Monthly Archives: September 2024

Old habits, new protests: on the politics of Israel’s allies

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Summary: those who have lost their moral compass will never understand that protest is leadership

Rule of international double standards

Today, it appears that many Western political leaders apply multiple caveats to the principle of the universality of human rights. The result is that rather than rule of international law we seem increasingly to have rule of international double standards. 

This is particularly plain in relation to British, American and German policy towards Gaza. In comparison with their supportive policy towards Ukraine and their outrage at Putin’s war crimes there, in relation to Gaza there is a lack of condemnation for ceaseless attacks upon civilians. On the contrary, the British, Americans and Germans remain publicly and materially supportive of Israeli policy.

The moral black hole at the heart of Western policy towards Israel

British, American and German policy on Gaza appears to be underpinned by a view that Palestinian lives are not equal to Israeli lives and so unworthy of comparable protection. Hence those three governments seem to have decided that it is better to arm and provide diplomatic cover for the far-Right Netanyahu government rather than to uphold the most basic principles of human rights and international humanitarian law.

In the face of the considerable evidence of genocide these governments are deaf to the international protests of conscience, and to the demands of Palestinian and Israeli voices for peace. Instead, they work to maintain the murderous Israeli Defence Forces supply lines at all costs. 

I have heard some try to justify this human rights double standard in relation to Israel by responding to protests with patronising reference to the need for realism, for a “realpolitik” approach to the conflict. This is, perhaps, a notion they may imagine that the protesters do not have the sophistication to properly understand. However, many will know that “realpolitik” is a term that has considerable previous, notably in the hands of Henry Kissinger, as a euphemism for moral vacuity and acquiescence in crimes against humanity. 

Given this many will remain unconvinced that “realpolitik” really is a sufficient justification for the mounting horrors in Gaza and the West Bank. So, why are the US, the UK and Germany so steadfast in their support of a far-Right Israeli government pursuing such a horrendous campaign of violence?

It is worth remembering that Germany was genocidal in Namibia well before the Nazis ever came to power. While relatively democratic, Britain and the United States were also genocidal in the 19th and 20th centuries in relation to, amongst others, Native Americans, Ireland and South Asia. It was democratically elected governments in the US that launched the invasion of Vietnam and the destruction of Cambodia. It was democratically elected governments in the US and UK that unlawfully invaded Iraq. Today it is democratically elected governments in the US, UK and Germany that have facilitated the far-Right in Israel in their indiscriminate slaughter of Gazan civilians. 

So, if we take even a medium-term historical view on these countries, it seems that there is a strain of thinking in those nations’ political cultures stretching from Left to Right that still view war crimes and genocide not as appalling and even unforgivable aberrations, but as legitimate policy options when it is convenient for them or those, however unsavoury, that they deem allies. 

Protest as leadership

It is in this context that the leaderships of the US, the UK and Germany display such an extraordinary arrogance toward those protesting their disgust at their policies. In the UK, along with their gleeful grasping at graft, their contempt towards protesters is a measure of government ministers’ extraordinary sense of entitlement.

But it is the protests of which they are so contemptuous that so often change cultures and countries in the ways in which corrupt politicians can only dream. This is because protest is moral leadership that seeks to make the world a better place by demanding that it become so. 

It is because of protesters that women have the vote, that apartheid has been ended in South Africa, that civil rights have been advanced in the US and the North of Ireland. When many governments have sought to merely manage the status quo – the “realpolitik” – protesters have asserted that this is not good enough and demanded better.

Today protesters understand, as the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement once put it, that “… we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form”.

So, at the end of the day, as Israel’s allies become ever more deeply mired in the murder of children, it is the protesters they disdain who will perhaps contribute most substantially to an end to apartheid in Israel/Palestine and thereby save the souls of their own countries.

Sweet Home, by Wendy Erskine

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Summary: a wonderful collection of short stories of contemporary Belfast

The first recorded ventriloquists in history were the Oracle at Delphi. These priestesses, who divined the future for fearful supplicants that sought their counsel, would take on the voices of the dead, and the gods, to add gravitas to their prophesies.

I was put in mind of these sorceresses reading Wendy Erskine’s wonderful collection of short stories, Sweet Home, because Erskine displays a similar witchcraft in the way in which she so convincingly evokes the diverse lives, and the diverse voices of the inhabitants of her stories. 

Like the blasted heath on which Macbeth encounters his witches, the contemporary Belfast in which these stories are set bears the scars of war and the gangsterism that flourished in the margins of that conflict. 

And yet even the most unpleasant of her wholly believable characters are treated with an extraordinary empathy by Erskine. With the brilliance of her writing, she forces the reader to understand that even the extortionist, or the disagreeable schoolteacher, whose stories she tells are still human beings with their own hopes, their own tragedies which have shaped who they have become. 

There may be few unambiguous happy endings in these stories. But they are filled with tenderness, lashings of pitch-black Belfast humour, and enough optimism to hope that some of these characters may yet see better days, even if that is only the quiet needed to read, the friendship of a new neighbour, or the chance of promotion for a shop worker. 

In a world of tawdry illusions and cheap tricksterism, Erskine’s stories are the real deal: the rarest of enchantments that the Irish call great short stories, and the rest of the world calls enduring literature. 

Magic.

The General’s Son, by Miko Peled; and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe

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Summary: on the original sins of Zionism

 In 1967 General Mattityahu Peled, who, as head of logistics of the Israeli Defense Forces, was one of the architects of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War, investigated an atrocity.

Peled had heard from a Palestinian prisoner how IDF soldiers in Gaza had massacred over 30 unarmed civilians, including a 13 year old boy and an 86 year old man. After they were shot the IDF drove a bulldozer back and forth over the bodies until they were unrecognizable. 

Peled, an Arabic speaker, went personally to Gaza to find out what happened and met the families of the victims. Afterwards he wrote a report to the Israeli government warning them about the moral degradation that the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories would bring and how atrocity would become a commonplace if it was allowed to continue. 

Peled’s son, Miko, reckons now that this was probably the decisive moment in his father’s life that transformed him from soldier to committed peace activist, something he remained for the rest of his life, a mantle taken up, in spite of incredible suffering, by both Miko and his sister, Nurit. 

But perhaps Matti Peled should not have wasted his breathe with his warning to the Israeli government. Because as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains in depressing detail in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, atrocities of the sort Matti Peled uncovered in Gaza – atrocities of the sort that Israel continues to perpetrate year in, year out, including in its genocidal post October 7th operations in Gaza – were part of the DNA of Zionism from when Israel was but a glimmer in David Ben Gurion’s eye. 

Prior to the founding of the state of Israel Ben Gurion and the cadre of Zionists that he gathered around him to be his closest political and military advisors, drew up detailed plans for the expulsions of the indigenous people of Palestine so they could realise their sectarian dreams of a Jewish state. They recognized from the outset that mass murder and terrorism would be intrinsic to this project. 

With the UN vote to partition Palestine they put their plans into bloody action. Deir Yassin was the pattern, not an aberration. 

On visiting the aftermath of one ethnic cleansing operation by the Haganah, the forerunner of the IDF, Golda Meir was reminded of the Eastern European pogroms that had terrorized her own family from their home. But, aside from this momentary lapse, she otherwise remained comfortable with her role as a war criminal.  But Pappe wonders how a mere three years after the Holocaust its survivors could inflict such barbarity on fellow human beings.

Pappe’s forensic analysis of the war crimes of Israel and the fundamental racism of Zionism has, of course, drawn criticism from other Israelis – the sort who benefit from apartheid in Israel and the West Bank and who celebrate the genocide in Gaza.

But, like Miko Peled, Pappe is on the right side of history. As the world increasingly sees Israel for the rogue terrorist state that it is, Peled and Pappe explain why it is as it is, and plot a path towards the inevitable end to apartheid there.

Both Pappe and Peled represent the enduring voice of conscience in the midst of atrocity. They are advocates of a common humanity in the face of prejudice and sectarianism. In the end it is this humanity that will always triumph over apartheid.

Paris ’44, by Patrick Bishop

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Summary: a gripping narrative of the liberation of Paris

Paris ’44 covers similar ground to the bestselling book, Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, focusing on the liberation of Paris from the Germans in 1944.

Bishop finds some novel perspectives on the story through recounting the experiences of JD Salinger and Ernest Hemmingway in the fighting in France. Bishop is also much less generous to the German commander of the Paris garrison, von Choltitz, than were Collins and Lapierre:  That von Cholititz did not set Paris ablaze had little to do with his moral qualms and much more to do with the logistical difficulties of such an act of terrorism. Bishop is also rightly caustic about how the grossly collaborationist French police switched sides when they discerned how the tide of the war was turning.

The Paris uprising in 1944 was possibly the luckiest such insurrection in occupied Europe. Elsewhere resisters were encouraged with considerable cynicism by the Allied high command to give battle to the Germans to draw off forces from the main allied armies. But Paris was one of the few places where the allied armies moved to support the uprisings before the Germans had time to massacre them. The relief of Paris by a Free French armored division was something of which the Home Army in Warsaw, or the Maquis on the French Vercors massif could only dream.

It is a compelling story no matter how it is served up, and Bishop does this with quite some style. 

The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker

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Summary: a fine novel of Cassandra that suffers in comparison with Barker’s initial foray into the stories of Troy

The Voyage Home continues Pat Barker’s feminist retelling of the tales of Troy, following the return of Agamemnon to Mycenae with the enslaved Cassandra in tow. This guarantees that the reunion with his wife Clytemnestra is going to be awkward. Just how awkward Agamemnon, even if he was a cleverer man, could not imagine.

But Cassandra, gifted with prophesy, but cursed that no one ever believes her, knows. In the bloodshed that she foresees she also discerns some measure of justice for the genocide that the Greeks have inflicted on her homeland. 

For this story, Barker replaces Briseis, the narrator of her previous Trojan books, with Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid: slave to a slave, or, as she describes her lowest of the low status, a “catch-fart.” 

The Voyage Home dealing with the beginning of the Oresteia, is, I think, a considerably better book than its predecessor, The Women of Troy. But neither of these books say much additional thematically to the stunning originator of this series, The Silence of the Girls.

Still, it is elegantly written, and Barker’s continuing focus on how war affects civilians and the sexual violence endured by women is important. In addition, Cassandra is always a compelling figure, and Ritsa is a fine creation. 

The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

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Summary: “You tried to bury us, but we were seeds.”

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 it was quickly recognized as a classic. An all too believable dystopian thriller, it is set in a United States that has been transformed into a theocratic dictatorship of the sort imagined in the fevered dreams of the legions of Trump’s incel supporters. 

It is told in the first-person, recounting the experiences of a young woman enslaved under the name Offred as the mistress of a leader of that state, Gilead. Such mistresses are prized because environmental devastation has rendered so much of the population sterile and it is a chance for the elite to reproduce. 

The compelling world that Atwood created in this book, and the open-ended nature of its ending could have seduced a lesser writer into a commercially successful career with spin-offs and sequels galore. However, Atwood waited over 30 years before returning to this fictional universe. That is, she waited until she finally had something new to say about it. 

The Testaments has stylistic similarities to The Handmaid’s Tale, but this time with three first-person narrators, including Lydia, a former judge now an “Aunt” – an older woman tasked with helping Gilead oversee and control its young women. In her deepest conscience however, Lydia is part of the Resistance, and The Testaments tells the story of how she plots to strike a blow to the heart of the dictatorship. 

Both books are gripping, building considerable tension as the protagonists strive to assert some aspects of freedom and free will in the cause of a more moral future, and hence place their fates in the balance. Both books are also deeply satisfying complements to each other, with Offred’s grim struggle for survival given context by Lydia’s more strategic overview of the battlefield. 

Lydia doesn’t have a cat. But she is doubtless the stuff of JD Vance’s nightmares. Such a brilliant character was well worth the 30 year wait. 

The Flashman Papers, by George McDonald Fraser (Flashman; Royal Flash; Flash for Freedom!; Flashman at the Charge; Flashman in the Great Game; Flashman’s Lady; Flashman and the Redskins; Flashman and the Dragon; Flashman and the Mountain of Light; Flashman and the Angel of the Lord; Flashman and the Tiger; Flashman on the March)

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Summary: A thoughtful rumination on Empire masquerading as a scurrilous romp… or is it the other way round?

I read my first Flashman book in the 1990s when I was working in Afghanistan. That book, George McDonald Fraser’s first dealing with the character, described his experiences in the retreat from Kabul. In the market of the town in which I was living, Jalalabad, it was still possible to buy buttons cut from the uniforms of the British dead of that retreat.

The Flashman books are rigorously researched historical novels, and so a great introduction to aspects of British imperial history which are little remembered in Britain, but which still reverberate in the global South. 

They are also exceptionally filthy and extremely funny, though much of the humour, drawing on the racist attitudes of Victorian England – and indeed of McDonald Fraser’s own day – can sometimes be hard to stomach. It is as if the boorish bores of Foster’s Passage to India are given centre stage to opine on the imperial order and revel in the privilege of being top dog in it, albeit with much more interesting lives to narrate.  

By the end of his life, Flashman has attained the rank of Brigadier General, been awarded the Victoria Cross and a knighthood, and is regarded as one of the heroes of Victorian Britian. He has met some of the greatest luminaries of his age, including Lincoln and Bismarck, and been witness to some of the epoch-making events of his days, including the Charge of the Light Brigade, the burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing, and the Battle of Little Bighorn. 

Throughout all of this Flashman remains what he was when expelled from Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays: an utter and selfish coward. And so, his reputation as a Victorian hero is built upon a reality of luck, murder, rape, deceit and pillage. In other words, Flashman is probably the most honest exemplar of British Empire in all of literature. 

Indeed, it is honesty – at least as a memoirist – that is one of Flashman’s few redeeming qualities, though he is also proud of his gifts with languages, women and horses. It is an impressive achievement that McDonald Fraser never softens the character across the decades of the books. 

However, readers continue to be seduced by Flashman. He is undeniably charming when he wants to be. His humour can be enough to make the reader forget on occasion that these are the memoirs of a monster, someone prepared to sacrifice the lives and liberty of everyone who has ever trusted or helped him, with the possible exception of his canny and perpetually under-estimated wife, Elspeth, if it can advantage him. 

Because of the painstaking historical research, Flashman can be highly opinionated on the events and individuals involved. Flashy is never reticent about what he thinks of the good sense or otherwise of the unfolding events and those involved in them. Some of the opinions are uncontentious: he is in justifiable awe of Lincoln, for example. But some of his conclusions are much more questionable: for example, he is mightily impressed by the venial betrayer of the Navajo, Kit Carson. But then as an inveterate Judas himself, Flashman may have sensed a kindred spirit in Carson.

McDonald Fraser states in an introduction to these books that all he was interested in was writing adventure stories. But, he writes, readers insist on finding in them works of satire, moral tales, indictments of Empire, handbooks for leadership. He was once even dumbfounded to find the books compared to Proust in a German review. 

I’ve not read Proust, but tend to agree with the critics who have found all those things that McDonald Fraser said he never put there. I have also read some Tolstoy and, for my tuppence worth, would suggest that taken together these books are literature worthy of serious comparison with the great Russian writer’s ruminations on the Napoleonic wars: a sort of 18-certificate Carry On British Colonialisim, if you will. 

They are a remarkable achievement, and gloriously entertaining. Try them.