A cheap shot?

Despite numerous interviews the author conducted with Israelis, it seems he came away with, at best, a second- or third-hand account of the country’s history of fighting terrorism.

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Ariel Sharon at Western wall 521 (photo credit: Flash90/MCT)
Ariel Sharon at Western wall 521
(photo credit: Flash90/MCT)
‘When [former IDF chief of staff Moshe] Dayan visited the newly captured Western Wall in Jerusalem on June 8, 1967, while the war was still going on, he immediately ordered the Israeli flag removed from the Temple Mount....
Dayan knew that for the Arabs the flag was a ‘detested symbol.’” In repeating this and other overly repeated quotes about Dayan, author Daniel Byman reveals the lack of original research that is, unfortunately, typical throughout this book.
One would like to know, if Dayan wanted to make the “occupation invisible” by removing these flags, how it was possible that soon afterward, the entire Arab neighborhood in front of the Western Wall was bulldozed. Byman doesn’t explain this fact, because his actual knowledge of the subject matter he has chosen to discuss is taken, almost wholesale, from research that others have conducted.
A High Price purports to be an examination of the history of Israel’s war against terrorism. Byman, a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, attempts to wrestle with the country’s terror dilemma, a “nowin situation... [where] there is no clear-cut solution.” He sets out to understand how Israel combined brilliant, mythmaking strikes against terrorists with a seeming inability to win the war on terror. “Israel’s successes and failures can serve as a blueprint for all countries fighting terrorism,” he writes.
Trying to understand the problems the country confronted and what lessons others might learn is a noble goal; unfortunately the succeeding chapters never live up to the introduction.
Byman’s first three chapters examine the period from 1920 through 1993. They are at best a cursory examination of these 73 important years, and the author provides so little analysis and insight into the facets of the country’s fight against terrorism that one is left with the impression that this era is not taken seriously. He argues that “Israeli retaliation placed Arab governments in a bind from which they never escaped,” and then explains that Arab governments had to support terrorism to placate their people, and in so doing faced Israeli retaliation.
But this leaves out a third option: not supporting terrorism.
The book never provides any insight into what a better policy might have been for the Israelis, either. For instance, the author argues that as “[terrorist] violence struck at the heart of Israeli morale, Israeli leaders found it difficult to avoid retaliation.”
This is a simplistic view of what terrorism does, and sheds no light on what Israel might have done to react to all the murders these terrorists committed. Even those who argue that fighting terror is primarily a law-and-order problem recognize that it is not because of “morale” that one fights terror, just as one doesn’t arrest bank robbers merely to keep faith in the banking system.
The weakness with which this book covers many of the crucial years in which Israel cut its teeth on fighting terror is a result of the sources employed. In describing the events of the Black September civil war between the Palestinians and Jordanians in 1971, the author relies on a Haaretz article from 2009.
This results in a glaring error when Byman claims that “it looked as if Syria might intervene on behalf of the [Palestinians]” – suggesting that perhaps it did not intervene in the end.
In fact, Syria invaded Jordan during the war, losing a few dozen tanks in the process.
The main contribution of this text is the several hundred pages it devotes to the period between 1993 and 2009. Here again, Byman accepts the standard wisdom that “[prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin’s assassination would set back the peace process irretrievably... [he] has rightly gone down in history as a martyr for peace.” A self-fulfilling prophecy sets in, because Rabin’s death apparently did doom peace; it turns out that PLO leader Yasser Arafat “began to lose faith in the peace process after Rabin’s assassination. In personal interviews many Palestinians date their lack of faith in the peace process to the assassination and the Netanyahu victory.”
A High Price also perpetuates received wisdom about the outbreak of the second intifada. “Although [former prime minister Ariel] Sharon’s visit sparked the fire, the conflagration can be explained only by looking at the broader political environment... a closer look suggests that Arafat did not plan the Second Intifada’s outbreak,” he writes.
While the book does provide some insights and details here about how the IDF operated – the details about Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 are especially interesting – Byman still relies on simplistic platitudes: “The infrastructure of terrorism is human; to destroy it you have to find and arrest people or, if you can’t, kill them.” He repeats the overused cliché that “checkpoints, detentions and the occupation itself... are also a constant insult to Palestinians’ dignity.”
Byman’s tome spans a huge number of topics, including targeted killing, Jewish terrorism, the security barrier, and “what Israel can teach the world and what Israel should learn.” Despite numerous interviews the author conducted with Israelis, it seems he came away with, at best, a secondor third-hand account of the country’s history of fighting terrorism. In terms of understanding the Palestinians, he merely parrots what others have already written.
One pays a high price in terms of time and money to read this book, which deals with a fascinating subject to which the author has simply not done justice.