BOOK FEST: Sands, Torture Team

Philippe Sands
Torture Team
2008

FORMER British prime minister Tony Blair was advised that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal just hours before former US president George Bush presented him with his timetable for war.

This was the central claim put forward by leading British QC Philippe Sands when he came to Edinburgh to promote his latest book Torture Team.

Professor Sands pointed to documents uploaded online by The Iraq Inquiry which lay bare the claims he made in his earlier book Lawless World (2005), specifically that attorney general Lord Goldsmith was leaned on by the government to change his views on the legality of a war with Iraq.

He pointed to a memo drawn up by Lord Goldsmith on the eve of Blair’s meeting with Bush on 31 January 2003 – available here – in which Goldsmith categorically stated that UN resolution 1441, which offered Saddam a final chance to disarm his weapons, “does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council”.

The existence of this memo has been known about for over five years, but Sands was particularly excited by the release of a new annotated version on The Iraq Inquiry website earlier this year which includes new and, Sands argues, damning notes by Tony Blair and his private secretary on foreign affairs Matthew Rycroft.

Prof Sands even suggested that Blair thought Lord Goldsmith was “a tosser” for writing this memo on the eve of such an important meeting.

Sands told the audience at Edinburgh Book Festival: “If you go on The Iraq Inquiry website and have a look at the declassified documents available on the site there’s a memo from attorney general Lord Goldsmith dated 30 January 2003. The memo states:

'In view of your meeting with President Bush on Friday, I thought you might wish to know where I stand on the question of whether a further decision of the Security Council is legally required in order to authorise the use of force against Iraq...

'You should be aware that, notwithstanding the additional arguments put to me since our last discussion, I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council.'

Sands went on: “Mischievously, and wonderfully, the Chilcot Inquiry didn’t put up the original copy – it put up the annotated Number 10 copy. In the top left hand corner someone has scribbled:

‘Clear advice from attorney on need for another resolution.’

“However, next to that is another note, by Tony Blair’s private secretary on foreign affairs Matthew Rycroft, which reads:

‘[We] specifically said we did not need further advice this week, Matthew.’

“At the bottom of the memo Goldsmith concludes: ‘I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of force without a further determination by the security council.’

“This phrase has been underlined and next to it, scribbled in Tony Blair's handwriting, is written: ‘I just don’t understand this.’

Sands continued: “In other words, Tony Blair is saying ‘I just don’t understand why this tosser is putting out advice saying that the war is illegal’.



“And what happened the next day? Blair’s chief foreign policy advisor [later US Ambassador] David Manning recorded a meeting between Bush and Blair which said that America was preparing for war. The advice is right there at the bottom of Manning’s Memo:

‘The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin.’

“It was made clear that he was doing this with or without another resolution and Blair told Bush that he was ‘solidly behind him’" Sands continued. "Bush added that it would be good if another resolution could be achieved but only as an insurance policy.”

Sands is much more engaging in person than his writing, which is unfortunately but necessarily dry and methodical. However, his style compliments the sterile language of the memos he describes in which US defence chiefs such as Donald Rumsfeld and William Haynes discuss the degrading and inhumane treatments they were meting out to terror suspects.

He is the first to admit that he is no journalist, and is more at home wading through papers than navigating emotive prose. However, for Torture Team he had to learn the skills of a journalist as most of the evidence he needed for his exposé of the US government’s sanctioning of torture techniques in the wake of 9/11 was very deliberately not written down.

“I think many of the people I spoke to for the book met with me precisely because I wasn’t a journalist,” said Sands.

However, Sands’ paper chase to discover who-knew-what-and-when, and his pursuit of key witnesses to corroborate his assertions, would make even Woodward and Bernstein proud.

Ansary, Destiny Disrupted

Tamim Ansary
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
2009

THE first thing that strikes you about Tamim Ansary’s whistlestop tour through 1400 years of Islamic history is the title. Destiny Disrupted implies an unfulfilled entitlement co-opted by western hegemony, while boldly suggesting that this destiny is back on track and on course to be fulfilled.

As an Afghan-born author living in America, Ansary is well placed to analyse this “destiny” from both an Eastern and Western perspective, but as he outlines the circumstances that made the Islamic world the bastion of culture and knowledge for almost a millennium - and of its decline - he refrains from explicitly predicting how this supremacy could be achieved again.

“Although history is not over, the period since 9/11 has not mulched down enough to enter history yet: it still belongs to the journalists. It is not too soon, however, to reflect on this period as a manifestation of two great out-of-synch narratives intersecting.”

Speculation over the Islamic world’s possible resurgence is clearly, therefore, for other authors, but for Ansary the lessons are in the history.

In the course of 350-odd pages, in his own informal conversational style, he tells how a 6th century Arabian businessman in the middle of a “mid-life crisis” started a religion which, with a small band of followers, converted Mecca, conquered Medina and, through a mixture of theological persuasion and a series of unlikely military victories, spawned an empire that would stretch from the Atlantic coast to the borders of China.

In relating this period Ansary relegates some of the greatest events in Western history – the Crusades, the discovery of America [incidentally a voyage to find trade routes to the east], the Christian reformation and the resultant wars in Europe – to mere footnotes taking part in one small corner of the Eurasian continent while the great Ottoman, Safavid and Moghul Islamic empires held sway over much of the rest.

The closest Ansary comes to articulating the Islamic world’s disrupted “destiny” actually comes from university of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson:

“In the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars could well have supposed that the human race was on the verge of becoming Muslim.”

However, Ansary shows how the Islamic world then went into a period of decline, largely through stagnation and mismanagement. Much of its territory fell to empires built on Judeo-Christian foundations, while the rest tried to adapt to the new world order.

However, Ansary’s unspoken implication is that the last 500 years of Judeo-Christian dominance in world history was just an interlude, that normal service will shortly be resumed. According to Ansary’s thesis, backed up by a wealth of undisputed historical facts, this resurgence has already begun and has been gathering pace for the last century.

From this point on Ansary’s simple, straightforward narration really begins to illuminate by boiling down the often impenetrable world of Middle East politics and Islamist aspirations in the last century into a series of simple fundamentals.

He declares the notion of “nation-statism”, the skeleton upon which most of the world’s principals of cooperation (The United Nations) and discord (from Arab nationalism right down to Scottish Nationalist backbiting) hangs, to be a modern-day invention, a phantom almost, and far from an established fact.

“It’s easy to forget that the organisation of the world into countries is less than a century old...Unfortunately, the ideology of ‘nationalism’ and the reality matched up only approximately if at all.”

But what does all this mean for Western hegemony?

Under the principles of “nation-statism” the United States of America, the chief exporter of Western hegemony today, is a unified entity, with a shared economy, military, official language and a constitution based on the principles of “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”.

However, once the veil of nationalism is stripped away and its status as the established locus of organisation and control is removed, other networks of co-operation become apparent.

Today, “nation-statism” and Islamism are already combining. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran are already fully fledged Islamic States, where Sharia law and the law of the land are indistinguishable, but beneath the level of nationalism and statehood there is already a shared Islamic economy, military and common constitution.

Groups like the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which promotes Muslim values within the United Nations on behalf of its 57 member countries with Islamic majorities, and the Organisation of Petrolium Exporting Countries (OPEC), which fixes oil prices on behalf its member countries, most with Islamic majorities, form the basis of a quasi-governmental constitution and shared economy. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, imports British and American arms by the bucketload, while militant groups like Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, to name but a few, work towards similar ends and form the basis of a unified paramilitary force with international reach. Finally, the insistence that the Quran be read exclusively in Arabic ensures a common language across all Islamic and Islamic-majority states.

To cobble these links together and call them The United States of Islam would be a gross over-simplification, but it is clear that Islam fosters a common link between these nations that is 1000 years older than the nationalist glue that holds the United States of America together.

However, according to Ansary this reawakening of Islamic identity to re-establish its place in world history isn’t something to be feared. Some may find it unpalatable [and I’m going to nail my colours to the mast and state that I find all theocracies unpalatable whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or other] but it’s not necessarily dangerous or incompatible with liberty:

“The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a ‘clash of civilisations’, if that proposition means we’re-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there’s-only-one-of-us. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds crossed paths much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is still going on...

“Islam is not the opposite of democracy; it’s a whole other framework. Within that framework there can be democracy, there can be tyranny, there can be many states in between.”

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog Cracked Spines.

I have launched this blog as an offshoot from my other blog Mark McLaughlin Online, which I started about this time last year basically as a press cuttings file but started posting up the odd book review to relieve the monotony of writing about Edinburgh all the time.

After a year, I've built up a decent body of work and I've started to get attention from a few authors, so I figured it was time to let it stand alone. I've uploaded all of the old reviews and will update it every few weeks, or however long it takes me to finish my latest book.

In my day job, I have access to an endless supply of new hardbacks, first editions and yet to be released review copies so most of the reviews on this blog will be up-to-the-minute reading that hasn't been widely reviewed elsewhere.

There's no greater affront to wisdom than a book with an uncracked spine.

Enjoy

Mark

Ambrosio, Before We Say Goodbye

Gabriella Ambrosio
Before We Say Goodbye
2010

THE teenage book market is replete with books about monsters – particularly Stephenie Mayer’s hugely successful Twilight saga – and thanks to Amnesty International the shelves now have a new addition.

Gabriella Ambrosio’s Before We Say Goodbye, a semi-fictional account of a day in the life of a teenage female suicide bomber from Palestine and her Israeli victim, received a special endorsement by the human rights group at this month’s Edinburgh International Book Festival for its contribution to the understanding of the conflict. Like Twilight there are no shortage of monsters on both sides, and like the vampires of the saga these monsters are struggling to maintain their humanity against hateful, vengeful urges and an insatiable thirst for blood.

Before We Say Goodbye is based on the factual tale of Ayat al-Akhras, 19, who became Palestine’s youngest female suicide bomber when she killed herself and two Israelis including one Rachel Levy, 17, in a Jerusalem supermarket in 2002. The physical similarities between the two girls led the authorities to speculate initially that there had been two Palestinian suicide bombers, and that Levy was al-Akhras’s accomplice and perhaps even her sister.

The case starkly demonstrated the similarities between the communities on both sides, and in this book Ambrosio imagines the personal circumstances that brought these two girls together through the lives of two proxies, the Palestinian Dima and the Israeli Myriam, both 18.

Ayat al-Akhras and Rachel Levy on the cover of Newsweek

As the book is aimed at the teenage market, I have handed over my blog for this review to two Edinburgh teenagers, Andrew MacLean and Frances Singer, recent James Gillespie’s High School graduates who Amnesty pulled together for a chat with the author Gabriella Ambrosio at the book launch last week. I was struck by their different interpretations of the book, and conflicting sympathies, but as we shall see Ambrosio herself was not surprised.

“I seemed more sympathetic towards Myriam,” said Andrew, from Bruntsfield, who is going on to study biological sciences at Oxford next month. “Dima seemed a little naive, talking about how killing herself and others would make right all of the wrongs that that her family had suffered. There’s a line in the book about her actions taking all of the injustices away and making the Israelis pay, but I think this book showed that her actions were just part of a never ending process. By the end of it the Israelis were shouting, ‘death to the Arabs’, while the Palestinians celebrated.”

‘Dima had to blow herself up in the middle of a crowd. She had to blow up a crowd.
‘She wouldn’t be doing it if she weren’t sure she would kill lots of them. She would postpone it. Her life was not worth a few lives; it was worth a great many Jewish lives – at least a hundred. She would blow herself up and take a hundred people with her. A hundred Jewish families would have to suffer what they as Palestinians were suffering. And finally the camp would celebrate. The return of honour. Of a little justice.’ (Before We Say Goodbye, p.115)

Frances, from Newington, who is going travelling for a year before taking on a chemistry degree at York, had a slightly different take.

“I identified slightly more with Dima,” she said. “You can really feel her anger at the situation, whereas Myriam seemed quite empty. Myriam was upset about the death of her friend but it never seemed to sink in, whereas Dima’s response was more emotional. I don’t think I would do what Dima did [suicide bombing] but I can see why she did it. She felt there was nothing for her, and she was going to be stuck in the same situation unless she did something about it, but if she had just carried on she could have made much more of a difference. She wanted to be a journalist and she could have made much more of a difference doing that rather than blowing herself up.”

Two other characters stand out from the book who are worth noting. Myriam’s brother Nathan, 19, is doing his military service at the Erez checkpoint and is probably the closest thing to Mayer’s teenage vampires, a human child, a pacifist, unwillingly conscripted by older monsters who begins by being horrified by the brutality on both sides but ends up resigned to it.

' “You have to check everyone who crosses over [the checkpoint],” Nathan said flatly. “People are made to partly strip off, and their shoes and bags are passed through the metal detector. Often they have blades hidden in their soles...the first thing that came to mind was a scene from the Holocaust.
“I felt like I had got everything wrong...and then that awful thing happened...everyone saw Ariel’s head fly inside the blockhouse...
“They do this to us. Someone thinks it up and sends them to do this to us. The truth is, as far as their concerned we shouldn’t exist!"' (Before We Say Goodbye, pp72-73)

Then there is Ghassan, the Palestinian puppet-master, the man who “thinks it up” and sends “them” – ordinary Palestinians like Ayat al-Akhras and her fictional proxy Dima – to kill Israelis. Ghassan is the personification of every Hamas/Fatah/Hezbolla/Iranian/Al-Qaida hardliner who believes death and destruction is the only solution to the Israeli occupation but sends others to do their dirty work.

‘Peace. That is what Ghassan felt after every explosion. Peace at last. The blast, the trembling air, the pieces shooting away in all directions...
‘What must it be like, living as if you were always stuffed with explosives? What else could you want if not to get rid of them every so often? This is how it was for Ghassan, who sought every explosion the way another might seek an orgasm.’ (Before We Say Goodbye, pp76-77)

I had originally believed Ghassan to be not only the personification of Arab monsters but a dual personification of the monsters from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with his one brown eye representing the Arabs and his one blue eye a metaphor for the occupying European Jew stereotype, but according to Ambrosio his heterochromia is descriptive rather than metaphorical. Andrew’s and Frances’s insights, it seems, were more on the button than my own:

“His different coloured eyes are a result of the shrapnel in his head from one his grenades that exploded too close - nothing more,” said Ambrosio. “I am not surprised that Andrew and Frances came to different conclusions about the characters because when I read a book I identify with the people, not the politics. It’s the humans you identify with as they are your guides in this other world, and often the only way that you can understand how you would feel in this world is to understand how the characters feel."

Cowley, The Last Game

Jason Cowley
The Last Game
2009

The Last Game, ostensibly an extended essay about the Liverpool v Arsenal title decider in 1989, is about much more than football. It is part biography, part social commentary, part fanzine and a wholly passionate read. It’s about Cowley’s relationship with football, with his father, with journalism and with the world around him, often all four at once. The prologue provides an interesting insight into his psychology:

“I accepted the false dichotomy between the so called highbrow and lowbrow and had concluded that you couldn’t be both a book man and sports man – that the two cultures were separate, with no connecting bridge between them.”

As a bookish journalist living in Edinburgh, 60 miles from my derelict hometown of Linwood where ignorance is practically a virtue, and 60 miles from my football team St Mirren which I still visit most weeks largely to catch up with my brother and boyhood friends, I know all about this dichotomy and can identify with the polar forces pulling him apart.

But Cowley and I both know that this dichotomy is, indeed, false (many people still recoil in shock when I inform them novelist Christopher Brookmyre is also a St Mirren fan). Cowley approaches his sport like the giants of American literature approached their sports. He marries his bookish head with his sporting heart and does for football what Norman Mailer did for boxing, Ernest Hemingway did for bullfighting, and Hunter S Thomson did for desert racing - he chronicles the attitudes, troubles and prejudices of the day through the prism of a single sporting event.

He even measures his own theories on that other momentous sporting event of 1989, the Hillsborough disaster, not against those of contemporary British writers such as the divisive Kelvin MacKenzie but against another giant of modern American literature Don Dellilo, who described the fans’ suffering like a great religious painting, “a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it”.

And he writes about Arsenal v Liverpool the way Mailer wrote about Ali v Foreman, as a titanic battle between gladiators rather than a lowbrow working class sport. He elevates Arsenal manager George Graham, a tough Scot born eight miles in the opposite direction of Glasgow as myself, to the status of an ageing warrior-poet:

“[As a player] Graham was a languid presence in midfield. He passed and moved so gracefully that he was known variously as the Stroller, the Ringmaster and The Peacock. ‘I had a quick brain but a slow body,’ he has said. ‘I needed time, which is not available in the English game today.’...

“[As a manager] Graham did not like strollers or peacocks: the footballer as the egoist or exhibitionist. He preferred grafters...Graham demanded toil and labour from his players and coaching staff.”

Even when he moves away from the football field to review the social change of the 80s he does so from the terraces, chronicling the changing attitudes to race through the eyes of John Barnes dodging bananas, likens a rave during 1988’s second summer of love to “an especially intense football match”, and conflates his Last Game thesis – that the ’89 title decider marked the transition between old and new football – with the other great social upheavals of the late 80s such as the decline of communism and Fukuyama’s theories on “the end of history”.

Running through it all is his own struggle to maintain his relationship with football and with his ailing father, his efforts to kindle his relationships with his wife and with journalism and the journey he took towards becoming the current editor of New Statesman and, as author of The Last Game, the thinking fans wordsmith.

Lock & Irving, Gaza: Beneath The Bombs

Sharyn Lock with Sarah Irving
Gaza: Beneath The Bombs
2010

“Israelis don’t oppress Palestinians,” activist turned author Sarah Irving told a packed crowd at the opening show in Amnesty International’s Imprisoned Writers Series on the first day of the Edinburgh International Book Festival this afternoon.

Irving and her co-author Sharyn Lock are here to promote their new book Gaza: Beneath The Bombs, and their statement – while apparently jarring coming from one half of a team of committed pro-Palestinian activists – sums up the humanitarian message of the book.

“Israelis don’t oppress Palestinians...the Israeli government oppresses Palestinians,” Lock elaborated. “While a lot of racism undoubtedly exists if you speak to Palestinian taxi drivers in the West Bank many of them will tell you that some of their best friends are Israelis.

“However, such relationships are becoming more difficult because it’s hard for an Israeli to travel to the West Bank. Ariel Sharon actually made it illegal for some Israelis to travel into the West Bank, and it was a deliberate effort to cut these ties and foster separation and resentment.

“The vast majority on both sides are just people trying to get on with their lives, but one side is systematically having everything they hold dear stripped away from them.”

Both Irving and Lock have been visiting Palestine for the best part of the last decade, and their eyewitness accounts confirm many of the horror stories that continually flow out of the embattled Gaza strip and West Bank.

“I actually worry more about the West Bank than I do about Gaza,” adds Irving. “Despite the bombing going on in Gaza the extent of the institutionalisation and acceptance of Israel’s ongoing programme of settlement building concerns me.

It’s like it’s become a part of life, but I’m continually shocked by how large these settlements have become even in the last nine years that I’ve been visiting.”
Irving’s persistent activism has taken an awful toll on her health. Hobbling in on crutches she explains that her legs are slowly deteriorating from an injury she sustained after being thrown to the ground by an Israeli soldier.

Irving and Lock told the crowd of their experiences crouching in parsley fields dodging bullets, and getting drenched by Israeli water cannons firing on Gazan fishing boats. The boats fire putrid water which, the authors claim, is laced with some form of poison which makes the fishermen sick and contaminates the fish destined for an area where food is scarce.

Lock emotively related her experience to the comforts of home. “I often forget that the planes flying overhead are actually death machines, and sometime catch myself imagining that they’re actually passenger planes full of eager holidaymakers like the planes back home.

“I sometimes mistake Israeli tanks for roadworks. The noise is very similar and I suppose in a sense they are road works – they’re unmaking the roads.”

While much was said about the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians, little was said about the counterpart governments in Gaza and the West Bank that arguably play their own part in oppressing the Palestinians by stoking Israeli anger – the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and corrupt secularists Fatah.

Speaking after the event, Sharyn Lock explained why Hamas has yet to show its true colours – for good or for ill – in Gaza because the area has been under constant blockade and frequent bombardment since Hamas took power in free Palestinian elections in 2007.

“No one can really decide how well Hamas are doing because they’ve got nothing to judge it against. Any progress Hamas makes is immediately bombed out of existence by Israeli planes.

“What many people forget is that there is no such thing as a welfare state in Palestine, no health care or child support, and for a long time Hamas was the welfare state. They organised help for the communities suffering under the occupation.

“And while there are stories about Hamas forcing women to wear the veil it’s not something I’ve seen myself. Some women do wear the veil but no more than in previous years, and nobody seems to make a big deal about feeling oppressed under Hamas because they’re all so focussed on the infinitely larger oppression their suffering at the hands of Israel.

“It’s got to be remembered that 50 per cent of Palestinians are under 18, so you’ve got a community full of children who don’t engage in politics and don’t have any idea about elections. Those that did vote for Hamas had watched as the Fatah controlled Palestinian Authority failed to secure any gains for the Palestinians.

“Faced with no other option they thought – like many British people in the last election – ‘These guys aren’t working for me; let’s see what the other guys have got to offer.”

Milton Edwards & Farrell, Hamas

Beverley Milton-Edwards & Stephen Farrell
Hamas
2010

AS an RAF Spitfire screamed overhead at the annual air-show in my ancestral home of Sunderland last weekend, my mother remarked how frightening it must have been for my Nana growing up in this heavily-bombed shipbuilding town in World War II to hear that foreboding sound in the knowledge that death could shortly follow in its wake.

But as the Spitfire receded over the horizon it was followed by an even more bloodcurdling noise. Children covered their ears and adults looked to the skies as a Dutch F16 launched into a barrel-roll, the buzz of its engines growing to a deafening roar as it blasted the seafront with its fearsome afterburner. This sound must be a thousand times more frightening to the embattled people of Gaza, regularly bombed by Israeli F16s, largely, in latter years, as a result of their political support for Hamas.

"Hamas stunned the world when it won one of the only free elections in the Arab world,” writes James Hider, author of The Spiders of Allah and Middle East Bureau Chief of The Times, in his endorsement of Beverley Milton-Edwards’ and James Farrell’s eponymous study of the radical Islamist resistance group that has ruled Gaza with an iron-fist since its election in 2006. The stellar-list of endorsements that accompany this book is reason enough to make it compelling reading, from Hider, to former BBC Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin, to Guardian Middle East correspondent Rory McCarthy, plus a host of respected authors and academics, but the fact that Belfast Queen’s University politics professor Dr Milton-Edwards was able to recruit Farrell, the twice kidnapped former Times and now New York Times correspondent, as co-writer lifts it from what could have been a weighty and worthy academic tome to an indispensible and often gripping account of Hamas’s inception and rise to power.

Hamas’s origins can roughly be summarised as inspired by the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, infused with the spirit of 1930s anti-colonial fighter Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, stirred up by the foundation of Israel in 1948 and the six-day war of 1967, propelled by the foundation of Sheik Ahmed Yassin’s Mujamma following the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and finally ignited by the first intifada in 1987. The authors chronicle how Hamas’s brand of deadly resistance to Israel came into its own during the second intifada:

“The first intifada was the stone throwing intifada. Now who believes in stones.” (Hamas MP Jamila al-Shanti)

Hamas rise to power was essentially a reaction to years of ineffectual resistance to Israeli expansionism and oppression of the Palestinians, who watched as the secular politics of Nasser and Fatah failed to contain Israel within its 1948 borders and proved ineffectual in making their anti-Zionist protests heard.

“We tried the fiasco of liberalism in 1948 and we lost half of Palestine. We tried socialist communism in 1967 and we lost the rest of Palestine. We need to be more doctrinaire if Israel is to be overthrown. We need an Islamic state founded on the principles of the Koran.” (Unnamed Islamist student activist)

The authors piece together Hamas’s complex web of supporters and financiers. Following its election in 2006 the movement benefitted greatly from the resources it inherited (or commandeered) from its Western-approved predecessors Fatah and, after international sanctions and the Israeli blockade cut off Gaza’s lifeline, it took a leaf from Hezbolla’s book and looked East for its support, overcoming its sectarian opposition to Iran’s Shi’a theocracy to rely on its support and drawing further assistance from the Arab states.

The authors go to great lengths to distance Hamas from the mindless terrorists that many western leaders often portray them to be. Hamas’s founding fathers are here revealed to be articulate and often reasonable in their justification for their attacks on what they regard as invaders. Even the abhorrent act of suicide bombing, painstakingly deconstructed in this book by psychologists, politicians and families of “martyrs” interviewed by the authors, contains a touch of reason when deployed against an enemy that is vastly superior in weaponry, finance and international political backing:

“Believe me if we had F16s we would never use suicide attacks.” (Senior Hamas leader Dr Abdel Aziz Rantissi)

However, the inherent brutality of the movement frequently seeps through and can be seen writ-large in the days after it took control of Gaza and began to remodel it as an austere Islamic entity in the mould of Iran and, at times, approaching the brutality of the Afghan Taliban. Women were relegated to the status of incubators for future resistance fighters and forced to cover up under threat of an acid wash (in a region where short-skirts were not an uncommon sight during the swinging 60s). Men were encouraged to grow their beards and forced to subscribe to the Hamas doctrine wholesale or risk being shot. And yet the Palestinian people continue to support them because they appear to be the only effective resistance to the Israelis who have had them under the cosh for over 60 years, and certainly the only force that has been able to inflict any serious damage.

Parallels are occasionally drawn with the French resistance during WWII or the Provisional IRA, particularly in Hamas’s recent embrace of the ballot box, but these parallels quickly break down on closer analysis. Unlike Sinn Fein, the authors observe, Hamas went into politics to keep their arms not lay them down and its leaders admit that its policy is to continue to terrorise Israel, whose existence it steadfastly refuses to recognise. Hamas is also standing up to an enemy far more deadly and vindictive than the British. As one Irish observer in Palestine noted in the aftermath of the one tonne bomb that killed Salah Shehadeh, founder of Hamas’s military wing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in 2002, wiping out 145 civilians in the process:

“If the British wanted to wipe out Gerry Adams would they use a bomb that size in a residential area?”

Ultimately, it is horrors such as this, and the countless other examples listed in this book’s 300 odd pages, that makes it hard to entirely condemn Hamas as nihilistic thugs. Gaza freely chose an Islamic resistance group with a history of violence in one of the fairest and most transparent elections in the region, so it is tempting to say that Gaza deserves everything that it has suffered in their hands. But the lesson of this book is that the people of Gaza felt they had no alternative. The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority failed to halt Israeli settlements, failed to create a Palestinian state, failed to stop the indiscriminate killing of innocent Palestinians and, by all accounts, lined their own pockets at the people’s expense. It failed to prove that secularism was the way to battle an aggressive theocracy so the only alternative was Hamas.

And the final lesson of this book is that, for the foreseeable future at least, Hamas is in Palestine to stay.