On December 20 Mondoweiss published Hatim Kanaaneh’s review of my book The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad. While I welcome any criticism that sheds a different light on a text I wrote, this review baldly misrepresented the book’s contents and mischaracterized my own approach. Kanaaneh makes a sweeping argument that I fall short in ridding myself “of the ‘Jewish Israeli’ tribal prejudices and inimical presumptions about all things Palestinian.” Needless to say, for a scholar who has dedicated his academic career to studying various aspects of Palestinian history, society, culture, and politics, this is an offensive allegation that should not go unchallenged.
The book itself aims to portray the fascinating life of Tawfiq Zayyad (1929–94), a renowned Palestinian poet, a committed Communist activist, and a charismatic political leader. For four decades, Zayyad personified the collective struggle of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and a scholarly biography of him has been long overdue. For five years I collected, piece by piece, fragments of information from the Arabic and Hebrew press, several archives, including materials housed in the official Tawfiq Zayyad Institute in Nazareth, and interviews with dozens of family members, friends, and acquaintances, as well as with political partners and rivals. I enjoyed the trust of Zayyad’s family and close friends who shared with me invaluable personal documents. Together these sources enabled me to portray Zayyad both as an influential political leader, but also as a human being with weaknesses.
To be sure, there are inevitable gaps in the history, some of which I discuss in the book. Kanaaneh’s only concern, though, was with the legitimacy of a Jewish-Israeli scholar to tell Zayyad’s story (“What did I expect from him, anyhow, I ask myself?”). From this departure point he seems to scan the text looking for evidence of my presumed biases and prejudices, but the examples he provides are based on an unrefined distortion of the text itself.
I should begin with Kanaaneh’s wondering about what my stance on Zionism is, and the statement in the Mondoweiss Facebook introduction to the review that I do not reject Zionism. Kanaaneh wrote that he even made an inquiry among my “learned associates” to find out what my “formal stand” on Zionism is. While I think scholars should be politically involved, I am puzzled by the requirement to have a “formal” position on anything. I analyze Zionism as a settler-colonial project, I firmly object to any regime of ethnic and racial superiority – including its Zionist version, and I believe that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine has proven to be incompatible with the principles of human rights and democracy. I do not know what would make these stances “formal.” I do sympathize with Kanaaneh’s initial suspicion of Jewish Israeli scholars and understand where it comes from. At the same time, one need not “wonder” about my politics if one reads my work carefully and with an open mind.
The second major problem in this review is the direct association Kanaaneh made between me and the Hebrew media which I frequently quote in the book. To be clear, in contrast to what was conveyed by the review, the book is based on a variety of sources in different languages, and the coverage of Zayyad by the Hebrew media is only one of them. Furthermore, I was baffled while reading that I am being accused of “unquestioning of standard Israeli sources.” In the book introduction I explicitly discussed the frequent racist and paternalistic biases of Israeli journalists and the ties of many of them with the security establishment. For that reason, I wrote “it is difficult to tell when a piece of information was accurate, based on some truth but filtered through the surveillance lens, or intentionally fabricated as part of a psychological warfare campaign” (p.8). Furthermore, I dedicated seven pages of the book to analyzing the way the Hebrew media treated Zayyad, trying to explain the irrational hate and fear that characterized his coverage.
However, all of this was apparently not unequivocal enough for Kanaaneh. It seems to me that he was particularly offended by a quote from a 1957 piece in Ma’ariv in which the author, Y. Kinarot, reported about the arrest of Zayyad after a speech he gave in Kanaaneh’s own home village, Arrabeh, echoing the establishment view of Tawfiq Zayyad and referring to Arrabeh as “notorious.” Even though I preceded the quote by suggesting the journalist relied on a source from within the Israeli security services, Kanaaneh associated me with that offensive text and complained that I did not explicitly criticize its hateful tone: “discrediting Tawfiq Zayyad’s political and literary inspirational status by keeping silent vis-a’-vis his detractors is unacceptable.” The book contains many more quotes of negative characterizations of Zayyad and the Palestinian leadership in general and I did not interrupt the text after each one to condemn it. Reading that quote in its proper context in the chapter, though, should leave any open minded reader with little doubt that I consider Zayyad’s speech in Arrabeh as an anticolonial just action and do not subscribe in any way to the vocabulary used by the Zionist media. Personally, I have visited Arrabeh many times and interviewed many inhabitants during my work on previous books. I have fond memories of my encounters there and I do not need to be educated that the place is not actually “notorious.”
Kanaaneh continues with the argument that I am “complicit with the Zionist tribal narrative of innocence” about the near ethnic cleansing of Nazareth because, among the reasons I listed for the fact that the Nazareth residents were not expelled I mentioned that David Ben Gurion was aware of the importance of Nazareth to the world’s Christian community (an explanation that sounds reasonable to many Israeli, Palestinian and other historians). The real reason, Kanaaneh writes, was that the Canadian Jewish commander of the invading Hagana force, Ben Dunkelman, demanded a written order. However, in the book I explicitly mentioned that Dunkelman received an order from his commander Haim Laskov to evacuate the city’s population and he disobeyed it by asking for a written order (p.25). The review misleads the readers to believe that I ignored the initial expulsion order, and therefore support a “tribal narrative of innocence”.
I have much respect for Kanaaneh as an activist and I am confident that he, like many Palestinians of his generation, could have provided many more valuable memories about Zayyad (actually, an interview with his cousin Tawfiq was conducted for the biography, although not directly by me). When he describes Tawfiq as “our hero” I understand very well what he means because I have learned throughout my research how significant Zayyad was for many Palestinians. At the same time, this sense of ownership, encapsulated in the word “our,” is especially difficult for me, as an outsider, to tackle. More broadly, as a Jewish Israeli who writes about themes and topics which are at the core of the Palestinian national ethos, I am used to suspicious reactions and to the tendency of some readers to question my motives. I think, though, that this case also reflects an unbridgeable gap between the ways a devoted political activist who has personal involvement in the story writes about politics, and the more distant writing of academic scholarship. When this gap is superimposed on the understandable suspicion of Palestinians toward Israelis the risk of misunderstanding is high. It might be, though, that because of my identity, many Palestinian activists need a much more frequent reassurance in the text that I am on their side.
