Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History by Norman G. Finkelstein & Norman Finkelstein

Author:Norman G. Finkelstein & Norman Finkelstein [Finkelstein, Norman G.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Human Rights, Israel & Palestine, Historiography, Judaism, Social Science, Jewish, General, Anthropology, Religion, Cultural & Social, Middle East, Political Science, History
ISBN: 9780520249899
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2008-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

8

Blight unto the Nations

IN THE CASE FOR ISRAEL, Alan Dershowitz maintains that Palestinians accrued tangible benefits from the Israeli occupation. “[T]he Israeli occupation, unlike any of the other current occupations,” he writes,

“has brought considerable dividends to the Palestinians, including significant improvements in longevity, health care, and education. It has also brought about a reduction in infant mortality” (p. 161). Let us leave to one side that Dershowitz never specifies to what other “current” occupations he’s comparing the Israeli one (arguably, there aren’t any) and that, historically, many other peoples, perhaps most, under foreign occupation accrued some benefits. It is correct that, especially in the early years of the occupation and by standard indices, Palestinians enjoyed a measure of prosperity. However, the overarching framework of this prosperity merits close scrutiny. But first it warrants recalling that Palestinians during the British Mandate period also arguably accrued significant benefits from Jewish settlement. The authoritative 1937 British Royal Commission (Peel) Report, after careful sifting of the claims and counterclaims, concluded: “[B]roadly speaking, the Arabs have shared to a considerable degree in the material benefits which Jewish immigration has brought to Palestine.”1 Yet 1. Palestine Royal Commission Report (London, 1937), pp. 125–30 (cf. p. 241).

190

BLIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS 191

these benefits vanished, as it were, overnight when the Zionist movement ethnically cleansed Palestine in 1948. It would be one thing if the ethnic cleansing were circumstantial—that is, unanticipated and undesired. But the growing consensus among historians is that the putting of the Palestinian Arabs to flight was premeditated, indeed, deeply entrenched in the Zionist goal of creating an overwhelmingly Jewish state in a territory overwhelmingly non-Jewish.2 From this perspective, it’s a moot point whether or not Palestinians during the Mandate benefited from Jewish settlement: prosperity was an ephemeral moment in their eventual, planned dispossession. The same basic principle applies to the initial years of Palestinian prosperity in the West Bank and Gaza.

As individual Palestinians briefly experienced relative prosperity, crucial resources and huge swaths of their territorial base were being alien-ated while their indigenous economy was being methodically and premeditatedly destroyed, now standing on the verge of total collapse.

In an important study, Sara Roy, a Harvard-trained political economist and currently senior research scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, argues that the distortions of the Palestinian economy under Israeli occupation go beyond those typical of colonized and otherwise externally dominated territories.3 This is because Israel’s fundamental aim hasn’t been to exploit but rather to dispossess the Palestinians, clearing as much of the Occupied Territories as is feasible to make way for exclusively Jewish settlement. The vagaries of the Palestinian economy, including “a decade of rapid economic growth”

and “marked improvements in the standard of living,” must be seen, according to Roy, in the context of its “de-development”—that is, Israel’s systematic expropriation of crucial Palestinian resources for Jewish settlement, on the one hand, and the dispossession and denationalization of the Palestinians, on the other. If, as Dershowitz claims,

“the Israeli occupation [is] unlike any of the other current occupations,” it’s for reasons rather different than those he cites.

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