Unspeak

by Steven Poole

  Thus began a veritable orgy of tragedy-talk by officials and commentators. ‘Tragedy’ has long been a most useful term of Unspeak. For what is a tragedy? It is a work of fiction, devised by a godlike author. It plays out before us, with implacable logic, for our moral edification. But we are not actually involved in it, and cannot change the outcome. The spectators are not at fault when a tragedy occurs, any more than you blame the theatre manager for the death of Hamlet.

  Who, then, to blame for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes? You might suppose, from reading the police statement, that Menezes himself was in error, having been careless enough to ‘lose his life’. According to the first theoretician of tragedy, Aristotle, the tragic hero must be doomed by his own tragic error, or hamartia. It was presumably just such an error to run away from undercover policemen, if that was what the victim actually did. Hence the tragedy in this case may be seen to be that of Menezes himself. Such was the insinuation of the police’s coolly distancing language. Their announcement that they were ‘now satisfied’ that he was not a terrorist further insinuated, in icily sinister fashion, that it was the victim’s fault not to have ‘satisfied’ them of his innocence sooner: and indeed that anyone who could not so ‘satisfy’ the police on demand, at the very least by being dressed appropriately for the climate, might expect to be shot. Aristotle said that a tragedy should inspire pity and fear in the audience; the police felt only a lukewarm ‘regret’. And they were clearly only spectators, since there was no mention of their having killed Menezes, who instead somehow mislaid his health with no outside help. Tony Blair subsequently corrected this unfortunate implication with the most passive, no-blame language possible, referring to ‘the death that has happened’,3 as though, perhaps, it had been the result of natural causes.

  It could be that Home Secretary Charles Clarke was also accusing the victim of hamartia when he called the shooting ‘an absolute tragedy for Mr de Menezes and his family’.4 Alternatively, the odd construction ‘a tragedy for’ might imply a performance put on especially for the victim and his relatives; in that case, it was all too unfortunate that Menezes had somehow broken through the fourth wall and become an unwilling participant in the drama.

  Another option was to suggest that the graver mistake had actually been made by the police in shooting to death a man innocent of any crime: so the Muslim Council of Great Britain called this a ‘terrible, tragic mistake’.5 But then if the mistake belongs to the police, it might be a hamartia, and so the tragedy itself might be theirs too. The police had in place a shoot-to-kill policy in regard to suspected suicide bombers, a policy that had been in effect in secret since 2002.6 Now, when its existence was revealed, the term was hastily retooled with the somewhat more unwieldy name ‘shoot-to-kill-in-order-to-protect’, according to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair;7 or, as former Prime Minister John Major subtly shortened it, ‘shoot-to-protect’,8 thereby avoiding any distasteful mention of killing at all. The policy’s official code name was Operation Kratos.9 Kratos was a word borrowed from ancient Greek and so had aptly tragic resonances; it meant, appropriately, ‘power’.

  Tony Blair pleaded: ‘I think it is important […] that we understand that had the circumstances been different and, for example, this had turned out to be a terrorist and they had failed to take that action, they would have been criticised the other way.’10 Yes; but the circumstances were not different. Blair attempted to reframe the debate in the most euphemistic manner: apparently the real scandal was the fact that the police had been ‘criticised’, rather than that an innocent man had been killed. Now, few people should like to be a police officer working under the Kratos principle, with the duty to make split-second decisions about whether the person pursued may be about to detonate an explosives belt. The officers involved may have been traumatised by their actions. But to regard the incident as their tragedy had the effect of relegating the man killed to a walk-on role in a drama of heroic-but-flawed law-enforcers.

  All the more so if the killing were characterised more widely, as the tragedy of society as a whole. Thus London mayor Ken Livingstone: ‘This tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility.’11 Tragedy here is a kind of impersonal machine – an arithmetical machine, for adding tolls of deaths – hovering over everyone. It has been set in motion, or authored, by ‘the terrorists’. Neither Menezes nor the police are at all to blame in this most generous definition of ‘tragedy’: as an epic conceived by supervillains who ‘bear responsibility’ even for deaths physically performed by their enemies.

  And so it went. Under the onslaught of tragedy-speak, it became ever more difficult to make out the person of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot repeatedly in the head, fading into the rhetorical distance.

  Fence

  The use of ‘tragedy’ to avoid accepting responsibility or pointing the finger has long been widespread. In 1988, the killing of three Palestinian villagers by an Israeli soldier was deemed a ‘tragic incident’ by the army, who declined to prosecute the perpetrator.12 In the same year, meanwhile, PLO leader Yasser Arafat disdained any mention of acts of terrorism committed by his group, instead using the words ‘tragedy’ or ‘tragic’ five times in a speech to the United Nations.13 Not only specific incidents but entire conflicts can be called tragedies, and the Israel-Palestine situation as a whole is particularly apt to be described as one. So wrote outgoing New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent in 2005: ‘Who can be dispassionate about an endless tragedy? […] Each day’s reports in The Times are tiny fragments of a tragic epic.’14 Okrent’s power to predict the future, and so ascertain that the ‘tragedy’ would indeed be endless, was impressive, and his marriage of tragedy with another literary form, epic, no doubt demonstrated the extent of his passion. Like Homer’s Iliad, an epic was bound to be a tale of blood-soaked heroism, in which no one was really at fault, but all were the playthings of the gods. Less thrilling to the moral imagination but more demonstrable, however, was the fact that Israelis and Palestinians had been engaged in one of the most intense and multifaceted contests of Unspeak in modern times.

  In 2002, Israel began constructing what it called a ‘security fence’15 around its territory. The term ‘fence’ evokes thigh-high slats of wood, painted white, around the borders of a pleasant suburban garden, or a decorative wrought-iron structure. (The Modern Hebrew term for the structure, gader, has the same connotations of something ‘usually made of wire (barbed wire is geder tayil) or wood’,16 as opposed to a wall.) The Israeli fence was rather more complex, consisting of, at various parts along its length, roads, trenches, guard-towers, thermal-imaging cameras, a steel-and-barbed-wire electrified fence, and an eight-metre-high concrete wall.17 Therefore, to call the entire structure a ‘fence’ was deliberately misleading propaganda. It became known in Arabic as ‘the Wall’,18 and was thus referred to in English by some commentators, though that appellation too was deliberately misleading propaganda, since in many places it was not a wall. In Britain, BBC News told its presenters not to use the term ‘wall’ for the structure as a whole; but they were allowed to say ‘fence’, which was also inaccurate.19 How to get around this problem? Some opted to use both names at once: ‘fence/wall’.20 George W. Bush called it a fence when standing next to Ariel Sharon, but a wall with then-Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.21 Meanwhile, one photograph of a section that was a wall, from Agence France Presse, carried the splendidly ironical caption ‘concrete fence’.22

  A further idea was implied by the epithet ‘security’ in the original designation ‘security fence’: that the structure was being built only to keep Israeli citizens safe. Certainly one reason for it was to prevent suicide bombers from crossing over from the West Bank into Israel and blowing up civilians; as a spokeswoman for the Israeli Embassy in London put it: ‘to impede the terrorists’ access to Israel’.23 Some writers accepted this argument while indicating their displeasure by using the competing noun, callin
g the thing a ‘security wall’.24 In an apparent concession to the fence/wall controversy, some official Israeli communications began to refer to the ‘security barrier’ instead. ‘Barrier’ might have looked like a more neutral term for the structure in toto, but that word, too, always has a connotation of defence from danger or contamination, as in flood barrier, or blood-brain barrier. And so the word ‘barrier’ worked to enhance the other half of the term: the claim that its motivation was solely ‘security’. Yet the structure did not simply enclose pre-1967 Israeli territory but encroached far into the occupied West Bank. Under the proposed final route of the barrier in spring 2005, according to a report that continued nonetheless to use the soothing, suburban noun ‘fence’: ‘9.5 percent of the territory of the West Bank would end up on the Israeli side of the fence […] and 230,000 Palestinians would be living in enclaves surrounded on three sides by the fence.’25

  Some Palestinians had therefore renamed the structure the ‘Apartheid wall’, attempting to align themselves in international sympathy with the oppressed black population of South Africa during apartheid rule. This propaganda term was also adopted, for instance, by retired British MP Tony Benn.26 Others contested the idea of security as the sole motivation in different ways. Chris McGreal, Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian, explained in an internal memo that he had sometimes chosen to write ‘“security” barrier’, with scare quotes around the first term only: ‘to convey the idea that the dispute is not whether it’s a fence (where it is) but whether it’s about security. It signals that there are legitimate questions over the government’s claim that this is driven by security considerations when there are good reasons to believe that the barrier is also (or mainly) political, marking out a future border and grabbing land.’ In 2004, the International Court of Justice noted that the barrier’s construction involved the demolition of Palestinian homes and ‘led to increasing difficulties for the population concerned regarding access to health services, educational establishments and primary sources of water’, and that if it became permanent, it ‘would be tantamount to de facto annexation’. The ICJ concluded that it was ‘contrary to international law’.27

  Finally, the state of Israel was driven to concede in a court case that security was not the only reason for the structure. Ha’aretz reported:

  Israel has acknowledged for the first time that not just ‘security’ considerations were instrumental in determining the route of the West Bank separation fence.

  Responding to a petition brought to the High Court by the residents of the Palestinian village Azun in the northern West Bank, the state asked for the fence to be left on its original route, previously ruled to be unsuitable, as it would be very expensive to move. […]

  In its principal ruling on the issue last year, in the Beit Surik affair, the High Court determined that the state has no authority to build a fence for ‘political’ considerations, such as appending land to Israel. […] Until now, the state has claimed that the fence was a short-term measure, and it was possible to move or dismantle the barrier.28

  The reporter continued to use the terms ‘fence’ and ‘barrier’ interchangeably, but notice what had happened to the secondary term: it was no longer a ‘security fence’ but a ‘separation fence’. It was not that the claim of security as a motivation had been disproven or abandoned – the structure had reduced the number of suicide attacks within Israel – but that security had been shown not to be the sole motivation.

  A general lesson is here exemplified. It is that political acts are commonly overdetermined: there are many reasons for them. Contests of Unspeak ensue when each side attempts falsely to simplify the facts by claiming that only one motivation exists: so, on one side, the ‘fence’ was purely for ‘security’; on the other, the ‘wall’ was a tool of ‘apartheid’. The designation’s eventual evolution into ‘separation barrier’ was something of an improvement, even if the phrase was a crude tautology. Both sides could at least agree that its effect was indeed to separate one side from the other, though ‘barrier’ still implied that its function was to protect the Israelis from the Palestinians, and not vice versa.

  Merely calling the thing by a different name did not ease the grievances of Palestinians affected by its route. ‘It’s certainly a problem to the extent that it prejudges final borders, confiscates Palestinian property or imposes further hardship on the Palestinian people,’29 said a US State Department spokesman in July 2005. Less than a week after conceding that it had other considerations besides security in building the structure, meanwhile, the Israeli government decided to ‘cut off 55,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem from the rest of the city’.30 It was part of what was called the ‘Jerusalem envelope’ project.31 It was a strange ‘envelope’ that could be constructed out of concrete and steel. Envelopes, of course, are there to be pushed, and the Jerusalem envelope was no exception: ‘Out of the 130 kilometers of the fence in the Jerusalem area,’ Ha’aretz reported, ‘102 kilometers are on West Bank territory, to a depth of up to 10 kilometers.’32

  A further, ingenious trick of Unspeak was employed to justify the appropriation of land in East Jerusalem: people whose land was cut in two or entirely annexed were deemed nifkadim, or ‘absentees’. Israeli law had decreed ‘absent’ anyone who, during its War of Independence more than half a century previously, found themselves at any time on Palestinian territory not controlled by Israel or on the land of another Arab state:

  An absentee was anyone who, on or after 29 November 1947 (the date of the United Nations General Assembly resolution to partition Palestine) [and before 2 December 1948] had been: (a) a citizen or subject of one of the Arab countries at war with Israel; (b) in any of these countries, or in any part of Palestine outside the jurisdiction of the regulations; or (c) a citizen of Palestine who abandoned his or her normal place of residence. Technically, this included virtually all Arabs who vacated their homes during the war, regardless of whether they returned […] [T]ens of thousands of Arab Israeli citizens [were] classified as absentees, assuming the paradoxical legal identity of ‘present absentee’.33

  A fine paradox, ‘present absentees’ (nochihim nifkadim). Though they were right there, they were absent. They were phantoms, unpeople – rather like the CIA’s ‘ghost detainees’, whom we shall meet in Chapter Seven. One such present absentee was a farmer named Johnny Atiq, who in 2004 saw the ‘separation barrier’ constructed through his olive groves so that 40 trees remained on his side and 150 on the Israeli side. The Israeli army subsequently told him that those trees now belonged to Israel. Ha’aretz reported that he was amazed to discover that ‘he is an “absentee” living physically 100 metres from his olive trees’.34

  The phrase ‘present absentee’, a giddy apex of Unspeak, expresses a wish that the enemy should not even exist. In the same way, Israel’s government and press cooperated after the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000 in spreading the message that there was ‘no partner’ for peace negotiations, the continuing existence of Yasser Arafat notwithstanding.35 Such rhetorical fantasies are common on both sides. The Arab League countries, including Libya and Syria, officially recognised the existence of the state of Israel (within its pre-1967 borders) only in 2002; in 2005 Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar was continuing to insist that ‘in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the earth’.36 Conversely, some Israelis and supporters of Israeli policy have always refused even to use the term ‘Palestinians’, preferring simply ‘Arabs’, because to say ‘Palestinians’ might already imply that the people so named have some just claim to statehood. Thus, for instance, American preacher Pat Robertson referred contemptuously to ‘so-called Palestinians’.37

  Instead, generalisations were made about ‘the Arab’38 – to name one’s enemy in the singular, of course, legitimises collective punishment, for ‘the Arab’ must be responsible for any act by an individual Arab. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak claimed that Arabs could not distinguish between truth and
lies: ‘They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture […] There is no such thing as “the truth”.’39 Essentially, this is to say that all Arab speech is Unspeak; that they do not exist in the civilised continuum represented by ‘Judeo-Christian culture’, that they are ineffably other. Such epistemological contests were even evident in heated disagreements over what a man’s own name meant: Mahmoud Abbas was also called, by Israelis and Palestinians alike, Abu Mazen, but for very different reasons. ‘Abu Mazen’ means ‘father of Mazen’, and is a common honorific in Arab societies, where sons are highly prized: it is a ’kunya, a nickname that most often refers specifically to one’s offspring’.40 On the other hand, pro-Israeli commentators routinely referred to ‘Abu Mazen’ as Abbas’s ‘nom de guerre’,41 thus darkly hinting that he was or had been involved in acts of terrorism.

  If one accepts that one’s enemies do in fact exist, perhaps they are disqualified in some subtler way from equal consideration. Israel Zangwill had coined a well-known slogan to promote the founding of Israel in the late nineteenth century: ‘A land without a people for a people without a land.’42 This phrase was often subsequently misquoted in anti-Zionist writings as ‘A land without people’, missing the indefinite article.43 This subtle falsification enabled some to make a comparison of early Zionism with the racist attitudes of the colonial English in America and the Dutch in South Africa, to whom native Americans or Africans did not qualify as human beings at all. But in Zangwill’s particular slogan, the difference represented in ‘without a people’ is crucial. The specific claim was not the blatantly false one that the territory was unpopulated, nor that those living there were not human, but that they did not constitute ‘a people’: in other words, it was argued that they had no conception of nationhood in a modern western sense. Therefore, they would presumably not mind leaving their land and moving to other Arab countries. It was in this sense that Golda Meir, later to be Israel’s Prime Minister, told historian Tony Judt in the 1960s that he could not speak of ‘Palestinians’ since ‘they did not exist’.44 However, the grammar of Meir’s formulation shows well the ease with which rhetoric can slip from one claim – long highly contested by Palestinians themselves – about the self-image of a ‘people’, to another, darker claim, evident in the phrase ‘present absentees’, about people whose existence one finds uncongenial not really being there at all.