Reading Israel-Palestine
Sometimes I’m asked what books I’d recommend to help understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here’s a list of related books I’ve read in the past few years, and then a list I’m still trying to get to.
I’ve paid attention to some of these issues since my teenage years, when I read a lot mostly from the Zionist perspective and wrote a steady stream of high school and college term papers. But I’m not an academic expert, and I’m not trying to do a comprehensive review of the literature (though I’d like to read one, if anyone can point me to it). My current reading is selective and mostly one-sided, mostly to fill in details I’d like to know more about. Like many of us, I read a lot of short pieces online from a variety of sources, but I’m trying to avoid the trap of deciding the situation is so complicated that constant reading is all that makes sense.
I did just order a copy of Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. This was the primary text of the weekly discussion groups Brooklyn Young Judaea organized for its teenage members in the 1960s. As I recall, it has a long introduction, and then a wide variety of readings representing the full array of Zionist factions. Some of the readings I remember as shockingly racist and even fascist, but most presented perspectives conducive to a humane Jewish state. I assumed at the time that the right-wing rants had only historical relevance. As I’ve written elsewhere, I never imagined that the Betar kids running around Brooklyn in military-style uniforms, learning how to shoot guns in their summer camp, and wearing buttons showing Greater Israel extending far eastward of the Jordan River would someday be running things. In any case, I’m curious to re-read Hertzberg’s book and think about just why the overall package appealed to me. Maybe that will help figure out how to deflect Zionist appeals to Jewish kids today.
I’ve blogged about some of these books, so you can do a search on the author to see my impressions:
Dan Cohen-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami, The Palestine-Israeli Conflict: A Beginner’s Guide. (I read this dual-narrative history four or five years ago, before beginning this blog. I wanted to see how the two authors, a rabbi and a Palestinian lawyer, would approach their alternative histories. What I remember most is that Cohen-Sherbok wrote more than a dozen pages before mentioning Arab opposition to Jewish settlement.)
Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine
Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State
Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Palestine
Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents
Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: How its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy
Michel Warschawski, On the Border
Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploration of Jewish Suffering
Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair (Editors), The Politics of Anti-Semitism (I list this despite resenting Cockburn’s chapter, which attacks me by name for an essay of mine that he badly misrepresents. If you read his chapter, please see my response.)
Books on my shelf I’d like to get to, though the larger historical works I may just skim…:
Alice Rothchild, Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience (Alice is a neighbor of mine, a primary organizer of the Boston-area Visions of Peace and Justice in Israel-Palestine, which is now a chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace)
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle
Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock
Michael Neumann, The Case Against Israel
Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A HIstory of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001
Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
Robert Rotberg (Ed.), Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double Helix
Alan Dowty (Ed.), The Jewish State: A Century Later
There are many more, I know. Later.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:14 pm
An understanding of the history of Israel-Palestine is required in order to address the current situation
David Green
In the 1980s, Israel ’s “new historians” challenged a Zionist narrative that had been publicly unquestioned in Israel and the United States . Among these historians, Israel could never again be viewed as an underdog David challenged by an Arab Goliath. Since then, the debate has been about whether this biblical metaphor should be turned on its head. Three recent books have made it uncontroversial to assert that the post-World War I Zionist movement, sponsored by Britain and the U.S. , should no more be seen as the underdog than we now see British colonialists in relation to Native Americans. In turn, Palestinians can no more be sensibly called anti-Semitic than indigenous Americans can be called “anti-European.”
These three books evoke the Zionist-Palestinian conflict with metaphors of confinement, separation, and exclusion: the “iron cage,” the “iron wall,” and the “glass wall.” In The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Palestinian-American Professor Rashid Khalidi documents British support for a Jewish national migration movement in Palestine since World War I, and concurrent opposition to an indigenous Palestinian national movement, most violently during the revolt of 1936-39. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine , by which the British ruled from 1923-1948, endorsed a “national home” for the Jewish people while never citing the Palestinians by name. Thus, “the (90%) Arab majority was effectively ignored as a national and political entity.”
The brutal suppression of the Palestinian revolt effectively decimated Palestinian leadership and resistance thereafter. In contrast, after World War II Zionist terrorism caused Britain to give up its Mandate, and to acquiesce in the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages that began during the Mandate’s final months while British forces remained. It has been claimed that in the wake of Holocaust, Zionists had to confront both a British Goliath and an Arab Goliath. It is clear that an increasingly well-armed and bold Zionist movement provoked a weakened British Goliath into abandonment, gained American and Soviet support, faced timid, compromised, and militarily inferior Arab regimes, and subsequently overwhelmed a virtually defenseless Palestinian society with profound internal problems, violently “transferring” over 700,000 Palestinians with relatively little provocation or resistance.
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has documented—house by house, village by village, city by city—the violent and sadistic expulsion of the Palestinians from the end of 1947 into 1949. It has long been established that the Palestinians fled not in response to “Arab broadcasts,” but to physical intimidation, including unprovoked massacres. Based on Pappé’s meticulous research, it is now clear that this ethnic cleansing was premeditated, thorough, not retaliatory, and half completed before the feeble and ineffectual intervention of Arab armies in May of 1948. “If there was a turning point in April (1948), it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population toward the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed.” This ethnic cleansing was based on a belief among Israeli leaders that an “iron wall” was required to separate an overwhelming Jewish majority from the Palestinians, who were understood then as now to pose not a military but demographic threat to a Jewish state.
This demographic threat is addressed by Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in the Arab Israeli city of Nazareth , in Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State. The 150,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 are now over 1 million, over 20% of the population, a percentage that increases due to their high birthrate. This presents a problem for a Jewish state that has used a harsh but “legal” discriminatory “glass wall” between its Arab and Jewish citizens that is “needed to cloak the contradictions inherent in the concept of Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state.” These contradictions have been exposed by Israeli attacks on unarmed Palestinian civilians during the outbreak of the intifada in 2000, by increasing suspicion of the loyalty of historically quiescent Arab Israelis who demand social equality, and by increasing calls for expulsion by popular right-wing politicians. All of this has resulted in plans to re-draw borders in order to transfer as many as a quarter of Israel’s Palestinian citizens to a future Palestinian state, an outcome in no way supported by those affected.
Metaphors of separation, confinement, and exclusion are made literally concrete by the wall that Israel has built mostly inside the occupied West Bank . While largely invisible to Israelis, in areas where visible it has been, according to Cook, “painted with murals on the Israeli side, reimagining the view that was now missing while making sure that it was empty of the Palestinian villages that could be seen before its construction.” Pappé adds that also eliminated are “the people who live in them.” The rights of those people—and of all Palestinians—have been made invisible not only by Zionist aspirations for a Jewish state on land that had to be taken by diplomatic chicanery and brute force, but by British and American policies that have exploited those aspirations for their own imperial ambitions.
David Green lives in Champaign
January 24th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Ephraim Karsh neatly skewers the “new historians”, using all the documents available, including those recently released by the Israeli government.
“Fabricating Israeli History” is a classic.
Karsh shows how historians like Morris and Pappe used parts of quotes, changed wordings and totally misquoted sources, to push their agenda.
Lightweights like Cook, Carter, Finkelstein, need to go back and read original sources.