New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. $29, 332 pp.
The "blood-dimmed tide" in the title of Amos Elon's new book comes
from lines by the famous Dublin-born poet William Butler Yeats
(1865--1939):
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
The tide, in Elon's view as he writes from Jerusalem at the end of
1996 (after Netanyahu's election victory) "is not yet dammed." He
quotes the warning by David Flusser, a distinguished historian of
religion at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, a few days after Yitzhak Rabin's murder: "Ancient
religions are reawakening (both in Israel and in the Arab
countries), but behold they are vampires. It's really high time for
God to intervene."
A Blood-Dimmed Tide consists of 21 dispatches, of which the first
dates back to August 1967 and the Six-Day War, and the last to
December 1995 and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Some of the essays
touch on one of the central questions in the political history of
the region: What opportunities, if any, existed for making peace
after the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973?
Could It Have Been Otherwise?
The writer notes what he sees as the miscalculations on both sides
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of his criticisms of the
Palestinian side is founded on his belief that, had they accepted
the "full autonomy" offered in the 1978 Camp David US-sponsored
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, by now they would have had their
independent state side by side with Israel. (He argues that "the
thirteen American
colonies started out with very much less" than the autonomy
proposal.)
As for the Israeli side, which the writer regards as his main
concern in the book, it suffered from grave delusions, among them
that after 1967 the Arabs had no military option and that the
national aspirations of the Palestinians could
safely be overlooked. Hence Golda Meir's comment, "Who are the
Palestinians? I am a Palestinian," or Moshe Dayan's answer to the
author's question on the need for Palestinian self-determination:
"Why see a problem where there is none… What is the West
Bank? At the very most, five or six small townships." More
delusions were to come - that the Intifada could be crushed by
force, and that massive settlement would serve Israeli security
when, in fact, the increasingly powerful settler lobby's opposition
to territorial concessions had a diametrically opposite
effect.
We now know, Elon thinks, that peace, at least with Egypt and
Jordan, perhaps also with the Palestinians, was a practical
proposition from the early 1970s. However, "the price for peace was
the evacuation of territory occupied in the 1967 war. A succession
of Israeli governments was in no mood to relinquish any."
No Common Denominator
All this comes from the author's twenty-page Introduction, written
in November 1996, which attempts, not too successfully, to find
some common denominator time-wise and content-wise between the
essays. Though the author's approach
to the conflict, to the region and to Israeli society is
consistent, no such common denominator can be expected from the
essays themselves, written as they were (mostly in the New
Yorker and the New York Review of Books) on a wide range of
topics over the course of some thirty years.
So the essays should be read and evaluated one by one. Because he
observes the scene with such sensitivity, and since he writes so
well, Amos Elon is always readable and enjoyable, but considering
these articles in 1997, it is perhaps inevitable that one finds
some are far better than others. On the whole, therefore, because
of its lack of cohesion, this is a much less important book than
the author's former works, like The Israelis: Founders and Sons;
Herzl; or Jerusalem, City of Mirrors.
Before discussing some of the pieces, one must note that the
editing and proofreading of this book leave very much to be
desired. A competent editor would at least have prevented phrases,
not to speak of whole passages, which appear in one
essay from being repeated word for word in another. As for typos,
the first one appears on the front flap and too many more follow in
the Introduction and in the text. The name of one of the PLO
representatives to the Oslo negotiations in Chapter 16 is spelt
differently within the space of six pages. Such unprofessionalism
is unworthy both of the publisher and of the author.
The general topics of these essays are as follows: the 1967 war and
the future of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT); Moshe
Dayan; Kiryat Arba, a settlement in the OPT; three essays on Egypt;
the Lebanon war; the Israeli political scene in the mid-1980s;
Jerusalem; two essays on the Intifada; the Peace Now movement; the
Gulf War and US Secretary of State James Baker's initiative; Yasser
Arafat; preparing the Oslo Accords; Jordan; the impact of the
Holocaust on Israel; politics and archaeology; and the
ramifications of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.
Worth Recalling
The importance of some of these articles, like those on the
Intifada written in 1988-99, has by no means diminished since then.
Sometimes the contrary is true. For example, about a decade after
the event, it is worth recalling, as Elon does, that "as far as
most Israelis are concerned [the Intifada] took place on a
different planet." He records the reaction of leading Israeli
novelist A.B.Yehoshua to the relative
indifference in Israeli public opinion to the futile attempt to
crush the uprising by brute force: "He told an interviewer that he
was now able to understand how many Germans could say after the
Second World War that they had never seen or heard of the
concentration camps." (Elon adds that "the statement struck a nerve
and elicited a storm of protests.")
Elon himself writes of two decades of military occupation which
"held 1.5 million Palestinians as pawns or bargaining chips, and as
a source of cheap menial labor, while denying them the most basic
human rights. The pawns have now risen (in the Intifada) to
manifest their frustration, their bitterness and their political
will with a vengeance and determination that surprised everybody."
This sort of writing doesn't date.
Neither does the thought-provoking essay called "The Politics of
Memory," on the ramifications of the Holocaust on Israeli life.
Elon records that Menachem Begin "habitually described every major
policy act of his government - in Lebanon or in
the virtually annexed occupied territories - as a milestone in
Israel's historic march 'from Holocaust to Redemption.'"
When Shulamit Aloni of the dovish Meretz party was minister of
education in the Rabin government, she discontinued the propagation
by the state school system of what was called "values of the
Holocaust"; the very term made her shudder and she decried the
Israeli tendency to continue tearing open the wounds rather than
trying to cure them. As for Amos Elon, he wants not to forgive and
forget, but to seek "a new equilibrium… between memory and
hope."
On the other hand, the 1990 piece on Peace Now, for example, is
informative (and sympathetic), but better reading on this and other
peace-oriented movements in English is now available, including
some deeper insights into the changing problems related to the
subject. So the dimension of time sometimes favors Amos Elon and
sometimes doesn't. All in all, anyone tasting the 21 courses
included in Amos Elon's rich menu will probably find something to
savor and enjoy. Since there is no accounting for taste, let me
write briefly about the two "dishes" which I found particularly
tempting.
Moshe Dayan: Loving the Land, Not the People
The first are the chapters on Moshe Dayan which start with the
words "this gloomy, lonely, gifted man - too cunning, too admired,
too hated, too ambiguous, too extravagant, too famous… this
home-bred Talleyrand who has served (nearly) all the political
regimes of the last thirty years… emotionally blocked,
estranged from his sons as he himself had been from his father. A
lover of power, money, good food, fast cars and all manner of
creature comforts." Not bad, one might say, for "the first child
born in the first kibbutz."
The first senior Israeli-born politician, behind his back Golda
Meir called him "that Arab." Elon sees him as conducting a
passionate love affair with "the sights, the topography, the
weather, the sun and the wind, the fauna and flora, the rocks and
thistles and antiquities of the Holy Land." He nearly died in one
of his beloved archaeological digs. "He has been conducting his
clandestine (and illegal) excavations for almost forty years. As in
an old Humphrey Bogart movie, where the villain is cast in the role
of a sympathetic safe-cracker, we end by falling in love with
him."
Dayan's love of the land is apparently not accompanied by a love
for its inhabitants, except those Bedouins, shepherds and fellahin
who remind him of what Elon calls "the ancient Hebrew barbarian."
Once having resigned from the government, he said that his
conscience was clear, to which Abba Eban retorted: "Anything stays
clean if you don't put it to use." Underestimating his Arab
enemies, he failed as minister of defense in the Labor government
to prepare the army for the 1973 war. He was forced to resign, only
to bounce back in the Begin government.
The Dayan cult, nevertheless, flourished in Israel since Dayan was
seen as the "quintessential Sabra," without Diaspora complexes who
"knew despair but never, apparently, fear." Referring to the Dayan
cult ("for a time Dayan was probably the world's best-known Jew
since Jesus Christ"), Elon thinks that "charisma is always
irrational, as is religion" and that Dayan was an improviser who
"in the last resort had no true sense of politics and of
history."
Oslo Peacemakers
My second favorite item is something totally different: the chapter
called "Peacemakers" which describes the role of Yair Hirschfeld
and Ron Pundik et al. in preparing the ground for the Oslo Accords
(the Declaration of Principles) with the
Palestinians late in 1993. The two Israelis were in Elon's words
"obscure freelance peaceniks," in those of an Israeli Foreign
Ministry official "accidental tourists in history," and in those of
Shimon Peres "crackpots." Therefore, one is bound to ponder the
question: would the accords have been achieved without them?
The blow-by-blow account of the negotiations is fascinating. It
involved a number of personalities, all playing their particular
roles, on the Palestinian, Israeli and Norwegian sides. Elon writes
of "an adventure - some would call it an intrigue," leading to "one
of the most surprising volte faces of recent diplomatic history."
The longish list of those involved, in one way or another, included
prominent PLO people, like Abu 'Ala (the main Palestinian
negotiator) and Hanan Ashrawi, as well as Hassan Asfour and Maher
al-Kurd and Arafat himself; leading Israeli officials, like
then-deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin, Uri Savir and Yoel
Singer (and later Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin); and Norway's
Terje Rod Larsen and his wife, Mona Juul, as well as Deputy Foreign
Minister Jan Egeland.
There seem to be two schools of thought about the protracted
proceedings. The first, as Elon puts it, is that they were
"propelled by impulse, contingency, improvisation, and
coincidence." The second is the conspiracy theory, according to
which two independent intellectuals were used by two-faced
politicians. Elon discounts the latter view and quote the British
historian A.J.P. Taylor as remarking that the greatest acts of
statesmanship were made by people who did not know what they were
doing.
Everyone praised the Norwegian contribution and PLO representative
Asfour said, "We all became a little Norwegian in the end."
Incidentally, it is interesting that, bearing in mind past rivalry
between Rabin and Peres, Amos Elon quotes novelist Amos Oz who
compared them to "two elderly women in an old-age home who were
constantly quarreling but who realized that to cross a street they
had to hold hands."
Shimon Peres is reported to have said after the Oslo negotiations
that "history is such a clown. It makes all of us look like
fools."
For his part, Ron Pundik, writing on the Oslo process in the Winter
1995 issue of this journal, stressed that we must "create
irreversible facts before the 1996 elections, in case an
ultra-right government comes to power in Israel... The only
alternative to a political solution is a stalemate which will bring
many more years of bloodshed." Perhaps he too shares the view that
the danger of "the blood-dimmed tide" in Yeats's poem and in Elon's
book still looms before us.