Robin Yassin-Kassab on The Israel-Palestine conflict

Tell me about the Ilan Pappe book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Pappe has written a great historical work on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947/8 and he shows that it was organised and planned, called Plan D, or plan Dalit, and he has exploded the myths that were current until his work.

What myths?

Well, for example, that the Arab leaders told the Palestinians to leave, or that the Palestinians were Bedouin people who didn’t really live there anyway, and he showed that they were ordinary people in brick and mortar homes who were intentionally forced out. This is very important because the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is the original sin of Zionism and the root of the current problem.

Pappe is part of a group called the New Historians or Revisionist Historians who have undermined the traditional narrative of the birth of the Jewish state. Benny Morris (Professor of Middle Eastern History at Ben-Gurion University) is another, and he says yes they were forced out but it was a good thing and let’s do it again. But Pappe is an anti-Zionist Jew, the son of Holocaust survivors, and a proponent of the one-state solution. He’s not suggesting getting rid of the Jews who are already there. This is an accessible book – a good work of history by someone who is unashamedly politically committed.

Now The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand.

It’s been a bestseller in Israel, and that’s very interesting because it undermines the blood and soil aspects of Zionism and also the Christian Zionism that is so rife in the United States.

What is Christian Zionism?

It’s a right-wing protestant thing that is actually quite anti-Semitic because it says that Israel is a land promised to the Jews and they must kick out all the Arabs and we will support them in that. The movement goes to apocalyptic extremes, saying the key sign of the ‘end times’ will be that the Jews return to Palestine and then Christ will come again and smite them all.

Anti-everyone really.

Well, not anti-Christian because the right kind of Christians will all be orgasmed away to paradise. But obviously it’s against the Palestinian Christians.

But the important thing about The Invention of the Jewish People is that it undermines all that by using science to show that the Jews are not, in fact, a race – that is a 19th-century idea that comes out of the same environment as fascism. Sand shows that there was never a mass exodus of Jews from Palestine – there was the decapitation of the political class but no exodus. The direct descendents of the Jews of Judea are, in fact, the Palestinians. Ashkenazi Jews are converts from the Khazar Kingdom in Russia (Arthur Koestler wrote a book about this) and the Sephardis are converted North African Berbers and the Yemeni Jews are, obviously, Yemeni. Sand again comes to the conclusion that Israel should be a democratic secular state and not a Jewish state. The ethnic underpinning of Zionism is false – the Jews are not a race. I mean, nobody is a race, of course. I think it was Benedict Anderson [the American Professor of International Affairs and specialist in nationalism] who said that we are all imagined communities. Of course, there are other arguments for Zionism that are much more sensible – I don’t happen to agree with them but they are more sensible than saying that today’s Jews are God’s chosen people who must return to the land God promised them. Those people are the Palestinians if they’re anyone and not this Jewish State made up of Russians, Moroccans and Yemenis.

Is Shlomo Sand Israeli?

Yes, he is, and, despite the ideological blindness that afflicts so many Israelis, the book has been a bestseller in Israel.

Now The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Mearsheimer and Walt are scholars of great repute, not conspiracy theorists or racists. In this book they argue that the remarkable American financial, military and political support for Israel is motivated primarily by the workings of a powerful right-wing Zionist lobby. This acts against American interests and even against Israel’s long-term security. Mearsheimer and Walt examine who makes up the lobby and how it works.

Controversially, the book shows that the Israel lobby played a key role in agitating for the disastrous Iraq war – the lobby wasn’t the only factor, but was certainly more important than oil. The authors have been misrepresented and predictably accused of anti-Semitism, but many American Jews have expressed appreciation for their work. The lobby often pretends to speak for all Jews, but on Iraq, for instance, a majority of US Jews opposed the war from the start. Mearsheimer and Walt have opened up the debate. Brave souls like investigative journalist Phil Weiss continue the work.

Let’s move on to Ali Abunimah’s book and proposed solution to the conflict.