John Kearney: Netanyahu's gift of Mark Twain book to Obama is loaded
In 1984 Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial was published, and Twain's satire, The Innocents Abroad (1869) was thus canonized in the Zionist effort to erase the history of Arabs in Palestine. Peters argued that Palestine was effectively empty until Jewish Zionists came on the scene in the late 19th century, and that Arabs then emigrated from surrounding lands to take advantage of economic opportunities provided by the Zionists. Hence, the Arabs are"arrivistes," have no legitimate claim to be refugees.
Among other"sources," Peters relied on Twain's savaging portrayal of the Holy Land as a filthy, backwards, empty place. Peters makes no effort to contextualize Twain's remarks: namely, that he was skewering nineteenth century America's sacred cows about the glories of Europe and the sacredness of the Holy Land. Twain, it should be noted, also said Greece, Syria and Lebanon are empty. And we now know that in his nonfiction Twain was happy to invent as necessary to fit his tale.
It makes for great entertainment in Twain's book, but it's hardly demographic data. Yet let's suppose that Twain's view of Palestine as"empty" has a grain of truth. Today there are still large, non-agricultural areas in the West Bank and Israel where you can drive and not see a soul (though settlement building of the last decades has reduced such areas.) Twain just hit a few biblical areas, hardly a survey. In Twain's time Palestine was largely a village population coupled with a cluster of cities and towns: Jaffa, Nablus, Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, Hebron.
Peters' thesis has been extensively discredited: by Yehoshua Porath in the NY Review of Books and, even if I'm generally not a fan of Norman Finkelstein's polemical style, he's at his best in his shredding of Peters' thesis in his essay in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. (Needless to say, From Time Immemorial was published by the mainstream Harper & Row and received accolades in the Washington Post Book World, TNR, The National Review, The Atlantic, etc., while Blaming the Victims needed left-wing Verso to get in print.)
There have been additional demographic studies demonstrating the presence of an extensive Arab population in Palestine long prior to the Zionist movement; who has time to go into them now! Even right-wing historians like Benny Morris think Joan Peters and other"people without a land for a land without a people" advocates are shilling tripe. I thought these folks had come around to the idea of, 'Yes, Arabs were here, we kicked them out, and we had a right to do it. Tough shit.' At least that's honest. But when Netanyahu has the audience of Obama, propaganda still reigns.
What's sad (to me) is that Zionism has brought many Jews and non-Jewish Zionists to this level of dishonesty about history. To me it's outrageous that this has occurred and it's outrageous that it's being proffered at the White House -- today. I hope, if Obama opens the book, he's a critical reader.