Andrew Sullivan has a bash at the Foreign Office, on the back of this Telegraph report. It proves, he says, that the Foreign Office will always blame the Jews. But it seems to me to prove something more worrying: the difficulty of balance, both for the dispatch writer and for Sullivan himself, and the difficulty of keeping distinct anti-semitism and an opposition to Israeli occupation of the West Bank. This is not just a distinction to be observed by other people. It’s a danger, I think, for anyone who believes, as I do, that Israel has no business occupying the West Bank, and that the Palestinians are entitled to a real state of their own.
The offending dispatch, from the consul-general in Jerusalem, is quoted thus:
“Before we reproach the Arabs too much, perhaps we might try to put ourselves in their shoes.Sullivan comments “Ah those plucky terrorists. Not their fault if a few pushy Jews got killed.” Of course, he’s half-right: to blame the deaths of the hostages on the bungling of the rescue is to miss, rather elaborately, an important point. But is it anti-semitism? If I think Israel is expansionist, does this mean I have to believe that Jews are pushy? Of course not. Presumably it is the Foreign Office that Sullivan is accusing of anti-semitism.
“They are, after all, human beings with normal human failings. The Palestinians in particular have seen their land taken away from them by a group of mainly European invaders equipped with superior armed force and modern technology.
“Whatever one’s moral criticism, it must be agreed that the Munich operation was well planned and that the Arabs there carried it out to the bitter end. It is said that lives were really lost because of Israel and West German bungling incompetence.”
Mr Woodrow’s head of department, James Craig, wrote on his letter: “Not bad but he goes just a little too far.”
But there are two true and important facts in the report. Terrorists are often brave. This is worth remembering, if only because it helps to predict their future activities. The second is that
“The Palestinians in particular have seen their land taken away from them by a group of mainly European invaders equipped with superior armed force and modern technology.”This is the more important, unarguable fact. You may well become anti-semitic by brooding on it too long. But there is an opposite error in denying it. I don’t know if the error is equal as well as opposite; and I don’t, frankly, much care.
And when one goes on to read the next FO memorandum quoted by the Telegraph (though not by Sullivan), it’s clear that the author was doing rather well exactly what a diplomat is paid to: understanding and predicting the behaviour of foreigners:
It is self-evident that the hijacking is a manifestation of the Palestine problem. This is a problem which the Israelis are trying to solve in two main ways: one by pretending it does not exist (hence their claim that Amman is the capital of the Palestinians), the other by hitting the Palestinians so hard that they cease to exist, militarily if not physically. “What the hijacking does is to remind the international community that the Palestine problem exists: in one sense this is unwelcome to the Israelis as it shows their pretence for what it is, but in another it provides them with an excellent opportunity to enlist the aid of the international community in erasing the problem.Of course, in the thirty years of war since that was written, the Palestinians have now graduated to killing large numbers of Israelis, and this is terrible too. So is the endless cycle of retaliation. The war has acquired its own momentum. Neutrality gets harder. But that’s no reason not to strive for it, or to avoid the effort needed to avoid taking sides. The present Israeli governments is directly descended from a successful terrorist movement. It bases its claim to the West Bank on biblical authority and brute force. And I find it odd that Sullivan, who won’t — quite rightly — take his sexual ethics from the Old Testament, seems to have so little trouble with the people who take their political geography from that book.
“Hence their apoplectic reaction to the hijacking, which is of course calculated to produce the desired attitude in airline workers at Heathrow. It also provides them with an excellent opportunity to slip into Syria, bomb a few more bases and kill a few more innocent people with impunity. Deplorable though the hijacking may be it caused the loss of no lives whereas . . . casualties in Syria may be as many as 45 or even more.
Hey there. First time reading your blog, and I’d like to ask you a few questions re: this post.
1) You say, “[the Likud government] bases its claim to the West Bank on biblical authority and brute force.” I think you’re missing the third, most important element: realpolitik (sp?) and the notion of the Jewish people’s need for their own state. A great deal of the pre-WWII Zionists were socialists, not observant Jews. A great number of subsequent immigrants were refugees (from the Holocaust or their expulsion from Arab nations), not missionaries or mercenaries.
2) You touch on political geography and the (il)legitimacy of statehood. To what extent do, say, Americans (of which I am one) or Australians (where I lived for six months) have a right to their lands?
They conquered the indigenous peoples by force and they were atrocious in their subjugation (i.e. real genocide) to get the land.
I’m unfamiliar with Australian colonial history, but “Manifest Destiny” and other religious concepts played a huge role in the US colonization.
And the only points on which I can divine more US/Australian legitimacy is that they greatly outnumber the native peoples and they have the benefit of 200 years of precendence.
Why should Israel vacate the lands it “occupies”, while no one suggests the US or Australia do so (save for setting aside low-value tracts of land as reservations)? Does the omission say that all Israel needs is time and numbers to legitimize Zionism?
Thanks for your note. To take your points in order:
1) I didn’t dispute the need for a Jewish state, nor its legitimacy. My problem is with the boundaries. It seems to me that there are two peoples who have a reasonable legitimate claim to states in Palestine, and the traditional, least worst solution, which I therefore favour, is partition.
One of the differences tht always strikes me between British/European and American views of the Middle East is that the Americans tend to view Israel as an entity which naturally stretches to the Jordan river — and we see it as a state whose natural boundaries were set in 1948 or thereabouts. This comes out in differing attitudes to the UN resolution 242, and in the way that the European media always say “occupied” territories, whereas American TV in my limited experience, just says “territories”.
Which brings me to point 2.
You ask “Why should Israel vacate the lands it ‘occupies’, while no one suggests the US or Australia do so (save for setting aside low- value tracts of land as reservations)? Does the omission say that all Israel needs is time and numbers to legitimize Zionism?”
I don’t know why you put scare quotes around ‘occupies’: it is a reasonable working definition of ‘occupy’ to say that overwhelming armed force is neccessary for the process. The Israeli Army occupies Jenin, or Nablus, in a sense that it doesn’t occupy Tel Aviv, and the British Army does not occupy London.
Equally, I’m not trying to delegitimise Zionism. I just think that its legitimacy doesn’t solve the question of boundaries. So I don’t think that time and money affect the legitimacy of Zionism.
Do they affect the legitimacy of the expansion of Israel into the West Bank? In time, yes they might. It’s easy to imagine a future in which there have been five or six generations of Jews settled in Nablus, who are no more guilty of what was done to gain the land than a German born today would be guilty of Hitlerism. The British plantation of Ulster was an enterprise with quite deep similarities to the Zionist movement. That doesn’t make the presence of modern Protestants in Ireland legitimate, nor give the IRA the right to try and drive them out. But that doesn’t make right or just what was done to the Catholic Irish four centuries ago. It just means we can no longer help it.
One must distinguish between the future legitimacy of the consequences of an action and its present justice, or rightness. To do otherwise is to abandon moral judgement, and to cry, with the Crusader Siomon de Montfort, “kill them all. God will know his own!”