Beyond the violence in Gaza
LAST week a provincial newspaper in Ireland ran a feature on likely destinations for a novel holiday weekend, and its top recommendation went a bit beyond Prague, or Warsaw, or even Istanbul — Tel Aviv in Israel was the preferred location.
Given the recent and ongoing events in Gaza, this was immediately seized upon by the Twitterati and others as evidence of insensitivity, if not worse, with the description of the Israeli city — “lively” — featuring heavily in the laughs being had.
Hamfisted as the timing might have been, however, it pointed up a difficulty that many people here have in dealing with events in the region: That beyond the headlines about rockets and children, there is also an Israel which exists as a functioning state, with minor scandals and sports events and — yes — as a place people can go to enjoy weekend breaks.
We feel perhaps that both can’t exist together, but they do, and a general point worth making is that Israel is a legitimate state recognised by the international community. It is not a territory which exists merely to provide a flag of convenience for criminals, like Transnistria, or the other splintered delinquent states of that particular region.
Reading Leslie Stern’s book, Israel Since The Six-Day War: Tears of Joy, Tears of Sorrow, proves that point. Though the significance of conflict is reflected in the title, Stern fleshes out the picture and it’s invaluable, particularly at this moment in time, to see that Israel is a place which has more mundane challenges than being this week’s bête noir for western liberals.
What’s interesting about some of those relatively mundane challenges, of course, is the starkness of the comparisons one can make with Israel’s attitude to Gaza and Palestine.
Take the case of Ethiopian Jews struggling for acceptance in Israel — Stern accepts that they have had “to cope with religious bigotry and racial prejudice stemming from minority groups” since arriving in Israel, being subjected to demeaning rituals such as forced remarriage, and disliked because their arrival in numbers “could lead to a depreciation in property values and an increase in crime”.
The parallels between their status within the state of Israel and the Palestinians next door need hardly be stated. They’re certainly not overstated in the book, which could not by any stretch of the imagination be termed a severe, or even astringent, appraisal of Israel.
It wears its allegiances on its sleeve, perhaps with a metaphorical Star of David armband. Early on, as Stern gives a thrillerish outline of the difficulties faced by the fledgling state, he adds: “Yet in spite of it all, Israel largely held its ground.”
He concludes the book on a pluralist note, though one with a stirring affirmation: “Today Israel stands tall, with a diverse population of just over 8m, 6m of whom are Jews.”
Given the heartbreaking images coming out of Gaza of dead and injured children, it’s easy to imagine that a pro-Israeli tome framing the last five decades or so in the context of its survival in the teeth of overwhelming odds wouldn’t find much favour with many people in Ireland now.
That partiality is a crucial point when dealing with such a sharply divisive topic. There’s an ongoing tension for the reader of such a book between the acknowledgement of a point of view, and the need to wrinkle out facts which aren’t tainted by that partiality.
Simply noting the writer’s position doesn’t do quite enough to rinse away the bias; when Stern talks about Palestinian civilians not bothering to aid an Israeli soldier shot on the street, there’s a clear slant to the words he chooses.
In a conflict where context rules, this book also recalls the grim days of the 1970s, when every news broadcast seemed to feature hazy footage of a passenger airplane sweltering in tropical heat as negotiations continued with hijackers in sunglasses.
The Israeli raid on Entebbe, in Uganda, to rescue hostages seized in one such case, was probably the high watermark of that era, though Stern is reticent on the legality of that venture, which entailed an incursion into another state’s sovereign territory, after all.
Famously, the only Israeli commando to die in the raid on Entebbe was Jonathan Netanyahu, brother of current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own brand of pugnacity, or intransigence, seems to personify the entire Israeli approach for many outside observers.
Netanyahu’s ascent to the top of the Israeli political tree is well mapped out — how familiar to an Irish reader the dreary jostlings that see potential governments fail to coalesce — but his very prominence, both in this book and in current coverage of the Middle East, provokes a question.
The contrast between the bellicose Israel personified by Netanyahu and the more diffuse identity of Hamas seems a striking one. The passing of Yasser Arafat in 2004 removed the PLO image with which the world was familiar. In his very appearance, Arafat conveyed the image of a scrappy underdog defying the odds, but since his death the visible image of the Palestinian struggle that leaps to mind is the body of a child in their parents’ arms rather than a spokesman facing a bank of microphones.
By contrast, Netanyahu — bluff, blunt, growling in that half-American accent — presents the Israeli case in a sharply delineated package, but to whose advantage? It’s natural to have sympathy with the Palestinian cause; there would be something questionable about any individual who felt nothing when confronted with the images emerging in the last couple of weeks.
That has a lengthy enough provenance on these shores. Many readers will recall the heady days of the 1980s when the PLO scarf was a handy signifier of your political sophistication in addition to keeping the throat warm on a winter’s evening.
Stern isn’t in the business of eliciting sympathy for Hamas and the PLO, and for an Irish reader it can be bracing to come across an account of the last 40 years of conflict which is resolutely sceptical about the Palestinian cause.
There are some pointed reminders here, for instance, of the unabashed partiality of many commentators towards Arafat, with an account of a BBC reporter’s tears at the PLO leader’s decline in his late years.
Recent events in Ireland are mentioned, too, and one reference is likely to poke the equilibrium of some of those shouting loudest at present. Stern quotes academic Efraim Karsh: “In Ireland the dismantling of the arms of the IRA was a precondition for a peaceful outcome. In the occupied territories, Israel saw the arming of the PLO, despite its abysmal previous track record, as a key to peace and security.”
The kind of discovery designed to give pause to those leaping to conclusions in recent weeks.
- by Leslie Stern, Polity Books
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