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Commentary's scurrilous attack on Edward Said
Enemies are calling him "the Palestinian Tawana Brawley," but Said's stories of displacement and diaspora are true.

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By Christopher Hitchens

Sept. 7, 1999 | Israeli schoolchildren returned to their desks this year to find a new history curriculum. In place of the self-pitying and self-justifying standard story about the War of Independence, with its David and Goliath mythology and its deceitful propaganda about how the Arabs of Palestine were not expelled but were told by their leaders to flee, the updated texts acknowledge that Zionist forces were actually quite well prepared for combat by 1947, and that those same forces often dispossessed and drove out the Palestinians.

These admissions, which come perhaps a little too late to be termed magnanimous, at least reflect a new confidence and a new candor, born -- at least in part -- from the recognition of Palestinian existence that results from the Oslo accords. (Many of the same recognitions were on show in Israeli TV's 50th anniversary documentary series last year, a series it would be nice to see on an American network.)

This wholesome and overdue revision, of course, does not sit well with the sympathizers of that traditional Zionist revisionism -- the militantly chauvinist variety advocated by Vladimir Jabotinsky and his followers. Resentment against Israeli "concessions" and Palestinian claims remains very intense, and has just found expression in an essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity. Sarcastically entitled "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," it appears in the September issue of Commentary under the byline of one Justus Reid Weiner of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

After a claimed three years of research into Edward Said's own account of his and his family's history, Weiner alleges:

1. That Said did not live in a house owned by his family in Mandate Palestine, and was not expelled.

2. That he did not attend St George's School in Jerusalem.

3. That as a boy he lived instead, and was educated, in luxurious conditions in Cairo.

4. That he has never tried to bring any claim for compensation for the "loss" that he did not really suffer.

The implication -- made explicit not just by Weiner but by some extremely hasty and cheap seconders in the conservative tabloids -- was that such myth-making by Said discredited the entire Palestinian "narrative" of diaspora and dispossession. But it takes only about three minutes to demonstrate that Weiner's three years were a malicious waste of time.

. Next page | Who decides whether Said is Palestinian?



 

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