Above is a photo of the copy of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi that I received from a bookseller based in the United Kingdom. This was surprising, as I had ordered the not-terribly-easy-to-find 25th anniversary edition of The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden. The correct title was on the packing slip with the incorrect book, though the box it came in was sized to the paperback and not the large-format hardbound I ordered.
I contacted the seller to say that for the time being, I was presuming that this was an error, rather than a political message from someone in their fulfillment center, and I asked them to address the matter. One of their sales representatives responded swiftly, off-hours, and with evident mortification. They apologized with express intentions to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again. I was able to return the Khalidi book at no cost to myself and they furnished the book I purchased.
That said, if this was a mistake, what are the odds? It wasn’t a different book by Roden. It wasn’t another cookbook nearby. There are millions of nonfiction books on politics, and the one sent to me just happened to be a self-described “History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance” pertaining to “Palestine,” as it is called by they who want to see the Jewish homeland destroyed and handed over to the distant descendants of Arab settler colonists who arrived after the foundering of Roman colonization in the region. Point in fact, prior to 1964, the only people calling themselves Palestinians were Jews.
Frankly, it’s easier to imagine some disgruntled warehouse drone seeing an order slip from someone named “Einspruch” for something called The Book of Jewish Food and deciding to stick it to him. Beyond that, it’s hard to grasp his thought process. Was he thinking that I would receive the Khalidi book, forego my desire for the cookbook and the thirty dollar difference between them, and sit down to take in the progressive view of Israel? He didn’t even send a Middle Eastern cookbook in its stead, which would have been a more interesting statement, though maybe he got confused when he learned that Claudia Roden had written one as well. (I’d like to own that too.) But now I’m speculating.
I had planned to let it go unremarked upon, but this morning I read the open letter to PEN America from 600 writers and poets demanding that the organization “release an official statement about the 225 poets, playwrights, journalists, scholars and novelists killed in Gaza and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.” Again I was struck by the curious substitutions.
The letter never mentions Hamas or the Israelis whom Hamas is still holding hostage. There is no inventory of the Israeli writers and poets murdered on October 7.1 And those were in fact murders, of civilian targets, by terrorists.
Those dead by Israel’s military reply in Gaza would be better described as killings. Every death by war is a tragedy and the distinction makes no difference to the killed. But those writers were not hunted down like the attendees of the Supernova rave and the kibbutzniks living near Gaza. They had the misfortune of being a part of the civilian infrastructure through which Hamas intertwined its military operation, for the purpose of maximizing civilian death in any attack on that operation.
Proportionality has a particular meaning in war: it is the minimum retaliatory force necessary to ensure that no attacks recur. Israel’s response has been proportional, and that proportionality is resulting in outsize Palestinian death thanks entirely to Hamas’s war strategy. Palestinians fleeing to safety at the urging of the Israeli military, which is trying to minimize civilian casualties, have been shot in the back by Hamas fighters. This does not at all bother Hamas’s leadership, who are billionaires living in Qatar.
Israel, for all its imperfections, is not a genocidal project. Hamas is. The most expedient military option for Israel would be to write off the hostages and carpet bomb Gaza into the hundreds of thousands of casualties. They do not because Jews value life. Hamas wants to annihilate Israel, but it doesn’t have the military capability, the numbers, or even the support of much of the Muslim world.
Their belligerence is known and regarded with dismay all over the region. Fighters on behalf of the Palestinian cause have killed targets in Egypt and tried to assassinate the King of Jordan twice. The barrier that Egypt mounted on their border with Gaza makes the wall that Trump wanted look like a white picket fence. It has three tiers of concertina wire on it. The one-state solution, in which Jordan takes back the West Bank and Egypt annexes Gaza, is rejected by both countries respectively because neither wants to absorb the associated political chaos. Even the long-faithful Saudis have misgivings about them. In 2020, Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud said to the press, “The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful.” The Saudis and the Israelis were in normalization talks when October 7 happened. There are suspicions that the talks prompted it.
The open letter complains that
On January 31, PEN America chose to platform Mayim Bialik, a person committed to the racist ideology of Zionism. In doing so, PEN is perpetuating dangerous, fascist views and offering tacit approval for the Zionist, racist and genocidal regime.
Bialik’s detractors wanted PEN to deplatform her. When they did not, because they support free expression, one of those detractors attempted to stop Bialik’s presentation by haranguing her from the audience. This is called the Heckler’s Veto, and PEN rightfully removed her, because, again, they support free expression. Yet this is how the signatories characterize the situation:
Rather than defending Jarrar’s right to free expression, PEN America violently dragged her out of the event by her audience chair, and threatened her with state violence, stating that if she did not silence herself the Los Angeles Police Department would be summoned to silence her.
Are you following this? They think it’s free expression when Bialik is deplatformed, and failing that, when someone prevents her from speaking. Conversely, the person who tried to stop her presentation, by being removed from the room, was supposedly silenced. What curious substitutions.
Israel is a racially diverse country, and despite its primary commitment to Judaism, is religiously diverse as well. Two million Muslims live there as citizens, out of a population of nine million. It is a democracy, and an especially contentious one at that. They who want her destroyed are much closer to being racists and fascists. When Israel returned Gaza to local control in 2005, the locals elected Hamas, who proceeded to kill off its rivals and suspend further elections. While many Muslims live in Israel, no Jews live in Gaza. In fact Israel removed Jewish settlers from Gaza as part of the ‘05 deal. There should be no question about which is the racist regime. There should also be no question of what kind of regime Hamas would institute in democracy’s stead. Women and homosexuals who signed the PEN letter, take note.
As for American backing, that would be a more damning charge if the United States had not also supported various Palestinian projects to the tune of billions of dollars. That’s leaving aside all the American aid that went to Hamas via the United Nations. Too, the Biden administration unfroze billions of dollars of Iranian assets weeks before the October 7 massacre, and afterward labored ridiculously to quash the conclusion that one had something to do with the other. Much of the aid to Israel goes toward the Iron Dome, because it’s in United States’ interest (in theory) to avoid the kind of ground war that’s going on now. There’s a principled case for cutting off everyone—Israel, the Palestinians, the UN, everyone—but that isn’t what the signatories are calling for.
Despite the fact that three-quarters of polled Palestinians were found to support the October 7 pogrom, I feel enormous pity for the Palestinians, for having been born into a supremacist ideology that exaggerates Islam’s worst tendencies and maximizes them for the political gain of plutocrats. But the signatories of the PEN letter, as well as the signatories of the Artforum letter, are like a mini-nation of those disgruntled warehouse drones, dully thinking one move into the future. Why do they not consider consequences? My pity exhausts; I can’t fathom the hebetude.
The concept of microagressions should never have been seriously entertained. But now that it has, sending a pro-Palestinian tract to the purchaser of a Jewish cookbook, or frothing about the “Zionist, racist and genocidal regime” because Israel does not so loathe itself that it will supplicate terrorists for the return of its criminally abducted citizens, is more outlandish than any microagression, and easily and rightfully labeled as Jew-hatred. If that unfairly implicates some good-faith critics of Israel, and more Jews than I would wish, too bad. Let them distinguish themselves from the bigots, if they can.
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It seems that no one has bothered to form one. I am tracking the artist victims of October 7, of whom I know two: Chaim Peri, 79 years old and a hostage, and Inbar Haiman, abducted and murdered at 27, her body not yet returned.
Thank you so much for this perceptive and powerfully-written post. Regarding artists who have thus far been largely ignored: I have been trying to bring attention to the Israeli writers taken hostage or murdered by Hamas on October 7, including hostage Amiram Cooper (https://www.timesofisrael.com/musicians-read-sing-and-strum-to-poems-of-hostage-amiram-cooper-84-as-worries-mount/); hostage Oded Lifshitz (https://www.timesofisrael.com/taken-captive-oded-yocheved-lifshitz-drive-gazans-to-hospitals/); and Judih Weinstein Haggai, who was murdered October 7 and whose body is being held by Hamas (https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israeli-american-judith-weinstein-was-murdered-on-oct-7-her-body-being-held-in-gaza-kibbutz/).
Again, thank you.
I read a medium-length piece by Khalidi at one point -- trying to be open-minded -- and it was basically, "Never mention any fact at all that might make the Palestinian side look bad."
Well yes, if you run down a long list of everything that Israel's done, without ever mentioning anything that Israel's enemies have ever done to provoke these actions, it seems pretty shocking. And if you're a 20-year-old kid who literally knows nothing, it must be easy to get swept up in all of that.
But come on, whatever happened to having basic intellectual integrity and self-respect? I can respect people who weigh the balance and find it tilting in one direction or the other, but the kind of nutty propagandists who seem to dominate here are just not worth listening to.