Anniversaries are occasions for celebration, mourning, commemoration, re-telling – and reflection. This book was planned to mark key events in the history of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the centenary year of the British government’s Balfour Declaration of November 1917 and the half-century since the Middle East (‘Six Days’) war of June 1967. Other significant events, described in the pages that follow, took place (by coincidence, unless perhaps the seventh year of nearly every decade has some mysterious, occult quality) in 1897, 1937, 1947, 1977, 1987 and 2007. Enemies and Neighbours looks back to the establishment of the first Zionist settlements in Palestine, then made up of several provinces of the Ottoman Empire, in the early 1880s, and proceeds chronologically, with thematic diversions, up to the present day. My hope is that this long overview, based on up-to-date research, will bring the big picture of what is widely considered to be the world’s most intractable and divisive conflict into sharper focus. It tries to tell the story of, and from, both sides, and of the fateful interactions between them.
Unrest, violence and peace initiatives are its inevitable milestones. But to concentrate too narrowly on wars, diplomacy or terrorism is to overlook the ordinary Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, who have encountered and confronted each other on the ground – on front lines, at refugee camps, at checkpoints and in daily life, language and culture. Politicians, strategists and soldiers in London and Washington, as well as in Amman, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus, have all played roles in this drama, but closer attention is paid here to Jerusalem, Jaffa, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Nablus, Hebron and Gaza and the bitterly disputed landscape around them.
Underlying structures, attitudes and routines matter as much as the endless ‘newsworthy’ events that erupt from them – a conclusion I have reached in my work both as a journalist and historian. Important themes include the creation of a separate, autonomous Jewish society and economy before 1948 and, especially, the extent to which the Zionists were aware of Arab opposition – which was evident far earlier, in my view, than is often understood. Other big themes are Palestinian flight, expulsion and dispossession – and the subsequent yearning to return home; the massive impact of the 1967 war; the steady expansion of Jewish settlements in the territories occupied that year; the driving forces behind two intifadas (uprisings), the shift to the right in Israel, the rise of Islamist views among Palestinians, the vast asymmetry between the sides, and the slow demise of the two-state solution to the conflict – and what that may mean for the future.
Israel’s Palestinian minority, too often overlooked or treated as an afterthought, receives close attention because its unique circumstances from 1948 to the present day offer important insights, and because it forms a slender human link between two peoples who have all too often simply ignored each other. The main thread running through this book, from the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II to the Donald Trump era, is the troubled relations between them.
The Israel–Palestine issue has a strong claim to be the most closely studied conflict on Earth. ‘Voluminous’ does not even begin to capture the sheer quantity of the material about it. The range and depth reflect its importance, complexity and contentiousness. Back in the mid-1970s, when I began studying the British Mandate period, it was already a well-ploughed field. Now the topsoil has gone and battalions of researchers are hacking away at the bare rock underneath.
This book is intended for the general reader. Keeping it to a manageable length has meant that choices have had to be made throughout about what to include and what to leave out. It is based on a synthesis of existing scholarship and secondary sources: primary research covering the entire 135-year history is far beyond the capability of any one author. Specialized publications like the Journal of Palestine Studies, Israel Studies and the Jerusalem Quarterly are vital resources. Nowadays material originally published in Arabic and Hebrew often finds its way quickly into English, but important older material has not.
Academic interest has grown enormously and is closely related to political positions. Several universities in the US and Britain now have dedicated (and separate) centres for Palestine and Israel studies. In the last decade or so the fundamentals of the conflict have been illuminated by the paradigm of settler colonialism – based on the experience of the US, Australia, Canada and South Africa – when native populations are replaced rather than exploited by Europeans. That approach struggles, though, to encompass the Jewish religious–national connection to Eretz-Yisrael that is so central to Zionist ideology and Israeli identity. And Mizrahi (Eastern or oriental) Jews who came to Israel from Iraq, Morocco and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds are another specific element with no exact parallel elsewhere. In a way this heated contemporary debate reflects a familiar truth about how the conflict is perceived: Zionists have tended to focus on their intentions in immigrating to Palestine; Arabs on the results, and especially, in the words of Edward Said, of ‘having their territory settled by foreigners’.1
Anthropological and ethnographic research – conveying the texture of remembered experience – can be very valuable. Political science, sociology, geography and cultural studies have all enriched understanding too, though the terminology used can often be dense. I greatly enjoyed an article entitled ‘The ingathering of (non-human) exiles: the creation of the Tel Aviv Zoological Garden animal collection, 1938–1948’ – an unusual angle on cultural aspects of state formation.2
Journalism remains an indispensable ‘first rough draft of history’ that can sometimes turn out to be impressively close to later, more polished versions. Arguably I learned as much reporting from the streets of Nablus and Gaza during the first intifada as from poring over declassified files or old newspapers in archives in Jerusalem and London – as well as from simply talking to people on both sides of an often impassable national divide. Working out how to cross that divide, back and forth, had its lessons too. Palestinian and Israeli journalists covering the occupied territories face special challenges and dangers, sometimes from their own society as much as from the other.
In recent years journalists, social scientists and historians have all had to take account of the immense amount of material published on social media. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have become rich sources of facts, opinion, propaganda and disinformation about the conflict. Hashtags now matter as much as – if not more than – learned journals. The ephemeral has become both permanent and easily retrievable. ‘Passing the test of time’ is an outdated notion in a digital age when students of the US presidency are reduced to instantly analysing global policy pronouncements in hastily composed messages of 140 characters. Palestinians and Israelis fight their wars in cyberspace these days, as well as on the soil of their contested homeland.