Exodus into genesis
Harold Beeley
0 Jerusalem Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4) Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War Dan Kurzman (Vallentine Mitchell £3.95)
It is a misfortune, more so certainly for Mr Kurzman, that two books so closely similar in subject and method should appear almost simultaneously. Both tell the story of the armed conflict in which the State of Israel came to birth; they tell it day by day, incident by incident, with a sustained and commendable effort to hold the reader's interest equally for Arab and Jew, and after taking evidence from a great number of participants. Mr Kurzman claims a thousand interviews, Mr Collins and M Lapierre appropriately twice as many.
The trouble with the Tolstoyan approach to history is that the more it concerns itself with what actually happened the less convincing it becomes. That Tolstoy held nonsensical views about Napoleon scarcely matters, since the figures he thrust into the foreground were creations of his own imaginative genius and no less interesting than the upstaged emperor. But the authors of these two books, limited to the portrayal of men and women who actually took part in the events they describe, cannot make us forget the historical disprdportion of their treatment. It is no doubt true that conventional history pays too little attention to the ordinary man, the common soldier. But if the remedy for this is sought by studying him as an individual in greater depth and with deeper sympathy than his leaders, the result for all its immediacy and poignancy is confusing and ultimately tedious.
Mr Kurzman seems to have been worried by this problem, and has consequently fallen rather heavily between the stools of fact and fancy. He has also fallen into the trap which the cinema sets the modern writer. Any film director interested in Genesis 1948 will find that he is thoughtfully provided both with a generous selection of flashbacks and with an average of one pretty Israeli girl per episode. The authors of 0 Jerusalem have been more successful in resisting the temptations of their method, and have shed new and valuable light on certain figures of the second rank, notably on David Shaltiel, the Haganah commander in Jerusalem. Their subject is a less satisfactory one for the isolation of their struggle for Jerusalem from the war as a whole is highly artificial. But in general they have made a serious contribution to the sources for. the definitive history still to be written, and it is on this achievement that they deserve to be judged.
Not surprisingly, the truth is a moral leveller. As such it works in the main to the advantage of the Arabs, since the Israelis have hitherto been more successful in imposing their sense of righteousness on the minds of non-specialist observers. Much has been made, for instance, of Arab defiance of the United Nations. But here is Yitzhak Sadeh, founder of the Palmach, saying while waiting for the result of the vote on partition: " If the vote is positive, the Arabs will make war on us. . . . And if the vote is negative, then it is we who shall make war on the Arabs."
Another issue on which the Israeli version suffers is the exodus of the Arab refugees. "The cause of the Arabs' flight has been much disputed in the years since 1948. For some time the Israeli government maintained that they were ordered to leave by Arab radio broadcasts to make way for the Arab armies. A careful study of the BBC's recorded archives of all broadcasts of the time by two independent sets of researchers indicates no trace of any such broadcasts." Mr Kurzman reports the same conclusion. On the other hand Mr Collins and M. Lapierre quote Hazem Nusseibi, who had a voice in deciding how to broadcast to the Arabs the news of the massacre at Deir Yassin, as saying later that it had been "a fatal error" not to play down the tragedy.
Concentrating as they do on the ArabJewish conflict, the authors have less time for the British predicament. An army Which at a time of mounting strife was instructed to renounce the task of maintaining order and to give priority to its own extrication from the scene was neces
sarily — and perhaps sometimes unnecessarily — cast in an unsympathetic role. That its tactical decisions in Palestine are given an appearance of incoherence is not surprising. More open to criticism is the treatment in both books of the British government's political aims and decisions. The illusion persists, as it persisted in the lobbies of Lake Success and Flushing Meadow during the winter of 1947-48, that the British reference of Palestine to the United Nations was a manoeuvre designed to demonstrate that, since nobody else could solve the problem, it should be returned to Britain with the blessing of the General Assembly and carte blanche to settle it with full regard for British interests. Only the unexpected marshalling of the necessary two-thirds majority for partition, it is suggested, frustrated this design. But in fact Attlee and Bevin were determined on withdrawal whatever might happen thereafter, In 1947 the Government was bent on disengagement wherever it was possible — from the Indian subcontinent, from Greece and Turkey. Some idea of the frustration and hopelessness which caused them to add Palestine to the list can be formed by looking at Northern Ireland today. And Palestine was not part of the United Kingdom.
A minor perplexity in 0 Jerusalem is th€ relationship of its text to the earliei French edition. I was diverted to this while puzzling over the phrase "the fading dawn ", which the French reassuringly renders as the " brumes de l'aube ". And again by a passage on the history of Damascus "from the conquests of the Ommayad caliphs to the conversion of Saul of Tarsus . . . and to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918." The French has a somewhat different list and a less eccentric chronology: " depuis les conquetes par les hordes assyriens et la conversion de Paul de Tarse jusqu' a l'ecroulement de l'Empire ottoman." It is fair to add that neither text is described as a translation of the other.
Sir Harold Beeley was Secretary to the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry on Palestine in 1946, and Ambassador to the UAR 1961-1964.
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