History Upside Down

History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression, is a book by author David Meir-Levi, published by Encounter Books , 2007.¹ David Meir-Levi is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and has a graduate degree in Near Eastern Studies from Brandeis .² From the book overview: In the United Nations , on university campuses, and among a growing number of our most prestigious Western newspapers, the historical record has been rewritten so thoroughly that Israel is seen as the worst of the oppressive Western occupiers of the Third World. So successful has this propaganda campaign been that Palestinian spinmeisters and their apologists have effectively declared the Israelis, a people living in the shadow of the Holocaust , to be "Nazis." How could this happen? How did unacceptable anti-Semitism morph into justifiable anti-Zionism , and odious Jew - hatred turn into a politically correct Israel-hatred? In History Upside Down, David Meir-Levi exposes the ideological DNA of Palestinian nationalism and its ludicrous "alternative" histories, revealing how Nazi fascism gave the Arab world's amorphous hatred of the Jews an intellectual structure and how Soviet communism masked its genocidal intentions with the mantle of national liberation. Meir-Levi then explodes the cornerstone myths that the Palestinian movement created--myths that rationalize and celebrate decades of unremitting terror and genocidal ambitions, turning the history of the Middle East upside down and inside out, making the victim the aggressor and the aggressor the victim. History Upside Down is the first wave in a counterattack against this Arab war on history. It rejects the idea that the basic situation in the Middle East has changed since the United Nations first established the Jewish state and the Palestinian state that would have stood alongside it. Sadly, argues Meir-Levi, the issue in the Middle East is today what it has been since the Muslim invasion in the seventh century: the Arabs ' hatred of the Jews . ASMEAS’s (who’s charirman is Bernard Lewis ) George L. This is the question that David Meir-Levi seeks to address in his provocative and polemical work, History Turned Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. Meir-Levi contends that the contemporary Arab-Israeli dispute is not a modern, political phenomenon, but rather is an existential one that dates back to the Arab-Islamic conquest. He asserts that the traditional, Islamic anti-Semitism of the Middle East has undergone a transformation under the influence of Nazi , and then Communist, ideology to create today’s radical genocidal movements. The author shows that groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda are the progeny of this historical process, and insists that they are dedicated not merely to the destruction of the Zionist state, but the complete annihilation of its Jewish inhabitants as well. The conciseness and clarity of the author’s style and presentation do much to recommend this book to the general reader. Meir-Levi is generally persuasive as he addresses a number of contentious issues. His linkage of the rabid variety of anti-Semitism that is today emanating from the region with Nazi ideology and Communist intrigue is compelling. From a review by Asaf Romirowsky : Meir-Levi's book attempts to unearth the historical root problems of defending Israel; he shows how doing so has become increasingly difficult as a result of the intellectualization of the debate. The author traces the origins of Palestinian revisionist history and details how it undermines the pursuit of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He argues that until Palestinian culture comes to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, that demonization will continue. Furthermore, what the author defines as "Palestinianism" is the process of adoption of the Palestinian cause by liberal groups, such as women's and gay rights groups, which use the Palestinian cause in the same fashion as the Arab world uses it—as a media tool to galvanize their own agenda. Added to the regular use of Holocaust rhetoric, which Palestinians use to describe their treatment at the hands of the Israelis, a popular narrative has been created in which Palestinians are now the David and Israel the Goliath.³