The fuse that led to the war now engulfing the Middle East was lit on October 7 when Hamas invaded Israel and massacred more than 1,200 people. The subsequent Israeli retaliatory invasion of Gaza led to the decimation of Hamas and of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the undermining of Iran’s influence everywhere.
The Gaza war has also spread its malign tentacles further afield as successive victories for Islamist and Green anti-Israel campaigners in Britain have sadly demonstrated. So much stems from the Israeli-Palestine conflict that a new history of its development by the distinguished British historian Colin Shindler, Emeritus Professor of Israel Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London, is a welcome addition to the already considerable body of literature on the subject. Much of its content will be painfully familiar to reasonably well-informed Jewish readers, but it remains a useful handbook to the seemingly intractable Jewish-Palestinian stand-off – concise, readable and erudite, as one would expect from Shindler, himself no stranger to these pages.
Shindler charts the birth of Zionism in 19th-century Russia, as Jewish revolutionaries who could not understand why “progressive” thinkers turned a blind eye to the antisemitic pogroms of the age, realised they had no future in the country. He is very sharp on the left’s double standards, which have surfaced repeatedly over the past 150 years, from the USSR cracking down on Jews in the 1960s without criticism from Western progressives, to the refusal to condemn Iran’s mass killing of socialists in the 1980s, to today’s leftists who line up to denounce Israel for its Gaza invasion while ignoring Hamas’s atrocities.
Shindler traces the most recent roots of today’s conflict to the failure of the Camp David and Oslo accords to enable the Israelis and the Palestinians to coexist peacefully as once seemed possible. He details the rise on radicalism on both sides since then: the growth of Islamism in the Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank and the increasing influence of right-wing politicians and parties in Israel, whom Benjamin Netanyahu has skilfully exploited since the 1990s as he has become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
Until this point, Shindler’s account has been a model of impartiality, but his distaste for Netanyahu becomes the dominant feature of the book’s closing chapters. He gives Netanyahu credit for liberalising Israel’s economy as finance minister but otherwise has little good to say about the man who has dominated Israeli politics for the past three decades, contrasting his liking for the finer material things in life with the more austere approach of his predecessors, of both left and right. Shindler sees Netanyahu as clinging onto power at any price, frustrating any chance of a peace deal with the Palestinians.
This analysis, of course, is shared by many Israelis as well as foreign critics of Israel. Netanyahu will always be a divisive figure.
Shindler is perhaps guilty of wishful thinking when describing the crowds supporting the Gaza hostages booing Netanyahu’s name at a rally in Tel Aviv as “undoubtedly Netanyahu’s Ceaușescu moment”, comparing a similar incident to the prelude to the Romanian dictator’s downfall. Ceaușescu was shot shortly afterwards by his own people but the only leader killed so far in the latest hostilities is Ayatollah Khamenei, on Netanyahu’s orders.
In a short book covering several millennia it is impossible to cover everything in the detail it deserves. Still, Shindler underplays Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, from which everything that has happened there since stems, and, oddly, October 7, when he says “hundreds” of Israelis were killed, although he deals fully and fairly with its aftermath.
He believes Israel’s attack on the Hamas leadership in Qatar, which angered President Trump, was the catalyst for the Gaza ceasefire. Others think the IDF’s renewed offensive was the real reason. Perhaps it was a mixture of both.
This is a book that is both well-timed and immediately out of date. The Gaza war has engaged the attention of the world so an explanation of its root causes must be worthy of attention. But the latest Iran war could change things in Gaza and the West Bank in ways that we cannot yet know. Any further weakening of Iran’s military machine must undermine Hamas even more than the IDF has done so far, with far-reaching consequences for the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. Or perhaps, as history tends to show, nothing much will change and the Forever War will resume in due course, a dismal prospect indeed.
A Forever War: Israel, Palestine and the Struggles for Statehood
By Colin Shindler
Swift Press
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