False Dichotomies

Micah’s excessively-titled ‘On being a naïve, self-hating, single-issue sympathy tourist (or some notes on the Jewish civil war)’ isn’t a particularly original auto-da-fe. He grew up a ‘liberal Zionist’, an avid reader of Amos Oz and David Grossman, and believed that if Israel got out of the territories then all would be well. His Damascene conversion came with the “disproportionate” Operation Cast Lead, when he decided that the Zionist project had been a bad idea in the first place; a courageous stance, he thinks, especially given the Jewish Chronicle’s hatred for all things anti-Zionist.

Of some interest, however, is the following: “I had begun to ask whether Zionism and the creation of Israel had been ‘good for the Jews’, or indeed anyone else?…I could now see what a disaster this project was turning out to be for Jews and Judaism.” Like Micah, I’d accept that Israel has been bad for the Palestinians. No matter who is most responsible for the conflict, the creation of a Jewish State has meant their dispossession, slaughter, dispersal, and immiseration. If there will be peace, Israel will have to sincerely acknowledge the role it has played in Palestinian suffering. The Palestinians and the wider Arab world will have to do the same.

But I do not understand how anybody can sincerely argue that Israel has been bad for the Jews. Assessing this question is tricky. Measuring the happiness of an individual is hard enough. Doing the same for an entire people is exponentially more difficult. And it would be cheating to resort to counterfactuals, although it would be nice if Israel’s prophetically-inspired Jewish critics were to ponder what might have happened had Israel lost in 1948 (clue: look at the Nakba that took place in the few areas the Arab forces managed to win). Read more

Last week, Paris Hilton visited Mumbai to promote a new collection of handbags and accessories. On her first day in town, near a mall in the upmarket suburb of Andheri, and from the comfort of her chauffeur-driven car, she handed a $100 note to a beggar woman.  According to reports, the beggar woman, who was holding her baby, reacted in bewilderment. “Can I get change for this?” she asked the Mid-Day Metro photographer, Satyajit Desai. $100 is currently worth 4901 rupees, a miraculous windfall by any Indian beggar’s standards. But from her reaction we can assume that handling foreign currency was a new experience for her. Read more

After a while, you start to think that Varanasi is held together by an invisible thread. Only by intuition can you become part of the matrix. I used to walk with trepidation in case I was mowed down by a motorbike or a cycle-rickshaw; now I didn’t need to worry – my movements were locked in to those of the other 3.6 million residents of this stinking city. Without looking, I knew when to stop, when to deviate from my path, and when to plough straight through. One false move would send everyone in my vicinity tumbling down like dominoes, but that doesn’t happen, not once you’re part of the crowd.

I’ve now spent one-sixtieth of my life in northern India, a not insignificant amount of time. I’m both proud and slightly disturbed by this. Proud, because some people are so repulsed by the place that they get on the first plane to Bangkok. Disturbed, because I haven’t learnt the language, acculturated, or managed to understand or accept the way things work here, and I suspect I never will. Read more

Like children without an invite to their classmate’s birthday party, the Israeli far-left has had to jealously watch on as the J14 demonstrations have grown bigger and bigger, culminating in this weekend’s protests, which were the largest in Israel’s history. Outside Israel, pro-Palestinian groups have been unmoved. Ali Abunimah tweeted with a shrug that J14 was “like whites protesting for better incomes in 1985 South Africa, leaving out apartheid because it’s “too divisive””. Inside Israel, though, there has been a split between those who agree with him and those who have decided to try and influence J14 from the inside.

Joseph Dana and Max Blumenthal are two anti-Zionists who have chosen to remain in the jealous children camp. In an article entitled “The Exclusive Revolution”, they predictably take the J14 organisers to task for not demanding an end to the occupation as part of their platform. They argue that this is because J14 is resolutely Zionist, and hence excludes the Palestinians and their litany of legitimate grievances against the Jewish State.

Like Abunimah, their argument that a protest against socio-economic conditions is not a protest against the occupation is rather banal, but it is also typical of the myopia and dogma that has increasingly consumed those campaigning on the fringes of the Israeli left. This is unfortunate. It’s true that the occupation is both immoral and increasingly harmful to Israel’s prospects, both in the security and socio-economic sphere. But instead of asking why J14 isn’t dealing with the problem, the far-left should be asking why its activists remain unable to mobilise hundreds of thousands of Israelis out onto the streets. Read more

In 1993, according to a recent article in the Guardian by Pankaj Mishra, current Israeli President Shimon Peres met with BJP leader LK Advani and advised him that the best way to secure long-term Indian control over Kashmir was by settling non-Kashmiri Indians there. This neatly encapsulates the differences in Israeli and Indian policies when it comes to their occupied/disputed territories. Given the obvious injustice involved in maintaining control over a territory against the will of its population, it’s sometimes difficult to take a step back and ask why Israel and India have been so stubborn about maintaining their control of Palestine/Kashmir despite the conflict this causes. But if we are to assess future prospects for Kashmir/Palestine, we have to address the question head-on. Read more

“The United Kingdom and Israel are currently under the sway of massive political unrest. In both countries, the cause of this is systemic economic problems, reflected in increasing public dissatisfaction with neoliberalism, but the contrast between the nature of the unrest is striking: the UK gets riots, while Israel gets some of the most inspiring political protests in generations. Why the difference, and what lessons can be drawn from it?

Socio-economic factors alone do not provide the answer. The failure of neoliberalism justifies massive political protests but it does not justify rioting. The people of Beer-Sheva’s Schunat Daled live in equally poor conditions to the people of London’s Tottenham. Contrary to what Eyal Clyne intimates, however, there is little sign that Israelis will turn on one another in the way that the rioters in the UK have done. So while economic distress explains the timing of the unrest, we have to look deeper into the political cultures of both countries to answer why Britain witnesses unfocused rage while Israel sees the possible birth of a new political movement. My unfashionable explanation for the difference, having lived in both countries, is that Israeli is a nationalist society and Britain is a post-nationalist one.” Read the rest at The Propagandist.

The millions killed during the Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan can be described as victims of a grass-roots genocide. Their slaughter was not ordered by politicians or warlords, but was the result of the brutality of their neighbours, caught up in the frenzy produced by the partition. The perpetrators were not brought before a war crimes tribunal, nor were the bereaved and dispossessed survivors compensated for their losses. It may be difficult to stomach, but today this is maybe for the best. The last thing an ever tense Indian-Pakistani relationship needs is a reopening of the wounds of the original division. But it remains astonishing how little a Western world brought up on the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide and the Balkans knows about the sheer medieval horror of the violence on the subcontinent in 1947.

Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (the word has been translated from Sanskrit as ‘indifference’), written in Hindi and translated into English by the author himself, is perhaps the greatest of all Partition novels. In an unnamed town, presumably somewhere in the Punjab, a shadowy Muslim politican called Murad Ali pays a sweeper named Nathu to kill a pig. The act is described in excruciating detail (“The pig was sniffing at the rind of a watermelon close to its forelegs, its bloodshot eyes blinking and its little tail swishing.”), by contrast with the rest of the novel, which unfolds at tremendous speed. Nathu kills the pig and delivers it to Murad Ali. The next morning, the pig is found on the steps of a mosque. Mayhem ensues, while Nathu withdraws to the background, reappearing every so often as the moral and emotional centre of the novel, bemoaning his actions before being brutally dismissed from the story in one throwaway line in the final chapters.  Read more

Today is Indian Independence Day. Nobody in Kashmir is celebrating. The mobile networks are switched off. As on Martyrs’ Day, Srinagar is on lock-down. The Indian flag will be raised at a local stadium, in the presence of chief minister Omar Abdullah, but the event will be closed to the public. Last year, a J&K policeman used the event as a chance to throw his shoe at Abdullah. This national holiday, so fervently celebrated elsewhere in the country, potently illustrates the failure of India to convince the people of Kashmir that their future lies with the Indian Union.

Kashmiris are famous – or perhaps infamous – for their ambivalence. Pakistan, India, Independence – partition this way, partition that way. Even when talking those fervently in favour of independence, you get the sense that in their heart of hearts they know it to be both unrealistic and impractical. Unrealistic because of India’s massive soft and hard power around the world, and the lack of an effective diaspora lobbying Kashmir’s cause in western capitals. Impractical because, despite having decent resources, particularly in agriculture and tourism, an independent Kashmir would inevitably become squeezed between India, Pakistan and China, making the chances of Kashmir becoming a South Asian Switzerland slim.

So what’s a good Kashmiri to do? I would suggest that there are a number of steps that could be taken which would be both in the Kashmiri and Indian interest. I should hasten to add that these are not original ideas. Read more

We are constantly told, correctly, to ignore the artist and focus on the art. What does it matter if Wagner was an anti-Semite or David Lynch practices transcendental meditation or V.S. Naipaul thinks that women’s writing is shit, when they’re all great artists? And yet the artist’s life continues to tempt us. Perhaps, we think, in learning about their life, we might learn something about the source of their inspiration, and – who knows? – maybe a bit of it will rub off on us.

Then there is the category of artists who only achieve fame with death, following which their lives achieve mythological status, and they dully and tragically become martyrs for the cause of art itself. Perhaps no writer embodies this phenomenon more than Franz Kafka, for whom the concept of the ‘tortured artist’ seems to have been invented, and for whom life was one long trial, without even the closure of an adequate sentence.

Kafka’s myth seems to warn off a biographer like some old temple curse, but Ronald Hayman’s 1981 biography analyses its subject with admirable restraint, with a strict focus on Franz the man rather than Kafka the literary deity he would become. And it is testament to Hayman’s skills that his Franz feels like Kafka’s Franz: timid, bewildered, and above all unqualified for the demands of an early twentieth-century central European life. Read more

The popular view of Pakistan is that it’s a failed state in the making, a Somalia in South Asia. It’s the place where Daniel Pearl was beheaded, where leaders are regularly assassinated, and the Taliban are on the verge of taking over. It is the dark opposite of secular India, an Islamic ‘Land of the Pure’. In his new primer on the country, Anatol Lieven takes issue with this hysteria. His thesis is that Pakistan is “a hard country”, but far from failing. Read more