Justus Weiner
Justus Reid Weiner (1950-2020) was a human rights lawyer and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the
Biography
Justus Weiner was born in Boston, and graduated from the
As a scholar at the
In 1999, Weiner published an article in Commentary in which he accused the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said of dishonesty about his origins.[10][11][12]
Following a 1997 meeting with a Christian pastor who alleged human rights abuses directed at Muslims who converted to Christianity, Weiner became interested in the topic, and subsequently conducted research and published in this area.[13][14][15]
Weiner died on September 5, 2020, in Jerusalem after a long illness. "Justus proved that in pursuit of the truth he was prepared to defy the conventional wisdom," Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations wrote. "That was a secret source of his strength."[16]
Weiner's claims about Said's early life
In his Commentary article, reprinted on August 26, 1999, on the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal as "The False Prophet of Palestine", Weiner argued that Edward Said's immediate family did not permanently reside in Talbiya or any part of Palestine, but rather in Cairo, and that they did not live in Palestine during the final months of the British Mandate, and were thus not refugees. Weiner said Said's aunt owned a house in Talbiya where Said's family visited. Weiner also stated that Said had no recollection of the Consulate of Yugoslavia located in the aunt's home or that Martin Buber had been evicted from the house in 1942, before the lease expired, when Said was seven years old. In the article, Weiner quoted Said as claiming that Buber had lived in the house after the Said's were expelled.[17]
Weiner also challenged Said's claim that his family fled in response to the use, by Zionist extremists, of truck with a public address system ordering Arabs in Talbieh to leave. Weiner claimed that the sound truck incident occurred after a Jew was shot in the area, but cited local press reports and official dispatches from the British High Commissioner's office to establish that the incident occurred on February 11, 1948, whereas Edward Said claimed his family left in December 1947. According to Weiner, some Arabs left the area temporarily after the February 1948 incident but returned a few days later.[17]
Weiner wrote, "On [Said's] birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo" and that Said's family is mentioned in consecutive annual directories, such as the Egyptian Directory, the Cairo telephone directory, Who's Who in Egypt and the Middle East, but not in similar listings for Jerusalem. Weiner wrote that Said did not attend St. George's Academy in Jerusalem, except briefly, and that his name was not on the school registry.[17]
Weiner did not interview Edward Said. Asked about this, he said that after conducting research that lasted three years, he saw no need to talk to Said about his memories or his childhood: "The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, 'You're a liar, you're a fraud.'"[2]
Response to Weiner's article
In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's, but quotes Said saying in 1992 that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo.[18] Hitchens told Salon magazine that Weiner's article was an "essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity." Weiner replied, "The issue here is credibility, a man with an international reputation who made himself into a poster boy for Palestine."[2] New Republic editor Charles Lane said he considered publishing the article but discussions broke off when Weiner refused to "look at the galley of Said's memoir and take it into account."[2]
In
In The Guardian, Julian Borger wrote "The Said family, including the 12-year-old Edward, left Jerusalem in 1947 when it became too dangerous to remain in the crossfire between Arabs and Jews over the city's future. Christopher Hitchens, a US-based British journalist and a Said family friend, said: "There's no question. The Saids decided to go because life was made hard for them. It became difficult and dangerous for him to go to school."[20]
Holocaust survivor and Israeli human rights activist Israel Shahak said the argument over how the Said family left Jerusalem did not affect Said's status as a refugee. He said, "This is like saying the Jews who escaped from Germany before the war were not kicked out. The main argument is that they were prevented from returning to their land. This is what it is about."[20] In his 1994 book, the Politics of Dispossession, Edward Said had written, "I was born in Jerusalem in late 1935, and I grew up there and in Egypt and Lebanon; most of my family – dispossessed and displaced from Palestine in 1947 and 1948 – had ended up mostly in Jordan and Lebanon."[21]
In his response to Weiner's article, titled "Defamation,
Said wrote that the "Zionist movement has resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques" and alleged that the movement had hired "an obscure
Selected publications
- 'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said" Commentary 1999. Article in paid archive.
- "Hard facts meet soft law: the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles and the prospects for peace: a response to Katherine W. Meighan" Virginia Journal of International Law, 35(4) Summer 1995
- Peace and Its Discontents: Israeli and Palestinian Intellectuals Who Reject the Current Peace Process. International Law Journal. 29, 501.
- The Palestinian Refugees' "Right to Return" and the peace process. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review. 20, 1.
- Terrorism: Israel's legal responses. Journal of International Law and Commerce. -. 142, 183–207.
- Israel-Palestinian Peace Process: A Critical Analysis of the Cairo Agreement.
- Human rights in the Israeli administered areas during the Intifada, 1987–1990. Madison, University of Wisconsin Law School.
- Business ethics and social responsibility. Jerusalem, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rothberg School for Overseas Students.
- The temporary international presence in the city of Hebron ("TIPH"): a unique approach to peacekeeping. Jerusalem, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
- Peacekeepers: Will they advance any prospective Arab-Israeli peace agreement? Fordham International Law Journal. 34, 1.
- Legal Implications of 'Safe Passage': Reconciling a Viable Palestinian State with Israel's Security Requirements. University of Connecticut Journal of International Law. 22, 233.
- International legal business environment: reader. Jerusalem, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
- Justus Reid Weiner (2015). "Israel and the Gaza strip: Why economic sanctions are not collective punishment". Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Retrieved 26 September 2016.
References
- ^ a b c Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs Justus Reid Weiner
- ^ a b c d e Offman, Craig (September 10, 1999). "Said critic blasts back at Hitchens". Salon.com.
- ^ Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
- ISBN 978-0-7658-0390-0. Retrieved 12 March 2011. The author cites Weiner's article Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society
- ISBN 978-90-411-0375-8. Retrieved 12 March 2011. The reference here is to Weiner's Human Rights in the Israeli Administered Area during the Intifada: 1987–1990
- ISBN 978-90-411-1082-4. Retrieved 12 March 2011.
- ISBN 978-1-4039-6681-0. Retrieved 12 March 2011. Author cites Weiner's The use of Palestinian Children in the Al-Aqsa Intifada
- ISBN 978-1-4000-6097-9. Retrieved 12 March 2011.
- ^ Referral to Iranian President Ahmadinejad on the Charge of Incitement to Commit Genocide
- ISBN 978-0-312-30648-9. Retrieved 12 March 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-7658-0153-1. Retrieved 12 March 2011.
- ^ David Pryce-Jones (January 2008). "Enough Said: A review of Defending the West: A Critque of Edward Said's Orientalism by Ibn Warraq". The New Criterion. Retrieved 2011-03-11.
- ^ Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society
- ISBN 978-0-8264-8788-9. Retrieved 12 March 2011. Weiner's tribute to a murdered Palestinian convert to Christianity
- ^ Brean, Joseph. "How a Jewish lawyer came to devote his career to protecting Christians in the Palestinian Territories". nationalpost.com. National Post. Retrieved 18 June 2015.
- ^ Gold, Dore (September 6, 2020). "Legal rights, refugees scholar Justus Reid Weiner dies at age 70". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved September 8, 2020.
- ^ a b c http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/"my-beautiful-old-house"-and-other-fabrications-by-edward-said/ Commentary September, 1999, ""My Beautiful Old House" and other Fabrications by Edward Said" by Justus Weiner
- ISBN 1-55786-229-X.
- ^ http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/tobin082799.asp Jewish World Review Aug. 27, 1999, "Opening up Historical Cans of Worms: Myths and facts about Edward Said and Israel's War of Independence" by Jonathan Tobin
- ^ a b "Friends rally to repulse attack on Edward Said" by Julian Borger 23 August 1999
- ISBN 978-0-679-43057-5
- ^ Edward Said, "Defamation, Zionist-style," Archived 2009-02-15 at the Wayback Machine Al-Ahram Weekly August 26 – Sept. 1 1999, accessed February 10, 2006.
- ^ Edward Said, "Freud, Zionism, and Vienna" Archived 2009-05-17 at the Wayback Machine Al-Ahram Weekly March 15–21, 2001, accessed October 31, 2006.
- ISBN 1-57806-366-3.