The Iron Wall Quotes

“bombings stopped suddenly in April 2004 as a result of a strategic choice by its leadership and a subsequent secret deal with Israel.33”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“rejection forty years earlier. In this context the annexation of Jerusalem was seen as an act of peace insofar as it demonstrated to the Arabs the unflinching resolve and the power of the Jewish state.52 But in another sense the annexation of East Jerusalem represented an abrupt reversal of the policy of the Zionist movement over the preceding three decades. From 1937 until 1967 the Zionist movement was resigned to the partition of Jerusalem, and in 1947 it even accepted the UN plan for the internationalization of the city. But from 1967 on there was broad bipartisan support for the policy that claimed the whole of Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the State of Israel.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“third front. The one thing it did not have was a master plan for territorial aggrandizement. Its territorial aims were defined not in advance but in response to developments on the battlefield. Appetite comes with eating. The decision-making process of the Eshkol government during the war was complex, confused, and convoluted. It did not bear the slightest resemblance to what political scientists like to call “the rational actor model.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Israel hesitated on the brink. The government, paralyzed by fear and by conflicting currents of opinion, took two weeks to reach a decision. These two weeks were a traumatic experience for the Israeli public, and they went down in history as “the period of waiting.” During this period the entire nation succumbed to a collective psychosis. The memory of the Holocaust was a powerful psychological force that deepened the feeling of isolation and accentuated the perception of threat. Although, objectively speaking, Israel was much stronger than its enemies, many Israelis felt that their country faced a threat of imminent destruction. For them the question was not about the Straits of Tiran but about survival. Weak”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“been in existence since 1958.18”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“hitting policy of military reprisals practiced by the Ben-Gurion–Dayan duo in the early 1950s. Eshkol’s moderate policy toward the Arabs was”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“For Shiloah the alliance of the periphery was not just a political strategy but an ideological response to Nasser’s doctrine of the three circles. Nasser’s doctrine portrayed Egypt as standing at the center of three circles—the Arab, Islamic, and African circles. It was a monolithic concept of the Middle East that posited Egypt as the dominant power and Pan-Arabism as the dominant ideology. The”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Another consequence of Suez was to deepen Nasser’s involvement in the Palestine question. Ever since the Arab League had been founded in 1945, the two main items on its agenda were Arab unity and the Palestine question. The Suez War prompted, or at least enabled, Nasser to merge these two subjects into one. His aim was to forge a cohesive, active, and militant Pan-Arab movement, and he started to present the liberation of Palestine as the principal goal of this movement. In the past he used to talk about the need to find a solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees, whereas after 1956 he began to talk about the liberation of Palestine and took the lead in establishing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“the official version, which says that Israel went to war only because it faced an imminent danger of attack from Egypt.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“a joint operation with them might have to be abandoned, and that he was looking for other partners in the war against Nasser. He added that there were three different timescales: the French advocated immediate military action against Egypt, the British wanted to allow two more months for diplomatic action, and the Americans wanted a much longer period to undermine Nasser’s regime without the use of military force. He assumed that Israel’s timescale was closer to Britain’s than to France’s.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“conclude that Ben-Gurion was simply trying to score points off his opponent. Anderson tried his best to persuade Nasser to grant Ben-Gurion’s wish for a high-level meeting, but Nasser rejected the idea. He said that the Egyptian people, the Egyptian army, and the Arab nation would not allow such a meeting. Nasser made two additional points. First, Israel was not just an Egyptian problem but an all-Arab problem, and Egypt had to keep in step with the other Arab states. Second, as far as Egypt was concerned, the only basis for a settlement with Israel was the UN partition resolution of 1947. This was, of course, a complete nonstarter for Israel.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Members of the left-wing Mapam party objected to annexation and still supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“measure responsible for the disaster that overwhelmed them.10 Israel’s leaders knew of these divisions and exploited them to the full following the official outbreak of hostilities, just as they had exploited them previously.11”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“white paper of 17 May 1939 abruptly reversed British support for Zionism and for a Jewish state. It condemned the Jews to a status of permanent minority in a future independent Palestinian state. So the Zionist movement was driven to develop its own military power, through the paramilitary organization called the Haganah (which in Hebrew means defense),”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“the Jews, and led a full-scale revolt in 1936–39 against the British authorities and their Jewish protégés.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The Balfour Declaration, as this letter came to be known, represented a major triumph for Zionist diplomacy. At the time of its issue, the Jewish population of Palestine numbered some 56,000 as against an Arab population of 600,000, or less than 10 percent. Considering that the Arabs constituted over 90 percent of the population, the promise not to prejudice their civil and religious rights had a distinctly hollow ring about it, since it totally ignored their political rights. Britain’s public promise to the Jews could not be reconciled either with its earlier promise to Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, to support the establishment of an independent Arab kingdom after the war in return for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire or with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 to divide the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence in the event of an Allied victory. These irreconcilable wartime promises returned to haunt Britain on the morrow of the Allied victory.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“The term “Zionism” was coined in 1885 by the Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, Zion being one of the biblical names for Jerusalem.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Amnesty International reported that since the start of the second intifada Israel had destroyed 3,000 Palestinian houses in Gaza, throwing over 18,000 Palestinians onto the street. It damaged a further 15,000 houses, in addition to destroying hundreds of factories, workshops, greenhouses, wells, pumps, irrigation canals, and orchards. It uprooted 226,000 trees and”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Brigadier General Israel Lior, Eshkol’s aide-de-camp, suspected that the never-ending chain of action and reaction would end up in all-out war: In the north a pretty heavy war was conducted over the water sources. The war was directed by the chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, together with the officer in charge of the northern command, David (“Dado”) Elazar. I had an uneasy inner feeling on this matter. All the time it seemed to me that Rabin suffers from what I call the “Syrian syndrome.” In my opinion, nearly all those who served along the front lines of the northern command … were affected by the Syrian syndrome. Service on this front, opposite the Syrian enemy, fuels feelings of exceptional hatred for the Syrian army and people. There is no comparison, its seems to me, between the Israeli’s attitude to the Jordanian or Egyptian army and his attitude to the Syrian army. … We loved to hate them.”
― Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World