Customer Reviews

Israel & Palestine

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Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford University, is the author of The iron wall, the best book on Israel's relations with its neighbours. This erudite work is a collection of articles that were originally published in the Journal of Palestine Studies and the London Review of Books.

Part 1 comprises ten articles on the 1948 war and after, Part 2 ten articles on the Oslo Accord of September 1993 and beyond, Part 3 five articles on the breakdown of the peace process, and Part 4 five articles looking at the current situation from various perspectives. He identifies three main watersheds, each the subject of heated debate: the founding of Israel, the 6-Day war of June 1967 and the Oslo Accord.

Israeli governments usually oppose a Palestinian state and a return to its 1967 borders, even though, as Shlaim argues, ending the occupation of the West Bank would enhance Israel's security. The Oslo Accord, negotiated by Israelis and Palestinians, with virtually no US or EU involvement, was a great step forward towards creating a Palestinian state. But tragically Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his successor Ehud Olmert wrecked the Accord, as Shlaim shows.

Shlaim recognises that the Iraq war had `no solid basis in international law' and that the invasion did not help to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict or promote democracy in the Middle East. You don't end one illegal occupation by starting another.

Shlaim argues that Israel's brutal military occupation of Gaza was `deliberate de-development'. The USA and the EU helped the Israeli state by imposing sanctions on Gaza, not on the occupier but on the occupied. As Shlaim writes, "The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence."

In 2005-8, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire from Gaza; in 2005-7, the Israeli Defense Force killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children. In November 2008, Israel broke the ceasefire which had held for four months. In its 22-day attack on Gaza, 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. Bush and Blair backed the attack and opposed UN calls for a ceasefire.

Shlaim concludes, "A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria."

This is a great collection of fascinating articles from a learned and respected historian. It is precisely the reasons why I feel let down by Professor Shlaim naive treatment of the Nakba and by his conviction that the 1967 borders are the internationally recognised borders for Israel. He does not say why? He simply expects the reader to accept that argument without question. It is because of such light-hearted treatment of such a sensitive issue, that the Palestine-Israel question remains unanswered in this book. Professor Shlaim, moreover, states categorically that the two state solution remains the only solution to the problem. This raises another big question: How? Again, this book leaves this crucial question unanswered.

Shlaim believes that "job of the historian is to judge". This seems, alas, to entail some noticeable shoe-horning of reality to fit the requirements of ideological fashion and convenience.

There are some interesting passages here, but Shlaim's slightly facile and romantic positions are all too easy to take from the safe distance of Oxford, where Fatah's constitution can be read with agreeable detachment "Article (12): Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.
Article (19) ... this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated."

(There can be little responsible doubt about what "complete liberation of Palestine" or "eradication of 'Zionist' ... cultural existence" would concretely entail under an Islamic state, or even under a secular majoritarian hegemony, if such a thing could actually be achieved).

Generally, there is a too strong a sense of distortion of the historiographic project by an anxiety to conform to the uncomplicated ideological preferences of some of his northern european hosts. These are not perspectives that would ever be seen as more than fashionable posturing by an electorate in Israel, particularly by the 40% or more whose families have concrete experience of living in Arab countries before the Jewish nakba began in 1948, generating, by the 1970s, even more Jewish Arab refugees than Palestinian refugees.

The purely ideological section devoted to Benny Morris is diagnostic of Shlaim's predicament. It fails to engage with a single issue of technical historiography, and devotes itself instead to ad hominem fulminations against Morris's failure to be limited by the bounds of Shlaim's preferred, and structuring, ideology - namely that "the Palestinians, by any reckoning, can only be seen as the victims" while only the Israelis are to be seen as aggressive. Regardless of the evidence, apparently.

Fatah's Constitution, and Hamas's Charter, documents which are eloquently expressive of the history and balance of forces in these organisations, but uncongenial to Shlaim's romantic ideology, are not brought to the reader's attention.

Meanwhile, the review of this book by Benny Morris in The New Republic is worth looking at, I think.