-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=18144
An official history of Israel The Western media have universally welcomed Michael B. Oren’s “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East” as a masterpiece. John R. Bradley argues that it is in fact crude Zionist propaganda, which Oxford University Press should never have published. When I was an undergraduate I struck up a friendship with an American-Israeli who’d written asking if he could contribute articles to the London Quarterly, a cultural magazine I was editor of at the time. As well as subsequently publishing a number of his essays — on an emotional visit he’d made to Israel following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, for example, and the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said’s Reith lectures — I settled into a weekly lunch routine with him. I haven’t seen him for years, but I was recently reminded of Gur when reading the Israeli academic Michael B. Oren’s new book “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” In particular, I recalled Gur’s perspective — or rather, his lack thereof — on the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I was happy to publish Gur as a Jewish writer whose background was American-Israeli. What he had to say generally was intellectually and morally legitimate, and clever to boot. But the more I got to know him, and the more deeply we discussed Israel, the more I realized that, although generally a sensitive, intelligent and compassionate individual who could never be described as hawkish or hateful, he was simply incapable of criticizing the mythical Zionist version of Israel’s coming into existence in 1948. It was as though he became lost in a kind of ideological haze. Michael B. Oren’s “Six Days of War” has been massively reviewed and praised in the Western media and the author himself made an appearance on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel. While Oren acknowledged in another interview with The Atlantic Monthly how, as “a Zionist”, he might lack objectivity, he added that he nevertheless “set out to write a thoroughly honest and dispassionate book.” In fact, Oren is rather like my old friend Gur, and like almost all other committed Zionists, in that his love for Israel is unconditional, blind and absolute. From the opening pages of “Six Days of War”, it’s obvious that this is little more than thinly veiled Zionist propaganda. The kind of ideological haze I observed engulfing my old friend Gur, whenever the events surrounding Israel’s founding came up, similarly chokes Oren. If “Six Days of War” had been published in Israel, or had been marketed as a manifestly polemical undertaking by a commercial publisher elsewhere, none of this would be noteworthy. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their opinion, however extreme and misguided. However, Oren’s book appeared from Oxford University Press (OUP), the world’s most prestigious academic publisher whose charter states that every book it publishes must be ratified by academics at Oxford University itself. All of OUP’s titles undergo a vigorous editorial review at the submission stage, including being anonymously read by experts in the field whose comments have then to be taken into account by the author. The idea, when it comes to books such as “Six Days of War”, is that if it comes from OUP then readers and students can trust it as authoritative and exhaustive. “Six Days of War” is now likely to establish itself as a major set text for Western students taking courses on the Middle East, and for that reason its loudly trumpeted “objectivity” and “brilliance” need to be unmasked. For Oren’s is the kind of flawed, illogical history that even Israel’s handful of New Historians have in recent years openly called into question. In “Six Days of War”, the founding of Israel is seen as a straight-forward tale of justice, heroism and redemption in the shadow of the Holocaust. Oren’s opening chapter is entitled “The Context”, and it does indeed set the agenda for everything else that follows. It starts off by propagating the notion that the Jews enjoyed a miraculous initial victory over a massive, combined Arab army, all against “near- impossible odds.” It is now widely argued, however, that the “Arab Army” the Jews were heroically defeating in fact constituted only about 20,000 men, the vast majority of Arab soldiers having been kept at home in fear of domestic instability. The stronger side predictably won, and in terms of historic battles the Jews’ initial was no big deal. Consider also the highly selective history of Zionism pre-1948: “What began as a mere idea in the mid-nineteenth century had, by the beginning of the twentieth, motivated thousands of European and Middle Eastern Jews to leave their homes and settle in unthinkably distant Palestine. The secret of Zionism lay in its wedding of modern nationalist notions to the Jewish people’s mystical, millennial attachment to the Land of Israel.” Well, in the end it did; but Zionism’s founder had famously declared long before settling on Israel that this “mere idea” led to him pondering whether even Argentina would serve as a base to establish a Jewish state. The Biblical context was dragged in later, when the early Zionists realized “Israel” could serve as a Western colonialist outpost. The Biblical myth was then successfully confused with the terrible consequences for Jews of the Holocaust, just when the Zionists themselves — we should remember — were behaving like fully-trained Nazis. In a word, it was old-fashioned colonialism, not nationalism, that was the guiding principle of Zionism from its very beginnings. As Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, said in 1895, when speaking of the Arabs of Palestine: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Israel is a state that was born of terror. Not that you’d guess this from Oren’s account. He does admit that “up to a million Arabs” had to leave Palestine in 1948; but nowhere does he document the terrible brutality of Israel’s founders which led to that mass exodus. It’s all conveniently contextualized, or buried as part of the consequences of war. Actually, many if not most Arabs were forcibly driven off their historic land. Some 800,000 of the approximately 900,000 Palestinians who originally lived in the area that became Israel were forced to flee as a result of a systematic campaign of intimidation, massacres and internationally recognized ethnically-motivated mass expulsions. When the Jewish state was created, approximately 400 Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated by Jewish armed groups under the cover of the war, and were razed to the ground. Instead of these crucial details, what we get from Oren is an image of pastoral Zionist bliss, of pure and progressive civilization struggling to survive in the midst of the dark and hostile Orient: “Drawing on Western and East European models, the Jews of Palestine created new vehicles for Agrarian settlement..., a viable socialist economy with systems for national health, reforestation, and infrastructure development, a respectable university, and a symphony orchestra — and to defend them all, an underground citizens army...” Even if true, this is like saying “At least Mussolini made the buses run on time!” or “Hitler loved Wagner and promoted opera!” So what, any decent person would respond, if the cost was the persecution and ethnic cleansing of millions? It is by utilizing this kind of romantic nonsense that Zionists have since promoted the image of Israel as a little outpost of vulnerable civilization and democracy surrounded by a mass of Arab Jew-haters, forever at risk of being smashed into oblivion by the illogical and backward Arab mob. And on this count, Oren does not disappoint. Israel, he writes in language that observers of Israeli political rhetoric will find only too familiar, “had nowhere to fall back to but the sea”. The barbaric Arab society, meanwhile, “patriarchal, capped by totalitarian regimes, dwindling employment opportunities, low levels of health care were endemic to most of the Arab world... was hardly ripe for progress.” Oren’s intention, here as elsewhere, is clear: to show that Arabs hated Israel primarily because it represented a kind of “democratic, civilized ideal” that threatened the Arab world’s autocratic order. Arabs in fact hated, and still hate, Israel not because of anti- Semitism or because they can’t bring themselves to appreciate the virtues of democracy but because Israel has murdered their fellow Arabs in the tens of thousands and pillaged their villages and occupied their countries and later their Muslim and Christian holy sites. Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, is presented by Oren as a hero who despite everything “refused to despair”, and whose cunning and brilliance saved the new Israel against those barbaric, corrupt Arab aggressors. His passion for Ben-Gurion is equaled only by his apparent contempt for everything Gamal Abdul Nasser stood for. Everything bad Nasser did is thoroughly documented. Nothing bad the Israeli leaders did is documented. The following statement by Yitzhak Rabin on Ben-Gurion for example would have provided a bit of balance and useful context: “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’” Whenever Israel goes on the offensive in Oren’s account, it is always “in reprisal for guerrilla attacks”. And even then, when there is clearly documented evidence that war crimes were committed, he tries to excuse the parties involved by adding little disclaimers, even for the butcher Ariel Sharon: “Israeli commandos led by Major Ariel Sharon blew up dozens of houses, killing sixty-nine civilians — inadvertently, he claimed.” What should matter here to the “objective” historian is not what Sharon claimed happened, but what history says happened. Elsewhere, the fashionable word “terrorist” is repeatedly used, but exclusively to define actions by Palestinian-led resistance organizations. Then as now, no Israeli, it would appear, is ever capable of provoking a “terrorist” act, let alone engaging in one. Perhaps most damning is Oren’s treatment of the issue of colonialism. Almost needless to say, Soviet support for the Arab world in the context of the Cold War is well- documented. The confusion — or, more likely, deliberate obfuscation — arises over the question of why France, and then the United States, threw their support behind Israel. “Finally an alliance was formed (between Israel) and France,” writes Oren, “which was also at war with Arab nationalism — in Algeria — and which shared Israel’s socialist ideals.” Excuse me? The link between colonial France’s slaughter of one million innocent Algerians in a country it had no right to have occupied, and colonial Israel’s “war with Arab nationalism” in a country it too had no right to have occupied, and from which it had thrown almost a million Arabs, could hardly be said to have anything to do with “socialism”. To suggest otherwise, as Oren does, is to enter the realms of fantasy and idiocy uncharted even by academics of the ultra-right. However, Oren is thankfully nothing if not inconsistent when it comes to the little tricks he plays with history, and he later unwittingly undermines himself by revealing the true colonialist basis of the analogy: “Citing the Algerians’ recent victory over France — a victory that owed much to Nasser’s support — (the Syrians’) called for a ‘people’s war’ to destroy the Zionist plot.” Yes indeed. But why the mocking phrase “Zionist plot”? Maybe because to replace it with “the same kind of destructive and illegitimate colonial forces” might be to steer too dangerously near the truth. The United States’ support for Israel is a much simpler matter according to Oren. In 1964, Israel’s Prime Minister Levi Eshkol visited Johnson and told him: “We cannot survive if we experience again what happened to us under Hitler.” As a result, Johnson “gave Israel $52 million in civilian aid.” Now wasn’t that nice of the altruistic Mr. President, who of course had not a colonialist intention in his administration! Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Oren is well-trained in insidiously subverting the truth for ideological ends as former adviser to the Israeli delegation to the United Nations, an organization that has done its utmost over the past 50 years, at the behest of the United States, to ensure Israel gets away with its perpetual war crimes. The final nail in the coffin — or rather, two nails in the coffin — of “Six Days of War” as a serious academic undertaking comes in the form of “advance acclaim” on the back cover. One endorsement is from Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel and previously chief of staff of its terrorist outfit ironically called the Israeli Defense Forces, an extreme right- winger who as recently as 2000 likened the Palestinians to “crocodiles,” explaining: “The more you give them meat, the more they want.” Another quotation is from Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic, an ultra-right campaigning American political journal that has long been defined by its crude Zionist agenda. *** (John R. 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