More Books on "Palestine"

The very, very far out Left The Nation has a book review on two new books on that mythical geopolitical replacement for Israel.

Some excerpts [with my comments in brackets]:-

In Palestine, a Dream Deferred
by BASHIR ABU-MANNEH

Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been the only sovereign state in British Mandate Palestine. [and Jordan was never part of the Mandate?]Palestinians have been living either as second-class citizens in the Jewish state; [there are no Jews in Jordan byt the way] or as colonized residents of the West Bank and Gaza with no human or political rights; or as refugees dispersed and stranded in neighboring Arab countries, in often extremely difficult conditions [actually, Pals. are Jordanian citizens by special entitlement in the 50s]. The chances of Palestinians overcoming exile and exercising their right of return seem as far away as ever [whew]. Hardly more promising are the immediate prospects for ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in accordance with the international and Arab consensus, in place since at least 1976 and rejected by the United States and Israel.

Neither armed struggle from bordering Arab countries and the occupied territories nor popular mobilization and political struggle have brought liberation and decolonization. The defeat or containment of one intifada after another has only strengthened the Israeli colonial presence in the West Bank. Despite the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from Gaza, the area's 1.3 million Palestinians are under intensified blockade and siege. Since the summer nearly 400 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, as in the recent Beit Hanoun massacre. Haughtily told by the United States that the lack of Palestinian "democracy" was the main obstacle to peace, Palestinians freely cast their ballots in the legislative elections in January, only to be punished for their democratic choice: threatened by Israel with "starvation" and denied the funds needed to pay the salaries of civil servants, the breadwinners for much of Palestinian society. Walls, checkpoints, closures, collective punishments, roadblocks, Jewish-only roads, massacres by shelling, assassinations, mass imprisonment and a poverty rate of 70 percent have come to define the Palestinian condition under occupation.

The diplomacy of the Oslo period has also failed to restitute--even some--Palestinian national rights. In fact, as far as the Israeli elite were concerned, the Oslo framework was never intended to end the occupation or to bring about withdrawal to the 1967 borders. Oslo has proved to be yet another version of the Allon Plan, first presented after the 1967 war by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The Allon Plan proposed a truncated autonomy for Palestinians in the West Bank (Allon suggested that Arab-majority areas be placed under Jordanian jurisdiction), with substantial quantities of their land annexed to Israel, which would control all borders and entry points to the territory as a whole.

Since 1993, under the guise of peacemaking, Israel has doubled the number of settlements and settlers (around 400,000) [that high? oh, including Jerusalem. well then, if so, it should be higher]...

This bleak picture is compounded by grave internal divisions between Fatah and Hamas, which in the past year have spilled over into street confrontations and killings. For the first time in Palestinian history there looms the possibility of civil war.

The new books by Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah are important in this regard...Khalidi's The Iron Cage examines the causes of the Palestinian failure to achieve statehood, from the British Mandate in 1922 to Hamas's recent electoral victory, while Abunimah's One Country makes the case for the creation of one state for Arabs and Jews in all of Israel-Palestine.

Why did the Palestinians fail to achieve statehood before 1948, and what impact did their defeat have on their national prospects thereafter? This is the main question that Khalidi tackles in The Iron Cage, a work of forceful historical analysis written in a spirit of self-examination. If the Palestinians take center stage in this critical survey of their leadership, it's not because Khalidi is "blaming the victims." Rather, he is holding them "accountable for their actions and decisions," as he puts it. Ridiculing Palestinian leadership has long been a veritable pastime in the West, from Abba Eban's oft-quoted line "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to the myth that Arafat consigned his people to continuing occupation by rejecting Ehud Barak's "generous offer" at Camp David. Khalidi, in contrast, never loses sight of the fact that the Palestinians had few good choices, and that the odds against their struggle for self-determination may have been insurmountable. Those odds are well suggested by a remark made in 1919 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish "national home" in Palestine: "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." Since then, denial of Palestinian national aspirations has been a constant of Western and Zionist policy in the region, and Khalidi emphasizes its crucial significance. He minces no words appraising the US record: "In practice the United States is, and for over sixty years has been, one of the most determined opponents of Palestinian self-determination and independence."

...Even more than this dependence on the Mandatory system, what set the Palestinian leadership apart from other Arab nationalist elites was its specifically religious character. These were, in fact, intertwined, as Khalidi demonstrates in a striking discussion of the role played by Haj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Palestine. The British created his office--raising his stature in order to help them administer the Mandate--and invested it with powers that no mufti had ever enjoyed in the history of Islamic religious institutions. This put the Palestinian national movement at a severe disadvantage: "Lacking effective vehicles for building toward statehood, either pre-existing, provided by the British, or developed by the Palestinians themselves, the Arab population of Palestine was instead granted a religious leadership, authorized, encouraged, legitimated, subsidized, and always in the end controlled by the British..."

It's a long article but worth the read.