GG is great at this kind of rousing demagoguery. The interviewer was completely out of her depth and with no facts to back up her case. But Galloway?! I'm reminded of Hugh MacDiarmid's lines on Trotsky, "He's nocht but a romantic rebel, striking dilettante poses/ Christ, no wi' a croon o' thorns, but a wreath of paper roses". That 'Middle Eastern accent' he affects when he gets emotional, the self-conscious theatricality (it's something about the eyebrows - he's looking more and more like Gary Glitter), the way he mimics "the exaggerated rhetorical gestures of the Arab" (so to speak), have become - well, either hilarious or distressing, depending on how you view it.
His comments throughout were absurd. The Shebaa farms!! As far as the UN is concerned, they belong to Syria, and of course we could discuss the Israeli occupation/annexation of Syrian territory, but the Shebaa farms have made a convenient, but utterly bogus, alibi in recent years for Hizbollah's aggression. And no one with any sense thinks that the war began with the 'kidnapping' of two Israeli soldiers, but it didn't start in 1982 either. I could mention the Avivim school bus massacre, if we're talking about children, but few on the left ever mention the key atrocities against Israeli people. And if we're going to trace the original sin back to 1948, we're back on the subject of Israel's right to exist, but of course Israel doesn't face an existential threat does it?
The vicious glee with which so many on the left pile themselves together against the Jews - sorry, Zionists - genuinely puzzles me. It's a sort of collective outbreak of righteous hysteria. Or perhaps you feel as strongly about the Georgian refugees from Abkhazia, or the oppression of the Abkhaz minority by the Georgian state, or about cultural rights for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, or about Azeri refugees from the Armenian occupied territories. At least that would be original. I find the smugness of your previous posts on Israel incredibly irritating - hence this long post, written in anger - as if you've got Israel bang to rights, diagnosed and dispatched, it's all over. It's a pity because I really enjoyed your Zizek posts - most helpful. But Zizek refuses to endorse the Danish cartoon protests, believes in the usefulness of the term 'Islamofascism' - albeit in certain precisely defined circumstances - and opposes an academic boycott of Israel. So if we're going to make the 'Israeli' question the point of critical political fracture, I like to hope Zizek might fall with the angels.
Ich habe das tote Kind gesehen.
I suspect Galloway's feelings are merely artifacts of rhetoric, but don't you feel there's a danger that those opposed to Israel are jacking themselves up somehow, losing all political judgement, and becoming no better than those neo-cons with post traumatic stress disorder from watching the twin towers collapsing again and again on TV? Theorising Zionism solely in terms of colonialism is intellectually lazy, unless you think that nationalism is colonialism is fascism, and know nothing about Turkish, say, or Arab nationalism, but as I hardly need to point out, it's a lot more complicated than that.
It was sad to see the scared, amateur way in which Sky attempted to shut Galloway down, with the split screen and the noise interference, but while Sky may be stupid and lazy (and even then it's a mile better than BBC News 24), that doesn't make Galloway right. He's little more than a tawdry agitator.
I remember a live review of Nick Cave in the NME once that compared listening to his vocal performance to eating brussels sprouts; the point being that just as for some people brussels sprouts taste like raw sewage (there is supposedly a gene that controls this), so for some people the slight yet persistent incorrectness of intonation in Cave's singing voice made him excruciating to listen to.
So it is with Galloway, as far as I can tell. I find him insufferable: a vain, windy, self-aggrandising shyster with a nasty sideline in egregious sucking up to despots (any despot will do, it seems, so long as their despotism is freelance rather than US-financed).
Why anyone with half a brain is taken in by it I can't imagine; yet I know several people with brains spilling out of their ears who inexplicably admire the man. What exactly has he ever done right? What is it about his variety of theatrical demogoguery that is so appealing?
I suspect it's enthusiasm-by-proxy: he's good at moving crowds, who cares if the rhetorical means employed are crude, violent and absurd? But it seems to me that the consciousness of the masses so moved is not being raised, but subordinated; consequently, I find Galloway's version of the oratorical sublime patronising, instrumentalising, and deeply anti-democratic.
I mean, that line of his about the Zionist rape of that "beautiful Arab daughter" Jerusalem; his audience should have strung him up for that. "Don't patronise us, you cunt! What do you think we are, fucking savages? You think the only way we can think about politics is via metaphors of family honour and the gallant defence of our womenfolk? Fuck you, you preening dickhead!".
However bad Galloway may be, his enemies are surely worse. To put it a little crudely, he has never killed anybody, has never ordered missile strikes against civilian populations. In this way, I would claim that Galloway should not be subjected to a moral critique, that such critiques are ultimately inane and useless.
But then, this point is a general one, and in any case it seems to me - Dominic - that your own critique contains two other points.
One seems to be a genuine question: why does the left love Galloway so, given his faults. My answer here is simple, if not pleasant: it is because the (european) left feels itself generally impotent and exiled, and Galloway is nothing if not swaggering and virile, and really - who else is there? It might be claimed that, to a certain extent, Galloway does nothing but incarnate the frustration and rage felt by many, but even you, I suspect, admired the performance he delivered in Washington.
Your second point is more subtle, Tom makes it as well, and it seems to me to relate most especially to questions of strategy and political judgement. I will address this at length anon.
Finally, Tom - I am sorry that you find my posts on Israel smug, perhaps they have been to a certain extent. But let us be frank, there is a certain smugness about your post here too, and maybe for the same reason - written in anger. In this respect, you and I are in a clinch here. But let us forget this, and get down to specifics. I say that the only solution to the middle east crisis is a secular-universalist Palestinian state, incorporating Jews, Christians and Muslims, with indeed - and ironically - Lebanon as the model. What is your position?
I read my post for smugness afterwards and felt a bit discontented, but damn it was like a smudge I couldn't get rid of, so yes, I take your point. I think it would be inane and useless to waste too much time criticising Galloway, partly because it's so easy. There's the same temptation when criticising GWB, getting stuck on the prurient satisfactions of discussing his "drinking" or his relationship with "Dad". But the reason I dislike Galloway is that I think rhetoric, especially at this time, is critically important. When rhetoric starts to heat up like that, people get drunk on it and kill. Once anyone starts on the "good hiding" route, we are lost. That's partly why JH Prynne I think calls war "a fiercly linguistic event". We are still in the stage of preparing for a greater war, a war of elimination in which people could participate with righteous joy. Of course our corruptions may be traced far more deeply into language than anyone would guess who merely "sees through G's rhetoric", and the phılosophical complexity of those deeper linguistic issues is something I'd want to consider more carefully before discussing in any detail, but wasn't Abu Ghraib in some ways a product of the rhetorical crudity of the US administration? Such clear, contemptuous rhetoric gives permission, it silently unleashes, people work "towards the fuhrer". Galloway's mere rhetoric in my view gives implicit permission for actual, euphoric aggression.
To cut to the chase, my view is that a "universal state" in Israel/Palestine can only develop (by way of a common economic area) from the establishment of two clearly defined national states. I just don't feel that one can leapfrog to secular universality without the full development of nationalism. An imposed (as surely it would have to be) bi-national solution would surely result in endlessly localised communalism and a constant see-sawing struggle for supremacy. One key difference we have is that I don't feel that the establishment of Israel was a crime, except in the sense (important I concede) in which all nationalisms and ethnic revivals are partly criminal. But I compare the development of Hebrew and the "Israeli" identity to the development of "Turkish" and the Turkish national state (with all the terrible cleansings which developped from that) and the case of Israel doesn't seem to me so exceptional. And then there's the demographic issue. There's nothing uniquely Zionist-racist about considering it an important one, and I think that this again stands in the way of a single-state solution. Demographic questions were absolutely at the heart of the conflicts in Abkhazia and Armenia/Azerbaijan, but when Israel raises "demographic" objections, it's seen as if uniquely "racist".
even you, I suspect, admired the performance he delivered in Washington.
Somewhat. He delivered it to essentially the wrong audience. But it was gladdening to see someone - anyone, really - knock the lumps he knocked off Rumsfeld on that occasion.
Who else is there? Tell you what - someone boot that pillock off the main stage, and maybe we'll get a chance to find out, eh?
Galloway's also never been in a position to order missile strikes against civilian populations. It's not possible to know how he would behave if he were - nobody's yet made the reality TV show in which they present him with a big red button, tell him that it will turn the whole of Tel Aviv into a smoking crater, and see if he presses it.
In any case, Galloway is not a figure of no importance: he's one of the figureheads of the anti-war movement in the UK, a movement which if it has any ambitions at all ought to hope for the cessation of at least some missile strikes against at least some civilian populations. The success or failure of that movement is arguably of at least as much moral moment as the decision of some commander-in-chief somewhere to do what capitalism tells him to...
Tom - I think that one of the reasons - for better or for worse -that Israel is singled out for special condemnation (when there are obviously more heinous regimes in the world) is that Israel somehow seems closer to the West then Armenia or Chechyna does. I don't think this is a matter of anti-semitism; rather indeed the opposite almost.
There is a certain image of Israel: enlighted, educated, modern European, democratic. If it is true, as you claim, that the left feels a particular revulsion towards Israel, excessive to the real crimes of Israel, then this is due to the fact that Israel is understood as a nation more or less like us. In this way, it is easy to make Israel into a metonym for the racist, imperialist, colonialist, etc crimes of the west generally.
This, of course, is exactly what you are objecting to, and I see your point here. But I wonder nonetheless whether Jerusalem today perhaps really does occupy the vanishing point of violence at the centre of the Western geopolitical map - a map that we both are implicitly using, whether we like it or not.
If this point can be accepted, then it would be worth asking what then would be implied.
It is refreshing to have two such intelligent and reasonable sparing partners, especially over an issue like this.
Daniel - I cetainly take your point that since Israel had once been a noble symbol for many on the left, that in some ways the intense reaction against it now might be understood as resulting from shattered illusions. I fell in love with the Zionist project as a result of reading books about kibbutzim as a child and learning about the revival of Hebrew. To digress a bit, I was once a member of the Albanian Society, a Stalinist organization which promoted the works of Enver Hoxha. I joined when I was 14 and knew nothing about anything, but I liked getting the magazines, and stayed. Funnily enough George Galloway was Honary President for a year in 1991 (I think), but I don't remember him taking part in any meetings. But anyway, the Stalinists invested all their hopes in this country and when communism collapsed, a new Albanian Society was constituted and every last Stalinist vanished. I ended up the longest serving member. I remember one guy lamenting the Albanians' "loss of innocence". Anyway, all this is just a round about way of emphasising that I believe in 'constructive engagement'.
"Where does the anger come from?" I was working last night, and I suddenly remembered what had really made me so angry, angry enough to leave a comment. Last week I attended the screening of an Israeli film "Walk on Water" - it's quite good, it's made for an Israeli audience and flatters them a bit, but it's humane, mainstream entertainment and raises some interesting issues. There was a discussion afterwards, led by a female rabbi who works with Israeli/Palestinian friendship projects and with Israeli gay rights groups. And she wanted to talk about the film, and about the complex ways in which gay Jews and Palestinians interact, but all she got was righteous condemnation, "statements" of outrage, and talk of apartheid and Qana. At the time I was more curious than disgusted; some of the faces there were visibly tense with anger; they had taut muscles and strained faces. I've seen a lot of this kind of thing, we all have, but apart from Israel, only the anti-vivisection movement seems to channel such rage. The reason I mentioned Georgia and Armenia wasn't so much because I think they get ignored or because people don't feel the same outrage about them, but because most people understand these conflicts as the complex things they are and without over-identifying with one side or another they try to support peace. It saddens me that a lot of people can't seem to do that with Israel. On the other hand, you're right, in these cases no one in the UK knows enough to get angry, but as bystanders we have the priceless advantage of personal security and a space for calm, and it annoys me to see people wasting that on hatred. And I think Israelis see the reasonableness expended on Armenia and Georgia and wonder why they receive so little. That's why I think many put it down to anti-Semitism.
Dominic - actually I felt sorry for GG after the senate hearings. It was sad to see the way people applauded him, "Good old George!" It reminded me of the way the inhabitants of Notting Hill applauded the striking miners.
I'm sorry if this comment is a bit too rambling. I'm tired, but your remark about the vanishing point of violence is an interesting one, and I shall have to think through a response. In the end, with regard to this conflict, we all have the same ultimate fear.
I have to catch a plane this afternoon, but wanted to add two quick points. Or maybe three. With the regard to "seeing through GG's rhetoric", I feel the danger is that by marking Galloway-speak as a kind of minstrelism, and laughing it off, we avoid engaging forcefully with the very real rhetoric of "honour" and violation which do form a part of much Arab and Muslim political speech. The danger is that we avoid confronting this latter not so much (righteously) because we want to avoid a clear critique of Islamist language in case it becomes racist, but so as to avoid exposing ourselves to that same critique mirrored back to us. That is necessary! But it can't be done unless we confront Islamism clearly on the basis of its rhetoric, both verbal and visual. Honour and dignity are key reactionary concepts in the west too, which their persistent use by Muslims helps to conceal. Example of a productive consequence of such a strategy: who believes in the guilt/shame distiction or the concept of "face" as applied to Orientals any more?
Second point, more directly engaging with something Daniel wrote. There is a danger I think in understanding Hizbollah as a mirror, or creation of Israel. Wouldn't it be equally true, or truer, to view Israel as the creation of Hizbollah? For example, Iranian government antipathy to the very existence Israel helps obscure such complicating facts as the significant number of Persian Jews nin Israel - indeed of course the president was born an Iranian. They obscure such things because they are opposing a monolithic white settler state of their own invention. It's arguable that Hizbollah was as much the creation of the 79 revolution as of the 1982 invasion, (but as I'd concede, what caused the 79 revolution... etc.!)
Thirdly, there's a danger that Western anti-Zionists do something similar by refusing to see the Arab or Muslim as anything other than acted upon, thus colluding with reactionary conspiracy theories. I'm ready to stand corrected on this, but I'm not aware of any good historical evidence that Zionists were responsible for the bombings in Baghdad which accompanied the mass exodus of Jews from Iraq. And in any case, it would have made not the slightest difference to the final outcome if the bombings (on synagogues etc.) had never occured. Arab nationalism and the gradual development of modern Islamism and turn away from communism had its own inner logic and historical role to play, but it seems that behind it all... must be the Zionist. And it's the same stories retailed again and again, like talking points.
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GG is great at this kind of rousing demagoguery. The interviewer was completely out of her depth and with no facts to back up her case. But Galloway?! I'm reminded of Hugh MacDiarmid's lines on Trotsky, "He's nocht but a romantic rebel, striking dilettante poses/ Christ, no wi' a croon o' thorns, but a wreath of paper roses". That 'Middle Eastern accent' he affects when he gets emotional, the self-conscious theatricality (it's something about the eyebrows - he's looking more and more like Gary Glitter), the way he mimics "the exaggerated rhetorical gestures of the Arab" (so to speak), have become - well, either hilarious or distressing, depending on how you view it.
His comments throughout were absurd. The Shebaa farms!! As far as the UN is concerned, they belong to Syria, and of course we could discuss the Israeli occupation/annexation of Syrian territory, but the Shebaa farms have made a convenient, but utterly bogus, alibi in recent years for Hizbollah's aggression. And no one with any sense thinks that the war began with the 'kidnapping' of two Israeli soldiers, but it didn't start in 1982 either. I could mention the Avivim school bus massacre, if we're talking about children, but few on the left ever mention the key atrocities against Israeli people. And if we're going to trace the original sin back to 1948, we're back on the subject of Israel's right to exist, but of course Israel doesn't face an existential threat does it?
The vicious glee with which so many on the left pile themselves together against the Jews - sorry, Zionists - genuinely puzzles me. It's a sort of collective outbreak of righteous hysteria. Or perhaps you feel as strongly about the Georgian refugees from Abkhazia, or the oppression of the Abkhaz minority by the Georgian state, or about cultural rights for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, or about Azeri refugees from the Armenian occupied territories. At least that would be original. I find the smugness of your previous posts on Israel incredibly irritating - hence this long post, written in anger - as if you've got Israel bang to rights, diagnosed and dispatched, it's all over. It's a pity because I really enjoyed your Zizek posts - most helpful. But Zizek refuses to endorse the Danish cartoon protests, believes in the usefulness of the term 'Islamofascism' - albeit in certain precisely defined circumstances - and opposes an academic boycott of Israel. So if we're going to make the 'Israeli' question the point of critical political fracture, I like to hope Zizek might fall with the angels.
Ich habe das tote Kind gesehen.
I suspect Galloway's feelings are merely artifacts of rhetoric, but don't you feel there's a danger that those opposed to Israel are jacking themselves up somehow, losing all political judgement, and becoming no better than those neo-cons with post traumatic stress disorder from watching the twin towers collapsing again and again on TV? Theorising Zionism solely in terms of colonialism is intellectually lazy, unless you think that nationalism is colonialism is fascism, and know nothing about Turkish, say, or Arab nationalism, but as I hardly need to point out, it's a lot more complicated than that.
It was sad to see the scared, amateur way in which Sky attempted to shut Galloway down, with the split screen and the noise interference, but while Sky may be stupid and lazy (and even then it's a mile better than BBC News 24), that doesn't make Galloway right. He's little more than a tawdry agitator.
Tom,
Is there some particular aspect of Daniel's posts on Israel that you disagree with?
I remember a live review of Nick Cave in the NME once that compared listening to his vocal performance to eating brussels sprouts; the point being that just as for some people brussels sprouts taste like raw sewage (there is supposedly a gene that controls this), so for some people the slight yet persistent incorrectness of intonation in Cave's singing voice made him excruciating to listen to.
So it is with Galloway, as far as I can tell. I find him insufferable: a vain, windy, self-aggrandising shyster with a nasty sideline in egregious sucking up to despots (any despot will do, it seems, so long as their despotism is freelance rather than US-financed).
Why anyone with half a brain is taken in by it I can't imagine; yet I know several people with brains spilling out of their ears who inexplicably admire the man. What exactly has he ever done right? What is it about his variety of theatrical demogoguery that is so appealing?
I suspect it's enthusiasm-by-proxy: he's good at moving crowds, who cares if the rhetorical means employed are crude, violent and absurd? But it seems to me that the consciousness of the masses so moved is not being raised, but subordinated; consequently, I find Galloway's version of the oratorical sublime patronising, instrumentalising, and deeply anti-democratic.
I mean, that line of his about the Zionist rape of that "beautiful Arab daughter" Jerusalem; his audience should have strung him up for that. "Don't patronise us, you cunt! What do you think we are, fucking savages? You think the only way we can think about politics is via metaphors of family honour and the gallant defence of our womenfolk? Fuck you, you preening dickhead!".
However bad Galloway may be, his enemies are surely worse. To put it a little crudely, he has never killed anybody, has never ordered missile strikes against civilian populations. In this way, I would claim that Galloway should not be subjected to a moral critique, that such critiques are ultimately inane and useless.
But then, this point is a general one, and in any case it seems to me - Dominic - that your own critique contains two other points.
One seems to be a genuine question: why does the left love Galloway so, given his faults. My answer here is simple, if not pleasant: it is because the (european) left feels itself generally impotent and exiled, and Galloway is nothing if not swaggering and virile, and really - who else is there? It might be claimed that, to a certain extent, Galloway does nothing but incarnate the frustration and rage felt by many, but even you, I suspect, admired the performance he delivered in Washington.
Your second point is more subtle, Tom makes it as well, and it seems to me to relate most especially to questions of strategy and political judgement. I will address this at length anon.
Finally, Tom - I am sorry that you find my posts on Israel smug, perhaps they have been to a certain extent. But let us be frank, there is a certain smugness about your post here too, and maybe for the same reason - written in anger. In this respect, you and I are in a clinch here. But let us forget this, and get down to specifics. I say that the only solution to the middle east crisis is a secular-universalist Palestinian state, incorporating Jews, Christians and Muslims, with indeed - and ironically - Lebanon as the model. What is your position?
I read my post for smugness afterwards and felt a bit discontented, but damn it was like a smudge I couldn't get rid of, so yes, I take your point. I think it would be inane and useless to waste too much time criticising Galloway, partly because it's so easy. There's the same temptation when criticising GWB, getting stuck on the prurient satisfactions of discussing his "drinking" or his relationship with "Dad". But the reason I dislike Galloway is that I think rhetoric, especially at this time, is critically important. When rhetoric starts to heat up like that, people get drunk on it and kill. Once anyone starts on the "good hiding" route, we are lost. That's partly why JH Prynne I think calls war "a fiercly linguistic event". We are still in the stage of preparing for a greater war, a war of elimination in which people could participate with righteous joy. Of course our corruptions may be traced far more deeply into language than anyone would guess who merely "sees through G's rhetoric", and the phılosophical complexity of those deeper linguistic issues is something I'd want to consider more carefully before discussing in any detail, but wasn't Abu Ghraib in some ways a product of the rhetorical crudity of the US administration? Such clear, contemptuous rhetoric gives permission, it silently unleashes, people work "towards the fuhrer". Galloway's mere rhetoric in my view gives implicit permission for actual, euphoric aggression.
To cut to the chase, my view is that a "universal state" in Israel/Palestine can only develop (by way of a common economic area) from the establishment of two clearly defined national states. I just don't feel that one can leapfrog to secular universality without the full development of nationalism. An imposed (as surely it would have to be) bi-national solution would surely result in endlessly localised communalism and a constant see-sawing struggle for supremacy. One key difference we have is that I don't feel that the establishment of Israel was a crime, except in the sense (important I concede) in which all nationalisms and ethnic revivals are partly criminal. But I compare the development of Hebrew and the "Israeli" identity to the development of "Turkish" and the Turkish national state (with all the terrible cleansings which developped from that) and the case of Israel doesn't seem to me so exceptional. And then there's the demographic issue. There's nothing uniquely Zionist-racist about considering it an important one, and I think that this again stands in the way of a single-state solution. Demographic questions were absolutely at the heart of the conflicts in Abkhazia and Armenia/Azerbaijan, but when Israel raises "demographic" objections, it's seen as if uniquely "racist".
even you, I suspect, admired the performance he delivered in Washington.
Somewhat. He delivered it to essentially the wrong audience. But it was gladdening to see someone - anyone, really - knock the lumps he knocked off Rumsfeld on that occasion.
Who else is there? Tell you what - someone boot that pillock off the main stage, and maybe we'll get a chance to find out, eh?
Galloway's also never been in a position to order missile strikes against civilian populations. It's not possible to know how he would behave if he were - nobody's yet made the reality TV show in which they present him with a big red button, tell him that it will turn the whole of Tel Aviv into a smoking crater, and see if he presses it.
In any case, Galloway is not a figure of no importance: he's one of the figureheads of the anti-war movement in the UK, a movement which if it has any ambitions at all ought to hope for the cessation of at least some missile strikes against at least some civilian populations. The success or failure of that movement is arguably of at least as much moral moment as the decision of some commander-in-chief somewhere to do what capitalism tells him to...
Tom - I think that one of the reasons - for better or for worse -that Israel is singled out for special condemnation (when there are obviously more heinous regimes in the world) is that Israel somehow seems closer to the West then Armenia or Chechyna does. I don't think this is a matter of anti-semitism; rather indeed the opposite almost.
There is a certain image of Israel: enlighted, educated, modern European, democratic. If it is true, as you claim, that the left feels a particular revulsion towards Israel, excessive to the real crimes of Israel, then this is due to the fact that Israel is understood as a nation more or less like us. In this way, it is easy to make Israel into a metonym for the racist, imperialist, colonialist, etc crimes of the west generally.
This, of course, is exactly what you are objecting to, and I see your point here. But I wonder nonetheless whether Jerusalem today perhaps really does occupy the vanishing point of violence at the centre of the Western geopolitical map - a map that we both are implicitly using, whether we like it or not.
If this point can be accepted, then it would be worth asking what then would be implied.
It is refreshing to have two such intelligent and reasonable sparing partners, especially over an issue like this.
Dominic - for my next trick, watch in amazement as the SWP tear me to shreds.
Daniel - I cetainly take your point that since Israel had once been a noble symbol for many on the left, that in some ways the intense reaction against it now might be understood as resulting from shattered illusions. I fell in love with the Zionist project as a result of reading books about kibbutzim as a child and learning about the revival of Hebrew. To digress a bit, I was once a member of the Albanian Society, a Stalinist organization which promoted the works of Enver Hoxha. I joined when I was 14 and knew nothing about anything, but I liked getting the magazines, and stayed. Funnily enough George Galloway was Honary President for a year in 1991 (I think), but I don't remember him taking part in any meetings. But anyway, the Stalinists invested all their hopes in this country and when communism collapsed, a new Albanian Society was constituted and every last Stalinist vanished. I ended up the longest serving member. I remember one guy lamenting the Albanians' "loss of innocence". Anyway, all this is just a round about way of emphasising that I believe in 'constructive engagement'.
"Where does the anger come from?" I was working last night, and I suddenly remembered what had really made me so angry, angry enough to leave a comment. Last week I attended the screening of an Israeli film "Walk on Water" - it's quite good, it's made for an Israeli audience and flatters them a bit, but it's humane, mainstream entertainment and raises some interesting issues. There was a discussion afterwards, led by a female rabbi who works with Israeli/Palestinian friendship projects and with Israeli gay rights groups. And she wanted to talk about the film, and about the complex ways in which gay Jews and Palestinians interact, but all she got was righteous condemnation, "statements" of outrage, and talk of apartheid and Qana. At the time I was more curious than disgusted; some of the faces there were visibly tense with anger; they had taut muscles and strained faces. I've seen a lot of this kind of thing, we all have, but apart from Israel, only the anti-vivisection movement seems to channel such rage. The reason I mentioned Georgia and Armenia wasn't so much because I think they get ignored or because people don't feel the same outrage about them, but because most people understand these conflicts as the complex things they are and without over-identifying with one side or another they try to support peace. It saddens me that a lot of people can't seem to do that with Israel. On the other hand, you're right, in these cases no one in the UK knows enough to get angry, but as bystanders we have the priceless advantage of personal security and a space for calm, and it annoys me to see people wasting that on hatred. And I think Israelis see the reasonableness expended on Armenia and Georgia and wonder why they receive so little. That's why I think many put it down to anti-Semitism.
Dominic - actually I felt sorry for GG after the senate hearings. It was sad to see the way people applauded him, "Good old George!" It reminded me of the way the inhabitants of Notting Hill applauded the striking miners.
I'm sorry if this comment is a bit too rambling. I'm tired, but your remark about the vanishing point of violence is an interesting one, and I shall have to think through a response. In the end, with regard to this conflict, we all have the same ultimate fear.
I have to catch a plane this afternoon, but wanted to add two quick points. Or maybe three. With the regard to "seeing through GG's rhetoric", I feel the danger is that by marking Galloway-speak as a kind of minstrelism, and laughing it off, we avoid engaging forcefully with the very real rhetoric of "honour" and violation which do form a part of much Arab and Muslim political speech. The danger is that we avoid confronting this latter not so much (righteously) because we want to avoid a clear critique of Islamist language in case it becomes racist, but so as to avoid exposing ourselves to that same critique mirrored back to us. That is necessary! But it can't be done unless we confront Islamism clearly on the basis of its rhetoric, both verbal and visual. Honour and dignity are key reactionary concepts in the west too, which their persistent use by Muslims helps to conceal. Example of a productive consequence of such a strategy: who believes in the guilt/shame distiction or the concept of "face" as applied to Orientals any more?
Second point, more directly engaging with something Daniel wrote. There is a danger I think in understanding Hizbollah as a mirror, or creation of Israel. Wouldn't it be equally true, or truer, to view Israel as the creation of Hizbollah? For example, Iranian government antipathy to the very existence Israel helps obscure such complicating facts as the significant number of Persian Jews nin Israel - indeed of course the president was born an Iranian. They obscure such things because they are opposing a monolithic white settler state of their own invention. It's arguable that Hizbollah was as much the creation of the 79 revolution as of the 1982 invasion, (but as I'd concede, what caused the 79 revolution... etc.!)
Thirdly, there's a danger that Western anti-Zionists do something similar by refusing to see the Arab or Muslim as anything other than acted upon, thus colluding with reactionary conspiracy theories. I'm ready to stand corrected on this, but I'm not aware of any good historical evidence that Zionists were responsible for the bombings in Baghdad which accompanied the mass exodus of Jews from Iraq. And in any case, it would have made not the slightest difference to the final outcome if the bombings (on synagogues etc.) had never occured. Arab nationalism and the gradual development of modern Islamism and turn away from communism had its own inner logic and historical role to play, but it seems that behind it all... must be the Zionist. And it's the same stories retailed again and again, like talking points.
Any way, I must start packing!
I've got to go to Heathrow. Bugger.
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