Historians' Fallacies - Prof. Rashid Khalidi

The following quote of a footnote in Rashid Khalidi's new book (Hat Tip: Martin Kramer) reveals some basic errors in scholarship:

The exact number of Palestinian refugees in 1948 is difficult to ascertain, and has long been highly disputed. Contemporary UN estimates put the figure at over 750,000, while Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1, writes of "some 600,000-760,000" refugees. The first figure given by Morris is low; the latter is probably closer to the truth. Morris's book, which drew on the newly opened Israeli archives to dispel some of the most tenacious myths regarding the Palestinian refugees, has become the standard work on this topic. See also Morris's 1948 and After, rev. ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1994. Norman G. Finkelstein argues convincingly that Morris fails to draw the requisite conclusions from the damning evidence he assembles: see Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995, 51-87. Among the first to publish results of research in the Israeli archives regarding the Palestinian refugees that reached conclusions similar to those of Morris were Segev, 1949, and Flapan, The Birth of Israel, published in 1986 and 1987, respectively. [emphasis mine]

OK, problem no. 1 is the highlighted sentence - Khalidi does not make any attempt to actually prove that the 'latter figure' is closer to the truth. Even if we were to consider the 'UN document' estimate as proof, one would expect Khalidi to at least adress the problem of the reliability of UN estimates due to widespread fraud; the UN documents themselves discuss this problem (See Gelber, Yoav, Komemiyut VeNakba, Dvir 2004, in the Chapter "Pelitei HaPelishah"). Heck, Walter Pinner adressed this issue a-way back in 1960 (Pinner, Walter, How Many Arab Refugees? A Critical Study of UNRWA's Statistics and Reports, London, 1960.) Obviously Khalidi doesn't have to agree with this, but surely he must adress the issue - one can not simply ignore opinions contrary to one's own because it's inconvenient like Norman Finkelstein.

There's another problem that is just as fundamental. The quoter of the book, Rick Richman from Jewish Current Issues, has pointed out that Khalidi is horribly outdated, in not mentioning Morris' revised work of 2004 [BTW, if you ignore the 'transfer-mania', the book is pretty good].

I think this is being much too kind, if only due to the fact that Benny Morris is no longer the sole major authority or student of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. The past 6 years has seen a virtual explosion in scholarly books, as well as MA and PhD theses written on the 1948 War, including works on various aspects of the refugee problem (for instance, Yaacov Tubi's Phd thesis, Haifa, 2002). For instance, a book by Prof. Alon Kadish, Prof Avraham Sela and Dr. Arnon Golan came out in 2000 directly challenging Morris' description of events in Lydda in July 1948.

Even when it comes to books on the Problem as a whole, Prof. Yoav Gelber's book, which does not agree with Morris in interpretation of many events, is comparable both in scope and use of source material. In the coming years, it is likely that this area of 'expertise' will become even more crowded. That's not to mention the many scholarly articles on the subject.

If Khalidi doesn't at least refer to some of these sources, then one wonders where he has been hiding in the last 15 years?