Scars of War, Wounds of Peace

"Well it’s written from a very Israeli point of view. The writer is Shlomo Ben-Ami, who’s a liberal, who’s an intellectual, who’s a historian. But he was also the foreign minister for a year in 2000 under Barak. There are quite a lot of books by historians and journalists that try to be neutral and objective. And then there are books by important figures in Israeli society and politics, who will obviously tell the story through a lens of who they are and what they did. But I don’t know any books apart from The Scars of War which are by both a professional historian and a participant – at least from the Israeli point of view. Ben-Ami tries to keep a detached perspective and brings his personal experience in only when it’s relevant. So, for example, he was involved in the Camp David negotiations, and he does an interesting job of debunking the myth which is still widely believed in Israel that the Israelis made Arafat a marvellous offer which he turned down flat. That was a famous quote by one of Ben-Ami’s predecessors as foreign minister. And if you asked Ben-Ami, he would probably agree with that statement in general terms, because it’s very true that the Palestinians have missed a lot of opportunities. Then again so have the Israelis. Ben-Ami says that what happened at Camp David was not just Arafat’s fault. But more generally he shows how Israeli policy is founded on this idea of a struggle for its survival, and that at the beginning the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza seemed to make sense from the point of view of this strategy. But it stopped making sense. So he goes back to 1967 when the Israelis had captured all this territory and felt like it was on top of the world, and then there was the question, ‘What should we do with all these territories?’ And Ben-Ami recounts the episode of four men from Mossad who did some research and said, ‘If we hold on to this land it’s going to turn into an albatross around our necks. The Palestinians are interested in negotiating independence and we should negotiate with them. We should give Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians and let them set up a state right now.’ Well, there was some initial interest from the Israeli cabinet in this solution, but within a few weeks, for a number of different reasons, that interest faded and the notion that these territories were of strategic value took hold. And that was it. Yes, it makes you realise that Israel really does have some great people in it. Unfortunately, they tend not to have too much influence these days. But it’s interesting for that intellectual honesty."