Israel in counterfactual history

The historian Walter Laqueur has just published a paper under the auspices of Middle East Strategy at Harvard, and has kindly alerted me to it. It's called Disraelia: A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008 and it can be downloaded here. It's a fascinating read. I recommend printing it and setting aside time to digest it.

In his influential study A History of Zionism (1972, p. 593), Mr Laqueur noted that: "A mass influx of Jews into Palestine in the early part of the nineteeth century (provided the Ottoman government had agreed to it) might have proceeded without much resistance on the part of the native population, because the idea of nationalism had not yet grown roots outside Europe. But there was no national movement at the time among the Jews either: east European Jewry had not yet left the ghetto; central and west European Jews had not yet experienced the new antisemitism."

Disraelia, told through the medium of imagined historical documents and correspondence, is this counterfactual history of the emigration of Jews from Europe in the mid-nineteeth century. The inspirer of the Jewish national movement is not Herzl but Disraeli, in an interregnum in his political career and before he became Prime Minister. The outcome is different from the modern state of Israel: a state of sixty million at the beginning of the 21st century, with extensive natural resources, and for whom the forces of global realpolitik have worked to render it secure and its legitimacy unquestioned. (This notion allows Mr Laqueur some nicely acerbic imaginings: "BBC correspondents had been shown weeping uncontrollably at the recent funeral of the prime minister of Disraelia.")

Walter Laqueur maintains that this state might have come about - "assuming that the great anti-Semitic wave would have occurred in Europe eighty years earlier than it did, provided the Ottoman empire would have disintegrated eighty years earlier, and provided that the Jews of Europe would have read the signs of the times correctly, and under wise leadership would have followed a policy leading them to peaceful solutions."

Would it have been a desirable outcome? Well, see this blog post by the Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, who argues that Laqueur's Disraelia lacks a national dimension:

Laqueur's Disraelia is perhaps aptly named, precisely because it is de-Israelized. It also might not have lasted into this century. Middle Eastern states that lack a primary nationality are today vulnerable precisely because they are empty of identity at the core. Multi-ethnic, religiously diverse Iraq is a case in point - and had a Disraelia emerged, it is just as easy to imagine it reaching the same tragic impasse, oil and all.

So pardon me, Walter, for preferring Israel as it is. I'll take my chances.

I don't agree with this either historically or prescriptively. In the real world, the Jewish national movement took root and gained impetus as one of a variety of nationalisms that emerged quite late. National claims in the twentieth century and still today have been bedevilled by boundary issues, stemming in particular from the collapse of the multinational empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Turkey. I'm sympathetic to the Wilsonian idea in foreign affairs, but the principle of creating small new republics from the ruins of empire, without regard to their vulnerability to more powerful neighbours, plainly did not work in the twentieth century. In the early years of the last century, US diplomacy saw few precedents in the post-Napoleonic history of Europe and thus overlooked the importance of maintaining a balance of a power. America entered WWI too late, when it might have prevented that war altogether by siding much earlier with Britain and France against German expansionism.

By extension, Laqueur's Disraelia - in taking root a century earlier than the state of Israel - might have exercised an important and benign role in the balance of power in the Middle East. My own views of the Jewish state perhaps differ from Kramer's. I wrote a piece for The Times a couple of years ago (about the Pope's visit to Auschwitz) in which I stated briefly my philosophy on this point. I have no interest in the fortunes of Judaism, but an intense interest in the fortunes and welfare of persecuted peoples. I'm a friend and supporter of Israel, not because it's a Jewish state but because it's a liberal democracy in a region where constitutional and secular principles are not widespread. Disraelia might have thrived and might also have caused the expansion of those principles - inside the country, as well as more widely within the region.

There is one final aspect of the counterfactual history of Disraelia worth noting. The A-bomb is developed in the early 1930s, by scientists in Disraelia - to the consternation of the German ambassador in Tel Aviv. This is entirely plausible. Mr Laqueur certainly has in mind the exiled physicists Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, who in 1940 first explained how a uranium fission bomb might be developed. Had their forebears left Germany and Austria for Disraelia in the nineteenth century, then this discovery might have been developed by that country's research institutes. Had it been done early enough, then conceivably WWII might not have taken place. As it was, we can only be thankful that in the real world the absolute weapon was developed by the Western democracies before Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan acquired it; the history of the twentieth century, bleak as it is, would have been unimaginably worse with a Nazi A-bomb.

(Incidentally, I had the good fortune to meet Peierls in the 1980s; he was a fellow of the Oxford college where I was an undergraduate, and I listened to him expound his view on the urgency of a nuclear freeze between the superpowers. As military strategy, this would in fact have been a bad idea - it would have frozen everything, good or bad, when the development of more accurate and lighter weaponry made the nuclear stand-off less perilous. But to be in the presence of this remarkable intellect and one of the most significant figures in human history was a humbling experience that has remained with me. I should add - before anyone puts it in the comments box - that Peierls was accused after his death of having passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. I know of no evidence that this is true, and the source of that claim - the former Tory MP Rupert Allason, whose pen name as a popular historian is Nigel West - is not a source I find credible.)

I digress. Do read Walter Laqueur's paper; it's profound and thought-provoking.

Comments

[Barry Larking]

I read the Laquer's article yesterday and it provoked very different reactions in me. I find this 'what if' approach to history for practical purposes useless and in turns, dangerous. At the height of the successful IRA-Sein Fein campaign one benighted Unionist politician opined that, but for a few miles of water, Northern Ireland (and Ireland) would be connected to Great Britain, with obvious consequences for the history of both islands. John Hume replied "It isn't".

Essentially what Mr Laquer has created (rather elegantly) is an illusionary narrative which actually does nothing to develop a useful understanding of the present. Much less elegantly, Hollywood (the name itself is almost a shorthand for this phenomenon) has practised this trope as a sort of art form for many years, writing off whole historical episodes where the plot (largely a device for massaging American contemporary sensibilities) demanded it, which it always did. This is easily dismissed by the snooty; yet film in the 20th century has been all pervasive and persuasive in connecting with mass audiences.

A gifted practitioner of this 'art form' in these islands is been Robert Harris. Mr Harris writes intelligently, far more subtly than the average film script, and does not, as far as I am aware, suggest his entertainment should supplant history. Yet all around us, especially on the internet, the weak minded willingly propel themselves into an alternative reality where mere wishful thinking is enough to frame and perhaps even alter in some psychologic way, the unpleasant reality of the world we have and with which we must deal.

I am very grateful for your link to the paper prepared by Peierls and Frisch on the possibility of creating a weapon by exploiting the nuclear process in fissionable material. Unfortunately the providers of the link failed to mention that this paper was written at the University of Birmingham, England. I understand this work was subsequently provided free of restraint to the Americans by way of Lord Cherwell's (Frederick Lindemann) famous 'Black Box' in 1940, as an inducement to obtain continued US financial support for Britain following Dunkirk.

[Tom]

Why confuse 'the fortunes of Judaism' with Israel? Most Israeli Jews - like Jews elsewhere - are secular. Most ultra-Orthodox Israelis reject Jewish sovereignty before the Messiah's arrival; some, like the Neturei Karta, even support Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel.