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.]
Showing posts with label Morris West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morris West. Show all posts
Friday, April 12, 2019
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
The Conroy Conundrum
Don the sackcloth and ashes now!
Stephen Conroy, 53, has up and resigned... and, thanks to 20 years 'service' in the Senate, this great man will be getting a cool annual pension of $200,000. Nice.
I know... WTF?! right?
But wait, it gets worse:
In his Diary of a Foreign Minister, Bob Carr described Conroy as "the firebrand of the Victorian Right with an umbilical attachment to the cause of Israel." (p 233)
I know... OMFG!! right?
But what I want to know is why, O why, anyone in their right mind, in the 21st century, other than maybe a certifiably mad Christian Zio, would have such a thing as "an umbilical attachment to Israel"?
I mean, if Conroy wore a pith helmet everywhere, or a monocle, or a Davy Crockett hat, wouldn't you want to know why?
Is it Christian Zionism? Is it parental blah? Priestly blah? Is it Leon Uris? Morris West? Is it patronage? Is it some unholy combination of these? What is it?
Seriously, I'd really, really love to know what IT is.
Stephen Conroy, 53, has up and resigned... and, thanks to 20 years 'service' in the Senate, this great man will be getting a cool annual pension of $200,000. Nice.
I know... WTF?! right?
But wait, it gets worse:
In his Diary of a Foreign Minister, Bob Carr described Conroy as "the firebrand of the Victorian Right with an umbilical attachment to the cause of Israel." (p 233)
I know... OMFG!! right?
But what I want to know is why, O why, anyone in their right mind, in the 21st century, other than maybe a certifiably mad Christian Zio, would have such a thing as "an umbilical attachment to Israel"?
I mean, if Conroy wore a pith helmet everywhere, or a monocle, or a Davy Crockett hat, wouldn't you want to know why?
Is it Christian Zionism? Is it parental blah? Priestly blah? Is it Leon Uris? Morris West? Is it patronage? Is it some unholy combination of these? What is it?
Seriously, I'd really, really love to know what IT is.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
West's Wild East 5
Continued from the previous post...
This will be my final post on Morris West's The Tower of Babel, the preferred in-flight reading of The Australian's foreign editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan as he wings his way from the lucky to the plucky country. Babel, described by Sheridan as a "ripping good read," is an invaluable compendium of 60's/70's Ziobabble - the kind that still resonates with him and makes his columns on the subject of Israel such ripping good rants.
Having introduced you to West's awful 'Arabs' and awesome 'Israelis', it's now time to reveal where all this is heading - to the Zionist myth of Masada, which is to say the Zionist appropriation of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-70 CE), and (to paraphrase Israeli historian Idith Zertal's Israel's Holocaust & the Politics of Nationhood, 2005, pp 30-31) the cloaking of the 1st century Jewish rebels in the mantle of Zionism and their transformation into Palmach fighters as a foil to the scorned alleged passivity of the leaders of European Jewry and their people in the face of Nazi slaughter:-
It is January 1967. Israel's military brass are playing their annual war games in the Negev Desert: "The real objective [of Operation Maccabee] was the pass of Abu Agheila, key to the Sinai Desert, where in the campaign of 1956, Israel had suffered grievous losses... If the Sinai campaign had to be fought all over again - and every threatening pointer said that it would - Abu Agheila would have to be retaken." (p 335) The Israelis have got to get Abu Agheila right next time around because the consequences of not doing so are dire: "In Israel every life was precious, because, without men, the desert would creep back and eat up the pastures and wither the pine trees and fill the cisterns with sand." IOW, Operation Maccabee was "a rehearsal for survival." Think about it: "two and a half million, camped in a narrow perimeter, beset, outnumbered by tens of millions, a child country, matched against giants terrible in their armour." (p 335)
As you would, Jakov and Chaim decide to undertake a "sentimental journey" by helicopter to Masada during their lunch break. "As they banked and began their spiral around the great plateau, they fell silent, awed by the monstrous majesty of the place, familiar yet terrible, sacred, glorious and full of bloody memories." (p 336) West parades before us, in turn, Herod the Great, the Parthians, Titus, Eliezer ben Yair and his Zealots, and Flavius Silva.
Understandably, Jakov has a sudden access of spine-stiffening Masada Syndrome: "[T]his was a symbol of Israel itself - walled in by [Arab League] boycott and blockade and belligerent rivals. They would never starve her into submission but they could and did reduce her, bleeding her capital into arms, cutting the life-lines of her trade, blackmailing those who wished to do business with her. But she still held out - as the thousand on Masada had held out for 3 years against the 10,000 Romans." (p 357)
And then, having touched down, these two Zionist warriors out of central casting, Jakov and Chaim, become "twins drawn back into the womb of the same folk-memory" - from which comes the voice of Eliezar ben Yair himself: "Let us die then, before we become slaves under our enemies..."
Israel's raison d'etre is revealed at last:"The Chief of Staff thrust his hand into the pocket of his tunic and brought up a small shard of pottery, inscribed with a Hebrew character. He smiled and held it out to Jakov Baratz. Baratz nodded and brought out another one to match it... They were the personal tokens of the Zealots of Masada, used for the drawing of rations, and perhaps for the last fratricidal lottery on the mountain-top. They were the last answer to the last question. The symbols inscribed on them were the only words that made sense in the Babel tower of politics and legalities and family quarrels, and split loyalties. Sooner or later, believing or unbelieving, every man had to find one inch of soil* on which he would stand and defy the world. Sooner or later, he had to say: 'This is all I know. It is not enough; but so be it.' Sooner or later, prophet or mountebank, he had to take his own small shard of truth in his hands, write his name on it and toss it into the bowl, prepared to live or die by the draw. 'Full circle', said Jakov Baratz. 'Twenty years and we're here again' 'Do you remember the words, Jakov?' 'I remember them'. They clasped hands, pressing the potsherds into their palms and recited the old oath of the Haganah and their own covenant with the new Israel. 'Masada shall not fall again'." (pp 339-340) [*Err, shouldn't that be someone else's soil? And lo, "it" wasn't nearly enough, Israel going on in June to take and occupy the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria's Golan Heights, and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.]
And here's the same propaganda trope passed from Ephraim Sneh to Sheridan: "Apart from the overwhelming experience of visiting the Yad Vashem museum recalling the Holocaust, the most powerful image I saw in Israel was in a small office in the Knesset (parliament) building in Jerusalem. I had gone to see Ephraim Sneh, a white-haired veteran Labour Party politician and soldier, a former cabinet minister and a former general. He points to a picture on the back wall of his office. It is of 2 Israeli F-15 fighters flying over Auschwitz. 'When we didn't have F-15s, we had Auschwitz', he says. His grandparents, he tells me, were killed by the Polish farmers they had paid to shelter them. You learn the lessons of trusting other people with your security. Israel will certainly make compromises. But it will not commit suicide." (Deep inside the plucky country, The Australian, 19/1/08)
Of course, this was no blinding insight for Sheridan - he'd picked it up decades before from his mentor on the Middle East, Morris West. This, folks, is the raw material for Sheridan's 'quality' journalism.
This will be my final post on Morris West's The Tower of Babel, the preferred in-flight reading of The Australian's foreign editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan as he wings his way from the lucky to the plucky country. Babel, described by Sheridan as a "ripping good read," is an invaluable compendium of 60's/70's Ziobabble - the kind that still resonates with him and makes his columns on the subject of Israel such ripping good rants.
Having introduced you to West's awful 'Arabs' and awesome 'Israelis', it's now time to reveal where all this is heading - to the Zionist myth of Masada, which is to say the Zionist appropriation of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-70 CE), and (to paraphrase Israeli historian Idith Zertal's Israel's Holocaust & the Politics of Nationhood, 2005, pp 30-31) the cloaking of the 1st century Jewish rebels in the mantle of Zionism and their transformation into Palmach fighters as a foil to the scorned alleged passivity of the leaders of European Jewry and their people in the face of Nazi slaughter:-
It is January 1967. Israel's military brass are playing their annual war games in the Negev Desert: "The real objective [of Operation Maccabee] was the pass of Abu Agheila, key to the Sinai Desert, where in the campaign of 1956, Israel had suffered grievous losses... If the Sinai campaign had to be fought all over again - and every threatening pointer said that it would - Abu Agheila would have to be retaken." (p 335) The Israelis have got to get Abu Agheila right next time around because the consequences of not doing so are dire: "In Israel every life was precious, because, without men, the desert would creep back and eat up the pastures and wither the pine trees and fill the cisterns with sand." IOW, Operation Maccabee was "a rehearsal for survival." Think about it: "two and a half million, camped in a narrow perimeter, beset, outnumbered by tens of millions, a child country, matched against giants terrible in their armour." (p 335)
As you would, Jakov and Chaim decide to undertake a "sentimental journey" by helicopter to Masada during their lunch break. "As they banked and began their spiral around the great plateau, they fell silent, awed by the monstrous majesty of the place, familiar yet terrible, sacred, glorious and full of bloody memories." (p 336) West parades before us, in turn, Herod the Great, the Parthians, Titus, Eliezer ben Yair and his Zealots, and Flavius Silva.
Understandably, Jakov has a sudden access of spine-stiffening Masada Syndrome: "[T]his was a symbol of Israel itself - walled in by [Arab League] boycott and blockade and belligerent rivals. They would never starve her into submission but they could and did reduce her, bleeding her capital into arms, cutting the life-lines of her trade, blackmailing those who wished to do business with her. But she still held out - as the thousand on Masada had held out for 3 years against the 10,000 Romans." (p 357)
And then, having touched down, these two Zionist warriors out of central casting, Jakov and Chaim, become "twins drawn back into the womb of the same folk-memory" - from which comes the voice of Eliezar ben Yair himself: "Let us die then, before we become slaves under our enemies..."
Israel's raison d'etre is revealed at last:"The Chief of Staff thrust his hand into the pocket of his tunic and brought up a small shard of pottery, inscribed with a Hebrew character. He smiled and held it out to Jakov Baratz. Baratz nodded and brought out another one to match it... They were the personal tokens of the Zealots of Masada, used for the drawing of rations, and perhaps for the last fratricidal lottery on the mountain-top. They were the last answer to the last question. The symbols inscribed on them were the only words that made sense in the Babel tower of politics and legalities and family quarrels, and split loyalties. Sooner or later, believing or unbelieving, every man had to find one inch of soil* on which he would stand and defy the world. Sooner or later, he had to say: 'This is all I know. It is not enough; but so be it.' Sooner or later, prophet or mountebank, he had to take his own small shard of truth in his hands, write his name on it and toss it into the bowl, prepared to live or die by the draw. 'Full circle', said Jakov Baratz. 'Twenty years and we're here again' 'Do you remember the words, Jakov?' 'I remember them'. They clasped hands, pressing the potsherds into their palms and recited the old oath of the Haganah and their own covenant with the new Israel. 'Masada shall not fall again'." (pp 339-340) [*Err, shouldn't that be someone else's soil? And lo, "it" wasn't nearly enough, Israel going on in June to take and occupy the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria's Golan Heights, and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.]
And here's the same propaganda trope passed from Ephraim Sneh to Sheridan: "Apart from the overwhelming experience of visiting the Yad Vashem museum recalling the Holocaust, the most powerful image I saw in Israel was in a small office in the Knesset (parliament) building in Jerusalem. I had gone to see Ephraim Sneh, a white-haired veteran Labour Party politician and soldier, a former cabinet minister and a former general. He points to a picture on the back wall of his office. It is of 2 Israeli F-15 fighters flying over Auschwitz. 'When we didn't have F-15s, we had Auschwitz', he says. His grandparents, he tells me, were killed by the Polish farmers they had paid to shelter them. You learn the lessons of trusting other people with your security. Israel will certainly make compromises. But it will not commit suicide." (Deep inside the plucky country, The Australian, 19/1/08)
Of course, this was no blinding insight for Sheridan - he'd picked it up decades before from his mentor on the Middle East, Morris West. This, folks, is the raw material for Sheridan's 'quality' journalism.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
West's Wild East 4
Continued from the post before last...
Meet the 'Israelis':-
Jakov Baratz, Director of Military Intelligence, is The Tower of Babel's poster boy, the complete converse of that awful Syrian Ba'thist, Colonel Safreddin. He's your typical, conscience-racked Israeli philosopher-warrior who does everything humanly possible to avoid civilian casualties when planning his country's next war crime... which the author has based on Israel's 1966 "reprisal raid" on the West Bank village of Samua when the West Bank was still under Jordanian control (1948-1967). "PLO terrorists" have been infiltrating Israel from the West Bank and Jakov and his staff have been tasked by Aron the PM to prepare a plan for said "reprisal raid"on one of three villages in the Hebron area. They must consider how long it'll take Jordanian troops to counterattack, and, of course - being Israelis and all - "We have then, to consider the villagers themselves. We are to avoid civilian casualties*. Our plan is to move out the population and then destroy the village. However, the villagers must have some place to go. If there are caves and wadis where they can shelter, so much the better. We cannot have them caught in cross-fire between the Jordanians and ourselves... Any questions?... 'Suggestion, sir.' 'Let's have it.' 'Medical services. In case there are civilian casualties...'" (pp 90-91) [*"The Israelis are among the most disciplined troops in the world and go to great lengths to avoid civilian caualties." Greg Sheridan (See my 8/2/09 post On Planet Sheridan)]
As the "raid" proceeds, Jakov and Israeli Chief of Staff Chaim observe the action from an "observation post overlooking the Hebron valley": "In essence, the Hebron plan was very simple and there was little room for mistakes. At 0600 the fighters would be in the air, and the ground troops would be right on the Jordan border. They would drive 5 kms into Jordan territory and surround the village. The villagers would be moved out and a mixed company of infantry and engineers would move in to clear out stragglers and set demolition charges in houses and public buildings. The charges would be exploded, the company would withdraw, the operation would be over. The tanks were there to protect the infantry, provide a massive show of strength and bar the road to any approach by troops of [Jordan's] Arab Legion. The only probable oppostion would be small arms and sniping from armed irregulars of the PLO." (pp 310-311)
And lo, like clockwork, "[w]hen the villagers saw [the Israeli tanks] they fled in panic..." But, just for the panic-proof among them, "a huge distorted voice began calling on the villagers - if any remained - to leave their homes and follow their neighbours... They would not be harmed, the voice promised them, but if any man fired a shot... they would be killed without mercy. The call was repeated, once, twice and again. Then, under the watchful eyes of the gunners, the last frightened folk crept out of their homes and hurried away. The ring of tanks closed around the huddle of empty habitations. The troops moved in to prepare its destruction." (pp 315-316)
Jordanian troops arrive only to be badly mauled by Israeli tank rounds. In the village, "buildings... spouted fire or collapsed like card-houses in a puff of dusty air," before Israeli troops, "shepherded" by tanks, depart for home, "unscarred, unhurried." Remarks Chaim, "Very neat, very efficient." (pp 316-317) The PM, of course, is a tad pissed off at the number of Jordanian casualties, but Chaim will have none of it: "'We told you the risks. You accepted them. We [the military brass] won't be made scapegoats'. The PM drew in his horns like a snail."
To recap: the cool, civilian casualty averse Israeli army has carried out the pollies' dirty work with the heaviest of hearts, but apart from one too many Jordanian troops biting the dust, neither villagers (shame about their village though) nor Israeli heroes emerge with so much as a hair out of place. Now you believe that, don't you? West did. Sheridan does. Only problem is history wasn't quite as "neat" as the novelist would have us believe.
According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, "The military had been demanding permission from the government to act against a Jordanian village for months... The government had refused, authorizing only limited action that the military commanders deemed useless. Now the army proposed entering the village of Samua... and bombing a few dozen houses there. Chief of Staff Rabin [Chaim] went to see [PM] Eshkol [Aron] at his home in Jerusalem. Eshkol would have preferred to take steps against Syria, but he agreed that the circumstances demanded action in Jordan, despite the risk of unwanted conflict with the Jordanian army." (1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East 2007 p 150)
Nor, it seems, did the villagers or their attackers emerge unscathed: "Israel's envoy to Washington, Ephraim Evron, reported that the [military] attache [at the US embassy in Amman, who visited Samua] had seen 'many civilians' bodies, which suggested that not all the houses were evacuated before being blown up. Some of the bodies were those of elderly women who had not been able to escape in time, Evron reported. Operation Shredder, as it was called, grew far beyond the [security] cabinet's expectations... A regiment commander in the paratroopers was killed and 10 IDF soldiers were wounded." (1967, p 151) Oops!
There were other consequences of the raid as well: the West Bank erupted in anti-Hashemite riots, savagely put down by the Jordanian army. It also had the effect of convincing King Hussein that whether he threw in his lot with the Syrians and the Egyptians or not, Israel wanted to occupy the West Bank regardless (see Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War & Peace, Avi Shlaim, 2007, p 227). Funny that, because one of the novel's themes is alleged Arab provocations of Israel designed to goad it into war.
Party pooper Segev might describe Yakov, Chaim & Co as "like adolescent boys or bulls in rut. They believed in force and they wanted war. War was their destiny (1967, p 296)," but what the hell does he know? West's Director of Military Intelligence is a man who cares, damn it, a man in pain:
"As he walked back alone to his office [Jakov] thought, as he had thought many times before, that it was all too spare and frigid and impersonal - a game played on a sand map, with no true knowledge, or even knowledgeable discussion about the human factors involved. Move out the civilian population! So simple! A roar on a bull horn and the human ants march out in orderly procession from the ant-heap. But it was never like that. How could it be? It was something far more poignant and destructive, old women doddering in panic through the alleys, a confusion of men shouting and yelling in contradiction, babies snatched from the breast, children herded like frightened sheep to caves and clefts in the hillside, the small hoards of seven hundred poor lifetimes buried under a pile of rubble. For what? To tell a harried princeling that he must police a hundred miles of desert border a little better. Medical services! God Almighty, how easy it was to say - how harsh the instant reality! A man with his eye gouged out by a bullet; a boy pushing his spilled guts back into his belly; the blank puzzlement on the faces of the dead. How easy it was to make political calculations - as if you could work out the whole human equation with a pair of calipers and a slide rule. Across the Atlantic the assembly of nations would sit in judgement on the act which, today, was being planned with such professional detatchment. All round the spinning planet, men and women would read the news and wonder whether this incident or the next would trigger an atomic destruction. There were no bounds to the consequences of the simplest act of violence. One man dead meant thousands would never be born. One homeless man might one day tear down cities in a mad vendetta against the human race. You could push the monstrous logic to a point at which it would drive you mad. On the other hand you could affect to ignore it altogether and limit yourself to that area of action which was allotted to you by legal commission. You could inform, advise, protest and then submit yourself to the consensus with a clear conscience... Or could you? He remembered Eichmann* sitting in his glass box in the courtroom, and making the same plea in a hundred different forms. What beat Eichmann in the end was the sheer horror of the arithmetic; but it started with the first Jew beaten by the first bunch of bullies in the street. So, if because of what you have begun this morning, one child is killed in a Hebron hovel, where do you stand? You know it can happen. You know it probably will. You have already accepted this tacit probability. How do you plead, Jakov Baratz? Guilty or not guilty?" (pp 91-92) [*Whoops! Inappropriate analogy! Morris West, you're an anti-Semite for sure!]
Like all those Israelis charged with keeping the hordes of Amalek at bay, Jakov suffers terribly from Existential Threat Syndrome (ETS): "'A man was killed this morning, sir; a peaceful farmer...' 'We have lost 6 million dead in the holocausts, Captain. Israel is built on their ashes. remember that'... The young man saluted and went out, closing the door behind him. Baratz stood staring at the map, where the red ink was spattered like blood spots and the cryptic military symbols told the story of a daily battle for survival. The map was as familiar to him as his own skin and he reacted instantly to every itch and prickle on its surface. Sometimes in his troubled dreams it was a skin; a living human skin, stretched tight and pegged down over a narrow ground between Egypt and Jordan and Syria and Lebanon and the sea which was its life blood. Suddenly the skin would errupt into swellings and pustules and out of these would come legions and legions of soldier ants, marching in serried ranks until they blotted out the skin and ate through it to the bare ground. When the ants left, the ground would be covered with bones, over which the voice of the ancient prophet chanted a threnody: The Power of the Lord laid hold of me and by the Spirit of the Lord I was carried away and set down in the midst of the plain which was covered with bones. Round the whole extent of them he took me, where they lay thick on the plain, all of them parched quite dry. Son of man, he said, can life return to these bones... Then, in the dream, there would be a silence while he waited for the promise of resurrection that should follow the threnody. But the promise never came and he would wake, sweating and terrified, knowing that if the ants took over the land there would be no resurrection any more and that the House of Israel would be blotted out for ever."
But, despite his troubled dreams, he's really just a regular guy we can all identify with (unlike those Arab freaks already described: "[H]e did not believe in magic any more than he believed in the God of the Fathers, who could sit removed in his heaven while 6 million of his chosen ones perished in a monstrous hecatomb. And this was the irony of his situation, that in him, an appointed trustee of the continuity of Israel, the continuity was already broken. The hands which lay before him on the table were not anointed to a priesthood. No prophecies were written in their leathery palms. They called down no benediction from a silent sky. They were artisan's hands, apt to the working of wood and metal. They were soldier's hands, that could strip a gun and assemble it again from stock to muzzle swifter than most. They were lover's hands, which had once wakened Hannah to triumphant ecstasy..." (p 6)
And, and, he's sooo connected to the land: "He had come to it 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) [*So Jakov threw himself into the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948? You gotta love this guy.]
To be continued...
Meet the 'Israelis':-
Jakov Baratz, Director of Military Intelligence, is The Tower of Babel's poster boy, the complete converse of that awful Syrian Ba'thist, Colonel Safreddin. He's your typical, conscience-racked Israeli philosopher-warrior who does everything humanly possible to avoid civilian casualties when planning his country's next war crime... which the author has based on Israel's 1966 "reprisal raid" on the West Bank village of Samua when the West Bank was still under Jordanian control (1948-1967). "PLO terrorists" have been infiltrating Israel from the West Bank and Jakov and his staff have been tasked by Aron the PM to prepare a plan for said "reprisal raid"on one of three villages in the Hebron area. They must consider how long it'll take Jordanian troops to counterattack, and, of course - being Israelis and all - "We have then, to consider the villagers themselves. We are to avoid civilian casualties*. Our plan is to move out the population and then destroy the village. However, the villagers must have some place to go. If there are caves and wadis where they can shelter, so much the better. We cannot have them caught in cross-fire between the Jordanians and ourselves... Any questions?... 'Suggestion, sir.' 'Let's have it.' 'Medical services. In case there are civilian casualties...'" (pp 90-91) [*"The Israelis are among the most disciplined troops in the world and go to great lengths to avoid civilian caualties." Greg Sheridan (See my 8/2/09 post On Planet Sheridan)]
As the "raid" proceeds, Jakov and Israeli Chief of Staff Chaim observe the action from an "observation post overlooking the Hebron valley": "In essence, the Hebron plan was very simple and there was little room for mistakes. At 0600 the fighters would be in the air, and the ground troops would be right on the Jordan border. They would drive 5 kms into Jordan territory and surround the village. The villagers would be moved out and a mixed company of infantry and engineers would move in to clear out stragglers and set demolition charges in houses and public buildings. The charges would be exploded, the company would withdraw, the operation would be over. The tanks were there to protect the infantry, provide a massive show of strength and bar the road to any approach by troops of [Jordan's] Arab Legion. The only probable oppostion would be small arms and sniping from armed irregulars of the PLO." (pp 310-311)
And lo, like clockwork, "[w]hen the villagers saw [the Israeli tanks] they fled in panic..." But, just for the panic-proof among them, "a huge distorted voice began calling on the villagers - if any remained - to leave their homes and follow their neighbours... They would not be harmed, the voice promised them, but if any man fired a shot... they would be killed without mercy. The call was repeated, once, twice and again. Then, under the watchful eyes of the gunners, the last frightened folk crept out of their homes and hurried away. The ring of tanks closed around the huddle of empty habitations. The troops moved in to prepare its destruction." (pp 315-316)
Jordanian troops arrive only to be badly mauled by Israeli tank rounds. In the village, "buildings... spouted fire or collapsed like card-houses in a puff of dusty air," before Israeli troops, "shepherded" by tanks, depart for home, "unscarred, unhurried." Remarks Chaim, "Very neat, very efficient." (pp 316-317) The PM, of course, is a tad pissed off at the number of Jordanian casualties, but Chaim will have none of it: "'We told you the risks. You accepted them. We [the military brass] won't be made scapegoats'. The PM drew in his horns like a snail."
To recap: the cool, civilian casualty averse Israeli army has carried out the pollies' dirty work with the heaviest of hearts, but apart from one too many Jordanian troops biting the dust, neither villagers (shame about their village though) nor Israeli heroes emerge with so much as a hair out of place. Now you believe that, don't you? West did. Sheridan does. Only problem is history wasn't quite as "neat" as the novelist would have us believe.
According to Israeli historian Tom Segev, "The military had been demanding permission from the government to act against a Jordanian village for months... The government had refused, authorizing only limited action that the military commanders deemed useless. Now the army proposed entering the village of Samua... and bombing a few dozen houses there. Chief of Staff Rabin [Chaim] went to see [PM] Eshkol [Aron] at his home in Jerusalem. Eshkol would have preferred to take steps against Syria, but he agreed that the circumstances demanded action in Jordan, despite the risk of unwanted conflict with the Jordanian army." (1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East 2007 p 150)
Nor, it seems, did the villagers or their attackers emerge unscathed: "Israel's envoy to Washington, Ephraim Evron, reported that the [military] attache [at the US embassy in Amman, who visited Samua] had seen 'many civilians' bodies, which suggested that not all the houses were evacuated before being blown up. Some of the bodies were those of elderly women who had not been able to escape in time, Evron reported. Operation Shredder, as it was called, grew far beyond the [security] cabinet's expectations... A regiment commander in the paratroopers was killed and 10 IDF soldiers were wounded." (1967, p 151) Oops!
There were other consequences of the raid as well: the West Bank erupted in anti-Hashemite riots, savagely put down by the Jordanian army. It also had the effect of convincing King Hussein that whether he threw in his lot with the Syrians and the Egyptians or not, Israel wanted to occupy the West Bank regardless (see Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War & Peace, Avi Shlaim, 2007, p 227). Funny that, because one of the novel's themes is alleged Arab provocations of Israel designed to goad it into war.
Party pooper Segev might describe Yakov, Chaim & Co as "like adolescent boys or bulls in rut. They believed in force and they wanted war. War was their destiny (1967, p 296)," but what the hell does he know? West's Director of Military Intelligence is a man who cares, damn it, a man in pain:
"As he walked back alone to his office [Jakov] thought, as he had thought many times before, that it was all too spare and frigid and impersonal - a game played on a sand map, with no true knowledge, or even knowledgeable discussion about the human factors involved. Move out the civilian population! So simple! A roar on a bull horn and the human ants march out in orderly procession from the ant-heap. But it was never like that. How could it be? It was something far more poignant and destructive, old women doddering in panic through the alleys, a confusion of men shouting and yelling in contradiction, babies snatched from the breast, children herded like frightened sheep to caves and clefts in the hillside, the small hoards of seven hundred poor lifetimes buried under a pile of rubble. For what? To tell a harried princeling that he must police a hundred miles of desert border a little better. Medical services! God Almighty, how easy it was to say - how harsh the instant reality! A man with his eye gouged out by a bullet; a boy pushing his spilled guts back into his belly; the blank puzzlement on the faces of the dead. How easy it was to make political calculations - as if you could work out the whole human equation with a pair of calipers and a slide rule. Across the Atlantic the assembly of nations would sit in judgement on the act which, today, was being planned with such professional detatchment. All round the spinning planet, men and women would read the news and wonder whether this incident or the next would trigger an atomic destruction. There were no bounds to the consequences of the simplest act of violence. One man dead meant thousands would never be born. One homeless man might one day tear down cities in a mad vendetta against the human race. You could push the monstrous logic to a point at which it would drive you mad. On the other hand you could affect to ignore it altogether and limit yourself to that area of action which was allotted to you by legal commission. You could inform, advise, protest and then submit yourself to the consensus with a clear conscience... Or could you? He remembered Eichmann* sitting in his glass box in the courtroom, and making the same plea in a hundred different forms. What beat Eichmann in the end was the sheer horror of the arithmetic; but it started with the first Jew beaten by the first bunch of bullies in the street. So, if because of what you have begun this morning, one child is killed in a Hebron hovel, where do you stand? You know it can happen. You know it probably will. You have already accepted this tacit probability. How do you plead, Jakov Baratz? Guilty or not guilty?" (pp 91-92) [*Whoops! Inappropriate analogy! Morris West, you're an anti-Semite for sure!]
Like all those Israelis charged with keeping the hordes of Amalek at bay, Jakov suffers terribly from Existential Threat Syndrome (ETS): "'A man was killed this morning, sir; a peaceful farmer...' 'We have lost 6 million dead in the holocausts, Captain. Israel is built on their ashes. remember that'... The young man saluted and went out, closing the door behind him. Baratz stood staring at the map, where the red ink was spattered like blood spots and the cryptic military symbols told the story of a daily battle for survival. The map was as familiar to him as his own skin and he reacted instantly to every itch and prickle on its surface. Sometimes in his troubled dreams it was a skin; a living human skin, stretched tight and pegged down over a narrow ground between Egypt and Jordan and Syria and Lebanon and the sea which was its life blood. Suddenly the skin would errupt into swellings and pustules and out of these would come legions and legions of soldier ants, marching in serried ranks until they blotted out the skin and ate through it to the bare ground. When the ants left, the ground would be covered with bones, over which the voice of the ancient prophet chanted a threnody: The Power of the Lord laid hold of me and by the Spirit of the Lord I was carried away and set down in the midst of the plain which was covered with bones. Round the whole extent of them he took me, where they lay thick on the plain, all of them parched quite dry. Son of man, he said, can life return to these bones... Then, in the dream, there would be a silence while he waited for the promise of resurrection that should follow the threnody. But the promise never came and he would wake, sweating and terrified, knowing that if the ants took over the land there would be no resurrection any more and that the House of Israel would be blotted out for ever."
But, despite his troubled dreams, he's really just a regular guy we can all identify with (unlike those Arab freaks already described: "[H]e did not believe in magic any more than he believed in the God of the Fathers, who could sit removed in his heaven while 6 million of his chosen ones perished in a monstrous hecatomb. And this was the irony of his situation, that in him, an appointed trustee of the continuity of Israel, the continuity was already broken. The hands which lay before him on the table were not anointed to a priesthood. No prophecies were written in their leathery palms. They called down no benediction from a silent sky. They were artisan's hands, apt to the working of wood and metal. They were soldier's hands, that could strip a gun and assemble it again from stock to muzzle swifter than most. They were lover's hands, which had once wakened Hannah to triumphant ecstasy..." (p 6)
And, and, he's sooo connected to the land: "He had come to it 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) [*So Jakov threw himself into the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948? You gotta love this guy.]
To be continued...
Friday, August 21, 2009
West's Wild East 3
Continued from the previous post...
Meet the Syrian Ba'thist:-
Colonel Omar Safreddin, a most unBa'thist Ba'thist...
"Colonel Omar Safreddin was a man of fixed and clear beliefs. He believed in Allah, the One the Merciful. He believed in Mohammed the Prophet - blessed be His Glorious Name! He believed in the Book and in the Reading which was the fountain of all knowledge. He believed in the People - the Chosen of God, the Sons of the Prophet, who had rolled like sea waves across the face of the earth and who, through the Book and the Prophet, must find again their identity and their brotherhood and their dignity among the infidel. He believed in the Land and the Tribe, defined by borders and by possessions and by history and tradition. He believed in power, and its exercise by an elite who had prepared themselves to assume it.
"In the Syrian Army, which was his own tribe and territory, he had set himself to create such an elite: a group of young officers, noble in body, enlightened in spirit and trained by education to be the first inheritors of the revolution and the resurrection... The instrument of application was the Hunafa Club, a group of 15 young men who met every week... The Club took its name from that small group of Meccan believers, among whom Mohammed the Prophet first found inspiration and enlightenment... Each meeting of the Club began with prayer and ablution, which were followed by a ritual meal... After the meal, the members recited in chorus the Summons, which the angel Gabriel made to the Prophet at his first calling, and the Answers which he, terrified, gave to the angelic voice. It was, perhaps, symbolic that Omar Safreddin spoke with the voice of the angel while his disciples answered with the voice of the Prophet." (pp 73-74)
"What could they know of the high visionary enterprise of building a 20th-century state on the ruins of a French colony and a province of the Ottomam Empire? What could they know about the vision - larger yet - of Islam restored and purified, of an Arab hegemony... from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules?... This was his own mission. To fight the Jews... to call together the wandering Arabs - those who were left behind in the march of history - and weld them into a mighty host eager for the rewards promised by the One the Merciful. He had to bring them back to the tremendous simplicities of the Book. He had to teach them that the risk was worth the gain and that it was always expedient for a few to die for the ultimate greatness of the many." (pp 167-168)
My God, the Syrian Christian originator of that stream of Arab nationalism known as Ba'thism, Michel 'Aflaq, would be turning in his grave if Colonel Safreddin had really been a member of his movement. The objectives of the Ba'th were strictly secular: Arab unity, freedom and socialism. For 'Aflaq, the answer to contemporary Arab decadence and disunity was not religion, but a moral resurrection (ba'th) of each and every Arab individual. Islam, if it figured at all in Ba'thist thinking, was merely seen as a product of the genius of an eternal Arab nation. Here's 'Aflaq in full flight: "They ask us, Brethren, what do you mean by the mission, the eternal Arab mission? The Arab mission does not consist in words which we proclaim, it does not consist in principles to be incorporated in programs, it does not constitute matter for legislation. All these are dead, counterfeit things... It is our life itself, it is to agree to experience this life with a deep and true experience, great and massive in proportion to the depth of suffering undergone by the Arabs, in proportion to the great dangers which threaten its continued existence. This living and true experience will bring us back to ourselves, to our living realities; it will make us shoulder our responsibilities and will set us on the true path in order that we may fight these diseases and these obstacles, these counterfeit conditions, in order to fight social injustice, class exploitation, and the eras of selfishness, bribery and exploitation, in order to combat tyranny, the falsification of the popular will, and the insults to the dignity of the Arab as a citizen and a man; for the sake of a free society in which every Arab will regain consciousness of himself, of his existence, his dignity, his thinking, and his responsibilities. The experience in which our struggle takes place is that of the Arab nation dismembered into different countries and statelets, artificial and counterfeit; we struggle until we can reunite these scattered members, until we may reach a wholesome and natural state in which no severed member can speak in the name of all, until we can get rid of this strange and anomalous state. Then will it be possible for the Arabs to unite, for their spirit to be upstanding, their ideas clear, their morality upright; then will their be scope for their minds to create, for they will have become that wholesome natural entity, one nation. This wholesome and true experience, struggling against the existing conditions until we return to the right state, such is the Arab mission... " (The Struggle for Syria, Patrick Seale, 1986, pp 155-156)
To complete the caricature, Omar Safreddin can sleep quite soundly as his infant son hovers between life and death in a hospital bed: "[H]e settled himself in the chair, stretched out his long legs, canted his military cap over his eyes and began to take long deep breaths. Within 3 minutes he was asleep... This was the method man, pure, without alloy. You see death hovering. You pray against him. You sleep; because you have done all that there is to be done. Death comes. You weep. You bury the body. You breed again." (p 85)
In short, Colonel Safreddin is to Ba'thism as Sheridan is to journalism.
Before ending this post in the series, consider this sentence from West's novel: "[Aziz] lingered on [the next question] tenderly, as if he were testing the blade of a dagger." (p 100) Can you imagine any writer today getting away with this: '[Insert Jewish name] lingered on the next question, as if he were counting a bag of money'?
To be continued...
Meet the Syrian Ba'thist:-
Colonel Omar Safreddin, a most unBa'thist Ba'thist...
"Colonel Omar Safreddin was a man of fixed and clear beliefs. He believed in Allah, the One the Merciful. He believed in Mohammed the Prophet - blessed be His Glorious Name! He believed in the Book and in the Reading which was the fountain of all knowledge. He believed in the People - the Chosen of God, the Sons of the Prophet, who had rolled like sea waves across the face of the earth and who, through the Book and the Prophet, must find again their identity and their brotherhood and their dignity among the infidel. He believed in the Land and the Tribe, defined by borders and by possessions and by history and tradition. He believed in power, and its exercise by an elite who had prepared themselves to assume it.
"In the Syrian Army, which was his own tribe and territory, he had set himself to create such an elite: a group of young officers, noble in body, enlightened in spirit and trained by education to be the first inheritors of the revolution and the resurrection... The instrument of application was the Hunafa Club, a group of 15 young men who met every week... The Club took its name from that small group of Meccan believers, among whom Mohammed the Prophet first found inspiration and enlightenment... Each meeting of the Club began with prayer and ablution, which were followed by a ritual meal... After the meal, the members recited in chorus the Summons, which the angel Gabriel made to the Prophet at his first calling, and the Answers which he, terrified, gave to the angelic voice. It was, perhaps, symbolic that Omar Safreddin spoke with the voice of the angel while his disciples answered with the voice of the Prophet." (pp 73-74)
"What could they know of the high visionary enterprise of building a 20th-century state on the ruins of a French colony and a province of the Ottomam Empire? What could they know about the vision - larger yet - of Islam restored and purified, of an Arab hegemony... from the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules?... This was his own mission. To fight the Jews... to call together the wandering Arabs - those who were left behind in the march of history - and weld them into a mighty host eager for the rewards promised by the One the Merciful. He had to bring them back to the tremendous simplicities of the Book. He had to teach them that the risk was worth the gain and that it was always expedient for a few to die for the ultimate greatness of the many." (pp 167-168)
My God, the Syrian Christian originator of that stream of Arab nationalism known as Ba'thism, Michel 'Aflaq, would be turning in his grave if Colonel Safreddin had really been a member of his movement. The objectives of the Ba'th were strictly secular: Arab unity, freedom and socialism. For 'Aflaq, the answer to contemporary Arab decadence and disunity was not religion, but a moral resurrection (ba'th) of each and every Arab individual. Islam, if it figured at all in Ba'thist thinking, was merely seen as a product of the genius of an eternal Arab nation. Here's 'Aflaq in full flight: "They ask us, Brethren, what do you mean by the mission, the eternal Arab mission? The Arab mission does not consist in words which we proclaim, it does not consist in principles to be incorporated in programs, it does not constitute matter for legislation. All these are dead, counterfeit things... It is our life itself, it is to agree to experience this life with a deep and true experience, great and massive in proportion to the depth of suffering undergone by the Arabs, in proportion to the great dangers which threaten its continued existence. This living and true experience will bring us back to ourselves, to our living realities; it will make us shoulder our responsibilities and will set us on the true path in order that we may fight these diseases and these obstacles, these counterfeit conditions, in order to fight social injustice, class exploitation, and the eras of selfishness, bribery and exploitation, in order to combat tyranny, the falsification of the popular will, and the insults to the dignity of the Arab as a citizen and a man; for the sake of a free society in which every Arab will regain consciousness of himself, of his existence, his dignity, his thinking, and his responsibilities. The experience in which our struggle takes place is that of the Arab nation dismembered into different countries and statelets, artificial and counterfeit; we struggle until we can reunite these scattered members, until we may reach a wholesome and natural state in which no severed member can speak in the name of all, until we can get rid of this strange and anomalous state. Then will it be possible for the Arabs to unite, for their spirit to be upstanding, their ideas clear, their morality upright; then will their be scope for their minds to create, for they will have become that wholesome natural entity, one nation. This wholesome and true experience, struggling against the existing conditions until we return to the right state, such is the Arab mission... " (The Struggle for Syria, Patrick Seale, 1986, pp 155-156)
To complete the caricature, Omar Safreddin can sleep quite soundly as his infant son hovers between life and death in a hospital bed: "[H]e settled himself in the chair, stretched out his long legs, canted his military cap over his eyes and began to take long deep breaths. Within 3 minutes he was asleep... This was the method man, pure, without alloy. You see death hovering. You pray against him. You sleep; because you have done all that there is to be done. Death comes. You weep. You bury the body. You breed again." (p 85)
In short, Colonel Safreddin is to Ba'thism as Sheridan is to journalism.
Before ending this post in the series, consider this sentence from West's novel: "[Aziz] lingered on [the next question] tenderly, as if he were testing the blade of a dagger." (p 100) Can you imagine any writer today getting away with this: '[Insert Jewish name] lingered on the next question, as if he were counting a bag of money'?
To be continued...
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
West's Wild East 2
Continued from the previous post.
Meet the 'Palestinians':-
Nuri Chakry: The best thing that ever happened to Nuri was the Israeli 'takeover' of Palestine. The guy was made for Beirut...
"In his lighter moments... Nuri Chakry was wont to deliver a little speech describing himself. '... There's no such thing as luck. Character is destiny. We do what we are. We get what we deserve. I, for instance, am a Phoenician. I love money. I love trade. The haggle is a game to me; the risk is as heady as hashish. If I'd been here in the old days, I'd have sat in a little booth down by the mole, changing gold for silver, trading camel hides for axe-heads and oil for the lentils of the pharaohs. I am - what do you call it? - a huckster. For me there is only one rule: never do business with a huckster smarter than myself... ' Chakry was a Phoenician, in the sense that he was an adopted citizen of what had once been a Phoenician city. However, the record showed - for those who could dig deep enough to find it - that he was a Palestinian Arab, born in Acre, who had fled the country in 1948 when the Israelis took over." (p 17)
"[Chakry's] Mecca was in the West... In the East he saw no dawn, only a twilight of past glories and a gaggle of jealous princelings enthroned over a bottomless sump of black oil. He would shout any creed you pleased, provided you left your purse in his safe. He would bend to every wind like a reed rooted in a festering swamp. Open the highway from Tyre to Haifa and he would be the first to ride along it, his pockets stuffed with bonds, bursting to do business with the Jews who had cast him out of his homeland. If the Americans played money music, he would dance to the happy tune. If the Russians beat the drum he would march, submissive to the martial beat, a happy camp-follower ready to bolt at the first boom of the guns." (pp 205-205)
Chakry's best mate, Heinrich Muller. An ex-Nazi? But of course!
"[Chakry's] alliance with Heinrich Muller had lasted for 17 years and had produced a handsome profit for both... Heinrich Muller was not Heinrich Muller at all. He was a Swabian, born and babtized Willi Reiman, and he had been one of the most expert forgers in the Third Reich... "(p 66)
Idris Jarrah: PLO terror master; an ex-informer, he's in on the fantasy of liberation merely to line his own pockets...
"Idris Jarrah, the mild-eyed terrorist, was a man who understood the why of things. He understood the personal why, the political why and the public why. And he understood that they were all different and mutually contradictory. The personal why was the simplest of all. Idris Jarrah was a stateless Arab. A stateless Arab had no identity and no future. If he wanted a home, he could have it among the refugees on the Gaza Strip or in the hovel towns west of the Jordan. If he wanted work, he could have that too - as a street sweeper or a day labourer or a pedlar of dates or a carver of trifles for the tourists. But if he wanted an identity - an official assurance that he was a person and not a nameless piece of flotsam - then he had to find a market in which he could buy one, at a price which he could pay. Idris Jarrah had found such a market in the Palestine Liberation Organization - that family of dispossessed zealots which had vowed to drive the Jews into the sea*, re-establish the old borders of Palestine and build an Arab hegemony across the whole of the Fertile Crescent**. As for the price, Jarrah was able to offer solid coinage. He had worked first as an informer and later as a junior detective for the old Palestine police force. He knew the tricks of espionage and the usages of terror. He had learnt from the British the value of system and method. Because he had no illusions and no hopes beyond the Organization, he worked with a nerveless efficiency. Because he never promised more than he could perform, his work always gave satisfaction; and because he believed in neither God nor politicians but only in Idris Jarrah, he was beyond seduction - if not insensible to his self-interest. He spoke his mind, took his orders, delivered a night raid or a bomb explosion, collected his pay and slept happily with any available woman, while greater men tossed in nightmares of frustration or dreamed wild fantasies of empire.
"The political why was equally clear to him. So far as the Arab world was concerned the State of Israel was God. If you did not have it, you would have to invent it as a focus of discontent and as a rallying-point for the sorely divided Muslim world. Without the Jew, what other scapegoat could you find for the slum-dwellers in Alexandria and the beggars who scratched their sores in the courtyard of the Noble Sanctuary and the workless men in Damascus and the hundred and ten thousand lost people camped between the desert and the sea near the city of Samson? Without the Jew, how could you find a common cause for the wealthy Lebanese, the Kuwaitis and the Bedouin tribesmen and the Hashemite King and the Marxist Syrian and the Egyptian Fellah fighting a meaningless war in the Yemen? Arab unity could only express itself in the negative: destroy the Jews! But without the Jews it could hardly express itself at all! As for the restoration of Palestine, Jarrah knew better than most that even if it were restored it would be dismembered overnight by its jealous neighbours. So the Organization was dedicated to a fantasy, but fantasy was the stock-in-trade of politicians and they paid large sums of money to preserve it and to keep men like Idris Jarrah working for their rival causes.
"And this was the public why. The Egyptians wanted Israel destroyed, but they lacked the money and the resources to do it. The Syrian socialists wanted to get rid of the little king of Jordan, who was a friend of the British and a symbol of outdated tribal monarchy. The Jordanians wanted a highway to the sea and a port on the Mediterranean. The Lebanese wanted money and trade and the Russians wanted a socialist arc from Baghdad to the Pillars of hercules. For each of them, the Palestine Liberation Organization had a peculiar value. They could praise it publicly or damn it in secret and pay generously to keep it alive." (pp 24-25) And the Americans, Morris?
Although West's 'Palestinians' might rivet the likes of Sheridan, and provide grist for his Zionist mill, they are little more than cardboard cut-outs. Nor has West done his history homework. Remember that he's writing about the period leading up to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The PLO was created in 1964, with Arab League backing, but did not embrace the concept of armed struggle against Israel at the time. This was espoused by the Palestinian nationalist organization Fatah, which operated independently of the PLO and took up armed struggle against Israel clandestinely in 1965 because all Arab states except Syria opposed such a course. So West's characterization of the pre-67 PLO as a military tool of the Arab states is sheer baloney. The PLO did, however, come under the control of Fatah after the war, in 1968. As for West's nonsense about the Palestinian resistance aiming to "drive the Jews into the sea," the stock standard Zionist talking point of all time, Fatah's position was clear: "All the Jews, Moslems and Christians living in Palestine or forcibly exiled from it will have the right of Palestinian citizenship... This means that all Jewish Palestinians - at the present, Israelis - have the same right, provided, of course, that they reject Zionist racist chauvinism and fully agree to live in the new Palestine as Palestinians. The revolution therefore rejects the supposition that only Jews who lived in Palestine prior to 1948... and their descendants are acceptable." (Palestine: The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Ramparts Press Reader, ed Russell Stetler, 1972, p 208)
West's blindness on the issue of Palestinian refugees is curious. While registering the fact of Palestinian dispossession ("cast him out of his homeland," "refugees on the Gaza Strip or in the hovel towns west of the Jordan," "dispossessed zealots") he shows no interest in going further: Why were they cast out? What were the circumstances of their dispossession? Nor can he appreciate the obvious connection between dispossession and resistance, dismissing the latter as zealotry and fantasy. Dispossession and statelessness fail to elicit from him the most elementary empathy. (Sheridan, of course, goes one step further, dismissing even the fact of Palestinian dispossession as "rubbish... just rubbish." See my 9/5/09 post Sheridan: Nakba Denier). The best West can do is reflect, typically through his Israeli protagonist, that "it was impossible to render an absolute justice to every single human being who, by the act of birth, was made a victim of the human paradox. Six million Jewish dead were commemorated in the sombre crypt of Yad Vashem; but 310, 000 living Arabs were camped in the hovels of the Gaza Strip and they would not renounce one jot of their claim to a place in their original homeland." (p 149) And why the bloody hell should they, then or now?
I'll leave you with a genuine Palestinian voice from that era, that of the wonderful Leila Khaled: "I come from the city of Haifa*, but I remember little of my birthplace. I can see the area where I played as a small child, but of our house, I only remember the staircase. I was taken away when I was 4, not to see Haifa again for many years. Finally I saw my city 21 years later, on August 29 1969, when Comrade Salim Issawi and I expropriated an imperialist plane and returned to palestine to pay homage to our occupied country and to show that we had not abandoned our homeland. Ironically, the Israeli enemy, powerless, escorted us with his French and American planes. What I knew about Haifa had come from my parents and friends and from books. Now I saw Haifa from the air and formed my own cherished image of my home. Haifa is caressed by the sea, hugged by the mountain, inspired by the open plain. Haifa is a safe anchor for the wayfarer, a beach in the sun. Yet, I, as a citizen of Haifa, am not allowed to bask in its sun, breathe its clear air, live there with my people. European Zionists and their followers are living in Palestine by right of arms and they have expelled us from our homeland. They live where we should be living while we float about, exiled. They live in my city because they are Jews and they have power. My people and I live outside because we are Palestinian Arabs without power. But we, the graduates of desert inns, we shall have power and we shall recover Palestine and make it a human paradise for Arabs and Jews and all lovers of freedom." (My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, 1973, pp 21-22)
[*See my 7/5/08 post Bend It Like Benny]
To be continued...
Meet the 'Palestinians':-
Nuri Chakry: The best thing that ever happened to Nuri was the Israeli 'takeover' of Palestine. The guy was made for Beirut...
"In his lighter moments... Nuri Chakry was wont to deliver a little speech describing himself. '... There's no such thing as luck. Character is destiny. We do what we are. We get what we deserve. I, for instance, am a Phoenician. I love money. I love trade. The haggle is a game to me; the risk is as heady as hashish. If I'd been here in the old days, I'd have sat in a little booth down by the mole, changing gold for silver, trading camel hides for axe-heads and oil for the lentils of the pharaohs. I am - what do you call it? - a huckster. For me there is only one rule: never do business with a huckster smarter than myself... ' Chakry was a Phoenician, in the sense that he was an adopted citizen of what had once been a Phoenician city. However, the record showed - for those who could dig deep enough to find it - that he was a Palestinian Arab, born in Acre, who had fled the country in 1948 when the Israelis took over." (p 17)
"[Chakry's] Mecca was in the West... In the East he saw no dawn, only a twilight of past glories and a gaggle of jealous princelings enthroned over a bottomless sump of black oil. He would shout any creed you pleased, provided you left your purse in his safe. He would bend to every wind like a reed rooted in a festering swamp. Open the highway from Tyre to Haifa and he would be the first to ride along it, his pockets stuffed with bonds, bursting to do business with the Jews who had cast him out of his homeland. If the Americans played money music, he would dance to the happy tune. If the Russians beat the drum he would march, submissive to the martial beat, a happy camp-follower ready to bolt at the first boom of the guns." (pp 205-205)
Chakry's best mate, Heinrich Muller. An ex-Nazi? But of course!
"[Chakry's] alliance with Heinrich Muller had lasted for 17 years and had produced a handsome profit for both... Heinrich Muller was not Heinrich Muller at all. He was a Swabian, born and babtized Willi Reiman, and he had been one of the most expert forgers in the Third Reich... "(p 66)
Idris Jarrah: PLO terror master; an ex-informer, he's in on the fantasy of liberation merely to line his own pockets...
"Idris Jarrah, the mild-eyed terrorist, was a man who understood the why of things. He understood the personal why, the political why and the public why. And he understood that they were all different and mutually contradictory. The personal why was the simplest of all. Idris Jarrah was a stateless Arab. A stateless Arab had no identity and no future. If he wanted a home, he could have it among the refugees on the Gaza Strip or in the hovel towns west of the Jordan. If he wanted work, he could have that too - as a street sweeper or a day labourer or a pedlar of dates or a carver of trifles for the tourists. But if he wanted an identity - an official assurance that he was a person and not a nameless piece of flotsam - then he had to find a market in which he could buy one, at a price which he could pay. Idris Jarrah had found such a market in the Palestine Liberation Organization - that family of dispossessed zealots which had vowed to drive the Jews into the sea*, re-establish the old borders of Palestine and build an Arab hegemony across the whole of the Fertile Crescent**. As for the price, Jarrah was able to offer solid coinage. He had worked first as an informer and later as a junior detective for the old Palestine police force. He knew the tricks of espionage and the usages of terror. He had learnt from the British the value of system and method. Because he had no illusions and no hopes beyond the Organization, he worked with a nerveless efficiency. Because he never promised more than he could perform, his work always gave satisfaction; and because he believed in neither God nor politicians but only in Idris Jarrah, he was beyond seduction - if not insensible to his self-interest. He spoke his mind, took his orders, delivered a night raid or a bomb explosion, collected his pay and slept happily with any available woman, while greater men tossed in nightmares of frustration or dreamed wild fantasies of empire.
"The political why was equally clear to him. So far as the Arab world was concerned the State of Israel was God. If you did not have it, you would have to invent it as a focus of discontent and as a rallying-point for the sorely divided Muslim world. Without the Jew, what other scapegoat could you find for the slum-dwellers in Alexandria and the beggars who scratched their sores in the courtyard of the Noble Sanctuary and the workless men in Damascus and the hundred and ten thousand lost people camped between the desert and the sea near the city of Samson? Without the Jew, how could you find a common cause for the wealthy Lebanese, the Kuwaitis and the Bedouin tribesmen and the Hashemite King and the Marxist Syrian and the Egyptian Fellah fighting a meaningless war in the Yemen? Arab unity could only express itself in the negative: destroy the Jews! But without the Jews it could hardly express itself at all! As for the restoration of Palestine, Jarrah knew better than most that even if it were restored it would be dismembered overnight by its jealous neighbours. So the Organization was dedicated to a fantasy, but fantasy was the stock-in-trade of politicians and they paid large sums of money to preserve it and to keep men like Idris Jarrah working for their rival causes.
"And this was the public why. The Egyptians wanted Israel destroyed, but they lacked the money and the resources to do it. The Syrian socialists wanted to get rid of the little king of Jordan, who was a friend of the British and a symbol of outdated tribal monarchy. The Jordanians wanted a highway to the sea and a port on the Mediterranean. The Lebanese wanted money and trade and the Russians wanted a socialist arc from Baghdad to the Pillars of hercules. For each of them, the Palestine Liberation Organization had a peculiar value. They could praise it publicly or damn it in secret and pay generously to keep it alive." (pp 24-25) And the Americans, Morris?
Although West's 'Palestinians' might rivet the likes of Sheridan, and provide grist for his Zionist mill, they are little more than cardboard cut-outs. Nor has West done his history homework. Remember that he's writing about the period leading up to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The PLO was created in 1964, with Arab League backing, but did not embrace the concept of armed struggle against Israel at the time. This was espoused by the Palestinian nationalist organization Fatah, which operated independently of the PLO and took up armed struggle against Israel clandestinely in 1965 because all Arab states except Syria opposed such a course. So West's characterization of the pre-67 PLO as a military tool of the Arab states is sheer baloney. The PLO did, however, come under the control of Fatah after the war, in 1968. As for West's nonsense about the Palestinian resistance aiming to "drive the Jews into the sea," the stock standard Zionist talking point of all time, Fatah's position was clear: "All the Jews, Moslems and Christians living in Palestine or forcibly exiled from it will have the right of Palestinian citizenship... This means that all Jewish Palestinians - at the present, Israelis - have the same right, provided, of course, that they reject Zionist racist chauvinism and fully agree to live in the new Palestine as Palestinians. The revolution therefore rejects the supposition that only Jews who lived in Palestine prior to 1948... and their descendants are acceptable." (Palestine: The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Ramparts Press Reader, ed Russell Stetler, 1972, p 208)
West's blindness on the issue of Palestinian refugees is curious. While registering the fact of Palestinian dispossession ("cast him out of his homeland," "refugees on the Gaza Strip or in the hovel towns west of the Jordan," "dispossessed zealots") he shows no interest in going further: Why were they cast out? What were the circumstances of their dispossession? Nor can he appreciate the obvious connection between dispossession and resistance, dismissing the latter as zealotry and fantasy. Dispossession and statelessness fail to elicit from him the most elementary empathy. (Sheridan, of course, goes one step further, dismissing even the fact of Palestinian dispossession as "rubbish... just rubbish." See my 9/5/09 post Sheridan: Nakba Denier). The best West can do is reflect, typically through his Israeli protagonist, that "it was impossible to render an absolute justice to every single human being who, by the act of birth, was made a victim of the human paradox. Six million Jewish dead were commemorated in the sombre crypt of Yad Vashem; but 310, 000 living Arabs were camped in the hovels of the Gaza Strip and they would not renounce one jot of their claim to a place in their original homeland." (p 149) And why the bloody hell should they, then or now?
I'll leave you with a genuine Palestinian voice from that era, that of the wonderful Leila Khaled: "I come from the city of Haifa*, but I remember little of my birthplace. I can see the area where I played as a small child, but of our house, I only remember the staircase. I was taken away when I was 4, not to see Haifa again for many years. Finally I saw my city 21 years later, on August 29 1969, when Comrade Salim Issawi and I expropriated an imperialist plane and returned to palestine to pay homage to our occupied country and to show that we had not abandoned our homeland. Ironically, the Israeli enemy, powerless, escorted us with his French and American planes. What I knew about Haifa had come from my parents and friends and from books. Now I saw Haifa from the air and formed my own cherished image of my home. Haifa is caressed by the sea, hugged by the mountain, inspired by the open plain. Haifa is a safe anchor for the wayfarer, a beach in the sun. Yet, I, as a citizen of Haifa, am not allowed to bask in its sun, breathe its clear air, live there with my people. European Zionists and their followers are living in Palestine by right of arms and they have expelled us from our homeland. They live where we should be living while we float about, exiled. They live in my city because they are Jews and they have power. My people and I live outside because we are Palestinian Arabs without power. But we, the graduates of desert inns, we shall have power and we shall recover Palestine and make it a human paradise for Arabs and Jews and all lovers of freedom." (My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, 1973, pp 21-22)
[*See my 7/5/08 post Bend It Like Benny]
To be continued...
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
West's Wild East 1
"As a naturally lazy fellow I was always watching TV of an evening." Greg Sheridan, Two Bobs' worth of life lessons, The Australian, 18/4/09)
When Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, the "most influential foreign affairs analyst in Australia" (theaustralian.com.au) and foreign editor of The Australian, last found himself winging his way to the Plucky Country, he admitted to "being seduced by a 40-year-old Morris West thriller, The Tower of Babel." "A rattling good read," he described it. (See my 26/7/09 post No Idea) That's right - "seduced." Mark that word. This 1968 potboiler didn't simply materialise in Sheridan's briefcase. No, it was consciously selected for this trip of trips (with DPM Gillard, no less), lovingly dusted off, and reverentially placed there by the man himself.
I've often wondered what kind of intellectual (I use the term loosely) input has gone into the production of the Sheridan we all know and love, and specifically, what it is that makes his opinion(ated) pieces on the Middle East such ranting good reads. So, taking as my cue his reference to Morris West's wild eastern, I managed to track down a copy (hint: St Vinnies), and peg on nose, read the damned thing - cover to cover! Now, at last, I feel I not only know where Australia's "most influential foreign affairs analyst" is coming from when he writes about the Middle East, I feel I have actually located the very point at which the earlier plasticity of the Sheridan brain (I'm being optimistic here) had hardened into the synaptic sclerosis of Zionism. And so, over the coming weeks, I shall regale you, dear reader, with gems from the book that "seduced" our Greg some 40 years ago and continues to seduce him to this very day.
Now where would those bloody Ayrabs be without Israel?
"So far as the Arab world was concerned the State of Israel was like God. If you did not have it, you would have to invent it as a focus of discontent and as a rallying-point for the sorely divided Moslem world. Without the Jew, what other scapegoat could you find for the slum-dwellers in Alexandria and the beggars who scratched their sores in the courtyard of the Noble Sanctuary and the workless men in Damascus and the hundred and ten thousand lost people camped between the desert and the sea near the city of Samson*? Without the Jew, how could you find a common cause for the wealthy Lebanese, the Kuwaitis and the Bedouin tribesmen and the Hashemite King and the Marxist Syrian and the Egyptian Fellah fighting a meaningless war in the Yemen? Arab unity could only express itself in the negative: destroy the Jews! But without the Jews it could hardly express itself at all!" (p 25) [*Yep, without Israel the lives of these victims of Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1948 would have absolutely no meaning! And as for that figure - one hundred and ten thousand - West has it elsewhere as three hundred and ten thousand (p 149) Is this where Sheridan gets his creative accounting from? See my posts When Even the Retraction is Dodgy (4/2/08) and 2 (10/4/08)]
Or, as Sheridan put it in his feature Israel still looks good, warts & all (6/5/09) 40 years later, "It would be wrong to understimate the benefits that anti-Semitism can provide Arab regimes. Israel is the licensed grievance for these societies. By theologising the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and presenting it as a case of Western and specifically Jewish persecution of an Arab minority, Arab regimes, even those allied with the US, can offer an outlet to anger on the street and attempt to channel both Islamist and pan-Arab sentiments in a direction that does not challenge their rule."
Syrians are so bloody hopeless that any Syrian doctor who really cared about the welfare of his people would immediately throw in his lot with the Israelis and join an Israeli spy ring, no?
"The house surgeon hesitated a moment, resentful and stubborn; but the anger in [Dr] Bitar's eyes subdued him instantly... Bitar bent over the bed and bathed the child's forehead with a damp cloth, crooning a tuneless little song of comfort. He had seen hundreds like this one, in rich apartments and stinking hovels, the life draining out of them through leaking and inflamed intestines, their skin dry as silk on the dyers' racks, their muscles knotted by electrolysis, literally dying of thirst because their parched gullets could not absorb a drop of water. Helpless and moribund they were the focus of all his anger - against demagogues and junta men and claptrapping theorists who made politics while their children wilted with trachoma and malarial spleens and intestinal parasites. Finally, with miraculous haste for Damascus, the bottles and the trays were wheeled in and he was able to scrub up and begin the simple, overdue surgery." (p 82)
Dr Bitar is seriously pissed off. If only he hadn't been corrupted by the ways of the West!
"He felt suddenly old - too old for the angers that consumed him every day; too old for the hopeless battle against poverty and ignorance and disease; too tired for plots and counterplots against a regime which he hated, because his studies abroad had given him a taste for unattainable liberty and a faith in the free commerce of men and ideas. In his secret heart he knew that the battle was futile and the plots were barren. Only time and education would cure ignorance. There was no cure for death. And liberty was a state towards which man grew slowly, or reacted dangerously from the tyranny of the collective. But he could not abandon the fight, because to do so was to abandon himself... " (pp 83-84)
To be continued...
When Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, the "most influential foreign affairs analyst in Australia" (theaustralian.com.au) and foreign editor of The Australian, last found himself winging his way to the Plucky Country, he admitted to "being seduced by a 40-year-old Morris West thriller, The Tower of Babel." "A rattling good read," he described it. (See my 26/7/09 post No Idea) That's right - "seduced." Mark that word. This 1968 potboiler didn't simply materialise in Sheridan's briefcase. No, it was consciously selected for this trip of trips (with DPM Gillard, no less), lovingly dusted off, and reverentially placed there by the man himself.
I've often wondered what kind of intellectual (I use the term loosely) input has gone into the production of the Sheridan we all know and love, and specifically, what it is that makes his opinion(ated) pieces on the Middle East such ranting good reads. So, taking as my cue his reference to Morris West's wild eastern, I managed to track down a copy (hint: St Vinnies), and peg on nose, read the damned thing - cover to cover! Now, at last, I feel I not only know where Australia's "most influential foreign affairs analyst" is coming from when he writes about the Middle East, I feel I have actually located the very point at which the earlier plasticity of the Sheridan brain (I'm being optimistic here) had hardened into the synaptic sclerosis of Zionism. And so, over the coming weeks, I shall regale you, dear reader, with gems from the book that "seduced" our Greg some 40 years ago and continues to seduce him to this very day.
Now where would those bloody Ayrabs be without Israel?
"So far as the Arab world was concerned the State of Israel was like God. If you did not have it, you would have to invent it as a focus of discontent and as a rallying-point for the sorely divided Moslem world. Without the Jew, what other scapegoat could you find for the slum-dwellers in Alexandria and the beggars who scratched their sores in the courtyard of the Noble Sanctuary and the workless men in Damascus and the hundred and ten thousand lost people camped between the desert and the sea near the city of Samson*? Without the Jew, how could you find a common cause for the wealthy Lebanese, the Kuwaitis and the Bedouin tribesmen and the Hashemite King and the Marxist Syrian and the Egyptian Fellah fighting a meaningless war in the Yemen? Arab unity could only express itself in the negative: destroy the Jews! But without the Jews it could hardly express itself at all!" (p 25) [*Yep, without Israel the lives of these victims of Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1948 would have absolutely no meaning! And as for that figure - one hundred and ten thousand - West has it elsewhere as three hundred and ten thousand (p 149) Is this where Sheridan gets his creative accounting from? See my posts When Even the Retraction is Dodgy (4/2/08) and 2 (10/4/08)]
Or, as Sheridan put it in his feature Israel still looks good, warts & all (6/5/09) 40 years later, "It would be wrong to understimate the benefits that anti-Semitism can provide Arab regimes. Israel is the licensed grievance for these societies. By theologising the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and presenting it as a case of Western and specifically Jewish persecution of an Arab minority, Arab regimes, even those allied with the US, can offer an outlet to anger on the street and attempt to channel both Islamist and pan-Arab sentiments in a direction that does not challenge their rule."
Syrians are so bloody hopeless that any Syrian doctor who really cared about the welfare of his people would immediately throw in his lot with the Israelis and join an Israeli spy ring, no?
"The house surgeon hesitated a moment, resentful and stubborn; but the anger in [Dr] Bitar's eyes subdued him instantly... Bitar bent over the bed and bathed the child's forehead with a damp cloth, crooning a tuneless little song of comfort. He had seen hundreds like this one, in rich apartments and stinking hovels, the life draining out of them through leaking and inflamed intestines, their skin dry as silk on the dyers' racks, their muscles knotted by electrolysis, literally dying of thirst because their parched gullets could not absorb a drop of water. Helpless and moribund they were the focus of all his anger - against demagogues and junta men and claptrapping theorists who made politics while their children wilted with trachoma and malarial spleens and intestinal parasites. Finally, with miraculous haste for Damascus, the bottles and the trays were wheeled in and he was able to scrub up and begin the simple, overdue surgery." (p 82)
Dr Bitar is seriously pissed off. If only he hadn't been corrupted by the ways of the West!
"He felt suddenly old - too old for the angers that consumed him every day; too old for the hopeless battle against poverty and ignorance and disease; too tired for plots and counterplots against a regime which he hated, because his studies abroad had given him a taste for unattainable liberty and a faith in the free commerce of men and ideas. In his secret heart he knew that the battle was futile and the plots were barren. Only time and education would cure ignorance. There was no cure for death. And liberty was a state towards which man grew slowly, or reacted dangerously from the tyranny of the collective. But he could not abandon the fight, because to do so was to abandon himself... " (pp 83-84)
To be continued...
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