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> This story was written before the current crop of revisionist
> history blurred the truth (just check out current Encyclopedia
> Britannica; the Post's Eye on the Media, etc.)
and Collier's Encyclopedia...
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Collier's Capitulates to Middle East Revisionism
Collier's Encyclopedia, a general reference work published by Macmillan
Educational Company and widely used in public libraries as well as by
individuals, joins the Britannica in allowing its pages to be filled with
spurious Middle East history. Rashid Khalidi contributed the "Palestine,
Modern" segment, a new entry added in 1991, and Zachary Lockman wrote the
"Israel" section. Neither are likely candidates to produce impartial
accounts of Arab-Israeli events.
Khalidi is an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team, president of
the pro-Arab Middle East Studies Association, and frequent media spokesman
for the Palestinian perspective. His description of "Palestine, Modern" is a
crude assault on truth commencing with a passage that asserts the prior
existence of a Palestinian state. "During the first half of the 20th century
the term `Palestine' applied to a state for three decades, starting in
1917...[In 1948 the Palestinian Arabs] rejected the plan to partition their
country." Trusting Collier's readers will, as Khalidi intends, wrongly
conclude that a sovereign Palestinian Arab state once existed. The intent in
misrepresenting these facts is to bolster present-day demands for a state -
charging Jews with having stripped Palestinian Arabs of their nationhood.
Khalidi excludes any statements, particularly by fellow Arab historians,
that fly in the face of his rendition. Thus he omits the words of George
Antonious whose 1939 The Arab Awakening described the status of Palestine:
"Except where otherwise specified the term Syria will be used to denote the
whole of the country of that name which is now split up into mandated
territories of (French) Syria and the Lebanon, and (British) Palestine and
Transjordan." That is, a vast Arab polity called Syria was seen as
encompassing not only the small notch of western Palestine but all of
modern-day Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. No separate Palestinian state was even
imagined.
Philip Hitti, another leading Arab historian, was emphatically in
agreement with Antonious when, in 1946, he denounced the increasingly
prevalent usage of the term "Palestinian," which referred, as everyone very
well knew, to the Jews of Palestine. Like all Arabs he considered Palestine
a nether province of Syria when he insisted "..there is no such thing as
Palestine in history, absolutely not."
In further effort to discount legitimate Jewish claims to Israel Khalidi
writes, "...on Nov. 2, 1917, while British and Arab forces were fighting to
conquer Palestine from the Turks, the Zionists obtained a promise, published
in the form of a letter from Balfour to Lord Rothschild, that the British
government would support `the establishment in Palestine of a national home
for the Jewish people.'"
But it was Palestinian _Jews_, not Palestinian Arabs, who fought alongside
the British to throw off Turkish rule in Palestine. In the summer of 1917
Britain had formed a Jewish Legion which aided British and Australian units
in driving out the Turks. Palestinian Jews also assisted in vital
intelligence gathering behind enemy lines. Presumably, Khalidi has maligned
the Jewish role in freeing the land from Turkish rule because such evidence
of devotion and sacrifice is inevitably damaging to Palestinian claims of
prior, more authentic nationhood. All the more devastating to the Arab case
that Palestinian Arabs did not, in fact, exert the same effort.
Similar calculated malformations of fact litter the Collier's account of
immigration to Palestine and Jewish land purchase. Khalidi cites floods of
European arrivals, many "illegal," who are said to have overwhelmed,
displaced and, in general, worsened the lot of the indigenous inhabitants.
The facts are otherwise. The author omits the large legal and illegal
immigration of Arabs into Palestne between the world wars. This parallels
his silence on the myriad Arab immigrants of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In this censored history there are likewise no "Arab
colonists," only Jewish ones, although as many as 100,000 Arabs poured into
Palestine from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and even Sudan
during the period of the British Mandate, in response to the rejuvenation
wrought by Zionist development.
Wage scales in Palestine, particularly for Arab peasants in fledgling
industries and in agriculture, were higher than anywhere in the region and
advances in health care brought reductions in infant mortality. Within
Palestine Arabs gravitated to areas of Jewish development; the Arab
population in Arab towns grew only slightly between the wars (Gaza's actually
decreased), but the number of Arabs in such predominantly Jewish cities as
Jerusalem and Haifa leaped by 97% and 216% respectively. Information such as
this is excluded by Khalidi, it hardly need be said, because it conflicts
with the view that Zionists brought devastation to the Arabs rather than
opportunity.
The political record in Khalidi's account is similarly shaped to emphasize
Arab victimization and to minimize Arab responsibility for failure and
violence. Thus, the 1937 Peel Commission proposing partition is described
without noting the Arabs rejected it while the Jews accepted it. Arab
instigation of the 1948 War is obscured in the statement that, "Fighting
between Arabs and Jews in Palestine _broke out_" [emphasis added]. Passed
over in silence are the exhortations of Arabs such as Azzam Pasha, Secretary
General of the Arab League, who declared on May 15, 1948, "This will be a war
of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the
Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
The description of the Six Day War is a similar distortion. Khalidi
writes of "a cycle of provocation, retaliation, threat, and escalation that
culminated in June 1967 in a new war between Israel and the Arab states."
Censored out is the magnitude of frenzy and aggression toward the Jews
stirred by Arab leaders, the declarations of Palestinian Arab leaders that
the annihilation of the Jews was at hand, the mobilization of Arab armies,
including the massing of 100,000 Egyptian soldiers and 1000 tanks in the
Sinai, the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba, and other acts of war.
The pervasive masking of Arab aggression and violence produces a
particularly surreal picture of the PLO. Khalidi notes "vicissitudes"
endured by the PLO in Lebanon "as a result of civil warfare in which it was
deeply involved..." The PLO was, of course, a primary cause of that bloody
civil war! Not a single instance of the organization's calculated murder of
innocents and wreaking of global mayhem is cited. Khalidi refers only
elliptically to the gruesome record: "After the early 1970's, the mainstream
PLO groups - Fatah, the PFLP, and DFLP - almost exclusively concentrated
their attacks on targets in Israel and the occupied territories, while
dissident factions, generally backed by Arab regimes at odds with the PLO,
carried out bloody attacks against Israeli, Jewish, and other civilian
targets in Europe and elsewhere." Khalidi speaks here in the true voice of
the PLO, which has historically disavowed murderous deeds committed by member
factions. Thus, the PLO disclaimed both the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre
and the 1985 Achille Lauro terror attack, though both were carried out by the
organization. Moreover, Khalidi's bland assertion that the PLO eventually
confined itself to "attacks" within Israel's borders conveys nothing of the
atrocities perpetrated, including the mass murder of school children at
Ma'alot, but implies rather that the shift in tactics was a sign of
moderation.
In addition to the spurious history of Collier's "Palestine, Modern"
section is the spurious history in the "Israel" entry, authored in this case
by Zachary Lockman, a particularly vituperative critic of Israel and
erstwhile member of the advisory committee of the notorious "Jewish Committee
on the Middle East" (JCOME). Alongwith fellow advisor Noam Chomsky, Lockman
has attached his name to numerous public advertisements proclaiming "Just say
NO to Israel." The ads have charged Israel with "killings, torture,
repression, intransigence, double-talk" and called for a cessation in support
for the country. JCOME laments that Israel "threatens to stigmatize Jews
everywhere."
Lockman's "Israel" entry reflects precisely this tone of malice toward the
Jewish state. The legal system, he charges, offers only token freedoms, the
government alienates and subordinates Israeli Arabs and confiscates their
land, and women are subject to "gender stereotypes." Lockman parrots
throughout Arab attacks on Israel's legitimacy. He presents Arab rejection
of the 1947 partition plan this way: "...the United Nations had no right to
give away most of Palestine to a minority...[ie: to the Jews]" He joins
Khalidi in charging that Israel engaged in systematic "expulsions" of Arabs
and omits any mention either of the documented pleas by Jews that Arabs
remain in the new state or of the Arab literature of the late 1940's and
1950's that acknowledges Arab responsibility for Arab flight, a literature
produced before Arab leaders realized the propaganda value of blaming the
Jews.
Lockman's enmity prompts peculiar emphases, as in his repeated references
to Jews emigrating from Israel or choosing not to immigrate to Israel. His
point, apparently, is to demonstrate how intolerable life is in that nation.
The fact that some percentage of immigrants to any nation are unable to
adjust and move elsewhere is, of course, unmentioned. Israel is blamed for
the broken diplomatic ties with African countries after the 1967 and 1973
wars - even though Arab states were the aggressors in those wars and even
though the African nations were effectively blackmailed into breaking ties.
Lockman claims African states (all of them dictatorships of one kind or
another) were offended by Israel's "aggressive and expansionist" policies.
In myriad instances Israel is falsely blamed for inciting otherwise
peace-loving Arab leaders to resort to aggression. Thus, Egypt's Gamal Abdel
Nasser is said to have shunned guerilla activity against Israel until
suffering an unprovoked February 28, 1955, attack by Israel on an Egyptian
army base in Gaza. Lockman explains that "This humiliating blow marked a
turning point..." In fact, Israel was forced to respond after the murder of
an Israeli bicyclist near Rehovot on February 25, by an Egyptian commando
unit, the twenty-seventh Egyptian penetration in six months. Nasser had
supported terrorist attacks against Israel from the moment of his ascension
to power in February, 1954, vowing "to erase the shame of the Palestine War."
Venting antagonism toward Israel may be appropriate in the opinion pages
of a political journal, but Lockman's personal views and bizarre
misrepresentations of fact are unfit for the pages of a responsible,
mainstream reference work. Collier's has done an inestimable disservice to
the millions of readers, among them perhaps a generation of children, who
look to it for honest information.
Andrea Levin
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Protest Middle East Revisionism
1. Write to Collier's to protest its erroneous and distorted history of
Israel and the Middle East.
Bernard Johnston, Editor in Chief
Colliers's Encyclopedia
866 Third Avenue - 9th floor
New York, NY 10022
Tel: (212) 702-7000
2. Let your local public library and school libraries know that
Collier's information on Israel and the Middle East is not accurate.
Urge them to consider acquiring, instead, the Encyclopedia Americana
whose entries are far more reliable.
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Copyright (c) 1994 by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting
in America. All rights reserved. Permission granted to reproduce this
information without changes or additions to individual stories, segments
or articles. Reproduction may be in either mechanical or electronic
form, provided that this copyright statement is included.
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