Conor Cruise O’Zion

Letters

Vol. 8 No. 14 · 7 August 1986

From Norman Cantor

SIR: Your edition of 19 June, with the lengthy and illuminating review of Conor Cruise O’Brien by David Gilmour, has just appeared on the newsstands here. I hope I am not too late to make three comments on Mr Gilmour’s review. First is with reference to the remarkable statement: ‘since 1967, Israel has attacked or invaded six Arab countries … during that time no Arab country has attacked Israeli territory.’ This is equivalent to saying that in 1939 Britain attacked Germany although Hitler had invaded no British territory. In 1967 General Nasser of Egypt closed the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aquaba to Israeli shipping. A blockade is an act of war. In 1973 the Syrians attacked Israeli positions on the Golan Heights, precipitating the largest tank battle in history. Of course Mr Gilmour has decided that the Golan Heights belong to Syria. If the Syrian armour had broken through on the Golan Heights, they could have been in Haifa in two days. Presumably the Israeli tanks should have pulled back, in the Gilmour view, and awaited the Syrians there. The next time Mr Gilmour visits his beloved cesspool of Lebanon, I urge him to make a detour and visit Degania, the largest kibbutz in Israel, which lies some forty miles south of the Golan Heights. There, right in the middle of the kibbutz, he will find a Syrian tank that was immobilised after it burst into the kibbutz in 1948. Just think, if the Israelis take Gilmour’s advice, this scene can be repeated in the next Syrian-Israeli War.

Secondly, Gilmour is very concerned about the Jewish Problem. I hear that many intellectuals in Britain are these days just like the good old days of T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Sir Oswald Mosley). He finds the Zionist solution unacceptable because allegedly it hurts Arabs. He thinks ‘the assimilationists were right.’ I question the assimilationist solution to the Jewish Problem: too long and too messy and too unpredictable. You never know when assimilating Jews might take to reading the Hebrew Bible – or Gilmour’s columns – and the whole process will fall apart. I have a better solution, indeed the Final Solution. I hear there is a village near Munich where there are currently unused gas ovens and a President of Austria who has had experience in shipping Jews to be processed in them. This seems far more effective than the assimilationist approach to the Jewish Problem.

Finally, sir, I want to tell you that the heading you gave to Mr Gilmour’s review (‘Conor Cruise O’Zion’) is not only hilariously funny. It merits for your journal the 1986 Julius Streicher Award.

Norman Cantor
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society,

David Gilmour writes: How kind of this gifted historian to remind you that it was I who ‘decided that the Golan Heights belong to Syria.’ Some of your readers had probably forgotten how T.S. Eliot and I arranged the matter with Balfour and Lloyd George during the war. Later, of course, we managed to fix Woodrow Wilson and old Clemenceau as well, and from then on it was too easy. We were so successful that the League of Nations, the UN and, eventually, every country in the world – including Israel for a while – accepted our decision. Subsequently, we felt a bit embarrassed about having organised such a spectacular fraud. After all, as I think Ezra pointed out at the time, the Syrian Arabs had been living in the area for only about fifteen hundred years.