Among the themes that top the list of the coming year’s publications dealing
with the Middle East are Iranian history, Lebanon’s vibrancy, Saudi Arabia and
stories of American combat soldiers. But there is one that, unsurprisingly,
towers above all the rest: Israel and the Palestinians. Of the 700 books that
will be published in English on the Middle East in the next year, 107 (15
percent) of them will be devoted to the conflict or aspects of it. This is based
on a careful examination of forthcoming publications at Amazon.com, although
there are probably other obscure publications lurking out there.
That
there is so much focus on the Holy Land is a fact of life. But the trouble with
the forthcoming publications is that the narrative of Israel and its history is
being communicated to the English-speaking world almost entirely by those who
dislike it. Lone defenders like Alan Dershowitz and reasoned supporters like
Martin van Creveld and Martin Gilbert are among the authors of next year’s
harvest (Dershowitz is the author of a novel about Israel,
Trials of Zion, not a
nonfiction account).
Holland-born Van Creveld is a military historian who
wrote a well received history of the IDF and now argues in
The Land of Blood and
Honey that Israel is the “greatest success story in the entire
20th century.”
London-born Gilbert, a biographer of Winston Churchill, is publishing a
book on
Jews in Muslim lands which is described as a “moving account of mutual
tolerance
between Muslims and Jews... a template for the future.” Italian
journalist
Giulio Meotti also writes on
the
Untold Stories of Israel’s Victims of
Terrorism.
For the Israel bashers that dominate publications on the
region, Gaza is a favorite topic.
Nine books are in the pipeline for that
small sliver of land. James Patras, a retired professor from Binghamton
University and author of numerous books on the Israel “lobby,” has just
published
War Crimes in Gaza
and
the Zionist Fifth Column in
America.
In Gaza:
Beneath the Bombs, an International Solidarity Movement volunteer
and another
radical left colleague write about Gazans facing “oppression not only
with
courage but with humor.”
Haaretz fixture Gideon Levy is
publishing
The
Punishment of Gaza which examines “the brutality at the heart of
Israel’s
occupation of Palestine.” Norwegian Aid Committee members Mads Gilbert
and Erik
Fosse bring us
Eyes in Gaza
with a cover festooned with the beaming eyes of a
baby and the claim that the two were “the only Western eyewitnesses in
Gaza” for
14 days during the winter 2008- 2009 war. Vittorio Arrigoni, an ISM
volunteer in
Gaza, writes
Gaza: Stay Human
with his fellow travelers Daniela Filippin and
Haifa-born Ilan Pappe. The title “stay human” was taken from peace
protests in
Italy; it is not clear if it also implies that Israelis or Palestinian
risk not
being human. Joe Sacco, a veteran Israel hater, is publishing a comic
book about
Gaza called
Footnotes in Gaza,
and Noam Chomsky, Frank Barat and the prolific
Pappe edited
Gaza in Crisis:
Reflections on Israel’s War Against the
Palestinians.
Four books being published will be adorned with the
unoriginal “separation fence” on the cover. To be fair one is merely the
paperback version of Columbia University Prof. Rashid Khalidi’s
The Iron Cage:
The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Pappe is
publishing two
books using the fence as a motif. The first,
Peoples Apart: Israel, South Africa
and the Apartheid Question, claims that “for the first time one
of Israel’s most
celebrated academics, Ilan Pappe, has gathered together perspectives” on
whether
Israel is an apartheid state. The conclusion won’t be surprising, Pappe
already
claimed Israel committed ethnic cleansing in 1948. One wonders what
original
allegation will come next? Pappe and Jamil Hilal, a sociologist at Bir
Zeit
University, are also publishing
Across
the Wall: Narratives of
Israeli-Palestinian History.
Jeff Halper, an American-born activist in
the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, uses a photo of the wall
on the
cover of the second edition of his
An
Israeli in Palestine: Resisting
Dispossession, Redeeming Israel. The mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini,
and the Nazis
get some attention. Klaus Gensicke, a German scholar, covers the topic
in his
The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis,
and three authors collaborate on a volume
examining
Nazi Palestine: The Plans
for the Extermination of the Jews of
Palestine. Pappe (again) examines
the Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty:
The Husaynis. He follows in the footsteps of his fellow Israeli
historian living
in the UK, Avi Shlaim, author of
Lion
of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein, in
casting Arab politicians as remarkable figures.
The two-state solution
gets short shrift in the coming year with Hasan Afif el-Hasan’s
Is the Two-State
Solution Already Dead? and Virginia Tilley’s paperback edition of
The One State
Solution: A Breakthrough.
THE PALESTINIANS get doting coverage by
academics and authors who genuinely appreciate them. Hillel Cohen, an
excellent
Israeli writer, publishes on
The Rise
and Fall of Arab Jerusalem. Amal Jamal
examines
Arab Minority Nationalism in
Israel, and Rochelle Davis, assistant
professor of anthropology at Georgetown University, researches
Palestinian
Village Histories.
Azzam Tamimi, a London-based scholar, offers a
“sympathetic analysis” in
Hamas: A
History from Within. Basam Ra’ad attempts to
reconstruct an indigenous history of Palestine in his
Hidden Histories. Nicolas
Rowe, an Australian expert on dance who lives in Ramallah, gives us a
Cultural
History of Dance among the Palestinians.
Books on the Jews in Israel
hardly compare in their sympathy. In his “personal search for the soul
of a
nation,” NBC Tel Aviv bureau chief Martin Fletcher has written
Walking Israel,
but he incongruously uses a photo of an Arab village, probably Taiba,
and
minaret on the cover. One wonders if he would have put a church on the
cover of
a book about Egypt? Tudor Parfitt and Emanuela Trevis Semi edit
The Jews of
Ethiopia: The Birth of an Elite, which includes essays calling
the mass deaths
of Ethiopian Jews in Sudan a “myth” and claims Europeans may have
created an
Ethiopian Jewish identity. Thus the Palestinians get a genuine narrative
from
academics, but even the Ethiopian Jews cannot mourn their dead without
being
denigrated.
The history of Israel has been left almost entirely to those
who hate it, while the Palestinians have conquered both the academy and
the
intellectual world with stories of their suffering, narratives and
history. Even
Hamas and Haj Amin, both of whom borrowed from Nazi rhetoric, are
considered
sympathetic.
Anyone visiting Israel’s leading bookstore, Steimatzky, will
find the Israel section crowded with Shlomo Sand’s
The Invention of the Jewish
People and Yitzhak Laor’s
The
Myths of Liberal Zionism. They will be hard
pressed to find anything positive about the country.
It is a commentary
not only on the publishing world, both academic and popular, but also on
Israel’s cultural elites, who show little interest in writing positive
things
about their country. It is a remarkable testament to the moral
bankruptcy of the
West, which finds so little positive in Israel but can be open to the
most
conservative chauvinisms of Palestine. Unless we struggle to change the
narrative, our history will soon be left to our critics.
The writer is a
PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem
Institute for
Market Studies.