The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, second edition by Avi Shlaim (review)

This is the second edition of a book published in 2000, one reviewed favorably at the time by this reviewer for the Britain-based Institute of Historical Research’s online Reviews in History. Avi Shlaim’s thesis, set out in the first edition, is that Israeli foreign policy after 1948 followed the “iron wall” thinking of the Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky from the 1920s, where an iron wall of absolute security and force was the prerequisite for any Jewish state before it embarked on negotiations with the Arabs. Crucially, for Jabotinsky, this was a two-stage process: first, security and strength, and then, political dialogue and settlement. For Shlaim, the first part of the iron wall determined the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict, with an aggressive Israel led by David Ben-Gurion provoking a succession of wars, preferring fighting to dialogue, torpedoing peace negotiations, and blind to the final political settlement stage of the iron wall.

This changed in the early 1990s with the ascent of Yitzhak Rabin as Israel’s prime minister, a former soldier and proponent of the iron wall who had made the mental leap to political dialogue, taking for the first time the road to peace with the Palestinians — positive-sum rather than zero-sum relations — and someone who was willing to trade land for a durable two-state peace. Shlaim’s original edition of the book ended just after Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by a Jewish extremist furious at the peace process, and the subsequent election of the rightist hard-liner Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996. Shlaim’s final chapter was entitled “back to the iron wall,” the window to peace having closed with Rabin’s death and with Israel back on the track of maximal security, “destined to live by the sword” (p. 595).

The text of the second edition up to Netanyahu taking power in 1996 varies from the first edition only in parts of chapter six on the effects of the Six Day War that absorb Avi Raz’s 2012 book The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War (pp. 271, 279–280, 283–284). Shlaim has also included some of the information from his 2007 biography of King Husayn, Lion of Jordan, for the new edition of Iron Wall. So why spend money on a second edition, especially when the original text is almost entirely the same as that in the first issue of the book? Readers will buy the updated edition for the substantial extra text — over 200 pages in five lengthy, discrete chapters plus an epilogue — covering the period after 1996 that takes the book (in the epilogue) up to 2013 and which reworks the Iron Wall from a political history to a book that is grounded in history while also being contemporary. More than this, the extra text sharpens and completes Shlaim’s original iron wall thesis. The new edition is tougher on Israel than the first version, more passionate in tone, pulls fewer punches, super-charging the original text, giving it added life and vigor: “Jabotinsky believed in peace through strength; Netanyahu was addicted to military domination . . . Jabotinsky saw Jewish military power as a means to an end; Netanyahu saw it sometimes as a means to achieving security and sometimes as an end in itself” (p. 627).

The second edition also closes off the unfinished business of the effects of Rabin’s murder, making it a more satisfying read, with the reader being able to chart Israel’s course after his death (sadly, back to the iron wall). Having seen the hope of Rabin’s political moves up to 1995, Shlaim is angry and saddened by the leaders who followed: Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and back to Netanyahu in 2009, whom Shlaim said had formed one of “the most aggressively right-wing, chauvinistic, and racist governments in Israel’s history . . . led by...