Summary
Scholar of the modern Arab world whose 1980 observations on the entrenched conventional wisdom about the Arab-Israeli conflict open Perceptions of Palestine and supply two of its governing phrases (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 145-167).
Details
- Kerr wrote in 1980, as Christison presents him, that the conventional wisdom about the Arab-Israeli conflict had become so entrenched in the United States that diplomats were severely inhibited in formulating policy, serious discourse had ceased, and officials fell back on the analysis prevailing in Congress, the press and the public; two elements of that wisdom were that Palestinian national claims are “artificially and mischievously inspired” and may be ignored, and that the only real issue is an unreasonable Arab refusal to accept Israel’s existence (lines 145-149).
- The Palestinians’ dispossession and dispersal in 1948 is, in Kerr’s phrase as Christison quotes it, “an unrecognizable episode”, forgotten and seldom recognised as the conflict’s ultimate cause (lines 153-157); Christison returns to the phrase for the Truman chapter, where the displacement became a forgotten or “unrecognizable episode” once Israel had won the 1948 war (lines 722-730).