Justus Weiner

Justus Reid Weiner is an international human rights lawyer.

Biography

Justus Reid Weiner was born in Boston and attended UC Berkeley law school. He worked at the Wall Street firm White & Case before moving to Israel in 1981. Until 1993, he worked for the Israeli Ministry of Justice, investigating claims brought by human rights groups and media organizations about Israeli conduct toward Palestinians.

Academic and legal career

Weiner is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Law Forum, and an adjunct lecturer in international law and business at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Weiner was formerly a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Law, Boston University. He practiced law in the litigation department of White & Case. He served as director of the Department of American Law and External Relations at the Israel Ministry of Justice, specializing in human rights and other aspects of international law. Today he is a scholar-in-residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.Weiner wrote for academic legal publications in the United States and Commentary Magazine. Following a 1997 meeting with a Christian pastor who alleged that Muslims who converted to Christianity were subject to human rights abuse, Weiner began to research the topic.

Edward Said article

In August 1999, Weiner published a controversial article in Commentary Magazine entitled "My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said" that challenges Edward Said's claims about growing up in the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem. He claimed that Edward Said's nuclear family did not permanently reside in Talbieh or mandatory Palestine, but rather were residents of Cairo, where Said's father owned a large home and a stationery business. While Said's family may have visited Palestine periodically and stayed in Talbieh, land registry records show that the house was owned by Said's aunt. Weiner wrote 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 Said had fabricated an incident in December 1948, to explain his family's departure from Palestine.

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 it was in 1938 (ten years before Israel was established) that 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 in a dispute with Nabiha Said, who broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for their personal use, winning a judge's ruling in favor of eviction."

Weiner argues that Said claimed that 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. Weiner found a record of a similar incident on February 12, 1948, two months after Said claimed his family had 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.'"

Criticism

Journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair criticized Weiner for his "deliberately falsified" report, noting Weiner had interviewed one of Edward Said's childhood classmates but not mentioned it. In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's, and quotes Said saying in 1992 that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo. Hitchens called Weiner's article "an essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity."

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 (!)."

Said's rebuttal

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's name was not on the title deed because he "didn't like having his name on anything he had to have it on." 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."

Published works

• "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