From Londonistan to Bantustan

Book reviews by Mike King

Palestine – Peace not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter
264 pages 
Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2006 
ISBN-10: 0743285026
£8.99

Londonistan – How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within, by Melanie Phillips
304 pages 
Gibson Square Books Ltd, 2006
ISBN-10: 1903933765
£9.89

Carter’s Palestine and Phillips’ Londonistan were both published in 2006, and both deal with the question of Palestine (though Phillips’ book does so less directly). However, one cannot imagine two more different books in terms of their approach. Carter’s reputation as international statesman and recipient in 2002 of the Nobel Peace Prize is only enhanced by the neutral and thoughtful tone he takes to his subject, while Phillips’ stance, as shown in her book, can only, and regrettably, be called bigoted. This is a harsh word to use, and I do so after much search for an alternative. Yet her book raises essential questions, and provides a huge wealth of information that anyone interested in the so-called ‘war on terror’ will find invaluable to take into account. The key issue at dispute between the two books is whether Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians can be considered a justifiable cause for some or most of Islamic violence; whether Israel and the occupied territories are well-described by the term ‘apartheid.’ If that term is historically justified, then much Islamic terrorism (including the use of suicide bombers), by analogy with the ANC in South Africa, can better be described as ‘freedom fighting.’  If, on the other hand, Phillips is right to call this the ‘Big Lie,’ then all our moderate responses to Islamic extremism are bogus.

Turning to Carter’s book first, it deals with the Palestinian question as seen through his own experience of decades of involvement, both before his Presidency of 1977-1981 and after. His style is straightforward, neutral, and interspersed with many personal anecdotes of trips to Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and surrounding countries, and accounts of meetings with what seems to be a veritable roll-call of key figures in the conflict. The book also contains a useful chronology of the struggle and maps showing the continuing encroachment on Palestinian-held territory. But the very title of Carter’s book suggests that he has made up his mind: he believes that the analogy between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and South Africa’s treatment of the blacks is a good one. Hence one is surprised to find that Carter’s extensive travels in Israel (motivated in part by his Christian desire to see the holy sites of the New Testament) paint a very positive portrait of the Jewish state, its achievements, and its courage in the face of what seems to be a relentlessly hostile Arab world pressing on its borders. When he pulls no punches in describing the appalling treatment of the Palestinians, he often mitigates the Israeli role by showing how consistently the US has, alone amongst nations, supported it in all its actions. His personal involvement when President is very telling here: for example he was outraged by the use of American-made cluster bombs in the 1978 invasion of the Lebanon by Israel (he felt that their use violated the terms of sale); he also points out that the US has more than forty times used its veto to block United Nations resolutions critical of Israel.

Carter leaves us with many positive images of the Palestinians as the genuine victims, forced to defend themselves out of increasing despair at their plight. He mentions how their enforced removal or flight from their ancestral lands strikes him as a parallel with the ‘Trail of Tears’ of 1838 when Cherokee Indians were forced off the Georgian lands of the Carter family farm, and comments on how the ancient olive trees of the Palestinians were cut down by Israelis, effectively turning them from traditional farmers into day-labourers. Also, tellingly, he points out that ‘private discussions with Arab leaders are much more promising than their public statements would lead one to believe:’ a crucial insight of international diplomacy. He also does not hesitate to state quite simply that Israel ‘has a major nuclear arsenal and the capability to launch weapons quickly,’ a fact always denied by the Israeli officials. Perhaps the most chilling quote in his book from an Israeli, the 1970s  foreign minister Abba Eban, is that ‘Arabs and Jews were inherently incompatible …’ (my emphasis). So too were blacks and whites in South Africa, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and Muslims and Orthodox in Kosovo. Carter’s conclusions, reached after the coverage of more than 30 years personal involvement is stark: ‘It will be a tragedy – for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world – if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail.’ And he is clear: it is the United States that is at fault for ‘unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.’

Is he right though? Clearly, Phillips does not think so. For her the British mainstream (and presumably Carter as well) have adopted a ‘warped analysis’ in which ‘the Iraq war was not a defence against Muslim aggression but its cause, that America is a superpower out of control, and that the origin of Muslim rage against the West lies in Israel’s “oppression” of the Palestinians.’ Personally, I think it absurd to suggest that the 2003 Iraq war was a defence against Muslim aggression, as Saddam Hussein was a secularising influence and whose aggression against Iran and Kuwait had nothing to do with Islam. Personally, I think that the US is out of control because it invaded without United Nations approval, and because, for example, it permitted the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. And personally, I am inclined to the thesis that Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is at the heart of Muslim rage against the West, though I would want a lot more evidence on both sides of the argument before making my mind up. It is just this evidence however which is so lacking in Phillips’ account, replaced instead with a rhetoric and fury which one continuously needs to cut away to get to the argument. She calls the negative accounts of Israel as promoting apartheid a ‘Big Lie,’ as ‘propaganda’ by the media. She says that the idea that Israel is more of a threat to world peace than Saddam is a ‘poisonously false belief.’ But the only argument she puts forward against the apartheid analogy is that Arabs within Israel have full civil rights, and that, by definition, Arabs outside Israel (i.e. within the West Bank and Gaza) are not its citizens. Surely this is no argument at all: after all many of the Bantustans of South Africa were declared independent (though never recognised internationally) as a core policy of apartheid, a ploy that denied the blacks the vote and continued their subjugation as a source of cheap labour. Both the Bantustans and the Palestinian territories fall or fell under the full military control of their enclosing States: their independence a sham. We also know that Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela both commented on the Palestinian’s plight as a direct parallel with that of blacks in South Africa.

But Phillips’ book, although it devotes lengthy sections to the Israeli question, poses a different thesis that does require serious debate: that London has become the epicentre of Islamic militancy in Europe, and hence deserves the moniker ‘Londonistan.’ Whether or not that militancy is justified is a secondary issue, and Phillips’ assumptions on this are neither illuminating nor edifying. The central question she raises however is whether Britain has allowed this creation of an epicentre of Islamic militancy through a betrayal of its own values. The evidence she puts forward for the ‘Londonistan’ thesis is extensive and convincing, but one could draw the opposite conclusion from the bare facts: that it has come about because of that core British value, going back to John Locke and his contemporary Enlightenment thinkers: toleration. At no point does Phillips consider this; instead she rails against the retreat from Judeo-Christian values, against a Britain ‘taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “antiracists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands.’ But Phillips, like many right-wingers, finds it hard to pin down what British values are, having excluded human rights, which she sees as having, for the left, ‘replaced Christianity for a Godless society.’ Norman Tebbitt offered the ‘cricket test,’ while Phillips talks about the ‘bulldog spirit’ – but surely it is the British sense of fair play which may well be at the root of the unwitting creation of ‘Londonistan’ – and which also offers the best bulwark against its future dominance. The Judeo-Christian heritage, which Phillips is so proud of, was challenged at its core by the Enlightenment principle of Locke and others, and which principles now define Britishness. As the great religious scholar Radhakrishnan pointed out in his 1936 inaugural lecture at Oxford University, the Jews first invented the myth of the ‘one true religion’ – and one can point to Locke (and later Enlightenment thinkers) as the destroyer of that myth when he advocated toleration between sects. This was only a start of course: toleration had to be extended to all cultures and religions, but Locke also proposed a very natural boundary to that toleration: those who had allegiance to ‘a foreign prince’ excluded themselves from British public life. Here Phillips is right: a British citizen cannot have allegiance to an Imam, whether in Britain, Iran, or elsewhere, over and above their allegiance to the state in which they live, neither can they demand the establishment of Sharia law. Phillips is also right when she insists that the Koran should not be exempt from ‘historical criticism’ – this is another key element of Enlightenment thought, and should apply equally to the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. 

But Phillips proposes, in her conclusions, that we repeal the Human Rights act, reverse secularism, and assert the primacy of British culture as Judeo-Christian. She believes that Britain now is like Weimar of the 1930s with the same combination of amorality, appeasement, decadence and denial, and that the left-wing dream of ‘human rights’ is the cause. But history tells us that religion was firmly relegated to the private sphere in the Enlightenment period, and that its very relegation is at the core of British values; at the core of a humanist ethics which has, at every turn, outstripped religious ethics. It was the religious murders of the 17th and 18th centuries that provoked the Enlightenment thought of Locke and Voltaire, and which led to our freedom from religion, the right to pursue it in private if we wished, or to have no faith at all, but above all to keep its power in check. Phillips wants a return to Judeo-Christian values to stem the tide of radical Islam: I would suggest instead it that the humanist ethics of the Enlightenment, applied equally to the restraint of Islam as to the restraint of the Judeo-Christian tradition, is the right tool for the job. Locke’s conception of toleration was not supine: neither should its modern equivalents be.

But, returning to the original question: who is right over the analogy between Palestinian oppression and apartheid? Phillips makes us question her conclusions, firstly because of the intemperate language deployed non-stop through her book, and secondly because she gives no reasonable argument against the analogy. Carter has made his mind up but doesn’t force us to agree with him. Personally, I would like to read an account of the conflict from the Israeli point of view, one which is as thoughtful and as neutral as Carter’s, before I make up my mind (if any reader has a suggestion here, please let me know). In the meantime Carter’s book is recommended without reservation, and Phillips’s book recommended with a health warning: it has an undeniable strength of detail, but one needs to whittle the invective of bigotry from almost every sentence to get to the bone of the facts.