cepekkolodziej
30.12.06, 09:07
Oczekując na nadejście ksiązki Ilana Pappego pt. "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", wasz ulubiony potwór postanowił zapoznać się z tezami innej, wczesniejszej ksiazki. Zgodnie z którą większość palestyńskich uchodźców to w istocie rzeczy niedawni imigranci z sąsiednich krajów arabskich, przyciągnięci do Palestyny przez możliwości awansu ekonomicznego powstałe dzieki prężnemu rozwojowi gospodarczemu kraju, zapoczątkowanemu przez żydowskich imigrantów. W związku z czym ci Palestyńczycy, ktorzy pozostali na miejscu, nie mogą żadna miarą pretendować do roli podmiotu procesów państwowo-twórczych, a to z prostej przyczyny - bo nie są "stąd".
Chodzi o książkę Joan Peters "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine" (1984). Potwór juz od dawna chciał zapoznać się z jakimś solidnie udokumentowanym opracowaniem źródlowym, z ktorego jasno wynikaloby, jaka była sytuacja demograficzna Palestyny przed i po przybyciu do niej pierwszych żydowskich osiedleńców. Czy istotnie - zgodnie ze świadectwem dwu podrózników - Palestyna była jedynie niezaludnioną ziemią pustyń i malarycznych mokradeł? Czy istotnie osiedlający się w Palestynie Żydzi tworzyli dla Arabów nowe miejsca pracy?
Potwór spodziewał się, że znajdzie książkę Peters w dostepnym w necie księgozbiorze wydań elektronicznych. Niestety, nie odnalazł jej tam. Odnalazł natomiast szczegółowe recenzje, z których wynika jasno, że ta wciaż popularna ksiązka jest produktem na zamówienie. Potwór mógłby tu dodać, z przekąsem, że na zamówienie "określonych kół". Mógłby, ale wstrzyma się.
Najobszerniejszą recenzję opublikował w 2002 roku Paul Blair. Oto jej zakończenie:
<<From Time Immemorial is work of propaganda, with all the bad connotations that term carries. Peters' case rests upon distortion and fabrication. Time and again, she misconstrues sources in a tendentious manner. She cribs uncritically from partisan works. She conceals crucial calculations, and draws hard conclusions from tenuous evidence. She speculates wildly and without ground. She exaggerates figures and selects numbers to suit her thesis. She adduces evidence that in no way supports her claims, sometimes even omitting "inconvenient" portions of the citation. She invents contradictions in sources she wishes to discredit by quoting them out of context. She "forgets" undesirable numbers in her calculations. She ignores sources that cast doubt on her conclusions, even when she herself uses those sources for other purposes. She makes baseless insinuations and misleading claims.
Peters' distortions apply, not simply to minor issues, but to the central pieces of evidence for the principal contentions of her book. Her claim that the majority of Arabs in pre-state Israel were recent arrivals is false, as is her related assertion about the vast majority of Palestinian refugees. Her contention that Arab immigrants were filling the places Jews had cleared for other Jews is untrue. Her view that the League of Nations Mandate was intended to make Palestine into a Jewish state has no valid basis, nor is is true that the British created the Transjordan in violation of the Mandate. Peters' claim of a nineteenth-century Jewish majority is misleading at best; her thesis that the first Jewish settlements lured significant numbers of Arabs into Palestine is fiction.
As with all successful disinformation, the distortions are placed within a wider context of truth; not everything Peters says is a lie. Palestine was in fact sparsely populated when Jewish colonization began. Arab nationalism did not yet exist, let alone Palestinian nationalism. When the British took over they unjustly restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine while Arabs immigrated into the territory. After the Arab violence of the late 1930s, British appeasement slowed Jewish immigration to a trickle. Ultimately, Jews who sought to escape the Holocaust were turned away from the Jewish National Home, even while "emergency arrangements" were taken to bring in Arab immigrant laborers. Had Peters let the facts speak for themselves, she would have had a dramatic, compelling story to tell.
But Peters wishes to do more; she wants to destroy, definitively, the claims of Palestinian nationalism--and she wishes to do so without rejecting Jewish nationalism. Thus her focus on demography; the essence of her case is: "The Arabs are latecomers to Palestine and so have less right to be there than the Jews." But torture the numbers as she will, she cannot escape the fact that the Arabs in Palestine in the late nineteenth century outnumbered the Jews. Hence, she contends that those Arabs had no national "identity," that they considered themselves Ottoman subjects or Southern Syrians, but certainly not Palestinians. And if today's Arabs wish to live in a Palestinian state, they should move to Jordan.
Peters' fundamental premise, then, is ethnic nationalism. Why else waste ink trying to show, in essence, that the Palestinians are not the descendants of the Canaanites, who inhabited the land before the Israelites arrived? Such arguments are utterly pointless. Ethnicity entitles no one to a state--not Arabs, and not Jews either. The right of sovereignty does not reside in numerical superiority or "peoplehood" or a "continuous presence in the land" or "ethnic self-determination"; it rests on a government's respect for individual rights. Once such a government exists, no ethnic separatist has any valid claim against it.
Peters' book does not simply distort the facts, then; it is a philosophically repugnant enterprise from the start. Ethnic nationalism has produced most of the wars in the last half century; Arab opposition to Israel rests largely on the same foundation. The doctrine of ethnic self-determination has no valid intellectual basis; given the bloodshed it has caused it deserves not respect but unequivocal repudiation.>>
Potwór sądzi, że z ostatnim zdaniem wypada się zgodzić, bez zastrzeżeń.
www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2135
