Remora
Okay, LI is obsessed. You are tired of the Middle East. You want things the way they used to be around here. The eccentric flights into biz-olect. The homey essays about encyclopedias.
Well, forget it.

David Remnick's Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker is a bouquet of Cold War flowers of rhetoric. It exudes a sweet, poisonous smell. He even writes of the "parlor politicians" in Europe -- is this derived from the phrase, parlor pinks? Surely it is. I suppose the contrast is between those effete guys enjoying teas in roccoco-ish chambers and speaking French to each other (yuck!) while on the other side of the world, in the New World, our politicians are up at the crack of dawn, donning grease stained t shirts, smoking marlboros, roping and wrangling and squinting into the sun and getting long and tall and philosophical. Our politicians are like our usurping Potus. They are like Trent Lott. They are as honest and funloving a bunch of guys as you'd want to take out on patrol. And smart! Not in that parlor sense, not with a bunch of book larnin.' No siree, they was all trained at their grandmas knee on the good book and Horatio Alger, and has forsaken the word since then, since what is the point?

But the more interesting part of Remnicks' demagogery is another McCarthy-ite trope: moral equivalency. Remember the second Cold War, the Reagan phase, when we were hammered with that phrase? It has been a while since we saw it last. But here it comes again. We particularly enjoyed this passage:


"There is no moral equivalence between Arafat and Sharon: the first thrives on the idealization of martyrdom; the other now blunders while trying to stifle him. Nevertheless, history has seldom conjured two leaders less fit for their historical moment than Arafat and Sharon. (And those who stand in waiting�a murderer's row of Palestinian security chiefs and Benjamin Netanyahu�are no more promising.) Another party is needed, and this moment, like September 11th, demands American diplomacy, imagination, and intervention. President Bush was, at first, slow to engage at anywhere near the level needed. His actions, and the actions of his agencies, were contradictory and confused. One day early last week, when Bush was asked about criticism that he had not done enough to bring an end to the confrontation, he complained that in fact he had been making calls all morning. The President sounded put out; it was a tone familiar not from his best speeches after the September attacks but, rather, from his more feckless moments during the 2000 campaign."

We vote for "moral equivalence" as our favorite phrase in Remnick's piece, because unlike parlor politician, it is not mere vituperation. It supposedly means something, something deep. Demagogery is not mere ornament. It has to provide a content, however ersatz. So here we are in the Cold War again, with an 'us' -- see above, re squinting into sun politicos on ranches -- and a 'them'. There's evil Arafat, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a figure out of the Flintstones -- blundering, but no doubt decent and humane Ariel Sharon.

Well, all talk about the Middle East eventually gets around to history -- which is why, perhaps, the place seems so enigmatic and maddening to Americans, who officially believe history is something that comes in marble, with columns and a statue, that you visit on your D.C. vacation -- but that is otherwise irrelevant to anybody's life.

Yet because Remnick's Fred Flintstone is leading a party that actually has a history -- and because that history, with its roots in the Irgun, exhibits pattern that are on display in every one of Sharon's acts and speeches, and in the acts and speeches of his rightwing cabinet ministers -- LI would think that the New Yorker editor would have some feel for the past, here, as that force that portends the future. LI has been boning up on the Middle East himself, kiddies. We are reading Conor Cruise O'brien's book about Israel, The Siege. Though we are far from finished with that book, one thing clearly emerges from the history of Israel's founding. The PLO's model for statehood is not Algeria, it is Israel.

The Israel, that is, that countenanced a double track policy in its early years. The Israel that knew that its very existence depended on provisionally defying the world, or at least the Free World. On the one hand, the official Zionist line of peaceful coexistence, promulgated by David Ben-Gurion. On the other hand, the unofficial Irgun line of "by whatever means necessary." The Irgun line involved massive covert shipments of arms, assassination (as of the UN's mediator at the time, Count Bernadotte), and the deaths of as many Palestinian Arabs as was necessary to create the critical fright that leads to wholesale flight.

Since this history is a mere fifty years ago and less, burying it is still difficult. But les gens bien-pensants like Remnick, who have otherwise exhibited a ravenous thirst for information about, say, Stalin's crimes -- which stretch back sixty years and more -- seem to be satiated on a tepid version of Israel's founding, development, and present state. It is all in the heroic mode, a la Leon Uris, and bloodshed is what the Israelis suffered, instead of caused.

So we have this version of Arafat the terrorist, which is a top ten number for right wing pundits and moderates alike. How can the man actual debase the peace process by competing with more radical Palestinian factions? Such behavior would never be allowed in Israeli politics, right?

Come on. Are we serious here? Of course not. That's why, out of the ruins of the camps, the newspapers will be extracting, in the next few days, evidence from the IDF, the most neutral and kindly of armies. As the mounds of the Palestinian dead are buried, the papers will instead focus, with their eternal vigilance over right and wrong, on documents and weaponry.

As for the hand-wringing in Remnick's article about the settlements on the West Bank -- like every other American journalist, he assures us that the vast majority of the Israelis don't want them, don't need them, etc., etc. But by some magical force, some national impotence a la the Fisher King, they just can't seem to prevent them from happening. They just can't seem to connect, say, electing Ariel Sharon prime minister and the continuing support given to the West Bank settlements.

For a much more specific article about the politics of those settlements, go to Anthony Lewis' article in the NYRB.
. LI has been planning to comment on this surprising and slendid article for a couple of days, but we don't have time to right now. Look for it in the future, kiddies.