Efraim Karsh slams Palestinian academic Professor Sari Nusseibeh (pictured). Reviewing Nusseibeh’s latest book in the NY Sun, Karsh writes:
I was particularly taken aback when Mr. Nusseibeh, even then widely considered the epitome of Palestinian moderation and a staunch proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence, turned out to be the most extreme member of the group. Dismissing out of hand the two-state solution — Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — he instead sang the praise of the ‘one-state paradigm’ — a standard catchphrase for Israel’s destruction — demanding the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza population into the Jewish state as full-fledged citizens, to be followed by the refugees from the neighboring Arab states and beyond.
In subsequent years, Mr. Nusseibeh continued to pay lip service to the two-state solution and consistently questioned the very legitimacy of the state with which he ostensibly wished to make peace. On a few occasions he even let the mask drop, unveiling his true agenda. In the late 1990s, for example, he told an old Oxford friend that ‘one day, in the near or further future, all this [ Israel and Palestine] will be one binational state. It’s just a question of how we get there.’….
It is also a corollary of the narcissist and patronizing mesmerization among educated westerners with the ‘noble savage’ in general, and the westernized native in particular. With his posh Jerusalem high school education, his Oxford and Harvard degrees, and impeccable western demeanor, Mr. Nusseibeh, like cultured Arabs and Muslims before him, represents the ultimate product of the ‘white man’s civilizing mission,’ a contemporary replica of George Antonius, the Cambridge-educated Syrian political activist who was the toast of British chattering classes in Palestine and beyond during the 1930s.
The MSM certainly likes to portray Nusseibeh as a moderate. Karsh was reviewing Nusseibeh’s latest book, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life.
(Hat tip: Melanie Phillips)
