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.
Biography
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.
As a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Weiner wrote about legal and religious issues and human rights, particularly in Palestinian society. Weiner was also the principal author of the monograph Referral to Iranian President Ahmadinejad on the Charge of Incitement to Commit Genocide, with Elie Wiesel, Dore Gold and others.
In 1999, Weiner published an article in Commentary in which he accused the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said of dishonesty about his origins.
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 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."
Weiner's claims about Said's early life
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.
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.
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.'"