An Ethnic Cleansing of History

I went down a rabbit hole yesterday that resulted in hours of reading and media consumption I hadn’t planned on doing, so now I’m going to write something I wasn’t planning on writing. Not that I was planning on writing something else, I just hadn’t decided yet what to write about and this topic wasn’t on my short list.

Zionism is a political project which originally had the goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The early Zionists believed they had the right (whether given by God or fate) to colonize Palestine and marginalize the Palestinian people. When the state of Israel was formed in 1948 the goal changed to one of growing and solidifying the state to ensure continued Jewish supremacy and subjugation of the Palestinians.

It is for this reason that many people (myself included) believe that Israel is a settler-colonial project and should be called to account and pressured to reform.

Before October 7th, 2023 I never gave any thought to whether a particular writer or speaker was Jewish when I was consuming content. It just wasn’t important to me. Now every time I hear a podcast or read an article I find myself wondering if the author or speaker is Jewish. Why? Because I have learned that a large majority of Jewish people, particularly Jewish Americans, are Zionists.

I have also learned that there are networks of people, some sponsored by the state of Israel but many propped up by various pro-Israel NGOs, who engage in propaganda (what they call hasbara) in defense of the Zionist project.

It doesn’t matter whether someone identifies as a Zionist, it is important to understand that anyone who identifies as “pro-Israel” is a Zionist by definition. Although many Jewish people are not supportive of Zionism and strongly reject attempts to conflate being Jewish with being pro-Israel or Zionist, a large majority of Jewish Americans do have a deep attachment to Israel.

In a 2019-2020 Pew Research Center survey, 82% of Jewish adults in the United States said caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them. - source

Since October 7th I have been immersed in “pro-Palestinian” advocacy (advocating for Palestinian self-determination and, by extension, opposition to Zionism). I have always tried to think and consume content critically, but I simply didn’t know about hasbara before so I wasn’t looking out for it. Now I am, and an important clue as to whether that content might be hasbara is if the author or speaker is Jewish.

So, back to the rabbit hole.

There is a primary election coming up this Tuesday in Michigan, so I decided to review the candidates for local office and make my selections before going to the polls. The League of Women Voters provides an excellent resource at Vote411.org that lets you compare and contrast the candidates by viewing their responses to a survey the organization sends out. It’s super helpful, especially for those of us who have no idea what a County Clerk is or does, much less anything about the candidates.

In this case one of the candidates for County Clerk is the incumbent, someone named Larry Kestenbaum. Larry’s claim to fame (besides being County Clerk) is that he created a website in 1996 called The Political Graveyard, which claims to be “The Internet's Most Comprehensive Source of U.S. Political Biography” and appears to be current despite it’s charming refusal to bring the web design into this century.

My next stop in the rabbit hole was Larry’s Wikipedia page (linked above) in which I read that he and his ex-wife were active in a Reform Judaism temple in Ann Arbor. From the temple’s website I found their Facebook page, and there I found an ad for a lecture they sponsored back in February of this year. The lecture was titled Gaza and the Hundred Years War, and the description said (emphasis mine):

This talk will set the current Gaza war against the background of a century of Palestinian-Jewish competition. It will examine three frequently heard critiques of Israel, namely that Israel is an illegitimate imposition on the Arab world, that Palestinian hostility responds primarily to Israeli oppression, and that Israel routinely flouts international norms. This talk will then dissect those critiques and explain why, despite their historical inaccuracy, they remain deeply rooted among sectors of Western opinion and throughout much of Asia and Africa. Finally, it will consider what the future of Arab-Israeli relations may look like.

I was surprised to read this talk description because everything I have read about the history of the conflict, especially from the so-called “New Historians”, suggests that every one of those critiques is right on the money. Yet here was University of Michigan professor Victor Lieberman, a renowned educator who is apparently best known for teaching a class called “History 244: The History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict”, suggesting that these critiques were “historically inaccurate”.

Naturally I was curious to hear his arguments, but the talk was months ago so I started looking for other sources of his views. The first thing I discovered is that he wrote a textbook on the topic called The Hundred-year Struggle for Israel and Palestine: An Analytic History and Reader. The cheapest copy of the book I could find was listed for $100.00 used, so I decided to keep googling. Before long I came across this podcast in which two former UM students (one of whom had taken Lieberman’s course) interviewed him about the history of the conflict.

I listened to all 54 minutes of the podcast episode carefully and took about three pages of notes in the process. None of what he said was inconsistent with what I know about the history of the region or the conflict, he even hinted at empathy for the Palestinians. After arguing the current of history is flowing inexorably toward Israel becoming fully normalized in the region, he says (at about the 48:00 minute mark):

I don’t know how the Palestinians can be brought on board, I really don’t know. Because their sense of injustice, quite understandably…as I said they weren't responsible for the holocaust, why should they have to pay the price for the holocaust? Why should their lives be transformed and their sense of worth trampled upon?

But the framing—in particular what he left out or downplayed—dramatically distorted the historical context to portray Israel as earnest and peaceful citizens of the region and Palestinians as implacable. Despite covering the history of the region from the days of the Ottoman Empire through to the present day, he never mentioned the Nakba. It’s not just that he didn’t use the word, he didn’t mention that there was a mass displacement of Palestinians between 1947-49.

When he talks about the UN he only talks about the resolutions that either benefitted Israel (e.g. Resolution 181 in which the partition plan was presented) or that were later revoked (e.g. Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism a form of racism). He somehow forgot about the post-1948 war Resolution 194 that reaffirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return and restitution, and Resolution 3236 that reiterated those rights and went further to reaffirm the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty.

He never talked about the different laws for Palestinians and Jews in Israel, much less used the word ‘apartheid’ to describe it. But given that he also never mentioned UNRWA, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or B’Tselem (all of whom have described Israel as an apartheid state over the years) it seems safe to conclude that he doesn’t think human rights are an important part of the story.

Twice during the talk Lieberman referred to a statistic that “about 70% or more” Palestinians objected to any Jewish political presence in Palestine, but I have not been able to find any similar published statistics. According to data from just before October 7th a little over half of the Palestinians in the occupied territories were in favor of a “two-state solution”. I can imagine that number has dropped, but the Lieberman interview is from a few years ago.

In fairness to Professor Lieberman, I have not taken his course nor read his textbook, so maybe he provides more nuance in his lessons than one might assume from how he covers the topic in this one brief episode of a podcast.

There is another data point, though. Apparently the University of Michigan Central Student Government voted against allowing him to speak against BDS at a meeting hosted by UMDivest, so he took to the press with his comments. There isn’t enough ink in my typewriter to respond to every false or misleading claim in that document and besides, I’m sure you’ll agree this post is already way too long.

I would pay good money to see Victor Lieberman debate Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé, or Avi Shlaim. If anyone knows how to make that happen please let me know!