Ian black guardian biography sample

Dr. Ian Black was the Middle East editor, European editor, and diplomatic editor for the Guardian over 36 years. He is now a visiting senior fellow at the Middle East Centre at the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE). In addition to English, he speaks Arabic and Hebrew and that is not necessarily true for all those who report on the Middle East. His bio notes that he has an MA in history and social and political science from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in government from LSE. And he has written two books on Israel. His latest book is called, Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017. Therefore, his writing comes with a high level of authority.

Black and ‘Annexation’

The Guardian is not generally supportive of Israel (to put it mildly). But I was curious to see what Black would write about the new situation that has the whole world holding its breath and wondering if Israel will do ‘it’ or not, ‘it’ being ‘annexation’ if you are against ‘it’, or ‘extending her sovereignty’ if you are for ‘it’.

Published in the op-ed section called “Comment is Free”, Black titled his piece, “Israel’s annexation of the West Bank will be another tragedy for the Palestinians“. So even his title is loaded. Not only did he use the term “annexation’, he also used the misnomer ‘West Bank’ to refer to a geographical region using a name it was never called even as a geographical region before it was illegally annexed to Jordan when that country occupied it (1948-1967). And, of course, he regards the impending situation — should Israel have the temerity to extend her sovereignty (oops, my bias is showing) to about one-third of the territory — as ‘another tragedy’ for the poor downtrodden Palestinian Arabs. So, already anticipatin

Ian Black has written a very well-researched, comprehensive and insightful survey of a century of Palestinian-Israeli conflict, from the Balfour Declaration to the present. Even though this is well-travelled terrain, his systematic and detailed account is instructive as it pulls together from a wealth of, albeit secondary, sources a complex story in a very coherent and well-structured narrative. However, the narrative of the conflict is marred by the absence of some critically important contexts and by an imbalance in the treatment of the two parties.

Context

Black argues, correctly, that the settler colonialist paradigm does not fit the Israeli Zionist story as it fails to grasp ‘the Jewish religious-national connection to Eretz Yisrael that is so central to Zionist ideology and Israeli identity’ (p.xxi), but he misses a key distinction of the Zionist endeavour. Zionism was a movement of national liberation and salvation for the Jews after centuries of European exclusion, expulsion and eventual extermination. The Zionist movement of the late 19century resulted from the discrimination, oppression and rejection of the Jews by the nationalist movements of Europe. German, Polish, Russian, and even French nationalism, as Theodor Herzl discovered in the Dreyfus case, would not accept the Jews, who consequently sought to establish a national movement and a homeland of their own, in the only place that made any historical sense.

On its own, the Jewish reaffirmation of their ‘religious-national’ connection to Eretz Yisrael would have neither attracted too many Jews nor have aroused much international attention. Had it not been for the push of the ‘Jewish question,’ (Die Judenfrage), the Jews as the downtrodden of the earth, the international community would most probably never have bothered to recognise the legitimacy of the Zionist movement, as it did in the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate and the UN Partition Resolution of 1947. This key theme

In Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Ian Blackoffers a new panoramic history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 up until the present day. Linking the impact of political decisions to everyday lives and experiences and drawing on a wide array of voices and perspectives, this is a beautifully written and up-to-date introduction to the development of the conflict, finds Menachem Klein.

This review was originally published on the LSE Middle East Centre blog. 

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017. Ian Black. Allen Lane. 2017. 

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A century has passed since World War I, providing an opportunity to revisit one of the war’s most famous byproducts: the Balfour Declaration. In his letter to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917, Lord Balfour, then British Foreign Secretary, wrote:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Just twenty years after its foundation, the Zionist Federation had scored a remarkable diplomatic coup. Great Britain, still then the most powerful colonial empire, recognised the young national movement as the sole representative of the Jewish people; integrated the Zionist political goal into its colonial policy and post-war plans; and relegated Palestine’s non-Jews, then 90 per cent of the population, to mere religious communities.

The short text, just 67 words, had a far-reaching impact. The League of Nati

"To Fisk," in the sardonic definition of the blogosphere's media watchdogs, means to demolish tendentious views masquerading as fact—a very backhanded compliment to the British journalist whose remarkable reporting from the middle east has attracted admiration and rage in near equal measure for close to 30 years.

Based in Beirut since 1976, Robert Fisk's mission has been, in his own words, to chronicle "the betrayals, treachery and deceit of middle east history"—most of those carried out by the Americans, British and French. He takes his book's title from the medal awarded to his father for his part in the "Great War for Civilisation." The peace treaties that ended that war, the Balfour declaration and the secret agreements dividing up the Ottoman empire drew the borders of much of the modern middle east—Iraq, with its Shia, Kurds and Sunnis, carved out of Mesopotamia; Christian-dominated Lebanon out of Greater Syria; a Jewish "national home" promised in Arab-majority Palestine. Fisk, says the book's publicity handout, "has spent his entire career watching people within these borders die." This 1,366-page magnum opus of his writing is certainly full of furious, vivid and highly personalised writing.

Fisk's wars have been waged on very different terrain from his father's Somme, but he has remained a very English chap who likes steam engines, acts the "outraged Brit" with uncooperative foreigners and carries the spirit of the trenches far beyond the western front: the Iranian Basij are compared to Wilfred Owen's doomed youth, the tulips of Khomeini's martyrs to the poppies of Flanders fields. His jihad is written by Laurence Binyon.

It was in 1980 that I first read Fisk's riveting account of riding shotgun with a Kalashnikov on a Soviet convoy down the Hindu Kush—how often does one journalist remember another's story for so long? It is still superb—and all the better for having placed himself at th