BOOKS

...But that's a problem easily remedied in future editions...

...Privately...

...Her technique: allowing group members to drown themselves in their own sexist, monosyllabic spew...

...His new book is the clearest exposition yet on how the peace process fulfills rather than alters Zionism's traditional goal of separating Arabs and Jews once and for all...

...The book, From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters, boldly asserted that several hundred thousand Arabs residing in the part of Palestine which became Israel in 1949 were themselves recent immigrants to the area...

...However, as both his and Finkelstein's analyses make clear, that dream will not come true unless Israel and its supporters confront the inherent flaw of Zionism, which requires the subordination of Palestinian rights.U She'll Make Her Way Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap Edited by Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers Delta Music/Dell Publishing...

...one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country...

...Benvenisti argues that the need for separation was driven home not only by the Intifidah, the Palestinian uprising, but by the closures and deportations ordered by the Rabin government prior to Oslo, which gave Israelis a taste of how separation might actually feel...

...The sheer number of entries in the collection can seem daunting, and the reader may be overwhelmed now and then by jargon (a problem in all music criticism), forced wit, and the occasional clunky experiment with style...

...Barbara Tuchman attributed the "smear campaign" to "growing anti-Semitism" and "long-term apologists of the Palestine Liberation Organization...

...animated, laudably amateurish entries from mimeographed fanzines...

...The first step in bringing new attention to an overlooked history is to provide readers with the source materials that flesh it out...

...However, Rock She Wrote works well as a resource of enlightening and inspiring writing about pop music...

...477 pages...

...Benvenisti further contends that the notion of a Palestinian state conveniently resolves questions about ethnic discrimination within Israel...

...In the detailed celebration of women critics that kicks off the collection, McDonnell offers the following statistic: Out of the 125-plus entries in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing, just nine are the work of women writers...

...Barbara Tuchman called the book a "historical event in itself...

...Benvenisti, who is acutely aware of these realities, offers his binationalist vision not as a program but as a dream, insisting "there is a place for that dream" in imagining a future different from the one being planned...

...It is pretty much a badge of respectability in American intellectual culture to side ardently with the aspirations of Jewish nationalism, which is perhaps why not one of Peters's boosters has suffered the slightest downgrading in intellectual or moral stature for having endorsed a pro-Zionist fraud...

...And this troubling sense of being both "Other" and "It" gives special power to these pieces, from Marianne Faithful's short description of her furtive artistic competition with Mick Jagger, to Emily White's discussion of how the Riot Girl movement's fascination with rape helped put a capital "R" in its "revolution girl style...

...The implications of Peters's thesis were all too obvious: Israel need not recognize Palestinian rights, or compensate the Palestinians for having been displaced, since they were never really there in the first place...

...Israeli ministers like Yosef Weitz stressed that "there is no room in the country for both peoples...

...That's just what they've done...

...Her victims: the intercourse-obsessed dullards of Motley Crue...

...The anthology covers the entire spectrum of music criticism: glossy celebrity journalism...

...Twelve years later, Joan Peters and her book have fallen into utter obscurity...

...And it is why, today...

...Benvenisti calls this "peace without sacrifice...

...Elie Wiesel, Daniel Pipes, Jehuda Rein-harz (current president of Brandeis University), and a host of other luminaries offered endorsements or favorable reviews...

...Benvenisti is a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and founder of the West Bank Database Project, which began in 1982 to compile extensive documentation on human-rights violations and the growth of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories...

...To their credit, McDonnell and Powers don't push a particular esthetic or set of politics in Rock She Wrote...

...It would function even better as a reference work if the editors had included an index...

...Eyal Press is a freelance writer in New York City...

...Will separation succeed...

...Finkelstein dares to expose what he sees as Zionism's basic incompatibility with democratic values...

...Making masterful use of a tired warhorse of rock journalism, the celebrity profile, she quickly uncovers the aimless self-destruction and brute misogyny thai forms heavy metal's true raison d'etre...

...That is wh\ Israel has no written constitution outlining civil rights for Jews and non-Jews...

...For this we can thank Norman G. Finkelstein, the author of an important new study...

...Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land by Meron Benvenisti University of California Press...

...a lucid examination of how Madonna's flirtation with supremacist stereotyping and her insistence on playing the role of the white goddess undercut the perception of her as a liberated female pop icon...

...But it's the tension between having been marginalized by pop music for many years as screaming female "fans," and fetishized as the sexual object of countless "love" songs that adds a unique energy to much of the writing collected here...

...But, unfortunately, as Benvenisti knows, such a post-Zionist, binationalist arrangement has no chance of becoming the subject of concrete political discourse any time soon...

...It is why even Israeli leftists speak of an impending "crisis" when the percentage of non-Jews in the population rises too high...

...rambling album reviews laced with snatches of the latest critical theory...

...What would be nicer," Benvenisti writes mockingly, "than to wake up in the morning and realize that the problem has been solved—that the 'others' [Arabs] had disappeared...

...Commentators were quick to tout the book's significance...

...And shouldn't the lesson of exclusionary nationalist movements engender total opposition to any ideology that abrogates the rights of minorities...

...Enormously relevant, says Meron Ben-venisti, a distinguished analyst of Arab-Israeli affairs and author of Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land...

...It's not that these critics aren't capable of rhapsodizing over hot licks and drawing up tortuous lists of a scene's influences and counter-influences...

...Finkelstein made this discovery in 1984—a year before Peters was awarded the National Jewish Book Award—but could elicit no interest in his findings from the intellectual community that had just fallen all over itself praising her work...

...Tom Laskin (Tom Laskin is a staff writer for Isthmus, the weekly newspaper of Madison, Wisconsin...

...A mere eight months after publication, From Time Immemorial seemed well on its way to changing history, entering its seventh print run, with author Peters booked for 250 speaking engagements...

...he writes, "imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it...

...Finkelstein shows why From Time Immemorial qualifies as one of the most "spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...The only solution is a Land of Israel without Arabs...

...Palestinians, in other words, were not indigenous people displaced by Zionist settlement, as they had always claimed, but newcomers who arrived en masse only after Jews had made the region prosperous...

...There is no room here for compromises...

...260 pages...

...Publicly, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gu-rion said that peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews was possible...

...he writes...

...by Eyal Press In April 1985, a distinguished committee chaired by the renowned Middle Eastern scholar Raphael Patai awarded the prestigious National Jewish Book Award in the "Israel" category to a study that, judging by its reception in the American press, was destined to fundamentally transform contemporary understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...the attitude has hardly softened over time...

...Eventually, Benvenisti envisions the region transforming from two separate and unequal nations into a Confederation of Israel/Palestine...

...If understood, it could also affect the history of the future...

...Finkelstein exposed Peters's work as a tangle of fudged quotations, miscalculations, and distortions worthy of a professional propagandist...

...Although he managed to publish an essay debunking Peters in the small Chicago-based magazine In These Times, none of the prominent journals that had run favorable reviews of the book were willing to run any subsequent critical correspondence...

...Academic criticism also gets its due in the form of bell hooks's "Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister...

...Finkelstein's account sometimes too cleanly disentangles Jewish nationalism from the European theater, whose xenophobia and persistent anti-Semitism were certainly critical to Zionism's emergence...

...Nor is it that they aren't interested in the building blocks of music marketing...

...As Finkelstein shows...

...Seeking to conserve the work of women who have written music criticism over the last twenty-five years, Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell have assembled an exceptionally diverse anthology...

...Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, ventured that From Time Immemorial "will change the mind of our generation...

...As Finkelstcin shows, the so-called solution to the presence ot Palestinians on what was to be Jewish land was mass "transfer"—displacement by force...

...The acute quest 'to get rid of the Arabs,' shared by right and left, doves and hawks, has become the driving force and source of public support which brought about the dramatic breakthrough in the peace process in 1993...

...Palestinians see it as a diminution of their national struggle into a civil struggle for equal rights within a larger Jewish entity...

...For one, the current division of land and resources is simply too unequal to create lasting peace...

...Even after Peters's loopy thesis was savaged in the British and Israeli press, Peters's American endorsers stuck by their word...

...The son of Holocaust survivors, he casts his arguments as challenges to his readers: Shouldn't the memory and experience of Jewish suffering foster sympathy for the victims rather than denials that any harm has been done...

...And here's hoping for future editions, because McDonnell and Powers need several volumes more for all the insightful critics they couldn't wedge into this valuable anthology...

...It cannot last, he says, because "the Palestinians will not suffer it for long...

...Zionism emerged as a subspecies of European romantic nationalism grounded in the notion that the stale, and hence citizenship, belongs to one group...

...Frost has respect for the idea of metal as the most sinister strain of teen rebellion, but she's also honest enough to admit that theory and practice often gaze at each other across a yawning gulf of dubious intentions and human failings...

...Jews perceive coexistence on such terms as fundamentally at odds with the notion of a Jewish state (as indeed it is...

...Because the editors have chosen well, the reader need not remember the stars or the controversies covered to appreciate each author's insights...

...Finkelstein neither poses as nor wishes to be considered a dispassionate or detached scholar...

...How bad is the hegemony...

...93 percent of Israeli land can be owned legally only by Jews...

...The result of her labors is gut-busting social satire that makes the whole phallocentric genre go limp...

...Novelist Saul Bellow felt that "millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, would be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians...

...It's a worthy project, especially since men still hold much of the power in music journalism, and male editors have placed a hammerlock on the major anthologies of rock and pop criticism...

...Indeed, if there's one thing that most of the women writers in Rock She Wrote share, it's the ability to go beyond the trading-card-stats approach to music journalism that clutters up the work of so many canonized male music critics...

...Benvenisti argues that it will not...

...Elie Wiesel lent his name to a subsequent paperback, as did all of Peters's original endorsers...

...But Frost's strategy for splaying out the blatant sexism and drunken lifestyle of metal's adherents is no less impressive...

...One can...

...24.95...

...Israel still controls one-third of the Gaza Strip and two-thirds of the West Bank, dominates water resources, and has quietly expropriated roughly 40,000 acres of additional land in the West Bank since the peace process began...

...According to Finkelstein...

...Rapid changes in pop fads guarantee that the subject matter of some entries is as dusty as those Boston and Cameo LPs warping in your parents' basement...

...Of what relevance are these questions today, when, on the surface, the current Oslo peace process seems to be resolving the dilemma of competing claims to the land of Palestine...

...15.95...

...That said, he correctly insists that historical anti-Semitism should never be used to justify subsequent discrimination against Arabs...

...Nor did a single national newspaper or columnist find the story of the Peters fraud newsworthy until January 1986, when Anthony Lewis of The New York Times wrote a column appropriately titled, "There Were No Indians...

...No longer a commercial force, metal took a nosedive five years ago, when Nirvana and other "grunge" stars shot to national prominence...

...A case in point is the Heavy Metal renaissance Deborah Frost wrote about in 1985 for the Village Voice in "White Noise: How Heavy Metal Rules...

...But McDonnell and Powers (the former a contributor to a variety of music publications, the latter an editor at The Village Voice) have an eye for compelling writing—key requirements for this sort of enterprise...

...The counterargument is that since Jews were themselves denied minority rights in Europe, and were eventually faced with mass extermination, they had an understandable reason for embracing nationalism...