Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
Having spent most of last week in Israel, with some brief incursions into the West Bank, and having got as close as I care to go to Gaza, I thought it would be a good moment to look at the ridiculous falsehoods and self-deceptions which infest the coverage of the issue.
I didn't go to Gaza (though I passed fairly close by on my way to a squalid and neglected Bedouin settlement) because I didn't think it worth the risk. I have never intentionally got myself into a war zone, but I have ended up in a couple by accident, and discovered that I am most definitely not a war-junkie. To put it mildly.
My visits to the West Bank were mainly interesting because of the calls one had to make, on arrival, to local potentates. It would have been extreme bad manners, and unwise, to pass through without paying such respects. These were the clan or faction chiefs, or their representatives, who actually run these places. This is the nature of life in Arab Muslim communities, and those who imagine that such places can become European or American democracies should grasp this. The clan - a form of family link that simply does not exist in Western countries - is the most important unit.
A very good description of this sort of society can be found in a superb and intelligent detective story, "The Collaborator of Bethlehem", to be published shortly in Britain by Matt Beynon Rees (it's already available in the USA). Mr Rees, an experienced reporter in the region, manages to be sympathetic and generous to Arab society and its many attractive features and strengths - hospitality, loyalty, family, tradition, respect for the old and good manners - while being severely critical of its faults.
These include the powerlessness and vulnerability of those - especially Christians - who have no clan to help them; also the absolute power which faction or clan leaders can exercise, and the almost total absence of anything we would recognise as law or freedom of speech, or of political pluralism. Such conditions lead inevitably to severe corruption, a ghastly blight on those places where it exists. We in Britain simply don't realise how lucky we are to be mainly immune from it.
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This clan power is one of the main reasons why western democracy does not transplant into Arab societies. They are different. We have seen what has happened in Iraq, where the division between Shia and Sunni Muslim is also hugely important. But even in peaceful, relatively civilised Jordan, attempts to encourage political parties have largely failed because they keep splitting into smaller and smaller units, generally clan based. A Muslim Arab almost always owes far greater loyalty to his cousins than he does to any party or government.
I suspect that clan hostility and rivalry is a large part of the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, though of course it is not as simple as that. Many of Fatah's leading figures have spent a lot of time abroad, thanks to the long period when they were excluded from any territory that Israel controlled. Hamas is also more appealing to those who take Islam seriously than to the more secular-minded Arabs, who have no great objection to alcohol or to unveiled women. Mind you, moral crusades against alcohol and other un-Islamic things are often used by militants in Muslim countries anxious to show they are in charge.
There is an excellent portrayal of this in the great film 'The Battle of Algiers', in which the anti-French rebels establish their rule over the Algiers Casbah by closing down bars and taking on the racketeers and whoremongers. Shia militias in Basra have been particularly active in shutting alcohol shops, though I am told that a little home-made Arak goes down quite well in many a supposedly Muslim home in that city.
But what is the deep political difference between Fatah and Hamas? In my view, very little. Long ago, before the Arabs of the region had weapons, I remember visiting the offices of many 'Palestinian' spokesmen, including supposed 'moderates' and noticing they all had one thing in common. Each had exactly the same thing hanging on his office wall - a map of pre-1948 Palestine, showing the names of every village and town in Arabic as they had been before Israel was created - and as they hoped they would be again once Israel was gone. It was also pointed out to me that Yasser Arafat always appeared in public with his scarf carefully arranged across his chest in the shape of pre-1948 Palestine. His scarf was not in the shape of the pre-1967 border everyone claimed to want to restore, but in the shape of a world before Israel.
I concluded then, and continue to believe, that no politically significant Arab from the area really believed in a compromise on territory. I thought - and continue to think - that the talk about a return to the Jewish state's 1967 border was just for gullible westerners. They didn't like the pre-1967 border when it existed, and they didn't like the UN's planned 1947 border, even more limited, when that was on offer, or the planned 1937 border proposed by the Peel Commission (which was more limited still).
Well, you might say, who could blame them? Jewish immigrants had turned up and taken their country. No wonder they wanted it back. Actually the truth is nothing like so simple. Many people with passionate views on this subject know amazing little about the subject. I remember conversing with a prominent TV presenter who generally interrogates Israeli spokesmen as though they were war criminals, and asking him what he thought of the San Remo accords. He'd never heard of them. You haven't either? That's no surprise . Nor have most people, but it seems to me that you can't really get too worked up or moral about this unless you know the whole story.
The most important thing is that 'Palestine' never existed as a country, only as an entirely artificial colony carved out of the Turkish Empire by Britain (and France) after the First World War. The borders they eventually agreed on had no connection with the old administrative boundaries of the Turkish Empire, or with the Roman province of 'Palestine' from which the name was borrowed.
To begin with, British 'Palestine' included all of what is now Jordan, right up to the Iraq border, what is now called the 'West Bank' plus Gaza and the Golan Heights, and much of this area was originally designated for Jewish settlement under the 1917 Balfour declaration in which Britain pledged to create a 'national home for the Jews'. Note it was to be a 'national home'. Nothing was said about statehood, and it wasn't intended to be a Jewish State. The word 'Palestinian', used before 1948, meant anyone, Jewish or Arab, living in the colony ( or 'mandate' as we had to call it, thanks to the early political correctness of the day). The newspaper now called the 'Jerusalem Post' was called the 'Palestine Post'.
Arabs now living in Israel (or Gaza, or the West Bank) will tell you that they are closely related to Arabs in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan - and this is not just because refugees from the Israelis fled to these places in 1948, though they did. It is because the real Arab nationality in this area is far wider than the clans living in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza. In fact, if Israel did not exist, the most likely event would be the gradual emergence of a 'Greater Syria' including present-day Syria, Jordan and the territory now held by Israel.
This region was originally carved up by the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement made during the First World War, a classic piece of Great Power cynicism (Britain had earlier made promises to the Arabs which conflicted with it) . It was then re-carved once the war was over, and the original plans went badly wrong. Britain had wanted to install its ally, Faisal, on the throne of Syria. But the French didn't want him. So we gave him Iraq instead, another invented country whose foundation has led to endless problems. This left his brother, Abdullah, disappointed - since we had promised Iraq to him and he now had no throne on which to sit, and became angry.
This led to the invention of what was then called Transjordan, whose territory was simply taken away from the original 'mandate' as a consolation gift to Abdullah. Thus, before it had even begun, the 'National Home' had shrunk hugely in size.Everything West of the Jordan river, right to the Iraqi border, was gone. By the way, the 'West Bank' was seized by Transjordan in the 1948 war, and then annexed. The seizure and annexation were just as illegal as Israel's later seizure of the same patch, and its annexation of East Jerusalem. But Britain, which has fastidiously refused to recognise Israel's action, recognised Jordan's annexation. And nobody made much of a fuss about it during the 19 years the West Bank was ruled by Jordan. Nor, interestingly enough, did any major Arab figure take advantage of Jordan's long ownership of the area to visit the Dome of the Rock or the Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, which are often alleged to be the 'third holiest site in Islam'.
The Golan Heights - whose annexation by Israel we also refuse to recognise - were originally partly in British Palestine and had they remained there would presumably have belonged to Israel after 1948. But we had handed them over to the French in 1923 in return for a shift in the frontier on the Sea of Galilee, so they ended up in Syria instead.
The story of what follows, by no means inevitable, is largely the result of British indecision about who we wanted to please most, and of factional conflicts in the British government, over the 'National Home'. British endorsement,. as official leader of the area's Arabs, of the fiercely anti-Jewish Haj Amin al-Husseini (who ended up recruiting SS soldiers for Hitler) made a delicate situation far, far worse and in my view is to blame for much of the tragedy that has followed.
I mention these facts simply to point out that the events leading to the foundation of Israel are not a simple story of one group taking a sovereign country from another group, or of one group always being in the right and one always in the wrong. Both have engaged in massacres, both have used terror. Both have also performed actions of kindness, tolerance, mercy and generosity.
Jews as well as Arabs had in any case lived in the area from time immemorial. As recently as the 1920s, empires were still looked on as normal in Western countries, and it seemed quite reasonable for the victors to parcel out territory captured from another empire, without paying much attention to the wishes of the inhabitants.
Britain gained worldwide Jewish support (especially in the USA) for its war effort in 1917 by offering to establish a national home. It was also useful in persuading the League of Nations to give us control of a valuable piece of land on the Mediterranean coast, including the naval port of Haifa. It gave us an overland route to India, and a chain of airbases. Even more crucially, it allowed us to control one of the key land approaches to the Suez canal, the windpipe of the empire.
But those rules of imperialism were already changing even then, and were to change far more in the 40 years that followed. It always makes me smile that the most influential 'anti-colonialist' power was the USA, which is itself a huge land empire obtained by conquest, ethnic cleansing and purchase - but which had the good sense to be all lumped together in one place, rather than scattered round the globe like its rivals.
Long study of what happened in British Palestine and afterwards has convinced me that both Jews and Arabs have a great deal of right on their side, and the two cases both have much to be said for them. Both have also been guilty of grave crimes against each other. Though I would add that the argument, often made, that there is no reason why Arabs should be asked to make recompense for the anti-Jewish Holocaust is not correct. The behaviour of Al Husseini was pretty appalling and undoubtedly contributed to the deaths of many European Jews, denied the chance to escape thanks to Husseini's actions.
You might well argue that there is at least as good a case for the establishment of a Jewish State in Bavaria or the Austrian Tyrol as in the Middle East. If not a better one, in all justice. And interestingly enough the Germans are the one people whose large-scale ethnic cleansing (from Poland, the Czech Lands and East Prussia between 1945 and 1948) nobody seems to mind about. But life is not so neat. Thanks to Balfour, and Sykes Picot, and to the original Zionist settlements, and to the continuous presence of Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron for thousands of years, Israel ended up where it is and we are stuck with it.
And the sensible thing to do, given the powerful cases of both camps, would surely be a compromise, involving the removal of Jewish settlements in the West bank and the final compensation and generous resettlement of the refugees, as full citizens of neighbouring Arab countries.. But let us go back to those maps and to Yasser's scarf.
There has never really been any Arab interest in a permanent compromise. Palestinian nationalism did not become a real issue until after the Arab armies had been defeated in 1967, and did not really get off the ground until they were defeated again in 1973.
Offered the semblance of a national state, which a serious nationalist would have seized on as a starting-point for further negotiations, Yasser Arafat broke off talks and soon afterwards returned to violent confrontation on the feeble pretext of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Old City of Jerusalem. Arafat was happier to be at war. He knew that the rest of the Arab world would be appalled by anything that looked like a permanent peace. It is perfectly true that the offer was not very attractive. But it has always been rather hard to see how a Palestinian State, even if it contained the whole of the West Bank, without any Jewish settlements or access, and Gaza, could be economically or politically viable. It could only ever really exist as a stage on the way to the final goal, the end of the Jewish State. Palestinian nationalism is surely a means, not an end in itself. The 'two-state' solution, which so many people claim to believe in, would be an unworkable absurdity if tried.
Those areas which Arafat did control under the Oslo deal rapidly became distinguished for corruption and tyranny. The Arabs living under Arafat in 'free' Palestine were in almost every way much worse off than they had been under Israeli occupation. (Christian Arabs, especially, have headed off in large numbers, often to South America, Bethlehem, once a Christian town, is now a majority Muslim one). But of course neither they nor their supporters could or would say so in public, though I have heard this admitted by Arabs in private. Because the point of what was going on was not the improvement of the conditions of the refugees, who are pawns, not players, but the undermining and eventual removal of a Jewish-run state in the Middle East.
Maybe at some stage the Western powers could have stood up against this and insisted on a final deal that left Israel in place, fully recognised, and which also properly compensated the refugees of 1948, as well as withdrawing the Jewish settlers from the West Bank . But long ago, back in the days of Haj Amin al Husseini, they began to play both ends against the middle for their own ends rather than those of the inhabitants.
And, since the West became so dependent on Arab and Iranian oil, the game has been still more rigged and devious. Those who believe that the USA is or always has been a reliable and unfailing friend of Israel should check up on the actions of such Presidents and Secretaries of State as Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, George Bush the First and James Baker. It isn't, and never has been, that simple. America's relationship with Saudi Arabia is in fact just as close, if not closer.
And when the current pointless nonentity has finally departed the White House, I expect we will see some pretty powerful pressure from Washington on Israel, pressure that will not be designed to lead to a final, permanent compromise over territory, but which will instead continue the gradual isolation and weakening of Israel which will, in my view, eventually bring about its absorption in a larger, Arab-dominated state.
