Sunday, December 05, 2021
From Ian:
11 Days in May
Publishers against the People of the Book
11 Days in May
For 11 days, beginning May 10, "Hamas fired nearly 400 projectiles a day" for a total of "approximately 4,350" (680 of those rockets landed in Gaza, killing an estimated 91 Palestinians). The airstrikes marked the largest—in terms of number—ever lobbed toward the Jewish state in its young history. The tactic was by design.
Because while Hamas has grown in strength, so has Israel. It has the Iron Dome missile defense system that can, at this moment, effectively counter Hamas's rockets. It has more technologically advanced drones (air and sea) to counter Hamas's and a tunnel detection system in place to minimize the threat Israel faces in its own territories.
But by firing as many missiles as it could—including a five-minute salvo that included a "remarkable 137 rockets"—Hamas was testing to see whether it could overpower and confuse Israel's Iron Dome. It didn't work. At no point in the 11-day battle did Israel incur significant destruction. Hamas, however, came close with a "lucky strike" near the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline that could have crippled the oil supply and attempted strikes at the secretive Dimona nuclear facility that could have ended even worse.
"The Gaza war of 2021 truly provided a glimpse of future warfare," says Schanzer. "But even the best technology and intelligence are no guarantee against the unforeseen events of war."
Fortunately, the fighting earlier this year did not get worse. And that's, surprisingly, thanks to the Egyptians, who brokered peace between Israel and Hamas to get back into the good graces of the newly sworn-in Biden administration. "On the one hand, it was a thankless job with little prospect of success," Schanzer says. "On the other hand, Egypt was now viewed as a friend of the White House again."
The most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel is just the latest in a decades-long war—and sadly won't be the last. So where should things go from here? Schanzer has some productive thoughts.
"Under the current circumstances, a three-state solution (Israel, the West Bank under the PA, and Hamas-controlled Gaza) appears to be the only path forward." Yes, that would mean the only prospect for peace is between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the West Bank—but the Gaza solution is not so simple.
To do that, the Iran problem must be solved. "Gaza is now ground zero in a proxy conflict. It is part of a bigger battle between Israel and Iran," says Schanzer. But that's a larger problem for perhaps his next book.
Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War
by Jonathan Schanzer
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 284 pp., $29.95
Publishers against the People of the Book
Kestin was already a journalist and the published author of well-received fiction when his 2019 novel, The Siege of Tel Aviv , blurbed by Stephen King, was canceled. Even though it “was seen as a first best-seller for the publisher,” it was pulled after 13 Twitter accounts protested alleged Islamophobia. Kestin notes that none of the 13 had advance reader copies, and he doubts any of them read it after Kestin later self-published it.US Taxpayers to Fund Revisionist, Anti-Zionist History
Kestin describes these critics as “in the main neither Muslims nor Palestinians but American left-wing enemies of Israel.” The Islamophobia charge stemmed from the cover using the word “Moslem,” which Kestin says was his publisher’s doing; he wrote “Muslim” in the text. Critics also objected “to the story, which describes the conquest of Israel by a pan-Islamist alliance led by Iran.”
Pointing to the history of Arab-Israeli wars and the Iranian government’s perpetual saber-rattling, Kestin observed that the plot “is hardly something the author made up out of whole cloth.” He also added, “There are at least four heroic Arab/Muslim characters in Siege, while the Israeli establishment is painted as naively complicit in its own destruction.” None of this mattered, though.
Kestin emailed: “Once Siege was accused of racism and Islamophobia, the dozens of critics who had praised my earlier work ... simply disappeared. (American journalism found nothing of interest in a publisher pulping its own popular book because of a handful of anonymous complaints.) As a result, Siege received only six reviews, all glowing, including one from a Palestinian-American novelist and one from a prominent British Muslim media personality. ... Sadly, my most prominent fan, Stephen King, who for over a decade had provided ecstatic blurbs for all my novels ... in the process becoming one of my closest friends, simply turned his back, explaining that he, America’s most popular writer, the writer to whom Siege was dedicated, did not wish to risk standing up to the raging mob.”
Reflecting on his experience, Kestin observed, “Certainly what is judged to be pro-Israel material is no longer in fashion. A generation of Jews has grown up with little to no affection for the Jewish state, not least because it sees in Israel not David but Goliath.”
Kestin added, “Jews have been replaced by other minorities, possibly because Jews have convinced themselves they are not a minority at all, and so are hardly in need of speaking out as a group.” And yet, anyone who’s been paying attention is aware that Jews are not only a minority group, but an increasingly vulnerable one in the West, as the postwar taboo against open antisemitism has receded.
Yossi Klein Halevi observed, “There's an irony that is increasingly haunting me, that even as large parts of the Arab world begin to dismantle the 70-year boycott of Israel, that boycott is now being taken up by parts of the progressive West, and it’s infiltrating the publishing world as well. It’s unfair to say you can’t publish an Israel book in a mainstream [publishing] house today ... but I worry we’re heading in that direction.”
No one is questioning that Jews lived and could prosper in the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed they did so for a lot longer than Arabs, who conquered the region 1,000 years after Jews had settled there. No serious scholar would argue that life for Jews was one, continuous chronicle of misfortune. Jews interacted with the society around them, especially in trade and business. Arabic was the most widely spoken Jewish language for centuries.
But Jews were always a vulnerable minority, suffering from institutionalized discrimination as dhimmis under Islam. As one pundit has observed: “The NEH would never fund revisionist history that denied that black people were discriminated against during segregation. Why is it funding the same sort of revisionism against Israel?”
Sternfeld elides the pre-colonial condition of dhimmi status—where unquestionably, Jews suffered restrictions and a precarious existence—and their situation during the colonial era, when Jews benefited from education and greater security. The good life many enjoyed under the British and French protectorates and mandates was fatally threatened by the rise of Arab nationalism and Islamism, resulting in their forced exodus.
There is a deeper problem here. The prominence given by post-modern academics to cultural and socioeconomic factors over people, historical events and politics has served to falsify the history of Jews from Arab countries. Take for example the work of Bashkin, whose “New Babylonians” was reviewed by professor Norman A. Stillman.
Stillman says Bashkin is at “her insightful best” in describing the intellectual and cultural ferment in the Iraq of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. However, her chronicling of the watershed events of the 1940s leading up to the mass exodus of 1951 “lacks the same degree of analytical insight,” he writes.
“This is due, I suggest, to her basic approach as a cultural studies scholar who interprets texts, but does not fully take into account the actual events, people, and politics. It is also due to a priori ideological assumptions. Bashkin from the very outset acknowledges her intellectual debt to contrarians such Sami Zubaida, Ella Shohat, and Gilbert Achcar, and the ghost of Edward Said often lurks in the background un-named. Previous historical work on the Jews of the Islamic world is reduced to an oversimplified caricature: ‘a model of harmonious coexistence’ or ‘a tale of perpetual persecution,’ and ‘alongside these ideas, an orientalist interpretation.’
“More seriously, there is an element of naïve wishful thinking which constantly views positive examples of Jewish acculturation and patriotism, on the one hand, and the openness of some Arab liberal intellectuals and politicians, on the other, as proving that the dark forces of radical Arab nationalism were not really as powerful as they appeared in retrospect.”
A shared culture and language with Arabs did not save the Jews of Iraq, any more than the Jewish contribution to German culture, or their love of Mendelssohn and Goethe, saved German Jews from Nazism. All MENA Jews, including anti-Zionists, Communists and the most Arabized, were forced to take the road to exile. And thus a study of how groups interacted before the great exodus becomes irrelevant, because it does not take into account actual events, political factors and actors such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arab League, Nasser and Saddam, leading to the exclusion and persecution of Jews and other minorities.
