If anyone still believed that political Zionism’s objective was anything less than ethnic cleansing The Fall of Israel would surely disabuse them of that delusion.
The English edition of Max Ghilan’s How Israel Lost its Soul appeared in 1974, not long after Israel’s ignominious defeat by Egypt in October 1973. I didn’t know much about Ghilan at the time, and his brief Wikipedia entry doesn’t leave me much the wiser.
It’s interesting nonetheless to learn that, before 1947, he’d fought in the Stern gang, otherwise known as Lehi, a terrorist group seeking to overthrow the British rule in Palestine. Then, shortly after the British withdrew, the newborn Israeli government threw him into jail, which is where he witnessed Palestinian prisoners being tortured. He came out committed to their cause, and was one of the first non-communists to call for negotiations with the PLO. He left Israel in 1969, only to return in 1993 after the Oslo Accords were signed. He died in Tel Aviv, aged 74, in 2005.
It’s been a while since I read How Israel Lost its Soul. I thought it went the way of so many of my books in a lifetime of serial relocations. Amazon’s going price is USD675, so I knew I couldn’t replace it. But then to my amazement I found it. There it was, crammed on my bookshelf, its paperback pages friable and yellowed. I guess I’d kept it because it was the first book to awaken me to Israel’s manifest shortcomings.
Another book, Michael Broning’s 2010 The Political of Change in Palestine, marks the second stage of my evolving anti-Zionism, the recognition that the so-called Jewish state had, as had been predicted, grown into an profoundly ethnocratic, undemocratic colonising state. It too was hiding in my bookcase. There have been many others, but somehow these two – which may not be the best of them – have been significant milestones in my understanding of the import of Zionism’s brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people. These were the books that marked my evolving from a relatively unthinking Israel supporter to someone unshakably convinced that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was a grievous mistake from the start.
In between were the six weeks spent in Israel where I met my relatives, many of whom had fought with the Haganah on the road to Israel’s creation, and my sixth novel based in part on that visit, the book that took me years to write and was so hard to get published.
Yet now that Israel is established, with its history of nearly 77 years, I can’t help wondering what will become of it. I’m certainly not alone in this. Dan Steinbock, the author of The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, has been wondering about it himself. Prompted by the Hamas attack on Israel last year, he refers to it in his preface, setting it firmly in its context, a feat of panache and an astounding thoroughness. The Fall of Israel is a widely-resourced book, arguably a defining one on the Zionist state’s audacious appearance after the second world war and its powerfully detrimental impact on the geopolitical scene.
Steinbock is Jewish, the research director of an international think tank, but those who would disparage any settler-colonialism analysis will find little comfort here. At the book’s start he states categorically:
‘Until recently, many attributed the fall of Israel mainly to the occupation of the Palestinian territories in the 1967 War and the subsequent expansion of Jewish settlements. Even though colonisation and the settlements have played a central role in the conflict, they are its proximate effect. It is the ethnic expulsions of the Palestinian Arabs that is the modus operandi of the conflict – from the late 1940s to contemporary Gaza and the West Bank.’
And so the narrative proceeds, from FDR’s secret deal with Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud to secure US access to its oil reserves, to the assassination of Count Bernadotte and its implication for the elusive ‘two-state solution’ to the creation of Unit 101 for implementing the new state’s Dahiya Doctrine to the genocidal obliteration of Gaza today and all stages in between. Some of it comes from Steinbock’s personal experience, though much of what he records is necessarily what others have previously documented. Yet in gathering together this vast amount of material he connects a myriad of dots. And so the case is made. In the interests of its own failing empire, and against all reason and humanity, the US continues to back Israel, and the fate of Israel is inevitably entangled in the decline.
Many of the players come out looking badly. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, is one; Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency another; the American Rabbi Meir Kahane, father of the far-right illegal settlements yet another. There’s Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu, Biden, even Tony Blair – the list goes on. The latter was involved in a murky deal to deliver gas from Gaza’s off-shore fields to Israel. As Steinbock writes, their ‘ploys killed the prospects for a limited Palestinian budget autonomy and the Oslo Accords, while a path was paved for new wars, which would then be blamed on the Palestinians.’
If anyone still believed that political Zionism’s objective was anything less than ethnic cleansing The Fall of Israel would surely disabuse them of that delusion. As for Israel’s prospects, for all the seeming success of its forever wars, the author has this to say: ‘Unfortunately, time is running out … What has happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. Perhaps it won’t even stay in the region.”
Steinbock’s outlook was pessimistic enough when his book went to press. Since then we’ve had Trump returning to the White House, Israel’s assassinations and attacks on Lebanon and Iran, and now the end of the Assad regime, with all the uncertainty these entail. Ever at the ready, Israel has begun bombing Syria. Meanwhile, Gaza’s devastation, the total immiseration of its people, continues, as repression on the West Bank intensifies.
The American empire and its gung-ho supporters in the western democracies have a great deal to answer for. Who knows how or when we will pay.
Sara Dowse
Sara Dowse is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist. Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.