thing. Instead, he has plunged into a latter-day version of France’s war against the FLN insurrection in Algeria in the 1950s. Like Sharon’s Israel, France unleashed its full might against bombers and gunmen, killing, torturing and imprisoning many thousands, crushing resistance in the casbahs with terror. Yet after a lull, the rebellion reignited even more powerfully than before, and the French were forced to quit. Israelis usually have far fewer illusions about what is going on in their country than their Western supporters. Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general in the mid-1990s, recently described the Palestinian intifada as a ‘war of national liberation’, adding: ‘We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities . . . we established an apartheid regime’.
But despite President Bush’s much-vaunted public appeals to Sharon to begin a military pullback from the main Palestinian towns, the US – the one power in the world with the leverage over Israel to make it withdraw for good – shows no sign whatever of seriously reining in its long-term client state. On the contrary, the US administration, with the British government in ever-loyal echo, repeatedly expressed its ‘understanding’ of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian territory in the first phase of this invasion. Sharon’s determination to destroy not just ‘terror networks’ and the military infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority, but its civilian infrastructure as well – including educational and health institutions – has effectively had the green light from the US government. Both Sharon and Bush want to see the removal of the elected Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, even though his stature throughout the Arab world has grown dramatically as Israel has sought to humiliate him. Both appear to want the wider problem taken out of Palestinian hands and dealt with at a regional level. Nothing could have made the real US attitude clearer than Secretary of State Colin Powell’s leisurely peregrinations across North Africa while Israeli forces have wreaked devastation in Jenin, Nablus and Bethlehem. To all intents and purposes, the destruction of the Palestinian Authority has been a policy signed off in Washington.
It can hardly be a surprise. US military and economic support for Israel – worth $70 billion since 1979 – has been the linchpin of its imperial power in the Middle East since at least the 1960s. There is a widespread mythology (which at one end of the spectrum shades off into anti-Semitic fantasies about global Jewish conspiracies) that US backing for Israel is largely the result of the effectiveness of political lobbying in Washington. In reality, it has been primarily driven by strategic interests in the world’s most important oil region. Unlike the autocratic Arab potentates the US and other Western states lean on to keep the oil flowing and their populations in check, Israel is an utterly reliable ally with a proven military record against Arab armies. It was Israeli military prowess which broke the dangerous spell of Nasserism when it defeated the Arabs in the six-day war. As a settler state in a hostile region, with a developed Western political and economic system and dependent on US military and financial support, any Israeli move against US interests in the region is unthinkable. But while it is impossible to imagine Israelis electing an anti-Western government, it would be a one-way bet in many Arab countries if their people were actually given a choice.
The pattern for the relationship was set by Britain as the dominant imperial power in the region in the early part of the last century. Sir Ronald Storrs, the first governor of Jerusalem under British rule in the 1920s, explained it as ‘forming for England a “little loyal Jewish Ulster” in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’. A lifetime later, that is essentially the role played by Israel for the US and wider Western interests today. It also helps explain the licence given to the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state to violate UN security council resolutions at will, and why even the EU is unlikely to agree to the economic or military sanctions demanded yesterday by the European parliament. The closeness of the alliance does not, however, mean the US will not bring its client to heel if necessary. When US administrations have felt that Israeli behaviour was encroaching on vital US interests – as in 1956, when Israel seized the Suez canal in collusion with Britain and France, for example, or in the 1980s, when it tried to prevent the sale of Awacs surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia – they have been prepared to slap their ally down, regardless of its friends on Capitol Hill.
The paradox of Middle East peacemaking has long been that while the US is an open partisan of one side in the conflict, it is only through US intervention that a viable long-term settlement can be achieved. Bush’s half-hearted attempt to strike a more even-handed public note over Sharon’s onslaught in the West Bank this week is transparently the product of fears of growing unrest in the region, – and the problems it is creating for American plans to settle accounts with Iraq. But the US will only move decisively if it feels its own interests are under threat.7
(11/4/02)
The battle for History: Stalin, Hitler and colonial crimes
It would be easy to dismiss the controversy over the latest Martin Amis offering as little more than a salon tiff among self-referential literati. His book, Koba the Dread, follows a well-trodden political path. An excoriation of Lenin, Stalin and communism in general (interlaced with long-simmering spats with his once communist father Kingsley and radical friend Christopher Hitchens), it is intended as a savage indictment of the left for its supposed inability to acknowledge the crimes committed in its name. Strong on phrasemaking, the book is painfully short on sources or social and historical context. The temptation might be to see it as simply a sign that the one-time enfant terrible of the London literary scene is reliving his father’s descent into middle-aged blimpishness.
That would be a mistake. Amis’s book is in reality only the latest contribution to the rewriting of history that began in the dying days of the Soviet Union and has intensified since its collapse. It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin with Hitler as twin monsters of the past century – Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought – and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold-war victors’ version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure.
This profoundly ideological account has long since turned into a sort of gruesome numbers game. The bizarre distortions it produces were on show last week during a television interview with Amis, when the BBC presenter Gavin Esler remarked in passing that Stalin was ‘responsible for at least three times as many deaths’ as Hitler – a truly breathtaking throwaway line. Esler was presumably comparing Amis’s own figure of 20 million Stalin victims (borrowed from the cold-war historian Robert Conquest) with the 6 million Jews murdered by Hitler in the Holocaust. But of course Hitler took a great many more lives than 6 million: over 11 million are estimated to have died in the Nazi camps alone and he might reasonably be held responsible for the vast majority of the 50 million killed in the second world war, including more than 20 million Soviet dead.
But in the distorted prism of the new history, they are somehow lost from the equation. At the same time, the number of victims of Stalin’s terror has been progressively inflated over recent years to the point where, in the wildest guesstimates, a third of the entire Soviet population is assumed to have been killed in the years leading up to the country’s victory over Nazi Germany. The numbers remain a focus of huge academic controversy, partly because most are famine deaths which can only be extrapolated from unreliable demographic data. But the fact is that the opening of formerly secret Soviet archives has led many historians – such as the Americans J. Arch Getty and Robert Thurston – to sharply scale down earlier cold-war estimates of executions and gulag populations under Stalin. The figures are still horrific. For example, 799,455 people were recorded as having been executed between 1921 and 1953, and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million (most convicted for non-political offences) at its peak after the war. But these are a very long way from the kind of numbers relied on by Amis
