Steve Tobias: By the Numbers

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I am currently enrolled in a six-week course at Rice University titled, “A Middle East Primer: History and Current Developments at a Crossroad.”

The first lecture by Rice Historian Dr. Lisa Balabanlilar, “The Origins of Islam,” was carefully prepared, well thought-out and excellent. The second lecture, last Tuesday by Prof. Ussama Makdisi, “A Brief History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” was a by-the-numbers exhortation devoid of balance and a sense of fair play.

I must admit, it was truthfully advertised in the course description, promising to be a lecture that dealt with “… the creation of the modern state of Israel in territory regarded by many Arab nations as belonging to the Palestinians.” Indeed, it dealt largely with arguments of why the Jews have no right to the lands that currently comprise the State of Israel.

Without our own Max Blankfeld reminding the lecturer during that Q&A that Jews were the majority occupants millennia ago, all semblance of balance would have been totally lost. I do not begrudge Prof. Makdisi his passionate feelings for the plight of the Palestinians: As the nephew of the late Edward Said, I would expect nothing less. What frustrates me is how he leverages his position at a highly esteemed university to advocate his positions without so much as a pretense of balanced history.

Take, for example, his insistence early in the lecture on repeating (no fewer than four times) the infamous statement attributed to early Zionists: “A people for a land, for a land without a people.” He drove this point home to set the tone for the rest of the lecture, namely to communicate clearly that the early Zionists were self-serving colonialists that denied the existence of any indigenous people.

Yet, had Makdisi chosen to be less of an advocate and more of a historian, perhaps he would have researched the roots of that phrase. If he had, he would have found that the origins were attributable not to European Jews, but rather to American Christian Zionists. These words were first uttered by William Eugene Blackstone in 1881, someone who felt that Palestine was a land without “a people” in the sense of an established nation: He never meant to imply that the land was uninhabited.

More to the point, many scholars insist that this interpretation – largely championed by Edward Said, and now his nephew – is misleading, if not outright disingenuous. One Columbia University professor recently has gone on record as stating that, far from ignoring the existence of Palestinian Arabs, “In fact, the inverse is true. Zionists never stopped debating Palestinian nationalism, arguing with it and about it, judging it, affirming or negating its existence, pointing to its virtues or vices…. The accusation of ‘denial’ is simplistic and disregards the historical phenomenon of a polemical discourse revolving around the central axis provided by Arab or Palestinian nationalism.”

And yet, Manichean simplicity is what Makdisi was selling. His goal obviously was to frame his arguments in terms of colonialism and racism, not balance and objectivity.

The most egregious example of this was his summary of the Peel Commission’s final recommendations. This British commission that was set up to solve the Arab-Jewish problem 75 years ago recognized what many are choosing today to again forget: that a “one-state solution” is not possible, full stop. It recommended partition with population transfer similar to what followed the Greco-Turkish war of 1922. And yet, the extent of Prof. Makdisi’s discussion of this momentous event was to simply list the reasons why this was a bad deal for the Arabs, and how the British consequently appealed to the Arab’s “well-known sense of generosity” to make it happen.

Gone was any mention of the Peel Commission’s profound findings that many Arab complaints largely were unfounded: “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased…. There was at the time of the earlier sales little evidence that the owners possessed either the resources or training needed to develop the land.” Furthermore, the commission found that the main Arab complaint about land shortage “was due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews, than to the increase in the Arab population.”

Did the Palestinian Arabs have reason to reject the Peel Commission’s recommendations as presented? Of course they did, and that part was adequately covered. But, how can Rice expect its undergraduates, graduate students or the community, at large, to gain a fair understanding when only one side is presented?

Rice has a problem, and I think it knows it – or should. When a tenured professor of history presents lecture after lecture with maps boasting the logo of passia.org, a leading Palestinian advocacy group, Rice needs to understand that one of its tenured professors has inextricably conflated intellectual honesty with advocacy, intellectual laziness with stimulating academic challenge.

Steve Tobias: By the Numbers

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