Whose Jerusalem?: The conflicts of Israel

by Ronald Segal

284 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1975

About the author

From the obituary in The Guardian (2008):

"At Cape Town University he majored in English and Latin and learned the raw facts of political life. Trinity College, Cambridge, followed, where he was more influenced by Enid Welsford, tutor in the English moralists, than by FR Leavis. An upper second was a disappointment. A dissertation on Paradise Lost won him a fellowship to the University of Virginia, but he found Charlottesville a 'museum world'. Within six months, in 1956, he was back in Cape Town to launch the magazine Africa South. Politics had won out."

From the book jacket for Islam's Black Slaves (2001):

"South African-born Ronald Segal, former editor and publisher of Africa South, left his country with the African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo in 1960 for political exile in England. Banned for more than thirty years, he returned briefly in 1992 and again in early 1994 to help the ANC run its campaign in the Western Cape for South Africa's first democratic election. Founding editor of the Penguin African Library, Segal is the author of thirteen books, including The Anguish of India, The Race War, The Americans, and, most recently, The Black Diaspora (FSG, 1996)."

From the book jacket for Into Exile (1963):

"From April 1960 to the end of 1961, Ronald Segal continued to publish Africa South in Exile from London, despite lack of funds (the South African Government had frozen all his assets) and the difficulties of smuggling copies back into the Union. In 1961 he published a book called Political Africa, a kind of Who's Who of the leading political personalities in Africa and of the aims and histories of their political parties. His personal knowledge of African affairs and his acquaintanceship with men like Nkrumah, Kaunda and Nyerere led him to expand some of the entries in Political Africa to form a book of African Profiles, published by Penguin a year later. In April 1961 he joined the Penguin staff as the editor of their new African Library. Recently he spent three months in India gathering material for a new book."

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 1973 STUDY OF ISRAEL AND ITS RELATION TO ITS ARABIC NEIGHBORS

Author Ronald Segal wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, “This is a book about Israel… My purpose has been to examine Israeli society as it is and the dynamics of its development. Yet a book about Israel must be a book, too, about the Arabs…. I have, therefore, looked at how each side sees itself and the other; and have tried to show that much of what each sees is only its own illusion. And I have thought it necessary to examine Arab societies as well… and at last, I consider the experience and attitudes, the divisions and dilemma of the Palestinians in their own Diaspora… the Jews, so victorious in battle… confront themselves in a crisis of identity… increasingly urgent, is the clash between the covenant with man and the Covenant with God… I have, happily, met those, on both sides of the conflict, who seek what is reasonable and right in the cause of the other and reject what they see as unreasonable and wrong in the assertion of their own… I trust that… this book will provide them with some small help to understanding each other.”

He notes, “Certainly, those who see Arab enmity as still one more stage in the long persecution of the Jewish people offer abundant evidence that Arab attitudes to Israel are informed by an unmistakably ‘racial’ hatred. They point to… popular dissemination of notorious anti-Jewish propaganda, like ‘The Protocols of Zion’… Israeli soldiers, capturing the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War, came upon school textbooks with caricatures of Jews scarcely distinguishable from those in the popular press of the Third Reich.” (Pg. 9)

He asks, “why should the Soviet Union be so concerned over the fate of the Arabs? Ideological affiliations could scarcely be a factor…. It is the expansion of Soviet power, through economic relationships diplomatic agreements, military bases and facilities, and not moral concern for the Arabs, that conditions Soviet conduct in the Middle East.” (Pg. 11)

He states, “It is the nuclear capability of the United States and not the armed might of Israel that would credibly deter the Russians from moving directly to achieve their aim… Yet the mass of Israelis would not allow that their state is, therefore, an American satellite… But why do these same Israelis then deduce that the dependence of Egypt or any other Arab state on the Soviet Union, for sophisticated military equipment and economic subsidy, must imply just such mere satellite status?” (Pg. 28)

He argues, “The ‘national problem’ now is the Israeli occupation of Egyptian territory. And the ‘social problem’ is all too evident,. There are the multitudes who gained little or nothing from the Nasserist era: the landless laborers and the peasants with tiny plots in the countryside, the poorly paid, casually employed or totally jobless in the swelling cities. There are the many whose era it seemed for a while to be: the mass of the petty bourgeoisie who now seek some real advance in their living standards and easily resent the elite of government and the economy. There is a massive constituency for revolt against a regime which can solve neither the ‘national’ nor the ‘social’ challenges confronting it.” (Pg. 73)

He notes, “the Jewish identity embodied in Israel has been far less a religious than a national assertion. And nowhere is this more evident…than among … the ‘125,000 Arabs of the Jewish faith’; those Israelis whose parents, or whom themselves, have come from Arab states. Such of them who attach much importance to Jewish religious doctrine represent probably as small a minority as exists among Israelis of European and American origin. But they are in general even more fervently attached to a Jewish national identity that would dissociate them from an Arab one.” (Pg. 107)

He says, “this points to the need for the major impulse: a Palestinian movement able to unite the overwhelming mass of the Palestinians in their separate communities for a single struggle… And perhaps the Palestinian people will remain conservative until leaders emerge to make the most radical departure of all, in initiating a real communication with them. From this… may even come, to manifest the Palestinian identity, a Palestinian Zionism as inclusive as the present commitment to Arab Zionism is an exclusive one. And from such a development, perhaps, the Jewish identity may be drawn from its own exclusive commitment, towards a sense of common Palestinian purpose. For surely in the end only a common identity, realized albeit by stages in a common society, will promote the free and creative identities of both peoples.” (Pg. 115-116)

He explains, “Gerontocracy is an undeniable feature of the Israeli political system. The population itself is among the youngest in the industrially developed world… Yet in both the Knesset and the Cabinet the average age was sixty-three. And a settlement disproportionately old was similarly to be found along the upper reaches of the civil service and the trade union movement.” (Pg. 159)

He points out, “the leadership in the homeland has never abandoned its resolution to base the Jewish state on broadly socialist principles… Israel’s welfare services are such as few far richer states can properly boast. Economic discrepancies in the country are among the narrowest in the world; and certainly much narrower than in many states describing themselves as socialist.” (Pg. 164)

He suggests, “there may be ways of making the state support far larger numbers of citizens in conditions of decent space and quiet and cleanliness. But if Israel’s leaders show incipient signs of recognizing that there is a challenge here, they show none of having developed any coherent attitude to meet it. As industrial, so military success has produced unenvisaged problems. An expansionist, indeed imperial, aspiration, previously limited to more or less tentative commitments among the religious and the Revisionists, has been popularly encouraged by conquest.” (Pg. 177)

He reports, “a demonstration was to be held in Jerusalem, to protest against police brutality, by the Black Panthers: a group of young Oriental Jews who had taken to demonstrating in the streets against the gap between the circumstances of their own community and those of the dominant Western Jews. The Black Panthers chose their name to deliberately shock Israeli public opinion… It was not only, or indeed mainly, that, for the majority of Israelis who believed that they knew something about them, the original Black Panthers of the United States were hostile to the Israeli cause and critical of the American Jews. The name was a symbol of racial revolt against white ascendancy. And there was just enough validity in the implied parallel to make of it a distressing challenge.” (Pg. 208-209)

He asserts, “Tel Aviv must be among the ugliest cities on earth. It cannot, to be sure, help having no mountain or hillside to climb, or central wide river along which to glide; though it does have the sea, and instead of washing itself there, seems to turn impatiently from it. It is confused, agitated, distraught… There are no great parks and squares to wander in and find quiet with a sense of space… The new [buildings] seem agelessly shabby almost as soon as they have been built. Yet, the past and its pressures are in part responsible. But the present and its pressures are the occasion for yet more nearsighted haste rather than repentance. But bulldozers are busy: to make not parks and squares and apartment buildings of inviting design... but an ever faster supply of housing and commercial units to sell, for a city without kindness or dignity.” (Pg. 263-264)

He concludes, “The more powerful that Jewish nationalism proves to be, under challenge from its Arab counterpart, the more divided… the society of Israel becomes. Inseparable in their separate communities, Jew and Arab move from one false dawn to another, within the nationalist night. And yet, paradoxically again, it is the Palestinians, perhaps the most fervently nationalist of the Arab peoples in their very homelessness, who may first sufficiently discover and declare the futility of the engagement… For it is not their own nationalism that the repeated triumphs of Israel on the battlefield fortify with an all-Arab involvement, but the particular nationalism of an Egypt, a Lebanon, a Jordan, that discards them as strangers.” (Pg. 279-280)

Although 50 years old, this book may still offer some insights for those studying the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors.