502
PAl~TISAN
REVIEW
current issues would make the task of debunking easier, not more diffi–
cult. Isolating one issue of
Contemporary Sociology
is a solid guide to the
weird conditions of a field, but I am willing to be shown that the issue
chosen (September 1993, Volume 22, Number 5) is an aberration. As
matters stand, a review of this journal of reviews is seriously overdue.
It
reveals the recently acquired ideological underbelly of fanaticism masked
as reflexivity. The informal demand for orthodoxy that binds extremists
must be confronted, if sociology has a chance to recover its soul and
reestablish itself as the science of today.
Volume 22, Number 5 begins with a symposium on the book by
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal,
Palestinians: The Making oj a
People.
The book has been widely recognized, and in some quarters
hailed, as a prime example of the capacity of Israelis to understand and
appreciate Palestinian history and rights. The singular Israeli reviewer in
this symposium, Sasha Weitman, despite his evident sympathies with the
book, states frankly that "they wrote it from the Palestinians' point of
view." But the editor was able to locate two other reviewers who were
less direct: one a Palestinian scholar long resident in Canada, the other a
sociologist at Birzeit University, the vanguard Palestinian school in the
West Bank.
The results are predictably dismal. Mr. Tamari, while delighted with
the authors' recognition of Palestinian national claims, cannot bring
himself to utter the word "Israel." For him it is "the Zionist territorial
movement, whose settlement policies of native Palestinian land continue
to be contested" that defines the "Zionist responsibility for the expulsion
of refugees...." Any attempt by the authors to ofTer a balanced
account is simply dismissed as "wavering," an attempt "to be conciliatory
[rather] than to establish intellectual rigor in determining what actually
happened."
Mr. Zureik is somewhat more sophisticated but takes his cue from
Edward Said. He sees the problem of the book as a failure to come to
terms with Fanon, Marx, and Gramsci, and yes, "the new school of so–
cial history, led by Hobsbawm and Thompson" (as if they were some–
thing other than Marxists who write with grace). His conclusion is that
the Turks, British, and Israelis were all part of a wave of foreigners
whose "expulsion of indigenous leaders" was at least a major factor in
"the implementation of brutal policies which thwart attempts at au–
tonomous institutions and land dispossession." This, along with the
"factionalism of Arab society," has produced the impasse that, in £Kt, has
now been broken.
Sociology has not produced the sort of dominant American scholars
