Mike Scott-Baumann on Zionism and conflict
A Forever War: Israel, Palestine and the Struggles for Statehood by Colin Schindler published by Swift Press
Colin Shindler’s new book undoubtedly “sheds much-needed light on the conflict”, as the flyer claims, especially from a Zionist and Israeli perspective. It also contains a very useful timeline, but no bibliography.
The author discusses the origins and developments of different shades of Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, as you would expect of an expert on the Israeli Right, he explains the intra-government debates and the twists and turns in the development of Israeli government policy on the future of occupied territories after 1967. He traces Netanyahu’s “zig-zag” rise to power, the development of the religious and nationalist Right and its increasing influence on government policy.
He is not uncritical of Israeli policy: he recognises the disaster that was Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the IDF’s complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut. He is highly critical of Netanyahu, for whom “political survival became the central aim at any cost” and who seemed to have no clear idea of what he meant when he called for “total victory”.
However, the book is more of a history of Zionism and Israel than a history of the Israel-Palestine conflict because it contains much less of the Palestinian narrative. This is surprising in a book subtitled “Israel, Palestine and the Struggles for Statehood”. There is no mention of the Arabs living in Palestine before 1914 except to write that “Arabs immigrated from neighbouring countries to seek work there’. It is very thin on the inter-war years with no acknowledgement of Britain’s privileging of Jews over Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, which Israeli historians now recognise. And it is arguable, at the very least, to say of the Nakba (Disaster) of 1948-49 that “only a minority of refugees [were] forcibly expelled”.
Shindler recognises that it was extremists (the “maximalists”, proponents of a one-state solution) on both sides that destroyed hopes of Oslo. Both the suicide bombings carried out by Hamas and the killings perpetrated by extremist Jewish settlers played a significant part in the unravelling of the “peace process”.
Much of his comment on the atrocities carried out by Hamas and other militant groups on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s response centres on reactions in the UK, and he decries the blurring of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. However, he singles out Palestine Action’s supporters and the foul-mouthed utterings of a singer at the Glastonbury music festival rather than the huge numbers, including many Jews, who demonstrated peacefully in support of the people of Gaza and the need for a ceasefire in the two years following 7 October.
The Preface says that the book is “intended as a contribution towards understanding the complex background to this hundred-year war”, yet there is no discussion of the nature of the Occupation, which has been at the heart of the Israel-Palestine struggle since 1967. Shindler acknowledges the illegality, under the Geneva Convention, of Israeli settlements, but there is no recognition of what might be achieved by the implementation of international law nor of any possible role which the United Nations might have in ending this “Forever War”.