2005-04-19—Book Review: Rape of Palestine... |
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Book
Review |
The Rape of Palestine and the
Struggle for Jerusalem by Lionel I. Casper; Gefen Publishing House;
no price listed.
So quickly do events move and situations
change, especially in a region as volatile as the Middle East, that this book,
published about two years ago, seems outdated in
its approach to present-day issue.
Turn the clock back to the spring of 2003. Yasser Arafat is very much alive, even if he is restricted to his compound in Ramallah, and he is orchestrating repeated terrorist attacks on Israel. Meanwhile, U.S. forces appear poised to win an overwhelmingly decisive victory in Iraq, and are still searching for Osama Bin Ladin in the wake of the Sept. 11 catastrophe.
We indeed are living in a fast-changing time,
for better or worse.
Still, this study is valuable as a work of 20th
century history. Starting with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Lionel Casper
traces the rapidly changing attitude of British
officialdom in the interwar period, the diplomatic wrangling that led to the
establishment of the State of Israel, and
the virtually constant intransigence (with very few exceptions) of the Arab
world toward the Jewish state.
He does write at some length about two of the
exceptions - instances when Arab leaders were willing to accept the existence
of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. At the end of
World War I, the Emir Faisal, a leader of the Hashemite clan and a major Arab
figure, actually signed an agreement with Chaim
Weizmann providing for both Jewish and
Arab states in Palestine (which then included
what later became Jordan). Alas, the
rest of the Arab world quickly repudiated this accord.
Much later, soon after Israel gained its
independence. King Abdullah of Jordan held a series of secret talks with Moshe
Dayan and other Israeli leaders. But these
too came to naught, and in the summer of 1951, Abdullah paid for his moderate
stance with his life - he was assassinated
just outside the Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem.
Their abortive efforts, however, belong in any
history of Jewish-Arab relations, as they show that the story in not entirely
bleak - perhaps there is a long-term hope of a
rapprochement.
Casper focuses largely on the controversy over
Jerusalem, as the title indicates, but perhaps the most provocative chapters
portray the 180-degree turn in British policy,
from the Balfour Declaration to the infamous White Paper of 1939 which, if
fully implemented over a long period,
would have ended all Jewish hopes and aspirations for a homeland in Palestine.
And, ironically, he points out that it was
a British Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel, the first high commissioner under the
British mandate in the early
1920s, whose policies began the erosion of
Britain's promises to his fellow Jews.
Although Casper goes into considerable detail on
the relatively abrupt change in British policy, he gives little explanation
for the motivations behind the change.
Arab pogroms, and their negative results for the Jews of Palestine in the
1920s and 30s, are discussed at length. But
only in his discussion of the World War II era and later does he stress the
use of the oil weapon, which
apparently accounted for President
Roosevelt's sudden shift from a pro-Jewish to a pro-Arab position. Oil had
been a key issue, and continued[ as
such in Arab anti-Zionism as supported by British and U.S. interests.
The book contains a few historical inaccuracies.
For example, the bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel did not occur in
1948, as Casper indicates, but in the summer of 1946. And the book obviously
was not well edited - there are sentences which
can only be described as unintelligible.
Still, as a concise, relatively readable summary
of a troubled time in the Middle East - mostly especially Palestine and
especially Jerusalem- the book makes worthwhile
reading. And, while written from an Israeli viewpoint, it is not a polemic
and does not advocate extremist views.
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