Know thine enemy: When the PLO hosted 80 scholars at a Beirut Israel studies center
Historian Jonathan Marc Gribetz’s ‘Reading Herzl in Beirut’ excavates a forgotten decades-long PLO research center that helped shift some Palestinians’ thinking regarding Israel
Reporter at The Times of Israel
Largely forgotten in the chronicles of Israel’s First Lebanon War, the IDF captured the complete library and archive of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Research Center in September 1982. The trove of books hauled south to Israel included “The Zionist Idea,” a compendium of classic Zionist texts, and other seminal writings about building a Jewish state.
Understandably, media attention at the time was mainly focused on Israel’s war against the PLO and the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Created in 1965, the Beirut-based research center’s massive library had a brief stay in Israel. It was returned to the PLO in 1983 as part of an exchange for Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon.
In his new book, “Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy,” published on July 9, historian Jonathan Marc Gribetz documents Israel’s “fraught” relationship with the Research Center, now based in Ramallah.
“Since those early years in Beirut, Palestinian nationalist intellectuals, activists, and allies have been among the most avid readers of the Israeli press and of Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli scholarship. This might be seen as a legacy of the PLO Research Center,” Gribetz told The Times of Israel in an interview.
During its heyday in the late 1970s, the PLO Research Center employed 80 people and published intensively. The PLO constitution called for a “department of research,” and scholars were soon “researching the detailed facts about everything connected to the Palestinian issue from all sides.”
A professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Princeton, Gribetz researched the book in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Europe. In 2018, he visited the West Bank to see the PLO Research Center’s current headquarters.
In Ramallah, Gribetz was warmly received by staff. He met with Samih Shabeeb, the late director of the Center. The Palestinian intellectual had joined the research center in 1978 and was in the West Beirut center when bombs fell on the building in February 1983.
Gribetz was surprised to learn from Shabeeb that there were no plans for the archive to be returned to the Palestinian Authority from Algeria, where the library is assumed to be today. (Algeria was a top patron of the PLO and provided weapons and training for Palestinian terrorists.)
“We here haven’t seen anything — at all,” Shabeeb told Gribetz regarding the archive.
In addition to being separated from its archive, the current Research Center is a shadow of its former self, wrote Gribetz. Far fewer researchers are employed and publishing has sharply decreased, compared to the 1970s.
“Serious research requires a level of stability,” said Shabeeb. “In Beirut, we were happy and stable. [In Ramallah] our situation is not stable. Here, there is much more volatility,” Shabeeb told Gribetz.
While researching in Jerusalem, Gribetz met with Israeli military and intelligence officers who participated in the confiscation of the library in Beirut or were among those who returned the library in the prisoner exchange. From the Palestinians he interviewed, Gribetz realized the center enabled them to learn about Zionism and Israel as part of their own nationalist project.
“There is no doubt that the PLO Research Center, along with the Institute for Palestine Studies, modeled for Palestinians and their supporters that reading Zionist and Israeli texts need not be regarded as a sign of disloyalty to the Palestinian cause; rather, this engagement with the ideas of the enemy could be understood as serving the cause of Palestinian liberation,” said Gribetz.
‘Waves of antisemitism’
Among the books published by the PLO Research Center, Gribetz was particularly struck by an Arabic translation of “The Zionist Idea.” Originally published in 1959, the iconic tome compiled important essays by Zionism’s leading thinkers, including Theodor Herzl, for whom Gribetz named his book.
Gribetz also highlighted another Research Center publication, a book written by PLO researcher Mustafa ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. To the Palestinian author’s thinking, “Israel violated a basic principle of international law — namely, that states exercise sovereignty only over their own territories and their own citizens,” wrote Gribetz.
Israel, wrote ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, “actively helps to bring about waves of antisemitism that break out from doubt surrounding the loyalty and allegiance of the Jews of the world.” ‘Abd al-‘Aziz also claimed that the existence of a Jewish state “slows the extent of Jews’ integration in their societies” and “isolates them from their nations.”
The Center’s publications include numerous documents related to questions involving Jewish peoplehood and Zionism. For decades, a central PLO message point has been that Jews are not a real people and therefore cannot form a nation-state.
“Many [Palestinians] continue to follow the classic PLO view that the Jews are a religion, not a nation, and thus Zionism is illegitimate because religion is not a legitimate basis for nationalism. There are others, however, who argue that even though the Jews were not a nation before the rise of Zionism, they have become a nation through their common experiences in the nation-state of Israel,” said Gribetz.
‘Like studying cancer’
A leading Palestinian intellectual who eventually directed the PLO’s Research Center was Sabri Jiryis, a graduate of the Hebrew University law faculty. His seminal book, “The Arabs in Israel,” was published in Hebrew in 1966.
In researching “Reading Herzl in Beirut,” Gribetz asked Jiryis if studying Israel made him at all sympathetic to the Jewish state and Zionism.
“Certainly not,” Jiryis told Gribetz. “More hateful? Also, certainly not,” said Jiryis.
At the end of the day, decades of studying Israel made him “more rational,” Jiryis said.
The iconic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once overheard someone accusing Jiryis of being fond of Zionists, wrote Gribetz. Darwish apparently offered a staunch defense of Jiryis.
“According to Jiryis, Darwish had responded that doctors and scientists can spend their entire careers studying cancer or other illnesses, but ‘that does not mean that they love sickness, or that they love cancer. It is the same with Sabri [Jiryis]. He is just studying Zionism. That does not mean he likes Zionism.’”
Regarding a settlement with Israel, Jiryis was more “rational” or practical than his PLO contemporaries in the late 1970s. However, legitimizing Zionism — and Israel — was always out of the question for him.
“The Palestinians may, in certain circumstances, be ready to seek a settlement in the area to which Israel is a party. But they are not prepared to conclude an agreement recognizing the legitimacy of Zionism; no Palestinian Arab can ever accept as legitimate, a doctrine that he should be excluded from most parts of his homeland, because he is a Muslim Arab or a Christian Arab, while anyone of the Jewish faith from anywhere in the world is entitled to settle there,” wrote Jiryis in a 1977 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Jiryis also stands out for claiming Israel’s continued existence depends on a permanent state of war with its neighbors. He identified this state of war as the “glue” holding together a very small, fragmented Jewish state. Rejecting peace offers has enabled Israel to present Arab states and Palestinians as permanently hostile, wrote Jiryis.
“Realism may require recognition of the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine and that this may be taken into account in seeking a settlement. But this can never mean approving the expansionist and exclusivist tendencies of Zionism,” wrote Jiryis.
After accepting “peace” with Israel, wrote Jiryis, the ground would be prepared for the self-dissolution of the Jewish state.
“By employing his knowledge of Israeli society, and especially his assessment of its highly fragmented conditions, holding together only due to its perceived common enemy, Jiryis made an argument for embracing a peace initiative. His study of the enemy led him to believe that making peace was the way to win the war,” Gribetz suggested.
