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.