Jaws

The Murdoch press is currently on a Captain Cook binge, with a 5-part series by journalist Trent Dalton, Cook Rediscovered. Today's essay, An Endeavour for the age, contains these words from Cook's journal: "... the natives... did not offer to touch any of our Casks that had been left ashore and in the after noon 16 or 18 of them came boldly up to within 100 yards of our people at the watering place and there made a stand - Mr Hicks who was the officer ashore did all in his power to entice them to him by offering them presents but it was to no purpose all they seem'd to want was for us to be gone... "

Quite. Cook read the Australians' body language correctly.

For these representatives of the original owners of this land, Cook and his men represented only one thing - trouble. They felt it first in their bones, before they felt it, as buckshot, on their bodies.

While they could not, of course, have known at the time of their coming dispossession at the hands of wave after wave of European settlers, their gut instinct told them that no good could possibly come of these invaders, and that only one response was required, namely, BUGGER OFF!

Another, far wordier Briton, the writer G.K. Chesterton, detected, in his fashion, a similar reaction on the part of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine to invading European Zionists in 1920:

"The Syrians and Arabs and all the agricultural and pastoral populations of Palestine are, rightly or wrongly, alarmed and angered at the advent of Jews to power... I will give one curious example from one of the best and most brilliant of the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mind and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything like a sense of humour. Yet, in the middle of a very temperate and magnanimous address on 'Zionist Policy,' he can actually say a thing like this: 'The Arabs need us with our knowledge, and our experience and our money. If they do not have us they will fall among sharks.' One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity. It is much as if President Wilson were to say, 'Unless America deals with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power, that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires.' But would President Wilson say it? It is as if the German Chancellor had said, 'We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put under some system with militarism and a bullying bureaucracy.' But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly that? Would anybody put it in the the exact order of words and structure of sentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it?.. If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely the first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of. And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin and the crescent of cruel teeth... But the case is yet more curious than that. These simple tribes are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements which Dr. Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got; they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got. They may be in error, at the first superficial glance, in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark. But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectable professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect. And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in stating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews. They fear, in exact terms, their knowledge and their experience and their money. The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need... " (The New Jerusalem (1920), pp 289-291)

First Impressions

Sometimes it's the first impression that turns out to be the correct one:

"I can proudly claim that I do know the date of my first pilgrimage to Jerusalem; partly because it was a year after the close of the Great War, and partly because when my publishers suggested my going to the Holy Land, it sounded to me like going to the moon. It was the first of my long journeys through a country still imperilled and under arms; it involved crossing the desert at night in something like a cattle-truck; and parts even of the Promised Land had some of the qualities of a lunar landscape. One incident in that wilderness still stands out in my memory for some strange reason; there is no need to recur here to Palestinian politics; but I was wandering about in the wilderness in a car with a zealous little Zionist; he seemed at first almost monomaniac, of the sort who answers the statement, 'It's a fine day,' with the eager reply, 'Oh, yes, the climate is perfect for our project.' But I came to sympathise with his romance; and when he said, 'It's a lovely land; I should like to put the Song of Solomon in my pocket and wander about,' I knew that, Jew or Gentile, mad or sane, we two were of the same sort." (Autobiography, G.K. Chesterton, 1936, p 284)

PS: You might also enjoy my 11/2/12 post Listen Up, Guys...]

GK Chesterton: Anti-Semitic Zionist

"Readers of this column may possibly know already that I am devoted to GK Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown, the clerical detective." (Greg Sheridan, The Forum, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 14/9/13)

As the Australian media's most vocal Zionist, The Australian's foreign editor might be interested to learn that the GK Chesterton [1874-1936] to whom he is "devoted" was a self-confessed anti-Semite.

This revelation may be found in Chesterton's book The New Jerusalem (1920) - the product of a Zionist-sponsored rambamming in 1919:

"There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long period rebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we are less likely than ever to repent. It was always called Anti-Semitism; but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. At any rate it was much nearer to the nature of the thing to call it Zionism, whether or no it can find its geographical concentration in Zion."

Anti-Semitism is Zionism?! Perish the thought! How can this possibly be?

"The substance of this heresy was exceedingly simple. It consisted entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen." 

IOW, Jews didn't really belong in Europe.

Chesterton elaborates:

"During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade them to eat pork. My own brief contact with the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discover any trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russian pilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter."

The fallacy here, of course, is Chesterton's assumption that just because these East End Russians, unlike other Russians, were averse to pork that somehow made them not Russian.

He continues:

"The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposed to anything, it was not to Jews, but to that sort of remark about Jews; or rather to the silly and craven fear of making it a remark about Jews. But my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter; and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews. I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem more rational to call it Semitism." (pp 264-265)

So, not belonging in Europe, Jews needed a land of their own - outside Europe.

And blow me down if the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in response to such anti-Semitic logic as Chesterton's, didn't come to the exact same conclusion as that of the great British writer: "Everything tends, in fact, to one and the same conclusion, which is clearly enunciated in that classic Berlin phrase: 'Juden Raus!' (Out with the Jews!)" (The Jewish State, 1896, Dover Publications, p 86)

And so it is that Herzl's Zionism and Chesterton's (or anyone else's) anti-Semitism are really just two sides of the same coin.

Speaking of which, a penny for your thoughts on the subject, Greg.

In Palestine's Green & Pleasant Land

"I descended from the desert train at Ludd which had all the look of a large camp in the desert; appropriately enough perhaps, for it is the traditional birthplace of the soldier St. George. At the moment, however, there was nothing romantic or rousing about its appearance. It was perhaps unusually dreary; for heavy rains had fallen and the water stood about in what it is easier to call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools. A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform; I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land. The dark red plains had rolled away like an enormous nightmare; and I found myself in a fresh and exceedingly pleasant dream.

"I know it will seem fanciful; but for a moment I really felt as if I had come home; or rather to that home behind home for which we are all homesick. The lost memory of it is the life at once of faith and of fairy-tale. Groves glowing with oranges rose behind hedges of grotesque cactus or prickly pear; which really looked like green dragons guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides. On each side of the road were such flowers as I had never seen before under the sun; for indeed they seemed to have the sun in them rather than the sun on them. Clusters and crowds of crimson anemones were of a red not to be symbolised in blood or wine; but rather in the red glass that glows in the window dedicated to a martyr. Only in a wild eastern tale could one picture a pilgrim or traveller finding such a garden in the desert; and I thought of the oldest tale of all and the garden from which we came. But there was something in it yet more subtle; which there must be in the impression of any earthly paradise. It is vital to such a dream that things familiar should be mixed with things fantastic; as when an actual dream is filled with the faces of old friends. Sparrows, which seem to be the same all over the world, were darting hither and thither among the flowers; and I had the fancy that they were the souls of the town-sparrows of London and the smoky cities, and now gone wherever the good sparrows go." (The New Jerusalem, G.K. Chesterton, 1920, pp 39-40)

[Related post: The Blooming 'Desert' (27/4/12).]