Middle East Archives - Martin's Booklog

The Iron Wall – Avi Shlaim

Published on April 13, 2009

Cover of The Iron Wall

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 interpretations.

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”.

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side — Clive Stafford Smith

Published on August 17, 2008

Cover of Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side
Clive Stafford Smith
307 pages including index
published in 2007

Lord knowns there have been a lot of depressing books published about America’s war on terror; not to mention a metric shitload of blogs writing about it, including my own. So what good is yet another book decrying the injustices committed at Guantanamo Bay? After all, if you don’t know about them by now, you’ll never know. But when the author is one of the lawyer volunteers defending the victims of the war on terror, who has been coming to Guantanamo for years and who also manages to inject some humour in what’s otherwise a bloody dreary subject.

Clive Stafford Smith is somebody who has a lot of experience with worthwhile but hopeless causes, as he spent years working on death penalty cases in the American Deep South. When the news about the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp became known he didn’t hesitate, but immediately got involved. Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is based on his personal experiences at Guantanamo. The title is a reference to the fact that all the lawyers have to stay on the leeward side of the bay and therefore have to take the morning ferry to get to their clients each day. Surprisingly for a book on such a dark subject matter, Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is quite funny in places, due to the absurdity of some of the situations Clive Stafford Smith and his clients find themselves in.

Ghost Wars – Steve Coll

Published on December 8, 2007

Cover of Ghost Wars

Ghost Wars
Steve Coll
230 pages
published in 1974

When New York and Washington were under attack on September 11, 2001, it came as a bolt out of the blue, just like that other sneak attack permanently etched in the American psyche, the attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. The mythology surrounding both attacks would portray the US as innocent victim of cruel, remorseless enemies, but as anybody who paid any attention in the past six years should know by now, the September 11 attacks were in fact blowback, the end result of years, if not decades of bad choices made in America’s foreign policy. In Ghost Wars, Steve Coll describes this hidden history behind the attacks, starting with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 up until September 10, 2001. It makes for fascinating, if depressing reading.

Depressing, because Coll shows you how year after year it seems successive American governments made the wrong choices in Afghanistan. Sometimes these choices were made out of ignorance, sometimes out of indifference, sometimes because other policy concerns were more important. But all those choices helped create Al Quida and eventually would lead to the September 11 attacks. But it’s not just American policies that created the Taliban and Bin Laden; Steve Coll also pays attention to the role Saudi Arabia and Pakistan played in first financing the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance and later supporting various parties in the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet departure.