Wright Is Wrong
The influential author Lawrence Wright gets the Camp David accords badly wrong in his book Thirteen Days in September.
Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David (New York: Knopf, 2014), 368 pp., $27.95.
I REMEMBER sitting on the carpet on the typist’s living-room floor in a London suburb collating, in stacks, the original and carbon copies of my PhD dissertation. The next day I was to deliver the copies to the Faculty of History in Cambridge. It was evening, November 19, 1977, and in the center of the TV screen, live, appeared Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, his arms raised and a big, perhaps nervous, smile across his face, white teeth glittering in the spotlight, as he emerged from the door of the Boeing that had flown him from Cairo to Tel Aviv. It was a historic moment, of course, but it was also surreal and magical; indeed, it was almost messianic, bearing with it a foretaste of peace and the promise of deliverance after decades of unremitting Arab-Israeli warfare.
Almost thirty years earlier, on May 15, 1948, Arab armies, including Egypt’s, had crossed the frontiers and invaded the territory of the State of Israel, established the day before. During the following decades, the Arab states maintained a comprehensive boycott of Israel, and in effect waged a low-key guerrilla war along its frontiers. Periodically, Egypt and Israel met in full-scale conventional battle, and no Arab leader openly met or spoke with an Israeli. Indeed, Arab leaders refrained from even uttering the taboo name “yisraeel” (Israel).
The idea that an Arab head of state—and especially the head of the Arab world’s most important state, Egypt, which had traumatized Israel four years earlier when its army had lunged across the Suez Canal into the Israeli-held Sinai—would fly to Israel and shake the hands of Israel’s recently installed right-wing prime minister, Menachem Begin, and Ariel Sharon, the general who had led the Israeli countercharge across the canal in October 1973, was simply inconceivable.
Yet, there I was, along with probably 99 percent of Israelis, at home and abroad, staring at the TV screen, mouth agape. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised. After all, it was Egypt in February 1949 that was the first among the Arab states to reach an armistice agreement with Israel, ending its participation in the 1948 war; Lebanon, Jordan and Syria rapidly followed. And in the early 1970s, Sadat had secretly and repeatedly informed Israel, under Prime Minister Golda Meir, that he was interested in reaching an interim agreement or a nonbelligerency agreement or even full peace—it was never really clear which—with the Jewish state. But Meir and her senior ministers didn’t believe that he was sincere or thought the price he was asking was too high, or both, and nothing came of these overtures, and so we got the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Still, Sadat’s appearance on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport four years later was little short of astonishing; nothing that followed could be anything but anticlimactic. Now we have Lawrence Wright’s description of the first major anticlimax, the Camp David conference of September 1978, when, during thirteen days of often-bitter negotiations between Begin, Sadat and the mediating U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, the three leaders hammered out the framework of an accord that would result in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, signed by the same threesome on the White House lawn on March 26, 1979.
Let it be quickly said that perhaps no less remarkable than the signing of that treaty is the fact that the peace it delivered has held ever since. In 1979, many—Israelis and others—predicted that it would not last, that the Egyptians were insincere, that Sadat’s successors would not honor his signature and that Arab-Israeli warfare elsewhere in the Middle East would inevitably suck in the Egyptians. They were wrong.
The accord remains one of the few stable fixtures in a region that has known nothing but turmoil and wars (and, most recently, revolutions and civil war) during the past three and a half decades. The peace survived Sadat’s assassination by Islamist fanatics, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the first Gulf War and Iraq’s missile assault on Israel, the first and second Palestinian intifadas against Israel, and even the year or two of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt. True, the peace between Egypt and Israel never evolved into a warm one. There is almost no trade between the two countries, Egyptians are not allowed by their government to visit Israel (though many Israelis have toured Egypt), and the Egyptian education system, media and professional associations (doctors, lawyers, artists) have remained implacably hostile toward the Jewish state. But even the Islamist president Mohamed Morsi didn’t tear up the treaty, tacitly acknowledging that the peace served Egypt’s national interests, bringing in American largesse and freeing the country from the constant expenditure of blood and treasure that the fight for Palestine, or the Palestinians, has entailed since 1948.
WRIGHT, WHO previously published a marvelous study about Al Qaeda and the lead-up to 9/11, The Looming Tower, has now written a workmanlike history of Camp David, devoting a chapter to each of the thirteen days of the talks. Most of the chapters also contain “flashbacks,” in which Wright traces a variety of historical themes pertaining, in some way, to what happened at Camp David—including the course of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; Carter’s, Begin’s and Sadat’s political biographies; and even a retelling of the biblical stories of the exodus from Egypt and Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. Taken together, the “flashbacks” provide a sort of thumbnail history of the whole conflict.
His account is based almost exclusively on memoirs and secondary works, with a sprinkling of interviews with participants, including Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Walter Mondale, Gerald Rafshoon (Carter’s press adviser) and Yehiel Kadishai (a Begin aide). Wright has not tapped any archive or collection of private political papers, which, in terms of proper historiography, necessarily renders the book an interim assessment at best, and he doesn’t add much of real substance above and beyond what William Quandt presented in his 1986 work Camp David, except in terms of anecdote.
Some of the anecdotes Wright has mobilized from memoirs and interviews are eye-opening and historically significant. He certainly adds to our understanding of the psychological dimensions of what transpired. One of the more moving episodes he describes—the summiteers’ excursion to Gettysburg, on the sixth day of the conference—probably had a real impact on Begin. One of Carter’s great-grandfathers had fought there, and the president “emotionally” related the story of the Confederate failure and what had followed—the devastation and defeat of the South—to his guests. When Carter got to Lincoln’s famous address, Begin, in a Polish accent, suddenly chimed in, and recited by heart the classic 272-word speech. Rosalynn told Wright that perhaps, for Begin, that was “a turning point,” when he realized how beneficial peace might be for Israel.
In another luminous anecdote, Wright relates that on the final day, at a moment when it appeared that an argument over an American side letter to the Egyptians on the issue of Jerusalem had annoyed Begin and was about to scuttle the summit, Carter signed a bunch of photos of the three summiteers “with love” and inscribed each with the name of one of Begin’s grandchildren. Begin had merely asked Carter to sign and give him some photographs. A depressed Carter walked over to Begin’s cabin to hand them over. Wright recounts:
“Mr. Prime Minister, I brought you the photographs you asked for,” Carter said.
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
Carter handed Begin the photographs and the prime minister coolly thanked him again. Then he noticed that Carter had signed the top photograph “To Ayelet.”
Begin froze. He looked at the next one. “To Osnat.” His lip trembled and tears suddenly sprang into his eyes. . . . Carter also broke down. “I wanted to be able to say ‘This is when your grandfather and I brought peace to the Middle East,’” he said.
Begin relented and agreed to a slightly modified side letter on Jerusalem. The talks were saved.
But the days leading up to that moment were a difficult, almost Sisyphean haul. Wright suggests, perhaps correctly, that Camp David was launched because of a “misunderstanding by a madman.” The madman in question was Hassan Tohamy, the Egyptian deputy prime minister and an old intelligence hand (in the 1950s, he had orchestrated anti-Israeli terrorist attacks). In September 1977, Sadat had sent him on a secret mission—to personally sound out, in Morocco, Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan about what Israel was willing to give up for peace with Egypt. According to conventional wisdom, Dayan assured Tohamy—who by most accounts was quite crazy (Tohamy, a Sufi mystic, maintained that he could stop his heartbeat at will and that he was in conversation with God and dead saints)—that Israel was willing to give back all of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, in exchange for peace. But according to Wright, Tohamy said to Sadat that Dayan had told him that Begin was willing “to withdraw from [all] the occupied territories,” not just from Sinai. This was certainly untrue and there is no way that Dayan would have said such a thing; indeed, it is by no means certain that Dayan even explicitly assured Tohamy that Israel was willing to concede the whole of Sinai.
THE TALKS ground on from point to point like a drawn-out Chinese torture, the three delegations feeling trapped and claustrophobic in the remote presidential retreat. Bad personal chemistry also came into play. Carter liked, or even loved, Sadat from the get-go. (We don’t really know what Sadat thought of Carter.) But neither Carter nor Sadat took to Begin. After their first meeting, Carter described Begin as seeming “rigid and unimaginative, parsing every syllable; he was entrenched in the past.” At one point, Carter even described him as a “psycho.” Begin was certainly pedantic, legalistic, distant and haunted by the Holocaust. Sadat was something of the opposite. Warm and visionary, he looked at the big picture, a man of grand gestures. Carter and Sadat shared religious piety, but Carter was also an engineer and naval officer by training; he was interested in the nuts and bolts of things. Given Carter’s past support for Palestinian self-determination, Begin suspected Carter of harboring anti-Israeli, if not downright anti-Semitic, sentiments. Begin’s past, among hostile Poles and Russians during the Holocaust, anti-Semitic British officers during the mandate, and inimical Arabs through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, left him with a distrust of all Gentiles.
Begin, at least at first, was unpersuaded about the genuineness of Sadat’s quest for peace. After all, Sadat had launched the Yom Kippur War and, in his younger days, during World War II, had collaborated with the Nazis. Like many Muslims, he had an anti-Semitic streak (“I knew that a Jew would do anything if the price was right,” Sadat once said). Ezer Weizman, a Begin aide and the only Israeli Sadat bonded with before and during Camp David, described, probably quite fairly, the difference between Sadat and Begin: “Both desired peace. But whereas Sadat wanted to take it by storm . . . Begin preferred to creep forward inch by inch. He took the dream of peace and ground it down into the fine, dry powder of details, legal clauses, and quotes from international law.” Weizman and Begin fell out at Camp David and after, and Weizman resigned from the cabinet in 1980 after concluding that Begin was not serious about negotiating with the Palestinians and had no intention to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza.
Sadat came to Jerusalem, and then to Camp David, interested in reaching an Egyptian-Israeli peace. But he initially insisted that it be contingent on arriving at a solution to the Palestinian problem—meaning Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian-populated territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This linkage was rejected by Begin, who wanted to retain for Israel the West Bank or, in his terminology, Judea and Samaria. Eventually, Begin, supported by Carter, wore Sadat down. Two agreements were eventually reached, one relating to Egypt and Sinai, and the other to the Palestinian territories, but no real linkage or contingency was established.
Thus, Sadat within months signed a separate, bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty even though no substantive progress was achieved on the Palestinian track. Begin ultimately got what he wanted, and Sadat, for the (brief) remainder of his life, was reviled by the Palestinians and many other Arabs as having sold the Palestinians down the river. Sadat countered that the Egyptians had expended enough blood and treasure on behalf of the Palestinians and it was high time the Egyptians looked to their own welfare and interests. Sadat probably had, in the back of his mind, not merely the costs of the past and ongoing Egyptian-Israeli struggle but also the possible ultimate devastation of Egypt by Israel’s nuclear arsenal. This thought may have predominated in Sadat’s calculus when he decided to pursue his dramatic peace initiative.
Carter, for his part, was particularly focused on solving the Palestinian problem. But during Camp David he bowed, at least for the moment, to Begin’s resolve not to establish a Palestinian state and made do with what he regarded as a lesser achievement, Israeli-Egyptian peace. There is a surfeit of ironies here, not least of which is that Carter engineered a lasting peace between two powerful enemies and never received the Nobel Peace Prize he most certainly deserved (alongside Begin and Sadat, who both received one) while one of his Democratic successors, Barack Obama, was awarded a Nobel for achieving absolutely nothing, a state of affairs that has not noticeably altered since he received the honor, at least when it comes to the Middle East. (Shouldn’t Nobel committees have the right—duty?—to demand the return of prizes when their recipients renege or fail to deliver? The late Yasir Arafat also comes to mind in this context.)
APART FROM the linkage issue, the main point of contention during the protracted negotiation was Israel’s initial insistence on retaining its settlement complex, around and including the town of Yamit, in the northeastern corner of the Sinai Peninsula. Begin had earlier told reporters that he himself intended to settle in Yamit when he went into retirement. But more importantly, the Israelis feared, or argued, that the Israeli-Egyptian peace might at some point break down and that Egypt might once again send its armored divisions into Sinai. In that event, the Yamit bloc would serve as a trip wire and initial obstacle to a possible Egyptian lunge at Israel’s heartland, and at least slow it down. The Israelis also feared that the precedent of uprooting the Rafah Approaches settlement bloc, as it was called, would possibly be perceived as a sign of a readiness to uproot its settlements in the Palestinian territories. (In general, Zionist leaders since the 1920s have been extremely resistant to the idea of uprooting Jewish settlements, as it would lead to loss of territory and project infirmity of purpose.)
But Sadat flatly refused to countenance the continued presence on Egyptian soil of Israeli settlers; they were both the reality and symbol of Israeli expansionism, and leaving them in place would complicate any effort to remove the more substantial settlement enterprise in the West Bank. Moreover, the Yamit settlements were seen as a delimitation of Egyptian sovereignty and, as such, as a slight to Egyptian honor, and almost certainly would give rise to future imbroglios. What if Arab terrorists took Yamit settlers hostage? How would Israel react and how would this affect Israeli-Egyptian relations?
For days, Sadat and Begin, to Carter’s frustration, haggled over the Sinai settlements. In the end, Begin backed down—partly because he feared that he would be blamed for the collapse of the talks and the damage it would inflict on U.S.-Israeli relations, and partly, it seems, because he received the assent of Ariel Sharon, his agriculture minister, who was also the patron of the settlement venture and whom Begin greatly admired as a military figure. If Sharon believed that Israel could and should give up the settlements—that this was an acceptable price to achieve peace—then he, Begin, could live with it. But the main reason Begin backed down, of course, was because he wanted peace with Egypt and understood its benefits for Israel.
Begin withdrew his veto and agreed to bring the matter to a vote in the cabinet and in the Knesset—and if these bodies approved the deal, including the removal of the settlements, he would bow to the people’s will. He also agreed not to impose party discipline on the matter, allowing his fellow party members to vote their conscience.
At the end of the thirteen days, the three summiteers were exhausted. “There was no sense of jubilation,” as Wright puts it. On September 17, 1978, the three leaders signed two agreements in the White House. The first, “Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” dealt with the future of the Palestinians and the West Bank and Gaza; the second, “Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel,” dealt with future relations between Egypt and Israel.
The first accord provided for “transitional arrangements” for the West Bank and Gaza, lasting no more than five years, during which time the inhabitants would enjoy “full autonomy” under “a self-governing [freely elected] authority” or “administrative council.” Israeli troops would be redeployed out of parts of these territories, and a “local police force” would be established. Negotiations between representatives of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza on the “final status” of the territories would begin no later than three years after the start of the transitional period. The negotiations were to “recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements.”
This accord can be said to have led nowhere, as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the umbrella organization of the Palestinian national movement, immediately spurned it. The PLO rejected Israel’s existence and legitimacy, claimed all of historic Palestine and rejected all thought of a territorial compromise based on a two-state solution. (Had Yasir Arafat accepted the Camp David accords, and then built on the “autonomy” that was being offered, the futures of Israel and Palestine might well have been quite different. And it is highly likely that Begin was willing at Camp David to offer the Palestinians “autonomy” in the belief that the PLO would, indeed, reject the deal.) But a decade and a half later, the Israeli government under Yitzhak Rabin, one of Begin’s successors as prime minister, and the PLO under Arafat agreed in the Oslo accords to “autonomy” for the bulk of the Palestinian territories. And, between 1993 and 1995, Israel withdrew from the core areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and an “autonomous” Palestinian National Authority took control, “police force” and all. So it can be said that the seed planted by Begin, Sadat and Carter at Camp David did in the end bear some fruit.
The Israeli-Egyptian bilateral framework agreement laid out the principles that would govern the eventual Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Egypt would get all of Sinai, up to the international frontier (the line demarcated in 1906 by representatives of Britain, which then ruled Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Palestine). The accord called for the establishment of full diplomatic, cultural and commercial relations. Israeli ships would have the right of passage through the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba. Egyptian forces in Sinai were to be severely limited, and Israeli forces along the Negev border would be limited to four battalions. UN forces would be stationed between the two sides on the Egyptian side of the border. Israel would withdraw to a north-south line running down the middle of the Sinai Peninsula within three to nine months of the signing of the peace treaty. It was agreed that the treaty would be signed within three months.
During the signing ceremony, Begin thanked Carter profusely and said: “I think he worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.” Sadat may not have enjoyed this comparison, as, being a proud Egyptian, he found the idea that Jewish slaves had built the pyramids offensive.
WRIGHT’S BOOK is marred by a profusion of factual errors not common in good history, even in good journalistic history. Many of the mistakes relate to the 1948 war. Wright wrongly assumes that the 1948 war began with the Arab regular armies’ invasion of Palestine on May 15, 1948; in fact, it began on November 30, 1947, when Palestinian irregulars opened hostilities by ambushing two Jewish buses near Petah Tikva. Wright completely omits mention of the first half of the 1948 war, between November 1947 and May 1948, when Palestinian militiamen battled Jewish militiamen for control. He also says that the Lebanese Army was among the Arab armies invading Palestine on May 15. It wasn’t. He seems to assume that Arab anti-Semitism, rampant in the Arab world and in today’s Europe, began with the traumatic events of 1947–1949. But anti-Semitism was rife in Arab societies long before 1948 (as in the pogroms around the Arab lands in the Middle Ages and in modern times—in Baghdad in 1828 and 1941, and in Fez in 1912, for example).
Likewise, Wright’s description of what happened in the Arab town of Lydda on July 11–13, 1948—which he partly bases on my own research but also on Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land—is wrongheaded. There was no “systematic massacre of hundreds” of townspeople (even Shavit, in his tendentious account, doesn’t claim that)—and it is not true that “many” of the twenty to thirty thousand Arabs who trekked out of Lydda died on the march eastward (one Arab writer later wrote of “four hundred,” but a more reasonable estimate would probably put the figure at a dozen or several dozen). Moreover, Israel did not annex “eight thousand square miles” in 1948. The Jews were awarded six thousand square miles of Palestine for their state in the UN partition resolution of November 1947, and conquered and “annexed” another two thousand square miles in 1948–1949.
Wright also tells us that “most of the [1948 war’s] Palestinian refugees fled into neighboring Arab countries.” Actually, only one-third of them fled to neighboring countries—Jordan, Syria and Lebanon—while two-thirds were displaced from one part of mandatory Palestine to another (from Jaffa and Haifa to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, for instance). I also can’t agree with Wright’s assertion that toward the end of the 1948 war, “forced expulsion had become the policy of the new Jewish state.” Had this been true, there would be no explaining why the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) left some thirty to fifty thousand Arab inhabitants in central-upper Galilee during Operation Hiram in October that year.
There are also many errors unrelated to 1948. The Germans conquered Brisk (Brest-Litovsk), Begin’s hometown, in June 1941 (not “on July 22, 1942”). It’s not true that in the summer of 1942, Rommel had “bottled up the British Eighth Army” at El Alamein. The Arab revolt began in 1936, not in “1934.” It was not the “ultra-Orthodox” but the Orthodox Jews who “spearheaded the settler movement” in the West Bank beginning in 1967. And the turning point of the 1973 Yom Kippur War was not on October 18, when the Israelis set up a pontoon bridge across the Suez Canal, but on the night of October 15–16, when lead elements of Sharon’s division crossed the canal and took up positions on the west bank, signaling the successful breach of the Egyptian lines and the crossing by Israel of the canal. This was to lead to the complete encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army, stranded east of the canal, and to Egypt’s desperate plea for a cease-fire.
Wright does his readers a major service by providing verbatim Dayan’s famous eulogy over the grave of Roy Rothberg in Nahal Oz, next to the Gaza Strip, in 1956. Rothberg was shot dead by Arab infiltrators in the kibbutz fields. But Wright writes that Dayan had met Rothberg “during the siege of Gaza.” What siege? There was none; Gaza was then under Egyptian rule. The only “siege” of Gaza I know of is the one imposed by Israel on the Strip since 2007, when Hamas took over the Strip from the Palestinian Authority in an armed coup. And the kibbutz didn’t “commandeer” the Arabs’ fields—the fields were part of the territory conquered by Israel in the 1948 war, a war that the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab armies had launched.
BEYOND THESE factual errors, I found Wright’s book rather slanted. He has every right to prefer Sadat and Carter to Menachem Begin. Many, if not most, Israelis found Begin’s expansionist policies vis-à-vis the Palestinian territories and his war in Lebanon in 1982 abhorrent. Many also found him personally irritating and unlikable—though his reputation has definitely improved, in Israeli minds, since his death in 1992. This is partly due to the country’s steady drift to the right. But it also owes much to Begin’s personal honesty and reverence for the law.
But Wright’s tendentiousness goes way beyond his attitude toward the Israeli prime minister. In a way, he lets the cat out of the bag when he writes, regarding the Lebanese Christian Phalangist massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut in September 1982, that “the Israelis had a clear view of the slaughter from the rooftop of the Kuwaiti embassy, which they occupied. To assist the Phalangists in their work, the Israelis provided illuminating flares at night.” The implication is that the IDF deliberately aided the killers. This is essentially untrue. Israel’s subsequent Kahan Commission of Inquiry found fault in Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s conduct and in that of several senior generals (all of whom were fired)—but ruled that the army had been unaware that a massacre was taking place and that when awareness finally dawned, it intervened and stopped it. None of this is in Wright’s book.
Wright’s detailed description of the Israelite conquest of Canaan circa 1200 BC—which he bases solely on the Bible—is in a similar vein. To begin with, he calls Palestine a “vast tract” of land. “Vast”? By comparison, for example, with the lands that the Arabs rule, from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf? He speaks of “the Israeli horde” that crossed the Jordan River. (I know that “horde” can mean a wandering mass of tribesmen; but in current usage it has a definitely savage connotation.) He tells of Joshua’s conquests and attendant massacres of Canaanite tribesmen—which all sounds very immoral in 2014 but was quite the norm in the thirteenth century BC. Wright seems to be condemning the Israelites of three thousand years ago by the light of twenty-first-century morality. And he directly connects 1200 BC to 1978—or 2014—by writing:
For many believers, the account of the annihilation of the peoples of Canaan is one of the most troubling stories in the Bible. For Begin, however, Joshua was the original incarnation of the Fighting Jew. Joshua’s mission was to carve out a living space [a reference to the Nazi quest for Lebensraum?] for the Israelites, much as modern Jews sought to do so in the Arab world. . . . Begin certainly wasn’t the only Israeli leader who believed that spilling blood was a necessary ritual for the unification and spiritual restoration of the Jewish people, and that enacting revenge on the Arabs was a way of healing the traumas of the Jewish experience in Europe and elsewhere.
Curiously, Wright then goes on to say that much of the biblical story that he has just related is actually untrue or of doubtful veracity, given recent archaeological discoveries—that the town of Ai was not conquered by Joshua but was destroyed a thousand years earlier, for example, or that Jericho was not a fortified town. Nonetheless, Wright is telling his readers that Zionism—he mentions Begin, Dayan and David Ben Gurion in the same bloodlusting breath—is a conquering, vengeful ideology.
Wright also attacks Israel and the Zionist narrative from another angle, this one at least equally propagandistic. He tells us, buying into the Arab narrative about Palestinian origins, that “most scholars” believe “the Philistines . . . to be the ancestors of today’s Palestinians.” This is sheer nonsense. It is true that there is a linguistic nexus: the Latin name “Palestine” (Palestina) derives from the Latin “Philistia”—or the land of the Philistines, roughly the coastal area between Gaza and Jaffa. The Arabs later adopted the Roman-Christian name “Palestine” to designate the whole territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and, still later, the name “Palestinians” for those Arabs who lived in the area.
But, in terms of political, cultural and religious substance, there is no connection between the Philistines, the mid-second-millennium-BC sea people from the Greek islands, and today’s Arabs of Palestine. They do not share a common or even proximate language, religion, culture or historical consciousness. In fact, the Philistines simply dropped out of history sometime after the start of the first millennium BC and vanished. The Arabs, who were Muslims, and came from the Hejaz, in Arabia, entered the world stage and conquered Palestine in the seventh century AD.
Today’s Palestinians are descendants of those Muslim conquerors, some of whom settled in Palestine and intermingled with and married and converted, forcibly or otherwise, the local population, which was largely Christian-Byzantine and Jewish at the time. That local population, no doubt, over the previous nineteen centuries had acquired genes from the pre-Joshua Canaanite tribes, with whom the Israelites had intermingled and married, and from the various other conquerors who had washed over the country during those centuries—Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and so on. After the seventh century AD, Palestine’s Arabs also acquired genes from the European Crusaders who ruled Palestine in the Middle Ages and from the Mamluks, Turks and Britons who came afterwards. Similarly, the Jews who lived in Palestine throughout the past three thousand years acquired genes from all they came into contact with, including Arabs. But to say that the Palestinians are descendants of the Philistines is rank nonsense.
At one point, Wright even calls Procopius a “sixth-century Palestinian historian.” Well, it is true that Procopius, a Christian, was a native of Caesarea, which was located in the Byzantine province of Palestina Prima. But if “Palestinian” today means anything, it means an Arab, a speaker of Arabic, usually a Muslim, who regards himself as part of the greater Arab nation and the Islamic ummah. So defined, Procopius definitely wasn’t a “Palestinian.” To say so is about as true as calling Herod the Great a “Palestinian King” or Jesus a “Palestinian Prophet (or Son of God).” Perhaps Israelis should start calling Procopius one of the first “Israeli historians.” The Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian school systems may twist history and definitions to burnish their claims to Palestine, but there is no reason an intelligent Western intellectual should join in.
Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press, 2008).