Books
By the waters of the Jordan
Alistair Horne
Exile and Return Martin Gilbert (Weidenfeld £7.95) The Zionist Revolution Harold Fisch (Weidenfeld £8.50) Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate Michael J. Cohen (Elek £8.95) West Bank/East Bank: The Palestinians In Jordan 1949-1967 Shaul Mishal (Yale £6.85) Palestine: A Modern History A.W. Kayyali (Croom Helm £9.95) It seems to have become almost a convention to declare an interest when writing about the Middle East. To me the two most inspiriting and positive, as opposed to destructive, acts since the second World war have been the creation of the European Community and the State of Israel (even though, as a young soldier, I expended much energy on trying to prevent the latter from happening). Both ideals, in the trendily jaded world we live in, have currently and simultaneously reached a nadir of popularity. Of the two, the survival of Israel is unquestionably the more important; but, with a weak President and an inward-turned electorate in the United States, and a leader who thinks he is far stronger than he really is in Israel, it may now be more at peril than ever before.
If one seeks a lapidary justification of the existence of Israel, it would be hard to improve on that Grand Old Woman, Golda Meir, in a remark made back in 1938 and quoted by Mr Gilbert: 'There is one thing I want to see before I die — that my people should not need expressions of sympathy any more.' The case for Israel rests, I suppose, on four main pillars. First, it was, from biblical days, the home of the Jews; secondly, two thousand years of persecution across the globe denied them homes anywhere else; thirdly, they have husbanded the country better than the Arabs did; and fourthly, conquest (which the modern world has proved to be the most ephemeral of the four, though Mr Begin has yet to be persuaded of this). The third pillar was much favoured by that outstanding Zionophile, Winston Churchill, who once declared that the real injustice 'is when those who live in the country leave it to be desert'. Anyone who has visited Israel before and after knows what miracles have been wrought there; nevertheless, on the basis of British Leyland versus Mercedes, this is an argument which, if extended, might suggest that the world would be a better run show if Churchill had left England to the Germans. As regards the main pillar, the Jewish National Home, this right would now be disputed by few outside the most rabid Rejectionists, who still howl for the total extinction of Israel.
But how much territory, and for how many Jews? These two questions that threaten to tear the world in two now are the same that bedevilled the whole thirty, wretchedly thankless years of the British Mandate, when the Zionists spoke of the Aliyah, the Arabs of a Jihad, and the British of 'Illegal Immigration', when there were half a million Jewish Palestinians as opposed to 31 million Israelis. They form the common ground for all five books under review, among the plethora published in this thirtieth anniversary of Israel.
Mr Gilbert devotes the first part gf his book to an abbreviated account of the Diaspora and the three millennia of persecution. Though the broad facts are alltoo-well-known, they constitute such an indictment, of such inexplicable shame, it is well we should be constantly remirided of them. For everything that went wrong in society, the Jews provided the traditional scapegoat; in the Middle Ages they were blamed for spreading the Black Death. At first Poland protected the Jews, then turned on them; after a period of Arab benevolence in Spain, the Christian kings expelled them. Luther fulminated 'let us drive them out of the country for all time', and the Germans discovered antiSemitism. As Mr Gilbert grimly remarks, for the dispersed Jews `no golden age in one part of the world seemed possible without a black age elsewhere'. The 'Holocaust' perpetrated by the Nazis, though the most terrible and the most recent, was historically just one item on the list of shame. What country in the world could plead 'not guilty'? Possibly Great Britain, where in the early days Zionism found such warm support, might claim a better record than most; but this was largely balanced out by the callousness of her official policy over Palestine during the Hitler years. Doubtless there were also eras when the Diaspora was also relatively better treated in the Arab world; but not to the point of justifying its standard claim that the Jews were 'dumped' in Palestine in order to salve the European conscience. The insecurity from which the Jews suffered in the Arab world was illustrated by the Damascus massacres of 1840, and in more recent times when virtually the entire Jewish community was pushed out of Algeria in 1962 although many had supported the FLN's struggle against France.
No, the fact is that the historic persecution of Jewry is a world responsibility, as much as is the closely linked survival of the State of Israel. One is left, as always, with the painful, and unanswerable question: why were the Jews persecuted? Why? It is not in Mr Gilbert's brief to try to answer. any more than the film Holocaust, which tells what happened under the Nazis, with" out exploring the wherefores. But this section of Mr Gilbert's book serves a purpose if it helps expose the root motivations for intransigence and lingering mistrust that lie behind the unacceptable face of Mr Begin. If there is one country with the highest consistency in its treatment of the Jews, it must be Russia. When Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, they were singled out as scapegoats, and it was from the ensuing pogroms that Zionism was born. Nicholas Ills quoted (by Harold Fisch) as declaring, 'As long as I am Czar the Jews of Russia shall not receive equal rights.' He was hetter than his word; the treatment of Shcharansky el al shows that, as far as anti-Semitism goes, little has changed in, Mother Russia since the fall of the las' Romanov. In support of his view that the Jews are unassimilable, Mr Fisch makes a point by stressing the continuing 'abnormality of the Jewish condition' even within the Soviet Union 'where, according t° Marxist theory, anti-Semitism ought long ago to have been overcome'. Mr Gilbert's second part deals with the Mandate, and the hideous dilemmas with which it confronted the British Cl°vernment, based principally on documents many of which have been published for the first time. Occasionally he is too partisan; for instance, the blowing up of the King David (which killed ninety-one peoPle' many of them young British secretaries) hY the merry men of Begin's Irgun is rated as a measure of Jewish .`despair', while Parallel Arab deeds are simply 'terrorism'. In some respects, Mr Cohen in his overlapping treatment of the period 19361945 is more objective. Milder in his indictment of the British, he is able to exculpate the framers of policy for not having foresee°. the full horror of the coming Nail Holocaust and its impact on Jewish ingrog; ration into Palestine. On the other hand, Mr Gilbert, — who asks if we had had a State in 1939, how many Jews might we have saved from the Holocaust?' — sPealcs savagely of the ensuing six years when they were 'caught between the evil designs 01 those who sought to destroy them, and th indifference of those who had no speeia" desire to help them'. Yet, it has to be said, on the basis of the documents now revealed, there at! moments when the showing of Britis': officialdom, particularly over Immigration' do read horribly like a corn: panion volume to the recent Bethel; Tolstoy disclosures about the repatriate° Russians. Partly from the T. E. Lawrence. tradition, which died hard, and partly on' of awareness of British weakness in the Eastern Mediterranean, which led it ttlt seek the illusory benefits of Arab suPP01. during the second World war, the FO was assiduously pro-Arab throughout the Mandate. During the war, its rigid adherence to the White Paper (`Black' to the Zionists) prevented all but a trickle of Jews escaping from Nazi Europe to Pales", tine. After 1945, one finds the FO requesting the Polish Government not w issue exit villas to Jews anxious to leave the nightmare memories of all those murdered families behind them. (How, one wonders, in the face of such iniquitous hypocrisy. can we castigate the Russians for breach of Human Rights in refusing to let out their Jews today?) The tone of some of the documents is also revealing: 'They have waited two thousand years for their "home" • • they can afford to wait until we are better able to help them get their last pound of flesh.'
One of the biggest enigmas of British Polley under the Mandate centres around Winston Churchill. No voice was more eloquent and consistent in support of the Zionist cause than his; yet, when he came to power that voice became strangely muted in the hours when it was most needed. Why? Mr Gilbert who, as the official biographer, should be in a better position than anyone to explain, doesn't. In Mr Cohen's view, Churchill 'never in fact compromised generally accepted British interests for the sake of Zionism'; certainly When Lord Moyne and, later, British soldiers, were killed by the Stern and Irgun, he reacted fiercely. Later on Mr Cohen is more charitable to Churchill: 'why such a Powerful Prime Minister failed to dislodge the White Paper does not lie in Churchill's infidelity to Zionism, but rather in the complex of bureaucratical and military circumstances in which he had to conduct the war, Though Mr Cohen criticises the Zionist leadership for having muffed the golden oPportunity of partition as offered by the Peel Commission of 1937, out of both books it is Chaim Weizmann who stands nut as the grand, visionary and rather tragic figure; the founder-Zionist at odds With the unswerving anglophile, who was swept aside eventually by the 'Messianic' Ben-Gurion.
Of the five books under review, Mr Fisch's is perhaps the most thoughtProvoking in its originality, and the most disturbing. Depressingly, he holds that the creation of Israel has not lessened antiSemitism; if anything it has made the Jew More, not less, of a 'special case'. Either through excessive admiration or excessive hate, the world remains incapable of 'a neutral reaction to the Jew'. Therefore he should cease trying to be like other people; cease pursuing the chimaera of assimilation and the fallacy of a Western liberal tradition. 'Jews who accept their isolation', says Mr Fisch, 'are better off than those who don't.' In a sick world, the only salvation for Israel and its children lies in spiritual redemption. But, to Mr Fisch — a supporter of the Gush Emunim activists who, in 1975, demonstrated against the Kissinger-engineered Withdrawal from the Mitla Pass — the needs of the spirit also appear to have their territorial imperatives. In his eyes, the conquests of the Six Day War assume a sacred context; as part of Israel's 'manifest destiny' they sound unnegotiable. For Mr Fisch, a professor of English in Israel, 'the Israeli 'moderates' who counsel maximal concessions, including recognition of the Palestinians as a negotiating partner in some imaginary peace settlement, are out of touch with today's reality.' Mr Fisch's own realism also derives, in part, from gloom about how much longer Israel can .expect to depend on the all-succouring 'goodwill' of the American Government. If one seeks an explanation to the obduracy of Mr Begin, then one can hardly do better than read Fisch.after Part I of Gilbert.
Mr Mishal (of Tel Aviv University) and Mr Kayyali (editor of an Arabic intellectual monthly) both deal largely — and neither very effectively or with great novelty — with the Arab side of things. Drawing on 'previously unexploited Jordanian archives' captured in 1967, Mr Mishal seems out to prove that the Palestinians may be better off as they are now than they were under King Hussein's Jordan. Numbering twice as many as the assimilating Jordanians, the more urban and evolues West-Bankers were Constantly under-privileged between 1948 and 1956, and lacked any overall leadership of their own. There were the endless intramural intrigues involving Egypt and Syria, and the early rifts within the infant PLO itself— which acquire a special relevance at the time of writing. 'I embraced and kissed King Hussein,' wrote the first PLO chairman, 'and each of us spoke with two tongues about the Palestinian entity.'
At the Palestine Arab Conference of 1919, the 'young bloods' resolved that 'we consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria'. In citing this, Mr Kayyali does seem to support the contentions of both Mr Fisch and Mr Mishal that, until most recent times, an Arab Palestine could claim no political identity of its own. (But nor for that matter could Israel, before 1948.) When Mr Kayyali (for whom the Wailing Wall is 'a Holy Muslim property') points out that sustained Arab opposition to Zionist settlements dates back more than a generation in advance of Balfour, he suc ceeds in stressing just how long and deeply rooted is Arab hostility towards any Jewish presence; which, if nothing else, might offer a reason for the Israelis to continue to be mistrustful of any overtures by their neighbours for some time still to come.
None of this, however, adds up to an argument for eternal Israeli annexation of the whole West Bank, and it is difficult to believe — as does Mr Fisch — that any part of Israel's spiritual redemption lies therein. To rephrase the biblical lament, with the protracted menace of fresh war that these fruits of conquest are bound to bring, it threatens to become more a case of 'by the waters of the Jordan, there we sat down and wept'.
Previous page
