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| Volume XII, Summer 2005, Number 2 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, by Matt Rees. New York: Free Press, 2004. 302 pages. $26.00, hardcover.
Michael Rubner
Professor of international relations, James Madison College,
Michigan State University
In the December 2, 2004, issue of The New York Times, there appeared two separate and seemingly unrelated articles about Palestinian and Israeli politics. The first, by Greg Myre, dealt with the on-again, off-again candidacy of Marwan Barghouti for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority. Barghouti, who is regarded by many as the architect of the second intifada and the organizer of numerous attacks by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was arrested in April 2002 and eventually convicted and sentenced to imprisonment by an Israeli court for involvement in the deaths of five Israelis. It is widely believed that Barghouti deliberately exploited his initial and subsequent withdrawals from the race against Mahmoud Abbas, the official candidate of the Fatah movement, to extract concessions that would enable the younger generation of Fatah members to have a larger role in the movement's power structure. Indeed, shortly after Barghouti's first withdrawal in late November 2004, Fatah leaders announced their intent to hold internal elections next August, thereby providing younger members an opportunity ro replace veteran Arafat loyalists. After Barghouti re-entered the race in early December 2004, Fatah's central committee denounced his candidacy as an "act of political irresponsibility." The Times article further noted that, while Fatah was beset by its own internal tensions, the militant Islamic Hamas movement urged its followers to boycott the upcoming presidential elections.
The second article, by Steven Erlanger, recounted the ouster from the Israeli cabinet of the Shinui party, the largest partner in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's coalition government. When Mr. Sharon decided to include in his most recent budget $67 million for projects of the orthodox United Torah Judaism party, Yosef Lapid, the secular Shinui party's leader, stated, "We shall not be a party to selling the state to the ultra-Orthodox camp, which denies everything that citizens who believe in a democratic, liberal and -- yes -- Jewish Israel hold sacred." Sharon then fired the five Shinui cabinet members who voted against the budget. Shinui's departure meant that Sharon could count on just 40 of the 120 votes in the Knesset, a development that seriously jeopardized his plan for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and from four settlements in the West Bank. Consequently, Sharon sought to augment support for his plan by inviting the Labor party into the government. Erlanger noted that there was significant opposition to a Likud-Labor coalition within the leadership and membership of both parties.
These seemingly disparate accounts vividly capture the deep internal conflicts that have fractured both the Palestinian and Israeli political camps. It is this intracommunal dimension of the Palestinian-Israeli divide, as distinguished from the more frequently covered interstate dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that constitutes the focus of Cain's Field by Matt Rees, Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief. Rees decided to concentrate on the often overlooked internal fissures within the Israeli and Palestinian societies because, in his judgment, "Without beginning to look for solutions to these divisions within their societies, neither Israelis nor Palestinians could feel secure enough in themselves to take the risk of a true peace deal."
Each of the book's eight chapters, four about Palestinians and four about Israelis, highlights a particular type of polarization through heartbreaking personal accounts of two or three ordinary characters victimized by the cruelty and brutality of compatriots. A careful reader will discern significant implications for the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict in each of Rees's artfully constructed accounts of personal tragedy.
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A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, by Ilan Pappé. Cambridge University Press, 2004. xxi and 333 pages, 6 maps and 8 figures (photographs). $60.00, hardcover; $22.00, paperback.
Bethlehem Besieged: Stories of Hope in Times of Trouble, by Mitri Raheb. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. 157 pages. $11.00, paperback.
Robert Brenton Betts
Professor, The University of Balamand, Al-Kurah, Lebanon
This is a remarkable book by a Jewish-Israeli professor of politics at the University of Haifa. For the first time, Palestine is treated as the one geographical entity it is, and its history as an interlocking of the two ethnic groups that inhabit it in roughly equal numbers but with vastly different degrees of authority. For the same reason that it appeals to me and will, I am sure, to many readers of Middle East Policy -- its refreshing candor, absence of a political agenda, and hope against hope for the future -- it will doubtless infuriate the ultra-Zionists in Israel and especially the Zionist lobby in the United States and its right-wing, "Christian fundamentalist" allies. As the author himself admits, "the subtitle of the book may raise a few eyebrows" (p. 11). Fortunately, as a Jewish-Israeli citizen, Pappé is free to express himself without fear of academic censorship or worse, denunciation as an anti-Semite (in his case, a self-hating Jew), which would certainly be his lot if he were a professor of politics at any university in America. The First Amendment doesn't protect you any more when it comes to expressing views contrary to the AIPAC party line in the United States, but in Israel there really is free speech and academic freedom, which the Israelis exercise vigorously and without intimidation. If anyone doubts this, I suggest following the debate in any given session of the Knesset or reading opposition newspapers.
Bethlehem Besieged is a collection of essays, written with an amazing tolerance and acceptance of daily humiliation, harrassment and inhuman behavior on the part of Israel's armed forces. They illustrate with painful clarity the "harsh and brutal occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, exposed by Ilan Pappé. Mitri Raheb, a native of Bethlehem and pastor of its small Evangelical Lutheran community, has never known anything else. "Everything and the only thing I have known in my life, and still do, is living under the Israeli occupation" (p. 54). In many ways he enjoys a privileged position. As a Christian clergyman with a Vatican passport (his wife has a U.S. green card) and contacts at the highest level of the Lutheran communities in the United States, Germany and Scandinavia, he has been able to gain outside assistance and even intervention on the many occasions he has been subjected to deliberate mistreatment by Israeli officialdom. It beggars the imagination, therefore, what the average Palestinian without such protection must suffer on a daily basis. Small wonder that some, under the constant pressure of acts intended to dehumanize, embarrass and humiliate them, have run amok with knives or suicide bombs in an attempt to strike back at their oppressors. "Every Palestinian is familiar with the stories about Israeli soldiers who ordered people caught violating the curfew to take off their clothes and go back home naked" (p. 47).
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Zionism: A Brief History, by Michael Brenner, translated by Shelley L. Frisch. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2003. 184 pages, including index. $18.95, paperback.
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Associate, German Orient Institute, Hamburg
"The moment has arrived to say ‘yes' to the Americans," declared Ariel Sharon, "the moment has arrived to divide this tract of land between us and the Palestinians." Surely, a great many readers did not believe their eyes when reading the next sentences by the prime minister in Yediot Aharonot at the end of May 2003. "I have not hidden my position on the issue of the future Palestinian state," Sharon at the age of 75 explained. "I am not less connected to those tracts of land that we will be forced to leave in time than any of those who speak loftily. But you have to be realistic, [about] what can and what cannot stay in our hands." For the first time, an Israeli government has accepted the Palestinian claim to eventual statehood at the end of the American-proposed Roadmap to peace. Some will see this as a change in paradigm, especially if they consult the main historical developments as researched by Munich historian Michael Brenner in his Zionism: A Brief History. Walter Laqueur has called the English version a "brilliant short survey" of a very controversial movement.
Brenner, a graduate of Columbia University, has since the mid-'90s published books about the renaissance of Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic, the Jewish rebirth in Germany after the Holocaust, and the Zionist Utopia and the Israeli reality. Here, in his latest book, six chapters deal with Zionism -- in its early phase a kind of "international nationalism" -- as a tool for emigration to Palestine, a stick for party discipline, a factor in British Mandatory policy and a pillar of today's Israel. A chapter about Zionism in the current struggle between the West and the Islamic East is missing.
Brenner takes the reader on a historical journey starting on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, revealing the ancient Jewish longing for the Promised Land that gave the modern national movement its name. We learn about American projects such as Ararat, just a stone's throw from Niagara Falls, a Utopia promoted by Mordecai Manuel Noah on the occasion of the fiftieth year of America's independence. Since the echo among Jewry was small, this former American sheriff in the state of New York two decades later developed the profound idea that Jews should return to Palestine. At the same time, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai of Sarajevo and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer suggested the redemption of the Diaspora through the colonization of Palestine.
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Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle, by Mazin B. Qumsieh. London: Pluto Press, 2004. Foreword by Salman Abu Sitta. 236 pages. $15.61, paperback.
Ghada Hashem Talhami
D.K. Pearsons professor of politics, Lake Forest College
There are voluminous studies of the Palestine question from various angles. Most cannot be taken seriously for a lack of objectivity or omission of relevant parts of the historical record on Palestinian human rights. This study, however, manages to avoid most of these pitfalls. The author's humanistic focus envelops Israelis and Palestinians alike, revealing little-known facts, providing fresh analysis and shedding new light on what has been taken for granted as the historical reality.
Qumsieh's title, which he elaborates upon in the first chapter focusing on the ancient people and cultures of Palestine, explains his position on this tortuous question. He reminds us that all Palestinians -- Arabs and Israelis, Muslims, Christians and Jews -- are products of the ancient Canaanite culture that prevailed in Palestine, the ancient land of Canaan, for thousands of years. Buttressed by archeological and ancient historical data, he manages to demolish the myth of Jewish historical, theological and racial exclusivity while at the same time emphasizing the interdependence of all of the legacies of that land. The rest of the book proceeds to demonstrate the shortcomings of Zionist ideology, the missed opportunities and the current quagmire that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By emphasizing the common bonds of the Canaanite heritage, Qumsieh reprises an old theme of Palestinian-Israeli amity that the Israelis have dismissed as a defunct literary school (the Canaanite school) that existed during the early years of the Israeli state. The book turns out to be a serious reappraisal of the Western perspective on Zionism and the Israeli state.
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Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about
Zionism and Israel, edited by Adam Shatz. New York: Nation Books, 2004. 408 pages. $12.89, paperback.
Edward C. Corrigan
Barrister and solicitor, immigration law; London, Ontario
Adam Shatz, the literary editor for The Nation magazine, in Prophets Outcast has assembled an excellent anthology of writings by eminent members of the Jewish community. The book includes essays or excerpts from 24 leading Jewish intellectuals critically commenting on Zionism before Israel was created, and prominent Israelis and Diaspora Jews writings after the creation of the "Jewish State" in 1948.
The term "prophets outcast" is borrowed from historian Isaac Deutscher, "himself a great Jewish dissident," to "underscore the terrible price these remarkably prescient men and women have paid for speaking out" against Zionism and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. These Jewish dissenters have been attacked for giving ammunition to Israel's enemies or as "self-hating Jews." However, as Tom Segev, author of The Seventh Million, states in an endorsement on the publication's cover, "This book is a timely and important reminder . . . that it is anything but un-Jewish to criticize the State of Israel."
The editor covers the critique of Zionism primarily by Jewish leftists, Marxists and humanists. Isaac Deutscher, the inspiration behind the book, has two essays included in the volume, "The Non-Jewish Jew" and "The Israeli-Arab War, June 1967," both from The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (1968). Shatz calls Deutscher "the soul and inspiration of Prophets Outcast." Also included in the book are excerpts from Leon Trotsky's writings On the Jewish Problem (1934) and Abraham Leon's "Zionism," from The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1940).
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The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, by Kenneth M. Pollack. New York: Random House, 2004. 539 pages. $26.95, hardcover.
John W. Sutherlin
Visiting professor, Department of Poltical Science, Tulane University
Over the past few years, there have been numerous journalistic attempts to review the history of Iranian-American relations. The Last Great Revolution (Robin Wright) and Persian Mirrors (Elaine Sciolino) are just two examples. Another class of works would be those relying on previously unpublished sources or academic research methods, such as All the Shah's Men (Stephen Kinzer) and Modern Iran (Nikki Keddie). I have always found books written by journalists to be easily accessible, but not as useful as the latter for research purposes.
This book by Kenneth Pollack (author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, 2002) shows how to do both. The Persian Puzzle is well-documented and an enjoyable read. Pollack, who currently serves as director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, has documented what is arguably one of the most difficult subjects to understand. He then provides a vision of what future Iranian-American relations could become. He is neither naïve nor vague. Pollack offers a how-to for American policy makers, who "no longer [have] the luxury of considering a purely passive approach to Tehran" (p. 375).
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No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, by Reza Aslan. New York: Random House, 2005. 266 pages. $25.95, hardcover.
Mustafa Malik
Freelance journalist
This book is a sociohistorical narrative of Islam in which author Reza Aslan debunks many Orientalist myths about the faith. Then he argues that the uplift of Muslim societies calls for their democratization and "the interpretation of Islam that yields to the reality of democracy" (pp. 265-66) -- which leaves you wondering what the book was all about! Is democratization really the most important task awaiting Muslim societies?
No god but God will hurt the feelings of many devout Muslims. A self-described (Shiite) "apostate," Aslan dismisses the Muslim belief that the Quran is the word of God revealed directly to the Prophet Muhammad. He mentions Muhammad's continual bouts with "aural and visual hallucinations" and suggests that his "attainment of prophetic consciousness [might have been] a slowly evolving process" (p. 37). Salman Rushdie also challenged the authenticity of the revelation of the Quran in his novel The Satanic Verses, and it triggered Muslim protests in many countries. No god but God may not send Muslims parading in the streets, however. For, while Rushdie, besides questioning the revelation, crudely maligned the Prophet and his wives, Aslan extols Muhammad as the epitome of morality and human sensitivity and the "message of the Quran [as the] message of revolutionary social egalitarianism" (p. 71).
In No god but God the author rebuts the Orientalist characterization of Islam as a backward, misogynist faith that has spawned terrorism and political repression. Islam was the first confessional creed, he says, to proclaim human equality and women's rights and to institutionalize charity for the poor. It also was the first religious tradition to introduce popular government. Recalling the selection of Abu Bakr as the first caliph through consultation among Muhammad's associates, Aslan says that "from the Nile to the Oxus and beyond, nowhere else had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined, let alone attempted" (p. 118).
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