Remnick
This is good. David Remnick at the New Yorker has used the Gingrich moment re Palestinian national identity to recall the controversy over From Time Immemorial, the Joan Peters fabrication of the 1980s. I imagine this is the first time Remnick has treated this important lie; so the piece is a worthy act of the Jewish recovery movement, our discovery of the Nakba 6 decades on. Remnick should have also credited Norman Finkelstein with his brave work on Peters. That was very tactical of Remnick–though he has spent some of his cultural capital by blaming Elie Wiesel, Martin Peretz, Saul Bellow and Lucy Dawidowicz for falling for the lie. Also note the use of the word “colonial.” Henry Siegman also used this word recently.
And, because Gingrich has a little learning and a darkly sophisticated memory for intellectual battle, he catered to his cause by employing the word “invented.” In this context, the word summons a 1984 bestseller that was once totemic on the Jewish right (and still is, for some): “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine,” by Joan Peters.
Peters, who was not a historian, put forward a purportedly scholarly construction based on the notion, as Golda Meir famously put it, that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” The book, which is an ideological tract disguised as history, made the demographic argument that most people who call themselves Palestinians have short roots in the territory and are Arabs who came from elsewhere. It suggests that the territory that is now Israel was all but “uninhabited” before the Zionist movement began. It was a book that implicitly made the argument that Palestine was a tabula rasa waiting for its Jewish revival; or, as the old slogan had it: “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
The book was not only a commercial success; it also won plaudits from Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Martin Peretz, Theodore H. White, Lucy Dawidowicz, Arthur Goldberg, and Elie Wiesel. For a time, it was wielded as a means to dismiss Palestinian claims on the land, and a means to be dismissive of Palestinians entirely. The book was thoroughly discredited by an Israeli historian, Yehoshua Porath, and many others who dismantled its pseudo-scholarship. Even some right-wing critics, like Daniel Pipes, who initially reviewed the book positively, later admitted that Peters’s work was shoddy and “ignores inconvenient facts.”
To this day, however, for some people who cannot accept, or even deal rationally with, the claims of Palestinians, “From Time Immemorial” and other such propaganda still have their place. Never mind that Peters fails to use Arab sources and that her work is full of distortions. Hers is a book with clear polemical purpose: to deny Palestinian Arabs an identity and any territorial claim; it makes the case that the Arabs in question should instead live in Jordan. (It should also go without saying that radical and bigoted polemicists on the other side of the Arab-Israeli dispute have their own pseudo-scholarship—their own numbing, often anti-Semitic, tracts—which make the case that Israel, and the Jewish people, are alien and have no claim on the land.)
Those who value books like “From Time Immemorial,” those who talk as Gingrich has, fail to ask how they, as Americans, can dismiss Palestinians as “an invented people” when national self-invention is a reality for Americans and countless others on the globe. Palestinian nationalism may be historically recent and, in some measure, a reaction to Zionism, but that does not discount its legitimacy, its cultural cohesion and meaning, or its claims. There are many recent nationalisms—many nationalisms that grew out of regional conflicts or colonial borders.
The full piece says that the Republicans are after Jewish voters. A synecdoche that is becoming more and more irresponsible.
What a loaded and useless statement. To what extent? Be specific, David Remnick. Israelis ARE alien to the land in the sense that most Jews moved to Israel for the Zionist project.
Besides, how exactly can you claim that there IS in fact a case for THE Jewish people to have claim on the land? By what virtue? By virtue of merely being Jewish?
If that is the assertion then you are nothing but another ‘liberal’ Zionist.
So if that’s the level of intellectual honesty one can expect from you, David Remnick, then it’s not far fetched to presume that your entire defense of Palestinians is couched in a convenient exercise to perpetuate the myth created by Zionist colonialism.
Next time you attempt to make comparisons, make them between apples and apples, not apples and oranges. Your it-goes-both-ways shtick is fundamentally flawed.
“Hers is a book with clear polemical purpose: to deny Palestinian Arabs an identity and any territorial claim; it makes the case that the Arabs in question should instead live in Jordan. ”
This is the important point, the money shot.
And, it applies to the Gingrich quote, though Gingrich’s objectives are more passively supportive of imagined likud position.
The history though is somewhere in between the Palestinian assertion of “we were always there” and the Peters/Gingrich assertion “they were never there”.
The land was not vacant, and it was not fully occupied. There was room, or else the land would be able to hold the numbers even of Palestinians that are there. The population of the land is 10-fold what it was in 1947.
There was room for immigrants, for natural population growth of both Jewish and Palestinian population.
Also, the assertions of immigration to the land are largely true. Many Arabs DID migrate to Israel/Palestine as the economic prospects improved, and as the Turkish and then British land registration laws made it more difficult for squatting Arab/Palestinian peasants.
Also, the assertions of national identity are largely true. Prior, the majority of residents did identify as part of the Arab nation, the Arab world, of which Palestine was a changing jurisdiction.
The present though is clear. There is a Palestinian people (even if forged in relation to Israel’s formation). And, now with the great work of Abbas and Fayyad and many others, there are now coherent and functional Palestinian national institutions.
Why is Philip silent on the plight of the Coptics? Watch this testimony from a Coptic at the U.S congress.
If Philip would finally protest Arab aparthied, then the plight of the Copts would get better.
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/12/congress-hears-of-the-plight-of-egypt%e2%80%99s-christians/
Worth reading.
“………But let me just go on with the Joan Peters story.
Finkelstein’s very persistent: he took a summer off and sat in the New York Public Library, where he went through every single reference in the book—and he found a record of fraud that you cannot believe. Well, the New York intellectual community is a pretty small place, and pretty soon everybody knew about this, everybody knew the book was a fraud and it was going to be exposed sooner or later. The one journal that was smart enough to react intelligently was the New York Review of Books—they knew that the thing was a sham, but the editor didn’t want to offend his friends, so he just didn’t run a review at all. That was the one journal that didn’t run a review.
Meanwhile, Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the field who were telling him, “Look, call off your crusade; you drop this and we’ll take care of you, we’ll make sure you get a job,” all this kind of stuff. But he kept doing it—he kept on and on.
Every time there was a favorable review, he’d write a letter to the editor which wouldn’t get printed; he was doing whatever he could do. We approached the publishers and asked them if they were going to respond to any of this, and they said no—and they were right. Why should they respond?
They had the whole system buttoned up, there was never going to be a critical word about this in the United States. But then they made a technical error: they allowed the book to appear in England, where you can’t control the intellectual community quite as easily.
Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein’s work to a number of British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle East—and they were ready.
As soon as the book appeared, it was just demolished, it was blown out of the water. Every major journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review, the Observer, everybody had a review saying, this doesn’t even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy. A lot of the criticism USED FINKELSTEIN’S work WITHOUT any acknowledgment, I should say—but about the kindest word anybody said about the book was “ludicrous,” or “preposterous.” …..”
……………….”So after the Peters book got blown out of the water in England, the New York Review ASSIGNED it to a good person actually, in fact Israel’s leading specialist on Palestinian nationalism [Yehoshua Porath], someone who knows a lot about the subject.
And he wrote a review, which they then didn’t publish—it went on for almost a year without the thing being published; nobody knows exactly what was going on, but you can guess that there must have been a lot of pressure not to publish it.
Eventually it was even written up in the New York Times that this review wasn’t getting published, so finally some version of it did appear. It was critical, it said the book is nonsense and so on, but it cut corners, the guy didn’t say what he knew…. ”
http://www.chomsky.info/books/power01.htm
It’s an interesting story: the rise and fall of Joan Peters’ from Time Immemorial. The book received hundreds of favorable reviews in the US, and no unfavorable reviews. The promoters of the book were careful to arrange for reviews from known supporters of the Israeli narrative. Norman Finkelstein, then a graduate student at Princeton, spent months compiling a devastating critique of the Peters book. He sent it around to many media outlets, but couldn’t get it published anywhere. Finally, the magazine In These Times (which has a tiny circulation) published it. Alexander Cockburn and Edward Said attacked the book, but that’s about it. Eventually, the NY Review of Books, which had been silent for months, published a critique by an Israeli historian, Porath. After that, Anthony Lewis ran a critical column in the NYTimes, which the NYT published on Thanksgiving day when readership is very low.
Finkelstein deserves the credit for demolishing the book.
Those who praised the Peters book held prominent positions in American intellectual life. But none of them has suffered any professional consequences for “Nakba-denial”.
By the way, don’t think that the endorsers of the Peters book were making an honest mistake. Consider, for example, the historian Jehua Reinharz, who wrote a biography of Chaim Weizmann. Reinharz was fully aware, from reading the papers of Israel’s founding fathers, that the early Zionists knew that Palestine was not “a land without people, for a people without a land.” What happened to Reinharz in the wake of the Peters fiasco? He became President of Brandeis University. He was promoted.
The Peters book illustrates the toxic intellectual atmosphere that surrounded the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the 1980’s.
Worth following up on: The Israeli author Tom Segev remarked somewhere that the Peters book was commissioned by Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir.