Israel/Palestine

The Iron Wall – Avi Shlaim

books and books review, history, Israel/Palestine
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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”.

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Intifada – Zachary Lockman & Joel Benin

books and books review, Israel/Palestine
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Cover of Intifada


Intifada
Zachary Lockman & Joel Benin
423 pages including index
published in 1989

During Israel’s invasion of Gaza this January there was one of those stupid drummed up controversies that always happen whenever Israel’s engaging in warcrimes again and hence coming under foreign pressure. In this case it was Dutch Socialist Party member of parliament Harry van Bommel who got into trouble after his call for Intifada was twisted from being a call to resistance into not just a call for armed resistance but fullblown terrorism. Various zionist pressure groups were keen to pretend that intifada invariably meant terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings while ignoring that the first Intifada had been characterised by non-violent protests and most socalled Palestinian violence only happened in self defence against IDF aggression. Nobody honest can call boys throwing stones at tanks terrorists, but that didn’t stop our local zionists from pretending it was, helped by conflating the much more violent Second Intifada with the first.

Now I grew up in the eighties and I remember the first Intifada. I was barely in highschool when it started in 1987 and not very politically aware, but I did notice that by late 1988, early 1989 there were quite a lot older students wearing keffiyehs, usually as shawls, as a symbol of their support for the Palestinians; this at a not too leftwing Christian school. The Intifada had the same sort of stature as the ANC’s struggle to end Apartheid had because everybody could see how the Palestinians were being oppressed and how justified they were in their (largely non-violent) resistance despite IDF agression. It was therefore a blatant rewriting of history to equate Intifada with terrorism and to confirm this, I read this collection of essays on the Intifada.

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IDF soldiers talk about their war crimes

Israel/Palestine, War on Gaza
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That the IDF committed war crimes in their invasion of Gaza (let’s not even mention the invasion itself was a warcrime) was known on day one of the invasion. Evidence for that however only came from such unreliable witnesses as the victims themselves, or United Nations employees, or western journalists in Gaza, so it was largely rejected by Israel and its defenders. But now the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting the personal experiences of IDF soldiers during the Gaza invasion and those are less easy to sweep aside:

The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. “There was a house with a family inside …. We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof,” the soldier said.

“The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”

According to the squad leader: “The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

“I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his
job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way,” he said.

The IDF has ordered an internal probe into these allegations. This always is a great comfort to victims of Israeli aggression, as without exception it turns out they weren’t shot, it was all a big misunderstanding or just an innocent little mistake.

The strictly impartial BBC, operating on behalf of the Israeli government

Auntie Beeb, Manufacturing Consent, War on Gaza
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To update an old Young Ones joke. As seen on Prog Gold, the current BBC’s director general is quite cozy with the Israeli government, which of course did not influence the decision to remain impartial by not broadcasting an appeal for the IDF’s victims. Now Ellis Sharp reminds us that he has been impartial towards Israel from the start of his tenure when in 2004 the then Middle East correspondent was transferred to Africa:

Orla Guerin’s offence was to run stories not just about the grief of Israeli families who had lost family members to suicide bombers but also stories about the grief and suffering of ordinary Palestinian families. As one blogger put it at the time:

Guerin’s real sin, of course, is to show some sympathy for the victims of the Israeli bombing (that’s enough to brand her a “terrorist”).

Within days of Thompson meeting Sharon, Guerin was sacked as BBC TV Middle East correspondent and transferred to Africa.

As you’ll remember, Thompson became director general because his predecessor had to resign after the BBC got caught on a technicality and was keelhauled for it in the aftermath of the Hutton Inquiry. Thompson was brought in as very much a pair of safe hands who wouldn’t rock the boat, follow the establishment line ever more so than his predecessors and not embarass the government. Despite this, there have been several scandals during his tenure, from running unwinnable contests to sexing up a documentary about the royal family to of course the Ross/Brands clusterfuck. This seemed to have made the BBC gunshy, prone to overreact and moreover, seemed to have lost the corporation its political nous.

So while the BBC has always been careful to not upset Israel or its zionist cheerleaders in the UK, always had an internal bias towards Israel, it used to be much more subtle about this. Even five years ago, I don’t think it would’ve been so blatant as to refuse air time to a genuinely humanitarian appeal for the inhabitants of Gaza. But because the corporation has been so battered by the same politicians and tabloids that are such great friends of Israel as well, because it has been caught with its pants down so often lately, it has overreacted. And now even those people who are normally the first to accuse it of a pro-Palestinian bias are disgusted.

Poor Auntie Beeb. It just cannot win.

Dutch government does not believe Israel has committed warcrimes

Dutch politics, War on Gaza
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Which means the following are not warcrimes or have not happened, according to the Dutch government (in Dutch).

To Balkenende and his fellow moral crusaders, so happy to tell us what’s wrong and right, what Israel has been up to in Gaza is of no great concern. The only thing that should be condemned is Hamas violence.