by Clive James
The Arab nations, alas, forgot it immediately. With the honourable exception of Jordan, every one of them turned the Palestinians away, and not even Jordan has ever given them much beyond citizenship. There is enough oil money in the Arab nations to give every refugee a hotel suite with twenty-four-hour room service. Instead, far too many of them have been obliged to remain in camps that are really display cases, so that they can testify with their desperation to Jewish inhumanity. The inhumanity was thought to be endemic in the Jewish race. Arab theorists believed that there was scientific literature to lend this contention weight. The Jewish leaders had already been startled to discover, as early as 1949, that The Protocols had been officially translated and printed in the Arab nations. With the rise to power of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bad literature became a driving force. As Amos Elon reveals in his invaluable book A Blood-Dimmed Tide, Nasser discovered in The Protocols a proof ‘beyond all doubt that 300 Zionists, each knowing the others, control the fate of the European continent and elect their successors from among themselves’. He didn’t say how successfully they had controlled the fate of the European continent when Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the train timetables, but what he did say is recorded in the official collection of Nasser’s Speeches and Press Interviews. If Nasser was not precisely a madman, he was certainly no model of detached judgement when he sucked Hussein of Jordan into the 1967 war, thereby laying the West Bank open for occupation and the Palestinians to the second stage of their suffering.
The suffering might have been worse. If Israel, between 1967 and 1973, was fatally slow to realize that the Palestinians had fair nationalist aspirations, one of the reasons was that they seemed to be doing fairly well. Arabs in the Occupied Territories, as Arabs have always done within Israel itself, prospered economically to an extent that might have made the leaders of the Arab nations wonder why their own poor were quite so destitute. Luckily the anomaly could be put down to the continuing efficacy of the infinitely subtle international Zionist plot. Israel came so near to losing the 1973 war that Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan both had to resign in apology. It was the end of the old Labour Alignment’s preponderance in government. Begin was at last allowed into the Knesset from which he had previously been excluded as if infected – which indeed he was – and the inexorable rise of the hardliners began. But even then, the settlement movement might have been slower to start if a bunch of PLO ‘moderates’ had not attacked a defenceless school containing nobody except twenty-two Jewish religious students and murdered them all.
It was a crime encouraged by bad literature. The crime has gone on until this day, and it will continue to be a crime even if the Jews prepare a counter-crime of their own. Some would say they already have. On one occasion, a single Jew walked into a mosque and killed thirty helpless Arabs before his weapons could be disentangled from his ultra-orthodox beard. But no Israeli government, however keen on reprisals against terror, has yet proclaimed the desirability of killing any Arab it can reach. Hezbollah and Hamas both proclaim the desirability of killing any Jew, and there is nothing novel in the proclamation. For a quarter of a century before 1988, when Yasser Arafat finally recognized the state of Israel, it was the founding objective of the PLO to ‘liquidate’ it. Losing people at a crippling rate for a country with such a small population, the Israelis had no reason to doubt that the word ‘liquidate’ was meant in the Stalinist sense. In the last five years of suicide attacks, Israel has lost almost half the number of people that died in the World Trade Center. To inflict proportionate damage, al-Qa’eda would have had to burn down Brooklyn. Nearly all of the dead Jews were noncombatants going about their everyday lives, and no doubt that was what made them targets. Any Jew, anywhere. Hezbollah has killed Jews in that well-known centre of the world Zionist conspiracy, Buenos Aires. Where next? Reykjavik?
A week ago, shortly after Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin finally met his rocket, some of our media representatives were impressed when one of his supporters promised that the Gates of Hell would now be open. For the Jews, those same gates have been open for a long time. People who hold the understandable belief that Jewish reprisals will create more Arab terror should be equally prepared to consider whether more Arab terror might not produce an effect on the Jewish side that we have not previously had to contemplate because they have so far been able to keep their own maniacs chained up. Out on the extreme, far beyond Ariel Sharon and even beyond Benjamin Netenyahu, there are ultras who would like to see every Arab dead. Yitzhak Rabin, the lost hero of Israel, was murdered by the Jewish equivalent of the Arab fanatic who killed Sadat, the lost hero of Egypt. Rabin always believed that the loudly racist Gush Emunim settlers on the West Bank were a threat to democracy. Sharon couldn’t see it. By now he can, and those who loathe his ruthlessness might come to bless it when the time arrives for Jews to shoot Jews – as well it might, on the inevitable day when the last settlers are ordered out of the Occupied Territories. It wouldn’t be the first time Jews had shot Jews. In 1948, when Ben Gurion ordered the Irgun to disarm, their response was to run a fresh supply of guns into Tel Aviv. Ben Gurion ordered that the ship should be attacked. Twenty of the Irgun were killed, and Begin ended up swimming in the harbour. Some optimists believed he had learned his lesson.
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The University of the Holocaust had as many dumb graduates as clever ones. Nazi anti-Semitism was so awful in its irrationality that any contrary force is likely to be irrational as well. The only rational contrary force is called liberal democracy, which conquers extremism by containing it. In answer to those who think Mel Gibson, lonely creator of The Passion of the Christ, might be Hitler reborn with a more photogenic hairstyle, it should be said that if he had wanted to produce a truly anti-Semitic film, he would have had the Jews on screen whispering in Hebrew about setting up a world conspiracy with money swindled from the Romans. Authentic Jew-baiters don’t equivocate. In its classic form, anti-Semitism did indeed emerge as a by-product of Christianity. None of the abuse recently heaped on world Jewry by the ex-Prime Minister of Malaysia and the top Imam of Australia was not first heaped by Martin Luther. But Christianity finally got over it, mainly because the democratic states deprived Christianity of political power. In a democratic state, the passion of the Mel, whatever it might happen to be, must be tempered for rational ears if it is to open big on the first weekend.
The Mel’s passion aside, however, we really do have fanatics of our own, preaching versions of The Protocols that differ from it only by substituting America as the source of all the world’s evil – including, of course, the depredations of the Israeli state, which generate such universal anger that a bunch of young head-cases in Bali are moved to blow up a nightclub. In reality, they blew up the nightclub because they didn’t like the way young Australians dance. I don’t much like it either, but I don’t think blowing their legs off is an appropriate cure. My opinion, which I assume most of the readers of this newspaper share, was not transmitted to me by a sacred text, although I suppose the teachings of Jesus were in on the start of it. In the world of today, any reasonable and widely shared opinion is the result of a long and complicated history of enlightenment culminating in liberal institutions, which we should be proud of and teach our children to revere, instead of favouring the fantastic theory that a regard for civilized values somehow exacerbates a conspiracy against the wretched of the earth.
It shouldn’t need pointing out that the Bali bombers knew no more about the history of the Middle East than I know about quantum mechanics. But it does need pointing out, because so many Western intellectuals are incapable of reasoning their way to any conclusion that does not suit their prejudices. There are limits, however, to what they can say unopposed, and very definite limits to what they can do without legal sanction. With Islamic fanaticism as we now face it, no such restrictions apply. This is bad news for Islam in general, and for the Palestinians it is beyond bad news. There are many Palestinians who know this to be true. In t
he week after Sheik Ahmed Yassin’s death, the Palestinian Authority issued an appeal for passive resistance that amounted to a repudiation of the suicide bombing. The question remains, however, of how much authority the Palestinian Authority exercises over the fanatics. Our own absolutist half-wits need to realize two things. Al-Qa’eda would go on attacking the democracies even if the Palestinians achieved justice tomorrow. And the Palestinians will never achieve justice if they go on attacking Israel. Both crimes are abetted by bad literature, and to produce bad literature of our own adds fuel to the fire. To that extent, the seductive idea that we are all guilty is exactly right.
Sunday Times, 28 March 2004
Postscript
Even when devoted to dispelling myths instead of creating them, international opinion-peddling on the subject of the Middle East has little value beyond making the participants feel better. Intellectuals who think they can influence events by argument are usually making a mistake. Their only influence can be on the preservation or the further erosion of the complex truth. Those who imagine that there can be such a thing as a useful lie are joining a bad company. A less bad company, but still sad, is formed by those who believe that by clarifying the case they can affect its outcome. The humanities, of which political analysis is a branch, must be pursued for their own sake. Any thinker who can’t live with that imperative is doomed to die of disappointment. Our own experience of reading, however, tells us that a thought launched into the void is not necessarily going nowhere. When Albert Camus wrote ‘Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes’ he changed my life, even if he did nothing to change the minds of a million admirers of Stalin. That might seem a small reward for his effort, but probably the best reason for trying to say things well is that they might travel further, beyond the gravity field of automatic indifference. Thinly spread through space and time, there has always been a community of the receptive, glad to be confirmed in a view they already held, or at least to be reassured that they are not alone. On the Middle East, in my opinion, the reiteration of a commonplace – that anti-Semitism is the enemy of the Palestinian cause – is still worth it. But it is only just worth it. Remotely located pundits who have managed to persuade themselves that the clock can be put back beyond 1948 without generating a mushroom cloud aren’t going to have their minds changed by mere reasoning.
What really matters is the opinions of the people on the spot. In that regard, I got a quick education at the Wellington Festival in the following year, when the highly talented Israeli writer Etgar Keret told me that he not only understood what I was saying, but that it scarcely needed saying anyway, since every young person in the area, whether Jew or Arab, understood it perfectly, as long as they had an IQ in triple figures. In other words, there were no opinions left to be thrashed out: only the politics. Meanwhile there was a life to lead. In his marvellous stories, the youngsters lead it, with all the usual dancing to flashing lights. Some of the flashing lights are bombs going off, but that’s the way it is. Nevertheless it is surely permissible to be stunned by the sheer number of commentators on the international scene who think they know something that Amos Elon, Amos Oz and David Grossman don’t. All three want a Palestinian state. None of them believes in retaining the Occupied Territories. By what feat of mental gymnastics can they be regarded as imperialists? Yet they are so regarded. Now that the international left intelligentsia is united in the opinion that Israel is America’s cat’s-paw, the Israeli liberals, as if they didn’t have enough trouble with their own right wing, find themselves calumniated as stooges of imperialism, simply because they want the State of Israel to continue. Those of us who have lived long enough will hear a bell ringing, and remember the days when the Kremlin labelled liberal democrats as Social Fascists. In the Germany of the 1930s, it was one of the reasons why the Nazis came to power. Since Nazi power made the foundation of the State of Israel inevitable, it makes more sense to blame the Russians than to blame the Americans. But it makes more sense still to blame nobody. The eternal search for a scapegoat is where the whole thing started.
NO WAY, MADAME BOVARY
The first thing to say about Madame Bovary is that it’s a terrific story. Other comparably great and famous novels aren’t, but it is. Everyone should read it. Everyone would read it, given a free taste. The plot fairly belts along from the first page. Young Charles Bovary clumps into school to be laughed at by the other kids for his awkwardness. In no time he is a medical student, then a doctor. The beautiful Emma Rouault is his second wife. He wins the right to her hand after setting her father’s broken leg. It’s a simple job but it gets him a reputation for competence. Fatally he believes this too. Stuck with him in the depths of nowhere, Emma gradually realizes that she has married a chump. Longing for excitement and a classier way of life, she falls for a charming poseur called Leon. Their incipient affair is a stand-off. But with an upmarket louse called Rodolphe she finds sexual fulfilment, and plans a future with him. Sharing no such plans, Rodolphe dumps her. She collapses. Nursed back to health by the unsuspecting Charles, she hooks up again with Leon. This time it really happens. But the extravagance of her double life, financed by money stolen from Charles, gets her into ruinous debt. The loan-shark closes in, Leon backs out, and Emma has only one way to go. On a shelf in the pharmacist’s shop nearby is a bottle of . . . but I won’t say how it comes out, because some of you might not yet have read the book.
Some purists would say you can’t. They would say that Flaubert’s prose style is the essence of his art, and too near perfection to survive being translated. But we have to ask ourselves what we mean by the word ‘style’. Undoubtedly there is a rhythm and a cadence to Flaubert’s prose that only a fluent reader of French can appreciate, although the fluent reader of French had better be French. We are always better judges of tone in our first language than in a second or third. To turn things around for a moment, late nineteenth-century French critics were under the impression that Edgar Allan Poe was not only a spellbinding tale-teller but also a great master of English prose, and in the twentieth century it was widely assumed in the French literary world that the leading stylist of the English literary world was Charles Morgan, a dim bulb now long extinguished. If we are learning a foreign language, we tend to admire writers in it who are easy to read. One of the early bonuses attached to learning Russian, for example, is that all the standard European fairy tales were transcribed by great writers. So within a few weeks you are reading Tolstoy, whose name is on the title page of The Three Bears. It isn’t all that long a step to reading Anna Karenina, because Tolstoy’s sentences are never very tricky at however high the level of exposition. The temptation is to call Tolstoy a stylist. But in Russian, Turgenev was the stylist. Turgenev was the one who cared about repeating a word too soon. Tolstoy hardly cared at all.
It can safely be assumed that Flaubert’s prose makes music. More important, however, is that it would be impressive even if it didn’t. This is where the second, and richer, meaning of the word ‘style’ comes in. You need only rudimentary French to spot that Flaubert never wastes a word. Every word is to the point, especially in the descriptive passages. In his landscapes, trees are sometimes trees and leaves leaves, but when it matters he can give everything a specific name. Within four walls, he gives every object a pinpoint particularity. If he is looking at things through Emma’s eyes, he adds his analytical power to her naïve hunger. Emma’s wishes might have been blurred by her addiction to sentimental novels, but her creator, never sentimental for a second, keeps her perceptions sharp. Early in the story, there is a ball at a grand house: an episode that awakes in Emma a dangerous taste for the high life. In a few paragraphs, using Emma’s vision as a camera, Flaubert captures the sumptuous glamour with a photographic scope that makes us think of those lavish get-togethers in War and Peace, in Proust or in The Leopard. Dickens could lay out a scene like that, too, but would spend thousands of words on it.
Minting his every phrase afresh, Flaubert avoided cli
chés like poison. ‘Avoid like poison’ is a cliché, and one that Flaubert would either not have used if he had been composing in English, or else flagged with italics to prove that he knew it came ready-made. Martin Amis’s War Against Cliché is nothing beside Flaubert’s, who waged his with nuclear weapons. (He died waging it: his last book, Bouvard et Pécuchet, was about no other subject.) It follows that any translator must be unusually alert to what is alive or dead about his own use of language, or else he will do an injury to Flaubert’s style far more serious than merely failing to reproduce its pulse and lilt. When Flaubert seems to be saying that Charles’s off-putting first wife is long in the tooth, the translator had better be careful about calling her long in the tooth, which in English means old: Flaubert is just saying that her teeth are long. The translator needs to keep an eye on his own prose. Unfortunately the evidence continues to accumulate that we are now past the time when more than a few jobbing writers knew how to do this. In the second-last stage of our language’s decay, it was enough to write correctly in order to gain a reputation for writing well. Now we are in the last stage, when almost nobody knows what it means to write correctly. Among ordinary pens for hire, it is no longer common to write without solecisms; even those who can are likely to bolt phrases together with no real attention to their derivation; and in too many cases the language is utterly emptied of the history that brought it into being. This is a very depleted gene-pool in which to go fishing for a translator of any foreign writer at all, let alone Flaubert. One can only salute the boldness of a publishing house still willing to give it a try. For safety’s sake, however, it might be wise not to let the salute progress far above the shoulder until we have made sure that what we are acknowledging is a real contribution.