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Fear and Loathing: Palestinians Pay the Price of History
Israel still claims it has no choice but to continue the policies of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and extermination that started with its foundation, as becomes clear from books by Max Blumenthal, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Ilan Pappe, Rashid Khalidi, Alison Weir, Ari Shavit and Shlomo Sand
Other Israeli “new historians” – Pappe himself, Benny Morris – who went from documenting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to regretting they had not all been driven out – Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev and Shlomo Sand – followed in Flapan’s footsteps.
When Israel veered right the “new historians” were reviled as traitors and self-hating Jews. Shavit rejoiced in the “obsolescence” of post-Zionism, writing that the “enormous gap between the (human) dimensions of Israeli injustice and the (inhuman) intensity of the brutality that surrounds it” had “opened people’s eyes and explains some of the things we’ve had to do”.
Shlomo Sand, professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv, has persevered. His 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People became a bestseller, although his contention that Jews do not constitute a separate race or ethnic group enraged many.
The former Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi used to say that “God is not a real-estate agent”. In his latest book, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (Verso, £16.99), Sand attacks what he calls Zionism’s use of the Bible as a deed to Palestine. “In no text or archaeological finding do we find the term ‘Land of Israel,’ ” Sand writes. “All biblical texts employed the same pharaonic name for the region: the land of Canaan.”
Furthermore, Sand writes, the Jewish patriarch Abraham and most of his family were from Mesopotamia, not the “land of Israel”. Moses, Aaron and Joshua were born and raised in Egypt.
Sand’s conclusion should be engraved on the heart of every Israeli: “Remembering and acknowledging victims that we ourselves create is much more effective in bringing about human reconciliation . . . than incessantly recalling that we are the descendants of people who were once victimised by others,” he writes. “A brave and generous memory, even one tainted by hypocrisy, is still a necessary condition for all enlightened civilizations.”
None of these authors sees an easy way out of the conflict. Pappe says the much-vaunted “two-state solution” has become irrelevant.
With half a million settlers occupying 40 per cent of the West Bank, Israel-Palestine is de facto one country riven by apartheid. Pappe argues for a binational state for both peoples.
Khalidi says the Camp David-Madrid-Oslo mould, which places top priority on Israeli security but ignores Palestinians’ security and basic rights, must be broken. Negotiators must return to United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which demand that Israel withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967. With Palestinians wielding zero political clout, that’s unlikely.
Filiu writes that it is “in Gaza that the foundations of a durable peace should be laid”, as the intractable issues of borders and settlements no longer exist there. He does not say how US and Israeli refusal to deal with Hamas, which won free and fair elections in 2006, could be overcome.
Ultimately, as demonstrated in Khalidi’s and Weir’s books, unconditional US support for Israel is the knot of the problem. The conflict will not be resolved until or unless a US president, probably at the beginning of his or her second term, is willing to impose a solution.
Lara Marlowe,
Irish Times