Conventional wisdom holds that the Palestine-Israel conflict can be more freely discussed in the United Kingdom than in the United States. It’s true that, in 2006, the American political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer published an incendiary polemic on the US-Israel lobby in the London Review of Books, which American magazines had shunned. Without British support, their seminal article — which grew into a much-debated book — might have been written in vain.
Yet the signs are that the climate of opinion in Britain is changing thanks to rising anxiety about radicalism and the entrenchment of right-wing rule. Certainly, efforts by British Zionists to conflate sympathy for the Palestinians with “de-legitimization” of Israel are not going unrewarded. No one has more reason to be mindful of this than the ex-leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, who promised to champion Palestinian national aspirations if he became prime minister in the May 7 general election.
It can hardly be claimed that Miliband’s bid to become prime minister was undone by his pro-Palestinian stance. What can be said, however, is that the British media made much of perceptions that this Jewish politician was betraying his own community. No little coverage was afforded to the announcement by the veteran Jewish actress, Maureen Lipman, that because of Miliband’s recognition of Palestinian statehood she was abandoning the Labour-voting habits of a lifetime. In due course, it was reported that Miliband had “lost” the Jewish vote. Reviewing his ill-fated election campaign, a Jewish liberal columnist suggested that Miliband’s problem was that he did not seem to British Jews to be one of them, with the implication that this was in part because of his stance over Israel.
Unwelcome to many British Jews, a government led by Ed Miliband would have been anathema to the Israeli political establishment. That the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, was returned to office as UK prime minister met in Israel with unalloyed satisfaction. Cameron once described Gaza as an “open prison,” but since gaining power he has spared no effort to affirm his Zionist credentials. Having led a coalition government from 2010 until the May election, he now presides over an entirely Conservative administration, which includes ministers who do not hesitate to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
In April, the University of Southampton cancelled an academic conference on Israel and international law in response to official pressure, some of it applied by Cameron’s hyper-Zionist colleague, Michael Gove, who denounced the event as an anti-Israel “hate fest.” Small wonder against this background that one of the most remarkable books yet written about the experience of Palestinians under Israeli occupation has received scant notice. In Between River and Sea: Encounters in Israel and Palestine, the celebrated Irish travel writer, Dervla Murphy, has produced a magnificent portrait of life in Palestinian cities and refugee camps while also recording her instructive encounters with Jewish settlers and anti-Zionist Israelis. Nobody has written more tellingly about the grim consequences of Israel’s separation wall, or about the indignities that are the daily lot of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Force.
Murphy’s book combines what she calls a “worm’s eye-view” of the occupation with wide reading and reflection. She cites the arresting speculation of the British psychoanalyst Martin Kemp about why the West turns a blind eye to institutionalized Israeli brutality. Kemp believes that Israel and the West, with their “distinctive but linked histories of de-humanization — the West toward the Jews, the Israelis toward Palestinians” — became bonded in unconscious collusion as a means of evading their guilt. This explains, he contends, why an independent relationship between the West and the Palestinians never emerged.
Between River and Sea follows the compelling account of her stay in Gaza, A Month by the Sea, that Dervla Murphy published in 2013. The work of a hobbled octogenarian who traversed the occupied territories on a stick, her new 400-page book is a phenomenal literary achievement. That it has not been treated as a major publishing event is a scandal, but it is scandal of a piece with the chill that has descended over British discussion of the Palestinian issue.
