Israel and Palestine—two views - Israel and Palestine: Why they fight and Can They Stop? - Arafat: The Biography - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2004 by Charles Foster

Israel and Palestine: Why they fight and Can They Stop? Bernard Wasserstein. Profile Books. [pounds sterling]9.99. 224 pages. ISBN 1-86197-534-1. Arafat: The Biography. Tony Walker and Andrew Gowers. Virgin Books. [pounds sterling]25.00. 490 pages. ISBN 1-85227-924-9.

There are two views of Middle Eastern history. The first is the romantic, mystical one, which asserts that the ancient conflicts are as incomprehensible as the human heart, because they proceed directly from the human heart. The second is the reductionist one, which says that to dress history up in such human clothes is anthropomorphic nonsense. It thinks that history is woven from economic imperatives and cynical realpolitik. The battle between the views is analogous to the old battle between the 'Great Men make history' and the 'history makes Great Men' schools of historical dialectic.

Because historians are human beings, and most human beings are moved deeply by the Israel-Palestine conflict, the romantic school has recently been in the ascendant, at least in popular histories. Bernard Wasserstein is the high priest of the reductionists, and his book is a timely one. The world needs a reminder that international self-interest fuels the conflict, and that the region is not mysteriously immune from the forces which govern the rest of the world. In those observations lie at least the seeds of a solution.

Prof. Wasserstein has written a first rate text book of the economic and political mechanics of hate. All the formulae are here: Zionism is losing the demographic war with the Palestinians; there is striking economic apartheid in Israel; Israel is dangerously reliant on non-Jewish labour; Israel is drying up, and needs to go cap in hand to Turkey for water, and would like to be friendly enough with Syria and Lebanon to be watered by a reliable pipeline from the north; some sort of Israeli-Palestinian partition is inevitable, but draw the map how you will, the Palestinians will see the Israelis as a cancer in their national body, and vice versa; secular Zionism, which is capable of pragmatism, is giving ground to religious Zionism, which is not; secular Palestinian nationalism, which is capable of debate, is giving way to Islamic nationalism, which is not; poised on the borders of Israel are millions of Palestinian refugees, voiceless in the big negotiations, who clamour for return in increasingly Islamic language. Professor Wesserstein writes with tremendous clarity and strenuous dispassion. This is the best primer this reviewer knows of the grammar of the conflict.

But grammar alone has not made the songs of Palestinian external exile and internal repression, or the Israeli songs of exile while at home. For all those one needs a singer and an audience, and the electricity of a live performance often has little to do with the lyrics. One of the main singers has been Yasser Arafat. Prof. Wasserstein's 'grammar' is necessary, but alone it is seriously incomplete. It needs to be read along with Tony Walker's and Andrew Gowers' magnificent biography of Arafat.

Arafat has been remarkably successful in transforming himself into a totem. Everything about him is a political statement. The stubble is a parable of Palestinian homelessness; the keffiyeh is carefully folded to look like the map of Palestine; the pistol on the hip says that all Palestinians are soldiers. That success makes a book like this all the more important. Messrs. Walker and Gowers de-mythologize, stripping the totem, and thereby re-mythologize. Their sources are many and intimate and they unveil and Arafat who is far stranger than his self-drafted fiction. Here is the Arafat who lives on a cultural diet of comics, TV cartoons and occasional 'ping-pong', who rarely sleeps, whose great talent as a student activist was to be all things to all men, who believes his own rhetoric completely, and then forgets it honestly and utterly, who is a little boy, awed by the White House lawns, and an old man, scared of dying outside Jerusalem.

Although Arafat forgets, it is important for the world to remember. There is a lot to remember, and it is all here. Here is the man whose arrogant fedayeen, in Amman, killed and beheaded a Jordanian soldier and played football with his head. Here is the man who smiled when a Palestinian gunman shot the Jordanian Prime Minister and knelt down and lapped up his blood on the steps of the Cairo Sheraton. Here is the man who tried to topple the Hashemite regime in Jordan, the man who is probably the best tactician and the worst strategist in the world, the man who is hope to many and despair to more. Arafat, like all men, is half a creature of his circumstances, and half a creator of them. That is why Arafat is incomprehensible without Wasserstein, and Wasserstein's graphs mislead without Walker and Gowers.