Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel – Book Review

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/stone-men-the-palestinians-who-built-israel-book-review/

by  Nicholas V. Barney      3 April 2021          Palestine Chronicle

Stone Men: The Palestinians who built Israel, by Andrew Ross. (Book Cover)

 

By Nicholas V. Barney

There is a memorable passage from satirist Evelyn Waugh’s perhaps purposively unremembered political masterpiece “Black Mischief” (1932), in which Basil Seal, the chief Anglo architect of a modernization program in the fictional African island nation of Azania, passes a stark sentence on the democratically bereft principals of political modernity:

“You know,” he added reflectively, “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the press, referendums…”

“What is all that? ” asked the Emperor.

“Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.”

If this sounds like an incomplete list of the supposedly democratic state of Israel’s undemocratic practices in its modern occupation of Palestine, it might be because it’s taken until Andrew Ross’s “Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel” to sufficiently amend it.

Focusing on the nearly century-long, under-reported exploitation of Palestinian labor in the West Bank’s stone industry, a sweat and bloodsoaked epoch that Ross argues more than justifies the recognition of full Palestinian civil rights in a single-state framework, Ross traces with scrupulous detail how the Palestinians, since the pre-1948 days of the British Mandate, have had a “principal share in building the infrastructure” of Israel and a “decisive hand in most of the fixed assets on the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean coast.”

In recompense for their building:

“roads, railways, ports, telecom lines, an airport, and other public works; the ‘first

Hebrew city’ of Tel Aviv; all the Arab towns and cities that were taken under

Jewish control after the Nakba; the ever-expanding metropolis of ‘unified’ and

Greater Jerusalem; and the red-tiled hilltop settlements on the West Bank along

with their grid of bypass roads, barrier walls, super-highways, and other security

structures…”

The Israeli state has, cue Waugh, denied Palestinians “access to collective bargaining and legal avenues for redress and income deprivation from the policies of collective punishment and economic underdevelopment,” withheld the social insurance benefits of Palestinian workers from 1967 to the present, and blocked any pathway for Palestinian civil rights or inclusion within the Israeli state they’ve helped to build.

Not to mention the lack of freedom of the press (Palestinian news stations are frequently raided and pilfered), independent judicature (the IDF adjudicates in Palestine based off Israeli law, and often short of that, martial law), etc. etc.. Since the publication of “Black Mischief” in 1932, thanks to Israel the list of democratic negations in political modernism has nearly doubled (the only avenue of political progress it could be safely said that Israel is in any way at the forefront of).

But “Stone Men” doesn’t demarcate its investigations of corruption and exploitation based on the Green Line, the last legal border of Israel arranged in 1967 (incidentally the last year Israel ever recognized its legal demarcation). Ross makes critical forays into the Palestinians elites who skim money off the top of the exploitation racket – a venture most advocates for Palestine shy away from.

Bringing his focus to Israeli-Palestinian joint-ventures like the new Palestinian city of Rawabi, a source of much contempt and suspicion amongst Palestinians who live nearby and had their farmlands seized for the construction of Rawabi through eminent domain by the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ross parses through the baroque corruption of the Palestinian elite.

With the Oslo Accords officially establishing neoliberal economics in Palestine by dangling a debt-based consumerist carrot in front of the PA, supposedly plodding along a loan-burdened path toward peace and sovereignty, cities like Rawabi are built and financed entirely through private contracts with Israeli businesses instead of Palestinian. And to procure an apartment, one has to qualify for a long-term mortgage, loans Palestinians can’t exactly afford to shoulder with 25% of minimum wage earners living below the poverty line.

From 2009 to 2014 “household debt increased sixfold,” and between 2007 to 2017, Palestine’s national debt grew by 470%, with only 7.9% of loans held by Palestinians “being invested in a productive sector of the economy.” With lordly debt-holding profiteers like the Palestinian Masri family who spurred the creation of Rawabi and the Palestinian politicians who greenlight the operations, the Occupation has not only become a lucrative venture for Israel, but for Palestinian elites and the PA Fateh party.

Quoting a Palestinian interviewee intimate with the racket,

“’The Western donor community, Israel, Fateh, and Jordan each reap dividends in their currency of preference: power, money, security, and logistical support,’ and the whole enterprise ‘relies upon the manipulation and appropriation of the dreams and hopes of an oppressed people for freedom, peace, and justice.”

As an example, in 2004 when Egypt offered 360,000 tons of cement at a discounted price to help rebuild housing in Gaza after the highly destructive aftermath of the al-Aqsa intifada, the PA sold most of the cement to Israel by way of an export license procured by the Ministry of National Economy (headed incidentally by a Masri family member). The cement was instead used for the extension of the Separation Wall, which desperate Palestinians, of course, had little option but to sign on to build.

It is corruption like this and the unilateral conflicted interests shared between Israel and the PA against Palestinian citizens that lead Gatestone Institute, an anti-Muslim think tank (ponder those four joint words), to [defend Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] while simultaneously spewing intentionally false and misleading Islamaphobic news items about Palestine and Arab immigration into the United States.

With debt and loan payments at the forefront of the average Palestinian’s mind and a creditocracy for a government, “solidarity is eroding” argues Ross.

“Under such circumstances, the future is no longer measured as an open pathway to national liberation, but as a countdown to paying off the loan. For the supposed economic pacification – credit for peace – that threatens to prolong the Occupation.”

With the momentum of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement rallying around a single-state solution for Palestine, and emboldened members of the Knesset calling for annexation of the West Bank with 42% of Israeli citizens in support, Andrew Ross has left a portentous mark on what will be, if it happens, a profound debate for the civil rights of indigenous Palestinians in a single-state, a principal share Palestinians have already built themselves.

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– Nicholas V. Barney is an American writer, journalist, and advocate for human rights in Palestine. After the death of a close friend from the West Bank, Nicholas V. Barney has made several trips to Palestine and has spent considerable time living with Palestinian families

The Dual Scourge of Nakba and Corona

https://mailchi.mp/417f54dd3030/new-award-winning-fiction-from-interlink-books-6449384

While being quarantined is the shocking new reality to most people around the globe, it has become a fact of life to Palestinians facing unprecedented hardship and daily nightmares. The conditions in Gaza alone should make any decent human being fume with anger: over two million people in an open air prison facing massive shortages of life saving medicines and medical supplies due to Israel’s illegal blockade and the international community’s inaction. Before my father died, he gave me the key to our house in Jerusalem. My memory of that day is as vivid and bright as a silver coin in the sun. I will always remember it. He looked at me with his kind eyes and said: “This is the key to our house in Qatamon; the house belonged to my father and now it belongs to you, your children, and grandchildren.” Of course, my father was not naive. He knew all too well that our house in Palestine is gone—forever. But he wanted to make sure that I would tell my children so that they would tell their children about our Jerusalem home. Seventy two years ago today, the Jewish state of Israel was established and the Palestinian state of despair and homelessness began. Palestinians refer to this day as “al-Nakba,” the catastrophe that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of nearly 750,000 natives and the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns. May 15, 1948 is a date forever etched in the collective memory of every Palestinian. No one can forget what happened in the run-up to that fateful day. During that time, the world witnessed one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Today, Israel’s founding strategy of the forcible removal of the indigenous population continues. For decades Palestinians have been prevented from exercising their rights to freedom and self-determination; for decades they have endured horrific conditions of apartheid and brutal military occupation; and after decades, the hope of recovering even a small portion of their historic homeland has slipped away. And Palestinians know that the worst is yet to come, especially under the ultra-right, extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahu, who is moving quickly towards the annexation of the West Bank. The level of Palestinian despair is at an all time high. Palestinians continue to be colonized; Palestinian lands continue to be confiscated for illegal settlement building; Palestinian refugees continue to be exiled; and Palestinians living inside Israel continue to be discriminated against. Under the watchful eye—or intentional blindness—of its greatest ally, the United States, Israel has not only continued but has intensified its inhumane policies and violations of international law. The Nakba did not end in 1948; it continues to impact Palestinians everywhere. Al-Nakba Day serves as an important reminder that until there is an end to the occupation, until Palestinians get justice and equal rights, and until Israel adheres to international law there can be no hope for peace. Consider giving a friend a book on Palestine or by a Palestinian writer. Below are a few recommendations.  Stay safe, Michel Moushabeck Founder/Publisher/Editor   Fiction Poetry Illustrated Gift Books Interviews History, Politics & Current Affairs Cookbooks Children's Books Travel Literature Browse Books on Palestine Copyright © 2020 Interlink Publishing, All rights reserved.

Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom:by Norman Finklestein

Review for Amazon by Deborah H. Maccoby      March 15, 2018

 A Precision-Guided Missile

During the massive demonstrations in London against Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, the question was often asked by Israel’s apologists: why was Israel singled out? Why didn’t people come out in such numbers to protest against the actions of the Syrian government or Islamic State that have killed far more people? For Israel’s apologists, the answer was simple: anti-Semitism.

But the real answer must surely lie in the reaction by Western governments to Operation Protective Edge. Israel was indeed singled out, as the one state in the world that could massacre defenceless civilians – as Norman Finkelstein conclusively proves in this book-- and yet be described by Western governments as acting in “self-defence”. During the onslaught, then-President Obama (as Finkelstein writes) “reaffirmed Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ day in, day out”. In July 2014, the European Union called on Hamas to “renounce violence” and recognised “Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself against any attacks”. It was left to civil society to express its outrage.

Similarly, as Finkelstein points out, Western governments only evinced some concern about Israel’s strangulating and illegal blockade over Gaza after the murder of activists on the Mavi Marmara (the civilian aid ship to Gaza)– a concern that led to some easing of the siege (even though in practice this relaxation amounted to very little).

Gaza’s only potentially effective answer to high-tech Israeli military attacks (in contrast to Hamas’s ineffective token resistance of improvised, home-made rockets) is the resilience of its people, the activism of international civil society and the reports put out by human rights organisations. These reports, Finkelstein writes in his preface, “even if mostly underutilised…are the most potent weapon in the arsenal of those who hope against hope to mobilize public opinion so as to salvage a modicum of justice”.

Finkelstein concentrates on the two most devastating recent onslaughts on Gaza: Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, together with the attack on the Mavi Marmara that occurred between these two massacres. He demonstrates that Israel’s alleged aims – to stop Hamas rockets and (in Protective Edge) to destroy Hamas tunnels – were only pretexts; Israel’s real goals were a) to restore its “deterrence capacity”, after its humiliation in Lebanon in 2006 and (before Operation Protective Edge) the 2010 Mavi Mamara debacle and what was widely perceived as the failed 2012 Operation Pillar of Defence; and b) to destroy the “peace offensives” of Hamas that threatened to force Israel to the negotiating table to give up land for peace. Israel’s twisted rationale was exposed by Finkelstein in his previous book Method and Madness.

Parts of that book (and of Finkelstein’s previous book about Gaza, “This Time We Went Too Far”) – updated, expanded and (in the case of the chapter about Operation Protective Edge) almost completely rewritten --are included in Gaza as a necessary historical and political background. But, as Finkelstein writes in the preface, “the primary subject-matter” of Gaza is the myriad but largely unread human rights reports. His objective, he writes, is to refute the ”Big Lie” -ie the “official consensus” that Israel acts in “self-defence” -- by “exposing each of the little lies”.

“In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead” Finkelstein writes, “as many as three hundred human rights reports were issued”. These overwhelmingly gave the lie to Israeli hasbara (propaganda). For instance, in a chapter examining the often unthinkingly-accepted Israeli claim that Hamas used civilians as “human shields”, Finkelstein quotes Amnesty International’s categorical exoneration of Hamas and other Palestinian fighters on this charge:

“In the cases investigated by Amnesty International of civilians killed in Israeli attacks, the deaths could not be explained as resulting from the presence of fighters shielding among civilians, as the Israeli Army generally contends. In all of the cases investigated by Amnesty International of families killed when their homes were bombed from the air by Israeli forces, for example, none of the houses struck was being used by armed groups for military activities.”

Amnesty did, however, find ample evidence of the use of human shields by Israeli troops.

But the highest point reached by the international human rights community in relation to Operation Cast Lead was the Goldstone Report, the findings of the Fact-Finding Mission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. This Report presented the stark, unvarnished truth in its conclusion that Operation Cast Lead was “designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population”.

As Finkelstein stresses, Judge Richard Goldstone is a Zionist Jew who was forced to choose between tribal loyalty to Israel on the one hand and his universalist liberal conscience and international law on the other; his choice (which was not really a choice, because to have supported Israeli lies would have been to destroy his reputation) represented a sea-change among liberal Diaspora Jews. The Goldstone Report also, Finkelstein points out, put the findings of human rights organisations, including Israeli organisations such as B’Tselem, centre-stage; their reports became “charged…. with political consequences”.

Then came the bombshell of Goldstone’s recantation, which Finkelstein dissects in a devastating chapter that forms the turning-point of this book. Precisely because Goldstone is a Zionist Jew, the Israeli hasbara machine attacked him with particularly venomous force – though Finkelstein speculates that Goldstone’s capitulation could have been the result of blackmail. Finkelstein cites his own prophetic words written in an earlier version of this chapter, published in 2011: the recantation “most unforgivably.…increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault”. Finkelstein also, however, points out where he got it wrong in 2011; in his book “’This Time We Went Too Far’”, he considered Lebanon the most likely next target. However “in the end, defenceless Gaza remained Israel’s preferred punching-bag”.

Even before Goldstone’s recantation on April 1 2011, there had been, as Finkelstein points out,backpedalling among the human rights community, both Israeli and international (including Goldstone himself) in relation to Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report. The first casualties of this reversal were the murdered activists on the Mavi Marmara. Israel set up its own inquiry, the Turkel Commission, which completely exonerated the Israeli commandos. Finkelstein tears its Report to pieces, concluding by pointing to

“an odd paradox lodged in its conclusions: the shaheeds plotted and armed themselves to kill Israelis but didn’t even manage to kill those in their custody, whereas the Israelis took every precaution and exercised every restraint not to kill anyone, but ended up killing nine people”.

The then Secretary-General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, taking his cue from the US, set up a UN Panel Report, which Finkelstein eviscerates with even greater force, demonstrating, in a complex logical unravelling of its hidden premises, that the UN Panel's dilemma between placating both the Israeli government and international opinion causes the Report’s authors to tie themselves up in knots, whereas the Israeli Turkel Report is more honest, because its writers don't have any concerns in relation to international opinion. But, despite Goldstone’s recantation and the UN Panel Report, a UN Human Rights Council Fact-Finding Mission produced an unbiased report, upon which Finkelstein bases many of his arguments in this chapter.

Yet, as Finkelstein points out, the pressure of Israeli hasbara and its Diaspora supporters – a pressure particularly virulent precisely because the Israeli government knows it has lost the battle for international public opinion – has continued to take its toll on the human rights community, both Israeli and international.

Operation Protective Edge was the most terrible result of Goldstone’s recantation and the backpedalling by the human rights community. In Cast Lead, up to 1,200 Gazan civilians were killed, including 350 children, and 6,000 homes were destroyed. In Protective Edge, 1,600 Gazan civilians were killed, including 550 children; 18,000 homes were destroyed. Yet there was a stark difference between the response of the international human rights groups to Cast Lead and their reaction to Protective Edge. Finkelstein points out that after Protective Edge there was “a muted response from human rights organizations”. Human Rights Watch, which had supported Amnesty after Cast Lead, was almost silent.

An exception was Amnesty, which produced a series of reports. Finkelstein devotes the first of his three final chapters to a complex, detailed, case-by -case analysis of two Amnesty reports that brings out the full horror of the human suffering behind the statistics. Finkelstein demonstrates that Amnesty’s findings are at odds with its legal analysis, which whitewashes Israel’s actions in order to avoid making the charge that Israel had a deliberate policy of targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure.

To take just one example: the case of four Gazan children killed while playing hide-and-seek on a beach. Finkelstein writes: “Amnesty noted that an Israeli investigation absolving the military of responsibility for the killings ‘did not explain why the army had not identified’ the children ‘as such’”. As Finkelstein points out, this begs the question: had the army indeed failed to identify the children “as such”? Amnesty, he writes, “couldn’t even conceive, or wouldn’t let itself conceive, that the IDF HAD identified the four children ‘as such’ – and then proceeded to murder them”. (Emphasis in original)

Finkelstein does not accuse Israel of a policy of systematic murder of Gazan civilians –ie genocide. His charge is the same as that set out in the Goldstone Report. The “strategic goal” of Protective Edge, as Finkelstein writes in the penultimate chapter, was the same as that of Cast Lead but on a larger scale: “to punish, humiliate and terrorize Gaza’s civilian population, part and parcel of which was the infliction of massive civilian casualties”.

The book reaches its climax in the penultimate chapter, which analyses the report on Protective Edge that was put out by the UN Human Rights Council, which had produced the Goldstone Report and a report on the Mavi Marmara that was based on the facts. In the book’s most searing indictment, Finkelstein makes it clear in case-by-case detail that after Operation Protective Edge the UN Human Rights Council "succumbed to the Israeli juggernaut". As in the Amnesty report, the UNHRC’s legal analysis contradicts its findings, in order to avoid accusing Israel of the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the case of the four children murdered on the beach, the UNHRC Report “found strong indications that the IDF failed in its obligations to take all feasible measures to avoid or at least minimise incidental harm to civilians”. Finkelstein sums up the UNHRC's betrayal of Gaza:

“The Report itself copiously documented that Israel fired tens of thousands of high-explosive artillery shells into, and dropped hundreds of one-ton bombs over, densely populated civilian neighbourhoods, targeted hospitals, ambulances, rescue teams, civilian vehicles and ‘groups of citizens’ and pursued a shoot-to-kill-anything-that-moves policy in pacified areas that still contained civilians. But nonetheless it was the finding of this cynical, craven document that of the 1,600 Gazan civilians killed by Israel during the 51-day terror onslaught, only two were killed deliberately.”

The book’s Conclusion is realistically pessimistic about Gaza’s chances: on the brink of collapse, betrayed by the human rights organisations, its devastation dwarfed by other human rights catastrophes, particularly in Syria, with the international public becoming inured to the brutality of the Israeli army. Yet the Conclusion also puts forward the possibility of action to effect change. As well as a legal indictment, Gaza is a monument to the massacred people of Gaza that ensures that their agony will never be forgotten. But it is also an urgent wake-up call for the prevention of a still greater onslaught upon Gaza – a prevention that can only be achieved by ending Israel’s Occupation. Israel, Finkelstein writes in his penultimate chapter, has reached a state of moral collapse and “will not reform itself because it cannot reform itself”. So the Occupation can only be ended from without.

An Appendix that answers, in a complex, difficult but clear legal discussion, the question “Is the Occupation Legal?” also puts forward – in tandem with the Conclusion -- a concrete and achievable plan. The US will always exercise its Security Council veto with regard to Israel. But a UN General Assembly resolution and ICJ advisory opinion that would unequivocally declare the Occupation over could mobilise Palestinians into mass non-violent action that would be supported by international public opinion, galvanised and led by pro-Palestinian activists.

To conclude: this is not an easy book to read. Finkelstein writes in his Preface: “The reader’s forbearance must in advance be begged, as perusing this book will require infinite patience”. The reader who embarks on this demanding, often harrowing voyage is required to work his or her passage. Nonetheless, this is definitely a book for the general reader, who will bring back great rewards. No other scholar could make these reams of human rights reports so accessible to the general public or render complex logical and legal arguments so clear. Indeed, the book’s exposé of contradictions and absurdities would be entertaining if the subject-matter were not so appalling.

The sub-title of Gaza points to its two most striking qualities. As the word “inquest” indicates, the book is a meticulously detailed, logically-argued legal inquiry into the facts in order to come as close as possible to the truth. But the highly emotive word “martyrdom” points to Gaza’s other aspect: an impassioned anger at injustice and lies – a searing indignation reminiscent of the Hebrew Prophets. The unusual synthesis of these two qualities has always characterised Finkelstein’s work; but in Gaza each aspect reaches a higher level than ever before, because Palestinian martyrdom has never before reached such a peak of desperation nor has Israel ever before sunk into such an abyss of barbarism. Never before has Finkelstein deployed logical analysis and international law to such devastating effect; never before has his writing reached such heights of impassioned outrage. The combination means that the book is itself a precision-guided missile– brilliant, white-hot and accurately annihilating its intended targets.

White City Black City: Architecture & War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa: by Sharon Rotbard

http://futurecities.org.uk/2015/05/21/white-city-black-city-tel-aviv-and-jaffa/

    Review by Rozie Saunders | 20 May 2015                      The Future Cities Project

Sharon Rotbard’s “White City Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa”  is much more than just an architectural history of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The author, an Israeli architect and writer born in Tel Aviv, explores its development, and its sister city Jaffa through the lens of someone who has lived there continuously for decades. A critical examination of the accepted history of the region, “White City Black City” is also a strongly worded condemnation of the relationship between Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Sharon Rotbard has written a historiography of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus world heritage site, deconstructing the myths of the city’s origins, showing the effect Tel Aviv had on Jaffa and the how the built environment can be used as a tool to wage war and achieve political aims.

The first English language edition of “White City Black City” could not have arrived at a more topical time. Britain, and its architectural community in particular, perhaps still holding on to some internalised guilt over its role in the creation of Israel and consequently the destruction of Jaffa, clamours so loudly to be pro-Palestine today that it sometimes sounds anti-Semitic in tone. After the recent July 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, 20,000 people marched in the streets of London to protest Israel’s actions. Earlier that year only 10,000 people turned out to protest increased tuition fees and cuts to education; an issue happening on their own soil. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) even passed a resolution in 2014 calling for the suspension of the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) from the International Union of Architects until they ‘act to resist projects on illegally occupied land’.

Although originally written a decade ago in Hebrew, the author admits that he made no significant changes to the text. That this book still reads as completely relevant and not at all dated shows how intractable the problems of the region are. Although Tel Aviv and Jaffa have a unique story, their relationship can be read as a microcosm of Israel and Palestine in< “White City Black City”.

The book is divided into three parts, White City, Black City, and A Rainbow. The first part, White City, introduces Tel Aviv as a UNESCO World Heritage site, accepted by the academic and cultural community as a gem of both the Modern Movement and an unusually condensed example of the Bauhaus Style. The construction of a city, however, is not only physical but also cultural. A narrative must be created, and Tel Aviv’s story was told long before its actual birth. Taking us back to the earliest days of Zionism and the publication of Theodor Herzl’s novel“Altneuland”(old-new country) in 1902, Rotbard shows us how Tel Aviv’s history was written before it was ever built, and how the folktale of a Jewish homeland built on the dunes was recited until it was perceived to be true, despite the reality of the situation.

Rotbard calls this urban legend one of Tel Aviv’s “greatest deceits”. Unlike the local Palestinian sandstone constructions built directly on the region’s sandstone layer, Tel Aviv built its white city by first removing up to two meters of sandstone layer entirely, creating concrete foundations to replace the dunes. Although this criticism could be considered purely technical, Rotbard portrays it as a metaphor for Tel Aviv itself. Instead of building alongside the existing people of Jaffa using traditional methods and materials, Tel Aviv scraped away 4000 years of cultural heritage before constructing its White City. The main “urbicide” of Jaffa occurred in 1948 when at least 100,000 people, around 97% of the local population, fled the city as their homes were razed to the ground. The erasure of Jaffa’s original identity continued long after, as gradually all street names were changed and a completely new population moved in.

Rotbard is scornful of the legitimacy of the Bauhaus in Tel Aviv. Only four Bauhaus students ever emigrated to Palestine, and of those only Aryeh Sharon left a significant architectural legacy behind. Furthermore, the students of Bauhaus described it as more of an ethos and way of thinking than a coherent and identifiable style. Despite all this, Tel Aviv managed to turn Bauhaus into its brand, marketing the White City to the world as a marvel of Western European architecture and neglecting the historical and architectural heritage right under its feet.

The second part of the book, Black City, also delves into branding. If you believe Rotbard, everything Tel Aviv gained was at the expense of its sister city Jaffa. The epitome of this suggested zero sum game is the Jaffa orange. Once grown and exported by Palestine and seen as a symbol of national identity, the Jaffa orange was inherited by Israel after the mass evacuation of people from the city of Jaffa and its surrounding agricultural lands. Now Jaffa oranges are grown anywhere but Jaffa. By taking over key elements of Jaffa’s national identity, Tel Aviv effectively stripped away Jaffa’s narrative and exterminated the cultural construct of the city. This books argues effectively that architecture is a tool of war and oppression, and correctly wielded can influence culture, geography and history.

The final third of the book explores Modernism as a form of Western European colonialism. Tel Aviv is a city where colonialism won, and indeed never left. The occupiers are still controlling the land and its narrative from their defensive structures. Drawing on precedents who hold a condescending and at times downright racist attitude towards non-white non-Western-Europeans, Rotbard quotes Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”, shows Mies van de Rohe’s attempts to work with the Nazi regime and Le Corbusier’s cooperation with the colonial Vichy regime. Rotbard then implies that the attitudes of these founders of the International Style are similar to the attitude of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv arguably strives to be white architecturally and metaphorically, wisely dressing itself in the Western-European Bauhaus style. Tel Aviv strives to be better, purer than neighbouring Jaffa, yet the means of achieving this whiteness corrupt the end result.

Rotbard tackles the complex history and image perception of a region steeped in myth and propaganda with ease. This beautifully translated publication is an excellent insight to the history of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, told through their architecture. A poetic account of a centuries-long struggle to cohabit, “White City Black City”sometimes feels too personal, recounting the grievous crimes against Jaffa that Tel Aviv has committed and demonising architecture by association. While the Romulan tale of Tel Aviv’s ascendancy and Jaffa’s demise may feel too personal at times, the description of Modernism solely as a Western-European colonial moment seems too general. Furthermore, Rotbard’s disdain of Tel Aviv’s inauthentic building methods and materials, stemming from the perception that the city ignored its immediate context in preference to a more general cultural movement, would come across more persuasively with some descriptions of pre-Tel Avivan local architecture. An incredibly thorough book, this is the only area where the reader might want for precedents.

“White City Black City” is not just an architectural history. It is a reflective and academic analysis of a region so steeped in myth and personal grievances that citizens from all over the world feel compelled to pick a side. “White City Black City” tries to see through the fog of subjectivism, and draws on the wider themes of architectural and historical authenticity, the role of marketing on an urban scale, and the creation (or destruction) of national identity through culture. These themes speak to us all in our rapidly shrinking but increasingly diverse world.

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The Idea of Israel and My Promised Land – review by Avi Shlaim

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/14/idea-israel-ilan-pappe-promised-land-ari-shavit-review

by Avi Shlaim       14 May 2014           The Guardian

The separation wall on the West Bank that divides Palestinians and Israelis. Photograph: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty

Zionism achieved its greatest triumph with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The Zionist idea and its principal political progeny are the subject of deeply divergent interpretations, not least inside the Jewish state itself. No other aspect of Zionism, however, is more controversial than its attitude towards the indigenous population of the land of its dreams. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the state of Israel, famously said that it is by its treatment of the Palestinians that his country will be judged. Yet, when judged by this criterion, Zionism is not just an unqualified failure but a tragedy of historic proportions. Zionism did achieve its central goal but at a terrible price: the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians – what the Arabs call the Nakba, the catastrophe.

The authors of these two books are both Israelis, but they approach their subject from radically different ideological vantage points. Ilan Pappé is a scholar and a pro-Palestinian political activist. He is one of the most prominent Israeli political dissidents living in exile, having moved from the University of Haifa to the University of Exeter. He is also one of the few Israeli students of the conflict who write about the Palestinian side with real knowledge and empathy.

Pappé places Zionism under an uncompromising lens. In his reading it was not a national liberation movement but a settler colonial project imposed on the Palestinians by force with the support of the west. From this premise it follows that the state of Israel is not legitimate even in its original borders, much less so within its post-1967 borders. To correct the injustice, Pappé advocates a peaceful, humanist and socialist alternative to the Zionist idea in the form of a binational state with equal rights for all its citizens.

Ari Shavit is a member of the editorial board of the liberal Zionist paper Ha'aretz, and one of Israel's most influential columnists. He is an eloquent exponent of liberal Zionism, but he also exemplifies its ambiguities, inner contradictions and moral myopia.

Pappé has published a large number of books on the history of Arab-Israeli conflict of which the most widely read and most controversial isThe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The Idea of Israel is not a history book but a close study of the role of Zionist ideology in the making of modern Israel and of the continuing relevance of this ideology today inpolitics, the education system, the media, the cinema and Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations. The book thus offers a broad survey of the main critical schools of thought on Israel. Two chapters deal directly with the Palestine question: the historiography of the first Arab-Israeli war, and the uses and misuses of the Holocaust.

History is usually written by the victors, and the Middle East is no exception. Pappé himself is a leading member of the group of "new" or revisionist Israeli historians that emerged in the late 1980s and included Simha Flapan, Benny Morris and myself. In our different ways we all challenged the dominant narrative, the narrative of the victors. Using recently released documents we debunked many of the myths that had come to surround the birth of the state of Israel and the 1948 war. Intentionally or otherwise, our work thus lent credibility to the Palestinian historical narrative about the war for Palestine.

In his new book, Pappé deals with recent developments in the historiographical sphere, especially on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. The big question has always been: did they leave of their own accord or were they forced out? Israeli governments have always denied that they drove the Palestinians out. In his ground-breaking 1989 book on the subject – The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 – Morris presented incontrovertible evidence of Israeli involvement in creating the refugee problem. Evidence subsequently gathered by Morris points to an even higher degree of Israeli responsibility. But following the outbreak of the second intifada, Morris veered to the right and radically changed his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He concluded it was a mistake not to expel all the Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948. Pappé argues that the new documents prove that the expulsion of 730,000 Palestinians was more premeditated, systematic and extensive than Morris had ever acknowledged. In short, he claims that when war provided an opportunity, the Zionist idea was translated into the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The role of the Holocaust in empowering the struggle for Jewish statehood is another sensitive issue in the debate about the past. Pappé denounces any political manipulation of the Holocaust as a means of moral blackmail designed to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. His sharpest comments are reserved for Israeli officials who have perfected such manipulation as a diplomatic tool in their struggle against the Palestinians. His deeper concern, however, is to understand the impact and significance of the Holocaust memory in constructing and marketing the idea of Israel. Israelis have harboured an exaggerated sense of themselves as victims, and this self-image, he argues, has prevented them from seeing the Palestinians in a more realistic light, and impeded a reasonable political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The argument that what happened to the Palestinians was just a small injustice to rectify a greater injustice (the destruction of European Jewry) is rejected with some vehemence. The only hope Pappé sees of making peace with the Arabs is for Israelis to free themselves of their Shoah mentality.

Ari Shavit is one of Israel's most influential columnists. Photograph: Sharon Bareket/Courtesy of Spiegel

Shavit's position is more conflicted and therefore more opaque. He is a passionate but not uncritical Zionist. His book is also not a history of Israel but a series of stories of individuals and significant events that shed a great deal of new light on the making of the Jewish state. Among the cast of characters on whom Shavit draws to construct his picture of Israel are Holocaust survivors; a youth leader who helped to turn Masada into a symbol and shrine of post-Holocaust Zionism; an enigmatic engineer who was instrumental in building the atomic bomb in Dimona to defend the Jews against the threat of a second genocide; the zealous religious Zionists who spearheaded the settler movement; leftwing academics in Jerusalem; and pedlars of sex and drugs in Tel Aviv nightclubs. But, above all, this is a personal story. As the author explains in the introduction: "This book is the personal odyssey of one Israeli who is bewildered by the historic drama engulfing his homeland. It is the journey in space and time of an Israeli-born individual exploring the wider narrative of his nation."

The most vivid illustration of Shavit's attitude to this wider narrative is his account of the expulsion by the nascent Israeli army of 50,000-70,000 of the Arab residents of Lydda and the massacre of 70 civilians in a small mosque in July 1948. The grisly story has been told many times before, but Shavit's reconstruction is riveting. His original contribution consists of interviews with the Jewish brigade commander and the military governor in which they speak frankly about their strategic and moral dilemmas. Shavit refers to this episode as "our black box" in which lies "the dark secret of Zionism". But he goes on to say that the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of its inhabitants "were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state". "Lydda," he asserts, "is an integral and essential part of our story." Like Morris, Shavit evidently thinks that the end justifies the means; I don't. The massacre of innocent civilians can never be justified under any circumstances. It is a heinous war crime and it must be denounced as such even if the perpetrators are Jews and, yes, even if they are Holocaust survivors.

Both authors engage with the essence of Zionism as well as with its more problematic parts. While Pappé represents the cutting edge of radical anti-Zionism, Shavit exposes the dissonance, the double standards and intellectual incoherence of liberal Zionism. Shavit, by his own acronym, is a Wasp – a White Ashkenazi Supporter of Peace. His liberal credentials were burnished by serving as chair of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in the early 1990s. In addition, he enjoys the great advantage of writing like an angel. The smoothness and beauty of his prose is all the more remarkable given that English is his second language. But the brilliance of Shavit's style tends to conceal the ethnocentric character of his commentary and his inability to confront the moral consequences of the triumph of Zionism.

On one thing the two authors agree: the current status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is unsustainable. Both of them see the writing on the wall. The occupation, the relentless expansion of illegal settlements, the construction of the monstrous "security barrier" on the West Bank, the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem, the flagrant violations of international law, the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights and the rampant racism – all are slowly but surely turning Israel into an international pariah. No sane Israeli relishes the prospect of living in a pariah state that maintains an apartheid regime. But few Israelis are ready for a truly honest historical reckoning with the people they have wronged and oppressed and whose land they continue to colonise. To blame the victims for their own misfortunes, as the people in power habitually do, is both disingenuous and despicable. This is no way for any nation to behave, especially one with such an acute historical memory of the bitter taste of victimhood.

• Avi Shlaim's Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutationsis published by Verso.

• Ari Shavit's book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, published by Scribe, is available from the Guardian bookshop.

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

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