Zionism achieved its greatest triumph with the
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The Zionist idea and its
principal political progeny are the subject of deeply divergent
interpretations, not least inside the Jewish state itself. No other aspect of
Zionism, however, is more controversial than its attitude towards the
indigenous population of the land of its dreams. Chaim Weizmann, the first
president of the state of Israel,
famously said that it is by its treatment of the Palestinians that his country
will be judged. Yet, when judged by this criterion, Zionism is not just an
unqualified failure but a tragedy of historic proportions. Zionism did achieve
its central goal but at a terrible price: the displacement and dispossession of
the Palestinians – what the Arabs call the Nakba, the catastrophe.
The authors of these two books are both
Israelis, but they approach their subject from radically different ideological
vantage points. Ilan Pappé is a scholar and a pro-Palestinian political
activist. He is one of the most prominent Israeli political dissidents living
in exile, having moved from the University of Haifa to the University
of Exeter. He is also one of the few Israeli students of the conflict who
write about the Palestinian side with real knowledge and empathy.
Pappé places Zionism under an uncompromising lens. In
his reading it was not a national liberation movement but a settler colonial
project imposed on the Palestinians by force with the support of the west. From
this premise it follows that the state of Israel is not legitimate even in its
original borders, much less so within its post-1967 borders. To correct the
injustice, Pappé advocates a peaceful, humanist and socialist alternative to
the Zionist idea in the form of a binational state with equal rights for all
its citizens.
Ari Shavit is a member of the editorial board of the
liberal Zionist paper Ha’aretz, and one of Israel’s most influential
columnists. He is an eloquent exponent of liberal Zionism, but he
also exemplifies its ambiguities, inner contradictions and moral myopia.
Pappé has published a large number of books on the
history of Arab-Israeli conflict of which the most widely read and most
controversial is The
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The Idea of Israel is not a
history book but a close study of the role of Zionist ideology in the making of
modern Israel and of the continuing relevance of this ideology today in
politics, the education system, the media, the cinema and Ashkenazi-Sephardi
relations. The book thus offers a broad survey of the main
critical schools of thought on Israel. Two chapters deal directly
with the Palestine question: the historiography of the first Arab-Israeli war,
and the uses and misuses of the Holocaust.
History is usually written by the victors, and the
Middle East is no exception. Pappé himself is a leading member of the group of “new”
or revisionist Israeli historians that emerged in the late 1980s and included
Simha Flapan, Benny
Morris and myself. In our different ways we all challenged the dominant
narrative, the narrative of the victors. Using recently released documents we
debunked many of the myths that had come to surround the birth of the state of
Israel and the 1948 war. Intentionally or otherwise, our work thus lent
credibility to the Palestinian historical narrative about the war for
Palestine.
In his new book, Pappé deals with recent developments
in the historiographical sphere, especially on the origins of the Palestinian
refugee problem. The big question has always been: did they leave of their own
accord or were they forced out? Israeli governments have always denied that
they drove the Palestinians out. In his ground-breaking 1989 book on the
subject – The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 –
Morris presented incontrovertible evidence of Israeli involvement in
creating the refugee problem. Evidence subsequently gathered by Morris points
to an even higher degree of Israeli responsibility. But following the outbreak
of the second intifada, Morris veered to the right and radically changed his
views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He concluded it was a mistake not to
expel all the Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948. Pappé argues that the
new documents prove that the expulsion of 730,000 Palestinians
was more premeditated, systematic and extensive than Morris had ever
acknowledged. In short, he claims that when war provided an opportunity,
the Zionist idea was translated into the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine.
The role of the Holocaust in empowering the struggle
for Jewish statehood is another sensitive issue in the debate about the past.
Pappé denounces any political manipulation of the Holocaust as a means of moral
blackmail designed to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. His
sharpest comments are reserved for Israeli officials who have perfected such
manipulation as a diplomatic tool in their struggle against the Palestinians.
His deeper concern, however, is to understand the impact and significance of
the Holocaust memory in constructing and marketing the idea of Israel. Israelis
have harboured an exaggerated sense of themselves as victims, and this
self-image, he argues, has prevented them from seeing the Palestinians in
a more realistic light, and impeded a reasonable political solution
to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The argument that what happened to the
Palestinians was just a small injustice to rectify a greater injustice
(the destruction of European Jewry) is rejected with some vehemence. The
only hope Pappé sees of making peace with the Arabs is for Israelis to free
themselves of their Shoah mentality.
Ari Shavit is one of Israel’s most influential
columnists. Photograph: Sharon Bareket/Courtesy of Spiegel
Shavit’s position is more conflicted and therefore
more opaque. He is a passionate but not uncritical Zionist. His book is also
not a history of Israel but a series of stories of individuals and significant
events that shed a great deal of new light on the making of the
Jewish state. Among the cast of characters on whom Shavit draws
to construct his picture of Israel are Holocaust survivors; a youth leader
who helped to turn Masada into a symbol and shrine of post-Holocaust Zionism;
an enigmatic engineer who was instrumental in building the atomic bomb in
Dimona to defend the Jews against the threat of a second genocide; the
zealous religious Zionists who spearheaded the settler movement; leftwing
academics in Jerusalem; and pedlars of sex and drugs in Tel Aviv nightclubs.
But, above all, this is a personal story. As the author explains in the
introduction: “This book is the personal odyssey of one Israeli who is
bewildered by the historic drama engulfing his homeland. It is the journey in
space and time of an Israeli-born individual exploring the wider
narrative of his nation.”
The most vivid illustration of Shavit’s attitude to this
wider narrative is his account of the expulsion by the nascent Israeli army of
50,000-70,000 of the Arab residents of Lydda and the massacre of 70 civilians
in a small mosque in July 1948. The grisly story has been told many times
before, but Shavit’s reconstruction is riveting. His original contribution
consists of interviews with the Jewish brigade commander and the military
governor in which they speak frankly about their strategic and moral dilemmas.
Shavit refers to this episode as “our black box” in which lies “the dark secret
of Zionism”. But he goes on to say that the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion
of its inhabitants “were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that
laid the foundation for the Zionist state”. “Lydda,” he asserts, “is an
integral and essential part of our story.” Like Morris, Shavit evidently thinks
that the end justifies the means; I don’t. The massacre of innocent civilians
can never be justified under any circumstances. It is a heinous war crime and
it must be denounced as such even if the perpetrators are Jews
and, yes, even if they are Holocaust survivors.
Both authors engage with the essence of Zionism as
well as with its more problematic parts. While Pappé represents the cutting
edge of radical anti-Zionism, Shavit exposes the dissonance, the double
standards and intellectual incoherence of liberal Zionism. Shavit, by his
own acronym, is a Wasp – a White Ashkenazi Supporter of Peace. His liberal
credentials were burnished by serving as chair of the Association for Civil
Rights in Israel in the early 1990s. In addition, he enjoys the great advantage
of writing like an angel. The smoothness and beauty of his prose is all
the more remarkable given that English is his second language. But the
brilliance of Shavit’s style tends to conceal the ethnocentric character
of his commentary and his inability to confront the moral consequences of the
triumph of Zionism.
On one thing the two authors agree: the current
status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is unsustainable. Both of them
see the writing on the wall. The occupation, the relentless expansion of
illegal settlements, the construction of the monstrous “security barrier” on
the West Bank, the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem, the
flagrant violations of international law, the systematic abuse of Palestinian
human rights and the rampant racism – all are slowly but surely turning Israel
into an international pariah. No sane Israeli relishes the prospect of living
in a pariah state that maintains an apartheid regime. But few Israelis are
ready for a truly honest historical reckoning with the people they have
wronged and oppressed and whose land they continue to colonise. To blame the
victims for their own misfortunes, as the people in power habitually do,
is both disingenuous and despicable. This is no way for any nation to
behave, especially one with such an acute historical memory of the bitter taste
of victimhood.
Avi Shlaim’s Israel
and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations is published by
Verso.
Ari Shavit’s book My Promised Land: The Triumph
and Tragedy of Israel, published by Scribe, is available from the Guardian
bookshop.
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