Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Benny Morris stronca Avi Shlaim

Derisionist History
Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations
By Avi Shlaim
(Verso, 392 pp., $34.95)
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 is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion 
University and the author, most recently, of 1948: A History of the 
First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press).
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/derisionist-history

 Benny Morris
quoto

 
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/derisionist-history
Grazie, molto interessante.