This book extract is a must read for anyone who has wondered if the
argument that there are really no Palestinians, which is presented
sometimes in this group by Zionists, holds any water.
-Al-
http://www.chomsky.info/books/power01.htm
The Fate of an Honest Intellectual
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248
I'll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like
this. Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know
about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this
best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten
printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan
Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking
book with lots of footnotes, which pur****ted to show that the
Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled
areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of
1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of
rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Wa****ngton Post, the New
York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book
which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the
implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral
issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because
the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of
demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the
University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was
the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara
Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since
chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named
Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was
interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was
kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful
student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out
that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably
it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something
like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just
preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he
sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the
topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: "Here's what I've
found in this book, do you think it's worth pursuing?"
Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think
it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this,
you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the
American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are
not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you. So I said:
if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you're getting
into. It's an im****tant issue, it makes a big difference whether you
eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it's
preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people's lives
could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him,
because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.
Well, he didn't believe me. We became very close friends after this,
I didn't know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and
he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn't even
bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In
These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where
some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response.
Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to
be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn't make
appointments with him, they wouldn't read his papers, he basically
had to quit the program.
By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what
to do. I gave him what I thought was good advice, but what turned
out to be bad advice: I suggested that he ****ft over to a different
department, where I knew some people and figured he'd at least be
treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and
when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could
not get the faculty to read it, he couldn't get them to come to his
thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a
Ph.D.—he's very smart, incidentally—but they will not even write a
letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University.
I mean, sometimes you have students for whom it's hard to write good
letters of recommendation, because you really didn't think they were
very good—but you can write something, there are ways of doing these
things. This guy was good, but he literally cannot get a letter.
He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City,
and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs.
Very promising scholar—if he'd done what he was told, he would have
gone on and right now he'd be a professor somewhere at some big
university. Instead he's working part-time with disturbed teenaged
kids for a couple thousand dollars a year. That's a lot better than
a death squad, it's true—it's a whole lot better than a death squad.
But those are the techniques of control that are around.
But let me just go on with the Joan Peters story. Finkelstein's very
persistent: he took a summer off and sat in the New York Public
Library, where he went through every single reference in the
book—and he found a record of fraud that you cannot believe. Well,
the New York intellectual community is a pretty small place, and
pretty soon everybody knew about this, everybody knew the book was a
fraud and it was going to be exposed sooner or later. The one
journal that was smart enough to react intelligently was the New
York Review of Books—they knew that the thing was a sham, but the
editor didn't want to offend his friends, so he just didn't run a
review at all. That was the one journal that didn't run a review.
Meanwhile, Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the
field who were telling him, "Look, call off your crusade; you drop
this and we'll take care of you, we'll make sure you get a job," all
this kind of stuff. But he kept doing it—he kept on and on. Every
time there was a favorable review, he'd write a letter to the editor
which wouldn't get printed; he was doing whatever he could do. We
approached the publishers and asked them if they were going to
respond to any of this, and they said no—and they were right. Why
should they respond? They had the whole system buttoned up, there
was never going to be a critical word about this in the United
States. But then they made a technical error: they allowed the book
to appear in England, where you can't control the intellectual
community quite as easily.
Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in
England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein's work to a number
of British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle
East—and they were ready. As soon as the book appeared, it was just
demolished, it was blown out of the water. Every major journal, the
Times Literary Supplement, the London Review, the Observer,
everybody had a review saying, this doesn't even reach the level of
nonsense, of idiocy. A lot of the criticism used Finkelstein's work
without any acknowledgment, I should say—but about the kindest word
anybody said about the book was "ludicrous," or "preposterous."
Well, people here read British reviews—if you're in the American
intellectual community, you read the Times Literary Supplement and
the London Review, so it began to get a little embarrassing. You
started getting back-tracking: people started saying, "Well, look, I
didn't really say the book was good, I just said it's an interesting
topic," things like that. At that point, the New York Review swung
into action, and they did what they always do in these
cir***stances. See, there's like a routine that you go through—if a
book gets blown out of the water in England in places people here
will see, or if a book gets praised in England, you have to react.
And if it's a book on Israel, there's a standard way of doing it:
you get an Israeli scholar to review it. That's called covering your
ass—because whatever an Israeli scholar says, you're pretty safe: no
one can accuse the journal of anti-Semitism, none of the usual stuff
works.
So after the Peters book got blown out of the water in England, the
New York Review assigned it to a good person actually, in fact
Israel's leading specialist on Palestinian nationalism [Yehoshua
****ath], someone who knows a lot about the subject. And he wrote a
review, which they then didn't publish—it went on for almost a year
without the thing being published; nobody knows exactly what was
going on, but you can guess that there must have been a lot of
pressure not to publish it. Eventually it was even written up in the
New York Times that this review wasn't getting published, so finally
some version of it did appear. It was critical, it said the book is
nonsense and so on, but it cut corners, the guy didn't say what he knew.
Actually, the Israeli reviews in general were extremely critical:
the reaction of the Israeli press was that they hoped the book would
not be widely read, because ultimately it would be harmful to the
Jews—sooner or later it would get exposed, and then it would just
look like a fraud and a hoax, and it would reflect badly on Israel.
They underestimated the American intellectual community, I should say.
Anyhow, by that point the American intellectual community realized
that the Peters book was an embarrassment, and it sort of
disappeared—nobody talks about it anymore. I mean, you still find it
at newsstands in the air****t and so on, but the best and the
brightest know that they are not supposed to talk about it anymore:
because it was exposed and they were exposed.
Well, the point is, what happened to Finkelstein is the kind of
thing that can happen when you're an honest critic—and we could go
on and on with other cases like that. [Editors' Note: Finkelstein
has since published several books with independent presses.]
Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can
often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they
can survive in one fa****on or another, particularly if they get
community sup****t. But if they become too disruptive or too
obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked
out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within
the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that
way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere
along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the
institutions and are able to remain in them have already
internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them
to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got
there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system
perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it
operates, I think.
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