Enemies and Neighbors Quotes

“Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“PA security forces still worked closely with the Israelis against Hamas – and readily advertised the fact. Majid Faraj of the Palestinian mukhabarat (general intelligence), told his Israeli counterparts (in the presence of a journalist): ‘Hamas is the enemy, and we have decided to wage an all-out war against Hamas. And I tell you there will be no dialogue with Hamas, for he who wants to kill you, kill him first. You have reached a truce with them, but we won’t do so.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“It is very tempting,’ admitted Radwan Abu Ayyash, a leading Fatah loyalist, especially for youngsters and religious people, because they see these Israeli crimes and want to retaliate. But internationally, we have made many gains with the intifada that we would lose if we revert to armed struggle, and we are not prepared for it. If we use guns it will not be an intifada but a war. The Israelis want war. To take this decision would be to play into their hands.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“I felt that this whole country stands on a thin, flaky crust, and under it there flows a lava of terrible, irreparable hatred’, reflected an Israeli journalist who was dismayed to hear expressions of support for the unrepentant killer.4 As well as briefly reigniting the flagging intifada, the murders stirred unaccustomed fury among Israel’s Palestinian minority, triggering demonstrations in Nazareth and elsewhere. ‘I was born here and educated here but I have less value than a Russian Jew who decides to come here tomorrow’, complained Adel Manna, a leading historian. ‘I don’t feel I belong here.’5 Mass protests took place in refugee camps in Jordan, and Arafat called on the UN to deploy forces to protect Palestinians.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“In the absence of any changes on the ground or concrete political gains apart from the faltering PLO dialogue with the Americans, the uprising had itself become routine. International media coverage had been extremely important in drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians but its intensity lessened over time, not least because of the higher and more novel drama of the revolutions that were transforming the landscape of Eastern Europe throughout 1989. But the media could mislead as well as inform. The TV cameras captured repeated clashes, but rarely filmed the Palestinians who continued to work inside Israel, or the Israelis, especially in the Tel Aviv area, who were carrying on with their lives undisturbed by or oblivious to the sporadic unrest across the green line. ‘The situation in the territories was shunted – or repressed – to a marginal place in terms of public interest’, noted B’Tselem, the newly founded Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. ‘The types of stories that led … the news in the electronic media or made headlines in the written press in the past, are today noted laconically or relegated to inside pages of the newspaper.’16 There was an economic cost to be sure, but for the Israelis this was mitigated by the import of foreign workers and a fall in unemployment among Jews who replaced absent Palestinians. In June 1989 about 90 per cent of Palestinians from Gaza were still working, though the figure was only 56 per cent from the West Bank.17 Life”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Hamas made clear that Muslim values were a vital component of its worldview: ‘The Jews asked: will these people act without outside support?’ said another leaflet: They expected the generation that grew up after 1967 to be wretched and cowed, a generation brought up on hashish and opium, songs and music, beaches and prostitutes, a generation of occupation, a generation of poisoners and defeatists. What happened was the awakening of the people. The Muslim people is avenging its honour and restoring its former glory. No to concessions, [not] even a grain of dust from the soil of Palestine.72 Sentiments like these were codified in the Hamas charter, which was published in August 1988 and designed as an alternative to the PLO covenant.73 Its thirty-six articles defined the movement as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, hailed the martyr Izzedin al-Qassam, and described Palestine as a religious endowment (waqf), ‘consecrated for Muslims until judgement day’. In the face of the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’ no part of it could be surrendered. Its liberation was a religious duty. ‘There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.’ It referenced anti-Semitic notions about Jewish world domination, responsibility for the French and Communist revolutions, control of the media and the aspiration to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates in a plan embodied in a notorious Russian forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It opposed the PLO’s support – though that”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Beyond that, however, the Arab minority mattered ‘only in so far as they reflected Israeli iniquity and immoral behaviour’, noted one study. ‘In this capacity they were not only passive sufferers but also marginal ones compared to their fellow Palestinians in the occupied territories.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Other attacks were mounted against Israeli embassies and El Al offices. The PFLP, in the assessment of Hisham Sharabi, upheld the principle of total war: if Israel used napalm to kill civilians, dynamited homes in retaliation for commando activity, and engaged in collective punishment, then the guerrillas were justified in refusing to distinguish between civilian and military targets or to limit themselves to a single kind or field of action.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“In February 1970, the king announced a new clampdown on the Palestinians but then backed down and agreed a hudna – a truce or armistice – with Arafat. In June there was further escalation when the PFLP took eighty-eight foreigners hostage in Amman hotels.50 Israel, with the US, watched the position of the ‘plucky little king’ or PLK, as he was nicknamed by Western diplomats and journalists, with growing concern, stiffening Hussein’s resolve to force a showdown. It began in September 1970 and attracted global attention when the PFLP hijacked three civilian airliners and landed them at a remote desert landing strip in the kingdom called Dawson’s Field – renamed ‘Revolution Airport’ – and blew them up. ‘Things cannot go on,’ the king declared. ‘Every day Jordan is sinking a little further.’51 Hussein declared martial law. In fighting punctuated by feverish inter-Arab diplomacy, PLO forces were routed and driven out of the country. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians and 600 Jordanians were killed.52 Palestinians came to refer to this period as ‘Black September’. The common interests of Jordan and Israel had never been so clear. In October 1970 King Hussein met the Israeli deputy prime minister, Yigal Allon, in the desert near Eilat and promised to work to prevent further fedayeen raids.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“The Baghdad-born Israeli writer Nissim Rejwan lamented ‘the sheer size of the victory, the humiliation it brought on the Arab world, and the certain knowledge that the Arabs would never, ever contemplate peace and reconciliation with Israel from a position of such crippling weakness’.121 And it was not only public intellectuals or political activists who were concerned about the national mood and its implications. ‘I think that in the next round the Arabs’ hatred towards us will be much more serious and profound,’ mused an anonymous soldier who was interviewed in the aftermath of the war, though the publication of his remarks was censored at the time. Another fretted: ‘Not only did this war not solve the state’s problems, but it complicated them in a way that’ll be very hard to solve.’122 In later years many Israelis looked back and identified a moment of sudden understanding of the new situation: Matti Steinberg, a young soldier, was with his IDF armoured unit in the centre of Gaza City, deserted and under curfew, reflecting on the stunning victory and the achievement of peace, when a burst of gunfire suddenly targeted their convoy. It signalled that ‘one period in the Arab–Israeli conflict had ended, but another had begun, no less turbulent and demanding than its predecessors’.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Occupation brings foreign rule; foreign rule brings resistance; resistance brings repression; repression brings terror and counter-terror; the victims of terror are usually innocent people. The retention of the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims; let us leave the occupied territories immediately.120”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Life in Bureij and the other camps was hard and precarious, despite UNRWA’s efforts. The agency’s mission was defined as ‘the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation’.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Israel’s declaration of independence hailed the rebirth of the Jewish people in its ancient homeland, and promised equality for all citizens. But the state had been born in war and moulded by Arab hostility throughout the Mandate era. Security was the main prism through which the government viewed the Arab minority. Jewish immigration and economic development were its most urgent priorities. Building this new nation meant primarily the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ (kibbutz galuyot) in fulfilment of Zionist ideology. British restrictions on immigration had been lifted immediately. In July 1950 the Law of Return, a key piece of legislation, granted Jews the world over the automatic right to live in Israel, privileging their rights over native non-Jews. With the gates now wide open, the Jewish population rapidly swelled to 1.5 million by 1951, most of the first newcomers arriving from Arab countries such as Iraq and Yemen, where animosity towards Jews and levels of persecution had grown because of the Palestine disaster. The absorption of Holocaust survivors and the memory of the recent war, with over 6,000 Israeli dead and thousands injured, served as an unshakeable justification for Israel’s independence and the priority and privileges given to Jews.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“The contemporary history of the Palestinians turns on a key date: 1948. That year a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries. “The Palestinian people does not exist,” said the new masters, and henceforth the Palestinians would be referred to by general, conveniently vague terms, as either “refugees” or in the case of a small minority that had managed to escape the generalised expulsion, “Israeli Arabs”. A long absence was beginning.’ Elias Sanbar1”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Volunteering was the norm among Jewish youth: Tikva Honig-Parnass, a seventeen-year-old Hebrew University student, enlisted in the Haganah in November 1947. ‘It was well-known on campus who was a member’, she recalled. Most students were members and enlisting was the culmination of everything I had been brought up to believe in. We had fought to achieve what we had, it was now in danger and it was up to me to protect it. In that discourse there was no notion of attacking or being the aggressors, only defending ourselves and what we had built.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“On the eve of war the Jews were far better prepared, militarily and politically, than the Arabs, in Palestine or beyond. Their leaders had a high level of confidence that they would prevail if it came to a fight, as they assumed it would.13 The Haganah had a centralized command. It could field 35,000 men, including the 2,500-strong Palmah. The ‘dissidents’ of the Irgun and Stern Gang accounted for a few thousand more, in total making up an extraordinarily large percentage of the adult Jewish population. Approximately 27,000 Jews had enlisted with British forces during the war. In addition, the institutions of the Yishuv exercised national discipline. ‘The Jewish Agency … is really a state within a state with its own budget, secret cabinet, army, and above all, intelligence service’, observed Richard Crossman, the British Labour MP who had visited Palestine as a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. ‘It is the most efficient, dynamic, toughest organisation I have ever seen.’14 If it came to war, he predicted, the Haganah would trounce the Arabs. Crossman’s was an astute assessment (and at odds with the view of the British military).15 Still, his confidence was not widely shared. ‘We knew that 635,000 Jews were facing hundreds of millions of Arabs: “the few against the many”’, Uri Avnery, a young German-born Jew, wrote shortly afterwards. ‘We knew: if we surrender, we die.’16 Volunteering was the norm among Jewish youth: Tikva Honig-Parnass, a seventeen-year-old Hebrew University student, enlisted in the Haganah in November 1947. ‘It was well-known on campus who was a member’, she recalled.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“By February 1947 the Labour government in London had effectively given up an increasingly unpopular burden that was costing the lives of British troops and police in a ‘senseless, squalid war’, as Winston Churchill, now in opposition, put it.5 It decided to submit the Palestine question to the UN and in May the fledgling world body established a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). During their visit to the country the committee’s members witnessed the so-called ‘Exodus affair’, when 4,500 Holocaust survivors on board an old American passenger ship were detained as illegal immigrants and deported back to Europe. The favourable publicity that ensued for the Jewish cause went some way to offsetting revulsion at Jewish terrorism. That peaked the day the Exodus arrived in France, when two abducted British sergeants were hanged in retaliation for the execution of Irgun fighters. In a grisly sequel, their booby-trapped corpses were blown apart as they were being cut down in an orange grove near Netanya. The Arabs boycotted UNSCOP – their ‘cold malevolence’, as a Jewish official put it, in sharp contrast to the ‘warm reception by the Yishuv’.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“In 1943, when evidence of the scale of Nazi atrocities in Europe was already familiar, Simon lectured a group of Jewish eighteen-year-olds: ‘We are entering a country populated by another people and are not showing that people any consideration,’ he warned. ‘The Arabs are afraid we may force them out of here.’ The youngsters’ response was hostile, truculent and highly revealing: ‘Which is more ethical?’ one of them asked. ‘To leave Jews to be annihilated in the diaspora or to bring them in the face of opposition to Palestine and to carry out a transfer, even by force, of Arabs to Arab countries?’ It was an attitude that was increasingly prevalent among the so-called ‘Sabra’ generation of Jews who were born or raised in Palestine (named after the cactus-like plant that was prickly on the outside but soft inside), and who were to fight and rise to public prominence in the years to come. ‘Reference to the aspiration for peace and the desire for Arab–Jewish friendship became a kind of ritualised convention, repeated without any deep conviction’,19 in the words of one mainstream Israeli historian. Ihud leaders held discussions with Arab leaders in Palestine and the neighbouring countries. But these efforts were ‘unavailing as long as the official leadership on both sides looked on them with disdain’.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“In politics, the task is to distinguish what is possible from what is not; the policy that consists of taking what one can, even while demanding more, is preferable to sterile obstinacy.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“We who live abroad are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But this is a grave mistake. The Arab, like all the Semites, is sharp minded and shrewd. All the townships of Syria and Eretz Yisrael are full of Arab merchants who know how to exploit the masses and keep track of everyone with whom they deal – the same as in Europe. The Arabs, especially the urban elite, see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land, but they keep quiet and pretend not to notice anything. For now, they do not consider our actions as presenting a future danger to them … But, if the time comes that our people’s life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“The Zionist chapter proper in the country’s history began in 1882, after the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire (although the term was only invented a few years later). The first settlers called themselves Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups which aspired to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and, in a significant novelty, to use the reviving Hebrew language rather than Yiddish. In August that year a two-hundred-strong group from the Romanian town of Galatz landed at Jaffa, where they were locked up for weeks before enough cash could be raised to bribe the Turkish police to release them.6 Their goal was a plot of stony land that had been purchased south of Haifa. Laurence Oliphant, an eccentric British traveller and enthusiastic philo-Semite, described the scene shortly afterwards at Zamarin, a malaria-infested hamlet on the southern spur of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. It is a remarkably vivid portrayal of two very different sorts of people who were warily making each other’s acquaintance as future neighbours – and enemies: It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin [peasants], with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs [keffiyeh headdresses] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [cloaks], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labour on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter – a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“The existing Arab population of Palestine is small and at a low stage of civilisation’, he wrote. ‘It contains within itself none of the elements of progress, but it has its rights, and these must be carefully respected.’ Balfour told Curzon in 1919, in the same vein, that ‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’22 This brutally candid display of partiality, ‘dripping with Olympian disdain’, in the words of a leading Palestinian historian,23 would still arouse Arab anger a turbulent century later.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“The liberal Manchester Guardian newspaper, an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist cause, hailed the declaration as ‘the fulfilment of an aspiration, the signpost of a destiny’. Without a national home the Jews would never have security, argued the editor, C. P. Scott, citing a recent case of the fateful vulnerability of another minority in a Muslim land. ‘The example of Armenia and the wiping out of a population fiftyfold that of the Jewish colonies in Palestine was a terrible warning of what might be in store for these.’ Scott saw no contradiction between the declaration’s central promise and the rights of the country’s native Arabs – and thus reflected widely held contemporary Western views.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“The Egyptian Expeditionary Force had initially protected the Suez Canal from the Turks. Its first assault on Gaza in March 1917 marked the start of an Allied invasion of enemy territory. In April the entire civilian populations of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were ordered to leave ‘for their own safety’. Beersheba and then Gaza were captured after heavy fighting in late October and early November. Jaffa fell on 16 November. Australian troops who entered Tel Aviv shouted ‘Europe, Europe’. Those victories paved the way for the advance on Jerusalem.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organization, to inform him that: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.8 Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant9 and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location – its ‘fatal geography’ – to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India.10 Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.’11 Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Palestinian and Israeli narratives diverge over far more than the words that are commonly used for their respective national heroes, not least over the nature of the long and unresolved struggle between them over the same small territory on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Both are reflected throughout this book. Each is authentic, even if dismissed by the other side as propaganda or lies. Neither can be ignored. The conflict between these two peoples can only be understood by paying attention to how they see themselves and their history as well as each other. Narrative, in its simplest definition, is ‘the story a nation tells itself about itself’.”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017

“Academic interest has grown enormously and is closely related to political positions. Several universities in the US and Britain now have dedicated (and separate) centres for Palestine and Israel studies. In the last decade or so the fundamentals of the conflict have been illuminated by the paradigm of settler colonialism – based on the experience of the US, Australia, Canada and South Africa – when native populations are replaced rather than exploited by Europeans. That approach struggles, though, to encompass the Jewish religious–national connection to Eretz-Yisrael that is so central to Zionist ideology and Israeli identity. And Mizrahi (Eastern or oriental) Jews who came to Israel from Iraq, Morocco and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds are another specific element with no exact parallel elsewhere. In a way this heated contemporary debate reflects a familiar truth about how the conflict is perceived: Zionists have tended to focus on their intentions in immigrating to Palestine; Arabs on the results, and especially, in the words of Edward Said, of ‘having their territory settled by foreigners’.1”
― Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017