He Doesn't Get It

Steve Erlanger's book review of Rashid Khalidi's "The Iron Cage" (see below for excerpts), is adequate enough to tell the potential reader what is in the book but he is either too weak or too unwilling to deal with the claims the book makes regarding actual history.

What is lacking is the fundamental dividing line between Jews and Muslims, Zionists and Palestinians: do Jews have a primary claim to the land based on history, residence, culture, religion, judicial and other elements?

When Balfour refused to recognize any nationalist rights of Arabs, did he do so becuase he was anti-Arab or did not know what rights the Arabs could claim or was it because he knew that the Jews had a better claim in that area of the Middle East - as simple as that.

And was the collapse of the Pal. war and communal effort as result of overwhelming Jewish strength or, again simply, becuase Pal. society was a fiction and it fell apart because it wasn't really there in the first place?

Erlanger just doesn't get it or know it.

My opinion you know by now.

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October 7, 2006
Books of The Times
Assessing the Role Palestinians Have Played in the Failed Bid for Statehood
By STEVEN ERLANGER

Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, “The Iron Cage,” is at heart a historical essay, an effort to decide why the Palestinians, unlike so many other peoples and tribes, have failed to achieve an independent state. To Mr. Khalidi’s credit, the answers are not very comforting to Palestinians, whose leaders have often made the wrong choices and have not yet built the institutional structures for statehood.

He often contrasts the weakness of Palestinian decision-making, especially before 1948, with the more organized behavior of the Jewish population of British Palestine, known as the yishuv.

At the heart of the book is his anguished question about what the Palestinians call al nakba, the catastrophe — “why Palestinian society crumbled so rapidly in 1948, why there was not more concerted resistance to the process of dispossession, and why 750,000 people fled their homes in a few months.”

Mr. Khalidi has his own set of external culprits: British colonial masters like Lord Balfour, who refused to recognize the national rights of non-Jews; lavish financial support for Jewish immigration; the romanticism and cynicism of Arab leaders, themselves newly hatched from the colonial incubator.

Like Britain before it, he argues, the United States “consistently privileged the interests of the country’s Jewish population over those of its Arab residents,” helping Israel to push “Palestinians into an impossible corner, into an iron cage” from which, he suggests, a viable Palestinian state may not, in the end, emerge.

But he has plenty of blame for the Palestinians, too — for the rivalries among rich Palestinian families who competed to serve their colonial masters, for leaders who failed to see the impact of Hitler on Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine, for those who mismanaged the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt against the British and especially for Yasir Arafat, who, along with his colleagues in Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, has a special place in Mr. Khalidi’s pantheon of Palestinian failure.

...Whatever the justice of history — if the notion of justice can be applied to history at all — it is useful for Americans to understand that at the beginning of the 1930’s, Jews made up only 17.8 percent of the population of British Palestine, and annual Jewish immigration was declining to only a few thousand a year...Even in 1948 there were 600,000 Jews to 1.4 million Arabs in British Palestine, and Arabs owned nearly 90 percent of all private land.

Jews did not begin the fighting, but from March to October 1948, slightly more than half the Arab population — 750,000 people, Mr. Khalidi estimates (and his footnote on the topic is well worth reading) — fled, were forced to flee or were expelled from areas that became part of the new state of Israel.

...In a long introductory essay, “Writing Middle Eastern History in a Time of Historical Amnesia,” he insists that at almost every stage, Palestinians “were the weakest of all the parties engaged in the prolonged struggle to determine the fate of Palestine” and “remain considerably less powerful by any measure than the forces that stand in the way of their achieving independent statehood.”

He is overly defensive about choosing to analyze Palestinian failures, but his book represents a brave response to Palestinians who see themselves only as victims...