Israel, Palestine & the US
Keeping "Hidden History" Hidden
American Historical Association Censors Ad for Book on Israel, Palestine & the
US
By Alison Weir
April 10, 2015 "ICH"
- "If
Americans Knew" - The American Historical Association
(AHA) has refused to publish a paid advertisement for my book,
Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to
Create Israel.
This type of action
demonstrates how the history discussed in my
book has, in fact, so often remained hidden.
It follows an
incident a few years ago in which the
largest chain of history magazines in the
U.S. refused any advertisement by the
Council for the National Interest, based on
the accusation that CNI is “anti-Israel.”*
CNI is a 20-year-old organization that works
for policies that represent American
interests and principles.
The AHA was founded in
1884 and chartered by Congress in 1889 “to
serve the interests of the entire discipline
of history,” according to its
website. It is the largest professional
history organization in the U.S. and
publishes two journals, American
Historical Review and Perspectives
on History. The organization says the
latter is “the principal source for news and
information about the historical
discipline.”
According to AHA Executive
Director Jim Grossman in a phone
conversation with me, AHA would not publish
the
ad for several reasons: The book “does
not fall within the scope of the mission of
the AHA, the book is “advocacy not
scholarship,” it “has not been peer
reviewed,” and it “has not been reviewed by
the mainstream press.”
None of these objections –
even if they were accurate – seem relevant
to a paid advertisement, and none violate
AHA’s published
advertising guidelines in any way. In
fact, AHA guidelines particularly make clear
that advertising in an AHA publication “does
not necessarily constitute endorsement or
approval of any product or service
advertised.”
On top of the irrelevance
of Dr. Grossman’s objections to our paid
advertisement, his claims contain several
fallacies. These may be related to the fact
that he has never read the book.
For example, it’s
difficult to understand how he could
evaluate whether or not the book fits into
the scope of the AHA mission to further
knowledge of history without reading the
book. By the way, my book is thoroughly
cited, containing over 300 footnotes and an
extensive bibliography. It underwent a
thorough fact-checking process before being
published.
Dr. Grossman complains the
book has not been reviewed by the mainstream
press, but it received a long and positive
review in the Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs. The Washington
Report, founded by U.S. ambassadors and
Foreign Service officers, has been
publishing excellent journalism for over
thirty years and is considered by many to be
one of the top publications on the region.
Against Our Better
Judgment has
received positive
reviews from several distinguished
reviewers.
For example, Ambassador
Killgore, a career foreign service officer
who served throughout the Middle East for
many years,
wrote that the book was “prodigiously
documented” and said, “Alison Weir must be
highly commended for throwing such a
brilliantly hard light on the relationship
between the United States and Israel. I hope
this marvelous book gets all the attention
it deserves.”
1. Michael Haber,
co-founder of the International Development
Law Organization in Rome who has been
published in the Washington Post, LA
Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,
Christian Science Monitor, The Hill,
International Herald Tribune, and
the London Independent,
called the book “revelatory and
articulate.”
Senator James Abourezk,
who has long focused on the region,
stated: “This provocative book documents
a history that is essential in understanding
today’s world. Scholarly, yet readable, it
is a must for all Americans.”
Dr. Grossman also claimed
that the book was “advocacy, not
scholarship.” When I asked how he had
arrived at this conclusion without reading
the book, he backtracked and said it was not
the book itself that was the problem, it was
the advertisement. Yet our
advertisement contains no advocacy,
other than to advocate for the book itself,
presumably the function of any book
advertisement.
Perhaps one underlying
reason for Dr. Grossman’s unsubstantiated
claims is that the book was independently
produced, rather than the product of the
academic and mainstream publishers who
normally advertise in AHA, in a belief that
such publishers (and such publishers alone)
guarantee accuracy. There is much evidence
to the contrary, including
prize-winning books by major
publishers that
turned out to be
fraudulent.
AHA seems to have had no
problem publishing an advertisement by
Cambridge University Press for its book
Antisemitism and the American Far Left,
for example, despite the book’s substantial
bias and numerous inaccuracies, including
the strange assertion that “university
courses on European, American, and Middle
Eastern history have rarely addressed the
issue of anti-Semitism, or even the Jewish
experience.”
Similarly, some of AHA’s
articles on Israel-Palestine have contained
problematic statements, such as Barry
Rubin’s
claim that “pro-Israel lobbying efforts…
were minimal even into the 1980s,” despite
the fact that the pro-Israel lobby had been
significant for decades. (Extensive
information on this is available in my book
and others.)
In addition, the
suggestion that the ad was rejected because
the book was self-published and therefore
not subject to peer review is belied by the
fact that a quick scan of AHA advertising
reveals that in 2013 AHA published a
full-page ad for a self-published book
by an individual named Michael Swanson.
In addition, it is likely
that many of the commercially published
books advertised in AHA did not undergo "peer
review," a clearly defined process used
in academia that is not standard in
commercial publishing.
Troubled by Dr. Grossman’s
lack of logic and evidentiary support, I
phoned and emailed the members of AHA’s
Executive Committee, the body that Dr.
Grossman said had made this decision. I
asked them why they had decided to ban the
ad, and requested that they reconsider this
decision. I also asked if they had read the
book. (Dr. Grossman had said he didn’t know
whether any of them had read it.)
Except for one professor
who replied that she believed AHA president
Vicki Ruiz had already responded to my
concerns (Dr. Ruiz had not)**, none of the
committee members responded to my emails and
phone calls. I suspect that none have read
the book.
These are all professors
at reputable American universities. I hope
they would not be pleased with students who
made decisions about a book without reading
it. Moreover, my book is quite short and
takes little time to read.
In my email to the
committee members, I pointed out that we
were not requesting that AHA review my book:
“We simply asked to put in
a paid advertisement telling readers about a
new history book that contains clearly
cited, highly significant information that
would quite likely be of interest to them.
This information could then be studied,
considered, and debated. To me,” I wrote,
“this falls within the AHA mission.”
It’s sad that apparently
these professors don’t share this view – or
don’t find such a principle sufficiently
compelling to overrule a recommendation made
by their executive director.
Such negligence is
particularly unfortunate in those charged
with overseeing AHA operations, given that
Israel-Palestine, the subject of my book, is
an exceedingly timely issue and one that is
particularly relevant to AHA – not to
mention to millions of people in the Middle
East and beyond.
The AHA and
Israel-Palestine
The AHA, like several
other scholarly organizations, has recently
been embroiled in heated
controversies involving
Israel-Palestine. Such a situation should
make AHA even more sensitive to the need for
its members to have full, uncensored
information on this topic.
In 2014 an AHA member
submitted a resolution calling for a
boycott of Israel, because of its
violations of academic freedom, to be
placed on the agenda for the upcoming AHA
national meeting.
AHA President Jan
Goldstein, however, decided not to add the
resolution to the agenda because, according
to an
announcement by Dr. Grossman, an
“insufficient number of AHA members in good
standing had signed the petition, and the
resolution as written went beyond matters
‘of concern to the Association, to the
profession of history, or to the academic
profession.’”
While Dr. Grossman
ascribed President Goldstein’s decision to
consultation with the AHA parliamentarian,
the Weekly Standard
reported that she had also been heavily
lobbied by pro-Israel professors.
A number of
other academic organizations have passed
such boycott resolutions, including the
American Studies Association,
Association for Asian American Studies ,
African Literature Association,
Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and
Native American and Indigenous Studies
Association. The
American Anthropological Association is
expected to endorse a boycott next year,
having resoundingly rejected an anti-boycott
resolution in 2014. (The Modern Language
Association voted on a
resolution on Israel’s
violations, but although the majority of
those voting favored the resolution, the
number
required to ratify it was not attained.)
After AHA leadership
rejected the boycott resolution, a group
called
Historians Against the War introduced
new
resolutions that called for ending
Israeli
violations but stopped short of calling
for a boycott.
At this point, the
deadline for new resolutions had passed, so
the
group went to the AHA business meeting
and asked for a suspension of the rules so
that the resolutions could be sent to the
full membership for an “open
and full debate.” This failed for a
variety of reasons and the resolutions
were not debated at that time, but it is
clear that discussion of Israel-Palestine
will be
part of next year’s convention.
The New York Times
reported that AHA president Goldstein
announced that her successor, Dr. Ruiz, “had
already committed to holding several
academic sessions on the issue at the 2016
meeting,” and quoted Executive Director
Grossman, who endorsed this action: “Our
role is to provide a forum for historians to
discuss historical context.”
Given such admirable and
publicly expressed stances, and the
importance of this topic in the AHA, it is
disappointing that Dr. Grossman and
Professor Ruiz are blocking a paid
advertisement for my book from appearing in
AHA publications – thus working to prevent
the historical context it contains from
being part of this extremely important
discussion.
Notes:
*
The previous organization
that censored an ad is
World History Group (also known as
Weider History Group), which publishes
American History, America’s Civil War,
Armchair General, Aviation History, British
Heritage, Civil War Times, Military History,
Military History Quarterly, Vietnam, Wild
West, and World War II. For
more information on this incident, see “The
Empire Behind World’s Largest History
Magazine Chain: How American History
Magazine Censored Palestine,”
CounterPunch, Dec. 6, 2012.
Further Resources
on the boycott controversy:
Detailed reports on
violations: “Israeli
Violations of Palestinian Academic Freedom &
Access to Education” and “International
Human Rights Law: Violations by Israel and
the Problem of Enforcement.”
ComprehensiveFAQ
on the rationale for boycotts. Article
on one of the main opponents of the boycott:
“Cary
Nelson, the AAUP, and the privilege of
bestowing academic freedom.”
** After this article was
published, I was informed that Dr. Ruiz had
sent a response to my emails to her, but
this seems to have been misdirected and was
never received.
This article contains
three updates since its original publication
in CounterPunch: that the book
underwent a rigorous fact-check process
before publication, that AHA published at
least one ad for a self-published book, and
that many books advertised by AHA likely did
not undergo academic peer review.
When I posted this topic
to the AHA online
Members' Forum, it elicited considerable
discussion. After a few days Dr. Grossman
wrote that they had decided to "close the
threads related to this issue," saying that
some members had complained. However, there
are easy
options by which members can handle
unwanted discussions: they can unsubscribe
from a dicussion, elect to receive only one
daily digest, or choose to receive no emails
at all.