Of course, since the land was not literally empty, its recovery required the establishment of the equivalent of a colonial hierarchy-sanctioned by Biblical authority of its historic custodians over such intruders as might remain after the return. Jewish settlers were to be accorded exclusive privileges deriving from the Pentateuch, and Palestinian Arabs treated as part of the natural environment.
In the macho Hebrew culture of modern times, to know a woman, in the Biblical sense, and to know the land became virtually interchangeable as terms of possession. The Zionist settlers were collective subjects who acted, and the native Palestinians became objects acted upon.”
What utter balderdash! The phrase "a land without a people to a people without a land" was never a "Zionist slogan" and was never said (except to disagree with it) by any Zionist or Israeli leader.
Rather it was a phrase used by three nineteenth Christian proponents of a Jewish return to the land of Israel, who wrote before the (Jewish) Zionist movement was even begun by Theodore Herzl (see Adam M. Garfinkle, "On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase," Middle East Studies, October 1991, for a thorough debunking of the anti-Zionist myth of this supposed "slogan").
Nor did any Zionist or Israeli with any power or influence ever suggest that "Jewish settlers were to be accorded exclusive privileges deriving from the Penteteuch," or advocate "the establishment of the equivalent of a colonial hierarchy-sanctioned by Biblical authority."
Most Zionist leaders were, and still are, secularists who opposed any fundamentalist reading of the Jewish Bible. But even religious Zionists, such as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine, opposed any discrimination against, or hostility to, Arabs.
As for the claim that Zionists regarded women as objects of "possession" (an obvious play for feminist support of the anti-Israel cause), it has no historical or factual basis whatsoever.
Once again we must ask: how could an instructor with such an extreme pris partis for one side and against the other in a conflict possibly teach this subject to his students in a fair, balanced, and accurate way?
What is wrong with the CNES faculty, if not la pensée unique, a sclerotic ideological consensus that rejects factual truths when they run against the cherished "theories" to which the professors subscribe? What should be proscribed in academic circles seems to have turned into the norm in Near East Studies.
This pensée unique has a name: it is called "Palestinianism"-a fig leaf that might be convenient for some to hide darker prejudices against anything Jewish or Zionist.
Is there anything to celebrate in this 50th anniversary? Surely, the CNES can celebrate consistency as the pre-Renaissance Church celebrated the immutability of its dogmatic teachings on science. But this time, the CNES will not have 350 years to finally acknowledge its error as did the church. Many of CNES graduate students will soon be aware of crucial Middle East facts they were never told and they will be incensed for having been subjected to this kind of sustained academic indoctrination.
Thanks to John Landau and Salomon Benzimra for contributing to this article.
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