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December 28, 2003
Review: Western purblindness
DAVID Hirst, a former Middle East correspondent of the Guardian newspaper, wrote The Gun and the Olive Branch originally in 1977. This was the eve of the historic breakthrough in the Middle East conflict and the time when Sadat made his peace-making journey to Jerusalem.
However, the book was largely ignored by the US media with what Hirst later called “a resounding and puzzling silence”. Only The Washington Post noticed the book but wrote a brief, derisive review. Later, the editor of The New Republic called the second edition “the most malignantly anti-Israel book ever published”.
Today if you look at the Amazon.com website you will find “readers” screaming that it is “a ridiculous book” or “Hirst needs total re-education” or even “please read something else.” Rumour has it that in the past the book disappeared from bookshops and libraries in America and to purchase it cost a fortune.
Anyway, the first edition of The Gun and the Olive Branch, which caused a storm in the rest of the world 26 years ago, had just nine chapters. These chapters provided a well-documented historical panorama beginning with the 1880s when world Zionism began purchasing land in Palestine to settle European Jews to the 1967 Six-day War in pursuit of a greater Israel.
Exposing the twists and turns of political intrigue in London, Washington, Tel Aviv and elsewhere the book concluded that Zionism was simply the West’s last colonial enterprise, establishing the Jewish state in 1948 through the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians and then defiantly opposing the normal imperial pattern of relinquishing control to the indigenous population.
In the second edition of the book published in 1983 David Hirst added three chapters detailing the Egypt-Israel peace agreement, the subsequent “rape” of the West Bank, Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the resignation of Prime Minister Begin.
The third edition of the book published in August 2003 updates the tragic history of the Middle East. In addition to the 12 chapters of the earlier books, it has a 130-page foreword, which highlights developments like Likud’s rise, the growing power of the Israeli lobby in the United States, two intifadas and the ominous rise of suicide bombers, countless diplomatic attempts like the Oslo peace process, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the rise of Jewish settlements in occupied territories, the growth of dissent in Israel, the showdown between Sharon and Arafat and the possibility of nuclear catastrophe that threatens the Middle East.
This foreword has a tone, which is even darker than the original book. The basic thesis is the same, i.e., that the Zionists have been gobbling Palestine from the Arabs a little bit at a time for about one hundred years, and they are still doing it and that is the principal cause of violence in Palestine.
This colonial enterprise, adds Hirst, depends for its very existence on the support of an imperial sponsor. First that sponsor was Great Britain when we had the infamous Balfour Declaration in 1917. By 1948 the sponsorship shifted to the newly emergent superpower, the USA. “Hence,” writes Hirst, “the Palestinian tragedy has taken place in the 20th century as Western Purblindness — an indispensable environment for the actualization of the Zionist venture.”
This purblindness continues till present day. Witness the recent war in Iraq, writes Hirst. The current American administration’s neo-cons saw the road to war in Iraq no longer through peace in Palestine; peace in Palestine was seen through the war on Baghdad. Under the pretext of disarming Iraq of its imaginary WMD’s, the USA was not merely adopting Israel’s belligerent methods of preemption, it was also adopting Israel’s enemies as its own.
What will be the consequences of this neo-conservative blueprint for the Middle East, asks Hirst. His response: The path chosen by the Bush administration has calamity written all over it. When Bush calls Sharon a ‘man of peace’ and dismisses Arafat’s historic peace offer in which he renounced 78 per cent of Palestinian territory, it is nothing but a tragedy on a monumental scale and could lead to nuclear war down the road.
It is true that this classic book is a trenchant history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But given the stark one-sidedness of a majority of the American media, academics and politicians, The Gun and the Olive Branch is a corrective work. It is clearly pro-Arab and therefore provides some balance to the dominant orthodoxy of the “friends of Israel” in America.
The main shortcoming of the book is that it is written by a journalist who relies on second hand sources. However, Hirst has a broad view of things and his main objective is to expose the myopia of the other side. Obviously, his conclusions and assertions should by no means be accepted wholesale. Unfortunately, this problem exists with any sympathetic historian. I always remind people of what Oscar Wilde once said: History proves that anything can be proved by history.
Recently when the Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean said, in passing, that American foreign policy should be “even-handed” between Israel and the Palestinians, there was such uproar in the US that the beleaguered candidate had to apologize and withdraw his statement almost immediately.
Given this state of amnesia and intolerance, if Hirst’s book is ignored again, it is ignored at the world’s own collective peril.
Reviewer’s email: javedamir@hotmail.com
The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East
By David Hirst
Thunder Mouth Press, New York Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website:
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 1-56025-483-1
627pp. Rs1,170
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