Steven Erlanger reviewed Rashid Khalidi’s new book in Saturday’s New York Times: “The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood” (Beacon Press, 2006). Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at
Erlanger — a Times reporter who reports frequently from Gaza, and whose access to future journalistic sources (not to mention his personal safety) might be jeopardized by a poor choice of words — diplomatically describes the book as “more of an analysis than an exercise in original research” (translation: not a work of scholarship). But the following sentence from Erlanger’s review appears to give the book a scholarly patina:
Jews did not begin the fighting, but from March to October 1948, slightly more than half the Arab population – 750,000 people, Mr. Khalidi estimates (and his footnote on the topic is well worth reading) – fled, were forced to flee or were expelled from areas that became part of the new state of
Israel.
That must be some footnote, to be singled-out in the midst of a book review. From Erlanger’s sentence, you might think it sheds light on how many Arabs (a) fled on their own, (b) were forced to flee by the Arab leadership, or (c) were expelled by the Jews (as Jews were expelled in 1948 from all the surrounding Arab countries).
Well, let’s look at the footnote together (page 225, footnote 3). It is a little different from what you might expect. Here is the footnote in its entirety:
The exact number of Palestinian refugees in 1948 is difficult to ascertain, and has long been highly disputed. Contemporary UN estimates put the figure at over 750,000, while Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1, writes of “some 600,000-760,000” refugees. The first figure given by Morris is low; the latter is probably closer to the truth. Morris’s book, which drew on the newly opened Israeli archives to dispel some of the most tenacious myths regarding the Palestinian refugees, has become the standard work on this topic. See also Morris’s 1948 and After, rev. ed. (
Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1994. Norman G. Finkelstein argues convincingly that Morris fails to draw the requisite conclusions from the damning evidence he assembles: see Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict ( London: Verso, 1995, 51-87. Among the first to publish results of research in the Israeli archives regarding the Palestinian refugees that reached conclusions similar to those of Morris were Segev, 1949, and Flapan, The Birth of Israel, published in 1986 and 1987, respectively.
There are three things that are apparent from the footnote: First, contrary to the implication in Erlanger’s sentence, the footnote does not estimate how many refugees fell into each of the three categories. If a significant portion of the Arabs either fled on their own or were forced to flee by the Arab leadership, the 750,000 figure is obviously misleading.
Second, the sources cited in the footnote are not exactly current. Benny Morris’s book “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem” was published in 1988. The other cited sources were published in 1986, 1987, 1994 and 1995. Hasn’t there been more recent scholarship in the last decade?
Third, there is in fact a particularly important recent source — and one that Khalidi is undoubtedly aware of — that is curiously omitted from the footnote. In 2004, Benny Morris published “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” based on new documents released since his initial book 18 years before.
At the time “Revisited” was published, Benny Morris wrote an article about it in the January 14, 2004 issue of The Guardian, entitled “For the Record.” Here is a key excerpt:
Birth Revisited describes many more atrocities and expulsions than were recored in the original version of the book. But, at the same time, a far greater proportion of the 700,000 Arab refugees were ordered or advised by their fellow Arabs to abandon their homes than I had previously registered. It is clear from the new documentation that the Palestinian leadership in principle opposed the Arab flight from December 1947 to April 1948, while at the same time encouraging or ordering a great many villages to send away their women, children and old folk, to be out of harm’s way. Whole villages, especially in the Jewish-dominated coastal plain, were also ordered to evacuate. There is no doubt that, throughout, the departure of dependents lowered the morale of the remaining males and paved the way for their eventual departure as well. . . .
[T]he problem wasn’t created by the Zionists but by the Arabs themselves, and stemmed directly from their violent assault on
Israel. Had the Palestinians and the Arab states refrained from launching a war to destroy the emergent Jewish state, there would have been no refugees and none would exist today.
So the well-worth-reading footnote cites a refugee number that is misleading, since it does not estimate how many were encouraged or ordered to flee by their own leadership; even Khalidi’s overall figure may be overstated, given Morris’s 2004 figure of 700,000.
Indeed, when you look at the text in Khalidi’s book surrounding the footnoted portion, you find this bald assertion: “Israel’s new historians, using Israeli, British, United Nations, and other archives opened since the early 1980s, have shown these claims [that “Arab leaders told the Palestinians to flee”] to be groundless.” (Page 3). Khalidi allows only that in “a few areas” noncombatants were urged to flee, and that “some” fled “before the fighting reached them.” There is no footnoted reference to Morris’s 2004 book there either. Even a book that is “more of an analysis than an exercise in original research” should cite the original research that contradicts the "analysis."
In the end, the significant part of Erlanger’s sentence is not the reference to the faux-scholarly footnote, but rather the grudging admission at the beginning of Erlanger’s sentence: “The Jews did not begin the fighting, but . . .”
The fundamental responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem obviously lies with those who did begin the fighting, in an attempt to wipe out the Jews instead of living with the U.N. resolution granting the Jews a sliver of a state, and who advised and ordered the “noncombatants” to get out of the way so their genocidal project could proceed.
But you won’t find that basic point in either Khalidi’s book or Erlanger’s review. The book, tendentious from page one on, is another depressing contribution to the literature on a problem that could have been solved by the Palestinians in 1937 (Peel Commission), 1947 (UN Resolution), 1978 (Israel-Egypt peace treaty Appendix), 2000 (