Mideast Media Sampler 12/13/2011

From DB:

1) Invention
Newt Gingrich's comment about the Palestinians being an invented people has been much discussed. (See memeorandum for more.)

Barry Rubin writes:

Yet again I don’t see this point as very significant. What’s important is whether a large portion of the people in question believe that they are a people. Moreover, the same “invented” charge has been made against the Jewish people by Stalin and of course by Arab and Islamist propaganda.

The fact that today, a Palestinian people does exist doesn’t give the Palestinians a right to invent history, of course.
ABC News didn’t point out that they regularly claim a history of two thousand years or more. And Golda Meir was pointing to the fact that the dominant politics of the Palestinian movement certainly as late as 1945 was a pan-Arab nationalist one. If the “invention” of a Palestinian (Arab, Muslim) people is relatively recent, though, that does imply that they don’t have a claim to everything between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And that’s what’s important.

Daniel Pipes adds:

Everyone from the PLO to a Mitt Romney spokesman jumped on Gingrich for this assertion, but he happens to be absolutely correct: no Arabic-speaking Muslims identified themselves as "Palestinian" until 1920, when, in rapid order this appellation and identity was adopted by the Muslim Arabs living in the British mandate of Palestine.

At the New Yorker, David Remnick attacked Gingrich and made this observation:

It should also go without saying that radical and bigoted polemicists on the other side of the Arab-Israeli dispute have their own pseudo-scholarship—their own numbing, often anti-Semitic, tracts—which make the case that Israel, and the Jewish people, are alien and have no claim on the land.

Those "radical and bigoted polemicists on the other side" represent the mainstream view of Fatah, the supposed moderate faction of the Palestinian Authority. Article 20 of the PLO's charter states:

The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

One may claim that the Palestinians rewrote their charter, but that doesn't change the fact that this is still a belief held by many in Fatah. Palestinian Media  Watch quotes from a recent article by the PA's ambassador to India:

"The demands of this enemy [Israel] are strange and amazing demands, unique in the history of conflicts... They [Israelis] are not satisfied with Palestinian recognition that is a function of their state and its existence, but want recognition of the eternal right of Israel to exist. Possibly their nature will bring them to ask for compensation for the years that have passed without their state's existence, during the time it had the right to exist upon our skulls... They have a common mistake, or misconception by which they fool themselves, assuming that Fatah accepts them and recognizes the right of their state to exist, and that it is Hamas alone that loathes them and does not recognize the right of this state to exist. They ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist] enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist... Hamas, Fatah and the others are not waging war against Israel right now for reasons related to balance of power. 

There are no two Palestinians who disagree over the fact that Israel exists, and recognition of it is restating the obvious, but recognition of its right to exist is something else, different from recognition of its [physical] existence."

And this of course the premise behind Mahmoud Abbas's refusal to accept a Jewish state.

"They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state," Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

Remick claims "some people ... cannot accept, or even deal rationally with, the claims of Palestinians." I wish for once he and others like him would acknowledge that there are those who cannot deal rationally with the claims of Israel, and that includes the mainstream Palestinian political leadership.

Barry Rubin's argument about inventing history is also relevant here. Palestinians claim that they've already compromised and need not do more.

On November 15, 1988, the Palestinian National Council, then led by late President Yasser Arafat, declared the independence of the State of Palestine within the 1967 borders. This was the historic Palestinian compromise: we accepted that our state would exist on only 22 percent of our historic homeland. Israel responded by colonizing more of our land and entrenching its control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

Critics of Israel like Remick, accept this at face value and demand that Israel meet the Palestinian demands. According to these critics any Jew in the 22% of "historic" Palestine is a "settler" who has no right to be there. In other words, Remick, effectively accepts the premises of the "radical and bigoted polemicists" that he criticizes.

This, of course, encourages ever more Palestinian resistance to making peace.


2) Anti - Israelism

Asaf Romirowsky on Israeli academics who cannot deal rationally with Israel:

In its response, the BGU administration claimed that the department was structured to differ from traditional political science departments by offering a multidisciplinary perspective. Unfortunately, according to Israel Academia Monitor analysis, the department failed to execute this policy as illustrated by the roster of tenured and tenure- track faculty, which shows that a majority of professors specialize in various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict with an emphasis on what is termed the subjugation and mistreatment of the Palestinian and Arab- Israeli population. This peculiar reading of a multidisciplinary approach stems from the political activism of neo-Marxist faculty members who have coopted similarly minded scholars.

This is one issue that few people focus on. Israel's critics aren't simply critics. They condemn Israel not seek its betterment.

3) Sargent at arms

Greg Sargent notes that Two top think tanks may cut ties with former AIPAC spox for calling critics `anti-Semitic’. ( I have no idea that these two think tanks are top. I've never heard of one of them. But the story's much better if it's spun that way.)

Two top think tanks in Washington are mulling whether to sever ties with a controversial former AIPAC spokesman after it emerged that he was encouraging conservative writers to echo charges that critics of Israel are guilty of anti-Semitism, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

The fate of the former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, will be a big deal to people in left-leaning foreign policy circles in Washington. For them, the question of whether the think tanks will remain affiliated with Block will be seen as a referendum on the larger issue of whether demeaning Israel critics as anti-Semitic will be considered acceptable discourse among foreign policy experts.

Block stirred a lot of discussion and anger among foreign policy types when Salon reported last week that he was shopping “opposition research” on bloggers critical of Israel to friendly neoconservative journalists. Salon said that Block threw around accusation of anti-Semitism on a friendly listserv, calling on others to “echo” and “amplify” his efforts to “attack the bad guys.” The Salon story came after Block accused writers at the left-leaning Center for American Progress of writing “borderline anti-semitic stuff.”

What's odd is that Alana Goodman observes that the Center for American Progress (CAP) has "scrubbed" its website of references to "Israel firstsers." In other words, CAP effectively acknowledged the correctness of Block's charges. (Sargent, not known for his candor, didn't mention the "Israel first" terminology until he posted an update noting that one of  the bloggers charged by Block had pleaded ignorance.)

As I noted above Israel's critics often go a lot further than simply criticizing Israel; they condemn it and question its legitimacy. For Sargent there's nothing wrong with that. He even notes at the end of his original post:

It also sheds light on how intense the battle over what it means to be “pro Israel” has become, now that left leaning groups are mounting a serious challenge to the reigning and long unchallenged Washington consensus about what that term means.

Sargent has been here before, claiming that it is really Israel's critics who are pro-Israel. But after 18 years of peace negotiations during which Israel has made significant material concessions and taken substantial risks, only to get 3 terror wars and continued assaults on its legitimacy in return,  it's the critics who insist that Israel is fundamentally at fault for the failure of the peace process who have to show that they really have Israel's best interests at heart.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Middle East and Newt Gingrich and Media Bias.