October 1989, Page 46

Books

Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

Edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, New York: Verso, 1988. 296 pp. $13.95

Reviewed by David Wemple

Several years ago I had the good fortune to interview a former PLO official at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs. I also had the misfortune to ask him about various acts of "terrorism" by the PLO. His outburst took me by surprise.

"Look," he told me pointedly. "I saw an Israeli warplane bomb an apartment building in Beirut, and when the building collapsed into the basement, it crushed to death all of the children who were hiding there. So don't tell me about 'terrorism'!" It was a sobering lesson (albeit secondhand) in how the Palestinian people perceived terrorism. It was certainly not a viewpoint shared by Commentary, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly or other hard-line Israeli beachheads in the US media, nor even by the New York Times, still liberal on so many other issues.

Whenever the Palestinian struggle is raised, the wheel must be reinvented time and again. Aren't they terrorists? Don't they want to push the Jews into the sea? Can you trust these people? It has been said that history is written by the victors. In interpreting Middle East events, however, it is more appropriate to remember Napoleon's assertion that history is a fable commonly agreed upon.

Dehumanization of Palestinians

The extent to which Western, and particularly American, "scholarship" has dehumanized the Palestinian people is nothing short of criminal. In a society which prides itself on freedom of the press, a McCarthyite mentality persists and almost systematically purges the mainstream media of any unbiased view toward the Palestinian people. Only in the past few years have cracks begun to appear in the edifice.

Blaming the Victims stands as a fine anthology of essays exploring the Palestinian issue from the perspective of historical genocide. When a people have been thoroughly dehumanized, it is only a short step to blaming them for their predicament. Ironically, it is a form of victimization which the Jewish people, perhaps more than any other, should recognize.

The book's essays, covering a range of topics from terrorism to the rewriting of Israeli history, offer general readers a rare opportunity to face a side of the Palestinians' history not usually offered on the nation's newsstands. Nor should those who already "know" about the Middle East pass this by. If they have been largely educated through the so-called respectable newspapers and publishing houses, they should be in for a few surprises.

Abuse of Language

How is it that the media, the government, and otherwise respectable scholars continually focus on Abu Nidal and aircraft hijackings while ignoring Ariel Sharon's Special Unit 101, Yitzhak Shamir's LEHI and its 1948 assassination of UN mediator Count Bernadotte, the 1948 massacres at Deir Yassin and elsewhere carried out by LEHI and Menachem Begin's Irgun, and the bombing of the USS Liberty in 1967? Reading Noam Chomsky's essay on "Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System," the answer becomes clearer. As an internationally recognized linguist, Chomsky knows full well the powerful and subtle impact which simple words have on forming images and judgments. Using labels like "terrorism" and "retaliation" makes it easier, he points out, to "exclude the suffering of the primary victims, who are Arab and hence less than human."

When Palestinian forces are continually equated with irrationality, fanaticism and terrorism year after year, it is little wonder that public sympathies are lost. In this case it may be accurate to say that history is written by those adept at public relations, a skill which Israel and its apologists have honed to a fine edge. Much of their success ultimately rests on a skillful employment of one word: terrorism. That single word, writes coeditor Edward Said, "has displaced communism as public enemy number one. It has spawned uses of language, rhetoric and arguments that are frightening in their capacity for mobilizing public opinion, gaining legitimacy, and provoking various sorts of murderous action."

A striking example of the extent to which American "scholarship" has been blinded by selective amnesia is the reception accorded Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial. Her thesis is that Arabs who became refugees in 1948 were not really leaving "their" land, since they were new arrivals who had been attracted by wealth created by recently established Zionist enterprises. Never mind that leading Zionists, in their own memoirs, recorded that the land was inhabited. Joan Peters and others merely defined these inhabitants out of existence. While From Time Immemorial received scathing reviews in Israel and Great Britain, much of the American press slavishly praised its "scholarship," while real US "scholars" chose to ignore its half-truths, lies, and intellectual sloppiness. "The sad truth," writes Said, "is that where discussion of Israel is concerned, the United States is well below Israel itself in norms of truth and methods of debate."

In addition to its hard-hitting essays on terrorism and the 1948 refugees, Blaming the Victims takes on other sacred cows of the Middle East. Christopher Hitchens confronts the allegation that the flight of Palestinians from their homes in 1947 and 1948 was due to Arab radio broadcasts encouraging them to leave their land. Unfortunately, that myth still passes unchallenged in the United States.

Selective Forgetting

Peretz Kidron recalls his work on various memoirs, including those of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in which harsh realities of 1948 were selectively excised from the written record. It was obvious from such writings, Kidron points out, that in ordering the forcible evacuation of Palestinians, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was careful not to commit anything of an embarrassing nature to paper.

The influence the authors of Blaming the Victims have on the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli discussion comes not from sifting through massive archives or squeezing prized interviews out of the principals of 1948. Rather, it comes from redefining the rules of the debate. The essays discuss terrorism, dispossession and scholarly amnesia with a wonderful frankness. The authors refuse to recognize the conventions which prescribe avoidance of certain issues and acceptance of hypocrisy on others. Their conclusions are blunt and disturbing. But, as Henry David Thoreau said, "It takes two to speak the truth-one to speak, another to hear."

David Wemple is a writer on Middle East Affairs based in Albany, NY.

Blaming the Victims is available from the AET Book Club at a discount rate of $10.95 for one and $13.95 for two for Washington Report subscribers.

Children of Gebelawi

By Naguib Mahfouz

Reviewed by Catherine Willford

In 1988, Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arabic-language author to win the Nobel Prize. Often called the "Balzac of Egypt" due to his richly textured depiction of city life and his psychologically nuanced characters, he has also been favorably compared to Dickens and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In Children of Gebelawi, however, he addresses spiritual themes, portraying Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed as average Egyptians. This allegory, written in the style of myths and legends, proved so shocking to orthodox religious sensibilities that it was banned in some parts of the Arab world.

The setting is a Cairo valley, teeming with life, on the edge of a great desert. The alley dwellers are descended from the terrible and all powerful Gebelawi, who unseen and unheard lives in his "big house" and guards the sacred "ten conditions" which are to rule his "children." After his disobedient son Adham is expelled from the tranquility of Gebelawi's garden and exiled to the alley, each succeeding generation is confronted with the challenges of poverty, oppression and despair. Gebelawi is deaf to the cries of his children as they are oppressed by tyrants, both petty and great, who bar them from obtaining their share of his estate.

Each era produces one prophetic leader with a driving vision who leads the alley folk to rebel against injustice. The first, Gebel, frees the people by bringing justice, order and the law. Gebel's sometimes harsh adherence to the law is followed by the humble Rifaa's creation of a new order which venerates the poor and merciful. The final prophet, Kassem, believes in equality for everyone in the alley, justice tempered with mercy, and force to protect these rights when necessary.

After the lives of these three have drifted into the legends of storytellers, a magician named Arafa inadvertently becomes the agent of Gebelawi's death. Arafa tries to overthrow the tyrants who control the alley with a powerful explosive, but he is soon made a pawn of oppressors. Realizing that he cannot be saved by knowledge alone, Arafa warns the rest of the alley that, "Fear doesn't ward off death, but it wards off life."Mahfouz says that the novel shows that civilization cannot be built on science alone, but requires faith and moral values as well.

The issue of choice is a prominent theme. Each prophet has a moment of truth in which he must accept hardship in order to follow his ideal. While the alley dwellers initially choose to follow each prophet, they lack the diligence to adhere to any moral creed. Instead, they revere only dogma and myths.

"Our alley is plagued with forgetfulness," the narrator explains. The lessons imparted by the prophets soon fall by the wayside and greed invariably remains the bane of alley life. Eventually, religious strife among the followers of Gebel, Rifaa and Kassem tears the alley apart. Chaos ensues as the alley dwellers turn against each other; tyrants are once again free to usurp the rights of Gebelawi's children.

The strength of Children of Gebelawi is its ability to humanize religious figures while celebrating their ideals. It recognizes the prophets' common desires for justice, mercy and equality, yet shows how the vision of each builds on the values of his predecessor. For those interested in an Abrahamic, rather than a strictly Judeo-Christian interpretation of humanity's struggle against injustice and its effort to define its relationship with God, this is a work of commentary that is both lyrical and provacative.

Catherine Willford is the circulation director of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Children of Gebelawi is available from the AET Book Catalog, $7.95 for one, $10 for two, for subscribers to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.