Dan Cohn-Sherbok presents a comprehensive history of the creation of the state of Israel to the end of the twentieth century.
While his sympathies are committed to the Zionist project, he seems to this reviewer to be scrupulously fair in his account.
He does not disguise from his British readers the humiliating contradictions that the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate brought in their train, nor the ruthlessness with which British weakness was exploited in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is a cautionary tale which contemporary American sponsors of Israel would be unwise to ignore. The same honesty is apparent in his frank recognition that shadowing the conflict with the Palestinians there is a continuing conflict within Zionism between its secular and religious exponents. Palestinian hostility may have made such internal tensions seem incidental, but they remain as unresolved as the wider conflict.
It is therefore illuminating to be reminded of a religious dimension at the heart of Zionism that both its exponents share - an impatience with the strategies of passivity that a more transcendent understanding of God has usually inspired.
Secularists entirely repudiated the religious dimension with its ancient hopes of miraculous divine intervention. Religious Zionists, like the more conservative members of the Sea of Faith, re-appropriated the religious categories by transposing the tradition of messianic deliverance into a human programme of present action. In that respect its Islamic critics are perhaps correct to see in modern Zionism yet another instance of the the palestine — israeli conflict dan cohn-sherbok dawoud el-alami corrosive outcome of godless western secularism.
That is not however the critique which Dawoud El-Alami adopts. Instead he recounts much the same history from a Palestinian perspective. Images of his people's defiance have become a media commonplace, but the articulate voice of Palestinian outrage is seldom heard, and he is an impassioned advocate of the victims of Zionist victory. He conveys very effectively the mixture of resentment and exasperation felt by innocent Palestinians who have to make amends for the crimes of modern Europeans. He makes his appeal to the tradition of human rights and the respect for property at the heart of western liberal values and sees no reason why the state of Israel should be exempt from such demands. It is not therefore surprising that the two visions of the future barely seem to touch each other. Cohn-Sherbok concedes that the uprooted Palestinians have a need for a homeland, but seems to see the provision of such a state as primarily the responsibility of Israel's Arab neighbours. Dawoud El-Alami suggests that the state of Israel can only acquire legitimacy when it extends to Palestinians the same human rights and the same right of return that Israel readily extends to Jews throughout the world.
Even after the new situation created by September 11th this remains a most useful introduction. The only defect of this format is that it tends to obscure the significance of Israel's Gentile sponsors. For the paradox is that Israel has always been a Gentile project as well as a Jewish one. The fantasies of British Imperialism and American exceptionalism, and the simplicities of Evangelical Christianity have all played their part as sponsors of Zionism. Perhaps it would have been wiser to respect and value the contribution of the Jewish diaspora rather than encourage such a dangerous and. disruptive experiment. The discipline of mutual respect which Jew and Gentile have learnt for each other in the Diaspora may yet prove the only helpful contribution we can make - albeit a modest one; but we should not deceive ourselves that either side at the moment is ready to listen.