Justus Weiner

Justus Reid Weiner is a UC Berkeley law school graduate and a Boston native. He worked at the Wall Street firm White & Case before moving to Israel in 1981.

Weiner told Salon.com that after moving to Israel, "he worked for the Israeli Ministry of Justice under five administrations, investigating claims brought by human rights groups and media organizations about Israeli conduct toward Palestinians. He held the job until 1993."

A scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Weiner is known for writing an article in 1999 for Commentary while working as an adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, examining claims made by Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said about his early life. In the article, Weiner accused Said of dishonesty. Weiner, in turn, was accused, in several publications, of dishonesty in reporting his research about Said, although no evidence or examples of such alleged dishonesty were presented.

Work

Weiner has been published in academic law journals and he has written for the right-leaning political magazine Commentary Magazine.

Following a 1997 meeting with a Christian pastor who alleged human rights abuses directed at Muslims who converted to Christianity, Weiner became interested in the topic, and subsequently conducted research and published in this area.

Weiner's claims about Said's early life

Weiner briefly came into the public eye with an August 1999 article in Commentary that said Edward Said's immediate family did not permanently reside in Talbiya or indeed in mandatory Palestine, but rather were residents of Cairo in Egypt, where Said's father owned a large home and a stationery business. Consequently, Weiner argued, they were thus not refugees. Weiner conceded however that Said and his nuclear family periodically visited the house, which was owned (according to land registry records) by Said's aunt and that Edward Said's branch of the family spent an extended stay there during the final months of the British mandate in 1948.

Two of Weiner's more serious allegations were that Said had falsely accused Zionist humanitarian and German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber of living in the house after its Arab inhabitants "had been displaced" and that he had fabricated an incident involving a sound-truck in the shared Jewish-Arab neighborhood of Talbieh in December 1948, to explain his family's departure.

Of the former, Weiner quoted Said to the effect that "Buber of course was a great apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but he didn't mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced." Weiner pointed out that in fact after 1938, the entrance and basement levels were leased to "Martin Buber, his wife, and his two teenage granddaughters, all of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany. The Buber family was forced out of the house in early 1942 (when Edward Said would have been about seven) in a dispute with the owners--that is, Nabiha (Mrs. Boulos Yusef) Said--who broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for their personal use, winning a judge's ruling in favor of eviction." Citing the chronology of Buber's eviction relative to Said's own departure, Weiner concludes "there can be little wonder why neither that event, nor the presence in and subsequent removal from the building of Martin Buber's surely no less memorable library of some 15,000 books,[79] has ever figured in his meticulous recollections of "my beautiful old house... in Al-Talbiyeh." The Bubers and their library were there. Said was not."

Of the sound truck incident, Weiner argues that Said claimed "in December [1948], 'a Jewish-forces sound truck warned Arabs to leave the neighborhood" (interview with Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1997)." However Weiner found no record of such an incident either in the local press at the time or in the contemporaneous dispatches of the British High Commissioner, which recorded incidents of that kind in great detail. Weiner did however find a record of a similar, but minor, incident on February 12, 1948, some two months after Said claimed his family fled.

Regarding Said's birth, Weiner wrote, "On [Said's] birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo" and that Said's family is mentioned in consecutive annual directories, such as the Egyptian Directory, the Cairo telephone directory, Who's Who in Egypt and the Middle East, but not in similar listings for Jerusalem. Weiner wrote that Said did not attend St. George's Academy in Jerusalem, except briefly, and that his name was not on the school registry.

Weiner did not interview Edward Said. Asked about this, he said that after conducting research that lasted three years, he saw no need to talk to Said about his memories or his childhood: "The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, 'You're a liar, you're a fraud.'"

Journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair castigated Weiner for what they called his "deliberately falsified" report, noting Weiner had interviewed another of Edward Said's childhood classmates but had omitted any mention of that interview. In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's, and he quotes Said saying in 1992 that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo. Then New Republic editor Charles Lane said Weiner had offered to sell him the essay on Edward Said but that discussions over publication broke off when Weiner refused to "look at the galley of Said's memoir and take it into account."

Jonathan Tobin sided with Weiner in Jewish World Review, writing "Rather than growing up as a victim in war-torn Palestine, Said lived a privileged life as the son of a prominent businessman in Cairo with an American passport (!)."

In his 1994 book, the Politics of Dispossession, Edward Said had written, "I was born in Jerusalem in late 1935, and I grew up there and in Egypt and Lebanon; most of my family - dispossessed and displaced from Palestine in 1947 and 1948 - had ended up mostly in Jordan and Lebanon."

In the Guardian, Julian Borger wrote "The Said family, including the 12-year-old Edward, left Jerusalem in 1947 when it became too dangerous to remain in the crossfire between Arabs and Jews over the city's future. Christopher Hitchens, a US-based British journalist and a Said family friend, said: "There's no question. The Saids decided to go because life was made hard for them. It became difficult and dangerous for him to go to school."

Christopher Hitchens told Salon magazine that Weiner's was "an essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity." Weiner replied, "The issue here is credibility, a man with an international reputation who made himself into a poster boy for Palestine."

In an article titled "Defamation, Zionist-style", Said responded that "the family house was in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our families were one in ownership," and that his name could not be on the school's registry, which was terminated a year before he attended. In his autobiography, Said wrote that his father Wadie's name was not on the title of the house his sister had inherited from their father: "He didn't want his name on the title," because he "didn't like having his name on anything he had to have it on."

Said complained that the "Zionist movement has resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques" in hiring "an obscure Israeli-American lawyer to 'research' the first ten years of my life and 'prove' that even though I was born in Jerusalem I was never really there". To an interviewer, Said said, "I was born in Jerusalem; my family is a Jerusalem family. We left Palestine in 1947. We left before most others. It was a fortuitous thing... I never said I was a refugee, but the rest of my family was. My entire extended family was driven out."

Holocaust survivor and Israeli human rights activist Israel Shahak said the argument over how the Said family left Jerusalem did not affect Edward Said's status as a refugee. He said, "This is like saying the Jews who escaped from Germany before the war were not kicked out. The main argument is that they were prevented from returning to their land. This is what it is about."

Publications

• "Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society" (2005). Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. ISBN 965-218-048-3
• "Illegal Construction in Jerusalem" Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (2003)
• "The Use of Palestinian Children in the Al-Aqsa Intifada" (Jerusalem Letter, 2000) Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
• 'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said" Commentary 1999. Article in paid archive.
• "Hard facts meet soft law: the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles and the prospects for peace: a response to Katherine W. Meighan" Virginia Journal of International Law, 35(4) Summer 1995