Obituary: Noah Lucas (original) (raw)

Noah Lucas, who has died aged 81, was an expert on the politics and history of the state of Israel and the pre-state Zionist movement, his principal posts being at Sheffield and then Oxford universities. Although he was Jewish - born in Glasgow to immigrants from Ukraine - and pro-Zionist, his views often aroused controversy among Zionists.

Noah was not in the least surprised by the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war in October 1973. He had argued for some time that the occupation of Arab lands was bound to lead to a new war that would be much harder for Israel than that of 1967 had been. His insistence that the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat's aim was not to destroy Israel but to regain territory was not welcome to fundraisers for Israel, but later events suggest strongly that he was right.

Concerning earlier Israeli policy towards the Arabs, Noah was generally in sympathy with the position of Moshe Sharett, Israel's first foreign minister, who argued, in opposition to the more activist views of David Ben-Gurion, that the conditions for long-term peace should be nurtured even at some cost to short-term security. Noah thought the post-1967 Whole Land of Israel Movement, which advocated large-scale Jewish settlement in the newly conquered territories, was not in Israel's best interests, and he was a very active member of Peace Now.

He was drawn to political science by curiosity about the ways in which power was acquired and exercised. At Sheffield University, where he lectured in political science from 1967 to 1988, he tried to arouse the same curiosity in his students, sometimes by unorthodox means. Before beginning his first lecture to the new intake of students, he would choose two or three of them at random and tell them to move to seats in other parts of the hall, which they did with an air of puzzlement and irritation. Noah would then ask them why, since his orders had obviously annoyed them, they had obeyed him, and what they thought could have happened had they refused. This led naturally to a discussion of topics of the kind he had been due to lecture on.

Noah loathed artificial divisions between groups of people, especially if they seemed to imply any kind of superiority of one group over another. At Oxford, to which he moved in 1988 to take up a fellowship at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, he sometimes had to invigilate during university examinations, for which the regulations required him to wear the full academic regalia - known as subfusc - with robes or hoods. However, since he had no wish to walk through the streets of Oxford dressed in this conspicuous and (in his eyes) elitist manner, he turned up wearing just a suit and gown, as required, and a bow tie, but not a white one, a patterned rather than a white shirt, and brown instead of black shoes.

He got away with it, doubtless because the alternative would have meant a serious disruption to the exam arrangements, but perhaps also because no one else present had the authority and the will to prevent him - as he was likely to have discerned in advance.

Any sense of ceremony or tradition he held was subordinated to his dislike of institutionalised divisions based in any way on class or status. He preferred his students to call him by his first name. I think that applied all the way down to first-year undergraduates.

Noah's best-known work was his book The Modern History of Israel, which came out in 1974, but was completed, apart from a postwar epilogue, before the 1973 war. Noah subsequently had the satisfaction of seeing his analysis in at least one very important area vindicated by the events that culminated in Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the Camp David agreement the following year. However, his satisfaction was overshadowed by his regret about the war itself, which he thought could have been avoided had those in high places not misread Sadat's intentions. That has since become a widely held opinion, but in Noah's case it was not just the wisdom of hindsight, and his expression of it during the war itself was not always welcomed.

After gaining a degree in political science from Glasgow University in 1951, he went with his family to the Habonim kibbutz in Israel. From 1953 to 1958, he served as head of the foreign relations department of the Histadrut, the Israeli trades union federation, and that organisation gave him the subject - Histadrut as a nationalist and socialist movement, 1882-1948 - for the doctorate he gained at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

He taught American as well as Middle Eastern politics, and, in the early 1960s, was a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In demand as a reviewer and commentator, he wrote in the Guardian, the Times, the Independent and the Jewish Chronicle, and also in US journals.

He was an adviser to the Labour Friends of Israel, a member of the parliamentary committee on the Middle East and a senior associate member of St Antony's College, Oxford. In his retirement, he took up painting, to which he devoted himself with great seriousness and enjoyment.

Twelve years ago Noah was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and his condition grew much worse after he was struck by a car a few months before his death. He is survived by his wife Beatrice, whom he married in Jerusalem in 1965, and by their daughters, Sonia and Tamara.

Noah Lucas, political scientist, born 30 June 1927; died 2 December 2008