Ernie Suggs, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 23, 2004):

Few people alive know the intricacies surrounding the work and process that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision as well as John Hope Franklin.

And it is not because he is one of America's foremost historians, who penned the classic reader "From Slavery to Freedom."

It was because he was there.

"I assisted Thurgood [Marshall] and his staff in trying to bring to life the history of Reconstruction and to understand what those who voted for the 14th Amendment [which guaranteed equal rights to all citizens] had in mind," Franklin said. "Thurgood didn't know from Adam about that."

It was research conducted by Franklin and a team of social scientists and historians that helped Marshall's case and eventually led to the 1954 decision that reversed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld segregation as "separate but equal."

"We knew it was important and we knew that it would be bitterly challenged," said Franklin, adding that they had watched cautiously as higher education institutions across the country slowly became integrated. "But getting somebody into graduate school was different than getting them into elementary schools."...

But 50 years later Franklin told a group of more than 200 at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History that he is seeing regression that is deeper than education and spreads into where people live and work.

"There are people who haven't given up the battle from that day to this, so we are seeing this process of resegregation," he said.

"As long as we have segregation in housing and in the workplace it will be difficult to desegregate the schools," Franklin said. "We are not going to have another Brown; the courts have spoken. What we have to do is fight on the other fronts."

Franklin's personal odyssey through black history is long and storied. Born in Rentiesville, Okla., in 1915, he graduated from Fisk in 1935, before getting his master's and Ph.D. from Harvard.....

"He is an American treasure," said Herman "Skip" Mason, a local historian and archivist at Morehouse College. "And he should not be looked at as an African-American historian. His work helped non-African-Americans understand our experience."

Philip Kennicott, in the Washington Post (May 13, 2004):

It's only 8:30 a.m. on the East Coast, so some of the angry Americans dialing into the glass-walled C-SPAN studio with the perfect view of the Capitol are very early risers. In the "Washington Journal" hot seat, for 45 minutes, is Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and author of a new book about colonialism, memory and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

It may be early, but Americans are already hard at work trying to calibrate other people's outrage. Oklahoma wants to be sure that New York has its priorities straight, that people who are inclined to be saddened about Abu Ghraib are at least as outraged about the decapitation of Nicholas Berg. It's a beautiful, bright Washington morning, the white dome glistens in the background, and out in the heartland, rage is being balanced in the scales.

"Get our planes up and flatten 'em," says a caller from Pennsylvania. When he gets this kind of question, Khalidi looks down at a notepad and starts writing. His face is scrupulously blank. He's very good at not taking the bait when the caller is just looking for a little anger endorsement. (Tell me mine is the rage that matters most, so many callers seem to say.) Khalidi is also deft at taking just that part of the question that leads him where he really wants to go.

"The caller shows a healthy skepticism," Khalidi says to a caller who has, in fact, shown what feels a little more like paranoia. The subject is the media, the media's preoccupations, and the degree to which journalists bring back to the American people an accurate view of a part of the world in which we are now, with troops "and treasure," as the cliche goes, deeply involved.

Khalidi's book, "Resurrecting Empire," is part a primer on the history of the region and part an effort to sketch an intellectual battle that, in his view, we lost before the war even began. There has been "a muzzling of expertise," says Khalidi, a failure of academics familiar with the region, knowledgeable in its history, fluent in its languages to put themselves forward at a critical time. Especially during the march to war. The administration also failed to consult or heed its own government expertise, an expertise cultivated and created at huge cost over the years, he argues. Into the breach, an ignorance breach, stepped political ideologues -- "neocons" he calls them -- who advocated policies that are turning out to be disastrous.

Among other scholars who specialize in the region, this isn't a radical take on the present state of affairs. Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as preeminent in his field, a courageous scholar and public figure.

"The whole question of academic expertise in the Middle East is a scandal," he says. "This administration is particularly knowledge-averse, not only to the academic world outside but to their academic experts inside."

This understanding, naturally, is disputed. Danielle Pletka, a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute (which in his book Khalidi calls a "nest of some of Washington's most outspoken hawks"), disputes the information gap idea.

"What one finds, particularly in an election year, is that the world is filled with two kinds of people," says Pletka, who acknowledges Khalidi's credentials as a historian but not as a student of inside-the-Beltway policy making. "The kinds that make policy and the kinds who felt that if only the policy people had read their book, their memoir, their article, the policy would be different."

Khalidi's argument is that the world isn't divided into the lucky experts who get to make policy and resentful experts shut out of the conversation. Rather, it is divided between experts and ignorant political ideologues.

"The country was going to war blindly," he says of the time when he was contemplating writing his first book intended for a general audience. He started speaking publicly on the dangers of blundering -- even with good intentions -- into a region where memory of past colonial regimes is still fresh. Friends said the lectures should become a book, which they now are.

"Resurrecting Empire" may remind some readers of other lectures made into books, as it covers and recovers the same ground, but it is based on long experience with the region. Even as he was finishing it, however, it was being overtaken by events. The fast-moving, good-news war of the early months was over. The long grind had set in. Words such as "exit strategy" were beginning to be floated. In his book, Khalidi called for an "international mandate" -- with international peacekeepers -- to run Iraq during its transition to sovereignty.

He's not so optimistic that will work anymore.

"The options are bad, worse and much worse," he says. "The U.S. is going to leave Iraq. . . . The only question is when do the troops leave." To all the politicians who talk of disaster if we leave, he says the disaster is already here.

Khalidi speaks quickly, more so in person than on screen. When you first meet him there's an unplaceable but familiar quality, something bright and brusque about him, suggestive of a good doctor with a lousy bedside manner. Smart, direct, a little impatient, all business. When he warms up to a stranger, the pace is just as fast, but the manner is softer, the language a bit spicier. On a park bench outside the Capitol, he stretches out his feet in the mid-morning sun, slouches a bit and waves vaguely toward the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

"The morons down there in the president's house," he says, with exasperation. What exasperates him is the contempt he feels has been shown for the Geneva Conventions at high levels in the administration. They have been "systematically derated," he argues, and it will come back to haunt us.

"Everyone in the armed forces should be furious," he says.

He's not just worried about policies, but people.

"I have students all over the Middle East," he says. His daughters -- one is an archaeologist in Yemen, the other is at a legal institute in the West Bank -- are both there. He has extended family there. He travels there regularly.

"There are kids I know in the service," he says, worried about what will happen to them if they're captured. "Every time I hear these laptop neocons talk about international law. . . ."

He trails off, disgusted. "Neocon" and "neoconservative" are among Washington's most fraught rhetorical markers, used by some people in much the same way that "liberal" was once used to dismiss an entire category of supposedly failed thinking. Others, including the AEI's Pletka, see a more sinister resonance.

"I think the phrase 'neocon' is much more popular among people who think it shields their anti-Semitism," she says. "But it doesn't."

Which goes to the heart of one of the ideas in Khalidi's book: that the debate about Israel and Palestine, and proper U.S. policy in the region, has become so bitter that even experts dare not discuss it. In his book, he bemoans "the pervasive atmosphere of intimidation and fear that makes many experts on the region reluctant to express themselves frankly." It is not a problem that has limited his own public commentary -- which has brought him ample controversy.

Khalidi, 55, straddles a difficult line between academic historian and political commentator. When Columbia hired him from the University of Chicago, where he was director of the Center for International Studies and had taught from 1987 to 2003, it was considered a coup for the university. He became the first scholar to hold a new chair named for Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual who articulated the idea of "orientalism" -- the West's use of self-serving scholarship to define and control perceptions of people from the Middle East (and elsewhere). Khalidi has spent much of his career attempting to undo the habits of orientalism, to work back through the history and reinterpret it in a way that gives the West a better idea of what really motivates attitudes in places such as Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Egypt. His work on Palestinian history, and Palestinian identity, is particularly respected, but he has been an independent voice, often at odds with Palestinian intellectuals.

His thumbnail sketch of history, worked out in "Resurrecting Empire," goes like this: Once-great and often-autocratic civilizations of the Middle East were undermined by the 15th-century discovery of the New World, which reduced the Middle East's role in world trade. European civilizations, by contrast, flourished and eventually colonized the vast majority of the region. Local efforts at democracy were corrupted by colonial rulers. Oil made these interferences all the more egregious. Arabs and others turned to a sometimes aggressive nationalism to get the Europeans out; but nationalism, oil wealth and human nature corrupted these regimes, as well, and the people suffer still at the expense of cynical elites.

He has plenty of criticism for the leaders of the region, but no patience for blaming the region's woes on Islam. He has no patience for U.S. leaders who think they can bring democracy by force, rather than let it grow indigenously. He has no patience for people who think "they hate us because we're us."

"They like us, they like our values," he says. "They hate our policies."

He is, himself, a meeting point between the world he studies and the country he calls home. He is Arab American (his father was Palestinian, his mother Lebanese American), born in New York. His father was a U.N. staffer with high-level access to the backroom debates on Middle East policy. The affairs of the Middle East were dinner-table fodder. English and Arabic were spoken at home. He went to Yale (two years behind George W. Bush, he says), and felt isolated, especially as the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and Arab countries defined his political beliefs in a way that was undoubtedly in opposition to the way it defined the beliefs of students sympathetic to Israel. He ended up as a historian against his father's better judgment.

But there's no doing history of this part of the world without controversy. The New York Sun has labeled him "anti-Israeli" and poked into the financial backers of the Said Chair, which he holds, implying that he may be beholden to foreign governments or groups. Khalidi has also been regularly criticized by an organization called Campus Watch that has set itself up as a right-wing watchdog group covering academics whose work draws them into politically charged territory, especially the Middle East.

"He can't be characterized as objective," says Daniel Mandel of the Middle East Forum, parent organization of Campus Watch, citing Khalidi's view that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. "Views of that extremity can't be considered objective or impartial."

"He is eminently respectable," says Georgetown's Hudson. "I can't say the same for Campus Watch."

Glenn Garvin, author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras, in Reason magazine, in the course of an article prompted by the book, In Denial, to which Eric Foner (below) responded (April 2004):

In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."

Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn’t Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you’re sorry.

Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings. Time’s Strobe Talbott decreed in 1982 that it was "wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened." A Wall Street analyst who misjudged a stock so badly would find himself living under a bridge, if not sharing a cell with Martha Stewart. But Talbott instead became Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, where he could apply his perspicacious geopolitical perceptual powers to Osama bin Laden....

The end of the Cold War has produced many such numbing silences. The speed with which the Soviet empire imploded and the economic ruin and popular revulsion that were revealed have made it clear that baby boomer intellectuals and journalists, viewing the world through the distorted lens of Vietnam, overwhelmingly got it wrong. Peasants ate less and were slaughtered more on the other side of the Iron Curtain; the jails were fuller; the KGB’s list was a lot longer and a lot deadlier than Joe McCarthy’s. A team of French historians calculated the worldwide death toll of communism during the 20th century at more than 93 million. When Hoover Institution historian Robert Conquest used newly available data from the Soviet Union to update The Great Terror, his account of Stalin’s murderous purges of the 1930s, his publishers asked for a new title. "How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?" Conquest suggested.

The Conquest anecdote comes from In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, an improbably riveting dispatch from the battlefields of historiography by scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.

Chilling and often perversely funny, it details the intellectual sleight of hand to which many American historians of communism and the Soviet Union have resorted as newly revealed archives in Moscow and Washington suggest they were, well, fucking fools.

Their efforts haven’t been very successful. As Haynes and Klehr note, the world’s final redoubt of communism is not Havana or Pyongyang but American college campuses: "The nostalgic afterlife of communism in the United States has outlived most of the real Communist regimes around the world....A sizable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life."

Bold words, especially in academia, where suggesting somebody has communist sympathies -- even if he’s carrying a bloody hammer and sickle in one hand and Trotsky’s severed head in the other -- instantly draws gleeful cries of "McCarthyism!" I say, if this be blacklisting, make the most of it:

• Miami University’s Robert W. Thurston, in his 1996 book Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, rejects the overwhelming evidence that Stalin’s purges took the lives of millions. He concedes only 681,692 executions in the years 1937 and 1938, and a mere 2.5 million arrests. Even using those low-ball figures, that means that nearly one of every 20 adult Soviet males went to prison and that more than 900 of them were executed per day. Nonetheless, Thurston says Stalin has gotten a bad rap: There was no "mass terror...extensive fear did not exist...[and] Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder."

• Theodore Von Laue, a professor emeritus of history at Clark University, goes further in a 1999 essay in The Historian. He says it’s the damnable Russian peasantry that ought to be begging poor Stalin for forgiveness: "He supervised the near-chaotic transformation of peasant Eurasia into an urban, industrialized superpower under unprecedented adversities. Though his achievements were at the cost of exorbitant sacrifice of human beings and natural resources, they were on a scale commensurate with the cruelty of two world wars. With the heroic help of his uncomprehending people, Stalin provided his country, still highly vulnerable, with a territorial security absent in all history." And Stalin was no mere poet, Von Laue adds, but a damn fine technocrat too: "The sophisticated design of Soviet totalitarianism has perhaps not been sufficiently appre-ciated."

• Columbia’s Eric Foner, a past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, staking his bid as founder of what might be called the Smiley-Face School of History, denounces "the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages in the history of the Soviet era." He wasn’t talking about pesky American historians using the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out new horror stories about J. Edgar Hoover but about a Moscow exhibition on the Soviet gulag. What possible good could come of learning the details of that?

Foner, Von Laue, and Thurston are not lone nuts, the academic equivalents of Mark Lane and Ramsey Clark, but important revisionist historians. The revisionists, mostly baby boomer survivors of the New Left, have been conducting their own Cold War with traditionalist historians for nearly four decades. Unlike in the rest of the world, in academia their side was victorious. Since the 1970s, it’s been an article of faith in historical journals and university presses that the United States rather than the Soviet Union posed the greatest threat to world peace and political freedom....

Eric Foner Responds

I hope the rest of reason is more accurate than Glenn Garvin's review "Fools for Communism" (April), which references me. Garvin says "Foner 'denounces 'the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages of the Soviet era.'"

He is referring to an article I wrote after teaching in Russia in 1990. I did not "denounce" the focus on the Soviet past among the people I met in Moscow at all—I reported it, as part of a discussion of a museum exhibition on one of Stalin's prison camps and, more generally, of how Gorbachev's policy of "openness" had unleashed a wide-ranging discussion of history. As a historian I applaud all efforts to uncover forgotten or suppressed aspects of the past. How this qualifies me as one of the historians supposedly "in denial" about Soviet history is difficult to understand.

It is unclear if this misrepresentation stems from the book under review or is the invention of the reviewer. Either way, it does not reflect well on your generally interesting magazine.

Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University
New York, NY

...

Glenn Garvin Responds to Foner

If anything, both the book In Denial and my review soft-pedal the tone of Foner's essay, which appeared in the December 1990 issue of Harper's. The air of bitter disappointment was palpable as Foner described young Russians who admire Abraham Lincoln but "paint the history of the Soviet era in the blackest hues, reclassifying every top leader between Lenin and Gorbachev as either criminal or incompetent." Worse yet, he wrote, the Russians were turning away from distinctions between bourgeois and socialist ideologies in favor of something he referred to, contempt practically dripping from the quotation marks, as "universal human values." Foner sounded like nothing so much as a jilted paramour as he complained of "this love affair with America."

...

Avi Shlaim, in the course of an interview in the Palestine Chroncile (May 14, 2004):

You were born in Baghdad. Do you have any memories of living in Iraq?

I was born in 1945, and my family left Iraq in 1950. I was 5 years old, and hadn’t started going to school so I never learned to read and write Arabic. I have only disjointed memories of life in Iraq. My father was a very wealthy merchant … we lived in a spacious house, and had a very leisurely and pleasant lifestyle. My parents always referred to Iraq as ‘God’s Paradise’, and there was no history of anti-Semitism in Iraq, only isolated incidents. The Jews were generally well integrated and happy.

But after Iraq’s participation in the 1948 war, there was a backlash against the Jews. Life became uncomfortable and in 1950 there was a mass exodus to Israel of about 100,000 of the 130,000 Iraqi Jews. The Iraqi government did not want the Jews to leave as they were a pillar of the Iraqi economy. The Israeli government, desperately short of manpower, pressed for the Jews to come out, even if this meant they had to leave everything behind.

My family and I were part of that exodus to Israel. We were not refugees in the strict sense of the word because we weren’t persecuted or expelled; we made our own decision to leave. So are situation is not comparable to that of the Palestinian refugees, who were displaced by Israel in 1948. But in a real sense to us, we were victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Iraqi born Israeli Rabbi David Rabeeya refers to himself as an Arab-Jew, which is not an expression that the Israeli government recognises. Is this a term with which you would describe yourself?

No, I would not. I would describe myself as an Israeli because I grew up in Israel, served in the Israeli army, and I was even a patriotic Israeli in my youth. It never occurred to me to describe myself as an Arab-Jew. Neither part of this description would fit my identity today. I don’t see myself as an Arab, and although I happen to be a Jew, it is not a major part of my identity because I am an atheist.

I have often thought that if the people of the Middle East were more aware of their common background as Semites, this might go some way to blurring the battle-lines in the Middle East.

I agree with that. Unfortunately the Israeli establishment has never used Jews from the Arab countries as a bridge. The official ideology in the 1950s (during the time of mass immigration to Israel) was that everything Arab was inferior and primitive. The task was to erase the Arab identity, culture, language, habits and folklore of the new immigrants, and give them a new Ashkenazi identity.

There was an element of racism, or at least arrogance on the part of the Ashkenazi elite, in wanting to ‘raise’ the Oriental Jews to their level of civilisation. This prevalent attitude meant that Jews from Arab countries did not dwell on their Arab heritage, but strove to integrate themselves into their new society.

They also internalised the ethos of Israel as a new state that surrounded by implacable enemies with no option but to stand up and fight. This is the reason that many Oriental Jews vote for Right-wing parties that are nationalistic and xenophobic such as Herut and later Likud. Incidentally, it is also true that Israel has never used its Arab population as a bridge to the neighbouring countries.

While the Israeli Arabs accepted the legitimacy of the new state, the Israeli establishment persisted in regarding them with suspicion as a potential Fifth Column. Although the Israeli Arabs wanted to integrate, Israel saw them as a problem rather than an asset and was unwilling or unable to treat them as equal citizens. David Ben Gurion set the tone by projecting Israel as a European country in culture and values which only ‘by accident’ is located in the Middle East.

In the foreword to an Arabic edition of one of Bernard Lewis's recent books, published by the Muslim Brotherhood, the translator included a few words of ambiguous praise for the author. Lewis was, he wrote,"one of two things: a candid friend or an honorable enemy," but certainly not one to dodge the truth.

In the West, critics' views on the eighty-seven-year-old known as"the dean of Middle Eastern scholars" are more clear-cut. Conservatives tend to hail him as a priceless gem—the only scholar both erudite and honest enough to tell us the inflammatory truth about the condition of modern Islam. Leftists, particularly among his peers in academe, tend to regard him as a servant of imperial power, prone to making demeaning generalizations about Middle Eastern society, and arrogant enough to consider himself an objective scholar. The rift has deepened as Lewis's influence on Paul Wolfowitz, the chief architect of current White House policy in the Middle East, has become public knowledge.

For those who only know Lewis from his post-9-11 celebrity, From Babel to Dragomans, a newly published collection of Lewis' essays from the 1950s to the present, is a handy guide to his intellectual roots. Lewis's academic career spans seven decades—he enrolled in the University of London's School of Oriental Studies in 1933. A genuine scholar of Orientalism, unabashed by the recent denigration of the field by post-modernists, he believes in rigorous linguistic training, prodigious reading of primary sources, and a no-stone-unturned approach to scholarship. Before he became a national celebrity for telling us"What Went Wrong," Lewis delved as enthusiastically into such topics as the relative merits of donkeys and camels for medieval pilgrims, derivations of the Persian word for eggplant, and property law in the tenth-century Muslim provinces.

There is no doubt that Lewis's harsh critique of modern Islam stems from a deep affection for the civilization that it once was. As a student visiting Turkey in 1938, by a stroke of luck he became the first Westerner permitted to enter the Imperial Ottoman Archives. His recollection of the experience says much about his sentiments toward his field:"Feeling like a child turned loose in a toy shop, or like an intruder in Ali Baba's cave, I hardly knew where to turn first."

Lewis's two trademark preoccupations, historiography and the nuances of language, permeate his writings. The book includes a detailed essay on the evolution of propaganda in Islam, and several discussions of the meaning and uses of"history" in Muslim tradition. In an essay on Islamic revolution, he points out the absurdity of referring to Islamists as"fundamentalists.""Fundamentalist" is an American expression denoting belief in the literal divine origin of scripture–something that all Muslims, militant or otherwise, believe about the Koran. Lewis is not just being picky; language is a crucial issue in Islam. Analyzing Osama bin Laden's appeal, Lewis explains:"The first and most obvious reason for his popularity is his eloquence, a skill much admired and appreciated in the Arab world since ancient times."

Representatives of the West, Lewis says, need to pay more attention to the way they communicate with the Middle East, where their every word and signal are scrutinized for signs of weakness or uncertainty. If one had to sum up in one phrase his message to U.S. policymakers, it would be the title of his September 16, 2001, op-ed in The Washington Post:"We Must Be Clear." In trying to understand the intentions and capacities of the United States, Lewis writes, Middle Easterners have two guides:"The first is history... In this the record is not encouraging. The second is their current dealings with U.S. statesmen, soldiers, and diplomats, and the interpretations they put on what is said to them and what is asked of them." With clarity, firmness, and a show of resolve, there is"only a possibility" that the U.S. will win local support, Lewis concludes."Without them there is a certainty of failure."

From the Boston Globe (May 6, 2004):

A QUOTATION from Douglas Brinkley in Alex Beam's column "Historian's 'duty': PR for Kerry?" (April 29) leaves the impression that Brinkley has been misleading about interviews he conducted with John Kerry's crewmates. For the record, the introduction to the excerpts from Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," published in The Atlantic and approved by Brinkley, states the facts correctly: that he interviewed "all but one of the men still living who served under him."

CULLEN MURPHY

Managing editor
Atlantic Monthly

From the Boston Globe (May 3, 2004):

There is a venerable tradition of historians acting as official biographers for presidential candidates (e.g., George Bancroft for Martin Van Buren, Henry Cabot Lodge for Theodore Roosevelt, and James McGregor Burns for JFK), and an equally established record of historians acting as White House advisers (e.g., Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Neustadt for JFK). Though such scholars surely invite extra scrutiny of their work, they don't necessarily compromise their professionalism merely by engaging in the political process.

Finally, though Beam claims to identify three glaring examples of Brinkley's "lazy puffery," in fact, the first error appears in an interview Brinkley gave to the Atlantic Monthly, not in the book itself, and the second two errors - that Brinkley didn't interview Kerry's former commanding officer and that he accepts Kerry's explanation of events at the 1971 antiwar march - are matters of interpretation, not fact.

Though he hasn't made much of a case against Brinkley the historian, Beam implicitly raises interesting questions about his own objectivity as a journalist.

JOSHUA M. ZEITZ

Lecturer in history
Pembroke College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, England

"This truly is an appalling book," Morris writes at the end of the review. "Anyone interested in the real history of Palestine/Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would do well to run vigorously in the opposite direction."

Morris offers a catalog of the mistakes and inaccuracies he found in the book, which partly stem, he feels, from slovenliness and laziness, but mainly from the same philosophy of relativism in which there is no value to facts and historic truth.

Pappe's response was not long in coming. It appeared, flashing sparks and brusque statements, on March 30, 2004 on the Internet's "Electronic Intifada" site, after The New Republic refused to publish it (mentioned in the introduction to the response). Morris told Haaretz that The New Republic does not, as a matter of policy, publish lengthy responses to articles appearing in the magazine, and it was suggested to Pappe that he submit a brief rebuttal to the weekly.

Pappe claims he did in fact send The New Republic a short response, which will apparently be published alongside a counter-response by Morris. The skirmishing between the two and the great interest it has elicited on the Internet (numerous letters of response) indicate that although post-Zionism may be in a state of suspension, as some commentators believe, it has by all means become part of the public discourse, as others might argue....