David Mitchell

This book was suggested to me by that high-tech recommendation-generating algorithm known as a shelf – in the Waterstones ‘world history’ section.

A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is 144 pages and fifteen brief chapters of plain and precise sentences. The author, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, opens by recalling how UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, was fiercely condemned by Israel for making the factual observation that there was a context and history behind the October 7 attacks. This book, says Pappe, is that context and history: ‘I believe anyone who stands against oppression and injustice can understand the fundamentals of what we now know as the Israel-Palestine conflict. This book is my attempt to make it legible.’

The story begins not in the far reaches of history but in the summer of 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine. This was an era of nationalist construction, Great Power colonial rivalry, and intense antisemitism, forces that would drive the course of events. 

Soon we are in ‘Mandate Palestine’, the period after World War One when it was the British who facilitated the settlement of Jews while stymying Palestinian development and aspirations. Then the book moves through the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, the UN partition plan, the Nakba or the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestine’, and the many other notorious episodes of war and diplomacy up to 2024.

A theme is international support for the Jewish state. The Zionists have been excellent lobbyists, but Pappe shows that external sympathy for Israel has rarely been out of any love for Jewish people. Instead, it has been due to Christian Zionism (happily encouraged by Jewish Zionists) and/or because Israel has served powerful countries’ selfish interests. Grotesquely, it has also been because they are happy to have somewhere to receive their own Jewish populations.

There’s a dread that comes with reading all this. We know the looming catastrophes that are just pages away. How sad it is to be reminded that there was a time when things were not as they are, when things could have turned out differently. The final chapters return to October 7 and show how the historical analysis offers several keys to understanding events. Crucially, history explains what the ‘Gaza Strip’ is: a ‘holding pen’ for Palestinians removed from the land taken by Israel: ‘There was no Gaza Strip before 1948. Gaza was a cosmopolitan town on the Via Maris between Egypt and Turkey’.

Hope? Not much. Pappe writes: ‘What is clear is that there is no real Left in Israel or even a genuine peace camp anymore’. While he points to the ‘one democratic state solution’ as the only one that can provide equal rights and freedom of movement for all, the author admits he doesn’t have a road map to get there. (He also thinks that Israel itself may now be so divided between secular and religious blocs that it could break apart.)

But there’s empowerment in knowing that the conflict can at least be rendered accessible to anyone willing to learn. It’s only on such a solid understanding of the problems that peace, security, and justice for all people in historical Palestine can be built. A very valuable book.