Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000, Page 104

Book Review

Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians

By Dilip Hiro. Olive Branch Press, 1999, 372 pp. List: $18.95; AET: $14.

Reviewed by Char Simons

“Palestinian” and “Israeli” are labels too simplistic for the peoples who share the Promised Land. From his vantage point as an Indian and Londoner, author Dilip Hiro deconstructs the monolithic images of these two groups.

Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians is part political and historical analysis and part travelogue. The book connects in great detail the personalities and events of the last half-century. Hiro begins by examining a Jerusalem shared, more or less, by Israelis and Palestinians, a city that has been controlled by 40 different armies in the last four millennia. “Holiness is its tragedy,” said Arif al-Arif, a mayor of Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem before the 1967 Israeli conquest.

Hiro weaves personal narrative and interviews with ordinary Palestinians and Israelis in order to make political, economic, religious and cultural points. These real people serve to humanize the all-too-common labels of the Middle East. Also intriguing is Hiro’s chapter on two composite characters, Muslim Zaki and Jewish Amnon, who debate the religious basis for both Islamic and Jewish claims to the Holy Land.

Praised by both Arab and Israeli journalists, the author’s even-handed approach is Sharing the Promised Land’s particular contribution to the body of Middle Eastern political writing. No apologist of Israel, Hiro nonetheless helps the reader understand the vast array of tensions thriving in Israeli society and how Israeli politics, including the rise and fall of numerous prime ministers, has become intricately linked to the fate of the occupied territories.

Indeed, readers well-versed in Palestinian politics may find Hiro’s description of Israeli society the most valuable part of the book. The first half is an eye-opening account of the various important players in Israel today and the tensions that exist among them, such as between Sephardim (Middle Eastern and North African) and Ashkenazi (western European) Jews; the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox; the “double marginal” Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews; the West Bank settlers, or “zealots on the hills,” many of whom are new immigrants from Russia; the Israel Defense Forces, who provide the country’s military and social cement; and the secular center of pragmatic politicians.

The second half of the book is devoted to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, focusing largely on the struggle for statehood. Chapters include the origins and evolution of the secular PLO from armed resistance to “red-carpet respectability”; the nascent Palestinian Authority that tokenly rules over a handful of West Bank enclaves and less than half of Gaza; and the rise of the Islamist opposition Hamas and Islamic Jihad as the PLO concedes ever more political points to Israel and the United States.

Also discussed in the book are the effects of the Oslo accords, which have made the Palestinians economically poorer, even as the PLO hamstrung itself politically with too many concessions to Israel.

“We made peace with our enemy of 47 years, not to make enemies of our own brothers,” Hiro quotes Nabil Shaath, a senior aide to Arafat and PA cabinet minister. “Once we really resist them [the Islamic radicals] on the street, they’re willing to kill us too….If we arrest them, we look like human rights violators, Uncle Toms and lackeys of the Israelis.”

Throughout the book, Hiro identifies common points between Israelis and Palestinians, such as the common legacy of violence for land. The terrorism that some of Israel’s political establishment, such as Menachem Begin, engaged in during the Jewish nation’s struggle for statehood are paralleled today by Palestinians fighting to take control of the West Bank and Gaza. Other parallels are also touched on, such as how both fundamentalist Jewish and Muslim groups run charity organizations, schools and hospitals in order to boost popular support.

Another subtle sub-theme of the book is the role of language in dividing Palestinian and Jewish Israeli society. In Israel, Hebrew and Arabic are officially equal, and all laws are translated into Arabic. But a basic document such as the telephone directory of Jerusalem is issued only in Hebrew, with an option for an English edition. Similarly, when an enterprising Arab businessman printed a directory in Arabic, he included only Arab subscribers. There is scant consideration for Arabic-speaking citizens, with Israeli bureaucrats rarely posting signs in that language. Shop signs tend to be in either Hebrew/English or Arabic/English, but not Arabic/Hebrew. Israeli textbooks state that Zionist Jews migrated to Eretz Israel, which did not exist—and not to Ottoman Palestine, which did.

However, language also has played a part in whatever progress there has been toward peace. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said there were no Palestinians, only South Syrians. Later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin referred to them as “the so-called Palestinians,” while in the late 1970s, Prime Minister Begin used the term the “Arabs of Eretz Israel.”

Economic disparities in the region also have a tremendous effect on politics. For example, per capita income of the Sephardim is two-thirds of that of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews, who rule Israel. Sephardim are the dominant majority in the poor and working classes, while Ashkenazi are predominant in the upper-middle and upper classes. Yet, politically, the Sephardim have been no particular friends of Arab Israelis or Palestinians, whom the Sephardim view as an economic threat.

Although a great addition to understanding the forces shaping Palestine/Israel, Sharing the Promised Land suffers from a lack of conclusions. The Epilogue is a chronology of the most recent events, but without any analysis of how they relate to greater historical themes and issues. Also missing is the impact of Israeli and Palestinian peace groups, as well as the role of Christian Palestinians at a time when Hamas and Islamic Jihad are drawing supporters away from the PLO.

Regardless of how events unfold in the Middle East, Sharing the Promised Land is a useful and fascinating examination of Palestinian and Israeli societies, and provides greater understanding and meaning to events in the region.