The President That Didn’t

A youthful promise: Senator Obama

Former US Presidents resemble zombies: physically, they seem alive; but for all practical purposes, they are as good as dead.  That’s why any attempt to sum up their term in office inevitably sounds like an obituary.

About nine years ago, a relatively young, unknown US senator was bursting into the limelight of world’s attention, as presidential candidate.  Although few would admit it, it was – initially at least –the colour of his skin and his unusual name that made him a favourite, not just among African Americans, but also among liberals of every race and nationality, those eagerly seeking oppressed minorities in need of saving.

But Barack Obama was not just another African American candidate.  He was the perfect one: the exact opposite not just of George W. Bush, but also of Jesse Jackson.  He won over large parts of the American mainstream vote, because he was calm and not angry; because his demeanour was cerebral, rather than emotional; because he spoke on behalf of all Americans, not in the name of African Americans.  More than his policies, his charisma, his personal charm and his obvious intelligence carried him to fair and square victory not in one, but in two presidential elections.

Luck was on his side, too: he presided over no major national calamity – no 9/11, no Hurricane Katrina; by the time he took the helm, the worst of the credit crunch was over – and that financial disaster certainly couldn’t be attributed to him.

President Obama's second term job approval percentages

He seemed to hold (no pun intended!) all the trump cards.  And yet… and yet Barack Obama spent the bulk of his second presidential term with negative approval rates.  Why?

To understand the reason, one has to go back in time, to 22 January 2009.  In his second day in office, newly-anointed US President Barack Obama issued his first Executive Order: he directed that the Guantánamo Bay prison camp be closed within a year.

Yes, within a year.  But, eight years later, ‘Gitmo’ is still there – and around five dozen prisoners still linger in geographical and legal limbo.  Obama’s supporters will say that his deep, sincere desire to close down Guantánamo has been not just opposed, but sabotaged at every step.  And perhaps it was.  But that’s no excuse for a man in his position: after all, it was another US President (Truman) who displayed on his desk a sign with the wistful words ‘The buck stops here!’

More than anything else, it is the Guantánamo debacle that characterises Obama’s presidency.  And, more than anything else, that combination of good intentions and little to show for them explains the popular verdict of under-performance.  Because, in the eyes of the most pragmatic nation on earth, he seemed to want a lot, but do very little.  Sure, he was opposed; no doubt, the US political system – designed by America’s Founding Fathers above all to prevent tyranny – strongly curtails presidential power.  And yet, ‘The buck stops here!’  Navigating that difficult political system (not by issuing executive orders, but by cajoling and threatening, by wheeling and dealing) is – or should be – one of the President’s most essential skills.

Nobody gains respect by failing.  And when one is President of the United States of America and fails to implement what is – when all is said and done – an internal American decision, how can that President gain enough respect, how can he gather sufficient clout to implement foreign policy?  To carry with him, by dangling hopes and fears, other leaders – with smaller economic resources, but perhaps larger egos and stronger determination?

On the international scene, where America is either a leader or a scapegoat, Barack Obama just didn’t.

He was ideologically favourable to the Arab Spring and wanted to help – but didn’t; he wanted to save the Libyans – but didn’t: that failed state is no longer a country; nor is Syria – another place where Obama didn’t; Egypt’s anti-Islamist regime now draws succour from the Saudi theocracy, not from the US democracy, whose President just didn’t.

For the first time in a long while, Russia felt its heavy fists free to punch – not just in Ukraine, but in the Middle East.  Secure in the knowledge that the President That Didn’t – wouldn’t.

In 2012, the Obama Administration announced – with quite a bit of fanfare – a dramatic change of foreign policy focus, a ‘strategic pivot to Asia’.  Can someone tell me – without hours of intricate research and scalp scratching – what are the top three moves United States did as part of that new strategy?

That new US strategy was supposed – as everybody understood – to reassert and defend America’s interests in the face of China, with its newly found economic might, political weight and augmented military capability.  I won’t even discuss whether the ‘pivot’ was a sensible decision.  Wisely or not, the US Administration had decided to ‘pivot’.  Only… it didn’t.  Last time I looked, China was still building up its military and civilian presence in disputed South China territories.  Beijing has brushed aside with contempt a UN tribunal’s ruling, which rejected the Chinese territorial claims.  The United States did… exactly nothing.  ‘Pivot’ – my foot!

Not only ‘the enemies’ were contemptuous, however.  Even America’s closest allies were left unimpressed.  In October 2013 (i.e., in the midst of the American ‘pivot’), then British Chancellor George Osborne made a widely publicised visit to China, in search of tighter trade links.  Oblivious of the ‘special relationship’ between the United Kingdom and the (‘pivoting’) United States, Mr. Osborne declared (in a public speech and without even blushing) that the UK and China had "much in common".  That overture was followed less than a year later by the visit to the UK of China’s Prime Minister.  China’s President was given a red carpet reception when he visited the UK in 2015 – and a very thick carpet it was, too!

Israel is another ‘special relationship’ ally.  Soon after being sworn in for his first presidential term, Obama publicly pointed at Israel’s West Bank settlements as the main obstacle to the ‘two state solution’.  Eight years and about 200,000 ‘settlers’ later, Secretary of State Kerry tells us that... they still are.  Little has changed – if one ignores the difference between Obama’s cold, measured delivery and Kerry’s strident ‘gewalt!’

Now, there is much to be said – and much has already been said – on whether ‘the settlements’ are indeed the problem, or whether ‘two states’ is really the solution.  But that’s not the point.  The point is: if Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, believes that they are and that it is; if, moreover, the issue is so hugely important to him as to qualify for the very last gesture of his presidency, then how come he didn’t manage to do a thing about it?  In eight years of being the uncontested leader of the most powerful nation on earth?  Sure, sure, there are mitigating factors: Netanyahu is obstinate… or perhaps the Palestinians are vengeful and intractable…  Whatever: ‘The buck stops here!’  The bottom line is: the President didn’t.

I’ve no idea if Trump will be a better, or a worse President.  Who knows?  I claim no clairvoyance towards the future.  But I can analyse the past and one thing is clear: 2017 finds America with colder friends and bolder enemies than it had in 2009.  As for Barack Obama, he is about to enter history as The President That Didn’t.

A Tale of Two Agreements: what do Greece and Iran have in common?

Two important agreements have been concluded recently, almost at the same time: one dealt with Greece and its economy; the other – with Iran and its nuclear programme.  The former was said to remove a threat to the financial health of the Eurozone; the latter is purported to remove a danger to the security of the entire world.

The Supreme Leader smiles with satisfaction...

There are both similarities and differences between the two ‘deals’.  In both cases, negotiations have been long and difficult – though in the case of Iran brinkmanship was taken to an entirely new level: overtly or covertly, various wheeling and dealing has been going on for 12 years, until just 2-3 months separated the mullahs’ regime from its first nuclear weapon.  Both with Greece and with Iran, extreme economic pressures ultimately made the agreement possible.  Both countries were about to reach the end of the rope from a financial point of view – Greece through years of mismanagement and economic profligacy, Iran through the piling up of international sanctions.

A broken Greek Prime Minister on national
television: “I fully assume responsibility
for mistakes and oversights, and for signing
a text that I do not believe in, but that I am
obliged to implement... The hard truth is
this one-way street for Greece was imposed
on us...”

But a humbled Greek government was ultimately brought to its knees and – in return for a measure of financial relief – was forced to accept incredibly harsh terms negating its core ideological basis; in contrast, the mullahs’ regime will be granted full relief from nuclear-related sanctions, along with consent to continue its nuclear programme, although banned by six UN Security Council resolutions.  The democratically-elected Greek government has been forced to admit, in front of their own people, that all they could achieve was a “bad deal”, preferable only to an even-worse alternative; conversely, Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei could smilingly thank his negotiating team for its great achievement.  The Greek population – which only a few days ago voted to reject the terms – gloomily received the news of their country’s capitulation to European pressure; whether spontaneously or at the behest of the regime, Iranians celebrated in the streets.  Democratic Greece has been forced to accept blatant, colossal violations of national sovereignty – in practice relinquishing control over its own economic policy; the rogue ‘Islamic Republic’ has won recognition of its ‘sovereign right’ to enrich uranium under its own control, upon its own territory.

Barely a day after the signing of the Greek ‘bailout’ deal, none other than the International Monetary Fund (the ultimate financial experts) cried ‘the Emperor is naked’: in a publicly issued report, they basically conclude that the ‘deal’ has zero chances of being executed as agreed.  Similarly, nobody but a handful of starry-eyed naïves truly believes that the ‘Iran nuclear deal’ will ever be implemented as agreed.  In fact, not even the deal’s most enthusiastic supporters seem to entertain such illusions.  Writing about a month ago in the Time Magazine, one such supporter (a chap called Ian Bremmer) admited that

“The history of Iran’s nuclear program says it will cheat, and inspectors won’t catch every violation. In fact, Tehran may already have started, reportedly growing a nuclear stockpile it had promised to freeze.”

Still, Mr. Bremmer advocates the deal, on the basis that

“Even if Iran one day builds a nuclear weapon, it’s unlikely to use it…”

The rest of us, who are rather less cavalier and not endowed with Mr. Bremmer’s enviable clairvoyance, can only guess how “unlikely” that possibility really is; we can try to figure out what degree of ‘likelihood’ (that some jihadi finger will pull the nuclear trigger and obliterate our families) we are happy to tolerate.

You may wonder why anyone would conclude agreements that have – from the word ‘go’ – zero chances of being implemented.  And why was the mullahs’ regime (a rogue theocracy sponsoring global terrorism and regional sedition) treated so differently from democratic, tame Greece?

Some Western politicians (especially the self-appointed ‘progressives’ among them) appear to believe that non-Western or non-white people (especially if they are Muslims) must always be treated with kid gloves; that they have a God-given right to misbehave and that their misbehaviour must be treated with a degree of tolerance – like that of children.  Feel free to attribute that attitude to post-colonial guilt, to moral relativism, to some form of ‘Stockholm syndrome’ or to sheer stupidity; I think it stems from deeply entrenched (albeit carefully – perhaps too carefully – concealed) racism.

It’s called reverse racism.  Rather than viewing people as complete equals in rights and responsibilities, irrespective of faith or the colour of their skin, reverse racists tend to infantilise Muslims.  The latter are seen as having rights – even special rights, like children or disabled people; but, again like children, they are not expected to manifest complete responsibility for their actions.  In effect, reverse racists subliminally place Muslims (and less frequently other non-Western people) under some form of mental tutelage.

Reverse racist attitudes are manifest not just in the über-tolerant treatment of Iran versus the harsh handling of Greece.  They are visible everywhere: when ‘the government’ (i.e. a ‘paternal figure’) is expected to prevent young Muslims from being radicalised – rather than their own families and communities; when older men are allowed to take advantage of young girls simply because the men are Muslims and the girls white; when indoctrination and extremist propaganda in schools and mosques are seen as cultural peculiarity, rather than criminal activity…

And here is another, perhaps less obvious example of reverse racism: President Obama’s famous Cairo speech.  Made at the beginning of his first presidential term, the speech is full of nice words.  So nice, in fact, that they often stray far, far away from the truth:

“I am honoured to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar [a famous school of Sunni Islamic doctrine] has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress.”

“Harmony”? “progress”??  “advancement”???  Oh, pleeease!  There was, there is very little “harmony” in Egypt, a country ruled at the time – and now – by a ruthless dictator who imprisoned opponents and turned Al Azhar into just another propaganda tool; there was even less “progress” in a country where poverty was – and is – rife, where homosexuality is not even tolerated, let alone accepted, where one in every three women can't read and write.  Mr. Obama knew all this, just like every Egyptian knows it.  Yet he chose to ‘beautify’ the truth, rather than spell it out in its candid nakedness.  Some will say that he was just being courteous; but where does ‘courtesy’ end, at which point does it turn into brazen lie?  Why do tyrants deserve courteous lies more than their hapless subjects deserve the courtesy of being told the truth??  Would Mr. Obama have used such language, had he spoken to a Western audience?

The Cairo speech was made in the capital of a failed country – one that cannot feed its people, let alone develop and fulfil their natural abilities; yet one word could not be heard among the more than 6,000 uttered by the President: reform.

Yet Mr. Obama knows how to advocate reform.  Hear the tone of another speech – one made less than a year later, not at Cairo University, but at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.  The topic was healthcare reform:

“… every single President has said we need to fix this system.  It’s a debate that’s not only about the cost of health care […].  It’s a debate about the character of our country – about whether we can still meet the challenges of our time; whether we still have the guts and the courage to give every citizen, not just some, the chance to reach their dreams.  […]  George Mason, the time for reform is right now.  Not a year from now, not five years from now, not 10 years from now, not 20 years from now -- it’s now.  We have had a year of hard debate.  Every proposal has been put on the table.  Every argument has been made…”

Question: when did the President sound like speaking to children who need to be placated and cajoled – and when did he seem to address mature, responsible human beings, who need to make crucial decisions about their future?

But let us go back to the Cairo speech:

“I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap and share common principles – principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings…”

Reading these exhortations about Islam and “Muslims around the world”, one may think that this was the Pope speaking, or perhaps a Chief Rabbi.  Yet Mr. Obama is neither; nor was he speaking in the name of Christianity.  So why did the leader of a nation (the United States of America) purport to speak not to the host nation, but to the followers of a religion??  Simply: Mr. Obama was trying to manifest ‘empathy’ with the concept of ‘Muslim nation’ (ummah).  But why?  That concept is one promoted not necessarily by Muslims, but by Islamists.  Surely Mr. Obama does not believe that followers of Islam (whether in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, Europe or the Americas, whether speaking Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Turkish or English) belong to one nation and should therefore aspire to reconstitute the Islamic Caliphate.  No, he was just cajoling, ‘making nice’ to his audience, just like one tends to do with children.

I don’t pretend to know how “Muslims around the world” feel, but I suspect that, like everybody else, they feel in various ways – as individuals rather than collective; and I know that, were I a Muslim, I would feel deeply offended by such patronising, paternalistic and ultimately racist attitude.  Perhaps that is why Mr. Obama’s speech, replete with such over-schmaltzed attempts at ‘endearment’, was ultimately received with coldness, as just another expression of Western hypocrisy.  Perhaps it would have been better if he spoke and acted towards Muslims with the same unadulterated conviction, with the same honest bluntness that he uses towards Western audiences.

Folks, there is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about reverse racism.  It does not compensate for past wrongs, it perpetuates them in the present and exacerbates them in the future.  The key word in ‘reverse racism’ is ‘racism’ is ‘racism’ is ‘racism’.

A tale of two systems: general elections in UK and Israel

A few months ago, I was invited to make a presentation on some ‘hot’ political topic in the West Midlands, in front of an audience made up of local Labour Party activists.  During the Q & A session that followed, I happened to mention the concept of ‘democracy’.  One of the participants intervened: “The question is”, he pompously intoned, gazing down at me along his nose, “what is democracy, actually?  We cannot impose our Western views on other people.  What we see as democracy, other nations may see as something else – and the other way around”.

Whether born of sheer ignorance or moral relativism, such thinking (or lack thereof) is not uncommon among activists, journalists, politicians and even professional diplomats.

Take, for instance, the opinion of Andrew Green, a former British Ambassador who represented his country in Syria and Saudi Arabia.  In a Telegraph article entitled ‘Why Western democracy can never work in the Middle East’, Mr. Green states:

“Democracy is emphatically not the solution for extremely complex societies and Western meddling only makes matters immeasurably worse. The fundamental reason for our failure is that democracy, as we understand it, simply doesn’t work in Middle Eastern countries where family, tribe, sect and personal friendships trump the apparatus of the state. These are certainly not societies governed by the rule of law. On the contrary, they are better described as ‘favour for favour’ societies.”

To paraphrase Mr. Green, I would suggest that “The fundamental reason for our failure is the stupidity of our diplomats”.  To even use the term ‘Western democracy’ denotes ignorance; the rest of Mr. Green’s peroration is suffused with the falsely-tolerant but actually supremacist idea that cultural issues are either immutable or taboo.  Let me suggest to Mr. Green that the reason why in some countries “family, tribe, sect and personal friendships trump the apparatus of the state” is that that “apparatus” represents an artificial state, one that is not based on any true form of identity, such as national or religious identity.  Such artificial ‘states’ have been created by Mr. Green’s ‘imperial’ predecessors and are being ruled (‘oppressed’ may be a better description) by local despots with the ‘benevolent’ complicity of Mr. Green’s colleagues and bosses.

There is no such thing as ‘Western democracy’.  There is liberal democracy – a political system that may have originated in the West (although, unlike democracy, ‘West’ is a relative term), but that is equally suitable to nations vastly dissimilar in terms of society and culture.  Liberal democracy works in Asian Japan just as well as in the United States of America.  It works in European France and Middle Eastern Israel.  Germany’s Western European culture did not stop it from becoming a Nazi state in the 1930s; North and South Korea are home to the same Asian nation, yet one is a liberal democracy – the other an autocratic inferno; China may still be described as a “favour for favour society”, but liberal democracy rules culturally akin Taiwan.

Inane journalists often reduce ‘liberal democracy’ to the much-much narrower concept of ‘free elections’.  The BBC, for instance, informs its audience (‘misinforms’ would be a better description) that

“Mohammed Morsi was Egypt's first democratically elected president…”

Needless to say, while Egypt may have experienced one round of (almost) free elections, Morsi could not have been ‘democratically elected’, because the country does not have the basic infrastructure of a democracy: freedom of press, freedom of speech, expression and dissent, a healthy public debate, etc.

Had the West Midlands Labour Party activist been forced to live for a few months under a dictatorial regime, he would have developed a better understanding of what democracy actually is.  Had BBC journalists been forced out of their five-star hotels and forced to live like most Egyptians, they would have understood that there is nothing ‘democratic’ in that country.

But while politicians, diplomats and journalists wallow in intellectual paucity and moral relativism, the good news is that liberal democracy survives and flourishes.  Because, while people on the street may have difficulty in defining it in academic terms, they understand and appreciate its blessings; honest, down-to-earth street smarts easily beat vacuous Etonian and Oxbridgean arrogance.

It is heartening to see, therefore, that within the space of just a couple of months, truly democratic elections have taken place in two liberal democracies, on two different continents: Israel and the United Kingdom.  And it is not just that elections have taken place; in true democratic fashion, they have taken place after intense – sometimes to the point of stridency – public debate.  And in both countries – again in true democratic fashion – the losers have neither declared a coup, nor have they been imprisoned by the winners; rather, they have more-or-less graciously admitted defeat, while vowing to continue – as democratic opposition – to provide checks and balances on the winners’ power.

Israel and the UK have very different electoral systems: the United Kingdom is divided in electoral wards (constituencies) – each electing a Member of Parliament from among several candidates.  The winner is the recipient of most votes, irrespective of whether s/he achieved an absolute majority (the ‘first past the post’ system).  The Israeli system is a purely proportional one: it views the entire country (Israel is almost exactly the size of Wales) as a single constituency, whose inhabitants vote for one of several political parties.  The number of Members of Parliament elected from each party is in direct proportion to the number of votes received (i.e. a party that received 10% of the votes will have 10% of the seats in Parliament).  Each system has advantages and disadvantages; but whatever the technicalities, both give suitable expression to the collective will of the people.

In both countries, that collective will has this time favoured the incumbents.  In both countries, the winners belong to what I’d call the Sane Right, as opposed to the Sane Left who came out as the main losers.  In both Israel and the UK the media and pollsters (who, in both countries, typically lean left) allowed wishful thinking to taint their professional judgment – and as a result issued erroneous predictions.  The difference between the two electoral systems produced a governing party in the UK, but a coalition government in Israel.  Crucially, however, in both countries democratic rule will continue unabated.

Not everybody accepted the electoral verdict, of course.  In the UK, ‘protesters’ belonging to the extreme-left Socialist Workers Party ‘laid siege on Downing Street’ and clashed with the police, intent on ridding the country of the ‘F*****g Tory scum’.  In Israel, a host of ‘NGOs’ is in continuous ‘protest’ against the country’s democratically expressed will.  Like the British ones, most Israeli ‘protesters’ identify with what I call ‘Red Mad’: the extreme-left communist/anarchist/’just-gimme-a-cause’-ist fringe of the society.  In both countries, the ‘Red Mad’ hope is that ideology will trump democracy; having failed at persuasion, these people attempt coercion.  But that’s where the similarity stops: lame as they may be, the British ‘protesters’ are at least an internal phenomenon, rather than a foreign intervention; far-left extremists are not funded by Israel, nor supported by the United States; Israeli media shows little interest in their ideologically-skewed utterings.  Not so with the Israeli ‘protesters’: these ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’ (Foreign-Sponsored Subversion Agencies or FSSA would be a better descriptor) are typically funded by foreign governments, either directly or through other NGOs; and they are the ‘darlings’ of mainstream media, which showers them with attention massively disproportionate to their weight within the Israeli public opinion.

Unwittingly, undemocratically and unbeknownst to most British taxpayers who foot the bill (but under the advice of Mr. Green’s ilk of Middle East ‘experts’), the United Kingdom is, sadly, among the countries fomenting sedition in a fellow liberal democracy.  In that respect, it is not just the Israeli democracy that is undermined, but also the British one.  After all, democracy implies transparency and majority rule; but in allowing part of its foreign policy to be underhandedly hijacked by a militant minority, the United Kingdom deviates from both those principles.

In a future article, we will analyse the issue in detail.  Watch this space!

The Audacity of Hoax: the real story behind the ‘Iran nuclear deal’

Have you by any chance read the framework agreement recently signed by Iran and six world powers?  No?  Of course you didn't – no  agreement was signed.  True, after missing the original deadline, the negotiators did show up with exhausted-but-triumphant facial expressions, slapping each other on the back like NBA players that just scored a slam dunk.  But there was no slam dunk at all: the negotiations had only produced an agreement… to agree.

Years and a small fortune – nay, make that a laaarge fortune to you and me – have been spent; ministers have neglected their other duties, to pursue all-important nuclear negotiations; and all they have to show for all that is... a verbal agreement???  One that the parties already ‘remember’ in at least three different, conflicting ways?  Now, think hard: when was the last time a grave international dispute was resolved through a verbal agreement?  International treaties are long, carefully worded legal documents, signed with ceremony by leaders and ratified by parliaments.  A verbal agreement?  Seriously???

Folks, we are being taken for a ride; they’re playing us for fools, with ‘fact-sheets’ meant only to hide the ‘agreement’s’ blatant non-existence; its being but a figment of deceitful minds.  In reality, after months and years of negotiations – there is no agreement; nothing beyond a loose, vague, reversible, oral ‘understanding’ on some bare-bones ‘principles’.  That’s a truth politicians thought best to keep from us, ordinary Joes.  What a brazen hoax!  What incredible chutzpah!  How they mock our honesty, our genuine trust!

And it’s not just sordid politicians, these mollusks who make a living (and a good one, too!) from falsehood and deceit; it’s also regimented ‘journalists’, the politicians’ intellectual prostitutes; those swiftly mobilised to prop up the fraud.  Take, for instance, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein: he has already produced at least two 'articles' – two shameless pieces of Soviet-style propaganda – praising the verbal ‘framework’ (which he dubs, of course, ‘the agreement’ or ‘the deal’) as the best thing since sliced bread.  Just in case someone should doubt his ‘expertise’ in Middle Eastern affairs, Klein starts by brandishing his ‘Jewish’ credentials, informing readers that he’s just celebrated Passover Seder with his friend Ramin

"an Iranian leprechaun, if such a thing is possible – born a Muslim but converted to Judaism…"

Needless to say, the personal opinion of this starry-eyed ‘Iranian leprechaun’ (who, we are informed, “does favor regime change, but through peaceful means”) is harnessed to serve Klein’s ‘argument’ – or rather is employed in-lieu of an argument.  After all, as a mercenary pen-wielder, Klein’s ‘conclusions’ are pre-determined by ideological fixations.  So why bother to perform research or interview some genuine authority?  Much easier to pen an article based on casual conversations with friends over chicken soup and matzo balls!

Joe Klein, the 'resident Jew' in charge of propaganda

Despite his a priori enthusiasm for ‘the deal’, Klein does mention in passing a certain Mohammad Reza Naqdi; who, as the negotiators were still backslapping, declared that for the Islamic Republic of Iran “erasing Israel off the map” is “non-negotiable”.  Naqdi is neither a leprechaun nor one of Klein’s bohemian friends; he’s a much more prosaic (but much, much, much more influential) General and senior commander in the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard – a vital power base of the ayatollahs’ regime.  But don’t expect Klein to assign any importance at all to Naqdi’s genocidal threat.  In fact, the journo only mentioned Naqdi so he could take another swipe at Benjamin Netanyahu; no doubt, because the latter chose to react to the Iranian general’s spittle – and not by pretending it’s rain.  Of course, Netanyahu isn't necessarily right; the point is, however, that he has the right: his own family is on the line, within striking distance of Revolutionary Guard’s ballistic (and potentially nuclear) missiles.  If it’s Klein who got it wrong, the only personal pain he’s likely to feel is that caused by his own haemorrhoids, gingerly seated in a soft armchair in Midtown Manhattan.

So what’s gonna happen now?  Well, not much: they will continue to negotiate ‘the details’ of an as-yet non-existent agreement.  The new deadline is June 30.  But don’t worry – it will be extended, of course.  After all, the old deadline (March 31, the ‘deadline’ for the ‘framework’ concocted on April 2!) was itself an extension of the extension…  Eventually, some sort of agreement may emerge; or the whole thing might just fizzle out, as the world’s attention turns to some other crisis.  Ukraine, perhaps; or Yemen; or South China Sea…

In truth, it makes no difference if an agreement is signed or not; it’s all the same if you judge it to be a good deal or a bad one; it does not matter whether, like Klein, you’re stupid enough to trust the ayatollahs’ regime to abide by any agreement.  In general, it makes absolutely no difference what you or I think; or what Klein thinks, or what Barack-effing-Obama thinks.  What really matters – the only thing that matters, folks – is what people in the Middle East think.  Not all people, of course, just those few people in power.  And we know what they think: not one of them trusts the ayatollahs; not one of them puts his faith in the likes of Obama, John Kerry and François Hollande.  And why would they?  Aren't these just foolish Westerners, weaklings who want to ‘lead from behind’?  Hasn't their ilk already allowed North Korea to get The Bomb?

Says Prince Turki Al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s main foreign policy spokesman:

"I've always said whatever comes out of these talks, we will want the same.  So if Iran has the ability to enrich uranium to whatever level, it's not just Saudi Arabia that's going to ask for that.  The whole world will be an open door to go that route without any inhibition, and that's my main objection to this..."

Obama re-assuring the (now dead and buried)
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

The Saudi nuclear programme will of course be entirely peaceful.  Just like Iran (world’s fourth-largest reserves of crude oil) Saudi Arabia (world’s second largest) simply wants to produce a bit of atomic energy.  Which is why in March, just as the negotiators were hammering that Klein-acclaimed Iranian ‘framework’, the Saudis were quietly signing an agreement (a written agreement!) to purchase two South Korean nuclear reactors.  In total, the oil-drenched desert kingdom plans to build no less than 16 nuclear reactors.  All of them utterly peaceful, of course!  Egypt’s military rulers want an equally peaceful nuclear programme; which is why, in February, Egypt’s General-turned-President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi met Russia’s President-turned-Prime Minister-turned-President Vladimir Putin.  The two triumphantly announced an agreement to build a nuclear reactor in Egypt.  Doubtless, a few other Middle Eastern kings, sheikhs and presidents for life will follow the lead, using their oil wealth to buy themselves a bit of nuclear oomph.

Another good friend: former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak

As for the rest of us, one day we will wake up to a Middle East (yes, the Middle East of sectarian beheadings and suicide bombings!) able to wage nuclear jihad.  A prospect that should send some mighty shivers down Western leaders’ spines.  If, that is, they were leaders; or had spines.

Revising ‘revisionist history’

Freedom of information is one of the most fundamental human rights.  But so is the right to live in security – and the two rights need to be balanced and reconciled.  With that in mind, UK law statutes include the so-called ’30-year rule’, which compels Her Majesty’s Government to review and declassify secret documents upon the passing of three decades.

Amazingly (given the difference in the security situation between the two countries), Israel has the same rule.  Which – let us remark in passing – has led certain researchers to claim that Israel emulated the UK in this respect.  Avi Shlaim, for instance, writes that

“Israel adopted the British rule for the review and declassification of foreign policy documents.” [‘The Iron Wall’, Penguin Books 2000, Preface page xvi.  ISBN 13:978-0-140-28870-4]. 

Ilan Pappé makes a similar claim in ‘The Israel/Palestine Question’ [Routledge 1999, p. 153. ISBN 0415169488].

The only problem with this theory is that the relevant Israeli law (The Archives Law) has been promulgated in 1955, i.e. prior to the British law (The Public Records Act, issued in 1958).  Which may lead some historians to conclude that it’s the UK that adopted the Israeli rule; assuming, that is, that the two practices are related in the first place, and that ‘some historians’ are more interested in chronology than in ideology.  Two big assumptions, admittedly!

Be that as it may, the point is that Israel’s foreign policy documents (including minutes of cabinet meetings, communications among governmental and parliamentary officials, etc. etc.) are declassified and made available to researchers upon the passing of 30 years.  These documents complement others that are already available, including even the private diaries of former government officials (such as that of the country’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion).  Needless to say, such unusual wealth of easily-accessible information is a true bonanza for researchers and history scholars.  And indeed, through the years many have availed themselves of that brilliant research opportunity.

Among those who took advantage of it was a group of Israeli historians that came to be collectively known as ‘new’ or ‘revisionist historians’.  It is a very eclectic group, comprising staunch Zionists like Benny Morris, alongside anti-Israel zealots like Ilan Pappé and ‘post-Zionists’ like Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev.  But whatever the differences, they also have quite a few things in common.  True to the ‘revisionist’ moniker, the ‘new historians’ all see as their mission to disprove what they regard as ‘the official Israeli version’ of history, to ‘debunk its myths’.  Don’t get me wrong: anything and everything can and should be challenged; and if found to be wrong, ‘official versions’ should be disproved.  But for the ‘revisionist historians’, all too often the diagnosis of ‘wrong’ seems to be a starting point, rather than a conclusion.  Time and again, their research appears to be less about extracting knowledge from facts and more about finding facts that fit the preconceived theory.

This should not come as a surprise: the ‘new historians’ tend to approach ‘history’ from a position of left-wing or extreme left-wing political activism (in Morris’s case, that initial leftism seems to have evaporated in time, leaving behind what one might describe as ideological confusion – if, that is, one is kindly predisposed).

Ilan Pappé is the most candid in that respect; in an interview he gave to Le Soir (Brussels, Nov. 29, 1999) he confessed:

“I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings […] Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts.  Who knows what facts are?  We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.”

For those unaware of Mr. Pappé’s ideology, it may be interesting to note here that the mentioned interview took place barely six months after his attempt (and failure) to get elected to Israel’s Parliament on the Communist Party list.

Avi Shlaim is slightly more subtle with regard to his ideological motivations.  Nevertheless, in the preface to his book ‘The Iron Wall’, he declares:

“Like the British historian E.H.Carr, I believe that the main task of the historian is not to record but to evaluate”.

A political activist first and foremost, Edward Hallett Carr is remembered among other things for his ardent advocacy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany and later for his enthusiastic admiration for Soviet Union and Maoist China; Carr’s main claim to the title of ‘historian’ stems from authoring a 14-volume book about Soviet Union’s first 12 years of existence…  Needless to add, he was also an acerbic critic of Israel.

Whether motivated by political ideology or not, the ‘revisionist’ stance has served the ‘new historians’ exceedingly well.  A relatively humble lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, Ilan Pappé’s obvious scholarship (or was it his obvious anti-Israel fervour?) has propelled him to the position of Professor at the University of Exeter and Director of that university's European Centre for Palestine Studies.  A Reader of Politics at the University of Reading, Avi Shlaim’s ‘revisionist’ activity got him headhunted by Oxford, where he was soon created an Emeritus Professor of International Relations.  And that’s in addition to other ‘signs of appreciation’.  In the words of Shlaim himself:

“My greatest debt is to the British Academy for awarding me a two-year research readership in 1995-1997 and for giving me a research grant.  The readership freed me from my teaching and administrative duties at the University of Oxford, while the grant enabled me to travel, to visit archives, and to employ research assistants.  Without the generous support of the British Academy, this book [‘The Iron Wall’] could not have been written.”

Pappé and Shlaim are feted darlings in anti-Israel circles – and not just in the academic ones.  Both are frequently invited to speak at ‘Israel/Palestine debates’.

In this context, one must feel a bit of compassion for Benny Morris: from a strictly chronological and scholarly point of view, his work may claim priority over those of both Pappé and Shlaim; but his refusal to abjure the ‘mortal sin’ of Zionism made him ineligible for exalted positions such as professorship at the likes of Exeter or Oxford, let alone grants from the British Academy.  He therefore has to contend with the decidedly more humble station of Professor of History at Israel’s University of the Negev.  Prof. Morris’s 2010 invitation to speak at Cambridge was withdrawn when the University’s Islamic Society agitated against inviting such an ‘Islamophobic hate speaker’.  Even as an ‘Islamophobic hate speaker’, however, Morris must be an abject failure; perhaps that is why the British media shows so little interest in his contributions.  Meanwhile, The Independent recently gave Ilan Pappé ample space to denounce Israel as a “society inspired by visions of ethnic purity and supremacy”; while in The Guardian, Shlaim engaged in a moving defence of Hamas, which he declared “indeed guilty of terrorism but […] also a legitimate political actor”.

But let us concern ourselves less with who the ‘revisionist historians’ are and more with what they do – with their contribution (or lack thereof) to the science of history.  For this case study, I have chosen Avi Shlaim’s book ‘The Iron Wall’, authored in 1999 and published by Penguin as paperback in 2000.  The book is in many ways typical for the work of ‘revisionist historians’, although it is not the most outrageous example of that work.

In its author’s own words, the book aims to

“offer a revisionist interpretation of Israel’s policy towards the Arab world during the fifty years following the achievement of statehood”.

But then the author also writes:

“I should state at the outset that this is not a comprehensive history of the Arab-Israeli conflict but a study of Israel’s policy towards the Arab world.  Consequently, the emphasis throughout is on Israel – on Israeli perceptions, Israeli attitudes, Israeli thinking, and Israeli behaviour in the conflict.”

Such limitation is ‘standard policy’ for ‘revisionist historians’.  Shlaim attempts to ‘sell’ it as legitimate: the overall subject (‘the Arab-Israeli conflict’) is vast; hence, the prudent researcher defines a workable scope for himself.  This allows him to disregard anything that falls outside the scope – without the risk of being accused of sloppiness or intellectual dishonesty; this is standard academic practice, isn’t it?  Well, it is of course – provided however that the selected scope makes sense, that it enables insightful analysis aimed at producing better understanding of the subject.  Had Shlaim defined his scope as ‘Israeli-Arab politics between 1948 and 1998’ (or even ‘between 1948 and 1950’), that would have been the case.  But how can “Israel’s policy towards the Arab world” be understood, without looking at Arab world’s policy towards Israel??  That makes just as much sense as providing a commentary on a football match, by focusing exclusively on the actions of one team, while completely disregarding those of the other.  Isn’t it rather obvious that “Israeli perceptions, Israeli attitudes, Israeli thinking, and Israeli behaviour” were – at least to some extent – triggered, generated or at the very least influenced by Arab perceptions, Arab attitudes, Arab thinking, and Arab behaviour?  How can one be cogently and insightfully studied without researching the other??  Why, then, the ‘standard policy’ of ‘limiting the scope’ to Israel alone?

Partially, the answer is to be found in a type of pseudo-leftist (and actually crypto-racist) ideology which views ‘native’ populations (read: non-white people) as forever passive victims of ‘white colonialists’.  In the Arab-Israeli context, a branch of this ideology tends to see the Arab-Israeli conflict as a kind of argument between wilful adults (Israelis) and innocent children (Arabs); the former are held to behave responsibly – the latter cannot be expected to.  Therefore, the results of the argument, as well as ending it, are Israel’s exclusive responsibility.  This infantilisation of Arabs allows misbehaviour from their part to be disregarded or excused; not so misbehaviour by Israelis who, as ‘adults in the relationship’, are held to a much more demanding standard.

The ideological reason is reinforced, however, by a more practical one: simply put, research of “Israel’s policy” is easy.  It involves little more than reading documents freely offered by the State Archive, in a language familiar to the researcher.  And, if one is a ‘good revisionist’ such as Shlaim, this can even be undertaken with the help of research assistants generously funded by British Academy grants.  Researching the Arab side is, of course, much more difficult.  As Prof. Shlaim explains in the Preface to his ‘Iron Wall’:

“Arab governments only open their records for research, if they open them at all, in a haphazard and arbitrary manner.”

They also tend to open such records only to ‘researchers’ who do (or rather write) what they are told.

Not that this makes research of ‘Arab policies, Arab perceptions, Arab attitudes, Arab thinking, and Arab behaviour’ impossible; it only makes it more difficult.  Indeed, in the bibliography section of books written by other researchers (see for instance ‘Palestine Betrayed’ by Ephraim Karsh, or ‘The Shaping of the Modern Middle East’ by Bernard Lewis), one finds tens if not hundreds of Arab sources – from correspondence among Arab leaders to speeches, memoirs, official documents, transcripts of radio transmissions, etc. etc.  But then, both Lewis and Karsh took the trouble to actually learn Arabic and search extensively for Arab sources; perhaps Avi Shlaim’s British Academy grant did not really cover such strenuous efforts…  As it is, Shlaim’s Arab sources are notable only by their embarrassing absence.  The book’s list of interviewees includes exactly four Arabs: three former Egyptian politicians and the late King of Jordan.  The Egyptians were interviewed in 1981 and 1982; as for King Hussein, Shlaim met him in 1996.

Speaking about sources, there is another fact worth mentioning: given the ’30-year rule’ and since the main research for the book was completed, as we have seen, between 1994 and 1997, Shlaim only had access to official Israeli documents (his only serious primary source) up to the mid-1960s.  But Shlaim’s book does not end with the mid-1960s; it continues to ‘analyse’” Israeli policies, Israeli perceptions, Israeli attitudes, Israeli thinking, and Israeli behaviour” up to and including 1999...  What’s more, the transition between the two parts of the book (pre- and post-mid-1960s) is seamless and opaque to the unsuspecting reader.  There is no signpost saying ’Reader Beware!  Up to this point, what I wrote is based on documents; from here on, it will be based on… well, on my personal opinions!’

But, beyond all these rather fundamental flaws, what is it that ‘The Iron Wall’ says?  The ‘myth’ that this revisionist book sets out to debunk is that of Israel’s desire for peace.  To use Shlaim’s own words:

“Why was there no political settlement between Israel and its neighbours after the guns fell silent [i.e. after the armistice agreements of 1949]?  Why did peace prove to be so elusive? […] The traditional Zionist answer to this question can be summed up in two words: Arab intransigence.”

Shlaim’s answer , however, is that it was actually Israeli intransigence – an intransigence that continues to this day (or at least to 1999, when the book was completed).  Needless to say, from a commercial – if not scholarly – point of view, such claim makes the book much more interesting.  As some journalists have long ago realised, sensationalism ‘sells’.  And if it sells newspapers, why not books of ‘history’?  After all, ‘Dog Bites Man’ is such a banal story!  Whether true or not, ‘Man Bites Dog’ is interesting news.

But on what evidence is that new theory based?  Says Shlaim:

“Evidence for the revisionist interpretation comes mainly from Israeli sources.  The files from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, for example, burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 on. The two key issues in dispute were refugees and borders.”

The statement above – which all but summarises the book’s ‘message’ – is the historiographical equivalent of a mine field: for the unsuspecting reader almost every word conceals treacherous pitfalls.  To uncover the deceit, suffice to ‘dissect’ several of Shlaim’s ‘euphemisms’.

The “from September 1948 on” bit is crucial in this context: it ‘glosses over’ certain facts that, rather dishonestly, Shlaim chooses not to share with the readers.  Why “from September 1948 on”?  The UN Partition Resolution had been adopted by the General Assembly in November 1947.  It proposed the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into two independent states: a Jewish State and an Arab State.  At that point, there were no refugees.  If the Arab states wanted peace, all they needed to do was accept that Resolution.  If dissatisfied with the proposed borders, they could even have accepted the principle of partition, subject to negotiations on the actual borders.  There were sufficient precedents for such an approach, not in the least the Jewish Agency’s response to the 1937 Peel partition proposal.

But that is not what the Arab states did.  They – every single member of the Arab League – rejected the principle of partition lock, stock and barrel; and vowed to oppose it, including by force.  This is so well-documented that no one – not even Avi Shlaim – bothers to deny it; he simply chooses ‘not to focus’ on that issue.

What’s more, the Arab states’ rejection of UN’s Partition Resolution in November 1947 still did not close the door to negotiations and peaceful resolution, had those states desired such outcome.  The concerted Arab attack on the Jewish State came only on May 15, 1948.  Even then it was not too late.  There were additional attempts at mediation, but they were all rejected by the Arab League states.  In July 1948, they even rejected Count Bernadotte’s proposal, which abandoned the concept of partition in favour of a ‘union’, with the ‘Jewish member’ of that union awarded only limited sovereignty in a tiny portion of the territory.

What, then, caused the Arab position to change so radically – if indeed it did – between July and September 1948?  Shlaim's failure to analyse the reasons for such bizarre volte-face is a strange omission for someone who believes that “the main task of the historian is not to record but to evaluate”!  Let us, then, try to fill that gap:

The full-fledged Arab military onslaught on Israel had begun on May 15, 1948.  The Arab armies were (with the exception of the Arab Legion – the British-equipped and officered Transjordanian army) rather poorly armed, trained and led; but they were still regular armies – with artillery, tanks and airplanes.  Facing them was, initially at least, a clandestine militia (the Haganah) equipped for and primarily experienced in civil war skirmishes.  As a consequence, in that first phase of their invasion (May-June 1948), the Arab armies registered important successes.  Advancing in two directions, the Egyptian army managed to reach positions 20 miles south of Tel Aviv, as well as on the outskirts of Jerusalem.  By making contact with the Arab Legion, the Egyptians had succeeded in cutting the Jewish-controlled territory in two.  For its part, the Arab Legion reached the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, interdicting Jewish traffic and thus blockading Jerusalem’s Jewish neighbourhoods.  In the North, Syrian, Iraqi and Lebanese forces had occupied strategic positions, threatening to cut off Eastern Galilee.  But the IDF was gaining strength: weapons were being procured, additional recruits were being trained and in July 1948, when the Egyptian Army violated the truce, it encountered a much stronger adversary.  In just ten days of fighting in July, IDF successfully checked the Arab offensive and pushed the enemy forces back.  After ten days, a new ceasefire imposed by the UN stopped the IDF offensive, leaving the Arab forces still in control of large swathes of territory.  But by September, their situation was considerably weakened.  With long lines of supply and few reserves, the Arab armies were over-stretched and increasingly vulnerable to concentrated attacks by a better supplied and more mobile IDF.  The Arab forces needed time to consolidate their gains and re-supply.

Was the sudden Arab interest in sending “peace feelers” to Israel “from September 1948 on” just a ploy to gain time?  Ben Gurion certainly thought so – and his assessment looks more than reasonable, given the sequence of events.

Had Shlaim’s intention been truth-seeking, rather than revising “the traditional Zionist answer”, he might have wished to “evaluate” how genuine the “Arab peace feelers” really were.  That would have required, however, more than reading “files from the Israeli Foreign Ministry”; it would have necessitated researching ‘Arab policies, Arab perceptions, Arab attitudes, Arab thinking, and Arab behaviour’ – something that, as we have seen, Shlaim is neither equipped for, nor interested in.  In fact, throughout the book Shlaim simply assumes – either with no evidence or against the evidence – any secret diplomatic contact coming from the Arab side to be a genuine peace offer, while viewing Israeli leaders’ public peace proposals to be nothing but ‘double-talk’.

This is the place to note that, when Shlaim writes “Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate” he actually refers to meetings conducted and/or messages conveyed under heavy veil of secrecy.  But why were those “Arab peace feelers” so secret?  Why do we have to learn about them, 30 years down the line, from declassified Israeli files – rather than from contemporaneous newspapers, or from the speeches of Arab leaders?  Simply because for Arab politicians and diplomats any contact with Israelis was anathema – something that could at most be done under the blanket of utmost secrecy.  Admitting to such contacts would – in their view – ‘legitimise’ Israel.  But then, why would Israel give any credence to vague hints expressed in secret by people who in public vehemently denied its very legitimacy?  In contrast, every single Israeli leader expressed readiness to negotiate, directly and with no preconditions, towards peace treaties.  Yet Shlaim chooses to (mostly) ignore and (occasionally) discount Israel’s numerous public and unequivocal proposals, while building his ‘revisionist’ theory entirely on the few “feelers” that came from the Arab side.  Referring to Golda Meir, for instance, Shlaim writes:

“Meir never tired of repeating that she was prepared to go anywhere at any time to meet any Arab leader who wanted to talk about peace.  Given her expansionist policies, these statements had a distinctly hollow ring”.

Expansionist policies??  Golda Meir became Prime Minister in 1969, long after the Six Day War; she resigned in 1974.  During her tenure, the territory controlled by Israel did not ‘expand’ one square inch; on the contrary, it decreased somewhat, as a result of armistice agreements concluded after the (Arab-initiated) Yom Kippur War.

To even more fully understand Shlaim’s systematic and outrageous double standards, let us analyse the first so-called “Arab peace feeler”.  On September 23, 1948 a certain Kamal Riad, claiming to act as an emissary for King Farouk of Egypt, secretly met in Paris with an Israeli diplomat.  According to Shlaim,

“Riad suggested Egypt’s de facto recognition of Israel in return for agreement to Egypt’s annexation of a large strip of territory in the Negev”

In passing, let us make clear that “de facto recognition” does not mean peace: as legal documents, peace treaties constitute actual, de jure recognition; clearly, what was on offer was not a peace treaty – but some form of armistice.  The price Israel was required to pay for such temporary arrangement (assuming the offer was genuine) was what Shlaim rather deceitfully calls “agreement to Egypt’s annexation”.  ‘Deceitfully’, I say, because the Negev had been awarded by the UN Partition Resolution to the Jewish State; most of that territory was at the time under Israeli control and included Israeli villages.  It was not Israel’s “agreement” that Egypt’s monarch was purportedly seeking – it was Israel’s evacuation of a large part of its sovereign, legitimately held territory.  Yet somehow Shlaim does not view Farouk’s demand (to annex territory he had no legal claim to) as evidence of “expansionist policies” imparting “a distinctly hollow ring” to his “peace feelers”!

Shlaim’s next “Arab peace feeler” was that of Syrian President Husni Zaim, in May 1949.  According to Shlaim,

“He openly declared his ambition to be the first Arab leader to conclude a peace agreement with Israel and offered repeatedly to meet with Ben-Gurion to work together toward this end.”

There is only one problem with that idyllic description: Syria’s Army Chief of Staff Colonel Husni Al-Za’im (to use his correct name) became President in April 1949, after conducting a military coup d’etat which imprisoned the former President and suspended the Constitution.  What’s more, the coup was sponsored by the CIA, which was interested in a ‘friendly government’ in Damascus – one that would approve the passage through Syria of Arabian American Oil Company’s Trans-Arabian Pipeline.  Al-Za’im’s tenuous hold on power lasted all of 4 (four) months – in August 1949 he was in turn toppled and summarily executed by another military satrap.  Shlaim somehow omits to inform his readers of these rather essential facts; instead, he manages to present the short ‘reign’ of this incompetent dictator as ‘yet another’ peace opportunity missed through Israel’s damnable intransigence.

And so Shlaim proceeds, picking facts that prop-up his theory – and sweeping everything else under the proverbial rug.  He even manages to imply (not for the first time) that Israeli leaders ‘colluded’ to divide Palestine Mandate with Transjordan’s King Abdullah in 1947-1949.  A very strange ‘collusion’, given that the battles between IDF and Abdullah’s Arab Legion were arguably the war’s bloodiest and most costly in human lives on both sides!

Needless to say, people unfamiliar with the historical facts (and who already may have an anti-Israel bias) easily fall victim to such misinformation.  In fact, they tend to swallow such ‘alternative history’ hook, line and sinker.  Take, for instance, the ‘Historical Background’ compiled by the British Methodist Church in 2010, as part of its justification for anti-Israel boycott.  At times, the document haplessly reproduces Shlaim’s ‘Iron Wall’ theories:

“King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist for his suspected collusion with Israel. An offer of a full peace treaty with Israel by the Syrian leader Husni Zaim was rejected…”

Nowhere are Shlaim’s aberrant interpretations more blatant than when he examines the causes of the Palestinian Arabs’ plight.

As we have seen, the Egyptian army’s 1948 invasion was motivated by territorial expansionism, as well as internal and inter-Arab politics.  It had little to do with ‘providing support’ for the Palestinian Arabs.  And Egypt’s motivations for invasion were in no way singular; they were exhibited, in one form or another, by all participating Arab states.  In the words of the prominent contemporary Arabist Elias Sasson:

“The Arab states’ official military intervention in Palestine […] stems not from concern for the fate of the Palestinian Arabs or opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in a partitioned Palestine, but from fear of a unilateral invasion by Transjordan that would conquer the country’s Arab areas and improve the prospects of the realization of [King Abdullah’s] Greater Syria scheme.” [Karsh, Efraim (2010-08-20). Palestine Betrayed (Kindle Locations 4345-4346). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.]

His opinion was shared by the Mandate’s High Commissioner, British General Sir Alan Cunningham.  Both an anti-Semite and generally contemptuous of the Arabs, in this case Cunningham was, however, over-optimistic regarding the chances of inter-Arab accommodation.  In a report he sent to Westminster in February 1948, he estimated that

“The most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdullah, and the South to Egypt, and it might well end in annexation on this pattern, the centre remain uncertain.” [Ibidem (Kindle Locations 4105-4107)]

Even Arab League’s Secretary General Abdel Rahman Azzam admitted to a British reporter that

“Abdullah was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. The Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon if its inhabitants opted for it by a referendum (i.e. the inhabitants of the said coastal strip). In Jewish-controlled areas (including Haifa) the Jews would get some measure of autonomy.” [Ibidem (Kindle Locations 4108-4109)]

Were it not for that external aggression, the Palestinian Arabs would have been able to establish their own independent state in the territory allocated to the ‘Arab State’ by UN’s Partition Resolution.  Yet Shlaim manages not only to gloss over these well-documented facts, but to throw the responsibility, as usual, onto Israel:

“Israel […] succeeded in expelling all the Arab forces from Palestine with the exception of the Arab Legion, which remained in control of the West Bank.  This sealed the fate of the UN plan for an independent Palestinian state.  The Palestinians were left out in the cold.  The name Palestine was erased from the map. […] It was a striking example of the unsentimental real-politik approach that had dictated Israel’s conduct throughout the first Arab-Israeli war.”

Well, what exactly was “a striking example of the unsentimental real-politik approach”??  The fact that Israel expelled the invading Arab forces?  The fact that Israel did not expel the Arab Legion from what was supposed to be the Arab State?  Or perhaps both??  Shlaim does not quite explain; but, whatever the details, one thing is sure: it’s Israel’s fault!

I could continue... But to expose the entire extent of disinformation contained by 'The Iron Wall', I'd need to write an entire book.  Perhaps the British Academy would like to facilitate that by awarding me a two-year research readership and a generous research grant??

Seriously, I do not know how many people bought Shlaim’s ‘Iron Wall’, but I do know that they wasted their money.  Because, if one wants to read sensationalist contraptions uncomplicated by scholarly scruples, one can do so at significantly lower cost, by purchasing a tabloid.

As for ‘revisionist history’ – there is simply no such thing: there is of course history; and then there’s political activism.  I have nothing against the latter – when it is honest and well-intentioned.  But the ‘new historians’ are guilty of mislabeling the goods: they deliver ideology, when it says ‘history’ on the can…

Wake up, my brother Ahmed.

اجتنب مصاحبة الكذاب فإن اضطررت إليه فلا تُصَدِّقْهُ

Avoid the company of a liar. And if you can't avoid him, don't believe him.

أخوك من صَدَقك لا من صدّقك 

A brother is one who's honest with you, not one who believes you.

إصلاح الموجود خير من انتظار المفقود

Mending what you have is better than expecting what you don’t have.

(Arabic proverbs)

Eid Mubarak to you – my enemy, my friend!

This may seem like a strange time to write to you.  You are watching horrid videos: dead bodies of young children, parading on your screen in every gory detail.  Heartbreaking!  They tell you I deliberately did that.  They want you to believe I have set my weapon’s sights on their tiny body and murdered them.  They want you to believe I’m a bloodthirsty animal; or worse – a devil.  I am neither.  They want you to hate me – and you do.

This may seem like the worst time to write to you.  But when is it a good time?  Hate, if you wish; but listen.  My heart weeps.  As God is my witness, I don’t want your children to die; I just want mine to live.

Detail of Arab art, 11th century

A thousand years ago, your people – the Arabs – were arguably the world’s most advanced.  From the splendour of their culture, your ancestors were looking down at primitive Europeans: unwashed, uncouth, scratching off lice-bitten skin in darkness, cold and fear.  Your scientists were pitting their minds against algebraic formulae; your explorers were charting the lands and the skies; your physicians were succouring the body and trying to calm the soul.  Poets were weaving sweet feelings into mellifluous sonnets; architects were building palaces both sumptuous and delicate in their ethereal beauty; skilled dancers and musicians were delighting ears, eyes and souls.  Your women were among the freest, most powerful in the world; your philosophers – the most open-minded; your theologians – the most liberal.

Squalor in Egypt, 21st century

And today?  Today the Arab world is a place people fear; a place people want to escape from.  Those who once looked down on Europe now beg for a European visa; those who once sang the freedom of the desert are now among the most unfree.  Incredible richness bursts from under your feet, yet poverty humiliates you; there’s shameful levels of illiteracy among those who once brought the world numbers and algebra.

What happened to you, my brother Ahmed?  No it’s not The Jew’s fault that you are so oppressed, poor and dejected; it’s not the White Man’s fault, either.  Yes, I know your lands were under White Man's boots – and I know you resented it.  But they were there just for a few short decades – and what is that peoples as old as yours and mine?  They’ve been in India for centuries!

No, it’s not somebody else’s fault, Ahmed, much as it torments your soul to admit it; it’s your own leaders – Sultans, Emirs, Kings and Presidents; it's not the infidels, it's Muslim Turks and Arabs who have been doing THIS to you, for centuries now.  They got rich, while your children are starving; they demand respect when you are shamed; they can do whatever they please, while you bow your head to their harsh commands.

Beheading in Syria, 21st century

Worst of all, they whipped out hatred from your humiliated soul; they sent you to visit horrendous, appalling violence upon innocent others.  And what has hatred given you, my brother, other than a bad name??  Is it The Jew’s fault that in the old Bilad al-Sham, in the Heart of Levant, Arab is killing Arab by the thousand, in horrible, unspeakable, inhuman ways?  Haven’t they killed, in just one year, more, many more Arabs than The Jews did in a century?  Was it the White Man that enthroned over you murderous clowns like Gaddafi, Assad and Saddam?

They tell you should hate The Jew because he ‘occupies’ your land.  But doesn’t the Qur’an say The Almighty gave it to them?

And We said after Pharaoh to the Children of Israel, "Dwell in the land, and when there comes the promise of the Hereafter, We will bring you forth in [one] gathering."
[Surat Al-'Isrā', 17:104]

Did God change His mind??  How are they ‘occupying’ the land God gave them?

They tell you you must take it ‘back’, because it once was yours.  It sure was; but so was Spain – are you supposed to take that ‘back’, too?

And what is that tiny, tiny land to you, anyway?  One can fit the Jewish State 644 times in the lands of the Arabs.  644!

They tell you Islam is the answer.  But is THIS Islam??  They look back, rather than ahead; and they see just darkness and beheadings – their eyes can't take in the poetry and light.

Who made them Kings and Presidents over you, anyway?  And who put these ranting clerics between you and your God?  Does God speak to the wicked and the hypocrites?

They are lying to you, my brother; they are throwing sand in your eyes; they are shamelessly playing you for a fool.  They channel your righteous anger towards some alien scapegoat – to keep it from crashing over their own heads like stormy sea upon a nutshell.

My brother Ahmed, wake up from your long slumber.  Break your shackles; kick the thrones from under their fat, insensitive arses; claim your God-given rights – I long to share my freedom with you.  Come, let us make sulha; there is so much I can teach you; there is so much I want to learn from you.  I want your children to be free like mine.  I want my land, small as it is; yours are vast.  What are we fighting for??

Wake up, my brother Ahmed.

When to be 'ecumenical' – and when not

With three teenagers kidnapped by terrorists in the West Bank, a huge search operation is underway.  Every branch of Israel’s security forces is involved – from the Border Police to the Air Force, from the Army Intelligence to the Paratroopers Corps.  Even Palestinian Authority policemen reportedly cooperate.  But there is one type of uniform that one does not encounter among those active in the search: the beige vests of EAPPI – the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Palestine and Israel.  That’s because help with rescuing three kids whose only ‘crime’ is being Jewish is not within the ‘ecumenical’ remit of that organisation.

To be or not to be 'ecumenical'

Funded by the World Council of Churches and operated by the Society of Quakers, EAPPI “brings internationals to the West Bank to experience [Palestinians’] life under [Israeli] occupation”, but not Israelis’ life under Palestinian terrorism; it aims primarily to “provide protective presence to vulnerable communities [read: ‘non-Jewish communities’], monitor and report human rights abuses [read: ‘Jewish abuses’]”.  In practice, the EAPPI activists (who can’t speak the local languages and come equipped with little knowledge and loads of preconceptions) are easily manipulated and further indoctrinated by their Palestinian handlers.  Part of the mission is, upon return, to ‘tell others what they saw’; or, rather, what they were shown.

Given the outfit’s title, naïves may assume that this is just one of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programmes set up by the World Council of Churches – the one that acts ‘in Palestine and Israel’.  But it’s not.  It’s the only one.

Aftermath of suicide bombing near Mosul, Iraq

There is no Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Iraq, even while an Al-Qaeda splinter has taken control of large chunks of Iraqi territory and is threatening Baghdad itself.  The ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS) has already conducted hundreds of summary executions of civilians and POWs.    So far, one million refugees have fled from the Jihadists.  And that’s on top of Iraq’s ‘normal’ level of inter-sectarian violence.  Which, according to the UN Mission in Iraq, has killed 10,679 people and injured 23,735 in the last 18 months.

Victims of war and inter-sectarian violence in Syria. There are at least 162,000 of these, at least 10,000 of them children. But not an 'ecumenical accompanier' in sight.

There is no Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for nearby Syria, where the UN has already given up counting the human lives lost – people are simply killed faster than the international organisation can tally.  The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that over 162,000 people were killed, including more than 10,000 children.  Only God knows how many were maimed, tortured, raped.  There are 9 million refugees.  Palestinian refugees (or rather ‘people born in Syria for generations, but denied Syrian citizenship because they descend from Palestinian refugees’) are abundantly represented among the dead, the maimed and the fleeing.  But Palestinians only qualify for ‘Ecumenical Accompaniment’ when they are wronged by Jews.

There is no Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Egypt, where kangaroo courts sentence people to death, hundreds at a time.

Lest we forget – just like the World Council of Churches – the three countries mentioned above are home to sizable Christian communities.  The ‘are’ in the sentence above is gradually turning into ‘were’, as Christians flee the persecution of Islamists; but there are of course no 'ecumenical accompaniers' to “provide protective presence to [those] vulnerable communities”.

Execution in Iran. Were they 'enemies of God' or have they 'sown corruption on earth'?

There is no Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Iran, where 1,000 people have been executed in the past 18 months, on charges including ‘terrorist acts’,  ‘corruption on earth’, ‘attempt to overthrow the government’ and ‘enmity to God’.

Afghanistan after 13 years of Occupation: infant mortality rate 117 deaths/1,000 live births -- worst in the world (West Bank 13, Gaza 15). Literacy ratio: Afghanistan 28%; West Bank & Gaza 95%

There is no Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Afghanistan, a country still under US and UK occupation, where 46 people were killed in just one day (yesterday), in what the BBC calls ‘low level attacks’.

And that’s just a small part of the Middle East.  I could make this list much, much longer, cataloguing all the numerous and painful diseases that trouble our world.  But what would be the purpose?  Who cares?  Certainly not the World Council of Churches, whose one-and-only Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in the whole wide world operates in the West Bank.

According to the (very unfriendly to Israel) United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), in the past 18 months Israeli security forces have killed 27 West Bank Palestinians.  That number includes ‘Amer Ibrahim Naji Nassar and Naji ‘Abd a-Salam Naji al-Balbisi, shot while throwing Molotov cocktails at IDF soldiers; Yunes Ahmad Mahmoud a-Radaydeh, shot while bursting with a tractor into an IDF military base; Saleh Samir ‘Abd a-Rahman Yasin and Nafe’a Jamil Nafe’a a-S’adi, shot in an exchange of fire with IDF soldiers; and three armed members of an Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group, shot after refusing to surrender.

Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, Secretary General of the World Council of Churches and -- incidentally! -- also Co-Chair of the 'Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum'

The West Bank is, of course, hardly a place of harmony and safety, though it may seem such to many a human being forced to live in much, much worse circumstances; without an ecumenical accompanier anywhere in sight.

I am tempted to ask the leaders of the World Council of Churches and those of the Quaker Movement to explain their choices and priorities, as expressed by the one-and-only Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme.  But I know from experience that all I’d hear would be pathetic and dishonest attempts at post-rationalisation.

So, instead, I’m only going to propose a small change of name.  Why not call it, for the sake of honesty and God's Truth, Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Communities Vulnerable to Jews?