John Kearney writes:
Did you see the news item noting that Netanyahu is giving Obama a copy of Mark Twain's travelogue to the Levant from Innocents Abroad? This
may seem a peripheral news item, but it isn't — not in terms of the
sad history of propaganda marshaled by Zionists against Palestinians.
In
1984 Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial was published, and Twain's
satire, The Innocents Abroad (1869) was thus canonized in the Zionist
effort to erase the history of Arabs in Palestine. Peters argued that
Palestine was effectively empty until Jewish Zionists came on the scene
in the late 19th century, and that Arabs then emigrated from
surrounding lands to take advantage of economic opportunities provided
by the Zionists. Hence, the Arabs are "arrivistes," have no legitimate
claim to be refugees.
Among other "sources,"
Peters relied on Twain's savaging portrayal of the Holy Land as a
filthy, backwards, empty place. Peters makes no effort to contextualize
Twain's remarks: namely, that he was skewering nineteenth century
America's sacred cows about the glories of Europe and the sacredness of
the Holy Land. Twain, it should be noted, also said Greece, Syria and
Lebanon are empty. And we now know that in his nonfiction Twain was
happy to invent as necessary to fit his tale.
It makes for great
entertainment in Twain's book, but it's hardly demographic data. Yet
let's suppose that Twain's view of Palestine as "empty" has a grain of
truth. Today there are still large, non-agricultural areas in the West
Bank and Israel where you can drive and not see a soul (though
settlement building of the last decades has reduced such areas.) Twain
just hit a few biblical areas, hardly a survey. In Twain's time
Palestine was largely a village population coupled with a cluster of
cities and towns: Jaffa, Nablus, Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, Hebron.
Peters' thesis has been extensively discredited: by Yehoshua Porath in the NY Review of Books and,
even if I'm generally not a fan of Norman Finkelstein's polemical
style, he's at his best in his shredding of Peters' thesis in his essay
in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian
Question. (Needless to say, From Time Immemorial was published by the
mainstream Harper & Row and received accolades in the Washington
Post Book World, TNR, The National Review, The Atlantic, etc., while
Blaming the Victims needed left-wing Verso to get in print.)
There
have been additional demographic studies demonstrating the presence of
an extensive Arab population in Palestine long prior to the Zionist
movement; who has time to go into them now! Even right-wing historians like
Benny Morris think Joan Peters and other "people without a land for a
land without a people" advocates are shilling tripe. I thought these
folks had come around to the idea of, 'Yes, Arabs were here, we kicked
them out, and we had a right to do it. Tough shit.' At least that's
honest. But when Netanyahu has the audience of Obama, propaganda still
reigns.
What's
sad (to me) is that Zionism has brought many Jews and non-Jewish
Zionists to this level of dishonesty about history. To me it's
outrageous that this has occurred and it's outrageous that it's being
proffered at the White House — today. I hope, if Obama opens the book, he's a critical reader.
