New Historians’ Hissie Fit

In Harvard Hucksters, I spoke about the modus operandi of the New Historians: This is a group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted: ‘We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas’), who’ve cocked a snook at the liberal country in which they’ve thrived, so as to gain admittance into the fashionable Palestinian pantheon… they misrepresent documents, resort to partial quotes, withhold evidence, make false assertions, and rewrites original documents. Such is the incompetence of these Arabists that they even neglect Arab archival material, “relying almost exclusively on Western often only secondary sources.” As Ha’aretz’s Avraham Tal puts it, they are preoccupied with the systematic invalidation of the Zionist narrative in the Israeli-Arab conflict. Avi Shlaim, one of the performers in the New-Historian’s much sought-after vaudeville, juggles the facts to come up with an analysis of Israel’s failed war in Lebanon. The shtick is familiar: no mention of the eight dead and a murderous diversionary shelling of border communities by Hezbollah, but plenty of assertions about the vampiric lusts of the Jewish State’s leaders. The anatomy of hating Israel is worth reading.