A Response to Comments from My Previous Posting

I was about to leave this incredibly long reply to the last posting on leaving historical accuracy at the door of the public sphere when i realized it's so long and detailed that i should better put it as its own posting. so here are my replies to the comments. please excuse any run on sentences...

to begin with, i was accused by one commenter of using "ad hominem" attacks in my posting. to my knoweldge, i have yet to use any ad hominen's against someone commenting on this list, or against any one i've criticized in posting. however, commenters on my posting have done so, including the most recent attack, the says i "have been lying about israel... for quite a while."

nor has anyone called me on any 'outright fabrications', which is another innacuracy. i'm sure both mr. ramirez and mr. friedman (the two main commenters on the last post) think that many things i have written are outright fabrications, but that does not make them so. the incident that you might be referring to involves my support for the international solidarity movement, which led some commenters to write in accusing the ISM of supporting terrorists. i looked at the evidence they offerred and gave a detailed reply and said i would continue searching and seeing if i found anything else to support their contenction. to date i have not although i continue to look when i have the time. how this is not responding to criticism i'm not sure.

but never mind about that... let's look at what mr. friedman says about the last posting. he writes:

"And no, I do not think that most reputable historians view the early Arab Israeli conflict as a conflict of two national groups although, at this point, it has become that. Such view is contradicted by the lack of a serious second nationalist movement. In 1948, there were not really many Palestinian nationalist groups or a people or a nation as such. There were Arabs local to Palestine who viewed themselves largely as Syrians or simply "Arabs."

Continuing, mr. friedman writes: "And, as you know full well, the Palestinians managed, for the most part, not to know themselves that they were a people even in the 1960's (and one need only read the PLO Charter and its reference to Palestinian Arabs being part and parcel of the great Arab people and nation to realize that), largely in reaction to Israel. Which is to say, the notion of a Palestinian national group has no serious pre-Israel identity in the Muslim regions, no serious pre-Israel identity in Arab history as, in fact, the notion of nation states and peoples - as opposed to religious groupings - has a short history given the span of the Muslim Arab regions and their concepts of empire under the banner of religion."

simply--and sadly--put, everything mr friedman has written here is factually wrong, sorry to say. first of all, most every historian or other scholar who is considered among the leaders in the field considers the struggle one between two emerging national movements. if mr. friedman can name me a group of scholars who think otherwise and who are recognized today as producing the most accurate scholarship in the field then, then we can talk. (as for karsh's work, please see ian lustick's review of his work in the International Institute for Strategic Studies journal, Survival, in fall 1997, along with the exchange of letters between Karsh and Lustick published in the next issue (winter 1997-98)).

however, mr. friedman makes an interesting point, that so many of the people i list aren't actually historians. interesting, but does that disqualify them? in fact most have historiographic training and are first rate historians. they just approach the exploration of history from other disciplinary starting points. but many are just plain historians--lockman, shafir (who's book ends around 1914, hardly contemporary, despite being in a sociology department), avi shlaim, etc. and others who do post-1948 also engage the history in important ways. this demonstrates the vitality of the history profession and its ability to absorb new methodologies and disciplines. it is a shame that most other fields are much more focused on drawing boundaries and leaving out interesting inter-disciplinary ways of studying issues in which their members work. but that's a story for a different day...

back to the argument quoted above, it is making the utterly unsupported claim--but one that goes back to the roots of zionist writing and policy--that palestinians were never a 'people' until the last few decades. in fact, this is completely wrong. the scholarship of people like rashid khalid, beshara doumani, my own work on jaffa and tel aviv, salim tamari's historical narratives, may jayyusi's analyses of palestinian poetry and literature, boutros abou-manneh and mahmud yazbak and may seikali's work on late ottoman palestine and haifa in particular, iris agmon's work on jaffa, michell campos's work on ottoman zionist relations--and the list goes on and on--all show how a sense of a modern palestinian identity began to emerge in the latter part of the 19th century and particularly in the last decade of ottoman rule. it was not fully formed and there were various ideas that different leaders and intellectuals put out to the public, many of them tied to their class or political affiliation--but then, neither was the zionist identity that emerged at the same time.

but to claim that palestinians had "no serious second national movement" etc. is just utterly inaccurate (i can thing of no stronger way to describe it). it is a perfect example of writing history from a victor's point of view--because israel emerged victories then the palestinians couldn't have had a 'serious national movement' bc if they did how could israel have won? the evidence is overwhelming as to the existence and extent of the movement. this is not to say it was a successful movement, or well managed, or that its leadership wasn't self-serving, out of touch with most ordinary palestinians, and even selling their patrimoney out from under them at the same time they were trying to achieve statehood.

but the failings of the nationalist leadership (which are legion) can in no way be equated with a lack of a "second serious national movement" in palestine among the population. in fact, there is considerable evidence of how ordinary palestinians tried to resist in so many ways--many non-violent, others violent--throughout the late ottoman and mandate periods, only to be undone by a combination of british brute force and opposition to any successful development of palestinian nationalism, the stronger political foundations of the zionist movement (which was helped not just by massive inflows of capital and support but also was strongly supported by the british--as opposed to the palestinian leadership, which was seen through much more of a colonial lens and not given any power that would allow it to effectively oppose or challenge the commitments of the balfour declaration or jewish political aims in palestine.)

trying to deny palestinians any agency in their own history itself has a long history in the traditioanl scholarship on the conflict. but scholars like lockman, ted swedenburg and others have shown in great detail how much energy palestinian workers and peasants--that is, ordinary palestinians--put into trying to pursue their nationalist interests, even trying to use zionist unions to challenge their own leadership.

rashid khalidi has the most detailed exploration of the origins of a geo-identity as palestinian among non-jewish palestinian arab inhabitants of the country, but just to give a simple rebuttal to your assertion that they simply thought of themselves as 'arabs,' why was the most important newspaper in the country, founded in 1911, specifically called "Falasteen"? it's not because the leadership was dying to be part of "Greater Syria". in fact, while there were certainly various factions within the nationalist movement, including some that supported Greater Syria either because they were tied to Faisal's brief regime or because of loyalties to the old Ottoman-era notion of Greater Syria (which any way had given way to an administrative organization of Palestine in the last half century of ottoman rule that increasingly came to mirror the borders of what today is israel and the occupied territories), doesn't mean that such an identity wasn't there and growing stronger by the day.

it would seem that by denying palestinians an identity mr. friedman is trying to deny them a legitimate claim to the land vis-a-vis the zionist claim. but this is a waste of time: even if they didn't imagine themselves in the context of a modern nation-state (which is not at all true) they would still have had the right to live on their territory and develop at their own pace and manner and not be colonized by another movement whose goal of statehood clearly and quite naturally precluded their own (as ben gurion put it, "they do not have the right to rule the country to the extent that they have not developed it" (that's a paraphrase from memory but it's pretty close to his words)).

would we also say that because native americans didn't have a modern notion of the nation-state what european settlers and then the US did to them was justified? in both cases a discourse of development was used to deligitimize an indigenous movement's claims to sovereignty on the argument that only those who could "develop" the country--whatever that meant, and of course what it meant was deterimed solely by the colonizing society and often ignored similar processes in play in the indigenous society-- deserved to be its rulers.

finally, i don't know what the point is of mr. friedman's comment that palestinian identity has "no serious history" in the context of the long history of islam. neither does european nationalism in the long history of europe. or islam in the long history of the middle east that goes back 7,000 years. the irrefutable point is that palestinian and zionist nationalisms both emerged and solidified in the same period as competing nationalist movements whose histories can only be understood in relation to each other.

just a couple of more comments as i don't have time to go through every line of the comments. mr friedman says that the war of 1948 was a war of annihilation. i have no doubt that if the arab states could have done that, they would have. however at the same time the available evidence and latest scholarship on the issue is quite clear that most every state--egypt, syria, jordan, etc. had much more limited aims and in some cases, especially jordan, had cut tacit deals with the zionist/israeli leadership in the lead up to war on the future shape of the borders (with the exception of jerusalem). the arab states had no desire to create an independent palestinian state but rather to take whatever land they could for themselves without putting their regimes in too much trouble with their british/french masters or risking to much of their forces, which is exactly what did happen.

this is not to gainsay the horrible cost of the war on the nascent state of israel, although the cost to palestinians--the loss of most of their homeland--was at least equally high, and higher from a political point of view. but if we want to say that palestinians/arabs (not the same thing) wanted to annihilate israel, then one could make the same case that the zionist movement wanted to annihilate palestinian nationalism, which of course, and quite understandably, it--or, and this is important, most of its senior leadership, as opposed to the mass of the people--did. but where does that get us without contextualizing it vis-a-vis the political strategic goals and calculations on the ground? indeed, much of ben gurioni's genius as a political leader lay in his ability (as opposed to revisionist zionists of that era) to set aside ideological goals, at least for the time being, for more pragmatic strategies.

i should also point out that both pappe and morris have described in their books in detail what arabs/palestinians have done to israel, not just as friedman claims, what israel has done to them. the fact that he uses morris to support an argument for the true aims of the arabs and the driving out of jews from their villages proves that point.

finally, friedman (noah, not thomas) point out that 20 villages and 85,000 jews were displaced as part of 1948. okay, but 587 palestinian villages and 750,000 palestinians were displaced. so what does this number game mean? and the comment that "And, to be fair and as a result of that war, all told 856,000 Jews ended up fleeing from the various surrounding Arab countries, despite their alleged glorious tolerance of other peoples" is also neither fair nor accurate.

it's not fair because once again we're confusing the actions of arab countries with those of palestinians who, despite protestations to the contrary, are not the same people; not accurate because we now know that in many cases the state of israel actively worked to bring jews from arab countries to israel and in many cases jews who didn't want to leave were literally dragged by family members from their homes (this happened often in morocco, the one case i have some detailed knowledge of; see the writings of sami shalom chetrit, the great israeli poet who was born in morocco, for this narrative) to go to israel, or that he israeli government engaged in actions designed to precipitate their flight.

this is not to say that arab states behaved with any dignity or tolerance. but why is it that so many people have to play a zero-sum blame game? why is it either all palestinians' or all zionist/israelis' faults? why can't the complexity and the historical interconnections be accepted? recognizing the misdeeds of zionist/israeli or palestinian leaders no more delegitimizes the state of israel or palestinian nationalism than recognizing the same with american or european leaders delegitimizes the existence of their countries.

let me end with the comment from mr. schoenberg, who writes that "Mr. Levine, I have another question for you. Thomas Friedman has been writing quite a bit about the rise of the Chinese and Indians as far as their economies are concerned. Can you tell me if someone has been writing about the dearth of similar progress in the Arab world aside from their well known corruption. I know they come to the US to get PHD's and then can't do anything at home but still there should be more information out there."

yes, friedman is writing a lot (although i wouldn't take his comments as gospel truth as they are open to an incredible amount of criticism for accuracy and scope. see, among others, david korten's shattering review of his arguments in The Lexus and the Olive Tree). as to your questions: well, hundreds of scholars write about these issues. this is perhaps the number one topic of research today along with issues related to islamist movements of various stripes (moderate to terrorist). the fact that you don't see them in the mainstream press shows the poverty of discourse in the press, not a lack of research among scholars. i don't have time to provide a whole list here. without plugging my new book, 'Why They Don't Hate Us,' i in fact offer among the most detailed analyses of the dynamic you're questioning. for some reason it's cheaper on amazon.com ($13.57) than i can buy it from my own publisher with an author's discount, but that's another story... but if you want a very detailed analysis of the actual historical and contemporary dynamics of middle eastern economies that avoids a lot of economistic jargon, then check out the book...

however, i must take issue with the last sentences. first of all, who's "they" and who says they come to the US only, or that they can't do anything "at home"? there are many countries, particularly in the gulf, where the economy is booming and the need for trained high skill workers is so great that american universities are setting up overseas campuses as fast as they can build them in order to cash in on the need. as for why so many other countries in the region are so screwed economically, i can't get into that in detail here, but would refer you to relevant articles from my website, www.culturejamming.org or chapters 2-5 of the new book. but just briefly, you questions clearly imply that the reason for the problems in the muslim world lie entirely within it. certainly, it's hard to overestimate how corrupt and brutal muslim leaders have been and remain today. but it's equally hard to overstate how damaging have been the consequences and continuing impact of two centuries of european imperialism and more recently american domination of the region. once again, a thorough and accurate understanding only comes from looking at how all the forces related to each other on the ground.