I have been under attack in recent weeks for suggesting that the extraordinary concrete wall that the Israeli state is building around itself, designed to keep Muslim Palestinians out of its borders, is racist.
I am attacked for being racist myself — why shouldn’t Israel be allowed to do what it likes, considering the anti-Israeli assaults that are constantly being launched against it by supposedly fanatical Palestinian paramilitary groups that launch devastating suicide bombings and crude rocket strikes against its civilians? The new Israel Wall (that I have likened to both the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall that separated Eastern Europe from the West for so many years) is certainly designed to keep ‘civilisation”, as represented by the brashly exclusive Jewish state, safe from the new Barbarians, represented by the Palestinians justifiably knocking at its doors.
All sense is lost in the smoke of conflict. There is no rational intercourse in the non-existent dialogue between the contending sides.
In the absence of rational dialogue, of normal human intercourse, the conflict of diametrically opposed intentions does indeed take on an unnecessary racial dimension. It becomes an intractable conflict of Jews against Arabs — in apartheid terms, a minority justifying its actions by doing everything it needs to do to defend itself against an encroaching, irrational, uncivilised majority.
The truth is lost in the smoke of war, because that is what has become the daily bread and butter of the Middle East. Stones thrown by the angry children of the intifada that festered unstoppably in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila and many other non-homelands of Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in what Arabic-speaking cultures rightly regard as their inherited domain were met, and continue to be met, with rockets, tanks, heavily missiled strike aircraft and all the other vicious means at the disposal of the militarised Israeli state.
The irony is that the victim has become the determined victor. This, too, is an agonising element of this war. The modern state of Israel came about not by an act of God, but by a process of increasingly aggressive colonialism, instigated from the same Europe that had taken the initiative of dividing up the world among its own warring factions. The theoretical division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews became another step in this long, calculated game.
The devastating genocide against people of Jewish descent, played out in European pogroms over centuries, and culminating in the extermination camps of World War II, was a European affair. Its consequences are being played out not in Europe, but in the Middle East, with the Arabs as the main losers. History is reinvented, and its consequences justified, from afar.
Let me say it once again: injustices and genocides against Jews are no more acceptable than those committed against any other peoples. The Holocaust was a crime against all humanity, and its conception and implementation surely affects us all. But, for that very reason, it was not a private affair. Its consequences in the sorrowful state of human history should not, and cannot, be confined to the fortunes of the modern state of Israel. The fault is that all of us were there — just as in the horrors of the genocides of Rwanda and Burundi, the amputations and butcherings of Liberia and Sierra Leone, the dark nights of Cambodia and Guatemala and Chile, when so many wanton killings were sanctioned in the name of civilisation, and the unrequited injustices (to put it mildly) of apartheid South Africa, in spite of its much-cited Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to name but a few.
The horror of human inhumanity still lives with us in all of its many disguises.
Mordechai Vanunu remains one of my heroes. He is a victim of a huge injustice. Today he spends his time ringing the bells of St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem. He is a Jew who chose to convert to Christianity. Ringing the bells in the cathedral helps him to hold on to his sanity — because this is not a sane world.
Vanunu blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear programme in 1986. He thought he was safe and acting out of the best of human principles when he ran off to the West with information that probably implicated his own country in a collaboration between Israel and apartheid South Africa in a plan to develop weapons of mass destruction against what was then regarded as a communist plot to change the world and free Nelson Mandela. He was relentlessly tracked to London and then busted by Israeli Intelligence in an infamous ‘honey trap”, which took him all the way to Italy before it was sprung, and then taken back to the Holy Land, where he was destined to spend more than 10 years in solitary confinement in a prison cell for crimes that amounted to sacrilege, as far as the state was concerned.
The world is slightly different now. Mandela is free, an icon of what humanity could be if it wanted to.
Vanunu, though out of prison, is still effectively a prisoner in the increasingly walled-in state of Israel, a poor, isolated man ringing bells in a church. He never wanted to be a prophet, but his word has been spat out and forgotten anyway. So he goes on ringing the bells of St George’s Cathedral, a holy place in an unholy land.
Forgive me for thinking that God has left the house.