Dessin de Jacpé @ UBU PAN, journal satirique belge.
"But the message is clear. The barbarians truly are at the gates." (Benny Morris @ Daily Telegraph)
Half a century ago, relations between Israel and Britain were friendly. More than friendly. They were characterised by admiration. And nowhere in Britain was sympathy and admiration stronger than on the Left and among the young. The Left admired Israel’s social democracy, energy and pioneering spirit – Israel was one of the few states that emerged after the Second World War, and the only one in the Middle East, that became a success story.
There was huge admiration, too, for the kibbutz movement, with its three hundred-odd collective settlements, in which thousands of young Britons spent months, and even years, as volunteers, enjoying the egalitarian spirit, agricultural labour and sex. British socialists admired Israel’s powerful trade union association, the Histadrut, which had its own publishing company, bank, daily newspaper, health service and industrial plants. Somewhat shamefacedly, there was also keen appreciation of Israel’s military – resourceful, daring and successful.
In retrospect, ironically, at no time was this general admiration more apparent than at the moment of Israel’s greatest military feat – in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 War, when Israeli forces in six days routed the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. But half a century on, much of that admiration has fled and Israel’s military brilliance has become something to denounce and deplore. What has gone wrong?
Back in 1937, a royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended the end of the British Mandate over Palestine and the country’s partition into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab . The commission also recommended that most of the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish state’s area-to-be should be transferred to the Arab area , by force if need be, in order to assure the stability of the settlement. The Arabs rejected partition, demanding all of Palestine for themselves. But the British government, under Neville Chamberlain, initially endorsed the Peel proposals.
This support for Jewish statehood at least in part of Palestine conformed to British policy since 1917, when Lloyd George’s cabinet issued the Balfour Declaration, supporting the establishment of a “Jewish National Home”. But, given the triple challenges to Britain from the predatory regimes of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, Chamberlain opted to appease the Arabs (as well as appeasing Hitler) and, in 1938-1939, reversed Britain’s course and turned anti-Zionist. When the Second World War – and the Zionists – intervened, preventing the establishment of Arab rule over all of Palestine, Britain, in helplessness and disgust, thrust the problem into the lap of the United Nations. This was due largely to the terroristic Right-wing rebellion, by the Irgun and Stern (or Lehi) Group, against Britain during 1944-1947 that left great anger in Britain against “the Jews” for a generation or more.
In 1947, the UN re-endorsed partition and the two-state solution . Again, the Arabs rejected the proposal, and went to war against the emergent Jewish state. But they lost. One of the tragic consequences of the 1948 War was the creation of some 700,000 Palestinian refugees. The Arab world proved unable to get over its humiliation at the hands of the puny Jewish community of just 650,000 souls, and the refugees, festering in squalid camps, stood as a permanent challenge to Arab manhood. The Palestinians, egged on by the Arab states, never acquiesced in the outcome. Moshe Dayan, then chief of the general staff, put it succinctly in 1956, in a eulogy at the graveside of a kibbutznik murdered by Arab infiltrators: “For eight years, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home... Beyond the furrow of the border surges a sea of hatred and revenge... Let us not fear to look squarely at the hatred that consumes and fills the lives of hundreds [of thousands] of Arabs who live around us... This is our choice – to be ready and armed, tough and harsh – or else the sword shall fall from our hands and our lives will be cut short.”
Some 200,000 of the 1948 refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip. During the following decades, the refugee camps – actually suburban slums – supplied the fuel and manpower for bouts of terror against Israel, as well as serving as the hotbeds of the two Palestinian revolts, or intifadas, in 1987-91 and 2000-2004. Today, its population numbers 1.8 million. The slum-dwellers are the chief recruiting ground of the military wing of Hamas, which has battled the IDF during the past weeks in the alleyways and tunnels of Shaja’iya, Beit Hanun and Rafah.
Initially, like the US, Britain supported the return of the refugees to the area that became Israel. But as Israel absorbed millions of impoverished Jewish immigrants and settled them in the former Arab sites, the West tacitly accepted the Israeli argument that a mass return would undermine the Jewish state and returnees would constitute a giant fifth column. None the less, the Islamic world, including countries at peace with Israel such as Egypt and Jordan, continue to assert the refugees’ “right of return”.
Britain’s intimate relationship with Israel, founded in the Balfour Declaration, reached a new level in 1956, when Israeli troops fought alongside Britain and France at Suez. For the European powers, the resulting political defeat in effect saw them ousted from the Middle East. Soon, Britain was accepting Israel not as a subordinate recent colony, but as a partner, as part of the free world. Affection blossomed.
But it did not last: 1967 marked its high-water mark. A gradual disaffection grew in Britain. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories dragged on. Palestinian resistance and bouts of rebellion triggered Israeli clampdowns and repression – and in a post-imperial, post-colonial world, Israel’s behaviour troubled and jarred. The spread of television and then the internet, beamed endless pictures of Israeli infantrymen beating stone-throwers and, later, Israeli tanks and aircraft taking on Kalashnikov-wielding guerrillas. It looked like a brutal and unequal struggle. Liberal hearts went out to the underdog – and anti-Semites and opportunists of various sorts joined in the anti-Israeli chorus.
Israelis might argue that the (relatively) lightly armed Hamasniks in Gaza want to drive the Jews into the sea; that the struggle isn’t really between Israel and the Palestinians but between little Israel and the vast Arab and Muslim worlds, which long for Israel’s demise ; even that Israel isn’t the issue, that Islamists seek the demise of the West itself, and that Israel is merely an outpost of the far larger civilisation that they find abhorrent and seek to topple.
But television doesn’t show this bigger picture; images can’t elucidate ideas. It shows mighty Israel crushing bedraggled Gaza. Western TV screens never show Hamas – not a gunman, or a rocket launched at Tel Aviv, not a fighter shelling a nearby kibbutz. In these past few weeks, it has seemed as if Israel’s F-16s and Merkava tanks and 155mm artillery have been fighting only wailing mothers, mangled children, run-down concrete slums. Not Hamasniks. Not the 3,000 rockets reaching out for Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Beersheba. Not mortar bombs crashing into kibbutz dining halls. Not rockets fired at Israel from Gaza hospitals and schools, designed to provoke Israeli counterfire that could then be screened as an atrocity.
In the shambles of this war, a few basic facts about the contenders have been lost: Israel is a Western liberal democracy, where Arabs have the vote and, like Jews, are not detained in the middle of the night for what they think or say. While there is a violent, Right-wing fringe, Israelis remains basically tolerant, even in wartime, even under terrorist provocation. Their country is a scientific, technological and artistic powerhouse, in large measure because it is an open society. On the other side are a range of fanatical Muslim organisations that are totalitarian. Hamas holds Gaza’s population as a hostage in an iron grip and is intolerant of all “others” – Jews, homosexuals, socialists. How many Christians have remained in Gaza since the violent 2007 Hamas takeover?
The Palestinians have been treated badly, there is no doubt about that. Britain, America, fellow Arabs, Zionists – all are to blame. But so are they, having rejected two-state compromises offered in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008. They should have a state of their own, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. This is fair, this would constitute a modicum of justice. But this is not what Hamas wants. Like Isis in Iraq and Syria, like al Qaeda, the Shabab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, it seeks to destroy Western neighbours. And the Nick Cleggs of this world, who call on Britain to suspend arms sales to Israel, are their accomplices. It’s as if they really don’t understand the world they live in, like those liberals in Britain and France who called for disarmament and pro-German treaty revision in the Thirties. But the message is clear. The barbarians truly are at the gates.
Professor Morris is the author of 'One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict’
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