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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I suppose it was predictable that I would get a wide range of e-mails regarding my article about Israel called The Palestinian Götterdämmerung. One reader seems to feel I am a “crypto-authoritarian supporter of Jewish racism” whilst another accuses me of regarding Israel as ‘evil’ and yet another claims that by holding Israel in any way responsible I am “indifferent to the possible annihilation of all Jews in the Middle East”. Still others have written to me in such a manner that I can only speculate they read some different article altogether. Although this is actually one of my least favourite subjects, I will clarify and expend a few of my views seeing as so many people seem to take exception to them or want clarifications on what my views are.
I do not think Israel is ‘evil’ just because I feel there is a section of Israeli society that is far from blameless. Neither am I a crypto-authoritarian because I believe that Israel is entitled to defend itself. I think the state of Israel has been led by a series of people who have pursued disastrous policies derived from their collectivist mind sets rooted in the complex reasons and events that lead to Israel’s founding, the consequences of which are all too obvious today. The conflict within Israel between socialist collectivism, religious collectivism and capitalist (and sometimes even religious) individualism has, as in so many other western societies (for that is what Israel really is), resulted in a schizophrenic mess.
However I think Israeli society does indeed have the right, in fact the moral duty, to do what it has to do to defend itself. However that fact does not absolve the leaders of Israel who allowed this situation to come about of guilt, any more than any Israeli provocations absolve the morally deranged Palestinian extremists from what they have done and are still doing. I do not make any moral equivalence, far from it in fact, for a damnable litany of mistakes on one side may explain a torrent of evil on the other without at the same time justifying and excusing it. My sympathies are with Israelis for whom a visit to a pizza parlor can end in being blown to bits by the young girl standing next to them… and also with ordinary Palestinians who cannot build on their own property for fear of Israeli soldiers with bulldozers enforcing discriminatory ‘planning regulations’… and yet if they sell that property to an Israeli, houses will spring up there like mushrooms.
Yet my big problem with Israeli policies is not so much settlement, which if handled differently might not have been so provocative, but that regardless of the letter of the law and claims to the contrary, it has been made clear that there is no genuine wish to treat non-Jews as equals economically or judicially. Policies should have been aimed at fragmenting, factionalising and de-collectivising the Palestinians, co-opting them economically and culturally and pointing out that Western style Israeli institutions are vastly superior to their corrupt counterparts in surrounding Arab countries, rather than ghettoising the Palestinians and then using them as a nice source of cheap wetbacks. Every time the state of Israel made life harder and harder for entire communities of Palestinians with heavy handed policing, every time entire communities found themselves unable to travel to work in Israel or even the next town in the occupied territories because of the actions of a few, in fact every time they came in contact with the official face of the Israeli state, individual Palestinians discovered that they are not being discriminated against because they supported Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah personally, but because they are Palestinians. Not surprisingly more and more of them started to see no reason not to support Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah.
That is the ‘forcible collectivisation’ process of which I wrote, driven by the collectivist strain of thought that was present at the very foundation of Israel and which has been in conflict with the more rational individualist/capitalist ethos also present in Israeli society ever since… and then to make it so very much worse, Israel makes sure that the psychopathic Arafat ends up the uncontested leader, rather than bending over backwards to encourage rational economically oriented moderates to oppose him. I think that absorption and co-option of a significant chunk of the Palestinian population, giving them a genuine stake in Israel’s secular capitalist future, rather than leaving them with (on the West Bank) a GDP per capita of $1,500 per year, was the way to undercut the toxic forces represented by the ghastly Arafat. I realise that many within Israel understood that but for every rational Nathan Sharansky, there was a bigot like Rehavam Zeevi working to very different ends. A visible measure of the utter failure of Israeli policy is that Palestinian Christians, surely a natural factional ally of Israel and once a marginalised and often despised Arab minority, are now united with their Muslim confreres by their collective loathing of Israel. Likewise the stark example of the fate of pro-Israeli Lebanese Arab militias inside the former buffer zone showed what can happen when the going gets tough to those who throw their lot in with Israel.
Now people who do believe that these are all grossly unfair characterisations of the reality of the state of Israel’s policies will never be convinced otherwise and I do not propose to even try to change that. I do not purport to have my own unimpeachable sources of news from the region but I have known many Israelis and a few Palestinians and feel my grasp on what has gone on is reasonably sound. But at least I hope some people who feel the need to write long strident e-mails will try to see that my dismay at Israel’s policies over the last few decades springs not from hostility to Israel so much as dismay that things could have gone so terribly terribly wrong for what is clearly in many ways an admirable western society with which I share much in the way of meta-context and values.
But of course now, none of the sort of policies I wanted to see over the last 30 years are even an option any more and I realise that. That is why I wrote ‘Israel must do terrible things to survive’. The errors have been made, compounded and have now come due. To quote Talleyrand (or Joseph Fouché, I have seen it attributed to both), it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. That is why I want the people responsible for those compounded mistakes ‘to be damned’ when the time to tally up the final toll comes.
However if I was an Israeli right now, I would be more concerned about personal survival but eventually the inevitable consequences of the influence in Israel of those with a profoundly collectivist ethos are going to have to be faced by every single person in Israel. Israeli society is going to have to decide just what living within ‘The Jewish State’ actually means and what it should mean in the future. I wish them luck for I do not envy them that task.
With so much in the world to write about, comment upon, illuminate, satirise and analyse, I can no longer remain oblivious to the elephant that has rudely bashed down my door and lumbered into my room.
He’s been loitering outside for a good while now, occasionally catching my eye with a baleful and accusatory glance. Thus far, I have succeeded in shutting him out but I still catch a glimpse of him through the crack in my curtains; I lie in bed at night and hear his tail swishing to-and-fro and feel the bump as his ample haunches scrape against my walls.
My efforts at exclusion have availed me nought for he has abandoned his patient vigil and simply barged his way in. He is standing next to me now, snorting and bellowing and commanding my every regard.
I write this not because I want to but because I feel I have to.
We have all watched while events in the Middle East have rapidly escalated to the point where Israel has, now, formally declared itself to be at war. It is a conflict that we all regard with a deep sense of foreboding because we all instinctively realise the implications not just for the parties concerned but beyond. Having read the posting from Perry de Havilland, it is with a heavy heart that I concur with both his analysis and his prognosis.
But it does not end there and it would be bad enough even if it did. As evidence mounts that both Syria and Iraq are preparing to enjoin a wider war and given the intention of both the USA and the UK to go after Saddam and America’s broader war against Al-Qaeda, the mind begins to boggle at just how bad all this could get. Will Islamic radicals take this war to the USA mainland again? And what happens if they do?
In a way that if the most frightening element of this mess; the fact that Arab radicals really seem to think they can push the Israelis into the sea and bring the West to its knees. Not wishing to be pejorative, but they are, quite simply, deranged. That’s what makes this so different from the Cold War. The Russians had chained themselves to a warped and bankrupt philosophy but they could always be relied upon to act in their own best interests.
Not so here, sadly. Too many Arabic radicals believe their own rhetoric and are suicidal enough to act upon it. They simply do not seem to appreciate that whatever force the Israelis can unleash it is not but a gnat’s bite compared to that which can be visited upon them by Uncle Sam.
I can see the confluence of forces beginning to take shape and time-honoured dark clouds brooding on the horizon. Maybe this is my sordid and pessimistic imagination at work but there are too many red lights flashing to dismiss them all as herrings.
Did it feel like this in 1913? Could anyone see then where that Great Power rivalry was going to lead? Did anyone imagine the scale of carnage that lay ahead? If they did, would history have been any different? Or is there something deep within the epistemology of our species that impels us inexorably towards these periodic bloodlettings, regardless of the steps we take to avoid them? Is that really what all our searching and truth-seeking is all about? A desire to know the truth about ourselves when the real truth hides in plain sight all around us. Libertarianism, Conservatism, Socialism, Marxism and all other ‘isms’ seem nothing more than ephemeral and foppish casuistry in times like these; parlour games for the effete, the safe and the well-fed.
The kind of parlour games they probably played with each other in that last, dappled Edwardian summer before Europe became a charnel-house.
I don’t know if Europe, or anywhere else, will become a charnel-house again. I certainly hope not. But if things go as badly as they could go, then a lot of consequences will follow and expect none of them to be very agreeable. Synagogues are already ablaze in France.
None of us may be touched, but all of us will be tested.
The elephant is still here. I suppose I will have to learn to live round him somehow. He tells me that he once appeared in the background in Out of Africa and he keeps quoting a line from the film; a resignation used by the African farm workers when they were facing a catastrophe or force majeure that they could neither avoid nor prevent.
“Mem’sahib” they would say ”God is coming”
The way I see it, the Palestinian Götterdämmerung is at hand. Maybe this week, maybe this month, or maybe in a year from now, but it is coming. Israel will take the view that unless it either turns the West Bank into a vast concentration camp (literally not figuratively) on a pretty much permanent basis, or completely ‘ethnically cleanse’ it of its Muslim and Christian Arab population, because otherwise civil life within Israel will become completely intolerable.
Unlike many in the media and blogosphere who are gleefully baying for the streets of the occupied territories to run with Palestinian blood, I cannot add my voice to that ghastly chorus. Yet in fact I think that an apocalyptic end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just inevitable now but perhaps the sooner Israel gets it over with the better. I can see no prospect for a political solution. Thirty years of criminally stupid Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, aided and abetted by the Palestinian’s own psychopathic, inept and suicidal leaders, have worked to ensure that the forcibly collectivised Palestinian people are ‘ruled’ by a dependably duplicitous pathological liar with not even the prospect of a rational alternative leader, and so there is now no solution other than the effective destruction of the Palestinian people as a coherent society.
Yet the fact I regard the Israeli state as being a huge contributor to the horrors being visited upon themselves, that actually changes nothing. The time for blame has passed. It will come again but not for a while. Regardless of who is responsible, Israeli society finds itself where it finds itself and no amount of finger pointing will change one iota of the reality of that. People are now dying on a pretty much daily basis and in increasing numbers. Israel will either do what it must to survive or it will gradually bleed to death as a seemingly endless supply of Palestinians demonstrate that they have been given nothing to live for except hatred and revenge, and thus blow themselves up in Israel’s supermarkets, pizza parlours and hotels. That is the terrible reality. The other terrible reality is that when the IDF finally gets the order to kill Arafat, it will make not the slightest bit of difference. The killings will go on, the bombings will go on, the murderous hatreds will continue unabated until Israel shrugs off the last political restraints and finally by sheer force of arms imposes the quiet of the graveyard over the occupied territories.
Israel must do terrible things to survive and be damned for doing them. Do them they must… and be damned they must. Israel will survive but there will be no winners in this ghastly inter Semitic madness. Now today Tel-Aviv has been subjected to the insane horrors and thus individual Palestinians move a day closer to the end of their identity as a member of a distinct identifiable society, regardless of their personal responsibility.
I would just love to be completely wrong about this.
“Two important phenomena, of the same nature but opposed, are emerging at this moment in Asiatic Turkey. They are the awakening of the Arab nation and the latent effort of the Jews to reconstitute on a very large scale the ancient kingdom of Israel. These movements are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins”
From ‘Le Reveil de la Nation Arabe’ by Najib Azouri, written in 1905 
Not everywhere in the Islamic world forces women to hide under burqas.
 
As Jordanian society gradually evolves towards a more sophisticated extended order, I cannot think of an image more subersive and corrosive to the joyless Pan-Islamist world view than Queen Rania of Jordan: intelligent, elegant, articulate and Palestinian.
The murderers of Daniel Pearl live in another world. It is a world in which acts of deception that result in the murder of an unarmed noncombatant is seen as somehow heroic. It is an inverted world in which showing your weakness by murdering the would-be journalistic bearer of your own message is seen as showing your enemies that you are strong. It is a world with a chain of unfathomable logic that suggests that a course of action that murders a single fine but helpless American in Pakistan will change America foreign policy more to the murderers’ liking even when killing 3,000 helpless Americans in New York did not.
Well in the last one they are at least partially correct. By killing 3,000 Americans they filled the skies of Afghanistan with thunder and caused the destruction of their patron government, which was indeed a change in American foreign policy. And by killing this good man they move America closer to another change. Pakistan must now realise that they have no choice any longer but to crush the serpent in its midst with whatever force it takes or the United States will rightly do it for them in Daniel Pearl’s name. Just as these monsters filmed their foul acts of cowardice, so too we may soon see the deaths of his murderers, if not from the forces of the Pakistani state then through the green light of night vision scopes and guided bomb cameras of a vengeful America.
It is rather surprising, in the year 2002, to find someone expressing the thoughts noted in this article to which the Opinion Journal’s handy e-mail newsletter directed me.
The Associated Press reports on the proliferation of anti-Semitic propaganda in the Egyptian press, whose editors are appointed by the government. Al-Akhbar, one of the three leading dailies, published a piece last spring paying tribute to the 20th century’s leading evildoer: “Thanks to the late Hitler, who took revenge in advance for the Palestinians on the most vile criminals on earth, though we blame Hitler because his revenge was not quite enough,” Ahmed Ragab wrote.
I think someone should warn Mr Ragab of what we did to the Nazi’s the last time around.
Note: If anyone has a link to photo’s of the hangings of the Nazi war criminals, I would appreciate it.
Whilst I often agree with Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit, there is one pet theory of his that he has mentioned several times before that I find baffling:
I still say that what’s going on right now is that the Israelis are dismembering the Palestinian Authority and all the various terror groups there so that there won’t be any significant resistance when the Jordanians move in and take over.
To which I say, and have said before, what on earth is in it for the Jordanians? Why would the Hashemites want to risk another Black September uprising against their Bedouin dynasty five to ten years down the road by adding 2 million pissed off, radicalised, impoverished Palestinians to an already complex Jordanian 5 million strong ethnic Palestinian/Bedouin mixture? Quite apart from the horrendous political and security nightmare the occupied territories would present to Jordan if they were handed back to them, they are an economic booby prize. The Jordanians have a GDP of about $3,500 per capita, hardly rich…compared to the West Bank Palestinians GDP per capita of about $1,500, which is truly dire.
So whilst it might well take the pressure off Israel, so what? I must ask Glenn to say what on earth is in this for Jordan? They would have to be bonkers to want the West Bank back!
[Update: Glenn responds on Instapundit. However I do not doubt that Jordan and Israel will continue to cooperate in security matters, just that Jordan will accept the poison pill of reacquiring the West Bank. The article to which Glenn links seems to strengthen my case regarding the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Jordanian monarchy for having the West Bank Palestinians within Jordanian borders]
Today’s Opinion Journal newsletter has an interesting quote from the Axis of Evil:
Iranian Ex-Prez: We’ll Nuke the Jews
Anyone who thinks Bush was wrong on the merits in calling the Iranian government “evil” should consider a speech ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani gave on the occasion of “Jerusalem Day” last month. He said that the Islamic world will soon have nuclear weapons: “On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.”
While his statement is true as far as it goes, he neglects to include the response from elsewhere. I humbly suggest the US could spare a volley from a Trident or two without even raising a particular sweat.
It would be such a lovely memorial fireworks display. Mister Rafsanjani could watch it and ponder his errors… during his last .00000001 seconds.
To say that things are getting nasty in the Middle East would be facile. They’ve been nasty for quite some time
But if this report is anything to go by then the ratchet has moved yet another notch and Israel and the Palestinians are heading into a full scale, balls out, pants down shooting war for real
Is anybody surprised?
This test, being prepared all sorts of people, will be to see if the Bush administration is actually as sophisticated as I think they might be.
Somalia is being suggested as the next course on the menu after Afghanistan by all manner of odd bed fellows, from the Ethiopian government who would like to see their neighbour destabilized for their own ends, to oil companies looking to redeem worthless Siad Barré era concessions, to certain conservative US revanchists looking to avenge the bloody 1993 repulse of US Rangers by Somali militiamen.
My guess is that if there is any US military action at all, it will be highly targeted, rather than just blundering in and picking a fight with a Somali clan over an absurd UN derived desire to reorder Somali polity more to Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s liking, as happened last time.
Israel and the Middle East
Take a look at Victor Hanson in his article about why Arabs have misunderstood Israel. In a nutshell, his thesis is that if Israel did not exist, then as far as many Arabs are concerned, they would have to invent it.
If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent somehting like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for milliums of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn’t about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Isreal is a constant reminder that it is a nation’s culture-not its geography or size or magnitude or its oil reserves-that determine its wealth or freedom.
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