Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question by Edward W. Said (Editor), Christopher Hitchens (Editor)

From the Publisher

Since the 1948 war which drove them from their homeland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence.

Beginning with a thorough expose of the fraudulent assertions of Joan Peters concerning the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948, the book then turns to similar instances in Middle East research where the truth about the Palestinians has been systematically suppressed: from the bogus -- though still widely believed -- explanations of why so many Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, to today's distorted propaganda about PLO terrorism. The volume also includes sharp critiques of the wide consensus in the USA which supports Israel and its territorial ambitions while maintaining total silence about the competing reality of the Palestinians.

International Journal on World Peace

[M]akes a significant contribution to the literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by providing documented material and insightful analyses.

Publishers Weekly

The aim of these exhaustive, detailed essays and book reviews is to highlight what Said, a professor at Columbia, calls in his introduction the ``grotesque, almost parodistic garishness'' of pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian scholarship in the West, particularly in the U.S., where, he says, ``it is as if even the narrative of Palestinian history is not tolerable.'' In one piece, Said examines the reception of Joan Peters's book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine, which argues that most of the Arabs in Palestine in 1948 were recent arrivals from other parts of the Arab world: despite widespread enthusiasm in the U.S., the book was greeted with embarrassed disavowal in Israel and a critical thrashing for shoddy methodology in Britain. Hitchens, a columnist for the Nation, attempts to debunk the longstanding Israeli argument that Palestinians left their homes in 1948 because Arab governments made broadcasts urging them to do so, not because Israelis forced them out. Noam Chomsky maintains that in the 1980s, in the U.S., terrorism as applied to the Middle East ``refers to terrorist acts by Arabs, but not by Jews, just as `peace' means a settlement that honors the right of national self-determination of Jews, but not of Palestinians.'' Other contributors argue that there was an Israeli policy in 1948 of expulsion of Arab civilians, discuss the characteristics of Palestinian population over the centuries, and so on. This is a challenging book. (January)

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