Saturday, February 23, 2013

On "Dispelling" Common Misconceptions about the violent History of Palestinian "Resistance" to Israeli Occupation



As’ad AbuKhalil... a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus:: "...the movement began its resistance nonviolently .. —petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins, peaceful letter writing campaigns, poetry—in the 1930s..."






 
An article in  "The Chicago Maroon" reports, with some indication of approval, the following report:

"As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese-born professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, dispelled what he considered common Western misconceptions of the Palestinian resistance movement to Israeli occupation, such as that the Palestinian resistance had always been violent.

“The Palestinian people have been in a state of resistance for over a century,” he said. “But the movement began its resistance nonviolently, in the same ways as the rest of the civil rights movements throughout the world—petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins, peaceful letter writing campaigns, poetry—in the 1930s.”

How do I guess the approval of the article author? From the use of the verb "dispelled" which means  "Make (a doubt, feeling, or belief) disappear."

It means that the author of the article found the professor's arguments and facts so compelling and irrefutable that they made any beliefs he/she may have held up to that moment about Palestinian  terrorism's long and bloody history null and void.

Let's look at the statement again:  "Western misconceptions of the Palestinian resistance movement to Israeli occupation, such as that the Palestinian resistance had always been violent." and that the movement began its resistance, in the 1930, nonviolently.

Now let's look at the historical record:

Israel's occupation of the WB and Gaza (and now only in the WB) began in 1967, not in the 1930's, when there was not yet a state of Israel to occupy anybody.

In the 1930's there was a Jewish Yishuv, community, in Palestine, a region managed by the British  as a Mandate from the League of Nations. The Jewish Yishuv included new and veteran Zionist immigrant communities (townships, cooperative villages, kibbutzim, newly-established cities like Tel-Aviv) and centuries-old Jewish communities which had been concentrated mostly in the Jerusalem, Hebron, Jaffa, Zafed, comprising the majority of these cities' populations.

Before the 1930's the following violent riots were recorded:
"Incidents included the riots of April 1920, the riots in Palestine of May 1921, the 1929 Hebron massacre and Safed massacre, and the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. "
 Here is another, fuller account of the historical record.

It took me 3 minutes to find this information by Google. I assume the authors of the article above did not bother to check their facts before gushing over the professor's "dispelling" of misconceptions.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home