‘Avigdor Lieberman. The perfect choice to take control of a delicate equipoise. He’ll bring in some Russian finesse.’
‘People go on about demographics, but the worst push is self-inflicted. Only around a third – a third – of Jewish schoolchildren are getting a secular education.’
‘…I know what it’ll be like. It’ll be like the distorted age structures in the West. A shrinking middle class will have to pay for all the drones who spend their time frowning at the Torah or nutting the Wailing Wall. So. The state will eventually cease to be majority-Jewish, cease to be democratic, and cease to be secular. A racial theocracy. Just what we all hoped for. Like many a Red Sea pedestrian I feel, I feel let down by Israel.’
‘Judt’s the same. So’s Hobsbawm…What was it you imagined?’
‘I don’t know, somewhere full of interest and subtlety and testing intelligence. A friend of Victor Klemperer’s called the Jews “a seismic people”. They stir things up, but it should give rise to something original. A load of weightlifters from Queens buying second homes in Fort Condo – I suppose that’s original. But I wanted something, something more…’
The room was now dark, but I could see that this was becoming one of Christopher’s great political sadnesses. Like his sloughing of hope in socialism, like his sloughing of hope in the outcome of the war in Iraq…
Christopher stayed silent so I said,
‘What I couldn’t shake off was the sense of unreality. Michael says it’s like living with a permanent low-level flu. Manageable, but with flare-ups and fevers…Unreal. And humankind, Hitch, cannot bear very much unreality.’
‘I would never write this, but Israel should call itself Unrael. It’s utopian in the literal meaning. Not place.’
—————
The capital P has no bearing on the PTSD of Israel. The dread of extinction is the white noise the people continuously try to ignore – continuously, because the dread of extinction is punctually refreshed. Following the Holocaust, within three years of the Holocaust, what starts to happen?
Independence Day was proclaimed on May 15, 1948, and on May 16, 1948, five Arab armies launched what was avowedly a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation (its failure was the original Arab nakba – ‘catastrophe’). The same applied in June 1967 (the Six Day War) and in October 1973 (the Yom Kippur War)…In January 1991 the existential threat came from Saddam Hussein; during the first Gulf War, Tel Aviv was bombarded by Iraqi missiles, and Israeli families sat in sealed rooms with German-made gas masks covering their faces. In March 2002, with the Second Intifada, the threat came from the Palestinians. Now the threat comes from Gaza, and from the overarching prospect of nuclear weapons in Iran…
To understate the obvious, this is not a formula for radiant mental health. And if there’s a scintilla of truth in the notion that countries are like people, then it is vain to expect Israel to behave normatively or even rationally. The question is not, How can you expect it, after all that? The question is, After all that, why do you expect it?
Fifty-one years on, it is clear at least that the Occupation – as exactly foreseen by Abba Eban – was a social, moral, and political nakba for the Jews. Let us close with these incantatory lines from James Fenton’s ‘Jerusalem’ (December 1988):
III
This is your fault.
This is a crusader vault.
The Brook of Kidron flows from Mea She’arim.
I will pray for you.
I will tell you what to do.
I’ll stone you. I shall break your every limb.
Oh I’m not afraid of you
But maybe I should fear the things you make me do.
VII
…Have you ever met an Arab?
Yes I am a scarab.
I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn.
I cry Impure from street to street
And see my degradation in the eyes I meet.
And finally:
X
Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone.
These are the warrior archaeologists.
This is us and that is them.
This is Jerusalem.
These are the dying men with tattooed wrists.
Do this and I’ll destroy your home.
I have destroyed your home. You have destroyed my home.
* This ‘document’ was exposed as a fabrication almost a century ago, in 1921. It is curious that the word ‘forgery’ has attached itself to the Protocols (a word used pretty well invariably by even the most serious and well-intentioned historians). As Hitchens often pointed out, with deepening weariness, ‘a forgery is at least a false copy of a true bill’. What were the Protocols a copy of? The adhesive epithet slanderously implies that there was once an original, whereas of course the whole fantasy was conjured out of nothing, in the early 1900s, by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, to defame Russian Jews and so justify the coming pogroms…The Hamas charter. Though intransigently unrevised for thirty years, the Hamas Covenant (1988) is now considered to be something of a relic. But the updated version (2017) still demands the entire territory ‘from the river to the sea’ and still insists that the ‘establishment of “Israel” is entirely illegal’. ‘There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity’ – that is, of its right to exist.
Addendum Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘You know your father’s got a fancy woman in London,’ said Eva García, with her thick Welsh accent (‘Ewe gnaw ewe father’) and her thick Welsh Schadenfreude (the simple pleasure of relaying bad news). ‘Fancy man’, according to the dictionary, is ‘a woman’s lover’; ‘fancy woman’, far more specifically, is ‘a married man’s mistress’. I didn’t know that then. I was thirteen. But I took Eva’s meaning.
Celt-Iberian Eva García had served as our nanny-housekeeper during the family’s decade in Swansea, South Wales; and she was now summoned down to Cambridge to help keep things steady during an
