Israel's History

[Chinahand]

I found this book review in the Economist magazine highly informative.

 

Its a review of "Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy" By Shlomo Ben-Ami.

 

He was Israel's foreign minister and so has been directly involved in the decisions of war and peace that have bedevilled Israel's history.

 

It makes stark reading and is a bit of an antidote to both the "Israel is the victim" stories toted by some, and the "Israel is a monster" stories toted by others.

 

Discrepant historical rhythms

Feb 9th 2006

From The Economist print edition

 

MANY of the participants have now dissected the failure of Bill Clinton's heroic effort six years ago to make peace between Yasser Arafat and Israel's Ehud Barak. The longest book to date has come from Dennis Ross, the senior American official involved. The most profound may be this beautifully written account by Mr Barak's foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a Moroccan-born historian who became a politician. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who feels a partiality to one side or the other, though it will not be a comfortable read: Mr Ben-Ami is unsparing in his criticisms of both sides.

 

Mr Ben-Ami does not focus only on the Clinton initiative. He places that episode in the broad context of the conflict, employing a bluntness about his own country which, if he were a western journalist and not a former Israeli foreign minister, would undoubtedly have Israel's supporters in America rushing to denounce him.

 

For example, Mr Ben-Ami has no time for the myth that early Zionism posed no threat to the national aspirations of Palestine's Arabs. Indeed, the Arab revolt against the British in 1936-39—the real first intifada—confirmed the instinct of the Jewish leadership in Palestine that war with the Arabs was inevitable. But whereas the Arabs clung to maximal positions, he says, the Zionists planned carefully for their inevitable war while understanding the value of tactical compromises.

 

The UN partition resolution of 1947 was, says Mr Ben-Ami, the crowning achievement of one of the most successful national enterprises of the 20th century. The Arabs were defeated by the extraordinary capacity of the Zionists to combine diplomatic savoir faire with military means—and considerable brutality. The Palestinians faced “a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, and at times atrocities and massacres, it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community.” But in 1948 and ever since, Israel's hubris of victory was combined with a no less genuine, paradoxical and “almost apocalyptic” fear of annihilation. Paradoxical, but not, says Mr Ben-Ami, irrational. For whatever the concrete balance of military power in this conflict, Israel is rightly aware of the immense Arab hinterland that could afford one defeat after another and still be ready for the next round.

 

Mr Ben-Ami argues that a failure of leadership has throughout been a major cause of the calamity that has befallen the Palestinians. This was the case under the leadership of the fanatical Haj Amin el-Husseini in the 1940s and under Arafat from the 1960s onwards. But Israel's leaders also failed. The great victory of 1967 ushered in an “orgy of political drunkenness and military triumphalism [that] blinded the eyes of Israel's leaders from seeing the real, not the Messianic, opportunities that her lightning military exploits opened for her.” After the defeat, the Arabs might have made peace in return for the 1948 borders they had hitherto rejected. But now an intoxicated Israel wanted more, and the failure to make peace led both to a revival under Israeli occupation of a fierce Palestinian nationalism and the birth, under the spell of the six-day victory, of a Messianic national-religious Jewish expansionism.

 

With contrition such as this on the Israeli side, why did Mr Clinton's peacemaking fail? While admitting to Israel's negotiating mistakes and the arrogance of Mr Barak, Mr Ben-Ami says that at Camp David, and even more in the later Clinton “parameters”, a respectable two-state deal was there for the taking. But Arafat—“elusive, non-committal, the master of double talk”—was not willing to grasp it. In part, argues Mr Ben-Ami, this reflected a wider Palestinian preoccupation with vindication and justice, at the expense of a pragmatic search for a solution.

 

The book ends with Ariel Sharon's Gaza withdrawal but before the victory of the Islamists of Hamas in the Palestinians' election. Mr Ben-Ami concludes by arguing that it is time for both parties to realise that to continue to insist on the complete satisfaction of their respective dreams and presumed rights will lead them both to perdition. The Hamas victory suggests that such a realisation remains distant. The conflict, he remarks, has long been plagued by “discrepant historical rhythms”. At the very moment Israel is showing small signs of turning away from post-1967 Messianism and rediscovering a sense of its limits, the Palestinian side has on the face of it reverted to the self-defeating maximal demands of the 1940s. Folly marches on.