Israeli scholars are highly critical and engage in debate, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian scholars don't. This last is confirmed by Shalom Lappin's response to Jacqueline Rose's response to his excellent review of her book. Money quote (emphases are mine):
In response to my statement that no significant element of Palestinian society has challenged the official myths of the Palestinian narrative in a way comparable to that in which the official Israeli version of history has been subject to fierce debate among Israelis, Rose ‘is left wondering whether he reads any Palestinian writing’. She cites the work of several Palestinian (and Israeli Arab) writers and poets as evidence of such a challenge. Given this list it seems that Rose has seriously misunderstood the question at issue here. While the writers whom she mentions have certainly expressed empathy for Israeli Jews and, on occasion, criticised Palestinian terrorism, none of them, to the best of my knowledge, has questioned the view that Jews came to Palestine as European colonialists with a program for dispossessing its Arab inhabitants and establishing a western enclave of imperialist power. Quite the contrary, Mahmoud Darwish is a nationalist poet who promotes this idea. In fact, he resigned from the executive of the PLO in 1993 in protest when Arafat signed the Oslo Accords with Rabin. Similarly, Ghassan Kanafani was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a close associate of George Habash. [8] Anton Shamas, although he writes in Hebrew, is a militant advocate of this approach to Israel and Zionism. Elias Khoury (who is actually Lebanese, born in Beirut in 1948 to a Christian family) does indeed seek to overturn stereotypes of Israelis dominant in the Arab world. Moreover, to his credit, (together with Darwish and Edward Said) he publicly opposed the convening of a Holocaust denial conference, planned in Beirut for 2001. However, like Darwish he does not question the official Palestinian understanding of the history of the conflict.
Palestinian intellectual life is vibrant, and it has produced political theorists and historians of considerable distinction. But when one reads the work of some of its most notable representatives, such as Edward Said, Ahmed Khalidi, and Rashid Khalidi, one generally finds that moderation consists in the grudging acknowledgement of Israel’s non-eliminability. In historical terms Palestinians are portrayed as passive victims who have been the blameless targets of relentless Zionist aggression. The decisions, political programs, and military initiatives of the Palestinian leadership throughout the period leading up to 1948 (and, often, well beyond) are rarely if ever subjected to serious critical evaluation, even from the narrowest perspective of national self-interest. The fact that, in many cases, the solutions that these thinkers now suggest were previously proposed by the leadership of the Yishuv (or by the international community), and rejected by the Palestinians themselves, is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. Bi-nationalism, partition, and a federated state were all originally Zionist ideas that the Palestinians turned down in their time as incompatible with their political aspirations. The intense controversies over the facts of the 1948 war are being conducted entirely by Israeli historians, on the basis of recently opened Israeli public archives. Palestinian and Arab archives remain closed, and historical debate and revision is not part of the Palestinian public discussion. One can see this state of affairs as, at least in part, due to the fact that the Palestinians remain under a deeply repressive occupation within the territories beyond the Green Line. Unfortunately, the absence of critical debate is itself a factor that prevents the emergence of viable political strategies for ending this occupation.
QED. The last point bears repeating. When, and only when Palestinians acknowledge that Jews have right and justice on their side as well, can we have true peace and co-existence. As long as they keep viewing "justice" solely in Palestinian terms or adding "rights" of refugees, or "peace with (their) justice" as a price tag, peace will remain an impossiblity. It takes two to tango.
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