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.