Helmintholog

My old colleague Richard (D.) North just pointed me at a long, but incisive piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Spectator. The historical point of the argument was to show how many Jews had been anti-Zionist in the early years of the project, and how very far from self-evident the project of a Jewish nation-state once seemed. The polemical bite came from his dissection of the idea that anti-Zionism, and specifically opposition to the policies of the present Israeli government, is itself a form of anti-Semitism.

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On the other hand, he’s got the coming year quite right:

“Blair – again – is doing the right thing. Leadership means telling people what they don’t want to hear. It’s not just possible there will be a terrorist attack this coming year that is equal to or greater than the horror of 9/ 11/01. It’s probable. It’s not just possible that Saddam will unleash the vilest weapons in his arsenal in the coming war. It’s probable. My own view is that this year is probably going to be an awful one: full of death and conflict and struggle and because of them, economic distress. I think the era of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of evil, stateless men is imminent; and that things will likely get a lot worse before they get better.”

And if, in a year’s time, he looks alarmist, we should remember what Orwell said: that intellectuals are almost always wrong about the timing of events, but right about their direction.

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.

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It’s nice to see a liberal who can manage real, informed contempt, as opposed to the smug and ignorant sort typified by Richard Dawkins calling Bush “An illiterate buffoon.”

Here’s Joshua Michael Marshall:

“It’s one thing to be a hawk and have your hawkishness rooted in a cold-eyed realism and a willingness to use force, quite another to have it stem from emotional impulses arising from the fact that you grew up as a pencil neck and constantly had your lunch money stolen from you by the cool kids. I can’t give you the precise lunch money victimization statistics for various civilian political appointees at the Pentagon, for staffers in the Office of the Vice- President, Richard Perle or even Frank Gaffney. But I suspect most folks who are familiar with these guys will know what I’m getting at.”