Pryce-Jones' inquiry went beyond the streets of Gaza City. He found what he thinks now is a clue to understanding in these times. He found this in an unlikely book, the 19th-century memoirs of Isabel Burton, wife of the famous explorer and linguist Richard Burton. There was this sentence in her text: "Out of the very stones they will fabricate such a tower of falsehoods that you can only stand and gape in wonder and admiration at their fruitful invention."
The stereotype of the Arab as a born liar had been acknowledged, when Mrs. Burton wrote, by experienced English observers including Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh, Field Marshall Kitchener and Lawrence of Arabia. We learn from Pryce-Jones that Mrs. Burton was exceptional in having the human sympathy to perceive "that the lying was a sign not of innate bad character but of creative self-defense in circumstances of relative weakness."
If correctly guided by such reasoning, "Palestinians know in some reserved part of themselves that the Israelis are normal human beings and only doing what they themselves would do if the situation of the two people were reversed." But to admit any such thing is to surrender a weapon, one which seems to be working on luminaries of the international community, including Kofi Annan, Christopher Patten, and U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian -- and Michael Adams. They see what was done in Jenin as "totally unacceptable and horrific beyond belief."
Twice in my 40 years of journalism I have been mistaken in doubting that atrocities were at the level claimed by critics of the regimes. I found myself unwilling to grant the alleged atrocities of the Greek generals and, a few years later, those of the Argentine military troika. I swore then not to express doubt where there was no independent press around for corroboration.
This time, even without that corroboration, I express doubt that the Jenin "massacre," at the dimension being charged, actually took place.