The Jewish Chronicle
Review: Israel Since the Six-Day War
Battered child diagnosis for Israel and Jews
June 25, 2015 13:01
By
David Goldberg
2 min read
Battered child diagnosis for Israel and Jews
June 25, 2015 13:01By
David Goldberg
To amplify Ecclesiastes, "Of making many books about Israel there is no end". Reading this latest addition to the plethora, from Leslie Stein, I had the vague feeling that perhaps I had reviewed a previous book of his. My memory failure could well be due to incipient senility, but just as likely is that the author's turgid prose style and familiar analyses are easily forgettable.
Stein favours use of the double negative, such as: "This is not to suggest that the Jewish defenders were not hard pressed", or "Israel's achievements from the Sinai Campaign were not negligible". No adjective or noun escapes without further adverbial qualification. Platitudes and tautologies abound, typical being "Al-Husseini was in effect the Palestinians' de facto leader."
This is not to say that every historian has to be a skilled writer (although I can think of no major one who isn't). A more substantial defect is that Stein's book depends entirely upon secondary sources, mainly articles. Essentially, therefore, it is a digest of newspaper cuttings from 1967-2010, with authorial irony reserved for left-leaning targets like the Guardian, Noam Chomsky, the Independent, the Goldstone Report, and B'tselem, the Israeli Human Rights organisation.
There are perfunctory sections on Russian and Ethiopian immigration, Charedi Jews, and Israeli Arabs, but the main focus is on Israel's wars and military engagements since 1967. The chapters on the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal and the Yom Kippur War are particularly good, reminding one how complacent, hubristic and incompetent military intelligence was during that time, and how close to disaster Israel came.
Stein lets his pose of magisterial objectivity slip whenever he castigates Israel's critics for swallowing Palestinian propaganda. But he is equally dismissive of Israeli leaders, from Rabin to Olmert, who mistakenly thought that they could do a deal with the devious and unremittingly hostile Palestinians. To bolster his contention, he comes up with a piece of ludicrous cod-psychiatry, arguing that a large proportion of Israelis, as with the Jewish people throughout history, suffer from battered child syndrome.
'There is a heavy reliance on press cuttings'
An "innocent, assaulted and abused child" (Israel) is "constantly told by his callous and abusive parents" (the critical Western world) that he merits punishment. The child internalises parental strictures by mistakenly concluding that he has not yet reached an acceptable level of goodness. Similarly, many Israelis delude themselves that they have some freedom of action in improving relations with their neighbours. That might hold true if the neighbours were responsive to reasonable overtures, but this does not apply to the PLO and Hamas, who can be placated only by Israel's annihilation. Unwilling to accept the evidence, "Israelis… erroneously conclude that they are not being conciliatory enough."
Given his hard-line, tunnel vision (even Sharon is implicitly censured for evacuating Gaza), Stein's conclusion is depressingly predictable. The status quo will remain insoluble "until such time as the Palestinians accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state…"
David J. Goldberg’s most recent book is The Story of the Jews (André Deutsch)