Amy Dockser Marcus

This is an especially beguiling liberal Zionist fairy tale. Yet despite all its nuance and sophistication, it has all the hallmarks of the usual propaganda:
- beginning heavily with foregrounding of anecdotes and stories that suggest the author speaks from a place of universal values of human rights, but without naming those values specifically or explicitly and - therefore - not being able to be held accountable to them later on (such as emphases on coexistence, without really saying what show more that means)
- highlighting stories at every opportunity that demonstrate Jewish vulnerability, not strength
- framing the entire story in terms of Jewish agency and consequences for Jewish people, as if this is the only reason it would be of any interest
- acknowledging the facts of Jewish racist exclusion in Palestine, Jewish violence, and Jewish authorship of the story- while simultaneously downplaying them, and continuing to write all-the-same as if one is an objective disinterested voice
- foregrounding Arab violence and Jewish "response"
- never using the words "colonial" to describe Jewish activity or "native" to describe the Palestinians
- a methodological individualism that overstresses the power of individual leaders to shape events and understresses systems and structures of power
- a naming of “good” characters, and not directly naming those intolerant 'other’ forces who are supposedly truly responsible for things we dislike
- taking a long time to let the liberal credentials stew and lull the audience with jovial colourful good-natured stories, until suddenly amping up the volume at the very end that takes as a given the colonial claim of the land and prescribing *more* segregation and partition of the territory as some kind of reasonable antidote to the century's failure of segregation and partition.

The author's apologetics of colonialism is exemplified by this lovely summary of the 1937 British proposal to divide the country: "The Jews rejected the proposed British boundaries, although they accepted the concept of a partition in Palestine; The Arabs, for their part, refused to consider partition.... When the fighting broke out again a few months after the commission's visit, the British put it down with brutal force, and deported many of the Arab leaders. The Hagannah, the underground militia that had grown out of the force the Jews set up prior to the war to protect the settlements, was not allowed to organise officially. They were deployed not only to guard Jewish settlements against Arab attacks but also to launch their own reprisal missions."
- there is no related mention of the 1939 British proposal to reject partition and allow the Jews to move to Palestine only as immigrants, not colonists, and to a country that was whole and belonged to its native inhabitants
- "the Jews" are instead framed as agreeing with 'peace' plans in the face of violent, rejectionist Arabs
- British complicity with Zionist colonialism is not mentioned: that the Palestinians were totally disarmed the prior year, while the Zionist militias were trained by the British and quietly allowed to accumulate arms; that any indigenous Palestinian leadership was totally decapitated - leaving the Palestinians totally defenceless against Zionist ethnic cleansing that would soon begin under British watch and be facilitated by them
- This destruction of the native capacity for self-defence is presented by Dockser-Marcus as somehow equivalent to the Zionist militias not being allowed to organise 'officially'
- Jewish initiated violence is not conceived as possible - but only imagined as defensive (guarding of settlements) and in 'reprisals' that reacted to barbaric Arabs
- The Palestinians are not even named as such, and are instead called "Arabs," in complete contradiction to the historical record showing a strong sense of national consciousness - within a broader Arab identity - at that time.

One is accustomed to the liberal Zionist tale that Zionism was pure and good and Israel was all cupcakes and cotton candy until the 1967 theft of the West Bank changed everything. The innovation of this author is to update that mythology by resetting the date for the wrong turn, to 1913. She does so, of course, without any engagement whatsoever on the moral validity of the colonial and racist premises of Zionism itself. She still instrumentalises nostalgia to avoid engaging with critiques of Zionism, but updates that nostalgia so far back to Zionism's beginnings that it gives the appearance of engaging with critiques of Zionism. This is sophisticated stuff.

All the same, this 2007 liberal Zionist story was already out of date at its publication, given the rise of the neo-Zionist right in Israel since 1996. Now, the mask is falling off, and - in the words of Ilan Pappe - we no longer need Foucault and other complex theories to disentangle liberal Zionist propaganda and show it for what it really is. Now, not even Pulitzer prize-winning Jewish-American journalists can hide Zionism's true self from our eyes. show less

Jerusalem is one of those few places on Earth that seems never to be able to be at peace. Of course, it's not true - there have been plenty of times when there wasn't. But the times of conflict fill the histories of continents and at least three religions. Over the last hundred years, the modern Arab-Israeli conflict has become the latest of these. Amy Dockser Marcus, profoundly affected by her experiences in Jerusalem, examines how we got to the current state of affairs in Palestine by show more showing vignettes of the city in 1898 through the beginning of World War I.

Jerusalem 1913 isn't so much an depth study of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict as it is a series of studies of the people and decisions made during the period of interest. Of special note is Dockser Marcus' ability to present how opportunities for peace were missed and how that decision-making both mirrored and led to today's situation.

Highly recommended. show less

***.5

The book gets off to a great start, with the author briefly describing her experiences in Israel and how that led to trying to better understand the source of the conflict between Jews and Arabs, when they had seemingly co-existed peacefully for hundreds of years under Ottoman rule. While 1917 and the Balfour Declaration is often cited, she takes it back a few years to 1913 before the British arrived on the scene, while the Turks were still in charge.

Unfortunately, I had a hard time show more following the argument. It's obvious that she did an awful lot of work in researching the book, but it felt like she tried to include all of it into a relatively short book. As a result, there are so many quotes and references and extraneous details that it failed to hold my attention and I kept losing the plot. Which maybe is my fault more than hers, and the uninspired audiobook narration with its painful mispronunciations certainly didn't help.

She writes with journalistic crispness, and in the conclusion we see how the snapshot of 1913 influenced the more familiar events over the next three decades, culminating in the morass of current day Jerusalem. Was 1913 a missed opportunity for peace that could have avoided the century of suffering and violence that followed? Probably not, but it's still important to look back and fully understand what went wrong, so at least we won't continue to make those same mistakes out of ignorance. show less

I think the book was a good idea, filling in some gaps in general appreciation of the origins of the on-going conflict in the middle east, although it fell short of its potential.