Projecting Jakov Baratz

Australia has an Israel lobby with many shop fronts. There's the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), the Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBD), and so on.

There are Israeli dupes aplenty, on both sides of the political divide, in federal and state parliaments.

There are Israel-friendly journalists and columnists in the Australian press.

And then, in a class of his own, there's Greg Sheridan, who has been rooting for Israel in The Australian since, oh... time immemorial.

Needless to say, Netanyahu's success in Tuesday's Israeli election has him at his breathless, gushing best.

"Benjamin Netanyahu take a bow," opens his 'analysis' of the 'great' event.

Lost in admiration for this "giant of modern global politics," Sheridan goes to truly extraordinary lengths to play down Netanyahu's ideologically-fueled designs on the whole of Palestine:

"Netanyahu was widely criticised for statements during the campaign about possible future Israeli sovereignty over Jewish settlements in the West Bank. This led to some ridiculous headlines to the effect that Netanyahu had said he would annex the West Bank. He said nothing of the kind. His comments were, of course, ambiguous and could be criticised as irresponsible. But as with everything Netanyahu says, they must be evaluated carefully and in all their complexity. He was asked whether he would extend Israeli sovereignty to West Bank settlements and replied along the lines of: Who says we're not? This is a representative Netanyahu formulation, full of implications but with no specific commitment. He was also asked whether this would apply to isolated settlements or just the big settlement blocks, most of which are adjacent or almost adjacent to Jerusalem. These would then be part of Israeli sovereign territory. Therefore if you want to interpret Netanyahu's comments in the softest possible manner, he is merely restating orthodoxy. Making the same commitment for isolated settlements is much more problematic. Netanyahu specifically was not talking about the outposts or settlements that are illegal under Israeli law. The comments must also be understood in the context of Israeli electoral dynamics. Netanyahu was worried some of the smaller right-wing parties would fall under the 3.25% threshold for getting seats in the Knesset. These votes would then be wasted and Netanyahu might have fallen short of government. So for a while he was encouraging settlers and others to vote for non-Likud right-wing parties. But then he got worried that... " (Netanyahu remains Israel's hardball hero, The Australian, 11/4/19)

Is this kind of apologetic not unique in the annals of Australian journalism? Has any Australian msm journalist ever gone to greater lengths to ward off criticism of an Israeli land-thief? The expression 'bending over backwards' hardly begins to do Sheridan's cosseting of Netanyahu justice.

How is one to explain Sheridan's weird adulation of Netanyahu? While we may never get a satisfactory answer to that question, it is worth keeping in mind that his brain throngs with things he picked up long ago from his reading.

For example, Sheridan once revealed that he had been "seduced" by Morris West's 1968 wild eastern, The Tower of Babel.* More precisely, it seems that he was seduced by the novel's fictional hero, General Jakov Baratz:

"He had come to [Palestine] as a child, son of a landless trader from the Baltic, and he had never forgotten the splendour of his arrival: the furnace blaze of the sun, the blinding sky, the mountains hewn as if by wild axe-men, the desert where the air danced and cities and palm trees swam upside down and vanished at a glance. As a youth he had farmed it, building rock walls with his bare hands, carrying baskets of earth on his back, planting the vine twigs and the lemon-trees. As a man he had fought over it, using the military skills that the British had taught him, counting every bloody mile from Lydda to Ramle, to Abu Ghosh and the final foothold on Zion. And now his love for it was manifold: a dark passion that bound him closer to the soil than he ever had been to the body of a woman. He was jealous too, like all lovers; because his tenure in the beloved was always insecure - and no one knew better than he how strongly it was threatened." (p 30)

If, in fact, we are what we read, could the bookish Sheridan, perhaps, be projecting an indelible memory of Jakov Baratz onto Benjamin Netanyahu? Pure speculation, of course, but how else to explain what is going on here?

[*See my August 2009 series of posts, West's Wild East.]