LONDON, 5 November 2003 — With the Middle East crisis looking more ominous than ever, the re-publication of David Hirst’s somber study of the Palestine-Israel conflict, “The Gun and the Olive Branch”, could not be more timely. Originally published in 1977 and now in its third edition, this remarkable book by the former Middle East correspondent of the Guardian has been widely read — without ever enjoying the Western media coverage it deserves. Indeed, in the United States, it has struggled to get any coverage at all. In a copious foreword specially written for the new edition, Hirst recalls how, when the book first appeared, much of the American press declined to notice it, effectively censoring his harrowing account of the barbarous treatment to which Israel has subjected the Palestinians for half a century and more. It is shocking to learn that the New York Times went to the length of suppressing a review of the book which proved too favorable for its editor’s taste.

That US media culture is institutionally prejudiced in Israel’s favor has never been in doubt — though it is well to remember that, in the higher reaches of American journalism at least, there are signal exceptions to this rule. One of America’s most prestigious journals, the New York Review of Books, has not only been forthright in its criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians but has consistently and courageously projected a sense of outrage about US complicity in Israel’s ever more brutal regional hegemony. Last month, the New York Review — which is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary — published a magisterial discussion of the Palestine-Israel conflict by one of its regular contributors, the political academic Tony Judt. The fact that the magazine is run by Jewish intellectuals dedicated to purveying journalism of the highest quality could not but impart special weight and authority to Judt’s reflections.

Judt places Zionism among the nationalist movements of the late 19th century, such as those of the Poles, the Czechs and the Serbs, formerly subject peoples who, as the old European empires dissolved, established their own states, setting themselves up as the national “ethnic” majority. The dream of a Jewish national home in the midst of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait until the withdrawal from Palestine of imperial Britain, but the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by exactly the same concepts as their fin-de-siecle contemporaries in Warsaw or Bucharest, with the result that Israel’s ethno-religious self-definition and discrimination against internal “foreigners” have always had more in common with the practices of, say, post-Hapsburg Rumania than has commonly been recognized.

The trouble with Israel, on this reckoning, is not so much that it is a European enclave grafted onto the Middle East but rather that it imported a characteristically “late 19th century separatist project” into a “world that has moved on, a world of human rights, open frontiers and international law.” Portraying Israel as a moral and ideological anachronism, Judt argues that the very idea of a Jewish state where Jews and the Jewish religion possess exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded is rooted in the past.

If one thing has distinguished Israel from other insecure post-colonial micro-states, however, it is that it purports to be a democracy. Judt’s view is that the country now faces three stark choices: It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and return to the 1967 state borders within which the Jews constitute a clear majority — a step that would enable the country to preserve its status as a democracy, albeit one containing a community of second-class Arab citizens. Or it can hold onto the occupied territories, whose Arab population added to that of present-day Israel is destined to become a majority within 10 years, thereby exposing itself to the dilemma of whether to remain a Jewish state or face up to the implications of Israeli Arabs’ numerical superiority. Or, again, Israel can keep control of the occupied territories but eject the bulk of its Arab inhabitants: Such an option would enable Israel to sustain its essential Judaic identity while maintaining a semblance at least of being a democracy still. Given the current political dominance of the far-right Likud party, Judt fears this is precisely the course it may pursue.

What is refreshing about Judt’s piece, given its publication in an American journal, is its insistence on the disastrously counter-productive consequences of the US compulsion to condone Israeli policy, to grant the Jewish state a license to behave however it sees fit. Without America’s readiness to turn a blind eye, Israel would never have been able to persist in flouting UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied during war. Moreover, it is thanks to its acquiescence in Israel’s stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction that the US has made so little progress in preventing such weapons from falling into the hands of other small and potentially belligerent states. Indeed, if the rest of the world increasingly questions America’s good faith, it is in large measure because of the endless preferential treatment it has accorded to its Middle Eastern protege. As for the net effect of all this on US domestic debate, it has, Judt believes, been nothing if not corrosive. When the first instinct of most American politicians and pundits is to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, straight thinking about the future of the Middle East is virtually impossible.

In his newly written foreword to “The Gun and the Olive Branch”, David Hirst explores at length why it is that American politicians have been so disposed to view the Middle East conflict though Israeli eyes and why they have increasingly identified Israel’s enemies as their own. It is simply testimony, he suggests, to the immense power that “friends of Israel” have come to wield in American political culture, and he proceeds to show what an integral part of the machinery of US government those friends have become since the days, in the late 1940s, when the “father” of Israel, David Ben Gurion, began targeting American Jewry as an “instrument of leverage on American foreign policy.” Hirst depicts the American Jewish lobby, the “organized expression of Israeli influence in Washington,” as the most powerful ethnic interest group to have emerged in recent American history. One body in particular, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is capable, Hirst maintains, of determining the fortunes of Congressional candidates all over America. A Republican senator who fell foul of the AIPAC declared that the US Congress typically behaves like “a sub-section of the Israeli parliament,” with those who voice dissent about Israel’s actions apt to be seen as traitors.

Characteristic of both Nazism and Stalinism, insinuations of Zionist conspiracies have a long and grisly pedigree. What distinguishes Hirst’s book, however, is that it abounds in hard evidence, in demonstrable facts. Far from being an outpouring of anti-Semitism, “The Gun and the Olive Branch” is the work of an appalled humanitarian preoccupied with truth and justice. Some of the book’s most telling information concerns the sheer amount of money that the US has lavished on Israel over the years. Though Israel is hardly a poor nation, America continues to set aside an annual financial package for its pampered “foster-child extraordinary” of more than $3 billion. Hirst suspects that the true figure could be in excess of 5 billion and reveals that since 1973 the cost to the American taxpayer of bankrolling Israel has been in the region of 240 billion pounds sterling. When it comes to Israel, there seems to be, as Hirst puts it, “no end of American partisanship.” Needless to say, no other country has been a beneficiary of US largesse to anywhere near the same extent.

Like Tony Judt, Hirst believes that the US alone has the power to stop the situation in the Middle East from deteriorating catastrophically, but that it can only do so by freeing itself from its “purblind infatuation” with Israel. Yet at the same time this veteran observer of the Palestine-Israeli conflict seems close to despair about there being any answer to the bellicosity and intransigence which have become the hallmarks of Israel’s behavior.

Quoting Gen. Moshe Dayan’s stomach-curdling remark that “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother,” he is afraid that the Jewish state will plunge the whole world into turmoil before ever making the compromises necessary to secure lasting peace. Many will pray that David Hirst is wrong — while fearing that he could be right.