A tale of two photographs
Something from the Middle East that’s long been haunting me. Also this week: Elledge’s patent Anglo-Saxon wrangler; and what’s the *shortest* river?
Something a bit different to begin this week: I’m going to show you a pair of pictures that have been haunting me for years. I first came across them during a work experience stint at a national newspaper, which I briefly span into essentially being an unpaid researcher in an attempt to impress proper journalists enough they’d employ me. It didn’t work: one seemed impressed enough to keep asking me to do stuff, but not so impressed that either job or money ever followed, which had never really been the plan, but I digress.
One of the things on which I found myself putting together some briefing notes in that period was the history of the Middle East peace process – this was 2004, when we could still talk of such. That was when I came across this picture taken at the White House in 1979:
You probably don’t need telling that the guy in the middle is the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, may his memory be a blessing. To his left is Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt from 1970 until 1981; to the right, Menachem Begin, Israeli Prime Minister between 1977 and 1983, as well as the founder of the still dominant right-wing political party Likud. They’re celebrating the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, agreed in the Camp David Accords of the previous year.
As ever with this part of the world I’m wary of over simplifying and getting myself in bother – there’s always more history; there’s always a thing before. In brief, though, long-standing tensions between Israel and its neighbours had resulted, in 1967, in the Six Day War. Despite looking at this point like the underdog, Israel had won, in the process taking the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. In 1973, after years of yet more rumbling tensions, Egypt and Syria launched another war, generally known by its Israeli name of the Yom Kippur War, in an attempt to get their lost territory back. Israel won that too, albeit less decisively.
The purpose of the deal Carter had presided over at Camp David in 1978 was to stop this happening again by normalising relations between Egypt and Israel: in exchange for peace and acceptance, Israel would give Sinai back.1 The “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” also proposed steps to normalise relations between Israel and its other neighbours, which would take a bit longer; and to begin the process of creating a Palestinian state, and we all know what happened there. At the time, though, there was hope – Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize – and this photo seemed to sum up that moment of optimism.
The reason it caught my eye a quarter of a century later, though, was because I was already familiar with another photo. This one’s from 1993:
To the left of Bill Clinton is another Israeli Prime Minister, a Labour one this time, Yitzhak Rabin. On the right is Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and president of Palestine.2 They’re celebrating the Oslo Accords, the start of a new phase of the peace process which created the self-governing Palestinian Authority and began an ongoing dialogue about subjects including the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and Palestinian right of return. Again, you can see that bits of this happened, but most of it never did, and well.
One reason the two pictures lodged in my mind is because they are, in many ways, the same picture. Both show a Democratic president beaming outside the White House, as an Israeli prime minister shakes hands with an Arab leader; both have an air of hope and optimism which we know, in hindsight, will ultimately seem misplaced. (Another, if I’m honest, is that 1978 was before my time and thus sounds like ancient history to me, but I can remember what I was doing in 1993. That makes the two dates feel further apart than they actually are, adding to the already strong impression that this has been going on forever.)
On digging deeper though, I realised that there was another, more unnerving way in which the two photos echo one another. I said that Anwar Sadat’s term as Egypt’s president ended in 1981. I didn’t tell you that this was because, on 6 October, he was assassinated, by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The move was widely attributed to anger at the Camp David Accords he’s celebrating in that picture in the sunshine on the White House lawn.
On 4 November 1995, still in office, Yitzhak Rabin, too, was assassinated – in Tel Aviv, by a far-right Israeli law student. This time there was no doubt about motive. Rabin was speaking at a rally in support of the Oslo Accords when he was shot dead; the assassin, who I am not going to name because why the f*ck should I, opposed those accords.
Both those photographs show a moment of hope which would be dashed in large part because one of the men shaking hands – one Israeli; one Arab – was assassinated by extremists on his own side who did not want peace.
The Israel/Palestine chapter of A History of the World in 47 Borders – it’s a measure of how little I’ve engaged with this part of the world that the other meaning of “47 borders” really did not occur to me until the book was already out and I was googling – was the very last one that I wrote. I hoped that if I left it long enough, my editor would let me off; she didn’t.
In the end I went for a straight factual account, with no jokes and minimal editorialising; the thing about getting out of your lane is that you’re more likely to crash. But I did conclude that the more I read about the region and its history, the more sympathy I felt for its peoples and the more anger towards their leadership. That felt, when writing about a controversial topic, like a fairly safe conclusion.
Three years on, I realise that was, at the very least, incomplete. Those leaderships were not presiding over peoples united against the horrors; I don’t need to spell out that, even before the horrors of 7 October 2023 and all that followed, the events of this century had left neither side feeling more peaceable. There seem to be only two ways that intractable, generational conflicts such as this can end: when the extremists decide that they want it to; or when they are crushed so comprehensively that they cease to be a factor. It is hard, after the last two years, to be optimistic on either front.
Incidentally, while trying to work out what I might have been researching for no money back in 2004, I came across another photo:
It doesn’t quite match our set. It’s a Republican president this time, George W. Bush, with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in June 2003. It was taken in Jordan, not at the White House, and it lacks the smiles and sunshine in the rose garden vibes. No one here was assassinated.
Sharon, though – hardly a bleeding heart – did have an inconveniently timed stroke in January 2006, and spent the last eight years of his life in a coma. That came only weeks after he left Likud to form a new party, Kadima, in large part because of opposition to his plans to unilaterally clear Israel out of the Palestinian territories. The leaders of that opposition included Benjamin Natayahu.
The extremists don’t always need a bullet to get their way.
New book, new name, new offer
Hey, my new book has a new name! It’s now revelling in the title “35 Inventions That Changed Your World: How We Built Modern Life”, and is about how humanity has reshaped the planet around itself by inventing the concepts of buildings, cities and infrastructure.
Even more excitingly, if you pre-order from Waterstones this week, you can get 25% off. Just use code “FEB26”.
We’re probably going to change the cover, if I’m honest.
As you may or may not know, the big bookstores make buying and visibility decisions based on pre-order numbers – so if you think you probably will buy the book, you’re doing me a massive favour by ordering it now. Also, since there’s a discount, you’re doing YOU a favour, too. So.
Writing a new book always means swinging wildly between excitement and terror, and I am currently in the excitement phase of the sine wave – so if you enjoyed 47 Borders I hope you consider ordering this one too.
What’s the shortest river in the world?
A couple of weeks back, I explained at frankly fascinating length the debate over which was longer, Amazon or Nile, and the difficulties of measuring a river. They include the problem of determining which source is furthest from the mouth; deciding where, exactly, that mouth is; and working out which path you should follow between the two.
All of these things are obviously problems when measuring a river which winds its way through the landscape for thousands of miles. But none of them, one might think, would apply to the question of what is the shortest river. That sounds like it should be entirely straightforward.
...you can see where I’m going with this, right?
Let’s fire up the define-o-tron.
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