Issue No. 608
Culture
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17 - 23 October 2002 Issue No. 608 Culture |
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Plain Talk
The Independent Review, in last Wednesday's issue, published a survey asking 32 writers "who have most justice on their side? a) the Israeli people and their leaders , b) the Palestinian people and their leaders or c) I don't know."
Similar surveys were carried out in England in 1937 about the Spanish Civil War and in America in 1967 about the war in Vietnam.
Gareth Rubin explains the rationale behind this survey: "Today, the defining, dividing, intractable issue that pre-occupies the thinking classes of the West is that of Israel/Palestine. So it seems legitimate to ask: where do today's unacknowledged legislators stand on it?"
While most of the participants welcomed the survey and answered the questions, there were the cynics who asked why should writers bother at all. If the world's finest political minds cannot find a way out of the morass, what hope have a few cocooned writers?
"But that is to miss the point," argues Rubin. "What writers think today, others think tomorrow; and if today's literati seem overwhelmingly disapporving of Israel's leaders -- instead of either favouring the Palestinians or refusing to take sides -- it tells us something about the way the tide of opinion is moving."
Writers may not be any wiser of better informed than others but they are opinion- formers. They shape the worldviews of future historians and politicians.
It would be difficult, indeed impossible, to present the 32 answers here. Nor do the authors' names matter much; except for one or two they are almost unknown to us. But here is a taste of what they had to say:
John Mortimer, answer b) : "The question is too black and white, but at the moment the Israelis are more to blame. If we are going to have a war against someone because they disobey the UN and have weapons of mass destruction, then that is Mr. Sharon. That is the key to the upheaval in the Middle East and anti- American feelings. Why they want to bother about Iraq, I cannot imagine. The people who must be restrained and made to obey the UN are the Israelis. Meeting terrorism with terrorism is their way to behave. They have killed more Palestinians and Palestinian children than the Palestinians have killed Israelis and Israeli children. But, as for the conflict as a whole, it's like a marriage. It's like saying: 'Who's to blame for a divorce?'"
Kamila Shamsie, answer b): "Neither my reservations about the Palestinian leadership nor my sorrow at all civilian deaths alters the basic fact that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is not justified under legal or moral grounds. Moreover, state- sanctioned terrorism, such as that carried out by the Israeli forces, cannot be justified by merely slapping the word 'self-defence' on it. On the part of the rest of the world, to largely ignore the lives and deaths of those (many) Palestinians who play no part in violence but have violence -- in its varied guises -- inflicted on them is the gravest injustice of all."
Will Self, answer c): "It would be divisive for me to offer my opinion. I think input from outside constitutes trying to put a fire out with gasoline. The time has come to step back and put pressure on our governments to remove themselves from the sphere of influence. That means Britain should no longer be a poodle of the United States in terms of Middle Eastern policy. America should not be involved either. I don't have any great faith in the capacity of the United Nations to broker peace -- I think they should be left to slug it out. I don't believe in supranational resolutions to conflict. I think they are a fig leaf of deluded moralising humanitarians, used to hide from sight the fact that we live in an ugly, unpleasant world. I have sympathy for everybody involved in the conflict except for the extremists who believe that violence is the solution."
Those concerned with the Palestinian cause should analyse the results of this survery to understand how leading opinion shapers in a typical Western country as England think.
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