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Title: Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question by Edward W. Said, Christopher Hitchens ISBN: 0-86091-887-4 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: April, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Interesting and Insightful
Comment: By way of introduction, the obvious cannot be overstressed here, namely that Israel is the occupier and therefore the aggressor while the Palestinians are the occupied and therefore the victims. Paradoxically, this fact is hardly ever even taken into consideration by western politicians, thus ignoring the fundamental element of the conflict. Needless to say, attempting to solve this conflict without differentiating between the aggressor (Israel) and the victimized (the Palestinians) will never lead to permanent peace. According to Said, understanding the root causes of the extremist movements in the Palestine is crucial. People turn to extreme measures when in extreme despair and agony. Surely, no one chooses to blow himself in the air when happy and contented with life. Instead, it is in situations in which people see no other way out but to resort to terrorist actions. Needless to say, understanding why terrorism exists does not mean that it is justifiable and morally acceptable. On the contrary, violence is never a solution to any problem. Instead, it can only further aggravate matters. Killing innocent people is always wrong and morally reprehensible. Said further claims that Israeli government mainly consists of extremists and fundamentalists. This is never mentioned in mainstream media; the sole focus is on Islamic fundamentalists. Western politicians never ask themselves the fundamental question: why does terrorism emerge? Said recognizes a number of factors, the most important of which are injustice, poverty, subjugation, inferiority and discrimination. Thus, terrorism is not a result of justice and equality. Israel commits terrorist actions every day and violates international law but no one condemns nor criticizes Israeli government. Instead, the U.S. gives a billion dollar aid to Israel even though Israel is being accused of belligerent and merciless war waging against the Palestinians. As Said puts it, how is it that Israel can remain so extremely powerful among one billion Muslims? The answer to that question is readily apparent to those who disbelieve the mainstream media.
Rating: 5
Summary: Musical chairs for two? This isn't a game
Comment: This work seems to exist in another time,for it echoes with as relevant now after many turns of the merry-go-round as it did when written. It strikes the keynote of the last fifty years of the Arab-Israeli conflict as it ticks over in its basic manufactured fallacies, invariant through all policies, editorials and intiatives. The work opens with an account of the appearance of Peters' From Time Immemorial, a concoction of disinformation on the history of Israel, in the myth of the 1948 and the non-existence of the Palestinians. As the Oslo cycle joins the rest, and the next cycle of the basic swindle begins, one might as well go backto the future by rereading this work.
Rating: 2
Summary: Misrecognizing the victims
Comment: By now more than a little dated, this collection bears a title that makes sense only ironically. The "victims" in question are the fancifully named "Palestinians," a pseudo-ethnicity that conveniently came into existence with the founding of the state of Israel. To be sure, the people now being identified by this name are poor, enjoy few political rights or privileges, and live in often appalling conditions. But their victimhood stems from two major--and consistently dissimulated--causes: first, the cynical, strategically motivated refusal of statehood as proposed by the U.N. in 1948; and, second, their unanimous rejection by Arab neighbor states.
The populace thus left without access to institutional status or means of political self-expression or determination has become the victim of yet another cynical ruse. States like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and others have exploited the disaffection they created to direct pointless Palestinian acts of aggression against the Israeli population.
The international community's deafening silence on this point is hard to miss. While dictatorial regimes with long histories of abusing the human rights of their own citizens supply weapons, money and political cover for a decades-long campaign of terror, the U.N. passes one resolution after another condemning Israel's every attempt to deal with the problem. The Israeli government's reactions over the last three decades have varied dramatically, and reducing this variety to the rubric of "occupation" or "apartheid" is disingenuous and unjust.
Perhaps the editors and authors should ask if the conditions under which the Palestinian population now lives might have been avoided or ameliorated had the wealthy neighboring Arab states directed resources toward improving the Palestinians' economic conditions. Indeed, their cause could have been helped immeasurably if these neighbors had simply recognized Israel's right to exist, thus both generating trust and applying legitimate political pressure on Israel to come to an arrangement of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians.
Instead, it is the Israelis who are charged with providing for Palestinian well-being, and blamed for the persistence of conditions which long preceded the appearance of the state of Israel. To be sure, Israeli policies are far from blameless, but the essays in this book consistently misidentify the main perpetrators of injustice against this liminal population and persistently blame the other victims of this same injustice--the Israelis. What makes this collection particularly galling is that it provides a patina of intellectual legitimacy to what amount to little more than plain old anti-Semitism. The difference is that this anti-Semitism asserts itself as political criticism directed against specific government policies. But this, too, is little more than a ruse, since the policies in question stem directly from efforts at self-preservation. It is beyond dispute that Israel has no colonial predilections; its "occupation," misguided or not, is an effort to secure itself against attacks. It is a given that if its security could be guaranteed, Israel would have no interest in governing a non-Israeli population and would happily divest itself of that responsibility.
The inflammatory charges of "apartheid" imply that the Jews who live in a democratic Jewish state are perpetrators of injustice precisely as Jews, that is, as members of a privileged ethnic group. But this "group" is simply the citizenry of the state. American citizens, too, enjoy rights not afforded to non-citizens--even ones who live inside the U.S. This is hardly apartheid. Moreover, there is no Palestinian ethnicity. The Palestinians are simply Arabs who happen to live in a certain region of the Middle East. There is nothing racial, religious, cultural, or political that distinguishes them from millions of their neighbors. They do not form an "ethnos," and their very name did not exist until 1948. By contrast, Jews are a distinct religious and cultural minority, both in the Middle East and the world. Their "ethnic" solidarity has persisted for millennia, and their nation-state came into existence for the express purpose of securing their population against universal persecution. The state of Israel was created in a region inhabited by Jewish people dating back thousands of years. To equate this with the forcible imposition of foreign colonial control over an indigenous population is the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty, to say the least.
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Title: The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679739882 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination : 1969-1994 by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679761454 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (South End Press Classics) by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 0896086011 Publisher: South End Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Orientalism by Edward W. Said ISBN: 039474067X Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1979 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679758909 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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