Israelis and Palestinians — one land, two peoples. - Holy Land, Unholy War: Israelis and Palestinians - book review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2002 by Charles Foster

Holy Land, Unholy War: Israelis and Palestinians. Anton La Guardia. John Murray. [pounds sterling]22.50. 380 pages. ISBN 0-7195-5601-5.

Anyone who claims to be objective about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a fool or a terrorist or both. Anton La Guardia, the former Daily Telegraph Middle East correspondent, is neither. He makes no claims. He knows that the story of Israel is so extraordinary that the highest drama is achieved by telling it simply: it is diminished by comment. But it is difficult to tell such a story simply. It is much easier to give in to the temptation to weave personal counterpoint around the lines uttered by the land. La Guardia is disciplined. He resists the temptation and the result is one of the finest, most complete books about this heartbreak homeland full of the homeless.

It is a long story: a story written in totemic hieroglyphs with some of the kabbalistic power of the tetragrammaton. It is about wanderers from the upper Euphrates who, driven by an improbable promise, made a contract with God and found their way to a bit of good land astride the road to Egypt. The family split. The child of the promise fathered a dynasty which was to love the land and to believe that only in that land could it worship God properly. The child of a slave girl, Ishmael, had a family too, which for a while was quieter; but it was prophesied that his family would be thorns in the side of the other, and the prophecy was right.

Expelled from the land and reviled as the murderers of Jesus, the Jews never forgot Zion. With flames licking round their doors in the shtetls, they raised their glasses and swore: 'Next year in Jerusalem'. They got a foothold in the land, and then the great destruction in Europe came -- a destruction so great that it convinced the world that the Jews had to have a home. They got a home, but it was somebody else's home already. Then began the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was a conflict fought with many weapons: American warplanes and Molotov cocktails; hyperbolic speeches and Ottoman title deeds; lies and half-truths; threats and tactical withdrawals; songs and stones. Above all, though, each side squabbled over who had suffered more. Israel's answer was the one which had convinced the United Nations: it threw down the Holocaust card and folded its arms as if that was the end of the matter. Palestinian politicians, though, responded skilfully with the daily holocaust of dignity, the politically essentia l squalor of the camps and the colour photographs of dead children. Suffering gives title, thought the Palestinians: it must work for us as it worked for Israel. Gradually, though, it seemed that things might not be that simple. With that realisation came despair, and with despair came Islam. With Islam came Sharon, and the vicious circle became tighter and more vicious.

It is the tragedy of modern Europe that it thinks it can understand itself without its past, and even more of a tragedy that it increasingly can. It is the tragedy of Israel-Palestine that it is bound to its past as if to a spiked wheel. That means that anyone handling the modern conflict has to be adept with the old. Mr La Guardia is: his is a lightly worn, humane scholarship. He knows the relevant languages too. He is fluent in paradox and extended metaphor. Here he is on Israel's schizophrenia: '[Israel] inhabits parallel worlds, like the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem of the Jewish sages. It is both victim and aggressor, underdog and bully, deeply insecure and supremely arrogant, a democracy and an abuser of human rights. The Israelis can one moment argue that Arab countries present a mortal threat to Israel, and the next threaten to blow up their capitals into dust'. Israel is, in short, much more like a person than most nations. That means that its best commentators will be soldier poets, and individual s will be its best metaphors and well Mr La Guardia knows it. For him, the famous black eye patched face of Moshe Dayan is in some ways the face of Israel: 'One eye filled with vision and the other hopelessly blind'. He quotes van Creveld with approval: 'The minister of defence [Ariel Sharon] appeared to personify the new IDF; perhaps no longer lean, it was definitely mean'.

Irony is the agenda for most dealings between Israelis and Palestinians. La Guardia has a keen ear for it. He watched an Israeli soldier in Gaza casually ducking stones thrown by children returning from school. 'I don't want [the soldiers] to leave', solemnly explained one child: 'Who will we throw stones at when they're gone?' He paints menace well, too -- that heady, exotic menace which invades Israeli sleep. Two examples will do. First: Describing the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon he notes that 'The Palestinians watched, and learned the lesson that Israel cannot stand casualties'. Second: On many a wall in a Palestinian home is an embroidered map of Palestine. We have all seen them. But La Guardia bothers to translate the inscription: 'For those who were martyred for the land of sad oranges... and to those who have not been martyred yet'.