On Israel this time
by Will, 12 May 2008
The final paragraph in the newest C Hitchens article.
That last point, however, brings me to my own closing observation. It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today’s Iranian “Islamic republic” is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60th, let alone a 70th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.
Monday 12 May 2008 at 23:30
“whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West.”
The grounds for not doing so would be what? The only possible runner is the continued occupation of West Bank. Not a small question but enough on its own to tip the balance…?
And why does he say always say he is non-zionist? How can you support the national rights of Palestinians but not of Jews?
the rest of it is great though
Tuesday 13 May 2008 at 11:59
“And why does he say always say he is non-zionist?”
The lingering residue of Edward Said… Hitchens has turned against almost everything that he and Said had agreed upon in their friendship years ago. After his shock at Said’s LRB reaction to 9/11, he more or less discarded the man’s ideas of orientalism as worthy of consideration. But Said was gravely ill at the time of Hitchens’ awakening, and I suspect Hitchens feels some twinge of remorse at having “betrayed” him just then and there. His attitude towards Israel is still pretty much what it was always but the language changed, it is less ruthless, more compassionate. But still he feels the need to “show” that he didn’t completely go back on everything he and Said had worked on.
It’s just a theory but I believe in it enough not to mind too much when declares himself as a “non Zionist”.
Tuesday 13 May 2008 at 12:18
“And why does he always say he is non-zionist?”
One can support the right to peaceful existence of Israel without being positively a Zionist, there being, in any case, a wide variety of attitudes subsumed under the term.
In other words one can treat of Israel as a country like any other, albeit with its own specific history, born out of Zionism.
I assume that is what Hitchens means by being non-Zionist. As to Eamonn’s point, I think Hitchens’s qualification is more complex than the question of the West Bank, as being ‘part of the democratic West’ in the Middle East would be.
It is a very complex business being somewhere between a state, a refuge, a cause and a strategic, global, political statement (ie being a democracy among non-democratic states). For a secularist like Hitchens - and the rest of the secular world - Israel would, I imagine, have to be regarded as a state first and the rest in one or other disputable order. That is the first and greatest argument against boycotters and anyone else.
As for the rest - as Eamonn says - he is dead right.
Tuesday 13 May 2008 at 20:42
“In other words one can treat of Israel as a country like any other, albeit with its own specific history, born out of Zionism.”
If this is what Hitchens means then it’s not explicit or even clear, is it? When he takes the trouble to define himself to readers as a “non Zionist” he is making some sort of a moral judgment: that he is neither for nor against Zionism. Zionism is not something he wants to feel anything about. That’s not the same as speaking of Israel as a country like any other. When I speak of France or Britain I don’t bother to add that I’m a non-Francophile or a non-Anglophile. No one cares, because there is no moral judgment involved or intended. But declaring one to be a non-Zionist is a deliberate dissociation from Zionism. He is not an anti-Zionist but he is completely neutral and indifferent to the fortunes of Zionism, that is, Israel as a Jewish state.
It so happens that I think he is not so indifferent as he would like us to believe. I think he is evolving. There is a definite mellowing of tone between the way he used to express his loathing and contempt for Israel and how he writes about her these days.
Martin Amis talks about Hitchens’ feelings about Israel in his memoir “Experience”, twice he mentions that while he, Amis, thinks about Israel “with the blood” (due to an early love affair with a “Jewess” which induced him to donate blood for Israel) Hitchens, who discovered later in life that he actually had Jewish blood, will never feel the same kind of irrational attachment about Israel.
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 0:55
“Jewish blood”
FUCK OFF!!!!
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 1:22
1.
I agree with the first part of noga’s last comment. It’s indeed noteworthy that CH doesn’t feel the need to say things like “as a non-kurdish nationalist”
2.
I share Will’s view of the stuff about Jewish blood.
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 2:17
Will is so sensitive about certain usages of language, almost like a coy virgin. What’s wrong with Jewish blood, may I ask?
I notice no one has reeled back in horror at Martin Amis’ use of “Jewess”, which is actually a racial slur.
But then, a cunt by any other name is still a cunt, right, Will?
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 16:37
noga: a truly idiotic response
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 19:30
There was a meaningful conversation going on, until the charivari crowd decided it was enough of that and brought in the pots to bang on (Is noise the first refuge of the drunk trot?)
[zzzzzzzzzzzzzz — supreme trollery]
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 20:16
The notion of ‘blood’ like that of ‘race’ is a 19th Century pseudo-scientific category and belongs in the orbit of head measurers and dowsers.
Blood does not have ethnicity–that way lies the Nuremberg Laws–it’s a ridiculous idea: which parts of me are Jewish, which Norse and which Pictish? The blood flowing in my veins today is not the same blood which was flowing in them 6 months ago, and there is certainly no blood from my parents sloshing around.
Talk of ‘blood’ is at best ignorant and naive–and at worst pernicious and racist.
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 22:34
The obvious response to Noga’s complaint that no-one recoiled in horror from ‘Jewess’ is that ‘Jewess’ was already marked out by the quotation marks and required no further comment…and who gives a fuck about Martin Amiss anyway — fuck off again fucking dipshit, trolling, Attila Whore groupie and genetic-determinist, rightist, speculative-psychologizing ignoramus.
Wednesday 14 May 2008 at 22:53
“Blood does not have ethnicity”
Indeed it does not Hak Mao — and even if it did have (which it doesn’t), it would have bugger all to do with political standpoints, ideological perspectives, attitudes, frames of reference, morality and the production of any of those aspects that make up an individual.
Noga is now banned from here for being a racist — let that be a lesson to the rest of you.
Don’t be a racist — it means you are excluded. You can piss off to HP Sauce now and complain that because you are a racist you have been banned from commenting here — and say something about free-speech while you’re on the same subject.
Thursday 15 May 2008 at 14:02
new column here by Hitchens on Yank (non) elections stuff:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2008/05/15/christopher-hitchens-on-john-edwards-endorsement-of-barack-obama-89520-20418484/
not really a full-blown post in it…