Melanie Phillip’s latest rant about Israel and the West comes with the wonderfully original title: The war within the west (5). She seems to enjoy sequels – see also The war against Israel (9). Damn, even the guys behind Police Academy had the sense to stop at number 7.

She starts by once again talking about the usual moral decay in the West.

“In Israel, it takes the form of a deadly pathology, a kind of cultural version of multiple sclerosis in which the country’s central nervous system catastrophically mistakes foe for friend and, by thus neutering its defence mechanism through such radical confusion, causes the entire organism to turn upon and potentially destroy itself.”

“The deadly pathogens in this case are those Israeli academics who, over the past two decades or more, have systematically rewritten Israel’s history…”

A nice touch. Since she herself is Jewish she obvious feels she can get away with comparing other Jews to diseases. I wonder if Norman Finkelstein or Avi Shlaim would get the green light from her to do so just because they had hurt feelings about people disagreeing with them. Anyway, imagine: Melanie Phillips as a doctor. If she really did encounter multiple sclerosis in a person she would probably just petition the White House to nuke it. The rest of this quote shows how fanatical and vicious she can get:

“… so that citizens are taught that this nation, lawfully and justly restored (at least in part) to a people that narrowly survived genocide, was actually born in original sin.”

By “justly restored”, is she really saying that just because the Kingdom of Israel was once upon that land, it should be granted to its descendants without a second thought? If she is making the case through the historical angle then she might want to tell us why the borders of the Caliphate or the Seljuk Empire were not restored on that land, or why members of the World Zionist Organisation considered Argentina, Mozambique and Cyprus among other places for the location of their homeland/state. Their gaze was not just fixed on what we now call the State of Israel. If she is coming at us from a religious direction then she can have all the fruitless rows that she wants with Muslims; we wont find out if her God is bigger than their God for a very long time. Worst of all though, why has she decided to include the phrase “at least in part”, when referring to this restored nation? Would ripping Syria in two, in order to bring back the whole of the Kingdom of Israel be a just restoration too?

The purpose of her article, though, is to lay into a book that she has almost certainly never read. Continuing from the above paragraph comes this childish drivel:

“One such academic is Ilan Pappe, whose new book, ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ is shredded here by David Pryce-Jones.”

Now, Ilan Pappe is a fine historian that I disagree with in part, for example over Plan D [I have yet to see the hard evidence that it was a pre-arranged master plan to kick all the Arabs out of Palestine, even though a significant amount of the conduct by the Haganah, as well as the armed terror groups like LEHI and Irgun suggests that this was their intention during the war] and the right of return [which I think is unrealistic, regrettably]. I have read his History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and eagerly await the chance to read this new book, which will contain more original research and fact that the entire output of Melanie Phillip’s lightweight career. I would never accuse him of wanting to destroy a country, especially on the basis of work that I had never read.

To back up her assertions Phillips cites two sources, from David Price-Jones in Literary Review and The Economist. Neither do her case any favours at all. In order to save the best for last, I’ll start with The Economist. From their review Phillips extracts this:

“Ben-Gurion was a prodigious diarist, but selective in what he recorded. Mr Pappe admits that he does not in fact know what Ben-Gurion said at the supposedly fateful ‘red house’ meeting on March 10th. As for Plan Dalet, this is no new discovery by Mr Pappe. The plan has been public for decades and does not read unambiguously like a master plan for wholesale ethnic cleansing. The aim was to crush the Palestinian militias before the Haganah had to face the invading Arab armies. It gave commanders discretion to occupy or destroy and expel hostile villages or potentially hostile villages; some destroyed swathes of villages and a few did not. And Mr Pappe’s detractors will ask why he ignores the orders sent out by the chief of staff of the Haganah, Israel Galili, on March 24th, reminding commanders of the policy to protect the ‘full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without discrimination’.”

Unfortunately for her the rest of the review is actually not very critical at all of Pappe and his work, and I don’t believe that a control freak like Phillips would be too happy to see her minions reading the rest of it, since the only thing being shredded is the over-simplistic, no, racially biased, account of what happened in the 1948 war to which she still desperately clings to, and which she has long felt the need to protect with the abuse she heaps on those searching for the truth:

“Inside Israel, the historiography of 1948 has been in ferment for more than 20 years. Israel and its admirers once clung to a simple collective view about the circumstances of the state's birth. In a Solomonic judgment, the United Nations voted to divide the contested land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted the plan, but the Arabs tried to strangle the Jewish state at birth. In the course of the war that followed, the Jews overcame vast odds, guaranteeing their survival and expanding the territory allotted to them under the original plan. In the course of the fighting, most of the Arab population fled.”

“The last bit of this over-simple narrative has by now been comprehensively debunked. In 1988 Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, published “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”, challenging the view that most of the Arabs fled of their own accord, in panic or at the behest of the Arab states. In many towns and villages they were put to flight deliberately. Mr Morris said that there was no master plan to evict all the Arabs: many expulsions took place in the heat of battle and the fog of war. But he also argued that the idea of a population transfer had been carefully considered by David Ben-Gurion and the other Zionist leaders, and hovered behind their actions and deliberations.”

The review is framed as a debate between Benny Morris and Pappe about why the refugees were expelled, but that they were expelled is taken for granted by a reviewer perhaps familiar with the wealth of data that Morris has unearthed down the years. Not for the first time, Phillips goes all out-of-context on us.

Now, David Pryce-Jones does indeed give the book a shredding – in the same way that a dog might shred your homework. I like to check the sources, and I had such fun with this one that I think it deserves its own subsection. So, welcome to a review of the November issue of Literary Review.

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Those are supposed to be stars, like they have on the game shows. Mmm, glitzy…

OK, vegetables first, dessert later – lets start with the serious part: the review. The main problem with the review is that it barely mentions the book, and instead tries to slime Pappe. The first two paragraphs are a hilarious statement of intent:

“Ilan Pappe is an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for. In his view, expressed with obsession and a degree of paranoia, Jewish nationalism, that is to say Zionism, has been from its outset a deliberate tool for dispossessing the Palestinians; and therefore it is to be condemned root and branch. He reserves the Palestinian term of Nakba, meaning catastrophe, for describing what to Israelis is their war of independence of 1948. To him, Israeli politicians and soldiers, one and all, are so many murderers. Forests have been planted only to cover up the past. Houses are ‘monstrous villas and palaces for rich American Jews’. Everything Israeli is ugly, everything Palestinian is beautiful. One day, he supposes, the Israelis may well consummate their original crime with something even worse. The only possible alternative lies in the immediate return of every Palestinian to his original home, and that will mean the end of the state whose existence so offends Pappe. This, of course, is exactly the inflexible position taken by Hamas and the PLO.”

“The reader’s initial reaction must be one of pity. Poor man! What a strain it must be to belong to a nation whose members are so overwhelmingly unbearable that he longs for them to be overpowered by others. Yet there is more to it than that. Sad and creepy though it is, Pappe’s anger is open to rational analysis.”

As well as resorting to the usual cry-baby Israel-hater insults, Pryce-Jones tries to give a rational explanation for Pappe’s Israel-hating anger:

“The doctrinal element pushing Pappe into anti-Zionism is his prominent involvement in the Israeli Communist Party, known as Hadash. An outcrop of pure Stalinism and always a marginal movement, Communism in Israel rejected Zionism in favour of internationalism, according to which Jews and Arabs were to form a state together. Events, indeed the whole thrust of history, have proven this to be a complete illusion, but Pappe remains one of a minute handful still in its grip.”

Even if you didn’t know before hand that Pryce-Jones was a right wing empire-loving bigot, you could work it out quickly enough due to his resort, in true Daily Mail style, to the word “Stalinism” [“pure Stalinism” to be precise, but lets take the oxy away from the moron. It is a spectacular achievement to fit the words “Stalinism” and “pure” into the same sentence] to describe Hadash, a party with respect for worker’s rights. Unlike actual Stalinist parties and movements it gets its votes legitimately and wants to relinquish territory that it knows it has no right to keep. And Pappe seems so much less menacing when Pryce-Jones reveals his not so sinister plot to reject Zionism is aimed at “internationalism, according to which Jews and Arabs were to form a state together”. Pappe is a better man than Phillips or Pryce-Jones for being able to see that it is possible for Jews and Arabs to live together, and that they are not two different alien species.

Because he wants to stuff words into Pappe’s mouth and thoughts into his head, the final blow, which must appear quite devastating to Pryce-Jones, deluded as he is, actually appears ludicrous:

“There is a fatal contradiction at the heart of Pappe’s advocacy of the immediate return of all Palestinian refugees as the necessary condition of peace. If Israelis are really as vicious as Pappe presents them, then Palestinians could not possibly want to live among them. Are Palestinians to return only to wipe out Israelis or to be wiped out themselves?”

A contradiction that would be solved a lot quicker if Pryce-Jones realised that Pappe is not out to get “the Israelis” and is not claiming that they are all vicious. Since Pappe clearly does not believe that Israelis are inherently hostile to Palestinians, that last killer question is one that Pappe should never need answer.

But this particular issue of Literary Review is interesting for another reason. Applying the Phillips principle that a source can be totally discredited by the people working for it, whether or not their views are representative [see her recent desperate lunges at TIME, and Reuters for the latest examples], what else does this issue have to offer? I sure hope it isn’t full of bigotry and ignorance. Well, Paul Johnson is at the party. Another right wing nut and crazed member of the God squad [you can also detect a real racist hatred of the Palestinians and the French in past work], his best ever quote, on the subject of the tsunami [does it deserve two capital Ts?] in Indonesia sums up pretty well how feels about the inhabitants third world countries:

“So the calamity — so distressing for those individually involved — was for humanity as a whole a profoundly moral occurrence, and an act of God performed for our benefit.”

And there is further outreach to other peoples in Alexander Waugh’s review of 50 Reasons to Hate the French, which veers between tongue in cheek and foot in mouth oh so effortlessly. Read this passage, then imagine how hilarious it would sound if you changed the references to France and French people to Britain and the British:

“These are the words I wrote down in my little blue book when I first read 50 Reasons to Hate the French in proof back in July of this year:

“As a congenital Francophile, weaned from my cradle on the great cheeses of Normandy and the rich clarets of the Médoc; as someone for whom the glories of French culture, fashion and landscape have provided the keenest sensations of adolescence; as a grown man whose very fibre has, at times, fallen, prostrate, before the altars of all French people, places and things, I am greatly encouraged by the publication of this book. Eden and Clarke's inspired new gospel (which I read on a flight to Damascus) has cleared my head of all those erring passions and revealed to me the true darkness lurking behind all that fake accordion music and garlic. So verily, verily say I now unto you, the French are a vicious, absurd and inadequate people and I very much hope that this super book of proofs to that effect will succeed in one day drubbing their whole abominable nation right off the face of our lovely planet.”

Or

“Carefully and painstakingly, they haul their readers across everything concerning French life and culture, explaining exactly why the whole lot of it is rubbish”

Since she already thinks the West is corrupt [WEST-HATER, STUPID EVIL WEST-HATER], I would like Melanie Phillips to try the same exercise with the words Israeli and Israel. I don’t really detect an overall political stance with Literary Review, despite this rather damning sample. Food for thought for the next time Philips declares that we can never trust magazine or newspaper X ever again on the basis of one article.

Regrettably that is the end of the Literary Review section. WE shall be resuming Phillips-bashing shortly.

OK, so we’ve witnessed a book being comprehensively shredded and thus rendered utterly useless as a scholarly source. But oh no, the infection is already underway. Item 3 is produced to show how Israel is imploding from within. Lets see how Phillips describes it:

“[…] the damage by such historical revisionism has long been done within Israel, as this letter to Professor Rivka Carmi, President of Ben Gurion University, makes all too clear:”

This letter is a real tour de force. It is funny in parts, like the part when it claims that Sara Roy and Azmi Bishara are “Israel-haters” and that the latter, who stands up for Arab rights in Israel “has been running to Syria to call for Israel’s annihilation”. And we can marvel at the use of the passive voice in this sentence: “You will never learn that Israel’s ‘occupation’ of ‘Palestinian lands’ was caused by Arab aggression and violence and not the other way around.” [How can it be “caused by” anything other than the Israeli government’s decision to do it? Did these filthy Arabs harpoon those Israeli tanks and drag them on to their land? In this sentence, does he honestly thinks that the theft of Arab lands for settlements is the result of Arab violence, even though settlement expansion has happened through war and peace, under Labour and Likud rule?] We can be dazzled by the way he defies contradiction by claiming to have peaceful intentions, yet feels the need to put the word “occupation” in suggestive quotation marks, and claims that Israel is at war with the Palestinian Authority that it helped to establish at the repulsively one-sided Oslo Accords.

Gaze at the witless and unbalanced nature of the letter and then ask why Phillips refers to it as: “this letter to Professor Rivka Carmi”. Who wrote it, a fucking ghost? My guess is that she doesn’t know, in which case she is using evidence that she doesn’t even know to be half-truth. Wait, she does that all the time. The link on her site directs us to a shadowy anti-independent thought site called Israel-Academia-Monitor.com - one of the many groups, like Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch, that seeks to repress free speech with the paranoid pretext that the beliefs of men like Pappe are somehow a threat to a state’s existence – but not the letter itself. After I couldn’t find the letter on the website I did my own search and found the letter in full, complete with author.

His name is David Meir-Levi, some bonehead in Palo Alto, USA who works for the Israel Peace Initiative as Director of Peace and Education. The group he works for really could use such a Director as both are in short supply here. Witness the level of education one get from the fair and balanced FAQ on the website, for example, regarding the war with the Arab countries and the Palestinains:

“ What is the first step toward that solution?”

“The Arab States start educating their population toward tolerance and acceptance of a non-Muslim, democratic Israel. For the last century,they have educated their people to hate and reject Israel (the whole West, in fact).”

Wow, so much education. I really feel I have learned something. On the basis of that letter, however, Meir-Levi clearly is not the man for the job of directing peace and education, nor for the “tolerance and acceptance” that the FAQ preaches. He even wants to try the professor for treason. Look at this last paragraph:

“If what Prof. Gordon teaches is sound history, and rational analysis based upon bona fide facts and validated data, then Israel, as a free country where democratic process and rule of law prevail, must accomodate Prof. Gordon’s right to teach the truth even if it raises difficult political questions.

“However, if Professor Gordon is exploiting academic license to preach Israel-hatred under the faux mantle of scholarship, substituting transparently anti-Israel mendacious propaganda and decontextulized narratives for honest scholarship, then he is aiding and abetting Israel’s enemies in time of war. In doing so, he is making it easier for Israel’s enemies to gain political advantage. And in doing that, he is strengthening them and aiding them in their terrorist murder of Israelis. In time of war, that is treason”.

And here is the title of the piece:

“ANTI-ISRAEL INDOCTRINATION AT BEN GURION U:ACADEMIC LICENSE NOT LICENSE TO KILL”

Case closed: treason. And here is the problem with Phillips’ article/cut and paste extravaganza. She is so sensitive about differing opinion, about professors seeking truths that make her uncomfortable and about alternative points of view that she finds herself in the company of maniacs like Meir-Levi and Israel-Academia-Monitor.com, which have nothing but contempt for freedom of speech.