Peter Rodgers

The danger in writing about unfolding dramas is that they keep unfolding, potentially stranding both writer and reader. Not so with these two fine books, whose authors have long experience of the Middle East. Quite different in scope – a sweep of the Arab world contrasting with the ascent and decay of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal régime – they deal with past, present, and possible future events in a lucid, compelling way. Anyone with an interest in what is at stake in the Middle East would be well advised to read them.

It is a great pity that Efraim Karsh could not have read Raimond Gaita’s new collection of essays before completing his own. The essays might have prompted him to reflect that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not nearly as straightforward as he would have us believe.

I am old enough to remember when we called it ‘the Levant’. The eastern Mediterranean, a land where the sun rose, where camels lazed in the shade of palm trees, strewn here and there with baked mud huts and their shadows on the sand. A sleepy land, no trouble to anyone, least of all the Ottoman Sultan, its faraway and hands-off ruler – the sick man of Europe, they called him. I once had in my possession an early twentieth-century photograph that came to my family from Palestine with just such a scene: the square adobe hut, the palm tree, the camel. It has long disappeared, along with any misguided notions I had of the place. ‘Middle East’ conjures up altogether different images: bombed cities, crowded refugee camps, unimaginable suffering and bloodshed – above all, hatred. A hatred that runs so deep, over so many generations, that it is a test of the imagination to envisage its ever abating.

Barack Obama has promised to change the way America does things. If he is serious about this when it comes to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we can only hope that he will read Neve Gordon’s examination of Israel’s post-1967 rule of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The subject matter, and the occasionally choking academic writing, do not make for a pretty story. But the book might serve to temper the new president’s apparently effusive support for Israel. That country’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and its determined settlement-building programme, are an ongoing disaster for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Between the mid-1940s and the late 1960s, Mohammed bin Laden fathered fifty-four children (twenty-five sons, twenty-nine daughters) from an assortment of wives (he married twenty-two times). It should hardly surprise that such a large group included several extreme personalities. The eldest son, Salem, channelled his manic energy into aeroplanes, cars, girls and the good life. The eighteenth son, Osama, born in 1957, chose a very different path. This would eventually leave New York’s skyline smouldering, Osama repudiated by his family and disowned by his country: a ‘black sheep’ in a league of his own.

Whether they be Irish Fenians, Russian revolutionaries, the ‘guilty white kids’ of Italy’s Red Brigade or (then) West Germany’s Baader Meinhof gang, African National Congress members fighting to end apartheid, Palestinian gunmen, al Qaeda bombers, or an assortment of other evil-doers, Michael Burleigh sets out the terrible things that human beings can do to one another. He provides much information about what happened or allegedly happened, and points the finger in all directions – at individuals, groups and governments alike. Few are spared his disdain.

The day I began writing this review, the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) news service carried three items reflecting the umbilical nature of ties between the United States and Israel. One item reported President George W. Bush as threatening to veto an intelligence bill because it would require revelations about a mysterious Israeli air attack on Syria on September 6. A second reported the Bush administration’s delaying a request to Congress for approval of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The sale forms part of a $20 billion deal with Arab nations, aimed at a united front against Iran, but ‘some pro-Israeli groups and Congress members say it is risky to sell offensive arms to a régime that has at times harboured militant Islamists’. The third item dealt with a bill to fully integrate the United States and Israeli missile defence systems. The bill’s congressional sponsor hailed it as ‘a symbol of our shared values and a safer 21^st century’.

Not long before his election as Israel’s prime minister in May 1999, the country’s former military head Ehud Barak was asked by a journalist what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian. ‘I would have joined a terrorist organisation’, came the blunt reply. Barak, of course, had spent a good deal of his life working out how to kill Palestinians. So his was a decidedly candid acknowledgment that one’s perspective is highly coloured by circumstance.

Peter Rodgers, Australia’s Ambassador to Israel from 1994-97, has produced a flimsy and flawed anti-Zionist tract that tells the reader much about his mindset but does not provide anything approaching a reliable historical or contemporary guide to Middle Eastern realities. Rodgers maintains a veneer of even-handedness, but his underlying point appears anything but balanced. Israel, apparently, was born in sin through dispossessing another people. Herzl’s ‘Zionist dream came at terrible cost to both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples’, according to Rodgers, who is now firmly rooted in the ideological terrain of those diplomats and journalists who believe that Israel deserves all the pain it is suffering. Herzl’s Nightmare is nothing more than a skewed anti-Israel diatribe that builds its case by means of a selective presentation of some facts.