A man with answers and a woman with questions - The Jewish Chronicle

The Tail Wags the Dog
By Efraim Karsh
Bloomsbury, £25

Losing Israel
By Jasmine Donahaye
Seren, £12.99

It is a historian's old trick, popularised by A.J.P. Taylor, to take an accepted historical narrative and subvert it by arguing the opposite.

Efraim Karsh employs the same technique, rejecting the conventional notion that it was competing, great-power imperialism over the dismembered Ottoman empire post-1918 that produced the conglomeration of artificially patched-together states that comprise the modern Middle East. According to him, far from pursuing their own self-interested colonial agendas, the UK, France and the United States were comprehensively out-manoeuvred by local tribes and clans, led by the wily Sharif Hussein and his two sons, Faisal and Abdullah, who became king of Iraq and Emir of Mecca respectively.

After this provocative opening, his thesis loses focus. The well-disposed Foreign Office transmutes into perfidious Albion during the Mandate and high-minded Woodrow Wilson is low-down cunning in derailing the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Karsh takes us on a headlong gallop through upheavals in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine, to demonstrate that the former Soviet Union had no greater understanding or control of its client states than does current American foreign policy.

Even so, and hard-liner in defence of Israel though he is, his innuendos about Barack Obama's Muslim ancestry are unworthy. And his tame conclusion that the impetus for regional developments depends more on indigenous events than on external influences, is hardly original. Karsh documents many staggering examples of State Department ineptitude, and quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski's rueful admission that the Iran fiasco was a "failure of political intelligence in the widest meaning of the term." That is nothing new, either; history has always been a mixture of conspiracies and cock-ups.

Mind you, history seems to have bypassed Jasmine Donahaye altogether. She writes that, on kibbutz as a 17-year-old in 1986, "we knew almost nothing about Palestinians." That was almost two decades after the Six-Day War, and a year before the first intifada. It makes one wonder what mind-blowing crops her idealistic Labour Zionist parents were growing on Beit Hashita.

Nevertheless, this is a strange, picaresque, affecting and beautifully written little meditation, part memoir, part travelogue, mostly a riveting account of the author's lifelong passion for ornithology, first conceived in the kibbutz fields. Recurring motifs are the search for identity, family dynamics, attachment to place, rootlessness, and the persistence of memory. The same naivety that made Donahaye previously unaware of Palestinians, belatedly causes her to enquire what had happened to the two Arab villages of Yubla and Al Murassas that used to be where Beit Hashita now is. They had conveniently disappeared in the retelling of the kibbutz's pioneering mythology.

That happened all over Israel after 1948, when hundreds of Palestinian localities were razed or given new Hebrew names. I remember waiting to see Hanan Ashrawi in Ramallah a few years ago and looking at a map on her office wall, which at first glance seemed to be a version in Arabic of the contours of Israel and the West Bank. Close up, I realised that it recorded every single Palestinian town, village and hamlet pre-1948. The Palestinians will not forget, any more than we Jews can.

Neither of these very different books attempts to offer a solution to the Middle East's bitterest conflict. But, as an aid to understanding, I was more moved by Donahaye's sensitive evocations than Karsh's glib certitudes.

To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.