‘Reading Herzl in Beirut’

It’s fair to say that Jonathan Gribetz’s new book, “Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy,” began in Englewood.

He will talk about that book on September 24 for the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers. (See below.)

Dr. Gribetz, a Ramaz-, Harvard-, Oxford-, and Columbia-educated historian who is a professor of Near Eastern studies and Judaic studies at Princeton and the director of the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia there, grew up in Englewood. The germ of “Reading Herzl” was an Arabic-language book he found in the stacks of the University of Toronto, about 10 years ago, when he was finishing up his first book.

That book, “Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter,” grew out of Dr. Gribetz’s doctoral dissertation. It looked at the late Ottoman period — the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the huge empire, generally ruled by Turks, was in the last decades of its 400 years of domination in the Middle East — “and especially the way in which Zionists and Arabs made sense of one another in the earliest years of their encounter with each other,” he said. “I wrote about what I found in the sources, about the categories of religion and race as tools these people used to think about each other.”

Those ways of thinking about each other seem counterintuitive to us now, but, Dr. Gribetz said, back then, “there were Arab intellectuals who pointed to the Jews as their racial relatives. And they did so proudly, to show that they, as Arabs, were members of the same race, and therefore, like the Jews, Arabs were not essentially less talented, less capable — less anything! — than Europeans.”

In other words, “they saw the Jews as Semites, as racial relatives, and they saw the Jews, particularly the Jews or Europe, as successful and productive and respected.” That means that Arabs could be too.

“The only reason that Arabs were, as some of them took for granted, on a kind of less developed level” — because this worldview is necessarily hierarchical — “was not because of anything inherent, but rather because of the political circumstances in which they found themselves.”

The sources drew Dr. Gribetz to “some surprising conclusions, like the assumptions among many Zionists that Muslim Palestinians were natural allies of the Jews, and the only reason that they opposed Zionism was because the Christian Arabs in Palestine poisoned their minds against them, because of Christian antisemitism.

“If left to their own devices, the Muslims of Palestine would have been perfectly happy for the Jews to join them,” this argument went.

“There were also prominent Zionist leaders, like David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who looked at the Arabs of Palestine, especially the peasant farmers, and said that they were actually racial Jews, the descendants of the Jews who never left Palestine, and they are part of the Jewish people,” Dr. Gribetz said.

“So when I looked at the sources from this period with an open mind, rather than trying to prove what I thought I already knew, I realized that people were saying really interesting, counterintuitive, and surprising things about their new neighbors in Palestine.”

Dr. Gribetz meets with Sabri Jiryis.

“So that was what my first book was about.”

So where does Arthur Hertzberg come in?

“While I was editing that book, I spent a year at the University of Toronto as a post-doc,” Dr. Gribetz said. While he was there, “I took a break from working in the library and took a walk through the stacks in the area where the modern Jewish history books were. They were mainly in English; some were in Hebrew, and a few were in European languages. And then a book in Arabic caught my eye — I read Arabic — and I looked at the spine and saw that it was called ‘The Zionist Idea.’” That was the title of Rabbi Hertzberg’s classic anthology, published in 1959 and carrying the subtitle “A Historical Analysis and Reader.” Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg was the Conservative rabbi and fierce public intellectual who led Temple Emanu-El, then of Englewood, now of Closter, with a kind of growling, polished brio that drew people to his divrei Torah, on both Friday nights and Saturday mornings, as if they were graduate-level lectures as well as explorations of the Torah parasha.

“I said to myself, ‘It’s funny, a book called ‘The Zionist Idea’ in Arabic,’” Dr. Gribetz said. “So I opened it up, and I saw that this book is structured exactly like Arthur’s book was, with 37 chapters, and they’re all the same chapters.

“And then I said to myself, who knew that Arthur Hertzberg translated his book into Arabic?”

“But then I looked at the cover page, and I realized that it was quite likely that he never knew about this book, because his name was not there.

“Instead, there were several other names — names that I knew nothing about at the time, and I thought I had found a bootleg translation of Arthur’s book. My eyes panned to the bottom of the title page, to see who published it.

“And that’s how I learned about the Palestinian Liberation Organization Research Center.”

The reason that Dr. Gribetz was so very familiar with “The Zionist Idea” was that he hadn’t only read the book, he’d met and spent time with its editor. Rabbi Hertzberg, who died in 2006, about eight years before Dr. Gribetz’s discovery, had a soft spot for enterprising, appreciative young scholars like Dr. Gribetz, and so they talked in depth.

“That discovery led me on a decade-long project, trying to understand what this institution, this Beirut-based Palestinian Liberation Organization Research Center, was,” Dr. Gribetz said. “Why did it think it worthwhile to translate ‘The Zionist Idea’?

“Hertzberg’s book was translated into Arabic in 1970, and interestingly, it was translated into Hebrew in Israel the same year.”

The Arabic-language “Zionist Idea” was mostly true to the original, but there were interesting differences, Dr. Gribetz learned. “The primary sources were translated pretty loyally, but the biographies were different They tend to highlight, in ways Hertzberg didn’t, people’s religious backgrounds, particularly the ones who are regarded as secular Zionists.”

Dr. Gribetz came to learn that the PLO Research Center was founded in 1965, just a few months after the PLO itself. “One of the first things the PLO did was create a think tank of sorts,” he said. “That think tank — the Research Center — was tasked with studying what it called the ‘Palestine issue,’ in all its aspects. They broke this broad project into two spheres — one was learning about Palestinian history, which was knowing the self, and the other was learning about Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. That was ‘knowing the enemy’ — and that term was theirs.”

The goal of knowing the self was to be met by “exploring Palestinian history, culture, and nationalism.” The other goal, knowing the enemy, was accomplished “by publishing books, for example, about important Zionist leaders — there was one about Ben-Gurion — and about Zionist institutions before and after the creation of the state of Israel. There was a book about the moshav, a book about the kibbutz, a book about the Histadrut.”

Most of the books were in Arabic, though some were in English and other languages. Some were the kinds of serious studies that would have a limited readership — a history of the Histadrut is hardly beach reading — but some were more popular in orientation. There was a book called “A Handbook to the Palestine Question: Questions and Answers” that was meant to be a kind of primer for Arab college students in North America. “There were different genres; some were aimed at intellectuals or policy-makers; others were meant to reach a broader audience,” Dr. Gribetz said.

His book is composed of three parts — first, the story of the founding of the Research Center; second, an analysis of books the Center published — “I have a chapter about how a PLO scholar read the Soncino edition of the Talmud and argued that many people in the Arab world had misunderstood what the Talmud was. It was not related to the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ they said. They said that it was a complex text; some of the opinions in it were in favor of Zionism, and others were not” — and, finally, the story of what happened after September 1982.

Dr. Gribetz makes some fascinating stops along the way to his conclusion. He quotes an author of one of the works in the Research Center who militates against using antisemitism as an argument against Zionism. It’s wrong and it’s not necessary, the researcher wrote; the arguments against Zionism are strong on their own, and dragging in antisemitism only sullies and therefore weakens them.

So — what happened in 1982?

“In September of 1982, on the same days as the Sabra and Shatila massacres” — to simplify grossly, that was when Lebanese Christian militias slaughtered hundreds of mainly Palestinian refugees in Beirut, while the IDF basically stood by and allowed it — “the Israelis raided the PLO Research Center in Beirut, confiscated everything, and shipped it all off to Israel.

“I write about what happened to this material once it was in Israel. There was a big uproar, because the Palestinians and their allies accused Israel of stealing a natural treasure in the midst of war — they said that the library was a cultural national treasure, and taking it was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. There were debates in the New York Times and the Society of American Archivists, and in international fora like UNESCO and the European parliaments, about what Israel had done, and there were calls to return it immediately.

“Those calls came from people like Edward Said,” the Palestinian-American philosopher who taught literature at Columbia and was a theorist of post-colonialist studies and what he called Orientalism — “and people like Cynthia Ozick” — the now 96-year-old critically acclaimed novelist and essayist who put Jewishness at the center of her life and work — “who wrote in the Times that the Research Center was not an innocent place, but rather a terrorist intelligence unit.

“Ozick was relying on Israeli media reports, which claimed that the center was a two-faced institution,” with academic study masking the deeper truth of its identity.

“And they had reason to say that,” Dr. Gribetz said. “The PLO Research Center really did publish a small number — less than a handful — of what could be regarded as military intelligence based on public information. It doesn’t appear that they had spies who were getting secret information. But they did publish books, including maps that they said were for the fedayeen,” the guerrillas. “They did publish some of these books, in limited circulation, with no binding, so they could be used in the field.

“My assessment is that those were the exception to a broader set of books that were not meant for militants’ use, but there were some that were. So one of the questions I pose is which was the group’s true face, and which was the mask.”

Meanwhile, back in Israel in 1982 and 1983, “the pressure builds so much that Israel agrees to return the library and the archive. They do so as part of a prisoner exchange. In November 1983, Israel freed about 4,000 Arab prisoners. They sent most of them to Lebanon, but about 1,000 of them were sent to Algeria.

“And in the cargo holds of the very planes taking the thousand prisoners to Algeria, they also shipped the books, the library and the archive of the PLO Research Center.

“In return, they got six Israeli soldiers the Palestinian soldiers held during the war.

“I don’t know of any other time when a library was part of a prisoner exchange.”

As he worked on this book, Dr. Gribetz had the opportunity to “to interview the intelligence officer who was responsible for analyzing the library, and the director of the PLO Research Center, Sabri Jiryis.

“One of the interesting things about this project — as opposed to my work on the late Ottoman period, where everyone I wrote about was long dead — was that I actually got to talk to some of the people who were involved.”

That’s an interesting challenge for a historian, who is trained to work with resources in libraries, archives, museums, or possibly in trunks in garages or tucked away into odd corners of old buildings, but not with living people. Documents can be challenging, but no matter how nuanced or duplicitous they might be, they are infinitely less multidimensional than a human being.

“Working with people required me to figure out a methodology,” Dr. Gribetz said. “It required thinking about my sources in new ways.” Because it is natural and healthy to empathize with other human beings, “I had to try to be as critical with my living sources as I am with my written ones.”

Mr. Jiryis is a fascinating figure.

Dr. Gribetz began researching him by searching for his obituary. “I didn’t find it — but I did find his blog,” he said. ‘It had an About Me section. I wrote to him, and in a few minutes he wrote back.

“He was born in 1938 in Fassuta, a Catholic village in the north of what was then British Mandatory Palestine, and that village became part of Israel. He became an Israeli citizen after 1948. He studied at the Hebrew University, he became a civil rights lawyer in Israel, until 1970, when he left to Beirut to join Fatah, a Palestinian party.

“He started working in one think tank, and soon moved over to the PLO Research Center, where, logically, he came their Israel expert, and then he became the center’s director.”

In 1983, “the Lebanese government kicked him out; he went to Cyprus and lived there for about a decade, and then, after the Oslo Accords, he was allowed to go back to his home in Israel.

“I met him in Fassuta. He’s retired but continues to write on Facebook.”

Mr. Jiryis is complex. “One of the things that’s interesting about Sabri is that he was one of the first PLO folks to openly call for a negotiated settlement with Israel,” Dr. Gribetz said. “I am interested in understanding the connection between learning about the enemy and dealing with the enemy. I am not making an argument for causation, but I find it notable that someone who devoted his life to studying the enemy was one of the first ones to call for living with the enemy.”

In the end, Dr. Gribetz said of his Palestinian and Israeli subjects, “these are all just people. You may disagree with them. You may think that what they did was wrong in all sorts of ways. But at the end of the day, it is important to understand that the people on all sides of this conflict are just people.”

Who: Dr. Jonathan Gribetz

What: will talk about his new book, “Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy”

Where: at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers in New Brunswick

When: on Tuesday, September 24, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Registration: is necessary

For more information and to register: Go tobildnercenter.rutgers.edu and follow the links.