The Iron Wall
Avi Shlaim
670 pages including index
published in 2000

Avi Shlaim is an Israeli/British historian, one of a generation of revisionist historians who from the 1980s started tearing down the foundation myths of the state of Israel. History always has political undertones and perhaps nowhere more so than in Israel, which after all justifies its existence with the historical claim of the Jewish people on the lands of Palestine, as developed through zionist ideology. With the succesful establishment of Israel as a Jewish state came a set of founding myths and in the first decades after independence Israeli historians by and large confirmed rather than challenged those myths. In the eighties this changed, as new historians started re-examining those core assumptions. Unlike the earlier generation, people like Avi Shlaim had not had the same personal experience and direct involvement in the foundation of Israel and its wars and could look more objectively on the facts rather than let ideology steer their intepretations.

In The Iron Wall - Israel and the Arab World Avi Shlaim takes aim at Israel's foreign policy concerning its immediate neighbours. It's a big book, tracing the evolution of Israel's approach to the Arab countries from its struggle for independence up to 1998 and the failure of the Oslo peace process. The title of the book comes from two 1923 essays by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a Zionist leader and according to Shlaim, "spiritual father of the Israeli right". In these essays Jabotinsky set out the possibilities for dealing with the socalled "Arab problem" and coming to the conclusion that the only way to deal with it is to continue the settlement efforts "under protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down".

It's this idea, that the Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbours can be forced to accept Israel's existence without Israel having to compromise any of its goals or surrender any of its territory, that has driven Israel's foreign policy. According to Shlaim, this attitude has been the core assumption that has driven every Israeli government, regardless of which specific parties where in power. The Iron Wall looks in great detail at how each succesive Israeli government approached the Arabs, in the process showing how often chances at a negotiated peace, with the Arab countries as a whole and with specific countries like Syria, Egypt and Jordan, were scuppered one way or another because the government of the day rather trust in the Iron Wall than allow concessions. Negotiations would always come from a position of military strength and this position ensured that the need for concessions seemed less than urgent. Israel's military supremacy after 1948 would ensure the Arabs could never seriously threaten the country and sooner or later they would see that they could do nothing but accept the situation as it was, therefore no concessions needed to be made.

The point of view in The Iron Wall never shifts from that of Israel, as Shlaim traces the motivations of subsequent Israeli governments, factions and individual leaders. The Arab countries, the Palestinians and the various third parties involved with Israel's conflicts at one time or another are only portrayed in terms of their actions, apart from king Hussein of Jordan, who gets a little bit more stage time. Nevertheless this is a book about internal Israeli politics shaping its foreign policy and general attitude towards the Palestinians and neigbouring countries. In a way it's fitting that the motivations and actions of the other actors in the conflict remain unclear, as the Iron Wall policy itself quite obviously is based on making everbody but Israel's opinions irrelevant.

The Iron Wall is not a polemic and doesn't really evaluate Israel's policies on a moral basis, but it does look at the Iron Wall policy in terms of its effects on the country as a whole. On the one hand the history of Israel does seem to bear out the succes of the policy. From its inception in 1948 Israel has always had military supremacy over its neighbours, has almost always been able to enforce its will on the Arab countries and the Palestinians. On the other hand, this didn't come without costs. Shlaim shows succesive Israeli governments wasted opportunities to make peace with its neighbours because they put more trust in Israel's own military strength, as well as because they didn't want to make compromises. Even the peace agreement with Egypt almost floundered several times before it was signed, as Israel tried to keep as much of the Sinai as it could. Only a combination of bribery and threats from America finally forced Israel into the agreement, one of the few times there was an American government that had the guts to do this.

The Iron Wall doctrine Avi Shlaim describes illuminated a lot of Israeli history to me, of why so many different Israeli governments always fell back on military solutions to political problems. One of the essential books for anybody wanting to understand the modern Middle East.