For many years, Michael Adams — who died last week at the age of 84 — was among the most eloquent British advocates of the Palestinian cause. A patrician Englishman with an acute sense of justice, Adams was profoundly marked by his experiences in the occupied territories in the aftermath of the 1967 war; he was much affected, too, by the difficulties he faced in getting his reports on Israel’s wanton destruction of Palestinian villages published by the Guardian, then a staunchly pro-Israeli newspaper with an editor who was highly sensitive to Jewish opinion.
In concert with the Labour MP and fellow anti-Zionist, Christopher Mayhew, Adams went on to compose a passionate polemical study of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Thirty years old this year, Publish it Not remains a key, if neglected, text, a seminal discussion of its subject. In many ways, Adams’ and Mayhew’s account of Zionist intransigence and the self-righteous brutality it has licensed could have been written yesterday. Their book has dated only in its premature optimism that, in the wake of the 1973 war, Israel was going to be obliged to adopt an altogether more flexible posture. Dismayed by the lack of a consistent Arab voice in British political life and by the huge power of the Zionist lobby, Michael Adams was among the founders of the Council for Arab-British Understanding.
As CAABU’s director and as editor of the magazine, Middle East International, he did much to promote greater public understanding of the Middle East conflict and to challenge the received view of Israel as a plucky little nation fighting for its very survival in the teeth of all but impossible odds. The growing awareness in Britain of the Israel’s massive military and logistical superiority, of sheer one-sidedness of the conflict, owed something to his educative efforts.
Yet as a professional gentile critic of Israel, Adams always belonged to an embattled minority. Zionism was a powerful presence in British public life from the early decades of the 20th century — not least in the Labour Party, which used to abound in Zionist MPs. To speak out against Israel in Britain was always to run the risk of being condemned as an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism was a charge to which — despite the measured tone of their writings and public utterances on the subject of Israel — Adams and Mayhew were not infrequently exposed. It seems safe to say that the fear of being thus vilified has caused many in Britain who might otherwise have spoken out to stay silent. If criticism of Israel has increasingly sprung not from the likes of Michael Adams but from within the Jewish community itself, it is no doubt because of this pervasive climate of intimidation. Latterly, Adams himself was of the opinion that his work of advocacy was being most effectively sustained in Britain and elsewhere by anti-Zionist Jews, people with less reason to feel morally inhibited about calling the Jewish state to account than their non-Jewish counterparts.
One of the anti-Zionist Jews who particularly impressed Adams was the Israeli peace campaigner, Jeff Halper. In the week of Adams’ death, as it happened, and against the background of new and almost certainly oversold Middle East peace talks, Halper was in London to address a gathering at the School of Oriental and African Studies. An American anthropologist who has lived in Israel since 1973, Halper has made it his business to familiarize himself with the everyday realities of Palestinian oppression. In recent years he has poured his energies into the organization The Committee Against House Demolitions. The objective of this dedicated body is to highlight the unending Israeli preoccupation with bulldozing Palestinian homes, an activity which has long since assumed the aspect of a programmatic pathological obsession.
A burly figure who goes out and physically interposes himself between Israeli bulldozers and properties earmarked for destruction, Halper maintains that Israel’s systematic demolition of Palestinian homes epitomizes its determination to fill Palestinians with despair, with the sense that they simply have no claim to their own land. Since 1967, he points out, Israel has been responsible for the destruction of 12,000 homes; during the past 4 years, it has destroyed no fewer than 4,000 homes in Gaza alone. To become directly acquainted with the “facts on the ground”, Halper maintains, is to doubt that Israel ever seriously considered a Palestinian state as an acceptable option. And he insists that much of this has nothing to do with enhancing Israel’s security; rather it is dictated by administrative measures and the desire to subject Palestinians to collective punishment.
What makes Halper such a compelling voice is the way he integrates personal testimony with hardheaded political analysis. At the root of this analysis is his belief that Israel has evolved an awesomely elaborate “matrix of control”. Thanks to the complex network of settlements and US-sponsored highways that straddles the West Bank, Israel, he argues, could actually surrender most of the land while still preserving its domination of the entire area. Confined to disconnected enclaves and with their movements strictly limited, the Palestinian population of the West Bank is for all practical purposes imprisoned. Employing a simple but telling analogy, Halper observes that if you look at a map of a prison it can seem as if the prisoners own the place. The fact is, however, that the prison authorities need occupy only a small percentage of the whole establishment in order to exert total control over its inmates.
In common with other Jewish activists, Halper believes that Israel is now an apartheid state in all but name. If the Israelis were anxious to delegitimize Yasser Arafat, it was because they have been seeking a quisling leader who could impart a modicum of legitimacy to an emasculated Palestinian state made up of South African-style Bantustans. Halper regards Arafat’s successor as Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as just such a leader, but suspects that he will soon find himself impossibly compromised and that Israel’s disingenuous strategy will fail. What he would now like to see is a comprehensive “reframing” of the conflict, with a fresh emphasis not on Israel’s security but on the consequences of its illegal occupation. Such a reframing would mean placing acts of terrorism in a context of resistance to an occupation and raising the question whether that occupation was a legitimate response to terrorism or a concerted effort to smash Palestinian resistance for good in the interests of making Israel’s hegemony permanent and unchallengeable.
Much has changed in the 30 years since Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew wrote Publish it Not. Yet in terms of opportunities to promulgate its case Israel retains an immeasurable advantage. The fact is that Palestinians and their champions are still far from enjoying the privileged access to the media enjoyed by the Jewish state. It says much that at this critical juncture the invaluably instructive Jeff Halper should have been addressing not a mass television audience but a modest university gathering and preaching — with some few exceptions — to the converted.
