The New York Review of… Palestinian Blamelessness

If you’ve ever been puzzled by what motivates the rather consistent anti-Israel stance of publications like the New York Review of Books, a recent issue of that magazine provides one useful clue. The reflexive pro-Palestinian sympathies, it seems, are in part related to what could be called the Myth of Palestinian Blamelessness.

In a book review in the Nov. 20, 2008 issue (“Fishing in the Dead Sea”), Colin Thubron discusses several books about the late King Hussein of Jordan, and in the process leaves us the clue, a telling sentence that reveals his — and the magazine’s — embrace and propagation of this myth.

Here is his account of the 1948 war, a key turning point in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians:

Abdullah was the grandfather, mentor, and model of the young King Hussein. As a Hashemite and descendant of the Prophet, Abdullah conceived his ancestral destiny as leader of the Arab peoples. With the outbreak of the Arab-Jewish war in 1948, he moved his British-trained Arab Legion in to the Palestinian heartland, ad the ensuing peace left him in control of territory a few miles from the Mediterranean, with the prize of East Jerusalem. So together with Israel—and perhaps in tacit collusion—Abdullah aborted Palestinian hopes for a state ….

The state rejected by the Palestinians.

There you have it. The Palestinians, by this account, are not even partially responsible for their lack of a state. The culprits are Israel and Jordan. That the Palestinian leadership repeatedly rejected proposed compromises, including the UN’s 1947 partition plan embodied in General Assembly resolution 181, is apparently not considered. Nor does it seem to matter that the Palestinians responded to the UN resolution by starting a war against the Jews of Palestine. (Ironically, the author promotes this myth of Palestinian blamelessness, this lack of critical analysis of Palestinian responsibility, even while approvingly describing the Israeli revisionist historians as “critically analyz[ing] the founding myths of Israel.”)

The Palestinians, in reality, would have had a state had they chosen compromise instead of war. Instead, they chose to reject the Jewish state at the cost of their own independence. Israel, for its part, succeeded in defending itself against attacks by the Palestinians, and later by Arab states. And Jordan chose to annex the West Bank instead of turning it into a Palestinian state. But in the alternate reality in which the Palestinians seen as blameless actors (or even an act-less), perhaps the New York Review‘s anti-Israel tendencies are a bit easier to understand.

(For a rebuttal of Thubron’s allegation that Israel “colluded” with Jordan to prevent a Palestinian state from arising, see the chaper “The collusion that never was” in Ephraim Karsh’s Fabricating Israeli history: The ‘New Historians.’ Interestingly, but not surprisingly, neither this book nor its author is mentioned in the pages of the New York Review of Books, according to a web search of the magazine’s web site.)