My Middle Eastern Reading Binge, Part II
In which I realize the the phrase "Forever Wars" has many meanings
Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2007) Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: a Short History (Princeton UP, 2018) Ian J. Bickerton and Carla L. Klausner, A History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict* (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (OneWorld, 2006) A Very Short History of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict (OneWorld, 2024) Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic* (OneWorld, 2024) John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Strauss, Farrar & Giroux, 2007) Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: the Secret History of the Israeli Targeted Assassinations Program (Random House, 2018) Alistaire Crook, Conflicts Forum (Substack) *indicates I have not finished reading the book--yet
Hello again! Are we ready for another round of book reviews on a horrible, ongoing conflict? I know you are—otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this, right? Fresh off an American bombing campaign of Iran’s nuclear facilities—which may or may not have wiped out Iran’s nuclear program, depending on who you ask—we take a look at another conflict you might have heard of.
The Arab-Israeli Conflict
You might have heard there is a war going in Gaza. If you missed this bit of information, you probably don’t own a computer and therefore are not reading this right now. If you have, you are probably already have decided opinions about it. I will do my best to make this review worthwhile.
A History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict is a textbook which covers the entirety of the conflict between the state of Israel and the displaced peoples of Palestine, from the late nineteenth century all the way to the twenty-first century. (The edition I have goes up to 2014, but a new edition published in 2022 goes up to 2021.) It covers the region of Palestine under Ottoman Rule, the growth of Zionist settlement in the region, and the establishment of the state of Israel following World War II, and decade by decade the various conflicts that have followed (the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon…you get the picture). Each chapter begins with a chronology of key events covered, ends with a summary of the chapter, and liberally sprinkled with excerpts of primary sources, maps, and images.
I am not a great enjoyer of textbooks, but this one is very well done. If you want an overview of the whole of the conflict (the Introduction gives a brief history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as the geography of the Middle East), this is the book for you. It is a scholarly work, so it tries to maintain an even handedness in its presentation of events, which, as we will see, is exceedingly difficult, because virtually every aspect of the conflict is contested by both sides. The book is particularly good at putting the various wars fought between Israel and its Arab neighbors into a wider context. For example, it explicates the connection of the 1967 Six Day War to the wider Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in ways that were enlightening to me anyway. The way the book is structured, you can read it cover to cover but you can profitably use it as a reference work, which is what I did for my article.
Quite different than this are the two works of Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and A Very Short History of the Israel Palestine Conflict. Ilan Pappe is one of the self-styled “New Historians” of Israeli history, whose works challenge the official narrative of Israel’s founding in 1948. Needless to say, these historians have been controversial, none more so than Pappe, who left Israel in 2008 and now teaches in England. Both his books are highly partisan accounts of the conflict; the first is mostly about the 1948 war, while the second covers the entirety of the conflict. Pappe’s version of the conflict contradicts the narrative most people have of Israel’s founding in their heads. On Pappe’s telling, the Israelis, rather than being a David slaying an Arab Goliath (several nations sent armies into Israel in 1948) were the better trained, better equipped force, and only the Jordanian army put up any effective resistance. Whereas the Israeli government insists the Palestinians left voluntarily or fled before battling armies, Pappe insists they were driven out by force, “ethnically cleansed” (hence the title).
What I Learned
One of the things you learn when you begin to read about the Arab-Israeli conflict is how contested virtually every aspect of that conflict is. That is one of the reasons I wanted to read Pappe paired with a much more detached account of the conflict. I knew about Israeli militias who terrorized British military personnel as well as Palestinians prior to 1948, and I was a bit surprised that Israel claims the Palestinians voluntarily left their homes during the war. It seemed obvious to me this was if not planned something that would happen in the course of a conflict that had been brewing for several decades between the two groups.
I wanted especially to read Pappe, because of all the “New Historians” he is the most radical, and I wanted to see how his narrative matched up against that of more sober historians like Bickerton and Clausner. It is clear that Pappe goes to extremes in his zeal to vindicate the Palestinian cause. He cites oral testimonies of Palestinians in his work and though he doesn’t rely on them, don’t seem like the best of sources, given the state of the conflict (he doesn’t cite the oral testimony of Israeli soldiers from what I can recall). He romanticizes the amount of harmony that existed in Ottoman Palestine between different religious groups, before the founding of Israel. Moreover, he seems to exaggerate the role of the most extreme Zionists in Palestine before the founding, at least to some extent. As Clausner and Bickerton note, there were many diverse kinds of Zionists in Palestine trying to settle there and not all of them were as ruthless or violent as militias like the Irgun or the Lehi.
That being said, it sounds like the basic outline of his story has merit. The most ruthless Zionists were also the most clear eyed in my opinion; I doubt anyone could have successfully founded a Jewish state without using terror tactics. And though the numbers of Palestinian civilians killed are in dispute (the Israelis put it at around a few hundred, while the Palestinians put it at 15,000; Pappe doesn’t even try to estimate the number), it seems clear the Israelis did use violence to force many Palestinians out of their lands and homes. The numbers involved are not striking compared to comparable events, such as those in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, but it does sound like the textbook definition of “ethnic cleansing.” Certainly, whatever you want to call it, many of the Israelis’ actions were gravely immoral.
As for the Palestinians themselves, these books taught me something I did not know. Most of the Palestinians who were driven out by the Israelis in 1948 were poor and rural village dwellers; middle class urban Palestinians all fled before the fighting started. In fact, they were almost more like serfs than anything else. For centuries, those rural Palestinians had cultivated the land as tenants for the landowners. The Ottoman government in its last days did reform its property laws to make the land available to private ownership, but apparently many Palestinians villagers still lived basically as tenants on other peoples’ land when the war came. The Israelis, who came from European and had very modern ideas about private property, had no intention of perpetuating such a system when they took over.
As Pappe makes clear, the Palestinians were particularly vulnerable to attacks in 1948, because most of the Palestinian men with military experience had been killed or exiled after the 1936 Arab revolt against the British. (One of the causes of that revolt was rancor over Zionist immigration to Palestine.) Reading Pappe and Clausner together makes me think the New Historians are correct that the Arab governments in 1948 were divided and not particularly keen on doing anything for the Palestinians. (This is still true today: most Arab states refuse to take in Palestinian refugees. One gets the impression that only Arab public opinion pushes the leaders of Arab states to do anything about Palestine.) They also appear to be correct concerning Arab armies being incapable, save for the Jordanians, whose officer corps was made up of entirely British officers at the time.
Finally, something I will come back to in the later parts of this series is the effect of Israeli attempts to deal with the Palestinians as a result of the 1948. The Israelis occupied lands that had been earmarked for the Palestinians by the U.N., and this is what led to first the fedayeen (freedom fighters) to emerge in Palestine, then Al-Fatah and the PLO. The Israelis chased the PLO out of Israel and into Lebanon after the Six Day War in 1967, which in turn destabilized Lebanon and causes a civil war, as we have seen. The Israelis then invaded Lebanon in 1978, which led to the rise of Hezbollah. The conditions in the occupied territories led to the First Intifada in 1987, which in turn led to the creation of Hamas. Israel’s victory over its enemies secured its founding but that victory has also been the source of its woes ever since. As we will see, the Israelis are keenly aware of this.
I don’t want to make this post too much longer, but sufficed to say that if you are looking for information about the conflict, Bickerton and Clausner are your best bet. Pappe is someone who is interesting to read but most people have such passionate opinions about the conflict that I am not sure someone from the opposite camp would be willing to read him. But despite being an activist, he is a good historian, no matter how extreme his interpretations may be, and writes well enough for a wider audience. In my opinion, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is the better and more scholarly of the two books.