About twelve years ago my younger daughter went missing in Thailand and for several days there was no news from the British Embassy or anyone else with whom she had been in contact about her possible whereabouts. Then one night I received a call out of the blue from a woman who introduced herself as a member of the Israeli secret service. “I came across your daughter sleeping rough,” she said. “She has an injury and no money.” I was on a plane within hours, as you may imagine, and in due course I eventually met up with my daughter and her saviour. Actually I need to pluralise that word. There were four of them, all women in their early 20’s and enjoying holiday leave. They could not do enough to assist me.

The reason I say this is because one night I broke bread with them and they were eager to talk about their country and its right to exist. They had all the facts at their finger tips. Balfour Declaration. Pogroms. Promises made by the British then the United Nations for a Jewish homeland. They showed me videos of academics with maps and geopolitical data and much more besides. I felt slightly under ideological siege. They had been taught a hermetically sealed version of history, learnt it inside out and were obviously primed to impose it on anyone from a neutral country who was prepared to listen. I did not push back. To do so in such circumstances would have represented the height of ingratitude. I simply listened patiently and politely.

The historical truth is rarely pure and never simple. The most resilient and enduring versions are told by the victors of wars of conquest. From the outset Israel has been backed by the world’s premier superpower, allowed to develop a nuclear deterrent and continues to colonise land in places like The West Bank and The Golan Heights that was never given to it in 1948 when the British Mandate of Palestine ended. No wonder, therefore, Israel is so confidently vociferous in declaring unambiguously to the world its own take on history. It is one that many people in the UK have bought into uncritically, accusing those who publicly dispute it, like Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, of antisemitism.

The most interesting thing about this book to me is its author. He is a Jew of European parentage who was born and raised in Israel and who fought as a soldier in the IDF during the Yom Kippur War. Later he studied History and eventually became a senior lecturer at Haifa University, a branch of the larger Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His left of centre and anti Zionist views rapidly established him as a dissident voice in his native country. In a newspaper interview he later explained, “I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job. I am getting threatening calls from people every day. I am not being viewed as a threat to the Israeli society but my people think that I am either insane or my views are irrelevant. Many Israelis also believe that I am working as a mercenary for the Arabs.” As a consequence he bailed out and joined Exeter University in thenUK as Professor of History, and has been director of its European Centre for Palestine Studies since 2009.

Clearly “A Very Short History” is a response to the war that erupted after the October 7, 2023 attack by Hammas on Southern Israel. It is well written and is quick to remind the reader that this conflict is just yet another ugly brutal saga of global colonisation. What the settler Jews are doing to the indigenous Palestinian people is compared to the way the original European settlers of America, Australia and South Africa treated the natives they found there. They “othered” and displaced them. If you are British it is uncomfortable to be reminded that the territory known as Palestine never really belonged to us to give away. Britain simply took over the mandate to govern the area once The Ottoman Empire dissolved as a result of being on the losing side in World War One.

According to Pappe the first Jewish settlers began to arrive in Palestine around 1881, escaping from antisemitism. By 1918 they constituted 5% of the population, a minority but a highly organised one; and even then, indoctrinated by Zionist propaganda which “regarded the Old Testament as a religious and moral tract compelling them to obey God’s laws for humanity”, they saw themselves as laying the groundwork for an eventual takeover of Palestine. By the mid 1920’s, Pappe argues, the Zionist movement was in a position to begin a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”. They purchased thousands of acres of land and evicted, sometimes forcibly, the Arabs who had previously cultivated it. The eviction orders had to be sought from the British authorities and were usually granted automatically. Hence by the late 1920’s the settler colonial project was already well established. The Jewish immigrants had evolved a “logic of elimination” mindset. How did they justify it to themselves? Pappe asks. By choosing to perceive the Arabs as savages and primitives of a nomadic disposition – even though their villages and way of life had existed for thousands of years.

In 1931 Sidney Webb, a Labour peer, published a white paper condemning these practices and Ramsay McDonald determined to implement its main proposal to prevent further Jewish immigration and land embezzlement. However at the twelfth hour he appears to have been nobbled by the Zionist lobby and backed down. Come 1936 an umbrella grouping of all Palestinian political organisations announced a general strike , “demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases and the establishment of a Palestinian national government.” Unfortunately many Palestinians turned this initiative into a full scale revolt, targeting both British and Jewish forces. It took three years to quash – during which the Brits beat up the Arabs pretty badly. In 1939 WW2 broke out and six million Jews died as a result of Nazi racist policies. The moral case to provide a homeland for the survivors became indisputable amongst the victorious allies and so in 1948 the monster Israel was officially born.

I use the word “monster” because there is something Frankestinian about Pappe’s story. In 144 pages he rushes us through the nation’s conception, gestation, birth pangs, childhood, truculent adolescence and finally growth into narcissistic, domineering, vindictive maturity. It surprised me that he appears to have absolutely no truck with the Shoah mentality of Zionist leaders, nor does he advocate a two state solution to the problem. “There is no point in talking about peace as if both sides are equally at fault,” he cautions, “when the process we are really talking about is decolonisation.” Nor does he claim to have “a road map” as to how this noble aim can be achieved. The monster is now eight million people in size and has developed one of the world’s most powerful armies. Pappe derides Israel as “a fake democracy” because it practices a form of apartheid. The Arabs who live within Israeli territories do not have the same rights as Jews. No wonder then that in the past the ANC made common cause with the PLO.

The book, I suspect, was quickly and cheaply produced. A few maps and a timeline synopsis of the major conflicts, intifadas and abortive attempts at peace would have served the text better. But this is a small quibble. And I leave its daunting conclusion to the author. Namely that Israel has come to believe it cannot survive without oppressing Palestinians. Secular and religious Jews in Israel have very little in common, he asserts, “apart from hatred of the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. That’s not enough for a stable national identity.”

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While writing this review I happened across an interesting article about Pappe and two other dissident Israeli historians like him. Here is a link to it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/14/idea-israel-ilan-pappe-promised-land-ari-shavit-review

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As for the Moral Abdication book…….. How is it possible, Fassin asks, that with rare exceptions, ‘for political leaders and intellectual personalities of the principal Western countries…the lives of Palestinian civilians are worth several hundred times less than the lives of Israeli civilians’? How do we explain why ‘demonstrations and meetings demanding a just peace are banned’? Why is it that ‘without independent confirmation, most of the mainstream Western media quasi-automatically reproduce the version of events relayed by the camp of the occupiers, while incessantly casting doubt on that recounted by the occupied’? Why do ‘so many of those who could have spoken, not to say stood up in opposition, avert their eyes from the annihilation of a territory, its history, its monuments, its hospitals, its schools, its housing, its infrastructure, its roads, and its inhabitants—in many cases, even encouraging its continuation’?

The answer is that morality is not set in tablets of stone. We may have individual moral agency but at the collective level morality is displaced by the philosophy of “real politik”. Morality as exercised by our head honchos is a moveable feast, a chameleon and a chimera. It changes its shape and colour when a nation’s geopolitical self-interest is deemed to be under threat. DO AS YOU WOULD BE DONE BY quickly becomes MY ENEMY’S ENEMY IS MY FRIEND. And just as rapidly TALK LISTEN NEGOTIATE COMPROMISE becomes FIRST GET HOLD OF A MAN BY THE BALLS, HIS HEART AND MIND FOLLOW……..there is more to say about moral relativism but I don’t have time now.