by Amis, Martin
One time at a dinner in Regent’s Park Road, in the earliest days of the Arab Spring, Michael caused our friend Roger Cohen (of the New York Times and one of nature’s true optimists) to say, with dignified indignation (‘dignant’ is how more than one novelist has described the familiar stiffening), ‘I find that offensive.’ What he found offensive was Michael’s remark: ‘I don’t think the Egyptians are ready for democracy.’ Optimism originally denoted a character trait (rather than a mood one might occasionally adopt); Roger is an optimist…
Another time, in the summer of 2014, Michael’s eldest girl stormed out of a noisy kitchen-cabinet debate on the Palestinian question with the words, ‘You’re a fucking racist!’ But there is a sheen of stoical irony in Michael C’s habitual half smile. And he and I enthusiastically went on, that evening, to compare notes on Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, a book riven by patriotic pride in tandem with patriotic distress…
Michael is aware that Israel’s situation is almost certainly finite in time. He suspects that global disfavour will assume more and more tangible forms; he suspects that America, as its influence retreats, will one day retreat from Israel (DJT’s recent sheath of blank cheques notwithstanding); but he knows for a fact that the projectiles of Hamas (and Hezbollah) will continue to evolve in their accuracy and range.
‘I’m waiting for a voice on the other side,’ says Michael. A voice that seems desirous – or more frankly capable – of negotiation (the Arab administrators, he says, ‘couldn’t run a shop’). For now, the Palestinian Authority is moribund with corruption; and what can you do with the wild and childish rejectionism of the Zealots of Gaza (‘Hamas’, remember, means zeal)? Their very charter solemnly and gullibly cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,* and, in addition, lays claim to ‘every inch’ of historical Palestine, to be secured by means of jihad.
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Christopher said, ‘Mart, you try to be sympathetic to the Israelis, because they’re surrounded by about two billion mortal enemies. A tribute to the evenhandedness of Little Keith…I know, I know, but their location is hardly ideal, is it. I often idly imagine how things might be if they’d settled somewhere else.’
‘Yeah, me too. But where?’
‘I keep thinking – what if the Allies had forced a spacious Jewish homeland on the razed Germany of the later 1940s? A deindustrialised and ruralised and, I stress, an exhaustively humbled Germany. Serve it fucking well right. So. What’s wrong with Bavaria?’
This conversation took place on adjacent Greenwich Village barstools in the summer of 2010 (about three months after diagnosis). Christopher, tonight (all things considered), was at his ease. When you are ill in America you are also, and automatically, sick with worry about paying for it. Christopher was in New York to give an outlandishly well-paid speech; he would then have dinner with his wife and with me and my wife, sitting outside, at Graydon Carter’s restaurant in Bank Street, before going on to a party at Anna Wintour’s, where there would be many other friends and familiars…He was happy tonight, rediscovering how much he loved being in America, loved being with intimates, loved being the expositor and explicator, loved being himself, and loved being alive. He said,
‘As you recline in the Bavarian homeland, what would be the worst that could happen? An occasional Molotov cocktail lobbed in by some leather-shorted, feather-hatted Xerxes from the BLO?’
‘…But Germany. Germany might’ve gone nuts again.’
‘It was invaded and occupied. It couldn’t’ve gone nuts again. And it fears going nuts again. Germany fears itself. Could I have a Xerox of that,’ he said to the barman, and pointed at his double Johnnie Black. ‘I do see that the Bavaria solution, Zion in the Reich, was of course impossible for the Jews. It had to be the Holy Land.’
‘I suppose so. And at least it’s aesthetically right, don’t you think? If the whole thing was just dramaturgy, you know, a heroic poem or an opera, the artist wouldn’t even consider Bavaria. What about Bavaria? What about Madagascar? It had to be the Holy Land.’
‘Mm. But the Holy Land makes them messianic.’
‘The Six Day War made them incredibly messianic. But I’m told the Yom Kippur War gave them back the old fear.’
‘For a while. We Jews did do our atonement in 1973. Then what did we get? Likud, in 1977. That’s the durably significant date. Messianism is back and will never go away. They’ll be needing divine intervention – because the Islamist rockets will soon become cruise missiles. And the Fertile Crescent isn’t going to suddenly get over being anti-Semitic, now is it. Not in this millennium.’
‘…What the hell is anti-Semitism?’
‘Come on, Mart, you’ve read the books. The last time I saw you you finished The Oldest Hatred and picked up The Longest Hatred in the same afternoon.’
‘But I still don’t get it. You say it’s a neurosis, Saul said it’s a psychosis. Tony Judt – have you read him?’ I didn’t add that Tony Judt had died just a couple of weeks earlier, here in Manhattan, aged sixty-two. ‘Judt was talking about anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, and he said the causes need no analysis, because in that part of the world anti-Semitism is its own reward. Maybe that’s what I can’t grasp.’
‘That anti-Semitism is enjoyable?’
‘Yeah. Like self-righteousness. Look at people when they’re being self-righteous, look at their eyes. They fucking love it. It’s like cocaine. Anti-Semitism – mmmm.’
‘Same with messianism. For them it’s like a wonderful wank. As you’ll see.’
‘…And there’s something in the air of the Holy Land – it makes you fragile against illusion.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Late September. Just a family holiday…Your eyelashes, Hitch. They remind me of Jett Travolta’s. They’re about an inch long.’
‘I know. It’s just some fool of a side effect from the chemo…Well, take your notebook with you. I’ll want a full report.’
So we ate our dinner at the Waverly Inn, and went on to Anna’s party, and then in a group of eight or nine we cruised around the spontaneous block parties in the strips and rinks of downtown. As Blue would write in her afterword to Mortality (2012), evoking June 8, the day of diagnosis,
It was the sort of early summer evening in New York when all you can think of is living…Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn’t. We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived.
The new world lasted nineteen months.
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I scaled Masada in 1986 and I scaled it again in 2010. The crest of this dramatic chunk of rock is only a couple of hundred feet above sea level, but the ambient Judaean Desert is the most sunken area on earth, adding another 1,300 feet to the climb. So it takes at least an hour, and that afternoon the temperature was around ninety-five.
Elena and Eliza forged ahead on their powerful brown legs, while I was in the rear with Inez (b. 1999). About a tenth of the way up, as the slope became much steeper, she went all floppy and weepy and begged to go back down and take the cable car. I said,
‘Courage, Bubba. Onward. Just think. Hitch can’t climb Masada – but you can. And once you’re up there you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.’
She rallied. The young collapse suddenly and rally suddenly. About a tenth of the way from the summit I paused in a patch of shade for a breather (and a gasper), and Inez said imperiously,
‘Come on, Daddy! We haven’t come this far to give up now!’
‘I’m not giving up.’
‘Then come on!’
Ten minutes later we were all looking down at the beautiful and painfully ancient desert and the Dead Sea. And there too, on the
horizon, you could just make out in the bright air the distant mirage of Jerusalem and its vague devotional silhouettes.
The Masada movement started in January 1942. It was a time when the Jews were engaged in a spasm civil war with the Palestinians, who had recently formed an official alliance with the Third Reich (their Grand Mufti met with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941). At this point, too, Erwin Rommel was rampant in North Africa (and the Holocaust had been under way – as covertly as it could, given that the Germans were using bullets, not gas – for about six months). As the crises gathered there was a concerted campaign to mythologise and centralise, in effect to nationalise, Masada, or the spirit of Masada, or ‘the way of Masada’, in Shavit’s phrase.
Why? What happened there? This is the story.
By 73 CE, after the Roman sacking of Jerusalem, the Great Revolt of the Jews was close to its crushing end. Masada, which Herod had turned into a near-unbreachable bastion a hundred years earlier, was the locus of the last stand of the self-styled Zealots, the most extreme of the rebel forces. Up on the rock there were just under a thousand men, women, and children when Flavius Silva’s Xth legion began its final assault. With defeat inevitable, the remaining Zealots put themselves to the sword. The men killed the women and children, then drew lots to see who would start killing the men.
So: a nihilistic tale of bloody fanaticism and bloody downfall was re-engineered into the regnant symbol of the new Jewish identity. This had immediate popular appeal; but even Zionists, and David Ben-Gurion himself, found the associations of the historical event repellently grim. The men of fighting age on Masada faced execution, but the women faced not death but probable rape and certain enslavement, and the children faced enslavement only. Five of the latter group survived by hiding in a pothole and were captured. Making you wonder how many other women and children, given the choice, would have joined them.
Nevertheless, the campaign, dreamed up and spearheaded by the scholar, archaeologist, and trekker Shmaryahu Gutman (who, affectingly, was by birth a Glaswegian), shifted the emphasis: ‘Masada shall not fall again.’ And this shaping vow – the absolute refusal to yield – was very quickly emplaced as the defining Jewish truth…There are always many chains of boy scouts and girl scouts and school groups and platoons of IDF inductees streaming their way up and down Masada.
‘Only the young Hebrews willing to die will be able to ensure for themselves a secure and sovereign life,’ as Shavit summarises the meaning and the moral of Masada. ‘Only their willingness to fight to the end will prevent their end.’
We came down from the fortress on the mesa and went and immersed ourselves in another emblem of Israel and its political life.
I almost typed, We swam in the Dead Sea. But you cannot swim in the Dead Sea – swim in the sense of propelling yourself through water. Because the water of the Dead Sea (the Sea of Death) is ten times saltier than brine.
You can wallow in it – you can more or less sit in it, or even on it. When you try anything else you become aware that you have no weight, no ballast, and are soon upended by the whimsical physics of zero gravity, as in space. Then the head goes under and you savour the glutinous liquid – like the spoiled anchovies from the Sea of Azov that Stalin’s organs used to give to parched prisoners heading for the camps.
But look at what surrounds you. The festive daytrippers of Israel (some of them daubing themselves with the reputedly wholesome black sand), the cheap-and-cheerful snackbar (where Eliza and Inez devoured their burgers and fries), the scuttled waste of Judea, the dramatic eminences of Masada, and Jerusalem, twenty miles away, under its encrustation of curses.
The historian Tony Judt – late, lamented, and (for the record) Jewish – closed his monumental Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) with an epilogue entitled ‘From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’. Thirty-odd pages long, and shored up by the 800 pages that precede it, Judt’s tour d’horizon chastens the reader with its force:
As Europe prepares to leave World War Two behind – as the last memorials are inaugurated, the last surviving combatants and victims honoured – the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s recovered humanity.
Though still far from complete, the psychic work of reckoning, country by country, has typically taken two generations – or roughly fifty years.
Never mind, for now, about the countries with the most obvious burdens of guilt: Germany, and then (in no particular order) Romania, Hungary, Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, and France, all of which Judt inspects. France famously developed its ‘Vichy syndrome’ (amnesia and evasion), but as Judt says, every Nazi-occupied country ‘developed its own “Vichy syndrome” ’ – including Holland and, yes, Sweden (only Denmark escaped the taint of collaboration). All the occupied countries, and all but one of the countries that remained neutral throughout; Ireland played no part in the German war effort, but the others did, Spain (supplying manganese), Portugal (tungsten), Sweden (iron ore); and as for Switzerland…
We remember that during the occupation of France ‘Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime played Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes’ (as Judt witheringly notes). But consider the supposed Little Nell of Switzerland:
1) Not until 1994 did the Swiss government concede that it had petitioned Berlin (in 1938) ‘for the letter “J” to be stamped on the passports of all German Jews – the better to keep them out…’
2) ‘In 1941 and 1942, 60 per cent of Switzerland’s munitions industry, 50 per cent of its optical industry and 40 per cent of its engineering output was producing for Germany, remunerated in gold’ – and it ‘was still selling rapid-fire guns to the Wehrmacht in April 1945’.
3) Over the war years ‘the German Reichsbank deposited the gold equivalent of 1,638,000,000 Swiss francs in Switzerland’ – for channelling and laundering.
4) ‘Swiss banks and insurance companies knowingly pocketed indecently large sums of money belonging to Jewish account holders or to the claimants of insurance policies on murdered relatives.’
5) ‘In a secret post-war agreement…Bern even offered to assign the bank accounts of dead Polish Jews to the new authorities in Warsaw in return for indemnity payments to Swiss banks and businesses expropriated after the Communists’ takeover.’ (And the Poles ‘happily agreed’.)
All this surfaced in the 1990s, and Switzerland’s ‘burnished reputation’, writes Judt, ‘came apart’. The piecemeal disclosures racked the country for a decade.
By the end of the twentieth century, it is fair to say, the murder of Europe’s Jews was a Western idée fixe. Every population affected by the Nazis was thinking and talking about the murder of Europe’s Jews. Every population except that of Israel.
‘It’s like a family tragedy that you don’t discuss,’ said Michael C. ‘It’s taught in schools and it’s publicly commemorated. But privately you don’t talk about it.’
‘The Shoah? It just never comes up,’ you get quite cheerfully told again and again. This fact, and it is a fact, seems to me fathomable but psychologically very ominous. If you’re not talking about it then you’re not actively thinking about it. We can deduce from this that the subconscious of Israel is in a state of acute and chronic turmoil.
‘The denial of the Palestinian disaster’, writes Shavit (using ‘denial’ as a psychiatrist might), ‘is not the only denial the Israeli miracle of the 1950s is based upon. Young Israel also denies the great Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century.’
Holocaust denial, here, means Holocaust inertia. Not out of the bitter disgust expressed by a Bellow character – ‘First those people murdered you, then they forced you to brood on their crimes. It suffocated me to do this.’ It was, rather, an effort of cultural will. The two calamities – the Palestinian, the Jewish – have been consigned to the storage unit of the unarticulated inner life.
I
n response to the Palestinian disaster, the Israelis subvocalise as follows: What’s 700,000 displaced compared to 6 million displaced for the purpose of execution? In response to the Jewish disaster, the Israelis tell themselves, in Shavit’s words, ‘The Holocaust is only the low point from which the Zionist revival rose. The Israeli continuum rejects trauma and defeat and pain and harrowing memories.’ Here, the ‘survivors are expected not to tell their stories’.
‘It is highly likely that this multilevel denial was essential,’ Shavit goes on. ‘Without it, it would have been impossible to function, to build, to live…Denial was a life-or-death imperative for the nine-year-old nation into which I was born.’
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In Washington a month later Christopher said,
‘How am I? Well at the moment I’m being filleted by people offering advice. Fly today to Kyoto and consult Dr…Eat only wild fartleberries and raw kale until you…My aunt had cancer of the G-spot but as soon as she…
‘I did get quite a funny note from a Native American friend. Whoff fucking Native American friend? She’s Cheyenne-Arapaho and a fine comrade. And she wrote to say that everybody who’s taken a tribal cure died almost instantly.
‘Oh, and I did go to the palatial clinic of one celebrated quack, who leadenly told me what I already knew and then, as I was paying, gifted me a bugbite that doubled the size of my left hand. But fuck all that. How was Tel Aviv-Jaffa?’
This happened as October became November in 2010. The Wyoming, in the District of Columbia, late afternoon, under a cover of cloud. I said,
‘Jaffa…For days on end it’s like any Mediterranean city. You know, sun, sea – lunch with the children under a canopy on the beach. You have your delicious seafood salad and your lovely glass of white wine. Then on the way back Erin, that’s Michael’s very nice wife, points to the hulk of the uh, the Dolphinarium Disco.’