THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume X, Issue # 72, March 12, 2008
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
PROFESSORS HAMMER ISRAEL & FAIL
TO PREDICT PALESTINIAN WAR
By Jonathan Schanzer
THE FAULTY ANALYSIS OF POLITICALLY-BIASED AMERICAN PROFESSORS OF MIDDLE EAST STUDIES: ANTI-ISRAELI
PROFESSORS' OCCUPATION WITH LAMBASTING ISRAEL'S DEFENSE POLICIES & THEIR CONSEQUENT FAILURE TO IDENTIFY
AN APPROACHING INTERNECINE PALESTINIAN CONFLICT -- HOW THE MIDDLE EAST STUDIES PROFESSORS MISINFORM &
MISLEAD FOREIGN POLICY DECISION-MAKERS IN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
FULL STORY:
From the Egyptian border breach to indiscriminate rocket fire at Israel, the Gaza Strip currently poses serious threats to
regional security. The Hamas terrorist organization controls this territory because it defeated the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) in a six-day Palestinian civil war in June, 2007. But a cursory review of history shows that the
Hamas-PLO rivalry has been brewing since 1988, when Hamas first emerged on the scene. Despite clear signs of
impending conflict, nearly every professor of Middle Eastern Studies in America failed to see it coming.
Why did so few experts write about the internecine Palestinian war? Hundreds of Arabic-speaking professors and
researchers have trekked through the West Bank and Gaza over the years, funded by U.S. research dollars.
Most were too busy lambasting Israel's defense policies to identify the gathering storm, but a few U.S. professors saw
the writing on the wall:
Mahmood Monshipouri, a professor at Alma College in Michigan, published a prescient 1996 article in entitled, "The PLO Rivalry with Hamas." [1] He recognized the potential for conflict a full 11 years before the
Gaza Coup of 2007.
Don Peretz at the State University of New York in Binghamton also foresaw that the splintering of Hamas and the PLO
during the 1987 intifada would have lasting effects. He predicted that the two groups could only "paper over their
differences temporarily," and hence, "internecine conflict will very likely erupt among them when the time comes for the
Palestinians to determine their political future." [2]
But Monshipouri and Peretz were the exceptions during the 1990s.Virtually all of their colleagues lavished praise on
Palestinian "civil society" as the cornerstone of a budding democracy, or skewered Israel for cracking down on the
suicide-bombing terrorist groups that killed scores of Israeli civilians. After the outbreak of a new campaign of
Palestinian violence, commonly termed the "intifada" of 2000, academics shifted their focus to an Israeli self-defense
tactic they grossly mischaracterized as "apartheid," with a particular focus on Israel's security barriers around the West
Bank and Gaza Strip that prevented nearly 100 percent of attempted Palestinian suicide bombings and other acts of
Palestinian violence.
Over the past seven years, the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) -- the academic umbrella group to which
nearly every American professor in the field belongs -- has remained focused on these tired topics, but has failed to
produce a single paper that broke ground on the internal Palestinian discord and the civil war in the making.
As media outlets in the region began to openly report on the Hamas-PLO clashes in 2003 and 2004, only a few
professors chose to note it. Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College, often criticized for his Islamist apologia, noted in
the Washington Post that, "a danger exists that the further radicalization of Hamas will not only mean an
escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians but also the risk of intra-Palestinian civil war."
This dose of reality was the exception, not the rule. Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad, two Palestinian professors at
Columbia University, neglected to warn of the coming Palestinian storm. If they sensed an internecine Palestinian
conflict approaching, they neglected to warn U.S. policymakers. Instead, they produced a stream of tired anti-Israel
diatribes. Their colleagues at other institutions, who produced almost no critical work regarding the internal Palestinian
dynamic, provide additional examples of analytical failure and anti-Israel bias in this failing field.
What the professors did not grasp then, and refuse to grasp now, is that the radical Islamist ideology of Hamas, and the
Palestinian nationalist ideology of the PLO, are both expansionist, violent, and based more upon the destruction of
Israel than the creation of a viable Palestinian state. As such, it was only a matter of time before they clashed.
The Palestinian civil war and the subsequent Hamas coup has resulted in the launching of more than 800 rockets against
Israel, a border crisis in Egypt, the death of more than 330 Palestinians in internecine fighting, and regional tensions that
may soon lead to a new Middle East war. The professors in this field have yet to explain how they almost unanimously
missed this critical development in the region, despite the mountains of work produced on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
A proper reckoning of this grievous oversight will be one of the necessary steps required if Middle Eastern Studies
professors are ever to regain the trust of policymakers inside the Beltway and beyond.
NOTES:
[1] Mahmood Monshipouri, "The PLO Rivalry with Hamas: The Challenge of Peace, Democratization and Islamic Radicalism."
Middle East Policy, Vol.4, No. 3, 1996, pp. 84-105.
[2] Don Peretz, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 100-101.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Jonathan Schanzer, an adjunct scholar at Campus Watch, is Director of Policy for the Jewish Policy Center, and Editor of
inFOCUS Quarterly.
The foregoing article by Jonathan Shanzer was originally published in the American Thinker, March 12, 2008, and
can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to
define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(Article URL: http://www.meforum.org/article/1872)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
March 12, 2008
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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