1.
Are you Jewish? You are? Ok, pay attention because David Hare thinks that something terrible may be about to happen to you,
“If we do not find the path to honest cooperation and honest negotiations with the Arabs, then we have learned nothing from over 2,000 years of suffering and we deserve the fate that will befall us” is what Albert Einstein said.
I’ve no idea whether the quote is accurate and it doesn’t matter anyway. The article is by Hare not Einstein and the message it bears for Jews for couldn’t be clearer; behave or else. You, and only you, have to learn a particular lesson from history and if you don’t learn it, catastrophe looms. No, that lesson isn’t that leaving your security in the hands of well-meaning foreign intellectuals is not a brilliant idea, it’s that the best way to deal with people who want to kill you, or at the very least, destroy your project of self-rule, is to behave nicely towards them.
2.
Hare begins,
Please, please: consider the state of affairs, consider the desperation, consider the depth of the despair. A country has reached a point at which 84 percent of its people are in favor of building a wall along its borders.
A country? Just the one? I don’t think so. Fences and walls are going up everywhere and usually there are poorer people on one side of them and richer people on the other. Just as usually, they tend to be popular with the rich and anger the poor. But that doesn’t bother Hare because his article isn’t about walls in general or even mainly about the one built by Israel. It’s more about good Jews and bad Jews and the necessity for the former to get a grip on the latter if they are not all to perish. You see, he’s really worried about you, the Jews.
3.
The article is peppered with quotes from good Jews; hand-wringing urban dwellers all. One says “The occupation degrades them. But it also degrades us.” and another, “Israelis have a very fragile sense of the future,” Some are reluctantly for the wall and some are against it. All seem resigned. Meanwhile out on the hills of the West Bank there is the arrogant and insolent Jew manning the check point, this Jew doesn’t speak but he is identified as often being Russian or Ethiopian. Black Jews and Jews from the East.
4.
Bad people who are not Jews are also present.
One evening not long ago we’d been at a party in Ramallah. A guest told me about a Hamas torture technique against citizens of Gaza suspected of being informants: The victim is shown a wall on which a staircase is drawn, and at the top is a drawing of a bicycle. The victim is told to go and get the bicycle. He says he can’t get the bicycle because it’s a drawing. He is then told if he doesn’t bring the bicycle downstairs he will be beaten. “I can’t get it. It’s a drawing.” All right, what does that prove? I’m asking myself, as we drive on. Hamas isn’t very nice. You wouldn’t be nice if you lived under permanent siege.
They are bad because the behavior of the bad Jews has driven them to their badness.
5.
I’m not going to outline my own views on the wall or the West Bank. They will be familiar to anyone who reads this blog and I don’t want it to appear that I believe that holding those views somehow licenses me to write pieces like this. Some things are true whether the person who says them is “pro-peace” or not.
I remember writing a brief review of David Hare’s last exploration of the Middle East, his one-man show “Via Dolorosa,” ten years ago. I reproduce it below, with the throught that I may have been a bit too generous in my characterization of the author a decade back:
As someone who rarely misses a work by David Hare, I was both curious and excited to see his recent Middle East monologue, “Via Dolorosa,” when it first opened in London last year. How would the master playwright who had given human voice to transforming or declining British institutions in plays like “Pravda” and “Racing Demon” deal with the political-personal-societal-emotional hornet’s nest that is the Arab-Israeli conflict? It is a compliment to Mr. Hare’s gifts that his monologue’s failure is far more interesting than most other writer’s successes.
Having tossed away the historic document on which he first considered basing a Middle East play, Hare has chosen to enter the region with a fresh mind. Unfortunately, what he considers to be a blank mental slate has already been written upon, largely by the same media he so successfully skewered in Pravda. Thus Hare’s Middle East curiously resembles the narrowly-focused one we all know too well: Jews and Palestinian Arabs struggling over the same piece of land. Could geopolitical forces or the dysfunctional politics of two-dozen Arab states which has kept the Israeli conflict needlessly boiling for decades play even a small role in the story? To consider such possibilities, even the most talented playwright must enter the set with a mind open to more than cliché, not simply an open heart.
Absent any historical compass, Hare’s moral compass has no ability to point anywhere. For instance, early in his monologue, Hare sits with fellow writer David Grossman, contemplating the “underlying moral question (of Israeli society): how does a majority which itself has been historically unloved now deal fairly with an unloved Palestinian minority it its own midst.” And yet, later in the play, the writer talks with Israelis who dare live in Hebron, wondering why these Jews do not do their moral duty and clear out, leaving a West Bank as Jew free as the rest of the Arab world. Why is multiculturalism an “underlying moral question” on only one side of the divide? The question (not to mention the irony) does not seem to occur to Mr. Hare.
While Via Dolorosa does not bring its audience much insight on the Middle East that they could not read in the stultified British media, it does tell us a great deal about its author, who turns out to be just one more European innocent abroad, supremely gifted, yet supremely ill equipped for the project he chose to take on. Years ago, a British official asked why the Jews and Arabs of Israel could not just get along like good Christians. Hare, lacking the historic and moral footing to understand why Hebron is not Hampstead, turns out to be just another befuddled pilgrim in today’s Middle East.
There’s only one fact about the wall that interests me: namely, that it has reduced suicide bombings by 90%.
Clearly David Hare thinks that ‘jews’ - I think the word he wants is ‘Israeli’ - should put the feelings of Palestinians above the safety and lives of Israeli civilians.
He’s a moron, frankly.