Meron Benvenisti boasts impeccable credentials both in Israel and the United States. His own father was also one of Israel's founding fathers. In his own right, the author has held a high position in the Israeli government (deputy mayor of Jerusalem), headed a small but consequential think-tank analyzing the situation on the West Bank, taught at a leading university, and written a column for the country's most prestigious newspaper.
Benvenisti also has top-notch American credentials. He studied politics at Harvard University. Two great foundations, the Rockefeller and the Ford, have sponsored his work. The New York Times has regularly quoted his analyses; and, indeed, Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes in a laudatory preface to Intimate Enemies that Benvenisti is "the Middle East expert to whom Middle East experts go for advice." The president of the Association for Israel Studies, a named professor at the University of Pennsylvania, warmly endorses the book and warns against trying to understand Israel without reading it. The University of California Press hails him for his "rhetorical passion and bitter honesty of a biblical prophet."
Meron Benvenisti, it is safe to say, ranks as one of the Israeli interpreters of the Arab-Israeli conflict that the liberal American establishment most esteems.
On opening his book about "Jews and Arabs in a shared land," it therefore comes as a surprise to find not an authoritative and balanced essay but something quite different - part display of ignorance, part political fantasy, and part anti-Israel screed.
Let's start with the display of ignorance. For an expert's expert, Benvenisti makes some pretty rudimentary mistakes. He seems unversed in world affairs: how, in the light of the Nazi and Soviet experience, can he generalize that "Sovereign states reach decisions based on concrete, pragmatic considerations, in which ideology plays a secondary role"?
Nor does he know Middle Eastern history: he calls Kuwait "a creation of Britain's anachronistic interests," evidently unaware that Kuwait's roots as a state go back to the eighteenth century, long pre-dating British control.
Nor economics: he says Palestinians expelled from Arabia after the Kuwait War brought Jordan to the "verge of bankruptcy"; in fact, they infused the country with new capital and new energy.
Nor diplomacy: he writes that Palestinians enjoyed a "symbolic symmetry" with Israel at the Madrid conference in 1990 - hardly the case when the Palestinians did not form their own delegation but were an adjunct to the Jordanian one.
Nor Islam: he writes repeatedly of the rallying cry Allah hua Akbar (it's actually Allahu Akbar).
And least of all does he know Israel: Saddam's threats against Israel in 1990 made "most Israelis sigh with relief"? The landing of Iraqi missiles in 1991 brought "a sense of relief"? He must be kidding.
On this shaky factual base, Benvenisti proposes a fantastical solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: the Confederation of Israel/Palestine, a binational state in which the two peoples share power in the central government while living in homogeneous ethnic cantons which enjoy cultural and religious autonomy. Sound familiar? That's the system that worked so well in Lebanon and Yugoslavia. Sure, let's pull down the Jewish state and try it in Israel too.
Except that, with rare unanimity, Israelis and Palestinians reject binationalism. Indeed, they discarded it so long ago that an American advocate of this approach writes that by 1946 it was already "out of the question." Today, the two peoples desperately seek to disengage from each other. Benvenisti ignores their wish, preferring instead to dream of an Israeli-Palestinian embrace. That's his privilege, but it raises grave doubts about his common sense.
The anti-Israel screed then confirms those doubts. Although Benvenisti says his father inculcated him "with a profound attachment to Zionist ideology," what comes through here is a impassioned anger against his country and its government - a frustration that they lack the good sense to share his dream. He condemns Israelis of all political persuasions for wanting to "keep the Arabs out." His attack on them recalls passages from the old PLO copybook. He calls Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon the "perpetrators" of the 1982 war in Lebanon, implying that their actions were criminal. He characterizes Israel's treatment of the Palestinians over the past quarter-century as "legal violence ... used indiscriminately against a dominated and defenseless ethnic group." He finds the Israeli treatment of Palestinians similar to the apartheid system in South Africa.
And when Benvenisti really gets rolling, his rage inspires one loaded word piled on another. Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza he variously deems "macabre," "absurd," "ludicrous," and "harsh." The favorite term of all would seem to be "pathetic," for he uses it at least three times in this context.
The Palestinians are no angels either, but he seems not to care much about them. Yes, in the 1930s, they engaged in "uncompromising policy and violent acts"; but in another place Benvenisti terms their behavior back then "heroic." He does not question Yasir Arafat's credentials as leader of the Palestinians nor his long-range intentions. His fury, in brief, is directed against those who spurn him, his fellow Israelis.
The failings of Intimate Enemies raises an interesting question: Why does the liberal American establishment so prize Benvenisti's work? Does it too dream of binationalism? Or does it overlook his foibles because it finds great utility in an Israeli who despises his own country? That's an unpleasant thought.
