HHhH

By Laurent Binet, 2013

I got tired of this novel quite quickly. It is potentially a thrilling historical novel, with fascinating characters and extreme actions at the heart of a critical point in 20^th century history. Yet the author deliberately makes his story hard to read.

I had heard of Reinhardt Heydrich as an architect of the “final solution” to murder the Jewish population of Germany and its wartime territories. In this story, he comes across as a charismatic, ambitious overachiever who lies, manipulates and kills people who get in his way. In spite of an inauspicious early life, he quickly rises to the top ranks of the SS, and consolidates power by sucking up to Heinrich Himmler and eliminating opposition. In this telling, he is responsible for planning and executing the “night of the long knives,” when the Nazi party leadership killed their opposition within the party. He is appointed administrator of Czechoslovakia after Germany occupies the country in 1939.

The exiled Czechoslovak government in London decides to kill Heydrich, and sends a two-person team – one Czech and one Slovak – to work with the underground on an assassination plot. Through several mishaps, they carry out the plot, escape, are betrayed and fight a heroic standoff against hoards of the German Army. This would be an exciting thriller, and Binet points out that aspects of the story have been highlighted in several movies and novels.

Yet Binet deliberately breaks up the storyline with frequent comments about his process, historical writing and readers’ expectations. Sometimes he intrudes to say this is not the romanticized way most writers would present it, but it is the historical fact. Other times, he stops to say that he has just made up a section to make the story more engaging. Sometimes he talks about his sources and how unreliable they are.

All of this seems to be intended to focus the reader’s attention on the constructed nature of the narrative. As he points out, writers use a variety of techniques to make their story more interesting, to fill in missing details, to persuade the reader to accept their version of the story. This critical perspective is important, especially for historical writing where there is a temptation to accept what the author gives us without being conscious of the fact that it is one person’s reconstruction from a selection of the available bits of information. The first few times Binet broke in to shift the focus to the meta-picture, I was intrigued. After Binet had made the point several times, in a variety of different ways, I began to think, okay, we get the point. Half way through the book, I felt it had reached the point of irritating overkill.

There are many interesting historical notes. Binet shows the lies and phoney justifications behind Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia, and the futile choices that were left to the weak Czech government facing an overwhelmingly powerful opponent. These seem to have a direct parallel in the Russian, Israeli and even American military aggression of today, in which lies are used as a transparent excuse for the exercise of military power. Binet describes the Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czech territories as a model camp intended to address concerns of Germans about stories they are hearing about the treatment of Jewish prisoners. I’d heard of Theresienstadt as a model for international observers, but had not thought of it as a way to respond to internal dissent.

However, the nature of the story calls even these details into question. Since Binet apparently wants readers to question historical accounts, we have to say that they are interesting points for consideration, subject to further examination. Who are we to believe? Certainly not a novel-writer who deliberately calls his own sources and observations into question. This makes the whole book more than a little frustrating, which I suppose is the point. Truth is not objective, it’s something we have to weigh and balance. This is a valid message, and perhaps there is value in making it in the form of a novel. But it does not make an enjoyable read.

The Hundred Years War on Palestine

By Rashid Khalidi, 2021

This is the first history of Palestine that I have read from the Palestinian perspective. It persuasively undercuts the dominant Anglo-American ideology of Israel as a besieged rampart in a hostile land. Instead, it lays out an argument about the history of Israel as a European colonial settler project to control the region and deliberately suppress the history of the indigenous people of Palestine.

Khalidi writes with authority as a historian who, with his family members, has lived through the history and taken part in policy making about Palestine. He makes his arguments with reference to the key documents of the history, but the most memorable points are from his family’s life. His grandfather’s letters explaining that the land had been occupied for generations and his father’s advice to committees of the United Nations proved ineffective. His own stories of escaping Israeli bombardment in Beirut and deliberate massacre in Lebanese refugee camps make those political positions clear.

He also describes the defeats and the failures of the Palestinian leadership, overwhelmed by superior military power and repression in the “Arab Revolt” of 1937 to ’39 and again after 1948. The increasing isolation and weakness of the leadership, shut out of negotiations by colonialist powers, led to the radical street revolts in the 1950s and later the first and second Intifadas. With the leadership excluded, it’s not a surprise that Palestinians would take more hands-on, violent, action. What is more surprising is that these actions drew attention to the repression and led to increasing support for Palestinian people. The increasingly violent repression by the Israeli state, both in the Palestinian lands and in neighbouring territories, has only increased knowledge and sympathy for the Palestinian movement. Given this response, it is not a surprise that the Palestinian resistance would take more extreme actions, even knowing that intense repression would follow. Whether this is the strategy of Hamas in its October 7 attacks is not known – my first thought on hearing of it was, “What are they thinking? Don’t they know what this will cost?” – but the history can easily lead toward more violence.

While Andreas Malm in The Destruction of Palestine takes the position that the destruction of the imperialist Israeli state is necessary for a just resolution in the region, Khalidi takes a more nuanced view. “There are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, not withstanding the crucial historical differences between the two.” He thinks the positions of both Hamas and Fatah have been less successful than BDS and the student-lead oppositions and that a new long-term strategy should be based on education of US and other publics to oppose colonialism and inequality, and on build on Arab popular support instead of relying on compromised Arab governments.

Interestingly, Khalidi agrees with Malm that the root of the issue is not Zionist distortion of Anglo-American politics, but rather the self-interest of Britain and the USA. Both countries pursue their own interests when they occasionally conflict with Israeli desires. (Trump may be an exception, because his own self-interest is more prominent to him than the state’s self-interest.)

Khalidi’s position may be the more palatable, although I’m not sure it would be completely effective. Building support through education is essential, and the Arab street is likely more sympathetic than Arab governments. But forceful resistance – characterized as terrorism – is what brought about change in Algeria, Kenya, India, South Africa and other liberation movements. Colonialists do not readily give up what they control until it becomes too expensive to hold. (There are counter-examples – the Indigenous nations of Canada are slowly gaining economic and political power within a colonialist state through legal action, buttressed with occasional small-scale acts of resistance.)

Although the solution is not a clear or simple one, Khalidi’s book reveals a history of Palestine that helps understand a century of colonialism in the region and the impact of Zionist state-building and Anglo-American manipulation. It also offers a direction that is not based on more repression or violence.