Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

Renowned writers on the Palestine–Israel conflict confront the deceitful manipulations of mass media and mainstream scholarship

Since the Nakba in 1948, Israel has consistently denied Palestinians the most basic democratic rights. Originally published in 1988, Blaming the Victims shows how the cruel fate of this beleaguered people has been justified by spurious scholarship and biased journalism.

Nearly forty years on, Blaming the Victims remains devastatingly relevant and instructive for anyone committed to Palestinian liberation. With the incredible rise of a global Palestine solidarity movement since 2023, the systems of censorship that have long obstructed honest writing about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians are finally beginning to collapse. As Edward W. Said writes in the introduction, ‘A huge amount of work obviously remains to be done … The thing to be remembered, however, is that nothing – and certainly not a colonial “fact” – is irreversible.’

With contributions from leading pro-Palestine voices, including Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky, Norman G. Finkelstein, and Rashid Khalidi, Blaming the Victims explores how Israel not only conquered the land but also the treacherous territory of ‘ideas, representations, rhetoric, and images’.