[Peace-discuss] George Will vs. Truth

[David Green]

http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/08/george-wills-irrepressible-conflict-with-facts/
 
Conservative columnist George Will was recently in Israel. His trip resulted in 
a series of laughably error-laden columns revealing not only a crude view of the 
Israel-Palestine conflict and obsequious admiration for Bibi Netanyahu, but a 
lack of knowledge about major historical events in his own country.
 
In his third column, Will begins his mutilation of history in a passage about 
the Peel Commission. He wrote:
In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded 
that there was “an irrepressible conflict” — a phrase coined by an American 
historian to describe the U.S. Civil War — “between two national communities 
within the narrow bounds of one small country.” And: “Neither of the two 
national ideals permits” a combination “in the service of a single state.” The 
commission recommended “a surgical operation” — partition. What followed was the 
Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.
Asad Abukhalil has already nailed Will for getting the date of the Peel 
Commission report wrong. It was 1937, not 1936. And the Arab Revolt broke out in 
Palestine before the Peel Commission introduced its findings. I would also add 
that David Ben Gurion privately accepted the Peel Commission’s recommendations 
because he saw them as the basis for a later partition that would gift the 
Zionist settler minority with major port cities like Jaffa and Haifa and throw 
the Palestinian Arabs back to the hinterlands. Moshe Sharett, a future prime 
minister of Israel, remarked about the Peel Commission, “the [Palestinian] Arab 
reaction would be negative because they would lose everything and gain almost 
nothing ….”
 
But leaving his distortions about the Arab Revolt aside, Will made a major error 
and has not been compelled to correct it. This proves the point Abukhalil makes 
again and again: “in the US, you can say anything about the Middle East provided 
it is done from a pro-Israeli perspective.”
 
In the same passage, the Princeton PhD made another huge error, attributing the 
phrase “irrepressible conflict” to an unnamed “American historian.” I don’t know 
where Will got his citation from (some Wikipedia entry?) but it did not reflect 
well on his claim to expertise on American politics. Even amateur scholars of 
the Civil War know that the phrase was coined by then-Senator William Seward in 
his famous speech in 1858.
 
Will’s tendency to err and distort was also on bold display in his first column 
from Israel, a boot-licking ode to the leadership qualities of Netanyahu. In the 
column, Will repeated a widely discredited tale that Netanyahu first told at 
AIPAC:
 
"Nevertheless, a display case in Netanyahu’s office could teach the Obama 
administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone 
that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old 
— 200 years younger than Jerusalem’s role as the Jewish people’s capital. The 
ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: 
Netanyahu."
 
What is Bibi Netanyahu’s connection to the ring, and by extension, to the 
ancient land of Israel? There is none. His father, Benzion, changed his name 
from Milikovsky to Netanyahu after he emigrated from Lithuania to Palestine. 
Thus Bibi has  a much closer relation to Sarah Palin, whose Lithuanian maternal 
grandfather was rumored to be a Jew, than to any late Bronze Age “Jewish 
official” from the Middle East.
To understand the sheer insanity of Netanyahu’s magical ring story, consider how 
I would be received if my grandfather, Hymie Blumenthal, changed his name to 
Hymie Quetzalcoatl, then I asserted a historical mandate to rule over Mexico 
because Quetzalcoatl was a diety of the inhabitants of the ancient Toltec city 
of Teotihuacan. I would have a hard time being taken as seriously as David 
Koresh or the Unabomber.
 
Perhaps Bibi’s tall tale was inspired Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen, an opera 
about a magic ring fashioned by a dwarf that grants its bearer the power to rule 
the world. In the opera, Bibi is Siegfried, the megalomaniacal son of Wotan who 
wages in a destructive conflict for the right to wear the ring. And Will is the 
opera critic who writes a review of the fictional performance as though it were 
a real life historical event.


      
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