Ignoring Middle East History Skews Jassat’s analysis
Over seventy years ago, the British philosopher of history, Herbert Butterfield, identified the pitfalls of what he termed ‘presentism’ when analyzing the past. ‘When we organize our general history with a reference to the present’, he warned, ‘we are producing what is really a giant optical illusion.’ Iqbal Jassat does just that (Apartheid Israel: J M Coetzee delivers devastating blow).
His article is built on comments made by JM Coetzee at the Annual Palestine Festival of Literature. Having read these (see Allison Deger, ‘South African Nobelist Coetzee on Israel and apartheid: ‘Draw your own conclusions’), it is not clear whether the acclaimed Nobel Laureate was commenting on occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank or on Israel within the green line. It is quite understandable that Coetzee was affronted by what he saw in the territories. But to apply his views to Israel proper is crude, wayward and ahistorical - built upon a single reading of the past.
Whatever Coetzee’s views are (and these are not clear to me) it is apparent that Jassat uses them to pursue his usual invective against the Jewish state. With mind boggling simplicity, rooted firmly in a colonial settler paradigm and devoid of even a shred of historical sensitivity and sense of dialectic, a hundred year-old conflict is framed within an apartheid framework, an approach largely jettisoned by serious scholars of the subject today. To bolster his arguments, contemporary observations are employed. If only the issue was so simple.
Historical problems evolve, with twists and turns, rooted in contingency and changing options. One cannot ignore the historic failure of Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wherein lie the origins of the Zionist enterprise. And, unless one appreciates this, a full understanding of the problem is precluded. To be sure, Jassat disregards Jewish history and memory.
After all, Europe is steeped in Jewish blood, as indeed is the experience of Jews in Muslim Asia and North Africa. Keeping the past in mind is not an excuse for letting Israel off the hook for errors and misdeeds; but it is an essential aspect when reflecting on the Israeli/Palestinian problem. He also conveniently ignores an historical process that provided at once glimmers of hope, the foreclosing of options, and mistakes on both sides. No attempt is made to empathize with difficult choices facing Jews in the mandate period. Importantly Zionist pioneers purchased (as opposed to conquered) land from Arabs, a fact even acknowledged by the post-Zionist scholar Ilan Pappe.
Jassat fails to appreciate that Jews found themselves between a rock and a hard place in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1937 they accepted the Peel Plan which recommended partition of
The Arabs did not, despite the plan giving Jews sovereignty only over areas in which they were a majority. An ‘international’ Jerusalem under the UN was proposed as well as a larger Palestine relative to anything discussed since. In effect, the envisaged Jewish state comprised less than 1 percent of the Arab lands originally under Turkish rule - the other 99 percent had been carved up by the imperial powers into Israel’s neighbours and those other countries comprising the Arab league.
Israel expanded her territory in 1948 following the invasion of the nascent Jewish state by five Arab armies. Subsequently she occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Gaza in the Six-Day War of 1967, brought on when Egypt’s Nasser and his allies revealed plans to destroy Israel. Israel ultimately gave up the Sinai in a peace deal with Egypt.
An overwhelming number of Israelis also accepted the Oslo peace process that collapsed in 2000, only to be followed by waves of suicide bombers targeting and killing dozens of Israeli civilians. In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Thereafter hundreds of rockets were fired from Gaza at the border town of Sderot in the wake of the election of Hamas to power in 2006. That conflict continues to fester, with two brutal conflicts.
Despite on-going wars and non-acceptance by most states in the region, Israel has managed to build a democracy that is no more ‘exclusive’ (as implied in Jassat’s use of Coetzee’s words) than most other states. The Israeli Declaration of Independence did not determine that Israel was to be a Jewish state, but rather that the Jewish State - created by the United Nations - was to be called Israel.
What is by-passed by critics is the ‘exclusive’ nature of Arab states. Should Jassat (and Coetzee) care to widen their lens, they will find that with the exception of Lebanon, all Arab countries declare Islam to be the state religion. And Syria, with its huge Kurdish population, is officially known as the ‘Syrian Arab Republic’ (at least what is left of it), while Algeria ignores its Berbers in calling itself ‘an Arab country’.
There are obvious flaws in
What about the headscarf issue in France and the official status of particular churches in Denmark, Norway, and Greece? The Catalans and Basques in
Flagrant cruelties in so many other parts of the world are invariably ignored by Israel haters. Israel alone is demonized. Despite genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it took fifty-two years for the contracting parties to the 1949 Geneva Convention to convene for the first time - and this was to deal with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
With good reason
Milton Shain is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at UCT. His most recent book 'A Perfect Storm. Antisemitism in South Africa 1930 – 1948' was published by Jonathan Ball in 2015.
