A Fact Falsifier and An Adulterator of History

Nimer Sultany is Senior Lecturer in Public Law, the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London and a member of its Center for Palestine Studies. Sultany expresses an affinity and identification with "radical left theoretical thought and radical left practice". At that Center, a graduate student, and undergraduates as well I would presume, 

will develop an understanding of Palestinian history, political structure, development, culture and society. 

As for Israel, insight into the school's agenda perhaps could be gained from what Sultany published in one of his early articles on Israel's Supreme Court, he paraphrases David Grossman's, The Yellow Wind, writing of "occupation" that

With one stroke, the West Bank becomes Judea and Samaria, Nablus becomes Schem, al-Khalil turns into Hebron, and the Occupied Territories become the Area, the administered Territories or the Territories. Language becomes a mechanism to disguise and conceal the reality, a mechanism to present an alternative reality by giving it new packaging.

I would maintain that that semantic sleight-of-mind is exactly what the Arabs-called-Palestinians have done and do to Eretz-Yisrael.  By the way, Nablus is the Arabic pronunciation of Neapolis, the Roman name for Shchem, just as Filastin is the approximation in Arabic pronunciation (the language has no 'P' sound) of Palestina, the Latin term the Romans awarded vanquished Judea.

He now has an essay, in Critical Legal Thinking — Law and the Political" no less, which attacks Zionism as imperialist, non-democratic, illiberal nationalism, settler colonialism, etc., and challenges liberals when he writes

modern day-liberals deny the Palestinians’ the ability to meaningfully resist their servitude

There is much too much there to fisk and illustrate the lack of academic integrity, factual presentation and historical misrepresentation, like the "illiberal and anti-democratic genesis of Zionism" (whatever that means and as if 'Palestinian Arab' politics are somehow democratic and liberal), but I did comment on one assertion of his. I wrote:

I am still digesting all this but at the end you mention a Palestinian "right of return". Two points:

a. is there truly a "right" of return or but an option; the other being compensation?
b. since UN 190 originally was to be applied to "Palestine Refugees" (not "Palestinian Refugees" as if only Arabs somehow were to be numbered) which, of course, included over 10,000 Jews (20,000 if the Jews forced to move from their homes during 1920-1948 due to an Arab campaign of ethnic cleansing are counted), can not Jews make an equal-value claim for a right to return to Hebron, Gaza, Shchem, etc., where Jewish communities had existed, many for centuries and even before the Arab conquest and occupation of 638 CE?

Basing himself on Hannah Arendt, Sultany states that "the fertile ground for the rise of Zionism" was predicated on "the secularization of European Jewry" and "anti-Semitism and the rise of assimilated Jewish intelligentsia." If I am to fathom that, am I to understand that religion, culture and a 3000-year history the Jews possessed had little if anything to do with Zionism? No tribal federation, kings, priests and prophets in Eretz-Yisrael?  I can relax knowing Sultany will not accuse me of Biblical messianism?

Totally out of time and place, I think he is somewhere in the 1920s, he again seeks out Arendt to justify his racism, his ignorance and his prejudices:

Arendt (The Jewish Writings 180-181, 354) points out that “Zionism has never been a true popular movement..."

That is not true. With the majority of Jews in Israel, it patently is not true. Even then, the Bund, Zionism's main competitor for the "gasse", the Jewish street, was down and out in Soviet Russia. The waves of post-1948 waves of immigration also prove Arendt wrong then and surely today.

He purports that Zionists who seek to separate between 1967 and 1948, between consequences and origins, err in that they are engaged in "reducing the ongoing nature of the settler colonial enterprise into an event". So what were the Jews in Eretz-Yisrael doing when they revolted in 132 CE under Bar Kochba's leadership, in 363 CE when they responded to the permission decree of Justinian to rebuild the Temple, in 400 CE when they finished redacting the Jerusalem Talmud and on and on throughout the 1800 years of loss of political sovereignty when, despite that situation, the lived, immigrated to, planted and built prior to the appearance of political Zionism of Herzl.

How much is a professor at a London university allowed to lie, fabricate and mislead?

Two leading anti-Zionists are praised as having provided "cool-headed warnings". Quite the academic terminology there.

And how does he 'prove' Zionism is "colonialism"?  In part by quoting Moshe Hess, "a founder of Labor Zionism" [?], who 

envision[ed] in his Rome and Jerusalem (1856) “the founding of Jewish colonies in the land of their ancestors”

as if the term "colonies" had anything to do with the charge he is making against a people returning to the land of its fathers and mothers, as if the League of Nations knew nothing about this when they wrote in its 1922 Mandate decision that

recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country; 

Sultany, his students should know, is but a cheap propagandist, a falsifier of facts and an adulterator of political, social and cultural history.

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