The Question of Palestine, page 33
There have been several studies of Palestinian folk art. By far the most detailed is the resplendently illustrated and commentated Palestinian Costumes by Shelagh Weir (London: British Museum, 1989). A verbal equivalent is Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana, Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). See also Inea Bushnaq, Arab Folktales (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
Palestinian life inside and outside Palestine has benefited from the work of: Laurie A. Brand, Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Said K. Aburish, Children of Bethany: The Story of a Palestinian Family (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography (London: The Women’s Press, 1990); Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank (London: Quartet, 1982); Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
The Israeli occupation and the intifada are well represented in Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End, 1989); Jamal R. Nassar and Roger Heacock, Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (New York: Praeger, 1990); Geoffrey Aronson, Creating Facts: Israel Palestinians and the West Bank (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987); Joost R. Hilterman, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); ed. Naseer H. Aruri, Occupation: Israel Over Palestine (Belmont: AAUG, 1989, 2nd ed.); Gloria Emerson, Gaza, A Year in the Intifada: A Personal Account (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1991). Three extraordinary testimonials by doctors who worked in the Palestinian refugee camps are: Pauline Cutting, Children of the Siege (London: Heinemann, 1988); Swee Chai Aug, From Beirut to Jerusalem (London: Grafton Books, 1989); Chris Giannou, Besieged: A Doctor’s Story of Life and Death in Beirut (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1990).
Finally, the following works afford an unexpected perspective not only on the Jewish and Israeli aspects of the Palestinian issue, but on the future of Palestinian-Israeli relations: Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (New York, MacMillan, 1984); Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Mark A. Heller and Sari Nusseibeh, No Trumpets, No Drums: A Two-State Settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991); Marc H. Ellis, Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); Rosemary Radford Reuther and Marc H. Ellis, eds., Beyond Occupation: American, Jewish, Christian and Palestinian Voices for Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).
Chapter Notes
Introduction
1. For an analogous kind of censorship, see Noam Chomsky, “10 Years After Tet: The Big Story That Got Away,” More, 8, 6 (June 1978), 16–23.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 290.
Chapter One
1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 31–49.
2. There is a detailed account of press and publishing censorship imposed on the Palestinian problem (by consensus) in England in Christopher Mayhew and Michael Adams, Publish It Not: The Middle East Cover-Up (London: Longman Group, 1975). Note furthermore that any Israeli or pro-Israeli book is routinely reviewed in The New York Times by a well-known pro-Israeli (e.g., Irving Howe on Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back, Saul Bellow on Teddy Kollek’s book about his experience as mayor of Jerusalem, etc.). Yet any book by an Arab or someone critical of Israel is just as routinely reviewed by a pro-Zionist critic (e.g., Michael Walzer on Noam Chomsky’s Peace in the Middle East? or Nadav Safran on Sadat’s autobiography). The New York Review of Books has almost literally never printed anything by a Palestinian since the Palestinian question came to the fore after 1974. During 1978, NYRB did print articles more or less critical of Israel by I. F. Stone, Guido Goldman, and Stanley Hoffmann, all of them supporting some sort of Palestinian self-determination, and yet the iron barrier against Palestinians—of whom there is no shortage—representing themselves remains. More serious is the scandalous nonreporting of what goes on inside Israel or the Occupied Territories; there is an almost total blackout on reports of Israeli government practices (most of them routinely carried in the Israeli press), all of which, were they to have taken place anywhere else in the world, would have been front-page news.
3. The locus classicus is Bernard Lewis, “The Return of Islam,” Commentary, January 1976; this is a refurbished version of his “The Revolt of Islam,” in Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1964). Both pieces are useful Zionist propaganda: see my discussion of them in Orientalism, pp. 316–19.
4. Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (1835; reprinted Paris: Hachette, 1887), vol. 2, p. 533.
5. Quoted from Istakhari and Ibn Hankal, in Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1500 Translated from the Works of the Medieval Arab Geographers (1890; reprinted Beirut: Khayati, 1965), p. 28.
6. Quoted in Richard Bevis, “Making the Desert Bloom: An Historical Picture of Pre-Zionist Palestine,” The Middle East Newsletter, V, 2 (Feb.—Mar. 1971), 4.
7. The Anglo-Palestine Yearbook 1947–8 (London: Anglo-Palestine Publications, 1948), p. 33.
8. See Adnan Abu-Ghazeleh, Arab Cultural Nationalism in Palestine (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1973).
9. Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press and T. Yoseloff, 1960), vol. I, p. 88.
10. Palestine Papers 1917–1922 Seeds of Conflict, com. and annot. Doreen Ingrams (London: John Maney, 1972), pp. 19 ff.
11. Documents From Israel, 1967–1973: Readings for a Critique of Zionism, ed. Uri Davis and Norton Mezvinsky (London: Ithaca Press, 1975), p. 44.
12. Janet Abu-Lughod, “The Demographic Transformation of Palestine,” in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. 153–61.
13. Quoted in Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, 1917–1948 (1965; reprinted Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 5.
14. J. Abu-Lughod, “The Demographic Transformation,” pp. 141–42, 152–153.
15. A Survey of Palestine 1946: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Jerusalem, 1946), p. 146.
16. Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971; reprinted New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 194 ff.
17. See Ingrams, Palestine Papers, pp. 20, 28.
18. Ibid., p. 58.
19. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 462.
20. For a demystifying report on the kibbutzim, see The Candid Kibbutz Book (London: MERAG, 1978).
21. Elon, The Israelis, pp. 220, 222.
22. Quoted in James McDonald, My Mission to Israel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), p. 176.
23. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (1938; reprinted New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), p. 15.
24. I discuss this point at length in Orientalism, pp. 284–328.
25. Ingrams, Palestine Papers, pp. 31–32.
26. This subject is discussed in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
27. Edmund Wilson, A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1958), p. 85.
28. Edmund Wilson, Black, Red, Blond and Olive (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 462–63.
29. Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, trans. Inea Engler (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).
30. Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back (New York: The Viking Press, 1976) and Stephen Spender, “Among the Israelis,” in The New York Review of Books (March 6, 1975); but see Noam Chomsky, “What Every American Should Believe,” Gazelle Review, 2 (London: Ithaca Press, 1977), 24–32, for a critique of Bellow.
31. See I. F. Stone, “Confessions of a Jewish Dissident,” published as an epilogue to his Underground to Palestine, and Reflections Thirty Years Later (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 229–40.
32. This posture is perfectly set forth in Moynihan’s A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1978).
33. Nicholas Von Hoffman, Anaheim Bulletin, July 11, 1977.
34. Cited in The Right of Return of the Palestinian People, United Nations Publication, 1978, pp. 6–7.
Chapter Two
1. I. F. Stone, “Confessions of a Jewish Dissident,” in Underground to Palestine, and Reflections Thirty Years Later (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
2. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 50.
3. Ibid., p. 592.
4. Ibid., pp. 594–95.
5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 153–57. 214. 228.
6. Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1976), p. 133.
7. Ibid., p. 134.
8. See Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), pass.; a powerful case is made also by The Non-Jew in the Jewish State: A Collection of Documents, ed. Israel Shahak (privately printed by Shahak, 2 Bartenura Street, Jerusalem), 1975.
9. See Imperialism: The Documentary History of Western Civilization, ed. Philip D. Curtin (New York: Walker & Company, 1971), which contains a good selection from the imperialist literature of the last 200 years. I survey the intellectual and cultural backgrounds of the period in Orientalism, chs. 2 and 3.
10. Quoted in Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1974), p. 192.
11. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers Co., 1971), p. 324. The full text is to be found in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi Editore, 1975), vol. 2, p. 1363.
12. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 129.
13. Harry Bracken, “Essence, Accident and Race,” Hermathena 116 (Winter, 1973), 81–96.
14. See Curtin, Imperialism, pp. 93–105, which contains an important extract from Knox’s book.
15. Geroge Nathaniel Curzon, Subjects of the Day: Being a Selection of Speeches and Writings (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), pp. 155–56.
16. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth and Two Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925), p. 52.
17. Ibid., pp. 50–51.
18. Agnes Murphy, The Ideology of French Imperialism, 1817–1881 (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1948), pp. 110, 136, 189.
19. Amos Oz, a leading Israeli novelist (also considered a “dove”) puts it nicely: “For as long as I live, I shall be thrilled by all those who came to the Promised Land to turn it either into a pastoral paradise or egalitarian Tolstoyan communes, or into a well-educated, middle-class Central European enclave, a replica of Austria and Bavaria. Or those who wanted to raise a Marxist paradise, who built kibbutzim on biblical sites and secretly yearned for Stalin to come one day to admit that ‘Bloody Jews, you have done it better than we did.’ ” Time, May 15, 1978, p. 61.
20. I have taken all of these quotations from an excellent, and invaluable, M.A. thesis submitted by Miriam Rosen at Hunter College in 1976, “The Last Crusade: British Archeology in Palestine, 1865–1920,” pp. 18–21.
21. See Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), and Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, Vol. I 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass and Company, 1974).
22. See the forthright historical account in Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971; reprinted New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 218–24.
23. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? trans. David Thorstad (New York: Monad Press of the Anchor Foundation, 1973), p. 39.
24. Ibid., p. 38.
25. Quoted in David Waines, “The Failure of the Nationalist Resistance,” in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 220.
26. Ibid., p. 213.
27. Chaim Weizmann, Trail and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 371.
28. Ibid., p. 125.
29. Ibid., pp. 128–29, 253.
30. Ibid., p. 128.
31. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1972). Harkabi was chief of military intelligence until he was dismissed in 1959 by Ben Gurion. He later became a professor at the Hebrew University and an expert Arabist, indeed the principal propagandist in Israel against everything Arab and/or especially Palestinian. See, for example, his virulently anti-Palestinian book (distributed gratis in this country by the Israeli embassy) Palestinians and Israel (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1974). Surprisingly, General Harkabi has recently become a “dove” and a supporter of the Peace Now movement.
32. Reproduced in Haolam Hazeh, May 15, 1974. Haolam Hazeh’s editor, Uri Avnery, has written an interesting, somewhat demagogic book, worth looking at for the light it sheds on Israeli politics: Israel Without Zionism: A Plea for Peace in the Middle East (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1968). It contains vitriolic attacks on people like Moshe Dayan, whom Avnery describes essentially as “an Arab-fighter” (cf. Indian-fighters in the American West).
33. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 130.
34. Ibid., p. 188.
35. Ibid., pp. 215–16.
36. Ibid., p. 130.
37. C. L. Temple, The Native Races and Their Rulers (1918; reprinted London: Frank Cass and Company, 1968), p. 41.
38. Trial and Error, pp. 156–57.
39. On the army as a matrix for organizing society, see Michel Foucault, “Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie,” Hérodote, 1, 1 (first trimester 1976), p. 85. See also Yves Lacoste, La Géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (Paris: Maspero, 1976).
40. Details taken from Walter Lehn, “The Jewish National Fund,” Journal of Palestine Studies, III, 4 (Summer 1974), 74–96. It is worth noting here that during the academic year 1977–78, Lehn, a retired professor of linguistics, was visiting professor at Bir Zeit University, the only Arab institution of higher learning on the occupied West Bank. During the year he continued his research on the JNF, and also signed an open letter, on January 6, protesting (as an eyewitness) the savage beating of two young Palestinian students by Israeli soldiers (one of the two was hospitalized after he collapsed from the beating). Along with six other professors, Lehn was denied a work permit by the West Bank military authorities in early May 1978. Not one U.S. newspaper carried this news. But see also Uri Davis and Walter Lehn, “And the Fund Still Lives,” Journal of Palestine Studies VII, 4 (Summer 1978), 3–33.
41. As an example, consider the fate of Umm al-Fahm, a large Arab village given to Israel by King Abdallah of Jordan in 1949 according to the Rhodes agreement. Before 1948 the village owned 140,000 dunams, with a population of 5,000. In 1978 there were about 20,000 Arab inhabitants of Umm al-Fahm, but the village’s land had been reduced to 15,000 dunams, almost all of it rocky and poor for cultivation. All the best land was confiscated by various “legal” decrees, including the 1953 Law of Land, Insurance and Compensation. The greatest irony perhaps is that two socialist kibbutzim—Megiddo and Givat Oz—were built on the confiscated Arab land. What was left was turned over to a moshav, or cooperative agricultural settlement.
42. Joseph Weitz, My Diary and Letters to the Children (Tel Aviv: Massada, 1965), vol. II, pp. 181–82.
43. Jon and David Kimche, A Clash of Destinies: The Arab-Jewish War and the Founding of the State of Israel (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1960), p. 92. See also the two important articles by Walid Khalidi, “The Fall of Haifa,” Middle East Forum, XXXV, 10 (December 1959), 22–32; and “Plan Dalet: The Zionist Blueprint for the Conquest of Palestine,” Middle East Forum, XXXVII, 9 (November 1961), 22–28.
44. The most thorough study ever made of the Palestinian exodus, after a combing of every Arab newspaper and broadcast of the period, revealed absolutely no evidence of “orders to leave,” or of anything except urgings to Palestinians to remain in their country. Unfortunately, the terror was too great for a mostly unarmed population. See Erskine Childers, “The Wordless Wish: From Citizens to Refugees,” in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. 165–202. Childers, an Irishman, was a free-lance journalist when he conducted his research; his findings are devastating to the Zionist case.
45. See Avnery, Israel Without Zionism.
46. Weitz, My Diary, vol. Ill, p. 293.
47. Ibid., p. 302.
48. Tawfiq Zayyad, “Fate of the Arabs in Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies, VI, 1, (Autumn 1976), 98–99.
49. Yet in its editorial of May 19, 1976, The New York Times called the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza “a model of future cooperation” between the two peoples. Israeli destruction of Arab houses, torture, deportation, murder, administrative detention, all have been denounced by Amnesty International, the Red Cross, even the 1978 State Department Report on human rights abuses. And still the repression continues, both in the gross and coarsely brutal ways I have mentioned and in other ways, too. Collective punishment is common: In 1969 the military governor forbade the sale of mutton as a punishment for the whole town of Ramallah; during the middle of the grape season in 1970 the sale of grapes, harvesting, and the like were all prohibited unless notables denounced PLO publicity. In April 1978 a seven-day curfew was imposed on Nablus because “the inhabitants did not collaborate with the police.”
