Why isn’t Israel’s war ending?
The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar could have provided Israel an off-ramp to declare victory in Gaza and end the war. It didn’t. And the US seems unable to exert pressure on Israel to do any different. With the Palestinian death toll tragically nearing the 45,000 mark since Oct 2023, here is the full version of This Week, Those Books’ post Nothing justified Oct 7. Does Oct 7 justify everything?* as this contentious and important topic badly needs context. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story.
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The Big Story:
After a year of bloodletting since the brutal Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel continues to expand its war, spreading death and destruction across the region, killing innocent civilians and displacing them from their homes in Lebanon and Gaza.
The question on many lips: Why is the all-powerful United States, funder of Israel and its chief supplier of deadly bombs and other weapons, not stopping Israel from what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu1 has threatened as “a seven-front war”?2
It’s complicated.
The United States is consumed with elections but as one of this week’s books** points out: American engagement in the Middle East from Reagan to the current Biden administration, is largely a “tale of gross misunderstandings, appalling errors, and death and destruction on an epochal scale”.
This Week, Those Books:
A major new book looks at apartheid and the plight of the Palestinians.
A clear-eyed view from a policy wonk who served multiple US presidents.
The Backstory:
Israel receives roughly 15% of its defence budget from the United States,3 as well as significant military aid from Germany.4
Since the 1948 founding of Israel, each generation of Americans has had a subtly different attitude towards Israel.5 The oldest think of Israel as the underdog; those under 40 see “the Palestinian people as underdogs”,6 according to UCLA professor of Israel studies Dov Waxman.
This Week’s Books:
The Message
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Year: October 2024
This book, by award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, has just been published and it won’t even be available in the UK until early next year. However, I bought a Kindle version and have read the preface and the longest of its three parts, which is about Coates’ visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
There is good reason to do so: Coates is a thoughtful journalist and writer, who examines reality closely, laying it side by side with aspiration, intention and legislation. He has done this with respect to racism in America. And now, he turns his gaze on the Palestinian people and the reality of their life in a country that’s routinely described as the region’s only democracy. The way Coates describes what he found is devastating (see choice quotes). It has caused something of a media storm in the United States.7
Choice quotes:
“…race is a species of power and nothing else”.
“…Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere”.
“I now noted a symmetry in the bromides — that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state”.
“‘Jim Crow’ was the first thing that came to mind, if only because ‘Jim Crow’ is a phrase that connotes an injustice, a sorting of human beings, the awarding and stripping of the rights of a population. Certainly, that was some part of what I saw in Hebron, in Jerusalem, in Lydd”.
“Settlements like Kiryat Arba are not the work of rogue pioneers; much like our own redlined suburbs, they are state projects. In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates — a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen. Factories and farms are propped by a similar array of discounts and subsidies”.
** Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East
By: Steven Simon
Publisher: Penguin Press
Year: 2023
Steven Simon’s long career with successive US administrations from Ronald Reagan through to Barack Obama eminently qualifies him to write this brilliant and blistering critique. He examines 45 years of American policy in the region that the West calls the “Middle East” and the rest describe as “West Asia”.
He insists at the outset that America is not “singularly inept, cruel, solipsistic” and is, in fact, “leagues ahead of other imperial powers that have trod the vanquished territories of the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. The British, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgians, Germans, Russians, Japanese, and Turks were far crueler, greedier, and violent than the United States has been”.
However, Simon is clear-eyed about the multiple failures of US policy on and in the region, from Reagan’s disastrous 1982 despatch of marines to Lebanon; George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq; Obama’s somewhat scrambled response to the 2011 uprisings against Arab autocrats and Donald Trump’s declaration that US military help for Saudi Arabia would be purely on a fee-for-service basis.
The book, published some six months before the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, is prescient about Biden’s presidency and beyond. Simon writes: “…in the shopworn phrase favored by Washington pundits, you can avoid visiting the Middle East, but it can always visit you. If it does so during Biden’s term as president, it will be in the form of a confrontation between Israel and Iran…”
Choice quote:
“Was there a grand delusion? There was, and it was multidimensional…The delusion was rooted in the conviction that facts don’t matter, just intentions; that we create and inhabit our own reality, our capacities are unconfined, and the objects of our policy have no agency. They are just avatars in our own metaverse”.
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* The framing of this headline comes from a remark I heard on the BBC’s Broadcasting House programme on Oct 6, 2024. The programme brought together Mohammed Ghalayini, a British Palestinian with family in Gaza, and Sharone Lifschitz, a London-based film-maker and academic whose parents were taken hostage on Oct 7. Go to thisweekthosebooks.substack.com to access a local recording of the interview if you’re overseas and can’t get to it via the BBC site.
Daniel Seidemann, a Jerusalem-based lawyer and the founder of the Israeli NGO Terrestrial Jerusalem, has described it as “The inexorable Netanyahu doctrine: No bridge left unburned. No door left unslammed. No earth left unscorched”.
Full text of Netanyahu’s September 27, 2024 speech to the United Nations: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-netanyahus-un-speech-enough-is-enough-he-says-of-hezbollah-also-warns-iran/
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68737412
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/05/gen-z-israel-pro-palestinian-protests
The Washington Post report on the row, Oct 1, 2024
A video of the controversial CBS interview with Coates is at the top of this link: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/cartoonishly-racist-cbs-host-receives-backlash-from-progressives-over-shameful-interview-with-ta-nehisi-coates/
And here’s a US National Public Radio interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/01/nx-s1-5131276/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message-senegal-israel-gaza
Originally published at thisweekthosebooks.com
