Rallying Points

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 21 · 26 November 1987

From Edward Said

SIR: When he complains of David Shipler’s ahistorical and acontextual attitude to the Palestinian-Zionist conflict. Shlomo Avineri (LRB, 1 October) himself requires a historical and contextual gloss. He first asks us to imagine an analogous book written in 1945 by an American journalist about the poor defeated Germans, who, he hints, would be a preposterous object of sympathy. In other words, the Palestinians today are like the defeated Nazis. He then marches on to show how Shipler has no grasp of the context of Palestinian terrorism. True, he says, the Palestinians did have their Deir Yassin, but don’t forget that the great secret of Palestinian history is that the largest number of Palestinians killed was during 1936-39, when ‘thousands’ of moderates were murdered by the Mufti’s gangs. So not only are we to suppose that Palestinians and defeated Germans are equivalent, but that the real destruction of Palestinian society – the subsequent dispossession and displacement of the people, their continuing occupation by the Israeli military – is the responsibility of the Palestinians more or less totally.

Avineri writes as if we all live in a world constructed by Israeli propaganda. There is by now an ample library of Israeli historical scholarship which makes it plain that the Zionists never wanted to compromise with the Palestinians, or any of the Arabs for that matter. Moreover, this scholarship (by Beni Morris, Tom Segev, Simcha Flapan and others) shows that the Zionists pursued a course of terror and forced exodus with regard to the Palestinians, who, so far as conscripted regulars were concerned, were far outnumbered by the Zionists, who had considerable outside support. So much, then, for Israeli innocence and Palestinian guilt.

I find it outrageous, but typical, that Avineri makes his allegation about Palestinian gangs and moderates without a shred of evidence to support his point. The notion of thousands of Palestinians being killed by their compatriots is entirely made up by Avineri. The leading Israeli authority on the Palestinians, Yehoshua Porath, refers to the various killings that took place during the great Palestinian General Strike and Revolt, but there is no talk of ‘thousands’. Every Palestinian historian of note quite openly mentions these political killings – surely common during every colonial war, regrettable though it may be – but never is the figure anything more than a few, perhaps a few hundred. See, for example, Kayyali’s Palestine: A Modern History, or the more recent critical study by Philip Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem. The Survey of Palestine for the period lists 3,074 killed, most of them by the British and by Zionists. See the best Palestinian analysis of the period in Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, Appendix IV, ‘Note on Arab Casualties in the 1936-39 Rebellion’.

Doubtless Avineri’s preferred history is that which allows us also to forget that in 1982 he was not only fully in support of the Israeli invasion, but was actually briefing the Army on the desirability of entering West Beirut as a way of destroying the PLO in order to set up a compliant leadership inside Lebanon: (For more details see the open letter to Avineri by Meron Benvenisti, Ha-Aretz, 22 July 1982.) Are we to view his approbation of Hanna Siniora and of Palestinian rights in the same way, or is there another context he would prefer us to use?

Edward Said
Columbia University, New York

Vol. 9 No. 22 · 10 December 1987

From Shlomo Avineri

SIR: Professor Edward Said (Letters, 26 November) does not dispute my contention about internal Palestinian Arab terrorism during 1936-39: where we disagree is about the number of Palestinian moderates murdered by their compatriots. While I mentioned the figure of thousands (LRB, 1 October), Said maintains that only ‘a few, perhaps a few hundred’, were killed. I will not dwell on the apparent moral callousness on the part of a person of Professor Said’s stature in referring to a few hundred people murdered as ‘a few’. The point it that all historians of the period – including Yehoshua Porat, whom Said cites – agree that the Mufti and his supporters conducted a systematic campaign of intimidation and assassination against those moderate Arab leaders in Palestine who did not go along with their policies. That it is difficult to ascertain the exact figures of those assassinated and wounded is only natural in a situation of internal civil war: it is very difficult to assess the exact figure of people killed in the last decade in the Lebanese civil war. But there is no doubt that internal Arab Palestinian terrorism was a widespread phenomenon. Among those assassinated by the Mufti’s supporters were Khalil Taha, Chairman of the Arab National Committee of Haifa; Nasser ed-Din, Deputy Mayor of Hebron, and Michel Mitri, Secretary of the Arab Workers Association of Jaffa.

There were unsuccessful assassination attempts on many other moderate leaders, who subsequently were forced to flee to neighbouring countries. Among them were the Mayor of Haifa, Hassan Shukry, and two of the most prominent leaders of Nablus, Ahmed Shak’a and Suleiman Abdul Razak Toukan. In the collective memory of Palestinian Arabs this bloody phase of their history is deeply ingrained, and still casts its shadow over the present willingness of Arab moderates on the West Bank to come out into the open. My criticism of David, Shipler’s account of the Palestinian consciousness was his total ignorance of this dimension of the collective memory of the Palestinian Arab community.

In making the analogy with a hypothetical book about post-World War Two Germany, I said that ‘all analogies have their limits and the Palestinians are obviously not the occupied Germans.’ I wonder why a person of Edward Said’s acquaintance with textual analysis chose so cavalierly to overlook this explicit statement. I would similarly suggest to Said that he study more carefully the statements I myself made during the Lebanon War, which admittedly put many of us in Israel in a difficult position. I would certainly not claim that all of us made the right choices all the time. But my own views were clearly stated in a number of articles, both in Israel and abroad (in Ma’ariv of 4 July 1982 and 26 August 1982, and in the Los Angeles Times of 20 August 1982). I said explicitly that I had grave doubts about the war and that I would not have started it, but that whatever its outcome, but especially if the PLO would have to give up its ‘state within a state’ in South Lebanon, Israel should now offer the Palestinians a peace based on an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

Professor Said is one of the more eloquent and sensitive spokesmen for the Palestinian cause, and as such he commands a lot of respect among those Israelis who look for conciliation and compromise. Personally I hold him in great esteem as a scholar and a patriot. It was therefore with a saddened heart and great disappointment that I read his strident letter: it unfortunately gave expression to the same moral absolutism which led the Palestinians to their tragedy under the Mufti in 1947-48. Those of us in Israel who look for a compromise with our Palestinian neighbours know that nobody holds a monopoly of being absolutely in the right in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Edward Said, on the other hand, feels that the Israelis can do no right and the Palestinians can do no wrong. Such a Manichaean view does not lead to peace and reconciliation, but tends to exacerbate hatred and discord. I pray for the day on which Edward Said and other Palestinian intellectuals of his stature would occasionally be as critical of some aspects of Palestinian policy as many of us in Israel are critical of many aspects of our own country’s policies, past and present.

Shlomo Avineri
Hebrew University, Jerusalem

From Brian Johnston

SIR: The evident bad faith with which Shlomo Avineri (LRB, 1 October) proffers his preposterous analogy – the dispossessed Palestinians as the Germans of Europe in 1945, with the Mufti of Jerusalem as their Hitler – betrays the desperate need of Zionists to sustain an exculpatory mythology in the face of the public’s growing awareness of the nature of their ideology and its practices, past and present. In such mythography, the slaughters by the Zionist terror gangs, with their avowed program of the dispossession of a native people, and later the massive IDF onslaughts against a refugee population, can ethically be cancelled out by the fragmented and ill-equipped reprisals of the dispossessed against their oppressors: much as if the actions of the European underground movements were to be equated with those of the Wehrmacht. Avineri tries not to demonise the victims of Zionism, but he is in much the position of Claudius trying to pray in Hamlet. He deplores Zionist terrorism but, as an Israeli, is ‘still possessed/Of those effects for which’ the terrorists and the IDF performed their terrorism. His claim of equivalence for the actions of oppressors and oppressed, occupiers and occupied, reveals that he inhabits the same realm of ethical casuistry and historical distortion more crassly colonised by Zionism’s less discreet apologists.

Brian Johnston
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

Vol. 10 No. 1 · 7 January 1988

From Shlomo Avineri

SIR: Reading Brian Johnston’s intemperate and hectoring letter (Letters, 10 December), it became clear to me that he never read my review of David Shipler’s book beyond its first paragraph. Had he continued to read, he must have noticed that after postulating the analogy with the imaginary book about post-World War Two Germany, I explicitly state that ‘all analogies have their limits, and the Palestinians are obviously not the occupied Germans after World War Two.’ Could I have said it more clearly? But apparently Johnston marches to his own drummer. Similarly, on the more substantive issue of the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations, Johnston conveniently overlooks my explicit statements: that I oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, that I am against putting up Jewish settlements there, and that ‘I look forward to the day when Israelis and Palestinians negotiate an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories … and the Palestinians are able to live under a government of their own choosing.’ On what ground can one deny the Jews the same rights of self-expression and self-identity claimed by every other group aiming at self-determination? Of course the Palestinians are entitled to self-determination: but so are the Jews of Israel, and those two claims have to learn to live with each other, politically expressed in two states, an Israeli and a Palestinian or Palestinian/Jordanian one. I am sure Brian Johnston has a more elegant term by which he would like to cloak his wish to deny the Jews in Israel the same right to which all national groups – be they Irish Catholic, Palestinian Arab or South African Black – are entitled. But the racist undertones of his denial cannot – and should not – be overlooked. Just as Palestinian terrorism (which should be criticised) cannot detract from the Palestinian right of self-determination, so Israeli policies (which I have criticised myself more than once since 1967) cannot detract from the same Jewish right.

Shlomo Avineri
Hebrew University, Jerusalem