Middle East - Anthony Ham [34]
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One of Israel’s best contemporary novels, Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain, is about the early Zionists. It’s a magic-realist novel set in an early kibbutz and is loosely based on the experience of Shalev’s own family.
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It wasn’t always thus. What follows is our summary of the main bodies of opinion about Israeli independence among Israelis and Palestinians as they stood in 1948.
The Israeli View
For many Israelis in 1948, the founding of the state of Israel represented a homecoming for a persecuted people who had spent almost 2000 years in exile. Coming so soon as it did after the horrors of the Holocaust, in which more than six million Jews were killed, Israel, a state of their own, was the least the world could do after perpetrating the Holocaust or letting it happen. The Holocaust was the culmination of decades, perhaps even centuries of racism in European countries. In short, the Jewish people had ample reason to believe that their fate should never again be placed in the hands of others.
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Israel was the last country in the region to achieve independence, following in the wake of Egypt (1922), Iraq (1932), Lebanon (1941), Jordan and Syria (both 1946).
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Although the Jews were offered a range of alternative sites for their state, it could never be anywhere but on the southeastern shores of the Mediterranean. By founding a Jewish state in Palestine, the Jews were returning to a land rich in biblical reference points and promises – one of the most enduring foundations of Judaism is that God promised this land to the Jews. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of this land for a people whose traditions and sacred places all lay in Palestine, especially Jerusalem. This may have been the driving force for many observant religious Jews. But the dream of a return had deeper cultural roots, maintained down through the generations during an often difficult exile and shared by many secular Jews. This latter branch of Jewish society hoped to create an enlightened utopia, an egalitarian society in which a strong and just Israel finally took its rightful place among the modern company of nations. It was, according to the popular Zionist song that would become Israel’s national anthem, ‘the hope of 2000 years’.
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ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE: A PRIMER
In addition to the books listed below, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, edited by Eugene L Rogan and Avi Shlaim, brings together (on paper, if not in agreement) both Israeli and Palestinian scholars.
History by Israelis
▪ 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris – Israel’s most prominent historian has drawn criticism from both sides.
▪ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, by Benny Morris – an attempt to explain why 700,000 Palestinians ended up in exile.
▪ The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East, by Chaim Herzog and Shlomo Gazit –
although it covers more recent events, Herzog takes a long look at 1948.
▪ The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe – a controversial text that challenges many of Israel’s founding myths.
History by Palestinians
▪ The Question of Palestine, by Edward W Said – an eloquent, passionate, but fair-minded study of the issue by the late, leading Palestinian intellectual.
▪ Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948, by Nur Masalha – revealing insights from Zionist archives.
▪ The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle