Book review: Israel’s Forever War: Israel, Palestine and the Last Hopes for Peace by Paul Moorcraft

Jon Gower

It is testament to the authority, perspicacity and even-handedness of the historian Paul Moorcraft that he has written a book that has been spectacularly overtaken by events which still feels like essential reading.

If you want to understand the war between Israel and Hamas and trace the twisting roots of the conflict across troubled decades in the Middle East you can do no better than read Moorcraft’s latest tome, which takes its place alongside over fifty books the Penarth-based foreign policy expert has written on security issues.

Dresden

Israel’s Forever War pivots on the attack on Israel by Hamas on 7th October 2023 which was the bloodiest day for the Jewish people ‘since the Nazi abominations of the Shoah, the Hebrew name for the Holocaust’ and about 1,143 Israelis were killed and over 3,400 wounded. It charts the scale and consequences of the subsequent Israeli military response for civilians in Gaza where ‘By mid-December 2023, conventional bombs equivalent to two Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs had been dropped’ which took Gaza back to the Stone Age according to one aid worker and even Israeli officials made ‘comparisons with the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War.’

Genocide

The attendant ground war, ‘Operation Swords of Iron’ saw 300,000 Israeli Defence Force reservists being summoned to fight in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel’s northern border as they sought to rescue Israeli hostages and, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhyahu’s words to destroy Hamas as well as Islamic Jihad. The means of achieving this would lead to multiple accusations of war crimes and of genocide, the latter a word with the deepest resonance in Israel which is still home to thousands of survivors of the Nazi holocaust.

The book traces the origins of Hamas alongside the domestic political history of Israel which had brought the region to this bloody tipping point, taking account of all the outside forces and countries which influence and interfere in the fractious, volatile politics of the region.  ‘Palestine attracts all the pathos, but the centre of the war for Israel and the US is Iran’ suggests Moorcraft in a chapter whose title suggests Iran is the centre of the Hamas-Israel war’s gravity.

But there are so many other players, too, from big players such as the United States, which sends at least $ 3.8 billion to the Jewish state each year, mainly in military aid and Russia, which shored up the bloody Syrian regime until the toppling of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

Then there are the other countries of the Middle East which have their own various and often diverging interests such as Oman, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.

Insurgency

The last of these, sharing a land border with Israel, is one of countries whose stability is most intimately woven into the conflict, not least because it is home to Hezbollah, ‘Iran’s expeditionary force’ which blends ‘the sophistication and weaponry of a formal army with the near invisibility of a hit-and-run insurgency.’ In discussing both Hamas and Hezbollah it is telling that Professor Moorcraft suggests that ‘Destroying a popular guerrilla movement completely is almost impossible. The only modern example is the destruction of the Tamil Tigers.’

Moorcraft’s book visits other areas full of conflict and unrest such as the West Bank, supposed to be ‘the cornerstone of the new Palestinian state. Instead, the illegal settlements, giant partition wall and endless IDF roadblocks have forged a patchwork quilt of mini-Bantustans, toxic cantons of angry Jews and despairing Palestinians.’ He writes about the war at sea, an aspect sometimes forgotten about as well as such angles as the propaganda war and the war between Israel and Iraq which has technically been going on since 1948.

Skunk

Moorcraft also charts the military aspects of the conflict, from the use of relatively new weapons such as drones and skunk – a crowd controlling liquid which smells appalling and can cause dizziness or skin irritation.  We also learn about ‘Britain’s Dirty and Secret War in Yemen’ as the author points out the hypocrisy of the UK Government in withdrawing licences for arms sales to Israel because of the number of civilian deaths in Gaza when they were directly involved in the ‘savage Saudi air campaign in Yemen that killed and displaced millions, creating a humanitarian disaster.’ So much blood, so many hands.

The story of the Israel-Gaza war is, of course also a search for solutions. The one most often cited is the two-state solution, which takes us back to the past and the days of the Oslo Accords, thirty years ago when the Americans first conjured it up. It remains, according to Moorcraft the only game in town, the alternative being permanent war.

Peace

Even during the days this reviewer has been reading about the ‘last hopes for peace’ U S President Donald Trump has followed up the ceasefire in Gaza with the diplomacy-shattering suggestion that countries such as Egypt and Jordan should take in Gazan refugees: ‘You’re talking about a million and a half people … we just clean out that whole thing, ’ that ‘whole thing’ being Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants. This has led to more unrest just as Benjamin Netanhyahu arrives in Washington for talks. Showing words matter a lot, a fact proved by Paul Moorcraft’s pellucidly written account of a very complicated war which has cost so very many lives.

Israel’s Forever War: Israel, Palestine and the Last Hopes for Peace by Paul Moorcraft is published by Biteback Publishing. It is available here and from all good bookshops.