And Now For Some Facts

[eyl]

I've been intending to write a critique of & Walt's recent paper. When I read it, I noticed some massive errors of fact and logic. However, given the paper's length, I don't really have the time to do so at the moment (I'm already stuck on one thesis without adding another:)) so I'm opting to post a few articles which make some of the points I wanted to make (I stil hope I'll find the time to write my on critique in the near future)

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And Now For Some Facts (free subscription required)

This is an article by Benny Morris - who was one of the sources cited in the paper (something he seems to be incensed by). It's rather long, so instead of posting an excerpt, I'll list the issues he tackles, and anyone interested in the details can read the article. He challenges the following points:

1 - That Israel had both a numerical and qualitative (in terms of materiel) advantage over the Arab forces in 1948 and 1973, as well as during the current intifada*.
2 - That the pre-state Zionist leadership (the Yishuv) was not interested in a two-state or binational solution.
3 - That it was a longstanding and core policy of the Yishuv to expel the Palestinians culminating in 1948.
4 - Their characterizations of the (ultimately failed) negotiations prior to the intifada.
5 - That the British favored the Yishuv over the Arabs during the Mandate.
6 - Some other points to which he devotes a sentence or two each.

*Regarding the latter, Israel of course has a significant advantage, but Morris points out - for reasons which I've independently pointed out in the past, here - that that advantage is not as great as is often portrayed, since short of driving out or killing the Palestinians en masse, Israel can only bring a limited amount of force to bear.
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Is the "Israel lobby" distorting America's Mideast policies?

A fairly sympathetic critique, which also looks at the reason for some of the reactions to the paper.
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Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt “Working Paper”

I'm aware that many people here have a problem with Dershowitz; but most of the points he makes here (albeit not much of his interpretation and expansion of those points) tally with my own criticisms of the paper

[barb162]

1. Eyl, can you check the link for the Morris article

or provide the title of the article. It doesn't seem to be working; I have tried a few times. I have read the last two (Salon and Dershowitz) and they're excellent. Thanks

[Behind the Aegis]

2. Here ya go, Barb..

http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=20060508&s=morris050806 :)

There is also an article in the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401282.html

[barb162]

3. thank you!

I just tried eyl's link just now and it still is a non-working link

[eyl]

4. Yeah, looks like I mispelled the URL. Sorry

For anyone else reading this, "And Now For Some Facts" is the article title.

[eyl]

5. While I agree with Cohen

that the paper is shoddy work, I don't agree that it meets the burden of proof for me to consider it motivated by anti-semitism (at least not without supporting evidence*). It does, however, echo various and time-honored anti-semetic tropes; given that, it should have been done a lot more carefully. It seems to me, rather, that they belong to that section of thought which assumes in advance that Israel is at fault in everything (though I don't know Walt's "record" on Israel, Mearsheimer was one of the signatories of an "Urgent Warning" that Israel would use the invasion of Iraq to expel all the Palestinians; something that speaks well of neither his understanding of Israel or his analytic abilities). That, and their apparent refusal to address the flaws in their paper, is something I find rather intelectually odious.

*Though, there's a part of me that doesn't want to believe an academic institution like Harvard could produce such poor work without being motivated by bigotry (or bribery, or something of the kind) :)

[pelsar]

6. eyl...

whats so strange about the paper is that its so sophmoric....done by professors at such institutions. Can you image a paper written by a freshman student in polysci where misquotes a statesman" to give a meaning which is precisly the opposite of what the statesman meant?

the prof would throw the student out "on he ear" yet this is exactly what these two did....


two interesting examples;


Golda Meir
‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’” This reference to Meir is obligatory in Israel-phobic polemics of this sort, and I believe the requirement has been formally codified and is carved in stone somewhere. In fact, Meir said no such thing, even in the original interview from which the professors’ “famously remarked” quotation supposedly originates. In the longer version of their article, the authors cite (footnote 39) as their source for this information page 147 of Rashid Khalidi’s book Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. Therein Khalidi, whose name the professors misspell, quotes Meir as remarking that “There was no such thing as Palestinians…. They did not exist.’” In fact, contrary to Walt and Mearsheimer’s misquotation of Khalidi’s misrepresentation, what Meir in fact stated (in an interview with The Sunday Times in 1969), in response to being asked if she considered “the emergence of the Palestinian fighting forces, the Fedayeen, an important new factor in the Middle East” was the following observation:

Important, no. A new factor, yes. There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian State? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and than it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s distorted rendering of this observation does not even pass the smell test, much less verification of the actual sources they cite. Furthermore, writing in the New York Times in 1976 (January 14, page 35) Meir stated:

To be misquoted is an occupational hazard of political leadership; for this reason I should like to clarify my position in regard to the Palestinian issue. I have been charged with being rigidly insensitive to the question of the Palestinian Arabs. In evidence of this I am supposed to have said, ‘There are no Palestinians.’ My actual words were: ‘There is no Palestine people. There are Palestinian refugees.’ The distinction is not semantic. My statement was based on a lifetime of debates with Arab nationalists who vehemently excluded a separatist Palestinian Arab nationalism from their formulations.

Yet even in the original interview, as cited by Walt and Mearsheimer via their recycling of Khalidi’s parsing, it is clear that Meir was referring to Palestinian nationhood and not Palestinians in general, whose existence she clearly acknowledged both in that comment and in everything else she ever said about them.

Sadly, this Meir “quote” and its myriad permutations have become a prized staple of anti-Israel propaganda, even though Meir never expressed such an idea and even corrected—in the New York Times, no less



Ben Gurion
similar.....



http://theblueoctavonotebooks.blogspot.com/