Palestinians
Edward Mortimer
The Palestinians Jonathan DIMblebY Photographs by Donald McCullin (Quartet
£
Let me get some criticisms of detail out of the way first. It is not true, as Dimbleby states, that the survivors of the Holocaust 'were never asked' whether they wished to go to Palestine or elsewhere. They were asked, notably by the Anglo-American committee in 1946, and replied almost unanimously that Palestine was the only place they wanted to go. It is not true that the British in 1947-8 'had little doubt about the outcome of a war which they knew was inevitable' — or at least not if that is taken to imply, as Dimbleby does, that the cabinet shared the view he quotes as that of General J.C.D'Arcy, that 'the Haganah would take over all Palestine tomorrow' and 'hold it against the entire Arab world'. On the contrary, one of the Cabinet's main reasons for refusing to support the partition pldn. was that it believed large numbers of Britistit troops would be needed to enforce it agains Arab hostility. And it is not true that `no government in the West made any comment about what Israel did in South Lebanon' in 1978, as one of Dimbleby's Palestinians is allowed to say without contradiction. Virtually all Western Governments condemned the invasion, and an American diplomatic offensive secured the withdrawal of Israeli forces from most of the area occupied.
This last criticism illustrates a general, if mild defect in the book which is common to a great deal of writing in western languages on either side of the Arab-Israel conflict: it tends to exaggerate the extent to which its author is a lone voice in the wilderness.
Dimbleby is by no means the first 'pro-Arab writer to imply that before him the Arab case has gone by default, while pro-Israeli writers often seem equally convinced that Israel is misunderstood and maligned by everyone but themselves.
The truth, as far as I have been able to discover it, is a good deal more complex. The Arabs certainly got a bad press in Britain during the revolt of 1936-9, but so did the Jews, in the Palestinian context, during their anti-British campaign of 1944-7 and to a lesser extent during 1948-9 at the time of the murder of Bernadotte, the successive violations of ceasefires and the refusal to allow refugees to return home. It was only after the rise of Nasser that the Arabs were consistently presented as villains who unreasonably aspired to destroy a peaceloving neighbour. That lasted until after Nas,ser's defeat in 1967 and Israel's emergence as an occupying, if not expansionist, power. Since then there has been a gradual swing back towards the Arabs, with a jump in 1973 when they showed themselves both a military and an economic power of some significance. Especially since 1973 there has been a growing tendency to take the Palestinians seriously as a people with a just claim to national recognition — a reappraisal in which Jonathan Dimbleby himself has played an honourable part.
It could be said, therefore, that this book is only re-stating a case by now already well known. But it does so more comprehensively than one can in a mere television programme or newspaper article, yet more simply and accessibly than earlier books on the subject have done. Not only.
the author's name but his vivid, direct prose style and his generally successful technique of presenting an event or an institution through interviews with eyewitnesses or participants— all these should help to ensure the book an audience beyond those already involved with the Middle East. So too of course should the photographs of Donald McCullin, by now the acknowledged doyen of news photographers — though some of these photographs are less closely related to the text than others.
The main thrust of the book is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It proposes no solution to the problem, beyond warning that no solution that ignores the Palestinians will work. It shows very well how the Palestinian Diaspora has formed itself into -1 national entity around the fighting core of the PLO in Lebanon. It unfortunately says very little about the Palestinians who are still in Palestine, whether as citizens in Israel itself or as subjects in the occupied territories. Nor does it really address the complex and elusive relationship between the Palestinians and the state of Jordan. Above all, it is on sale at a price which risks defeating its object of reaching a wider public. A much cheaper paperback edition is clearly needed.
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