The brutal, and utterly pointless, killings in Paris have once again brought the current chaos of the Middle East and its consequences - the huge migration of dispossessed peoples to Europe and safer Middle Eastern countries, the growing number of calls for further bombings of Isis in Iraq and Syria, the increasing power of Isis affiliate, Boko Haram in Nigeria and bordering countries and, of course, fear to the streets of Europe - to the fore once more in the form of a cacophany of political and media demands for immediate tough responses. These responses have ranged from the absurd (that British Muslims should organise mass protests against Isis terrorism, as 'The Sun' demanded, to clearly demonstrate their opposition to Isis, the group that has been systematically murdering Muslims throughout their occupied territories), the contradictory, (Cameron et al charging that Russian air strikes are fuelling terrorism - the downing of aircraft over Sinai - whilst simultaneously demanding that we should begin air strikes in Syria to combat terrorist attacks) and the dangerous (that Britain should substantially increase its military intervention in the Syrian conflict, specifically against Isis forces).
The day after the Paris killings I phoned a good friend of mine who has lived in France, on the Paris outskirts, for forty years. He is married to a woman from Senegal, who is a Muslim, although my friend has no religious faith, and I was interested to hear his take on this terrible event. He sighed, and reiterated a view I had often heard him give: that France has an enormous Muslim population (over 6 million) who have for years experienced deeply entrenched prejudice and systemic discrimination in almost all areas of public and social life. They mainly live in poor, ghettoised housing, have little chance of rising in French society and experience overt discrimination in their daily lives. This has given rise to alienated young people, experiencing unemployment rates of over 25%, living in the banlieues around Paris and other cities, with high crime rates and with little sense of being fully integrated, or even welcome, in French society. He has experienced racist comments himself in France when out with his wife, and feels that overt racism in France is more pronounced than in the UK. He is not surprised that France has had the highest number of people travelling to Syria to join the ranks of Isis than any other European country, or that a number of recent atrocities have included home-grown terrorists from the banlieues, many of whom have petty criminal histories and low educational achievement. Isis can offer status and empowerment to those who feel alienation and disaffection from their society. None of this excuses such barbarism, but it must be understood. And France has made little effort to get to grips with the problem, not even collecting data on ethnic or religious background when analysing social conditions. At government level, the problem has not been properly acknowledged, let alone addressed.
The ratcheting up of military engagement in Syria will increase the threat of terrorism on European streets. There is a clear causal connection between military action and terrorism at home, between Western foreign policy and deaths in clubs and restaurants at home. To deny this is folly. It must be accepted as a likely consequence of a military interventionist policy. This is not to say the policy is necessarily wrong, but it is to say, clearly, that such policies increase the possibility of terror attacks.
What we have not seen in recent months is any concerted effort to push for a diplomatic initiative to generate something positive in the deteriorating Syrian situation. With Russia now an active participant, and a victim of Isis terrorism, there is an opportunity to get a UN brokered gathering of the various groups active in the civil war in Syria to try to find an interim coalition government which will have to include a resurgent Assad at this moment, as a preliminary to a more permanent resolution of a complex and seemingly intractable situation. This may seem absurdly optimistic, but at some point a political solution will have to be found, and concerted efforts to get this started are infinitely preferable to calling for increased air strikes. At the moment in Britain, the only use to be made of the UN seems to be to legitimise Cameron's demand for British air strikes. The demand must be for UN mandated talks, including Russia, France, the USA, representatives of the Assad regime and the leaders of the opposition groups fighting him, now exhausted and losing their initiative. An interim government has to be formed, which will inevitably include Assad at the moment, with a clear programme of political reform to be overseen by the UN. Such a government would then have the legitimate backing of the West and Russia to take on Isis as a clear threat to the integrity of the Syrian state and to the region. Any military action against Isis must have the leadership of relevant states in the region, with Western support if asked for, but not initiated by the Western powers themselves. Turkey, with a huge army, although more preoccupied with its dispute with the Kurds, could be a key player in such an initiative. Another coalition of Western superpowers causing further swathes of "collateral damage" in the region will only serve to add recruits to Isis and generate further terror threats in Europe. Pressure must also be put on our chief weapons importer, and regional 'ally', Saudi Arabia, to curtail its funding and arming of Sunni insurgent groups, whose weapons make their way to Isis. Not the only irony of this crisis is that our huge armaments sales to Saudi Arabia are helping to prolong and exacerbate the very tragedy we proclaim to be wishing to resolve.
Back in 1960, my council estate was far removed from anything resembling a Parisian banlieue. Most people were employed, and some in white collar jobs, many owned cars and several played golf on the local council golf course nearby.The only family of foreign extraction I can remember were Belgian and lived on the third floor of my block of flats. Their only child, Francis, a little younger than me and never allowed out to mix with the likes of us kids on the estate (probably very wisely, looking back) would look down on us from his balcony eyrie and shout various insults at us. These were both touchingly outdated and also almost incomprehensible due to his accent and unfortunate speech impediments. "you're weally thilly and thtupid" he would shout in a strongly accented voice. "Sorry Francis, can't hear what you're saying " we would reply. "You're weally weally thtupid then" he would scream . "Sorry Francis, can't understand you. Try it in English", we would respond. " I am thpeakin' English. You're just thtupid and weally weally thilly." "Sorry Francis. Can't understand a word you're saying son. We don't know any Belgian here." Now he would scream in a fury, "I'm going to thwow a bwick at you and I've got lots of bwicks up here, and I'll thwow them wight down you're thwoats". "Sowwy Fwancis, didn't quite get that. Did you say you'd thwow bwicks down our thwoats? What are bwicks, Fwancis and what are thwoats?" we'd shout back, and simultaneously hurl a round of stones upwards to his balcony as he ducked for cover, screaming and crying in impotent frustration. At this point, his dad, always wearing a caricature French beret for some reason, would appear and hurl further insults and threats at us as we departed. Francis' performances on his balcony were always a treat for us, and thinking of new ways to humiliate and torment him always added some spice to the day.
I mentioned the local golf course, and this also played a not insignificant part in my council estate life. Money was always in short supply, and one way of making some was to climb under the wire fences surrounding the golf course and make your way, surreptitiously, to the shrubs and trees that lined most of the fairways. From these, if you kept yourself reasonably well hidden, you could observe the progress of the golfers from hole to hole. What we were looking for was, of course, lost golf balls. These could be gathered, spit and polished, and sold back to the golfers, the price depending on their condition. We would wander through the camouflage offered by the golf course flora along the periphery of the course, bashing the undergrowth with sticks, searching for the prize of a good condition lost ball. Actually, they were surprisingly easy to find. The golfers, generally, must have been of pretty poor quality, since I usually retrieved five or six balls in an afternoon of searching.
The next stage, and the most difficult, was to initiate a possible sale. This involved approaching a group of golfers and getting a sense of whether they might be interested or not. Most were at least willing to appraise what you'd found, and some would then offer a price, usually a few pennies. Some, however, were hostile to your very presence on the hallowed green. They would tell you, in very forceful language, not only to get out of their sight, but to get out of the course entirely and not come back. This would sometimes be backed up with vivid descriptions of what could be done to you with a golf club - usually a number seven iron, but I know not why. This kind of golfer would sometimes literally chase you away, and this would necessitate our last resort, but also our 'piece de resistance', emphasis on resistance. ( We would also, if the golfer was particularly obnoxious, find a hiding place way down the fairway, wait until he had teed off, and then run out, take his ball, and run as fast as we could to get out of the course, laughing hilariously at his impotent fury way back in the distance.)
The golf course was criss-crossed with very long, and quite large, drainage tunnels. We all knew exactly where they were, and how long most of them were. We would all dash for the nearest entrances to this underground maze of escape routes and crawl into the tunnels where no golfer would follow. You had to keep your head right down to your knees and try to crawl forward on your feet since there was always a few inches of water at the bottom of the tunnel. They were very dark, but most of them straight enough for you to see the light at the far end. Slowly, and in some pain, you would place one heavily weighted foot in front of the other, and carefully waddle your way down toward the light. When you finally emerged, you were in another part of the golf course entirely, and a new group of golfers were there to do business with.
Only once was I forced to enter a tunnel I'd never tried before, only to find that it curved, and so there was no light to see at the far end. I couldn't go back, since the thought of a golf club being thrust somewhere unmentionable about my being, as had been threatened, was more worrying than negotiating the seemingly endless darkness. I painfully manoeuvred my body forward into the black space ahead, and just kept on going, hoping to round a bend and see light ahead. This didn't happen. I began to have fears of sudden onrushes of water coming up behind me and drowning me helplessly underground. Or encountering fierce underground animals that would tear me apart. I looked back, but only blackness. Ahead, the same. On I carried, until, finally, I did indeed negotiate a bend in the tunnel, and was able to perceive, a long way ahead, a glimmer of daylight. On I crawled, finally emerging, blinking and terrified into the daylight, still clutching my cherished haul of golf balls. I was rewarded by a friendly golfer offering me a shilling - a whole shilling (and a lot of sweets could be bought with this) - for my best golf ball. More than I'd ever got for one ball before. (For younger readers, a shilling was twelve pennies and there were two hundred and forty pennies in a pound. Base twelve. Such a simple monetary system, so much lamented).
The four years of my Junior School era were passing quickly, and Secondary school was on the horizon. This meant, THE ELEVEN PLUS!!! was looming. I could sense there was to be no light at the end of this particular tunnel, but only darkness unending.
Wednesday, 18 November 2015
Thursday, 5 November 2015
Two weeks ago a letter appeared in The Guardian criticising the growing movement in the world of arts and culture calling for a boycott of all cultural activity that is either financed by, or supportive of, the government of the state of Israel. This call is not directed at individual Israeli artists and workers in the cultural area, but those who are clearly using their activities to advance the interests of the Israeli state by accepting state endorsement and / or finance. The signatories of this letter opposing such a boycott included many politicians from both the main parliamentary parties, most of them long-standing members of the 'Friends of Israel' groups in parliament. Others have a history of uncritical support for a state that has broken or ignored over 60 United Nations resolutions relating to Israel's illegal annexation of Palestinian land; has continued to build illegal 'settlements' of Jewish occupiers on this seized territory; protects these by the most heavily armed force in the Middle East, even as these illegal occupiers harass, assault and sometimes kill Palestinian residents of the West Bank; systematically destroys any hope of a two state solution through these 'settlements', and continues its periodic murderous assaults on the defenceless citizens of Gaza.
Among those who signed this letter were several well known writers who are now, in effect, defending and aiding the systematic and widespread persecution of Palestinian citizens of Israel itself and those living under illegal occupation; giving support to the continued Israeli assaults on Palestinian villages and the subsequent bull-dozing of their homes, now an almost daily occurrence in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, but also common elsewhere; the arrest and imprisonment of children against all international agreements (between 500 and 700 children are arrested and prosecuted through Israeli military courts each year, most for throwing stones at heavily armed military vehicles and many are then transferred and imprisoned within Israel rather than their homeland, the occupied territories, against the UN convention on the Rights of the Child); the use of the world's most sophisticated weaponry upon unarmed and defenceless civilian men, women and children in Gaza (over 300 children killed in 2014 and 1200 adults); the continued effective imprisonment of a whole population in Gaza who cannot do anything without Israeli permission and the unrelenting West Bank occupation that has now effectively scuppered any hope of a two state solution, the very aim the signatories of the letter claim to be their solution to this one-sided and seemingly intractable situation. They appear to be completely unaware of the attempts over the last seventy years to change Israeli attitudes towards the persecution of the Palestinians through dialogue and engagement and the implacable resistance of successive Israeli governments to change their policies in any way. The idea that this government, perhaps the most virulently anti-Palestinian regime yet elected in Israel, might in some way modify their attitudes toward Palestinian aspirations through cultural dialogue shows a breathtaking naivete.
Signatories to this letter include: Hilary Mantel, J.K.Rowling, Melvyn Bragg, Wendy Cope, Fay Weldon and Zoe Wannamaker. Most of the others are long-standing defenders of the indefensible, but one, who has received little attention, is Danny Cohen, the Head of all four BBC television channels, its web-site and a member of the BBC executive board. The naivety or ignorance of reality shown by some of the signatories is concerning, but that someone who works at the most senior level of our most prestigious broadcasting service, a service with a duty to impartiality in all news and current affairs, can publicly give support to one side in one of the most contentious and potentially catastrophic political disputes currently unresolved, and receive no criticism or censure from the BBC Trust, is revealing of the increasingly partisan nature of BBC news coverage. The BBC is under very real threat from our current government and it seems to be protecting itself by steering its coverage of news and current affairs in a clearly right-wing direction, not only through the increasingly prevalent 'analysis' of political affairs by its own correspondents, who present any viewpoint that lies outside of the narrow boundaries of the neo-liberal orthodoxy as beyond reasonable discussion but also the continual use of 'experts' from right wing think tanks, often funded by the vested interests of the city and big business. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it increasingly difficult to defend the BBC in its current phase of well-founded fear for its future, and it will not retain its traditional supporters - those who would instinctively defend publicly owned services and resist the incursions of profit and commercialism into the structures of the BBC - by its current approach of being little more than the mouthpiece of the powerful.
Back in my childhood years of the the 1950's and early 60's, discussions of the Israeli state were occasionally picked up on my juvenile radar as they arose in the many political discussions that took place in our flat between my mother and her political colleagues (she was, by now, working at Labour Party headquarters in Smith Square in London, editing a small magazine called Labour Woman). These discussions usually centred on the enthusiasm of youthful members of various socialist groups for spending time in Kibbutzim in Israel. There was a romantic idea that the Kibbutz was a small socialist cooperative founded on egalitarian principles. This was often allied to another romantic myth that has been carefully cultivated by the Israeli state that theirs was a country heroically defending itself against overwhelming odds, trying to bring civilisation to a largely empty desert whilst all the time being threatened by the surrounding hostile Arab territories. The long association of the Jewish working class with socialist movements in pre-war Europe and the terrible European genocide suffered by the Jews in Europe all served to support the founding myth of the state of Israel and many young socialists in Britain and other European countries travelled to do voluntary work in Israeli kibbutzim. Many returned somewhat disillusioned. The influence of the 1960 novel and film, 'Exodus' in planting the state's creation myth in the popular imagination cannot be overemphasised.
The reality of the founding of Israel has now been incontrovertibly shown to be the very opposite of this persuasive myth. Work by Israeli historians including Benny Morris and, most significantly, Ilan Pappe have shown that mandated Palestine was, of course, heavily populated with Palestinian farmers and artisans. That the Zionist forces were heavily armed and considerably better organised and prepared than the Palestinian population and their Arab neighbours, and that it was largely through carefully planned terrorist action - the destruction and complete eradication of Palestinian villages, sometimes with the massacres of their citizens (February 1948 the village of Qisarya where 1500 residents were violently expelled and their homes destroyed, Barrat Qisarya where 1000 more were similarly treated, Kirbut Al-Burj and Atlit followed and the order to "blow up 20 houses and kill as many villagers as possible" saw an end to the village of Sa,sa where in fact over 30 houses were blown up and about 80 villagers killed*) that the forced ethnic cleansing of Palestine was initiated - what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe. This was part of a detailed plan drawn up by Israeli forces known as Plan Dalet. This outlined an explicit strategy for taking over Palestinian communities and expelling the Palestinian population: "operations can be divided into the following categories: destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines and debris), especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
The systematic attack by Zionist forces on largely unarmed and undefended Palestinian villages led to the flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and to permanent exclusion from their ancestral homes. There are now some 2 million Palestinians still living in refugee camps in Jordan, 760,000 in the occupied West Bank, 460,000 in Syria and 420,000 in Lebanon. All are denied any right of return to the places where they or their ancestors once lived. Indeed, the towns and villages from which they were expelled have been erased from Israeli maps and the villages themselves razed to the ground and built over with Israeli replacements. Palestinian history has been eradicated from the landscape. There is, of course, a terrible irony in a largely European Jewish military force expelling, through systematic violence, another ethnic group and creating an Arab diaspora, while Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories are subject still to appalling discrimination by the Israeli state. It is, though, heartening to see the growing number of Jews throughout the world who courageously take on the ideology of terror and discrimination now entrenched within Israeli politics and who are supporting the policy of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions that is now beginning to trouble the state of Israel. Groups like Jewish Voices for Peace in the United States and growing numbers of affiliates to the movement throughout the world are trying to replicate the success of the similar campaign against apartheid era South Africa.(Worth remembering that there was a very close, but secret, relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa who gave each other material support in the period when the rest of the world was isolating the racist regime in S. Africa). It is, of course, the growing success of the BDS movement that has given rise to the desperate nature of the letter that initiated this post.
* Source: Ilan Pappe - "the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"
I see I have neglected to come back to my grandfather on my father's side as promised in the last post. He always professed to being a communist, although I don't think he ever joined the communist party. He could never bear to have to listen to what someone else may think let alone be instructed by anyone else. Not sure the communist party would wear that attitude. He did, though, in the years after the war, volunteer to go to help - not Israeli kibbutzniks - but to rebuild destroyed roads in communist Yugoslavia, and I remember him showing me photos of him in vest and cord trousers pushing laden wheelbarrows up large mounds of rubble. This was no surprise to me, since he seemed to be permanently dressed in a vest and cord trousers; it was his default mode of attire for all occasions. He was proud of being the oldest volunteer in his group, just as he was inordinately proud of his general physical state - hence the permanent singlets to display his toned upper body. Yes, he was a vain and self-important man, opinionated and domineering to my put-upon grandmother. They lived in a very large detached Edwardian house and my grandfather had turned one of the downstairs rooms into a small gymnasium with weights and a rowing machine. Here he 'worked out' as we say now, but then, took his exercise. He also had a couple of young men who came to use his equipment in the evening and he would give them advice on their fitness regime. He was able to give advice to anybody on anything, as it happened, and freely delivered this all the time. Such philanthropy. He was what some would call eccentric, others a megalomaniac.
In the room next to his gym was a room whose only function seemed to be to house the telephone (at this time, a clear sign of the well-to-do). Around the walls of the room were stacked orange boxes, all of them filled with stacked magazines. These were divided into three categories. The largest housed hundreds of copies of a magazine called 'Soviet Life' to which he subscribed so that he could regale us all at meal times with the latest developments enriching the lives of those in the soviet union - those not in the gulags, on the whole. The next group of boxes held the more esoteric 'China Reconstructs' - the very title promising so much excitement. This usually had full size pictures of Chairman Mao on the front, or ecstatic Chinese workers. Both these magazines were large format and printed in colour and both entirely baffling to a child under the age of ten. The third magazine was smaller and was devoted to body building and featured pictures of flexing young males, liberally covered in body oil and wearing only thongs. Had I been older, these might have aroused a few suspicions - whether they aroused anything in him, I know not. Hidden among these particular magazines, though, were surreptitious copies of 'Health and Efficiency', featuring many tasteful pictures of young bare-breasted women playing volleyball with the ball always strategically placed.I couldn't help but notice that the magazine featured women almost exclusively. Even at this young age, I could relate 'health' to the images - but 'efficiency'? I'm still puzzled today.
The house had a large front room that housed, not only chairs, table etc. but also one of my grandmother's two grand pianos. She was an accomplished pianist and music teacher. Behind this room was my grandfather's workroom. This had to be seen to be believed. When you entered you were confined to a central narrow passageway that led between two floor to ceiling mountains of what can only be called junk, piled haphazardly and precariously to what seemed an enormous height. The passage led to a work bench with large drills, clamps and turning machines. Once, my brother and I climbed through the huge pile of discarded boxes and assorted debris on the left hand side, and underneath everything we found two pre-war motor bikes propped against the far wall. My grandfather was a hoarder of epic proportions. The work-bench was part of his entrepreneurial activities. He had owned a factory in a nearby town that produced plaster garden ornaments, among other things. He had once tried to develop a new kind of model from a new material and he set up the prototype in the kitchen - my grandmother's province entirely, normally - and left it working overnight. Part of this equipment was a large glass jar that, at some point in the process, exploded showering the kitchen with glass and embedding many large shards deep into the wall. Had my grandmother been there she would have been torn to shreds. His only comment - "humph, someone must have tampered with it".
One of his - many - unacknowledged weaknesses was severe deafness. He would spend large parts of the day watching test matches on television when they were on, always 'Grandstand' on Saturday afternoons, and anything else that interested him the rest of the time. To get around his deafness, he would plug a joined series of twisted light flex wires attached to what looked like second world war pilot headphones that would be clamped to his head and he would sit, in his vest and cords, for hours plugged in to the black and white set. The headphones, of course, had the effect of cutting off the sound to anyone else who might have wanted to watch, not that this concerned him in the slightest. However, he would have a habit, when something particularly annoyed him of suddenly turning round and shouting at anyone who happened to be in the room "Did you hear that! What nonsense! Did you hear the rubbish he just spouted?" Well, no we didn't, we haven't heard anything for the last three hours. But of course, he was oblivious to anyone else.
One of my favourite memories of him was when some builders were re-tiling part of the roof. This was a large, three storied house with a high, front-facing gable and they had scaffolding and a ladder running from ground to roof. The two builders were carrying hod-loads of tiles laboriously up this seemingly endless ladder. My grandfather, who knew everything about everything, imperiously stopped them before they had got a few rungs off the ground. "No, no, no. Come back down here now. You're moving all wrong here. Now then " he instructed, "watch me. Right, keep your back straight - really straight. Lift hod like so, right to left shoulder. Adjust for comfort. Now, move your legs from the hips - got that? From the hips (I was trying to think of how else you might move your legs, but I was stumped). Now, with back straight, up we go one leg at a time moving only from the hips." And up he went with loaded hod right to the roof. Back down he came having unloaded the tiles. "now, you see what I mean. The way you were moving you're likely to do your back.Okay?"
"No, not really. I didn't quite get that" was the response "do you think you could show me again?"
"Righto young man" came my grandfather's reply, now, load up the hod and watch carefully".
It took five attempts before they'd got it and finally let him go.
Among those who signed this letter were several well known writers who are now, in effect, defending and aiding the systematic and widespread persecution of Palestinian citizens of Israel itself and those living under illegal occupation; giving support to the continued Israeli assaults on Palestinian villages and the subsequent bull-dozing of their homes, now an almost daily occurrence in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, but also common elsewhere; the arrest and imprisonment of children against all international agreements (between 500 and 700 children are arrested and prosecuted through Israeli military courts each year, most for throwing stones at heavily armed military vehicles and many are then transferred and imprisoned within Israel rather than their homeland, the occupied territories, against the UN convention on the Rights of the Child); the use of the world's most sophisticated weaponry upon unarmed and defenceless civilian men, women and children in Gaza (over 300 children killed in 2014 and 1200 adults); the continued effective imprisonment of a whole population in Gaza who cannot do anything without Israeli permission and the unrelenting West Bank occupation that has now effectively scuppered any hope of a two state solution, the very aim the signatories of the letter claim to be their solution to this one-sided and seemingly intractable situation. They appear to be completely unaware of the attempts over the last seventy years to change Israeli attitudes towards the persecution of the Palestinians through dialogue and engagement and the implacable resistance of successive Israeli governments to change their policies in any way. The idea that this government, perhaps the most virulently anti-Palestinian regime yet elected in Israel, might in some way modify their attitudes toward Palestinian aspirations through cultural dialogue shows a breathtaking naivete.
Signatories to this letter include: Hilary Mantel, J.K.Rowling, Melvyn Bragg, Wendy Cope, Fay Weldon and Zoe Wannamaker. Most of the others are long-standing defenders of the indefensible, but one, who has received little attention, is Danny Cohen, the Head of all four BBC television channels, its web-site and a member of the BBC executive board. The naivety or ignorance of reality shown by some of the signatories is concerning, but that someone who works at the most senior level of our most prestigious broadcasting service, a service with a duty to impartiality in all news and current affairs, can publicly give support to one side in one of the most contentious and potentially catastrophic political disputes currently unresolved, and receive no criticism or censure from the BBC Trust, is revealing of the increasingly partisan nature of BBC news coverage. The BBC is under very real threat from our current government and it seems to be protecting itself by steering its coverage of news and current affairs in a clearly right-wing direction, not only through the increasingly prevalent 'analysis' of political affairs by its own correspondents, who present any viewpoint that lies outside of the narrow boundaries of the neo-liberal orthodoxy as beyond reasonable discussion but also the continual use of 'experts' from right wing think tanks, often funded by the vested interests of the city and big business. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it increasingly difficult to defend the BBC in its current phase of well-founded fear for its future, and it will not retain its traditional supporters - those who would instinctively defend publicly owned services and resist the incursions of profit and commercialism into the structures of the BBC - by its current approach of being little more than the mouthpiece of the powerful.
Back in my childhood years of the the 1950's and early 60's, discussions of the Israeli state were occasionally picked up on my juvenile radar as they arose in the many political discussions that took place in our flat between my mother and her political colleagues (she was, by now, working at Labour Party headquarters in Smith Square in London, editing a small magazine called Labour Woman). These discussions usually centred on the enthusiasm of youthful members of various socialist groups for spending time in Kibbutzim in Israel. There was a romantic idea that the Kibbutz was a small socialist cooperative founded on egalitarian principles. This was often allied to another romantic myth that has been carefully cultivated by the Israeli state that theirs was a country heroically defending itself against overwhelming odds, trying to bring civilisation to a largely empty desert whilst all the time being threatened by the surrounding hostile Arab territories. The long association of the Jewish working class with socialist movements in pre-war Europe and the terrible European genocide suffered by the Jews in Europe all served to support the founding myth of the state of Israel and many young socialists in Britain and other European countries travelled to do voluntary work in Israeli kibbutzim. Many returned somewhat disillusioned. The influence of the 1960 novel and film, 'Exodus' in planting the state's creation myth in the popular imagination cannot be overemphasised.
The reality of the founding of Israel has now been incontrovertibly shown to be the very opposite of this persuasive myth. Work by Israeli historians including Benny Morris and, most significantly, Ilan Pappe have shown that mandated Palestine was, of course, heavily populated with Palestinian farmers and artisans. That the Zionist forces were heavily armed and considerably better organised and prepared than the Palestinian population and their Arab neighbours, and that it was largely through carefully planned terrorist action - the destruction and complete eradication of Palestinian villages, sometimes with the massacres of their citizens (February 1948 the village of Qisarya where 1500 residents were violently expelled and their homes destroyed, Barrat Qisarya where 1000 more were similarly treated, Kirbut Al-Burj and Atlit followed and the order to "blow up 20 houses and kill as many villagers as possible" saw an end to the village of Sa,sa where in fact over 30 houses were blown up and about 80 villagers killed*) that the forced ethnic cleansing of Palestine was initiated - what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe. This was part of a detailed plan drawn up by Israeli forces known as Plan Dalet. This outlined an explicit strategy for taking over Palestinian communities and expelling the Palestinian population: "operations can be divided into the following categories: destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines and debris), especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
The systematic attack by Zionist forces on largely unarmed and undefended Palestinian villages led to the flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and to permanent exclusion from their ancestral homes. There are now some 2 million Palestinians still living in refugee camps in Jordan, 760,000 in the occupied West Bank, 460,000 in Syria and 420,000 in Lebanon. All are denied any right of return to the places where they or their ancestors once lived. Indeed, the towns and villages from which they were expelled have been erased from Israeli maps and the villages themselves razed to the ground and built over with Israeli replacements. Palestinian history has been eradicated from the landscape. There is, of course, a terrible irony in a largely European Jewish military force expelling, through systematic violence, another ethnic group and creating an Arab diaspora, while Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories are subject still to appalling discrimination by the Israeli state. It is, though, heartening to see the growing number of Jews throughout the world who courageously take on the ideology of terror and discrimination now entrenched within Israeli politics and who are supporting the policy of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions that is now beginning to trouble the state of Israel. Groups like Jewish Voices for Peace in the United States and growing numbers of affiliates to the movement throughout the world are trying to replicate the success of the similar campaign against apartheid era South Africa.(Worth remembering that there was a very close, but secret, relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa who gave each other material support in the period when the rest of the world was isolating the racist regime in S. Africa). It is, of course, the growing success of the BDS movement that has given rise to the desperate nature of the letter that initiated this post.
* Source: Ilan Pappe - "the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"
I see I have neglected to come back to my grandfather on my father's side as promised in the last post. He always professed to being a communist, although I don't think he ever joined the communist party. He could never bear to have to listen to what someone else may think let alone be instructed by anyone else. Not sure the communist party would wear that attitude. He did, though, in the years after the war, volunteer to go to help - not Israeli kibbutzniks - but to rebuild destroyed roads in communist Yugoslavia, and I remember him showing me photos of him in vest and cord trousers pushing laden wheelbarrows up large mounds of rubble. This was no surprise to me, since he seemed to be permanently dressed in a vest and cord trousers; it was his default mode of attire for all occasions. He was proud of being the oldest volunteer in his group, just as he was inordinately proud of his general physical state - hence the permanent singlets to display his toned upper body. Yes, he was a vain and self-important man, opinionated and domineering to my put-upon grandmother. They lived in a very large detached Edwardian house and my grandfather had turned one of the downstairs rooms into a small gymnasium with weights and a rowing machine. Here he 'worked out' as we say now, but then, took his exercise. He also had a couple of young men who came to use his equipment in the evening and he would give them advice on their fitness regime. He was able to give advice to anybody on anything, as it happened, and freely delivered this all the time. Such philanthropy. He was what some would call eccentric, others a megalomaniac.
In the room next to his gym was a room whose only function seemed to be to house the telephone (at this time, a clear sign of the well-to-do). Around the walls of the room were stacked orange boxes, all of them filled with stacked magazines. These were divided into three categories. The largest housed hundreds of copies of a magazine called 'Soviet Life' to which he subscribed so that he could regale us all at meal times with the latest developments enriching the lives of those in the soviet union - those not in the gulags, on the whole. The next group of boxes held the more esoteric 'China Reconstructs' - the very title promising so much excitement. This usually had full size pictures of Chairman Mao on the front, or ecstatic Chinese workers. Both these magazines were large format and printed in colour and both entirely baffling to a child under the age of ten. The third magazine was smaller and was devoted to body building and featured pictures of flexing young males, liberally covered in body oil and wearing only thongs. Had I been older, these might have aroused a few suspicions - whether they aroused anything in him, I know not. Hidden among these particular magazines, though, were surreptitious copies of 'Health and Efficiency', featuring many tasteful pictures of young bare-breasted women playing volleyball with the ball always strategically placed.I couldn't help but notice that the magazine featured women almost exclusively. Even at this young age, I could relate 'health' to the images - but 'efficiency'? I'm still puzzled today.
The house had a large front room that housed, not only chairs, table etc. but also one of my grandmother's two grand pianos. She was an accomplished pianist and music teacher. Behind this room was my grandfather's workroom. This had to be seen to be believed. When you entered you were confined to a central narrow passageway that led between two floor to ceiling mountains of what can only be called junk, piled haphazardly and precariously to what seemed an enormous height. The passage led to a work bench with large drills, clamps and turning machines. Once, my brother and I climbed through the huge pile of discarded boxes and assorted debris on the left hand side, and underneath everything we found two pre-war motor bikes propped against the far wall. My grandfather was a hoarder of epic proportions. The work-bench was part of his entrepreneurial activities. He had owned a factory in a nearby town that produced plaster garden ornaments, among other things. He had once tried to develop a new kind of model from a new material and he set up the prototype in the kitchen - my grandmother's province entirely, normally - and left it working overnight. Part of this equipment was a large glass jar that, at some point in the process, exploded showering the kitchen with glass and embedding many large shards deep into the wall. Had my grandmother been there she would have been torn to shreds. His only comment - "humph, someone must have tampered with it".
One of his - many - unacknowledged weaknesses was severe deafness. He would spend large parts of the day watching test matches on television when they were on, always 'Grandstand' on Saturday afternoons, and anything else that interested him the rest of the time. To get around his deafness, he would plug a joined series of twisted light flex wires attached to what looked like second world war pilot headphones that would be clamped to his head and he would sit, in his vest and cords, for hours plugged in to the black and white set. The headphones, of course, had the effect of cutting off the sound to anyone else who might have wanted to watch, not that this concerned him in the slightest. However, he would have a habit, when something particularly annoyed him of suddenly turning round and shouting at anyone who happened to be in the room "Did you hear that! What nonsense! Did you hear the rubbish he just spouted?" Well, no we didn't, we haven't heard anything for the last three hours. But of course, he was oblivious to anyone else.
One of my favourite memories of him was when some builders were re-tiling part of the roof. This was a large, three storied house with a high, front-facing gable and they had scaffolding and a ladder running from ground to roof. The two builders were carrying hod-loads of tiles laboriously up this seemingly endless ladder. My grandfather, who knew everything about everything, imperiously stopped them before they had got a few rungs off the ground. "No, no, no. Come back down here now. You're moving all wrong here. Now then " he instructed, "watch me. Right, keep your back straight - really straight. Lift hod like so, right to left shoulder. Adjust for comfort. Now, move your legs from the hips - got that? From the hips (I was trying to think of how else you might move your legs, but I was stumped). Now, with back straight, up we go one leg at a time moving only from the hips." And up he went with loaded hod right to the roof. Back down he came having unloaded the tiles. "now, you see what I mean. The way you were moving you're likely to do your back.Okay?"
"No, not really. I didn't quite get that" was the response "do you think you could show me again?"
"Righto young man" came my grandfather's reply, now, load up the hod and watch carefully".
It took five attempts before they'd got it and finally let him go.
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