Had he turned to Arab rather than Soviet scholarship, Abbas would have learned that “history is a science,” as historian Ibn Khaldun stated in his Muqaddimah, the 1337 book widely appreciated as a groundbreaking treatise on the philosophy of history.
Abbas’s communist commissars, by contrast, saw in historiography not an academic discipline but a political weapon and a propagandist’s toy. Had he realized that history is a science, Abbas would have understood that historiography’s first prerequisites are documentation and impartiality.
That would have made him understand that one can’t say, for instance, that Hitler “wanted the Jewish country to be loyal to him,” or that “the hatred of the Jews was not due to their religion” – without sounding like an idiot.
To recall the role of religion in what happened to the Jews, Abbas need only turn to the Arab effort to repel the Vatican’s retreat in 1965 from its historic libel that the Jews killed God.
Addressing a World Muslim League emergency meeting in Mecca at the time, the Mufti of Saudi Arabia cried that “the Catholics” are letting “a circle of prelates, seduced by and in complicity with Zionism, to trifle with dogmas and shatter religious convictions that have survived for two thousand years” (Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 1986, p. 223).
No, historians don’t have to be neutral, but they have to be objective, they must display evidence, and they must be emotionally prepared to accept what it attests. Abbas might have done all this, had he studied history at Oxford, Princeton or the Sorbonne, rather than with Leonid Brezhnev’s lieutenants at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University.
Unearthing the past also demands curiosity for adversaries’ feelings, the way Israeli historians, from Yehoshua Porat to Benny Morris, imagined the Palestinians’ suffering when they probed their national struggle.
Had he been intellectually curious, Abbas would have realized that his native Safed is not only the town of his yearnings but also the town where a Jew named Shlomo Alkabetz wrote no less longingly: “King’s city, the city of kingdom / Arise, emerge from the rubble... Wear the garb of your glory, my nation / By the son of Jesse of Bethlehem,” lines sung for more than 500 years by now every Friday night by millions of Jews, including those Abbas diagnosed as descendants of Khazars, and those he fingered as usurers, and those he now besmirches as dirty-footed defilers of holy sites.
Yet Abbas is not intellectually curious, and he thinks that if he says that he is “tired of hearing” about the Jews “coming to this country because of their longing for Zion or whatever,” he will babble away this crucial element of his predicament.
LACKING the historian’s instincts and tools, Abbas has waged a propaganda war based on three lies: that the Jews don’t belong in their land, that the conflict was a Jewish plot, and that its violence was a Jewish choice.
That is why he wrote (“The long overdue Palestinian state,” New York Times, 16 May 2011) that, following the UN’s partition resolution, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs... and Arab armies intervened,” whereas in fact the Palestinian attack on the Jews, and the Arab armies’ invasions preceded rather than followed the war’s displacements, just as partition – unlike Abbas’s insinuation – was rejected by the Arabs and accepted by the Jews.
(full article online)
History notes for Mahmoud Abbas