Matthew Carr's Blog, page 6

Valencia: Floods, Dams and Lies

There are many reasons to hope that we don’t wake up tomorrow with a Trump victory in the US presidential elections, and many reasons why the consequences of this election matter not just to America, but to the wider world.

But the terrible events that have taken place in Valencia over the last week should concentrate our minds on one of the least-discussed aspects of the presidential campaign. If Trump wins, extreme-right populist movements across the world that either deny or minimize the impact of climate change will be galvanised, and humanity’s diminishing prospects of limiting the calamitous effects of the climate emergency will be plunged into further chaos and disarray.

In pointing this out, I’m not suggesting that mainstream politicians are responding to the climate crisis with the urgency required.  The botched warning systems and early response of the Spanish authorities to the Valencia flash floods is one reminder, amongst so many others, that such urgency is too often lacking.

It is a bleak indictment of global environmental governance that even in our ongoing age of mass extinction, the COP16 summit in Columbia on global nature conservation has just ended without an agreement on how to fund further efforts to protect vulnerable species, and with no coherent forum for future decision-making.

It is a bitter and infuriating mockery that the forthcoming COP29 global climate summit is being held in Azerbaijan, a country that is currently ramping its production of oil and gas, and that some of its attendees are planning to do exactly the same thing.

At precisely the moment when our collective future is dependent on collective international action,  governments across the world lack the courage or the political will to communicate the urgency of our common predicament to their electorates, or are too beholden to fossil fuel companies to make the effort.

But in this, as in so many other things, a Trump victory always has the ability to make a bad situation worse. It is may be true that Trump once co-signed a full-page advert in the New York Times in 2009, with other business leaders, warning of ‘catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet’ without action on climate change.

In power, the Caligula of Mar-a-Lago actively sabotaged international attempts to take such action by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change.  According to one former aide, Trump once refused to give wildfire assistance to California until he knew how many people there had voted for him.  When Puerto Rico was devastated by a hurricane, Trump showed up to toss paper towels, like some pampered aristocrat throwing pieces of meat to his starving peons.

Such is the petty malevolence of the would-be leader of the most powerful democracy on earth.

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Trump has also said that the concept of global warming was ‘created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.’ His Project 2025 backers have called for a ‘whole-of-government unwinding’ of US environmental laws and the curtailing of the Environmental Protection Agency.

All this suggests that a Trump victory would give a massive boost to the climate disinformation machinery that movements like MAGA have made their own.   In country after country, these movements either deny that climate change is real, or try to undermine any meaningful response to it, while at the same seeking to transform every climate-related disaster into a conspiracy.

We may well criticize centrist democratic governments for their ostrich-like refusal to recognize the enormity of the environmental crisis that is now staring us all in the face, but movements like MAGA will always oppose even the limited mitigating efforts that have been made.

These movements are congenitally incapable of responding to real disasters or emergencies. They have no practical policies, no concept of the common good, and no ability to think outside their shrunken nationalist ghettoes and conspiratorial fantasies. They will never be able to generate the levels of solidarity, internationalism and collective action that represents humanity’s only hope of navigating the calamity that humanity has created.

Enemies of good government, these movements have no interest in protecting anyone or improving anything, and can only respond to the real disasters and calamities that are part of the 21st century by using them as narrative fodder for morbid concocted conspiracies.

All these tendencies were on display last week in Valencia, where the extreme-right has accused successive governments of destroying dams built under the Franco dictatorship – a policy which they claim caused the floods.

These explanations are nonsensical on many levels - dams and reservoirs did not cause the floods. There is no such policy. Only three demolitions have taken place in Valencia in the last two decades, and they did not involve the destruction of dams, but culverts and instream barriers. Nor were these demolitions carried out by the Spanish or Valencian governments.

None of this has stopped extreme-right digital media outlets from blaming the Socialists and the left in general for supposedly promoting ‘globalist interests’ using the ‘ecological excuse’ to destroy the general’s dams. When Ursula von der Leyen described the floods as a manifestation of the ‘dramatic reality of climate change,’ Vox leader Santiago Abascal blamed the European Union for the ‘criminal destruction of dams’.

What kind of people would tell lies about floods that have killed more than 200 people, purely for political gain? The same kind of people who condemn the ‘Islamization of Spain’ and described immigrants as thieves and rapists. 

The same people who call the pandemic a ‘scamdemic’ and described face masks as ‘face diapers’; who claimed that ‘15 minute cities’ were a Davos-driven conspiracy by the ‘globalist’ elite to force people to live in ghettoes, who tell you that the Southport murders were carried out by a Muslim asylum-seeker. The same people who believe that climate change scientists manipulate data, or blame global warming on ‘the power of the sun or volcanoes’, as Reform’s Richard Tice did earlier this year.

Such ideas are the common everyday currency of the liars, grifters, charlatans, political snake-oil merchants, ethnonationalists, fascists and downright sociopaths who infest the 21st century at precisely the point when we need them least. These are not people you want to see on the deck of the Titanic - unless you believe that safety and salvation can be achieved by denying the existence of the iceberg.

It is no surprise to find the likes of Santiago Abascal amongst them. In March 2023, the Socialist/Compromís/Unidas Podemos coalition that ruled the Valencian regional government created a new organization called the Valencian Emergency Unite (UVE) to improve the government’s response to fires, floods and other natural disasters.

In November that same year, this agency was shut down by the new right-wing Partido Popular administration of Carlos Mazón, following pressure from Vox, as a quid pro quo for entering into coalition with the regional PP.

Vox, in its infinite wisdom, called the UVE an ‘agencia fantasma’ (ghost agency), and argued that the UVE merely duplicated powers that the regional government already possessed. We don’t know whether that agency could have saved lives, though the failings of the regional government’s emergency warning system make it clear that such an agency was required.

Needless to say, neither Vox nor the PP have accepted responsibility for the UVE’s dissolution.

Over the last week, thousands of Valencians have volunteered to help clear up the damage. These volunteers include the immigrants that Vox despises, and Muslims, who have taken time out from reconquering Spain to set up soup kitchens for the survivors and volunteers:

And what has Vox done in this situation?  It posts tweets like this:

It is almost beyond comprehension that any political party could see a disaster like this as an opportunity to generate hatred, but hatred is the driving emotion behind this disgusting movement. Devoid of any interests except its own, Vox feeds on the righteous fury and grief of Valencians entirely for its own purposes. It lionises Franco and invents dam destructions that, as El País’s Javier Salas has pointed out, never happened. 

This is where ‘post-truth’ politics can take you, and Vox is only one component of a vast, well-funded global network that includes the extreme-right and the psychotic libertarianism that we saw during the pandemic.   Many of them, like MAGA, have connections to fossil fuel companies, but it’s not necessary to seek such connections in order to comprehend the danger to society that such movements pose.

Just as there were many people who saw the COVID ‘China virus’ as a globalist conspiracy, there are those who will readily embrace the idea that climate change is a lefty/green plot to overthrow capitalism or stop you driving your SUV outside the confines of a 15-minute prison-city.

Such delusions mean that nothing needs to change, either at the societal or individual level. And when real disasters happen, and real people gasp their last breath in ICUs, lose their homes in forest fires, or drown when a year’s worth of rain falls in a few hours, there will always be movements that blame these things on a Wuhan lab, on ‘explosive trees’ or tell you that somehow, somewhere, immigrants are responsible.

But the lesson of Valencia is that we are all - every single one of us - in a predicament that we cannot ignore or lie our way out of. Both our survival as a species and the preservation of our common home depend on the action that we take – or don’t take – now.

If Valencia shows us that people can be selfless, brave and heroic, it also demonstrates the lethal danger of parasitic movements like Vox, that pretend to speak for the people, and have no interest in helping the victims of climate disasters, only in exploiting them.

The sinister malevolence of these movements is not just a threat to democracy; it is an expression of political decadence, and a moral and intellectual pestilence that threatens our common survival.

And that is one more reason why we need these movements gone, and we need Trump gone too.

A Nightmare on Trump Street

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Halloween is upon us and the Democratic Party is clearly spooked, with good reason. It’s four years since Joe Biden managed to defeat Donald Trump in the midst of a lethal pandemic. Yet now, four years later, he is still here, and his movement is as strong as ever. After a brief period in early summer in which Kamala Harris seemed to have miraculously revived the moribund Democrat campaign, we are - incredibly - just over a week from an election that Donald Trump still has every chance of winning.

Once again, the polls hover on a knife edge, which is on one hand a better outcome than would have been the case if Biden was still been running, but is at the same time profoundly depressing.

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Because now, we are all familiar with what Trump is. We knew in 2020 that he was a vindictive and narcissistic liar, that he was ignorant, racist, shallow, sociopathic, cruel, vulgar, greedy, dishonest, corrupt and instinctively authoritarian in a way that no previous American president has ever been.

But since power was prised from his deathly grip in 2020, we know more than that. We know that Trump has been found liable in a civil court for sexual assault - well, rape in fact - and defamation. We know that he is a convicted criminal, guilty on 34 counts of falsification of business records, with at least four other criminal cases hovering over him.

We also know that he is slipping into madness or senility. Trump’s supporters often accuse his critics of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but Trump is the one who seems to be suffering from it. In the last twelve months, his speeches have frequently descended into rambling incoherent gibberish - an oratorical style that Trump calls ‘the weave’.

In one recent speech, Trump was unable to weave, and submitted his audience to forty-five excruciating minutes of music, in which he swayed to his favourite tunes like a distracted extra from Twin Peaks. In the only open debate that he has dared to engage in, Trump was comprehensively unravelled by his intellectually-superior opponent.

None of this has made any difference. Biden dropped out of the campaign because too many people thought he was too old for office. Trump is not held to the same standard. He could literally froth at the mouth and grunt and his supporters would cheer him on.

In more than twenty rallies, Trump has espoused the most vicious and brazen racism of any presidential candidate in US history. He has called immigrants animals, murderers, rapists, gangsters, the ‘enemy within’, and the ‘worst people.’ In one particularly rabid outburst, he told his audience that Kamala Harris had ‘imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylum and mental institutions,’ to ‘prey upon innocent American lives’.

Hitler once used much the same kind of language to describe Jews, and Trump’s depictions of immigrants with ‘bad genes’ who prey on Americans with ‘good genes’ have the same distinctly Nazi stench. He has also accused Haitian migrant workers who were invited to work and live in Springfield, Ohio, of eating domestic animals - another classic dehumanising racist trope.

As if this was not enough, he has promised to round up and deport twelve million immigrants, a program shaped by his sinister speechwriter and former policy advisor Stephen Miller, that if implemented, would rip apart families and communities across America and require Nazi levels of repression and brutality.

None of this appears to have had the slightest impact on his popularity.

Trump has praised Hitler, insulted US veterans, pledged to use the army against his political opponents, and promised to gut the law enforcement agencies that he believes have unfairly persecuted him. His own former associates have called him a fascist.

Until his campaign pushed her to the sidelines, Trump was publicly associating himself with the white supremacist conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer - a no no to anyone with even a smidgeon of decency. His presidency is seen by the extreme-right Heritage Institute as a vehicle for an all-out ideological assault on the American political system with a reactionary Christofascist hue, that will seek to roll back all the social gains that have been made since the 1960s for women and minorities.

If his supporters are shocked or alarmed by such possibilities, they aren’t showing it. At his Madison Square Gardens walpurgisnacht on Sunday, a succession of speakers seethed with racist contempt, white supremacism, vindictive rage and insane denunciations of the ‘radical left Democrats’ (you at the back, stop laughing).

No matter. Millions of Americans are still poised to elect a criminal megalomaniac who can barely put a sentence together. The polls in key states are almost tied. Some put Trump ahead. If Trump was running against Satan or Charles Manson, maybe you could understand it. But his opponent is an articulate, intelligent, empathetic former attorney general of Jamaican/Indian descent who promises to extend health care reforms, restore women’s reproductive rights, and nominate a Republican to her cabinet.

Why is this happening? Clue. It’s not just Trump.

Good Voters Gone Bad?

There is a belief, generally located at the left-liberal end of the political spectrum, which assumes that voters who choose fascism and authoritarianism have been manipulated and hoodwinked into a ‘false consciousness’ that blinds them to their ‘real’ interests - usually defined in economic terms.

This belief is not entirely wrong, but it’s also politically-convenient to assume the existence of an intrinsically virtuous and rational citizenry that somehow, somewhere, wants the same things we all want. In this way, progressives can shift the blame for negative political outcomes solely onto the politicians who lie to them, or the (corporate) media - usually imagined as a single entity - that feeds them false information or refuses to reveal the ‘truth’.

But the last few months have also revealed a bleaker possibility: that millions of Americans like and admire Trump not in spite of his viciousness, but because of it. Some recognise his manifold flaws and see him the way evangelicals do, as a ‘flawed instrument’ for realising their political aspirations. Others simply refuse to believe what is said about him by his opponents.

Manipulation is not absent here, nor is paranoia and stupidity. Many Trump supporters don’t believe that Trump is a criminal and think the charges against him are the work of the ‘deep state’ or the Democratic Party. Many of them feel the same about the multiple allegations of rape, paedophilia, and sexual harassment that make Bill Clinton look like Saint Francis.

These voters might be prepared to believe that Hilary Clinton eats the brains of trafficked children to gain eternal youth, but when a former model says that she was groped by Trump in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, of course she must be a gold-digger or another tool of the Evil Ones.

Such frothing drivel courses hourly through Twitter/X and Meta, thanks to Elon Musk, Russian bot farms, and an army of pro-Trump trolls that will say and do whatever it takes to get their man over the line. In an age of misinformation and disinformation propagated through technologies that we are only beginning to understand, the free flow of lies via social media bubbles and social networks has corroded the idea of consensus, compromise and a shared understanding of the world on which democracies depend.

Too many governments know this, and yet like the US government, too few make any attempt to hold the companies responsible to account.

But manipulation cannot in itself explain why so many people revere and idolise a man who by any honest objective standards, represents the worst that humanity has to offer and the opposite of what a leader should be.

To understand how the MAGA cult has taken possession of so many Americans requires not just political analysis but psychology. We can learn from Freud’s recognition of the fragile nature of ‘civilization’, and the role of moral censure in inhibiting anti-social behaviour, which he expressed so persuasively in papers like Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.

We also need to look back at the work of some of Freud’s disciples, like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, who examined the morbid psychological connections between charismatic dictators and the crowds they sought to mobilize, between the Great Leader and the little man - or woman.

In an era in which misogynistic charlatans like Andrew Tate can appeal to the fantasies and vulnerabilities of millions, there will always be men who regard Trump’s sneering sexual libertinism as an expression of the freedom they would like for themselves (‘you can do anything’.) Others will see his contemptuous attitude to women as evidence of a ‘real man’ in a supposedly feminised society that ‘doesn’t know what a woman is’.

When Trump rages against the ‘elite’, he speaks - or pretends to speak - for voters who feel that their government has betrayed and abandoned them. In his appeal to racism, he invites his voters to embrace the worst of themselves without shame or censure and see themselves as an endangered and persecuted minority - the victims of a ‘replacement’ strategy aimed at producing more Democrat voters.

In attacking women and minorities, Trump appeals to the status anxiety of white men (and white women) who feel that they are losing their dominant position in 21st century American society.

It was not for nothing that so many Republican attacks on Kamala Harris called her a DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) hire - the idea that black men and women rise to prominence through affirmative action programs has been a weary staple of the American right for decades.

Trump has brought this racialised resentment and victimhood to the surface, and aligned it with the previously beyond-the-pale white supremacist sectors that see his presidency as a vehicle for their racist ideological agenda.

This calamity did not emerge from nowhere. Trumpism followed two presidential terms under America’s first black president. To some extent Trump was the pushback against that. At the same time, his rise to power was the product of decades of failed wars; of rising inequality coupled with the near-collapse of a deregulated and corrupt financial system; of the gutting of the middle classes and falling living standards generally; of the out-sourcing of jobs and industries that have turned entire towns and neighbourhoods into urban wastelands.

These are the turbid waters where fascist and authoritarian movements always feed; where rage, frustration and insecurity can be turned into xenophobia, racial scapegoating, the targeting of minorities and the hatred of liberal ‘elites’.

It doesn’t matter if Trump is a member of the most corrupt and socially-irresponsible sectors of the ‘elite’, and associates himself with would-be oligarchs like Elon ‘dark Gothic MAGA’ Musk. It doesn’t even matter that his attempts to make America ‘Great Again’ have made his country weaker and less influential than it was.

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The point is that he hates the same people his voters hate, and in a society where millions distrust and loathe their own government, he makes his enemies ‘cry.’ When he cheats and gets away with it, he appeals to voters who think that they should be able to cheat and get away with it too.

Of course this freak of political nature is backed by billionaires who believe that America and the world belong to them, who dream of tax cuts, deregulation and tariffs on China; who bribe voters with lotteries that further rot America’s failing democracy.

But when voters go over to the dark side, and reject any notion of morality or virtue, simply because they want to crush their enemies, the task of people like Musk and Peter Thiel is made so much easier.

And then there is Kamala Harris herself; an engaging and inspirational campaigner offering a still-nebulous vision of a united country that might be more attractive than Trump’s poisonous dystopia, yet who remains an untested leader propagating quite shallow politics, without the dark insurrectional energy that Trump has harnessed.

Israel and Gaza

When Harris calls on Americans to ‘believe in the promise of America’, she is speaking to millions of people who no longer believe in that promise. And as fresh and refreshing as she is, Harris remains tied to two wars: the ongoing massacre in Gaza, in which the Biden administration has been haplessly and disgracefully complicit; and a war in Ukraine that America does not know how to win.

All this makes it easy to portray Harris as the continuation of Biden’s war presidency, which does not mean that Trump supporters care about Gaza. Last weekend, prominent leaders of Michigan’s Muslim community described Trump as a ‘man of peace’.

To appear on stage with the author of the ‘Muslim ban’ - who has promised to do the same thing if he is elected - was bad enough. But it is staggering political illiteracy to believe that the man who has vowed to ‘crush’ pro-Palestinian demonstrators and recently told Netanyahu to ‘do what you have to do’ in Lebanon, has anything to do with peace.

This could still cost Harris dear if Michigan goes to the wire.

Some will say, good riddance. Others may vote for Jill Stein or not vote at all. And this is one more reason why America could see a degenerate would-be dictator back in the White House.

I hope that doesn’t happen. Because in these dispiriting political times, there is a difference between the bad and the worst, and these differences will affect millions of peoples’ lives, and not only in America.

If Trump wins, Ukraine will go under, unless Europe steps up, because Trump and Vance are Putin’s men. If Trump wins, the annihilation of Gaza will very likely be followed by ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and an all-out war with Iran.

Whatever Michigan’s Muslim leaders may think, Trump will not be able to stop any of this, and will not even lift a finger to try - assuming that he even knows what is actually happening. If Trump wins, America will succumb to an eruption of political vengeance and state-organized ethnonationalist hatred, in which millions of mostly Latino immigrants will find themselves in camps, or on trucks and planes taking them to wherever Trump thinks they came from.

If Trump wins, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will turn America from a corrupt plutocracy into a dystopian billionaire’s playground. If Trump wins, the planet loses. If Trump wins, the Heritage Institute and the MAGA Mafia win, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer and everything that is corrupt and hateful about America wins.

If this happens, then similar forces across the world will be emboldened. If Harris wins, America gains another breathing space, in which possibilities than neither she or Biden have been able to realise may at least have a chance to flourish.

I recognize that none of this is certain. In a normal world, the outcome of that contest would not even be in doubt, but normality is long gone.

And in this age of political monsters, some choices are still better than others, which is why, in spite of everything and with no illusions, I hope the Democrats scrape through once again.

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The Boy in the Burning Bed

I’ve just seen the British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi’s marvellous film The Teacher. Despite a couple of plot outcomes that strain credulity, it’s a really powerful and moving piece of work. In fact, it’s probably the best Palestinian film I’ve seen.

Part of the reason for this is Saleh Bakri’s towering performance as the Palestinian teacher/resistant Basem. And there is also the film’s depiction of the suffocating reality of Palestinian life under a fifty-seven year military and quasi-military occupation.

Homicidal settlers burning olive groves and building gleaming suburban new towns on Palestinian land; the Israeli army’s use of collective punishment and British mandate-era house demolitions; a skewed criminal justice system that invariably finds against the Palestinians even in the rare cases that make it to court; the daily humiliation of roadblocks, checkpoints and identity checks; constant surveillance and atmosphere of pervasive violence; the complicity of the Palestinian Authority - it’s all here, and unsparingly and patiently rendered.

I urge you to see it, because so much of what it reveals is completely ignored by Western governments and in mainstream media commentary. Fifty-seven years of occupation, settler-colonization and land theft all taking place in plain sight - that is the reality of the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, which, some would have you believe, began on 7 October last year.

The Teacher also deals intelligently with the issue of Palestinian resistance to occupation. Its central character Basem is clearly a member of Hamas, or some other Islamist organization. He colludes in the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. He has served time in Israel jails. He has lost a son in an Israeli prison. According to the terms that Israel and its supporters use - and which the British once used to describe the Irgun and the Stern Gang - Basem is a ‘terrorist’ who uses violence for political means, in this case to obtain the release of more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees.

The film shows very clearly why someone would do this - even a compassionate man who loves books and cares about education and children. And in humanising the demonic figure of the ‘terrorist’, the film also does something that Israel and its supporters almost never do: it humanises the ‘other side’ - through the character of the American/Jewish ambassador who seeks out the teacher to ask for the whereabouts of his kidnapped son.

In a powerful scene, these two men meet in a school corridor, and the teacher says ‘1,000 of our sons is worth one of yours.’

Over the last twelve months that ratio has increased to once-unimaginable levels in Gaza, and it now includes not just sons, but daughters, mothers, grandmothers and young children. In its determination to sate its vengeance and restore deterrence, Israel has made it clear that there is no upper limit on Palestinian deaths. And even though the likes of Starmer, Biden, Blinken or Kamala Harris may say from time to time that ‘too many innocent Palestinians have been killed’, their actions and inactions demonstrate that ‘too many’ is an elastic category.

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Last week, the war in Gaza reached a new level of hideousness, when a video showed the teenager Shabaan al Dalou burned alive in a hospital bed after an Israeli strike on the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where he and his family had taken shelter.

I won’t show those horror-film images here. They are as bad as anything you are ever likely to see anywhere, and they’ve already been seen enough. I would rather show this young man and his family, the would-be software engineer who grew up in Gaza with the same hopes and dreams that any teenager can bring to the world, and was so obscenely killed in its ruins, along with his mother, because we need to think of Palestinians when they were living their lives, not just when they die.

Not a word of condemnation from any Western government. Well no, there was a kind of condemnation. A spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council described the images of ‘what appear to be displaced civilians burning alive following an Israel air strike’ as ‘deeply disturbing.’

You would think, right?

But then the same spokesperson also insisted that ‘Israel has a responsibility to do more to avoid civilian casualties’ even if - wait for it - ‘if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields.’ So not much of a condemnation, really. More an expression of concern. Accompanied by a headshaking, handwringing frown, because let’s face it, it is disturbing to watch a teenager being burned alive in a hospital bed.

Who wants to see that, when you’re the ones sending the weapons to the country responsible? And in an election month too, when the future of democracy is at stake?

Pallywood

The Israeli propagandist David Mercer found it less disturbing - no surprises here. Like Mark Regev before him, this is not a man with an uneasy conscience. In an interview, an indignant Mercer claimed that the whole thing was staged by Palestinian actors, in what he called ‘Pallywood’ - just to make Israel look bad.

This is the kind of thing that Israel will always say, and its supporters will always believe it, or refuse to acknowledge - let alone act upon - the truths that are staring them in the face. Last week, the novelist Harold Jacobson wrote a piece which suggested that even showing images of dead Palestinian children was ‘wilfully stirring race-memory of the child-killing Jew of the middle ages.’ Not that he wasn’t concerned. As he wrote:

Who has been able to watch the evening news on television three nights running without wanting to scream? Scream for those beautiful and broken children, the innocent victims of war, maimed, orphaned, wandering lost through their ruined cities. Scream if you’re a Palestinian, scream if you’re a Christian, scream if you’re a Jew.

So scream for them when you see them on the television. But better not to see them on television, because then you won’t have to scream for them. Though Jacobson insisted that ‘I do not minimise the tragedy that has befallen Palestinian children’, that is precisely the intention of his article - to describe such deaths as an inevitable tragedy - rather than deliberate tactical or strategic decisions - whilst suggesting that those who criticize and condemn such atrocities are guilty of anti-semitism or ‘blood libel’.

Jacobson’s interview with the New Yorker is even worse: a tortuous and convoluted attempt to unsay what he said, which only ends up reinforcing what he said; a Zen-like exercise in knowing-but-not-knowing which seems, like so many other commentators before him, to assume that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ began last October.

Jacobson is of course, entitled to his opinions, even if they do amount to pious gibberish, but he could at least make the minimal attempt to understand the historical context in which this calamity is unfolding. But too many people don’t. Politically speaking, the instinctive support of the right and far-right for Israel’s merciless onslaught on Gaza is not surprising.

These are sectors that long ago swung in behind the Israeli Sparta - regardless of the fact that some of their predecessors would once have been sending Jews to the camps. You expect the likes of Tommy Robinson to cosplay with the IDF. It is Muslims who are being killed, after all.

But it is - or should be - another matter with Joe Biden, or the Labour Party, or Howard Jacobson and so many others. These are liberals who support human rights and international law. Some of them once supported wars on behalf of democracy, or in order to save Arabs and Muslims from dictators. But when it comes to the Palestinians, they only have crocodile tears, and much of the time, not even that, in their fervent willingness to allow one state, and one state only, to do whatever it sees fit in order to ‘defend itself’ against an array of ‘malign’ enemies.

Take Yahya Sinwar. When I went into the cinema he was alive. When I came out, he was dead. On Thursday evening I watched the video showing him in a keffiyeh, sitting in an armchair in a shattered apartment, hurling a stick at the drone that had come to kill him - one of many nightmarish images that have passed before our glazed eyes these last twelve months.

And if my government, and so many others, had little to say about teenagers being burned alive in hospital beds, they had a lot to say about this. This was the world’s Bin Laden moment - when the Israeli posse stumbled upon the Evil One and just like Chuck Norris or Steve Seagal, took him out.

It was, chorused Biden and Harris, a ‘measure of justice.’ Starmer delivered an insipid homily, on why we shouldn’t ‘mourn’ the death of Sinwar, while also warning Israel that the world would ‘not tolerate any more excuses on humanitarian assistance.’

After the last twelve months, no one would expect Netanyahu to be particularly worried about the West’s lack of tolerance. He knows who he’s dealing with, and he understands the games that our politicians have to play. And so, on Sunday, Israel struck Beit Lahiya, killing eighty-seven people.

Peace can only be just around the corner.

And as for Sinwar, we don’t have to mourn him in order to consider where this hard, brutal, uncompromising man came from. Like all Palestinians he lived most of his life under occupation. He spent years in Israeli jails. He experienced successive wars in which Israel killed who it liked, when it liked.

His men pitilessly murdered non-combatants on 7 October. In doing so, these actions exposed his largely defenceless people to what he knew would be the vengeful and equally pitiless wrath of the Israeli army.

So no, I don’t mourn him. But if ‘justice’ had ever been taken seriously by the governments that now see it in the death of yet another Hamas leader, there would have been no Sinwar and no Hamas.

His killing is only ‘justice’ if you believe that the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ began last October. It’s only ‘justice’ if you believe that this ‘conflict’ is a war between equals, or, as Israel and its supporters so dishonestly put it, a war between the descendants of the Nazis and Jews. It’s ‘justice’ if you pretend that there is no occupation, and ignore decades of Israeli attempts to annihilate the Palestinian people, and decades of Palestinian resistance that have taken many different forms

But now - marvellous! - with Sinwar dead, ‘peace’ is in the air. ‘Ceasefire’ is on the lips of politicians, along with their ‘concern’ and ‘impatience.’

Even Jonathan Freedland - the pseudo-moralist whose hands must hurt from the hours he has spent wringing them - saw cautious reasons for ‘optimism’ in the Middle East as a result of Sinwar’s execution.

Earlier this month, Freedland wrote an article that was intellectually dishonest even by his dismal standards - a masterpiece of the ‘shooting and crying’ genre - in which he evoked the ‘two Israels…the Israel that is seen by much of the world, and the Israel that sees itself.’ In making this comparison, Freedland described ‘the war that has caused so much pain for all of the last year:’

What the world sees in Gaza is a benighted strip of land that Israel has crushed, heedless of the consequences for civilian life. What Israelis see is a cruel Hamas enemy that revealed its true face on 7 October and which has embedded itself inside and beneath the streets and homes of Gaza, using the entire population as a human shield, so that when innocents die there, it is Hamas who should bear the blame.

No prizes for guessing which Gaza Freedland sees. Ignoring the occupation, he evokes the world of the shtetl, when ‘Jews were an defenceless minority,’ and invites readers to Hamas’s vicious pogrom-assault on an Israel that is, ‘small - the size of New Jersey -besieged and vulnerable.’

Israel may be small, but what’s left of Palestine is smaller - partly because of the land that it lost - and Israel is the dominant military power in the region. No one else comes close, and it’s partly because that aura of invincibility was so brutally dented last October that Israel has gone to such shocking lengths to restore it.

And there is an Israel which Freedland does not acknowledge: an occupying power with direct control over the lives of more than three million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and indirect (before the war) control over 2.3 million Gazans.

This a country in the grips of extremism, whose politicians gleefully talk of annihilating cities and whole countries. A country whose soldiers post videos of themselves wearing Palestinian women’s clothing in the houses they have destroyed; who laugh as they demolish houses just for the hell of it; who beat and torture Palestinian prisoners, shoot civilians, blast whole families to pieces on the basis of AI data - and do all this from a position of impregnable military strength.

Yes, there is another Israel: the demonstrators who have bravely protested the actions of the Netanyahu government for the last twelve months; the Israel of Gideon Levy and +972 magazine; the 130 soldiers who have said they will refuse to serve in Gaza without a ceasefire.

But that Israel is small and shrinking, in part, because of the unconditional support that the West has given to Israel’s descent into depravity. And this support doesn’t just come from ghouls like David Mercer and Douglas Murray who don’t care how many Palestinians die or who they are. It also comes from liberals like Freedland, Jacobson and Simon Schama, who anguish about the deaths of ‘innocents’ but won’t condemn the state that kills them.

And so, with Sinwar dead, Freedland cautiously sees prospects for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages, and even ‘a diplomatic process that offers a different future for Israel and its neighbours’, based on the imaginary message to Israel’s leaders: ‘with Sinwar’s death, you have your total victory - now win the peace.’

There is nothing whatsoever in Netanyahu’s prosecution of this war, or the war that Israel is now fighting in Lebanon, to suggest that Israel has any interest in ‘the peace’ - or in a different future with its neighbours - beyond their submission.

If Netanyahu had ever cared about the hostages, he could have negotiated their release. He had no interest, and members of his own negotiating team have accused him of sabotaging attempts to secure a ceasefire.

To argue now, after so much carnage, and so much death and trauma, that the death of a single Hamas leader makes ‘peace’ possible is to ignore the historical forces that made Hamas possible - and that will, inevitably, produce a successor to Sinwar. It also means ignoring the nature of the war that Israel has fought in Gaza, which has effectively destroyed Gazan society, and made it impossible for Palestinians to live there.

Call this war a genocide, a war of extermination and annihilation, a second Nakba, or an act of collective punishment that goes further than anything that Israel has ever carried out before. But let’s not pretend that this has anything to do with peace or justice. And whatever it is, Western states, and too many commentators like Freedland, are too cowardly, too complicit, or too dishonest, to recognize Israel’s descent into the vortex and the awfulness of what has been done these last twelve months.

If Gaza is a genocide, it is a liberal genocide. Carried out by a democratic state, and supported by democratic governments, and by commentators who think themselves liberal on almost every other issue, many of whom once urged the US and Britain to wage war all over the Middle East and beyond in the name of democracy.

Yet faced with evidence of the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of an entire society in plain sight, these same governments and a broad swathe of the liberal commentariat have found a way to rationalise the carnage, to the point where some of them can now have the temerity to imagine ‘peace’ emerging from the wreckage.

In the future, many of these politicians and commentators will talk about China and Russia, about international law and the international community. But the stain of the last twelve months will never be eradicated. If Israel is found culpable for war crimes or genocide in the International Criminal Court, some of these governments may also be found complicit.

And the next time the United States and its allies set out to assert global ‘leadership’ and bring down the next dictator or human rights abuser or international lawbreaker, millions of people will remember the epic moral failure that reduced a little strip of land that was once known as the Gaza Strip to a smoking ruin.

They will be able to see the video of the boy in the burning bed - an image that shakes our species - and they will ask what kind of country did this, and what kind of countries allowed such things to happen?

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The Gaza Raid

I’m in the last week of a book deadline and working every hour, so I haven’t had time to post. Instead I’m reposting the piece I wrote just after 7 October last year.

Normal service to be resumed next week!

Settler-colonial conflicts aren’t like other armed confrontations. They are conflicts between peoples who lay claim to the same territory, in which one side must gain everything and the other must lose everything. In these conflicts, the settlers - a word that sounds much more innocuous than it actually is - aren’t necessarily interested in exploiting or enslaving the people they colonize.

They might do that, as an afterthought, but basically they want land, not people, and given that few people willingly abandon the land in which their memories, their past, their livelihood, and their aspirations for a collective future are all bound up, then the settler-government and settler-army must either subjugate the people who already occupy that land, or drive them away from it.

In the case of the Palestinians, Israel has done both these things, and as in other similar confrontations, the almost constant violence that has continued ever since the 1930s is not like the violence of conventional war.

In settler-colonial confrontations, violence is always bitter and personal. It is face-to-face and fought up close, door-to-door and in the home or the farm. In some cases settlers will throw you out of your own house. Or they will knock your house down. Or put a fence or wall around the land where you wanted to build a house, for yourself, your children or your grandchildren.

And if you persist on staying there, they will tear up your olive trees, kill your animals, throw stones through your windows, and terrorize you till you leave. They might drive you from your land by force with the keys still in your hand, and you might spend years watching as someone else moves into your house, or hunts the animals that you used to hunt, or exports crops from the land that you used to harvest, or builds towns and cities in the places that you already had names for, and turns the country that you thought was yours into their country.

So of course these confrontations are vicious and hateful. They aren’t impersonal battles between uniformed combatants, with distinctions between the innocent and the guilty, civilians or fighters, combatants and non-combatants. And the ferocity of such confrontations is likely to be intensified by the imbalance of power.

Unable to challenge a stronger opponent militarily, the weaker side is likely to attack the soft points in its enemy’s defences. It will seek to maximise its own resources and hurt and wound its enemies where they least expect it, disrupting their confidence and their ability to protect their population, spreading insecurity and fear even in territories they thought they had complete control over, and looking for political gains that go beyond their limited military capabilities.

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Sometimes they will do this as part of an overall politico-military strategy, or in order to demonstrate to their own supporters that they are still in the battle, and sometimes they will do it out of pure vengeance.

At this point, it is difficult to know which of these categories the savage and audacious coup de main carried by Hamas over the last few days belongs to. Maybe it contains a little of all of them. In terms of its planning and execution, the raid is an act of military brilliance. It has humiliated Israel’s government and its much-vaunted surveillance system; destroyed its attempts to normalize what Amira Hass has called the ‘largest prison in the world’. It has captured soldiers and even a general, and forced Israel to choose between a series of bad options that are unlikely - even on its own terms - to compensate for the most lethal blow to its internal security and its military prestige that any Palestinian organization has ever managed to achieve.

All this was planned and prepared over months and years without Israel knowing a thing about it, and no wonder some Israelis are looking to blame Iran.

I point this out, not as a cause for celebration. I don’t celebrate the murder of old people waiting at bus-stops, or families in their homes or partygoers - though I do question what kind of society would think it was a good idea to hold a ‘trance music’ rave within earshot of the Gaza prison camp.

Some people might depict these monstrous acts as ‘resistance’, but I won’t dignify them with that label. They are unforgiveable and inexcusable war crimes and crimes against humanity, and should be recognized as such, without any caveats. But - and there is a but here - even if too many of Israel’s supporters refuse to recognize it. There is always a but, which has been drowned out by the usual predictable cant, and the Israeli propaganda chorus that describes the entire raid as nothing more than a continuation of the age-old battle between the evil of terrorism and a moral/democratic/human rights-based society that is supposedly innocent.

Innocent people have been killed, but that does not make Israel innocent . There is a context here, that has always been denied by Israel, and by much of the outside world. Approximately 1.7 million of the 2.1 million people who live in the Gaza Strip are refugees or the descendants of refugees, most of whom originally came from the same areas in the south of Israel that Hamas has just targeted.

So they are products of a settler-colonial confrontation - enabled by military occupation - that is still going on in the West Bank, and which has been going on throughout all the decades of the ‘peace process’ and the decades since the possibility of ‘peace’ vanished.

The West knows this perfectly well, and yet no government has ever seriously raised its voice to condemn it, or put any serious pressure on Israel to do anything about it. The pressure is always on one side only.

All these governments knew that even after its withdrawal, Israel is still the de facto occupier of the Gaza Strip, which controls everything that goes in or out, and which has used that power consistently to deny the Palestinians even the slightest possibility of a dignified existence or a liveable future. They know this because they have been complicit in this stranglehold. And in all Gaza’s wars, and the periods of ‘peace’ in between, they barely raised their voices to condemn the military assaults and bombardments that have killed many more Palestinian civilians than the Israelis who have died at the hands of Palestinians.

They gave Israel carte blanche, to the point when it is barely possible to criticize Israel in the UK without running the risk of being called antisemitic or a terrorist sympathizer; when even local councils are banned from engaging in campaigns intended to put pressure on Israel.

Anyone who thought this would bring about ‘peace’, is either dreaming or complicit in the suffocating occupation-at-a-distance or occupation at firsthand that has crushed but never entirely defeated the Palestinians who live under the Israeli boot.

Those who - rightly - condemn the murder of young Israelis, where were their voices over the last few years, when Palestinian children were shot dead in record numbers in the West Bank by settlers and soldiers?

Those who claim to want the Palestinians to demonstrate peacefully, where were they when Palestinian children had their legs and arms broken by Israeli soldiers on the orders of the peacemaker Yitzhak Rabin during the first Intifada? And where were their condemnations when Israeli soldiers shot and wounded thousands of unarmed Palestinians who demonstrated at the border fence in Gaza in 2018?

When are Israeli soldiers ever prosecuted or even criticized for the endless cruelties and humiliations they have heaped on the Palestinians? Why were these voices who condemned the ‘terror’ of Hamas silent when Israel bombed cities all over Lebanon with the sole intention of terrorizing the civilian population into abandoning its support for Hizbollah? Or when the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in 2021? Where were these peacemakers, while Israeli settlers - with the complicity of the army - terrorized and bullied Palestinian farmers in order to drive them off their land?

These are rhetorical questions, because we know the answer. When Palestinians die, their deaths are barely worth a rueful shake of the head. They are inconsequential collateral damage, anonymous inhabitants of a savage and senseless fanatical world inhabited by people who, in the eyes of so many governments, will never achieve the status of full humanity.

Before this week’s raid, 10,757 Palestinians had been killed since 2000, compared with 1, 346 Israelis, according to the United Nations. Of these, 2, 345 Palestinians were children, compared with 143 Israeli children.

Anyone care to explain that disparity?

When Israelis die, they have names, stories and biographies, because they are ‘victims of terror’. Palestinians, on the other hand, will never be much more than another Muhammad or Ahmed shot dead in a war zone, victims of snipers who are never asked to justify anything, or ‘surgical strikes’ that are never that surgical.

Don’t get me wrong - because I know there are those who specialise in such misunderstandings - they should have names, stories, and biographies. But if humanity is reserved for one side only, don’t expect that the side whose humanity has been denied will not notice. Don’t expect it to observe the rules, or the morals, that you claim to uphold when you don’t uphold them.

And if you talk of peace in the context of a settler-colonial project, facilitated by military occupation, and only expect the side that has been occupied, dispossessed, humiliated and oppressed to recognize the existence of the occupier, while demanding no concessions from the occupier, then you are on a fool’s errand. Or maybe you are just a hypocrite. Either way, you are not doing Israel any favours, and you certainly aren’t doing the Palestinians any.

Nor, of course, is Hamas. Because if there is one thing we know for certain about Gaza’s latest war, it is that Palestinian civilians will pay the greatest price for it. There are those who are already talking of ‘turning Gaza into a car park’ - without even realizing the disparity of force that that implies.

Hamas undoubtedly knew this, and factored it in to its calculations. So whatever satisfactions this raid has brought to those who wanted to hurt the oppressor are likely to be temporary.

Most governments will simply urge ‘restraint’, and ‘stand with Israel’ while Israel takes its revenge for the vengeance that Hamas has taken. When Netanyahu calls for the Gazans to ‘leave’ the prison in which Israel has trapped them, the same governments will be silent, as they have always been silent.

Here in the UK, the scum of the Tory Party are using these awful events to try and attack Corbyn - and by association, the Labour Party - because Corbyn called for an end to the occupation. In the United States, the dregs of MAGA are blaming Biden, while Biden offers Israel the usual uncritical support that the US has always given, with the sole exception of the Suez invasion.

None of this will do a single thing to bring this horrendously destructive conflict to an end. This uncritical support for Israel will merely encourage Israel to indulge its worst instincts. And uncritical support for Hamas will encourage it to indulge its worst instincts.

In 1919 Arthur Balfour - the author of the 1917 Balfour declaration which laid the foundations for the creation of the state of Israel - wrote the following memorandum:

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

This was entirely at odds with Balfour’s public pledge ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’

More than one hundred years later, that essential dishonesty still prevails, after so many wars, rebellions, blows and counter-blows, and occupations. And until it changes, and the West uses its power to bring about a just resolution to this nightmare instead of blindly cheerleading the occupier in everything it does, there will be more raids, more wars, and many more deaths - most of which will be Palestinians - and neither Palestinians nor Israelis will ever know security or peace.

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Darkness in Bibiland

Many years ago, an American president told Israel to do something it didn’t want to do, and reinforced that order with genuine threats of sanctions, and Israel complied.

OK, pick yourself up now, because this really happened.

On 29 October 1956, Dwight Eisenhower’s government submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council calling on Israel ‘immediately to withdraw its armed forces behind the established armistice lines’ in Gaza and the Sinai, which Israel had invaded as part of the British-French-Israeli occupation of the Suez Canal.

In his memoir, The White House Years, Eisenhower revealed that he had prepared a subsequent UN resolution ‘calling on all United Nations members to suspend not just governmental but private assistance to Israel’ - sanctions that would have amounted to $40 million in tax-deductible donations from the US and $60 million bond purchases a year from the US alone.

Eisenhower also threatened to cut off all shipments of agricultural products, and munitions and military goods. In an address from the Oval Office on 20 February 1957, Eisenhower asked his countrymen: ‘Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal?’

Faced with these threats, Israel began the withdrawal of its forces from the Sinai the following month and completed it in April. From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to look back on this episode as something from geopolitical prehistory. It took place during the high Cold War, at a time when the United States was required to balance its support for Israel with the potential consequences of losing political influence in the Middle East to the Soviets.

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Needless to say, this did not become a pattern. Israel’s many defenders often claim that Israel is unfairly singled out for criticism and protest - a claim often accompanied by the accusation that any such protests are antisemitic.

But demonstrations on the streets or on university campuses are one thing; at the governmental level, the attitude of the United States and Israel’s other western allies towards the Jewish state has been clear for a long time: Israel can make war on who it likes, whenever it likes, and how it likes. And whatever it does, it will get the green light and the carte blanche, and the weapons to fight its wars with, and the diplomatic support and the veto votes in the Security Council required to neutralise any political opposition to these wars.

And whenever the bombs and missiles fall, the governments supplying them or providing political support will reiterate the same stale formulae: Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel’s enemies want to wipe it off the map. Israel is fighting terrorists. You can’t negotiate with terrorists etc, etc

Despite occasional tensions - the sinking of the USS Liberty in 1967; Ronald Reagan’s angry condemnation of the Israeli siege of Beirut - it has been like this more or less continuously since the Six-Day War. With Israel there are no red lines, and the slaughter in Gaza is proof of their absence. 1,200 Israelis were killed on 7 October last year. So far 41,000 Palestinians - mostly women and children - have been killed in Gaza.

You can only describe this ratio as ‘proportional’, if you have lost all sense of proportion, and have effectively rejected the notion of proportionality in warfare as a means of limiting violence against civilians or civilian objects. Or if you accept the propaganda fiction that Hamas is the equivalent of Nazi Germany. Many of Israel’s supporters have clearly done all of this quite comfortably. Perhaps that way, you can accommodate yourself to a ‘war’ in which 10 children a day lose one or both legs to Israeli bombs.

Because, apart from a few weasel words, not a single western leader has had a thing to say about the staggering destruction that has been inflicted on Gaza, and which is now spiralling out across the Middle East. Whatever reservations they may have about the civilian ‘cost’, no government has exerted any significant pressure to make Israel stop doing what it is doing. Take US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s response to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday:

I expressed my full support for Israel’s right to defend itself and its people against Iranian backed terrorist groups. I stressed that the United States is determined to prevent Iran and Iranian-backed partners and proxies from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict.

Whatever you think of Hezbollah or Nasrallah, Israel is clearly ‘expanding the conflict’ by killing him, just as it was when it assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, or killed seven Iranian officers with a missile strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

Once again, you don’t have to support the Iranian regime or Bashir al-Assad to notice that no other state is able to behave like this. ‘Do not mess with Israel,’ crowed Bill Maher last week. ‘They took the fight from their river to their pants.’ In a searing piece in New Lines Magazine, Eveline Hitti, the chairperson of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, compared the pager attacks to a mass casualty event:

“All of the first casualties that came in were all just carrying their hands wrapped with bloody towels,” she said. “Those were the walk-ins.” Then came the first ambulances “carrying the people who had eviscerated eyes who couldn’t self-transport.”

The mechanism of the explosions appears to have been designed to cause maximum damage. Most of those who were injured were men, along with a number of women and children. They tended to pick up the beeping pager and hold it toward their eyes to read the message. When it exploded, it caused damage to both hands and their face.

Well, Bill Maher found it funny anyway, and he is a comedian. And so did many Israelis on social media, whose gleeful amusement at all those eviscerated eyes caused the Times of Israel to suggest that ‘the mockery crosses a line and violates a traditional Jewish ethic that discourages undue rejoicing over the deaths of one’s enemy.

No western government has criticized these attacks. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested that the attacks ‘clearly and unequivocally violates humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict’, her office was vandalised, and tv host Chris Cuomo suggested that she would have supported al-Qaeda.

Democratic senators, on the other hand, praised Israel for what the Jewish Insider called ‘the stunning, targeted attacks against Hezbollah. ‘ One senator told the newspaper:

For those of us who care about regional stability we have to manage the risk of escalation, but for those of us who have been critical of the conduct of the war in terms of [there being] too high of a tolerance for civilian casualties, we should be a little cautious to criticize an operation this precise.

Yep, let’s all start using booby traps in order to be ‘precise’, because why the hell not? Once again, no other state gets this kind of treatment. And as for the ‘tolerance for civilian casualties’, Israel’s ‘counterinsurgency’ policy has for decades been based on the collective punishment of civilians, with the aim of turning them against whatever armed organisation they may or may not support. This policy was most famously explained in the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ by General Gadi Eisenhot in 2008, who cited the bombing of Beirut’s Dahiya quarter in 2006 as a model for future operations against any village from which Israel was fired on:

We will apply disproportionate force on it [village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint these are not civilian villages, they are military bases…This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

Eisenhot was to some extent merely reformulating what has been standard practice throughout Israel’s history, from cross-border operations in the 50s, and the bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, to the invasions of Lebanon, and in all the Gaza wars. None of this has made Israel more secure. And it has certainly not made the populations at the receiving end of these wars feel safer.

Perpetual War for Perpetual War

If war is politics by other means, Israel’s wars are a substitute for politics, - or rather, the perpetual postponement of politics through military force, coupled with the vague belief that somehow, if Israel can inflict enough enough misery, death, and destruction, its enemies will be cowed into submission or compliance. As a strategy for obtaining ‘security’, this leaves much to be desired. Because Rome may have tried to make its enemies hate as long as they feared, but in the end it didn’t work out for Rome, and as 7 October demonstrated so brutally, it won’t work for Israel.

In response to these attacks, the most extremist government in Israel’s history has effectively destroyed Gaza, and it is now extending the destruction into Lebanon. As the Minister of Education Yoav Kisch gloated on Israeli tv last week: ‘There is no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon. Lebanon will be annihilated. It will cease to exist.’

This is what you can say if you are a member of a supremacist government with a carte blanche. Essentially, you can say and do what you like, and your supporters will marvel at your capacity for inflicting death and destruction. Plastic explosives in pagers? Audacious! Or a ‘masterpiece’, as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has referred to the air strikes and pager attacks last week. Assassinate Hassan Nasrallah. Genius! Or rather a ‘measure of justice’ as Joe Biden put it.

There are those who would see the assassination of Netanyahu as a ‘measure of justice’, but those of us who don’t believe in assassinations, murder, destruction and ‘annihilation’ as a means of achieving ‘justice’ or peace in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, should not be drawn into this vacant bloodlust and wild lawlessness.

General David Petraeus famously asked how the Iraq war ends. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that from Israel’s point of view, this war doesn’t end. In a speech in which he held up a map of the Middle East from which ‘Palestine’ was conspicuously absent, Netanyahu told the UN last week that ‘Israel yearns for peace.’

Some Israelis might, but Netanyahu is not one of them. His government is effectively waging perpetual war for perpetual war, based on tactical successes with no coherent overall strategy. And Israel’s western allies have allowed him to get away with it.

In the space of a few days, France and the US have been humiliated by Netanyahu, who seemed to accept their ceasefire proposal and then reneged on it, because his own ministers threatened to vote against him. Still, Tony Blinken is there to find reasons why this is acceptable, or at least tolerable, and insisting that ‘ all parties refrain from any actions that could escalate the conflict.’

After the events of the last week, that escalation ship has sailed. And in a week in which Biden has just secured an $8.7 billion aid package, the US will not be doing an Eisenhower. The US has said various times that it wanted a ceasefire, and Hezbollah had said that it would stop firing rockets if there was a ceasefire, and at one point Hamas wanted a ceasefire too.

But then Israel killed Haniyeh. Genius! And now it has killed Nasrallah. Awesome! And now, no one wants a ceasefire.

Many years ago, Netanyahu joked about his ability to get America to do whatever he wanted. He must be laughing now. Because, in effect, the mighty United States, the world’s only superpower, the global policeman, upholder of international law, and showcase of liberal democracy is being dragged into endless war by a morally-bankrupt Israeli government, led by an amoral and mendacious politician whose political survival is dependent on endless war.

And so Lebanon is being bombed once again. And refugees are fleeing once again. And bombs are falling on Beirut and the Bekaa once again, and now on Yemen, while rockets are still being fired into Israel and no one seems to know how this ends.

What will happen to the Gazan Palestinians if Gaza is destroyed? Does Israel really want to re-occupy what is left of the strip? If not, who will govern it? What if Lebanon becomes another Gaza? Suppose Israel invades Lebanon? Will it face another insurgency like the one that drove it out last time?

What happens if Iran intervenes on Hezbollah’s side, in an attempt to save ‘face’, and Israel retaliates? If a regional war breaks out, and Iranian missiles fall on Tel Aviv, will Israeli missiles also fall on Tehran? What happens when Iran and/or the Houthi block the Straits of Hormuz? Does the US go to war with Iran too? Will Saudi Arabia and the UAE join in? Will Israeli settlers use the cover of a regional war to drive the Palestinians from ‘Judea and Samaria’? Will Russia and/or China support Iran, either directly or indirectly?

Maybe the Messiah will return to Jerusalem, as some evangelicals contend, and bring about the Day of Judgement and the Rapture. But beyond such fantasies, this is incomprehensibly reckless mayhem that a fragile world and a fragile region don’t need.

And asking Petraeus’s question once again, what happens at the end of all this, assuming there is an end? Who will be at the peace conference? What will be discussed, when tens of thousands of people - maybe many more than this - have died, and their neighbourhoods and cities burn? Will Israel live happily ever after? Will there be ‘peace’?

The horrors that these questions imply are only matched by the failure of so many powerful people - who ought to know better - to even ask them.

Israel, or at least the current Israeli government, clearly has no interest in asking them. And to their eternal shame and disgrace, the governments that could exert pressure to force Israel to change its ways, are too cowardly or too complicit in Israel’s criminal madness to ask any questions at all.

And so this is a failure of leadership, and a failure of politics and diplomacy, of strategy, and morality, for which the Middle East, and the rest of the world may pay a very heavy price.

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Things Might Not Get Better

It’s never a good idea to expect too much from British politics, even in better times. As John Clees once said, it’s not the despair that gets you, it’s the hope. The general pattern for many years has been this: Conservative governments win elections, do whatever they can to hack away at the legacies of 1945, privatise whatever they can, enrich those who are already rich, until they reach a critical mass of corruption and incompetence that even the long-suffering British public can’t stand any longer.

And then finally they turn to Labour, because there’s no one else to turn to. And for a while Labour becomes the repository of the nation’s better aspirations, until disenchantment sets in and the Conservatives come back to continue the cycle.

On 4 July this year we reached that tipping point once again, as some of the most genuinely disgusting, amoral and useless politicians this country has ever seen finally got the electoral humiliation they deserved. But this didn’t necessarily mean enthusiasm for the winners. This was an election in which even Tory voters were prepared to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat. And those who didn’t - Brexiters, Bravermanites, and radicalized Tories who thought that Sunak’s party had become ‘socialist’, embraced Farage’s malignant lynx-eyed charlatanry and the pub-bore rants of Richard Tice.

Faced with choices like these, who could not feel, at the very least, a sense of relief at Labour’s electoral victory? What did it matter that that majority was shallower than the numbers suggested? Or that it would have been much less, had Reform not eaten into the Tory vote?

Labour were over the line. And if it wasn’t the start of a new era, it was the long overdue ending to an old and very stale one. The parliamentary maths gave the government at least the potential to be transformational.

And this is when the laws of British political gravity began to kick in. Because being a government is very different from a government-in-waiting. In opposition, you can follow Napoleon’s axiom of never interrupting your enemies when they make mistakes.

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In parliaments with the likes of Gullis, Truss and Johnson, gravitas comes free of cost to any opposition leader who can keep a straight face. You can be forensic at PMQs, strategic and focused in your comms. You can write columns for the Sun. You can fly the flag, de-select leftwing MPs, and park so many tanks on Tory lawns that central office can’t even see out of the windows.

But in government you have to do things, and be something, and you have to be able to tell the people who voted for you what that thing is, and persuade them to accept what you are offering them.

This is always a difficult task for Labour governments, in a right-leaning country with a feral press that may print the occasional op-ed when Labour is in opposition, but cannot stand to see Labour in power.

The flagships of ‘respectable’ mainstream journalism such as the BBC and ITV will almost always subject Labour to harsher scrutiny than the Tories. And then there are the vast array of extreme right voices now operating on social media platforms from Elon Musk’s X to GB News, who loathe even the palest manifestation of social democracy.

Anyone who doubts the cynicism and downright depravity emanating from these circles should consider how quickly the worst of the worst - you know who they are - subtly encouraged and legitimised the summer’s pogrom/riots; tried to undermine the government’s response with disingenuous accusations of ‘two-tier policing’, and presented people who wanted to burn asylum-seekers alive as patriots and concerned citizens.

Or think about how - knights straight out of Camelot - they accused Labour of making the streets unsafe for women by letting prisoners out on early release, while ignoring years of Conservative misgovernance that had brought about the near-collapse of the criminal justice system

These people will never be Labour’s friends. They cannot and will not be placated. They have no moral compass, no concern for the truth or the common good, and they will use any excuse to bring a Labour government down.

This ‘honeymoon’ was even shorter than usual. The government had barely had time to rearrange the furniture when the right’s political killing machine cranked into action.

Put rioters in jail? Discrimination! Angela Rayner dancing? Lightweight! Take down Thatcher’s picture? Starmer hates women! On and on it goes, and it won’t stop till Starmer is standing at the podium outside Downing Street.

The polls show that Starmer’s personal ratings are now lower than Sunak’s, and Labour’s popularity is also dipping. Polls, schmolls, you might say. And what does it matter if a serious government is unpopular as long as it’s doing the right thing?

It matters, if the people on your side don’t believe that Labour is doing the right thing. Within two months, a government that promised to restore trust and service in politics is being battered with accusations of sleaze, nepotism and entitlement. Already cracks are showing in Starmer’s Downing Street operation.

This fall from grace is not necessarily calamitous. Labour doesn’t have to face the electorate for another five years. It has a large enough majority to get its business done. The question is, what business does it want to do? Some readers will be old enough to remember when George Osborne introduced his (in)famous ‘austerity’ speech at the Conservative conference in October, 2010, with the following words:

Conference, I come with good news and bad news. The good news is that we are in government after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy. The bad news? We are in government after 13 years of a disastrous Labour administration that brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy. And once again we are going to have to clear up the mess.

Osborne thrilled his audience with promises of sado-economic ‘tough decisions’, because there is nothing some Tory voters like more than a good fiscal spanking. And through the pain - which Osborne and his cohorts would never feel - the Iron Chancellor dangled ‘the prize at the end: a reinvigorated, prosperous, united Britain of which we can all be proud.’

Fourteen years later, that prize is very conspicuously absent. And yet on 27 August, Keir Starmer gave a speech in the Rose Garden, in which he told the public:

I have to be honest with you. Things are worse than we ever imagined. In the first few weeks, we discovered a 22 billion pound black hole in the public finances. And before anyone says oh this is just performative…Or playing politics. Let’s remember. The OBR did not know about it.

This, Starmer argued, was why his government had decided to introduce a means-tested Winter Fuel Payment for pensioners, and it was also why:

There’s a budget coming in October…and it’s going to be painful. We have no other choice given the situation we’re in.

Like Osborne before him, Starmer urged the public to ‘accept short term pain for long term good’, and ‘the difficult trade-off for the genuine solution’ in order to ensure ‘an economy that works for everyone’, whatever that means.

As Yogi Berra might have said, it was deja vu all over again. Another government, another spanking. Where the Conservatives once justified their ‘tough decisions’ on the grounds that the Labour government had overspent, Labour blamed its ‘painful’ budget, on the ‘black hole’ left in the public finances by its predecessors.

Snap.

Though Starmer promised that those with the ‘broadest shoulders’ would bear the brunt of this, but everyone knows that these ‘tough decisions’ will fall, as they always do, on the same people: the poor; the vulnerable; the elderly; immigrants; asylum seekers.

We expect such things from Tories, but even Boris Johnson promised to ‘level up’, even though he didn’t, and probably didn’t understand what levelling up actually meant or why it was necessary.

Starmer pitched his sobriety as an alternative to the wild ‘cakeism’ of the last few years. But that is clearly not how it was received. The decision to make the Winter Fuel Payment the flagship policy of Labour austerity was a stunning own goal, which enabled Tory politicians and the Tory press to discover a social conscience that has been almost entirely invisible throughout the last fourteen years.

Even the Reform chancers wrung their hands in a bad-faith anguish at the fate of freezing pensioners in their constituencies, dying at Starmer’s hands, because they care so much.

Was this really the only way that Labour could save £1.5 billion? Did Labour have to keep the two-child benefit cap? Was it worth the political cost, not only amongst Labour MPs who did not want to be associated with these policies, but in terms of how these policies are seen by the wider public? Who were Labour trying to impress with this performative toughness? Why did Labour cancel funding to upskill 37,000 care workers in a sector where there are more than 152,000 vacancies?

There is no evidence that anyone in the government was even asking these questions. And so, in the midst of what should have been a triumphal conference, Labour has been haunted like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, by images of pensioners unable to turn on the heating, while the likes of Crooked Bob Jenrick and James Cleverly are out doing their bit for Age Concern.

All this was bad enough, and the damage was compounded by revelations of free clothes, and Arsenal and Taylor Swift tickets, which Starmer and his team initially tried to defend - most notably through David Lammy’s ludicrous claim that the Starmers needed to ‘look their best.’

When you are preparing to inflict a ‘painful’ budget on the nation, it’s probably best not to make arguments like this. Nor should you be protesting, as some have done, that Boris Johnson and his cronies got more freebies than Labour, and the Tory press never complained, etc, etc.

All this is true. But a Labour government that seeks to embody public service should not be accepting freebies from interested individuals. Or donations of £4 million from tax-haven based hedge fund companies.

In these circumstances, it’s entirely logical to ask what these donors will receive in return, and why the government is behaving like this. Because whatever your opinion of Starmer’s political project when he was in opposition, he at least seemed to be an astute political operator.

But these are strikingly amateurish, unforced errors.

I have no idea what advantages Sue Gray has brought to Starmer’s team, or whether she has done a good job or a bad one. There may well be some merit in the argument that a veteran civil servant was needed to coordinate the government’s political business. But neither she nor her salary ought to be a political story, and the fact that they are, suggests some serious disarray at the heart of government.

Because this isn’t just Westminster froth - it is the kind of leaking and petty plotting that rots governments from within. No one who has followed the Labour right’s destruction of Corbyn can be entirely surprised by this. Two weeks ago the Guardian published an extract from Anushka Asthana’s forthcoming book on Labour’s victory, which described how Morgan McSweeney and his cohorts conspired to bring Corbyn down by presenting him as an enabler of antisemitism:

After a few months working from a park bench, the group funded a small office in Vauxhall, and soon it reached out to former Labour advisers to work alongside them with a focus on online antisemitism. In an early review, they identified problem posts in hundreds of Facebook groups with links to either the party or leftwing politics. Some of these were aimed at Labour’s female Jewish MPs. They then farmed out the posts they uncovered to journalists who were themselves reporting on rising evidence of antisemitism on the left.

If Labour party officials are prepared to do that to one elected party leader, they are perfectly capable of briefing journalists about another for entirely different reasons.

This amateurism is not limited to domestic politics. Earlier this month, Labour were flagging up the possibility of supplying long-distance missiles to Ukraine before a meeting with Biden’s team in Washington. One warning from Putin, and one meeting later, and the missiles had vanished from the agenda. But now they’re back on the agenda, according to Lammy, or at least they might be, because who knows?

And in the Middle East, the UK, along with the US government and the European Union, have been haplessly complicit in Netanyahu’s maniacal strategy of endless war with everyone, which is leading the entire region towards the regional conflagration that many have feared. In Europe, Labour’s ‘reset’ with the EU has proved so timid that Starmer could not even bring himself to accept the 18- top 30-year-olds Youth and Mobility scheme.

There is also the question of immigration - always an instant hope-killer whoever is in power in this country. Starmer reacted quickly and decisively to suppress what was effectively a far-right insurgency. But since then, his government has embraced the same tactics that so many liberal governments use when dealing with the far-right: treat immigration as the central problem to be met with ‘strong borders’, repression, and exclusion.

Like Blair’s two governments, Labour now boasts of deportations, cracking down on criminal gangs, and new forms of ‘offshore’ processing of asylum claims. Starmer even offered £4 million to support the fascistic Georgia Meloni’s ruthless immigration policies, regardless of criticisms these policies have received from Amnesty and other human rights organizations.

There is not the slightest indication that Labour intends to counter the obsession with immigration, that has already done so much damage to the country, and the dehumanisation of ‘illegal’ immigrants that has been one of most damaging consequences of that obsession.

Nor is there any recognition from the government of the value that immigrants bring to the country. Consider the proposal from 141 British universities to reduce the numbers of foreign students in return for raising tuition fees. In the 2021/22 academic year, foreign students contributed £41.9 billion to the UK economy.

The numbers of foreign students are now falling, due to spousal and family visa restrictions and other factors. Does Labour - or the universities which are offering to reduce them further - really believe that British students, many of whom are already struggling to pay for their education, will be able to match that contribution, if tuition fees are raised?

Is this the price that Labour wants the country to pay, for bringing immigration numbers down?

In pointing out these inadequacies, I don’t want to gloat, or join in the ‘Labour has failed already’ chorus. After two months in office, no one can say that a government has failed - the Truss/Kwarteng wild ride being the exception.

The government has done some things right. It got very quickly on top of the pogrom/riots in August. It has resolved the doctors and railway strikes with pay rises. It has begun to establish a publicly-owned energy company, and committed to renationalising the railways. Plans are underway for an Employment Rights Bill, for a housebuilding program, for Louise Haigh’s Better Buses Bill, for the creation of a National Wealth Fund to invest in green industries.

These initiatives are not nothing, and certainly not anything you could have expected from their predecessors. But they have been overshadowed or ignored thanks to a succession of errors and doom-and-gloom messaging, and cronyism which the right has every interest in exploiting, and also by precisely the performative toughness that Starmer says he’s not doing.

Starmer is right not to over-promise. Politicians aren’t magicians. And even in a country that likes to believe in unicorns, they can’t wave magic wands and repair the damage of decades. The electorate is volatile and fickle, and also demanding.

It may take time to fix the things that are broken. But Labour doesn’t have much time. If it can’t make tangible improvements in peoples lives, and administer CPR to the UK’s ailing public services, then more people will lose their belief that ‘normal’ politics can change anything, and look for what is not normal.

If Labour continues to fixate on growth and fiscal rules as a prerequisite for any progressive change, the country will get worse and it will get nastier.

If a left-of-centre government mires itself in sleaze, while forcing ‘tough decisions’ down the throats of an exhausted population, there is no shortage of demagogues willing to present themselves as the alternative to a cold, detached political class that doesn’t care about ‘indigenous’ Brits.

In these circumstances, it is entirely possible that Labour’s majority could one day vanish as easily as it materialised, and voters could be persuaded to embrace some kind of Tory/Reform formation.

That is why we need a Labour government - and for better or worse it has to be this Labour government - to do better and be better. Yesterday, Reeves attempted to loosen the sackcloth, and promised there would be no return to austerity.

Let’s hope she means it. Let’s hope that the government can find the political courage to take this country to a happier place. But with Labour, it’s best not to hope too much.

It’s the hope that kills you.

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Five Days in Berlin

All cities are historical cities, but some are more historical than others.

I’ve just come back from a five-day visit to Berlin - a city with more history than any capital has any right to expect. Two world wars and the frontline of the Cold War; fascist and socialist dictatorship; Nazi genocide and Prussian militarism; revolution and counter-revolution - Berlin was at the epicentre of the twentieth century’s darkest politics, and it is instantly and compulsively fascinating to see how this past has been incorporated into the physical structure of the city.

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We spent a lot of time in historical museums, or wandering the streets where the past is written into buildings, names and places familiar from history and literature. The history of Berlin is on one level the history of two failed utopian projects that took root in the same city. Firstly, the racially-purified ‘World City Germania’ that Hitler’s architect Albert Speer attempted to construct from his leader’s sketches and megalomaniac fantasies:

And then the Stalinist utopia of the GDR that emerged from the wreckage of Nazism:

Some may struggle to recognize the Third Reich as a utopian project, but that was how Hitler, Himmler and their movement saw General Plan East - their insane plan to kill 30 million Slavs by the early 1970s and connect Berlin to German farms in the Urals through supertrains and superhighways.

Nor is it easy for post-Cold War Europeans to consider the shabby Soviet-dominated surveillance-dystopia of the GDR as an ideal place, but that was the image of East Berlin which the German Democratic Republic transmitted to its people and to the West - a socialist city headed for a better future under Soviet tutelage.

These aspirations are embodied in the monumental architecture along Karl-Marx Allee (formerly Stalinallee until de-Stalinisation reached East Berlin in 1961) a wide boulevard of ornate apartment blocks constructed largely through volunteer labour after the war as a socialist counterpart to the bourgeois Unter den Linden:

Like so many of Berlin’s avenues and public squares, the boulevard seemed built for marching armies and massive crowd gatherings - including the crowds that rebelled against the communist government in 1953 and were met with tanks and soldiers while the development was under construction.

Today, it remains a vainglorious relic of socialist neoclassicism in a city where even the shopping malls are built on an epic scale. And once you get used to the size, you can trace the city’s history in the dazzling mixture of architectural styles, that include the nineteenth century apartment blocks known as Mietskaserne (rental barracks), modernist experiments, and the few Nazi buildings that still remain, such as Goering’s sinister aviation ministry:

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a city where so many buildings and historical sites recall universally-familiar images. Look at the Reichstag and you immediately see photographs of the burning building in 1933, or Russian soldiers soldiers flying the Soviet flag from the facade in 1945.

Few people who peer down at the empty bookshelves of the underground ‘empty library’ monument in the Bebelplatz, will not have seen the images of Nazi students piling books onto bonfires in the same space in 1933.

In East Berlin, we visited the offices at the Stasi HQ where Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security, coordinated ‘blanket coverage’ of the population until the last days of the GDR. Beyond the statue of ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzshinsky, the founder of the Cheka, in the foyer, the museum was a testament to the Stasi’s sleazy obsession with pervasive surveillance - all formica tables and desks, cameras in watering cans and bathroom walls, hidden microphones, lock-breaking tools and tales of informers who included the lead singer in a punk band and members of national athletics teams.

At the section of the Berlin Wall known as the ‘East Side Gallery’, we saw the murals and paintings celebrating the advent of a borderless world - another imagined utopia that now seems obsolete in our era of proliferating borders, drowning migrants and more ‘fortified’ walls and barriers than at any other time in human history.

IF Berlin is the city of lost utopias, it was also the city where the greatest genocide in human history was planned and organized, and this past is also visible all over the city. I was not impressed by the ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ - an abstract necropolis consisting of 2, 700 concrete slabs or stellae of different sizes in what was once the heart of the repressive institutional machinery of the Third Reich.

The monument comes out of the fraught discussions in the recently-unified Germany of the early 1990s, which Brian Ladd describes so forensically in his 1998 book The Ghosts of Berlin. Its creator, Peter Eisenman, has described the monument as an attempt to ‘develop a new idea of memory that differs markedly from nostalgia’ - a curious proposition when applied to the Holocaust - and a ‘frame of reference [that} leads to uncertainty and isolates the individual through a disturbing personal experience.’

Berlin’s official website says that ‘visitors that may experience a brief moment of disorientation, which should open up space for discussion’. Personally, I found the memorial tricksy, excessively-abstract, and distinctly underwhelming. Nor, wandering amongst the slabs, was I able to grasp Eisenman’s claim that ‘The time of the experience of the individual does not grant further understanding, because understanding is not possible.’

In constructing a memorial to so massive a crime, ‘understanding’ or not-understanding should not be the only considerations, and the monument felt to me like a pretentiously-conceived and pointless labyrinth, in a place where something more visceral, emotional and empathetic was required.

Berlin has many other forms of Holocaust remembrance, which are far more successful in achieving these aspirations. At the site of the SS Reich Security Main Office in Niederkirchnerstrasse, a permanent ‘Topography of Terror’ exhibition provides a document-based exploration of how Germany succumbed to Nazism - and the consequences of this descent for Europe and the rest of the world.

In the Jewish Museum in Kreuzberg, the lists of dozens of anti-Jewish laws hanging from long scrolls constitute a heart-breaking testament to Nazi racial persecution in all its petty vindictive malice and escalating cruelty. At the same museum an installation of screaming metal faces which clank mournfully as the visitor walks over them commemorates the ‘innocent victims of war and violence.’

All over Berlin, little brass stolpersteine (stepping stones) in the pavements bear the names of Jewish residents who once lived in the adjacent buildings. Outside the Jewish cemetery in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, a haunting sculpture on the site of a Jewish retirement home commemorates the Jews sent to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, and needs no further explanation:

In one of the Hackesche Hőfe courtyards in the former Jewish district, a small museum is dedicated to the Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind - where the Jewish 'anarchist individualist' Otto Weidt saved a number of blind and nearly-blind Jews by employing them in his brushmaking factory.

This humble workshop, with its hidden room, and its stories of extraordinary bravery and humanity of the people who made up Weidt’s network was deeply moving, and the murals on the wall outside that remembered the ‘disappeared’ victims of Latin American dictatorships complemented the museum’s message of resistance to oppression and solidarity across races and borders.

We also visited the villa in Wannsee, where the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, convened a meeting of fourteen third or fourth level bureaucrats on 20 January 1942 to coordinate the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question.’

This meeting is often depicted as the ‘beginning of the Holocaust’, in part because its written protocols constitute one of the few occasions in which these decisions were written down. In fact the extermination of the Jews was already unfolding. But Heydrich’s meeting was intended to take advantage of ‘opportunities’ opened up by the war in the east, and escalate the killing to a new level, through mass deportations, forced labour and - though this was not spelt out explicitly - through physical extermination.

All this was discussed and decided in little more than ninety minutes, with nibbles, cigarettes and cognac, in the villa that has now become a Holocaust memorial and archive. When we were there, a group of teenagers from an international school were being given a tour. They sat in the same room where Heydrich and his associates coolly planned the deaths of millions, and listened to their German teacher explain to them who such a thing could have happened.

Some were bored and sleepy. Others were sombre, attentive and curious. In one room a group of girls gossiped about their classmates. ‘His cologne gives me headaches’, one girl complained about one of her peers.

I don’t mention this as a generational condemnation. It’s difficult for any generation to assimilate what was discussed that day. An information board at the house warned that ‘dealing with history…goes beyond processing historical information and includes reflecting on one’s own experiences’ and expresses the hope that memorial sites ‘might protect against antisemitism, right-wing extremism, racism, and other forms of group-related enmity.’

Physical memorials, no matter how well-constructed, are only part of the process of remembering, and the Haus de Wannsee-Konferenz (House of the Wannsee Conference) invites visitors to consider the motives of the perpetrators as well as the suffering of their victims.

It explains that ten of the participants were university-educated, that eight were lawyers, that many of them had already been active in murdering Jews on the Eastern Front. It gives potted biographies of Heydrich, Eichmann and the others, which show the decisions they agreed on that day as a logical extension of their careers and ideologies. One photograph of Eichmann padding around his Israeli prison in his slippers was a jarring visual confirmation of Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation of the ‘banality of evil’ to describe the impossibility of matching such a petty individual to the enormity of his crimes.

Berlin is clearly trying to come to terms with this past, and to bring the past to the attention of the present. All the museums we visited were filled with youngsters on school trips. Some arrived laughing, with the exuberance that you find in any school expedition. In others, the laughter gave way to bewildered silence.

There were also more recent memorials, in which the cruelties of the past are intertwined with the cruelties of the 21st century.

Outside the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, we saw police guarding the magnificently-restored building that was badly-damaged during Kristallnacht and nearly destroyed by Allied bombing. A mural and photographs of Israeli hostages were clearly intended to conflate the Holocaust with the war in Gaza - a juxtaposition that effectively erases the 40,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza and the 622 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 7 October.

National guilt can have many different outcomes, and not all of them are positive or helpful in laying the basis for a better future. Germany’s harsh response to Palestinian protests, its intolerance of pro-Palestinian voices, and its uncritical support for Israel cannot be separated from the horrific events that Berlin seeks to remember.

It was impossible to think of Berlin’s past, without thinking of the present. One afternoon, we visited the little-known memorial to the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, at the Lichtenstein Bridge where she was shot in the head and thrown into the Landwehr Canal by Freicorps cavalry soldiers in January 1919, only a few hundred yards from the lake where her fellow-revolutionary comrade Karl Liebnecht met the same fate that day.

Next to the memorial, a plaque pays tribute to the ‘convinced socialist’ who campaigned against ‘oppression, militarism and war’ and became ‘a victim of a ruthless political assassination.’

Standing by the monument, we watched a young woman on the other side of the canal posing for a photo shoot. It was an incongruous juxtaposition, even if the model and photographers were unaware of it, but Berlin is filled with sometimes bewildering interactions between its dark past and its brighter present. It was not for nothing that Wim Wenders once placed the late great Bruno Ganz’s angel on the Victory Monument Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns erected to mark the advent of the First German Reich.

This a city where beauty and boundless creative energy have often co-existed with humanity at its worst, the city of the SA and the Spartacists, of Joseph Roth and Alfred Doblin, of Brecht and Lotte Lenya, Marlene Dietrich, of Christopher Isherwood, Georg Grosz and Kathe Kollwitz - a city where you can still admire the beauty of Max Liebermann’s lovingly-restored garden just around the corner from the Wannsee House:

Hitler never liked the city he wanted to be Germany’s ‘world capital.’ Berlin was too cosmopolitan, too experimental, too liberal and leftwing, too sexy or ’degenerate’. He would not have liked it now, with its women in hijabs; its groups of multi-racial primary schoolchildren hopping on and off trains; its resolute - if sometimes wrong-headed - repudiation of everything his vile movement stood for.

I often imagined Bruno Ganz’s angel listening to the thoughts of Berlin’s commuters, as I observed the passengers on the metro, immersed in their mobile phones, in a city that is as charming and engaging as its past has often been horrifying. Ganz was also famous for his other Berlin role - the mad, collapsing Fuhrer whose ranting monologue has been incorporated into so many Downfall videos.

But when I look back on Berlin, I prefer to think of the Turkish schoolchildren playing in a Kreuzberg street that had been closed off for the purpose:

There was a time, right into the early nineties, when Turkish immigrants were considered mere gastarbeiters - guestworkers - without any political or civil rights. Now they have become a permanent presence in a city that is now, racially-speaking, the opposite of everything the Nazis once wanted it to be.

And when I look back on the last week, I can still hear the delighted laughter of the little girl as she was spun round in a giant wheel in that same Kreuzberg park. One day she will discover the history of the country that is now her homeland, and learn that a city which has written some of the darkest pages in the history of humanity might have something to teach a world where too many sinister movements dream of making their countries ‘great again.’

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My Blank Pages

As promised, here’s the second extract from my writing memoir…down but not quite out in 80s New York…

It’s nearly forty years since I walked home to 546 East 11th Street with my keys ready to open the front door in an instant or jab a potential attacker in the eyes. These precautions were not based on urban paranoia.  Fear was an entirely justified and common-sense response to a city that seethed with multiple threats.  In the three years and half years I lived in New York I was mugged three times.  Once I was punched in the face in Tomkins Square Park by two attackers, one of whom put a knife to my throat.  On another occasion I was held up at gunpoint. 

One morning I woke up in my ‘homestead’ to find a junkie creeping past my bed carrying my stereo.   When I leapt out of bed and shouted at him, he dropped it and ran away.  Two days later I woke up at the same time and was amazed to find the same man carrying the same stereo. Once again, I shouted at him, and he dropped it a second time.   One afternoon I looked out of my window to find another addict trying to hang himself in the yard beneath my flat – an effort that only came to a halt when the acidhead on the top floor yelled “You can’t hang yourself, I’m tripping!”      

Why did I put up with this?  The most obvious answer is that I couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, but that would not be the whole truth.   In the recent Netflix documentary on her life and work, The Center Cannot Hold, Joan Didion is asked about an episode from her 1967 essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in which she describes a five-year-old girl who had been given LSD by her hippie parents. 

Asked by her nephew Griffin Dunne how she felt about this encounter at the time, Didion hesitates before replying “Let me tell you, it was gold. You live for moments like that if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.”

Most writers will recognise the essential truth of this observation.  Sometimes you come across people and events that demand to be written about, or which lend themselves perfectly to the story you want to tell.  These subjects may not be edifying, but you don’t ignore them.  I had originally arrived in New York in 1980 intending to continue to Latin America, where I hoped to write a book about my travels, but I was instantly gripped by a city that seemed to be tottering on the brink of collapse. 

New York had only recently emerged from its near bankruptcies of the 1970s, and it felt to me like a Victorian city with its extremes of wealth and poverty, a place where it was possible to fall all the way to the bottom without any safety net to catch you. To the young would-be writer that I was, all this was both alarming and instantly compelling. ‘Here, all the sickness that is latent in so-called “cultured” societies like England screams at you in headlines and neon signs. You get a great view of the apocalypse from the World Trade Centre,’   I wrote to my youngest brother. 

On the one hand, it was a city that felt familiar to me from Dos Passos, Henry Miller, Taxi Driver, and Escape from New York.  At the same time, New York was a larger-than-life world-metropolis that recalled other literary cities.   It was Brecht’s Mahagonny and Alfred Doblin’s Berlin. It was the Saint Petersburg of Dostoevsky, and the Paris of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, in which ‘the charming evening, the criminal's friend/Comes conspirator-like on soft wolf tread/ Like a large alcove the sky slowly closes/And man approaches his bestial metamorphosis.’ 

I often thought of the medieval Paris of Rilke’s The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge as I walked through late twentieth century streets where it seemed equally possible to imagine that ‘Here and there a man, whose eyes had during the day encountered the relishing glance of his murderer, would be overtaken by a strange presentiment.  He would withdraw and shut himself up, write out his last will, and finally order the litter of osier twigs, the cowl of the Celestines, and the strewing of ashes.’

From a writer’s point of view, the city was an endless resource, and  I was conscious that I was witnessing a special moment in American history.   In November 1980 Ronald Reagan won the US presidential election with the help of Jerry Falwell’s ‘Moral Majority’ Christian coalition.   Even before Reagan’s inauguration the following January, taxis began to appear bearing images of Uncle Sam in overalls carrying an axe encouraging the population to GET IT DONE AMERICA. 

In 1980 I read an article in the New York Times about groups of armed Nicaraguans carrying out military manoeuvres in the Everglades as part of a CIA covert operation to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government. I was astonished that the US government could brazenly plot the downfall of another government that it didn’t like in broad daylight.  Even the liberal Times barely batted an eye.  

It soon became clear what these preparations were intended to achieve, as the Contra war in Nicaragua got underway and the US government poured money and military aid into the dictatorships of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.  The Reagan administration’s new ‘trickledown’ economic policies also had an impact on New York itself, as cuts to mental health and welfare programs increased the numbers of homeless people on the streets, many of whom were in a state of acute distress.

Even after Thatcherite England, this felt like something qualitatively new and distinctly worse.  In the kitchen of my half-finished flat in East 11th Street I wrote short stories about New York lowlife, and filled notebooks with unfleshed-out character sketches and situations for a novel about the New York lower depths that I intended to call Summer in the City, but would have called A Season In Hell, if Rimbaud hadn’t already taken it.

Many of its characters were thinly fictionalised versions of the people I encountered every day, and much of the time there was no need to invent anything, because what was happening around me was so constantly bizarre.  I never did write that novel. It was impossible to fictionalise a city that constantly outstripped anything my imagination could conceive, and non-fiction seemed incapable of capturing its outlandish extremes and fervid intensity.  Instead, I concentrated on a new kind of writing that I had never done before, as I found myself singing and writing songs in a rock n’ roll band.

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Ever since I first heard Bob Dylan’s reedy voice and jangling guitar on my parents’ stereo in the West Indies, music has been a constant presence in my life, and I have always been attentive to song lyrics.  In my early teenage years, I was as influenced by singer-songwriters like Al Stewart, James Taylor, Buffy St Marie, Neil Young, Roy Harper and Harvey Andrews as I was by writers and poets.  

Even before leaving boarding school, I had begun to teach myself to play guitar during the holidays.  I worked my way through Chet Atkins and Mel Bay instruction manuals, and slowly progressed from ‘Skip to My Lou’ and ‘On Top of Old Smoky’ to Delta Blues and slide guitar.

By the time I arrived in New York my musical tastes had gravitated from psychedelia to pre-punk and New York New Wave, and I spent my first weeks in the city going out to see bands.  It was partly because of my musical orientation toward the New York sound that I moved into a flophouse in the Bowery called the Palace Hotel above CBGB (Country, Bluegrass and Blues).  This was the famous club, where Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Television, Blondie and so many New Wave bands had first made their mark. 

I paid about two dollars a night for a wooden cubicle that stank of cabbage and urine, with a wire mesh above it and walls stained with the blood of crushed mosquitoes.  The Palace was one of many similar establishments in the Bowery, most of whose ‘guests’ consisted of alcoholics, junkies, and the mentally-ill.

On my first night in the hotel one old man kept calling out “Jimmy, I’m dyin’,” to which his friend from another cubicle replied unsympathetically but no doubt accurately, “You ain’t fuckin’ dyin’ man, you ill that’s all.”

The toilets had no doors, to prevent addicts from shooting up. In the mornings I would find some of the clientele picking lice out of each other’s hair.  The older men spent most of the day watching boxing on TV, and there was a kind of pathos in the fury with which these casualties of the American Dream urged the fighters to beat each other to a pulp.   

At night the same men could be found out in the street, warming their hands round trashcan fires, drinking Night Train Express or Thunderbird wine, or coughing, moaning, and cursing each other in their cubicles while the noise from CBGB made the floor shake beneath us.  

At that time, I had no idea then that I would end up playing at CBGB myself.   One night I met a guitarist named Joe Braun in a Washington Square bar. Joe worked in a stationary shop and was carrying a pile of records, and we began talking music.  Out of that conversation, we arranged a jam session in a midtown studio with two friends of his: a bass player named Kevin Delaney and a drummer named Mike Deitch, both of whom had played with Joe in various bands.

I had never played electric guitar before and didn’t know how to jam.  Instead, I played three chords of what I thought might be the outline of a song.  From the moment the rest of the band locked into the tune, I felt as if I had been instilled with some mighty power that I had never known existed. 

We played those three chords over and over that night, and by the time the session was over we had agreed to form a band.  None of the others could write songs or wanted to sing, and to my surprise I found I could do both.  As a result, I found myself singing, writing songs, and playing rhythm guitar with three extremely talented musicians who had the patience to put up with my primitive technique and untutored vocals.   

By the time I moved into my East Village homestead, we were rehearsing weekly, and I had bought myself a Fender guitar and amplifier.  On cold winter nights I walked up and down my flat in a down jacket and hiking boots, working out tunes and writing song lyrics.  Within a year we were playing our first gigs in local venues.   

For a while we gave ourselves the very East Village name of Soviet Threat after the expression coined by Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig, before changing to the more enigmatic 1000 Violins.   Our sound was hard-edged, with nods to psychedelia, Television, Joy Division and the Velvet Underground, but we were very different from many of the bands that came and went in the East Village in those years. 

I remember one night I dropped in at the A7 after-hours club on the corner of Tomkins Square Park.   I made my way past the usual crowd of young men and boys with crewcuts and Mohicans, studded leather jackets and army boots with bandanas around the ankles; and the girls with fluorescent pink and green hair, wearing leopard-skin trousers and short skirts.

Inside, the low-ceilinged bar was thick with smoke and a Chinese American punkette with vampirella hair was performing a striptease while two New Wave girls flicked cigarette butts at her. The punkette began to cry, and she had just gone to seek help from the doorman when a guy with green hair and a Mohican jumped onto the little stage brandishing a crucifix and announced a band called The Sick Fucks. 

The other musicians slouched on stage behind him and a moment later the little club became a sea of pogoing heads and sweaty bodies bouncing off the walls while the singer screamed “Die! Die! Die!” over a deafening cacophony of tuneless guitars, bass and drums.  This was immediately followed by another song dedicated to ‘our asshole president’, in which the singer dropped to his knees and wailed “Ronnay!  I hate you Ronnay!” over a wall of noise played at the same breakneck speed.  It was not music but a sonic attack, and even in my mid-twenties, I already felt too old for it.

This was not the world we belonged to, even though we were sometimes obliged to enter it.   We liked songs with tunes, structure, and guitar solos, and the lyrics were as important as the music.  I wrote about the Moral Majority, the wars in Central America, random violence, urban alienation and the collapse of civilisation, in songs like ‘Shooting Gallery’, ‘Elephants Graveyard’, ‘State of Siege’ and ‘Stations of the Cross’. 

We may well have been the only band in history to reference Franz Kafka and Dostoevsky in a frenetic Cramps-style rockabilly song called ‘Telling Lies About Josef K.’    We quoted Orwell’s ominous phrase ‘We are the dead’ from 1984 in a Joy Division-influenced number, in which I howled desperately ‘the building’s on fire but I can’t get OUT.’

 “Why can’t we just sing ‘you’re my woman now’?” asked one of various exasperated drummers who came and went, but we weren’t that kind of band.  We believed rock and roll could change the world, and most of the lyrics I wrote were political in the broadest sense of the world and expressed levels of alienation that were very much par for the course for East Village bands in those years. 

We played our first indoor gig in front of two people at the Pilgrim Theatre in East 3rd Street – a former music hall run by an amiable Rastafarian named Patrick which was just around the corner from our rehearsal studio – and just up the street from a row of houses where most of the heroin in the city was sold.   

A few months later I saw a little-known band called REM play their first New York on that same stage to a packed auditorium, and later that night a local band called the Bloods who supported them was held up at shotgun point in their dressing room.  Our main stomping ground was CBGB.   The sound engineer liked us, and so did Television’s bassplayer. We played there regularly.  On one famous night we played to a packed house that consisted almost entirely of the staff from the Strand Bookstore where I worked. 

On another occasion we managed to convince the AFL-CIO union federation to let us play in a one-day concert in Central Park.  For a few weeks we fantasised about hiring a helicopter like the Rolling Stones and imagined ourselves playing in front of a vast crowd.  Luckily for us it was too expensive, because when we arrived in Central Park, we found only a handful of union members and their families eating picnic lunches, who listened to us with bemused incomprehension.  

For the best part of three years, we did what Lower East Side bands were supposed to do.  We rehearsed at least twice a week and refined our sound.  We went out to clubs with our demo tapes to hustle for gigs.  Whenever we played live at A7 or CBGB we stuck homemade posters on walls and lampposts to publicize ourselves. We got ourselves interviewed on a local radio station.   

At one point I took singing lessons with the mother of one of our drummers, who tried in vain to teach me operatic scales.  Music seemed to surround me wherever I went.  In Spanish Harlem the former drummer of The Supremes lived in the flat above.  I sat on the stoop and played endless salsa jams with a cocaine dealer named Hector, who owned the building next door. 

Hector asked me to play with him, and these were not invitations to be turned down.  The rumour in the street was that Hector had once served time for shooting one of his competitors in his back yard.  He would bring his own keyboards onto the sidewalk, and he usually arrived looking wild-eyed, with traces of white powder on his nostrils.  I would try to play along on my electric guitar and portable amp, while the old men played dominoes on the other side of the streets and few younger listeners came over and tried to dance to our clunky Latin-flavoured improvisations.

Had it not been for 1000 Violins I wouldn’t have stayed in New York for so long.  But it was thrilling beyond anything I had imagined to sing my own songs in a band, and play with musicians with such feeling and technique.  Though I wrote the words and chords, the arrangements were always collective and there was a real sense of  communion between us, that found expression in the music and also in the hilarity and banter that accompanied our gigs and after-midnight rehearsals.

In the winter of 1983, we shared a bill with Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye at CBGB.  That night it snowed so heavily that cars were buried in snowdrifts and the subways were closed, so that we were unable to bring our equipment from Brooklyn to the Lower East Side.

Luckily, the CBGB management was sympathetic, and agreed that we could use their drums and PA system, and we walked all the way from Brooklyn, bursting into the club carrying guitars in our freezing hands, with snow on our scarves and long coats like arctic explorers.  We played our set and stayed to watch the other bands.  At dawn we walked back across the majestic Brooklyn Bridge that echoed with our laughter and the shouts of stranded but joyful commuters throwing snowballs at each other, and looking out across the river where Hart Crane once observed seagulls ‘Shedding white rings of tumult, building high/Over the chained bay waters.’

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My Blank Pages

I’m off on holiday tomorrow, and I won’t be posting for the next two weeks. In the meantime, I’m posting two extracts from a memoir that I wrote during the pandemic about my writing life, which I called My Blank Pages . In the introduction I described it ‘as the personal story of a writer who wanted to write more than anything else, and held onto that ambition even when it sometimes seemed that it would never be realised.  But it’s also a story about all writers, about those who succeed and those who fail, and those who do both.’

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It’s a memoir about my personal writing trajectory; about how and why I became a writer; about literature, poetry, politics, and music. This extract is the first of two sections about the years I spent living in the Lower East Side in the early 80s, when I played in a rock and roll band and lived in a chaotic ‘housing association’ where a lot of very strange things happened.

I know it’s something of a departure from the pieces I usually write, and I would be interested to hear what you think, because I am considering trying to publish the whole thing one day, and may even do it on this platform.

And I assure you that every word is true…

In one two-week period alone, there were six fires and three homicides on East 11th Street.  Most of these killings were drug-related, as bodies turned up at the bottom of elevator shafts or on piles of garbage.   Gunshots could be heard on a weekly and sometimes nightly basis, but the police rarely came out unless you told them that one of their colleagues was being attacked.  

One night I was sitting in my flat reading Chuang Tsu’s aphorisms, when I heard an exchange of gunfire coming from the building directly opposite.  Ancient Chinese philosophy had not prepared me for this, and I dived to the floor to avoid a random bullet, before peering over the window to see armed cops with torches picking their way into one of the empty buildings. 

Faced with this mayhem, some people in the street looked to God for consolation or salvation.  Street preachers would stand on cars or soapboxes speaking to rapt audiences, and storefront churches would come and go, with tongues of fire or dayglo images of Jesus and the Virgin hastily-painted on sheets of hardboard, bearing names like Iglesia del Christo Rey or El Hogar del Espiritu Santo.   

On Sundays I would wake up to the sound of the congregation from the Pentecostal Church standing on the steps opposite, beating tambourines, clapping, and singing hymns to the accompaniment of an accordion.  Unlike the other churches, this one had a large green neon cross that was permanently glowing.  At nights when the streetlights failed, or someone shot them out or broke them with stones, the green neon cross was always spared.

Most of its congregation were black and Hispanic, and I was moved to see them see them standing on the steps of the church in their best Sunday clothes, singing ‘Amazing Grace’, holding onto their faith on the edge of a corner where at least six people had been shot or stabbed to death in the two years before my arrival.

God’s mercy was conspicuously absent from New York in the winter of 1981-82.  Temperatures frequently fell below zero and the snow piled up so high that subway lines were blocked or flooded, electricity wires short-circuited, and office workers came into Manhattan on skis.  All over midtown bag ladies and bag men carried bundles of possessions like the remnants of Paulus’s Sixth Army or huddled round warm air vents.  Some died and were later uncovered from snowdrifts.  Others threw themselves in front of subway trains. 

One homeless person climbed into the polar bear enclave in Prospect Park Zoo and offered himself as dinner to its inhabitants – an invitation that the bears unhesitatingly accepted.  Once I entered the subway outside Bloomingdales and found about twenty vagrants kneeling and sitting around in the cold, while commuters hurried guiltily past them. 

In the summer the street filled up with dealers and junkies, with Hispanic girls in cut-off jeans dancing to their radios, and old men playing cards and dominoes. Almost every week someone would set fire to one of the cars that were routinely dumped in the street, leaving burned out shells that remained there for weeks.   The mood of that summer was beautifully captured by Grandmaster Flash and His Furious Five’s epic The Message, which blared from almost every radio in the neighbourhood:

               Don't push me
              'Cause I'm close to the edge
               I'm trying not to lose my head
               Ah-huh-huh-huh
               It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder
               How I keep from going under

In the hot weather our tenants’ association sporadically tried to work on the house and keep unwanted intruders away from our abandoned storefront, but it felt like a lost cause. One night we held a meeting on the rooftop with two members of a motorcycle gang called the Newcomers who wanted to use the storefront as a garage. 

When we queried whether this was the optimum use of this space, one of the bikers suddenly exclaimed “This is bullshit, man!”  The biker went on to explain that he and his friends were Vietnam vets who had once been granted carte blanche by the police to use automatic weapons to clear a drug gang from their neighbourhood, and that they would do with the storefront whatever they saw fit.   

There was no arguing with that. Nor was there much we could say to the Hispanic dealer called Gabriel who stood outside on the corner of 11th and B most days with his shirt off and a knife in his belt. He told us that he was going to take our storefront and that he would decapitate, stab, or shoot anyone who tried to stop him.  

In the spring of 1982, a balding, fat middle-aged white guy named Mickey Cesar who looked like a degenerate Santa Claus expressed interest in the storefront.  Mickey described himself as a ‘Pope’, which should have set off warning signals.  It was not until he had moved into the gutted flat on the floor below mine that we learned that he really was the pope of an officially registered church called The Church of Realized Fantasies that worshipped marijuana and pleasure.   

One afternoon Mickey came into my flat and explained that he intended to use the house to set up New York’s first ever phone-in dope delivery service.   He proudly showed me an old newspaper cutting which described how his father had once tried to get him certified.  He explained that he had been a millionaire drug dealer in Amsterdam, until one of his competitors shot him and forced him to leave the city.  Throughout his years in Holland, Mickey had sent his drug profits to his father, who kept them for himself. Though a psychiatric report eventually concluded that Mickey was not insane, he had not been able to prove that the money was his.

“Daddy kept it,” Mickey explained. “But not for long. He had an unfortunate domestic accident. Electrocuted himself while mowing the lawn. Seems the machine wasn’t wired properly. Came as quite a shock to the old boy.  Wages of sin, my dear. Of course, he’d cut me out of his will, but mother made a deal in the end – in return for security in her old age.”

Now the Pope was reconstructing his empire using a contingent of teenage boys from broken homes, orphanages, and the streets as bicycle couriers. The aim of all this, he explained, was not to get rich, but to flood the capitalist system with black money derived from drugs, weapons, paedophilia, pornography and other illegal services. 

By ‘breaking the bank’ with dirty money, the system would eventually implode, and anarchy would prevail.   When I remarked that this sounded insane, Mickey replied happily that madness was always close to genius.  Over the next few weeks, the Pope’s couriers came in and out of the house with their bicycles at all hours, responding to orders from the UN building in Midtown and other upmarket clients. 

Often, I would hear them having discussions about their deals or fantasising about a world where women did not exist and only men could procreate.  The Pope continued to pester the tenants’ association to allow his church to use the empty storefront, and we refused to concede.  It was the Pope who introduced us to a Maoist sect called the Revolutionary Communist Party, who asked if they could use our storefront as their base of operations for a civil insurrection that they called a ‘breakout’ in the Lower East Side on May 1. 

It would be understating it considerably to say that the RCP occupied a marginal position on the American left, with their fervent support for the Shining Path in Peru and their loathing of the Sandinistas, but we hoped that their presence might keep the Church of Realised Fantasies and the heroin dealers at bay for a while.   Even the dealers were impressed, as the RCP filled the storefront with leaflets and newspapers written in Spanish, English, Farsi, Swahili, and Arabic, and pinned up a street map of the Lower East Side dotted with coloured drawing pins indicating which schools, streets, and projects were to be targeted for revolutionary agitation.   

When we pointed out that some of these buildings were the centre of a million-dollar heroin trade, an RCP cadre named Frank dismissed these ‘bourgeois cosmopolitan’ objections and insisted that they could handle a ‘few lumpen’.  Another comrade explained that the exiled party chairman Comrade Bob Avakian had given orders to proceed with the May 1st breakout, on the basis of a precise Leninist analysis of the current balance of class forces at a local level. 

I was surprised that Comrade Bob was able to analyse the Lower East Side from France.  All this seemed rather comical, until a female RCP member was found dead at the bottom of a lift shaft in an abandoned building on 6th Street and Avenue D where she had been distributing leaflets. It wasn’t clear whether she had fallen or been pushed, but the RCP immediately hailed her as a martyr and claimed that she had been assassinated by the CIA.  

Despite this pointless tragedy, on May 1st, the RCP marched through the Lower East Side with a megaphone proclaiming, “We’re not Americans, we’re proletarians!” before the ‘breakout’ petered out into a small demonstration whose only participants were members of the RCP itself.    

Throughout the summer of 1982 dealers continued to bear down on the storefront, breaking windows, smashing the locks on the front door, and selling heroin in front of our noses.  One day a dealer named Shorty came into the building and began banging on the stairwell with a baseball bat as he announced that his heroin had been stolen from the front entrance.  All the tenants were summoned into the Pope’s flat, where a dealer called Cool pointed a gun at my head and demanded to know what had happened to his smack. 

I sensed that the endgame was approaching, and I moved out of East 11th Street into a flat in Spanish Harlem with a friend.  It didn’t seem like the best decision, when we came back from a celebratory meal to find that our new flat had been set on fire by members of the Moonies cult, who had apparently confused us for someone else.  A few weeks later I passed by the old ‘homestead’ on 11th Street to discover that the Pope had been shot in the stomach by a rival dealer, and the building had been overrun by Gabriel’s gang, who had trashed every apartment in the house.  It was all very Assault on Precinct 13, and I felt lucky that I only had to endure a half-burned flat with a piece of plywood over the window.

Today 546 East 11th is advertised by real estate agents as a ‘boutique pre-war walk-up’ where an individual penthouse with a ‘rooftop oasis’ can be had for $775,000 dollars.  Few of the residents will be aware that a ‘communal marijuana sex church’ once used their building to sell dope to the United Nations, that its ‘pope’ survived his shooting and was subsequently arrested various times, before dying of liver cancer in 1995.   All that belongs to a lost chapter in the history of the Lower East Side, to which I once had a ringside seat.

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Gaza

I had thought, watching the Democratic National Convention unfold this week, that I would write a piece about the near-miraculous transformation of the Democratic Party into an electoral machine that now has a fighting chance of defeating MAGA extremism in November, and confining Donald Trump to the rubbish heap of history.

I would like to have written about Kamala Harris’s astonishing metamorphosis into Trump’s potential nemesis; about the all-round decency of Tim Walz and his family; about Michelle Obama’s imperious oratory; Elizabeth Warren’s heartfelt speech, or the lucid eloquence, humanity and intelligence of Pete Buttigieg.

All these things were on display last week, and in an era like ours, when the nationalist-populist right galvanizes anger, bitterness, fear and paranoia in pursuit of its destructive political agendas, it was thrilling to see despair turn to hope and belief, to witness politicians and party commit to a different vision of America than the one that Trump and his minions are proposing.

When they fight they win, and I hope the Democrats do win a crushing victory in November, because America and the world needs Trump and Trumpism gone. But beyond the feelgood atmosphere and the hopeful vibes, there was a spectre haunting the feast that cannot and should not be ignored.

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Gaza was not present in Chicago, except as a marginalised protest movement. The Palestinians and their supporters were effectively locked out of the convention, to the point when not even a single Palestinian speaker was allowed to address it. This was clearly a political decision from the party leadership, based on the calculation that Palestinian voices would be divisive and disadvantageous.

But even if the new revitalised party of Harris and Walz prefers to ignore it, Gaza was an absent presence on the fringes of the Chicago feast; bloody, battered, traumatised, starved, homeless, bombed from pillar to post, and somehow surviving this ongoing, daily massacre in the war that never ends.

No wonder the Democrats wanted Gaza locked out.

Consider the scale of the devastation. In December last year, Scientists for Global Responsibility estimated that Israel was dropping about 1,200 bombs a day on Gaza - 50 bombs every hour. That same month, the historian of bombing Robert Pape, predicted that Gaza would go down as ‘one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns’, with a rate of destruction comparable to the wartime bombing of Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg

So far, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 40,334 people are known to have been killed in Gaza - about 1.7% of the 2.3 million population of the territory. These figures include 25,000 women and children, but do not include the estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the rubble. Using ‘indirect death’ estimates that it once applied to the Iraq War, the Lancet has estimated that the death toll may rise to 186,000 - 7.9% of the population - due to ‘reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases’.

In the 48 hours before I began writing this piece, Israel killed 69 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 212. Over 100,000 Gazans have been wounded, of whom thousands have lost limbs, including 1,000 children who have had one or both legs amputated.

Today, more than 83 % of the population has been de placed, 59.3% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, and only 13 out of 36 hospitals are partly functional. All this has taken place in a tiny territory of 141 square miles about the same size as Sheffield, with the support of the same governments that once set out to implement ‘regime change’ across the world against ‘dictators who attack their own people.’

If Gaza is a genocide, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has said it might be, then it is a liberal, democratic genocide which has been sanctioned - whether reluctantly or otherwise - by a broad political and media consensus that reaches from Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden to Simon Schama, Tracy Ann Oberman and Tommy Robinson.

When people ask how genocides happen, this is how they happen.

It’s not complicated. You merely have to strip the humanity of an entire group of people, or lower the value of their lives, until you can do whatever you want to do to them and no one will oppose it.

If anyone dares to differ, and criticise this monstrous slaughter, you invoke magic words like ‘Hamas’ and ‘terrorist’ to erase the humanity of the Palestinians. You cry ‘antisemite’ to de-legitimise your critics - any critics. You use the atrocities carried out by your enemies to justify the even greater atrocities committed by your own side.

And very quickly, it becomes entirely logical and inevitable that two million all but defenceless people should be bombed day after day, month after month, in a display of force that is as strategically nonsensical as it is savage and immoral.

Many of these bombs were American bombs - liberal, democratic bombs delivered to a liberal, democratic country to enable it to ‘defend itself’ against a people it has occupied and oppressed for nearly sixty years.

JDAM guidance systems; 4,000 and 2,000 pound bombs; tank shells; components for 155 mm artillery shells; bunker busters; precision-guided munitions, combat aircraft - all these weapons have been transferred to Israel and used in Gaza. Even when the US itself believes that Israel has been violating international humanitarian law with the weapons that it had provided, it has not stopped sending them.

This month the Biden government approved $20bn in arms transfers in anticipation of war with Iran and Hezbollah. This not something that you want to talk about when nominating your presidential candidate. But when I watched the moving three-minute tribute to Joe Biden, I could not help thinking of these bombs.

I thought of Zaheeda, Tariq, Ahmed Abdullah and Mr T, and all the other Palestinians I once knew in Gaza back in the eighties. I thought of the grandmother I met during the first Intifada who once told me that Palestinians would continue to resist even if they had to eat leaves and drink the water from muddy pools.

I wondered, as I have done many times these last ten months, what happened to them, and whether they, their children and grandchildren, have survived this catastrophe.

I don’t think Biden is a bad man. But cruel and evil actions are not carried out by men with horns and tails. Geopolitics follows its own remorseless and pitiless logic that demands stronger and braver people than Biden to challenge the consensus - particularly the consensus that surrounds America’s death-embrace with Israel.

In her speech last week, Kamala Harris promised:

I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7th, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

I don’t defend what Hamas did in October. Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity that day, and unforgivably exposed its population to a war of annihilation, for the sake of a display of performative militarism that was designed to provoke the response it received.

But this banal recitation of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ does not even begin to address the imbalance between occupier and occupied within that equation, and the years of oppression and injustice that preceded October 7th - including the US’s own calamitous role in it. Nor does it question the disproportionate nature of Israel’s response to what happened on that day.

This is what Harris had to say about that response:

At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.

These are weasel words. The ‘scale of suffering’ is indeed heartbreaking and devastating, but it’s not the result of an earthquake or a hurricane. Israel is causing that suffering. And expressions of concern don’t mean much when your government is supplying much of the weaponry responsible for it.

Nor is there any sign that this suffering will end. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was planning to divide Gaza into ‘geographical “islands” or “bubbles” where Palestinians who are unconnected to Hamas can live in temporary shelter while the Israeli military mops up remaining insurgents.’

In these ‘bubbles, ‘ the WSJ suggested:

Palestinian civilians could be confined indefinitely to smaller areas of the Gaza Strip while fighting continues outside, and …Israel’s army could be forced to remain deeply involved in the enclave for years until Hamas is marginalized.

Other Israeli plans for post-war Gaza include hiring a network of local clans to control the strip, re-establishing settlements, and reinstating the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority.

How can the Palestinians obtain ‘dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination’ in these circumstances?

What form will self-determination take if settlers continue to run amok in the West Bank, and the US and Israel decide what kind of government the Palestinians will have? If Israel, the occupying power, must feel ‘secure’, what security does the occupied population deserve? Do the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, or is it only the occupier that has the right to defend itself?

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How, if Palestinians are even allowed to remain in Gaza, will they rebuild their schools, their hospitals and neighbourhoods? How will they make a living? Who will treat the wounded, the amputees, and the traumatized?

So many questions.

I didn’t expect Harris or any other Democrat to answer or even raise them in a forum like this. But nothing in her speech, beyond her commitment to a ceasefire, suggests that a Democratic government will do anything to address them in the future.

At present, she remains in Tony Blinken’s handwringing world - wedded to a policy that is a moral stain on her government’s reputation - a policy of geopolitical idiocy that is paving the way for regional war.

I still hope Harris wins. I don’t see what is accomplished by standing back and allowing a man to win who would be so much worse, not only for Gaza and the Palestinians, but for America and the wider world.

The Democratic Party may have found itself again, but the bombs are still falling on Gaza, sent by the government that is now in power. These bombs may be accompanied by expressions of concern for those on the receiving end, but they will continue falling until the United States stops sending them.

And if Kamala Harris becomes president, and really wants the Palestinians to have dignity and freedom, then her government will have to do so much better, and be so much braver, than her speech suggests.

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