Joel Beinin and John Chalcraft in discussion last Tuesday at LSE.
It must be November because because Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, was in town. Last November Beinin was telling a SOAS audience that “Israel is heading into the abyss” and that Israel is putting Bedouin “into what would effectively be concentration camps”.
At LSE last Tuesday when asked during the Q&A after his talk “Why has the world stood by while Israel built the wall when we boycotted South Africa in the 80s?” Beinin replied, inter alia, that:
“The state of Israel is in some measure a response to western guilt for having sat on their hands during the murder of six million Jews. Now the Palestinians had nothing to do with that but, as Edward Said said, they are ‘the victims of the victims’.”
Beinin’s talk was called High Risk Activism and the Popular Struggle Against the Israeli Occupation in the West Bank and was chaired by well-known Israel boycotter Dr John Chalcraft under the auspices of LSE’s Middle East Centre.
The talk was mainly in support of Anarchists Against the Wall founded by Jonathan Pollak. It is a group of “anarchist Jews” who travel to Palestinian villages on the West Bank to join Palestinians protesting against Israel’s security wall in what they like to call “non-violent action”.
Sometimes these Israelis get hurt in confrontations with IDF soldiers as when Gil Na’amati was apparently shot and injured.
Unsurprisingly Beinin made no mention of why Israel built the wall. His talk was like a parallel universe in which suicide bombings had never happened, in which Hamas did not exist and where the International Solidarity Movement was a force for good in the world.
When I raised this during the Q&A Beinin responded: “Had there not been that extremely harsh repression (by Israel) of the second Intifada there likely wouldn’t have been any suicide bombings”.
LSE’s student audience lapped up all this nonsense with one of them thanking Beinin for giving a “very balanced talk”. The lecture theatre was full with 200 students.
Meanwhile, the previous Tuesday I was at SOAS to hear William Mathew from the University of East Anglia give a talk under the auspices of the London Middle East Institute on British Policy and Arab Displacement in Palestine, 1915-23: Contingency, Imperialism, and Double-dealing.
Mathew described a state of affairs leading up to the Balfour Declaration of powerless Arab delegates up against powerful and racist British diplomats and Zionist Jews in London.
Despite the very strong current of anti-Semitism running through Britain’s political establishment Mathew said that Britain trusted European Jews more than the Arabs, who they “treated with contempt”, to defend Britain’s colonial interests in Suez and the trading routes to India.
According to Mathew Chaim Weizmann described Arabs who came to London to lobby British diplomats as a “body of potential blackmailers and trash”. And Mathew went into detail about how, in his view, Britain had reneged on its promises in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915-16.
During this Q&A I asked how, if Arab delegates were so powerless, did they manage to persuade world powers to carve trans-Jordan out of three-quarters of British Mandated Palestine? Mathew’s ridiculous response was “I don’t know”.
So there you have it. Two talks given at two outwardly respectable organisations: The Middle East Centre at LSE and the London Middle East Institute at SOAS. Both speakers gave two completely different reasons for the rise of Israel: For Beinin it was the Holocaust, for Mathew it was all down to the powerlessness of Arabs pitted against powerfully racist Brits and Zionist Jews.
And the theatre of hate continues apace. On Tuesday SOAS’ LMEI talk is about the “charismatic” Hassan Nasrallah. I kid you not.
RichardMillett's Blog 
“palestinians” and fascist iran
– denying the Holocaust
– praise Socialist hitler
– declare their intentions to “finish socialist hitlers “work””
– hezbullah do outstretched arm salutes (Google Images “arab nazi salute”)
– the grand mufti of Jerusalem was an ally of Socialist hitler
1941 The Grand Mufti meets Hitler
And joel beinin continues the immoral Socialist/Fascist alliance first established in 1939, and re-established with the Red/Green alliance of today.
Straighten out the “Beinin”, “Beilin”.
thanks.
Ed Said was a pompous man of letters and a bad one at that whose basic argument trips over itself on p177 of the pbk 25th anniversary edition . Half of Israeli Jews are descended from the Jews ethnically cleansed by Arabs from Arab countries in 1948 – 60. That makes these Palestine Arab victims victims also the victims of modern Arab savagery and intolerance. What is the punk trying to prove with his curlicue “victim’s victim”. Hana Zoabi just this week was telling police and press that the Israelis had not learnt the lesson of the Holocaust was not to be racist. She can talk when Abbas is publicly saying there will be no Jews in a Palestine State. Just for the record the maximum number of Palestine Arabs killed in Palestine for Palestine is perhaps 24k since 1920. Since 1948 over 2 million Arabs and other Moslems have been killed by Arabs induced violence, “from the Ocean to the Gulf.” Get a sense of proportion or look ridiculous.
Comparing the Israelis to Nazis is antisemitism. So maybe we know something about that Beinin.
Usual innumerate nonsense. !n 1949 there were 14 k Bedouin and now there are 140k+. There is no way they can continue to live where the camel roams because if nothing else they prefer motor vehicles now and have staked out squatters’ holdings. There are no miradors on the Negev skyline.
”….Now the Palestinians had nothing to do with that ….”. Oh really? The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al Husseini, collaborated with Hitler and Himmler during the war in Berlin, living in an apartment on Prinz Albrecht Strasse, provided for him by the SS. He founded two Waffen SS divisions of Bosnian Muslims in 1943, who went on to slaughter Jews, communists and Serbian resistance fighters. He and Himmler opened an SS school for Muslim imams in Dresden. He broadcast genocidal radio propaganda against the Jews to the Arab world throughout the war from Berlin, consulted with Hitler and Himmler on the Final Solution, planning death camps and the genocide of Jews in Palestine if the Nazis invaded it. And if it weren’t for the valiant Brits defeating Rommel at El Alamein, that is precisely what would have happened. After the war, he helped provide safe haven and an apartment in Damascus for the fugitive Nazi war criminal Franz Stangl, the ex commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka….a man responsible for the killing of at least 1,200.000 Jewish men, women and children. Let’s not forget that this man was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the spiritual leader of the Palestinians, who supported his murderous aims during the war. So to say that the Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust is a blatant untruth.
In fact, if Europeans and the rest of the free world are to blame for their inaction when Jews were slaughtered in Europe, so is the Arab world who did nothing to help the Jewish refugees who came banging at their doors. Especially in Palestine, where the then religious leader made all he could to help Hitler accomplish his sinister task.
But we’re talking about Muslims who seem to never be able to come to terms with their own demons. What is strange is that this Beinin repeats the same blatant absurdity of Muslim innocence regarding the Holocaust.
Then, the logical absurdity of linking Holocaust of being the cause of Zionism, making it the only effect that predates its alleged cause.
For Mathew, the stupidity comes from speaking of something that never even existed. The “powerlessness of Arabs” who got 98% of the Middle East was because of Brits’ racism? Then this racism must be antisemitism because the Brits just submitted to Arabs and stopped Jewish emigration to Mandate Palestine when it became too evident Jews were going to be eradicated at home.
Speaking of Zionist racism is projection. Arabs countries’ projection, as they are the most racist subgroup of humanity.
The Edward Said pomposity about being “the victims of the victims” is total tosh and meaningless except in that those using it are trying to climb onto and steal the Jewish victimhood. Let us remember the obvious that the Jews were set upon for no reason other than blind bigotries and kick the cat politics. The Arabs of Palestine according to all the press and media reports of the time deliberately rejected the UN181 compromise and set out to ethnically cleanse the Jewish community of Palestine and still wish to. Having taken to war they deserve the results. Further bus bombs and Hamas rockets are all ipso facto war crimes for being aimed indiscriminately at the Israeli civil sector and of no military pertinence.
Palestinians are victims of violent islam.
They are perpetrators and supporters of violent Islam.
The violent Islam of ISIS, Hamass, Hezbullah, Muslim Brotherthood, Taliban, Boko Haram, Fascist Iran’s Revolutionary Gestapo.
April fools day has come early for both of these messugas! And they get paid for this claptrap?
The Arabs too are heading for the abyss by their behaviour in Syria and Iraq and Yemen. In 48, 56, 67 and 73 they backed Israel into a corner and lost badly. Ditto in both intifadas especially the second. Now if they are out for another run in…. let them bang their heads on the wall of falling oil prices and Israeli steadfastness.
In other news, Der BBC wastes tax-payers’ money on a ‘celebration’ of Dimbleby’s 50 years of bigotry as a standard issue beeboid.
At least with the Dimblebottoms you are under no illusions they might like you. Do remember the Younger Pitt’s comment that, “British policy is British trade.” Then you can bash back with bank notes which is all that Whitehall understand that Britain does more trade with Israel – oil excepted – than with all the Arab World. So come the end of the oil era Britis trade with Israel will be the smart money in the Levant.