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June 26, 2007

A Review of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question

Anne Norton reviews Joseph Massad's new book in The Electronic Intifada:

The title of Joseph Massad's book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians does not do justice to the contribution this book makes to the history of Zionism, Israel, and the Jews. Massad's brilliant and scholarly work is profoundly illuminating not only for the history of Palestine and the discourses surrounding it, but for the history of Europe and the United States and, finally, as an account that raises compelling theoretical questions.

The Palestinian question is important enough to command attention in its own right: the politics of half a century have been moved by shockwaves from this epicenter of conflict. Massad offers invaluable information drawn from an array of carefully documented sources coupled with superb political and historical analysis that contributes directly to the study of Palestine.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:46 AM | Permalink

Comments

Prof. Mossad is in league with the antisemitic counterpunch website where his views have been much praised. He has no more credibility on Arab/Israeli issues then his pal Norman Finkelstein.

Posted by: SLC | Jun 26, 2007 12:46:32 PM

The reviewer seems to have a nice academic job, but given her writing, I am not sure how she managed this. Here is an example. Can you tell me what the heck she is talking about"

"
The core of the work is a careful and compelling articulation of the interdependence of Palestinian and Jewish histories, especially manifest in the dual project of Zionism. Readers within and outside the academy have long recognized the centrality and intensity of the Zionist effort to reshape Jewish subjectivity, creating a "new Jew" to inhabit the anticipated Jewish state. The Israeli of their hopes was to be strong, willful, and landed, capable of self-determination, self-defense, and self-provision. The independence of the anticipated Israeli citizen, the new Jew, reflected an anticipated sovereignty, mastery over the land and its people. It turned on a double subjection: the disavowal of the landless, stateless Jews of the Europe, and of the Palestinians, who were assigned the attributes Zionists endeavored to strip from themselves. The Palestinian Arab became the European Jew: landless and stateless, bearing the traits that had marked the Jew as subject. Massad's reading of the often harsh Zionist texts on Arabs, Mizrahi, and European Jews is careful, marked by scrupulous, well-supported scholarship, and presented with a calm generosity."
Now if you go to the book itself, you will see reviews from Pappe, a now-retired anti-Israeli Israeli academic and the chap from Columbia, whose gathering of anti-Israeli colleagues represen the ME Studies program. As for the Electronic Intifada, the name says it all and might, perhaps be changed to Electronic Jihadist...crap writing on a subject worthy of much better scholarship, either from the Arab perspective or the non-alinged one. Where is Edward Said now that Columbia needs him?

Posted by: fred lapides | Jun 26, 2007 1:49:50 PM

Sure, I can understand what she's saying easily enough. She's saying that Zionism had the aim of convincing Jews that, despite their history in European ghettos, they could become "strong, willful, and landed, capable of self-determination, self-defense, and self-provision," in the project of settling Jews in Palestine. Along with this, Zionism, according to Norton, transferred the opposite, negative predicates to the existing Palestinians, so that they were seen as weak, non-willful, having no title to the land, deprived of self-determination, etc.

I don't know whether this interpretation of Zionism is true or false, or partly true and partly false, but I don't see any problem in understanding what Norton is saying.

Posted by: JonJ | Jun 26, 2007 6:55:04 PM

Anyone whose breast heaves in despair upon apprehending that these people are taken seriously by educated men and women is invited to console him or her self with the scrawlings in that notorious Zionist mouthpiece, the Atlantic monthly:

Martha Gellhorn
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/196110/gellhorn

David Samuels
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200509/samuels

Posted by: Pseud | Jun 28, 2007 5:03:35 PM

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