Blaming the Victims
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| Publisher | Verso Books |
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Publication date
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1988 |
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Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, is a collection of essays, co-edited by Palestinian scholar and advocate Edward Said and journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, published by Verso Books in 1988. It contains essays by Said and Hitchens as well as other prominent advocates and activists including Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky, Norman G. Finkelstein, Rashid Khalidi.
In his introduction, Said says he believes that the establishment of Israel occurred partly because the Israelis "acquired control" of the land, and partly because they had won the "political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representations, rhetoric, and images were at issue." He returns again to this theme, remarking on the "dominance of the Zionist viewpoint in Western cultural discourse..." In describing this viewpoint he notes what he calls Zionism's "spurious, often flagrantly preposterous arguments." Said says there is an "official Zionist discourse", and "unofficial Zionist work", citing for some praise the "revisionist historians" such as Tom Segev and Benny Morris. Said criticizes American Zionists whose "shameless adulation of Israel is almost limitless."
Said remarks on a pattern in Israel supporters. They "reproduce the official party line on Israel or they go after delinquents who threaten to disturb the idyll." Critics and opponents of the Zionists "take it as their tasks first to decode the myths, then to present the record of facts in as neutral a way as possible." The Zionist viewpoint has "its peculiar blindnesses, its ideological weaknesses to say the least, its outrageous falsifications..." (p 13) Said notes that Western scholarly writing about the Middle East "is adversely affected by the Zionist-Palestinian conflict." Much work has been done by talented Arab scholars and writers, and non- or anti-Zionist Jews, but still needs to be done to expose and uncover the myths.
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