On the shelf: The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History by Ian J. Bickerton

by Richard A. Kauffman

A year ago I was on a tour of Palestinian villages that had been overrun by Jewish militias in the 1948 war. In one village our tour guide had been a 26-year-old father of one when the invading forces bombed his village. He escaped with his family and parents and took refuge in Nazareth.

The village was reduced to rubble, although the invaders tried to preserve the houses of worship. A small mosque remains, but it was partly bombed too, and Catholic and Orthodox churches stand almost within a stone’s throw of each other. An Orthodox congregation returns here each year during Holy Week to have a service.

After touring the Orthodox church, we noticed several young Jewish families from a local kibbutz having a picnic on the lawn between the two churches. One member in our group, a Syrian-American, asked our tour guide to ask these families if they knew this once was a Palestinian village, which he did. They seemed startled by the question at first, but then one young father said, “We don’t like to be reminded of that,” adding, “When you read history, you have to know there are two sides of the story.”

Indeed, there are two sides to the story, and usually we hear only one or the other. But Ian Bickerton, a self-declared secular humanist historian, brings a sense of detachment to the intractable conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. He attempts to write a balanced history going back to the British Mandate in Palestine following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and up through the Israeli invasion of Gaza in late 2008.

Bickerton, who teaches at the University of South Wales in Sydney, has a bias that I share. He believes that none of the wars between Israel and its neighboring Arab states have made it any more secure, that the continuing hostilities between Israel and Palestine only deepen the resolve of the two parties to yield no ground and that there can only be a nonviolent resolution to the conflict.

In response to Abba Eban’s famous quote that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity (to make peace with Israel), Bickerton gives ample evidence that Israel too has passed up many opportunities for peace. He is particularly helpful in describing the mythologies each side perpetuates that stand in the way of a nonviolent resolution: Israel’s leaders are trapped by the collective Zionist memory of persecution and discrimination. Palestinian leaders cannot free themselves from the diet of grievances against the invading Zionist enemy recounted to them since childhood by family members.While Bickerton deals extensively with the United States’ role in Israel, he thinks that role is largely overstated and that the U.S. doesn’t have as much influence over Israel as it thinks it does. The idea that an Israeli/Jewish lobby controls American policy is without sufficient documentary substantiation.

In the end, Bickerton has to acknowledge that the balance of power falls heavily on the Israeli side. Therefore, to tell both sides of the story accurately, as he attempts to do, must seem biased in favor of the underdogs from the perspective of Israeli partisans.

Back in that bombed-out Palestinian village, our guide asked the Jewish father whether he knew a certain person in his kibbutz—a Jewish veteran who was crippled by the 1948 war. He knew the man, and instantly there was a bond between these two men, a Palestinian and a Jew a generation apart. “I’m for peace,” the Jewish man said to us as we were parting. May it be so, but it likely won’t happen without more of his generation learning the other side of the story. And vice versa.