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Title: The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East by David Hirst ISBN: 1560254831 Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press Pub. Date: March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43
Rating: 5
Summary: Yes, there really is a Zionist Conspiracy!
Comment: If you believe that Palestine belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them, or that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine to compensate them for the Holocaust, or that the Jews must return to Palestine as a precondition for the second coming of Christ, then you are a Zionist, and you will not like this book.
However, if you are not a Zionist, this book will convince you that there is actually a Zionist conspiracy, and that our government should not support it.
The book thoroughly documents the fact that the Zionists have been taking Palestine away from the Arabs a little bit at a time for about one hundred years, and they are still doing it. This is the principal source of violence in Palestine.
To say that the Arabs have a legitimate grievance against the state of Israel is not to be anti-Semitic, because the Arabs are Semites. It is not anti-Jewish, because many Jews in Israel and in the USA are not Zionists, and many Zionists in the USA are Christian. However, I agree that it is definitely anti-Zionist!
Rating: 5
Summary: A complete history of the conflict
Comment: Whether you've just started to read about the history behind the violence in the Middle East or you've read hundreds of books on the topic, David Hirst's account is essential.
He begins with a 130-page introduction, a small book in itself, which brings the current conflict up to date. If you don't get any farther than this, you'll still learn a lot. By the end of this introduction --- which covers Palestian agreements to accept the loss of 78% of their homeland, the influence of the Israeli lobby in Washington, the Joan Peters' fraud, and nuclear blackmail --- you'll understand the basic thesis of Hirst's book: The Zionist plan to remove Palestinians from the Occupied Territories is the principle cause of conflict in the Middle East.
At that point, you'll either throw the book in the garbage and write an angry review, or you'll continue. If you continue, you'll read about the origins of the conflict, starting in 1882. Hirst quickly moves forward in time, hitting each major development (such as the Balfour Declaration) briefly but carefully. I liked this approach because I want an overview built on key facts, not an encyclopedic book that gets lost in the details.
Hirst continues, up to the early 1980s, where the previous edition of the book came to an end. The result is a 100-year history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, fully documented from a wide range of sources. Although you might disagree with one or two sources (such as Arab newspapers), he never relies on a single source. It's an impressive exercise in honest scholarship.
Rating: 5
Summary: An account that cannot be ignored
Comment: "The Gun and the Olive Branch" performs an immense part of the task of filling in the blanks in the narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is only necessary to note that most of the "discoveries" a decade later by the "New Historians" of Israel were already contained in the first edition of this book in 1977. Any American seeking to expand his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- and, in my opinion, any American of good conscience OUGHT to try to expand his understanding of a conflict in which his government is intimately involved on the behalf of one of the direct participants, at least until he is certain beyond a reasonable doubt either that his government's position is right or that it is wrong -- would do best to begin with this book far before any other.
The main shortcoming of the book is in that it is written by a journalist, and in a largely journalistic style. Where Benny Morris -- a historian -- in the parallel "Righteous Victims" largely goes to government documents and first hand accounts, and presents without conclusion different possible interpretations, Hirst often relies on secondary sources and editorializes to a certain degree. However, Hirst looks much more broadly at his subject than does Morris, who does very little of looking to Arab sources. It is hard to avoid the question of, if Morris and the other "New Historians" really did uncover material that had been missing from the Israeli version of the history, how did they avoid the obvious conclusion that there must be something of worth in the Arab version of the history, in which virtually all of the "missing material" was well covered? (Another parallel work, "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters, is the work of neither a historian nor a journalist, but of a propagandist. It's main importance is as a subject itself, providing an example from an effort to hijack history.)
Hirst clearly sees Israel and the Zionists as the bad guys in the conflict, and he clearly sympathizes with Arafat and the PLO. (If only half of his account is accurate, though, then this is a perfectly reasonable position to end up in.) His positions, conclusions, and assertions should by no means be consumed wholesale -- the same should be said of any historical writer. However, it should take only a very little bit of scratching of the surface in the direction indicated by Hirst for a typical American reader to see that, whatever the actual facts, there is something very wrong with the narrative of the conflict in American media and politics. It may be, as the September 11, 2001 attacks suggest, that we ignore this problem at our own peril.
A secondary matter with "The Gun and the Olive Branch" is its own reception. Hirst spends not a small amount of his long preface to the third edition decrying the reception of his earlier editions. To an extent, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a history of histories: a chronology of which version of events has taken hold in people's conceptions about the conflict. As I have written, I think that "The Gun and the Olive Branch" is an account that cannot be ignored; whether it will be ignored -- again -- might serve to be a strong indicator of the direction that the conflict itself is likely to take.
Another commentator has criticized Hirst for using as a source "an official newspaper in a country in which it is actually a crime to publish anything positive about Israel." It should be noted, first, that Hirst cannot reasonably be said to rely very much on any single source, so rich is his documentation; and second, that in Israel it is I believe a crime for any political party formally to oppose Israel being a "Jewish state." Does this mean that any pronouncements coming out of Israel should be ignored? I suspect that "a reader" does not think so.
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Title: Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 by Tanya Reinhart ISBN: 1583225382 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians by Michael Hoffman II, Moshe Lieberman ISBN: 0970378424 Publisher: Independent History Pub. Date: 29 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Reporting from Ramallah : An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land by Amira Hass ISBN: 1584350199 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Politics Of Antisemitism by Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair ISBN: 1902593774 Publisher: AK Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by Norman G. Finkelstein ISBN: 1859843395 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: 16 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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