War on Want should not be allowed charitable status and their fear of facing the truth is shown by their refusal to allow you in.

You mean like Stephen Marks one of the leaders of your own organisation who writes comments in debates such as the following :

“Mikey is a two-faced lying streak of shit, as was clearly demonstrated the last time he showed his face at Jews sans Frontieres and continued to repeat Efraim Karsh’s lie that Benny Morris had deliberately distorted the text of a Ben Gurion letter, despite it being clearly demonstrated that the claim was false.”

Or “What Slimeball Mikey fails to point out is that the photograph is one of a series relating to the Dir Yassin Remembered event of 2001 - several years before Eisen and McGowan came out with their present bizarre and indecent ‘holocaust denial’ notions, as a result of which most of the original sponsors of DYR have resigned.”

Hypocrits

Given the extensive range of *factual* criticism which has been shown concerning White’s book, you might address the issue of why JfJfP chose to push this faulty book?

Whilst doing that you might want to consider the five doctored quotes which White used to marshal his arguments and whether or not you think that Roger Garaudy is a legitimate source?

Again, White’s book is based on numerous falsehoods (that’s factual errors) so why did JfJfP decide to push it?

It simply does not serve your interest to try and label people with labels such as “anti israel” or “antisemites” or “self hating” or whatever hackneyed phrase you dredge up so frequently, because overuse simply saps the power of those accusations. It’s just crying wolf and in itself it puts us Jews further at risk.

It demonstrates weakness if you have to stoop to such tactics and makes it look as if your arguments cannot stand up on their own.

You seem sure of your points. So why not try according some respect to those whose views you oppose and have the guts to debate the issues rather than try to discredit them?

Surely a real debate is much more satisying than a playground-style slanging match anyway?

Aaron Dover
Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Pappe’s interview with the neo-Nazi newspaper seems not to have deterred White either:

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1856#

There is a paragraph in White’s response which needs further fisking:

‘The quotation which I am quite prepared to reconsider is from the beginning of Part I, when I cite Ben-Gurion writing, “We must expel Arabs and take their places”. The first prominent historian to include this quotation was Benny Morris, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. This quotation was subsequently questioned by historian Efraim Karsh, who analysed the meaning of the hand-written edits in the original document. Morris accepted this point, and in Righteous Victims (2001), cited the quotation as: “We do not want and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places”.’

It is unclear whether White became aware of Karsh’s challenge to Morris and Morris’ concession before or after reading Jonathan’s review. If White was aware of Karsh’s challenge and Morris’ concession of the point before he wrote his book, why did he include the false quote? That would point to a lack of integrity on White’s part.

Alternatively, White was not aware of Karsh’s challenge and Morris’ concession of the point before he wrote the book. If this is the case, then this surely demolishes any claims White has to be taken seriously. After all, White him self acknowledges that Morris conceded the point as long ago as 2001. So if White was not aware of an important debate within Israeli historiography, why should he be taken seriously as a commentator on any other issue?

The other point I would make even more forcefully than Jonathan does is about the sources White uses. Jonathan rightly points out that the likes of Pappe, Uri Davis, Charles D Smith, Tom Segev, Tanya Reinhart, Jeff Halper, Hussein and McKay, and Maxime Rodinson are ‘detractors’. That is true, but more can be said: many of them are also ‘discredited’.

Pappe’s scholarship has been exposed as being woefully inept by Karsh, Frantzman, Yoav Gelber and (ironically) Morris. Davis, as well as being an observer member of the PLO, helped to promote the antisemitic play ‘Perdition’ in the 1980s, which claimed that Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis in perpetrating the Holocaust. One of the central claims of his 1987 book ‘Israel: An Apartheid State’, namely that Arabs are banned from buying or leasing land in 92% of pre-1967 Israel, has long since been shown to be false (http://www.meforum.org/370/can-arabs-buy-land-in-israel). The work of the late Tanya Reinhart is pulled apart in Paul Bogdanor’s and Edward Alexander’s book, ‘The Jewish Divide over Israel’. Segev’s accoun t of 1967 has been taken to task by Michael B Oren. So why does White treat all these sources as authoritative? Either it is because he knows they are discredited but decided to cite them anyway (which would suggest a lack of integrity) or it’s because he didn’t know they were discredited (which would suggest he is not as knowledgeable a commentator as he would like to think). Either way, his use of them is a damning indictment of his work.