Israel deserves better than Netanyahu
We all surely remember one childhood memory: telling ghost stories until we were too frightened to go to sleep. Long years may have passed, but the other night, there was almost a comparison. Consoled by a good dinner, friends were discussing foreign affairs. We started off with the Netanyahu visit and there seemed no reason to banish gloom. By the end of the evening, we had talked ourselves into a mood of eupeptic pessimism. One of my favourite lines came to mind, and was hailed as appropriate: “The troubles of our proud and angry dust/Are from eternity and shall not fail.”
The troubles we discussed would rapidly outrun pen and paper. Sometimes, the wrong men have occupied key positions: Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are glaring examples, and we may not have done with either of them yet. But we spent most of our time on Israel/Palestine. Arguably, Netanyahu is even more formidable than the other two as a survivor. For all his flaws, he has managed to stay in office, but is absolutely the last leader his country needs. Israel must eventually find a modus vivendi with the Palestinians. Forget eupeptic pessimism: anyone examining the obstacles to a settlement might well relapse into despair. But consider the alternative.
If the Palestinians’ hopes for a decent future end up in hatred, religious extremism, millenarian fantasies, endless planning for terrorism, regular outbreaks of violence, with no prospect of a peaceable existence, the outcome could be too terrible to contemplate. The terrorists will not necessarily restrict themselves to conventional weapons. As Yeats wrote of Ireland: “Great hatred: little room.”
I have always enjoyed my visits to Israel. For a start, you are never more than 50 yards from a political argument, and Israelis will happily get into vociferous disagreements without being inhibited by foreigners. It is a nation which constantly stimulates the mental faculties (you will need them to cope with the locals) and there is also a heightened sense of the challenges of the human condition: man striving to shape his fate, inspired by glory, menaced by tragedy, in a Promised Land which has seen both, in a contest which does indeed appear to be eternal.
Anyone with any historical imagination should find it impossible not to salute the way in which the Israelis have built up their land. Their post-war recovery is profoundly moving. There have been hideous passages in history when men descended into a bestiality in excess of the most ferocious beast. But the Holocaust exceeds them all. Germany was a cradle of civilisation and culture. Whether or not one is a Deist, Judaism is a well-spring of Western values. The Hitlerian assault on the Jews was an attempt to launch a civil war between evil and good: to sweep aside Europe’s albeit faltering attempts to rule itself by humane principles and replace that by the rule of Hell.
After 1945, crawling away from the edge of the abyss, the Jewish survivors built a shelter and turned a refugee nation into a state. There is a paradox. it took Hitler to restore the independence which the Jews had lost in Biblical times.
But that achievement had a cost. After the Exodus, when Jehovah presented the Children of Israel with the Promised Land and its inhabitants, some of the inhabitants had other ideas. Within a few chapters, the Israelites were up to their armpits in Amalekites, Philistines et al, where they have remained at regular intervals ever since. Under Israeli stewardship, the land may have flowed with milk and honey. Others often coveted it.
The work that modern Israel’s founding fathers devoted to their task is awe-inspiring, from planning a modern economy to back-breaking labour in the fields: often by the same individuals at different hours of the day. There was also prowess on other fields: the battle-fields. A nation of pioneers only survived because they became a nation of soldiers. Their heroism is also awe-inspiring, but it is not enough. At some stage, the Israelis must become a nation of diplomats, and the sooner the better.
A post-Netanyahu leadership could be a start, but there are mighty problems. He seems to have no intention to leave office and it has proved hard to push him. There is also the almighty difficulty of facts on the ground. Could it be possible to create a viable Palestinian state on the West Bank? Even if there were majority Israeli goodwill – a huge “if” – that would be a hugely complex task.
The next line of the Housman poem quoted earlier on is “bear them we can, and if we can we must.” That sounds like good bracing stoicism, but is it true? Bear them we can. Can we?
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