Ariel the Unlucky
David Gilmour
- Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon by Ariel Sharon and David Chanoff
Macdonald, 571 pp, £14.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 356 17960 5
- The Slopes of Lebanon by Amos Oz, translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura
Chatto, 246 pp, £13.95, January 1990, ISBN 0 7011 3444 5
- From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman
Collins, 541 pp, £15.00, March 1990, ISBN 0 00 215096 4
- Pity the nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk
Deutsch, 622 pp, £17.95, February 1990, ISBN 0 03 561960 0
1982 was a critical time for the authors of all four of these books. It was the year of Ariel Sharon’s most sanguinary foreign venture, which ended in massacre, failure, and a measure of disgrace. For the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, it was the year ‘the Land of Israel’ died in Lebanon, while for him personally it aroused feelings of alienation, the sense of being an exile in his own land. For Thomas Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, the refugee camp atrocities produced ‘something of a personal crisis’ and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that or anything else, it was a year in which he escaped death a score of times and lived to produce some of the most memorable journalism of the decade.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 9 · 10 May 1990
From Michael Nelson
It is my observation that David Gilmour (LRB, 5 April) is an anti-Zionist, and that to him, Zionism – i.e. Jewish nationalism – is illegitimate. This is a view that the Arab states have been pressing with some success and with the concrete aim of de-legitimising the State of Israel. It is also my observation that where Israel is concerned Mr Gilmour is incapable of constructive criticism – only of unrelenting hostility. It is to this view that you consistenly give the hospitality of your pages, and I must presume that this is editorial policy. I am myself no supporter – in fact, a harsh critic – of the policies of the Israeli Government towards the Intifada, and towards Palestinian nationalism. Nevertheless I can still tell the difference between legitimate political commentary, even if adversarial, and ideological enmity. Mr Gilmour, in his writings, falls into the latter category.
Michael Nelson
Dunstable, Massachusetts
Vol. 12 No. 10 · 24 May 1990
From S.J. Fisher
David Gilmour (LRB, 5 April) could use some of the even-handedness and historical grasp that he so admires in Robert Fisk. To discuss the political attitudes represented by Begin, Shamir and Sharon – that is, to discuss the rise of Israeli ‘thug-ism’ – without mentioning the implacable, sinister, intransigent hostility of Israeli’s thug-like Arab neighbours is truly a remarkable feat of simplification. Imagine, if you can, a world in which Syria’s Assad and/or Iraq’s Hussein have given up their jihad to drive the Jews into the sea. Imagine them (à la Sadat) offering to make peace with Israel, contingent on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Israel, being a democracy, could then afford to put ‘doves’ into high office without the fear that they would give away Israel’s long-term security in exchange for a temporary peace with the powerless Arabs of the occupied territories. There would of course be much negotiation and political manoeuvring in Israel, in the PLO, in Jordan, in Lebanon and in all the smaller groups, but peace and a Palestinian state would surely follow. Until Syria and Iraq give up their holy war against Israel, strong men like Sharon will continue to appeal to a beleaguered Israeli public.
S.J. Fisher
Victoria, British Columbia
Vol. 12 No. 11 · 14 June 1990
From David Gilmour
S.J. Fisher complained in your last issue that I should not have discussed ‘the rise of Israeli "thug-ism" ’ without mentioning the hostility of Israel’s thug-like Arab neighbours.’ I was not discussing ‘the rise of Israeli “thug-ism” ’ but reviewing the autobiography of one particular thug, Sharon, and I saw no need to consider other delinquents. In any case, the behaviour of the Syrian and Iraqi dictators has had little influence on the careers of those thugs cited by Mr Fisher. Begin, Shamir and Sharon were busy murdering British and Arab civilians while Asad and Hussein were still children. Furthermore, Mr Fisher’s suggestion that ‘peace and a Palestinian state’ would automatically follow an Iraqi offer of peace is astonishingly naive. Does he not remember what happened after Egypt, the most powerful Arab state, made peace with Israel? Did the Israelis then ‘put “doves” into high office’ determined to pursue an overall settlement? Of course they did nothing of the kind. Exploiting the disappearance of the Egyptian military threat, they re-elected (with an increased vote) the bellicose Begin and thus paved the way for the devastation of Lebanon and accelerated land-grabbing on the West Bank.
In the previous issue Michael Nelson said a number of things about me, some of them true and some of them untrue. I am indeed anti-Zionist but I do not try to ‘de-legitimise’ the state of Israel. I believe the Zionist enterprise was an error and an injustice that has brought tragedy to millions of innocent people, but I have never thought that its victims’ grievances should be redressed by the disappearance of the Jewish state. Like most of the rest of the world, I have always supported a two-state solution to the conflict: Israel in its pre-1967 borders and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Mr Nelson goes on to accuse me of ‘unrelenting hostility’ towards Israel, but in fact that hostility is only unrelenting towards the brutal and expansionist policies of its government. When Israel stops invading Lebanon, when its soldiers stop shooting unarmed demonstrators, when its politicians stop building colonies on other people’s land – then, certainly, I shall relent.
David Gilmour
Edinburgh
