Rushing into judgment
Alfred Sherman
THE FIFTY YEARS WAR by Ahron Bregman and Jihan El-Tahri Penguin, £7.99, pp. 304 The Fifty Years War exemplifies the new genre of a television series downloaded into book form. If this example is anything to go by, the transformation loses more than it gains. Television makes its mark by immediacy and catholicity: we flash from Eshkol to Dayan to Nasser to assembled tank formations; sound-bite follows sound- bite. By contrast, the book loses that imme- diacy in piles of words, but does not compensate by furnishing a conceptual framework which adds significantly to our understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict or shows a way forward out of it. Original contemporary historians are much rarer than competent television producers. Tele- vision presumes much, rushing into judg- ment where historians tread warily.
The authors and their sponsors are com- pulsively optimistic, or perhaps politically correct, regarding the possibility of peace. They recount the number of times peace was feasible in their view, only to be thwarted at the last moment by unreason- able behaviour on the Israeli or Arab side. It is comforting to believe this, and unpopular to question it. Pace the book's blurb, there is nothing unique about the collaboration of Arab and Israeli authors in recording the conflict and urging peace; the bookshelves are full of such efforts, whole parties in Israel have dedicated themselves to this objective. But the pons asinomm remains, as it has since the turn of the century, the unwillingness of the Arab and Moslem world to countenance a Jewish state. The arguments are too well known to need repeating. The authors blame the Soviet Union for precipitating the Six Day war by its false claims that Israel was massing troops in the north to attack Syria, thereby prompting Nasser to take pre-emptive or preventative action by massing troops in the de- militarised Sinai. This carries no more conviction than previous explanations that Israel had massed troops in Jerusalem for the anniversary parade and then kept them there to launch an attack on the Jordan- controlled West Bank in retaliation for activities by fedayeen who operated out of the West Bank though their home base was Egypt.
Soviet mischief-making had been real enough ever since 1951, but there is no reason to suppose that Nasser would have risked war for the sake of Syria, with which his relations had been very bad indeed since the break-up of the short-lived but much vaunted Arab Federation. On the contrary, defeat at Israel's hands could have been presented as condign punish- ment for Syrian defection from the Federa- tion and a warning to others. Moreover, closing the Straits of Tiran was a major and irrevocable strategic act with quite differ- ent significance and time-scale from any antidote to an alleged concentration of Israeli forces round Lake Tiberias. Nasser, thwarted in his dealings with Syria, Sudan, Libya and the Gulf, sought to renew his glamorous image as the sword of Arabism and Islam by threatening Israel.
Hypnotised by the array of weaponry the Russians had sold him for petrodollars, he sent them across the Canal as a grand gesture to impress his fellow-Arabs, without working out the consequences. The combination of the passivity of Levi Eshkol, then Defence Minister as well as Prime Minister of Israel and Nasser's own rhetoric swept him forward. I remember monitoring his speeches live at the time and noting how he was characteristically talking himself into a frenzy. He did not foresee — indeed who did? — that this would impinge so powerfully on Israeli psy- chology as to sweep Moshe Dayan into the defence ministry with a popular mandate to launch a pre-emptive strike. So Eshkol's indecisiveness, which Nasser had correctly counted on, worked in favour of the war party. Had. Eshkol reacted more strongly and inspired more confidence, war might have been averted; it was his pacifism which led to war.
This is just one of the many examples during the 50 years of events jogging elbows. It was conquest of the West Bank which turned many Israelis who would otherwise have been happy to make peace within the Rhodes cease-fire lines into 'The Whole Land of Israel' enthusiasts. But whether a return to the status quo ante June 1967, which seemed inherently unsta- ble while it lasted, has enough support on either side to make it politically feasible and bring stability to the area for the first time in centuries is a different question. Though Brian Lapping, doyen of tele- vision historical documentaries, equates the Arab-Israeli war with the Hundred Years War, a dynastic dispute between Norman-Plantagenet rulers for the throne of France which led to the exact opposite, the termination of three centuries of common rule, the conflict in Palestine is what Hegel called a conflict of rights, the claim of two ethnoi to one territory. As a result, Israelis see their problem as one of survival. Only this criterion can provide common ground for judging their acts and policies, favourably or otherwise. The authors' rejection of this criterion as partisan effectively precludes meaningful judgment.
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