About the Author:
Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the author of the best-selling God Is Not Great. His books published by Verso include The Trial of Henry Kissinger, No One Left to Lie To, The Missionary Position, Unacknowledged Legislation, The Parthenon Marbles, Hostage to History, and more.
Edward W. Said (1935–2003) was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place. He is also the editor, with Christopher Hitchens, of Blaming the Victims, published by Verso. New Left Review published an obituary in Nov–Dec 2003.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of American Power and the New Mandarins, Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), Deterring Democracy, Year 501, World Orders Old and New, Powers and Prospects, Profit over People, The New Military Humanism and Rogue States.
Norman G. Finkelstein is the author of A Nation on Trial (with Ruth Bettina Birn), named a notable book for 1998 by the New York Times Book Review, and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
From Publishers Weekly:
The aim of these exhaustive, detailed essays and book reviews is to highlight what Said, a professor at Columbia, calls in his introduction the "grotesque, almost parodistic garishness" of pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian scholarship in the West, particularly in the U.S., where, he says, "it is as if even the narrative of Palestinian history is not tolerable." In one piece, Said examines the reception of Joan Peters's book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine, which argues that most of the Arabs in Palestine in 1948 were recent arrivals from other parts of the Arab world: despite widespread enthusiasm in the U.S., the book was greeted with embarrassed disavowal in Israel and a critical thrashing for shoddy methodology in Britain. Hitchens, a columnist for the Nation, attempts to debunk the longstanding Israeli argument that Palestinians left their homes in 1948 because Arab governments made broadcasts urging them to do so, not because Israelis forced them out. Noam Chomsky maintains that in the 1980s, in the U.S., terrorism as applied to the Middle East "refers to terrorist acts by Arabs, but not by Jews, just as 'peace' means a settlement that honors the right of national self-determination of Jews, but not of Palestinians." Other contributors argue that there was an Israeli policy in 1948 of expulsion of Arab civilians, discuss the characteristics of Palestinian population over the centuries, and so on. This is a challenging book.
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