Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 245

Apartheid - a few notes on the use of this word

‘Richard’ says he doesn’t understand my ‘lack of acceptance of the analogy with apartheid S[outh A[frica]' adding that he 'would have thought that there were many points of similarity between the two situations. Perhaps I just don't know enough about either.’

 

Well, it’s gracious of him to accept that he may not know enough about either.

 

But here’s a checklist to help him and others decide.

 

Grand Apartheid, as put into force by a series of National Party governments in South Africa after 1948 (and eventually dismantled by stages in the 1980s) legally classified citizens of South Africa according to the colour of their skin.

 

Treatment of those in the ‘White ‘classification was legally different from that of other colours.

It formally restricted entry into certain parts of major cities, especially by night, restricted employment opportunities, educational opportunities, access to state employment in privileged positions and of course the right to vote. It also governed, by law,  which part of the train you sat in, which buses you rode in, which hotels, restaurants, beaches, park benches, public lavatories etc., which you were permitted to use. The whole thing was based on an openly-avowed belief that there were different ‘races’ and that they deserved different sorts of treatment.

 

No laws of this kind exist, or ever have existed,  in Israel. Nor is there any such belief. Zionism, which was transformed from a minor and insignificant thing into an important current of thought by the Kishinyev pogroms of 1903 and 1905,  but took on the scale of an international movement after the National Socialist anti-Jewish persecutions began in Germany in 1933, was a reluctant admission by assimilated European Jews that they could never attain acceptance. It was absolutely not a religious movement (and is opposed to this day by many religious Jews, in Israel and outside it). It is based, if you like, on the racial bigotry of those who hate Jews, and who have insisted on a distinction many Jews would prefer not to make. It might be summed up as ‘You say we’re different, and don’t belong in your nation. Very well then, we’ll have a nation of our own’. Ultimately, the definition of who is a Jew in these circumstances can be summed up as ‘someone someone else thinks is a Jew, and might at some point want to persecute for it’.  As many Germans and other Europeans found out between 1933 and 1945, it didn’t matter whether they thought they were Jews or not, or whether they followed Jewish religious practices or not. This was taken to its ultimate conclusion in the seizure from her Dutch convent in 1942, and subsequent murder in Auschwitz,  of the Roman Catholic theologian and Carmelite nun, Edith Stein.  If the German state thought they were Jews, then they were first made miserable, then murdered.

 

This defensive and reluctant self-classification as a people needing special refuge from future persecution (based on hard experience of past persecution) is in my view very different from the assumed and imposed superiority of the South African white minority.

 

 

Arab citizens of Israel face no formal, legal bars to work, housing, public buildings, beaches, or any other public facilities. Informal systems of discrimination certainly exist, largely because most Arabs do not serve in the Israeli armed forces and thus are disqualified from many jobs and opportunities open to those who do. But similar exclusions operate against Christian Arabs in the territories governed by the Palestinian Authority. They are severely discriminated against, especially in the legal system, and rarely if ever are given jobs in the police or other important and powerful state bodies.  Jews also face legal discrimination in Syria, where they must carry special identity documents. I am not sure of the current law, but I believe that for some years Jews were not even allowed to live in Jordan, and I doubt if the intended Palestinian State will encourage Jewish residents.  In  many Arab countries, the remaining Jews were violently expelled after 1948, but if they remained they would have faced all kinds of informal discrimination, as Christian Arabs currently do, and as Christians face in Turkey.  

 

The only real parallel with the South African system was the open and legally enforced segregation which existed in the Southern states of the USA before Civil Rights. But, as in post-apartheid South Africa, racial discrimination also continues to exist in post-segregation America. Most cities, very much including Washington DC,  still maintain an informal boundary between white and black housing. Schools remain largely segregated in fact, if not by law. 

 

The boundary can be crossed by money. The same is true in post-Apartheid South Africa. I might say that prosperous, religiously-relaxed Israeli Arabs also live alongside Israeli Jews in certain areas of Tel Aviv.  The apartheid state specifically forbade this sort of mixing.

 

The great majority of South African blacks remain impoverished, badly-educated, stuck in badly-paid employment or jobless, and badly housed. The main difference now is that wealthy black citizens can climb over the barrier, when previously they could not do so.

 

Laws governing the movement and employment of citizens of the West Bank have become oppressive in the last 30 years, though they were originally much less so. The reason for this (and I believe it is a reason, not a pretext), is an attempt to reduce the repeated attacks on Israeli cities by Arabs with concealed weapons and bombs. It is not any kind of Israeli desire to segregate for its own sake, such as the South African state had. In fact, I think it true to say that until the original Arab ‘intifada’ (uprising), which followed after the decisive defeat of Arab armies in 1973, travel and contact between Arab and Jew in Israel and the West Bank was free and unhindered, and large numbers of Arabs worked in Israel.

 

The final point is this. The Apartheid system, though it allowed a measure of press freedom and parliamentary criticism, was fundamentally intolerant of opposition and lacked constitutional protections. Parliament was entirely white-skinned, as was the Judiciary.  This is simply not true of Israel.

 

If you are going to describe the Israeli system (which is of course faulty in many ways, as my previous article pointed out in some detail) as ‘apartheid’, then you will find that, in all justice, you have to apply the same term to many other societies which, for one reason or another, practise informal discrimination either intentionally, or as a by-product of another policy which may or may not have a disguised intention to discriminate. If you aren’t prepared to do that, then I have to ask again why your criticisms are reserved for the world’s only Jewish state.  I think a level-headed debate would avoid such propaganda.

Midwich Revisited

A few months ago I mentioned my liking for the novels and short stories of John Wyndham, and have now at last got round to re-reading his ‘Midwich Cuckoos’, (made into a film rather melodramatically called ‘The Village of the Damned’ which I have yet to see – and later there was a remake which I don’t wish to see). This is  in many ways my favourite among his longer books. I can’t recall how long it is since I last read it, but I was struck this time by one wholly unexpected way in which it has dated. PLOT SPOILER WARNING – do not read on if you do not want to have the plot revealed.

 

This shows in the huge amount of the book which is devoted to the reaction of many of the women involved to the fact that they have become pregnant outside wedlock. Some are very young. One is pretty plainly meant to be half of a lesbian couple, though the word is never used.  All but the married are deeply embarrassed and ashamed of their condition. The local vicar, aided by the doctor, have to work very hard to persuade them (and the village) to accept that their condition, not being their fault, should not be a matter of shame.

 

And yet this story is set in what are, more or less, modern times – the post-1945 age of the welfare state, telephones, broadcasting, jet planes and nuclear weapons.

 

The central event of the book is the mysterious isolation of the village, in an invisible dome-shaped force-field in which all living terrestrial creatures instantly lose consciousness.  Aerial pictures, taken at great risk from a considerable height, reveal a large egg-shaped presence in the middle of the dull, uneventful village of Midwich.  After a short period, the force field vanishes, and the object vanishes with it (leaving nothing more than a slight depression in the grass). Not long afterwards, all the fertile woman in the village are found to be pregnant. The resulting babies are strangely beautiful and largely indistinguishable from each other (though some are girls and some boys) . they rapidly reveal that they have extraordinary pwers over the human mind, powers which enable them to compel their mothers (for instance) to bring them back to the village from far away and are later used for much more sinister and frightening purposes.

 

But before we can get on with the main part of the story, the village has to overcome the moral and cultural shock of this mass outbreak of illegitimacy. Many, many pages are devoted to this. One couple, on the verge of marriage, are hugely distressed by the event. The vicar plays a major part in dealing with it.  Now, roughly 60 years later, I think  this would be the least of the village’s problems. The authorities of those times are plausibly shown as seeking to suppress the strange news, and successfully doing so. That, also, would be impossible now.

 

I like the book partly because of its portrait of English middle-class village existence in the early 1950s, which reminds me agreeably of bits of my own childhood, a few years later,  on the edge of Dartmoor, where we had no visitations from aliens but where many of the attitudes and mannerisms were similar to those described by Wyndham. He likes (as I have mentioned once before) to begin in fairly ordinary places and activities, among intelligent middle-class people, and to lead the  reader gradually into terrifying speculations on what really holds our society together, and on what we really believe.

 

The book also impelled me to look up the truth about the actual Cuckoo. Like millions of people, I had grown up in the vague belief that this bird lays its eggs in the nests of others, where its monstrous offspring first turfs out the other eggs and chicks, and then demands that the bereaved mother of its victim feeds it until it grows big enough to fly away and perpetuate its nasty self.

 

I suddenly wondered if this was one of those legends, like the untrue belief that lemmings commit mass suicide ( see this http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp). But no, the story of the Cuckoo is perfectly true, and rather disturbing.

 

And the parallel in this case, of human cuckoos, is actively terrifying once the implications become clear. Without giving away too much, I should mention that the Midwich Colony is not the only such visitation on the planet. There are several. But wherever they take place in ‘primitive’ societies, the reaction of the local menfolk is simple and savage. The babies (and in some cases their mothers) are immediately slaughtered, and so never grow enough to exercise their powers. It is only in the advanced countries that the golden-eyed children are allowed to grow.

 

 

You will have to read it to find out how the ‘advanced’ societies deal with their Human Cuckoos.

 

This book, together with ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Kraken Wakes’, offers a cold-eyed exploration of what actually lies beneath our comfortable society, and of what nice, well-mannered professional middle-class people can do, when the old rules are suddenly cancelled. He is also good on the way in which people find the obvious very difficult to believe, when it conflicts with their prejudices and assumptions – and of the disadvantages, and advantages, of seeing clearly while others delude themselves. He also has a wonderful way of concocting plausible ways in which these great global melodramas begin - small-scale, credible and yet profoundly disturbing. He uses no tricks of language or form, just good, workmanlike prose.

 

I am always surprised that there is not more of a cult surrounding Wyndham (who was also fascinated by the possible outcome of feminism, and wrote intelligently and disturbingly about time-shifts in his short stories). He really rather deserves one. 

 

For those weho haven't yet been there, a visit to Midwich is recommended. I fear that, since Dr Beeching it is hard to get there by rail, but the buses still run from Trayne to Stouch and Oppley. Except on the (very) odd days when they mysteriously don't get there at all.

So, 'Anti-Zionists', what is it about the world's only Jewish state which provokes your unique, selective outrage?

A few responses. I am well aware that RT is an organ of the Russian State. I think everyone is aware of this. I wouldn’t watch it for coverage of events in Russia. But I think it provides an interesting contrast to the coverage of the ‘western’ news networks, especially on matters such as the Syrian conflict, where the BBC has become a supporter of intervention (Its World Service arm has always been a state-sponsored outfit, though it used to be much more scrupulous than it is now in avoiding partiality, and the BBC as a whole now has an unusual concentration of Blairite liberal interventionists in its editorial ranks).  The behaviour of non-state TV stations is harder to understand, though I think it has much to do with the absurdly simple friend-and-foe narratives which ill-informed reporters are forced to follow by the crude ratings-boosting demands of TV news. They are anxious to get on the top of the bulletin wearing body-armour and with a  backdrop of romantic ‘fighters’ shooting lead into the sky (this moronic action should really be discouraged by broadcasters. The bullets all too often kill or injure innocent people as they fall).

 

I am really a newspaper reader, and a radio listener. I can’t concentrate on the modern style of TV news, which seems to have been designed for a different species, and takes a great deal of time to tell a tendentious and inadequate story rather badly.  Imagine how much better off you would have been if you had spent that time in reading. I am delighted to be a dinosaur from another age, and have always read several newspapers a day to try to ensure that I get something like the full picture. If you want a stern assessment of anybody or anything, you don’t ask a close friend or supporter. So, watch a TV station, or read a newspaper, which dislikes the country or the party or the institution about which you want to be well-informed. It’s the BBC’s unwillingness to attack liberal ideas and people, not its loathing for conservatives, that makes it so biased.

 

On the question of Israel, I am not going to say that being attacked by both sides shows I have got it about right. This is not necessarily true. You could be attacked by both sides precisely because you were hopelessly wrong.

 

In this case, I was attacked by both sides because my position is uncomfortable for anyone who takes an ideological position on this. Hardly any of my critics actually addressed my argument, which is that a utopian pursuit of an ideal ‘solution’ to the Israel-Arab conflict will only lead to blood, funerals and weeping.

 

Some years ago, I wrote a longer and more detailed exposition of this position here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/06/the_twostate_de_1.html

 

This followed a visit I’d made , described in this MoS article from 17th June 2007, which I’ll reproduce in full because I can’t seem to find a working link to the original:

 

‘Could this be the way the Middle East conflict ends, not with a mushroom cloud or a peace deal but with the slow disappearance of the Jewish state? It seems a real possibility.

 

Israel must cope with two far deeper dangers than Iran's amateur atom bomb, or even unending waves of suicide bombers.

 

Those perils come instead from maternity wards, where Arabs are slowly winning a long-distance population race with Jews – and from Israel's own foolishly forgotten Arab people, finally beginning to pump up their political muscle.

 

One sign of the way things are going is that in Israel itself – not even counting the occupied Arab zones of the West Bank and Gaza – the most popular boy's name is now Muhammad. There are also quite a few Vladimirs, thanks to the arrival during the last days of the Soviet Union of nearly one million not-very-Jewish Russians, with very few questions asked.

 

As many as 500,000 of these – experts disagree on how big the problem is – are either not Jewish at all, nothing in particular, or actively Christian.

 

Recently, to the annoyance of Orthodox Jews, several hundred Russian recruits to the Israeli army insisted on swearing their oath of allegiance on the Christian New Testament alone. Russian is an unofficial third language, and there is even a Russian TV station, though (madly) there is not one for Arabs.

 

Abstemious, kosher-observing Israelis have had to get used to having large numbers of Slav neighbours who cannot be persuaded to give up pork sausage or vodka, or even to be discreet about guzzling them. Russian-language bookshops have even been discovered selling neo-Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

 

The Israeli Arabs, meanwhile, have begun to ask why – if they are a fifth of the population – they must salute a wholly Jewish flag or stand to attention for a wholly Jewish national anthem, or vote for Jewish political leaders, or support an immigration policy that favours Jews and blocks the borders to Arabs.

 

Their leaders have issued a new manifesto demanding deep change, and wise Israelis are trying – quite possibly too late – to give it to them. One Arab Israeli said gloomily to me that while the first and second intifadas (Arab uprisings) had been in the West Bank and Gaza,'the third intifada will be on the streets of Nazareth and Jaffa, right inside Israel itself'.

 

If he is right, then there is no end to the misery. Israel's Arabs are here, and not going away. If their discontent were to turn to anger, if their leaders were to urge them on the streets, there is no saying where things might end.

 

It is, of course, unthinkable. But then, not so long ago, the appalling violence of the Occupied Territories was also in an unknown future.

 

I have been coming here for more than 20 years, and the shabby, semi-socialist, idealist Israel of those days has been buried under a layer of shiny new wealth and apparent confidence in a settled future.

 

Motorways, mirror-glass office blocks and billionaire suburbs have made the Tel Aviv coastal strip look as complacent, secular and secure as California.

 

There is a great gulf between the Americanised shore-dwellers and the determined religious Jews who increasingly dominate Jerusalem, believing – with history on their side – that bad things happen to the Jewish people when they neglect their faith.

 

Brainy, drily witty politicians – some ex-terrorists, some war criminals, some genuine warriors – have been replaced by dud mediocrities burbling cliches and slogans and almost all under investigation for one grubby thing or another.

 

In the same period the unattainable fantasy of peace with the Arab world has come, proved to be a false hope, and gone. As a result a chilly cynicism has hardened the hearts of all but an unrealistic few.

 

The open civil war among Arabs in Gaza is an illustration of the old saying that the most savage quarrels arise over the smallest stakes. For control of this suppurating slum, grown men murder each other for belonging to the wrong gang and throw fellow creatures to their deaths from high buildings.

 

Who can now seriously believe that a Palestinian state would do any good for its inhabitants, or remove a threat from Israel's borders?

 

So – since things cannot continue like this for ever – what is going to give? It is 40 years since the Six-Day War squelched Arab dreams of crushing Israel by force, nearly as long since the 1973 war proved the point again.

 

The alternative Arab strategy, of undermining the Jewish state by riot and bomb, maddening it into stupid, self-destructive retaliation, seems to have ended too – with the incredibly costly decision to build a great barricade between Jew and Arab.

 

The monstrous, ugly thing curves across the rocky hills of the Holy Land, a shocking and distressing sight. I don't dispute the argument for it. It is a rather civilised response to the repeated horrors of suicide bombing. It simply isn't, as its critics claim, a new Berlin Wall – that kept people in.

 

But, looking across it from Arab olive groves to smart Jewish suburbs, it occurs to me that this must be the greatest and most costly human barricade since the Great Wall of China, and that it will one day be a puzzling ruin, just like the Great Wall, though less picturesque.

 

It cannot possibly last. No country can afford to maintain such a defence for long. All its enemies need to do is wait for Israeli will to wilt and fail. And then, in the increasingly realistic dreams of the cleverer Arabs, will come a 'Joint Palestinian State' in which Jews will be a minority and the great Zionist project will be at an end.

 

The wall is a reminder that the Jewish State, or 'the Zionist Entity', as its many enemies call it, exists in defiance of the law of gravity. Only thanks to exceptional determination, exceptional valour, exceptional nerve, exceptional stubbornness, has Israel managed to survive at all. And now?

 

Thanks to exceptional ineptitude, Israel has lost, probably for ever, another even more important war, the war of the TV screen. Maybe it was lost from the start. Nobody in Israel likes to mention the fact that this country is, in many ways, the last Western colony. As such, it came at least a century too late.

 

Australia and New Zealand just got away with seizing their territory from people who were there before. And America's crushing and displacement of its native peoples is so long ago that it is now accepted as a kind of romantic legend.

 

But Israel's attempt to shove the Arabs out of the way was made in the era of the United Nations, of anticolonial campaigns, of political correctness and of 24-hour TV news and its greedy appetite for manufactured, self-indulgent pity.

 

And the great stage army of the good, who polish their consciences by attacking the misdeeds of others abroad, have now chosen Israel as their main hate-object.

 

This is not because it is specially bad in the league of wicked nations. It is because it is an easy, sensitive target – which, unlike Burma or China or Iran, freely allows journalists to operate on its territory.

 

A country that once lived by good public relations – plucky little Israel defies the Arab hordes – is now likely to perish thanks to bad public relations: brutal Israel persecutes the poor Palestinians.

 

And I think it is now possible to see how that slow death may happen. I should add at this point that what I write here does not please me. I happen to think Israel is in many ways a noble enterprise, worth defending and supporting, and that Israel's fashionable enemies in the West have allied themselves with some of the nastiest and most bigoted forces now loose in the world.

 

If the 'anti-Zionists' were really concerned about the fate of the Palestinian refugees, as they claim to be, then they have utterly failed, since the refugees' misery is greater than ever after 30 years of 'solidarity'.

 

But reason has little to do with this. In modern TV democracies, while you're explaining, you're losing. And Israel's explanations are brushed aside in the self-righteousness of Western condemnation. The wholly false idea that Israel is another South Africa, a country founded on racial bigotry, is being spread – by respectable people such as former President Jimmy Carter.

 

Even more insidious are the whispered insinuations that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is not much different from the Nazi treatment of the Jews.

 

Many people believe this stuff, perhaps tired of being guilty about the Holocaust and wanting an excuse to stop. This is not the place to argue with it, always assuming facts and logic would do any good. I simply mention it as a reason to believe that this is a country in serious trouble, that cannot long survive as it is. First comes the demographic problem. In the area of Israel and the Occupied Territories together, there are nearly 1 1 million people: about 6.5million in Israel, of which 1.25 million are Arabs, and almost four million in the Occupied Territories.

 

That means that only half of Israel's population is Jewish. If Israel cannot find some way of making the territories independent, it will either have to rule them with the sword or grant them civil rights, losing its Jewish majority. But even inside Israel, the non-Jews are breeding faster, so that some sensitive parts of the country may soon be as Arab as they are Jewish. Jerusalem, Israel's capital, may have an Arab majority by 2040. And elsewhere, too, the balance is shifting most significantly.

 

I went to Beersheba in the south, on the edge of the Negev desert. Here, a once-tiny population of Bedouin Arabs has grown hugely, so that Arabs are expected to be the majority in that region by 2020. And it will be an angry majority. There I visited a Bedouin 'unrecognised village', a place so nasty that it is hard to believe it is in the same country as Tel Aviv.

 

The service entrance to Hell must be something like this. On one side the two squat chimneys of a power station poke above the sandy hills. On the other a chemical factory exhales nameless filth into the hot sky. A few melancholy camels stand about waiting to be milked (or eaten), and flocks of sheep hunt for rare blades of grass.

 

The village, in reality a scattered, untidy archipelago of sordid, cramped hutments and tents, is crisscrossed by power-lines but has no mains electricity. Water is supplied via a feeble one-inch pipe, for several hundred people.

 

Ibrahim al Afash, the village headman, tells me an immensely long story of injustice, unfairness and mistreatment stretching back almost 60 years, before pausing for prayers in a Spartan mosque made of corrugated iron.

 

His complaint is made worse by the fact that the Bedouin Arabs, unlike their city-dwelling brothers, served willingly in the Israeli army.

 

They mostly do not do so any more.

 

The old man, who looks strikingly like Osama Bin Laden, said: 'I served in the army. They told me that if I did so I would receive all the rights given to any other Israeli. I did not receive a single one of those rights. My children saw this and drew their own conclusions.' Actually, while most Israelis concede that the Bedouin have been foolishly mistreated, it is not that simple. Here, unlike in any Arab country, a Bedouin gets a real vote in a contested election and has freedom of speech and thought. A minority of Bedouins live a great deal better in 'recognised villages', though nothing like as many as should do.

 

But this is the general problem of Israeli Arabs. By Arab standards they are well off.

 

By Israeli standards they are abominably mistreated. Some Israeli Arabs told me in private that of course they would not want to live in an Arab country, let alone in the West Bank or Gaza.

 

A plan to shift the border so a group of Arab towns in central Israel could be switched to Palestinian control was rejected with haggard horror by Arab leaders in Israel. They all ritually praise the Palestinian cause, but none wishes to live under its lawless rule.

 

One Arab journalist told me he had been asked by friends in the West Bank if he knew how to get them Israeli passports.

 

Meanwhile, after years of foot-dragging, Israel has finally begun to treat at least some of its Arabs as equals. Recently a Muslim Arab, Ra'leb Majadleh, became – as Minister of Science – the first Arab member of an Israeli government.

 

The Israeli flag stands in the corner of his office. He greets suggestions that there is anything strange about his appointment by retorting: 'Why should it be? Does my being a member of a Jewish and Zionist party [he belongs to Labour] make me a Jew or a Zionist?' He remains an Arab and a Muslim.

 

And, he jokes: 'I pray more now than I used to before I was a Minister.' More seriously, he adds: 'And I have not given up my Arabness, either.' Just before we met, a Labour primary had chosen Ehud Barak as the party's new leader – and Arab votes had been decisive in Barak's narrow victory.

 

Another example of the new mood is the appointment to Israel's diplomatic service of Rania Joubran, a 26-year-old Christian Arab, a minority of a minority.

 

Rania, whose father just happens to be the first Arab in the Israeli Supreme Court, is privately educated and hardly typical of the Arab masses.

 

The Israeli government is plainly pleased to be able to show her off, and she effortlessly fends off questions about divided loyalties, insisting her selection will serve the greater cause of peace. I shall be surprised if she is not a full ambassador fairly soon.

 

But she still faces grave problems of loyalty and allegiance. She candidly admits she cannot sing the National Anthem, and has never learned it. At a recent public ceremony she stood in silence as others sang it around her. She has asked that she not be sent to Arab countries, where she would be pestered with constant questions about whether she had let down her people.

 

She is Israeli in a particular way.

 

She recalls the feeling of shared danger when her brother's home in the northern city of Haifa was within range of Hezbollah rockets (which killed several Arab Israelis) last summer.

 

She has already experienced the bafflement that many feel over the very existence of Arab Israelis, and of Arab Christians.

 

Many of her Foreign Ministry colleagues had never before met an Arab of any kind, such is the barrier between the communities.

 

'People ask me why I don't wear anything on my head,' she laughs, 'and when I was abroad recently I was asked how I could be an Arab and a Christian, and one person wanted to know if I had any camels.' In fact, she is one of a new class of university-educated Arabs who live at ease alongside Jews, mostly in the giant, more anonymous city of Tel Aviv. Unlike many of her schoolfellows, she has not married or had children, a huge cultural break with normal Arab tradition.

 

The Israeli Arab radio presenter Iman Al Kassem, much loved by Arabs inside and outside Israel for her lively and controversial broadcasts, sums up their position well: 'We are stuck in the middle. We cannot leave Israel. It is our land, and our villages are our families. But we are also Palestinians, separated from our relatives by the war of 1948, when Israel was set up. I know of no other country where people are in such a situation.' Iman could easily be a Jewish Israeli. She dresses in Western clothes and speaks rapid Hebrew into her mobile. But she and Rania, as they both know and admit, are not typical.

 

Go to the mainly Arab city of Nazareth and you will see immediately how much poorer and shabbier the streets are than in Jewish towns. It is not, as one Arab acquaintance claimed, 'like Gaza', but the average Arab child can expect a worse education, more threadbare hopes and a general attitude that he doesn't belong. Some have responded by abandoning Western clothes and dressing like Osama Bin Laden, while their wives increasingly adopt the headscarf and the Muslim shroud.

 

And here lies the danger. The Arabs, at 1.25million, are 19 per cent of the Israeli population but have access to only seven per cent of the land. As their population increases that means the amount of land per Arab, already small, is expected to shrink by half. Many jobs are closed to Arabs on the grounds that they have not done military service.

 

University entrance is generally thought to be harder for Arabs. Their schools are more crowded and less well equipped. Arabic, although an official language, has second-class status. And while almost all Israeli Arabs speak Hebrew out of necessity, very few Israelis learn Arabic, even the basic Arabic needed for good manners.

 

A vision of what might have been can be found in the very basic Arab town of Sakhnin in the far north. Turn off the smooth main road, pass neat Israeli towns and you come down a steep valley into Sakhnin which – like so many Arab places in Israel – is instantly recognisable as greyer, more untidy, more economically depressed than its Jewish neighbours, and yet also more free and more wealthy than almost any Arab town in any Arab country.

 

But there is nothing depressed about Mazen Ghnaim, manager of the Sons of Sakhnin football team which won the Israeli FA Cup in 2004. Generally, I loathe football, but Mazen's glowing enthusiasm and delight illuminate his pleasant, friendly home – decorated by the cup, which he has somehow managed to hang on to.

 

The victory gave Israel's Arabs a giant, irrational moment of joy and triumph.

 

They finally belonged, they had beaten Jewish teams at their own game on their own ground, they had a right to respect.

 

He looks a little like the young Egyptian President Gamal Nasser as he recalls: 'The mood was indescribable. As we made our way homewards through the Arab part of Haifa, there were men and women in their 60s, dancing in the street at two o' clock in the morning. Everywhere we tried to go, the roads were blocked with cheering people. When we finally got back to Sakhnin, the crowds were so dense that we had to get out of the bus and walk the last three miles home.' Mazen also saw a political message: 'We are prepared to treat you as equals, if you are prepared to treat us as equals.' Many Jewish Israelis felt a similar wave of emotion, one describing it to me as 'like the pride an older brother feels for a younger brother's success'.

 

But the opportunity drained away with the euphoria, as a nation distracted by violence forgot its concerns at home, and the same old promises were broken in the same old way by the same old people.

 

Meanwhile, disillusionment and division grew among Israelis, with the children of several former leaders rumoured to have left for America, along with many thousands of more ordinary citizens who have given up on the Zionist dream and prefer life in the multicultural, post-modern West where nobody cares who is a Jew.

 

Here in Jerusalem, they still care like anything. And we shall have to care too, since the continued existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East is the central strategic quarrel of our time, around which the policies of the White House and of Islamic terrorism both revolve.

 

Largely thanks to the West's long, slow loss of nerve, and of the Western public's acceptance of only one side of a complicated story, it seems to me that Israel is in the process of losing that argument.

 

What remains to be seen is exactly how and when defeat will come, and what shape it will take.’

 

Oh, a footnote on one contributor’s suggestion that my defence of Israel’s faults could be used to defend South Africa. I don’t think this is so. South Africa’s formal system of legalised bigotry was unique in the world. It is true that many who condemned it did so from countries which had ( and in many cases still have) informal and unacknowledged racial discrimination on a large scale. It is also true that its most dogged opponents were Stalinist Communists who ignored the considerable racialism in the USSR, but saw South Africa as a strategic prize in the Cold War . But the honest conscientious person who objected to, and protested against, South Africa’s unique system of racial oppression did so for noble reasons, and would have objected to similar arrangements in any country. Israel’s undoubted faults ( and it is amusing to be accused of Zionist propaganda for an article in which I reference the Deir Yassin massacre and praise Benny Morris’s far from complimentary account of Israel’s conduct in 1948) are not unique, as I pointed out. Selective outrage is fake outrage, as I often say - a statement which no serious person can contradict. Those who raise the temperature of the problem by selective condemnation, propaganda claims of ‘apartheid’ which are either dishonest or ignorant or both, must be asked, along the lines used by Mrs Merton ‘What is it about the only Jewish state in the world which arouses your selective, special and unique hostility?’

 

You may be sure they will not answer.  

Shoulder to Shoulder, or Cynical Calculation? The US-UK relationship

The supposed ‘Special Relationship’ between Britain and the USA continues to fascinate me. This curiously unequal love-affair (if it can be so called) was supposedly forged during our Finest and/or Darkest Hour, in 1940.

 

It was during this period that Britain was stripped almost completely naked by the ‘cash and carry’ system under which we were allowed to buy war supplies, for hard cash only , from the USA before the later introduction of ‘Lend-Lease’. This was enforced under US neutrality laws (party framed in resentment at our failure to pay off our 1914-18 war debts to the USA).  

 

Lend-Lease’ was not introduced until Britain had shown, to the satisfaction of the US Congress, that she was bankrupt. This had many aspects. Lord Lothian, the (dying) British ambassador in Washington, said openly and bluntly to American reporters in November 1940 ‘ Boys, we’re broke – all we need now is your money’. It was true, too true, and too blunt,  which is why poor Lothian was reprimanded for saying it. Britain was in fact borrowing gold at this stage from the Czech government in exile, and even from the Belgians, just to keep going. British assets in the USA had to be pledged (and in one bitterly-remembered case, for which the company was later compensated by the British government after a court battle, the Courtaulds subsidiary American Viscose)  sold to American buyers at knock-down prices.

 

Secret convoys of warships, meanwhile, were hurrying across the Atlantic loaded down with Britain’s gold reserves, and packed with stacks of negotiable paper securities, ostensibly for fear these would fall into German hands, though perhaps the real purpose was to ease their sale. These arrived in Canada via Halifax, and were trans-shipped to the Bank of Canada (the gold) and a secret vault beneath an office building in Montreal (the securities). South African gold also made its way direct to North America, or via Australia. From Ottawa much of this bullion (perhaps all of it) made its way to Fort Knox, the USA’s   vast and overbearing bullion vaults in Kentucky. One calculation of the value of this bullion is (in modern terms) rather more than £26 billion, the Pound Sterling of 1940 being worth roughly 47 times as much as today’s feeble imitation.

 

How much of this, the accumulated savings of Britain over many decades, ever came back is not stated in the only book I’ve been able to find about the subject, Alfred Draper’s fascinating ‘Operation Fish’ (Cassell, 1979). The whole operation remained largely secret when he wrote it, and probably still does.

 

The book is written in an old-fashioned and optimistic style, very much imbued with the ‘shoulder to shoulder’ atmosphere of the time and the subsequent Anglo-American closeness which endured through the Cold War. But the bare fact, that the nation’s monetary heart was removed and physically shipped to the vaults of a rival, shines coldly through the narrative.

 

Using the 47:1 conversion rate, I’ll try to sum up what had happened in the opening months of the War of the Polish Guarantee, as the 1939-40 war between Britain and Germany should more accurately be called.

 

By November 1940 we had paid for all the war supplies we’d received from the USA – selling about £15 billion in American shares requisitioned from private owners in Britain, and paying out about $212 billion in cash. We had reserves of just $94 billion left in investments, which were not readily saleable.

 

As Draper puts it ‘Even if we divested ourselves of all our gold and foreign assets, we could not pay for half [of what] we had ordered, and the extension of the war made it necessary for us to have ten times as much’.

 

 

By January 1941, (I revert here to contemporary figures, as these are in US dollars rather than Sterling – the US dollar at this time was worth approximately five English shillings, that is to say one Pound would buy four Dollars).

 

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary spelt out the position to the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, Britain having by then been forced to open up its most closely-kept financial secrets to prove the depth of her need.

 

Some samples from this statement:

 

Britain’s current (January 1941) debt to US manufacturers - $1,400,000,000 (1941 values)

 

British total assets (including private holdings in dollars, gold and marketable securities) $2,167,000,000 – of which $1,811,000,000 were actually available for use. (1941 values)

 

Britain’s gold and dollar reserves had already dropped by $2,250,000,000 (1941 values)in the first sixteen months of the war. The war was now costing Britain $48,000,000 a day (1941 values) – the cost of the war was 60% of national income, much of which was being raised by crippling taxation.

 

Morgenthau told the sceptical senators that of course Britain had resources all over the world, but she could not  turn them into dollars, so they were of no use in buying weapons.

 

‘I am convinced’,  he told the Senators, ‘they have no dollar assets beyond those they have disclosed to me. Lacking a formula by which Great Britain can continue to buy supplies here, I think they will just have to stop fighting, that’s all’.

 

Thus the great act of generosity (‘This most generous act’ as Churchill publicly termed it) called Lend-Lease,  actually began with something very like a bankruptcy hearing.  The two houses of Congress would not have passed it otherwise( and it was a very close-run thing).  And when Lend-lease began, it was strictly limited to ensure that we could fight the war, but not use American aid to recover our lost economic strength, as Benn Steil makes clear in his important new book ‘The Battle of Bretton Woods’.

 

Also, it’s interesting to see just what an anti-British document the ‘Atlantic Charter’ of August 1941 was, though it was lauded at the time as the embodiment of supposed Anglo-American friendship, with sailors from both navies singing the same shared hymns as they gathered to celebrate its signing on the decks of majestic warships in Placentia Bay.

 

But article three, with its insistence on self-determination for all peoples, was aimed straight at British rule in India; article 4, with its hostility to trade barriers, was aimed at the British system of Imperial Preference, article 7, with its insistence on ‘freedom of the seas’ would greatly constrain the future activities of the Royal Navy. Much of the rest of it is pregnant with the kind of social objectives and supranational aims which have helped to promote state interference in private life, and to restrict the actions of medium-sized powers (while not affecting superpowers) ever since 1945.

 

I’m all in favour of hard, cynical foreign relations in one’s own national interest. Nothing else works. But why should we simper over the USA’s decision to use our War of the Polish Guarantee to diminish our power and wealth, and supplant us in all important areas? It was a neat bit of work, but it certainly wasn’t charity, or based on soppy sentiment.

An Interview with RT

Here is an interview I gave last week to Afshin Rattansi of RT, the Russian TV station:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqmVv9IerUM&feature=youtu.be&a

I'm not sure whether we did it standing up as a funky broadcasting innovation, or because RT's furniture has to arrive in their fancy new London studios. Either way, I think it sharpened the discussion.

The Middle East Conundrum

I suppose I should have realised that any mention of the Israel problem would produce the wearisome litany of the selective anti-Israel lobby. Members of this lobby often have a strange difficulty in typing the word ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ with the normal initial capital letter. I do often wonder why. But then I also wonder why they have this selective animus towards one small country, but never seem to level parallel criticisms at other countries which behave in the same way, or very similar ways, or worse.

 

Israel is of course a country full of faults. Its foundation, its subsequent behaviour towards its minorities, its occupation of land, all fall below the high standards required of any Utopia.

 

First, it seized land by conquest and drove out the indigenous inhabitants. This is also true of most countries, and in the modern era it is true particularly of the USA, whose record on the treatment of Native Americans is wholly appalling, and whose seizure of land by force from Mexico in the 1848 war is at least questionable. Something similar could be said of Australia, especially in Tasmania, and of course of China, which has seized Tibet, and has also begun to turn the native Uighurs of Chinese Turkestan into a minority in their own homeland, through targeted immigration and settlement of Han Chinese. I only mention these things because I have yet to see the anti-Zionists, who are so consumed by Israel’s equivalent wrongs, mounting any comparable protest against these countries.

 

Selective outrage, in my experience, is invariably fake outrage, and is about something other than the ostensible purpose of it. What is unique about Israel that gets these people so upset?

 

Second, there’s the matter of the refugees. Any reader of Benny Morris’s superb study of the 1948 war ‘1948’ , will know that Israel often behaved very badly during this curious war, and took the opportunity to drive Arabs from their homes. The massacre of Deir Yassin was a particularly disgraceful episode. But at roughly the same point in human history, India and Pakistan (1947) also saw disgraceful episodes of ethnic cleansing about which we hear virtually nothing today. And, closer to home, there were the savage and murderous mass expulsions of ethnic Germans,  mainly wholly innocent women and children, from Eastern and Central Europe, under Allied direction and supervision, under the Potsdam, Agreement in which we pledged (dishonestly) to ensure that these events would be ‘orderly and humane’. They were not.   Those words form the bitter title of R.M. Douglas’s excellent book on this wrongly forgotten episode, discussed here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html

One might add the continuing mumbling and changing the subject which follows any mention of the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915, the forgotten but hideous ‘population exchange’ between Greece and Turkey after World War One, and also the gradual but enormous driving of Christian Arabs out of the Middle East, by discrimination and intimidation, still going on.

 

Then there are the mythical versions of events. Many anti-Israel fanatics appear to believe that there was a nation state called ‘Palestine’ which existed before Israel destroyed it and seized its land. There was not.  Before 1917, the area was a series of Sanjaks and Vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, none of its administrative borders having any connection with those which were later drawn up by British officials.

Palestine was a scholarly ( and perhaps anti-Zionist) reference to the cynical name which the Romans had given to their colony in that area (whose borders again have little to do with modern ones) after they had utterly crushed Jewish resistance to their rule and renamed and rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman City. The Roman name ‘Palestina’, was a delibrate reference to the Philistines,  historic enemies of the ancient Jewish people, who once dwelt in the area but who have vanished into history, probably carried off by one of the many invaders of the region.

 

There was a British colony of this name, originally granted to Britain by the League of Nations for the purpose (as stated in the Sanremo Accords) of ‘close settlement of Jews’. More than half that colony was later lopped off , by Winston Churchill, to create the then Emirate of Transjordan. This solved a complex political problem which Britain then had with France with the Arab leaders to whom we had made extravagant promises during World War One, in return for help and support.

 

The land now known as the ‘West Bank’ was not part of that Churchillian appeasement fo Arab wrath.  It was later seized by Transjordan during the disorder of the 1948 war, and occupied by Transjordan from 1948 to 1967, illegally. Nobody protested. Britain and Pakistan, alone in all the world, recognised the seizure. Israel then seized the land, in my view mistakenly, in 1967. A lot of fuss is made about this being ‘illegal’, but it is rather hard to say who it really belongs to. Probably Turkey, since Britain, which seized it from Turkey in 1917, has long ago left.

 

The point  about all this is that there is no simple obvious solution. But there are many millions of good, decent people living in this area who are in no way helped by the stirrings and Utopian prescriptions of outsiders who claim that one side or the other has the absolute right to rule and control all the land and all its people. (These people seem oddly reluctant to seek such absolute solutions, ‘rights of return’ etc,  in the USA, Australia, Turkey, India, Pakistan or Eastern Europe. They must ask themselves why they are especially interested in this one example of human injustice, and uninterested in the others)  Civilised, human compromise is hampered, not helped, by ideological, idealist nonsense of this kind.

 

 

 

 

Don't be duped, Demon Gove's a softie inside

My old friend Michael Gove would do well as a professional magician. He is so clever at distracting people that hardly anyone ever notices what he is really doing.

Amid huge clouds of green smoke, and the noise of thunderflashes, he stands there wearing his cruel heavy-rimmed glasses and posing as the nation’s Demon Headmaster.

Teachers supposedly tremble. Badly behaved schoolchildren supposedly bow their heads and learn their times tables, before hurrying to Bible classes.

Actually, they don’t. Mr Gove is not a conservative. In education and other matters, he seeks to follow the (almost wholly useless) agenda of the Blair creature, whom Mr Gove has long admired, almost as much as Wendi Deng, former wife of Rupert Murdoch, admires him.

For Mr Gove, it’s not Mr Blair’s piercing blue eyes or his ‘good legs and butt’ that do the trick. It’s his stylish way with bombers, tanks and troops, plus his agenda of equality, diversity, and bureaucracy.

Back in February 2003, Mr Gove penned a love letter to the then Premier which is almost as embarrassing as Wendi’s girlish jottings.

Beneath the headline ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony’, Mr Gove gushed: ‘All I can say looking at Mr Blair now is, what’s not to like?’

He described Mr Blair as ‘right and brave’ on university fees, ‘impressive’ and ‘braver in some respects than Maggie was’ on Iraq, ‘resolute’ in his stand against strikers, and ‘correct’ on asylum policy.

In fact, he has even been holding meetings with Mr Blair, who is also privately admired by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor (he refers to him as ‘The Master’). His entirely empty row last week over the removal of the Blairite Sally Morgan from the chairmanship of Ofsted is privately described by Tories as what it was – ‘a staged smash-up’.

It is yet another pretext for a fake squabble between Tories and Liberal Democrats, who don’t really disagree but must now pretend to do so to win back lost voters.

As for the schools, they need what they have needed since they were actively ruined by Labour and the Tories between 1965 and 1980. They need the restoration of the authority of teachers, the resumption of tried and effective methods of teaching (especially of reading), and the reintroduction of selection by ability rather than wealth.

As for the opening up of the private sector to state pupils, nothing could be better than the scores of Direct Grant schools that used to do this so well.

They were spitefully destroyed by Labour 40 years ago, and not reinstated during 18 years of Tory rule. But all these things are either illegal or unthinkable in the Blairite universe, with its useless, destructive targets, its incessant tests, its Stalinist inspections, and its stealth selection, available to the wealthy and cunning.

Under the Blair-Gove arrangement, education favours the rich and the sharp-elbowed, and leaves the bright child of a poor home struggling far, far behind.

So instead, Mr Gove makes another speech, about writing lines, or the wonders of traditional history, or the Bible, or whatever it is. And The Guardian newspaper attacks him for it. And nothing happens.

It’s good soap opera. It entertains and diverts. But it is a big fat fake, and if you go on being fooled by it you will get the country you deserve.

►► When will coroners notice the  apparent correlation between suicide and ‘antidepressant’ drugs? We will never  know if this is significant until it is centrally recorded.

This is very difficult, partly because coroners often don’t ask about it, and also because many suicides are not recorded as such thanks to modern ‘narrative verdicts’.

Read any inquest report carefully, and almost always you will find the dead person was taking these pills, which are known, especially in the US, to carry this risk.

The West Bank needs Scarlett, not dogma

One of my favourite people in the Middle East is a witty and wry Arab citizen of Israel (yes, they do exist and very interesting they are too). On my last visit to Jerusalem, he drove me up to Ramallah through the wearisome security barriers that now divide Israeli territory from the West Bank.

And he sighed: ‘Oh, for the good old days before we had “Peace” .’ What he meant was that, until the world began seeking to solve the Israeli-Arab question, the two peoples lived reasonably happily together.

Arabs worked in Israel, crossing freely backwards and forwards and supporting their families instead of relying on political handouts.

Incredibly, Israelis used to go to Gaza (now behind an impassable barrier) for its beach-front nightlife (now suppressed with Islamic ferocity).

Actually, some of this sensible human pragmatism has recently begun to return. Israeli settlers help Arabs decode the Hebrew labels in a cut-price supermarket on the road to Nablus. Ramallah’s town centre, once gruesomely adorned with the dangling corpses of alleged collaborators, is now a pleasant spot for an evening out. It has a shopping mall with a cinema multiplex, just as Israeli towns do.

This is why I side with Scarlett Johansson, right, and against Oxfam, which has condemned her for promoting an Israeli-owned factory in the West Bank.

She is right. Helping to promote and sustain the normal things of life – work, homes, ordinary pleasure, mutual interdependence – is the road to peace. Oxfam’s dogmatic utopian desires lead to murder and terror. Oxfam was not founded to preach politics, but to relieve hunger. It should go back to doing that, and I for one won’t give it another penny until it does.

BBC 'neutral' in bogus war

What should BBC impartiality cover? Is strict neutrality between our (identical) political parties enough? Or should its staff avoid taking sides on other big controversies?

I ask because the Today programme presenter Justin Webb last week wrote a newspaper article on the so-called ‘War on Drugs’, giving full weight to polls and figures which support the view that there is a ‘war’, and that it is failing, and saying, among other things, that ‘on cannabis the game is surely over’.

Funny that he didn’t mention that (for instance) first-time cannabis offenders form a tiny proportion of prisoners in the US, and that the funky American magazine Rolling Stone recently dismissed as a ‘myth’ the claim that the USA’s prisons are full of people convicted for marijuana possession.

I can supply Mr Webb with plenty more information of this sort – if he wants it. But does he?

►► This column’s ‘I told you so’ department would like to point out that a month ago I attacked ‘the grandiose quango called the Environment Agency’, adding: ‘The Agency’s great at issuing statements, but does it do much dredging of ditches and streams?’

Nice the way everyone’s caught up.

Mr Whatsisname's Boom - is it Real?

Newspaper coverage of the economy has now become so party political that it’s  very hard to know what to believe. Tory-supporting media claim that we are marching into sunlit uplands of prosperity. Labour supporters say nothing of the kind is happening. I am suspicious of good news at all times, and tend to think the Labour supporters are more likely to be right, not because I like them, but because they have no reason to delude themselves. And, as all readers here know, the most dangerous con-men and con-women we ever meet are ourselves.

 

I gaze open-mouthed at the praise some of my fellow-scribblers give to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (what is his name? I can never remember it), as the United Kingdom’s unpayably vast national debt climbs rapidly towards the Moon, and increases by about £2,000,000,000 a week. At this rate it won’t be long before it reaches 90% of Gross Domestic Product (it’s now around 75%). It has been higher, mainly as a result of the two enormous wars we fought in the middle of the 20th century, but we had been getting it back under control until the Blair-Brown splurge, in which we still wallow and flounder, because nobody has any idea how to climb out of it.  But what about the lives of the people, employment, income and standards of living.

 

I was very struck by the low-temperature, calm demolition of the idea of recovery in the ‘Guardian’ of Monday, 3rd February, in an article by Phillip Inman  which you can read here. http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/feb/02/living-standards-of-british-workers-analysis

 

 

Once again, it demonstrates Hitchens’s Law, that ‘All Politically Significant Statistics Are Fiddled’.

 

It suggests that actual manufacturing jobs are down; that many new jobs counted as ‘private sector’ are in fact contractors , employing low-skilled workers on behalf of the public sector. And it argues that a huge increase in self-employment, which is often left out of figures on wage levels,  is frequently a tale of woe and uncertainty, not a sign of a new spirit of enterprise.

 

We are turning into a low-wage economy, in which most people will never rise above insecure, poorly-paid, short-term jobs. I hate to think how much worse this will be after a period of hefty inflation, which I don’t think we can avoid in the next few years.

 

I continue to think of a visit I made some years ago in Canton, where I saw boys who in Britain would have been at school, trudging through a market carrying heavy burdens for tiny wages; of the clothes and backpack sweatshops I visited in which workers toiled for 18 hours for money nobody in today’s Britain would have accepted as a tip, and the bleak factories in which the workforce laboured beneath large signs proclaiming ‘WORK HARD TODAY, OR YOU WILL BE LOOKING HARD FOR A NEW JOB TOMORROW!’.

 

This was in my time, and yours, on our planet, happening to people no different from us, except that they were born in Canton. What was there now, I thought to myself, to prevent such things coming to Britain again? What trade barrier? What frontier? What vast reserve of gold and accumulated wealth? What educational advantage?

 

The answer is, nothing but inertia and the fact that we have grown used to what we have, and for some reason expect it to continue, because it is so. 

A Reflection on Death

Philip Seymour Hoffman RIP

 

I must confess that I couldn’t have named Philip Seymour Hoffman before his sad death earlier this week, though I knew the face and voice.

It took his death to make me put the name to two life-enhancing cinema performances I hugely enjoyed – once as a moustachioed, paunchy, profane explosive CIA agent in ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’(one particular scene will make most people who watch it want to applaud, though it’s interesting to wonder if it might not have been better without all the f-words), and once as a musician in ‘A Late Quartet’, one of the best films of the last few years. So I was moved by his death, as one is when some total strangers, especially actors or public figures, die (and even more so when they are much younger than I am).

That voice will not be heard again. Those films now contain shadows of a person who has gone from us, and they become more haunting and more distant as they recede into the past. The civilised person tries to think, in all such circumstances, of the majesty and seriousness of death, and of the bereaved, especially – in this case - the children. It never occurred to me for a second that it was a matter for political comment or propaganda.

 

The older I get, and the more death I experience directly, the more I try to stick to the rule that one does not speak ill of the dead. I’m not sure it applies when undoubted monsters die, but otherwise I can see the point of it. If you wouldn’t have said it while they were alive, when they could answer back, you shouldn’t take advantage of death to say it when they can’t respond and when their families and friends are full of grief. And in any case, my view is that they have gone before an all-knowing justice which (to put it mildly) needs no help from me, and which I both fear and hope that I shall sooner or later face myself.

 

No doubt I’ve broken this rule in the past. I regret having done so. I will try not to break it again.

 

Then, I began to notice stirrings among the Twitter mob. His death, it was suggested, was in some way a refutation of my views about ‘addiction’. Then, today, one person wondered in public whether I had responded to Mr Seymour Hoffman’s death by saying or thinking that it served him right. That made me decide to write this.

 

Well, these are the sorts of critics and opponents I have acquired, by refusing to take a fashionable position on drugs. I don‘t mind all that much. It’s not me they harm by harbouring this idea of me. It’s themselves, by reducing their opponents to ludicrous caricatures and so preventing themselves from thinking about what others say.

 

I don’t wish to use this occasion to have another argument about ‘addiction’, and ask readers not to post comments on that subject. But I would like to say something about death and the proper response to it.

 

Was it the 20th century of war and bombing, mass graves and mass murder, that made us forget the simple, overwhelming rules of our civilisation? Remember Wilfred Owen’s reference to each slow dusk being the poor equivalent in war to the ‘drawing down of blinds’ in the street,  which would have marked any individual death before 1914, not to mention the panoply of mourning dress, black-bordered paper, wreaths and formal grief, now so vanished that a funeral can pass down a busy street and most people will not even turn to look, let alone bow their heads. Death is serious, the most serious thing we face. It is by thinking about it, and recognising that it is real and actually happens, and that it will really happen to us, that we become adults.

 

At the entrance to one of the Wren churches in the City of London there is a great black stone grave slab inscribed with the words ‘Prepare to Follow’ in deeply incised letters. No-one, seeing this, can pretend that it does not apply to him or her. Follow we must and shall, whether we want to or not.

For me this dark doorway is most unbearable if it leads nowhere. That is why the most fitting statements about it have been written by believers. I advise anyone, believer or not, to recall and commit to memory John Donne’s great, meditation ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee’, also the Requiem Aeternam, ‘Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him’, and finally this extract from the astonishing words of the English burial service, the only ceremony, in my view,  which fully matches the raw power of the occasion with its immense depth and beauty of language and great thoughtfulness : ‘ Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life; through our Lord Jesus Christ who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself’. If anyone feels like commenting on this, I’d ask them to do so in a civil and restrained manner. It should not be the opportunity for another argument about drugs.

The Mystery of Michael Gove

I was amused this morning when newspapers asked why it was that Michael Gove had appointed the Blairite Queen Bee, Sally Morgan, as chairman of OFSTED in the first place. He has now declined to repappoint her, an act (which probably has something to do with the acclelerating and much publicised break-up of the Coalition) for which he is being rather absurdly attacked.

 

I count Mr Gove as a friend.My liking for him it makes it so much easier to disagree with him. I have argued with him in private for years, on several subjects,  on one occasion in a marvellous ding-dong lasting hours as we strode around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens in a biting wind, discussing the meaning and significance of David Cameron. We ended it tired but satisfied that we stood on different sides of several important issues.

 

Michael reads books and is interested in his opponents. He enjoys arguing as much as I do, if not more, and doesn’t in the least bit mind being disagreed with. Like any sensible person, he sees it as a chance to learn, and actively relishes tough, serious opposition (by which I do not mean obtuse, unresponsive, repetitive resort to conventional wisdom).   

 

I have debated with him in public, where he and Charles Moore were good enough to defend the Tory party against my attacks on it, at an ‘Intelligence Squared’ event in London. The debate was spoiled by the last-minute withdrawal of my supposed ally, who pulled out without good excuse far too late for me to find a proper replacement, and who I shall not name, out of kindness.

 

The thing that has emerged from all these meetings and arguments is my complete certainty that Michael is not, by my definition, a conservative. Remember that his first major expedition into public life was a biography, not wholly unsympathetic, of Michael Portillo. Mr Portillo was David Cameron before his time, socially, culturally and morally liberal. He was also (and still remains) a better public speaker, and a deeper, more thoughtful and better-educated person than Mr Cameron, which is perhaps why I suspect that Mr Portillo slightly resents Mr Cameron’s relatively easy success, compared with his bitter failure.

 

But for the definitive understanding of what Michael is about (in the absence of a biography which someone surely ought to write), I have to ask you to pay your way past behind the paywall of Times Newspapers. I can give you only a flavour of what lies there.  First, you should consult an article he wrote for The Times on the 25th February 2003. The headline on it says ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony’.  It is not misleading.

 

It was the Iraq affair that did it, but not only that. Mr Gove, whom I suspect of being a utopian in foreign affairs, declared ‘All I can say looking at Mr Blair now is “What’s not to like?”’

 

But he was careful to add that Mr Blair had been ‘right and brave’ on university fees, and (does this remind you of anything?) ‘correct in conceding, to the annoyance of his wife I'm sure, that the European Convention on Human Rights gets in the way of a sane asylum policy.’

 

More indicative still is a brief article he wrote on the 27th December 1997,  about the Frank Capra film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. For those of you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s about an unspectacularly good man called George Bailey ( a building society manager)  man who – contemplating suicide -  finds out what would have happened if he hadn’t been born, and is allowed a disturbing visit to his home town, Bedford Falls ( a generic American small town) to find out. Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, renamed after the evil, miserable, spiteful landlord who was once kept at bay by George Bailey’s building society. Pottersville is corrupt, sordid, violent and full of grief, individual and general,  because George wasn’t there to prevent these things. Perhaps the most striking change is that of the local bar, formerly a friendly neighbourhood home-from-home, now a raucous, hard-drinking honkytonk joint with an edge of barely-suppressed cruelty. Like most people, I love the film.

 

But Michael doesn’t.  He said it was ‘truly terrible’, and accused its director Frank Capra of being ‘A Peoria Poujadist who believes small is beautiful but ends up celebrating not just the local but the narrow’.  He declared that Pottersville is a ‘a far more attractive place’ than Bedford Falls , which he calls ‘a communitarian dreamland’ . Michael lieks the ‘freewheeling, cheap-drinking speakeasy atmosphere’ averring that liberty is always (always?!) preferable to constriction, however enlightened.

 

Well, we’ve heard traces of similar arguments here, and have explained why I disagree with them. In fact, I think this brief article encapsulates my disagreements with Michael more than anything else he’s ever written or said.  But I hardly see why it would be surprising that he, a declared admirer of Mr Blair, would appoint a Blairite to an important job. OFSTED itself, with its doomed aim of improving bad schools through Stalinist exhortation and pressure, is a Blairite project . Michael, though given to sentimental musings about ‘Our Island Story’ and such things is not fundamentally different from the long line of Blairite education secretaries who picked fights with the teachers’ unions to appear as if they were doing something.

 

In fact, they sit at the apex of a huge egalitarian project with some not very good schools attached. And until its egalitarian purpose is removed, the state school system is bound to be bad – because it puts compulsory equality first, and education a very poor third. Modern government, dedicated to eglitrianism,  can cope with ministers who have good intentions and are intelligent. It absorbs them just the same.

 

Funny that I thought we were ever on the same side, though I did. The strange thing is that it was the Iraq war and what followed , which enabled many conservative journalists to climb under the flap of the big tent of Blairism, back into the centre of things - and which left me, and many others, beached and marooned on the further shores of hopeless dissent.