More than the sum of its parts

1948: The First Arab-Israeli War By Benny Morris Yale University Press, 546pp, $59.95 (HB) Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East By Robin Wright Penguin, 400pp, $35 (HB) A History of Modern Israel By Colin Shindler Cambridge University Press, 371pp, $39.95 The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East By Olivier Roy Hurst, 167pp, $39.95

The Arab leaders, who declared war on the Jewish population of Palestine the moment the UN resolved to partition the country in November 1947, and the anti-Semites who dominated British -- and to a significant extent, US -- policy on Palestine, were certain of one thing: Britain would depart by mid-May and the promised invasion by the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon would immediately follow. The Jews would declare independence but their state would be strangled at birth. Even senior Jewish leaders rated their chances as 50-50 at best.

In the intervening six decades Israelis and Palestinians (and their supporters) have perpetuated mutually exclusive accounts of the war, its causes, course and consequences.

The two narratives have been so at odds that dialogue has been for the most part impossible; to outsiders, the protagonists appear to inhabit different universes. After 60 years, each side is still largely deaf to the other's case and often unwilling to accept the other's right to determine their own destiny in their own state.

The Israeli account presents the war as a heroic battle against overwhelming odds to re-establish their national home in part of the ancient Land of Israel, where the Jewish people had enjoyed sovereignty and statehood for more than 1000 years, centuries before the Arab conquest and the advent of Islam. Although most of the mainly European Jews who built the modern Zionist dream had only arrived in Palestine after 1880 (in the wake of yet another round of pogroms), important remnant Jewish communities had stubbornly and continuously persisted in their homeland throughout the almost 2000 years during which most Jews were exiled to the Diaspora.

In this narrative, the Zionist pioneers wanted their renewed Jewish homeland to be much more than just a haven from hundreds of years of oppression that culminated in the Shoah (Holocaust). For this reason, they rejected proposals to establish a Jewish homeland elsewhere. The Zionist movement sought to draw on the creative energies of the Jewish people to revive Hebrew as a spoken language, create a modern Hebrew culture and build a society based on freedom and justice.

Indeed, many Jews advocated a tolerant, inclusive, multi-ethnic, moderate socialist Israel and therefore laboured to build a collective rather than individualistic ethos, society and economy. As a consequence, the aim of their "war of independence" was not, at least initially, to drive Palestinian Arabs from their land but to defend the internationally recognised partition of Palestine into two states -- one Arab, the other Jewish, even if the territory allotted to Israel did not encompass historic Jewish areas (Samaria and Judea) and its designated borders were convoluted and irrational, rendering its defence almost impossible.

In the course of the war, Israelis believe that on most fronts their leaders tried to convince the Palestinians to stay and help build the new state and reap economic, social and political rewards as equal citizens, despite the ethnic cleansing campaign the Arab leaders had launched against them. In this account, some extremist Zionists carried out massacres and forcible deportations of Palestinian communities, but this was never official policy. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, after being deserted by their leaders, abandoned their homes fearful that otherwise they would be branded as traitors for remaining in Israel. They were encouraged by their irresponsible leadership to believe that it would only be weeks, or at most months, before they would return in triumph after the Arab armies had "driven the Jews into the sea".

There is no doubt that the Arab leaders were products of generations of vicious hatred of Jews. After the UN partition vote they were spurred on by an intense and popular hysteria on the streets, and most could not resist the smell of victory, although the more sober-minded realised the campaign would not be so easy.

In the Palestinian account, the 1948 war is called the nakba (catastrophe), during which their society was destroyed by a calculated, Zionist campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinian areas, driving 700,000 Palestinians from a homeland they believe their ancestors had occupied "since time immemorial". The Palestinian version is that there was a Zionist blueprint to achieve this, including a series of massacres, most notably at Deir Yassin in April 1948 and six months later at Jish, Saliha, Majd al-Kurum and elsewhere, to create fear and convince Palestinians there was no future under Jewish rule. These atrocities were reinforced by mass deportations, leaving most Palestinians no option other than flight.

Palestinians point to the consequent humanitarian calamity, with many refugees fleeing to neighbouring Arab states, where they and their descendants have lived as permanent exiles in "temporary" camps with no employment, infrastructure, future or hope, causing desperation and fuelling hatred of Jews (and the West, especially the US) and forcing them into terrorism and Muslim fundamentalism.

During the past decade, a new generation of historians has re-examined the record of these competing accounts. In part, this has been possible with the opening of official Israeli and Western archives. (It is notable that official Arab records remain almost wholly closed.) Paradoxically, the rich details that have emerged from previously classified Israeli, British and US military, intelligence and diplomatic files demonstrate that there is considerable substance to both narratives. Yet the truth is more complex and nuanced, belying the self-serving propaganda that too often passes for history.

Benny Morris is pre-eminent among a school of contemporary Israeli historians loosely known as the revisionists (among whom there are divergent views). Morris's meticulously researched and understated history of the 1948 war will stand as the definitive work for many years; at least until (or if) the Arab countries undergo their own version of glasnost and open their archives. He shows beyond doubt that the war was a brutal life-and-death struggle in which both sides carried out some shameful acts of ethnic cleansing. Morris concludes that the scale of Israeli crimes was much greater than those of the Arabs, who had few opportunities to carry out the large-scale massacres they had repeatedly vowed to perpetrate against the Jews.

What is remarkable, however, is the relatively small scale of the atrocities carried out by both sides. Although about 6000 Jews and 14,000 Arabs may have died in the war (combatants and civilians), Morris puts the number of murdered civilians and prisoners of war at about 1000, 80 per cent attributed to the Israelis. After the Arab invasion of mid-May 1948, both sides' conventional armies mostly observed the Third Geneva Convention and treated prisoners of war correctly. Compare this to the horrors of the 1990s wars that dismembered Yugoslavia.

This is all the more remarkable in light of the strong passions and hatreds that had been engendered by concerted propaganda campaigns, especially among the Arabs. For the fact remains: only the Arab side in the 1948 war had genocidal intent. Arab (including Palestinian) leaders were serious when they proclaimed they would massacre the Jews. As early as the mid-'30s, with the persecution of Europe's Jews already under way, the Palestinian leadership had openly promised to expel all Jews who had arrived or were born in Palestine after 1914. They said nothing about the fate of these Jews, but secretly forged an alliance with Nazi Germany.

Many in the Zionist leadership (including Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion) wanted an understanding with the Palestinians that would allow both peoples to achieve self-determination. They believed the fight against British colonialism could unite them. Mass killings of Jews, terrorist campaigns against Jewish communities and a steady stream of genocidal threats had, however, begun in the early '20s and accelerated during the Arab revolt of 1936-39. Such crimes had gradually convinced the Zionist leadership that Arab-Islamic antipathy would be uncompromising and intractable, and that accommodation was impossible. From this recognition slowly grew an expulsionist ideology that embraced the idea of a population transfer between the two communities.

Ben-Gurion recognised that the conflict arose from the Arab perception that the Zionists had stolen Arab lands, even if the Jews' claim was historically powerful and they had paid often inflated prices to willing Palestinian sellers to painfully acquire the core of their homeland. Furthermore, Jewish industry had created the basis for increasing Palestinian prosperity and population growth, as immigrants from surrounding countries were drawn to Palestine by the lure of jobs and higher living standards.

As Morris shows, Jewish strategy pre-May 1948 was mainly dictated by military exigencies: how to deal with the large, hostile Palestinian population inside and adjacent to Israel's borders in the face of the impending Arab invasion? From late 1947 Palestinian villages were supporting irregular units, determined to wipe out their Jewish neighbours, which threatened to become a fifth column following the Arab invasion.

About one of the most important myths from 1948 Morris's unequivocal conclusion is that there was no Jewish 'master-plan to carry out massacres of Palestinians and to uproot them permanently. Instead, between November 1947 and May 1948 there developed an at first haphazard, later more coherent, strategy of forcing or encouraging the Palestinian population to flee so that the Jewish army, the Haganah (soon to be transformed into the Israeli Defence Force), would be able to meet the Arab invasion without having to contend with guerilla operations behind its own lines. In areas where such considerations did not apply, especially central Galilee, Palestinian Christians were left intact, although many Muslims fled.

In the first phase of the fighting (November 1947-March 1948), the Palestinians had the upper hand. But as the British started to withdraw, larger battles broke out in mixed Palestinian-Jewish areas. From early April, superior Jewish co-ordination, command and control and sheer determination to resist Arab annihilation proved decisive. Two events set the tone for the Palestinian disaster. The massacre of 100-120 combatants and civilians at Deir Yassin in early April by right-wing Zionist units acting outside central command, and the battle for the key port city of Haifa (within Israeli-designated territory) a few weeks later, were instrumental in causing the mass exodus of Palestinians.

In Haifa, the Arab leaders proved to be incompetent, with many fleeing at the first sign of fighting. However, after the Jewish victory many of Haifa's 70,000 Palestinian residents still remained, although many others had fled even before fighting commenced. The British then mediated truce terms under which the Palestinians would hand over their arms and live as "free and equal citizens". The local Arab leaders, after negotiating terms, unsuccessfully sought instructions from their national leaders. To the astonishment of the Jews and British, they then decided to evacuate the remaining Palestinians, for fear of them being branded as traitors. As a result, only about 5000 Palestinians remained.

The massacre at Deir Yassin and the exodus from Haifa sent shock waves throughout Palestine. Over the following weeks the psychological impact of these two events set the pattern, fuelled by a hysterical Arab media intent on whipping up anti-Jewish sentiment. Israeli tactics evolved as the campaign unfolded, ranging from simple threats (provoking flight before actual fighting), to conventional military operations (causing panic and mass exodus), forced expulsions and sporadic, localised massacres. The Arabs' policy of mass evacuation exacerbated the Palestinians' plight and contributed to the stiffening of Jewish resolve to bar their return to ensure a secure Israel that did not have to rule a hostile minority.

There can be no dispute that this was a harsh, even cruel, outcome for the Palestinians. In light of the subsequent history of Palestinian and Arab efforts to destroy Israel it must be asked: Was there any rational alternative for the Jews, short of capitulation and submission to far worse treatment at the Arabs' hands? From the Jewish perspective the answer must be no: a more accommodating policy towards the Palestinians would have been suicidal.

Israel's capacity to fight successful wars, in 1948 and subsequently (1956, 1967, 1973, 1982), has preserved the nation, but at a high price, in casualties, and sometimes, moral reputation. These successes were aided by the incompetence of the Arab states, their internal conflicts and competing territorial ambitions; in 1948, each scrambled to grab as big a chunk of Arab Palestine as possible with no consideration for the Palestinians' rights (Jordan annexing the West Bank, Egypt the Gaza Strip).

Israel accepted the outcome in the West Bank, having secretly but unsuccessfully negotiated with Jordan to achieve this in preference to Palestinian control.

Agreement on an orderly exchange of populations was (and remains) the only "peaceful" alternative. This policy was not openly endorsed by the Jewish leadership before the 1948 war (fearing it would undermine Western support); the Palestinian and Arab leaderships have consistently and emphatically rejected it and remain firmly expulsionist towards the Jews.

Yet the remnant Palestinian Arab communities, who make up 20 per cent of Israel's population, have been treated far more humanely than the Jewish communities of Arab states such as Syria and Egypt. Approximately the same number of Jews were officially expelled from Arab states after the 1948 war as Arabs were displaced from Palestine. Most have long since become Israeli citizens and established new homes and livelihoods (in marked contrast to the treatment of displaced Palestinians by most Arab states, which have refused to integrate them). So a one-way population transfer has already been successfully achieved.

In comparison to the Arab states, Israel stands as a beacon of democracy and human rights in a sea of oppression and dictatorship. This is not to minimise Israel's failings, especially its settlement policies in the West Bank and the harsh restrictions it imposes on ordinary Palestinians there. But Israel remains a robust democracy in which all citizens (including Palestinians) have a vote and are equal before the law; governments regularly change in free elections; the executive is separated from the judiciary (which frequently holds politicians to rigorous account); a free and highly critical media flourishes; and even the worst Arab terrorists are accorded a level of human rights unknown to those who are brave enough to be dissidents in Syria, Iran or Egypt.

The ups and downs of Israeli democracy over the past 60 years are chronicled in Colin Shindler's readable, comprehensive but concise A History of Modern Israel, which is especially insightful in dealing with the powerful role of military leaders in domestic politics. It also documents the role of the judiciary in holding politicians and generals to account. An acclaimed historian, Shindler recently was appointed to Britain's first professorship in Israeli studies (at London University).

He traces the rise of the Israeli Right in the '60s and '70s and shows how this slowly led to the abandonment of many of the idealistic goals of the Zionist pioneers. This trend was personified by Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun during the 1948 war, whose units were largely responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre. Contradictorily, it was Begin who negotiated the historic 1979 peace treaty with Egypt's Anwar Sadat (a former Hitler admirer), underlining another of Shindler's themes: that forward progress towards peace with Israel's neighbours is often made by right-wing leaders with a strong military record. Shindler's book, like Morris's, will set the standard for some time for excellent scholarship shedding light on Israel's history, both bright and dark sides.

The picture in the Arab world, however, remains almost universally depressing six decades on, even after tectonic shifts such as Israel's peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. As distinguished American reporter Robin Wright details in her region-wide coverage of the Middle East, democracy and respect for human rights are almost unknown in the Arab world and neighbouring Iran. The strength of Dreams and Shadows is that it presents the voices of the region, not those of faraway experts. It reflects 30years of travel throughout the region and provides an accessible window into the realities of Middle Eastern life.

Many of the voices are pro-democratic, or at least opposed to autocratic and brutal regimes that dominate the region. Their stories are frequently uplifting, if only because of their determination in the face of mass repression and their courage after decades of torture and inhumane imprisonment without charge, let alone trial. Wright injects a hint of optimism through such voices, although it is apparent that the region will not dramatically improve anytime soon. Still, the overwhelming youthfulness of the Arab world's populations and the internet information explosion both challenge the status quo and are hopeful indicators.

There are, unfortunately, many negative voices in Wright's book. Hamas's is one. The irresponsibility of many Palestinian leaders during the 1948 war has not improved. After decades of corrupt, self-serving and nepotistic control of the Palestine Liberation Organisation by Yasser Arafat, it was inevitable that a new generation of Palestinian leaders would arise. History will record that Arafat achieved little in the fight to win the inalienable right of the Palestinians to self-determination and their own state, despite his belated embrace of the Olso agreements and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the '90s.

Public opinion polls among Palestinians in the areas of their future state (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) indicate strong support for a two-state solution, which is also Israeli policy. In 2006 Palestinians overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, an organisation that had already provided improved social, educational, health and economic infrastructure to its people, contrasting with Arafat's corrupt and ineffective leadership.

Hamas, however, has taken Palestinians backwards by imposing a medieval social conservatism on a politically sophisticated people and abandoning the PLO's tentative steps towards a peace deal, in which recognition of Israel, with permanent, secure borders, would be accompanied by the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside it, as envisaged by the UN.

Across Israel's northern border, the 1982 war against the PLO dislodged one dangerous enemy from Lebanon but created a more effective foe: the Shi'ite Hezbollah, another of Wright's negative voices. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Shi'ite regime in Iran (which arms, trains and finances them) have not moved one millimetre from the old program of driving the Jews into the sea. Iran seems determined to acquire nuclear weapons to do the job more efficiently.

Wright is scathing about the Bush administration's policies, arguing that the Iraq intervention was counterproductive and disillusioned many Muslims about democracy. In The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, Olivier Roy, a leading French analyst, also criticises the manipulation of policy by George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives to justify the invasion of Iraq, and the "woolly and ideological" thinking behind America's "global war on terror".

Instead, Roy advocates conventional methods to deal with Islamic fundamentalist violence, including classic intelligence and police work, bolstering the judiciaries of the countries most affected by terrorism and working with Muslim communities to isolate extremists. These are long-term strategies requiring patience to achieve less spectacular but perhaps more enduring results in undermining terrorists' bases of support and creating space for Wright's voices of moderation and optimism. Roy also criticises Bush's indifference to concerted diplomacy to further the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Roy's picture is not comforting for Bush's successor. In the end, a lasting resolution of the 60-year stand-off that followed the 1948 war can only be achieved either if Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran achieve their genocidal goal and wipe Israel off the map, or if commonsense and pragmatism prevail through an agreement to redraw the UN's 1947 map and provide Israelis and Palestinians with viable, secure and prosperous states. In such a deal, both sides must make concessions: Israel, in ceding areas it has settled in the West Bank; Palestinians, in finally letting go of areas they regard as unjustly taken from them in 1948.

It is inconceivable that Israel will change its mind about the right of return for the descendants of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. Israelis view this as a thinly veiled attempt to achieve by demographic means what the Arabs have failed to achieve through military force: the destruction of Israel. Similarly, Israelis will never agree to either a unitary or bi-national state in which the Arabs would be in the majority; this would be tantamount to relinquishing their inalienable right to self-determination.

The only realistic choices for the Palestinians, therefore, are either war without end, which neither side can win (short of a genocide that would blight the perpetrator forever), or a noble compromise involving a "just terms" deal that finally allows Palestinians to pick up the pieces of their society, which was shattered in the 1948 war. Having voted in a democratic election for Hamas, which eschews compromise, only time will tell whether ordinary Palestinians can convince the now dominant faction of their national leadership that they actually mean it when they tell pollsters they prefer a two-state solution to endless jihad.