Antecedents to today's talk of "Palestinian rights" in how Reconstruction was described

Sar Shalom

I finally got to start reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction, through which I learned of W. E. B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America. One of the topics of DuBois' work is the Dunning school's historiography of Reconstruction which was responsible for generations of Americans believing that Reconstruction was simply a tool for corrupt northerners to prop up incompetent negroes to which DuBois' contemporaries could happily say goodriddance. An example of DuBois' struggle with the zeitgeist at his time, from Chapter XVII "The Propaganda of History," and some commentary of how his struggle parallels our struggle with the zeitgeist of the Palestinian narrative:

Herein lies more than mere omission and difference of emphasis. The treatment of the period of Reconstruction reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans. The editors of the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica asked me for an article on the history of the American Negro. From my manuscript they cut out all my references to Reconstruction. I insisted on including the following statement:

White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools.

This the editor refused to print, although he said that the article otherwise was "in my judgment, and in the judgment of others in the office, an excellent one, and one with which it seems to me we may all be well satisfied." I was not satisfied and refused to allow the article to appear.

Just as the intelligentsia of DuBois' time refused to challenge its narrative about the freedmen being a bunch of incompetents, today's intelligentsia refuses to challenge its narrative about the uppity Jews dispossessing the native Palestinians so as to revive their abandoned and forgotten kingdom. Unlike American Reconstruction for DuBois, Middle Eastern reconstruction for us is a matter of the present and not just history. Thus, instead of historical works ignoring parts of the past complicating the desired narrative, today the news media, as documented by Matti Friedman, ignore events of the present that complicate their precious narrative.

War and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. It is the duty of humanity to heal them. It was therefore soon conceived as neither wise nor patriotic to speak of all the causes of strife and the terrible results to which sectional differences in the United States had led. And so, first of all, we minimized the slavery controversy which convulsed the nation from the Missouri Compromise down to the Civil War. On top of that, we passed by Reconstruction with a phrase of regret or disgust.

In most western discourse about the Middle East today, the role of the Holocaust is rightly recognized as justifying the need for a Jewish homeland. However, such discussion invariably devolves into questions of how much the "innocent" Palestinians should pay for the sins and crimes of Europe. What such questions ignore is the 13 centuries of the Pact of Umar in general and the half-century before the First Aliyah in the Levant and Arab resistance to the Yishuv in particular. Having whitewashed the Arab/Muslim crimes against Mizrahi Jewry out of our history, it is now permissible to publicize questions if Middle Eastern reconstruction should be brought to an end now the way American Reconstruction was ended 138 years ago.

But are these reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying Truth? If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.

If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.

Now we get to the reason for why history was censored in DuBois' day. Today we recognize that allowing Jim Crow to emerge at the end of the 19th century is a stain on our nation's history. In DuBois' time, the stain would have been ever more real as Jim Crow was a present reality then. However, if the alternative to Jim Crow could be shown to be a perversion of justice, then Jim Crow could be tolerated as at worst the cost of righting a grave injustice and making it happen would have been a truly noble act. Such is also the case with Middle Eastern reconstruction. If it can be shown that the uppity Jews are guilty of unspeakable, unprovoked crimes against humanity, then giving them their comeuppance would not be such a terrible act. In fact, it would be a noble one. If the result of doing so is the reinstatement of the Islamic equivalent of Jim Crow, then it is at worst the unfortunate cost of seeing that justice is done. Such are the stakes of the narrative war.

Reconstruction, cont.

Sar Shalom

In today's "Disunion" blog at the New York Times, there is a post about how the South continued to fight for white hegemony after the surrender Appomattox Courthouse. One topic of the post was the debate over what exactly were the terms of the Appomattox surrender. A further issue was the southern notion that the result of the war was the triumph of “might over right.”

A notable passage in the post is

Trafficking in the toxic myth that congressional Reconstruction was a time of white Southern prostration and vindictive “black rule,” Gordon claimed, “our people feel that the faith which was pledged to them has been violated.” Southerners were “disturbed” by the congressional program, “deprived of rights which we had inherited — which belonged to us as citizens of the country.” If they had known what indignities and disabilities awaited them, Gordon surmised, Confederates would not have surrendered on April 9, 1865.

With changing a few words here and there, this passage would become

Trafficking in the toxic myth that Zionism is a force for Arab prostration and vindictive “Jewish rule.” “Our people feel that the faith which was pledged to them has been violated.” Arabs were “disturbed” by the Zionist program, “deprived of rights which we had inherited — which belonged to us as natives of the land.”

Altogether, that is not too off from the case that is put forward against Israel.

Returning to the point about how the American Civil War represented the triumph of “might over right,” which originates in General Lee's farewell address to his troops, I recall Einat Wilf's reflections on what led to her present views of the conflict. Among Wilf's points was her characterization of her Arab interlocutors at various “peace” gatherings. She described their position as “we get it, you're here, you're powerful,” and then over dinner they would say things like, “the people are not really a people, you're only a religion” and “your whole connection to this land is made up, it's a fabricated story that you created in order to take our land” with the conclusion that they reject any Jewish right to be in the Land of Israel.

Wilf continued on the asymmetry of moderation between the Israeli and the Palestinian side. On the Israeli side, a moderate recognizes the right of the Arab residents between the Mediterranean and the Jordan to have self-determination. However, the Palestinians considered moderates by the West “do not recognize my right. They recognize my might, but what happens the day when I no longer have might?”

When the South surrendered to Northern “might” without recognizing Northern right, the result was that as soon as that might was retracted, the South reimposed social order that had existed previously. Similarly, if the Palestinians recognize only Israeli might without recognizing any Jewish right, then as soon as Jewish might would be retracted, they will seek to overturn everything Israel has built up. This is why there can never be a just and equitable peace as long as the Palestinians reject Jewish rights to live in their ancestral land and that any notion that peace can break out by simply forcing “adequate” concessions from Israel without getting the Palestinians to recognize Jewish rights is simply fantasy.

For once, the New York Times accurately describes what is underlying the Mideast conflict (Updated)

Sar Shalom

{Editor's note - Eric Foner is considered the "dean" of historians of nineteenth-century American history, if not American historians, more generally.  His 1988 Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is a masterpiece of the field.}

While historian Eric Foner's recent New York Times article was not about the Middle East, it does describe an attempted reversal of fortune in that the formerly oppressed were granted equal citizenship while those attempting to thwart that emancipation were disenfranchised.

This is the situation that befell the Mizrahi Jews who throughout the 19th century were subjected to the whims of their Muslim neighbors and who gained full citizenship in Israel as the result of the Zionist enterprise. The example, along with the description of attempts to stymie and then discredit that effort, presented by Eric Foner is that of Reconstruction in the United States following the Civil War.

What we need to do is highlight the parallels between the efforts to bring about African-American equality through Reconstruction with the realized equalization of the Mizrahi Jews among the Arabs, and between the efforts to delegitimize Reconstruction and the efforts to delegitimize Zionism.

Reconstruction refers to the period, generally dated from 1865 to 1877, during which the nation’s laws and Constitution were rewritten to guarantee the basic rights of the former slaves, and biracial governments came to power throughout the defeated Confederacy. For decades, these years were widely seen as the nadir in the saga of American democracy. According to this view, Radical Republicans in Congress, bent on punishing defeated Confederates, established corrupt Southern governments presided over by carpetbaggers (unscrupulous Northerners who ventured south to reap the spoils of office), scalawags (Southern whites who supported the new regimes) and freed African-Americans, unfit to exercise democratic rights. The heroes of the story were the self-styled Redeemers, who restored white supremacy to the South.

Zionism refers to the period from roughly 1871 until today during which the Jews from across the Ottoman Empire and Europe were brought to one corner the the Ottoman Empire, the southwest Levant, where the Ottoman Jews were freed from the shackles of dhimmitude. According to a popular theory today, this represents the last vestige of European colonialism in which European colonists bent on subjugating the native Arab population, imposing white imperial rule over those Arabs and giving a voice the Jewish dhimmis who were unfit for self-rule. The heroes of this story are the irhabis, or as their supporters call them, jihadis, who are struggling to reimpose the Pact of Umar.

This portrait, which received scholarly expression in the early-20th-century works of William A. Dunning and his students at Columbia University, was popularized by the 1915 film “Birth of A Nation” and by Claude Bowers’s 1929 best-selling history, “The Tragic Era.” It provided an intellectual foundation for the system of segregation and black disenfranchisement that followed Reconstruction.

The aforementioned theory of Zionism received scholarly expression through Edward Said's Orientalism and popular support through efforts to demonstrate the human toll of Israel's existence on the lives of the Palestinians.

Lincoln did not live to preside over Reconstruction. That task fell to his successor, Andrew Johnson. Once lionized as a heroic defender of the Constitution against Radical Republicans, Johnson today is viewed by historians as one of the worst presidents to occupy the White House. He was incorrigibly racist, unwilling to listen to criticism

While the original visionaries of the Balfour Declaration, which became the British Mandate for Palestine, lived to see it go into effect, they did not remain in office to do so. The people who came to office, and successive High Commissioners for Palestine, were less committed to the goal of establishing a Jewish national home than were the drafters of the Balfour Declaration, notably the anti-Semite Louis Bols who sought to undermine it. It was those successors who empowered the Mufti who in turn made opposing Jewish self-determination a pan-Arab priority.

[T]he advent of African-Americans in positions of political power aroused bitter hostility from Reconstruction’s opponents. ... As late as 1947, the Southern historian E. Merton Coulter wrote that of the various aspects of Reconstruction, black officeholding was “longest to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.”

The sight of Jews, whom all their experiences taught are supposed to be at the mercy of the believers, overseeing their own governance was what was most horrifying and what most needed to be eradicated.

It was not economic dependency, however, but widespread violence, coupled with a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality, that doomed Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups began a campaign of murder, assault and arson that can only be described as homegrown American terrorism.

The real model for Palestinian resistance against Israel. Leila Khaled's attacks on Israeli buses are no different from Jesse James' attacks on Reconstruction officials.

Meanwhile, as the Northern Republican Party became more conservative, Reconstruction came to be seen as a misguided attempt to uplift the lower classes of society.

The one area where Zionism differs from Reconstruction. In Reconstruction, the chief beneficiary was the southern "Negroes" (using the terminology of the time) while the chief force sustaining it was northern whites. While the northern whites saw moral benefits to Reconstruction advancing, they did not enjoy any practical benefits of it doing so. In contrast, Zionism benefited both Mizrahi and European Jewry. Thus, while similarly to Reconstruction it was outsiders, the European Jews, who had been able to learn the defense maneuvers that were necessary to secure progress against resistance, something which was not available to the Jews living under Muslim rule, when Klan-like resistance sprung up to the emancipation of Mizrahi Jewry, the European Jews were not about to turn tails and abandon their Middle Eastern co-religionists because it was their dreams that were threatened as well.

A final note: It is time that we present the case that those championing the "Palestinian cause" are not repeating the effort to undo the Apartheid regime of South Africa, rather, they are repeating the effort to overturn Reconstruction, reviving the Pact of Umar the way the end of Reconstruction brought about Jim Crow.

Update:

An article in Tablet today asks about the tensions between attachment of American Jews to Israel and to liberalism. While the article did not go into depth about any of the details producing that tension, it did mention the Arab Spring and domestic-Israeli relations with their Arab population. However, the largest issue in general that is held to place the two at odds is the conflict with the Palestinians. In this regards, the conflict between Zionism and liberalism assumes that supporting the Palestinians is akin to supporting the Civil Rights struggle in this country.

The reality is that supporting the Palestinians is akin to supporting the southern whites under Reconstruction. One could argue that the suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli control is excessive,just as one could reasonably make a case that the disenfranchisement of the whites under Reconstruction went too far. However, arguing that the appropriate response to this situation should be to abandon support for Israel would be like arguing that the appropriate response to the excessive disenfranchisement of the whites under Reconstruction was to clear the way for the emergence of Jim Crow.