The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

We are told that Avishai Margalit [NYR, June 28] is a Professor of Philosophy, and yet his notion of appropriate analogy is—to say the least—defective. In reviewing Chomsky’s book I had raised the question as to whether an alien immigrant population of European Jews, claiming communal or national rights in Palestine, on the basis of what God said and what an imperial power had promised them, could ever have avoided a clash with an indigenous Arab population already resident there, and unanimously against a Jewish homeland being set up on what they considered to be their land. This, says Margalit, is a nasty racist question, rather like Enoch Powell denying “colored people” the right to enter Britain. To the best of my knowledge, the blacks who were formerly British colonial subjects (and milked by Britain for centuries) make no claim to set up a black commonwealth in Britain nor, so far as I know, have they acted to drive out 65 percent of the resident population, as a prelude to occupying and ruling the whole of the British Isles, nor, to the extent that I have read and heard, is there any black leadership asserting that 2000 years ago London was promised to black residents of Uganda or Jamaica. Nor finally, has any black movement taken over Britain and legislated a Right of Return for all blacks everywhere while at the same time denying any such rights to the dispossessed and excluded inhabitants.

Any analogy between Arab Palestinians and British racists could therefore only be the result of an ideological deformation so strong as to distort even a philosopher’s thinking. Put this down also to what is often referred to as the Zionist dream, although why anyone should now dream in so dishonest and tediously pious a manner as Margalit’s is puzzling. The dream doubtless explains Margalit’s unattractively self-congratulatory mode, especially the way he goes on about Israeli democracy. It’s symptomatic of course that he makes no mention of the 650,000 Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, who are second-class “non-Jews.” The merest honesty would have compelled some acknowledgement of the basic problem: that the imposition of a rigid distinction between Jew and non-Jew has led to the numerous crises which Margalit has done an ineffective job of glossing over.

Edward Said

Columbia University

New York, New York

To the Editors:

I have always admired Avishai Margalit’s courageous and principled stand on the Arab-Israeli conflict, as indicated by several references in my book The Fateful Triangle, which he reviewed in the June 28 issue of The New York Review of Books, including one that only he would have been able to identify (p. 146). I was therefore disturbed by his severe misrepresentation of what I wrote, and more important, by a perspective on the central issues that I would not have expected on his part.

Margalit begins by stating that “we Israelis should, I believe, plead guilty to many of Chomsky’s charges. Not to the charges as he states them, but to something not altogether unlike them.” To demonstrate my alleged failure to state the charges correctly he cites the events at Khan Yunis in 1956, where, he writes, “Israel was involved, according to the UN chief inspector, General E.L.M. Burns, in the massacre of at least 275 people.” Margalit has two objections to my reference to this massacre (there was another, at the Rafah refugee camp in the same area, with 111 reported killed, which he does not mention). First, he says that “knowledgeable Israeli sources” believe that the 275 figure “is too high.” Second, “What is missing from this account, however, is the fact that each of the persons who were shot was identified as a fedayeen (or terrorist, in Israel’s current jargon)….”

Here is what I wrote: “The Israeli occupying army carried out bloody atrocities in the Gaza Strip, killing ‘at least 275 Palestinians immediately after capturing the Strip during a brutal house-to-house search for weapons and fedayeen in Khan Yunis’…” (the quote is from Donald Neff, Warriors at Suez). The Israeli claim is not “missing from this account.” Margalit agrees that these “executions” were “evil.” One may imagine the reaction had Israelis been slaughtered in this manner by an Arab army after an attack on Israel. In this case, the facts were suppressed for many years and are now barely known.

The figures derive from Henry Labouisse, the American director of UNRWA, who received names of 275 people killed “from sources he considers trustworthy,” including “UNRWA employees, both refugees and others.” The source for information on the 111 victims at Rafan 9 days later is the same. General Burns, commander of the UN Truce Supervision forces, commented that this furnished “very sad proof of the fact that the spirit that inspired the notorious Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 is not dead among some of the Israeli armed forces.” I also cited corroboratory reports by the head of the Gaza observer force, Lt.-Col. R.F. Bayard of the US army, and by the editor of Al Hamishmar, Mark Gefen, who was an eyewitness to atrocities including wanton killing, for example, the murder of a doctor at Gaza hospital by an Israeli soldier. At Khan Yunis, Gefen was “shocked” to see “bloody bodies on the ground, smashed heads…no one bothered to remove them…I was still unaccustomed to the sight of a ‘human’ slaughter house….” He reports that atrocities continued until “Ben-Gurion himself gave orders to stop the looting, murder and robbery.”

The Israeli army (IDF) claimed that people were killed in the course of resistance to their “screening operations,” but the UNRWA reports and Moshe Dayan’s diaries deny this claim. Note that Margalit’s “fact” that “each of the persons who were shot was identified as a fedayeen” is denied by the official Israeli account, as well as by the reports cited. In fact, it seems that the army simply went on a rampage after the conquest. My own comment was that “It is an unfortunate fact that occupying armies often behave in this fashion [footnote citing examples], but then, they usually do not bask in the admiration of American intellectuals for their unique and remarkable commitment to ‘purity of arms.”’

One might add that “knowledgeable Israeli sources” have been notoriously unreliable, as in the case of other states with regard to their own atrocities. Recall, for example, Ben-Gurion’s pretense that the 1953 Qibya massacre was not committed by the IDF, or Moshe Sharett’s outraged denial of Egyptian charges concerning Israeli terrorism in Egypt in 1954 (which he knew to be accurate), and so on until the present, e.g., Israel’s official claim that 340 civilians were killed and 40 buildings destroyed in the bombing of Beirut.

Margalit observes that this is “one of many unpublicized cases of Israeli brutality that Chomsky mentions.” I also pointed out that across a broad spectrum of American opinion, it has regularly been claimed that “moral sensitivity is a principle of political life” in Israel and that the IDF “has from the start been animated by the same righteous anger and high moral purpose that has guided Israel through its tumultuous history” (New York Times, Time); these fables are regularly contrasted with often outright racist denunciation of Arabs (Palestinians in particular) for their violence and brutality. This pattern of deceit has been exploited with great effectiveness to enhance the vast US contribution to oppression, terror and war, with a persistent threat of superpower confrontation. I also emphasized the hypocrisy of criticism of Israel on the part of Americans who, in effect, are paying Israel to carry out the crimes that are described as flaws in this unique and magnificent record, when they become too visible to suppress. The point is not a minor one.

This is the sole example that Margalit offers to show that my account is inaccurate. Note that when his misrepresentation of what I wrote is corrected, then his conclusions are essentially the same as mine (apart from his faith in “knowledgeable Israeli sources,” whatever the evidence to the contrary). This, in fact, is characteristic of his review, throughout.

Margalit’s account of my discussion of the diplomatic history is similarly flawed. He claims that “to Chomsky, the Palestinians’ readiness for recognition [of Israel] is evident. The evidence, for him, is the unanimous decision in April 1981 by the PLO National Council to adopt Brezhnev’s explicit proposal that ‘it is essential to ensure the security and sovreignty of all states of the region including those of Israel.”’ I do indeed cite this case, not however as “the evidence” that the PLO is ready to recognize Israel, nor even as “evidence” that it is (nothing is said here about recognition), but merely as one example of a long record of peace initiatives by the PLO and the Arab states of varying sorts.

Margalit then writes: “Another piece of evidence that Chomsky considers is the open pronouncement by the Palestinian leader Issam Sartawi that the PLO’s readiness for recognition of Israel was ‘crystal clear.”’

Turning to the facts, first, the pronouncement was not by Sartawi but was a joint statement by Sartawi and Mattityahu Peled, whom Margalit admires as “an honorable man,” one of the “good guys” (Margalit suggests that I suppress the fact that Peled and Meir Pail were in command positions during the 1956 massacres because they are on my “list of good guys”; the charge is false and baseless). Secondly, my comment on the Peled-Sartawi statement just cited is that it perhaps “exaggerates the clarity of these [PLO] declarations.” Thus it is Margalit’s “good guy,” Peled, who states that the PLO position is “crystal clear,” while I question the fact. One might note, incidentally, that Sartawi was a high-ranking PLO official while Peled, his Israeli counterpart in peace efforts, has no standing in Israeli politics.

I added that while the PLO position is not as “crystal clear” as Peled suggests, “there is no doubt about the general drift of policy of the PLO and the Arab states, the ‘panic’ that this has regularly inspired in Israel [citing Amos Elon], and the reaction of dismissal or simply denial of the facts in the United States.”

This exhausts Margalit’s discussion of my treatment of the diplomatic history. He then concludes that while there were “signals” from the PLO, “they were accompanied by too much surrounding noise…. Chomsky hears only the signals….” This charge is false, as the very case he cites demonstrates when his misrepresentations are corrected. Throughout, I present the record as it is, noting ambiguities and “noise.”

In this connection, Margalit cites a statement by Farouk Kadoumi that Israel would eventually have to accept the PLO plan for a democratic secular state, nothing that “This statement does not appear in Chomsky’s book.” Similarly, many statements by leaders of Labor rejecting a political settlement with the Palestinians—now or ever—do not appear. I do, however, point out that the “dreams” of PLO leaders do not pose a barrier to negotiations and political settelement any more than Ben-Gurion’s long-term plans for a Jewish state including Transjordan and southern Syria and Lebanon ruled him out as a participant in negotiations in the 1940s—and one can cite more recent and current examples. As I noted, my account is by no means exhaustive, though it does suffice to establish the falsity of the propaganda that is accepted with little question in the US.