Vol. 18 No. 21 · 31 October 1996
pages 16-18 | 4010 words
Inhumane, Intolerant, Unclean
Ian Gilmour
- A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong
HarperCollins, 474 pp, £20.00, July 1996, ISBN 0 00 255522 0
- Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak
Pluto, 118 pp, £11.99, April 1994, ISBN 0 7453 0818 X
- City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present edited by Nitza Rosovsky
Harvard, 562 pp, £25.50, April 1996, ISBN 0 674 13190 8
- Jerusalem in the 20th Century by Martin Gilbert
Chatto, 400 pp, £20.00, May 1996, ISBN 0 7011 3070 9
- Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Norman Finkelstein
Verso, 230 pp, £39.95, December 1995, ISBN 1 85984 940 7
- To Rule Jerusalem by Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht
Cambridge, 554 pp, £29.95, June 1996, ISBN 0 521 44046 7
What exactly is a ‘holy city’ or, for that matter, a ‘holy see’? If Jerusalem is the prime example of the first and Rome the only example of the second, their holiness clearly does not reside in the behaviour of either their rulers or the ruled. More evil has been done in Jerusalem than in many, if not most, places on earth, and in Rome Papal conduct and government has sometimes been anything but holy – in the mid-18th century the city’s 150,000 inhabitants averaged four hundred murders a year.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 22 · 14 November 1996
From J. P. Spencer
In common with Edward Said, Ian Gilmour (LRB, 31 October) overlooks the fact that extreme fecundity (the average family on the West Bank has over eight children) is a major reason for wretched poverty in the Occupied Territories – and much of the Middle East.
J. P. Spencer
Oxford
Vol. 19 No. 1 · 2 January 1997
From Jacob Mendlovic
Many Jews, including myself, are outraged at the way you malign Zionism. Over the years you have given extensive space, in articles and letters, for Edward Said to fulminate against Israel, while those who have rebutted him have had little space. It takes some chutzpah for you to give six books about Israel for review to Ian Gilmour, who is virulently hostile to it (LRB, 31 October 1996). His analysis of War and Peace in the Middle East, by Avi Shlaim, an Israeli of the extreme left (LRB, 22 December 1994), made very plain his venom against Israel. It is even more offensive that two of the books, which are anti-Zionist, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, by Israel Shahak, and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, by Norman Finkelstein, were not offered for review to an objective scholar of the Middle East. Most would say that the former’s book is also anti-Judaism; all will find obscene the comparisons between Israelis and Nazis in the latter’s book.
Gilmour is highly selective with his facts. He claims that in the late Forties Israel instigated a massive operation to induce Jews in Arab countries to emigrate to Israel. They needed no such persuasion. There was hostility to Jews which had nothing to do with the Zionists: there were massacres in Fez in 1912 and in Constantine in 1934, and harsh persecution in Yemen. To be fair, this was far less than their brethren suffered in Christian Europe.
Gilmour points out the massacres of Palestinians by Israelis without mentioning that it was the Palestinians who initiated these bloodbaths in the earlier years: those in Jerusalem in 1920, Jaffa in 1921, Hebron in 1929 and throughout Palestine in 1936. Furthermore, when he states that ‘the Palestinians have committed a number of crimes, including terrorist atrocities,’ it is as if he were to say that Thomas Hamilton killed a number of schoolchildren in Dunblane. Never mind the endless horrific slaughter of Israeli civilians, Palestinians massacred Europeans at Rome airport in 1973 and at Rome and Vienna airports in 1985; perpetrated numerous hijackings of airplanes from many countries; bombed the World Trade Center in New York in 1993; are prime suspects in the bombing of an airplane over Lockerbie in 1988; and a Palestinian assassinated Robert Kennedy in 1968.
Gilmour, while glorifying Arab rule of Jerusalem, denounces Israel’s. However, he omits Jordan’s sovereignty over the holy city from 1948 to 1967, when it destroyed the Jewish quarter and refused access to all Jews. Not only is Jerusalem an open city under the Israelis, but they have acted with Gandhian restraint in the face of relentless violence by Arabs since 1967. Indeed, if Israelis were as barbaric and racist as Gilmour constantly tells us, they would have thrown out the Arabs from the captured territories immediately after the 1967 war (perpetrated by the Arabs who vowed to throw the Jews into the sea).
Jacob Mendlovic
Toronto
