This is a guest post by James Mendelsohn, who teaches Law at the University of Huddersfield in the UK.

Just to recap: Jonathan Hoffman wrote a review of Ben White’s book Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide here. Ben White responded here. Hoffman’s rejoinder to White’s response is available here. (Strangely, Jews for Justice for Palestinians seem to have overlooked Hoffman’s rejoinder, but that’s another story.)

Hoffman’s response to White is excellent. There are, however, a couple of points which I believe need to be made even more strongly.

Firstly, let’s look again at the sources White uses. Hoffman rightly pointed out, both in his original review and in his rejoinder, that the likes of Ilan Pappe, Uri Davis, Charles D Smith, Tom Segev, Tanya Reinhart, Jeff Halper, Hussein and McKay, and Maxime Rodinson are ‘known Israel bashers’ and ‘detractors of Israel’. That is true, but more can be said: many of them are also ‘discredited’.

Uri 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 Davis’ 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. (White himself does not repeat the 92% claim and relies on Davis’ 2003 book Apartheid Israel, rather than on the 1987 book. Nevertheless, Davis’ track record hardly inspires confidence.) The work of the late Tanya Reinhart is pulled apart in Paul Bogdanor’s and Edward Alexander’s book, ‘The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders’.

Alex Safian looked at Jeff Halper’s ‘ track record of material distortions‘. Werner Cohn accused Halper of trying to ‘hide and deceive’. Tom Segev was accused by Michael B Oren of ‘twisting his text to meet a revisionist agenda’.

And then of course there is Ilan Pappe. Pappe was described as a ‘charlatan‘ by Yoav Gelber. Efraim Karsh labeled one of Pappe’s books as ‘disgraceful‘. Ricki Hollander examined Pappe’s ‘record of promoting blatant misinformation’, particularly with reference to the Tantura massacre hoax. Benny Morris wrote an emphatically devastating three-part review of Pappe’s A History of Modern Palestine (here, here and here). Morris’ conclusion: ‘This truly is an appalling book. Anyone interested in the real history of Palestine/Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would do well to run vigorously in the opposite direction.’ Reviewing Pappe’s later book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Seth Frantzman accused Pappe of ‘flunking history’: ‘As a work of scholarship, Pappé’s book falls short, and it does so in a particularly damning way. He ignores context and draws far broader conclusions than evidence allows by cherry-picking some reports and ignoring other sources entirely. He does not examine Arab intentions in the five months between the U.N. endorsement of Palestinian partition and Israel’s independence, nor does he consider the widespread public statements by Arab officials in Palestine and in neighboring states declaring their goal of eradicating the Jewish presence in Palestine. It is obvious why a polemicist such as Pappé would cleanse-so to speak-his narrative of any such references: To avoid doing so would strike at the core of the reality that he wishes to foist upon his readers, one which precisely inverts the historical record and turns a coordinated Arab attempt at ethnically cleansing Palestine of its Jews into a Jewish attempt at ethnically cleansing Arabs. Just to cap it all, there was the interview Pappe gave to the German neo-Nazi newspaper Die National Zeitung. Yet none of this stopped White from citing Pappe as an authoritative source, or from (presumably) sending Pappe a preview copy of his book for Pappe to write a commendation.

Of course, all of this begs the question: why does White treat all these sources as authoritative? After all, if you are aiming to write a ‘highly readable introduction’ for ‘beginners’, surely you owe it to them to use the most reliable sources possible; or, at the very very least, to give some sort of acknowledgement that the sources you do use have been (vigorously) contested. White does neither, for which there can surely be only two possible explanations. Either he knew that many of his sources are discredited but decided to cite them anyway - which would suggest a lack of integrity on his part. Alternatively, it’s because he didn’t know that they were discredited, which would suggest he is not quite the specialist his own website suggests. Either way, his use of these sources, without any qualifications or caveats, is a damning indictment of his work.

Secondly, the one candid confession in White’s response to Hoffman’s initial review merits closer scrutiny. Such scrutiny will leave White facing some very difficult questions.

Hoffman initially wrote:

The tone of Chapter Two - on the history of Zionism - is set by the doctored quote with which it opens. As anyone who reads Guardian: Comment Is Free knows, a whole new industry of manufacturing false quotes has been set up by the Israel bashers. White has chosen probably the most common one to open Chapter Two. David Ben-Gurion never said “We must expel Arabs and take their places!” He said the opposite: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places.” (emphasis mine)

White responded:

‘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”.’ (emphasis again mine)

Is White being charitable and gracious when he says that he is ‘quite prepared to reconsider’ the quote? Let’s look at the internal evidence in White’s own book.

In Israeli Apartheid, White references Righteous Victims twice, on page 82 and page 121. Righteous Victims is also included in White’s ‘Select Bibliography’ on page 164. In other words, White was clearly familiar with Righteous Victims when he wrote Israeli Apartheid. He should, therefore, already have been familiar with the Karsh-Morris spat, which culminated in Morris accepting that he had previously misquoted Ben-Gurion. Yet it was only in his response to Hoffman, rather than in his book, that White acknowledged this. All of which leads to the pressing question: why then did White head his second chapter with what he now recognises to be a false quote?

To summarise: White himself has made it clear that he was familiar with Righteous Victims at the time he wrote his book. In Righteous Victims, Benny Morris implicitly acknowledged that he had been wrong to quote Ben-Gurion as saying ‘“We must expel Arabs and take their place”. Yet White nevertheless used this false quote, which derived back to Morris’ earlier work. Why? Once again, there can surely be only two plausible explanations.

The first explanation runs like this. White referenced Righteous Victims twice, and included it in his select bibliography, but somehow managed to miss the bit where Morris conceded that he had previously distorted Ben-Gurion. If this is the case, then the kindest that can be said of White is that he is an idiot.

The second explanation goes like this. White was aware of Karsh’s challenge and of Morris’ concession before he wrote Israeli Apartheid, but (perhaps gambling on the ignorance of the ‘Beginners’ at whom his book is aimed) decided to include the false quote anyway. If that is the case, then the kindest that can be said of White is that he knowingly misled his readers.

Only White himself knows which of the two explanations is the right one. But the conclusions are inescapable. If White is idiotic enough to include Morris’ book in his select bibliography but somehow miss a salient point that same book makes about a distorted quote, then White cannot be taken seriously on anything else. Or if White is dishonest enough knowingly to include a false quote in his book, then he cannot be taken seriously on anything else. Z Word readers will probably already realise this. If others do not, perhaps they need to become reunited with their critical faculties, rather than leaving them at the door every time the word ‘Israel’ is mentioned.