Avi Shlaim Quotes

While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

The Zionist movement was in origin and in essence a European movement led by European Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state for European Jews.

bombings stopped suddenly in April 2004 as a result of a strategic choice by its leadership and a subsequent secret deal with Israel.33

Amnesty International reported that since the start of the second intifada Israel had destroyed 3,000 Palestinian houses in Gaza, throwing over 18,000 Palestinians onto the street. It damaged a further 15,000 houses, in addition to destroying hundreds of factories, workshops, greenhouses, wells, pumps, irrigation canals, and orchards. It uprooted 226,000 trees and

Meanwhile King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan had his own ambitions to dominate as much as possible of Palestine, having done his best to come to terms with both the Zionists and his British backers over his plans for the country. As Avi Shlaim reports in Collusion Across the Jordan, his account of this era, extensive clandestine contact took place between King ‘Abdullah and Jewish Agency leaders (later Israeli prime ministers) Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir.30 As the United Nations moved toward partition of Palestine, the king repeatedly met with them secretly in the hope of reaching an accord in which Jordan would incorporate the part of Palestine to be designated for its Arab majority. The king confidently gave them his assurances that the Palestinians would come around and assent to his rule.* Thus ‘Abdullah, unlike Iraq’s Nuri, had no use for any form of independent Palestinian leadership or for a body like the Arab Office that would serve as their diplomatic arm.

As the historian Avi Shlaim noted, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that” British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin “colluded directly with the Transjordanians and indirectly with the Jews to abort the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.

There was an acute sense of betrayal at all levels of society, from the king downwards, and the political fallout from the war was impossible to contain. On 1 November parliament passed a resolution calling for the severance of diplomatic relations with France. Only the fear of bankruptcy deterred it from calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Britain too. On 20 November, however, parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the abrogation of the Anglo–Jordanian treaty and of an exchange of diplomatic representatives with Russia and China. The treaty was clearly doomed, but there was as yet no agreement on how to replace the subsidy it provided. Nabulsi wanted to delay the termination of the treaty until Arab funding could be secured. Hussein, on the other hand, wished to avoid dependence on Arab allies and made a determined bid to secure American financial support for Jordan. His aim was not Arab unity against the West but the replacement of one external patron and protector by another. The first, secret approach to the Americans was made not by the king himself but by his chief of staff. On 9 November, Abu Nuwar requested from the American military attaché in Amman American economic and military aid to Jordan in “sufficient volume” to compensate for the imminent loss of British aid. If America put up the money and arms, Abu Nuwar said, communism would be prevented from dominating Jordan; he would dissolve parliament and take over the government: “I and the people of Jordan will follow US policies.

The British for their part were not only ready but eager to renegotiate their treaty with Jordan, not least because of budgetary constraints. After the dismissal of Glubb, the election of Nabulsi and the Suez débâcle, the subsidy had become a costly white elephant. The dilemma for the British was how to cut their losses without undermining the Hashemite state that they themselves had created in the aftermath of the First World War. The answer was to offer their ward up for adoption, and the most desirable candidate for parenthood was the United States of America. By a happy coincidence this was also the adoptive parent that Hussein had chosen for himself.

Bar Kokhba was held out as a national hero although the revolt he led was crushed, Judea was devastated and its population was killed, exiled or sold into slavery. The lesson we were expected to draw from the history of this revolt was that it is more honourable to go down fighting than not to fight at all.

The Palestinians called Abdullah a traitor. He sold them down the river, they said. Yet, if Abdullah had not sent his army into Palestine upon expiry of the British mandate, it is likely that the whole of Palestine would have been occupied by Israel and an even larger number of Palestinians turned into refugees. There is thus at least a case to be made for viewing Abdullah not as a traitor but as a saviour of the Palestinians.32 The Palestinian retort is that Abdullah preserved a part of Palestine from being swallowed up by Israel, only in order to swallow it up in Jordan. Some arguments never end.

King Abdullah…was, in his innermost soul, as opposed to the alienation of any part of Palestine as any one else. But to him, moral judgement and personal beliefs were an exercise in futility, unless backed by viable and adequate power, in the broad meaning of the term.

As for the myth of the extended hand of peace, the documents show clearly an intransigent Israeli leadership that refused to open up negotiations over the future of post-Mandatory Palestine or consider the return of the people who had been expelled or fled. While Arab governments and Palestinian leaders were willing to participate in a new and more reasonable UN peace initiative in 1948, the Israelis assassinated the UN peace mediator, Count Bernadotte, and rejected the suggestion of the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), a UN body, to reopen negotiations. This intransigent view would continue; Avi Shlaim has shown in The Iron Wall that, contrary to the myth that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss peace, it was Israel that constantly rejected the peace offers that were on the table.

Brigadier General Israel Lior, Eshkol’s aide-de-camp, suspected that the never-ending chain of action and reaction would end up in all-out war: In the north a pretty heavy war was conducted over the water sources. The war was directed by the chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, together with the officer in charge of the northern command, David (“Dado”) Elazar. I had an uneasy inner feeling on this matter. All the time it seemed to me that Rabin suffers from what I call the “Syrian syndrome.” In my opinion, nearly all those who served along the front lines of the northern command … were affected by the Syrian syndrome. Service on this front, opposite the Syrian enemy, fuels feelings of exceptional hatred for the Syrian army and people. There is no comparison, its seems to me, between the Israeli’s attitude to the Jordanian or Egyptian army and his attitude to the Syrian army. … We loved to hate them.