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A review by lukes_ramblingwritings66
Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question by Edward W. Said, Christopher Hitchens
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Blaming the Victims is a dense read. Each essay, written by different authors, gives us a glimpse into the lives and histories of the Palestinians under the occupation. I have found this book an invaluable resource for the contextual history of the displacement of the Palestinians in their native land.
The second section, titled “Myths, Old and New” tackles with the idea of Palestinian Identity and the Israeli occupation’s justifications of invasion. The essays deconstructing and flipping the narrative behind the word “terrorist”, written by none other than Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, prove that the Israeli narrative and propaganda uses a large brush to generalize all Arabic people as “Terrorists”, making it easier for their allies, (the United States to name a prominent one) to spread said propaganda and misinformation to further gather support for the Israeli regime on a global scale. Both authors also address the blatant war-crimes and terrorist acts that the state of Israel continues to employ on Palestinian refugees in other countries, most notably, Lebanon. One of my favorite essays in this collection, titled “Palestinian Peasant Resistance to Zionism Before World War I”, illustrates with great detail and research that even before the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration, Palestinians were already being displaced by Zionist settlers, as much of the land were under registered ownership to non-Palestinian absentee landlords, due to a property law established by the ending Ottoman Empire. What astounds me is that this book was originally published in the late 80s, yet the information here still remains relevant to what is going on in Palestine right now.
This is an important book for many reasons, and I implore all who support the Palestinian Right to Resistance and Right to Return to read what is written here.
The second section, titled “Myths, Old and New” tackles with the idea of Palestinian Identity and the Israeli occupation’s justifications of invasion. The essays deconstructing and flipping the narrative behind the word “terrorist”, written by none other than Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, prove that the Israeli narrative and propaganda uses a large brush to generalize all Arabic people as “Terrorists”, making it easier for their allies, (the United States to name a prominent one) to spread said propaganda and misinformation to further gather support for the Israeli regime on a global scale. Both authors also address the blatant war-crimes and terrorist acts that the state of Israel continues to employ on Palestinian refugees in other countries, most notably, Lebanon. One of my favorite essays in this collection, titled “Palestinian Peasant Resistance to Zionism Before World War I”, illustrates with great detail and research that even before the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration, Palestinians were already being displaced by Zionist settlers, as much of the land were under registered ownership to non-Palestinian absentee landlords, due to a property law established by the ending Ottoman Empire. What astounds me is that this book was originally published in the late 80s, yet the information here still remains relevant to what is going on in Palestine right now.
This is an important book for many reasons, and I implore all who support the Palestinian Right to Resistance and Right to Return to read what is written here.