Letter to The Economist

Ok, I hope you don't think I'm obsessing, this is tthe second post in a row about the Economist but having read their "Briefing" on forty years on from the Six-Day War I had to write to them to let them know what I thought. Since they'll never publish it in a month of Sundays I thought I'd post it here. Unsurprisingly, I have not received a reply. Happy reading

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Sir,

As you can see, this is a rather long letter, not intended for publication but simply to let you know the opinion of a reader regarding an article in the latest edition of The Economist (26 May, 2007). I would greatly appreciate a reply to some of the points I make.

I would simply like to address a number of issues raised in your article “Forty years on” and highlight what I feel are some problematic areas. I have dealt with my various concerns as they appeared in the article and not in a thematic manner.

Firstly, a most serious and fundamental matter. The article states that ‘the reunification of historic Palestine...under Israeli rule seemed to give the Palestinians a chance to get their own struggle for a state back on track’ (emphasis added). ‘Back on track’ implies that the Palestinians were already struggling to liberate what are now known as the ‘Occupied Territories’ before the Six Day War. But this is clearly not the case. There was no Palestinian national movement to liberate the West Bank from Jordan. Jordan was as much an ‘illegal occupier’ of that territory as Israel is today. The state of Transjordan captured the West Bank in the First Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1949 when it had no right or claim to that land whatsoever, yet there was a complete absence of either Palestinian or international pressure on Jordan to relinquish it in order to set up a sovereign state of Palestine for the Arabs living on the west bank of the Jordan river.

A smaller, yet significant point and one which illustrates the general problem of The Economist’s approach to reporting and commentating on the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the use, or lack thereof, of adjectives in this Briefing. Yasser Arafat is described as ‘a young engineer’, Nasser is given no description at all. However, Yitzchak Rabin is ‘hot-headed’ and Moshe Dayan is ‘hawkish’. The problem is clear.

While on the topic of nomenclature, I notice that the Palestinians engage in ‘armed struggle of some sort’ and ‘extremism’ while Israeli settlers and Palestinian combatants are both classed as ‘militants’, without any distinguishing adjectives. The word terrorist or terrorism is not used once in the whole Briefing, in keeping with The Economist’s standard policy regarding Palestinian violence, despite the fact that the term is employed by the publication in relation to the perpetrators of Islamist violence in Britain, al-Qaeda in general and other conflicts as well.

The article makes a dramatic, and in all probability, false assertion about the intentions of Nasser and the Arab states in their military escalation of April and May 1967 when it says of the war that it was prompted in Israel by ‘a misreading of the enemy’s intentions’. The article is clearly coming down in favour of one of the main historiographical opinions of the war that both sides stumbled into a conflict which neither really wanted. The other side of this historiographical conflict is that Nasser and the Egyptian leadership knew exactly what they were doing and thus sent 80,000 troops and 900 tanks into the Sinai, expelled the UN force patrolling the Egyptian-Israeli border, sent two MiG-21’s on a reconnaissance flight over Dimona and closed the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping in order to provoke a war with Israel which, it was believed, would be won quickly by the invading Arab armies. Anwar Sadat said that upon blockading the Straits of Tiran, Nasser declared that this action would increase the chances of war to one hundred percent. If this article sought to present the conflict in a neutral manner it would have been necessary to highlight some of these facts.

Another aside to the main issue of the Six-Day war tackled in the Briefing is the manner in which the article tags the 2006 Lebanon War as a ‘debacle’ from the Israeli point of view. The media generally overlooks the fact that the IDF estimates that it killed approximately 600 Hizballah guerrillas in just over a month of fighting and suffered 119 casualties in so doing. This 6 to 1 ratio would be enough to win many wars and had the fighting continued over several months the larger part of Hizballah’s army would have been destroyed with, in objective and unemotional terms, very little damage to the IDF as an effective fighting force. That the conflict was halted before this happened is due to both domestic Israeli and foreign pressure. The subsequent portrayal of the war as at best a ‘debacle’ and at worst a defeat for Israel is largely due to political considerations of both Israel’s external enemies and domestic critics.

The Briefing also directly compares Hamas to Israel’s settler movement (‘Hamas is to the Palestinians what the settlers are to Israel’) in religious terms. Unlike Hamas, however, Israeli settlers don’t perpetrate mass-murder bombings against Palestinian civilians or fire rockets indiscriminately at Palestinian towns. The comparison is highly offensive.

The article then boils down the conflict since 2000 to the usual ‘cycle-of-violence’ type analysis. Israel demands security first and Palestinians demand an end to the ‘occupation’ first and so the conflict perpetuates itself. The ‘occupation’, and its accompanying checkpoints, roadblocks and IDF incursions, was re-instated after the Palestinians launched the intifada in late 2000 as a means of protecting Israeli civilians from terrorist attack. Before that point, the Palestinian Authority directly administered forty percent of West Bank territory and ninety percent of the Palestinian population. The drastic decline in the political and economic fortunes of the Palestinian people is wholly attributable to the decision to take up arms once again against Israeli civilians.

The article carries on to state that ‘neither side has ever had a leadership willing to override those views’. This is simply wrong as Ariel Sharon did exactly that when he discarded the land-for-peace, bilateral strategy of the previous thirty-eight years of diplomacy and gave the Palestinians the Gaza strip without anything in return, especially security guarantees. The danger of this approach was subsequently highlighted (and Israel’s prior insistence on security guarantees before territorial concessions justified) by a huge increase in weapons smuggling into the Gaza strip from Egypt after the IDF relinquished control of that border, increased rocket fire into sovereign Israeli territory and the cross border attack by Hamas combatants on 25 June, 2006 in which Corporal Gilad Shalit was abducted and two Israeli soldiers were killed.

The Briefing also argues that economic conditions create ‘extremism’ when it states that the measures of IDF control over the West Bank ‘stifle the West Bank’s economy and drive even more Palestinians to extremism’. This assertion, frequently made by the media, is grossly misleading, if not completely false. There are numerous examples of Islamists who have perpetrated terrorist attacks and had not been reduced to abject poverty or oppressed by a brutal occupying regime. Such examples include, the members of the Hamburg cell who plotted the 9/11 attacks, the bombers who carried out the 7/7 atrocities, the would-be-bombers who tried to blow up a number of London Underground stations on 21 June, 2005, the conspirators who planned to use the 600kg of ammonium nitrate fertilizer they had acquired to commit terrorist outrages in Britain and numerous other cases. It is indoctrination and hatred that creates terrorism not economic conditions, otherwise how could affluent, middle-class Arabs living in a modern German city come to murder nearly three thousand innocent people? The assertion to the contrary is disingenuous to say the least.

The Briefing also states that the Saudi Peace Plan of 2002 was an admission of defeat by the Arab world by offering Israel ‘full normalisation of relations in return for full withdrawal from the territories captured in 1967’. The article fails to mention that this plan also states that the Palestinian refugee problem be solved in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 which calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel. Arab insistence on the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees remains a political and not a humanitarian demand aimed at nullifying the Jewish majority in the State of Israel, thereby destroying its Jewish character and thus the very aims and purposes of Zionism. Such a plan will never be acceptable to Israel and should not be portrayed as any deviation from the general Arab aims since 1947.

The problem with this Briefing, and The Economist’s approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict in general, is that it simply fails to balance its presentation of the complex issues of this struggle, which are overwhelmingly in favour of the Arab world, with the alternative Israeli perspective. In this article alone one, I have tried to point out the numerous instances when the alternative historical and political interpretation of events is simply whitewashed by The Economist’s political inclination. This attitude is so entrenched that the publication can not even bring itself to call the war by its most common name, the Six-Day War, as it alludes to the overwhelming Israeli victory and the defeat of not only the Arab armies but the failed and ideologically bankrupt regimes of the Arab world in the face of the resurgent, vibrant and newly-freed Jewish people. The Economist’s shortcomings in reporting and commentating on this crucial arena of international affairs is a stain on its reputation and, for the sake of the publication’s credibility, should be reviewed and amended to provide a more balanced perspective on this enduring and multi-faceted conflict.

Yours sincerely

The [extremely] Cantankerous Camel