Criticism
New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman said of Khalidi's book The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood: "But he makes this more than an exercise in self-pity by refusing to let the Palestinians themselves off the hook. If they indeed live in an iron cage, well, Khalidi says, they helped mold the bars themselves" and asks "When he talks about repressive Israeli measures having been 'sometimes imposed on the pretext of security,' critics are bound to ask: What pretext? How many suicide bombings of cafes and pizza shops does it take before a country has a right to end them by any method that seems to work?" Efraim Karsh said about the same book "One would have hoped that after 80 years of stubborn adherence to the 'one-state solution' and an equally adamant rejection of the 'two-state solution,' which have resulted in Palestinian statelessness, all but the most fanatically self-deluded would grasp the root causes of the Palestinian debacle — not least a historian purporting to redress the 'continuing refusal to look honestly at what has happened in this small land over the past century or so.'"
Read more about this topic: Rashid Khalidi
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)