Letters to Palestine
Edited by Vijay Prashad
(Verso, £8.99)

SOME years ago, visiting an Israeli friend — one of that small number monitoring and publicising the oppressive actions of the Tel Aviv regime — I was taken to see the calculated humiliation of Palestinians in the West Bank.

“How could people with such formative memories of the Holocaust behave so inhumanely?” I asked. The terse answer: “More land, fewer Arabs,” said it all.

Then “ethnic cleansing” may have sounded too extreme a description. Not so now after the barbarity of last year’s slaughter in Gaza, with the deaths of hundreds of children accounted as “collateral damage.”

Even so, as film-maker Rumzi Araj — one of the 27 Palestinian writers whose experiences and analyses comprise this book — comments: “It’s hard to use words to describe Gaza.”

Yet there are words. Summer Rain, Autumn Cloud, Grapes of Wrath, Cast Lead, Pillar of Cloud and Protective Edge were the euphemistic, poetic titles for the repeated series of savage assaults on a defenceless people that sum up the obscene Israeli ethnic cleansing there.

It is a grotesque historical irony that like the nazis, Israel combines overpowering violence with “legalised” subtlety to strangle their victims. The process, as a one of this book’s contributors notes, involves “a dizzying assemblage of laws and bylaws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions and sudden irrational moves, all of this mixed together and imposed with the greatest care.”

For the inhabitants of Gaza, the largest concentration camp the world has seen, the Israeli authorities in 2008 calculated the minimum number of calories necessary for Gazans in order to determine the precise quantities of food they would allow to enter the strip.

The UN estimates that 30 per cent of Gaza’s arable land lies unreachably within the lethal buffer zone next to the border fence.

This collection covers both the experiences of the writers — many now resident in the US — in or visiting Israel and Gaza, along with essays on the role of the US, Israel’s “great enabler,” in vetoing every feeble attempt by the UN to restrain, let alone condemn, their protege. That’s exemplified in US Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the massive Tel Aviv retaliation against pin-prick rocket strikes by describing

Israel as “under siege by Hamas.”

If the penultimate piece in this important book The Collapse of the Pro-Israel Consensus holds out a vestige of hope for the future, the US unholy alliance of “Christian zionists, the arms industry, the profits from American and Israeli warfare, and American interests in hegemony in the Middle East” remains a daunting barrier to progress.

On the ground, the recent Israeli election suggests that a myopic Israeli public — oblivious to the lessons of their own history — supports the Netanyahu regime which, like Macbeth, is “so far stepped in blood that returning were as tedious as to go on.”