BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – Palestinians and Israelis: A Short History of Conflict
Published by The History Press,
rrp £12.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
In Deuteronomy, Chapter 31, Moses claims ‘the Lord’ promised a swath of land west of Jordan to the Israelites, saying ‘the Lord shall do unto them as he did to Sihon and to Og, kings of the Amorites, and unto the land of them, whom he destroyed’. In Chapter 34, ‘the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan; And all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost Sea; And to the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.’ In the next book, Joshua says ‘unto the children of Israel’ that ‘the living God is among you, and that he will drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.’
This assault, expulsion, and genocidal war on local tribes by another tribe ‘out of Egypt’ led, by the Iron Age, to a Kingdom of Israel that covers at its northern extremity all the land within its current borders, down to a few miles north of Jerusalem, with a small zone extra to the east. Below, and including Jerusalem, belonged to the kingdom of Judah (and, east of the Dead Sea, Moab) and on the coast ‘the Philistine city states’, including Gaza. South of that was the land of the Arubu tribes.
UNPICKING PAST INJUSTICES LEAVES EVERY EMPEROR NAKED
The Canaanites are sometimes claimed as the predecessors of modern day ‘Palestinians’, who then would precede the Israelites claim to the territory. Modern day Zionism was birthed in Europe, so all sides in a debate on ‘whose land is it?’ face complications. The transfer of tribal lands through war has been part of our history throughout the world for millennia. Modern international law regards such displacement as criminal, and unpicking past injustices leaves every emperor naked.
Of more use is genetics. And, in those terms, ones that ignore contingent religious affiliation. Today’s Palestinians in the main have two roots. The Christian Palestinians are one, and the other share genetic features with, maternally, a proportion of sub-Saharan DNA and, primarily, the same genetic markers as the pre-WWII indigenous Jewish population (Ashkenazi, Iranian, and Moroccan Jews). Some of the European genetic stock in today’s Israel are more complex. However, the takeaway here is that, bar religion, these are to a significant degree the same peoples.
Irony – and ancient history – aside, the current crises emerged from the 1930s and 1940s. This puts the British Empire in the frame for a good deal of the instability in the Middle East, which is not news. The Germans, too, had suggested Israel as a deportation spot (and Argentina, amongst other locations) when ‘negotiating’ migrations as ‘a solution’ to Hitler’s ‘problem’ to senior rabbis in Germany. Even before 1948, some of those frontier settlers already in the Palestine were waging a low-intensity war against the British, as well as covert collective punishment against those already resident. Palestine and Lebanon had cities that looked much as ours did, wore western clothing, and drove cars: they were not generally a population of nomadic Bedouin with no fixed home. It was short work destroying them.
RIGHT FROM THE PAGES OF DEUTERONOMY AND JOSHUA
The first real blowback went badly for the natives and rather well for the embryonic Israeli state. The first major war left an Israel that was to a degree exclusionary, and far greater in extent than the British had planned. The next serious blowback, in 1967, had dramatic impact too. Israel’s position has never been conciliatory toward its neighbours. This has, clearly, been reciprocated, and cause-and-effect is opaque at best. But the roots of today’s Gazan War precede the cross-border attacks on Israel by Hamas, a body that as tightly controls the people of Gaza as Israel does the incredibly-shrinking Palestinian settlements in the West Bank. Settlers from Israel, and the Jewish diaspora, seem to have jumped right from the pages of Deuteronomy and Joshua. In today’s international order, this is not acceptable, although pragmatically accepted by Israel’s chief western allies, Britain and the USA. Nor is Islamist territorial expansionism.
It is, and will remain, a mess for as many generations ahead as behind, though the current conflict as persecuted by Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government aims to ‘solve’ a significant proportion of the mess. In ‘eye-for-an-eye’ terms, the assault on Gaza goes way beyond a proportionate response, ‘collective punishment’ being business as usual since the mid-1940s. The West’s attitude is similar to that felt after 9/11, where ‘the others’ are, weighed in the balance, apparently much less important or valuable than ‘us’. The rest of the world, especially in the middle-east, have of course seen and been offended by this exceptionalism, so we can expect more ‘blowback’ any time soon.
In the meantime, you could do a lot worse than gen up on the background to the conflict than grabbing a copy of Michael Scott-Baumann’s Palestinians and Israelis, which is updated to October 7th, and is far more worthwhile than reading, for example, Howard Jacobson’s irrational Zionist screeds or propaganda from Hamas!
Available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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