At breakfast yesterday, sometime between eating the salad and the tuna sandwich, I conducted a random survey. You probably recall that our breakfast table parliament is one of many similar informal forums found all over the country. We are a gathering of self-appointed know-alls ready to criticise everything and everybody.
Addressing two fellow "parliamentarians" who happen to have American born wives, I asked them how they viewed the lead-up to the 2012 Republican presidential primaries. It appears their affinity to the US didn't extend to that country's party politics. Both expressed apathy, almost complete disinterest. One of them grudgingly commented that Newt Gingrich favours Israel.
Bear in mind that we wake up every morning to a day punctuated by frequent newscasts. We don't have nice Canadians to the north and flamboyant Mexicans to the south. Instead we have Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist mutations as well as Ahmenijad over the horizon all trying to blow us to "kingdom come." Furthermore, our own political system is daunting enough, so forgive us for the oversight, our inability to grasp the niceties of the GOP.
Just the same Newt Gingrich certainly got our attention this week. In an interview on the Jewish TV channel Gingrich, a leading Republican presidential contender, dismissed the Palestinians as “an invented people”
Former House of Representatives speaker and self-described historian disqualified the Palestinians’ claim to nationhood status. Going one step further he described the peace process as “delusional.”
David Remnick, editor of New Yorker said there are “lots and lots of nationalities that are ‘invented’ – not least of which Americans and Israelis,” but Gingrich “knew what he was doing: signalling a cultural and political disdain for the Palestinians as a people."
Gingrich’s spokesman has his hands full explaining away some of his boss’ headline making statements. Spokesman/press secretary R.C. Hammond said Newt Gingrich was merely referring to the “decades-long history that has surrounded this issue,” and he had long supported the concept of Palestinian statehood.
Maybe this is a departure from a long-standing presidential consensus. “It is an example of Newt Gingrich talking outside of the tradition of even recent Republican presidents who he admired,” said Aaron David Miller “It is way out of the bipartisan consensus built up over 30 years among presidents and presidential candidates.”
Many Israelis view the contenders for the race to the Oval Room through a narrow angle lens. They are not too concerned about the US economy, Medicare or the national deficit, they simply ask, “Is he good for us?” However, the people in Israel who study and teach US party politics don't put too much stock in Newt Gingrich’s chances of going the full course, winning nomination and going on to trounce President Obama.
In a telephone interview with Haaretz reporter Chemi Shalev, David Remnick said, “Now, after being written off as an unpleasant relic of the mid-nineties, he can plausibly imagine himself behind a desk in the Oval Office. Can you? Go on. Imagine it.”…. “If Gingrich does win the nomination, the Republican party will have a real problem.” Further to that Remnick said, “The Republican Party establishment cannot stand Newt Gingrich. They didn’t even like Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House. They find him grandiose, self-regarding, incredibly arrogant and prone to making mistakes on a colossal and self-destructive level. They fear him,” He added "Barak Obama and his team at the White House are salivating at the chance of running against Newt Gingrich.” Remnick detected a link between Gingrich’s verbal bombshell and Joan Peters’ book “From Time Immemorial. The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine.”
Remnick claims, ”Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in general are hoping to woo at least the more conservative sector of Jewish Americans—those who feel that Obama has been too hard on Benjamin Netanyahu. And, because Gingrich has a little learning and a darkly sophisticated memory for intellectual battle, he catered to his cause by employing the word “invented.” In this context, the word summons a 1984 bestseller that was once totemic on the Jewish right (and still is, for some): “From Time Immemorial: by Joan Peters.”
In retrospect Ms. Peters work has lost a lot of its former luster. She was not a historian, yet she put forward a purportedly scholarly construction based on the notion, as Golda Meir famously put it, that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people." Remnick put it succinctly ” The book, which is an ideological tract disguised as history, made the demographic argument that most people who call themselves Palestinians have short roots in the territory and are Arabs who came from elsewhere. It suggests that the territory that is now Israel was all but ‘uninhabited’ before the Zionist movement began. It was a book that implicitly made the argument that Palestine was a tabula rasa waiting for its Jewish revival; or, as the old slogan had it: ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’……..” Peters fails to use Arab sources and her work is full of distortions. Hers is a book with clear polemical purpose: to deny Palestinian Arabs an identity and any territorial claim; it makes the case that the Arabs in question should instead live in Jordan.”
In discussing the reactions of commentators to the book, liberal intellectual and New York Times op-ed contributor Anthony Lewis compared the reaction of American commentators to the reaction of Israeli ones: "Israelis have not gushed over the book as some Americans have. Perhaps that is because they know the reality of the Palestinians' existence, as great Zionists of the past knew. Perhaps it is because most understand the danger of trying to deny a people identity.” Professor Yehoshua Porath who specialises in the history of Palestinian nationalism says, “Neither historiography nor the Zionist cause itself gains anything from mythologizing history."
Daniel Pipes, founder and director of the Middle East Forum , said in an article he wrote for Commentary, "Despite its drawbacks. From Time Immemorial contains a wealth of information, which is well worth the effort to uncover." Pipes agrees with author Joan Peters, "Thus, the 'Palestinian problem' lacks firm grounding. Many of those who now consider themselves Palestinian refugees were either immigrants themselves before 1948 or the children of immigrants. This historical fact reduces their claim to the land of Israel; it also reinforces the point that the real problem in the Middle East has little to do with Palestinian-Arab rights."
Zalman Shoval, Israel's former ambassador to Washington, commenting on Gingrich's remarks and whether they were "factually true" or not, said they were politically irrelevant. "Whether Palestinians existed before or not is neither here nor there. Palestinian Arabs for the last 50 or 60 years have defined themselves as a separate national unity. Their aspiration to a national unity and self-governance is the fact we should be dealing with."
In the meantime the prospects for any kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations appear more distant then a fading star.
Have a good weekend.
Beni 15th of December, 2011.
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