In the preface to his book Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel 1917-2017, Ian Black claims that he tries “to tell the story of, and from, both sides,” yet, notes Asher Susser, these two sides turn out to be “the victorious Israeli villain and the vanquished Palestinian victim.” Although Black breaks with the now-popular academic view that Zionism is a form of colonialism, and recognizes the Jews’ historical and religious attachment to the Land of Israel, he fails, writes Susser, to grasp the intensity of Arab anti-Semitism or to display skepticism toward the claims of Arab propagandists and anti-Zionist historians—accepting unquestioningly, for instance, the tale of a “massacre” at Lydda. Susser also notes more subtle problems:
When it comes to Palestinian (or British) [deaths], Black’s language tends to become more graphic. During the second intifada, when Israeli missile strikes killed Palestinian operatives, meticulously singled out for their personal responsibility for the deaths of Israelis, we are told that the victims were “incinerated.” The booby-trapped corpses of two British soldiers hanged by the Irgun Jewish underground in the summer of 1947 were “blown apart” when they were cut down. But hundreds of Israelis, murdered indiscriminately by Palestinian suicide bombers in the second intifada, were always “killed,” never “blown apart.” It is only the Israelis who “incinerate” and “blow apart” [others]. . . .
Israeli leaders, Black says, have refused to admit responsibility for Palestinian suffering. He faults the Israelis for not accepting “the passionately held Palestinian demand for Israel’s recognition of its responsibility for creating the [refugee] problem in 1948.” But the responsibility shoe is very much on the other foot. Israeli leaders have been prepared, at Taba in 2001 for example, to accept their share of responsibility for the consequences of 1948. But they have never been willing to accept sole responsibility. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have never taken any responsibility for the decisions they made in 1947-1948.
Nakba, [the Arabic term used to describe Israel’s creation], means a natural disaster like an earthquake or a flood and, as Sadiq al-Azm has argued, the very use of the term is, in itself, an act of “exoneration and the evasion of responsibility and accountability, since whoever is struck by a disaster is not considered responsible for it.” The Israelis, needless to say, are entirely responsible for all their deeds and misdeeds, but they cannot also be held responsible for the decisions and actions of the Palestinians. . . .
[Regarding] the separation wall constructed by the Israelis to keep out suicide bombers [after the second intifada], . . . Black quotes a Palestinian who lamented that this “stupid wall has nothing to do with Israel’s security.” The fact that the number of Israelis killed by the bombers dropped from hundreds a year to zero after the wall [was completed] is not mentioned. . . . [Likewise], Hamas’s decision, after Israel’s withdrawal, to turn Gaza into a launching pad for rockets, rather than a potentially prosperous economic enterprise, is not even discussed.
Read more on Fathom: http://fathomjournal.org/book-review-enemies-and-neighbours-arabs-and-jews-in-palestine-and-israel-1917-2017/