More has been written about the politics of the
Middle East than one can read in a lifetime. One can therefore imagine the
difficulties of choosing the readings for a course on the topic that I will be
teaching this year at Trent University. It is a year-long course, and I divided
it into two broad sections: the Israeli-Arab conflict, and Islamist ideology.
For both, I assigned only books, as this would allow my students and I to delve
deep into the subjects. The first book we read, The Revolt, was written by the former Prime Minister of Israel,
Menachem Begin. He was a member of the Irgun, the terrorist organization which
infamously blew up the King David Hotel and that helped to expel the British, a
necessary condition for the foundation of the state of Israel. The book is
essentially an apologia on the foundation of the Jewish state, but there is
much more that makes it an entertaining read: it recounts Begin’s first-hand
experiences in the fight against the British with often macabre and gripping
scenes that attest to man’s capability to suffer and die for a cause greater than
himself, a sentiment that has largely been lost in the modern and secular West
and that is now associated mainly with jihadists and other unsavoury characters
who fill the headlines.
Those who closely follow the politics of the Middle
East are aware that the Left is generally critical of Israel and favourable to
the Arabs. Readers of The Revolt might therefore be surprised to learn
that when the state was founded, the roles were reversed: progressives cheered
for Israel in its fights against the enemies it is surrounded with. One of the more interesting parts of the text
is the analysis of the role in the USSR in saving Jews from the Nazis and in
founding the Israeli state. Begin himself is a Russian Jew, and the book starts
with his experiences in the Russian gulag, where he is interrogated on
suspicion of being a counter-revolutionary. Despite this experience, Begin has
a lot of nice things to say about Russia. He admires Russians’ tolerance for
suffering without which it would have been impossible to defeat the Nazis. He
is grateful for Russia’s support for Israel’s fight against the British, even
though the firsts’ motives were anything but altruistic: Britain was the symbol
of the international bourgeoisie, and removing its colonial possessions in the
Middle East constituted a victory for the broader struggle against capitalism.
Furthermore, Israel’s founders, including Begin, were secular socialists and
hence their ideology was closer to Russia’s than to the West’s, at least at the
time of the state’s founding. In light of this history, the turn-around in
global political alignments is remarkable: now, it is the Right which is mostly
supportive of Israel. I posed the question of why to my students, and the most
convincing answer is that the Left generally cheers for the underdog, and
Israel did indeed have that status in its fight against the mighty British
Empire and the surrounding Arabs. It is no coincidence that the Left took a
major turn in its views about the Jewish state after its victory in the war of
1967, which established its unmatched supremacy in the region despite the fact
that its Arab enemies vastly outnumber it, in terms of population.
The Revolt is not a scholarly account of the
foundation of Israel, and Begin admits as much in the book. There are therefore
no theoretical expositions of the conflict and no nuanced accounts of the
different perspectives of the main actors. It is rather a narrative rooted in
the collective experiences of a long oppressed people, with the scintillating
elements of a good story: good and evil, suffering and redemption, tragedy and
triumph. The first great evil, according to Begin, was the Roman conquest of
Israel and its expulsion of its Jewish inhabitants, which created a stateless diaspora
that wandered across the world for nearly 2000 years. Throughout this period
they were mostly defenceless against whichever country hosted them and could
not protect themselves against the anti-Jewish pogroms that periodically
happened. This culminated into the Holocaust, which killed almost half of world
Jewry. It was this event which helped to provide the impetus for the necessity
of the creation of Israel. The founding, then, was justified for two main
reasons: that Israel had rights to that territory going back thousands of
years, and that it needed a state to provide a secure homeland for Jews. This
is compelling stuff, until one recognizes that a lot happened in the nearly
2000 years since the Romans expelled the Jews: that land has been occupied by
many different empires, and each has claimed it, at one time or another, as
their possession. The conquest that is more important to current events is
Caliph Umar’s invasion in AD 637. After that, the Holy Land was a Muslim
possession, with the exception of the two century period when it was conquered
by the Crusaders. After the Muslim conquest, Jerusalem became a holy city for
Islam, a fact which finds its most concrete expression in the Al Aqsa Mosque
which sits atop of the Temple Mount. Muslim empires ruled the Holy Land until
World War One, after which it became a British possession.
The wishes and experiences of the local Arabs are
not given much attention in The Revolt, and this is perhaps one of the
greatest weaknesses of the book. Arabs are certainly not depicted in the same
light as the British, the latter of which are presented as the epitome of evil,
as extremely cynical in their administration of their rule in Palestine.
Despite this, Begin is very condescending to the Arabs, depicting them either
as an irrelevant sideshow or as pawns of the British. In fact reading the book
one gets the sense that the British are responsible for the Israeli-Arab
conflict: their policy of divide and rule, which formed such an effective
strategy in the administration of their colonies, helped to cement the
divisions that still characterize the conflict today. This implies that, but
for British cynicism, the Arabs would have accepted the establishment of the
Israel. This is questionable. That land was deemed to be part of Dar al Islam,
and Muslims did form a majority there before the large-scale Jewish immigration
after the foundation of the state. Jerusalem, too, was and is believed to be
one of Islam’s holy cities. It therefore stretches credulity to think that the
Arab-Israeli conflict can be blamed on the British. In fact one could argue that
the region was more peaceful under British hegemony, which used its iron fist
to keep the peace between conflicting peoples.
But this shortcoming is perhaps understandable given
that the book is written by a partisan and revolutionary, not a disinterested
scholar. Although this militated against any semblance of scholarly
impartiality, it also allowed for poetic passages that stir the soul and that
are never found in dry academic prose. A few examples will illustrate:
“Faith is perhaps stronger that reality; faith
itself creates reality.”
“The angel of forgetfulness is a blessed creature.
The touch of its wings goes far to heal our wounds. Our capacity to forget is
every bit as important as ur capacity to remember.”
“The atrophy of natural, deep human feelings is no
proof of a strong character. If such a thing as a ‘heart of steel’ exists or
evolves, it is acquired at a heavy cost in suffering.”
These penetrating
insights into the soul of man emerged from Begin’s unique experiences of
suffering as a Russian prisoner, as a member of a group which suffered mass
genocide, and as an actor in the fight against the British Empire; for Begin,
this immense suffering was redeemed through the foundation of Israel. The
Revolt is not only an entertaining read, but also essential reading to
anyone who wants to understand the mindset of the founders of the Jewish state.