Caroline Pickard offers an appreciation of ‘An Untouchable State: Lobbying for Zionism on both Sides of the Atlantic’ by Ilan Pappe, published by Oneworld Publications 11th Jun 2024, 608 pp.
Over 150 years, Zionist lobbying groups transformed Israel into an untouchable state. This is a magisterial history of the most successful advertising campaign the world has ever seen.
Cover quote
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Ilan Pappe has been a hero of mine ever since I read his The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, one of his early acts of resistance against the Israeli government. Its publication in 2006 cost him his job teaching history at the university in Haifa; although he remains an Israeli citizen he is not allowed to speak in Israeli schools or colleges. Meanwhile he is based at the University of Exeter and continues researching, writing and resisting.
He wanted to explore a conundrum: How is it that a wealthy, powerful and educated country like Israel, unlike any other country in the world, still needs to argue for its validation while, at the same time, the Palestinian cause, simple and just though it is, has been denied by so many of the powerful?
His most recent book Lobbying for Zionism on both Sides of the Atlantic explores the problem and his answer lies in very effective lobbying, initially for Zionism and, since 1948, for the State of Israel.
Consider the following familiar statements:-
- Jews have a right to their ancestral homelands promised in the Hebrew Bible
- Jews are not just a people with a religion, but a nation.
- After the Holocaust the world owes something to the Jewish people
- Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
- Criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
There is no mention anywhere here of the Palestinian people.
It comes as a surprise to many that the early Zionists were Christian, Lord Shaftesbury for example in Britain, and across the Atlantic a whole theology was developed about the Jews returning to their promised land and converting to Christianity when Jesus would return to earth and save the righteous (Restorationism). Religion has always played a more important part in Zionist lobbying in the USA where the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded in the fifties, has become one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the world. Pappe describes Senator Fulbright, (he of the scholarships) as its first political victim. After the first world war however lobbying became more political there as Zionism was portrayed as a defence against communism.
In Britain, the political and colonialist ambitions of the Zionists like Herbert Samuel felt it was essential for Britain to gain advantage of the collapsing Ottoman Empire and this led eventually to the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate and finally the recognition of the State of Israel in 1948. The expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages was allowed to happen with very little protest from Britain or the USA.
The mixture of Zionism with socialism spread among Zionists world wide and Pappe traces its influence among the British Labour Party. Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee and Anthony Greenwood founded the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) in 1957 and it has remained a powerful influence in the Labour Party ever since, Harold Wilson being an avid supporter. Meanwhile Israel funded visits to Israel for both Labour and Conservative politicians and does so to this day. Pappe records that such visits outnumber politician visits to anywhere else in the world.
Since 1967, when Israel took over East Jerusalem and placed the West
Bank under military occupation and hundreds of thousand refugees were left in refugee camps, the lobby continued with the familiar lines that Israel must defend itself. Since the turn of the century there has been more emphasis on antisemitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) was formally adopted 2016 as a part of this process. Criticism of the State of Israel is now posited as being anti-semitic. I was surprised reading this section that Pappe makes no mention of the Jerusalem Declaration which came out in response to the IHRA and gives a much better definition of antisemitism.
Recent events in Gaza still show Israel controlling the narrative: no journalists in Gaza and it is ‘hostages’ in Gaza but ‘administrative detainees’ in Israel. Pappe devotes a few pages to the BBC under attack by pro-Israel groups earlier and now claiming to be unbiased. However it was Channel 4 which showed films like Kosminsky’s The Promise and Pilger’s Palestine is still the Issue, and in March of this year ITV screened Our Land, Israel’s Other War. (still available on ITVX at the time of writing).
“Daddy, what’s that pile of rags in the corner?” “That, dear, is the cloak of liberalism.” “But it’s all tattered and torn. No one would wear it, surely?” “On the contrary, dear. They will put it on again and again and pretend that it’s beautiful and true.”
‘Tweet’ (X) from Michael Rosen 8th April 2025
Of course the lobby has not had it all its own way: Pappe charts the many people who resisted it as well as the proponents, varied and fascinating as they all are. We see the undersides of much of our history and of today’s world.
In the Afterword, written after the start of the Gaza war, Pappe fiercely deplores any conflation of what happened on 7th October 2023 with the Holocaust as it “minimises the unparalleled horror of the Holocaust”.
Perhaps the power of this book is reflected in the fact that, so far, I haven’t seen it reviewed, apart from in Jewish Voice for Labour, in any of today’s press.
Long may Ilan Pappe continue with his policy of resistance.