Will Israel Survive?
Mitchell G. Bard
Palgrave Macmillan, 246pp, £14.99
Mitchell Bard has not attempted to write a balanced account of the Arab-Israeli dispute. His book is dedicated ‘to the citizens of Israel who persevere despite the odds’ and he adopts a relentlessly, and sometimes absurdly, pro-Israeli attitude. Although he accepts that not all Muslims and Arabs are Islamists, and that ‘militant Islam’ is Israel’s real enemy, hostility to Palestinians and Muslims forms a consistent thread through his argument. Thus he writes about 9/11: ‘the Israelis mourned with the American people while the Palestinians held a parade’ and the Pope should ‘confront Islam in Europe in the same way his predecessor took on communism’.
Sections which do not cover the Arab-Israeli dispute – such as those on Israeli politics and US-Israeli relations – are informative, but the book contains numerous inaccuracies. For example, it is highly unlikely that Saudi Wahhabis would fund schools for members of Hizbollah – a Shia group supported by Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia’s rival.
There are also inconsistencies – in a passage marked by his mistrust of Israeli Arabs, Bard argues that the ‘gravest long-term threat to Israel’s future’ is the demographic risk to Israel’s Jewish character. He is not optimistic about Israel’s response to this challenge. Yet, during the following chapter he declares that ‘of all the threats to Israel’s long-term survival, one danger overshadows all the rest – an enemy with nuclear weapons’, but he is also overly-sanguine about the peril of an Iranian bomb. Surely a nuclear-armed state whose president has called for the ‘annihilation of the Zionist regime’ poses a greater threat than non-Jewish Israeli residents?
Bard is confident that, with US support, Israel will survive and thrive ‘until real peace is achieved’. This book’s tragedy is that Bard’s solution would offer no such thing. He does not accept that Israeli security depends on a stable Palestinian state. He advocates unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, with the Palestinians negotiating a ‘peace deal that would give them statehood in any part of the territories the Israelis are prepared to cede’. Israel should then use disproportionate military force against Palestinian rejectionist groups. Such a one-sided plan – and book – offers neither Palestinian stability, nor Israeli security. Will Israel survive? Yes, but this book offers no path to peace, for Palestinians or Israelis.