Brilliant but Depressing

[erudito]

Just finished one of the most brilliant and depressing books I have read for quite some time, David Pryce-Jones’s The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. I had previously read and enjoyed his The War that Never Was: the Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985-1991 (also published as The Strange Death of the Soviet Union). In the latter book,

Comments

[catsidhe]

... But hey, there is always that old standby of blame the Jews.

Please stop that. You know better. Acknowledging atrocities perpetrated by Palestinians, or even by Arabs as a fungible group, and by Israelis is not a mutually exclusive enterprise. Those of us who are horrified by what Israel is doing to Palestinians are, by and large, not doing so because of any lingering repressed Anti-Semitism. On the contrary, many are motivated by fear of what these actions are doing to Israel itself. Unless you want to claim that my dislike of Israeli actions in occupied Palestine are the result of my being anti-semitic, in which case I would remind you who I married, and ask you to step outside. Moreover, there is a huge (almost entirely unreported) movement in Israel itself denouncing Israel's actions, so to claim that they are somehow 'blaming the Jews' is more than faintly ridiculous.

I repeat: denouncing Israel's actions != Unconditional support of Palestinian actions != reflexive Anti-Semitism.

No

[erudito]

You miss my point. It is not that any criticism of Israel is unreasonable. It is that, too often, the problems endemic to Arab (including Palestinian) politics are blamed on Israel and Zionism. And/or Israel and Israel's policies are used as an excuse not to examine said problems. (Not least because, if one does, Israel's dilemmas become more understandable.)

David Ben Gurion thought that Israel's continued occupation of Gaza Strip and the West Bank after 1967 was a mistake. David Pryce-Jones says something similar. Indeed, he makes the interesting observation that one of Israel's basic problems is that it appears to be have been dragged into the cycles of Arab politics.

One of things I particularly liked about Pryce-Jones' book is his demolition of the mess the British Foreign and Colonial Office got itself into, and how they reverted to the old standby of blame the Jews. In their case, of course, there was an element of old-boy anti-Semitism.