Reflection on A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 by Mark Kishlansky

Why did Parliament and King Charles I conflict in the English Civil War?

               Charles’ troubles with Parliament began with his father, James I, who was forced to call Parliament over his desperate finances, requesting more money so that he could enter into the conflict that would become known as the Thirty Years’ War. James inherited debt from Queen Elizabeth and did not do much to reduce it in his first years in office, spending without much control. At this point, Parliament was more of an advisory council of wealthy elites who met to give the king money when he asked for it in exchange for some concessions from him. The institution was established by the Magna Carta in 1215, which declared that no King would impose taxes without the advice of this new group. They rarely met. However, in 1621, they gave King James two subsidies (grants of money) and passed no bills, essentially giving him everything he wanted for nothing in return so that he could prosecute war with Spain. Instead, the King sought to arrange a marriage of his son, Charles, to a Spanish princess, which must have been quite the waffling to explain to Parliament.

               The real troubles began after James’ death in 1625. Parliament was to meet all four years from 1625-1628 due to the new King Charles I’s inherited debts and it became a magnet for grievances from all over the country. In 1628, Charles feared that holding another Parliament would cause the House of Commons to openly question his authority and so he dissolved Parliament. The members commanded the Speaker of Parliament to continue the session and the King’s representatives commanded him to end it as he wept in his chair. Eventually the session was ended and Charles would not dare to call Parliament for another eleven years. The fundamental weakness of the monarchy was its finances and the need to raise money somewhere. Bound by the Magna Carta to consult Parliament, they would have to call the body, which had now become more aggressive, demanding more concessions in return for their money.

               Charles I was forced to call Parliament in 1640 due to a Scottish invasion of England. After eleven years without Parliament, this one would sit for the rest of his life. He found that Parliament would not grant him his subsidy without first the presentation of grievances that had built up or over a decade. The old relationship was dead and now there was great distrust. This distrust would be a major element in the conflict between Parliament and the King. Eventually it led to Parliament (barely) passing a bill called the “Grand Remonstrance,” which was an angry resolution detailing all the failings of the king and successes of Parliament. Parliament demanded to approve the King’s counselors, reform religion, and oversee the military expedition to Ireland (which was now also in rebellion). Charles attempted to arrest Parliamentary leaders and entered Westminster Abbey himself (never before done by him) to do so. He found that they were hidden around the city and sensing the situation, fled London with his family. He and Parliament both decided to raise armies and war was begun.

Who was Oliver Cromwell and what makes him so special?

               As the war between Parliament and the King went on without a decisive battle, each side sieged and sacked the other’s cities. Parliament lost its leader, John Pym, to sickness in the winter of 1643-4. Finally, a decisive battle came at Marston Moor in July 1644 and for the first time, a Parliamentary cavalry force (led by a man named Oliver Cromwell) turned back a Royalist wing. This was decisive in weakening Royalist morale, winning the battle, and turning the tide of the war. Thanks in large part to Cromwell, who never lost a battle, Parliament was victorious in the war, though King Charles would flee to Scotland, where he thought he would be treated as a guest but was instead held for ransom as a hostage. He was sold back to Parliament but would escape to start a war again in 1648. In this Second Civil war, a crucial break occurred in which Parliamentarians’ hearts softened but the hearts of their generals, led by Cromwell, hardened towards the King. Parliament offered better and better deals to the King that he would not accept while the Army grew more and more indignant as they were the ones whose lives were sacrificed. Meanwhile, Charles I kept swinging between supreme confidence in his victory and a desire to become a martyr. A martyr he would become, and his head was separated from his body on January 30^th, 1649. While others demurred, Cromwell was the first man to sign the order.

               Cromwell ruled until his death in 1658 and was very effective as a ruler, maintaining order in the new Commonwealth, later the Protectorate. In essence, he was the result of a conflict in which neither Parliament nor the King came out on top, but rather the military that Parliament had created became a “monster” outside of Parliament’s control and took over the whole country. Cromwell was hardly a monster though and helped to restore and rebalance the Isles after an incredibly destructive war. Upon his death, Parliament would reconsider whether or not to reinstate the line of Kings. In the end they would bring in Charles II, son of Charles I, who had been in exile.

Why did Scotland and England unite in 1707 and not when James I, a Scotsman, became King of England approximately 100 years earlier?

               When James inherited the “three crowns” on England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1603, he declared himself the King of all three, but instability prevented him from integrating them all together. Each had different laws, customs and religions, and the English King (and his successors) would be too weak to bring them all together under one rule. The major obstacle to the union was religion, as English church and state became united during the 17^th century under Anglicanism, yet Scotland remained Presbyterian. However, the benefits of union were eventually seen to outweigh the costs.

               For England, it was important to remove the enemy from their backdoor. Scotland invaded England multiple times in the 17^th century and often allied with France against England. It was crucial to integrate this “frenemy.” For Scotland, the considerations were largely economic as England had much greater access to colonial markets and Scotland had just met with a tremendous failure in the “Darien Scheme” to control the Isthmus of Panama and therefore control trade between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It came to nothing when superior Spanish forces took back their land. With the economy wrecked, Scotland needed to be absorbed into Great Britain to save its financial situation.

What were the major changes to English and British government over the course of the book’s timetable?

               First off, the conflicts mentioned assured that Britain would never again have a Catholic monarch after the crypto-Catholic James II, who took orders from French king Louis XIV. IT was also assured that Parliament would meet annually instead of at the pleasure of the King, a serious erosion of kingly powers. There was also the creation of the national debt as a result of the wars of King William, which transformed military expenditure from a rare, extraordinary cost into a regular cost, central to the workings of the royal budget. Britain emerged from this maelstrom stronger than ever, with a more stable government based on sound finance rather than the whims of a king or queen. Thanks to a better foreign policy that came with William and Mary as well as Queen Anne, Britain obtained Gibraltar and other Mediterranean bases and strengthened their hold on North American colonies. The threat of invasion from Europe was passed and by the time the Hanoverian dynasty came to the throne, Great Britain was on the cusp of becoming a truly global power, stable and prosperous. As the author writes, “There could be no better measure of their accomplishments than the fact that eighteenth-century Frenchmen came to envy the achievements of seventeenth-century Britain.”

How did Britain transform from an absolute monarchy where Parliament rarely met to a constitutional monarchy where Parliament meets every year?

               Much of this transformation can be summed up by the role of the court, which at the start of the century merged both the King’s public and private interests, though by the end of the century was solely representative of the King’s private household. By the end of the century, these great influencers were in Parliament. It happened due to England’s increased role in European affairs, draining the royal treasury and forcing the king to bow to the people, as the French King Louis XVI would do at the end of the 18^th century. In sum, the king ran out of money and it allowed for the gentry and aristocracy to assert greater control over the nation as no new, stronger potentate emerged.

Conclusion

               The author writes that, “In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. Personal honour could not be detached from social standing, and social standing could not be confirmed without office.” It was this political system that failed, as it could not accommodate nor could it crush principled dissension. In the end, it was far better for England to end with the system, as it would stabilize the politics of the country until the modern day, some 400 years after the rule of James I.

               I really liked this book. It was reasonably short at just under 350 pages and covers everything I felt that was of substance, a very good introduction to the time period. I would maybe like to read a more intellectual history of the time if I decide to pursue the topic further, as the events described in the book were the backdrop to the treatises of thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Bacon.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed 80 percent of the old city. 13,000 buildings burnt along with 87 churches and four bridges, leaving 100,000 homeless and a cost of 10 million pounds to rebuild, eight times the annual revenue of the monarch.
• Some important differences between New England and Chesapeake colonies:
• In New England, there was little disease and infant mortality was lower and life expectancy higher than at any point before modern medicine. Twenty percent of the first generation of New Englanders lived to 80 years old.
• In the Chesapeake, swamps, a bad climate, and many diseases wreaked havoc on the population and two-thirds of those who arrived in Virginia between 1619 and 1622 were dead by 1623. More than three-quarters of the white men arriving in the Chesapeake were indentured servants, creating a huge gender imbalance.
• Between 1500 and 1600, London quintupled in size from just 40,000 people to over 200,000, tripling again in the next century to be over 600,000 by 1700. Dublin, on the other hand, reached 10,000 in the middle of the 17^th century and Edinburgh, the second largest urban center in Britain in 1700, had just 40,000 people, ten times smaller than London at the same time and the same size as London was 200 years earlier.
• By the mid-17^th century, cloth accounted for 80 percent of goods exported.
• Oliver Cromwell allowed the Jews to return to England, though he did so hoping that their eventual conversion to Christianity would hasten the second coming. He also banned Christmas because it was too “pagan” for his liking.
• Queen Anne had 17 pregnancies and all 17 would die within days, weeks, months or a few years after.

Reflection on Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time by Ian O’Connor

              You could sum up Bill Belichick in the word determination. I’ve read biographies of Julius Caesar, Saddam Hussein, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson and none of them show the determination I read about in Bill Belichick. The book is filled with stories about people arriving and seeing his car there at dawn and leaving, with his car still there, at midnight. This is a guy who loves and obsesses over one thing above all else and has catapulted himself to the top of his world: professional football coaching.

What are Bill Belichick’s key qualities that make him such a great coach?

               I identified three qualities that are crucial to Belichick’s success. The first is his determination and willingness to work harder. With absolute dedication to football, Belichick is famous for being the first in the building and the last out. This is a guy who will just outwork you straight up every single time. The second is his curiosity. An ideal conversation for the coach would feature very few words from him, maybe just a few questions, and a ton of speaking from the other. In conversations he seeks to learn. This is also the man who as a 6-year-old was watching tape with his dad in the living room. He was obviously always interested in football and his curiosity made him learn more than anyone else. The last quality is that he’s humble. He famously says after Super Bowl trips that “now we’re five weeks behind the rest of the league.” He doesn’t take victory for granted and knows how to lose, having spent plenty of time losing as the Cleveland Browns head coach before he went to the Patriots. He also expects his players to be humble and doesn’t let star players coast on their success, calling out failures wherever he sees it.

What weaknesses does Belichick have?

               I see that Belichick has trouble building personal relationships with his players built on anything other than professional success. He has never shared a dinner with Tom Brady. He really relies on his record to gain the loyalty of his players, so as long as he keeps on winning it’s okay. For now he has been winning, but if he ever doesn’t win the division for some reason, he may find trouble.

Is Belichick a cheater? How much has it helped him?

               When Bill Belichick interviewed to be the Special Teams coach for the New York Giants under Ray Perkins, Perkins listed three words: consistent, right, and fair. He asked Belichick which word didn’t belong in the playing of football or any other game. Without any hesitation, Bill said fair and was hired. Belichick has always understood, as have most other coaches, that it is crucial to get any advantage you can get. He generally doesn’t cheat, though he will push the rules to their limit and got hung out to dry in Spygate, when he illegally taped other teams’ practices. I think this is cheating, but it hardly does anything to diminish Belichick and the Pats’ success. I hate the Patriots with all my heart, but you have to recognize that even after getting caught and ceasing the process, they had an undefeated regular season and made it to the Super Bowl. As for Deflategate, the book convinced me that it had much more to do with Brady than Belichick. Pushing the rules to their limit is usually worth it, like when a disgruntled former Dolphins player, upset with how Nick Saban left the team in 2005, handed the Dolphins playbook to his new Head Coach, Bill Belichick.

How much of the Patriots’ success is Brady and how much is Belichick?

               I think if you ask Tom Brady or Robert Craft, they will tell you that Brady is a special, once-in-a-lifetime quarterback, though Belichick and the coaches would disagree. They don’t find him a special. As for me, I think that Belichick needs a truly great Quarterback, or his program would likely fall flat, but it didn’t and doesn’t have to be Brady. Belichick is a great scout and would have found another like Roethlisberger or Rodgers if he didn’t have Brady. Brady’s success is his own, but another QB could have been similarly successful in Belichick’s system so long as he had the smarts to keep up. I doubt any other QB would get to five Super Bowl wins though, maybe just 3-4.

What’s the Belichick-Brady relationship like?

               I got the vibe that their relationship is not great and worsening. The two of them have always been professional and not friendly. Belichick would bench Brady the moment he believed another QB could do it better, but for now that’s not true. I think both of them are desperate for the other to go so that they can prove their greatness solo. It got worse when Belichick threw Brady under the bus for Deflategate and when he drafted Jimmy Garoppolo. Belichick has apparently long told associates he wanted a shot at winning the Super Bowl with another QB and I think that Brady would say the same about him. People often ask the owner, Robert Kraft, when he’s gonna fire Belichick and he’s been known to respond, “when he goes 8-8.” Brady, when asked if Kraft and Belichick had the “appropriate gratitude” for his achievements responded, “I plead the fifth,” and, “that’s a tough question.” This year, Brady didn’t show up for organized team activities in May and it seems like as the QB approaches retirement that he doesn’t care so much about his coach anymore.

Conclusion

               This is a solid book though a little longer than necessary and could probably benefit from being cut down from 600+ to 500 pages. I really liked it though as an analysis of not just Belichick but the entire NFL as a business and a competition. It’s an amazingly in-depth study of how these teams and especially the coaches work and relate to their players and owners. Anyone with an interest in the NFL over the last 15+ years will definitely be entertained by this biography.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Bill’s father, Stephen Belichick, was the equipment manager for the Detroit Lions and one game, when losing 24-0 to the Packers in 1941, they put him in the game and he returned a punt for a 77-yard TD.
• Bill caddied for former Vice President Spiro Agnew and snapped a football to Johnny Unitas at his dad’s camp.
• Bill attended Andover Prep Academy as a fifth year player at the same time as Jeb Bush, who was “among the regular marijuana users”
• Belichick is close personal friends with Jon Bon Jovi from his time as Defensive Coordinator for the Giants. Bon Jovi was a fan and attended practices.
• Since Tom Brady took over as the Patriots starter, Chad Pennington is the only other Quarterback in the division to win the division since then, winning it in 2002 for the Jets and 2008 for the Dolphins, the year Brady missed to injury.
• Tom Brady is 11-6 against Peyton Manning.

Reflection on The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson

            The Battle Cry of Freedom is about as good an introduction to the Civil War as I’ve ever seen. I read it as I watched the Ken Burns documentary and I think that it’s one of the most interesting events in American history. The Civil War is so captivating because of the buildup to it over the years after the revolution, the moral component of the end of slavery, the political test of whether a democracy could exist on such a massive scale, the personalities of the characters involved like General Lee, President Lincoln, and the various officers and generals such as JEP Stuart, Longstreet, Grant, McClellan, and more, and finally because of the abundance of material available to scholars. This includes letters, newspapers, photographs, diary entries, and more that give life to the people caught up in a world-shaking event. Every American who lived through the war would have agreed that it changed the country profoundly, especially for the slaves who gained their freedom. I’m going to try to answer four questions about the causes of the war, the various advantages and disadvantages each side had before and during the war, and the results of the war.

What caused the Civil War?

               The direct cause of the Civil War was the question of whether or not to add new states to the Union as free or slave states. From the birth of the United States, it had always expanded westwards. From independence onwards, the primary economic and political divide in the country was the geographical divide between the slaveholding Southern states and the free Northern states. As the country expanded westward, states were added in such a way to maintain that balance. This worked until the United States won the Mexican War and hit the Atlantic Ocean. These “southern” states such as New Mexico and Arizona were unfit for plantation farming and therefore would not host many slaves. California was admitted as a free state in exchange for the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced Northerners to help Southern slaveowners to catch their “property.” Southerners felt that if they did not expand slavery, they would lose political power. There were calls to annex countries in the Caribbean and Central America to annex into the slave empire. Violence broke out in Kansas over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the states’ residents to vote on whether to have slavery or not. People moved their and fought between North and South. With the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860, South Carolina seceded, refusing to accept a Northern President, even though he had promised not to interfere with slavery. They were soon joined by Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

Going into the war, what were the relative advantages and disadvantages the Union and Confederacy had?

               The South had two main advantages before the war started. The first was the initiative. Southerners wanted to secede and made it happen, pushing with unity to defend slavery and the states’ rights top slavery. They felt the North encroaching on their political power and they already felt the North dominant over them economically, which gave them a unity of feeling paranoid about Northern power. In the North on the other hand, there was not so much unity. The Northeast/New England was divided from the Old Northwest culturally and filled with immigrants. Perhaps this is why the Republicans were able to coexist with a smaller Democratic party during the war, largely filled with Westerners and Catholic immigrants. This meant that early in the war, despite having a lower population, the South was able to mobilize an equivalent force to the Union, which would slowly but surely dwarf the Southern numbers of soldiers. The second advantage was that the South didn’t need to conquer any territory. All that Jefferson Davis needed was for the North to feel that conquering the South was pointless and too difficult so that they would enter into negotiations. At the beginning of secession, some Southerners didn’t even think that there would be a war.

The North had crucial advantages over the South before the war started. The first and by far the most important was a powerful, diversified economy. “Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—more than twice that region's proportion of the free population,” writes author James McPherson. The North counted on more factories, more railroad lines, more educated people, and more industrial capacity.  The Confederacy had 1/9 the industrial capacity of the Union. The North in 1860 was producing 97 percent of the country’s firearms, 94 percent of the cloth, 93 percent of pig iron, and 90 percent of boots and shoes. Meanwhile, the South relied on cotton exports, which mainly went to Northern states and Europe, but were almost completely blocked off during the war, crippling the Southern economy. The South was also at a disadvantage when it came to the slavery issue, as only a very small proportion of the people were slaveowners. The North’s more egalitarian society would help to motivate troops. Finally, the North had more people. Northern white men outnumbered southern white men 3 to 1. Southerners felt confident that one Southerner could beat ten Yankees, but they quickly learned that the Yankees were just as tough as them.

During the war, what advantages and disadvantages did each side have?

               The South had four advantages, mainly evident in the early days of the war, until the defeat at Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg on July 4^th, 1863. They were better generals, a slow and equivocal Northern response, a political advantage in recruiting states to secede, and the fact that Europe wanted to see the Union split. All of these served the South well, especially as the war dragged on into 1863. The South’s superior generals had successfully held off Union attacks in the West and began to advance into Union territory in the East, their military advantage overcoming a weaker economy and fewer people. The slow and confused Northern response gave the states more time to prepare and gave power to those in the North who wanted to appease the South or make peace. Similarly, the North was still attempting to bring the South back in peacefully as well as trying to ensure that more states didn’t secede, especially Maryland and Kentucky, both of which the Union retained. Finally, Louis Napoleon III and the government of Great Britain hoped that the Union would fail, as the United States was becoming a giant country. However, things hit a turning point with Union military successes in the summer of 1863 that allowed the Union to keep the faith and utilize its more long-term advantages.

               The North had several advantages that generally tended to manifest themselves over a longer period of time than the Southern advantages. First, the North had many more people and would eventually be able to call up more men to military service. They ran into problems initially because they called men for only ninety days at first and then had to do so for three years afterwards. Then after three years they had to extend even further. Additionally, the Northern naval blockade was crucial. Even though 5 of every 6 blockade runners escaped through the Northern lines, the blockade discouraged shipping and resulted in huge losses the Confederate economy. By 1863, Southern money had only 1/7 of its prewar value, reaching 9,000 percent inflation by the end of the war. While 8,000 trips were made through the blockade during the war, this was not half of the 20,000 that left Southern ports during prewar years. Prices of cotton and other goods skyrocketed so that Southerners suffered much more greatly than Northerners during the war. By April 1862, every Southern port except for Charleston and Wilmington, North Carolina was in Union hands or closed. Also, Lincoln was a better war leader than Jefferson Davis. Davis played politics with his generals and based many decisions on personal feelings and pride, while Lincoln was much more willing to name generals to posts for winning battles and unafraid to fire them. Additionally, the very structure of the Confederacy was bankrupt. The confederation model caused the South to be unable to act as a coherent unit, instead acting as several competing states with little cooperation. Finally, Lincoln’s decision to emancipate the slaves gave the North the tremendous advantage of moral truth. It motivated Norther soldiers and made England and France unable politically to join the South, now that it would mean fighting for slavery. In addition it led to the creation of black regiments, increasing the Northern labor pool and strength of Northern forces.

What were the results of the war?

               At the war’s end, one quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age were dead. Two fifths of Southern livestock were gone with half of the farm machinery, thousands of miles of railroad, thousands of farms, and the system of slavery, upon which the entire Southern economy was based. Two-thirds of Southern wealth “vanished” in the war. While in 1860, the South had contained 30% of the country’s wealth, by 1870, it had just 12%. The South’s economy was destroyed for a generation. Politically as well, another President who was a resident of the old Confederacy would not be elected until 1964, when Lyndon Baines Johnson won the presidency, 99 years after the war’s end. It was truly devastating for Southern economic and political power.

               The war resulted in a massive expansion of the powers of the federal government. While the federal government had rarely touched citizens’ lives before the war, after the war it would do so plenty. The federal government created an internal revenue bureau to manage the new income tax, printed a national currency, formed a national banking system, drafted men into the army, and created the Freedmen’s Bureau, the first national agency for social welfare. While eleven of the first twelve amendments limited the federal government’s power, six of the next seven expanded it.

               The most important result of the Civil War was the emancipation of the enslaved people all over the defeated Confederacy (nearly four million people). Made voting citizens, black men began to participate in the political process in great numbers and there was a migration from the South to the North, though many chose to stay where they had grown up. The struggle was not over however. Former slaves and their descendants, despite major achievements in arts and sciences, continued to face hatred and discrimination in both North and South and continued to remain one of the poorest groups of Americans, largely thanks to Jim Crow policies that kept their neighborhoods poor, their police White, and their schools in bad condition. These problems continue to this day and show us that the Civil War contained conflicts that still remain unresolved in American history.

Conclusion

The author writes at one point that, “The South had no just cause. The event that precipitated secession was the election of a president by a constitutional majority.” It is important to remember that in a democracy, you can’t just leave because you don’t like the result of an election. It’s also important to remember that this war and this conflict continues to affect us today. After all when you look at the map of Electoral College votes, you can still see that the Confederacy often votes as a block. The war may be over but the cultural conflict is not. Before the war, people used to refer to the United States as a plural noun, like these United States, but today, we’ve become one country: The United States of America.

In the end of this book I have no sympathy for the Southern elites and politicians but a lot of sympathy for the Southern people, who faced starvation and poverty and an invading army that killed huge numbers of their people. I have even more sympathy for the slaves who suffered never knowing what freedom meant. I am glad the North won. I like the image of the beaten General Lee, scion of one of the great old Virginia houses, wearing his full-dress uniform with his jeweled sword, surrendering to General Grant, who wore a private’s uniform (his headquarters wagon had fallen behind) and muddy boots, the son of a poor tanner in Ohio.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Before 1815, the cost of transporting a ton of goods thirty miles inland was thee same as shipping that same ton across the Atlantic Ocean.
• Train transport cut the travel time from New York to Chicago from three weeks to two days.
• The New England textile industry increased its production from 4 million yards of cotton cloth per year in 1817 to 308 million in 1837.
• About one quarter of slave marriages ended due to being split up by their owner.
• Cotton from the American South made up three-fourths of the world supply.
• James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any US President. He was responsible in just one term for the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and the seizure of Mexican provinces in the Mexican-American War.
• James Buchanan was a massive coward and advocated that the North, as Southern states left his Union, stop criticizing slavery and allow the acquisition of Cuba as a slave state.
• Congress passed a Thirteenth Amendment that would have protected slavery but secession made it impossible for the states to ratify it.
• To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed the fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called "shoddy." This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general.
• The concept of clothing “sizes” came from the Union Quartermaster Bureau, which needed to standardize clothing production in a way never done before in modern history.
• The steamboat Sultana had a loss of life equal to the Titanic when it sunk on the Mississippi carrying liberated Union prisoners of war.

James M. McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom (Kindle Locations 531-533). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Reflection on The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World by Avi Shlaim

             From the beginning of the Jewish resettlement of Israel, the Jewish settlers ignored the existence of a Palestinian people and searched instead for an outside power as an ally, a trend that continues to this day from the Ottomans to the British to a flirtation with the French and also the Soviets and finally to a strategic alliance with the United States. I think this is important to understand because it’s the “original sin” that causes a lot of the conflict from the Israeli side. For the first forty years of Israel’s existence it worked, but when the First Intifada began in 1987, Palestinians demanded to be recognized as a people and to get statehood, beginning the odyssey that continues today. Originally, the Gaza Strip was Egypt and the West Bank of the Jordan River was Jordan.

               From the original partition of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, saw the borders as temporary. Immediately, Arab states attacked Israel from all sides, he had an opportunity. He was relatively moderate. “Revisionists” were Israeli territorial maximalists who wanted al the territory possible immediately. Ben-Gurion also wanted all possible territory but was willing to work to get the land gradually. Therefore, in the leadup to the creation of Israel, Ben-Gurion accepted a smaller amount of land always knowing that he would attempt to get more. The radicals were the followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a hard-right Jewish nationalist, in groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Menachem Begin, commander of Irgun and future Prime Minister of Israel who would sign a peace treaty with the Egyptians said in 1947, “The partition of Palestine is illegal… Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for ever.”

               Israel was born into war and was attacked on all sides by its Arab neighbors Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Israel fought the war cleverly and well though, and was able to deal with each enemy one by one. Israel won the war and hoped to gain recognition from the Arab states, but they offered Israel even less land than it was given in the 1947 UN declaration. Within three years of this embarrassing defeat, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt all toppled their governments. After the war, Ben-Gurion was solidified as Israel’s primary leader for about another 15 years. He described his priorities:

“First and foremost, we have to see to Israel’s needs, whether or not this brings improvement in our relations with the Arabs. The second factor in our existence is American Jewry and its relationship with us (and the state of America since these Jews live in it). The third thing—peace with the Arabs. This is the order of priorities.”

In 1953, Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister, giving the job to Moshe Sharett, who earnestly wanted peace with Israel’s neighbors, however Ben-Gurion proved a harsh critic of his own anointed heir. After two years Ben-Gurion would become prime minister again in 1955 and precipitate the Suez Crisis in 1956.

               In the lead-up to the Suez crisis, Israeli generals and politicians, especially Moshe Dayan, sought to provoke Egypt to attack them, starting a war. Dayan believed that if Israel played nice it would not get any foreign arms, but that if it “misbehaved” it could extort the major powers for arms as an incentive to act more responsibly. Dayan was fundamentally a hawk and extremely loyal to Ben-Gurion. While the Israelis attempted to provoke Egypt, Ben-Gurion complained that Nasser would not meet with him one-on-one, claiming that if he could just get into a room with Gamel Abdel Nasser, the new Arab Nationalist Egyptian leader, he could make peace. Nasser refused to meet with him. The author suggests that Ben-Gurion knew this and was only scoring political points, but I think that even if that’s true, Nasser is at fault for not meeting with him. He should have called Ben-Gurion’s bluff, but he refused to meet with any Israeli because he was a hardliner. At this point, Ben-Gurion replaced his former partner Moshe Sharett, who had been Foreign Minister, with Golda Meir, chosen precisely because she knew so little about foreign policy. Her job was to rationalize and defend the actions of the Israeli military, led by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

               Ben-Gurion was able to team up with the French and the British to attach the Suez Canal, which would be followed by an Anglo-French operation to “stop” the Israelis and restore the canal to European control. The campaign failed when the US and USSR got wind of it and forced everyone to stop where they were, though as a result, Egypt opened up the Straits of Tiran for Israeli use, though not the canal. In 1967, Egypt would renege on this agreement. The Sinai campaign was in a sense the last battle of the 1948 war as it confirmed the Egyptian-Israeli border. In the aftermath of the war, Gamel Abdel Nasser emerged as the leader of the Arab world. Israel found itself more isolated from the West, and its 1957 application to join NATO was rejected.

               At 76 years old, Ben-Gurion resigned, and Levi Eshkol, who was everyone’s first choice to succeed Ben-Gurion, won the Premiership. He was mainly qualified as an economics expert, though like Ben-Gurion, he took on the job of Defense Minister as well. The Arab League solidified Arab unity against Israel and in January 1964, the Arab states declared their goal to be the destruction of Israel for the first time ever. In the coming years, pressure would build again, especially with Syria and Egypt, which symbolically united though they were unconnected by land, a problem that would be remedied by the absorption of Israel. The Israeli Defense Forces welcomed conflict and, led by Moshe Dayan and David Elazar (Northern Command), began to provoke Syria by moving tractors and other equipment into the demilitarized zone until the Syrians shot. This led to a dogfight in which the Israelis shot down six Syrian planes.

               On the Egyptian front, it was not Eshkol but Nasser who did the provoking and he went a step farther than he intended.

“Nasser took three steps that were intended to impress Arab public opinion rather than be a conscious prelude to war with Israel. The first step was to send a large number of troops into Sinai. The second was to ask for the removal of the UN Emergency Force from Sinai. The third and most fateful step, taken on 22 May, was to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. For Israel this constituted a casus belli. It canceled the main achievement of the Sinai Campaign. The Israeli economy could survive the closure of the straits, but the deterrent image of the IDF could not. Nasser understood the psychological significance of this step. He knew that Israel’s entire defense philosophy was based on imposing its will on its enemies, not on submitting to unilateral dictates by them. In closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, he took a terrible gamble—and lost.”

Israel launched its planes into the air and destroyed the entire Egyptian air force in the first day of the war. All their neighbors declared war on them and Israel was able to defeat them each in order, seizing the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, the first two of which make up today’s occupied Palestinian territories. Israel also seized the Sinai Peninsula, which it would give back later after the October War in 1973. Even the author Avi Shlaim, who takes a very critical view of Israel, calls the Six-Say war a defensive war. This is because Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran, threatening Israel’s existence and nullifying the agreement made after the Suez crisis. Territorial aspirations did not drive Israel to war but emerged as a result of the war and were then realized by Israel. However, prolonging the war to take the Golan Heights cost Israel to lose its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, as the Soviets became firmly allied with the Arabs and the United States with the Israelis. On the other hand the Israelis won over the Americans by offering land for peace with the Arab states. However, it was a ruse. They communicated this to the US and not to the Arabs in secret and it was not a real offer. The Arabs’ official position was made at the Khartoum Conference, which ended in the adoption of the “three noes,” no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel. This was actually a victory for the moderates, as the hardliners wanted to continue active war, while the agreement made would be more of a cold war.

               Golda Meir succeeded Eshkol as Prime Minister in 1969 and formed two principals that became the bedrock of Israeli policy: no return to the pre-1967 borders and no withdrawal without direct negotiations and peace treaties. She constantly talked about peace but didn’t give it much space to develop. She made the mistake of turning down an opportunity to trade Sinai for peace (which would be the exact result of the October war in 1973, the basis of the peace treaty eight years later) and she turned down Anwar Sadat’s (successor to Nasser after his death) interim settlement, which forced him to go to war to save Egyptian pride and honor.

               In October1973, Egypt invaded the Sinai Peninsula and made gains before being turned around by Israel. It was an embarrassment for Golda Meir and she lost the Premiership in 1974 to Yitzhak Rabin, who was unable to make any major gains towards peace. He himself was defeated by Menachem Begin, leader of Likud, the right-wing party that became the first party that was not Labor to put their man/woman in the office of the Prime Minister. Likud’s ideology could be summed up by the term “Greater Israel.” Their primary goal was to make the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Jewish, Israeli territory. Their inspiration was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, and their leader was Menachem Begin, who lost both his parents and brother in the Holocaust. Likud was more ideological where Labor had been pragmatic, and their ideology was peace through strength. Israel’s foreign policy became more activist and aggressive with Begin as PM, Yitzhak Shamir as the Foreign Minister, and Ariel Sharon, “the relentless hawk,” as Defense Minister. This coincided with the inauguration of American president Ronald Reagan, and the two countries signed a treaty of strategic cooperation, creating closer military and intelligence cooperation s well as defense research and development. Israel officially became an enemy of the Soviet Union.

               The PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), began in 1964, started to conduct raids into Israel in 1968. In 1975, a civil war broke out in Lebanon (that would last until 1990) and Syria invaded in 1976. In 1978, Israel achieved its historic peace with Egypt, giving back the Sinai Peninsula and earning much good credit in the Arab world. All that changed when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to stop Palestinian attacks and laid a siege upon Beirut, the only time Israel ever laid siege to an Arab capital. It would be known as Israel’s Vietnam. Begin openly proclaimed that he saw this as him fighting against another Hitler, which was a controversial take among Israelis who were against the war of choice. The Israelis had trouble leaving because they wanted a peace treaty from Lebanon; Lebanon could not offer one because it was much weaker than Egypt and could not defy the Arab world.

               In 1984, after a very close parliamentary election after which neither side could form a government, Shimon Peres of the Labor Alignment and Yitzhak Shamir of Likud formed a national unity government of both parties and agreed to alternate the role of Prime Minister with Peres as Premier for the first 25 months and Shamir as Premier for the following 25.  Peres succeeded in getting Israel out of Lebanon, which was truly a disaster. 660 Israelis had died, Israel’s image abroad was damaged, and it spawned the terrorist group Hezbollah, which continues to threaten Israel to this day. Israel was also responsible for a massacre carried out by Christians against Muslims in an Israel-run refugee camp in which 800 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered.

               On December 9^th, 1987, an IDF truck hit a Palestinian car near the Jabliah Refugee Camp, killing 4 Palestinians. This accident gave rise to the First Intifada, the dramatic release of the tension that had built up after 20 years of Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Unlike Israel’s past wars, this involved an internal enemy that fought with guerrilla-style tactics. It lasted from 1987 until 1993, through the end of the Premiership of Yitzhak Shamir in 1992 and peace was made thanks to the Oslo Accords until Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. The result was the establishment of the Palestinian Authority to govern parts of the West Bank and the Palestinian recognition of the state of Israel. Another result was that Jordan washed their hands of the West Bank, leaving it to the Palestinians and allowing Israel to sign a peace treaty with Jordan after the Oslo Accords. A major negative result was the creation of Hamas, a hardline terrorist group that refused to recognize Israel and that decided to continue the fight until today. Finally, Israel was partitioned for the first time since the failed plan in 1947, when the Palestinians rejected partition, thinking they could get the whole of Israel. Rabin was assassinated for his part in the peace deal and succeeded by Shimon Peres.

               However, like the accord caused a split between the PLO/PA run by Fatah and the rejectors of the accord in Hamas, on the Israeli side rose Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky to the Premiership. He argued that Shimon Peres was an appeaser and ripped up the deal, though he kept the deal with Jordan, managing to survive even though it was based on the earlier Palestinian deal. The Jordan peace deal was the first “warm peace” for Israel, as the Egyptian deal came after a long time of hostility, Jordan had been a consistent partner to Israel. By 1996, Israel established direct diplomatic contacts with fifteen Arab states and no longer faced an Arab boycott, Israel was on the way to peace when Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon intervened. As Ariel Sharon said in 1998, “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlementsbecause everything we take will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

               Ehud Barak, the former Chief of Staff for the IDF was elected Prime Minister for Labor in 1999 and attempted to make peace with the Syrians, but he found himself trapped in a chasm between the doves and the hawks. The deal failed and he angered American partner Bill Clinton in the process. During his premiership, Ariel Sharon, the new leader of Likud replacing Netanyahu, decided to stage a highly publicized visit with 1,000 security guards to al-Haram al-Sharif, what Jews call the Temple Mount. The day after his visit, large-scale riots broke out in Jerusalem and Palestinians on the Temple Mount threw rocks down at Jewish worshippers praying at the Western Wall. The IDF returned fire with rubber-coated bullets and the Second Intifada (AKA the al-Aqsa Intifada) began. In the first five days 47 Palestinians were killed and 1,885 were wounded. Sharon then won election as Prime Minister against Barak and dropped the hammer on the Palestinians.

               I’m going to finish this up quickly even though there’s a lot more that can be said. Ariel Sharon enjoyed a partnership with the George W. Bush administration, which put the least restrictions on Israel of any American government ever. Sharon decided to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip, with the idea that it would reduce the demographic relevance of Palestinians to Israel, put off the need for a peace treaty for several years, and give him some room to bargain for more of the West Bank. It was a surprising move from a far-right wing Prime Minister who wanted all of Greater Israel, but like Ben-Gurion, he never intended this to be a final move. Instead it was to be a position from which Israel would get more and more. The Second Intifada ended after 5 years in 2005 with Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the construction of more Israeli settlements in the West Bank as well as the construction of the West Bank barrier, a system of walls, barbed wire, etc. that cut off Palestine from Israel. Out of site, out of mind.

               Ariel Sharon formed his own party as a centrist counter to Likud but had a stroke and was incapacitated and later died, so he didn’t run in the election. Ehud Olmert took up the Kadima banner and won, but his government lasted a short time, managing to invade Lebanon, before the return of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has been the least interested in peace of any Israeli Prime Minister ever and the farthest right-wing in every sense. The book only covers his return in the epilogue, and mainly what you need to know is that he is uninterested in Palestinian conditions of life, survival, and well-being.

               This was a very thorough book that covers conversations and deals in-depth, sometimes too much so. I would have liked more info on the return of Netanyahu and some other things to be cut, but what are you gonna do. Overall it was a great way to understand why Israel acts the way it does and who the major players have been in its foreign policy.

              

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Theodor Herzl’s inspiration for a Jewish state came as a reaction to the Dreyfuss affair in France. He saw the Jews as not just a religious group but a nation.
• In 1953, Ariel Sharon, who would be Prime Minister of Israel nearly 50 years later, commanded Unit 101, an Israeli special forces group, and was responsible for a massacre at Qibya, Jordan, where 45 houses were destroyed and 69 civilians killed.
• The Norwegian chief of staff of the UNTSO (United Nations Truce Supervision Organization) was named “Odd Bull.”
• Major General Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the IDF wanted to blow up the Dome of the Rock after the Six-Day War but was denied this.
• Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was known for his humor and after the victory in the Six-Day War, “he began to sport a Churchillian V sign. His wife Miriam, a militant moderate, said to him: ‘Eshkol, what are you doing? Have you gone mad?’ With characteristic humor he replied, ‘No. This is not a V sign in English. It is a V sign in Yiddish! Vi krikht men aroys?’ Roughly translated, this means ‘How do we get out of this?’”
• Lea Rabin refused to shake Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand after her husband’s death because she blamed him for inciting it. She was moved by the sincerity and warmth of Yasser Arafat on the other hand.

Avi Shlaim. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Updated and Expanded) (Kindle Locations 2037-2039). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.