Vol. 22 No. 23 · 30 November 2000
pages 8-10 | 3992 words
The Great Lie
Charles Glass
- The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World by Avi Shlaim
Allen Lane, 670 pp, £25.00, April 2000, ISBN 0 7139 9410 X
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 by Benny Morris
Murray, 752 pp, £25.00, January 2000, ISBN 0 7195 6222 8
- A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East by Amos Elon
Allen Lane, 354 pp, £20.00, August 2000, ISBN 0 7139 9368 5
- Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ by Efraim Karsh
Frank Cass, 236 pp, £39.50, May 2000, ISBN 0 7146 5011 0
- From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism by Amnon Rubinstein
Holmes & Meier, 283 pp, £25.00, October 2000, ISBN 0 8419 1408 7
An Israeli Jewish woman told me a story about her father’s return, many years later, to the house in Vienna that his family had abandoned in 1938. More than any of the other possessions he had lost when Austria merged with Germany, he told her, it was his library that he missed and longed to see again. Yet the old Viennese gentleman could not bring himself to enter the flat in which he had grown up. His daughter, born in Palestine, remembers him in his hat and coat, unable to speak. ‘We stood downstairs in the courtyard, and my father pointed at the apartment where they lived. A woman came down and looked at us with suspicion. My father said he had lived here once. She was not impressed, only more cold.’ The woman explained, in her Austrian German, that, when she arrived after the war, his books had already gone.
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 23 No. 1 · 4 January 2001
From Naomi Shepherd
The two recent articles in the LRB on Israel and the Palestinians, by Charles Glass (LRB, 30 November 2000) and Edward Said (LRB, 14 December 2000), both propose that Israel officially admit its 'great lie' – the denial of Palestinian nationhood – preferably at Said's fantasy seminar on Historical Truth and Political Justice, presided over by academics like himself. Said suggests that this 'might reveal a way out of the present impasse'. Can he be serious?
At no time in the last fifty years has there been greater recognition in Israel of Palestinian nationhood and right to sovereignty than there is today. If anything, this has only increased the fear of large sections of the Israeli electorate that a Palestinian state, on a territorial base free of Israeli control, and with help from outside (Iran, Iraq, Islamic terrorists on the Bin Laden model), might constitute an irredentist threat. Said points out that the land offered the Palestinians today is only a fraction of what they owned before 1948 and warns that Israel is surrounded by three hundred million Arabs and even more hostile Muslims – precisely the kind of rhetoric which alarms those Israelis. His demonisation of the Israelis – the 'malign genius' behind the Oslo Accords, their 'reliance' on a subservient American press (can he really believe that the New Republic determines US policy?) – is absurd. The Israelis do not lack their own futile rhetoric – the 'eternal unity' of Jerusalem under Israeli rule, for example, when the city is so clearly divided – but the tenor of the negotiations so far makes nonsense of the idea that it is the incompatibility of 'discourses' or 'narratives', or even 'ideological' support for the settlers, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation and the undeniable injustice and suffering experienced by those living under Israeli rule. Negotiations broke down because there is still a gap between Israel's minimal security demands and Palestinian minimal sovereignty requirements, though this gap had been substantially narrowed. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, if this is the model for Said's seminar, did not precede black African independence but followed it, and the only practical consequence of a similar Israeli/Palestinian commission might be the payment of reparations to Palestinian refugees – something already proposed by Israel at Camp David, but explicitly offered without any admission of guilt.
There has indeed been much controversy in Israel over the historical record, and not only among academics, as Charles Glass's article suggests. The education committee of the Knesset is currently arguing over proposed changes to the (secular) school history curriculum – a reflection of the impact of the 'revisionist' historians. An Israeli district court is shortly to hear a libel case brought against a researcher who investigated a massacre of Palestinian villagers during the 1948 war. The long neglected rights of Israel's Arab minority have never been more in the public eye. Meron Benvenisti, whom Said attacks, is one of the most outspoken critics of Israeli policy. In Sacred Landscape, published last year, he documents Israel's systematic annihilation of the hundreds of Arab villages whose inhabitants were driven out or fled in 1948. Israelis and Palestinians have never held a closer dialogue than in the post-Oslo period (including countless seminars with participants from both sides). But all this has little or no political resonance.
Said's rubbishing of the Oslo Accords dismisses both the optimism they first aroused in the Palestinians living under Israeli rule and the degree of co-operation which was in fact achieved. The problem with Oslo was not that it was a 'gigantic fraud' on Israel's side, connived at by a corrupt and inept Palestinian leadership, as Said argues. Oslo represented a genuine step towards a settlement, but to be successful it had to be rapidly and honestly implemented, so that the benefits of compromise could be demonstrated to both sides before extremists on both sides could impede further progress. That this did not happen was largely Israel's responsibility (three lost years under Netanyahu). But to present the Palestinians solely as victims, as Said does, it to deny them the strength of their weaknesses. Said's proposition that Arafat's volte face after Camp David – the immediate cause of the present impasse – was dictated by failure of nerve, rather than the calculation that an uprising would serve his purposes better than an agreement, is unconvincing.
Naomi Shepherd
Jerusalem
