JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Pages 67-68

Book Reviews

A Fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search For Peace

By Mark Perry. William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1994, 366 pp. List: $25; AET: $18.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

A certain Middle East country in the mid-1960s had such low credibility that its own citizens and foreign observers applied the "opposite test" to its public statements. An announcement that something was so was taken as confirmation that it was not. Anything labeled false was seen as true.

Readers of The Washington Post have learned to factor this exotic Middle East "opposite" import into their assessments of the Post's reviews of books on the Arab-Israeli issue. Honest books that would enhance the public's understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and its baneful influence on domestic American politics and the standing of the United States in the world are slammed, or not reviewed at all. Books that "spin" Middle East history and portray a preternaturally benign Israel, on the other hand, receive highly favorable reviews designed to enhance sales and further mislead already poorly informed Americans.

Perhaps the most notable example of the latter was the glowing review by the Post some years ago of Joan Peters' book, From Time Immemorial. Actually little more than a crude hoax designed to soften the truth of Israel's brutal expulsion from their ancient homeland in 1948-1949 of 750,000 Palestinians, Ms. Peters' work was hailed by the Post as brilliant historical research.

Peters' Israel-is-not-guilty theme was her utterly false claim that the Palestinians were not an indigenous people but, rather, newcomers who had come to the Holy Land only to batten on the prosperity brought by Jewish settlements. This theory rationalized Israeli dispossession of Palestinians from their lands on the grounds that essentially they were non-natives. Peters' made-up "research" was not merely dishonest but absurd on its face for two reasons. First, Zionist ideology and actual practice in the early days shunned non-Jewish hands on Jewish projects. And second, for decades Jewish settlers in Palestine had themselves barely managed to survive only through the charity of Baron Edmond de Rothschild of the French branch of the great Rothschild banking family.

A shameless example of the other kind of book review, blasting it so that it won't be read, was the Post's hatchet job two years ago on The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, by former Deputy Secretary of State George Ball and his son, Douglas Ball. A professional and deeply compassionate study by the now deceased diplomatic and business titan and his historian son, The Passionate Attachment was nevertheless belittled by the Post's reviewer, Walter Laqueur, a career apologist for Israel.

Laqueur could not refute the Balls' facts and their conclusions that Israel was an unadmirable country enabled to exist only by annual multibillion dollar gifts from a neo-Rothschild, the American taxpayer. So, ignoring the book's actual contents, Laqueur snidely intimated in what essentially was a non-review that since the Balls' complaints were so numerous, both they and their book were somehow discredited.

The Post's continuing policy of concealing from the public the honest realities of the Israeli-American relationship, a policy that has perceptibly intensified under its current editorial leadership, reveals a hard-to-fathom naiveté by one of the world's most important newspapers. In reality, keeping ugly facts about Israel hidden from view does not serve either American or Israeli long-term interests. Rather, it inculcates Israeli leaders with a smug self-satisfaction that impels them to take actions that, inevitably, will erode American friendship.

The latest victim of a Post hatchet job is Mark Perry's A Fire in Zion, a really fine book that must be widely read. The hatchet man this time is Adam Garfinkle of the pro-Israel Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

A sure "opposite test" sign that A Fire in Zion seriously worried the Post's editors is the fact that, as in the case of the Ball book, they picked an unabashed partisan of Israel to review Perry's book. Garfinkle not only trashed the book but personally vilified its author by falsely accusing him of factual, language and conceptual errors. In fact the only "error" spotted by this reviewer is a misspelling of Erez, the main border checkpoint between Israel and Gaza. Also, Perry's estimate that Christians still constitute 20 percent of the population of the West Bank probably is too high. A systematic and open Israeli government policy aimed at driving out Christian Palestinians has reduced the percentage from a previously estimated 15 percent to about 10 percent at present.

Garfinkle's "corrections" of Perry's "errors" are themselves overwhelmingly false. Perhaps the most grievous of the "corrections" is Garfinkle's taking Perry to task for writing, correctly, that Britain restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine after the 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt, which aimed at keeping Palestine for the Palestinians rather than surrendering it to a flood tide of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. It seems incredible that Garfinkle would not know of the "White Paper" issued by Britain in 1939 that limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over the next five years.

It is impossible to say whether Garfinkle's incorrect claim that immigration restrictions preceded the revolt is dishonest or merely misinformed. Adherents to Zionist dogma generally proceed on the basis that every individual and every institution not Jewish, including the British government, is an actual or potential enemy. From such a mindset a "wicked" Britain might have restricted immigration at any time, although it certainly did not do so just to be nasty.

From the hard-line Israeli Likudist point of view, which frequently is reflected in the Post's pages, everything is wrong with A Fire in Zion, even the title, taken from the Old Testament's Lamentations, attributed to the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah's unheeded warnings to ancient Israel that it faced a calamitous future unless it mended its sinful ways proved to be "prophetic."

Thus Jeremiah was not the most honored of ancient Israel's great prophets. The invocation of his name and his prescient warnings of two and a half millennia ago fare little better with contemporary Israel and its zealous "defenders."

An Easy and Unaffected Style

A Fire in Zion is easy to read and unaffected in its honesty about relationships between the United States and Israel. Author Perry has done something all but unheard of by simply ignoring the standard U.S. media approach of pointing-no-fingers-at-Israel. For example, in his first chapter on Jabalya, the noxious Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza, Perry's evocation of the misery and degradation perpetuated by the Israeli occupiers is so palpable that the outbreak of the intifada there in December 1987 becomes "inevitable."

Emigration from Israel is just another sacred icon knocked off the wall by Perry. He writes that half a million Israelis had departed (a low estimate in this reviewer's opinion), by 1994. Another 300,000 will depart, he predicts, by the year 2000, at a rate of 50,000 a year. The impact of this ultra-secret Israeli emigration on the total population of the tiny country is brought home by the author's conversation with a long-term resident of Israel who is emigrating with her family because life is just too hard to bear in Israel.

Mark Perry's detailed account in his "Tunis" and "Oslo" chapters of the secret Palestinian-Israeli negotiations leading eventually to the Yasser Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin handshake at the south lawn of the White House on Sept. 13, 1993 achieves real excitement and inspires admiration for his industrious digging. No other account I have seen is nearly so detailed nor so potentially useful to future historians.

Moreover, Perry opened my eyes to the fierce internal PLO debates about Chairman Yasser Arafat's decision to support Saddam Hussain's 1990 grab of Kuwait. As recounted in convincing detail by Perry, these debates were long-drawn-out and so acrimonious that Arafat threatened more than once to resign. The abiding mystery is that the PLO leader stuck so recklessly to his guns against all but total opposition from his most trusted supporters, who correctly foresaw the folly of Arafat's bullheadedness.

Perhaps the basest of Garfinkle's cheap shots against Mark Perry is the charge that Fire is simply a "quickie" book churned out to make a fast buck on the drama of the famous handshake. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perry reports research over a period of six years, and a reading of his book confirms an arduous job of digging that must have consumed virtually all of his time over that period.

Most of the drama of the Israel-Palestine actions leading to Oslo is conveyed through sharply etched and revealing "personality profiles." Any writer who has attempted these knows they are not easy to do. The sheer number of such profiles belies Garfinkle's cruel put-down of Fire as a quickie job. Moreover, biography is correctly recognized as one of the most palatable as well as effective ways to teach history. Part of Mark Perry's success in examining the "road to Oslo" and making its tangled path stand out so memorably is his employment of such "biographic history."

Another of Perry's "sins," about which Garfinkle waxes wroth, is comparing the reactions of two Washington, DC figures, Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich and senior PLO official Salah Ta'mari, to the search for peace and the White House handshake. Both Ta'mari and Rabinovich are depicted as keenly intelligent, with Rabinovich seen as having an almost "mystical" view of the joint effort at peace.

Garfinkle seems to have gone ballistic over the word mystical. It is not entirely clear why. But a good guess based on a not-very-successful attempt to understand the fortress mentality of the Likudniks is that "humanizing" a distinguished Palestinian and "softening" a distinguished Israeli break too many stereotypes. Palestinians have to be seen as terrorists and Israelis have to be seen as grimly determined to vanquish them by force. So, to Garfinkle, both Rabinovich and Ta'mari are simply bewildering "softies," rather than the altogether human figures Perry portrays. Garfinkle's bewilderment reveals the workings of the Likudist mind, particularly the American Likudist mind, to which Middle East peace appears both as the end of the dream of Greater Israel and also the consignment to irrelevance of an expansionist Israel's huge American support network.

Another of Perry's "deadly sins" is to suggest that members of that Likud-leaning American support network wanted their own way, regardless of the wishes of Israel's elected government. Perry has the temerity to suggest that Prime Minister Rabin is committed to doing what he considers best for Israel, regardless of the views held by the Jewish diaspora.

Still another Perry "sin" is to point out that weaknesses in both the Palestinian and the Israeli position were clear to any observer of Middle East affairs. The weaknesses in the Israeli position are long-term and therefore less obvious, but Perry makes clear that they are very serious. In touching on the hush-hush Israeli statistics on emigration, for example, Perry compounds his sin by quoting Rabin's poignantly revealing remark, "We don't want Israel's main export to be its children."

A Fire in Zion is fair, comprehensive and totally honest in its treatment of issues normally ignored by mainstream American journalists. Such misguided mainstream attempts as Garfinkle's to help Israeli leaders in reality do a grave disservice to Americans, Palestinians and the Israelis themselves. They encourage extremism in the latter when only mutual moderation can bring to the Middle East the comprehensive peace that all of its peoples, and their well wishers, so desperately need. This book should be read by everyone concerned with helping the Middle East protagonists to reach a lasting Middle East peace. It is honest, honest, honest.