The Meaning of Recognition (49 page)

*

One of the consequences was the flight of the Palestinians. In fairness to them, we should not mince words: the flight was an expulsion. The instrument of expulsion was terror.
The nascent Israeli state already had an unfortunate heritage of terror, much of it due to the initiatives of Menachem Begin, a University of the Holocaust alumnus armed with the inflexible
conviction that the only answer to the threat of overwhelming violence was to get your retaliation in first. When the tiny new state was attacked from all sides, his brainchild, the Irgun, teamed
up with the Stern Gang to massacre almost 300 Arabs at Deir Yassin, and the exodus of the Palestinians understandably ensued. Though their disappearance suited Ben Gurion’s purposes –
already embattled on half a dozen external fronts, he would probably have lost the war if he had been forced to fight on an internal front as well – the Jews were suitably sorry at the time.
But the Palestinians were sorry forever. We should not forget their grief.

The Arab nations, alas, forgot it immediately. With the honourable exception of Jordan, every one of them turned the Palestinians away, and not even Jordan has ever given them much beyond
citizenship. There is enough oil money in the Arab nations to give every refugee a hotel suite with twenty-four-hour room service. Instead, far too many of them have been obliged to remain in camps
that are really display cases, so that they can testify with their desperation to Jewish inhumanity. The inhumanity was thought to be endemic in the Jewish race. Arab theorists believed that there
was scientific literature to lend this contention weight. The Jewish leaders had already been startled to discover, as early as 1949, that
The Protocols
had been officially translated and
printed in the Arab nations. With the rise to power of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bad literature became a driving force. As Amos Elon reveals in his invaluable book
A Blood-Dimmed
Tide
, Nasser discovered in
The Protocols
a proof ‘beyond all doubt that 300 Zionists, each knowing the others, control the fate of the European continent and elect their
successors from among themselves’. He didn’t say how successfully they had controlled the fate of the European continent when Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the train timetables, but
what he did say is recorded in the official collection of
Nasser’s Speeches and Press Interviews
. If Nasser was not precisely a madman, he was certainly no model of detached
judgement when he sucked Hussein of Jordan into the 1967 war, thereby laying the West Bank open for occupation and the Palestinians to the second stage of their suffering.

The suffering might have been worse. If Israel, between 1967 and 1973, was fatally slow to realize that the Palestinians had fair nationalist aspirations, one of the reasons was that they seemed
to be doing fairly well. Arabs in the Occupied Territories, as Arabs have always done within Israel itself, prospered economically to an extent that might have made the leaders of the Arab nations
wonder why their own poor were quite so destitute. Luckily the anomaly could be put down to the continuing efficacy of the infinitely subtle international Zionist plot. Israel came so near to
losing the 1973 war that Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan both had to resign in apology. It was the end of the old Labour Alignment’s preponderance in government. Begin was at last allowed into the
Knesset from which he had previously been excluded as if infected – which indeed he was – and the inexorable rise of the hardliners began. But even then, the settlement movement might
have been slower to start if a bunch of PLO ‘moderates’ had not attacked a defenceless school containing nobody except twenty-two Jewish religious students and murdered them all.

It was a crime encouraged by bad literature. The crime has gone on until this day, and it will continue to be a crime even if the Jews prepare a counter-crime of their own. Some would say they
already have. On one occasion, a single Jew walked into a mosque and killed thirty helpless Arabs before his weapons could be disentangled from his ultra-orthodox beard. But no Israeli government,
however keen on reprisals against terror, has yet proclaimed the desirability of killing any Arab it can reach. Hezbollah and Hamas both proclaim the desirability of killing any Jew, and there is
nothing novel in the proclamation. For a quarter of a century before 1988, when Yasser Arafat finally recognized the state of Israel, it was the founding objective of the PLO to
‘liquidate’ it. Losing people at a crippling rate for a country with such a small population, the Israelis had no reason to doubt that the word ‘liquidate’ was meant in the
Stalinist sense. In the last five years of suicide attacks, Israel has lost almost half the number of people that died in the World Trade Center. To inflict proportionate damage, al-Qa’eda
would have had to burn down Brooklyn. Nearly all of the dead Jews were noncombatants going about their everyday lives, and no doubt that was what made them targets. Any Jew, anywhere. Hezbollah has
killed Jews in that well-known centre of the world Zionist conspiracy, Buenos Aires. Where next? Reykjavik?

A week ago, shortly after Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin finally met his rocket, some of our media representatives were impressed when one of his supporters promised that the
Gates of Hell would now be open. For the Jews, those same gates have been open for a long time. People who hold the understandable belief that Jewish reprisals will create more Arab terror should
be equally prepared to consider whether more Arab terror might not produce an effect on the Jewish side that we have not previously had to contemplate because they have so far been able to keep
their own maniacs chained up. Out on the extreme, far beyond Ariel Sharon and even beyond Benjamin Netenyahu, there are ultras who would like to see every Arab dead. Yitzhak Rabin, the lost hero of
Israel, was murdered by the Jewish equivalent of the Arab fanatic who killed Sadat, the lost hero of Egypt. Rabin always believed that the loudly racist Gush Emunim settlers on the West Bank were a
threat to democracy. Sharon couldn’t see it. By now he can, and those who loathe his ruthlessness might come to bless it when the time arrives for Jews to shoot Jews – as well it might,
on the inevitable day when the last settlers are ordered out of the Occupied Territories. It wouldn’t be the first time Jews had shot Jews. In 1948, when Ben Gurion ordered the Irgun to
disarm, their response was to run a fresh supply of guns into Tel Aviv. Ben Gurion ordered that the ship should be attacked. Twenty of the Irgun were killed, and Begin ended up swimming in the
harbour. Some optimists believed he had learned his lesson.

*

The University of the Holocaust had as many dumb graduates as clever ones. Nazi anti-Semitism was so awful in its irrationality that any contrary force is likely to be
irrational as well. The only rational contrary force is called liberal democracy, which conquers extremism by containing it. In answer to those who think Mel Gibson, lonely creator of
The
Passion of the Christ
, might be Hitler reborn with a more photogenic hairstyle, it should be said that if he had wanted to produce a truly anti-Semitic film, he would have had the Jews on
screen whispering in Hebrew about setting up a world conspiracy with money swindled from the Romans. Authentic Jew-baiters don’t equivocate. In its classic form, anti-Semitism did indeed
emerge as a by-product of Christianity. None of the abuse recently heaped on world Jewry by the ex-Prime Minister of Malaysia and the top Imam of Australia was not first heaped by Martin Luther.
But Christianity finally got over it, mainly because the democratic states deprived Christianity of political power. In a democratic state, the passion of the Mel, whatever it might happen to be,
must be tempered for rational ears if it is to open big on the first weekend.

The Mel’s passion aside, however, we really do have fanatics of our own, preaching versions of
The Protocols
that differ from it only by substituting America as the source of all
the world’s evil – including, of course, the depredations of the Israeli state, which generate such universal anger that a bunch of young head-cases in Bali are moved to blow up a
nightclub. In reality, they blew up the nightclub because they didn’t like the way young Australians dance. I don’t much like it either, but I don’t think blowing their legs off
is an appropriate cure. My opinion, which I assume most of the readers of this newspaper share, was not transmitted to me by a sacred text, although I suppose the teachings of Jesus were in on the
start of it. In the world of today, any reasonable and widely shared opinion is the result of a long and complicated history of enlightenment culminating in liberal institutions, which we should be
proud of and teach our children to revere, instead of favouring the fantastic theory that a regard for civilized values somehow exacerbates a conspiracy against the wretched of the earth.

It shouldn’t need pointing out that the Bali bombers knew no more about the history of the Middle East than I know about quantum mechanics. But it does need pointing out, because so many
Western intellectuals are incapable of reasoning their way to any conclusion that does not suit their prejudices. There are limits, however, to what they can say unopposed, and very definite limits
to what they can do without legal sanction. With Islamic fanaticism as we now face it, no such restrictions apply. This is bad news for Islam in general, and for the Palestinians it is beyond bad
news. There are many Palestinians who know this to be true. In the week after Sheik Ahmed Yassin’s death, the Palestinian Authority issued an appeal for passive resistance that amounted to a
repudiation of the suicide bombing. The question remains, however, of how much authority the Palestinian Authority exercises over the fanatics. Our own absolutist half-wits need to realize two
things. Al-Qa’eda would go on attacking the democracies even if the Palestinians achieved justice tomorrow. And the Palestinians will never achieve justice if they go on attacking Israel.
Both crimes are abetted by bad literature, and to produce bad literature of our own adds fuel to the fire. To that extent, the seductive idea that we are all guilty is exactly right.

Sunday Times
, 28 March 2004

Postscript

Even when devoted to dispelling myths instead of creating them, international opinion-peddling on the subject of the Middle East has little value beyond making the participants
feel better. Intellectuals who think they can influence events by argument are usually making a mistake. Their only influence can be on the preservation or the further erosion of the complex truth.
Those who imagine that there can be such a thing as a useful lie are joining a bad company. A less bad company, but still sad, is formed by those who believe that by clarifying the case they can
affect its outcome. The humanities, of which political analysis is a branch, must be pursued for their own sake. Any thinker who can’t live with that imperative is doomed to die of
disappointment. Our own experience of reading, however, tells us that a thought launched into the void is not necessarily going nowhere. When Albert Camus wrote ‘Tyrants conduct monologues
above a million solitudes’ he changed my life, even if he did nothing to change the minds of a million admirers of Stalin. That might seem a small reward for his effort, but probably the best
reason for trying to say things well is that they might travel further, beyond the gravity field of automatic indifference. Thinly spread through space and time, there has always been a community
of the receptive, glad to be confirmed in a view they already held, or at least to be reassured that they are not alone. On the Middle East, in my opinion, the reiteration of a commonplace –
that anti-Semitism is the enemy of the Palestinian cause – is still worth it. But it is only just worth it. Remotely located pundits who have managed to persuade themselves that the clock can
be put back beyond 1948 without generating a mushroom cloud aren’t going to have their minds changed by mere reasoning.

What really matters is the opinions of the people on the spot. In that regard, I got a quick education at the Wellington Festival in the following year, when the highly talented Israeli writer
Etgar Keret told me that he not only understood what I was saying, but that it scarcely needed saying anyway, since every young person in the area, whether Jew or Arab, understood it perfectly, as
long as they had an IQ in triple figures. In other words, there were no opinions left to be thrashed out: only the politics. Meanwhile there was a life to lead. In his marvellous stories, the
youngsters lead it, with all the usual dancing to flashing lights. Some of the flashing lights are bombs going off, but that’s the way it is. Nevertheless it is surely permissible to be
stunned by the sheer number of commentators on the international scene who think they know something that Amos Elon, Amos Oz and David Grossman don’t. All three want a Palestinian state. None
of them believes in retaining the Occupied Territories. By what feat of mental gymnastics can they be regarded as imperialists? Yet they are so regarded. Now that the international left
intelligentsia is united in the opinion that Israel is America’s cat’s-paw, the Israeli liberals, as if they didn’t have enough trouble with their own right wing, find themselves
calumniated as stooges of imperialism, simply because they want the State of Israel to continue. Those of us who have lived long enough will hear a bell ringing, and remember the days when the
Kremlin labelled liberal democrats as Social Fascists. In the Germany of the 1930s, it was one of the reasons why the Nazis came to power. Since Nazi power made the foundation of the State of
Israel inevitable, it makes more sense to blame the Russians than to blame the Americans. But it makes more sense still to blame nobody. The eternal search for a scapegoat is where the whole thing
started.

The first thing to say about
Madame Bovary
is that it’s a terrific story. Other comparably great and famous novels aren’t, but it is. Everyone should read
it. Everyone
would
read it, given a free taste. The plot fairly belts along from the first page. Young Charles Bovary clumps into school to be laughed at by the other kids for his
awkwardness. In no time he is a medical student, then a doctor. The beautiful Emma Rouault is his second wife. He wins the right to her hand after setting her father’s broken leg. It’s
a simple job but it gets him a reputation for competence. Fatally he believes this too. Stuck with him in the depths of nowhere, Emma gradually realizes that she has married a chump. Longing for
excitement and a classier way of life, she falls for a charming poseur called Leon. Their incipient affair is a stand-off. But with an upmarket louse called Rodolphe she finds sexual fulfilment,
and plans a future with him. Sharing no such plans, Rodolphe dumps her. She collapses. Nursed back to health by the unsuspecting Charles, she hooks up again with Leon. This time it really happens.
But the extravagance of her double life, financed by money stolen from Charles, gets her into ruinous debt. The loan-shark closes in, Leon backs out, and Emma has only one way to go. On a shelf in
the pharmacist’s shop nearby is a bottle of . . . but I won’t say how it comes out, because some of you might not yet have read the book.