Justus Weiner

Weiner died on September 5, 2020 in Jerusalem after a long illness. "Justus proved that in pursuit of the truth he was prepared to defy the conventional wisdom," Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations wrote. "That was a secret source of his strength."

In 1999, Weiner published an article in Commentary in which he accused the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said of dishonesty about his origins.

In his Commentary article, reprinted on August 26, 1999 on the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal as "The False Prophet of Palestine", Weiner argued that Edward Said's immediate family did not permanently reside in Talbiya or any part of Palestine, but rather in Cairo, and that they did not live in Palestine during the final months of the British Mandate, and were thus not refugees. Weiner said Said's aunt owned a house in Talbiya where Said's family visited. Weiner also stated that Said had no recollection of the Consulate of Yugoslavia located in the aunt's home or that Martin Buber had been evicted from the house in 1942, before the lease expired, when Said was seven years old. In the article, Weiner quoted Said as claiming that Buber had lived in the house after the Said's were expelled.

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.

Holocaust survivor and Israeli human rights activist Israel Shahak said the argument over how the Said family left Jerusalem did not affect 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." 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 Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's, but quotes Said saying in 1992 that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo. Hitchens told Salon magazine that Weiner's article 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." New Republic editor Charles Lane said he considered publishing the article but discussions broke off when Weiner refused to "look at the galley of Said's memoir and take it into account."

Justus Weiner was born in Boston, and graduated from the UC Berkeley law school. In the United States, he practiced law as an associate in the litigation department of the international law firm White & Case before moving to Israel in 1981. After moving to Israel, he "worked for the Israeli Ministry of Justice...investigating claims by human rights groups and media organizations about Israeli conduct toward Palestinians" until 1993.

Justus Reid Weiner (1950-2020) was a human rights lawyer and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was the author of numerous publications. Weiner also lectured widely in various countries, and was a visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Law. He was a member of the Israel and New York Bar Associations. Previously, he practiced law as an associate in the litigation department of the international law firm White & Case in New York City. Weiner also served as a senior attorney at the Israel Ministry of Justice, specializing in human rights and other facets of public international law.

Weiner also challenged Said's claim that his family fled in response to the use, by Zionist extremists, of truck with a public address system ordering Arabs in Talbieh to leave. Weiner claimed that the sound truck incident occurred after a Jew was shot in the area, but cited local press reports and official dispatches from the British High Commissioner's office to establish that the incident occurred on February 11, 1948, whereas Edward Said claimed his family left in December 1947. According to Weiner, some Arabs left the area temporarily after the February 1948 incident but returned a few days later.

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."

Said wrote that the "Zionist movement has resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques" and alleged that the movement had hired "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". He did not state who he alleged hired Weiner or offer any evidence that Weiner had been hired. 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."