Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: godibile stroncatura di Avi Shlaim

accademicamente ineccepibile
Avi Shlaim burst upon the scene of Middle Eastern history in 1988,
with the publication of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah,
the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Before that, as
a young lecturer at Reading University in England, he had produced two
books, British Foreign Secretaries Since 1945 (1977) and The United
States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949 (1983), and several
revealing essays on modern Middle Eastern historical issues in
academic journals. But it was Collusion Across the Jordan, with its
676 pages of solid and well-written research, that thrust him into the
academic limelight.
Shlaim’s book traced the thirty-year relationship between the Jewish
Agency for Palestine and, later, the government of Israel and Prince
Abdullah (later King) of Transjordan (later Jordan), focusing on their
secret friendly ties and mutual interests--the “collusion” of the
title--during the 1948 war, and their unsuccessful secret peace
negotiations, which were suspended just before Abdullah’s
assassination by a Palestinian gunman in July 1951. Shlaim argued that
Abdullah and the leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in
Palestine/Israel, were united in their fear and their hatred of Haj
Amin Al Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian national movement, and
also in coveting the territory of Palestine; and so they agreed, in
the run-up to the 1948 war, to “collude” to prevent the Palestinians
from establishing a state.
Bowing to the realities of power, Shlaim contended, the Hashemite king
and the Zionists agreed to divide the territory between themselves. As
it turned out, and despite fierce Israeli-Jordanian clashes in and
around Jerusalem, this is exactly what happened in the course of the
war, the Jordanians occupying and eventually annexing the West Bank--
the core of the area allotted by the United Nations partition
resolution of November 1947 for a Palestinian Arab state--and the Jews
establishing the state of Israel on the remainder (minus the Gaza
Strip, also allotted to the Palestinians, which Egypt occupied in the
course of the war and held until 1967). And following the war, the two
countries embarked on peace negotiations, but failed to conclude a
deal. Shlaim argues that it was an unconciliatory Israel that was
largely responsible for the diplomatic failure--as it was, also, for
the failure to explore properly the options for peace with Syria and
Egypt that opened up, in his view, in those immediate postwar years.
Much of Shlaim’s spadework, especially relating to Zionist-Arab
diplomacy before, during, and after the war, was original, but his
thesis itself, about the nature of Jordanian-Israeli relations before
and during 1948, was not. Israel Ber--who had served as an important
officer on the General Staff of the Haganah, the Yishuv’s main pre-
state militia that changed its name later to the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF), and on the General Staff of the IDF in 1949–1950 (before his
resignation, he headed its Planning and Operations Department)--had
suggested the “collusion” thesis in his book Israel’s Security:
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, published posthumously in 1966. And
Dan Schueftan and Uri Bar-Joseph had presented and analyzed it in
their learned and well-argued works, A Jordanian Option (1986) and The
Best of Enemies (1987).
But Ber’s was an unannotated political essay by a discredited man--he
was jailed in 1961 as a Soviet spy--and it appeared only in Hebrew.
Schueftan’s work also appeared only in Hebrew, and Bar-Joseph’s drew
little attention. Shlaim certainly did his work more thoroughly, and
he wrote with verve and elegance. Though one or two critics suggested
that Shlaim had given too much weight to oral testimony elicited
decades after the events described, Collusion Across the Jordan
enjoyed wide acclaim. Some of that, without a doubt, was owed to what
was seen as the book’s anti-Israeli slant.
The title itself gave the game away. When two states, with whose
policies and leaders one agrees, act in unison against a third party,
their cooperation is usually described as an alliance or a
partnership. “Collusion,” by contrast, is a pejorative term. The
Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “collusion” as a “fraudulent secret
understanding, especially between ostensible opponents as in a
lawsuit.” For many Britons (the book first appeared in England), the
word raised the specter of the “imperialist collusion” between Israel,
Britain, and France in their attack on Nasser’s Egypt in 1956; all
three were vilified by opponents of the war as conspiring against a
relatively innocent and weak Third World third party. Heeding
criticism of the loaded title, Shlaim later published an abridged
version of his book under the title Politics of Partition, but
subsequently he expressed remorse over his momentary lapse, and stated
that he should have stayed with Collusion. (He resurrects the usage in
his new book when he speaks of “the Sharon-Bush collusion” against the
Palestinians during the Second Intifada.)
In Collusion Across the Jordan, only one of the parties to the
“collusion” was pilloried--the Yishuv and its leaders, chiefly David
Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and, from May 14,
1948, Israel’s prime minister and defense minister. Ben-Gurion is
portrayed as conniving, inflexible, and war-mongering. The other party
to the “collusion,” Jordan, was let off by Shlaim with barely a slap
on the wrist. Indeed, Abdullah was held up as a wise, noble, and peace-
craving statesman--a portrait, incidentally, that greatly endeared
Shlaim to the Hashemite princes, and did much to open doors for him in
Amman for his subsequent biography of King Hussein, Lion of Jordan:
The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace, which appeared in 2008.
(Abdullah was Hussein’s beloved grandfather.) The fact that Abdullah,
in defiance of the U.N. resolution of 1947, had occupied the core area
of the proposed Palestinian state, and during the following years did
nothing to promote Palestinian statehood in the West Bank, and,
indeed, did a great deal to stifle Palestinian nationalism, and that
in 1949–1951 he had proved unable to persuade and unwilling to force
his Cabinet to endorse peace or even a limited non-belligerency pact
with Israel--all this was somehow exempted from the moral fervor that
characterized Shlaim’s treatment of Israel.
To be sure, Shlaim’s attitude to Israel earned him prestige among his
British, European, and Arab academic colleagues. So did his voluminous
The Iron Wall (2000), a history of Israeli-Arab relations since 1948.
In his new book, a collection of essays, in a piece called “Free
Speech? Not for Critics of Israel,” Shlaim sums up that book not
inaccurately: “The central theme of … The Iron Wall is that Israel
throughout its history too readily resorted to military force, and has
been unwilling to engage in meaningful diplomacy.”
In fact, The Iron Wall was more balanced than that. In the heat of his
current pro-Palestinian righteousness, Shlaim forgets that The Iron
Wall devoted many pages to the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Syrian
post–October War disengagement negotiations, which led to substantial
Israeli troop withdrawals; and to the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations
and peace treaty of 1977–1979, which saw Israel evacuate every last
inch of the Sinai Peninsula; and to the Israel-PLO Oslo accords and
the negotiations that resulted in the Israel-Jordan 1994 peace treaty.
And while Ehud Barak’s (and Bill Clinton’s) efforts in 2000 to achieve
an Israeli-Palestinian peace may not have been successful, they cannot
be airily dismissed as “meaningless” diplomacy. Indeed, one can say
that in the course of its sixty-year history, Israel has engaged in
very meaningful diplomacy--and in diplomacy that resulted in its
evacuation of huge swathes of territory (Sinai alone is three times
the size of Israel) and in peace treaties with two of its Arab
neighbors.
Shlaim often refers to himself as an Israeli, though Wikipedia’s
designation of him as a “British historian” is more accurate: born in
Baghdad in 1945 and educated as a historian in Britain, Shlaim has
lived in the United Kingdom since 1966. He was one of a small group
who emerged in the late 1980s and were lumped together and designated-
actually by me, in an article in Tikkun, an American Jewish journal--
as the “New Historians,” their collective work being the “New
Historiography.” I included myself and my own work in this rubric. It
countered the “Old Historiography” of the “Old Historians,” which
painted a roseate portrait of Zionism and its works. The “Old
Historians” generally ignored, omitted, or otherwise swept under the
carpet all that was morally reprehensible and dubious and unwise in
the activities of the Yishuv and Israel before and after 1948. The
“New Historians,” availing themselves of Israel’s very liberal
Archives Law and its newly opened archives (and also British, U.N.,
and American material), published a series of books in the late 1980s
that were critical of the traditional Zionist historical narrative.
Collusion Across the Jordan was one of those transgressive books.
Over the past decade, the New Historians--we were never a tightly knit
school but were all, loosely, “of the Left”--have largely parted ways
politically. Ilan Pappé, formerly of Haifa University and now of the
University of Exeter; Tom Segev, a journalist at Ha’aretz who does
history on the side (in The Seventh Million: Israelis and the
Holocaust, an important work on the Yishuv’s reaction to the Holocaust
and the role of the Holocaust in post-1948 Israeli politics, and most
recently in 1967, a far less impressive work); and Avi Shlaim steadily
drifted leftward (if that really is the direction of people expressing
understanding and sympathy for the likes of Yasser Arafat and Hamas),
largely under the impact of the Second Intifada. I myself, while still
believing that a two-state solution is the only just solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have moved marginally rightward--and in
Israel and Palestine, while mildly praising my historiographic work,
Shlaim castigates me for this in an essay called “Benny Morris and the
Betrayal of History.” (“Benny is in danger of becoming … ‘a genuine
charlatan,’” Shlaim writes, which is a very British way of saying that
I am a charlatan. Also “his post-conversion interpretation of history
is old history with a vengeance ... indistinguishable from the
propaganda of the victors.” Shlaim fails to explain how, precisely, I
have “betrayed history,” and his name-calling is motivated solely by
political disagreement.)
Israel and Palestine, which will probably earn Shlaim more Israel-
bashing brownie points than all his previous books combined, is a
collection of academic essays and reviews, along with some
journalistic articles about politics. The pieces are mostly an
extended exercise in anti-Zionism, nothing more. There is also one
interview, originally published in The New York Review of Books in
1999, in which Shlaim asks King Hussein about his meetings with
Israeli officials and leaders from the 1960s until the 1990s, and
about Jordan’s participation, or non-participation, in the wars of
1967 and 1973. The monarch’s responses are vague, fluffy, and
imprecise (he often answers that he cannot remember but will later
look for the relevant documents, which, of course, are never referred
to again) and generally uninformative, heavily larded with avowals of
goodwill and the love of peace.
The scholarly essays deal with “The Balfour Declaration and its
Consequences”; “The Rise and Fall of the All-Palestine Government in
Gaza,” an impotent, short-lived organization established by the
Egyptians in September 1948 as a means of controlling Palestinian
politics, countering King Abdullah’s territorial, claims and, if one
is prone to generosity, providing the Palestinians with some sort of
representation; and “Husni Zaim and the Plan to Resettle Palestinian
Refugees in Syria.” This last essay, which was trailblazing when
published in 1986, describes a peace overture by Husni Zaim, Syria’s
short-lived prime minister.
Zaim ruled Syria from March 30, 1949, to August 14, 1949, when he was
deposed and executed by his colleagues. Working through American and
U.N. mediators, Zaim proposed peace with Israel, and also that Syria
absorb a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees in exchange for
Israeli cession of the eastern half of the Sea of Galilee (according
to the U.N. partition resolution, the whole sea was to be within
Israeli territory) and, by implication, the Israeli-owned strip of
land to the east of the lake, which included Kibbutz Ein-Gev.
Israel and Syria were at the time in the middle of armistice
negotiations, and Ben-Gurion suspected that Zaim’s move was a ploy to
delay Syrian withdrawal from Israeli territory that it had conquered
during the war, which Israel was demanding. At the same time Ben-
Gurion believed that Zaim was not trustworthy. (The Syrian was
apparently a CIA agent and had previously been in intermittent contact
with Haganah intelligence officers.) Ben-Gurion was in any case
unwilling to give up half of Israel’s major water resource, and to
surrender hard-won territory in exchange for a bilateral peace
agreement on which the Syrians could at any time renege. He refused to
meet with Zaim until the Syrians agreed to withdraw from Israeli
territory, and the Syrians rejected the Israeli proposal to negotiate
at the foreign ministers level.
According to Shlaim, Zaim gave Israel “every opportunity to bury the
hatchet and lay the foundations for peaceful coexistence in the long
term,” but an “intransigent” Israel and a “short-sighted” Ben-Gurion
“spurned” his offer and “frittered away” a “historic opportunity.” A
historic opportunity? I am not so sure, and in the absence of Syrian
documentation the seriousness of Zaim’s offer and his ability to carry
it out remain unclear. (Itamar Rabinovich, in The Road Not Taken,
highlighted Zaim’s internal problems in this respect.) Equally unclear
is what would have been the fate, after Zaim’s death, of any agreement
that he had signed. It is also worth asking whether a semi-arid
country should give up half of its main water resource (and territory)
in exchange for a peace treaty of doubtful longevity with a country
that has just attacked it. Shlaim, intent on pillorying Israel, does
not ask this question.
On the face of it, Shlaim’s essay on the Balfour Declaration--the
British declaration of November 2, 1917, which supported the
establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine--appears to be
a straightforward inquiry into what happened and why, based on the
documents. Yet it exudes an unscholarly myopia, a selectivity in the
use of documents, which hints at anti-Zionist prejudice. Why did the
British issue such a seemingly uncalled-for and unrealistic
declaration? After all, the Zionists, even “the Jews,” had little
power in or over the British government or any other major government,
and a very meager presence in Palestine itself. (In 1917 there were
some 55,000 Jews and 650,000 Arabs in the country.) Indeed, the only
Jew in the British government, Edwin Montagu, fiercely opposed
Balfour’s declaration, and most of the world’s Jews were non-Zionists
or anti-Zionists. All knew it would alienate tens of millions of Arabs
and perhaps many Muslims besides.
So why did Britain issue the declaration? Shlaim devotes several pages
to reviewing the prevailing explanations. Leonard Stein, in his
classic study The Balfour Declaration, suggested that it was due to
“the activity and skill [as a persuader]” of Zionist lobbyist and
leader Chaim Weizmann. The historian Mayir Verete offered a contrary
thesis: that the British government was motivated by “British imperial
interests in the Middle East”--that is, safeguarding the Suez Canal
from the east and keeping France out of Palestine. As an afterthought
Shlaim adds that the British may have hoped to “enlist the support of
the Jews of America and Russia” for the anti-German war effort, or to
pre-empt a similar declaration by the German government. Again,
imperial British wartime interests.
Shlaim then gives pride of place to Tom Segev’s explanation in his
book One Palestine, Complete--“a [historiographic] step forward,”
Shlaim calls it. According to Shlaim, quoting Segev, David Lloyd
George, Britain’s prime minister in 1917, pushed the declaration out
of “ignorance and prejudice.” Lloyd George “despised the Jews, but he
also feared them,” believing in their world-embracing “power and
influence.” The people who sired the document “believed the Jews
controlled the world,” says Shlaim, quoting Segev. Which is to say,
the Balfour Declaration was primarily a product of anti-Semitism.
Historians love paradoxes, even fictitious ones.
Shlaim fails completely to mention the relevance of philo-Semitism and
philo-Zionism as a decisive factor in the issuance of the declaration.
Indeed, it was probably the single most potent factor in the support
of the key Cabinet ministers: Lloyd George, Arthur James Balfour
himself, Lord Milner, Robert Cecil, and Jan Smuts. Brought up on the
Bible and on a belief in the Jews’ contribution to Judeo-Christian
civilization, these potentates believed that Christendom owed the Jews
a debt--and that it must atone for two thousand years of persecution
by restoring them to their land. As Balfour told the House of Lords in
1922:
It is in order that we may send a message to every land where the
Jewish race has been scattered, a message that will tell them that
Christendom is not oblivious of their faith, is not unmindful of the
service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and
most of all to the religion that the majority of Your Lordships’ house
profess, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them
that opportunity of developing ... those great gifts which hitherto
they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries that know
not their language and belong not to their race? This is the ideal
which I desire to see accomplished, that is the aim that lay at the
root of the policy I am trying to defend; and though it be defensible
indeed on every ground [he means imperial interests, and so on], that
is the ground which chiefly moves me.
Shlaim would have it that Balfour, George, Milner, Smuts, and Cecil
were all liars or dissemblers. I prefer to believe them. It was mainly
their esteem and their sympathy for the Jews that drove them into
supporting the harebrained scheme known as Zionism. No doubt material
wartime interests and postwar imperial calculations also played a
part. Yet Shlaim cannot resist an opportunity to assert his high
ethical credentials, his anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism at once,
two birds with one stone: “Britain had no moral right to promise a
national home for a tiny Jewish minority”--why “tiny”? The Zionists
expected millions to pour into the country, as in fact they did--“in a
predominantly Arab country. It did so not for altruistic reasons but
for selfish and misguided ones.”
Shlaim once said that he believes historians should not merely
describe and analyze but also act as “judge and jury” (or was it
“judge, jury, and executioner”?)--that it is their responsibility to
pass moral judgment on the actions (and the thinking?) of their
protagonists. He has a powerful confidence in his own “moral compass.”
He once wrote that I had lost mine. I do not believe that historians
should moralize in their historiography: it is a sign of hubris, and
it is tedious. My belief is that historians should seek truth, not
“justice,” and describe and analyze events, using as wide a range of
sources as possible to try and work out why people acted as they did
and what were the consequences--and then let the reader judge, using
his or her own “moral compass,” whether the protagonists were right or
wrong, wise or unwise.
Shlaim concludes his essay on the Balfour Declaration with the flat
personal assertion that “I can only agree with Sir John Chancellor
[British high commissioner to Palestine, 1928–1931] that the Balfour
Declaration was a colossal blunder--it has proved to be a catastrophe
for the Palestinians and it gave rise to one of the most intense,
bitter, and protracted conflicts in modern times.” But of course it
was not the declaration but Zionism itself--the successive waves of
Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the creation of Jewish social and
political and economic institutions there, with the aim of recreating
a sovereign Jewish state--that gave rise to the conflict.
What does all this tell us about Shlaim’s views? Well, he sets out his
credo in the introduction to Israel and Palestine, where he tells us
that “The Jews are a people and, like any other people, they have a
natural right to national self-determination. In the aftermath of the
Second World War, the moral case for a Jewish state became
unassailable…. This was the background to the U.N. resolution of 29
November 1947 … an international charter of legitimacy for the Jewish
state…. Arabs … felt that the gift of Palestine to the Jews was
illegal. However, a resolution passed by the UN General Assembly by a
large majority cannot be illegal. It may be unjust but not illegal.”
Subsequently, Israel and the Arab states agreed in armistice
negotiations and accords on Israel’s borders. “These are the only
borders,” Shlaim writes, “that I regard as legitimate.” So, he
concludes, “I believe the creation of the State of Israel involved a
terrible injustice to the Palestinians…. I fully accept the legitimacy
of the State of Israel within its pre-1967 borders.”
In 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan
Heights, Sinai, and the Gaza Strip. In November of that year, the U.N.
Security Council passed Resolution 242. The resolution, Shlaim informs
us, stressed “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by
war, and the resolution … called on Israel to give up the territories
it had captured in return for peace.” Actually, the resolution, in its
definitive English version, spoke of giving up not “the territories”
but “territories,” as Shlaim notes elsewhere in his book. “But,” he
continues, “Israel preferred land to peace.” Actually, it has been a
mixed bag--as Shlaim well knows. Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula in
exchange for peace with Egypt, and hundreds of square kilometers of
territory in exchange for peace with Jordan, and on June 19, 1967
(and, again, in 1994–2000) offered to give up the Golan Heights in
exchange for peace with Syria. It has also given up the Gaza Strip
without getting any peace in return. In the case of the West Bank and
East Jerusalem, matters have been more complicated and Israel has been
less “giving.” But historically speaking, the bald claim that “Israel
preferred land to peace” is something less than a half-truth.
About more recent times, Shlaim has this to say: “I reject, and reject
utterly, completely and uncompromisingly, the Zionist colonial project
beyond [the pre-1967 borders].” And also this: “Ilan Pappé and I
[following the Second Intifada] ... held on to our belief that Israel
bears the primary responsibility for both the persistence and the
escalation of the conflict” This is a persistent nonsense. Far fewer
Israelis or Palestinians have died in the major bouts of violence of
the past three decades than, say, in 1948, or 1973; and of course both
peoples suffered far more in 1948. The recent Israeli-Palestinian
bouts of violence, the First Intifada (roughly 1987–1991) and the
Second Intifada (roughly 2000–2004), have been more prolonged than the
previous wars, but far less bloody and exacting. And as for the wider
Israeli-Arab conflict, the region has seen, strategically speaking, a
substantial de-escalation, with two Arab states making peace with
Israel during the past three decades. There were wars between Israel
and Arab states in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, but none since
then. And the recent bouts of violence between Israel and Hezbollah in
2006 and Israel and Hamas in Gaza in 2008–2009 were extended campaigns
between a state and terrorist organizations, not “wars.”
As for the future, Shlaim writes: “The only fair and reasonable
solution is the partition of Palestine … a two-state solution.”
Presumably he means a Jewish state called Israel in the pre-1967
borders and a Palestinian Arab state composed of the West Bank, Gaza,
and East Jerusalem. He does not tell us whether he is amenable to
minor border changes between the two states to allow, say, for the
incorporation in Israel of Jewish settlement blocs along the Green
Line (the pre-1967 demarcation line between Israel and the West Bank)
or, for that matter, of border-hugging Israeli Arab settlements in a
Palestinian state.
All in all, there is much to be said for Shlaim’s credo. The problem
with Israel and Palestine is the dissonance, which is sometimes very
jarring, between these lofty professions of faith and Shlaim’s
assertions (and their tone) about the very recent history of the
conflict, which are not just critical of Israel’s post-1967
expansionism, but also unrestrainedly anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli.
On page 307, for example, he tells us that the establishment of Israel
“involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians,” and goes on to
quote a leading British Foreign Office anti-Semite, John Troutbeck, in
1948, to the effect that the Americans were responsible “for the
creation of a gangster state headed by ‘an utterly unscrupulous set of
leaders’.” Shlaim comments: “I used to think this judgement was too
harsh,” but then Israel’s “vicious” assault on Gaza in December 2008–
January 2009 “reopened the question.” His logic here is faulty: either
Israel’s leaders in 1948 were “unscrupulous” and Israel was, at its
inception, a “gangster state,” or it was not. These have nothing to do
with how Israel behaved, or allegedly behaved, sixty years later. But
more alarming than Shlaim’s lapse of logic is the content of his
assertion, which seems to involve a renunciation of the credo that I
have just outlined. “Legitimate” and “gangster state” have some
difficulty in co-existing.
Palestinian political aspirations, then and now, were “just,”
according to Shlaim. He never applies the word to Zionist aspirations,
before 1948 or after. Was Israel’s establishment “just,” and is its
continued existence “just,” in light of the monumental “injustice”
that it caused the Palestinians? Should the Jews never have
established their state in Palestine? Shlaim implicitly leaves on the
table the standard Palestinian argument that the Palestinians have had
to pay for an injustice committed against the Jews by others. Nowhere
in this book does Shlaim say a word about the Jewish people’s three-
thousand-year-old connection to the Land of Israel--that this land was
the Jewish people’s cradle; that they subsequently ruled it, on and
off, for over a thousand years; and that for the next two millennia,
after going into exile, they aspired and longed for repatriation. Nor
does he mention that the Arabs, who had no connection to Palestine, in
the seventh century conquered the land “unjustly” from the Byzantine
Empire and “illegally” settled in it, forcibly converting it into an
“Arab” land. If conquest does not grant rightful claim, then surely
this should be true universally?
Nowhere does Shlaim tell us of the persecution, oppression, and
occasional mass murder of Jews by Muslim Arabs over the centuries,
starting with Muhammad’s destruction of the Jewish communities in
Hijaz and ending with the pogroms in Aden and Morocco in 1947–1948.
And nowhere does Shlaim point out that the Palestinian Arabs had an
indirect hand in causing the death of European Jewry during the
Holocaust, by driving the British, through anti-British and anti-
Zionist violence, to shut the gates of Palestine, which was the only
possible safe haven, after the United States and the Anglo-Saxon world
had shut their gates to escaping European Jews. And, more directly,
Palestinian (and other Arab) leaders contributed to the Holocaust by
politically supporting Hitler and, in the case of Haj Amin al
Husseini, actually working in Berlin for the Third Reich, peddling
Nazi propaganda to the Arab world and raising troops for the
Wehrmacht.
Most scholars try to be thoughtful, moderate, and balanced when
putting their thoughts into print, even if they are more truculent and
extreme in their speech. Shlaim is the opposite. On stage, he is all
sweet reasonableness, sensitive and fair-minded, in the manner of an
Oxonian gentleman; but in print he is harsh, unbalanced, immoderate,
and occasionally wild. He calls the young Yitzhak Rabin a “predator.”
Ariel Sharon is variously described as a “bully” and “merciless,” his
career marked by “the most savage brutality.” Shlaim even speaks of
Sharon’s “attempts to destroy the Palestinian people.” In 2002, at the
height of the Second Intifada, when Sharon was prime minister, he
“waged a savage war against [the Palestinian] people which included …
the bombardment of refugee camps ... attacks on medical facilities …
and summary executions.”
To be sure, in the Second Intifada there was quite a bit of
“savagery”--but most of it was Palestinian. I know that terrorism is
the inevitable--and for Shlaim and his ilk, the “understandable”--
weapon of the weak. But the massive terrorism of the Palestinians,
religious and so-called secular (both Hamas and Fatah suicide bombers
believed that they were headed for heaven), truly merited the
designation “savage”; and it was the series of suicide bombings that
culminated in the Passover bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, with
thirty-five dead and dozens of severely wounded, that triggered the
IDF reoccupation of the Palestinian cities, which was actually
conducted with great care for the lives of civilians. Though the
Palestinians shouted “massacre” at every turn, as they have done for
more than sixty years whenever Israel retaliates following their own
acts of savagery, there was almost no deliberate killing of civilians
by Israel in the four-year-long Second Intifada (whereas most of
Israel’s 1,300 or so dead were deliberately targeted civilians). Of
the four thousand Arabs killed, less than one-third were civilians.
This is not nothing, but it is not quite what Shlaim says it is.
The Israeli Air Force did not, as Shlaim states, “bomb refugee camps.”
Had it done so, there would have been hundreds or thousands of dead
after each mission, but this was not the case. The IAF bombed specific
targets in refugee camps (and outside them)--terrorist headquarters,
the homes of terrorist leaders, military bunkers, and so on. There
certainly were casualties--but this was inevitable, given that the
Palestinians, in 2002 as today, placed their arsenals, their command
posts, and their hideaways inside and on the peripheries of refugee
camps. During the Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza at the end of 2008,
the Hamas leaders sat out the campaign in the basement of Gaza’s Shifa
Hospital, gambling-correctly--that Israel would not bomb or storm a
hospital.
And is Shlaim fair in his description of Sharon’s career? Take the
phrase “the most savage brutality.” Presumably he is referring to the
young Sharon who, in October 1953, led the infamous IDF attack on the
West Bank village of Kibya, in which about sixty villagers were killed
(in retaliation for a terrorist grenade attack at the nearby Israeli
settlement of Yehud, in which a mother and her two children were
murdered). If Kibya may be described as “the most savage brutality,”
then what words are left to describe, say, Iraq’s gassing of thousands
of Kurds in the 1980s, or the Sudanese Arabs’ mass murder of
Darfurians and Christians, or Syria’s slaughter of twenty thousand or
so Muslims in its own city of Hama in 1982? Were Sharon’s various
campaigns, including the assault on the PLO in Lebanon and the
reoccupation of the West Bank’s cities in 2002, after a string of
suicide bombings claimed hundreds of Israeli lives in Tel Aviv,
Netanya, Haifa, and Jerusalem, really “attempts to destroy the
Palestinian people”--as, say, Turkey’s slaughter of the Armenians in
World War I or Hitler’s murder of the Jews in World War II, were
“attempts to destroy” peoples? Orwell would have charged Shlaim with
abusing the English language, and noted, too, that Shlaim’s careless
and inflammatory hyperbole is always directed against only one party.
When it comes to the Arabs, Shlaim is often mealy-mouthed, hesitant,
disingenuous, and laudatory. Thus he tells us at one point that “the
Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in
the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon and Morocco.” I
am sure that the imprisoned opponents of the absolutist monarchy in
Rabat would be much amused--as would various Shiites, Greek Catholics,
and Sunni Muslims in Lebanon. So would the Fatah prisoners tortured in
Hamas jails in Gaza, and the Hamas prisoners tortured in Fatah jails
in the West Bank. Does a single relatively open and successful general
election transform a polity into a democracy?
One-sidedness and plain unfairness permeate almost every subject
touched and every argument propounded in Israel and Palestine,
perverting and distorting history. Take Shlaim on the post–Second
Intifada Sharon. In 2005, breaking away from the Likud, Sharon
uprooted all Israeli settlements in, and withdrew from, the Gaza
Strip, and indicated that he intended a similar unilateral withdrawal--
as he believed there was no peace partner on the other side with whom
he could reach agreement--from the bulk of the West Bank. The
evacuation from Gaza should have cheered Shlaim, who supports Israeli
withdrawal from the territories. Instead he divines a nefarious plot,
hatched with George W. Bush’s complicity. “The real purpose behind the
plan,” Shlaim writes, “was to sweep away the remnants of Oslo, to
undermine the position of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority,
and to derail the road map [for a two-state solution]…. The plan is a
pitch for politicide.” Presumably, if and when Israel pulls out of the
bulk of the West Bank--again unilaterally, as there is still no
credible Palestinian partner for peace--Shlaim will continue to
inveigh against Israeli plots and Israeli-American conspiracies.
Sharon, who a few months after the Gaza pullout had a massive stroke
and departed the political arena, never made clear how much of the
West Bank he intended to evacuate. He was the driving spirit behind
the construction of the security barrier separating the territory from
pre-1967 Israel. The barrier probably indicated the lines to which
Sharon intended to withdraw, though the initial motivation for
building the barrier was to keep out suicide bombers, and in this
purpose it was highly successful. The barrier--more than 90 percent of
it is a fence, though Shlaim refers to it, in line with common Arab
and Western usage, as “the wall”--incorporates (or will do so, when it
is finished) about 7 percent of the West Bank into Israel. This 7
percent includes the large border-hugging settlement blocs that Israel
intends to keep, and that both President Clinton and President Bush
agreed should be ceded to Israel, with Israel compensating the
Palestinians with land elsewhere. In Shlaim’s account, however, the
“wall will gobble up by the time it is completed … 15 to 25 percent”
of the West Bank--an exaggeration by 200 to 300 percent--and,
alongside the Barak-Clinton peace plan (or “parameters”) of July and
December 2000, will slice up the West Bank into several “bantustans,”
preventing a contiguous Palestinian state.
Of course, a Palestinian state, if it ever emerges, will never be
contiguous, inasmuch as the West Bank and Gaza Strip are separated by
Israeli territory; but neither the barrier nor the Barak-Clinton
proposals would have violated the contiguity of the West Bank (see the
relevant map at the start of Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace). Shlaim
also charges that the barrier creates “an environmental catastrophe.”
This, too, is hysterical nonsense. It is true that the barrier
separates several thousand villagers from their fields and workplaces,
making their lives difficult and requiring complicated improvisatory
solutions. But bombs exploding in downtown Tel Aviv and Haifa--as
happened almost daily at the height of the Second Intifada, which is
what drove the construction of the barrier--also creates
“difficulties.” These “difficulties” never exercise Shlaim and his
“moral compass.”
Shlaim fails in this volume to properly describe what was without
doubt a historic turning point in the conflict: the Barak-Arafat-
Clinton negotiations in Camp David in July 2000, and the subsequent
“Clinton Parameters” of December 2000. He fails to inform his readers
even of what it was that the Palestinians were offered. Instead he
declares that “the most fundamental cause of the failure … lies not in
Arafat’s psychological makeup but in Barak’s package.” He singles out
Barak’s demand that the Palestinians agree that the offered package
would be final--that is, agree to an “end of conflict” and an “end of
claims.” “This remorseless insistence on finality,” Shlaim explains,
“was in fact part of the problem, not the solution,” as if most peace
treaties include a loophole that one of the parties may resume
hostilities after signing the treaty if all its demands are not met.
The Barak offer--a Palestinian state on 100 percent of the Gaza Strip
and 91 percent of the West Bank--“was a reasonable basis,” Shlaim
says, “for an interim agreement, not for the final end of the
conflict.” Is Shlaim hinting here that he supports such Palestinian
demands as the full repatriation of the five million refugees to the
territory of pre-1967 Israel, the “right of return” espoused by the
PLO and Hamas (and all the Arab states)? He doesn’t tell us. Nor,
indeed, does he tell his readers that Clinton, in his “Parameters,”
substantially upped the ante by awarding the Palestinians 95 percent
of the West Bank, and sovereignty over half of Jerusalem and the
surface area of the Temple Mount--and that the Palestinians again
responded with a flat “no.” Again, bizarrely, Shlaim speaks of an
Israeli-American “conspiracy” to “corner” the lamb-like Palestinians,
which they rightly defied.
Nowhere in this volume is Shlaim more scathing than in his criticism
of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Hamas in Gaza in December 2008–
January 2009. “Merciless,” “unremitting brutality,” “totally
disproportionate,” “indiscriminate”: these are some of the phrases he
uses. He concludes his book by asserting that Israel has “become a
rogue state with ‘an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders’ … In Gaza it
went too far: It sowed the wind and it will surely reap the
whirlwind.” Is he referring to a possible Iranian nuclear attack on
Israel? Is he justifying it in advance?
At one point Shlaim concedes that “Hamas is not an entirely innocent
party in this conflict.” But he quickly buries this observation under
his own display of the basic inability of many Western liberals to
come to grips with the phenomenon that they are confronting: true
believers with a fundamentalist ideology. Shlaim says that it is wrong
to portray the Hamas as “just a bunch of religious fanatics.... The
simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with
normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any
other national group.”
But the Hamas leaders daily repeat the slogan, from their Charter or
Constitution of 1988, that “Israel will exist until … Islam will
obliterate it.” Does that sound like a “normal aspiration”? Do most
people around the world speak this way about their neighbors? What
does this, or the mass festivities in the streets of Nablus and Gaza
when a suicide bomber successfully exploded in a bus in Tel Aviv, tell
us about the Palestinians, who voted Hamas into power in free
elections in 2006? Shlaim blithely informs his readers that “like
other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political program
following its rise to power.” He acknowledges “the ideological
rejectionism” of Hamas’s charter, but he declares confidently that
Hamas has begun “to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-
state solution. Its spokesmen said many times that they would accept a
Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and offered a long-term
truce on that basis.”
Shlaim hears what he wants to hear, not what is actually said. The
“moderate” Hamas leader Ismail Haniya almost daily repeats that Hamas
will never recognize Israel, and less frequently says that it will
continue the struggle until all of Palestine reverts to Palestinian
Muslim rule. Hamas “extremists” such as Khalid Mashal speak even more
firmly about Israel’s eventual demise and its replacement with a
Muslim polity governed in line with sharia law. Indeed, sharia has
been gradually imposed, without much fanfare, in the Gaza Strip since
Hamas gained dominion there--no mixing of the sexes in public, harsh
dress codes, no alcohol, no cinemas, no Internet cafes, and,
gradually, no Christians (a few have been murdered, most have left).
True, Hamas’s leaders over the past few years have sometimes spoken
about a prolonged truce--if Israel first agrees to withdraw to the
1967 borders and accepts the “right of return” of the refugees. Is
this tantamount to accepting a two-state solution? Of course not. And
we are talking tactics, not strategy. Hamas, despite massive pressure
by the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and the United States, has been
firm in resisting changes in its political goals, which are the
destruction of Israel and the imposition of sharia law. When Hamas
leaders amend the Charter in accordance with Shlaim’s irenic
fantasies, I will start to believe that it is changing; but not a
moment before.
About Israel’s restrictions on the flow of goods into the Gaza Strip
since the Hamas takeover, Shlaim observes that “the aim was to starve
the people of Gaza into submission” and resulted in “a humanitarian
catastrophe.” This is simply wild. Darfur is a humanitarian
catastrophe. Somalia at times has been a humanitarian catastrophe. But
Gaza? As far as I know, no Gazan has died of thirst or starvation.
There are no African-style bloated bellies there. It is true that
Israel has barred the importation of iron and steel and other
materials needed for reconstructing houses destroyed or damaged in the
December 2008–January 2009 campaign (and, in my view mistakenly, also
barred the entry into Gaza of various other goods). But Israel argues,
with solid logic, that Hamas would immediately use these materials to
rebuild bunkers, munitions storage facilities, trenchworks, and the
other institutions and instruments of its aggression.
Without a doubt, history has ill-served the Palestinians. They became
a separate and distinct “people” (while remaining part of the greater
Arab “people”) as a result of the Zionist enterprise and the Zionist
challenge, and Zionism has caused them repeated bouts of suffering.
Their persistent rejection of compromise, as expressed by their
successive leaders, has had a major role in the perpetuation of this
suffering. And this suffering appears to fuel Shlaim’s animosity
toward Israel. But there is a mystery here. Many intellectuals, in
Israel as in the West, have been moved by the Palestinians’ history
and their plight, but at the same time they have remained sympathetic
to Israel’s predicament, and admiring of its real and in some ways
incomparable achievements over the past six decades. In Israel and
Palestine, by contrast, there is no sign of any such complex sympathy.
For Shlaim, Israel and its leaders can do no right. It all begins to
seem very personal. What is the source of this bias and this
resentment? It is always hazardous to speculate on the motives of
writers and scholars. Perhaps one day Shlaim will enlighten us on this
score.
Benny Morris
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/derisionist-history

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