and, again, pointing up the manifest sources of the turmoil in
Palestine, the commission wrote:
Nor is the conflict in its essence an interracial conflict, arising from any
old instinctive antipathy of Arabs towards Jews. There was little or no friction
. . . between Arab and Jew in the rest of the Arab world until the strife
in Palestine engendered it. And there has been precisely the same political
trouble in Iraq, Syria and Egypt—agitation, rebellion and bloodshed—
where there are no “National Homes.” Quite obviously, then, the problem
of Palestine is political. It is, as elsewhere, the problem of insurgent nationalism.
The only difference is that in Palestine Arab nationalism is inextricably
interwoven with antagonism to the Jews.
And the reasons for that, it is worth repeating, are equally obvious. In the first place, the establishment
of the National Home [for Jews] involved at the outset a blank negation of
the rights implied in the principle of national self-government. Secondly, it
soon proved to be not merely an obstacle to the development of national
self-government, but apparently the only serious obstacle. Thirdly, as the
Home has grown, the fear has grown with it that, if and when self-government
is conceded, it may not be national in the Arab sense, but government
by a Jewish majority. That is why it is difficult to be an Arab patriot and
not to hate the Jews. (15)
The injustice inflicted on Palestinians by Zionism was manifest and,
except on racist grounds, unanswerable: their right to self-determination,
and perhaps even to their homeland, was being denied. Several
sorts of justification were supplied for the Zionist enterprise as against
the rights of the indigenous population, none of which, however, withstood
even cursory scrutiny. Belief in the cluster of justifications put
forth by the Zionist movement presumed acceptance of very specific
Zionist ideological tenets regarding Jewish “historical rights” to Palestine
and Jewish “homelessness.”
For example, the “historical rights” claim was based on Jews having originated in Palestine and resided
there two thousand years ago. Such a claim was neither historical nor
based on any accepted notion of right. It was not historical inasmuch as
it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and
the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right
except in mystical, Romantic nationalist ideologies, implementation
of which would wreak—and have wreaked—havoc. Reminding fellow
Zionists that Jewry’s “historical right” to Palestine was a “metaphysical
rather than a political category” and that, springing as it did from
“the very inner depths of Judaism,” this “category . . . is binding on us
rather than on the Arabs,” even the Zionist writer Ernst Simon was
emphatic that it did not confer on Jews any right to Palestine without
the consent of the Arabs. (16)
Another sort of justification conjured away the injustice inflicted on
the indigenous population with the pretense that Palestine was (nearly)
vacant before the Jews came. (17) Ironically, this argument has proven to
be the most compelling proof of the injustice committed: it is a backhanded
admission that, had Palestine been inhabited, which it plainly
was, the Zionist enterprise was morally indefensible.
Those admitting to the reality of a Palestinian presence yet functioning outside the ideological
ambit of Zionism couldn’t adduce any justification for Zionism
except a racist one: that is, in the great scheme of things, the fate of
Jews was simply more important than that of Arabs. If not publicly, at
any rate privately, this is how the British rationalized the Balfour Declaration.
For Balfour himself, “we deliberately and rightly decline to
accept the principle of self-determination” for the “present inhabitants”
of Palestine, because “the question of the Jews outside Palestine
[is] one of world importance” and Zionism was “rooted in age-long
traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import
than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit
that ancient land.”
For Cabinet Minister (and the first British high commissioner
of Palestine during the Mandate period) Herbert Samuel,
although denying the indigenous population majority rule was “in flat
contradiction to one of the main purposes for which the Allies were
fighting,” it was nonetheless permissible because the anterior Jewish
presence in Palestine “had resulted in events of spiritual and cultural
value to mankind in striking contrast with the barren record of the last
thousand years.”
And for Winston Churchill, testifying before the Peel
Commission, the indigenous population had no more right to Palestine
than a “dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though
he may have lain there for a very long time,” and no “wrong has been
done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade
race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has
come in and taken their place.” (18)
The point is not so much that the British were racists but rather that they had no recourse except to racist
justifications for denying the indigenous population its basic rights.
Pressed to justify what was done, they became racists not from predilection
but from circumstance: on no other grounds could so flagrant a
denial be explained.
If only because of its eminent provenance and frequent quotation,
one last argument merits consideration. The Marxist historian Isaac
Deutscher put forth, in the form of a parable, less a justification than a
largely sympathetic ex post facto explanation for Zionism’s trampling
of Palestinian rights:
A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many
members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life;
but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that
person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man
with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune. If both behaved
rationally, they would not become enemies.
The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console
the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim
of circumstances over which neither of them had control. But look what
happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames
the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other,
afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him, and beats him
up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again
punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so fortuitous at first, hardens
and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison
their minds. (19)
This account gives Zionism both too little and too much credit. The
Zionist denial of Palestinians’ rights, culminating in their expulsion,
hardly sprang from an unavoidable accident. It resulted from the systematic
and conscientious implementation, over many decades and
despite vehement, often violent, popular opposition, of a political ideology
the goal of which was to create a demographically Jewish state in Palestine. To suggest that Zionists had no choice - or, as Deutscher puts it elsewhere, that the Jewish state was a “historic necessity”
(20) - is to deny the Zionist movement’s massive and, in many respects, impressive
exertion of will, and the moral responsibility attending the exertion of
this will, in one rather than another direction.
The expulsion of Palestinians did not come about on account of some ineluctable, impersonal
objective force compelling Palestinians to leave and Jews to replace
them. Were this the case, why did the Zionists conscript, often heavyhandedly,
the Jewish refugees after World War II to come to Palestine
and oppose their resettlement elsewhere? Why did they stimulate, perhaps
even with violent methods, the exodus of Jews from the Arab
world to Palestine? Why did they call, often in deep frustration and
disappointment, for the in-gathering of world Jewry after Israel’s
establishment? If Zionist leaders didn’t make the obvious amends after
the war of allowing Palestinians to return to their homes and sought
instead to fill the emptied spaces with Jews, it’s not because they
behaved irrationally, but rather, given their political aim, with complete
rationality.
Deutscher, of course, knows all this. Indeed, he acknowledges that
“[f]rom the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely
Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.” (21)
To claim that Zionist leaders acted irrationally in refusing to “remove
or assuage the grievance” of Palestinians, (22) then, is effectively to say
that Zionism is irrational: for, given that the Palestinians’ chief grievance
was the denial of their homeland, were Zionists to act “rationally”
and remove it, the raison d’être of Zionism and its fundamental historic
achievement in 1948 would have been nullified.
And if seeking to “rid the country of its Arab inhabitants” was irrational, how can the “positive”
flipside of this goal, a Jewish state, have been a “historic necessity”?
It’s equally fatuous to assert that Palestinians act irrationally
when they “blame” the Zionists “for their misery” and not accept that
they were “the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had
control.” It’s only irrational if Zionists bore no responsibility for what
happened.
Yet Deutscher is nearly breathless in his praise for the
achievements of the Zionists in Palestine: “The emergence of Israel is
indeed . . . a phenomenon unique in its kind, a marvel and a prodigy of
history, before which Jew and non-Jew alike stand in awe and amazement.”
(23) Isn’t it pure apologetics to sing paeans to the summoning
of material and moral energy that made possible such undoubtedly
real accomplishments, yet deny, in the name of “historic necessity”
and “fortuitous” “circumstances,” that any real responsibility is incurred
for the dark underside of them? (24) The selfsame concentrated will,
meticulous attention to detail, and lucid premeditation that created
Israel also created its victims
.
Although in violation of the indigenous population’s elementary
right and in contradiction of avowed international principle, a second
socioeconomic entity (in addition to the native Palestinian Arabs) came
into existence in Palestine and, inevitably, demanded its right to self-determination.
Unlike the prior Zionist claim to Palestine, based on an
imaginary “historical right,” this one seemed to be grounded in generally
accepted criteria of right: the Jewish settlements now comprised a
vital, organic, distinct community. The creation of this community,
however, had been contingent on the resort to force: without the “steel
helmet and the gun’s muzzle” (Moshe Dayan) of the Zionist settlers,
crucially supplemented by the “foreign bayonets” (David Ben-Gurion)
of the British Empire in the form of the Mandate, a proto-Jewish state
could never have come into being. (25)
The question of at what point a claim acquired by might becomes one anchored in right is complicated,
indeed probably insoluble on an abstract level. The intuitive argument
that a moral-legal threshold has been crossed when a new generation,
born on the land, stakes its claim on the basis of birthright poses as
many questions as it resolves. Doesn’t this give incentive to hold out as
long as possible in defiance of international law and public opinion?
This, of course, was the essence of the Zionist approach: if sufficient
facts were created on the ground and sufficient time elapsed, hard reality
could not be reversed.
This brings to the fore a related consideration. The United Nations
crowned the Zionist movement with legal title to more than half of
Palestine some thirty years after Zionist settlers began in earnest, in the
wake of the Balfour Declaration and despite overwhelming indigenous
opposition, to create, “dunum by dunum, goat by goat,” facts in Palestine.
Yet more than thirty-five years have elapsed since Jewish settlers
began creating facts in the West Bank and Gaza. Haven’t these by now
acquired legitimacy as well? In any event, when the Peel Commission
first proposed in 1937 partitioning Palestine on the ground that a distinct
Jewish entity had crystallized, Palestinian Arabs rejected the legitimacy
of a Jewish claim founded on force over and against the rights
of the indigenous population, as they did in 1947 when the United
Nations General Assembly ratified the partition resolution. (Although
officially opposing the Peel recommendation and officially accepting
the U.N. recommendation, in fact the Zionist movement was rather
more ambivalent in both instances.) (26) It’s not hard to see the argument
on their side, (27) although in hindsight it’s also not hard to see the imprudence
of rejecting partition.
Complex as this conflict over rights emerging out of forcible Zionist
settlement is at the abstract level, it found practical resolution after
resurfacing in modified form following the June 1967 war. Confronted
by the inescapable reality of Israel’s existence and lacking viable political
options, Palestinians cut the theoretical Gordian knot in the mid-
1970's by effectively conceding legal title to some 80 percent of their
historic homeland. Apart from the refugee question, the only truly complicated
element of the Israel-Palestine conflict was thus overcome.
Yet this resolution remains provisional and fragile. If Israel has created new
facts on the ground in the Occupied Territories that preempt a two-state
settlement, a new complication of the conflict will have arisen. But
it won’t be on account of a “primordial, irreconcilable, endemic shepherd’s
war” or “historic necessity” or “fortuitous” “circumstances.” Just
as the prior conflict originated in conscious, willful Zionist denial of
basic Palestinian rights, so the intractability of a new conflict will originate
in this same premeditated injustice, indeed, in denial of even a
severely attenuated form of Palestinian rights.
Benny Morris, although approving the ethnic cleansing of Palestine
and nearly pathological in his hatred of Palestinians, (28) nonetheless
anchors Palestinian opposition to Jewish settlement in a perfectly
rational, uncomplicated motive: “The fear of territorial displacement
and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to
Zionism.” (29)
What’s remarkable about this formulation isn’t so much
what’s said but, rather, what’s not said: there’s no invoking of “Arab
anti-Semitism,” no invoking of “Arab fears of modernity,” no invoking
of cosmic “clashes.” There’s no mention of them because, for understanding
what happened, there’s no need of them—the obvious explanation
also happens to be a sufficient one. Indeed, in any comparable
instance, the sorts of mystifying cliché's commonplace in the Israel-
Palestine conflict would be treated, rightly, with derision. In the course
of resisting European encroachment,
Native Americans committed many horrendous crimes. But to understand why doesn’t require probing
the defects of their character or civilization. Criticizing the practice,
in government documents, of reciting Native American “atrocities,”
Helen Hunt Jackson, a principled defender of Native Americans writing
in the late nineteenth century, observed: “[T]he Indians who committed
these ‘atrocities’ were simply ejecting by force, and, in the contests
arising from this forcible ejectment, killing men who had usurped
and stolen their lands. . . .
What would a community of white men, situated
precisely as these Cherokees were, have done?” (30)
To apprehend the motive behind Palestinian “atrocities,” this ordinary
human capacity for empathy would also seem to suffice. Imagine
the bemused reaction were a historian to hypothesize that the impetus
behind Native American resistance was “anti-Christianism” or “anti-
Europeanism.” What’s the point of such exotic explanations—unless
the obvious one is politically incorrect? Of course, back then, profound
explanations of this sort weren’t necessary. The natives impeded the
wheel of progress, so they had to be extirpated; nothing more had to be
said. For the sake of “mankind” and “civilization,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote,
it was “all-important” that North America be won by a
“masterful people.”
Although for the indigenous population this meant
“the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery,” it couldn’t
have been otherwise: “The world would probably not have gone forward
at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage
and barbaric peoples.” And again: “The settler and pioneer have at
bottom justice on their side: this great continent could not have been
kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.” (31)
It was only much later, after the humanity of these “squalid savages”
was ratified—in any event, formally—that more sophisticated rationales
became necessary. In the case of the United States, the “hideous
woe and misery” inflicted could be openly acknowledged because the
fate of the indigenous population was, figuratively as well as literally, in
large part a dead issue. In the case of Palestine it’s not, so all manner of
elaborate explanation has to be contrived in order to evade the obvious.
The reason Benny Morris’s latest pronouncements elicited such a
shocked reaction is that they were a throwback to the nineteenth century.
Dispensing with the ideological cloud making of contemporary
apologists for Israel, he justified dispossession on grounds of the conflict
between “barbarians” and “civilization.” Just as, in his view, it was
better for humanity that the “great American democracy” displaced the
Native Americans, so it is better that the Jewish state has displaced the
Palestinians. “There are cases,” he baldly states, “in which the overall,
final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course
of history.” Isn’t this Roosevelt speaking? But one’s not supposed to
utter such crass things anymore.(32)
To avoid outraging current moral sensibilities, the obvious must be papered over with sundry mystifications.
The elementary truth that, just as in the past, the “chief motor of
Arab antagonism” is “[t]he fear of territorial displacement and dispossession”—
a fear the rational basis for which is scarcely open to question,
indeed, is daily validated by Israeli actions—must, at all costs, be
concealed.
To evade the obvious, another stratagem of the Israel lobby is playing
The Holocaust and “new anti-Semitism” cards. In a previous study,
I examined how the Nazi holocaust has been fashioned into an ideological
weapon to immunize Israel from legitimate criticism. (33) In this book
I look at a variant of this Holocaust card, namely, the “new anti-Semitism.”
In fact, the allegation of a new anti-Semitism is neither new nor
about anti-Semitism.
Whenever Israel comes under renewed international
pressure to withdraw from occupied territories, its apologists
mount yet another meticulously orchestrated media extravaganza alleging
that the world is awash in anti-Semitism. This shameless exploitation
of anti-Semitism delegitimizes criticism of Israel, makes Jews
rather than Palestinians the victims, and puts the onus on the Arab
world to rid itself of anti-Semitism rather than on Israel to rid itself
of the Occupied Territories.
A close analysis of what the Israel lobby tallies as anti-Semitism reveals
three components: exaggeration and
fabrication; mislabeling legitimate criticism of Israeli policy; and the
unjustified yet predictable “spillover” from criticism of Israel to Jews
generally. I conclude that if, as all studies agree, current resentment
against Jews has coincided with Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinians,
then the prudent, not to mention moral, thing to do is end the
occupation.
A full Israeli withdrawal would also deprive those real
anti-Semites exploiting Israeli policy as a pretext to demonize Jews—
and who can doubt they exist?—of a dangerous weapon as well as
expose their real agenda. And the more vocally Jews dissent from
Israel’s occupation, the fewer will be those non-Jews who mistake
Israel’s criminal policies and the uncritical support (indeed encouragement)
of mainline Jewish organizations for the popular Jewish mood.
I began this introduction recalling the From Time Immemorial hoax,
since a main reason so much controversy swirls around the Israel-
Palestine conflict is the vast proliferation of sheer fraud masquerading
as serious scholarship.
Although imperfect, a mechanism for quality
control nonetheless exists in intellectual life. In practice it usually takes
the form of a sequence of skeptical questions. If someone quotes a book
putting forth an altogether aberrant thesis, he or she is usually asked,
“Where does the author teach?” or “Who published the book?” or
“Who blurbed the book?” or “What sorts of reviews did it receive [in
the main professional journals]?”
The answers to these questions generally
provide a more or less accurate gauge of how much credence to
put in the publication. It is one of the egregious features of the Israel-
Palestine conflict, however, that these mechanisms of quality control
function barely, if at all. (34) The book’s author can teach at a first-rank
university, and the book itself can be published under a prestigious
imprint, receive lavish blurbs as well as reviews in prominent mainstream
publications, and yet still be complete nonsense.
The most recent addition to this genre and the subject of the second part of this
book is the best seller The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor
Alan Dershowitz. (35) It can fairly be said that The Case for Israel surpasses
From Time Immemorial in deceitfulness and is among the most
spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Indeed, Dershowitz appropriates large swaths from the Peters
hoax.
Whereas Peters falsified real sources, Dershowitz goes one better
and cites absurd sources or stitches evidence out of whole cloth. The
core chapters of the present book juxtapose the findings of all mainstream
human rights organizations about Israel’s human rights record
in the Occupied Territories against Dershowitz’s claims. I demonstrate
that it’s difficult to find a single claim in his human rights chapters or,
for that matter, any other chapter of The Case for Israel that, among
other things, doesn’t distort a reputable source or reference a preposterous
one.
The point, of course, is not that Dershowitz is a charlatan.
Rather, it’s the systematic institutional bias that allows for books like
The Case for Israel to become national best sellers. Were it not for Dershowitz’s
Harvard pedigree, the praise heaped on his book by Mario
Cuomo, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Elie Wiesel, and Floyd Abrams, (36) the
favorable notices in media outlets like the New York Times and Boston
Globe, (37) and so on, The Case for Israel would have had the same shelf
life as the latest publication of the Flat-Earth Society.
The purpose of Beyond Chutzpah is to lift the veil of contrived controversy
shrouding the Israel-Palestine conflict. I am convinced that
anyone confronting the undistorted record will recognize the injustice
Palestinians have suffered. I hope this book will also provide impetus
for readers to act on the basis of truth so that, together, we can achieve
a just and lasting peace in Israel and Palestine.
------------------------------------------------------------
Footnote apparatus for "The Introduction" (of "Beyund Chutzpah")
1. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.
2. For background on the Peters affair, see esp. Edward Said, “Conspiracy of Praise,”
in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds.), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship
and the Palestinian Question (New York, 2001); for extensive documentation of the
Peters fraud, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict,
2nd ed. (New York, 2003), chap. 2; for recent developments in the fraud, see ibid.,
p. xxxii.
3. A few pockets of scholarly dispute remain: e.g., whether or not the Zionist leadership
intended from early on to “transfer” the Palestinians out of Palestine. Arguments
over the June 1967 war and its aftermath spring mostly from two sources: the main
Israeli archives are still closed, and more important, the political repercussions of the June
war—notably Israel’s occupation—are still with us. The only more or less live political
issue from the foundational period is the Palestinian refugee question, which is perhaps
why some, albeit limited, controversy still surrounds it.
4. Putting aside its apologetics for Zionism, the sheer racism of Uris’s blockbuster
bears recalling. The Arabs, their villages, their homes—to the last, they’re “stinking” or
engulfed in “overwhelming stench” and “vile odors.” Arab men just “lay around” all day
“listless”—that is, when they’re not hatching “some typical double-dealing scheme which
seemed perfectly legitimate to the Arab,” or resorting to “the unscrupulous ethics of
the Arab . . . the fantastic reasoning that condoned every crime short of murder,” or
“becom[ing] hysterical at the slightest provocation.” As for Palestine itself before the
Jews worked wonders, it was “worthless desert in the south end and eroded in the middle
and swamp up north”; “a land of festering, stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rockfilled
fields and unfertile earth caused by a thousand years of Arab and Turkish neglect.
. . . There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. . . . In this atmosphere, cunning,
treachery, murder, feuds and jealousies became a way of life. The cruel realities that had
gone into forming the Arab character puzzled outsiders. Cruelty from brother to brother
was common.” Truth be told, not much has changed in official Zionist propaganda (Leon
Uris, Exodus [New York, 1959], pp. 181, 213, 216, 227, 228, 229, 253, 334, 352–53).
Uris, Exodus [New York, 1959], pp. 181, 213, 216, 227, 228, 229, 253, 334, 352–53).
5. Walid Khalidi, “Why Did the Palestinians Leave?” Middle East Forum (July 1959).
Erskine Childers, “The Other Exodus,” Spectator (12 May 1961).
6. Apart from the scholarship itself, a voluminous secondary literature commenting
on it has proliferated. As good a place as any to begin is “The New Historiography: Israel
and Its Past,” in Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford,
1990), pp. 1–34.
7. See Chapter 6 of this book.
8. To be sure, the first big blow inflicted on Israel’s radiant image—its first public relations
debacle—was the June 1982 Lebanon invasion. The reason Israel’s actual practices
finally came to light then merits attention. Although the sheer brutality and density of
Israel’s crimes during the 1982 invasion were undoubtedly contributing factors, the main
reason, according to veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, was apparently
that, unlike during previous wars, neither the Arab dictatorships nor the finely tuned public
relations machinery of Israel could fully control, or manipulate, the reportage: “For
the Lebanese government was too weak and its security authorities too divided to impose
censorship upon the Western journalists based in Beirut. . . . Reporters travelling with
Israeli troops were subject to severe restrictions on their movements and sometimes to
censorship, but their opposite numbers in Beirut could travel freely and write whatever
they wished. For the very first time, reporters had open access to the Arab side of a Middle
East war and found that Israel’s supposedly invincible army, with its moral high
ground and clearly stated military objectives against ‘terrorists,’ did not perform in the
way that legend would have suggested. The Israelis acted brutally, they mistreated prisoners,
killed thousands of civilians, lied about their activities and then watched their militia
allies slaughter the occupants of a refugee camp. In fact, they behaved very much like
the ‘uncivilised’ Arab armies whom they had so consistently denigrated over the preceding
30 years. The reporting from Lebanon . . . was a new and disturbing experience for
the Israelis. They no longer had a monopoly on the truth.” Here is yet another indication
of just how disastrous the numbing repression in the Arab world has been for the Arab
peoples (Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation [New York, 1990], p. 407; emphasis in original).
9. Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest,” interview with Benny Morris, Haaretz (9 January
2004). For perceptive commentary, see Baruch Kimmerling, “Is Ethnic Cleansing of
Arabs Getting Legitimacy from a New Israeli Historian?” Tikkun (27 January 2004); for
Morris’s recent pronouncements, see also Finkelstein, Image and Reality, pp. xxix–xxx.
10. See, e.g., Salman Abu Sitta, “The Implementation of the Right of Return,” in
Roane Carey (ed.), The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid (New York, 2001), pp.
299–319.
11. U.N.G.A. Resolution 44/42, Question of Palestine (6 December 1989); U.N.G.A.
Resolution 58/21, Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine (22 January 2004).
For more on these U.N. votes, see Finkelstein, Image and Reality, pp. xvii–xviii.
12. In this text “Nazi holocaust” denotes the actual historical event whereas “The
Holocaust” denotes the ideological instrumentalization of that event. See Norman G.
Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,
2nd ed. (New York, 2003), p. 3 and chap. 2.
13. Meron Benvenisti, “Two generations growing up in Jerusalem,” New York Times
Magazine (16 October 1988); for similar formulations, see his Intimate Enemies: Jews
and Arabs in a Shared Land (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 9 (“a primeval contest, a shepherds’
war”), 19 (“its endemic intercommunal nature”).
14. For comparison with the Euro-American conquest of North America, see Norman
G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada
Years (Minneapolis, 1996), pp. 104–21; for comparison with apartheid, see Finkelstein,
Image and Reality, p. xxvii and chap. 7.
15. Palestine Royal Commission Report (London, 1937), pp. 76, 94, 110, 131, 136,
363; emphases added.
16. Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford,
1987), p. 197. For analysis of these Zionist rationales, see Finkelstein, Image and Reality,
pp. 101–2.
17. For background and discussion, see Finkelstein, Image and Reality, pp. 89–98.
18. Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations,
1914–1918 (London, 1992), pp. 13–14 (Samuel), 325–26 (Balfour); cf. 331. Clive Ponting,
Churchill (London, 1994), p. 254. Most versions of the non-Zionist justification synthesized
the “empty land” thesis with the racist one: namely, Palestine had remained
sparsely populated and barren in Arab hands, while Jews, as the bearers of civilization
and progress, would—or, after the fact, had—put the land to productive use, thereby
earning title to it.
19. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York, 1968), pp.
136–37; for similar formulations, see pp. 116, 122.
20. Ibid., p. 112.
21. Ibid., p. 137.
22. Ibid., pp. 137–38.
23. Ibid., p. 118.
24. In fact, Deutscher’s reflections on Zionism, although remarkable in their acuteness—
not a single page passes without another novel insight or uncannily accurate prediction—
are nonetheless marred, at any rate before his scathing denunciation of Israel
after the June 1967 war, by typical Zionist and racist apologetics: the kibbutzim were
“Jewish oases scattered over the former Arabian desert” (p. 99); prior to Zionist settlement
“no established society existed in the Palestine desert” (p. 100); the Zionist claim
that “Palestine is and never ceased to be Jewish” is on a par with the Arab claim that
“Jews are . . . invaders and intruders” (p. 116); and so on.
25. Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956 (Oxford, 1993), p. 380 (Dayan).
See Finkelstein, Image and Reality, pp. 98–110, for discussion (Ben-Gurion at p. 106).
26. See Appendix III to this book.
27. For a forceful restatement of the reasons behind the Palestinian rejection of the
partition resolution, see Walid Khalidi, “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution,”
Journal of Palestine Studies (autumn 1997), pp. 5–21.
28. He’s called the Palestinian people “sick, psychotic,” “serial killers” whom Israel
must “imprison” or “execute,” and “barbarians” around whom “[s]omething like a cage
has to be built.” See the Haaretz interview and the pages on Morris’s recent pronouncements
in Image and Reality cited above.
29. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict,
1881–1999 (New York, 1999), p. 37.
30. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (New York, 1981), p. 265.
31. For these and similar formulations, see Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the
West (New York, 1889), 1:118–19, 121; 4:7, 54–56, 65, 200, 201.
32. In fact, one isn’t even allowed to remember that Roosevelt said them: one searches
recent Roosevelt biographies in vain for any mention of the pronouncements of his just
cited, or scores of others like them pervading his published writings and correspondence.
33. Finkelstein, Holocaust Industry.
34. Revealingly, this caveat applies to the field of “Holocaust studies” as well. For
pertinent criticism by Raul Hilberg, dean of Nazi holocaust scholars, see Finkelstein,
Holocaust Industry, p. 60.
35. All references in this book are to the first hardback printing of The Case for
Israel, published in August 2003 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Almost immediately after
publication of The Case for Israel I publicly charged, and provided copious evidence, that
it was a fraud (see www.NormanFinkelstein.com under “The Dershowitz Hoax”). In the
first paperback edition of his book, published in August 2004, Dershowitz entered some
revisions.
36. See their laudatory comments for the book posted on www.Amazon.com.
37. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Ethan Bronner praised Dershowitz
for his “intelligent polemic” and ability “to construct an argument” and for being “especially
effective at pointing to the hypocrisy of many of Israel’s critics” (“The New New
Historians,” 9 November 2003). Bronner sits on the Times’s editorial board, where he’s
its “expert” on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the Boston Globe, Jonathan Dorfman
waxed rhapsodic about how Dershowitz “goes after Israel’s enemies . . . with the punch
and thrust of courtroom debate” and praised the author for having “restated some
obvious truths about Israel—truths its friends need to convey, its enemies need to confront,
and the chattering classes need to learn before they venture forth with pronouncements
about Israel that are simple, easy—and wrong” (“Dershowitz makes the ‘Case,’” 26
November 2003). Both these reviews appeared well after evidence had been widely disseminated
demonstrating that Dershowitz’s book was rubbish.
End of Quote
