This is the quality of Palestinian scholarship: The Institute for Palestine Studies refers to documents that never existed ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

This is the quality of Palestinian scholarship: The Institute for Palestine Studies refers to documents that never existed

The Institute for Palestine Studies calls itself "the most reliable source of information and analysis on the Question of Palestine." It publishes three academic journals and holds conferences for researchers. It is the original source of the field of "Palestine Studies" that is now taught in universities worldwide.

It has a digital archive of "the main documents on the Palestinian issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict."

In very little time, I found that two of these Arabic documents refer to British sources that simply do not exist.

One refers to a 1799 letter from British philosopher Joseph Priestly, where it claims he wrote a Letter to the Jews saying,

Palestine, the glory of all countries, now forms part of the Turkish Empire, and is almost uninhabited: its soil is never tilled, it is empty and ready to receive you. But unless this state, which maintains that country for itself without any benefit to it, collapses, it can never become your country. Therefore, I earnestly pray for its shackles.

Priestly's "Letters to the Jews" are online, and not one of them mentions Palestine, Turks or the Ottoman Empire. They were all written to convince Jews to convert to Christianity.

The second false reference it has is to the fictional Campbell-Bannerman document of 1907. The IPS describes it:

Recommendation of the London Conference (called the Campbell-Bannerman Conference):

1907
In the urgent recommendations submitted by the London Colonial Conference in 1907 to British Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman, the conferees emphasized:
"The establishment of a strong and alien human barrier on the land bridge linking Europe to the Old World and connecting them to the Mediterranean, such that it would constitute in this region and in the vicinity of the Suez Canal a force hostile to the people of the region, but friendly to the European states and their interests. The urgent practical implementation of the proposed means and methods is necessary."

The 1905 conference was held secretly and continued until 1907. It was convened by the British Conservative Party, and London submitted its recommendations to the ruling Liberal Party. A committee of leading historians, sociologists, agriculturalists, petroleum scientists, geographers, and economists representing all the empires existing at the time participated in it. Its members include: Professor James, author of The Decline of the Roman Empire; Louis Madelin, author of The Rise and Fall of Napoleon's Empire; and Professors Lister, Lessing, Smith, Dotherting, and Zaharof.

This never happened. It has been debunked by Arab researchers who sought to find the original document in British archives. The rumor was traced back to an offhand comment by an Indian historian sitting next to an Arab historian on an airplane flight in the 1940s.

Both of these fake documents support the conspiracy theory that Great Britain always intended to insert an illegal Jewish entity in the Middle East.

Interestingly, both of these IPS documents refer to the same source: "The Palestine Documents File" from the Egyptian Ministry of National Guidance, General Information Authority, 1969. The Ministry of National Guidance was a propaganda arm of the Egyptian government under Gamal Abdel Nasser, tasked with shaping public opinion and advancing nationalist narratives. It is not a reliable source at all.

Instead of looking up the original sources, the Institute of Palestine Studies used this Egyptian propaganda organization as their primary source.

Another source that the IPS digital archives include in its collection of documents is "Palestinian Documents: Two Hundred and Eighty Selected Documents, 1839-1987" from the Palestine Liberation Organization Department of Culture in Tunis, 1987. While the documents I looked up from this source appear to be real, it is still jarring to see an academic site only link to a secondary source that was created for political purposes. No decent academic journal would link to Encyclopedia Britannica as a source, and this is much worse, since Britannica has much less of a political goal.

Even if these archives were 100% accurate, glancing through them shows that none of the materials point to counter-examples of the common Palestinian conspiracy theory that the European imperialists and the Jews colluded for decades on a plan to expel the Arabs from Palestine. The entire database is cherry picked to support a narrative, not to find the truth. You certainly wouldn't use their database to research illegal Arab immigration into Palestine, which would cast doubt on how many Palestinians are really from the region. There is no doubt that Israeli historical archives include sources that challenge the Zionist narrative.

Academics trust the IPS to be a reliable source for their research. The most charitable explanation for these examples is that the IPS is sloppy in its use of citations in Arabic. Having written about the bias in Palestine Studies recently, I am more inclined to say that the entire field is meant to insert anti-Israel propaganda, and ultimately antisemitism, into universities in an acceptable manner.