Former professor offers supplement to Hasso

To the Editors:

In her page-filling “... history of [the] Zionist movement” Professor Frances Hasso asserts that “... all renditions of history are subjective and informed by our [sic] relationship to the events under analysis....” Whatever may be the validity of her assertion in general, she certainly creates an example of it in her March 14 piece in The Oberlin Review:

1. With Professor Hasso’s statement that “The State of Israel was declared by the Zionist movement on May 14, l948...” she neglects to mention anywhere in her article that establishment of the state had been previously authorized by a two-thirds vote of the United Nations General Assembly (as one sequel to Britain’s abandonment of its territorial mandate in the region).
2. Professor Hasso writes, after discussing consequences of the l948-l949 war initiated by Arab League nations against the State of Israel, “The 1967 war led to more expulsions and refugees (over 300,000)...” but she fails to mention that the 1967 war was started by Arab countries attacking Israel.
3. Professor Hasso makes no mention of the 1973 war, which began as a surprise attack against Israel by Egyptian military forces.
4. Space limitations may account for the professor’s failure to mention the 1917 Balfour Declaration pledging British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. But word of the declaration certainly deserves inclusion in a history, however sketchily brief, of the Zionist movement.

As an aid to readers’ estimation of the degree of subjectivity of the foregoing remarks, I offer the following autobiographical facts:
a. I have never been to Israel or to any other Middle East country.
b. I have never been a Zionist.
c. I have long admired the Jewish settlers in the area now Israel for their agricultural, technological, educational, literary, mathematical and musical accomplishments.
d. I am firmly opposed to the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. (I’m also firmly opposed to those of his pal George W. Bush!)
e. I have long been against the creation of Jewish settlements on land occupied by Israeli forces as sequels to the several wars mentioned above.
f. My current interest in Zionist history has resulted from my reading, in 2002, of “Daniel Deronda” (1876) by George Eliot and “In Search” (l950) by Meyer Levin.
g. I am 84 years old.

—Robert Weinstock
Emeritus Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy