Author: Martin Kramer

Ivory Towers on Sand: the download

On By Martin Kramer

Seven years ago this week, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy published my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. I’m pleased to announce that as of this morning, and for the first time, the entire book is available from the Institute as a free download (pdf). Click here to download.

The book appeared six weeks after 9/11 (here’s the New York Times report of its publication), and had a much greater impact than I imagined it would when I wrote it. The Institute and I hope that by making it freely available, Ivory Towers on Sand will live yet another life, especially among today’s university and college students. If you are a student or know a student, share the link. If you are in a Middle East course, send the link to your classmates and ask your professor to discuss the book in class. If you are a faculty member, it’s now easy to include the book in your next syllabus. (It should definitely be in the syllabus of any course that assigns Zachary Lockman’s Contending Visions of the Middle East, where Ivory Towers is critiqued over half a dozen pages. Students should be encouraged to read both books and form their own opinion.)

As an additional incentive to download the book, be advised that the text includes many a reference to the sayings and doings of Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian-American professor who is much in the news for his long-standing friendship with Barack Obama.

Rashid Khalidi, Obama’s Palestinian pal

On By Martin Kramer

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University, is much in the news these days, for his connection with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The Los Angeles Times did some digging around the story last spring, and most of the facts are there. I don’t know anything about the connection that I haven’t read elsewhere, so I have nothing original to say about it.

But this seems like an opportune moment to flag my own writings on Khalidi, going back a number of years.

• “Dr. Rashid and Mr. Khalidi.” On how Khalidi has varied his pitch according to audience—and, when interviewed on Al Jazeera, turns into a firebrand.

• “The Day the Rabbi Rescued Rashid.” Khalidi has always taken care to cultivate a few Jewish supporters, and the late Arthur Hertzberg was one of them. Shows how they haven’t a clue about what he really believes—and says.

• “Rashid Khalidi: Gaza blame-thrower.” Hamas took over Gaza, so who’s fault is that? Guess.

• “Unreal Rashid.” Dissects Khalidi’s 2005 interview with the Radical History Journal. “They are political,” he says of the right, “and we’re not political”—he tells his fellow radical historians.

• “Radical Rashid.” Khalidi finds the University of Chicago Law School faculty “extremely conservative”—even though the ratio of Democrats to Republicans there is 7 to 1.

• “Philistine at Columbia.” Considers a speech in which Khalidi indicted America’s universities—including disciplines he knows nothing about, such as medicine and agriculture—for failing to “challenge the reigning orthodoxies in their fields.”

• “The rise and fall of the third-rate.” Khalidi complains about “Uncle Toms” in Middle Eastern studies.

• And also download my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (2001), for my even earlier treatment of Khalidi.

As I said, I have no inside information on the Obama-Khalidi connection. But I did note this statement by Obama, when pressed on Khalidi:

I do know him [Khalidi] because I taught at the University of Chicago [where Khalidi taught prior to his Columbia appointment—MK]. And he is Palestinian. And I do know him and I have had conversations. He is not one of my advisors; he’s not one of my foreign policy people. His kids went to the Lab School where my kids go as well. He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy.

To which I would ask the candidate in response: What aspect of his “scholarship” do you respect?

Update: See my two new posts on Khalidi:

• “Khalidi and Obama: Kindred Spirits.” Considers what sort of insight we might gain from the videotape of Obama praising Khalidi.

• “Khalidi of the PLO.” Was Khalidi a PLO spokesman back in 1982? He’s obscured the answer.

Self-induced Nakba

On By Martin Kramer

This is a guest post contributed by Philip Carl Salzman, professor of anthropology at McGill University.

The greatest Middle Eastern success in public relations opinion-shaping in the last forty years has been the Palestinian self-definition of themselves as a separate people and as victims of Israel and the West. The entire world, it appears, has been convinced. Europeans and many Americans, not to mention members of the Muslim umma, trip over each other offering sympathy and buckets of money to the Palestinians. The United Nations makes unique arrangements for the Palestinians, and numerous UN bodies devote themselves solely to the needs of the Palestinians. And those same Europeans and Americans, and the members of those UN organs, risk apoplexy in their violent denunciations of Israel—Israel the bully, the oppressor, the colonialist, the racist—for thwarting the Palestinians.

Palestinians and their partisans, such as those who will meet at the “Edward Said Conference” at Columbia University on November 7-8, explain their unfortunate situation as a result of Western imperialism and colonialism, which, they explain in terms of “postcolonial theory,” are rationalized and encouraged by disparaging “orientalist” stereotypes of Arabs and Middle Easterners. The responsibility for any and all current disabilities of the Middle East, according to postcolonial theory, rests with Europe and America, whose interventions have only victimized and destroyed Middle Eastern society and culture.

There is a certain inconsistency in the Arab and Muslim narrative about imperialism and colonialism. About the period of the 7th to the 18th centuries, when the Arab Muslim Empire spread by the sword from Arabia across all of the Middle East and North Africa to Morocco in the west, to Sicily, Portugal, Spain, and France in the north, and to Central Asia and India in the East, followed by Ottoman conquests in Europe, the narrative of imperialism and colonialism is triumphalist. Endless slaughter, forced conversion, slavery, and wholesale expropriation of property were all for the glory to God, and all good. But the rise of the West, and its relatively brief and limited interventions in the Middle East, are viewed as the height of evil. Why? Because God choose Muslims as his True Followers, and as such, they have a right—no, a duty—to dominate.

The stagnation of the Muslim world in the 19th and 20th centuries, and its relative weakness in relation to the rising West, are today blamed by Palestinian and Arab partisans on Western intrusion in the region. But those directly facing the rising West at the time, the Ottomans and later the Persian Crown, knew that they had fallen behind, and sought Western civil and military technology and goods, and Western administrative and legal systems, in order to modernize and better face the challenge. This response is more consistent with our understanding of human life than the “postcolonial” argument that all is the fault of someone else, in this case, the West. One of the great Marxist students of imperialism, the anthropologist Eric Wolf, demonstrated that local peoples, at least those not murdered or enslaved, are not passive receivers of imperial and colonial culture, but shape their response according to their own culture and vision.

Narratives of victimization, such as the Palestinian one, neglect to account for the active Arab response to the Jews and to Jewish immigration. Explaining all by Western imposition robs the Arabs of Palestine of their agency, and infantalizes them. In reality, Palestinians responded actively: Elite landowners sold the Jews land, while the populace in general closed ranks against the Jews. Following the tribally-based principle of those closer uniting against those more distant, the opposition to the Jews was both organizational and religious. Jews were not kinsmen and, worse, were infidels.

Arab opposition to the Jews, expressed in riots and pogroms, was ratchetted up in the face of Jewish desires for national autonomy and independence. After all, it was believed that any part of the Dar al-Islam must remain under Muslim dominance forevermore. And for a thousand years, Jews under Islam had been a subservient and despised minority, cowering under the power of their Muslim masters. The Arabs in Palestine thought that the Jews could not and would not stand up to them, and they acted on that well established cultural principle. Honor would allow nothing less.

The Arabs acted according to their tradition, according to their lights. They refused compromise with inferiors; they refused to divide and share, rejecting a UN settlement. Instead, they strove for complete victory, as their ancestors had. However, the thousand-year-old conditions did not obtain. The Jews they faced were not dhimma, and they did not cower; against the odds, and with little outside help, they fought and won. The Arab states answered the call, but were ineffectual, and failed. The “Nakba” was self-induced by the Arabs. They demanded all or nothing, and got nothing. But they have continued to hold to the rejectionist position, taking an annihilationist stance toward Israel and the Jews. So in reality the self-induced “Nakba” is self-perpetuating. The successful agitprop that obscures this both to the world and to themselves is also a result of Arab agency. The Edward Said Conference will carry on in the same tradition.

This has been a guest post contributed by Philip Carl Salzman, professor of anthropology at McGill University.