From Cultural Amnesia (Clive James, 2007) pp628-31
Religion makes inspiration easy. Young Hamas and Al Qaeda suicide bombers of today are promised a place in paradise, as of tomorrow. It sounds more attractive than dying for dialectical materialism. But even a nominally Marxist terrorist is seldom likely to risk his life for communism. He risks his life for the oppressed. (Should he succeed, they will almost certainly end up more oppressed than ever, but he is too young to have read the books that prove it.) Our revulsion comes from his readiness to kill innocent people other than his own, but the mathematics might seem convincing. Kill a few innocent people in a nightclub now, and that will save the lives of thousands later. (In the 1960s, the mathematics were put into a book, Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea: a little classic of casuistry which can be recommended, with 3 health warning, to anyone who doubts just how dangerous the French intelligentsia could be in that period.) He assumes that there can be an economy of killing, and the awful truth is that he is not entirely absurd o think so. An economy of killing was in the minds of the terrorists who helped to found the state of Israel. Britain, the mandatory power, was a democratic state within the meaning of Rognoni’s definition, Theoretically, it was open to persuasion by democratic means. Practically, the Israeli activists didn’t think it was. (It should be remembered that British foreign policy had spent years looking as if it had been designed to support their view. The pre-war quotas set against Jewish immigration into Palestine had retained their lethal effect even after che war, with British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin’s ill-disguised self-satisfaction being remembered in Israel as a particularly offensive insult.) ‘The terrorists of the Stern Gang, and the more militant members of the Irgun, saw no means of dissuading the British from their tutelary mission except by terror. The strategy was assumed to have worked because Britain gave up: post hoc ergo propter boc. (We can be sure that this apparent chain of cause and effect has been in the minds of IRA strategists ever since.) When the Irgun massacred the Palestinian inhabitants of Deir Yassin—the empty houses could still be seen in my time, only a short walk into the suburbs of Jerusalem—officers of the Haganah protested. Bar Lev, Haganah commander in the area, wanted to arrest the Irgun leaders, one of whom was Menachem Begin. David Ben-Gurion didn’t listen. It seems a fair inference (I have heard even anti-Zionist Israeli liberals implying it) that terrorizing the Palestinian population into flight was a deliberate policy.
These considerations need to be kept in mind by anyone who, like myself, believes in the state of Israel’s right to exist and regards the concerted attack by the Arab nations in 1948 as ample reason for Israel to be concerned in perpetuity about defensible borders. But it was worse than unfortunate, it was tragic, that the apparently efficacious use of terror threw a long shadow. When the Arab countries had their man of the hour in Anwar Sadat of Egypt, the man of the hour in Israe was none other than Menachem Begin, whose pedigree went back ta Deir Yassin. Actually it went back further than that, into an experience under the Nazis which taught him that the only answer to threatened extermination was to fight with any means: moral considerations were ‘culpable luxury, for which your own innocent people would have bay. The two major totalitarian earthquakes of the twentieth century – the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—had a seismic influence on the Middle East: wave after wave of distortion, the waves interfering with each other in a pattern so complex that it looks like chaos.
But there was one influence easy to isolate. The state of Israel was built by people who knew all too much about terror. Failure by the Arab powers to grasp this fact led them to the supreme stupidity of threatening extinction to people who had been threatened with it already by experts. But Israeli leaders who take a hard line against Palestinian insurgency are asking a lot if they expect automatic moral condemnation from onlookers for the latest suicide bomb delivered by a young Palestinian with a ticket to the beyond. The PLO has a suitably disgusting track record in which the Black September massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 was merely the most attention getting point. Hamas will probably top that sooner or later. But the state of Israel’s own track record goes back far beyond Ariel Sharon’s dubious achievements in the Lebanon refugee camps. (All he did was stand by, but it was a murderous indifference.) It goes back to an act of terror by the Irgun. It goes back to the King David Hotel collapsing in Jerusalem. When it did, the perpetrators got what they wanted.
Now their descendants must convince the Palestinians that similar means will never work. The Palestinians would be easier to convince, of course, if their activists, and the Arab nations that stand behind them, had any real idea of the continuous historical tragedy that led up to the installation and consolidation of a Jewish settlement in Palestine. Unfortunately the standard of informed commentary on the Arab side has been kept ruinously low by the absence of an independent, secular intelligentsia. I met Edward Said, and liked him as anyone would. He had distinction of mind written all over him. He must have been already sick by then, but he looked haunted as well, and I don’t think jt was just by his outrage at Israel’s behaviour. He was haunted by the ironic fact that his only natural allies were liberals within Israel. Av inch away from Amos Oz and a thousand miles from Vanessa Redgrave, Said was an isolated figure, and he himself could never admit in print that the Arab nations dished their cause in advance by not persuading the Palestinians to accept their own state in 1947, and by combining to attack the nascent Israeli state in 1948. If he had, he would probably have been assassinated. (As the assassination of Sadat proved, the Arab irredentists, like the Zionist ultras, have always been unerring in picking off any incipient mediators.) In the Israeli press, a constant feature is a sottisier of what the official Arab publications, including school textbooks, say about the eternal iniquity of the Jewish race and the holy necessity to eradicate it from the face of the Earth. The Israelis scarcely need to quote any of that stuff out of context. Most of the remarks could have come out of the divinely inspired mouth of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time when he was in Berlin urging Hitler to get on with it.
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