The Sharp Side

Edward Said once wearily referred to “the ubiquitous Amos Oz”. Said, of course, was perfectly positioned to get the true measure of someone like Oz.

Glancing at today’s page in the weekly TV guide I spotted that The Ubiquitous One is back again – yup, at 10.40 pm tonight on BBC1 there’s a one hour documentary entitled Amos Oz: The Conscience of Israel.

Amos Oz is as much the conscience of Israel as Jeffrey Archer is the patron saint of truthfulness and integrity. If anyone seriously deserves that accolade it’s the academic and author Ilan Pappe (whose articles about Israel appear from time to time in the London Review of Books), not a Left Zionist like Oz.

I’ll be setting the VCR. According to the TV guide, in tonight’s programme Oz will give “an eye-witness account of Israel’s birth through the publication of his childhood memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness”. As it happens I’m two-thirds of the way through this memoir, making copious notes, so I’ll save my comments on the TV programme and the book for a future lengthy post. All I’ll say for now is that it’s a brilliantly written book. It’s also a deeply dishonest, manipulative piece of Zionist propaganda. Oz is not Israel’s conscience – he’s Israel’s Leni Riefenstahl.

The British paperback edition of A Tale of Love and Darkness (Vintage) bears on its cover a single quote: “One of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books, I have ever read” GUARDIAN. What it doesn’t say is that the unidentified Guardian reviewer was Linda Grant – a fanatical Zionist. Regular visitors to the blog Lenin’s Tomb may recall she had a run-in with its proprietor, Richard Seymour. You can read the full exchange in the Tomb’s archives (under ‘Lenin’s long 'uns’). As Seymour put it with his customary clarity: “The murder and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-8 was a planned component of the theft of Palestinian land. The settlements, from WWI onward, were contiguous with British colonialism in Palestine, and were often co-opted into the occupation. The final success of the Zionist movement was to replace the British occupation with a European settler occupation.”

Needless to say that’s not the kind of historical background you’ll find in A Tale of Love and Darkness. It’s a Zionist family saga, packed with eccentrics and warm-hearted, rollicking Dickensian characters. Reviewing the book for the Israeli publication Haaretz, Avirama Golan put it well in describing it as an “autobiographical novel”. All autobiography involves an element of fiction-making but Oz’s is of the full-blooded variety. He purports to remember lengthy conversations he had as a child. His recall of places is crammed with improbable detail. But the book isn’t an innocent memoir. His colourful yarn of Jewish family life is disturbed by bad people – Arabs. Virtually invisible in the first half of the book, they emerge from the shadows of Palestine to make trouble. It’s not hard to see why this self-serving account of Zionists as a loveable, warm-hearted, cuddly people whose existence is threatened by crazy irrational Arabs has proved massively popular in Israel.

Avirama Golan notes, “Every choice [Oz] has made - literary, historical, psychological or linguistic - reveals how bound he is to the ‘hard disk’ of Zionism, as he calls it.” That hard core of belief which drives Oz is exposed at its rawest in his short, avuncular book Help Us To Divorce: Israel and Palestine - Between Right and Right (Vintage paperback), which I’ve just finished reading. Let’s take a peek at some of the core beliefs of Amos Oz, taken from Help Us To Divorce:

(i) “The Israeli Jews are in Israel because there is no other country in the world which the Jews, as a people, as a nation, could ever call home.” (p. 5)

Eh? To be Jewish is to belong to a religion. Jews live quite happily alongside other religions all over the world. Religion does not define statehood. Italy may be a Catholic country but to be Italian all that’s required is that you are born there, not that you are a Catholic.
As for “no other country in the world”: the Zionist pioneers in fact considered setting up a state in Argentina and in central Africa before finally settling on Palestine.

(ii) “Both peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, have equally deep, different historical and emotional roots in the country.” (p. 10)

This simply isn’t true. Zionist settlers did not arrive in Palestine until the late nineteenth century. Arabs had been living in Palestine for centuries. Even when the United Nations allocated land for a sectarian Jewish state in 1947, Arabs formed the majority of the population of that state.
By “emotional roots” I assume Oz is referring to the Bible. Apart from being a work of fiction, this cannot reasonably be said to provide an adequate mandate for a racist, colonising twentieth century project.
Ironically, modern archeology has established that although a historical entity called Israel did briefly exist around 800-700 BCE it was not Jewish but pagan, and Jerusalem was not its spiritual centre.

(iii) “Half the population of Israel are people who were kicked out of Arabic and Islamic countries.” (p. 19)

But the founding of Israel in 1948 created that situation, just as today’s Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians have made Israelis hated throughout the Middle East – not because they are Jews but because they are sectarian colonialist thugs.
Nor is “kicked out” an accurate way of describing what happened. In 1948 there were 800,000 Jews living in Arab countries – around 6% of the world’s Jews. Iraq, for example, had a 2,500 year old Jewish community. The British government thought it would be a marvellous idea if the Jews got out of its puppet colony Iraq and let ethnically-cleansed Palestinians take over their homes. Not surprisingly there was no great enthusiasm for the deal among those on whose behalf it was being brokered. Then, in the face of the reluctance of Iraqi Jews to leave, a 14-month terror campaign of anti-Jewish bombings began. And who was behind this terrorism? All the historical evidence points to Israel. And it worked. Jews were terrorised out of Iraq by Jews, to inflate Israel’s minority Jewish population.

(iv) “Modern Israel is not a product of a colonialist enterprise.” (p. 21)

The chutzpah of Zionists like Oz really is extraordinary. The documentation on the original aspirations of Zionism and its subsequent occupation of Palestine is enormous. Both in its theory and its practise Zionism is and always has been a ruthless colonialist project. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, was enormously impressed by the way Cecil Rhodes had appropriated Mashonaland and Matabeleland from its indigenous population. He thought this supplied a marvellous example for the setting up of a future Jewish state. First expropriate the land, then get rid of the natives – though as Herzl cautioned, “the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

(v) “The Jews have a right to be a majority in one small land.” (p. 30)

Here we come to the sectarian core of Zionism. Why should Jews - or any religious or ethnic group - have a natural right to be a majority anywhere, least of all in a land they have stolen from the indigenous population by brute force?
I am a white Briton. Do I have a right to say that white Britons have a natural right to be a majority in Britain? I don’t think so. In a hundred years’ time most people in Britain may be black, brown or mixed race, with whites in a minority. Why should that matter?
Israel has only arrived at a Jewish majority population through ethnic cleansing, reinforced by its sectarian ‘Law of Return’, which allows Jews from around the world to emigrate there, despite having no connections with the Middle East whatsoever. Simultaneously, Israel denies Palestinian refugees the right to return to the homes they were driven out of in 1948 and the land that has continued to be stolen from them bit by bit over more than half a century. Israel refuses to allow these refugees within its borders. And that’s fine by Amos Oz. As far as he is concerned everything will be resolved if the Palestinians are given their own state which, as he charmingly puts it, “will be even smaller than Israel, but it will be home”. (p. 30) And that’s where those 5 million refugees will have to squeeze in, because there’s no room for them in a state determined artificially to maintain a Jewish majority.

(vi) “Not one of them [Israelis and Palestinians] is an island and not one of them can completely mingle with the other. Those two peninsulas should be related and at the same time left on their own.” (p. 81)

Under the homely metaphors, this is the argument of a racist and a sectarian. It’s hardly surprising that Oz is a keen supporter of the wall which is being built to fence the Palestinians into their open-air prisons, or that he supports a state which refuses to admit Palestinians in the West Bank who marry Israeli Arabs. Such cruelties are indeed very reminiscent of apartheid South Africa. But then Israel is a state where racist remarks by a senior government minister attract little comment. Back in August 2003, cabinet minister Gideon Ezra urged that Arabs should be used as security guards in Israel because only they have “the sense of smell needed to smell other Arabs”.

Gideon Levy remarked at the time (‘The Scent of Racism’, Haaretz, 25 August 2003):

“Separate lines for Jews and Arabs have long since become second nature here. There is no need to go as far as the occupied territories - where apartheid roads for Jews only and curfew for Arabs only have long been the reality - in order to witness the separation. It’s here, within the country. Under the aegis of the security situation the phenomenon has grown to worrisome proportions, far beyond what’s necessary. Arab students find it difficult to rent apartments in Jewish cities solely because of their ethnic origin and without any security justification. The country’s Arab citizens are increasingly loath to venture out of their towns and villages because of the suspiciousness and humiliation they encounter in every contact with Jewish citizens or with the authorities.”

The most eloquent critics of Israel are themselves Israelis, and Jews are at the forefront of the anti-Zionist movement. Amos Oz isn’t one of them. Amos Oz “the conscience of Israel”? Don’t make me bleedin’ laugh, as my aunty Dot used to say.