What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?; Hope and Despair: Israel’s Future in the New Middle East; Hamas: The Quest for Power; Blindness: October 7 and the Left

Veteran Palestinian human rights activist Raja Shehadah’s What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? is a short but elegantly written tract that expands on a lecture he gave in 2016, revising and updating it for the current context, following the October 7th attacks and the subsequent carnage in Gaza. Shehadah clearly feels that so little has changed in the past decade that his original argument still stands. While the horror of the war in Gaza has caused revulsion worldwide, and no doubt drawn many new supporters to the Palestinian cause, the occupation continues to be the focal point of Palestinian indignation.

Shehadah bemoans the failure of the Oslo Peace Accords and acknowledges that the dissenters on the Palestinian side in 1993 have been proven right, that Israel never had any intention of dismantling the settlements. Israel also managed to cast Palestinian anger during further talks in 2000 and 2008 as intransigence when it had allowed further land to be eaten away in the West Bank in the interim (and more since then) and the implementation of a de facto apartheid system.

This was a situation that was predicted by none other than Yitzhak Rabin, who said in 1976 that the 60 settlements at the time were “a cancer in the social and democratic tissue of the state of Israel”. Like other Israeli leaders, however, Rabin would do little to contain the settlements while in power.

[ Remembering Yitzhak Rabin in a country reeling from recent violence (2015) ]

Shehadah’s short book, which is suffused with anger without descending into bitterness, ends on a mildly optimistic note, observing that the Madrid peace conference followed the difficult days of the first Intifada. It also takes hope from the fact certain European countries, particularly Spain and Ireland, are beginning to take action to make dialogue a possibility again after more than a decade of Binyamin Netanyahu’s obstruction.

Homeland Insecurity: security trumps liberty as ‘terrorism’ is weaponised - a superb study

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New poetry: Aoife Lyall, Eamon Grennan, K Patrick and Armen Davoudian

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In the face of pushback, historian Corinne Fowler is trying to open minds to Britain’s legacy of slavery

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Poem of the Week: Gaza

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Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast Beverley Milton-Edwards and Reuters journalist Stephen Farrell return to their 2010 study of the Islamist rulers of Gaza in Hamas: The Quest for Power, effectively an update of their earlier book. Though the new edition does at times appear to be a rushed job in response to current events (there are many avoidable repetitions between older and newer passages), the work is a thorough examination of Hamas and how it has managed to weather a succession of Israeli assassinations of its leaders and Western sanctions to maintain a high level of legitimacy among Palestinians in spite of its hardline ideology.

The book relies on a wealth of interviews with key figures in Palestinian society, inside and outside Hamas, and offers an invaluable insight into the perspective of the movement, which rose to power partly through ruthlessness and intimidation but also by successfully casting itself as a foil to the corruption of its rival, Fatah.

One of the most notable secrets of Hamas’s success is it having been a long-standing beneficiary of Israel’s indulgence, which goes back to the group’s prehistory as al-Mujamma’ al-Islami, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood established in Gaza in 1973 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who would found Hamas 14 years later. Fatah activists accused Israel of turning a blind eye to the thuggish actions of al-Mujamma in Gaza in the 1970s, which included attacking news stands, burning down cinemas and threatening women who refused to wear the hijab in an ultimately successful effort to roll back the social liberalisation that occurred during the 19 years of Egyptian occupation.

Israel would also ignore the millions flowing into Hamas’s coffers from abroad in the early years of the group’s existence, the clear purpose being to provide a counterbalance to the PLO. After the Oslo Accords, Hamas embarked on a decade-long campaign of deadly suicide bombings in Israel, yet the rhetoric of successive Israeli administrations was focused on the PLO, which it viewed as the real threat, even as it was assassinating Hamas leaders, such as Salam Shedade in 2002 and Sheikh Yassin two years later. This is a habit that Israel has found hard to kick, with Netanyahu in recent years allowing Hamas to receive payments via Qatar, even as the rulers of Gaza firmly became the Jewish state’s bête noire.

This effort on Israel’s part to manage the conflict has been a resounding failure, as the catastrophe of October 7th showed. Hamas, despite the battering it has taken in successive wars and assassinations, shows no signs of being eradicated, as Netanyahu publicly fantasises. It is only likely to gain more willing volunteers embittered at Israel’s pummelling of Gaza. Certainly the prospect of Hamas coming to power in the Palestinian territories is a grim one, for Palestinians above all, but the group, or at least its members, are going to necessarily be part of any eventual settlement, even if that will require major concessions on its own part too.

[ Can outsiders keep the peace in post-conflict Israel and Palestine? ]

“Palestine fatigue” is something the Israeli writer Michael A Horowitz, in Hope and Despair: Israel’s Future in the New Middle East, says drove the rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf states that resulted in the 2021 Abraham Accords with Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with Saudi Arabia lined up next. But while the Palestine issue might have engendered fatigue among the Gulf elites, that certainly was not the case in the so-called Arab Street, and Horowitz says even an autocracy such as Saudi Arabia has become a lot more hesitant in its thaw towards Israel. Its planned normalisation of relations has been put on hold since the start of the war in Gaza.

Horowitz says the chief divide is not between Palestinians and Israelis so much as it is between those who think they can win the conflict and those who think it should be solved. It’s an exaggeration but not a massive one – both nations have influential ideologically-driven factions, Hamas and the Israeli far right, who see themselves as victors-in-waiting in a winner-takes-all situation. And both are the most motivated historical actors within their own country at this moment in time. It’s a zero-sum attitude that will have to be cast aside for a peace settlement of any sort, but neither party is going anywhere. Each will have to be reckoned with ultimately.

We are given an excellent account of Israel’s far-right settler movement. The author notes that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Irgun paramilitary organisation, was a lot more lucid about the Palestinians’ likelihood to resist colonisation than Labour were, however racist and eliminationist his attitude towards Arabs was. Jabotinsky’s hardline ideology is in the ascendant in Israel today, facilitated by the son of his one-time personal secretary Benzion Netanyahu. The way the younger Netanyahu’s government has prosecuted the war in Gaza, with “tragic errors” on a near monthly basis resulting in civilian carnage and even Israeli troops and hostages killed by friendly fire, you wonder if alienation from the world is the ultimate goal.

It seems reminiscent of the “sharpening of contradictions” sought by extreme Islamist groups with the aim of rendering coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims impossible. Perhaps the Israeli far right’s aim is to make a peace deal impossible. A common thread running through Revisionist Zionism in the post-Holocaust age has been that Jews, both in Israel and the diaspora, cannot rely on help from anyone, that allies will come and go and anti-Semitism will remain a constant but manifest itself in different forms. It is for this reason that Israel under Netanyahu has pragmatically forged close alliances in Europe with far-right political parties with historic, and sometimes even contemporary, ties to anti-Semitic figures.

Horowitz’s book is a sober and fair-minded analysis of a country at a critical juncture, prey to internal tensions as much as it is to external enemies. It is well worth reading, even for the most implacable of Israel’s critics.

In Blindness: October 7 and the Left, published as the May 2024 issue of The Jewish Quarterly, journalist Hadley Freeman takes issue with the radical left and its anti-Zionist stances that allegedly bleed into anti-Semitism. Freeman says the October 7th attacks left her in no doubt that “the progressive left hates Jews”. She elaborates on that argument in this 80-page polemic, with varying degrees of success.

Freeman is right in saying that some of the reactions to October 7th on the left were callous and hateful. From a US college professor with no skin in the game declaring that she felt exhilaration at the attacks to protesters in Sydney chanting “f*ck the Jews”, there was a dispiriting glee at the slaughter of civilians. More common was blithe disregard, a reflex to centre the plight of the Palestinians as if to eclipse the suffering of those killed by Hamas.

There are few leftists, in the West at least, circulating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or desecrating Jewish cemeteries. Anti-Semitism on the left, and more broadly among pro-Palestinian sympathisers, is generally more mundane, yet nonetheless insidious, with many of its perpetrators probably not even recognising it as anti-Semitism. This takes the form of appending Palestine as a rejoinder to Jewish matters not directly related to Israel. Celtic FC posted a simple Hanukkah greeting to its Jewish supporters on Instagram last December, only for the post to attract a wave of “Free Palestine” comments. An Irishman I know reacted to the murder of four Jews (none of them Israeli – not that it ought to have mattered) in a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015 with the despairingly predictable “do people realise what they are doing to the Palestinians?”.

Some on the left will say that bringing this up is simply distracting from Israel’s actions against the Palestinians but that is to obfuscate. Jews have been murdered and targeted on several occasions in recent years in both the US and Europe and it is understandable that they might be sensitive to a degrading rhetorical atmosphere. Of course, it does not help that Israel and many of its supporters routinely smear its critics as anti-Semites, but a failure of people on the left to uncouple Palestine from any aspect of the lives of ordinary Jews plays to that mendacious tactic.

The rest of Freeman’s book is a string of selective arguments, some stronger than others, that will be familiar to long-time observers of Israeli hasbara. She speculates over the European left’s move from a pro-Zionist to anti-Israel stance following the Six-Day War in 1967 and quotes novelist Howard Jacobson, who says the left “cannot sympathise with anybody who wins”. It’s a tempting formulation but one that ignores the devastating effect the illegal occupation of the West Bank has had on Israel’s international reputation, well beyond the left. Successive Israeli governments have prosecuted the occupation in defiance of international condemnation and have tried to rationalise it with boorishly ahistorical arguments.

There are some strange contradictions: Freeman approvingly quotes Anthony Julius, who disingenuously imputes to people calling for a ceasefire “What those people are really saying is, ‘Ceasefire now ... while Hamas rearm’”. Later in the text, Freeman wishes Israel didn’t kill so many people and Netanyahu didn’t get drawn into Hamas’s trap after October 7th. So which is it?

Having been at odds for some time with the British left on the matter of trans rights, towards which she has been, depending on your point of view, either sceptical or hostile, Freeman is, you imagine, not trying to seriously persuade many on the left. Her book, replete with many familiar Zionist talking points (and I don’t use “Zionist” as a term of abuse here), will attract mainly readers looking for confirmation of beliefs they already hold.