Rémi Brulin, an adjunct professor at New York University who is completing his dissertation entitled “The US Discourse on Terrorism Since 1945, and how The New York Times has Covered the Issue of Terrorism” (more here), sent us the following in response an article that ran in the New York Times Travel section last Sunday – When History Speaks in Israel:
The article in question is “When History Speaks in Israel,” and is one of the starkest examples of a complete erasure of the Palestinian from the history of the region that I have seen in a long time. I actually did a word search of the article and the word “Palestinian” doesn’t appear once! It is very much reminiscent of old claims that the Palestinian people “don’t exist,” that Israel was ” a land without a people for a people without a land”, etc…
Just read the lede:
CHAIM KAHANOVICH, an 18-year-old Polish Jew, caught his first brown glimpse of the Holy Land from the deck of a steamer in November 1924. He would never leave. Dark-haired, short and solid, Chaim brought with him a teenager’s blazing passion and an ideologue’s stubborn commitment to a cause. The long, slow journey had taken him from Warsaw by train to the Black Sea port of Constanta, then by ship through the Bosporus Straits and across the Mediterranean to Palestine. There at last, rising like the back of an ox from the blue water of Haifa Bay, was the sere ridge of Mount Carmel — the Promised Land.
From his boyhood study of Torah, Chaim would have known that Carmel was the place where the prophet Elijah faced down the pagan priests of Baal and fled the wrath of Queen Jezebel. But he had not come to Palestine to study Torah. He and his comrades were called halutzim — pioneers — and they had made aliyah (literally the ascent) to the Holy Land to plow the soil, plant grapevines and citrus groves, raise chickens, tomatoes and children, and to found a new nation.
I know the details of Chaim’s life and circumstances because he and his wife, Sonia, were relatives of mine (my maternal grandfather was their first cousin), and I recently went to Israel with my oldest daughter, Emily, for the first time to retrace their journeys and uncover what I could about our family’s story — a story of immigration shared by thousands of others. What made this trip especially inspiring was that I was able to cover so much of Israeli history: in this ancient but recently conceived nation, the founders lived just a generation ago. It’s as if the children and grandchildren of Washington, Jefferson and Adams were around to give interviews and point out historical sights.
I am usually quite critical of the New York Times in its coverage of many issues that have to do with foreign policy, but even for the Times this is particularly obscene.
I was shocked by this article especially because, with my class at NYU, I am currently using Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree, the premise of which is precisely that so many Israelis ignore everything about their past, and especially about the fact that Palestinians lived for generations in those villages that became Israeli villages in 1948.
I was shocked also by this article because I had just read Johann Hari’s great interview of Gideon Levy in the Independent. The following passage especially stood out:
He was fourteen during the Six Day War, and soon after his parents took him to see the newly conquered Occupied Territories. “We were so proud going to see Rachel’s Tomb [in Bethlehem] and we just didn’t see the Palestinians. We looked right through them, like they were invisible,” he says. “It had always been like that. We were passing as children so many ruins [of Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed in 1948]. We never asked: ‘Who lived in this house? Where is he now? He must be alive. He must be somewhere.’ It was part of the landscape, like a tree, like a river.
