The Muddle East

Another reason why God is not great

2011-12-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

This post appeared in a slightly different version at Harry's Place.

In tribute to Christopher Hitchens. Incomparable secularist, humanist, polemicist. April 13, 1949 - December 15, 2011.

As this morning brought news of the death of a great secularist and humanist, it seems apt to recall a day in September 1928, when a bloody religious dispute broke out in Jerusalem's Old City. History does not lack incidents which could illustrate the point equally well, but the one in question is distinguished by the particular triviality of its cause: a piece of cloth.

It was Yom Kippur, and the cloth was being used as a screen to separate male and female worshippers gathering for the service marking the start of the fast at the Western Wall. The Waqf, the Muslim religious trust which ran the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, had banned any alterations to the site, and so demanded the screen be removed. Jewish leaders refused. The British authorities struck a seemingly reasonable compromise: it would stay up until after the evening service, and be removed in the night.

When a British officer found it in place at 7am the next day, he sent a ten-strong, fully armed police force to destroy it. Predictably, mayhem ensued. In the months that followed, protests and counter-protests broke out, leading to a wave of violence, strikes, and a diplomatic rumpus that involved telegrams to the League of Nations and letters to the king of England. Far be it from me to question the solemn importance of such ritual appurtenances; but I venture to wonder if the piece of cloth was quite worth the hundreds of Arab and Jewish lives lost in the affair - which, moreover, played its part in edging Palestine towards civil war and enduring tragedy.

Fast-forward to July 2000: the dying days of the Camp David talks, aimed at resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict once and for all. The negotiations are stuck on one main issue: the status of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. Bill Clinton begs Yasser Arafat to accept Ehud Barak's latest offer: Israel will retain sovereignty over half of Jerusalem's Old City; the Palestinians will rule over the Muslim and Christian quarters. But there's a problem: Israel will not, under any circumstances, give up sovereignty over the holy compound. Clinton offers Arafat several sweeteners: the Dome of the Rock will have official embassy status. Arafat will receive a 'sovereign presidential compound' adjacent to the site. But Arafat is insistent:

If anyone imagines that I might sign away Jerusalem, he is mistaken. I am not only the leader of the Palestinian people; I am also the vice president of the Islamic Conference. I also defend the rights of Christians. I will not sell Jerusalem.

It's become almost a cliche: everyone knows, roughly, the likely shape of a future peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. And it's true that on issues like borders, settlements, even refugees, the chasm separating the two sides in 2000 has narrowed - even amid all the violence and overheated rhetoric.

But then there's Jerusalem. Its eastern half was annexed from Jordan after the 1967 war - illegally according to a unanimous ruling of the International Court of Justice - and proclaimed Israel's 'eternal, undivided capital'. Even if a rococo plan for divvying up the city's Arab and Jewish neighbourhoods can be imagined, on one issue the experts scratch their heads. If an Israeli prime minister agreed to hand back the Temple Mount, he'd probably wake up a few days later an ex-prime minister. If a Palestinian leader agreed to surrender his people's claim to the Haram al-Sharif, he'd wake up a few days later with a fatwa on his head. Peace seems destined to run ashore and splinter on thirty acres of holy stones.

Meanwhile ordinary Israelis and Palestinians increasingly succumb to differing fundamentalisms to provide certainty in a baffling, violent world. Hamas roughnecks detain young women for the crime of socialising with members of the opposite sex, while ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemites are ignorant of the grotesque associations of forcing women to the back of segregated buses. Both Jews and Muslims vandalise billboards and attempt to ban depictions of the female body - which, in both its real and imagined form, is unfailingly the first target of the kind of sordid bigots who harbour a poisonous loathing of everything human.

I don't claim moral equivalence: it's true modern Judaism has nothing quite comparable to the depraved sado-masochistic cult of crypto-fascist necromania espoused by the most hard-line Palestinian Islamists. But the antics of Jewish mosque-torchers, price-taggers, and hyper-Orthodox cowards determined to bully the less devout with their autistic scriptural literalism are almost as frightening, if only because they are partially shielded by a sophisticated modern state that seems reluctant to confront them.

Moderates on both sides will protest that such extremists are unrepresentative of their people and perversions of their faith. Perhaps so. But we should not underestimate how deep and tangled the roots of superstition grow in this disputed earth. Fundamentalist Jews have long enjoyed disproportionate power in the supposedly secular Israeli state, abetted by an electoral system that frequently makes their parties coalition power brokers. And the Palestinian leadership - also avowedly secular - may be close to losing its authority to an Islamic movement it increasingly tries to outflank through mimicry. Religious fanatics - albeit of drastically different stripes - are the reckless id in both Palestinian and Israeli national psyches, cajoling the less devout into matching the intransigence they call faith.

One of the lessons of secularism is that the separation of church and state protects not just the state, but the church (or mosque, or synagogue) too. God and politics is an adulterous union that rarely ends happily ever after: what's depressing is that it should be necessary to say so, urgently, in Israel in 2011.

How the far-too-Holy Land could profit from the wisdom of Christopher Hitchens now - as both sides retreat into their bunkers of stubbornness and certainty, no longer able to hear the other across the abyss of no-man's-land, all dialogue drowned out by the hymns of war.

Towards a democratic Palestine

2011-12-06T19:24:00.000-08:00

(This post appeared at Liberal Conspiracy.)

When seven Palestinian activists tried to channel Rosa Parks by illegally boarding a 'Jewish' bus in the West Bank last month, winning the world's sympathy should have been easy.

After all, the Israel-occupied territory has two kinds of citizens. Jewish settlers have their own towns, roads, buses, and schools - from which Arabs are, naturally, excluded. Jews can vote for their leaders; Palestinians have few democratic rights. Jews have full access to a liberal justice system; Palestinians are tried in military courts, and can be held indefinitely without charge or trial in jails where torture is routine. Everything, from the water supply to security arrangements, is tilted towards one national group and away from the other.

So why, when those activists stepped off the bus and were carted off to jail, didn't they inspire a storm of moral indignation from the watching world?

Perhaps because - unlike Rosa Parks, or Nelson Mandela - Palestinians aren't just campaigning for an end to racist segregation. Their ultimate aim is to replace the occupation with a Palestinian state. That is undisputably a worthy cause, which many liberals support for good democratic reasons.

But it's not at all clear that a future Palestinian state will be an oasis of liberalism and democracy. For instance, what will happen if Jews try and board a bus in the future state of Palestine?

If the comments of top-ranking Palestinian officials are anything to go by, the question is moot: there won't be any Jews in Palestine.

Remarks to that effect have been made by figures including president Mahmoud Abbas, US ambassador Maen Airekat, and even leading moderate intellectual Sari Nusseibeh.

Western leftists are often highly critical of the notion of a 'Jewish' state, calling it racist and incompatible with democracy. But how many of those same people support a fully democratic Palestine, where Muslims, Jews and Christians enjoy equal citizenship?

As a devout liberal, I believe states should ideally have no national or religious character. But things are rarely so simple. The UK, for instance, is officially a Christian state, but this is of little significance except to Anglicans. And in regions fraught with ethnic tensions, nation-states are sometimes the lesser evil.

That's why, in Israel-Palestine, I support the increasingly unfashionable notion of two states for two peoples: one with a Jewish majority, a distinctively Jewish public sphere, and equal civil and political rights for non-Jews; and another with an Arab majority, a distinctively Arab public sphere, and equal civil and political rights for non-Arabs.

As it happens, this view is shared by an overwhelming majority of Israelis and Palestinians.

The Palestinian leadership and its western supporters should seize the moral high ground, and declare that anyone who is prepared to abide by local laws can expect full equality and protection in a future Palestinian state - regardless of race or religion. Until we do so, we have no right to demand the same commitment from Israel.

As Egyptian democrats are discovering, it's not enough to eject a repressive regime if we simply swap one kind of tyranny for another. Changing the world is relatively easy; the true test comes when it's time to build a new one.

Middle East peace is still possible

2011-12-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

(A version of this post appeared at Harry's Place.)

In the maelstrom of blame and doomsday rhetoric that's Israeli-Palestinian politics, dispassionate enquiries into the prospects of peace are all too rare. So I'd like to draw your attention to an excellent report from the The Atlantic, called 'Is Peace Possible?' It explores four main issues - borders, security, refugees and Jeruslaem - and lucidly explains what peace might look like in each case. And while it avoids firm conclusions, the report has only strengthened my view that peace is there for the taking.

Such optimism may seem eccentric ten years after Camp David, in which we've seen a bloody intifada, Operation Cast Lead, and a drift towards pessimism and extremism amongst both peoples. It's true neither leadership has anything like the imagination or courage necessary to seal an agreement just now. But at the last serious talks, in 2007, substantive progress was made in all areas. Despite the fraying of the two-state consensus in recent years, I believe it's still the only way out of the Israel-Palestine mess.

When you try and imagine a Middle East peace deal, you can do so in one of two main ways. You can try and come up with the best solution in the best of all possible worlds. Or you can try and imagine an optimal compromise between the reasonable hopes and fears of both sides: the least-bad scenario that has a chance of enduring. That's what I've done in the following paragraphs, drawing on The Atlantic's special report for supporting detail. This plan doesn't embody some Platonic ideal of justice; it won't put right every historical wrong; and it won't produce two perfect societies. But it has one great advantage: it is, give or take some modifications, the only plan that could work.

Borders
As the most fundamental and visible manifestation of statehood, borders are the key to the two-state solution. Fortunately an internationally recognised 'border' - the so-called 1967 or 'Green' line - already exists around the territories that will make up the future state of Palestine.

It's often pointed out there's nothing sacred about what are, after all, simply the armistice lines of the first Arab-Israeli war (though, funnily, this argument only ever seems to cut one way - deep into Palestinian territory). All borders are more or less arbitrary conventions we agree to respect, but the 1967 lines are useful because: they enclose two territories with large national majorities; the whole world accepts them, as do most Israelis and Palestinians; and they represent the contours of a historic compromise whereby the Palestinians agreed to recognise Israel and seek a state on 22% of the land.

This Atlantic video shows that, despite decades of Israeli settlement-building on occupied Palestinian land, it will be possible to create two states based on the 1967 lines with relatively minor adjustments - allowing around 75% of Jewish settlers to stay put. A peace deal will provide for no more than 5% of 'Palestine' to be swapped for land of equal size and value, so that the main settlement blocs near the West Bank border can be annexed to Israel without damaging Palestinian territorial contiguity.

While I don't believe the Palestinian leadership has any moral duty to underwrite Israel's conquest of West Bank land, I think land swaps are a reasonable compromise for the sake of Israeli civilians who would otherwise be uprooted. The PA's willingness to consider land swaps at Annapolis in 2007 shows it's prepared to go beyond its commonly recognised obligations in pursuit of peace. Any viable deal will require Israel to make unpopular compromises in return - including the evacuation of all settlements deep inside the West Bank, notably those in the Jordan Valley.

Jerusalem
The 1967 line runs through Jerusalem, so a future deal will create a binational city that serves as the capital of both Israel and Palestine. But due to the unique historical and religious significance of Jerusalem for Jewish people, it seems reasonable to expect some adjustments. After all, many Israelis believe - not without reason - that the period before 1967 was a historical anomaly, with Jews banned from living in the Old City or worshiping at the Western Wall. Were Israel to surrender all territory east of the 1967 line, it would effectively authorise the continuation of this situation, striking at the heart of Jewish identity and faith. A future deal will likely allow for Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, the Jewish quarter in the Old City, and the Western Wall. The other questions discussed in The Atlantic's video - such as how to create a border - are essentially practical and therefore not immediately relevant here.

Refugees
For Israel to retain its Jewish majority, it is impossible for the Palestinian refugees of 1948 (and their millions of descendants) to return to their former homes. The return of millions of poor, hostile refugees would tear apart the fabric of everyday life for the vast majority of Israelis. It would make Israel's current citizens responsible for crimes committed before most of them were born. A peace treaty that recognised the right of return would have, as one of its provisions, the dissolution of the state of Israel. No doubt that's what some supporters of the Palestinians ultimately want, but they cannot hope Israel will agree to it.

A fair outcome must include a solution to the refugee crisis without destroying the foundations of the Israeli state. And, whatever its public rhetoric, the Palestinian leadership understands this. As a result, it seems likely that a peace treaty will provide for the resettlement of the refugees in the state of Palestine rather than Israel; an international fund of up to $85 billion to compensate them; and the return of up to 50,000 Palestinians to Israel proper, to symbolise Israel's partial responsibility for their tragedy.

I'm aware that, by failing to pay lip service to the idea of the 'right of return', I'm placing myself outside the boundaries of the pro-Palestinian movement for many. But if membership of that movement necessitates playing politics with the hopes of millions of unfortunate people, I have no interest in joining it.

What is a compromise, anyway?

Many will object that on all three major issues I've proposed that the Palestinians compromise on their commonly understood legal obligations. That may seem unfair. But if you take the prevailing status quo as the yardstick of compromise, I've required Israel to make the biggest sacrifices. For want of a better measure of fairness, I've made several mentions of the notion of what's 'reasonable' precisely because it's elastic enough to allow room for debate.

There's no objective definition of what's reasonable. Some Israelis will say of the Palestinians: for 50 years they try to wipe us out, to finish the job Hitler started, and now that's failed they come and talk about justice! That's reasonable?

And many Palestinians will say: over twenty years ago we accepted a state on 22% of our homeland, and now they come and ask for more concessions? When is it Israel's turn to start being reasonable?

At an emotional level, these are powerful arguments. But there is another which, I believe, trumps them both. We can look for a solution everyone agrees is fair, or we can find one that's fair enough to stand a chance of working. A compromise that satisfies either side fully is, of course, no compromise at all. By accepting a measure of tolerable unfairness, Israelis and Palestinians still have much more to gain than they can possibly lose.

The Atlantic's brilliant report is a library of features, articles, documents and other resources relating to the peace process, which I'm still exploring. I recommend it highly.

Harry's Place meltdown

2011-11-25T11:01:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, an editor at Harry's Place evidently decided that (to pilfer Abba Eban) the sum of human wisdom would probably remain intact if the thread beneath my latest article disappeared.

Harry's Place is one of the UK's more popular liberal blogs, partly due to a permissive comments policy that produces some marvelously feisty debate. My first two posts at the site (here and here) attracted some trenchant criticism and lively discussion, to say the least.

But the response to my third was so astounding that I'm going to test your patience a little by commenting on it.

'UNESCO, the West Bank and the Tree of Life' was, I thought, a fairly innocuous piece, calling for the UN agency to do something about the disrepair at an archaeological site near Jericho. Insofar as it had a political aspect, it was a criticism of the Palestinian Authority. I suggested that its neglect of Hisham's Palace and its glorious mosaics could be seen as a metaphor for its leadership of the Palestinian people.

I'd never normally advise you to take time out to read the electronic flotsam that washes up under any blog, and an angry online debate about Israel-Palestine is hardly notable. But another blogger evidently found this particular thread so remarkable that he saved and posted it (here and then here), which means you can decide for yourself whether the following summary is fair.

After some intriguing posts about Umayyad art and Islamic cultural puritanism, the thread veered sharply off-piste, with one poster calling me an 'asshole' and another, who simply couldn't have read my words, saying:

Oh sheesh, here we go again - yet another spittle-flecked, ignorant attack on Israel by the usual suspect.

The consensus seemed to be that, contrary to appearances, my post was an anti-semitic call for Israel's destruction. If only I were capable of such subtlety! Highlights included standard-issue accusations of racism (against Jews and Arabs), calls for me to be banned from Harry's Place, and an enquiry as to my whereabouts so a poster could deliver his critique, quite literally, to my face. There was a long and tedious interrogation of my personal life (not sparing that of my parents) in search of evidence of anti-semitism. One diligent researcher triumphantly unearthed a list of my reading from another website, concluding that my enjoyment of books about Jews and Israel was indicative of 'Jew-obsession' (how dare I research the topic I blog about nearly every day?). Another said he agreed with my article, and that my attempt to win his favour was evidence of deplorable cynicism.

Not everyone berated me, and not all my responses were as courteous as they might have been. When someone criticised my 'tone', another poster restored my faltering sanity:

at the risk of being admonished for my tone, you’re taking the piss, right? Work on his tone? Go re-read the threads on Matt’s last couple of posts. Is there something he hasn’t been accused of, because I’ve missed it if there is. And when commenters aren’t, disgracefully, outright accusing Matt of something, they are insinuating it.

[. . .]

Matt has been more tolerant of his debaters than most had any right to expect given the manner in which they tried (pretended to try) to engage with his posts.

There’s about a half-dozen regular(ish) commenters on this thread who need to examine their own tones before Matt needs to even think about reciprocating. The enquiry into his personal life – not to mention being offered out by that buffoon Barad – has shamed this blog.

Lest you think I'm simply trying to have the last word, let me say this: blogging at Harry's Place has taught me more about Israel-Palestine than a hundred books. There's a temptation to respond to this experience by seeking out more amenable audiences, but doing so would add to the polarisation in Israel-Palestine debate I decried in my first Harry's Place post.

Despite the internet's vaunted ability to eliminate differences (a cyber-utopian friend speaks dreamily of off-duty IDF soldiers skyping gay Palestinians) many of us use it to reinforce our fundamental views and self-image. Sensitive issues can only accommodate a narrow bandwidth of opinion before undermining the sense of community we seek out online.

Hoping to disrupt this cosy menage, I didn't introduce myself to Harry's Place readers with views they'd readily endorse: opposition to the Palestinian 'right of return', scorn for the notion of 'apartheid' inside the 1967 lines, sympathy for the idea of a 'Jewish state'. By leading with some (equally sincere) contrarian views, I evidently created the impression I'm an anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, perhaps even anti-semitic provocateur. As a result, the community closed ranks.

So what to conclude? That pro-Israel online communities can be unreasonable, unpleasant and hostile to alien views? Sure. The same goes for pro-Palestinian sites.

But this too: that those of us who advocate justice and statehood for the Palestinians must take seriously the defensiveness we arouse in Israel's supporters. Because ultimately, if we hope to achieve our goal, it's precisely such people - and their political leaders - we need to convince. Supporters of Israel are no less reasonable or intelligent than any other large political group. It's our job to persuade them that Palestinian rights and Israeli security aren't just compatible - they're co-dependent.

So I'm not afraid of another eloquent flogging at Harry's Place, if it'll have me back. After all, the site's masthead reads: 'Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear.' That goes for me too.

***

(Believe it or not, there are more important things going on in the world than my squabbles with Harry's Place readers. See here and here for some outstanding commentary on the threat to Israeli democracy from today's Haaretz.)

A job for UNESCO

2011-11-17T16:36:00.000-08:00

Since UNESCO made the 'state' of Palestine its 194th member last month, press coverage has focussed on the move's political implications. The UN culture agency may be feeling a little cash-strapped right now - a US law automatically defunds any international body that admits Palestine - but it will want to prove the decision was more than a diplomatic stunt. And I have just the job for that purpose.

Down at the bottom of the world, just outside the West Bank town of Jericho, lies an early Muslim archeological wonder. Hisham's Palace was an 8th century Umayyad ruler's winter retreat until an earthquake destroyed it. Its stunning ruins contain the exquisite 'Tree of Life' mosaic, a mysterious depiction of a lion attacking a deer under a mythical tree - making it a priceless rarity in representation-averse Islamic art.

And it's covered in shit.

When I visited the site this summer, it had plainly been subject to years of disregard. The Global Heritage Fund has listed it as one of twelve historic treasures that, if we don't act now, we're in danger of losing forever. It's precisely such emergencies that make UNESCO too important for US political subterfuge.

The seeming absence of management means anyone could stroll in and help themselves to a serving of ancient palace. Though this makes for an exciting visit - you can wander amongst toppled pillars and arches, running your fingers along the weathered sandstone - it's not just tourists who enjoy such easy access. Among other signs of damage to the complex, the celebrated mosaic is thickly caked in avian effluent.

Unlike some of occupied Palestine's other historical treasures - like the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron, not to mention the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem - Hisham's Palace is in West Bank Area A, which, in Oslo-speak, means it's under Palestinian jurisdiction. In other words its scandalous state (imagine leaving a Rembrandt out for a few hours in Trafalgar Square) is entirely the fault of the Palestinian Authority.

The PA's deplorable neglect of Hisham's Palace could, sadly, stand as a metaphor for its leadership of the Palestinian people. Since it was formed in 1994 - to oversee and legitimise Israel's occupation, many argue - it's become a global byword for corruption. In the fat years after Oslo, it allowed countless millions - donated by the international community to a half-refugee population - to be pocketed by shameless officials. The roads into major West Bank towns are flagrantly vulgarised by the mansions of middling bureaucrats and 'security contractors', parasites on human misery.

Israel's 44-year-old rule has brought despair to the occupied and shame to the occupier. But let nobody deny the role of the Palestinians' own leaders in compounding it.

Fittingly, some believe the 'Tree of Life' tableau symbolises good and bad government. The Palestinians have had plenty of the latter, but UNESCO can play a small part in undoing its damage by restoring the mosaic to its former magnificence.

What's more, the deed would carry its own quiet symbolism: of a world uniting to help a nation rise up out of its ruins.

It's true Israel is singled out - here's why

2011-11-14T11:45:00.000-08:00

This post originally appeared at Harry's Place.

I was worried my last piece at this site – ‘We need to have a serious talk about Israel-Palestine’ - was too blandly agreeable to provoke much comment. I needn’t have worried: my appeal for a reasonable debate about the subject led to a gratifying deluge of criticism.

A few posters found my words overly saccharine, perhaps even cynical (Discredited Andrew: ‘I hate to read this stuff more than anything else’). I can sympathise with that: claiming the middle ground can be a useful rhetorical means of portraying your opponents as extreme. I hope I was clear that I don’t value neutrality in and of itself. On controversial topics, such as whether the Holocaust actually happened I try to steer a middle course (following Bill Hicks) – between those who consider Holocaust deniers annoying idiots and those who consider them evil fucks.

Indeed, more than a few posters doubted my claims of moderation (Peter: ‘Hill as an honest broker? What a joke.’). That’s fair enough too: what’s moderate from one point of view may seem extreme from another, and I’ve made no secret of my sympathies for pro-Palestinians (while holding several opinions they would consider anathema). But while I have all kinds of strong views, a few of which I mentioned in the article, I hope I have enough common ground with most Harry’s Place readers occasionally to play the role of, as it were, an emissary from planet Palestine.

A few posters even seemed to like what I wrote. But the vast majority of dissent was summed up by Ohad: ‘Palestinian intransigence is what makes the conflict unresolvable for now’. I admit I was surprised by the vehemence and uniformity of those who disputed my claim that the Palestinians are eager for peace. I hope to have the chance to address that issue soon – after I’ve done some homework.

At times it felt, rather dauntingly, like I was being asked to defend every single claim made by supporters of the Palestinians. For now I want to answer just one criticism that appeared several times beneath my piece. Nick (in South Africa) drew attention – with a rather felicitous turn of phrase – to the ‘gimlet-eyed obsession’ the issue commands in the Muslim world. Lamia complained that too many ‘British liberals’ feel they have a right to ‘weigh in’ on either side of an issue that has little to do with them. These, and other comments like them, are versions of the common complaint that Israel is singled out for special criticism compared with other nations. The argument often comes with the implicit or explicit suggestion that this is due obsessive prejudice against Israel – or outright anti-semitism.

Let’s acknowledge one obvious fact: Israel is singled out for special criticism, way out of proportion to its misdeeds. Take, for instance, the monstrous regime that hijacked the Iranian Revolution of 1979. If its campaign of Cromwellian joylessness is sometimes darkly humorous (for many years its chief cinema censor was – true story – blind), its frequent bouts of murder, torture and persecution of women are anything but. Compared to Iran, Israel is an oasis of democracy, freedom and culture. Let’s agree it’s a different story beyond the 1967 lines, even if we won’t agree whether that’s due to security needs or senseless oppression. We can also agree there are far worse countries in the Middle East that aren’t subjected to a fraction of Israel’s scrutiny. Neither is Israel’s situation unique: Kashmir has been fought over since 1947; Turkey has occupied northern Cyprus since 1974; the 1982 Hama massacre in Syria claimed more victims than Deir Yassin, Qibya, Sabra and Shatila and Operation Cast Lead combined. But how many western liberals know much about any of these facts?

Some anti-semites undoubtedly use criticism of Israel as an outlet for their racism, and many supporters of the Palestinians let their anger at Israel blur into hatred of Jews. I wish more pro-Palestinians would make it clear such views have no place in their movement. But I can’t convince myself that anti-semitism is one of the main reasons Israel is singled out for special criticism. Here are some reasons why.

First, Israel singles itself out for special evaluation. It is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, with the ‘most moral army in the world’. Its idealistic founders hoped it would be, not just superior to its neighbours, but a ‘light unto the nations’. It claims to be at the front line of the ‘clash of civilisations’, a western outpost in a sea of barbarism and tyranny. If you claim to belong to the world’s respectable states, you must expect to be judged by their standards.

Second, precisely because Israel is a democracy that’s concerned about its global image, there’s a sense it’s susceptible to world opinion. We can argue all day about the despicable treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, but until we give up our addiction to their oil, they won’t take the blindest notice. Criticism of Israel, meanwhile, might just have an effect.

Third, many observers in the west – especially in the UK and US – have special reasons to take an interest in Israel. Both countries have many citizens with links to the region (my parents live in Israel, for instance). The British mandatory government played a special part in fomenting the Israel-Palestine conflict. And the US provides more financial, strategic and diplomatic support to Israel than any other country (Egypt, following close behind, is largely paid to play nice with Israel). It’s similar elsewhere: a high percentage of French citizens are Muslims, making Palestine an electoral issue in that country; and Germany’s reasons for taking an interest in the conflict are obvious.

Fourth, Israel controls some of the world’s most famous religious sites – from theTemple Mount or Haram-al-Sharif in Jerusalem to the remains at Qumran - and believers all over the world have a passionate interest in what happens to them. (There are also a depressingly large number of people, primarily in the US, who believe supporting Israel is somehow a way of ushering in the battle of Armageddon – supposedly a good thing. The less said about them, the better.)

Finally, by its very nature Israel will always have some of the most eloquent and effective critics in the world: I mean, of course, dissenting Jewish intellectuals. If there is a Kashmiri Noam Chomsky, or a Cypriot Avi Shlaim or David Grossman, I’m afraid I don’t know of them.

Indeed, there are several ways in which Israel’s special treatment proves beneficial. It is the only country in the world the US allows to keep nuclear weapons without pressure to sign up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US almost automatically vetoes any resolutions against it at the UN Security Council. It is the only country, so far as I know, that refuses to define its own borders (a sine qua non, normally, for statehood).

Ultimately, if I believed that, when people complained about Israel’s special treatment, they meant that they wished people cared as much about other oppressed peoples as they do about the Palestinians, I’d sympathise. But I can’t help thinking that some of them mean: if only people cared as little about the Palestinians as they do about the Cypriots or Kashmiris.

We need to have a serious talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict

2011-11-10T03:54:00.000-08:00

One reason I recently started blogging about Israel-Palestine concerned an experience I had when I first started studying the subject. I’d been visiting the region regularly for several years when, in order to impress an Israeli Arab girl I’d fallen for, I started reading obsessively about the conflict. It was then that I had a strange sense that the place I found in the UK press was a different country altogether from the complex, variegated land I considered a second home. Where were the voices of moderation like the Bethlehem cafe owner who spent hours serving me cardamon-scented coffee while praising Jewish culture? Or the young Israeli couple I came across at a Friday protest against East Jerusalem settlements, who then rushed home early to observe Shabbat? Or the young Arab Israeli who defied her family to marry her Jewish boyfriend, flying to Cyprus after his IDF service for a non-religious wedding?

It’s always seemed to me that moderates on both sides have a great deal in common; as, for that matter, do the extremists, from trigger-happy settlers to death-crazed suicide bombers. So why is the debate in the UK media totally adversarial, with partisan commentators resolutely supporting their own ’side’, and refusing to talk across the Israeli-Palestinian divide? There are, I think, several reasons. The psychology of taking sides means we tend to talk to those who reinforce our views; our remoteness from messy Mideast reality helps us filter out facts that may undermine prejudices; and, of course, the media’s thirst for controversy provides incentives for writers to harden their stance. The result is a stultifying consensus at both ends of the debate. It’s a curious but undeniable fact that British commentators are often more extreme than the ordinary Israelis or Palestinians whose cause they support.

Labelling is part of the problem too. I’ve never believed there’s any contradiction between calling myself both ‘pro-Israel’ and ‘pro-Palestinian’, because I believe each side’s dignity, security and prosperity is ultimately in the other’s self-interest. Since I desire precisely the same things for my Israeli and Palestinian friends, in one sense I’m a total neutral. But in another sense this makes neutrality, for me, difficult to sustain, because it seems obvious that the Palestinians are much further away from achieving these goals.

I can understand why those who call themselves ‘pro-Israel’ label me ‘pro-Palestinian’, but it makes me uncomfortable for a number of reasons. Such terms are often used to dismiss people’s views rather than shed light on them. And since calling yourself ‘pro-Israel’ presupposes an opinion on what’s best for the country, in my opinion there’s a very real sense in which I’m more pro-Israel than, say, Avigdor Lieberman. The Israeli foreign minister and his supporters advocate a bigoted form of Zionism that, I fear, could lead Israel towards catastrophe. My view is that Israel’s best interests would be served by pursuing peace while the conditions are ripe: its closest ally is at the apex of its global power; its PA negotiating partners are unusually moderate; and its nemesis Hamas hasn’t yet acquired the capacity to attack a major city like Tel Aviv. If an Israeli government emerged tomorrow with sincerely peaceful ambitions, I’d be its loudest supporter.

I wish it wasn’t necessary for me to make emphatically clear that I’ve never questioned Israel’s right to exist like any other state. Sympathy for the Palestinians bears no logical relation to the absurd notion that Israel should somehow be abolished, any more than most opponents of the Iraq war advocate the destruction of Britain, or regret over the plight of native Americans leads anyone to call for the dissolution of the USA. Few countries were born without some form of violence, and any that has existed for some time with the free assent of its people has all the rights and duties of an ordinary state. Neither do I see any problem, in theory, with a state manifesting a distinctively Jewish character if the equality of its non-Jewish citizens is guaranteed.

If the label ‘pro-Palestinian’ simply implied a passionate support of Palestinian statehood on fair terms, I’d be proud to use it. But I refuse to associate with self-proclaimed radicals who make excuses for groups like Hamas, which has defiled the Palestinian cause with the blood of innocent civilians. Nor is the ‘respectable’ leadership of the PA without blemish, with its corruption, authoritarianism, human rights abuses and inability to admit mistakes. And I have no qualms about criticising the hierarchical, sexist, and anti-semitic aspects of Arab culture in general – while keeping in mind that ordinary Arab men and women are the main victims of such parochialism.

But if nations had to prove their virtue before gaining statehood, the international community would be a very small club. And despite the brutalising effects of occupation, most Palestinians are surprisingly pragmatic and tolerant. Though Hamas won a wafer-thin plurality at the2006 Palestinian election, it’s less often noted that a comfortable majority opted for moderate parties. I’ve no doubt that, given the chance, Palestinians would overwhelmingly embrace a fair peace deal – marginalising extremists who prefer their sordid death-cult to democracy. And despite a growing sense of futility since the breakdown of Oslo – which has passed into myth as a result of Palestinian obstinacy – the vast majority of Israelis still yearn for the normalcy only peace can bring. Though there are several substantial issues that will not simply yield to mutual goodwill, I haven’t stopped believing the conflict can be resolved one day.

Perhaps because I don’t restrict my sympathy or skepticism to either side, I’m getting used to angering supporters of both. In the last week alone I’ve been called a ‘revisionist neo-fascist anti-semite’ (for suggesting Israel bore some responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1967) and a ’self-delusional crypto-Zionist with deeply ingrained anti-Arab bigotry’ (for arguing Zionism can take benign forms). Admittedly these are extreme reactions, but they are indicative of the way in which ambivalence can end up alienating both sides. Racism should never be tolerated, nor trivialised through casual allegations. At the same time, those of us who haven’t been bruised by centuries of persecution must sometimes expand our imagination to understand those who have.

The Socratic notion of debate as a form of cooperative truth-seeking may seem a bit old hat in our supposedly post-Enlightenment age. The internet’s heralded power to bring people together can seem utopian when, more often, it’s used for the like-minded to parrot each other’s views and for the angry to spew anonymous bile. (The adage about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so low could fairly be applied to the online world.) But however naive it may seem, I can’t help believing in the potential of open, honest debate to change minds and increase understanding.

It’s easy to have a reasonable debate with someone whose fundamental views you share. But if those of us who make a hobby of squabbling about the conflict can’t even succeed in having a civilised disagreement, what hope is there that the parties can come to a historic agreement? As Israeli author David Grossman has said, ‘the real enemy is not the Palestinian or the Israeli but the extremist and the fanatic on either side’.

(This post originally appeared at Harry's Place.)

Middle East writing and reading

2011-11-08T22:20:00.000-08:00

A few of my recent posts:

Here's one at Harry's Place called 'We need to have a serious talk about Israel-Palestine'.

Here's one at Liberal Conspiracy, about talk of the UK attacking Iran's nuclear facilities (but see also my caveat under the line here).

And here's one at the London Progressive Journal, about Norman Finkelstein's disappointing fudge on anti-Israeli terrorism.

Here's an updated story about why I became interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict in the first place.

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I thought I'd also round up some other superb articles I've found around the web on the Israel-Palestine issue recently:

Here's an excellent special report at The Atlantic called 'Is Peace Possible?' which looks at the major issues affecting the possibility of a final negotiated settlement to the conflict, full of helpful video presentations and smart analyses of the core issues. A must-read for anyone interested in knowing what the details of a final deal may look like. And its tentative conclusion - that there's still room for a peace settlement that would satisfy the minimal hopes of both sides - is encouraging.

Another encouraging article on the peace process is provided here by the always interesting Gershom Gorenberg at the The American Prospect. Gorenberg compares Condoleezza Rice's account of a near-agreement between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and PA president Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 with the standard Israeli government version, concluding that the Palestinians negotiated in good faith and showed flexibility and willingness to conclude a settlement.

And finally here's a piece at Haaretz about the effect of Qassam rockets on the communities of Sderot, Ashkelon and Gan Yavne in souther Israel. It's one of the more sensitive and evocative explorations of the damage wreaked by Hamas terrorism, and ironically it was written by someone who's often unfairly vilified as an apologist for such actions.

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Finally, here are some interesting books I've read on the Middle East lately (some of which I may write more fully on later):

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright (Penguin, 2008). Wright finds green shoots of democracy sprouting throughout the Middle East, a couple of years before the outbreak of the Arab spring. Prophetic and engaging - the best introduction to the modern Middle East.

What is a Palestinian State Worth by Sari Nusseibeh (Harvard University Press, 2011). A short, sometimes overly abstract look at the flailing 'peace process' that prompts many questions but comes to few firm conclusions.

My Happiness Bears no Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman (Yale University Press, 2009). Hoffmann manages to write an intimate history of Palestine through the life of the poet Taha Mohammed Ali. A fresh and unique book, as well as an obvious labour of love.

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart (Harvest, 2007). The incredible story of how a member of the UK's diplomatic service in his late-20s ends up trying to run a remote Iraqi province almost single-handedly. An astonishing book and a latecomer to the best tradition of colonialist literature. Highly recommended.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Bloomsbury, 2008). A journalist's celebrated account of the catastrophic occupation of Iraq, told from the perspective of the weird world-unto-itself of the fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad. The author is no Rory Stewart, but an intriguing, often darkly funny book nevertheless.

The real reason we're planning to attack Iran

2011-11-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

It's being touted that a military strike is the only way of dealing with a rogue Middle Eastern state with a nuclear weapons programme, along with a record of aggression towards its neighbours and an evident disregard for international law.

But given the human casualties and regional instability that would result, it's my firm view that we must exhaust every diplomatic option before attacking a nuclear site like the Dimona centre.

That's Dimona, Israel, of course. As it attempts to rustle up support for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, let's not forget Israel is one of four non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (the others are North Korea, Pakistan and India). Nor, as the UK fast-tracks plans to join in, should we forget the role of our government in helping Israel achieve nuclear status - the edifying details of which can be found here.

Of course, a world in which Iran's squalid leaders have access to an atomic bomb is not an appealing one. Paradoxically, it may be necessary to threaten military action in order to make military action unnecessary.

While it's difficult to assess claims about the Islamic Republic's nuclear capability without classified information, serious doubts have been raised about those claims, as well as about the wisdom of a military response.

You may dismiss the author of the most in-depth media investigation into the subject - Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker - as a predictable peacenik. But it's harder to ignore the vocal skepticism of two men in particular: former Mossad and Shin Bet chiefs, respectively, Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin. Israeli government claims that Dagan and Diskin are downplaying the threat posed by Iran, exposing their country and people to mortal peril, because they're disgruntled at being passed over for career advancement simply aren't credible.

But put aside, for the moment, the legitimate debate over Iran's capabilities and the best way to deal with them, and let's be clear about one thing. The evident concern among western powers over Iran's weapons programme isn't about the existence of nukes in the Middle East per se. What worries our governments is that Israel is in danger of losing the nuclear advantage that implicitly, through our silence and material aid, we've long supported as its right.

As we know from the Cold War and the India-Pakistan standoff, the risk of nukes actually being used is of less daily concern to policy-makers than the strategic calculations the weapons bring into play. A Middle East in which Israel was no longer the only nuclear power would be a very different place. Forced to avoid actions that could heighten deadly tensions, its near-total military dominance would be curtailed.

If you think Israel, alone of all its neighbours, should be allowed recourse to the ultimate weapon, that's an arguable, though contentious, opinion. But let's admit this is about maintaining a balance of regional power that's favourable to Israel - and spare me the humanitarian gloss.

Deborah Orr gets it so, so wrong

2011-10-24T05:40:00.000-07:00

Last week I tried to answer an obvious question about the Gilad Shalit deal that the mainstream media seemed largely to have ignored: why is one Israeli worth 1027 Palestinians?

I thought perhaps the reason nobody was talking about it was that the answer was so obvious. But apparently not. Deborah Orr, in a very succinct, very misguided article at The Guardian, has given her view - upsetting lots of people in the process. According to her, it's because we're all used to seeing Jewish lives as more valuable than Palestinians.

Now remember it was Hamas driving the deal: if Benjamin Netanyahu had had his way, far fewer Palestinians would have been swapped for Shalit (or none). Somehow I doubt Hamas thinks Jews (or 'pigs' in their usual lexicon) are each worth 1027 of their glorious comrades.

It's a shame that The Guardian - which, in general, provides pretty balanced coverage of the Middle East conflict - should fuel claims it's biased against Israel with silly pieces like this.

The real reason 1027 Palestinians were released in exchange for Shalit, in brief, is twofold. First, Israel is much more democratic than Gaza, so Netanyahu was under greater pressure to do a deal. Second, Israel held 5000 Palestinians prisoner, while Hamas held one. So Hamas were bound to hold out for the best possible deal before trading away their only chip. (See here for a fuller explanation.)

So what can we conclude? That Hamas values Jewish lives more than Palestinians? That Netanyahu is a closet anti-semite?

Or that Deborah Orr (and her editors) should think a bit harder before publishing the first thing that comes into her head?

This time he went too far: Norman Finkelstein

2011-10-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

I have very mixed feelings about Norman Finkelstein. But before I tell you about them, you must watch this increasingly famous clip of him answering a hostile audience member at the University of Waterloo, if you haven't already done so. The questioner is emotional and confused, but her gist is clear: you mustn't compare Israeli actions to those of the Nazis because, well, it's offensive. Clearly emotional himself, Finkelstein rips into his accuser with unanswerable passion and eloquence. After explaining that both his late parents were Holocaust survivors, that they took part in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and that all his other relatives died in the camps, he says:

And it's precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians. And I consider nothing more despicable than to use their suffering and their martyrdom to try to justify the torture, the brutalisation, the demolition of homes that Israel daily commits against the Palestinians. So I refuse any longer to be intimidated or browbeaten by the tears. If you had any heart in you, you would be crying for the Palestinians . . .

(I can't make out the very last phrase - if you can, please let me know what he says.)

If my lectures at university had been this exhilarating, I may have turned up to some. And had I done so, I would be able to use lots of fancy Latin words to describe the rhetorical devices he's using here. But you'd probably stop reading at that point, so let me just say I think that, in its way, this is one of the great examples of oratory I've come across. And the moral principle Finkelstein lays down is unimpeachable.

The clip illustrates two highly contradictory characteristics of Finkelstein's work. On the one hand, there's the detachment of an academic, the forensic attention to detail, the almost pedantic exactitude of his words (note how he insists on repeating a whole, manicured sentence when interrupted). On the other hand there's the moral fervour of the polemicist, the barely concealed anger of the boy whose parents survived genocide, the activist's sense of injustice.

It's rare for the scholar and the activist to be united in one person. Most activists lack the factual recall to support their vehemence; whereas most scholars are too equivocal to share Finkelstein's commitment. (I can think of several figures who'd like to be seen as scholar-activists but few who embody both roles as fully as Finkelstein. Noam Chomsky? The late Tony Judt?)

Finkelstein is arguably the most controversial writer on the Israel-Palestine conflict - quite a distinction in the context of a subject as controversial as this. As an illustration of the loathing he attracts, just read this comment by the Anti-Defamation League (a rather ironic name for a group whose sole purpose is to go around defaming people). Amongst partisans of the Palestinian cause, however, he's a hero.

Perhaps surprisingly, an attentive reader of Finkelstein's books will find little in them to cause shock or outrage. He is, without doubt, a zealous opponent of Israeli government policy. He explicitly equates Zionism with racism, and links the dispossession of the Palestinians with western imperialism in the epigraph to one of his books, from Joseph Conrad: 'The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.' His books are staunch and uncompromising, but there is nothing in them to place their author outside the limits of serious, civilised debate.

Indeed much of their content is typical of Finkelstein's scholarly diligence. As a young research student he made his name debunking a best-selling book by doing what nobody else had thought to do: check the footnotes. He has turned the scholarly demolition job into an art form. His infamous book The Holocaust Industry - largely an examination of claims that European banks hoarded the assets of Hitler's victims - comes to the (hardly radical) conclusion that they have no case to answer. Though it includes the controversial, and highly speculative, claim that memorials to the Holocaust first appeared in the late 60s as a cynical ploy to mitigate Israeli crimes, it's obvious that Jewish history is often misused in precisely this way. And some of his claims that once seemed unorthodox - such as his critique of the mainstream narrative of the 1967 war - have been confirmed by later scholarship.

So if Finkelstein's bibliography doesn't explain his reputation as a provocateur, can we conclude allegations of his extremism are baseless? Not quite.

Because Finkelstein does have a tendency to make shrill, unguarded comments in interview. It's revealing that his more extreme views tend not to feature in his books, where his detached, scholarly persona reigns supreme. You'd never find a passage like this, for instance, in his published work:

It has been a long time since I felt any emotional connection with the state of Israel, which relentlessly and brutally and inhumanly keeps these vicious, murderous wars. It is a vandal state. [. . .] I have some good friends and their families there, and of course I would not want any of them to be hurt. That said, sometimes I feel that Israel has come out of the boils of the hell, a satanic state (source).

Finkelstein has been described as an anti-Israeli obsessive, and only someone obsessed with Israel to the exclusion of all other countries could use such language. If Israel is 'satanic', how to describe Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia? (Not that this excuses Israel's crimes, of course: the Zionist state aspired to be a 'light unto the nations', not just superior to its squalid neighbours.)

And what about his alleged support for Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel's arch-nemeses? Much of what Finkelstein has said about these groups is brave and commonsensical, even if common sense isn't a quality they provoke in most observers:

People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question.

However, as Finkelstein knows, both groups have gone further than merely defending themselves against aggression, and it's on this subject that he is, in my view, seriously wrong. Asked if he supports their targeting of civilians, he said: 'It is impossible to justify terrorism.' But he goes on to do just that, saying: 'I do believe that Hezbollah has the right to target Israeli civilians if Israel persists in targeting civilians, until Israel ceases its terrorist acts.' This is a tremendous mistake. The immunity of civilians is sacrosanct, and cannot be forfeited. Once you make this principle dependant on the good behaviour of governments, you are in a free-floating moral universe. Indeed this is precisely how both sides justify their more egregious acts. Every atrocity throughout history has been justified with the claim that the victims somehow had it coming.

My heart sank when I read the interview I've quoted, published earlier this year, and I hope he recants. I don't believe one mistake - serious though it is - cancels all his excellent work in books like Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Self-evidently you can be right about some things and very wrong about others, and I don't believe in blacklisting authors. But while Finkelstein continues to make excuses for murder, we've lost a courageous and principled moral voice. I only hope we get it back, soon.

UPDATE (24/10)

The controversy Finkelstein provokes is amply illustrated by the reaction I've had to this post. Some pro-Israel voices on another site said they found my positive remarks about him 'vile' and 'evidence of anti-semitism'. Meanwhile when I asked the editors of a pro-Palestinian site (which has previously posted my writing) if they'd like me to rewrite it in the form of an article, I was pointedly told that my negative remarks were an 'outrageous slur' against a 'heroic truth-teller'. It seems that neither side can tolerate mixed feelings about Norman Finkelstein. (To their credit, the editors of another progressive site said they'd publish a rewritten version, despite expressing their disagreement with it.)

Review: The Forgotten Palestinians

2011-10-18T23:39:00.000-07:00

Ilan Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel

Yale University Press: 2011, 336pp

At the outset of The Time that Remains, a film by Israeli director Elias Suleiman, a man driving home from Tel Aviv airport gets lost in a rare Middle East thunderstorm. 'Why the hell am I here?' he says into the darkness as rain whips the windows. 'And where the hell am I?'

His sense of displacement has an existential edge because the character, like his director, is not just an Israeli but a Palestinian too. This may sound like a riddle, but it is a fact that 1.3 million Arabs live as citizens of Israel: 20% of the population. Identity can be a puzzle to the Palestinian Israelis themselves, who are often viewed with suspicion by both their Jewish co-citizens and their occupied Arab brethren. To the rest of the world, as the title of Ilan Pappé's new history indicates, they are normally simply forgotten.

During the conflict Israelis are fond of calling their 'War of Independence', most of the country's Arabs fled or were expelled, reducing the population from 1 million to just 160,000. The Nakba ('catastrophe') was a traumatic experience for a people who had populated the land since antiquity, and whose new rulers had been a small minority just a few decades ago. Families were divided between those who remained in Israel and those who fled, barred from returning. Israel's Declaration of Independence promised to 'uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens'. But critics argue that a 'Jewish democratic state', as Israel styles itself, is a contradiction in terms: what can it mean for a state to be Jewish in character, except that Jewish citizens have special privileges denied to others? In fairness it should be said that a state could, in theory, be nominally Jewish and fundamentally egalitarian - much as the UK is officially and quite meaninglessly Christian. The only problem with this argument is that it bears no relation to reality in Israel, where discrimination against Arabs is widespread, officially sanctioned and dismayingly popular.

In The Forgotten Palestinians, Ilan Pappé shows how the Palestinian Israelis have lived with Israel's contradictory nature for sixty-three years. For the first nineteen they lived under harsh military rule: citizens could be expelled without warning; suspects were detained indefinitely without trial; and movement was often banned in and out of towns. Abuses inevitably followed, such as the 1956 Kafr Qassem tragedy, when villagers committed the grievous crime of being out working the fields when a curfew was suddenly imposed. A routine journey home turned into a hideous massacre when they ran into trigger-happy IDF soldiers; forty-eight people died, including many women and youths. After the 1967 'Six-Day' war, Israel had a new, more troublesome population of Palestinians to worry about. Though it lifted military rule for its own Arabs later that year, the lessons it had learnt were not put to waste. The Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza were now subjected to the same regime of curfews, checkpoints, torture, detention without trial, secretive military courts, land expropriation, and so on. The system that causes so much controversy today has a long pedigree, having been tested to perfection on Israel's own citizens.

Though the Israeli state now spoke the language of liberal democracy, both de facto and de jure discrimination continued. Wary of rebellion in the Arab Galilee, the government embarked on a so-called 'Judaization' programme, expropriating Arab towns' lands to plant new Jewish settlements on their outskirts. When the victims dared to launch a series of protests against the land seizures, new minister Ariel Sharon's barefaced distortion of the facts summed up the authorities' upside-down moral universe: 'Alien elements are taking over the lands of the state. National land is robbed by others. Soon Jews will have no place to settle in.' In 1976 demonstrations turned violent, leaving six protesters dead. Each year on 30 March, these events are commemorated as the 'Day of the Land', symbolising the dispossession of Palestinian Israelis at the hands of their government.

The years from the outbreak of the First intifada in 1987 to that of the Second in 2000 were more hopeful, partly due to growing acknowledgement that a problem existed. The new mood was embodied by David Grossman's masterpiece Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel (Farar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), which describes his subjects' lives with preternatural empathy and disturbing honesty; it is still the best introduction to this subject. Eloquent voices arose from within the community too, in figures like director Elias Suleiman and novelist Anton Shammas. Yitzhak Rabin offered Arab parties their first opportunity to participate in government (a fact later cited by his assassin as a motive). An equal opportunities law banned racial discrimination (although employers were able to circumvent it by requiring applicants to have served in the military – code for 'Jews only'). New NGOs aimed to ameliorate everyday problems. Meanwhile the first serious peace talks between the two sides seemed to be making real, if fitful, progress.

But the last decade, which began with the killing of twelve Arabs by security forces at a demonstration, has been a story of disappointment and simmering resentment. An extreme, racist version of Zionism became increasingly mainstream, attracting a coalition of expansionist settlers, the ultra-Orthodox, and Russian and north African Jews. The latter two groups, themselves disenfranchised minorities, are readily persuaded to focus their anger against Arabs rather than the inequitable conditions they all face. Perhaps the decade's most dispiriting development was the rise to the post of foreign minister of Avigdor Lieberman, an unabashed advocate of ethnic cleansing, who has made a career playing on fears of a 'demographic threat', seeing a menace to the Jewish state in each new Arab child. Lieberman is a familiar type: such far-right demagogues have stalked the margins of Israeli politics for many years, but none had previously reached such high office.

Although there is truth in the book's titular claim that Palestinian Israelis have been 'forgotten' by the world, there is no shortage of material – mostly produced by Jewish academics, think tanks, even government commissions – documenting discrimination and inequality in Israel, to which Pappé's work is an important addition. Israel's healthy culture of dissent illustrates a paradoxical fact: that its often lamentable treatment of its Palestinians coexists with genuinely liberal and democratic characteristics. Neither is this lost on Israeli Arabs, whose attitude towards their citizenship is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, their deplore its inferior nature; on the other, they are realistic about its benefits. Polls find them relatively moderate in their politics – they demand only equality with Jews – and supportive of the 1967 borders. You cannot denounce rightwing plans to expel Israel's Palestinians without admitting that they overwhelmingly want to stay, preferring second-class Israeli citizenship to first-class citizenship in a future Palestine. Western radicals, often blithe about gruesome violence in the name of 'resistance', might reflect on the fact that only 5-10% of Palestinian Israelis support violence against civilians.

Israel's perennial apologists ought not be allowed to use these facts to give the state a free pass on minority issues. Though Palestinian Israelis are well-off relative to other Arabs, the relevant comparison is, of course, to Israeli Jews. Here the evidence is damning, as another new book – Israel's Palestinians: The Conflict Within (Cambridge University Press, 2011) – makes clear in superabundant detail. Israel counts itself among the world's respectable states, so it must expect to be judged by those states' standards, rather than congratulated for being more liberal than Saudi Arabia. Still, it is a fact to marvel at: that unless you have a penchant for Wahhabi clericalism, sharia law, sectarianism and unemployment, Israel may well be the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East.

You sometimes sense Ilan Pappé is frankly disappointed with his subjects for allowing their relative ease to foster passivity and temper resistance. That is because he is, avowedly, a partisan of the Palestinian cause. Historical 'objectivity' can be an excuse for a bogus neutrality when judgement is demanded, and Pappé's trenchant liberalism is often refreshing. But commitment to the cause can sometimes mar his work. He matter-of-factly refers to Arabs in mainstream politics as 'collaborationist' – glossing over the question of whether opposition is more effective from inside or outside the system. He suggests that all the refugees of 1948 were 'expelled' by Israeli forces, when as he knows many of them freely chose to flee fighting (temporarily, they thought). His description of Palestinian life on the eve of that war is revealing:

‘Almost each village had a school, running water and proper sewage for the first time, while the fields were plentiful and old blood feuds - as the village files tell us - had been settled. In the cities and towns prosperity was also budding. [. . .] The affluence was visible in the architectural expansion. New neighbourhoods, streets and modern infrastructure were also evident everywhere.’

This shimmering vision of peace and plenty is a Palestinian Garden of Eden, innocently awaiting the Israeli Fall. In fact, Palestine in 1948 was a place of seething tension and sporadic violence, as Britain gave up arbitrating between the two communities and the UN struggled to broker a compromise. And ironically much of the economic growth Pappé mentions was probably stimulated by the arrival of skilled Jewish immigrants from Europe

Pappé calls his book a 'people's history', but these people are rather spiritless on the page, treated as victimised specimens rather than the human portraits of a Grossman or Shammas. The complex psychology of citizens whose state is at war with their people is never brought alive. This limitation is partly imposed by Pappé's English prose, which ranges from the strenuously distinguee to the foggily theoretical. However, though the book lacks artistry, it is thorough and convincing, and takes its place as the authoritative history of the Palestinian Israelis. Pappé's previous book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006), was so controversial that he was hounded out of his job in Israel (he is now at Exeter University), but the facts he assembles here are hardly novel to those who care to know about them. They will make uncomfortable reading for diehard Israeli partisans, which is why, though it may be more respected than loved, this is undoubtedly an important book. The Forgotten Palestinians reads like an expert charge sheet; how Israel reckons with these charges will determine its political and moral future as much as its actions across the Green Line.

This article first appeared here at Review 31

You can buy the book here

Why one Israeli is worth 1027 Palestinians

2011-10-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

A pale, skinny Gilad Shalit returned to Israel today, while a few hundred Palestinians went in the opposite direction, with more to follow. In total, 1027 Palestinians are reportedly due for release as part of the deal.

A simple question. Why is one Israeli worth 1027 Palestinians? Why the 1:1027 ratio, rather than, say, 1:1? Specifically, why were Hamas able to hold out until Israel caved in and met almost all its demands?

As I see it, Hamas's bargaining position was vastly superior to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's for two main reasons. One is the relative democratic pressure on both sides. The other is the relative value both sides placed on the prisoners themselves.

First, Netanyahu was under immense pressure from his people to strike a deal, while Hamas was under almost none. As the leader of a genuine democracy - and one with a voting system that tends to create unstable governments - Netanyahu knows his job depends on keeping Israelis happy. An enormous popular campaign for the release of 'Gilad' has grown over recent years, turning the young captive into a repository of the hopes and anxieties of a nation. With huge cost-of-living protests taking place, the Israeli PM was desperate to reap the political rewards of bringing Shalit home.

Meanwhile, though Hamas won a real election (by the narrowest of margins) in 2006, nobody's exactly sure when (or if) more elections will be held, or whether they will make any difference. In general Palestinians feel powerless, dispirited, and frankly accustomed to having their sons and daughters disappear into Israeli prisons. As a result Hamas felt very little pressure to make a deal, leaving it able to hold out for the very best terms.

The second factor is the relative value of the prisoners on both sides. While Palestinian parents felt the pain of their children's absence no less than Shalit's mother and father, the key fact was this: Israel held around 5000 Palestinian prisoners, while Hamas held just one. Look at the swap another way: Israel is releasing just 20% of the prisoners it holds, while the Palestinians are releasing 100%. The Palestinians may not capture another Israeli for many years. As a result, it's obvious Hamas would hold out for the best deal possible before trading away the only chip it held. And you can bet Israel fought hard over every last prisoner, so 1027 is undoubtedly the minimum Hamas was prepared to accept.

The big omission from the Palestinian list is Marwan Barghouti, once a famed Fatah moderate who seemed to embrace terrorism during the Second Intifada and is serving several life sentences as a result. Barghouti, once the most popular politician in the territories, has been touted as a future Palestinian leader, and many expected him to be freed in exchange for Shalit. The fact he's still behind bars has been cited as proof Hamas failed to get everything it wanted.

Don't believe a word of it. It may be good PR for both Hamas and Netanyahu to claim they fought hard over Barghouti. But keep in mind he is a member of Fatah, the group Hamas defeated in a brutal civil war in 2007. He would emerge with the added lustre only time in an Israeli prison can bestow in the eyes of most Palestinians. Why would Hamas risk everything for the sake of the one man who could unite the Palestinian people against it? I have little doubt both Hamas and Netanyahu were quite happy to ignore Barghouti altogether.

So much for the mechanics of the deal; what about its long-term effect on the 'situation'? Predictions about the Israel-Palestine conflict are liable to make anyone look foolish, but I have a feeling the consequences of this whole affair will be relatively minor. Netanyahu will see a short-term jump in his poll ratings, bolstering his coalition. Hamas will gain in popularity, and taking IDF soldiers prisoner will become its number one priority.

So the winners will be the extremists on both sides. And the losers? Well, I have a hunch that, as countries mull over the Palestinian Authority's bid for UN membership, this vivid reminder of who really calls the shots in Gaza may be causing a few of them to have second thoughts.

Three articles at other sites

2011-10-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

I've had a few articles posted at various sites this week.

1. Here's an article at the London Progressive Journal about Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Negev Bedouin.

2. Here's a review of Ilan Pappe's new book at Review 31.

3. And here's a comment piece about the Gilad Shalit story at Liberal Conspiracy.

You have been seriously misled about Gilad Shalit

2011-10-13T00:06:00.000-07:00

You'd have to lack all sense of compassion not to be happy for Gilad Shalit, whatever your politics. It seems the IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas terrorists in June 2006 is finally to be freed, in return for 1000 Palestinians jailed for terror offences.

If you read that last sentence without spotting two major errors, you've been seriously misled. Because Shalit wasn't 'kidnapped', and neither his captors nor most of the prisoners due for release are 'terrorists'.

In the weeks before Shalit's capture on the Gaza Strip border, Israeli bombardment killed 14 Palestinian civilians. When you're attacked by a foreign army you have a legal and moral right to defend yourself; one common way of doing so is taking prisoners of war. This has nothing to do with whether Israel was right to attack Gaza: you can't 'kidnap' a soldier on the battlefield. Nobody had even heard of a 'kidnapped' combat soldier before Shalit. But if the concept was novel, its meaning was clear: 'kidnapping' is what criminals do. As though he'd been dragged from his bed after football practice, rather than taken in army uniform, performing exactly the kind of mission he'd signed up for.

The second misnomer – 'terrorist' – applies either to the Palestinians set to be freed or Shalit's 'kidnappers' themselves. Now let me be clear: blowing up a bus full of innocent people is terrorism, pure and simple. The usual culprit, Hamas, has done incalculable harm to ordinary Palestinians and defiled their honourable cause. And I have no time for soi-disant 'radicals' who call such mindless slaughter 'resistance'. But proper usage cuts both ways: capturing a soldier during wartime isn't terrorism – it's self-defence.

In fairness, this error has been more common in Israeli media than in the west. But almost everyone (see here, here and here) seems to agree that the Palestinians due for release are 'terrorists', even though Israel makes no effort to distinguish terror from self-defence. Anyone it suspects of hostile activity is liable to be detained, quite possibly tortured, and convicted by a closed military court, often on the flimsiest of grounds. And hundreds of Palestinians are 'administrative detainees' – held indefinitely without charge or trial. Palestinians are never 'kidnapped' or even 'captured', but always 'arrested': as though Israel is the policeman of all Palestine. Dare to defy the proper authorities and you're simply a criminal.

Israeli propaganda – so slick there's a word, hasbara, for it – has programmed Israel's viewpoint into the very words we use to discuss the Shalit affair. And the supposedly neutral western media has marched in lockstep, reducing a complex issue to a one-sided narrative. In this way Israel not only legitimises its occupation – it even strips its victims of the right to fight back.

So good luck, Gilad Shalit. But listen carefully to how his story is told, and remember: when powerful interests commit crimes against language, you can be sure crimes against people aren't far behind.

My top five Israel-Palestine books

2011-10-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

Friends often ask me to recommend some books about Israel-Palestine, perhaps in the (mistaken) belief that pretending to read about the conflict will stop me chewing their ear off about it. Anyway, here are the five books I most often recommend. I haven't chosen them because I think they're the 'best' books, whatever that means. And if I were trying to come up with a comprehensive, balanced guide to the topic, I'd list five fat history books. My only criterion here is hedonism: these are the five books about the whole affair that have given me the most pleasure. And since the best way to begin learning about something is to read books you enjoy, these would be a great starting-point for a novice. (For an expert they're simply compulsory.) My list includes a polemic, two autobiographies, a history and a novel. I recommend these books to anyone who's lucky enough not to have come across them already.

How Israel Lost, Richard Ben Cramer

This is, for my money, the most penetrating exploration of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Its four chapters pose four simple questions. Why do we care about Israel? Why don't the Palestinians have a state? What is a Jewish state? Why is there no peace? You might expect the answers to be complex and weighty, but in Richard Ben Cramer's hands they're sharp, compelling, even funny (I still chuckle at the story of the dog, the rabbi and the non-kosher steam). Instead of pages of ideological and semantic argument, the book is full of real-life anecdotes and sharp observations. When I first read it, the distinctive prose - cheerful, digressive, passionate, blunt and calculatedly naive - made me imagine a 24-year-old genius on his first book, rather than a middle-aged Pulitzer Prize-winner. Though it's a great way into the subject for beginners, How Israel Lost is so much more than an undergraduate primer. It's an original take on the conflict, a plea for peace for the sake of both sides. And its insights are as fresh as cut grass in spring.

A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz

Every country should have a writer with the genius of Amos Oz on standby to record its conception, birth and early growth. This tale spans 120 years of Jewish history, pillaging the author's family lore, from a time before Zionism in Russia and eastern Europe to the creation of Israel, where (most of) Oz's family found refuge from the Holocaust. The description of the pre-state Yishuv - excited, ambitious and insecure - brings to life the drama of a people creating a society from nothing, in a new language and a new landscape. In this book, Oz is the authentic inheritor of the great 19th century realist tradition of Flaubert, Tolstoy and Eliot. Read it especially if you call yourself pro-Palestinian, and watch your most cherished assumptions come unstuck. The book that would appear on most people's lists: an acknowledged masterpiece - and the greatest book by Israel's greatest writer.

Once Upon a Country, Sari Nusseibeh
A kind of counterweight and counterpart to Oz's book, and just as wonderful. Sari Nusseibeh's family history is so closely intertwined with that of Palestine that the account of his ancestors is also an intimate story of the land itself. But Nusseibeh has found fame not for his patrimony but for his gifts as a thinker, author and leader. His astonishing tale ranges from his salon for intellectuals in Jerusalem's Old City, to his role as Arafat's reluctant aide in the palaces of Europe, to incarceration in an Israeli prison cell for secretly organising the First Intifada. But this is not only an insider's account of recent Middle East history and an unrivalled evocation of Palestinian society. It is also an eloquent call for justice and moderation. Nusseibeh has a knack for being the first to see the way ahead for his people, often speaking heresies that are destined to become truisms. If peace is ever to arrive, we need more figures as brave and wise as Nusseibeh - on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. (As with Oz: read this book especially if you call yourself pro-Israeli - etc.)

1967: Israel, the War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, Tom Segev

I assume most readers looking for a general history of Palestine and Israel will find their way to books like Avi Shlaim's or Benny Morris's, so I'm including a personal favourite as a dose of history. Israel is gifted with several excellent historians, and many would contest my claim that Tom Segev is the best of the lot. He's written several brilliant books, but 1967 is so authoritative and convincing that, in my view, it settled the long-running debate over who started the 'Six-Day War' (the answer? It's complicated). I love it for the way it captures so much ordinary life, and shows that understanding this pivotal moment in history is as much about mid-60s Israeli shopping habits and youth culture as cabinet decisions and military strategy. Segev is also a consummate writer: his prose makes this account feel a lot shorter than it is. If you don't normally read history, this may be the book to bring you round.

To the End of the Land, David Grossman
As with historians, Israel is blessed with several great novelists: Grossman, Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, Anton Shammas. And the country has been memorably captured by foreign writers too: I almost chose Operation Shylock by US author Philip Roth for my favourite 'Israeli' novel. But it's impossible to overlook David Grossman's incomparable recent work To the End of the Land. On the face of it, this is a simple story: a mother, anxious about her son serving in an IDF unit in Lebanon, goes on a trek through the Israeli countryside, ostensibly to avoid hearing any bad news. Her reflections, memories and encounters on the way form a vision of the land which is both gorgeous and desperately sad. And when you know the cruel way in which life mirrored art - the author lost his own son to the war in Lebanon as he was writing the book - its shattering effect is only enhanced. Some have called it the great Israeli novel - and it's easy to see why.

* I see I've included four Jewish authors - three Israeli and one American - and just one Palestinian. Well, I wasn't trying to come up with a political list, and it didn't occur to me to try and balance the two sides. I could have chosen many great Palestinian writers in various genres - Edward Said, Raja Shehadeh, Anton Shammas - but these were the five books that seemed to suit my purposes best. And, now I've discovered the imbalance, they still seem the best choices. What can I say? If there's one thing that's been true of the Jews, from biblical days right up to the present, it's that they've produced a lot of damn good writing.

London Progressive Journal

2011-10-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

An article of mine appears on the website of the excellent London Progressive Journal today.

What Israel needs to understand

2011-10-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

In my last post I mentioned the 'uncomfortable truths [Israelis] must swallow before peace becomes realistic'. Someone asked me whether I could spell out what, in particular, I meant. Which hard truths, specifically, must Israelis accept if there's to be any chance of peace? It's a good question, which I'll try and answer here. In the interests of balance, I'll write the same kind of piece for the Palestinians next. Here are the most salient points I've come up with:

1. Most of the settlements must go. Look at a map of the West Bank settlements; observe how the land is flagrantly pocked and mottled by Israeli dwellings. If all, or even most, of the land on which these settlements stand - as well as, crucially, the roads connecting them - were to become 'Israel', what would be left for a Palestinian state? That 'state' would be no more than a land of Palestinian stripes; it would forever be a 'state' rather than a state. A journey straight through the West Bank would involve passing in and out of 'Israel' dozens of times. That won't work. Ergo, most of the settlements must go

2. Jerusalem must be divided. When during the Six-Day War Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Kotel (/Wailing Wall), it was only a matter of hours before ministers started boasting that the city had been reunited forever. Israel insists, in the face of global opposition, that the whole city is its capital (most countries maintain embassies in Tel Aviv, to Israel's annoyance; it even encourages journalists to byline articles with 'Jerusalem' rather than 'Tel Aviv'). The authorities have openly attempted to turn Arab areas Jewish, and they have built settlements across the Green Line to separate the city from Palestinian population centres. But as far as Jerusalem's many Arabs are concerned, the city is the capital of Palestine, whatever anyone says. So we have a problem. Precisely how the city will be divvied up in future is one of the most intractable issues in the (currently hypothetical) peace process; it's very difficult indeed to imagine a solution that would be even minimally acceptable for both sides. But one thing's for sure: any Palestinian leader who agreed to sign away Jerusalem would wake up the next morning as an ex-Palestinian leader. So Jerusalem must be divided, or there'll be no peace. Simple. That is, as simple as teaching your cat to speak Hebrew.

3. Hamas must come to the table. The idea of Israel negotiating with Hamas, whose whole raison d'etre is to see Israel destroyed, may seem completely insane. You don't have to be a far-right uber-Zionist to feel uncomfortable about talking with, and legitimising, people whose dearest wish is to wipe you off the face of the earth. I understand that, I really do. But here's the problem. Hamas has become so popular amongst Palestinians - partly, it must be said, due to the way in which Israel has consistently undermined and humiliated Fatah and the PA - that it's effectively acquired a power of veto over any future peace deal. So, like it or not (and I like the Hamas about as much as pig swill for dinner), the group must be coaxed towards compromise and legitimacy. That process is going to be long and painful, but the story of Sinn Fein and the IRA - not a perfect parallel, but similar in many ways - shows that hard-line groups can be brought inside the political tent, forced to swallow some bitter facts, and taught to play by the rules, given certain conditions and the right incentives. Ultimately, it's a case of making a deal with Hamas: give up your principles (that is, your genocidal plans), and we'll give you real influence. Don't like the idea? Fine, but sorry: no peace.

4. Wrongs must be acknowledged. I'm not saying Israel must wear sack-cloth and ashes and beg the world's forgiveness, or become like the Blind Lady Justice and put right every past wrong. And I'm not calling for some kind of official government apology for the Nakbah and other crimes. That's just not how things happen: Britain only just apologised for slavery (and it wasn't a real apology), and the Catholic Church only recently admitted that, ahem, Galileo may actually have been right about, you know, the earth going round the sun. But Israel's current line - that it's a paragon of victimhood, hounded by vicious, hate-crazed enemies - has to change. I'm not really talking about the government, in its official capacity. My point is that the political and security elite, the administration's opinion-makers and policy-people - must understand what the average Israeli, I think, has long known. It must come to a consensus that wrongs have been committed on both sides, and that the Palestinians have some legitimate claims. This point may seem vague or even obvious compared to the previous three. But unless Israel's leaders accept some share of responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy, it will always see moves towards peace as munificent 'concessions' granted to an undeserving enemy. Stopping the building of settlements on stolen Palestinian land is not a 'concession' - it's the right thing to do. That may sound glib, but the implications of Israel's leaders acknowledging their country's past wrongdoing would be an earthquake under its self-image.

These are just four of the more salient facts Israelis must understand before peace is even conceivable. To spell them out so bluntly is frankly dispiriting: imagine the uproar in the Knesset tomorrow if a government announced that Jerusalem must be divided, or that it had come to a preliminary understanding with Hamas about peace talks. (Maybe I'm naive, but I like to think ordinary Israelis are more flexible on such issues than the people they vote for, in general.) When you consider the kind of obstacles in the way of a comprehensive settlement, it's tempting to take the advice offered yesterday by Shlomo Avineri in his discomfiting Haaretz article: give up hope. I don't quite share Avineri's pessimism, but after this little exercise it's easy to understand where he's coming from. It's clear that in recent years Israel's leaders have made the assessment that the status quo is preferable to (or less intolerable than) the implications of trying to make peace. These are discouraging observations. But we're better off staring reality in the face than avoiding its gaze, no matter how ugly it turns out to be.

Thoughts on the Nobel Prize for Literature

2011-10-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

There's a definite Middle East angle to speculation about possible winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, which is awarded Thursday. A piece on the Guardian website tips Assia Djebar, the Algerian novelist, because, says the article, it's time for a woman to win, and a north African would be apt in the year of the Arab Spring. I confess I haven't read Djebar, but I do know she's not Arab - she's Berber. Now you can perhaps argue it's high time the prize went to a Berber writer, but to award the prize to a Berber because of the Arab spring would be like awarding the prize to an Austrian to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

One fascinating blog post I've come across - whose author's knowledge of world literature is frankly terrifying - mentions the Libyan novelist Ibrahim Al-Koni and Syrian author Zakaria Tamer as possible contenders. Another, by the always interesting D. G. Myers, mentions a poet who is ambiguously Palestinian: 'Remember where you first heard the name of Samih al-Qasim, an Israeli Druze who celebrates the Nakba in Arabic verse.' I'm not sure 'celebrates' is quite the right word here, but I'm in no position to cavil, as I confess a little shame-facedly to having read none of these three authors. All are tossed onto the must-read pile, which grows so high that one day I expect it to topple and crush me, like Leonard Bast.

Adonis is a name that often pops up among the favourites, which is annoying, because it's probably - no, certainly - the naffest pen-name in all literature. I used to avoid reading the Syrian poet I must insist on calling Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, because I figured that, since poetry is all about choosing words, a poet with such a disastrous nom de plume can't be much good. But I wondered if I hadn't dismissed him a little hastily when I came across a New York Times article that described him as an 'outspoken secularist' who 'has tried to liberate Arabic poetry from its traditional forms and subject matter' and is 'as likely to quote Jim Morrison as the Sufi mystics', so I looked up some of his work and found his usual choice of words far superior to his choice of pseudonym. Even so, I think reading poetry in translation is like listening to a string quartet over a bad radio signal with your ears stuffed with play-doh - worth the trouble if it's your only access to a great work, but still something of a defilement - so I'm not qualified to judge whether Adonis would make a worthy laureate. I'm glad to have overcome my prejudice against him though, just as I was glad to find the stirring open letter he wrote to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad recently. When I'm able, one day, to read his work in the original Arabic, I'll let you know exactly how good he is.

Personally, I'm boring and predictable enough to think that every year Philip Roth fails to win the Nobel prize devalues it a little further, just as it was devalued when Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino died Nobel-less. There are some who, reading this, would roll their eyes so hard they'd probably fall out, but sod it: I think Roth's achievement is so remarkable, his reputation so assured, his excellence so incomparable, that his name can only add lustre to the Nobel prize, rather than than the other way round. Though an American rather than Israeli Jew, Roth wrote one of the very best novels about Israel and the Zionist mind (incidentally in 1993, the year an American last won the Nobel): the towering Operation Shylock. However Roth has probably become too universally honoured for his own good: I very much doubt whether the famously mischievous panel is set to make everyone's favourite author, and an American to boot, its choice this time around.

The committee's decisions seem politically motivated to many, and with reason. It's not that the typical winner is an uncompromising polemicist, but he is vaguely liberal, anti-totalitarian, 'pro-freedom', and so on (as well as a he). Israel is blessed with several great writers, and one in particular is eminently Nobelisable: I mean, of course, Amos Oz. He's an acknowledged master with a rich and varied body of work; some of his books (like My Michael and A Tale of Love and Darkness) show truly soaring ambition; he is of a certain age (seventy-two); he's been a pretty consistent critic of his country from a liberal perspective for many years; and, as regards subject and tone, his books are quite Nobelesque (that is, suitably profound, solemn, and concerned with issues that touch on the existential). Another writer who meets almost all these criteria is David Grossman, who may have written the great Israeli novel recently in To the End of the Land; but at fifty-seven he seems a bit young.

I rather doubt whether Oz will be awarded the prize, especially in the year of the Arab spring, because there are plenty of blockheads out there who'd interpret it as an endorsement of recent Israeli governments. (If Oz and Benjamin Netanyahu are basically similar, so are Noam Chomsky and George W. Bush; but try explaining that to your more rabid anti-Israel partisans.) In any case, I would be thrilled to see Oz win the Nobel at some point, and for a special reason. Israel is one of the few countries left in the western world where writers and public intellectuals are taken seriously by the public at large (in the UK serious authors command about as much respect as estate agents). By choosing him the Nobel committee would give Oz's pronouncements far greater resonance amongst Israelis; the prize might even confer the kind of gravitas necessary to speak the uncomfortable truths his co-citizens must swallow before peace becomes realistic. To spell it out further: his influence could increase incalculably if the words 'the Nobel prize-winning author said' attended every Oz quote; quotes such as: 'Whenever war is called peace, where oppression and persecution are referred to as security, and assassination is called liberation, the defilement of language precedes and prepares for the defilement of life and dignity.' There are few countries on earth where the prize could help promulgate such wisdom so effectively, and few where that wisdom is so desperately needed.

So much for the politics: I feel I must have blasphemed the Muses - or at least my old Eng. Lit. university tutors - by such a bald conflation of literature and worldly concerns. Anyone who needs a literary argument for Oz's Nobel-worthiness need only read the titles I've just named. Though a traditionalist, he is far from retrograde. In books like Black Box - a sly, sinuous, almost Nabokovian drama of sexual jealousy and sportive perversity - and the risky metafiction Rhyming Life and Death, he demonstrates access to all the au courant tools of formal experimentation. But in his masterpiece A Tale of Love and Darkness he is the authentic inheritor of the great 19th century realist tradition of Tolstoy, Flaubert and Eliot. If realism seemed dated at times in the western 20th century, it was perhaps because this was supremely the age of the individual, and realism at its best is a kind of portraiture of dynamic communities (think of the flux of Middlemarch on the eve of the Great Reform Act). That's why Oz's realism, his passionate specificity, was the perfect medium for limning the Yishuv in Palestine as it transformed itself into a state. Nationalism is inherently communal, and so the literature of nationalism is by nature realistic. It was a piece of historical luck for Israel to have Amos Oz alive in his time and place (a young man in Jerusalem in the years before and after the state was founded). Every nation-state should have such a maestro to provide exquisite notation of its conception and birth.

And finally (as newsreaders say to introduce a whimsical item at the end of the programme), reports of a last-minute rush of money on Bob Dylan, taking him from 100-1 to 10-1, has me intrigued. Though I think there are probably worthier winners in purely literary terms, I do place Dylan 'among the poets', and he'd make a fascinating choice which, due to personal affection if nothing else, I'd celebrate avidly. Oh, and if you're looking for a Middle East link here, brace yourself for a listen to 'Neighbourhood Bully', Dylan's hamfisted Zionist polemic from 1984 - about which the kindest thing you can say is that it isn't among the deathless works that have made him a Nobel contender.

So, five writers: Djebar, Adonis, Roth, Oz, Dylan. My tip? Bet your house on it being none of the above.

'Illegal settlements' to be destroyed - just the wrong ones

2011-09-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

At last, the order has been given: the illegal settlements must come down. In just a few months' time, Israel's mighty army will be deployed against its own citizens: olive-clad soldiers in full combat gear dragging weeping mothers and children away from their homes, before reducing them to rubble. At long last, the land will revert to its rightful owners.

Except the illegal settlements in question aren't the Jewish neighbourhoods scarring the occupied West Bank, condemned by the world for making a Palestinian state all but unachievable. What's more, the land's self-proclaimed owners have no apparent use for it, nor have they ever even lived on it.

The West Bank settlements have seemingly become as permanent as the biblical hills on which they stand. Meanwhile the towns slated for destruction are the dust-caked encampments of the Negev desert in the south of Israel, home to some 90,000 Bedouin Arabs. Their forced removal amounts to an act of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing. As the crime is planned and executed, the international community is looking the other way.

Traditionally a nomadic tribespeople, the Bedouin eke out a living from livestock and whatever food they can coax out of the desert sands. They have survived uninterrupted in this hostile climate for at least 4000 years, but a government report, approved by the cabinet last week, looks set to bring an end to this ancient way of life forever.

Seemingly impervious to Israel's westernised, high-tech economy, the Bedouin have been viewed by successive administrations as a nuisance, an embarrassment or a security threat – suffering neglect or harassment according to the prevailing whim. Just a short drive from the city of Beersheba, with its shopping malls and high-rise apartments, they have settled, in modern times, in forty-five makeshift villages of cinder block, wood and corrugated tin.

A minority within Israel's Arab minority, the Bedouin are the most marginalised and under-represented group in Israeli society. Unconscious of modern state bureaucracies, few ever claimed formal ownership of their ancestral lands under the Ottomans or British. This provided the young state of Israel, eyeing the Negev for Jewish development, with a pretext to confiscate the land and corral the natives into the desert's least fertile corner. Ever since, the authorities have been engaged in a battle with the Bedouin to evict them from even that small fraction.

The unrecognised, 'illegal' status of the forty-five towns means they inhabit an administrative twilight zone in which, as far as the state is concerned, they do not technically exist. As a result they live under constant threat of demolition, receive no electricity, water, sewage or other services, and have no real local government. Search for the settlements on official maps and you will find only desert, even though many of them pre-date the state of Israel itself.

Since the 1970s the government has attempted to solve the Bedouin 'problem' by inducing them to give up their claim to the land in return for housing in a number of purpose-built towns. But though around half accepted the offer, many chose to return to the desert, finding their new homes no more than cramped, unsanitary ghettos with few jobs or services.

Those who remained have shown remarkable resilience in the face of the state's attempt to remove all trace of them. In a well-publicised case, the village of Al-Araqeeb has, by some counts, been demolished nearly thirty times over the last decade, only for occupants to rebuild it each time. Residents joined forces to create the Councilof Unrecognised Villages, aimed at protecting their homes and pushing for legal recognition. But two government commissions in recent years have illustrated the intractable contradiction in Israel's self-definition as both Jewish and democratic. Advocacy groups welcomed the 2008 Goldberg Report for its acknowledgement of Bedouin suffering and proposing the recognition of most of the villages: the democratic state in action. Then the so-called 'ethnocratic' side of the state reared its head: the Netanyahu government appointed the Prawer committee to implement Goldberg's recommendations, but when it submitted its report to the cabinet this month, advocates of the Bedouin were aghast. Goldberg's recommendations were almost entirely overturned, and Prawer recommended a programme of demolitions that would make some 30,000-40,000 Bedouin homeless. It hardly takes a conspiracy theorist to imagine that the rest will follow sooner or later.

At a time when hundreds of thousands of Israelis are protesting the unaffordable cost of housing, the logic of spending an estimated 6.8 billion shekels (£1.1 billion) to make a large number of people homeless seems more than a little perverse. The government claims that delivering services to such sparsely populated and remote settlements is environmentally wasteful; but while the bulldozers are destroying Al-Araqeeb, houses are springing up in the nearby settlement of Haruv – with full access to municipal government and amenities. No prizes for guessing the crucial difference between them: Haruv is Jewish; Al-Araqeeb is Arab.

It is hardly surprising, in view of Israel's inhumane disregard for the rights of the Bedouin, that some observers have concluded that their policies are motivated by nothing but malice. In reality ministers fear that a region dominated by Arabs may one day demand self-rule, forming a state-within-a-state and destroying Israel's unitary Jewish nature. Its solution has barely changed since the days of the pre-state 'Yishuv' (the Jewish community in Palestine): to acquire, by fair means or foul, as much Arab land as possible. It is a strategy that has proved enormously successful: Arab land ownership has fallen from 98% in 1947 to just 2.5% today. Former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami said in 2001: 'we have created a state, yet we still continue to behave as if we are a Yishuv.' It's about time Israel decided whether it wants to be a Yishuv or a state.

Israel, Palestine, history and me

2011-09-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Israel-Palestine conflict is never boring. And while it may be the most famous modern war - or series of wars - for me it's always been personal. When I first flew to Israel as a teenager, my reasons for visiting were not, I confess, particularly high-minded. In the spring of 1998, I took a fancy to an irresistible Arab girl from Haifa who had olive skin and big, expressive brown eyes. Back then I'd have sworn that one flutter of those eyes could persuade Yasser Arafat to lend Ariel Sharon the Dome of the Rock for his grandson's bar mitzvah.

I went to stay with her family that summer. It was my first visit to Israel, and I couldn't help noticing that every car, building and street corner was flying a blue-and-white Israeli flag. I also noticed that some people weren't in the party spirit: the ones marching all in black, as though on their way to a funeral. It turned out Israel was celebrating its 50th birthday, and the Palestinians were mourning the 50th anniversary of their nakbah or 'catastophe'. Inconveniently for two people sharing a country, the creation of the state of Israel and the nakbah were, in fact, pretty much the same thing. The Jews remember 1948 as the year something finally went right; the Palestinians remember it as the year everything started to go wrong.

But I had more important things on my mind than world history. I was busy learning - and trying to subvert - the elaborate maze of restriction and taboo Arab society places around young women. Every time I suggested something that, to me, seemed totally normal - like going to the cinema, walking along the beach, sneaking into a bar - the girl with the brown eyes gave the same reply. 'We can't.' Why not? 'You just can't do that around here.' But I'd seen young women doing all these things around town. 'That's different. They're Jews.' It seemed two cultures lived side by side in Israel: one in which women could do almost anything they liked, and another in which women could do very little, particularly where men outside the family were concerned.

Later I reflected that, had the Palestinians defended their homeland as stubbornly as they defend the honour of their young women, they would never had been occupied in 1967, nor would Israel have been established in 1948. I also realised I had misunderstood the Arab cult of virginity. The important thing wasn't, as I had thought, for women to avoid having sex. It was for women to avoid any suspicion of having had sex, while everyone around them subjected their every move to intense scrutiny. In fact, having sex was fine, so long as nobody suspected a thing - especially the girl's future husband, on her wedding night. As a teenager, I found this whole business hugely frustrating. Now I see the deceit, hypocrisy and misery it causes, and simply find it sad.

By my next visit, aged 18, my political views had been shaped by two years at a posh boarding school. Since almost everyone there was rich, right-wing and obnoxious, I decided to be left-wing. Left-wing people, I found, had a lot to say about the country where I had so many friends and memories. I knew about as much about Israel-Palestine as the next soi-disant radical - that is, absolutely fuck-all - but I was sure I knew all the relevant facts. Israel were the bad guys, the Palestinians had the superior virtue of the oppressed, and the suicide bombings I saw on TV every day were the inevitable actions of a blameless people who had been pushed too far, the oppressed striking back at the oppressor.

But then doubt set in. Every time I took a bus, it occurred to me that a suicide bomber would make no distinction between me and all the other passengers. This seemed unfair: I supported the Palestinians, unlike these other people, oppressively going shopping or visiting friends. It also seemed wrong to murder any of my friends, who were mostly Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, which meant they were also oppressed. (Not that many of them noticed it much, worrying instead about where to go to university, whether they'd pass their driving test, or whom to marry.) In all fairness, the nice liberal Jews I met who criticised their government and shared many of my opinions would have to be spared too. Plus anyone under thirty, since how could you be blamed for what happened in 1967, before you were born? And what about ex-soldiers who were sorry about taking over Palestinian land? And Holocaust survivors - surely they'd been through enough, without becoming the warm-up act for a harem full of heavenly virgins. It wasn't that I had a problem with the random slaughter of innocent people - all for a good cause, etc - provided it was carried out in a thoroughly civilised manner.

My movement from outright, uncritical support for whatever the Palestinians did to a more moderate position came gradually, like the loss of religious faith. I began to ask questions, see the other side of the story, make distinctions. I got to know some Palestinians in the occupied territories, and began to count several Israeli Jews among my friends. I discovered that Palestinians were far from unanimous in their support for terrorism, and that the same went for Israelis and the occupation. I decided murdering civilians wasn't cool after all. It occurred to me that I had the same hopes for both my Palestinian and Israeli friends: peace, prosperity, liberty, that sort of thing. Oh, and the freedom to get through the day without being blown to pieces. (Whether you were killed by a fighter jet or a suicide bomber seemed less important than the fact that you'd be dead either way.)

My most important discovery came when I got hold of some books about the Israel-Palestine conflict. I discovered I wasn't the first person to struggle with some of the questions I had. Some very smart people had spent a lot of time thinking, arguing and writing about them. One of them, Amos Oz, said a tragedy isn't a conflict between right and wrong, it's a conflict between right and right. I knew what he meant because, having good friends on both sides of the divide, I could sympathise with both Palestinian and Israeli moderates. Indeed, I began to see a lot of common ground between them.

According to some definitions of the word, I may even be a Zionist. I certainly see no contradiction in being both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, because this is not a war that either side can win outright. It is manifestly in both their interests to live alongside a secure, prosperous and friendly neighbour. Even so, I don't believe in the kind of bogus neutrality that evades moral judgement by splitting the difference between Israelis and Arabs. And I don't believe each side has its own 'narrative' that's inaccessible to the other. There is such a thing as history, a true sequence of real-life events, though reconstructing them may sometimes feel like the work of those East Germans who painstakingly reassemble entire files of paper-shredded Stasi documents. Any honest appraisal of the conflict will involve judgements that look a lot like taking sides.

In the summer of 2006 I'd just bought a ticket to Israel when a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon broke out. Unwilling to lose my money, I arrived in Haifa - the only city within range of Hezbollah's katyusha rockets - just as everyone else was leaving. Every half hour or so a siren would signal an incoming rocket, giving me 30 seconds to find a bomb shelter - or run. My fear subsided when it became clear that most of the rockets were splashing harmlessly into the sea, and on hearing the siren I'd wander out to the balcony (with a panoramic view of Haifa) and watch a katyusha shriek its way over the city sky. I even began feeling sorry for these poor blighters in some Lebanese cave, trying their best to kill me but only succeeding in frightening some fish.

At some superstitious level I must have thought I'd be protected from harm by my slight sympathy for Hezbollah. You wouldn't know it from reading The Times in London or New York, but if you accept the principle that Lebanese people had a right to fight back against Israel's long occupation of the south of their country, the group looked a lot more like guerilla warriors than terrorists. So when the rocket landed with an unbelievably loud clap, it was a direct hit - to my sympathy and self-assurance, as well as my pose of unshakeable cool. A derelict building down the street had collapsed, but fortunately there were no casualties this time - though 44 Israeli civilians died in the conflict, as well as over 1000 Lebanese.

My recent visits have been less eventful and the 'situation' itself has been calmer, though there are signs this may soon change. Now my parents live there Israel is a second home to me, and I find myself returning more and more often. But nobody's ever lost money betting on another outbreak of Israeli-Arab violence, and with peace no closer than it was in 1948, watching the conflict in real time is both tragic and fascinating. In this land, history never stops. Like all peace-minded Israelis and Palestinians, I'm looking forward to the day when things get boring.

About the Muddle East blog

2011-09-19T19:15:00.000-07:00

Me
This is a blog about the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Middle East more generally. My name's Matt, I'm 27, I live in London and spend a lot of time in Israel, where my parents live.

I'm not a scholar or a professional journalist. I just read a lot of books and like talking to people about the Middle East.

Writing
This blog comprises my writing from around the web, at sites like Liberal Conspiracy, Harry's Place and Review31, plus some that seemed too self-indulgent to put anywhere else. Here are some posts that give you a pretty good idea about where I'm coming from:

'Israel, Palestine, history and me' is about why I got interested in the Middle East in the first place.

'We need to have a serious talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict' is about the way people tend to debate the Middle East, especially in the UK, and where I stand in this context.

'My top five Israel-Palestine books' is about my top-five Israel-Palestine books.

Email
You can contact me at matthewrowlandhill at gmail dot com. You're also welcome to write whatever you like under these articles. I probably won't delete what you say, even if it's abusive, and I'll probably respond.

Where I'm coming from
Fundamentally I'm a humanist, which is a belief that we're all basically equal and worthwhile; that, whatever our differences, there's more to unite than divide us; and that the following principles are relevant to everyone.

I'm a democrat, which means I think states should be run for and by their people.

I'm a liberal, which means a lot of things, most importantly that I value tolerance, pluralism and a whole range of rights which add up to the idea that individual freedom should only be limited by the freedom and wellbeing of others (this is very different from libertarianism, and it has nothing to do with the common American usage either).

I'm a social democrat, which means I think the best way of maximising economic wellbeing is to harness capitalism's wealth-generating power for the benefit of everyone, especially the less well-off.

I'm a secularist, which means I think religion should mind its own business.

I'm a rationalist, which means I believe in old-fashioned stuff like science, truth and evidence (but I'm also a skeptic, which means I think truth is elusive and contingent, and I distrust utopias).

I'm a feminist, which means I think men and women should be treated equally, and that currently they're not.

Oh, and I'm an environmentalist, which means there are days when I think all this crap's going to be irrelevant pretty soon when we wake up and realise we left civilisation in the oven and forgot about it.

FAQs
Q. Is this blog really big enough to have an FAQ section?
A. Not really, I don't know what I was thinking. Sorry.