MIDDLE EAST: Prof Avi Shlaim, a leading Israeli historian who is visiting Ireland, talks to Lara Marlowe.
Prof Avi Shlaim was only five years-old when his Iraqi-Jewish family moved to Israel, where he grew up and served in the Israeli army.
Perhaps because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in his words, "one of the most bitter, protracted and intractable conflicts of modern times," he initially concentrated his academic work on British foreign policy and the Cold War.
That changed when Prof Shlaim became a professor of International Relations at Oxford University in 1987. The following year, he published the first of six authoritative books on the Middle East, and was henceforward identified with the Israeli revisionists or new historians.
Today, Prof Shlaim has all but lost his natural optimism. "We are in one of the bleakest and darkest phases in the 100-year history of this conflict," he said in an interview.
"What is most depressing is that there isn't any way out. Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a dance of death and they are destroying one another in a slow process of mutual carnage." Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "and the belligerent, aggressively nationalistic brand of Zionism that he represents" is one of the main causes of the impasse, Prof Shlaim says.
The other, he adds, is President George W. Bush's administration, which he calls "the most pro-Israeli administration in American history". Because Mr Sharon now realises that he will not be able to maintain Israel's occupation of the entire West Bank, Prof Shlaim says, "He has shifted to a unilateral solution based on separation, based on building a wall and annexing half of the West Bank to Israel." Security justifications for the wall are a lie, Prof Shlaim continues.
"It serves two purposes. One is annexation. The wall is about land grabbing, about stealing land and establishing the final border unilaterally rather than through negotiations. The other purpose of the wall is psychological.
Terrorist attacks generate a great sense of fear in Israel. By building a wall, the government gives the illusion that it's doing something about it. It's psychologically reassuring without solving the problem." Prof Shlaim deplores Palestinian suicide bombings on moral and political grounds. "No one in his right mind would justify suicide bombings," he says, "But it's not enough to condemn them. We have to ask why they happen."
He believes the underlying cause is the 37-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "Conditions in the occupied territories are so appalling that some kind of retaliation by the Palestinians is inevitable," he explains.
"Israel has done everything conceivable, everything imaginable, to terminate this conflict except the obvious and only solution, which is to end the occupation."
In the 1990's, the findings of the Israeli new historians, including Prof Shlaim, gradually worked their way into mainstream Israeli thinking. Many Israelis came to accept shared responsibility for the exodus of the Palestinians, and that Israeli intransigence blocked peace with the Arabs. But since the second Intifada and the election of Mr Sharon, the new historians have literally been written out of Israeli school books.
Palestinian suicide bombings have transformed once liberal, left-wing Israelis. Mr Benny Morris, one of the new historians who did most to document the dispossession of the Palestinians, has defected to the right.
"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing," Mr Morris recently told Haaretz newspaper. He suggested to the New York Times that if more Palestinians had been driven from their homes, Israel would be a safer place today.
Prof Shlaim has not changed his thinking. He will speak at 2 p.m. on Saturday as a guest of the Kate O'Brien weekend in Limerick. The theme of the weekend is "War".